r "-Igivt thefe Boo/tt far the founding ef a, Collige iti^tKis Ciio>iyp " ILKIBI^^IElf " "•: Gift of tv Professor George Paris: Fislier 1907- ;^'' ; THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. PAET FIRST. ByT. W.ALLIES, LONDON: LONGMAN, GREEN, LONGMAN, ROBERTS, AND GREEN. 1865. The -i-iiilil of translntion is reserved. LONDON : KOESOH ATSl} SON, GREAT NOETHEKN PRINTING WORKS, Faucra^ Boad, N.W. ADVERTISEMENT. The following Lectures do not profess to be a complete treatment of the subject. They form only a portion, perhaps about a fourth, of the author's design, which it seemed better to publish at once than to wait for the completion of the whole. CONTENTS. INAUGURAL LECTURE ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. PAGE What is the Philosophy of History ? . . . .1 What History itself is 1 Its growth as a picture of human society and civilisation . 2-10 Christianity causes it to take a further step . . 11-17 Philosophic History 17 The Philosophy of History . . . . ' . . .20 Created by the Christian Faith .26 First instance of it in the treatise De Civitate Dei . . .27 Second instance, Bossuet . . . . .30 Guizot .31 Balmez .... 33 Frederic Schlegel . . . . .33 Newman's History of the Turks 34 History in the last three centuries ... 35 Philosophy of History at present .36 LECTURE L the consummation of thb old wokld. Sketch of the Roman Civilisation : I. Its external grandeur The majesty of the Pax Romana Its facilities of commerce . Life at Rome : the baths . Roman legislation .... Internal support of Roman civiHsation VI CONTENTS. PA8B Contrast with other cities — Athens 60 Antioch 51 Alexandria 52 Roman citizenship, and Rome's mode of imparting it . 63 The Colonia 64 Character of Roman sovereignty 68 Majesty of her magistrates 69 Her language an image of this majesty .... GO II. Internal conditions of Roman society — Slavery . . 02 Summary of the slave's social position . . . .0.5 Effect of slavery on the free population : (ffl) 1. On labour ... . . 06 2. On domestic service 67 3. On aitisanship . . ... 67 (6) On the social and political temper of the free . 68 (c) As a fountain of moral corruption . . , .69 Judgment of St. Augustine on the moral and political temper thus generated 76 Condition of men's minds at Eome 77 The schools of philosophy and uncertainty produced by them 78 The idea of God lost 80 Perplexed notion of good and evil 82 Pantheism 85 Idea of human personality lost 87 Idea of Providence lost ... ... 88 And of immortality . . 89 Summary of moral state thus ensuing ... 90 III. Picture of the above condition of Eoman civilisation given by two eye-witnesses external to it . . .91 1. St. John . . . . . 92 2. St. Paul ... ... 93 Course of human history from the Flood to the Advent of Christ 94 Two incidents at Eome in Nero's time .... 98 The execution 98 The banquet 99 Morality of the emperors and chief writers of Eome . 100 St. Peter, and his coming to Eome . ... 101 On what his presence there was grounded . .102 CONTENTS. Vll LECTURE IL the new creation of individual man. PAGE 107 no Empire of Rome the summary of ancient civilisation How St. Peter and St. Paul dealt with it .... Reconstruction of society with two forces, the knowledge of God and of the human soul Sevenfold idea of God : 1. in His Unity ; 2. in His Person ality ; 3. in His Paternity ; 4. as Incarqate ; 5. as the Pood of man ; 6. as redeeming him. ; 7. as glorifying him, pre sented as a whole to man The existing civilisation a stranger to this idea Every Christian virtue derived from it How Christianity viewed human morality taken as a mass : 1. In the motive given to it . . . . Contrast between Marcus Aurelius and the Gospel 2. In the standard proposed to it . 3. In the support provided 4. In the reward offered How the whole is pervaded by the fact of the Incarnation From the above idea of God springs the distinction between natural and supernatural good . And the virtues of Faith, Hope, and Charity Charity, especially, rooted in the Incarnation Newness of this virtue to the heathen Moral purity of the Christian grounded on the Incarnation And the love of husband and wife . . . . Christian treatment of man as a member of civil society How it applied the doctrine of the Incarnation to slavery Treatment of man in his relation to equals Obligation of truth grounded on the Incarnation . Gentleness, mercy, humility, liberality . And in particular biptherly love .... Christian treatment of obedience to civil government Rejection of exclusive patriotism Christian idea of the New Creation In the individual and in the mass Christian and Heathen Virtue . The gift of Grace . The seven gifts of the Holy Spirit viewed in Christ as their Well-head 156 110 111 116 119 120 121 123 126 128 131132 1.33 134136137 139140140144144144145146147 149151 153 165 VIU CONTENTS. PAGE And thence imparted to man 157 The human and the Christian commonwealth a contrast like the natural and the Christian man . ... 158 Summary of the Christian restoration 158 Contrast between Heathenism and Christianity . . . 159 LECTURE IIL heathen and christian man compared. 164 165 168 169172 172 175 176 177183 The above principles illustrated in the lives of individuals Six points common to the Greek and Roman heathen Why Socrates is not taken as a representative man Why not Cato of Utica .... . . Why not Epictetus . . . . Nor Marcus Aurelius Cicero chosen, and why . . ... Sketch of his life and doctrines .... His treatise on social duties ... His treatise on the Nature of the Gods . Three critical points in his life : 1. His exile 2. His daughter's death . . 3. The break-up of the Republic Transition to St. Augustine .... Sketch of his life up to his conversion His conversion . . ... The death of his mother .... His subsequent life ........ His genms and character ; contrast with Cicero How his mind was penetrated with the thought of Provi dence His bearing and writings at the downfall of the Roman empire .......' His doctrine as to the City of God .... Importance of this work, the &st Philosophy of History The key to his own life and writings, and to all the change above contemplated, supplied in his treatise De 'Vera Religione . ... . . 213 186187188189190193 197 200201 203 207209 212 CONTENTS. IX LECTURE IV. effect of the christian people on the world. PAGE Cicero and Augustine apart from their genius fair specimens of Heathenism and of Christianity 216 The revolution wrought by Christiamty . . . 217 Description of it by an eye-witness at the beginning of the second century ... 218 Gradual growth of Christians . 223 All the progress took its rise from the Individual . . 224 Process of change in tho thoughts and actions of men pro duced by Christians 226 1. The Heathen contempt for human life remedied by the martyrs' abnegation of it 226 2. The Heathen impurity corrected by the Virgin mar tyrs ; St. Potamissna, St. Agnes, St. A fra. . . 229 3. Heathenism with its merely natural end ; refutation of it by Christians preferring a future unseen good at the cost of their life ... . . 236 4. Inwardness of Christian life and virtue . . . 242 The cardinal virtues completed and transformed by the theo logical .... 244 In all this the Christians imitators of one model, Christ . . 246 Action of the Christian society, as constituted in its Sacerdo- tium, on the world around 247 Its Unity, Uniformity, and Universahty, as derived from Christ seen in seven attributes .... . 248 1. It rested wholly on the authority of the Sender . 251 2. It was a coherent unchangeable system of doctrine . 253 3. It was a government of souls 261 4. Which was yet a ministration .... 263 5. Its success was connected with suffering . . 264 6. Its sacrifice was bound np with its teaching and all these attributes . . . . 266 7. It was supported by the example of its members carrying out its doctrines . ... 266 Summary of what the Christian faith had done in the first four hundred years 268 CONTENTS, LECTURE V. NEW creation op THE PRIMARY RELATION BETWEEN MAN AND WOMAN. PAGE The Personality of Man the subject with which the Chris tian Faith dealt 272 But it dealt with him also as a Race and a Society . . 273 He is himself the most dependent of creatures on others 273 I. The Primary Relation, that between man and woman . 273 What it was originally intended to be . . . . 274 The flrst institution of marriage 275 Its seven original attributes ...... 277 God herein the founder of human society . . . 278 II. State of woman in the last years of Augustus. . . 279 Her original condition in Greek society . . . 279 Great declension of morals from the time of the Pelo- ponnesian War 281 Her original condition in Roman society .... 282 Deterioration of morals from the second Punic War . 283 Condition of woman in Persia . .... 284 Among the Israelites 284 Condition of woman in the East and South . . 286 And among the Germans . 286 Divorce followed by re-marriage, adultery on the man's side, and polygamy, the three great infringements of marriage 287 Woman considered a minor . . ... 288 Her degradation outside of the marriage state . . . 289 Moral state of the world in consequence .... 290 Efforts of Augustus to improve it .... 291 Review of his position and means for restoring the family 293 Moral force of the Greek race 293 Of the Roman people 294 Of the Provinces ' . , 295 Of the German tribes .... . . 296 Of the Jews scattered over the world, and in Judea. . 297 III. The restoration of woman in herself, springing from the birth of our Lord 297 Restoration of marriage 301 In what the sacrament consists 302 The theory carried out into fact . . • . . . 304 1. Amid the corrupt Heathen civilisation . . . 305 CONTENTS. XI 2. Amid the inroads and establishment of the Northern tribes 3. Amid the kingdoms of Europe thence formed 4. Amid the license of modern times , Complete marriage only in the Church Two results of marriage as a Sacrament . First, the restoration of family life . Secondly, the education, properly so called, of children . 321 Summary of the work accomplished .... 325 308 309 310 312314314 LECTURE VL THE CREATION OP THE VIRGINAL LIPE. Our Lord's personal character, the mark of Christian imi tation 329 Parallel from the present influence of civilisation . . 330 I. A special feature in our Lord's character . . . 331 Christianity itself based on our Lord's Virginal conception 332 Mary's own choice of the Virginal Life .... 333 And our Lord's ; on these three facts rested the Cliristian feeling as to that life 333 This feeling new in the world both as to Jew and Gentile 334 Its source a special imitation of Christ and His Mother . 336 Description of the Virginal Life by St. Methodius . . 337 Summary of it from various writers .... 338 St.. Ignatius and St. Clement of Rome .... 340 It was not a mere theory, but carried into practice . . 340 And this in the first three centuries 341 Testimony of St. Cyprian, St. Athanasius, St. Augustine 342 Universality of its production in aU times and countries of the Catholic Church 344 The Virginal Life, the condition of all perfect following of our Lord 345 As a special following of Him it arises at once after Him, and that amongst the most various states and races of men 348 II. The special office assigned to Virginity, the propagation of Christianity 360 The cause of such ofiice being assigned to it . . . 352 Its development in the secular clergy .... 354 Xll CONTENTS. PAGE This development arose from within out of the nature of the clerical oflSce .... . . 354 Its development in the Rehgious Orders .... 357 The Three Vows and their reason ..... 360 Fecundity and continuity of the Virginal Life 365 Virginity the Church's marriage . . . 366 The causes of this 367 The human and the divine society, and their different motives . . 368 The human society as it acts in the propagation of rehgion 370 In education 372 In the works of mercy . . . 372 The divine society as it acts in propagating religion . 373 As it acts in educating . ... 377 As it acts in works of mercy . .... 379 The Virginal Life raises these works from being a pro fession to an act of devotion . . 381 III. Three sentiments as to the Virginal Life in the time of St. Chrysostome reproduced now .... 381 Force of an example raised above the natural life on others ... 383 The honour and exceUence of Virginity, a new element communicated to society 385 Europe as it was with this element infused into it . . 385 INAUGURAL LECTURE on THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY.* What is the ' philosophy of history' ? There are few persons, if I mistake not, who, were such a question suddenly addressed to them, would not be sensible of some vagueness in their notions, some hesitation in their answer to it. The word ' history' bears a certain meaning ; the word ' phi losophy' bears another; but what results from their combination ? To which of the two does it belong? Or in what proportions are they blended? Or which predominates? Is the result philosophy? or is it history ? Does it narrate, or does it com pare and deduce ? — It will be my endeavour in the course of this Lecture to give some sort of answer to so radical and primary a question. I have said that the word ' history' carries a plain and definite meaning to the ear. Its subject- matter, indeed, taken in the gross, has not varied from the earliest to the present times. It deals * Delivered before the Catholic University of Ireland. Z INAUGUEAL LBCTUEE ON with the whole course of domestic and national life ; with races and peoples ; their arts and arms ; their progress and decline; nay, -with the whole temporal destinies of that larger human society, which overleaps all international boundaa'ies, and may be said to constitute one unbroken whole from the earliest recorded time to the present day. History is the picture of civilisation, as that great travail of the sons of men with one another has been caUed. Not only the man indi^•idual, but the man collective, " has gone forth to his work and to his labour until the evening," and history has ever been describing what he has been doins,-. But as his works have been great or little, simple or com plex, broken up, divided, and deflectmg from each other, or again converging, and as by some mighty inward instinct and energy cooperating Avith each other, so has his history been; for it was but the portrait of man, and of the society Avhich he forms with his feUows. Let us take a glance at this course of history, which, we shall find, will lead us to our subject. In the first beginnings of nations, when the family grows into the tribe, and the tribe uito a people, man works as unconscious of any purpose. The sons of Noah went forth to possess the earth, to subdue it, and to cultivate it. The needs of the day prescribe its toil. But that rudimental society as little contemplates itself, or the objects it has in view, as little catalogues or defines theni. THB PHILOSOPHY OF HISTOEY. 3 as does the child. Yet, like the child, it is the creature of habits and tradition; it lives a vigor ous, outward, physical life; it has strong gener ous emotions; it reasons little, but it feels much. Great deeds of personal daring, labours undergone, dangers risked, dwell in its memory. In this, too, it is like a noble youth, whdse instincts and im pulses are keener and more vivid, perhaps some times more attractive, than the balanced thoughts of the gray-haired man. And as this youthful society lives in tradition, and is possessed by it unconsciously, it seeks to give a voice to those memories of which it is full, and so commences history. This is why history in its beginning is ever allied to poetry, and often in its first forms identical with it. Thus we have the hero de scribed as sitting by the seaside, and singing " the glories of men," whose great deeds the divine ballad-singer will presently gather into immortal verse, himself to be the parent of history as well as song, the fountain-head of a matchless language, the ever-living root of the most intellectual of hu man races. But it was the same beside the birth place of that ruder race whose destiny it was to govern, rather than to teach, the world. Unhap pily no Latian Homer survives to tell us — " How weU Horatius kept the bridge In the brave days of old." But we know that at the Roman banquets the youth were taught to admire and imitate the deeds 4 INAUGURAL LECTURE ON of those who had founded, nurtured, or preserved the race of Mars suckled by the wolf; how by such means Lucretia and Brutus became to them names of ever-living power, and from generation to gene ration the Roman matron drew from the former the dower of chastity, from the latter the Roman citizen the inextinguishable hatred of despotic power. Again, when the northern tribes had de scended to break up the Roman empire, Saxons, and Danes, and Normans, Franks, and Goths, hear recounted at the banquet the deeds of their sea- kings or their chieftains. This is at once their history and poetry. But society advances a step, and with it his tory. The Pelasgic tribe settles ; the Latian city grows; the Northman tills the earth. At this period we find chronicles no longer metrical, but recounting briefly those incidents which chiefly strike the imagination; recounting them without coherence or relation of parts ; without, as it were, any purpose; with simple juxtaposition. Such, we may suppose, were the " Annales Pontificum;" such, tn another clime and time, the Saxon Chro nicle". This is but the outward part of history; the recitation of the drama of life, just as it appears to a looker-on, full of its true spirit, but without self-consciousness. Society takes another step, and it is a great one. Those mysterious powers of race, and language, and primeval institutions, and hereditary laws, and THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY, 5 sympathies or antipathies, which date from the very cradle of man, grow up together into that complex, powerful, almost indestructible moral being called a nation. Men are no longer chil dren ; they are conscious of themselves, and of a common purpose, an inherited name; a definite and distinctive course of action ; of something which belongs to their own race, and land, and tongue, and not to others. Society is become national, and forthwith history becomes political. Whatever the march of society may be, that of history will be correlative to it. Let us go back for an illustration to the litera ture of that land to which we owe so much. He rodotus, so often called the father of history, is an instance of the transition of which I am speaking. He appears to us a man of very active and curious mind, who has the power and the will to seek knowledge everywhere. He verifies to the letter one poet's description of another poet's hero; truly he is the man " Qui mores hominum multorum vidit et urbes." He seems to have a greater poet's dictum at his heart, that " Home-keeping youths have ever homely wits." Knowledge was not yet stored up in great reser voirs ; he travelled after it from place to place ; he saw, and heard, and reflected for himself It was the fashion once to caU him a pleasant story-teller, 6 INAUGURAL LECTURE ON with fraudulent Greek vision, and credulous ears ; but I think this fashion is rightly past. Rather he listened thoughtfully to aU the leaming of the Egyptian priests ; he gathered up aU the traditions that lingered in the oracles, shrines, and cities of Greece; he made all the coasts of the Mediterra nean his tributaries, and wove together the parti coloured treasure into that mixture of chronicle and history, of lively narrative, religious musing, and political lore, which, pass the world through whatever shapes it may, will never cease to charm. Yet there is a clue to all his narrative. He knits together the nations whose history, or rather tra ditions, he traverses, by their relation to that bit ter, everlasting enmity between Europe and Asia, whereof the age immediately preceding him had seen so tremendous an explosion in the expedition of Xerxes. That very assault on the liberties of Greece had wrought its tribes, in spite of their internal antagonism, into one people, one society ; and, but haK a generation later than himself, we see what may be termed the political history of the ancients reaching a perfection in Thucydides which it never surpassed. This history may be called pohtical, because human society had then fuUy realised the idea of a people. The highest form of human or ganisation with which men were familiar was the ¦aoKiTSiu; nor does it here matter, perhaps, to say that both to Greek and Eoman such name was THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY, 7 derived from the population of a c%, and of an adjacent people aggregated round it; rather than from the population of a kingdom, or country, hav ing many cities, towns, and viUages living under one law and rule. No doubt the words ¦sso'kirila. or civitas denote the growth of the commonwealth fromthe kernel of the city ; whUe 'kingdom' derives it from the person of the prince : perhaps the for mer may be caUed the Greco-Latin, the latter the Asiatic principle of government. But at least both Greeks and Romans were familiar with great eastern kingdoms, which fully set forth the modem idea of a nation; and Alexander conquered and ruled over such an empire ; not to say that from its members several kingdoms, in the modern sense, arose. Society then had become national, and history kept pace with it. Let us see what is the character of this political history. Its hmit is the nation., and it deals with aU that interests the nation. Within the contracted limits of that famous Peloponnesian war passions are stir ring, political interests at stake, rivalries are in the field, such as are reproduced now in the larger sphere of Europe. Every form of government may be seen in embryo ; every political antagonism runs its petty but well-defined course ; and but lately the ablest organ of public opinion in Eng land has twice chosen the funeral oration of Pericles as the liveliest exponent of English feehng over the losses experienced at Sebastopol, Great, indeed, 8 INAUGURAL LECTURE ON is the charm, where the writer can describe with the pencU of a poet, and analyse with the mental grasp of a phUosopher, Such is the double merit of Thucydides. And so it has happened that the deepest students of human nature have searched for two thousand years the records of a war, where in the territory of the chief belligerents was not larger than a modem English or Irish county. What should we say if a quarrel between Kent and Essex, between Cork and Kerry, had kept the world at gaze ever since? Yet Attica and La conia were no larger. Pass over five hundred years, yet history scarcely seems to have enlarged its grasp. It deals, indeed, with an empire materially wider in extent, — the wonderful 'empire of that city which moulded into one dominion all the countries wa tered by the Mediterranean, the highway of the old world. Thus it might seem to include the orbis terrarum. Yet I do not know that in reading the pages of Polybius, of Livy, or even of Tacitus, we are conscious of a wider grasp of thought, a more enlarged experience of political interests, a higher idea of man and of all that concerns his personal or public life, than in those of Thucydides. I am not comparing the quaUfications of these several great masters, but trying to trace the idea on which their works are written. And I stUl find the tsokiTua. or civitas at the bottom of it. Rome, no doubt, is physicaUy greater than Athens. Her THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 9 gauntleted hand pitUessly strikes down one after anotber the fairest of Grecian cities. Syracuse and Corinth, with all their columns and statues, sink before her. Carthage meets her in vain in a hun dred battles by sea and land; the result is but that the Roman exUe moraUses over her ruins. Again, there is a wide difference between a Polycrates or a Peisistratus, and a master of thirty legions, with whom it was ill to argue ; but this is a difference of degree, and not of kind. Still the Csesar in his almost world-wide dominion reached no higher unity of man than the national unity, and the painter of a servUe senate and degenerate people, of a Nero or Domitian, and the empire super et Garamantas et Indos., which quivered beneath their rage, had indeed a wider canvass, yet grouped not his figures with a deeper thought than he who described the conflict in the bay of Syracuse, or immortaUsed the oration over the dead at Athens. In one respect, indeed, this political history of the ancients will never be surpassed, probably never be equalled — I mean as a work of art. I have hi therto been considering history in another point of view ; as to its substance, not as to its shape ; as to its inward thought, not as to its outward clothing. All of these great masters were genuine artists, and they copld work on materials which none can hope for now. They possessed, as instruments of their thought, two languages, very different in their capacity, but both of them superior in originaUty, 10 INAUGURAL LECTURE ON beauty, and expressiveness, to any which have faUen to the lot of modern nations. It may be that the marbles of PenteHcus and Carrara insure good sculptors. Certam it is that those masters of ancient thought deemed it not beneath their pains to spend much time on the mode of expression. Those, perhaps, who have but brick to deal with think it useless to mould so ignoble a material, or shrink from an attempt to rival in plaster the forms of marble art. Yet I have often lamented that his torians, who would feel insulted at a comparison of their subject-matter with that of Thucydides or Tacitus, should descend to a style which the Greek would have thought unworthy of an Athenian barber, and the Roman of a manumitted slave. Nor is it only in style, as an expression of thought, that the ancient historians possess so great an exceUence. In the narrative — that is, the poetic and pictorial part of history — ^they have equal merit. Their history is a drama, in which the actors and events speak for themselves. The author is not perpetuaUy intruding himself and his personal feelings, after the egotistic fashion of too many moderns. It is the difference between Shakespeare and a fashionable novel. In the for mer characters stand out to the mind and impress themselves on the feelings by action and suffering ; in the latter we are continuaUy being told that the heroes are brave or clever, and the heroines para gons of beauty. As we feel Othello or Hamlet., so THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 11 in a battle-field of Livy we comprehend how, whUe the combatants were fighting, "An earthquake reeled unheededly away." The historian is not yet become an untimely mo ralist or a duU dissertator. He is the great painter of human nature, and in his subject forgets him self But on the philosophic part of history, — ^the bearing of events on each other, the relations of cause and eifect, the apprehension of great first principles, the generaUsation of facts, — what shall we say concerning the poUtical history of the an cients? They had faithfuUy noted whatever be longed to the civU Ufe of man, the poUtical organi sation of human society in national centres ; but the bearing of nations on each other, the greater whole of humanity itself, they had not reached. Perhaps the course'of history within the memory of man had been too short, its experience too simple, its direction too Uttle evident, for such an advance. Something must happen to man, something to so ciety, something to humanity, before such a result could be attained. For history, as we have ob served, is the picture of man's civilisation as it is; and the reality must take place before its portrait can be drawn. Thus, to find any advance in the idea of history, with an exception which I shall note hereafter, the treatise De Civitate Dei,, the re markable work of a great and saintly mind, who has had more influence probably on human thought 12 INAUGURAL LECTURE ON than any uninspired writer, we must step over a long period of time, during which Europe was re constituting itself after the convulsions produced by the inroads of the barbarians. At length, after the rise of modern nationalities at the beginning of the sixteenth century, the revival of the ancient literature produced for a time a recurrence, at least in outward form, to the political history of the ancients. Such was the model in the mind of MachiaveUi and Guicciardini, But the state of the world had gone beyond this; had advanced to a riper growth. To have been contented with the limited views, the national boundaries of ancient history, because of the exquisite shape and per fect language into which that history was thrown, would have been to sacrifice the spirit to the body, would have been a positive retrogression in the then state of the human mind. Through the long travaU of the Middle Ages it had been prepared for something better. Indeed, in those very Mid dle Ages, and notably in the thirteenth century, there were minds which have left us imperishable memorials of themselves, and which would have taken the largest and most philosophic view of history, had the mere materials existed ready to their hand. Conceive, for instance, a history from the lummous mind of St. Thomas, with the stores of modern knowledge at his command. But the invention of printing, one of the turning-points of the human race, was first to take place; and then THB PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 13 on that soU of the Middle Ages, so long prepared and fertiUsed by so patient a toU, a mighty harvest was to spring up. Among the first fruits of la bours, so often depreciated by those who have profited from them, and in the land of chUdren who despise their sires, we find the proper aUiance of phUosophy with history. Then, at length, the province ofthe historian is recognised to consist, not merely in the just, accurate, Uvely narrative of facts, but in the exhibition of cause and effect, "What do we now expect in history?" says M. de Barante ; and he replies — " SoUd instruction ; a complete knowledge of things ; moral lessons ; po Utical counsels ; comparisons with the present ; the knowledge of general facts." Even in the age of Tacitus, the most philosophic of ancient historians, no individual ability could secure all such powers. What, then, had happened in the interval? Chris tianity had happened ; Christendom had been formed ; mankind had passed through fire and water — a deluge and a passion; the secret of its unity and its destiny had been given to it. The nation was no longer the highest of human facts, patriotism no longer the first of virtues. A re constructed humanity towered far above the na tion, and no one member of the human society could any longer engross the whole interest of man. There was a voice in the world greater, more potent, thrilling, and universal than the last cry of the old society, Civis sum Romanus; and this 14 INAUGURAL LECTURE ON voice was Sum Christianus. From the time of the Great Sacrifice it was impossible to sever the his tory of man's temporal destiny from that of his eternal ; and when the virtue of that Sacrifice had thoroughly leavened the nations, history is found to assume a larger basis, to have lost its partial and national cast, to have grown with the growth of man, and to demand for its completeness a perfect alUance with phUosophy. It is true that the breaking-up of the Roman empire — reducing the powers of society into a sort of chaos — long suspended these results. Like the seeds discovered in Egyptian tombs, they lay for hundreds of years, not losing their vital force, but buried, as it were, in the great Christian mind tUl the hour of awakening should come. The world of thought in which we Uve is, after aU, formed by Christianity. Modern Europe is a reUc of Christendom, the virtue of which is not gone out of it. Gregory YII. and Iimocent III. have ruled over generations which ignored them ; have given breadth to minds which condemned their bene factors as guilty of narrow priestcraft, and derided the work of those benefactors as an exploded theory. Let us take an example in what is, mor ally, perhaps the worst and most shocking period of the last three centuries — the thirty years pre ceding the great French revolution. We shaU see that at this time even minds which had rejected, with aU the firmness of a reprobate will, the re- THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTOEY. 15 generating influence of Christianity, could not emancipate themselves from the virtue of the atmosphere which they had breathed. They are immeasurably greater than they would have been in Pagan times, by the force of that faith which they misrepresented and repudiated. To prove the truth of my words, compare for a moment the great artist who drew Tiberius and Domitian and the Roman empire in the first century, with him who took up its decUne and faU in the second and succeeding centuries. How far wider a grasp of thought, how far more manifold an experience, combined with a philosophic purpose, in Gibbon than in Tacitus ! He has a standard within him by which he can measure the nations as they come in long procession before htm. In that vast and wondrous drama of the Antontnes and Constantine, Athanasius and Leo, Justinian and Charlemagne, Mahomet, Zinghis Khan, and Timour, Jerusalem and Mecca, Rome and Constantinople, what stores of thought are laid up — ^what a train of phUosophic induction exhibited! How much larger is this world become than that which trembled at Cassar ! The very apostate profits by the Ught which has shone on Thabor, and the blood which has flowed on Calvary. He is a greater historian than his hea then predecessor, because he lives in a society to which the God whom he abandoned has disclosed the depth of its being, the laws of its course, the im portance of its present, the price of its futurity. 16 INAUGURAL LECTURE ON Thus it may be termed a necessity of modern history that it should be phUosophic. It must give not only the course of things, but their re sults ; not only the facts, but their reasons. The civilisation which it ought to portray is one im mensely advanced beyond that of the ancients; advanced not merely in the material arts which give prosperity to civil life, but most of all in this, that it possesses a tie and bond of the whole race in the Person of its Deliverer, which was so fatally wanting to the old world, and from the absence of which its course was obscure and fluctuating, and its end unapparent. Now, where there is no de fined course and no recognised end, the phUoso phy of cause and effect is scarcely possible. How dreary to chronicle the rise and faU of Assyrian, and Persian, and Macedonian, and Roman domir nion, until the key to them was given, untU the stone cut out without hands was beginning to fill the earth ! Too often has phUosophy in the hand of modern writers shown itself ungrateful to the power which made it what it is; nor only un grateful, but unconscious of its debt. Christen dom, that mighty creation of the Church, has left an tnefiTaceable impression on modern society. It has protected it at once from the excesses and narrowness of such conquerors as the Romans. Never more can one pohtical organisation presume to be the whole of the world, and never again can it restrict man to its o^vn boundaries. Even now, THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 17 dislocated and convulsed, heaving with half-sub dued revolutions, and torn by fatal schisms, Eu rope feels itself to be one, and the pride of the proudest nation submits to have its history treated but as a part and member of a greater whole. We have kept the term barbarous from the old Greek, but we have altered its force. It no longer means that which is strange, foreign to us, but that which breaks away from the universal law of civi- Used Ufe, shared in common by so many nations ; and civUisation itself, the course of man's temporal destinies, can no longer be severed from that ocean of his eternal state into which it is seen to run. Thus it is that the modern historian looks at society from a higher point of view than the an cient. Its centre and its law do not Ue to him tn the nation, but tn the greater whole of humanity, which the Person of the God-man has revealed to htm. He sees before him a collection of nations which has indeed been a repubUc with a common laAV, which stiU has parts and members, common sjTnpathies and antagonisms, wherein no one has a moral or inteUectual primacy, but Aii'tues bal anced Avith great defects. It is a mutual give and take; an action and reaction aU around him. Here, perhaps, he sees a race at the top wave of its natural strength and energy, fuU of per severance, rarely missing success, but proud, hard, and worldly ; there another, wherein thought and action interpenetrate each other, more im- c 18 INAUGURAL LECTURE ON piUsive, frank, and tender, and withal so quick, keen, and homogeneous, that a single feeling will electrify the whole mass, a single man, the secret thought of the nation personified, assume absolute control, and weld them for a time into overwhelm ing force. A third, Avith vast and yet unlaioAvn powers, of one groAvth and jet, in force of bar barism, Asiatic, in flexibility of civUisation, Euro pean, knit together by an almost unreasoning obedi ence, and marshaUed in a huge mUitary hierarchy aspiring to future triumphs; fourth may come a troop of nations, differing in blood, in language, in social institutions, in their state of progress, but finding a single point of contact, a centre of unity, in the person of a common sovereign, and up holding his throne for centuries Avith unwaA^ering fideUty. Others, again, seem Uke the inferior, yet not unimportant, limbs of a great confederacy; they fill up interstices in the huge fabric; while some are great rather in their past renoAvn than in their present poAver, a magni nominis umbra., once rich in arts and arms, and in the thought which rules mankind. In all these a course and progress are ever going on; a common ciA^Uisation has its distinctive national colouring; race and religion produce their blended result; and phUosophical history has not only to recount facts Avith rigid ac curacy, not only to represent the panorama of Avar and peace, of outward action and inward develop ment, as it goes on, but to compare and estimate THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 19 the progress, and weigh the nations in its scales by a standard which they all recognise. Have we, then, come to the proper subject of which we were in pursuit, and is such a phUoso phical history identical with the phUosophy of his tory itself? They have, indeed, I beUeve, much in common; but this latter is, ifi mistake not, a yet maturer groAvth of civUisation. Let me en deavour to specify the distinction between them. Into whatever aUiance history may call philo sophy, stUl, if it be true to its OAvn nature, its basis must be narration. It has to set forth events, whether simple or complex, whether striking the imagination by sympathy, or exercising the rea son. Take, for instance, the history of a parti cular nation for a given period of moderate length, say of fifty years. Immediately what a crowd of different subjects force themselves on the mind ; war AAT.th its thousand incidents, diplomacy, poU tics, legislation, Uterature, social economy, religion. This is but a sample. AU these require to be de scribed. An accurate and Advid narrative of these must precede the phUosophical part of history, the deduction of results, comparison, contrast, gene ralisation ; nor avUI any amount of phUosophic sldU in the latter part make up for want of dramatic power in the former. Yet what a medley is here ! What a multipUcity of detaUs ! Each one of these subjects, the active force of a nation, its poUtics, its legislation, its Hterature, its social economy, its 20 INAUGURAL LECTURE ON state of religion, has its OAvn groAvth and progi-oss, its philoso[)hical point of vioAv, its manifold facts, and the Lxavs Avhich are thoir ultimiite expression. HoAv is it possible to have unity of conception in such a cluster of diff'erent subjects? It is at this point that tho philosophy of histoiy comes upon the stage. Its special force lies in this A'ci'A- unity of conception. It chooses one of those subjects ; it traces sucli one, as it Avoro, from tho cradle, foUoAVS it through all the adA'ontnros of its course, its trials, conflicts, progressions, defeats, recoA'ories, completion, and success; draAvs, as it Avere, the biograjtln" of an idea — gives life and colouring to an abstraction — sums up a chain of facts in their results. " Tho history of a nation," says ^\. Do Barante — himself so skilful in narration — " does not consist only in tho chronicles of its Avavs and rcA'olutions, in the living jwrtrait of its illnstvions men. So far is but the outAvnvd drama of history. Thoro m;u- be desired the history of causes that do not appear visibly; certain minds may even invfor it tothe his tory of effects Avhioh disclose themsel\-os to the oa-o. AU human things are subject to a progression, the LiAv of Avhioh may be sought out ui tho midst of nooidontal and A'ariable circumstances. Thore is an ordor of facts belonging f o each kind of his tory. Historical interest Avill turn on thehistory of a religion, of a legislation, of a soienoo, of an opinion, of an art, as avoU as on a history, the THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 21 scenes of which are represented in fields of battle, in the pubUc places of cities, or at the court of kings. Such histories," he continues, "in which a philo sophic genius foUoAvs across successive facts the development of an idea or the progress of a cause, have taken their place among the master works of the human mind. Their beauty mainly depends on unit'y of conception., on the author's power to dis tinguish and arrange facts according to his pur pose, according to the object of his researches and his analysis."* In such a work it would appear that history and phUosophy have an equal share. It rests on a basis of facts ; it results in a science, the scope of which is to set forth the laws by Avhich the poUti cal and social world is governed. How can we attain to the knowledge of these laws? I know, I can even conceive, but one way — by a cautious and conscientious induction of facts, an induction which needs to be as patient, as rigorous, as scrupulous, as extensive, as little Avarped by preconceived fancies or extraneous theories, as the induction on which the physical sciences are built, and which has been the main instrument of their wonderful advance. Let me quote here the words of one who has given us in his histories of civiUsation in Europe and m France perhaps the most finished specimen «> M. de Barante, Histoire des Dues de Bourgoytie, preface, pp. 9, 10, 11. 22 INAUGURAL LECTURE ON of the natural quaUties required to produce a PhUosophy of History. " What," says M. Guizot, " is the spirit which prevaUs at present in the intellectual order, in the research of truth, what ever be its object? A spirit of severity, prudence, and reserve, the scientific spirit, the phUosophic method. This method carefully observes facts, and only aUows itself to generalise slowly, pro gressively, in proportion as facts are knoAvn. This spirit has evidently prevailed for more than half a century" (we may noAV almost double that time) "in the sciences which are engaged on the material world ; it has produced their progress and their glory. Its tendency is at present to penetrate more and more into the sciences of the moral world, into politics, history, and phUosophy. On all sides the scientific method extends itself and gams influence ; on all sides is felt the necessity of taking facts for one's basis and rule; men are per suaded that they are the material of science ; that no general idea can have any real A^alue if it derive not its birth from facts, and be continually nou rished by them as it grows to maturity. Facts are noAV, in the inteUectual order, the power in credit." And he adds words, which appear to me kiminous Avith truth : " We are cast into a world which we have not created nor invented ; we find it there; we look at it; we study it; need is that we must take it as a fact, for it subsists outside of us, independently of us. It is on facts that our THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTOEY. 23 spirit exercises itself; it has but facts for materials ; and when it discovers their general laws, those laws are themselves facts which it verifies."* I accept these principles fuUy and imreservedly. I would apply to events of the moral order what a famous phUosopher says of physics, that the doc trine of final causes, when actively introduced, spoUs them. No doubt they have a final cause ; no doubt, UkeAvise, the whole course of events, as much in contingent as in material things, as much in the actions of free agents as in the unreason ing powers of nature, is foreordered and directed according to that end which is the first m the order ofthe divine counsels, as it is the last in execution. But it is not given to us, in this stage of our being, to jump at this hidden conclusion. The patient analysis of facts is our instrument of knowledge, in poUtics and history, as in the animal and vegetable world. I can therefore feel no jea lousy of facts, no fear of them, in the inteUectual order. A half knowledge, a meagre induction, a hasty generaUsation — this mdeed is to be feared as the parent of numberless errors; but there is no thing of which I am more intimately convinced than that the order of moral events, when fuUy disclosed, AviU be found to be goA-erned by laws far transcending human wisdom to conceive, or the heart of man to admire. In the mean tune, if we foUow any other guide but facts, we are but * Guizot, Civilisation en France, 1« legon. 24 INAUGURAL LECTURE ON dwarfing the Divine Lawgiver to the measure of our fancy. Indeed there is a solemnity involved in this view of facts which is seldom recognised. One thing, said the heathen proverb, the Deity can not do : undo that which is done. And is it not true that all Avhich once has happened, which has become a fact, in so happening passes, as it were, into an irrcA^ocable order of things, and shares the immutabUity and eternity of the Almighty Maker ? Thus it is even Avith the contingent acts of men, prescinding from the sin which may be involved in them. Once carried into effect, they form part of an universe which is God's creation ; the system of which, in its infinitely numerous detaUs, is one vast series of inductions as to what is His being and His AvUl, for AAdthout these they could not have been. The meanest fact around us is one in an infinite series, and bears Avitness to an infinite power. It is a disclosure ofthe Eternal; "for the iuAdsible thmgs of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made." Those, at least, who so look upon facts are not likely to disregard their importance. But if the philosophic historian must look to the induction of facts as the scientific method by which alone he can attain to a clearer and fuUer view of the laAvs governing the poUtical and social world, yet there are facts very intimately and uni- THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 25 versaUy concerning the actions of men and the course of humanity, which come to him guaranteed by authority. Whether the mere observer would deduce them for himself, the experience of the an cient heathen is perhaps sufficient to decide in the negative. But that experience is likcAvise suffi cient to show that, without fully admitting such facts, the course of human affairs was to the most sharp-sighted and reflecting among them dark, cheerless, and even unintelligible. No one can be a great and true historian if his history be not written Avith a full conviction that three great powers move through the whole course of human events.* There is a DiAune Providence, Avhich shapes things to its own ends, " rough-hew them how we will," and never leaves the mastery of re sults to the blind or iron force of chance or fate. There is a free will of man, left sacred in every human breast by that Divine ProAddence, not the slave of outward circumstances nor of inward plea sure, but the very basis of our moral being, and its iuAuolable ci,tadel. And there is, by the per mission of that same Providence, an ever-active power of evil, universal in his operation, and tempting every human free wUl to a false pleasure and an unreal good. If the human mind could not discern and recognise these three powers for itself from the mere contemplation of the outward facts of history, yet, at least, when they are dis- ' Schlegel, Pliihsop'ky of Histonj, Lect. xv. 26 INAUGURAL LECTURE ON closed by revelation, it sees infaUible proof of theu' presence in those facts; nor has either of these ever been denied or ignored by the historian Avith out manifest injury to the truth and the complete ness of the view which he takes of human affairs. Nay, I am prepared to maintain that it was the very discerning and reasoning on these three powers, and their joint operations in human affairs, which gave birth to that philosophy of history, of which we are now treating. And how can I better conclude these remarks than by some Ulustration from facts of the principles which have been here maintained ? When, then, did history first appear divested of what is local, national, and temporary ? When did it come forth at length conterminous Avith the human race and grasping its whole destiny? Who first allied it Avith phUosophy so as to produce a work which may be referred equaUy to both ? If what I have stated be true, if history be ever the portrait of an existing ciAdUsation, if it can not forestall the progress of that civiUsation, if the mirror cannot reflect tUl the object be pre sented to it, if moreover darkness and uncertainty brooded over the mind of the ablest and most philosophical of the ancient historians, so that it may be doubted if he recognised either of those three powers which move through aU the actions of men, then it is abundantly clear that no phUo sophy of history coiUd be produced tUl Christi- THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 27 anity had sunk into the minds of men and moulded their thoughts. Now, it is not a Uttle singular that the same great Father, who is usually consi dered the parent of theology viewed as a science, has HkcAvise given us the first specimen of the phUosophy of history. That period of thirty years at the commencement of the fifth century, during which the fertUe mind of St. Augustuie poured forth so many works to be the seed-plots of thought for future times, was itself one of the most important and decisive in all history. It saw for the first time the capture of imperial Rome, which fiUed the old world with dismay. That world felt instinctively that it was disap pearing. The fountains of the great deep were broken up, and who could teU how much or what would remain standing after the deluge ? On aU sides the barbarians were bursting m, and the em pire which had groAvn for a thousand years was upheaved from its foundations. He who gave a theory of history at such a time was subjecting it to a rude trial. And again, it is worthy of note that the very capture of the city by Alaric led to the work in question. Rome, said certain Pagan writers, obtained the dominion of the world by the aid of the gods. She is become Christian, and she faUs. The objection seemed to St. Augustme to need an answer, and he blends aU the trea sures of history and philosophy together ni giving it in the great treatise, De Civitate Dei. We are 28 INAUGURAL LECTURE ON the chUdren of those barbarians, adopted, tamed, regenerated by the Church. We Hve far on the other side of that gulf into which aU that was beau tiful, orderly, and peaceful of the old ciAdlisation Avas about to be cast. We have eighteen centuries be hind us, and St. Augustuie had four. What judg ment should we pass on his work? I wUl take a summary ofit, draAvn up by a very able modern his torian, that you may see how far it reaches such an ideal of the philosophy of history as I have sketched above. "As to what concerns history," says M. Am^dee Thierry, " the foUoAving is the idea of St. Augustine. The events of this world are neither fortuitous nor isolated. DiAone Providence directs them, forms them into a series, causes them aU to concur towards the same end, the triumph of truth and justice, such as they were revealed iu the first instance to the Hebrew people, and as Jesus Christ came to confirm and announce them to the nations. Whoever listens to the voice from on high, and follows it, belongs to the people ofthe elect, the city of God, nigh to which moves the city of the earth, devoted to worldly interests, the city of pride and dominion, the persecutor ofthe saints, but which not the less labours, by means of which she is ignorant, for the kingdom of God, Thus did Babylon in the east — thus does Rome in the west — both of them queens of nations, both of them announced by prophecies, both of them pre destined to spread abroad, the former the revela- THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY, 29 tions of the Old Testament, the latter those of the New. The kingdom of Rome was universal, be cause such was to be the kingdom of Christ. And as the ancient law was but a preparation for the new, every thing in the ancient world converged towards Rome, and the accession of Jesus Christ, just as every thing after that accession has con curred to the triumph and the universahty of the Christian faith. Never was Rome so powerful as since, by the communication of Christ's reUgion, she attached to herself the barbarian nations bent formerly on her ruin. The Gauls burnt that Rome which was subject to the false gods; the soldiers of Hannibal would have made her a heap of stones ; the Christian Alaric recoUs from the destruction of Christian Rome ; he makes himself her master, and preserves her,"* It is the main idea which is here so valuable. The atmosphere of Tacitus and the lurid glare of his Rome, compared AAuth St. Augustine's world, are like the shades in which Achilles deplored the loss of life contrasted Avith a landscape bathed in the morning light of a southern sun. Yet how much more material misery was there in the time of St. Augustine than in the time of Tacitus ! In spite of the excesses in which the emperors might indulge Avithin the waUs of their palace or of Rome, the fair fabric of civiUsation fiUed the whole Roman world, the great empire was in peace, and * Histoire de la Gaule, Introduction, p. 340. 30 INAUGURAL LECTURE ON its multitude of nations were brethren. Countries which now form great kingdoms of themselves were then tranqufl members of one body politic. Men could traverse the coasts of Italy, Gaul, Spain, Africa, Syria, Asia Minor, and Greece, round to Italy again, and find a rich smiling land covered by prosperous cities, enjoying the same laws and institutions, and possessed in peace by its chUdren. In St, Augustine's time aU had changed. On many of these coasts a ruthless, uncivilised, un believing, or misbeHcAdng enemy had descended. Through the whole empire there was a feeling of insecurity, a cry of helplessness, and a trembhng at what was about to come. Yet in the pages of the two writers the contrast is just in the inverse ratio. In the Pagan, every thing seems borne on by an iron fate, which tramples on the free avUI of man, and overwhelms the virtuous before the Avicked. In the Christian, order shines in the midst of destruction, and mercy dispenses the se verest humihations. It was the symbol of the coming age. And so that great picture of the Doctor, Saint, and PhUosopher laid hold of the minds of men during these centuries of violence which foUowed, and in which peace and justice, so far from embracing each other, seemed to have deserted the earth. And in modern times a great genius has seized upon it, and developed it in the Discourse on Universal History. Bossuet is worthy to receive the torch from St. Augustine ; THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY, 31 scarcely could a more majestic voice or a more phUosophic spirit set forth the double succession of empire and of religion, or exhibit the tissue Avrought by DiAdne Providence, human free avUI, and the permitted power of evil, I do not say that the scientific method reached its fnU perfection in either of these great authors. I do not say that in the latter theory never en croaches on the domain of facts. Nor have I time to touch on the relation which the course of man's temporal destiny holds to that of his eternal, or the bearing of history on theology, and how much the philosopher may assume from the theologian. These great men were, above all, theologians, and if they in any respect stretched their OAvn province too far, the tendency of things has since been so much in the contrary direction that there is Uttle danger of their example in this respect being fol lowed. Nothing of this sort, certainly, can be charged on a UAong author, — at once statesman, orator, phi losopher, and historian of the highest rank, — who has given to us, on a less extensive subject, a phi losophy of history in its most finished and accurate form. The very attempt, on the part of M. Guizot, to draw out a picture of civiUsation durmg four teen hundred years, and to dissect through that immense and ever-changing period the course of society in so many countries, indicates no ordinary power; and the partial fulfilment of the design 32 INAUGURAL LECTURE ON may be said to have elevated the philosophy of his tory into a science. In this work may be found the most important rnles of the science accurately stated, but the work itself is the best example of phUosophic method and artistic execution united to Ulustrate a complex subject. A careful study of original authorities, a patient induction of facts, a cautious generalisation, the phUosophic eye to detect analogies, the painter's power to group re sults, and above aU a unity of conception which no multipUcity of detaUs can embarrass : these are some of the main qualifications for a philosophy of history, which I should deduce from these works. Yet whUe the action of Providence and that of human free Avill are carefully and beautifully brought out, whUe both may be said to be points of predilection to the author, he has not aUuded, so far as I am aware, to the great evU spirit, and his personal operation. Strong as he is, he has been apparently too weak to bear the scoff of modern infideUty, "he beUeves in the DcatI," — unless, indeed, the cause of this lies deeper, and belongs to his phUosophy ; for if there be one subject out of which eclecticism can pick nothing to its taste, it would be the permitted operation of the great fallen spirit. Nor wUl the warmest admiration of his genius be mistaken for a con currence in all his judgments. I presume not to say how far such an author is sometimes, in spite of himself, unjust, from the pomt of view at which THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 33 he draws his picture. Whether and how far he be an eclectic phUosopher, let others decide: it would be grievous to feel it true of such a mind; for it is the original sin of that phUosophy to make the universe rotate round itself. Great is its com placency in its own conclusions, but there runs through them one mistake, — ^to fancy itself in the place of God. It is, perhaps, these works and their great in fluence which led to another effort ofthe phUo sophic mind in the defence of Catholicism as to its action on society by the lamented Balmez, too soon removed from Spain and from the Church. With less unity of conception, with less scientific method, above all, far better in its idea than in execution, it yet exempUfies the philosophy of history ; more so, I think, than the volume of the celebrated Ger man who has had the honour of giAong its name to the science. We miss, indeed, in Frederic Schle gel the accuracy, lucidity, and point, the admirable concentration ofthe great French mind above men tioned. Yet there is enough in his volume, in its Avide stores of thought and immense learning, to justify the title which he has assumed. St. Augustine, Bossuet, Guizot, Balmez, Schle gel : I have taken these names not to exhaust, but to illustrate the subject. Here we have the an cient and the modern society, Africa and France, Spain and Germany, and the Christian mind in each, throAvn upon the facts of history. They D 34 INAUGURAL LECTURE ON pouit out, I think, sufiaciently a common result. But amid the founders of a new science who shaU represent our own country? Can I hesitate, or can I venture, in this place and company, to mention the hand which has directed the scattered rays of Ught from so many sources on the wUd chUdren of Central Asia, and produced the Turk before us in his untameable ferocity, — ^the outcast of the human race, before whom the earth her self ceases to be a mother, by whom man's blood has ever been shed like Avater, woman's honour counted as the vUest of things, nature's most sa cred laws publicly and avowedly outraged, — has produced him before us for the abhorrence of mankind, the infamy of nations? To sketch the intrinsic character of barbarism and civiUsation, and out of common historical detaUs, travel, and observation, to show the ineffaceable stamp of race and temper reproducing itself through the long series of ages, surely expresses the idea which we mean by the ' philosophy of history.' We have seen how the strong Ught of CathoUc truth and teaching gave to history its unity and its universahty, reducing the nation under the greater whole of the race, subordinating the city of Romulus to the City of God, It was by dis cerning the growth and progress of that City of God that the Catholic Doctor, Saint Augustine, seized upon it as the central point in the desti nies of man, which, whUe dominion passes from THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 35 country to country and from race to race, remains fixed and immutable. And this idea penetrated and took possession of Christian history for more than a thousand years. At length a Auolent schism arose, which severed from the City of God a por tion ofthe ciAoUsed world. They who were outside felt no longer touched by its glories or soothed by its promises, and the last three centuries have wit nessed on their part repeated attempts to construct histories; — and philosophical histories too, — ^which either ignore the existence, or disfigure and mis- ^represent the operation, of the City of God, The grand exploit of these writers is to blot the sun out of the world. Their utmost skUl consists in throAving themselves back into the position ofthe heathen, when there was no truth,, but every man's opinion; their total success would be to banish from their readers' minds, and to exclude from their oAvn, the thought that God had become man, had sphered his truth in a society, and subordi nated the whole course of events unto the trial of men, of nations, and of races, in accepting or re jecting that truth, m combating or forming a part of that society. To aU such men a phUosophy of history becomes by their OAvn fault as impos sible, as without their OAvn fault it Avas to Livy or Tacitus. But there is scarcely a period or a fact of early, or mediaeval, or modern history, which this perverted view of things has not misrepresented ; and it is necessary to aUude to it, smee our OAvn 36 INAUGURAL LECTURE ON country has been the chief seat of the error. None can ask for a nobler intellectual work than to be instrumental in any sort to the restoration of truth to history. May we not hope that this also is a glory reserved for those who have ui the midst of them one who sits in Peter's Chair at the centre of the earth, alone immovable where all is fluctuat ing ; who may well possess and communicate to his children the secret of history, for he has seen age after age and people after people pass by him ? they are gone, and he remains the same, to be to aU future generations what he was to them — truth's piUar, or its witness, Sedet ceternumque sedebit. Ancl this would seem to be the special work in history of the present age, and the ages which are to come. If "facts are the power in credit," so never before were they communicated in such abun dance to the curiosity of mankind. The predic ted times are come upon us; "many run to and fro, and knowledge is increased." The world, in deed, in all its aspects, is ransacked for facts. Not only all that concern the experimental sciences, but aU that belong to the moral field of human action, are gathered together before us as in a museum. Life seems too short to exhaust the documents that belong even to a single generation. The ends ofthe earth are brought to meet, and a tide of traveUers is continually going forth to sweep every creek and shore of civUised or uncivUised life, and to lay up the results of their observation for posterity; THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 37 not to say that every age inherits the riches of its predecessors. In the records of human thought accumulation is ever going on : the individual mind passes away; but the collective mind con tinues its ceaseless progress. It is said that the greatest phUosopher of antiquity avaUed himself of the power and wealth of his mighty pupU, Alex ander, to coUect animals for the study of natural history. But the poorest chUd of modern civUi sation is richer than Aristotle Avith the stores of Alexander at his feet. Rather the student of his tory is embarrassed Avith the boundlessness of the wealth set out before him. It is obvious that the special work of such a period must be to select and combine, to analyse and construct. In this direc tion a work is possible now which in former days no power of mind could accomphsh, because the materials were wanting. A subject of importance may be chosen, pursued through centuries and nations, every fact bearing on it noted, the expe rience of most dissimilar circumstances calculated ; and the result may be to throw a new Hght on even the leading motives which governed such times and countries. The actors themselves and their contemporaries are usuaUy imconscious of those very motives. "One must be outside the picture," says an able historian,* "to know weU its striking and characteristic pomts." It is in such studies, perhaps, that the mmd is most sensibly *• M. de Barante. 38 INAUGURAL LECTURE ON affected by that wonderful mystery of Almighty power, the Providence which rules the free actions of men. Who has not gazed Avith admiration on a swarm of insects unconfusedly engaged, Avith cease less industry and unity of purpose, in the work of their hive ? Who has not felt arrested at the spectacle of the Divine mind which planted this instinct Avithin them, and reveals itself in such effects ? But look now on the hive of men, where every one possesses not instinct, but the diviner gifts of memory, understanding, and wUl — where every one has an origin of action and choice in himself, which is essentiaUy free, which he is ever exercising. And yet no less the whole hive conspire to a work beyond the thought and aun of the indi vidual, beyond that of the mass — every one goes his own way, but all go together a way they wot not of, and man's free AvUl works out God's inten tion. Gazing on such a scene, we realise the poet's thought, and admire Avith him " La Prowidenza che governa il mondo Con quel consigUo nel quale ogni aspetto Creato e vinto pria che vada al fondo."* Such is human history in its highest aspect ; a most wonderful and entrancing sight. In thus analysing, comparing, sorting, and combining facts, the phUosophy of history has a great field open before it. If carried out faithfuUy and conscien tiously, no science can be fraught Avith more im- » Dante, Farad, xi, 28. THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 39 portant advantage to mankind. The simple reci tation of great deeds AviU ever possess a charm for the human naind ; but the phUosophic induction and inference from facts is replete Avith instruction for the race, and prepares the future against the errors ofthe past. But if such be the phUosophy of history, my hearers may fairly ask what right or title have I to take any part in so great a work? Now to this I have but. one reply. I have not sought a post, but obeyed a caU.* It is a caU, the nature of which I had never thought of till it was made ; in foUoAving it I obeyed another's judgment, not my OAvn. I put my feebleness under the shield of his authority. I recognised him, indeed, as one of the chiefs among the sons of thought, and felt that it was glory enough for me to serve under him. I reflected also that the fortress of error, which we are besieging, is of enormous force ; the despotism of self-AviU, for many a long year ruling undis puted, has filled it full Avith all the munitions . of war; its defenders are proud and stubborn. That the fortress avUI one day be taken, I know fuU weU : but who will take it, is another story. Many and many a soldier AviU fall before it; yet, in the day of its capture, their toil, their suffering, their it may be unnoticed fall and unhonoured lot, AvUl * The Author was appointed, under the rectorship of Dr. New man to the post of lecturer on the " Philosophy of History" in the Catholic University of Ireland. 40 INAUGURAL LECTURE. not have been in vain. They will have a portion of the success ; for they spent in it their force and their Ufe, which is aU that the bravest can do. If such be my portion, I accept it beforehand wiU ingly. The soldier who so fights cannot be pre sumptuous ; for his trust is in his commander and his cause, not in himself. It is not his part to judge whether the work is according to his strength; for it comes to him as a duty tobe fulfiUed, the spring of which is not ambition, but obedience. It has been my single object in this Address to answer the question. What is the 'phUosophy of history' ? and to lay doAvn some chief rules which should attend the scientific treatment of such a subject. When next I have the honour to meet you, I hope to commence a course in which I shaU attempt to apply the principles here touched upon to a great subject of study, the 'Formation of Christendom.' THE FOKMATION OF CHEISTENDOM. LECTURE I. THE CONSUMMATION OF THE OLD WORLD, The empire of Augustus inherited the whole ciAdU sation ofthe ancient world. Whatever poHtical and social laiowledge, whatever moral or inteUectual truth, whatever useful or elegant arts " the enter prising race of Japhet" had acquired, preserved, and accumulated in the long course of centuries since the beginning of history, had descended Avithout a break to Rome, vsdth the dominion of aU the countries washed by the Mediterranean, For her the wisdom of Egypt and of aU the East had been stored up; for her Pythagoras and Thales, So crates, Plato, and Aristotle, and aU the schools besides of Grecian phUosophy suggested by these names, had thought; for her Zoroaster, as weU as Solon and Lycurgus, legislated; for her Alex ander conquered, the races which he subdued forming but a portion of her empire. Every city in the ears of whose youth the poems of Homer 42 the FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. were familiar as household words OAvned her sway. Her magistrates, from the Northern Sea to the confines of Arabia, issued their decrees in the lan guage of empire,- — the Latin tongue ; whUe, as men of letters, they spoke and wrote in Greek, For her Carthage had risen, founded colonies, dis covered distant coasts, set up a world- Avide trade, and then faUen, leaAdng her the empire of Africa and the West, with the lessons of a long expe rience. Not only so, but HkeAvise Spain, Gaul, and aU the frontier provinces, from the Alps to the mouth of the Danube, spent in her serAuce their strength and skUl ; suppUed her armies Avith their bravest youths ; gave to her Senate and her knights their choicest minds. The Augour of new and the culture of long-poHshed races were alike employed in the vast fabric of her power. In fact, every science and art, all human thought, experience, a;nd discovery, had poured their treasure tn one stream into the bosom of that society which, after forty -four years of undisputed rule, Augustus had consoUdated into a new system of government, and bequeathed to the charge of Tiberius. It is hard to conceive adequately what a spec tator called "the immense majesty ofthe Roman peace,"* Where now in Europe, impatient and uneasy, a group of half-friendly nations jealously '¦* Pliny, Nat. His. xxvii. 1. "Immensa Eomanje pacis majes- tate, non homines modo diversis inter se terris gentibusque, verum etiam montes et excedentia in nubes juga paxtusque eorum et herbas quoque invicem ostentante.'' THE CONSUMMATION OF THE OLD WORLD. 43 watches each other's progress in power, and the acquisition of a province threatens a general war, Rome maintained, from generation to generation, in tranquU sway, an empire of which Gaul and Spain, Britain and North Africa, SAvitzerland and the greater part of Austria, Turkey in Europe, Asia Minor, Syria and Egypt, formed but single limbs, members of her mighty body. Her roads, which spread like a network over this immense territory from their common centre, the golden mUe-stone of her Forum, under the palace of her emperors, did but express the unity of that spirit with which she ruled the earth, her subject, leveUing the moun tain and filling up the vaUey, for the march of her armies, the caravans of her merchandise, and the even sweep of her legislation, A moderate fleet of 6000 saUors at Misenum, and another at Ra venna, a flotilla at Forum Julu, and another in the Black Sea, of half that force, preserved the whole Mediterranean from piracy ;* and every nation bordering on its shores could freely interchange the productions of their industry. Two smaUer armaments of 24 vessels each, on the Rhine and the Danube, secured the empire from northern incursion. In the time of Tiberius a force of 25 legions and 14 cohorts, making 171,500 men, with about an equal number of auxUiary troops, that is, in all an army of 340,000 men, sufficed not so much to preserve internal order, which * Champagny, Les Cesars, iii, 386, 44 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. rested on other and surer ground, but to guard the frontiers of a vast population, amounting, as is calculated, to 120,000,000,* and inhabiting the very fairest regions of the earth, of which the great Mediterranean Sea Avas a sort of central and do mestic lake. But this army itself, thus moderate in number, was not, as a rule, stationed in cities, but in fixed quarters on the frontiers as a guard against external foes.f Thus, for instance, the whole interior of Gaul possessed a garrison of but 1200 men; that Gaul which, in the year 1860, in a time of peace, thought it necessary for internal tranquiUity and external rank and security, to have 626,000 men in arms.| Again, Asia Minor had no miUtary force : that most beautiful region of the earth teemed Avith princely cities, enjojdng the ciAoHsation of a thousand years, and aU the trea sures of art and industry, in undisturbed repose. And Avithin its unquestioned boundaries the spirit, moreover, of Roman rule was far other than that of a mUitary discipline, or of a bureaucracy and a poUce pressing with ever watchful suspicion on every spring of civU life. The principle of its » By Gibbon estimated at 120,000,000 ; by DoUinger {Heide^n- ihum u-nd Judentlium, i.) at about 100,000,000. •f Champagny, iii. 386. % The Dailii Telegraph, on August 20, 1864, calculated the number of men in arms in Europe, in a time of peace, at 6,000,000 ; the calculation being taken from the budgets of the several countries. The revenues of these countries were esti mated at 314,000,000?., of which their armies and navies cost 123,000,000?. a year. THE CONSUMMATION OF THE OLD WORLD. 45 government was not that no population could be faithful which was not kept in leading-strings, but rather to leave cities and corporations to manage their own affairs themselves. Thus, its march was firm and strong, as one whose empire was assured, but for this very reason devoid alike of fickleness and haste.* Under the peace of so vast an empire, guarded rather by the majesty of the Roman name than by the amount of force employed, the inhabitants ot three continents, with ready transit by roads, ca nals, rivers, and the great central sea at their com mand, had unexampled facUities of commerce. No theory of free trade could equal the advantages arising from unity of empire : for the pubHc tran- quilUty being maintained at so slight a cost, this vast dominion was free from a large part of that burden of taxation which presses on modern in dustry, when the penalty of past wars is felt dur ing even the uncertaui periods of intermittent peace. Far indeed was the pax Romana removed from that armed jealousy of rival nations, the sole resource of the world after the forfeiture of its spi ritual unity, which is termed the balance of power. Then, on the contrary, from the Rhine and Danube to the deserts of Africa, from utmost Spain to the Euphrates, no war, nor suspicion of war, could arise. Of such a period TertulHan wrote : « DoUinger, Heid. und Jud., i. 34-5. Champagny, iii. 100, gives the disposition of the army. 46 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM, " The world itself is opened up, and becomes from day to day more civUised, and increases the sum of human enjoyment. Every place is reached, is become knoAvn, is fuU of business. Solitudes, fa mous of old, have changed their aspects under the richest cultivation. The plough has levelled forests, and the beasts that prey on man have given place to those that serve him. Com waves on the sea-shore ; rocks are opened out into roads ; marshes are drained; cities are more numerous now than villages in former time. The island has lost its savageness, and the cliff its desolation. Houses spring up every where, and men to dweU in them. On all sides are govemment and life. What better proof can we have of the multipUcation of our race than that man is become a drug, while the very elements scarcely meet our needs; our Avants out run the supplies ; and the complaint is general that we have exhausted even nature,"* And this Rome herself, the centre, the ruler, the presiding genius of the ciAoUsed world, — she who, in the words of Strabo, " had taught human ity to man,"f — what was the Ufe which she be stowed on her inhabitants? Judge of it by the gift of an emperor to his people: of such gifts there were many in Rome. A vast square, of more than a thousand feet, comprehended Avithin « De Ainima, 30 ; referred to by Champagny, iii. 196. t See Champagny, iii. 200 ; Dandolo, Ro-ma e i Papi, cap iii vol. i. 122. .c I F THE CONSUMMATION OF THE OLD WORLD. 47 its various courts three great divisions. One con tained libraries, picture and sculpture galleries, music-haUs, and every need for the cultivation of the mind. A second, courts for gymnastics, rid ing, Avrestling, and every bodUy exercise. A third, the baths : but how Uttle the word associated Avith modern poverty conveys a notion of the thing ! There were tepid, vapour, and swimming baths, accompanied Avith perfumes and frictions, giAdng the body an elastic suppleness. Then as to their material : alabaster Aued Avith marble ; mosaic pave ments Avith ceilings painted in fresco; waUs were incrusted in ivory, and a softened daylight re flected from mirrors; while on all sides a host of servants were engaged in the various oifices of the bath. The afternoon siesta is over ; a beU sounds ; the Thermae open. There all Rome assembles to chat, to criticise, to declaim. There is coffee house, theatre, exchange, palace, school, museum, parhament, and draAving-room in one. There is food for the mind, exercise and refreshment for the body. There, if any where, the eye can be satisfied Avith seeing and the ear Avith hearing, and every sense and every taste find but a too ready gratification. This feast of intellect, this palace of ancient power and art, is open daily Avithout cost, or for the smaUest coin, to every Roman citizen. Private wealth in modem times bestows a few of these gifts on a select number ; but poor as weU as rich could revel then, without fear of exhaustion. 48 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. in this treasure-house of material civUisation. For all is the gift of the imperial delegate to the people whom he serves and represents. The estabUsh ment is a graceful homage offered by the chosen of the nation to his constituents, who, according to the theory, have invested him Avith the plenitude of their coUective power. Nor must we here forget the greatest gift which the Roman empire bestowed upon the hu man race — a system of equal law ; a system which, in spite of the force from Avithout, that at last broke up the empire, stiU Hved on, was first the admiration of the barbarian conqueror, then in structed him, and finaUy subdued him to a avUI- ing homage. And that Roman law should thus have broadened out into an universal system of equal rights for aU, is the more wonderful because at the beginning it treated the most elementary and necessary rights of man in society as in the strictest sense national, or rather civic priAoleges. If the Roman could legaUy marry, and possess the power of a husband and a father; if he could inherit, acquire, and transmit property, he could do aU these things, not because he was a man, but because he was a citizen of Rome. The stranger residing Avithin his borders could do none of them. But when, in the last century of the republic, Rome became a world- Avide power, and was brought as a ruler into daily contact Avith the most different nations, each possessing their oAvn customs, laws, THE CONSUMMATION OF THE OLD WORLD. 49 and rights, this old, stern, and most exclusive sys tem of the Twelve Tables became supplemented, modified, corrected in a thousand detaUs. Under the ceaseless labour and thought of phUosophic ju risconsults, applying general principles, the science of right was gradually formed, and a barbarous groundwork of civic privUeges, local, arbitrary, relative in the highest degree, and full of the most galling inequahty, became in process of time, with out sudden change, by the slow and gradual de duction of Roman genius and Greek subtUty, a complete system of natural equity, Avith a sort of phUosophic precision and mathematical elegance.* This great result had not indeed been accomplished at the time we are considering, the fifty years which succeeded the Incarnation, but things were in pro gress towards it. Rome was bringing aU civUised nations to have and to acknowledge but one law, and this law not imposed by the power of the victo rious nation, but the result ofthe good sense of aU: so that what we now call Roman law was nothing but a great revolt of universal equity against insti tutions originally peculiar to the Roman people. For this material fabric of surpassing power and extent rested upon more than material founda tions. Rome was not merely the mighty conque ror, but the skUful assimUator of the human race. Her reign would not have acquired and deserved the name of a majestic peace but for this. And « See Champagny, iv. 94-102. E 50 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. to appreciate her power and her merit herein we must look beneath the surface. Perhaps if we compare her for a moment Avith other great cities which were most distinguished amid the thousands comprised in her dominion, this AviU be most apparent. We wUl choose none but the heads of former empires, the chief Ughts of ciAdUsation. First of all Athens. She had been a great naval power, a great emporium of traffic ; she was still, as she had been for ages, a great centre of human thought and speculation. Once the tributes of many Greek cities flowed to her, and she became the representative of the Greek name. The most beautiful buUdings ofthe world raised upon her acropolis out of the wealth of her subjects testified to what had been her sway. But she had not the gift of making this sway acceptable to her tribu taries. They quickly revolted from her, and her empire passed like a dream. Henceforth her reign was restricted to the arts of peace : painting, music, and sculpture, poetry, eloquence, and phUosophy, the natural gifts of the most gifted among ancient races, chose her for their home. The great and the wise of the earth loved to visit her, and to spend a time of study Avithin her walls, reverencing the shadoAV of departed political greatness, but more enjoying the light of present culture and refine ment, nay, charmed by the very clearness' of the atmosphere, and the hues of a spot renoAvned for its lovehness. THE CONSUMMATION OF THE OLD WORLD. 51 " Where on the JEgean shore a city stands BuUt nobly, pure the air, and light the soil." Athens was of old and gradual growth; but Antioch was selected by a rich and brUliant sove reign for the head of his empire. She was croAvned Queen of the East at her birth ; and so long as the kingdom of the Seleucidte lasted, its princes found in their beautiful Antioch a residence to their mind. They poured out upon her their wealth, and her lovely climate lent itself to every invention of luxury. Seated in a matchless valley between two ranges of lofty mountains, she grew till four cities, each enclosed Avithin its OAvn walls, extended from beyond the deep-floAving Orontes to the heights of Mount SUpius, and her battlements, stUl towering over craig and ravine, even in their ruins astonish the traveUer. AU the races of the East found in her their home: there Greek and Oriental civUisation joined hands; [and she con tinued for ages, under Roman dominion, a spot where the wealthy delighted to dweU, her Syrian magnificence embeUished by a long series of Ro man emperors. CaHgula, Trajan, and Hadrian buUt her baths; Antoninus Pius^ paved ^her chief street Avith Egyptian granite. For more than eight hundred years this glory lasted, until she was taken and destroyed by Chosroes. But what, as a heathen city, are Antioch' s contributions to the human race? She was a splendid capital, ^a choice abode of luxury and power, and nothing more. 52 THE FORMATION OF CHEISTENDOM. Greater yet than Antioch, fairest ofall fair cities, yielding to Rome only in size, but her rival, perhaps her superior, in traffic, was Alexandria. Chosen by one of the greatest conquerors and sovereigns to be a military and commercial metropoUs, she coUected in her bosom the trade of three continents. From the beginning Egyptian, Greek, and Jew had each in her their quarter; but every nation of the em pire, and Indians, Scythians, and Ethiopians from beyond it, were represented there. Occupying a broad tongue of land betAveen the sea and the lake Mareotis, from which every fog Avas scattered by the northern AAdnds that ventilate the Delta in summer,* her dry atmosphere preserved for cen turies the colour and outline of her buUdings un impaired ; not a flute of her pUlars or a flower of their capitals was marred by time; and eye-Avit- nesses tell us that no city of the world presented such a scene of beauty and grandeur as that AvhicTi met the traveller disembarking at the Gate of the Moon, and passing to the Gate of the Sun, from sea to sea, through a street lined with co lumns, f This was crossed by a chief thorough fare of Uke beauty and more than four mUes long, Avhile her quays lined the two harbours, and exhi bited the productions of Europe, Asia, and Africa in abundance unri\-alled by Rome herself AU * strabo, vi. 17. t AchiUes Tatius, lib. v. beginning. Diodorus Siculus, xvii. 52. Strabo, vi. 17. THE CONSUMMATION OF THE OLD WORLD. 53 that the Seleucidse had done for Antioch, and more yet, the Ptolemies had done for Alexandria. They had made her the great school of phUosophy and medicuie. Her Serapeion and Museum had no equals in the world for grandeur. She j.oined then in herself the glory of Athens and of Antioch; a seat no less of thought, study, and mental cul ture than of material wealth. She was the. fuU- groAvn offsj)ring of Alexander, sharing his double greatness from her birth to her end, and this brU Hant life lasted for well-nigh a thousand years, until she yielded to the Arab destroyer. Yet what great contribution did she too, as a heathen city, leave to the human race? Greater than Athens, Antioch, and Alexandria in the material order, Rome exceUed them yet more in this, that she had at once the avUI and the power to communicate to others that which was most precious of aU her possessions in her own eyes, in the eyes of her subjects, and in the eyes of posterity : her poHtical and civU rights, her citi zenship. Her great instrument in the government of men, her great means of preserving that majestic peace which was the true glory of her empire, was this gift of imparting her own rights in various degrees to the conquered. Her mode of doing this well deserves mention, since it lets us into the secret of her power. The Latin city which ui her cradle had groAvn upon the ruins of Alba Longa, takmg its citizens 54 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. as the most precious spoU of victory to be her OAvn, had pursued the same poHcy through seven hun dred years of increasing power. Thus aU Italy- had gradually acquired the right of Roman citizen ship. For she, for the first time tn history, had created a citizenship independent of material waUs and limits. Her rule was not the exclusion of the stranger and the isolation ofthe city; but to attract, to associate, and to extend. How did she effect this? Let us take an instance. Augustus found the Alpine vaUeys descending on Italy stUl in possession of the native tribes. Having con quered the AvarUke Salesi in the largest and fairest of these, he terminated a series of rebelHons by selHng for slaves their male population ; but in the midst of the valley he planted a colonia. A legion of veteran soldiers, Avith standards displayed, Avith their tribunes, centuries, and cohorts, marched to the chosen spot. At their head the augur, the pontiff, the notary, and the land-surveyor took their place. The ground was solemnly marked out according to the sacerdotal laws of Etruria; the omens taken ; the lines draAATi ; officer and pri vate receiA'ed his portion according to his rank. In the midst of the ground so aUotted the sacred plough traced the enclosure without which there could be no legal city, the pomcerium imaging that of Rome. The parallelogram so formed was intersected by two lines, termmatmg at the four cardmal pomts, which marked the site of four THE CONSUMMATION OF THE OLD WORLD. 55 gates, sacred and inviolable as those of Rome, whUe at the point of intersection was the forum, the likeness of that whose name had become famous over all the earth. Out of the armed force, which had thus become citizen, the new re pubUc chose duumviri, which were its consuls; and decemAurs, which formed its senate. Three hundred famiUes answered to the three hundred original Roman gentes ; thirty decemvirs to the three hundred senators ; there was priest for priest, and sacrifice for sacrifice. There was Rome her self in her fourfold aspect of camp, city, temple, and field.* It was henceforth Roman soU, dwelt in by Roman citizens Avith all civil and political rights. ForthAvith the new republic became in its district a sentinel, a citadel, a capital of Roman power : the centre of all existing ciAdUsation, and besides the market-place, tribunal, emporium to all the neighbourhood. Every occupation and busi ness of life drew the natives around to it; There only on market-days could they exchange their goods and make their purchases ; there, if strife arose between neighbours, the law would deter mine the right. There they saw an image of life, wealth, comfort, and civU peace far superior to any thing which they had unagmed. Insensibly it drew them to its bosom, and the aim of their life became to share the privUeges which they saw « " Campus, urbs, templum, ager Romanus." 56 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. securely possessed by its inhabitants. Rome had planted herself, Avith aU her attributes of power, order, wealth, and peace, before their eyes and Avithin their grasp. How could they faU to stretch forth their arms to the embrace of such a mother?* After nearly two thousand years you may stUl gaze doAvn from the overlooking mountain on that colonia. " Its enclosure remains. Its AvaUs in large part continue as they were then buUt. Its central square was the ancient forum ; its chief streets the intersecting lines draAvn by the augur ; and before its gate stands the very triumphal arch bearing the name of Augustus, its founder, twenty-seven years before the Christian era.f Even in her stones Rome seems everlasting. Now what Rome did here in the fairest and most important of Alpine valleys, the great road by which Julius passed to conquer Gaul, and Na poleon from Gaul descended on Italy, that she had been doing for hundreds of years in her OAvn peninsula, wherein during that time she had planted 161 colonise and 72 municipia; that she was doing over the broad plains of Gaul, and by the great rivers and thoroughfares of Western Europe, the Rhine, the Rhone, the Tagus, and the Ebro. She « Champagny, Les Cesars : to whom I am indebted for this view of the importance of the colonia in the Roman system of rule. " Colonial nostra: omnes in literis antiquis uibeis quod item conditffi nt Roma." Varro, De L. Lat. v. 40. " Colonise, qiiasi effigies parvffi simulacraque populi Romani." Aui. GeU. xvi. 13, quoted by hun. t The city of Aosta, seen from the Becca di Nona. THE CONSUMMATION OF THE OLD WORLD. 57 propagated herself in France by such cities as Lyons, Narbonne, Toulouse, and Aries; in Spain, by such as Cordova, Tarragona, Merida; m Africa, by Carthage, Utica, Adrametum; on the Rhine, by Cologne and B^e ; on the Moselle, by Treves ; in England, by Colchester and London. These are but specimens oi her assimUating power, by which she, who had conquered in arms, won and moulded by civiUsation, educated by governing, united and exalted by imparting rights. Athens, Antioch, Alex andria did not this, and so Uved soUtarily, and at length died ignominiously; whereas Rome sowed the whole West with the imperishable seed of her own liberty, law, and self-government, so that her municipal autonomy passed on as a principle of freedom to our Uving Europe ; and throughout her proAonces all that Avere distinguished by wealth, industry, energy, rank of any sort, strove for her citizenship and obtained it, and henceforth had two countries — one that tOAvn or district which bore them, the other and the greater, Rome, that queen- mother of ten thousand cities, from whose womb they had been bred, by whose milk they had been nur tured, whose heart's blood— the possession of her original civU and poHtical rights — ran in their veins. Was the Greek orator* wrong when he called the colonise and municipia of Rome her true ram parts, ramparts not to the city only, but to the whole empire? " The waUs of Babylon were but '> Aristides, De Urie Roma. 58 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. chUd's play," he cried, "in comparison Avith these. Darius once netted a single city on an island Avith in a circle of liAong men, but Rome has netted the world." And thus she is Uke the common mother earth, supporting all ; or like the ocean, receiAung all streams into her bosom Avithout overflowing ; where every one has his deserts ; and no geogra phical division prevents merit from being knoAvn and honoured. And thus the Avord 'Roman' is be come the name not of a city merely, but of a gene ral race, and her guards are her OAvn citizens, the best and most powerful citizens in every city of the world. Great, then, as in itself was the mUitary power of Rome, it pressed very Hghtly on so vast an em pire, being throAvn entirely on the frontiers, whUe the whole interior was guarded and maintained in tranquillity without soldiers by that sole majesty of her name. Indisputable, aU-controUing as was her sovereignty, at the same time it did not efface the variety of subject races, for it left them ui general in possession of their OAvn laws, liberty, property, and customs, reserAong to itself the right of peace and war, and requiring only that they should have the same enemies and the same friends Avith herself It was a patronage,* says Cicero, rather than an * " Regum, populorum, nationum portus erat et refugium sena tus. Nostri autem magistratus imperatoresque ex hac una re maxi- mam laudem capere studebant, si provincias, si socios sequitate et fide def endissent. Itaque iUud patrocinium orbis terrse verius quam imperium poterat nominari." De Offic. ii. 8. This state of things, THB CONSUMMATION OF THE OLD WORLD. 59 empire. By so many cities, images of Rome her self, possessing and communicatuig her -privileges, she drew and moulded the various nations after her OAvn pattem ; and so, Avithout an ubiquitous police or an army of administrative agents, she gave Hfe, order, and unity to the whole mass, as the centre of all rights, and the disposer of aU rewards. "The one thing which I especially admire in you," says the same Greek rhetorician, "is that Avith so great and strongly constituted a dominion you go vern men as freemen, Avhich is entirely peculiar to yourselves. It is no Caria given to Tissaphernes, or Phrygia to Pharnabazus, or Egypt to another, as the private property of one himself a slave ; but as the magistrates of a particular city govern its revenues for that city's good, you have made the world one city, and appoint its rulers to preside over and provide for citizens with lawful not des potic power."* We can now better understand the majesty of that omnipresent city as seen in the several magis trates, who by the names of Proconsuls, Propras- tors. Procurators, or Praefects, bore her name and. power in the several countries. Round their tri bunals at Aries, at Cordova, at Carthage, at Thes salonica, at Ephesus, at Antioch, at Alexandria, nations distinct in their origin, laws, and customs, broken down in the hundred years preceding the empire, seems certainly to have been, in part at least, restored under the empire. o Aristides, De Urbe Roma, pp. 207, 211, 213, 214. 60 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. waited Avith an equally humble obedience, receiv ing a common laAV from their mouth. Armed force was not needed, for greater than any force was the name of the goddess Roma, whom they represented. And so the five hundred cities of Asia reverence, Avithout a garrison, a single ruler and his consular fasces. The Greeks with aU their Avisdom, the Macedonians after aU their victories, bow humbly before six rods. The Gauls, who fought for freedom during eighty years, pay tri bute and accept prosperity from the Romans, Avith but 1200 soldiers among them, scarcely more nu merous than the number of their cities.* Yet these rulers, whose majesty surpasses that of kings, are themselves magistrates oAving obedience to another. They serve their appointed time and depart ; are responsible for their actions and their judgments to that supreme ruler at Rome Avho governs the world by his letters. Is this an unworthy development for those Avho in their beginning Avere so unsparing to self, so stem in their notion of duty, so devoted to their country; for which parents were knoAvn to sacri fice their chUdren, patriots to devote themselves to death — the city of Marcus Brutus, Camillus, Decius, Fabius, Regulus, Manlius, Curtius, Virginius? Is not the very language of Cicero and VirgU an expression of this lordly, yet peaceful rule; * See the speech of Agrippa, dissuading the Jews from war, in Josephus, De Bello, ii. 16. THE CONSUMMATION OF THB OLD WORLD. 61 this even, undisturbed majesty, which holds the world together like the regularity of the seasons, Hke the alternation of Hght and darkness, like the aU-pervadmg warmth of the sun? If every lan guage reflects the character of the race which speaks it, surely we discern hi the very strain of VirgU the closing of the gates of war, the settling of the nations doAvn to the arts of peace, the reign of law and order, the amity and concord of races, the weak protected, the strong ruled ; in a word, "Romanos rerum dominos gentemque togatam." It is with the settled reign and matured policy of Augustus that this peace begins, and it lasts more or less two hundred years in its complete ness, and two hundred more in its decline. To it wUl apply the words of Seneca, that Rome had found most faithful allies in the nations which had been its most obstinate enemies : for in what would its empire consist had it not Avith wise pro vision blended the conquered Avith their conque rors?* And a Roman general reminds the Gauls how their country had been a scene of intermin able wars and revolutions before the Romans in tervened. "And if they were expelled, Avhat else," he added, "would follow, but a struggle betAveen every nation and its neighbour ? It cost the good fortune and the discipline of eight hundred years to weld into one mass this empire, which cannot be rent to pieces but with the destruction of those * Seneca, De Ira, ii. 34. 62 THE FORMATION OP CHRISTENDOM. who rend it. Cherish, therefore, and love that peace and that city, which, whether conquered or conque rors, we possess with common rights."* From this glimpse of the external grandeur of the Roman people let us turn to the internal con dition of its society. First and foremost is the great institution of slavery, the broad basis on which this mighty pyra mid may be said to rest. For not merely was all domestic service performed by slaves, but the cul tivation of the land had at this time faUen almost entirely to them, as weU as all Avorks of industry involving hand-labour in toAvn and country. Even the liberal arts, such as medicine and architecture, were mainly in their hands. Of their number it is difficult to obtain any certain knowledge. It differed probably in the various provinces, being largest of aU at Rome, where the servUe popula tion Avas tAAdce, if not thrice, in number the free. Thus, first of aU, hand- work was serAdle ; secondly, domestic service; thirdly, industry; fourthly, com merce and the useful arts of Ufe in great part, and even the fine arts in some degree. The con quest of all the countries bordering on the Medi terranean, accomplished in the hundred and fifty * Speech of Cerialis, Tac. Hist. iv. 73-4. " Nam pulsis, quod dii prohibeant, Romanis, quid aliud quam beUa omnium inter se gen tium existent? Octingentorum annorum fortuna disciplinaque compages hsec coai^'ii.t, qu£e conveUi sine exitio conveUentium non potest. . . Proiude pacem et mbem quam victi victoresque eodem jure obtinemus, amate, coUte." THE CONSUMMATION OF THE OLD WORLD. 63 years precedmg Christ, flooded the Roman Avorld with slaves. Nor were they of an inferior or even markedly different race from thefr masters. DraAvn from Germany, Gaul, Spain, Northern Africa, Syria, Asia Mmor, Greece, and Thrace, the vast majority belonged, like their conquerors, to the great Aryan race. There were few of the chUdren of Shem ; fewer yet of Ham's unhappy progeny. On the whole, the Roman slave was, in natural gifts of body and mmd, fully his master's equal. What then was his social condition? A slave was a piece of property;* an animated instrument, something absolutely belongmg to his master, a being absorbed in his master's being, by whom he could be given, lent, pledged, exchanged, or sold. This was the fundamental notion of Roman slavery in particular, that the slave was a thing, not a person ; so specially a thing, that the Roman word for ' chattel' belonged to him pecuharly. He was mancipium., a marveUous expression of the hard Roman idea, by which the human being became a thing which you could grasp in your hand. Varro, in treating of agriculture, Avrote : " There are three sorts of instruments, vocal, semi- vocal, and mute : vocal, which comprises slaves ; semi- vocal, oxen ; mute, wagons." The principle thus tersely stated • by Varro was carried out through Roman law Avith * The foUowing summary of slavery is condensed from WaUon, and DoUinger Heid. und Jud. p. 704-10. It must be remembered that Roman slavery is here treated of, not slavery in general,— a question which I reserve for future treatment. 64 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOJI. the most rigorous precision in all its details. As the citizen was the equal of aU other citizens in the eye of the state, so he was absolute sovereign within his oavu house. And the slave was so abso lutely his master's property that neither the favour of the people nor the authority of the prince could legally sever the bond. The master could not bind himself to a slave ; could not accuse him of theft, because the slave being Avithin his domi nion, any thing taken by him could not go out of it. The slave had no civil position; no marriage; no paternity. By custom his master allowed him certain perquisites, which he could lay by for him self, and which was called his peculium ; but this too belonged legally to the master. Much more had he no political rights; and an attempt on his part to enter military service or to take any civil office was punished Avith death. He had no power to receive a legacy ; no power of legal action. He could not give CAudence, save upon torture; and when he was so caUed in as a Avitness the law care fully proAdded that any damage done to him by breaking of limbs or loss of life should be repaid according to its money value to his master. His punishment was left entirely in his master's hand. The right of the master had no Hmitation. There was an old law punishmg with death the killing of an ox ; but the laAV made no such proAusion in the case of the slave; the human being, outside the range of civic rights, had never such value in its THB CONSUMMATION OF THE OLD WORLD. 65 eyes. The master, then, might condemn his slave ; his sentence itself was subject to no control, and its execution to no impediment. Such executions Avere carried out pubhcly under Augustus, and Avithout his interference. The usual mode of in- fHcting death on the slave was by crucifixion. Not untU Hadrian's time was this power taken aAvay by law, on account of the excesses still witnessed. As long as the Romans were their own masters, they never thought of limiting the master's power over the slave, Cato the Censor, that brilhant example of old Roman Adrtue, Cicero's model of the old man, was especially remarkable for the exactness Avith which he carried out the Roman view of the slave being his master's chattel. He saAV no difference between animals and slaves, save that the latter were rea sonable and docUe, and so could be made respon sible. When his slaves grew old and helpless he used to seU or drive them aAvay. And he had them trained like dogs and horses, and at certain times he allowed .them to pafr. Finding the slave- trade profitable, and loving money more and more, he made his slaves in his latter years buy and train boys, and then sell them again. Such being the law, in custom and in fact, the ordinary state of the slave was] no doubt ruled. by the law of interest. It is mj^the whole mass that the true character of their condition must be seen; and this condition ui general represented the F 66 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. influence on Avhich by its nature it depended, that is, the law of property as foundation, and utUity as rule. The Roman's custom answered but too well to the law, which gave him the slave for his property, to use him as a thing. This false idea had taken fuU possession of Roman life. Such was the condition of that large majo rity by whose labour society was supported. But must not the superstructure of society correspond to its basis ? There could not be a single free Roman household which was not affected by the existence of such slavery as this. Large as was the part of the social domain which it occupied en tirely to itself, it fermented through aU the rest. The spirit of slavery is never Umited to the slave : it saturates the atmosphere which the freeman breathes together Avith the slave, passes into his nature, and corrupts it. Let us mark this aggres sive character of slavery at Rome in three points of Adew. (a) 1. First, slave-labour was continually ex- peUing free labour. The land of Italy was origin aUy tiUed by a free peasantry. At Rome especiaUy agriculture was held in the highest honour. But the effect of war and conquest had been to exter minate the class of smaU proprietors both at Rome and in Italy. Their lands went to form the broad estates, latifundia, of the nobles ; their honourable toUs were replaced hj the sorry but cheaper tU- THE CONSUMMATION OF THE OLD WORLD. 67 lage of the slave, who was uicapable of miUtary service, and Avithout suffrage, the mere mstru ment of an absent master, and superintended by a steward Hke hunself a slave. Thus agriculture, which had been the nursery of Roman legions for so many centuries, was become servile, and the land of the hardy Sabins had been, in the words of Seneca, delivered over to " fettered feet, bound hands, and branded faces."* 2. Again, not only were servants slaves, but slaves were the only servants. There is nothing in domestic service of its oAvn nature incompa tible Avith freedom. The happier state of society in which we Hve allows master and servant to have the same political and ciAdl rights, the same rehgious duties and hopes. But at Rome the system of slavery had rendered free service im possible, not only by fixing a brand upon it, but because the whole social economy was opposed to it. 3. Once more, slaves were artisans, and held in the city almost as complete a monopoly of the skUled labour by which the various arts of life are carried on, as of the ruder field-labour in the country. Industry, retaU trade, commerce itself in large part were not free, but conducted by masters through thefr slaves, who were taught at the smaUest cost every manufacture and every ~- " Impediti pedes, vinctas manus, inscripti vultus ;" quoted by Champagny, iv. 2. 68 THE FORMATION OF CHEISTENDOM. art by Avhich the fortune of thefr lords might be increased. Labour, therefore, under the three great divi sions of tUlage, domestic service, and artisanship, had been rendered ignominious because it was the portion of slaves. (b) But, secondly, Avhat was the social and poH tical temper which slavery generated around and outside of itself? What was the condition and the spirit of the free ? This rich man, to whose ab solute power the life, the honour, the happiness of so many slaves are committed, Avithout a check upon passion or caprice, what else could he be but a tyrant, regardless of human life and suffering ? By the original constitution of the Roman famUy he was master, Avith power of life and death, both of Avife and chUdren. But when, in addition to this, his household was founded upon slavery, when from his tenderest youth he had been re ceived m the arms of slaves, heard thefr language, Avitnessed their habits, and beheld them not merely sacrificed to their master's advantage, but crouch ing before his feet in helpless impotence, where was he to learn the spirit of a father or of a citi zen? And the poor freeman, supplanted by the slave of the rich in the great field of trade and in dustry, indisposed moreover to work of all kinds, as being the portion of the slave, Avhat had he left to him but his quality of a Roman, dependence upon the imperial largess of corn and money, and servile THB CONSUMMATION OF THB OLD WORLD. 69 flattery of his patron as cHent ? It is the great work of the emperor to feed the Roman people. It may cost him his throne if the fleet from Africa be delayed too long, bearing corn to three hundred thousand idle and starvmg citizens. For here at least the master of rich and poor, of slave and free man aUke, pays his homage to the universal spfrit of serAdUty, and lives in dread of that people as a whole, of whom every single Ufe and fortune are at his mercy. For the lord of a thousand slaves returning some day from his palace-vUla on the cool heights of Tusculum, or the lovely shore of Baiaa, may find an order from the emperor granting to him the truly Csesarean indulgence of choosing his OAvn mode of death. Then wiU he collect a few chosen friends for the last social feast, discourse on the shortness and uncertauity of Hfe, and order himself to be placed in the warm bath, where the obedient slave-physician, ever at his side, wiU skil fuUy open his veins, so that the stream of life may ebb away Avith the least suffering.* Thus slave and master, patron and client, sena tor and emperor, form a graduated hierarchy of slavery, the social and political spfrit of which be comes the model., as well as the basis,, of society. (c) Yet aU this is as nothing to the foun tain of moral corruption opened by slavery in every Roman household. It was not merely that the labour, the time, the health, and strength of ** Vide the death of Seneca, 70 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. the slave belonged to the master; not merely that he might be poorly fed, miserably lodged, beaten Avithout mercy, cast out in his sickness or age, crucified hi his yoiith ; it was that the common nature of man in him was not recognised; that the last stronghold in which the moral being resides, the stronghold of purity, sanctity, and conscience, was recklessly invaded and violated. There was, be it remembered, according to the Roman law, and what is more, according to universal Roman custom, no such thing as adultery, no such thing as seduction, no such thing as outrage in the case of male as weU as female slaves. Jn this respect, as in aU others, they were the prey of the master. The Roman house was a fortress, Avithin which, as concerns the relation of master and slave, the writ of the law did not run. What passed Avithin it was not merely unpunished ; it could not be knoAvn, The law of man-property was sacrosanct, and had priority over every thing, the law of human nature included. There is an outrage of animals which the EngUsh law tiU lately, as the divine law of old, forbade under pain of death ; but that right of out rage itself, if we may so violate aU propriety of language to express the utter violation of nature, that right of outrage itself was sacrosanct under the Roman law. It is needless, then, to dweU on what was the moral character of the male and female slave Avith in the precincts of a Roman palace. " The Roman THE CONSUMMATION OF THB OLD WORLD. 71 law by its distinction between a novitius and a veterator mforms us of the effect which servitude exercised on the slaves themselves. A slave who had been a year or more in service was a veterator, a used man, and therefore of much less value; for, says the law-book, it is but too hard to improve a used slave, and adapt him to the service of a new master. The dealers, therefore, often passed off a veterator for a novitius. Thus, a year of service was sufficient so to spoU a man that he sunk con siderably hi value Hke any other worn-out ware,"* But Rome was the centre of the world, and thither from every subject proAdnce streamed a host of slaves, the most accomplished and refined, soon to become the most abandoned, of both sexes. In them an inexhaustible supply of fresh victims made up for the rapid waste of life : and a slave- market, fed by a subject world, was always at the flood. But what was the result to the mas ters ? We find a series of laws passed by Augustus and the succeeding emperors, to encourage, to enjoin marriage, giving rewards and priAdleges to those who had famUies, fining and censuring ce- Hbacy. But all in vain. Under Augustus the number of unmarried citizens far exceeded that of the married. Poets, historians, phUosophers com plain that the Roman avUI not marry, that Roman famUies decrease in number. But thefr example is more powerful than their complaint. Horace * DoUinger, Heid. wnd Jud. p. 713. 72 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM.' and VirgU and CatuUus and TibuUus, and the very ministers of the monarch who enjoins mar riage, remain themselves voluptuous ceUbates. The utmost tenderness of the most pathetic and inspired of Latin poets is spent on the most pro- ffigate of even Roman women, the Avife of another, until in the bitterness of his heart he is compeUed to denounce her unequalled shame : "Lesbia nostra, Lesbia iUa, nia Lesbia, quam CatuUus unam Plus quam se atque suos ama-vit onmes." But few A^dll marry ; fewer still claim the priAdleges granted to the parent of three chUdren : for the unnameable advantages of the chUdless far exceed any reward, immunity, or honour which imperial power can devise for the married. And if even in compliance Avdth the imperial law they Uve in marriage, yet their married life is destitute of its natural fruit ; and so Ovid, Lucan, Statins, SUius Italicus, Seneca, the two Plinies, Suetonius, and Tacitus, are married but chUdless.* By this, far more than by the suspicious cruelty of Tiberius, or by Nero's thirst for blood, the Roman nobUity dies out. The old patrician, the newer noble, the newest senatorian families disappear. In vain are they replenished from the class of knights or even freedmen. The knights themselves, the rich middle class, suffer from the same cause. They are hardly kept up by continual suppletions from ** DoUinger, Heid. und Jud. p. 718. THE CONSUMMATION OF THE OLD WORLD. 73 below. And lastly, the very Roman plebs has long ceased to be that sturdy race of freemen which seceded to the Mons Sacer. It has been replen ished again and again out of the surging tide of slavery. Already Scipio, the conqueror of Carth age, told the populace to their face that he was not to be daunted by the murmurs of those whom he himself had dragged in chains to Rome.* They were no longer " the dregs of Romulus," but the dregs of aU the proAdnces who Uved on the imperial poor-law, and swarmed by myriads all through the summer day to behold the encounter of gladiators and beasts in the CoUseum, and the race of rival charioteers in the Circus Maximus. Thus, while the moral corruption, engendered by the sensual indulgences which slavery thrcAV into the lap ofthe Romans, was causing the race of freemen in senate, knights, and people to die out, those classes themselves Avere continually replen ished Avith slave-blood. For instance, the freedmen of the emperors, acquired immense fortunes and armies of slaves ; and one of them, PaUas, will have a brother, Antonius Felix, marked by one historian as the husband of three queens, and by another as " a monster of blood and lust, who Avielded," m Judea, " the power of a king Avith the mind of a slave."t In a short time this slave-blood ran through every vein of Roman society. And thus « Valerius Maximus, vi. 11 ; quoted by DoUinger, p. 715. -j- Tacitus, Hist. v. 9. 74 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. in the very city of those to whose ears for five centuries the very name of king had been abomi nable, it was necessary that one man should rule whose word should be law, according to the maxim, "Quod principi placuit, legis habet Adgorem;" though, like CaUgula, he might sum up his power as being "the right of aU things over aU men," or like Nero, when seeking poison to destroy his brother Britannicus, he might ask ofthe poison- vender, "Have I to fear the Juhan law?"* But even this was not the worst. There was a portion of the wealthy Roman's house caUed the Paedagogium, that in which the young male slaves were brought up, Avith a certain varnish of edu cation and accompHshments. Seneca gives the portrait of one. " Dressed out Hke a woman, he struggles with his years : he must not go beyond the age of youth ; he is kept back ; and though his figure be massive like that of a fighter, he has a smooth chin where the hair is rubbed away, or' plucked out by the root."f I forbear to quote what foUows. In a word, as Nero must surpass aU other men, while every wealthy Roman may possess his harem of male slaves, the emperor has a harem of freemen. J Thus slavery, after stamping all honest labour " " Monenti Antonise aviie, tanquam parum esset non obedire, Memento, ait, omnia mihi et in omnes licere." Suet. Cal. 29. " Sane legem Juliam timeo." Suet. Ner. 33. t Seneca, Ep. 47 ; quoted by DoUinger, p. 719. % " Ingenuorum." Suet. THE CONSUMMATION OF THE OLD WORLD. 75 Avith ignomuiy, and vitiatmg m its source the social and poUtical spirit of the free, had this further re sult, that it destroyed the general morahty, and in doing so caused the population to decay Avith a force which no remedial laws could prevent; no filHng up from its oavu ranks counterbalance. And through every part of the slave-law mus an utter disregard of human life. Man as man has lost his value. He is become the cheapest of aU things. In the amphitheatres Uves are mown doAvn by thousands yearly, and all Rome gloats over the spectacle of blood. Within the prison- house, which slavery has made of each private family, the vices, luxury, and caprice of masters waste away generation after generation in their first bloom and Augour. Here, then, in the midst of this Roman empire, so grand in its outward tranquUHty, under whose guardianship the ciAuUsed nations of the earth aspire not in vain after the blessings of universal peace, we find a despotism Avithout Hmit in the internal relations of society, in the master over the slave, in the father over the wife and children, in the patron over the client, that is, the rich over the poor, and in the prince over the subject; and Avith the despotism a moral corruption and a disregard of human life, which are eating away the population, and undermining the foundations of the state. It was the world of Nero prolonged in the minds of those outside the Church to his OAvn 76 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. tune which St. Augustine saw and described to the life, when a chorus of voices arose from the worshippers ofthe old gods in favour of a state which gave them an abundance of material goods. What wonder that they, to whom Jupiter Avith his cupbearer Ganymede Avas the model of one sex, and Venus with her lover Mars of the other, should be touched by no moral turpitude in such a govemment? "Only let it remain," they said, " only let it be stUl abundant in wealth, and glori ous with victories, or better stiU, secure in peace. Why obtrude upon us this notion of sin ? What we care about is that wealth should increase, to proAdde these daUy supplies. Poverty is weak, and wealth is strong, and it is natural that strength should command wealaiess. The poor may weU obey the rich, if they be fed by them, and enjoy a quiet idleness under their patronage. Let a uni versal suffrage approve not those who provide for its good, but who supply its pleasures. Impose no hard command, but do not prohibit enjoy ment. Kings should regard not their subjects' mo rality, but their obedience ; and provinces obey thefr rulers not as models of virtue, but as yielding material sway, and proAdding for material needs. Thefr tribute should be not sincere loyalty, but servile fear. The province of the law is to protect property, not to interfere with private vice. Bring to trial Avhoever has injured the estate, or house, or life of another, or been troublesome to him; THE CONSUMMATION OF THE OLD WORLD. 77 but may he not do what he likes Avith his OAvn ? or Avith those who join him voluntarUy? Give us in abundance the instruments of pubhc licentiousness for all who choose to enjoy them, or for those specially who cannot have them to themselves. There cannot be too much of large houses, rich feasts, and revelry by day and night. We avUI have no restrictions on our theatres, no squeamish- ness as to the pleasures which they offer. Count that man a public enemy who likes not such pro sperity. But should he attempt to meddle Avith it, let a free people close their ears to him, pluck him from his place, and sweep him from the earth. Count those for true gods who have proAuded and preserved such gifts for the people. Let them have what worship they desfre, ask for such games as they Hke, wherein thefr worshippers shall be companions or instruments. All we ask of them is to suffer no enemy, no plague, no calamity to interfere Avith such prosperity."* But what is the mental condition of which these things are the token ? On what root do they grow? The actions of men are the results of what they believe, hope, fear, and desire. We have seen how Roman heathenism was acting. What then was its behef? First of all, the whole' of this heathenismf which Rome inherited, represented, and sustained, " S. Aug. De Civ. Dei, ii. 20. j- DoUinger, Heid. u-nd Jud. p. 652. 78 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. was destitute of what we mean by reUgious doc trine, and of teachers whose office it was to pro mulgate and propagate such doctrine. It had no where a moral authority: what it possessed was only transmitted ceremonies and fables. To take, for instance, the most universal of religious rites, the rite of sacrifice. The reason and meaning of the institution were every where lost. So priests and priesthoods existed every where, interwoven Avith the civil govemment, as in all the Hellenic cities, and in Rome herself especially ; but no where was it imagined that " the priest's Hps should guard knowledge, and that they should seek the law from his mouth, because he is the messenger of the Lord of hosts."* ReUgious rites were separated from what we understand by religion, that is, the obedience and homage of heart and will to God, and from morality, not to say that they were too often connected Avith the most flagrant breach of moral purity. Nowhere accordingly were the priests moral or reUgious teachers ; and what the priests were not, the phUo sophers sought to be. And as this great gap in the moral life of a people yavmed every where frightfully open and void, the few in every age who thought for themselves and busied them selves Avith the problem of human life, sought to fiU it up. "They who seek Avisdom," says Cicero,t "are called philosophers; nor is philosophy any '¦' Malachi, ii. 11. f De Officils, ii. 2. THB CONSUMMATION OF THE OLD WORLD. 79 thhig else, if you take the meaning of the word, than the study of Avisdom. Now wisdom, as de fined by the ancient phUosophers, is the knowledge of divhie and human thmgs, and of the causes which contam these things; nor do I understand what he who censures this study would praise. For whether you seek the mind's entertainment, and its rehef from anxieties, where is there any to be compared vsdth that derived from studies which embrace the whole field of a virtuous and happy life? or whether you seek the grounds on which constancy and vfrtue rest, either this is the art whereby to obtain them, or there is none at all." PhUosophers, then, aspired to be theologians and moraUsts of nations, whose priests performed, in deed, what should have been rehgious rites, but had ceased to teach the doctrine which gave mean ing to those rites. But as these philosophers re cognised no standard, no common authority, each, according to the variety of human thought, pur sued his OAVU theories, selecting from his predeces sors' opinions, changing or reversing them at his pleasure. Thus if we take only the three prevailing philosophic systems at Rome in Cicero's time, the Stoic, the Epicurean, and the Academic, the whole field of moraUty, in the words of Horace, " Quid pulchrum, quid turpe, quid utUe, quid non," was completely broken up. It was a mass of endless variety and contradictions : so that as to the cardi nal point of the end for which all other thmgs are 80 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. to be sought, St, Augustuie remarks* that Varro could point out no less than two hundred and eighty- eight different opinions into which the three classes ramified, who placed this end in the mind, or in the body, or in both. As there was scarcely any opinion which could not claim some man of ability, not without a certain foUoAving, for its author, and as aU opinions stood on the same foundation of mere reasoning from that common human nature which each interpreted differently, the result could only be, as it was, the destruction of aU moral certainty in thinking minds, and the acquiescence of the vulgar in a practical system of rehgious rites, which carried with them no moral force or value, and in which man had no inteUi gent belief. But, secondly, the study of rehgion and mor ality being the proper study of phUosophers, they had one and all lost that notion Avhicli is the key stone ofthe arch that supports both religion and morality, the notion of an immaterial and personal God. If, amid perpetual inconsistencies and con tradictions, some at some time appear to set forth their belief in one God, the orderer and ruler of all things, yet their conception of such God would seem to be material or at least pantheistic. Thus Cicero makes Velleius, in the person of an Epicu rean, expose, not withont reason, the conflicting theories of no less than tAventy-seven ofthe most '•^ De Civitate Dei, xix. 1. THE CONSUMMATION OF THB OLD WORLD. 81 famous phUosophers, comprising, in fact, every name of note from Thales to his own time, which he entitles not so much sober judgments as deU- rious dreams ; Avhich, however, seem all to agree hi this, that they do not recognise a God at once immaterial and personal.* And being without the notion of a personal immaterial God, it is not wonderful that they should .Hkewise have no grasp of the soul's enduring personahty. The greater part beheved it to perish at death ; but those who deemed of it most highly, deemed it some thing of fiery, aerial, or etherial nature; or like the harmony of a musical instrument, or a por tion of the universal world-soul, which after death was dissolved again into that from which it had sprung, as a flask fiUed Avith water in the sea when broken returns the severed portion to the sur rounding element.f The notion of immateriahty, of spirit, was one which they did not conceive, either as concerns God or the human soul. J But from this it followed likewise that they had lost the notion of sin, which is "any thing done, or said, or desfred against the eternal law."§ This eternal * De Natura Deorum, i. 11-15. The phUosophers whose deliri ous dreams on the subject of the Godhead are so noted are, Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Anaxagoras, Alcmaeo, Pythagoras, Xenophanes, Parmenides, Empedocles, Protagoras, Democritus, Diogenes ApoUoniates, Plato, Xenophon, Antisthenes, Speusippus, Aristoteles, Xenocrates, Heracleitus, Theophrastus, Strato, Zeno, Aristo, Cleanthes, Perseus, Chrysippus, Diogenes Babylonius. f DoUinger, ut sup. p. 593. t Champagny, iii. 335 ; DoUinger, p. 340. § S. Augustuie, tom. viii, 378, G 82 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. law is the divine reason. The goodness of the human act depends principaUy on its conformity to the eternal law, and by consequence its maHce consists in being discordant from that law, that is, from the divine reason or AviU, which alone is the rule of its oavu act, as not being dfrected to any superior end.* But since in this great sea of ignorance the notion of a personal God had been lost, the notion of His reason or wiU, as the rule of government in the whole universe, which He had created, was gone Avith it.f Again; as to the nature of good and evU there prevaUed the utmost uncertainty and contradic tion. For the supreme good had become unknoAvn to them; their horizon was limited to the visible world, and in the Ausible world evU was so mixed up Avith good, and to the mass of men indeed appeared to exercise so equal a contest with it, even if it did not gain the mastery, that they were inclined to attribute to it a coeternity Avith good, and to con nect its origin Avith matter, not Avith a fault of the wiU, This error, which prevaUed almost univer sally, indicated a confusion between the notion of moral and of physical CAdl. Or again, they identi fied evU with the imperfection or weakness of the faculty of knowledge, as Socrates maintained that aU sin was ignorance. Of the avUI's freedom, or of its perversion, they had no clear view ; none there- « S. Thomas, Sum. 1, 2, 19, 4, and 21, 1, and 1, 63, 1. tH.l,2,91,L THE CONSUMMATION OF THE OLD WORLD. 83 fore of the doctrine of human merit or demerit, as proceeding from the right or wrong use of the wUl. The perception of the diAdne personality being lost, the perception of the human personality was greatly weakened, and no phUosopher could detach himself from a certain pantheistic leaning. In this state of things the notion of moraUty, of duty, which still remained, confused and as it were Avithout an object, was but the stamp of the diAdne reason uieffaceably impressed on the human reason, the work of His hands. Thus the names of Adrtue and Auce, of good and evU, stiU remained, while the existence of that Being to whom alone they had reference, had ceased to be an object of faith. Cicero, with aU the books of Grecian wisdom be fore him, constructs an ethical system in which he makes as good as no use of his knowledge ofthe God head. Now Cicero, Avithout being himself a phUoso pher, was yet perhaps "Rome's least mortal mind," and it was his purpose, after studying the whole field of Grecian thought, to present to his country men what he found most worthy of value. He was an eclectic, who, Avith a vast treasure-house at com mand, selects a picture here, a statue there, a rich mosaic, a costly table, an inlaid couch, the work of men long past away, for his oavu intellectual mu seum; and as he died in the last half century before the Christian period, his writmgs serve to show us what Grecian and Roman antiquity was as to 84 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. morals and religion. " In his work upon duties,* he passes Avith short mention over the duties of man towards the Godhead, though he does indeed assign them the first rank before all others: in what they consist we do not leam. Nowhere is theology brought into an inward connection Avith morality, nor are moral commands and duties rested on the authority, the vrill, the model of the Godhead. His motives are always draAvn merely from the beauty and excellence of the honestum, from the evil and. shamefulness of crime, f If, when a witness is to give testimony on oath, he reminds him to reflect that the presence of God has been invoked, this god changes at once into his OAVU soul, as the most godlike thing which the Godhead has given to man. The idea of a retri bution after death was not merely strange to him as to so many of his contemporaries, but he openly declared it in one of his speeches to be an absurd fable, Avhich every man, as he adds, takes it for. J ' Dost thou hold me for so crazed as to beheve such things ?' he makes a listener exclaim, at the mention of judgment under the earth after death: and as to the condition after death, Cicero knows but one alternative, either cessation of existence, or a state of happiness. In taking an oath, it should not be the fear of the Avrath of the gods which keeps back * DoUinger, Heid. und Jud. p. 571. -f De Officiis, iii. 10. X Pro Cluentio, c. 61. THE CONSUMMATION OF THE OLD WORLD. 85 from perjury, but only respect to justice and good faith." Thus nowhere is heard the voice of nature calling upon Him who created nature ; nowhere the chUd in sorrow, disappointment, or bereavement yearning after the Parent, and pleading Avith Him, "We are Thy creatures and the work of Thy hands. Thou hast made us, and not we ourselves." If any one rose above the multitude of gods to the notion of One, it was of a material pantheistic God, beside whom, equal in eternity, there loomed in the half- Ausible. obscurity the world-S(?til, and the primal matter which it was the highest function of this god, itself a fine etherial fluid, to combine, arrange, transfuse into numberless outward forms for ever passing into a cycle of generation, death, and re production. That God created the visible world and the souls of men out of nothing, was an idea never reached by Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, or any Greek or Roman mind before Christ. VirgU has arrayed in the most gorgeous poetry the exact Pythagorean and Pla tonic theory as to the origin of souls and thefr relation to the Godhead. " Principle coelum ac terras camposque liquentes Lucentemque globum Lunse Titaniaque astra Spiritus intus alit, totamque infusa per artus Mens agitat molem, et magno se corpore miscet. Inde hominum pecudumque genus, vitseque volantum, Et quse marmoreo fert monstra sub squore pontus. Igneus est oUis vigor, et coelestis origo 86 THE FORMATION OP CHRISTENDOM. Seminibus, quantum non noxia corpora tardant, Terrenique hebetant artus moribundaque membra."' And again, no less clearly; " His quidam signis, atque hsec exempla secuti, Esse apibus partem di-vinse mentis et haustus ..Sitherios dixere ; deum namque ire per omnes Terrasque tractusque maris coelumque profundum ; Hine pecudes, armenta, viros, genus omne ferarum, Quemque sibi tenues nascentem arcessere vitas ; Scilicet hue reddi deinde, ac resoluta referri Omnia ; nee morti esse locum, sed viva volare Sideris in numerum, atque alto succedere co3lo."f There is no distinction here between the souls of birds, beasts, fishes, insects, and men ; none in their origm; none in thefr destination; each at its birth catches for itself a tiny spark ofthe world- soul, passes through its little life, and is resolved into the great world-soul again. Possessed Avith this idea the ancient authors of the GentUe world, when they seem to say the noblest things are reaUy depriAdng man of his sole value, his personality. Thus Cicero in the beautiful dream of Scipio makes Africanus say to his great descendant: " Be assured that it is not you, but this outward body which is mortal; for that outward shape does not exhibit your real being ; but the mind is the man, not that figure which the finger can point out. Know therefore that you are god, if indeed he is god who has Adgour, sense, memory, provi dence, who as much rules, directs, and moves that ° ^«. vi. 724. f Geor. iv. 219. THB CONSUMMATION OF THB OLD WORLD. 87 body over whieh he is set, as the supreme God this universe : and as God, himself eternal, moves a partiaUy mortal universe, so the everlastmg mind moves a fraU body." And a Httle further on: "-Since then what is moved by itself is clearly eter nal, who can deny that such a nature has been given to souls ? For every thing is soul-less which is moved by external impulse ; but that which has soul is moved by internal motion, its oavu motion, for this is the proper nature and force of soul. And if soul be the one only thing which moves itself, then was it never born and is eternal."* And so the ignorance which divested God of His creative power, by the same stroke divested man of his personality. In Greek and Roman phUosophy man had not only ceased to be a crea ture, being conceived either as an emanation of the world-soul eternally transfused through mate rial forms from generation to generation, or as a product of the earth's slime warmed into life by the sun's heat ; but likeAvise, emanation or pro duction as he was accounted, like aU other Uving things, he could hardly in his short transit through the world be held to have a personal subsistence : or if this be aUowed him, it must be allowed to aU other Hving things, and at the same time was deprived of all moral value, being utterly extin guished at death by resumption into the world- soul. « Somn. Scip. 8, 9. 88 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. It is but a part of the same error as to the di vine nature, that the notion of a diAdne providence obserAdng and dfrecting the course of the world, rewarding or punishing the actions of men, had HkcAvise been lost. The Avisest and the best of the heathen used vdth regard to such a proAddence the language of doubt. Perplexed Avdth the fre quent triumph of the evU, and suffering of the good, and without faith in a future state of retri bution, doubt on this point was thefr best, and de spair their ordinary state of mind. Thus Tacitus, describing the persecution and death of the vfr tuous Soranus, contrasts the conduct of a friend and client, a Stoic philosopher, at Rome, who was bribed to betray his patron, and amply rewarded for his hypocrisy and treachery, Avith that of a friend in the provinces, who remained faithful to him, and defended him, and for this was stripped of aU his goods and banished ; and he ends Avith the bitter sarcasm, " Such is the equity of the gods towards good and evU actions."* And what Tacitus here says, the historians and phUosophers of Greece and Rome aU thought. It is in vain to seek for any certain hope of im mortal life beyond the grave in Greek or Roman Hterature. Cicero, pleading, mocks such a behef as absurd ; but the pleader addresses himself to the general standard of human feeling and opinion. Cicero phUosophising, wherem he addresses an * Tacitus, Annal. xvi. 33. THB CONSUMMATION OF THE OLD WORLD. 89 eclectic audience of higher minds, would fain be Ueve it, but dies at sixty-three before he has made up his mind. VirgU, as a poet, sets forth the old tradition, in which a certain sort of future life Avith an accompanying retribution appears; but he sig nificantly dismisses his guests through that ivory gate which he says transmits falsehood. And in deed in what was such a life to consist? Was AchUles for eA^er to drive his chariot, and Homer to recite his verses, in the pale moonhght beneath the earth? What object in the future world did polytheism offer to satisfy the aspiring soul of man? Its gods were deified men, who carried out the enjoyment of every human lust Avith super human power. Could the human heart love and adore that Jupiter Avhose private Hfe was the con secration of aU wickedness ? whose government did not distinguish between good and evU ? Rather Nero as emperor was a fitting representative of Jupiter as god. And as to the material deity of the phUosophic mind — that is, under the name of spirit, a fluid finer than ether, and devoid of avUI — was it more possible for Plato or Cicero to love and adore such a god than for men now to love and adore the law of graAdtation ? In fact, despair and depression had seized on the higher class of minds, while the lower wal lowed in gross sensuality. And the whole may be summed up in one word, " there was wanting the consciousness of sanctity in God, and the need of 90 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. sanctification in man."* In other words, thefr state was the contradiction of the precept, " Be ye holy, for I am holy." Man, then, had lost his Maker, and in losing his Maker had lost himself. In proportion as the knowledge of God had been darkened to him, the knowledge of his OAvn soul had been darkened also. If he admitted that he had a soul, it was such a soul as he gave HkeAvise to the animals: a soul whose union Avith the body was broken at death, never to be restored; a soul which, if it survived that shock, surAdved not A^dth a separate conscious existence, capable of its oavu joy or sorrow, reward or punishment, but as reunited to that world- soul, of which it had been a portion temporarUy detached and enclosed in a fleshly prison. This was the root of that profound contempt for human life which ruled the heathen society. Hence the slave perished undeplored, unvalued, on the rack, in the underground workhouse, of disease, of over labour, the sport of his master's or his mistress's passion or caprice. Hence the rich man, after in dulging every fancy, and reveUing to satiety in every pleasure, would " die of weariness."f Hence suicide was deUberately proposed by the most moral of heathen phUosophic systems as an escape from pain, disease, bereavement, or disappoint ment. Hence the noblest, bravest, and Avisest of •* Heidenihum und J-udenihum, p. 633. t " Fastidiose mori." THE CONSUMMATION OF THE OLD WORLD. 91 the Romans surrendered first the poUtical Hberties of thefr country under JuUus and Augustus, and then every security of individual life under Tibe rius, Caius, Claudius, and Nero. And thus man, " noble in reason, infinite in faculties, in form and moving express and admfrable, in action like an angel, in apprehension like a god, the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals," was become in his OAvn eyes without value : his labour, the profit of a master ; his death-agony, the pastime of a mob ; all his destiny on earth, the sport of chance, the Auctim of despotism, the instrument of bhnd fatality; and at last his body the prey of destruc tion, his soul absorbed as a drop lost in the ocean of being. It has been my purpose hitherto to set before you two pictures of the Roman empire ; one of its greatness, the other of its Httleness; one of its material unity, extent, and magnificence ; the other of its moral poverty and desolation ; both touched in as few strokes as possible from the writings of its OAvn historians, poets, morahsts, and phUo sophers. But there exist two descriptions ofthe same great power, draAvn by two contemporaries who were eye-Avitnesses of what they described, yet at the same time outside of it, antagonists not portions of its society. And it is further remark able, that thefr descriptions, though both taken from the moral point of view, dweU the one spe ciaUy on the exhibition of material power, the 92 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. other speciaUy on the exhibition of moral disso lution. Nor AvUl the intrinsic force of these de scriptions be lessened to any thinking mind by the fact they express not merely the opinions of eye- Avitnesses, but the judgment of inspired writers. One of these AAdtnesses, summoned to Rome on a capital charge in the reign of Domitian, thus after wards described what he had seen : " The waters which thou sawest, where the harlot sits, are peoples, and multitudes, and nations, and tongues ; — and the woman which thou sawest is that great city which holds dominion over the kings of the earth: — Babylon the great, — ^who says in her heart, I sit a queen, and am no Avidow, and may not see grief; — for her merchants were the princes of the earth, for by her sorceries aU the nations have been led astray; — and the kings ofthe earth, who committed fornication and wantoned Avith her, shall weep for her and mourn over her, — saying, Alas, alas, Ba bylon, that great city, that strong city;— and the merchants of the earth weep and moum over her, because no one any longer buys thefr freight ; freight of gold and sUver, and precious stone, and pearl, and fine linen, and purple, and sUk, and scarlet, and aU sweet wood, and every ivory ves sel, and vessel of most precious wood, brass, iron, and marble, and cinnamon, and odours, and oint ment, and frankincense, and wine, and oU, and fine flour, and wheat, and cattle, and sheep, and horses, and chariots, and slaves, and souls of THE CONSUMMATION OF THB OLD WORLD. 93 men."* Do we not see here the long Hne of a triumph defile before us, and Caractacus walking in chains, and the forum fuU of the slaves of all nations, and the world's shipping which crowds the Tiber from Ostia to Mount Aventine, and Nero's golden house, and his banquets in the gardens of Agrippa, and countless thousands call ing for thefr human prey from the pUed-up seats ofthe CoHseum? The other description was addressed to the Christians at Rome by one who afterwards lived two years at least there, and haAdng been acquitted once by the Emperor Nero returned thither to suf fer a glorious martyrdom. " The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all impiety and injustice of men, who keep doAvn the truth con cerning God by their injustice. Because what is known of God is manifest in them ; for God has manifested it to them. For the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world understood by what He has made are plainly seen, HkeAvise His eternal power and Godhead; so that they are Avithout excuse. Because when they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor give thanks, but grew vain in their thoughts, and their foolish heart was darkened : for, caUing them selves Avise, they became fools ; and they changed the glory of the incorruptible God into the like ness of the image of corruptible man, and of birds « Apocalypse, xvii. 15, 18 ; xviii. 2, 7, 23, 9-13. 94 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. and quadrupeds, and reptUes. For this cause God dehvered them over to the desfres of their heart, to uncleanness, so that they dishonoured their OAVU bodies in themselves : who changed God's truth into falsehood, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever ; Amen, Wherefore God deUvered them over to ignominious passions : for their women changed the natural use to that which is against nature: and HkcAvise their males, leaAdng the na tural use of the female, burnt in thefr desfres towards each other, men Avith men working out that which is unseemly, and receiAdng in them selves the fitting recompense of thefr error. And as they thought not good to retain God in thefr knowledge, God dehvered them up to a repro bate mind, to do what was not fitting: fuU of aU injustice, malice, fornication, avarice, Avickedness, fuU of envy, murder, strife, deceit, mahgnity, whisperers, backbiters, hated of God, insolent, proud, puffed up, inventors of evU things, dis obedient to parents, nuAvise, covenant-breakers, Avithout natural affection, implacable, unmerciful, who knoAving the justice of God, understood not that they who do such things are worthy of death, and not only they who do them, but they who consent Avith those who do them,"* What makes especiaUy for our purpose here is that the apostle has grouped into one mass the * Romans, i. 18-32. THE CONSUMMATION OF THE OLD WORLD. 95 whole heathen world, which he tacitly signifies to be under the headship of Rome, to be represented and summed up in Rome, hi that he Avrites thus to the Christians at Rome. Viewing Avith one rapid aU-embracing glance the whole progress of man since the nations were divided after the Flood, he considered their actual moral state at the time he wrote as a penal state, the punishment of idolatry. And he traced the cause of this idolatry as not being ignorance, but a corruption of the heart which turned away from the knowledge of God, in order that it might indulge in desfres forbidden by that knowledge. And as men would not read the book of the world, spread ever open before them, and pointing to one Creator, Ruler, and Judge, because they desfred gods of thefr own making to sanction deeds after which they lusted, God more and more Avithdrew Himself, whom they would not have, punished more and more this affected igno rance Avith the moral corruption which had been its first cause, untU the world had universaUy be come that which St. Paul beheld and described it under Nero. We must here further remark the exact identity of the description Avith that which we had before draAvn from the heathen Avriters themselves. As to the facts of the case, Cicero, Seneca, and Tacitus alone, not to speak of the long array of Greek and Roman authors, would supply us Avith inexhaustible detaUs of the picture thus summarUy draAvn by St. Paul and St, John. 96 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM, We have, then, before us two great facts as the result of human history for more than two thousand years after the Flood : the parallel groAvth of a brUHant civUisation, and of an intense moral corruption. For these things advance and flourish together, not civiHsation in one tribe and place, and moral corruption in another ; but as the ciAdl life becomes refined, and the poUtical life develops and assumes shape, and man builds cities and calls the places after his name, the moral Hfe becomes weaker, ancestral virtues decay, the sanctions of reUgion are less regarded, belief in the unity of God gives way to idolatry, and idolatry dissolves every moral bond. In aU the heathen nations this experience repeats itself:* in aU, the tradition of a golden age, when justice dwelt on the earth, suc ceeded by ages of sUver, brass, and fron, bears witness to it. Rome, gathering together into her mighty empire so many scattered limbs of the one human family, summed up and represented this result in its most striking form. She had, on the one hand, aU the arts and conveniences of life; a network of roads made her forum the world's centre, and her sea was a highway for aU nations to exchange their commerce. Her name was peace as well as strength from the Rhine and Danube to the African desert, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Euphrates. Within these immense boundaries ^ See Rosmini, Filosofia della Politica, pp, 286-8, for a passage on the dechne of the human race. THE CONSUMMATION OF THE OLD WORLD. 97 "peoples, multitudes, nations, and tongues," held her for supreme arbitress, and the daily journals of her capital made knoAvn the acts of her rulers. Nay, far more, she was preparing one civil law for aU these regions and races; and the poet has ex pressed her truest praise when he cried in rapture, " Fecisti patriam diversis gentibus unam ; Profuit injustis, te dominante, capi ; Dumque offers victis proprii consortia juris, Urbem fecisti, quod prius orbis erat."* On the other hand, aU this splendour, all this greatness was for the fcAf . This world-wide society was buUt upon slavery, and felt its foundations tremble beneath it day by day. Every house con tained within it victims and enemies. No law nor any custom protected the labour, the honour, the Hfe of the slave from his master ; no law nor any custom protected the property, the liberty, the life of the master from the suspicion or enmity of the prince. But penetrating beneath these outward coverings into the human heart itself, what do we find there? An impurity and a cruelty, the de taUs of which are sickening; a doubt or an infi delity which makes rehgion a hypocritical routine. Man has ceased to believe in the unseen, to hope in the future, to desfre what is beyond the needs- of his body and the gratification of his tastes. In a word, whUe the state rules over the fairest re- o-ions of the earth, and possesses boundless wealth « RutUius. H 98 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM, Avith unrivalled power, the life of man is become valueless because his soul is ignored, and his exist ence upon earth seems, in his oavu eyes, Avithout meaning or object. In Nero's time a stranger from a distant pro Adnce is passing one day through the streets of Rome, He flnds them in unwonted commotion, for one of the principal thoroughfares is lined Avith soldiers who keep back an agitated crowd,* In their countenances anger and terror, sympathy and fear, rule by turns; even Nero's guards almost waver and yield to the emotions of the multitude, as between their Unes marches a long procession of four hundred men, women, and chUdren, preceded and followed by fresh troops. They are slaves, and they are marching together to a common exe cution. What was their crime ? They are the famUy of Pedanius Secundus, prefect of the city, who has been murdered in his house by one of his OAVU slaves. The deed had been done either be cause the master having promised the slave his freedom, and received the price, had refused to execute the agreement; or because the slave, as another report said, enamoured of a fellow male slave, the victim of his master's abandoned pas sion, could not endure a rival in this unnatural tie. Where a master had been kUled in his OAvn house by one of his slaves, whatever might have been the cause, the law of Rome ran that every * Tacitus, Annal. xiv. 42-5. THE CONSUMMATION OF THE OLD WORLD. 99 slave in the house, male or female, old or young, should be put to death. On this case the senate has debated. A famous patriot has insisted that the law should take its course, chiefly on ground of the public security: " Our ancestors," said he, "suspected the disposition of slaves even when they had been born and bred on our country estates or in our own household, and had imbibed at once affection for their masters : but from the time that we have been embracing whole nations in our fami hes, who have different religious rites, and foreign reHgions, or none at aU, there is no means of keep ing down that seething mass of corruption, save by terror." This pleading prevaUed : the law was left to take its course ; and lest the public pity should be more yielding than the prudent ferocity of the senate, the emperor has lent the assistance of an armed force to carry out the decision. In the evening the stranger is proceeding by the Campus Martins. He finds, as he goes along, the squares and public places resplendent with torches. The emperor's freedman TigeUinus gives a banquet to-night on the lake of Agrippa, hi the gardens close by the Pantheon.* There, says Tacitus, a platform has been erected, moved by ships superbly decorated Avith gold and sUver, Ayhose crews are formed of the most abandoned slaves, each having his station according to his age and skiU ha the practice of debauchery. The ** Tacitus, Annal. xv. 37. 100 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. country has been ransacked for birds and game, and fish has been brought even from the ocean. On the borders of the lake are buUdhags fiUed Avdth ladies of rank, who invite every comer ; on the opposite side a band of harlots make no secret of their persons. Wanton dances succeed ; and as night comes on, a blaze of light, Avith a concert of music, breaks over thie lake. There in person the Emperor Nero revels in every turpitude : but not yet satisfied until, a few days afterwards, he had solemnly espoused one of that abominable crew named Pythagoras. The emperor puts on the bridal veil; the augurs assist; the dowry is paid; the genial bed is displayed, and the nuptial torches lighted: "all," says the historian, "is public, even those endearments which natural marriage veUs in secrecy." And, in order to give the measure of the world's morality at that time, it must be added that the abominable crime thus committed by her emperor in the face of Rome lies equaUy upon the memory of fifteen out of sixteen who first wore the purple.* Julius AAdth his matchless genius, Augustus AAuth his Avise good fortune, Trajan the '-'¦ See Gibbon, ch. iii. p. 100, note p. For Antoninus Pius, see DoUinger, Heid. und Jud., 718. Marcus Aurelius, in his Medi tations, lib. i. 16, praises his father for having overcome this vice : Ilapa rov -irarphs — Kal t^ ira5(rat to -irepl tovs epatras Tuy fietpaKiwy. — It was reserved for the first Christian who became emperor, PhUip, exoletos vetare. See note of Champagny, Les Antonins, vol. iii. p. 346, quoting Lamp, in Alexand. THE CONSUMMATION OF THE OLD WORLD. 101 great ruler in peace and war, and Adrian Avith his varied talents, and Titus the delight of the human race, and Antoninus Pius in spite of his simame, — ^were.no less stained Avith this blot than those emperors who seemed to exhaust the capacity of human nature for crime, Tiberius, Caligula, Nero, or Domitian. Out of the sixteen there is but the husband of Messalina and Agrippina who escapes at least this poUution. And to the fifteen em perors we must add the greatest names of Latin Hterature, Horace, and Virgil, and Catullus, and Cicero.* And the stranger who beholds this double triumph of cruelty and lust, this utmost disregard of human life joined Avith the utmost debasement of man's dignity as a moral being, why has he come to Rome, and what is he doing there ? Poor, unknoAvn, a foreigner in dress, language, and de meanour, he is come from a distant province, small in extent, but the most despised and the most dis-' liked of Rome's hundred provinces, to found in Rome itself a society, and one, too, far more exten sive than this great Roman empire, since it is to embrace all nations; far more lasting, since it is to endure for ever. He is come to found a society by means of which all that he sees around him,, from the emperor to the slave, shall be changed. He AvUl first teach that slave, now the secret * It does not seem possible to extricate Cicero from this crime after the testimony of Pliny, in his letter to Pontius, lib. vii. 4. 102 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. enemy in every household, to be "subject to his master Avith all fear, not only to the good and gentle, but also to the froward;" and reciprocaUy he Avill teach the master " to give to his slave that which is just and equal, because he has himself a Master in heaven."* But more, under the effect of his teaching,^ that great work of injustice and oppression, which had groAvn up, flourished, and increased in all nations, Avill be dissolved as it were of itself, and the master accept the slave to equaUty of civU rights ; whUe at the same time towards the sovereign power, which had made its AvUl the rule of law, he vdU learn to exercise an obedience compatible Avith a freeman's Hberty, and a new virtue AviU find for itself the new name of loyalty. But what remedy AviU our foreign teacher ap ply to the disease prcA^aUing aU around him, the contempt of man as man, and of human Hfe ? What power of persuasion does he bear Avithin him which was wanting to those phUosophers, men of ability, learning, and eloquence, who from age to age, and out of every cHme, had sought in Rome, as the world's centre, to estabhsh a doc trme and gather a foUowing? They have come .Avith many A^aried gifts of human genius, and after shining for a whUe and attracting attention, have dropt aAvay, and thefr followers after them. But ':he stranger of whom we are speaking has none of « 1 Pet. THE CONSUMMATION OF THE OLD WORLD. 103 these gifts. He has neither the wisdom nor the eloquence of the Greeks ; he is even AAuthout the learning of a cultivated mind : a fisherman by trade, poor, old, obscure, a foreigner of the most despised race, how can he succeed as a teacher among these lords of the world ? He has two things Avithin him for want of which society was perishing and man unhappy; a certain knowledge of God as the Creator, Ruler, Judge, and Reward of men, and of man's soul made after the image and likeness of this God. This God he has seen, touched, and handled upon earth ; has been an eye-Avitness of His majesty, has received His mes sage, and bears His commission. In this name he wUl speak to Nero and his court; to the patrician, the freeman, and the slave ; to the female sex, the victim and instrument of the corruption around. He AviU speak ; the few Avill Usten and believe ; the many AviU reject. Presently persecution AviU arise ; he AviU be tried, condemned, and crucified on a hill overlooking the city. But in that death he wUl take possession of the city lying beneath him, which from him avUI receive the germ of a new Hfe. In that city, the centre of idolatry, heathen ism, and tyranny, and of all the corruption that is in the world through lust, he Avill have been the first of a line of rulers which is never to cease, and which, while the crown of temporal empfre falls away from the Capitol, wUl substitute for it the 104 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. spiritual rule of purity, gentleness, and charity over the whole earth. But whence had this despised foreigner re ceived the double knowledge of God and of the soul so miserably lost — as we have seen — to this brUliant Roman civiUsation? In the latter years of Augustus, when the foundations of the imperial rule had been laid, and the structure mainly raised by his practical Avis dom, there had dwelt a poor famUy in a smaU toAvn of evil repute, not far from the lake of the remote province where this fisherman pHed his trade. It consisted of an elderly man, a youthful wife, and one young chUd. The man gained his livelihood as a carpenter, and the chUd worked Avith him. Complete obscurity rested upon this household until the child grew to the age of thirty years. Then he is suddenly found in the cities, villages, and fields of his native country, preaching a new kingdom, based upon a new doctrine. This doctrine proclaimed that hitherto the whole world had gone astray, caUing evU good, and good evil, fixing its desires on wealth, honour, and prospe rity, seeking for rest and enjoyment in visible things, and in this idolatry forgetting God, its Creator, and its End. But the new Teacher de clared that every man possessing Avithin himself an undying soul was made for something infinitely greater than the Ausible Avorld contains. And He THE CONSUMJIATION OF THE OLD WORLD. 105 further affirmed, in proof of His doctrine, that He Himself would suffer the most despised and abject of deaths in the sight of aU men, abandoned and rejected: that, lifted up in scorn upon the cross as a malefactor, He Avould draw all men unto Him, and make aU things new upon the earth. For He would create a new society of men, founded upon the imitation and communion of His passion, the passion of a God-man. And He should Himself be the rule and model not only of the society in general, but of every member, according to His words : "if any man be wUling to come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross and foUow me. For whosoever wUls to save his life shall lose it, and Avhosoever loses his life for my sake shaU find it. For what is a man profited ifhe gain the whole Avorld, and lose his OAvn soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?" What He had foretold took place. He suffered the death reserved to the vilest slave, whose Ufe we have seen held of no account, and in so dying appeared the weakest, the most despised, and re jected of aU men. This death the stranger we have mentioned above had Avitnessed, and HkeAvise that resurrection which followed it : had Avitnessed both the man in suffering and the God m poAver. From His lips, when risen again, he had received authority to form this new society, resting on the Teacher's person and example : and in the strength 106 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. of this word alone, the self-sacrifice of God for man, revealing visibly the SaAdour in the Creator, he had come to Rome to inaugurate, in the seat of the world's corrupt empire, the everlasting king dom of charity. LECTURE II. NEW CREATION OF INDIVIDUAL MAN BY THE CHURCH. Thus the empfre of Rome was the summary and definitive conclusion of the ancient world. In it the old heathen civilisation culminated. It was the product ofall man's labour, invention, suffer ing, and experience doAvnwards from the division of the nations after the Flood, untU the time when Rome gathered up and reunited so many Hmbs of the great human famUy. And it rested upon the slavery of the majority. Outside of the narrow range of citizenship man was a thing in the eyes of his feUow-man ; an instrument, not a person. And even Avithin the circle of citizenship the State treated the Individual as devoid of personal in- aUenable rights. For the false principle of disre garding man as man lay at the [foundation of the human commonwealth itself Slavery was its most offensive and most ruhious result; but it ruled even the highest poUtical relations of man Avith his feUow-man. The dignity and value of man as a reasonable soul, the image of God, were not knoAvn; but in their stead were substituted the dig nity and value which he might possess as a mem- 108 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. ber of the political body. But thus Adewed the part is inferior to the whole. And so it came to pass that the state violated not only the mterests of the stranger and the sojourner, but made even the citizen in himself and in his family, as AveU as in his property, a sacrifice to its unlimited sove reignty. And Avith the change from repubhc to empire, after the savage acts of successive pro scriptions, this principle obtained stiU greater mas tery ; for whereas the old republic only debarred from fire and water, that is, drove into banish ment, the most criminal, except in a very few cases, the emperor ceased to regard not only the goods but the lives of men. And as was the whole, so were the parts ; for in the fanuly the father Avas the master of Avife and chUd, whose rights were not coordinate Avith his, but gave Avay to them and merged in them. The husband had an unlimited privilege of divorce. Cicero repu diated the mother of his children for a young and rich bride, and then, after a year's marriage, expelled her in turn ; and the virtuous Cato di vorced his wife in order to bestow her on his friend. For indeed all these miseries had a deep abiding cause. The fountain of aU truth and right was concealed to men. The Judge of the earth was not seen to sit upon His throne. Men had in their thought broken up the Ruler and Rewarder of the world into numberless idols, whose range was limited and their rule conflicting : and the NEW CREATION OF INDIA^DUAL MAN. 109 human conscience amid this moral twilight groped after the .scattered fragments oftruth and justice. Here and there indeed Polytheism itself bore wit ness to its OAVU fatal error ; as where, in the city which was the eye of Greece and the university of heathenism, it inscribed an altar to the UnknoAvn God. And TertuUian* could appeal against the schools and the philosophers to the simple unlet tered soul, to the language ofthe street and the manufactory, to men's household words in joy or sorrow, for testimony; as when they said, " If God wUl,""God grantit," "Good God," "God bless you." Yet practically the eclipse of the truth on which man's spirit should live was all but total, and the reign of sensual indulgence unbounded. The whole of man was given to the goods that met the eye. He tried them in aU thefr richness and variety, plunged into them, was speedily satiated, and was then ready to " die of weariness." This was the world m which St. Peter and St. Paul raised the standard ofthe Cross. How did they deal with it? * De Testimonio Animce, i. "Novum testimonium advoco, immo omni literatura notius, omni doctrina agitatius, omni editione vul- gatius, toto homine majus, id est, totum quod est hominis. Con siste in medio anima. — Sed non eam te advoco, quse schoUs for- mata, bibliothecis exercitata, academiis et porticibus Atticis pasta, sapientiam ructas. Te simpUoem, et rudem, et impoUtam, et idi- oticam compeUo, qualem te habent qui te solam habent, iUam ipsam de compito, de trivio, de textrino totam. — ^Nam te quoque palam et tota Ubertate, quia non Ucet nobis, domi ac f oris audimus ita pronuntiare, Quod Deus dederit, et Si Deus voluerit ; — Deus bonus, Deus benefacit, tua vox est." 110 THB FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. First of aU, they did not set themselves to re- estabUsh dfrectly the poUtical, the social, the do mestic, or the indiAudual rights of man. Indeed they did not speak of rights at aU, but of duties. Society was in rapid progress to dissolution because it knew not its Superior: they essayed to stop the decay by revealing that Superior. When the golden chain between heaven and earth should be once more suspended, the earth could rest upon it and be secure. They disclosed God in His most wonderful and most touching attribute of compas sion and love, dying upon the cross, the universal Auctim, and embracing with His outstretched arms the race whose nature He had assumed, whose death He had endured, and whose liberation He had accomplished. This and no other was the rock on which they prepared to buUd that new society. This diAdne Person they set forth to be at once the model of every private man and the bond ofthe whole mass. Setting aside aU ques tion of rights in a world where the most precious rights of the individual, the family, and the society were utterly disregarded, they enjoined every duty Avith a reference to this great Exemplar. The re generation of man himself was their remedy for a world in ruins. To this end they reconstructed society Avith two forces. They disclosed God on the one hand, and His creature, the human soul, on the other ; but God clothed in human flesh and the human NEW CREATION OF INDIVIDUAL MAN. Ill soul raised to a participation of this incarnate God. These were thefr two factors, and in thefr teaching every human duty became the result of the joint apphcation. The soul of man viewed in its im mense capacity for joy or suffering, in its eternal duration, by nature of which the whole visible universe faded into insignificance before it, and in its triple unity of a being which has reason and AviU, wherein consists its likeness to the Triune Maker, this soul of man was the unit which the Creator and Redeemer of men, haAdng first assumed it into his OAvn Person, took to remould the moral fabric by the hands of His Apostles and their spfri- tual successors. The gods many and lords many who diAdded the aUegiance ofthe heathen nations, whUe they encouraged a boundless and often most degrading and most immoral superstition in the Aoilgar, had become contemptible to thinking minds. Instead of these an adequate object for every inteUect and every heart was to be proAuded. Such an object was presented in the great doctrine of one God set forth to aU mankind in the beginning, but now repubUshed. The gods of Greece and Egypt, old Saturn who devoured his chUdren, Isis and Anubis Avith all their barkhig crew, disappeared like a wrack of stormy clouds before the brilliant rise of that sun. That great doctrine of the divine unity, which came to Noah's chUdren as their birth right, stamped Avith the judgment of the Flood, 112 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. and which, Avhen already obscured by the retro grade nations, was heard in fear and awe by Israel amid the thunders of Sinai, — -that bond and stay of man, "the Lord thy God is one God," — came forth in softer soul-penetrating tones from the gentle height of Thabor ; for there, not merely joined, as of old, Avith this declaration of unity, but now visibly represented and embodied in the Son of God, appeared the equally needful and most pre cious doctrine of the divine PersonaUty. EquaUy needful ; for then, as now, outside of the Christian pale, the whole moral atmosphere was charged with pantheism, and that which modern infidelity recurs to, as the result of a long induction from the laws of matter, had for ages been the fostered dream of many an eastern sage ; while the acuter minds of Hellas, in spite of the popular Hellenic longing for personal and visible gods, had rested in this as the solution of their poets' imaginative mythology. And most precious doctrine assuredly; for pantheism, in destroying the diAune personality, sweeps away by the same stroke in man that which gives him his only value — the undying personal existence, the produce of an inward self-acting root and cause, the subject of an eternal retribution. But inter- twhied inseparably with the doctrine of the diAdne Unity and Personality came forth at the same time, for the consolation and joy of man, the inexpress ibly attaching doctrine of the divine Paternity, which said, " This is my beloved Son, hi whom is aU NEAV CREATION OF INDIVIDUAL MAN. 113 my pleasure." For hence all fathership is named in heaven and earth, and because of this eternal Fathership and Sonship the only-begotten Son came before the nations as the First-born of many brethren, whose delight was to be with the chUdren of men, ahd who was not ashamed to call them, the chUdren of Adam, brethren : " Se nascens de dit socium." Who can imagine, far less describe the thrill with which the heart of man first met that most unimaginable mercy of the Incarnation ? When the words of the Archangel fell on our Lady's ear, " The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the poAver of the Most High shall over shadow thee, and therefore that Holy which shaU be born of thee shaU be called the Son of God," does it not give the greatest idea which Ave can have of the strength which grace had infused into the creature, that the message did not take away her life Avith joy, and that she was able to answer, "Behold the handmaid ofthe Lord; be it done unto me according to thy word." Who then can picture the emotion which the echo of that word produced on the heart of man? How Greek or Roman, Scythian or Barbarian, bond or free, learned or unlearned, rich or poor, prosperous or miserable, heard it with amazement, and forthwith these petty differences of a fallen state and a tem porary exUe disappeared as their eyes opened on that unanticipated universe of the divine grandeur and beneficence. And yet it stopped not there. 114 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. The truth that God had become incarnate did not flash upon the soul of man save in conjunction Avith another truth as little to be imagined, a refinement of diAdne love, which the angels might well desire to look into, since never from the beginning of creation had such a thought occurred to a created mind. This God, who out of love had made Him self man, would give Himself in that assumed na ture to be the food of His creature. That creature, whose soul is full of infirmity, whose flesh is frailty and weakness itself, requires for his soul as weU as his body a daily replenishing, a daily instrengthen- ing, a daily union Avith that essence, presence, and poAver by which alone it lives. And out ofthe In carnation itself flows forth this perennial yet daUy fountain; and the nations knew not that God was among them, until they knew that the same God was likeAvise their food : not only " Se nascens de dit socium," but "convescens in eduUum." Is the divine mercy satisfied ? Not so ; but in these depths there is a farther depth. The God who is incarnate, the God Avho is the food of man, is seen hanging between heaven and earth in the utter most torture which the human frame can bear, a victim ; a victim for the innumerable sins of men from the first sin of Adam and Eve to the last sua which the last child of Adam shall commit a mo ment before the final judgment. The life who is the Light of men is their Sacrifice too : the grain of diAdne wheat which is to be their food must first NEW CREATION OF INDIVIDUAL MAN. 115 be ground in the mortar and baked in the fire of suffering; and out' of the whole race of man one specimen of created nature shall voluntarily choose that death which is the supreme mark of divine displeasure, the utmost punishment for sin, the state of an executed criminal, and make it the sin- offering to efface the spot of guilt which was in effaceable, and to deify the nature which was con demned. We must add to the hymn of the divine benefits, "Se moriens in pretium." Yet we do not end here : and this surpassing sphere of wonders has yet a fitting croAvn. He who conveys to man the diAdne Unity, Personality, and Paternity; Avho is become the Brother, the Food, and the Sacrifice of man, is likeAvise, and finally, and for ever, not only his Rewarder, but his Reward. Nothing else but Himself, nothing short of God, does He offer to the intellect and the heart of man, misled by a thousand false lights, wasted upon a thousand false goods. Here only He ends where all is endless : " Se regnans dat in prsemium." Such was the sevenfold Adsion of the divine majesty and mercy which burst upon the aston ished nations Avhen St. Peter and St. Paul raised the standard of the Cross in Rome, their Queen, For this diAdne doctrine came all together, not de tached and piecemeal, but forming one great whole, accordant and indissoluble, since the harmony ran throuofh all. At one and the same moment the nations had God preached to them as One God, 116 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. personal, nay the source and root, and marveUous exemplar ofall personality, as in the absolute unity of His ovna divine essence personal distinctions were revealed : the Father, for He had made them after the image and likeness of that Son who now, in the fulness of time, was formed in flesh as that diAdne man, of whom Adam had been the first sketch ; the Saviour, for none other but He who made had now redeemed, by His thirty-three years' labour and suffering on the earth, with the cross embraced in thought each moment, and at last embraced in fact ; the ViAdfier, Supporter, and Strengthener, for He gave His oAvn Flesh and Blood for their food; and yet the same one God, the ultimate croAvn of blessedness to this redeemed race; in whose ocean of being they should one day be plunged, yet not absorbed, for every life should be distinct in that all-penetrating life; every human eye behold for itself the King in His glory ; every human heart embrace Him for itself; every human voice sweU the accordant notes of that triumphant hymn; every human person share in due degree the glory which the eye and heart of man should be strengthened to contemplate. The existing civiHsation was an utter stranger to this help which came to it from above. There was nothing in the dominant empire, or in the region of barbarous tribes or apostate nations lying beyond it, which gave any such promise. Heathenism had worked itself out, and was not NEW CREATION OF INDIVIDUAL MAN. 117 dumb but powerless to satisfy, much less to re store and exalt man. For not only had all sense of human responsibiUty been weakened by the mul tiplicity of deities into which men had broken up the one incommunicable Name, but they had not merely divided, they had also degraded to their own level the objeqt of thefr worship. Man is responsible only to the Infinite One, but Infinity cannot be divided ; and the gods of Greece, and Syria, and Egypt, and Rome, and of all the hea then nations, at least at that time of deep moral decline which marks our Lord's advent, were not man's makers, but themselves made by him, who had lost the sense of his OAvn creatureship. They were but reflections of his own mind as it was kindled by sensuous beauty, thrUled by the sight of Nature's calmness, order, and majesty, engrossed in war and agriculture, or before primeval tradi tion faded away, was yet touched by mystic dreams of another world. All had become emanations of the earth, foul clouds of human passion steaming up from her fertUe bosom. This illumination, on the contrary, which burst forth afresh Avith intense splendour from the Cross, this sevenfold radiance of the Most High, was of another birth, plainly descending from above. In part no doubt it had been disclosed to the ancient world, and the nations at thefr very beginning, Avhen they shot forth from the trunk of Noah's race, had received a great and precious deposit of truth, wherem the Unity, Per- 118 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. sonality, and Paternity of God were conspicuous parts, and Avherein another great doctrine was foreshadowed in the rite of sacrifice. And it is the great and exceeding guilt of heathenism that having this truth, it corrupted, distorted, and finaUy lost it. Heathenism has been well called nothing else but "the continuation and carrying out ofthe Fall;"* and assuredly it affords the most convinc ing and ever-abiding eAudence of that mystery, so hateful to the philosophic mind, that is, the natural pride of man. But this one complex ancl inter- Avoven idea of the Incarnation, the Blessed Eucha rist, the Atonement, and the Beatific Vision and enjoyment of God, associated with the former truths in the preaching of the Cross, is assuredly a gift from heaven to earth AA^hich affords as strong evidence of its own divine origin as heathenism affords of the FaU, If, as is beyond doubt, the rational creature ever more and more faUing away from its Creator speaks of an earthly influence which, left to itself, draws irresistibly downwards; so HkeAAuse, the rational creature, brought back and restored to its Creator, speaks of a power from above tending upwards. And so, as every hea- * " Obgleich das Heidenthum eigentUch nichts anderes ist als die Fortsetzung des Urfalls, oder die durch den Einfluss des Satans instigirte weitere Entwickelung des in die Natur- egoitat getretenen Menschen, welche die Menschheit von Gott abzufiihren und in das Verderben zu stiirtzen bemiiht war, so ist dasselbe doch gleichwohl keinesweges als ein voUiger Abfall und eine eigentliche Negirung der Religion zu betrachten." Molitor, PhilosopJiie der GescUc'ht€, 4 Th. § 160. NEW CREATION OF INDIVIDUAL MAN. 119 then Adce was the dfrect product of idolatry, every Christian virtue is the dfrect result of the Chris tian revelation as we have above considered it. Morality to the Christian bears a constant refer ence to the dogma of the Incarnation, lives by it, and perishes when severed from it. The vision of God which the Christian Faith communicated to the human soul possessed and transformed it. A DiAdne Person laid hold of the nature of man, and became, as it Avere, a soul within the'soul: hence forth in Him, His example. His life, and His death, what had been the imperfect virtues of the natural state obtained a new root. Man's life had no fewer sorrows than before, but all were viewed in the Hght of God's passion ; man had equal need of help from his brother man, but the Master of charity had first given His life for His enemies ; and those of His foUowers Avould be Hkest Him who should approach nearest to the sacrifice of self. Let us see how these principles were practi cally appHed to the circle of human life. First let us consider the tissue of human acts, affections, and energies in the mass, before we pro ceed to dwell on its several parts. And, again, this morality in the mass may be looked at from four points of view : its motive, its standard, its support, and its reward. We wiU take each in its order. 1. As to the motive of moraUty, this sevenfold vision of God told on it Avith great power by re- 120 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. storing at once the idea of creatureship on man's part, and of beneficent providence on God's. In that wide sea of ignorance wherein the heathen nations lay tossed, man knew not whence he was, hoAv he came upon the earth, to what he tended. The common idolatry mixed up the earth and its productions, the stars, and the gods in an existing whole, or system, if that which had no unity could be so called, without knoAving its origin or determin ing its relations. Such was the state of the mass, while among cultivated minds one Avidely-spread philosophy declared specificaUy that the gods med dled not Avith human affairs for govemment, reward, or punishment. Another substituted the notion of Nature for that of God, stripping Him thereby of personality. To idolater and phUosopher ahke man was not a creature but a substance among other substances above or below him, a portion of the Avhole, a physical portion of a physical Avhole, the former Avithout responsibility, as the latter was Avithout providence. But in this vision which the Christian faith disclosed man saw himself clearly, distinctly, and in the most viAud light a creature, at a certain time called forth out of nothing, formed Avith sovereign wisdom and power, sent into the Avorld, guided, guarded, watched over in it ; and then, moreoA^er, a creature to God so precious, that after creating him He would be made Himself man and die for him. Redemption, if it did not ex plain Creation, cast round it a light which drew NEW CREATION OF INDIVIDUAL MAN, 121 man towards God Avith an invincible attraction, Ajad Avith the idea of creatureship man recovered the complete idea of duty ; not an idea of that merely which was fitting for the good of human ' society, ^for so much as this, so long as he was a social animal, he could not wholly lose, — but an idea of that great primary relation in Avhich he stood to God as the work of His hands. Thus only the value of his acts as a free agent stood revealed to him : thus only their consequences. God, crea tureship, duty, and judgment for the acts of free- Avill came upon him together, and formed a new motive of his life. How distinct the two voices sound ! Marcus Aurelius gives us that of the old heathen world. " There is one light of the sun, though it is distributed over waUs, mountains, and other things infinite. There is one common sub stance, though it is distributed among countless bodies which have their several qualities. There is one soul, though it is distributed among infinite na tures and individual circumscriptions. There is one intelligent soul, though it seems to be diAuded." — "How small a part ofthe boundless and unfathom able time is assigned to every man ! for it is veiy soon swallowed up in the eternal. And how small a part of the whole substance ! And how small a part of the universal soul ! And on what a small clod of the whole earth thou creepest ! Reflecting on all this, consider nothing to be great, except to act as thy nature leads thee, and to endure that 122 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. which the common nature brings." — "Man, thou hast been a citizen in this great state ; what differ ence does it make to thee whether for five years or three? For that which is conformable to the laws is just for all. Where is the hardship, then, if no tyrant, nor yet an unjust judge, sends thee away from the state, but Nature who brought thee into it? The same as if a prsetor, who has employed an actor, dismisses him from the stage. ' But I have not finished the five acts, but only three of them.' Thou sayest weU ; but in life the three acts are the whole drama; for what shall be a com plete drama is determined by him Avho was once the cause of its composition, and now of its dis solution; but thou art the cause of neither. De part, then, satisfied, for he also who releases thee is satisfied."* Human life becomes desolate, morahty evaporates, under such teaching. Would you hear Avhat bound it up, Avhat gaA'-e it an abiding motive, a distinct course and end? It is that other voice of the great Teacher, surrounding man's life Avith the tender care of the Father. " Are not two spar- roAvs sold for a farthing ? and not one of them shaU fall on the ground Avithout your Father. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not, therefore; better are you than many sparrows." A Father and his chUdren succeed to that notion of a physical whole Avithout sympathy or succour '** Marcus Aurelius, Thoughts, xii. 30, 32, 36 ; Long's trans lation. NEW CREATION OF INDIVIDUAL MAN. 123 for its parts. But it is in redeeming that the Fa ther is disclosed. And the Son whom He has sent is likeAvise the Judge. It is not a simple notion of duty which has been elicited, but a desire of pleasing God manifested as the redeeming God. The abiding presence of One who is at once Crea tor, Father, Redeemer, and Judge surrounds men, no longer units and atoms before an unbending necessity, but persons before a personal God. This thought at once rules the present and embraces the future, as St. Paul says : " We know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle be dissolved, we have a buUding from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. Therefore we labour — whether present or absent — to be weU pleasing to Htm : for we must all of us be made manifest before the judgment-seat of Christ, that every one may receive the things done in the body, according as he has done, whether good or CAdl."* 2. Again, what standard of morality was there placed before man in that old heathen world ? It is here that the false gods told with most demoral ising effect. It is here that Marcus AureHus Avith his spectral form of fatalism called Nature, and Epicurus Avith his gods who knew not human af fections, nor cared for human life, nor considered human actions, were more moral at- least than Ju piter, Juno, Venus, ApoUo, Mercury, Isis, Baal, MyUtta, and a thousand others. For their power o 2 Cor. V. 1, 9, 10. 124 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. and immortality lent consecration to every foul deed wrought by the imitation of their Avorship- pers. It must not be forgotten that the multitude looked upon these as examples. But let us turn to the highest reason ofthe contemplative mind, ancl see what guide it proposed. " Of human life," says Marcus Aurelius again, " the time is a point, and the substance is in a flux, and the perception dull, and the composition of the whole body sub ject to putrefaction, and the soul a Avheel, and for tune hard to diAdne, and fame a thing devoid of judgment. And to say all in a word, CA^ery thing which belongs to the body is a stream, and what belongs to the soul is a dream and vapour, and life is a warfare and a stranger's sojourn, and after- fame is oblivion. What, then, is that which is able to conduct a man? One thing and only one — philosophy. But this consists in keeping the genius Avithin a man free from violence, and un harmed, superior to pains and pleasures, doing no thing Avithout a purpose nor yet falsely and with hypocrisy, not feeling the need of another man's doing or not doing any thing, and besides accepting all that happens, and aU that is allotted, as coming from thence, wherever it is, from whence he him self came, and finally waiting for death with a cheerful mind, as being nothing else but a disso lution of the elements of which every liA^ing being is compounded. But if there is no harm to the elements themselves in each continually changing NEW CREATION OF INDIVIDUAL MAN. 125 uito another, why should a man have any appre hension about the change and dissolution of aU the elements? For it is accordnig to nature, and nothing is evil which is according to nature."* This is all which that great, most accomphshed, thoughtful, and, save only to Christians, benevo lent prhice could devise for the guidance of man through Hfe. But now instead of these false gods, who we know were demons ; instead of these gods serenely careless of manl^ind, the produce of faith less impiety ; instead too of the genius Avithin man, a something at least no stronger or Aviser than man himself; who was the Christian's guide, standard, example? Before him rose, in beauty unimagined untU then by man, the man-loving God — the God who dies upon the cross — the God whose teaching is his OAvn suffering — ^the Legislator who Avrites His law upon men's hearts by obeying it Himself There were heathens who talked of the imitation of God, and they meant the foUoAving that divine prin ciple of reason in man, by which, as they thought, he shared a common nature Avith God. It was a vague phrase, which, seemingly raising man above himself, left him reaUy to his oavu hmate poAver alone. But in the sight of God's Throne and Tri bunal, which was lUicAvise His chafr of teaching — in the sio-ht of the Cross — to imitate God became the most definite of all instructions. For there was spread before men the whole life of the thirty- « Marcus Aurelius, ii. 17. 126 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. three years; the boyhood passed in obscurity, and the manhood in labour ; the teaching, requited with opposition, terminated Avith the Cross ; the complete exemplar of humility, obedience, self- sacrifice, the spotless mirror of purity. This was man, the guide and teacher of men, and this like wise was God. And if Marcus AureHus had stooped to examine what was passing in Lyons, one of the cities of his own empire, and by his own order, about the time the words above quoted were writ- ' ten by him, he would have found men and women who could not only direct their Hfe according to the pattern of that God-man, but coidd die not only serene in the midst of terrible torments, but full of the Hveliest hoj)e and the firmest certainty, because His image was impressed upon the heart, and the desire of seeing Him conquered at once aU love of the world and aU fear of death. 3. But the one abiding difficulty ofthe heathen was the weakness of his moral nature. In the perpetual strife between body and soul the body continually won the battle. And it was not only an incessant fall, but one in which there was no thing to arrest the descent. In vain the phUoso pher cried to him : " Live with the gods. And he does live Avith the gods who constantly shows to them that his own soul is satisfied Avith that which is assigned to him, and that it does aU that the genius Avishes, which Zeus hath given to every man for his guardian and guide, a portion of him- NEW CREATION OF INDIVIDUAL MAN. 127 self And this is every man's understanding and reason." * Bnt the reason was itself the traitor. It was ' always failing at the critical , moment. When the body pressed it hardest, reason gave way. When the mind desponded, reason fluttered for a while and then sunk Avith it. Reason, said philosophy, was the man himself; but it was no more than man, and a greater than man was wanted. It was here that the Creating and Re- deeming God came in with constant power and efficacy. The Apostle, describing this very con flict under which the heathen continually sunk, exclaimed, " Who shaU deliver me from the body of this death?" and he answered his own ques tion: "The grace of God through Jesus Christ our Lord." And again : "I have strength for all things through the instrengthening Christ."f This indwelling of the Redeeming God, by which a continuous never-failing support for every day's trials and work was bestowed on the creature, was the very substance of Christian life. It was at once Adsibly represented and imparted in all the seven sacraments of the Church; was the very mystery of the most divine and excellent of them all, intended for his daUy sustenance. For in Baptism redeemed man was buried and raised again Avith the Incarnate God ; in Confirmation strengthened by Him ; in Penance absolved by Him; in Marriage blessed by Him; in Order con 's Marcus AureUus, v. 27. f Ro™- ¦"!• 24 ; Phil. iv. 14. 128 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. secrated as His officer by Him; in the Holy Eu charist fed by Him ; in Unction anointed for the last conflict by Him. And the vital breath on man's part of this union so Ausibly expressed on God's part was prayer, which is the constant dis claiming of power and sufficiency in his oavu na ture ; the constant request of power and sufficiency from a higher nature, and that the God who had not only created but redeemed him, and who, stiU more, in the work of redemption had become man. So that into every part and fibre of Christian morality, into the work of every day, the thought of every hour, into the whole domain of man, his affections, words, and actions, the grace of God incarnate descended as a life-stream. 4. The fourth general view of Christian mo rality which we were to take was the reward pro posed to it. And here an intrinsic value, and that immeasurable, Avas given to every human act by the end assigned to it. For in Greek and Latin heathenism all human life was struck Avith worth lessness by its severance from any Hfe to come, of which the course and nature should depend on its actions here. Nor can any more universal reason be assigned for the cruelty, the impurity, the extremes of luxury and poverty, of sensual enjoyment and of suffering, which abounded every where, than the loss of faith in a future life of retribution, wherein the person of the man who did weU or Ul should be restored. Most plaintive and touchhig in thefr NEW CREATION OF INDIAiTDUAL MAN. 129 doubt near akin to hopelessness are the very aspi rations of the Aviser and better among them; as when, after delineating the noble character of Agricola, Tacitus cries, " If there be any place for the shades of the pious — if, as the wise avUI have it, great souls are not extinguished together with the body — ^mayest thou rest in peace !" * But the imperial stoic phUosopher boldly said, " Thou existest as a part ; thou shalt disappear in that which produced thee, but rather thou shalt be received back into its seminal principle by trans mutation:" and again, "To conclude, always ob serve how ephemeral and worthless human things are, and what was yesterday a little mucus, to morrow wUl be a mummy or ashes. Pass, then, through this little space of time conformably to nature, and end thy journey in content; just as an oHve faUs off when it is ripe, blessing nature who produced it, and thanking the tree on which it grew."f Would you gather, in a word, the wondrous change which Christian faith brought on human Hfe, pass on to the anticipated tribunal of Him who is at once Creator, Redeemer, and Judge, y.et Brother and Kinsman of man. " When the Son of Man shall come in His majesty, and all the holy angels Avith Him, then shaU He sit upon the throne of His majesty: and aU nations shaU be gathered together before Him, and He shaU sepa rate them one from another, as the shepherd sepa- « Agricola, 46. t Marcus Aurelius, iv. 14, 48. 130 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. rates the sheep from the goats: and He shaU set the sheep on His right hand : but the goats on His left. Then shaU the King say to them that shaU be on His right hand, Come ye blessed of My Father, possess you the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry, and you gave Me to eat ; I was thirsty, and you gave Me to drink ; I was a stranger, and you took Me in ; I was naked, and you covered Me ; I was sick, and you visited Me ; I was in prison, and you came to Me. Then shall the just answer Him, saying. Lord, when did we see Thee hungry, and fed Thee ; or thirsty, and gave Thee drink? And when did Ave see Thee a stranger, and took Thee in ? or naked, and covered Thee ? or when did we see Thee sick or in prison, and came to Thee ? And the King shaU answer and say to them, Amen, I say to you, inasmuch as you did it to one of these My least brethren, you did it to Me. Then shall He say to them also that shaU be on His left hand, Depart from Me, you cursed, into everlasting fire, which was prepared for the devU and his angels. For I was hungry, and you gave Me not to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave Me not to drink ; I was a stranger, and you took Me not in; naked, and you covered Me not; sick and in prison, and you did not Adsit Me. Then they also shall answer Him, saying, Lord, when did we see Thee hungry, or thirsty, or a stranger, or nalced, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister to Thee? NEW CREATION OF INDIVIDUAL MAN. 131 Then shaU He answer them, saying. Amen, I say to you, inasmuch as you did it not to one of these least, neither did you do it to Me. And these shaU go into everlasting punishment ; but the just into everlasting life." * Here observe how the acts of daily human life are invested Avith an importance far transcending their natural measure, shace on them depends a futurity Avithout Hmit. Nor only so, bu.t they are connected Avith the human nature assumed by God, since the acts done to His brethren are counted by Him as done to Himself. That work of the In carnation is not' an act done once for aU, and then receding back into distance of time; but a state touching and by its touch transforming every hu man Hfe and every relationship of human life, man and man's society in every time and place. That human Hfe at Bethlehem, Nazareth, and Golgotha, surrounds us aU, connects us altogether now Avith its sympathies, affections, and kinsmanship. The kingdom promised as the sequel of this earthly" Hfe, made up of trials, is an inheritance prepared of old for brethren, as weU as a reward given to combatants; and the King who gives it connects it inseparably Avith His own sonship. His human na ture, and His sufferings, as in that high and trans- cendant promise wherein His OAvn description of eternal life culminates : "To him that overcometh will I give to sit Avith Me on My throne, as I also « Matt. XXV. 31-46. 132 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. have overcome, and am set down with My Father on His throne."* We have seen the light cast from this seven fold Adsion of God on man as a moral agent in general. Let us now consider this Hght as it faUs upon man in his different relations. And first as it faUs on the individual. The intellect of man tends naturaUy to truth, which is its object, desires to possess it, and aims at it. The avUI of man tends naturaUy to good, and desires equally its possession. But this truth and this good are both ofthe natural order; and the natural power of man's intellect and avUI is limited to this order. Now the Hght we have above mentioned disclosed to man God as the Au thor of a supernatural order, and a multitude of truths concerning that order comprehended in God and deduced from Him ; disclosed to him HkcAvise God as the Author of supernatural good, and the possession of this good as the further and higher end of his own being, superadded to the natural end. Thus this Ught in its operation upon the soul of man distributed itself into three vfrtues: that of Faith, Ufting man's inteUect to the know ledge of God, not only as his Creator, but as his Redeemer and his Reward; that of Hope, lift ing his Avill to the desire of such a good; that of Charity, uniting actually his Avill Avith the good itself These three virtues, Faith, Hope, and ** Apoc. iii. 21. NBW CREATION OF INDIVIDUAL MAN. 133 Charity, cognate as haAdng the same object, pu rify, enlarge, and exalt the natural powers of the soul, raising them immediately to God, as the first Truth, the Giver of beatitude, the infinite Good Himself. In the order of generation Faith is first, for the inteUect must apprehend before the Avill can desire; Hope succeeds, for the will must de sfre before the desire can be terminated in the possession of the good itself, which is the final union of charity. But ha the order of perfection Charity is supreme, since it alone touches that Truth and that Good which the others aspire after. But the God who is the object of these three vfrtues is He who not only creates but redeems; who is become visible in His Son; who by that Son imparts sonship to those whom He redeems. As to Faith, among those things hoped for of which it is the substance, and those things unseen of which it is the evidence, the economy of redemp tion takes so large a place that the word often stands by itself for the profession of Christianity. As to Hope, the possession of eternal beatitude, after which it aspires, is so entirely the gift of God in Christ, that we are said to be saved by it.* Bat let us take especially Charity, shice, masmuch as it unites with God, it becomes as it were the uaform- ing power or soul of all other virtues, Avithout which none of them can merit etemal Hfe, and so is the proper mark and character of the Christian. Now every where this habit of charity in the Apos- * Rom. viii. 24. 134 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. toHc Avritings is referred back to the example of Christ in becoming man for us, — ^in teaching, la bouring, suffering, and finaUy dying for us. It is our Lord Himself who first sets forth the Incarna tion as the proof of unsurpassable love on the part of the Cremator. " God so loved the world that He gave His only -begotten Son." It is our Lord Him self Avho first made the appeal from the diAdne love to the human, on the eve of His passion. " A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this shaU aU men know that you are my disciples, if you have love one for an other."* But the commandment was an old one, and together Avith the love of God, out of which it flowed, was, as He had before declared, even the great commandment of the law, on which the whole laAV and the prophets depended. How then was it new? It was new in its motive and new in its standard: for it ran no longer, "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself," but "as I ha\^e loved you." The imitation of Himself, therefore, was the motive ; the standard was God becoming man for man's sake, and as man dying for him. He makes the application so that none can mistake it. " This is My commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love than this no man hath, that a man lay doAvn his life for his friends. You are My friends, if you do the things that I command you."f Thus out of loving * John iii. 16 ; xiii. 34. f John xv. 13. NEW CREATION OF INDIVIDUAL MAN. 135 our neighbour as ourself in the old law is deve loped by means of our Lord's passion the martyr dom of charity in the new law. St. John draws the same conclusions thus : " By this hath the charity of God appeared towards us, because God hath sent His only-begotten Son into the world that we may live by Him." Here is the first point of the diAdne love, God becoming man. But there is a second; for he urges more strongly, " In this is charity, not as though we had loved God, but because He has first loved us, and sent His Son to be a propitiation for our sins." Here is the second point, the passion of God become man. From both he concludes : "If God hath so loved us, we ought also to love one another." And again : "In this we have knoAvn charity, because He hath laid doAvn His Ufe for us ; and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren."* Nor is St. Paul behhid St. John in putting forth this motive when he says : " God commends His charity towards us, because when as yet we were sinners Christ died for us." And on this he rests the spring of the interior Hfe : " The charity of Christ constrains us, judging this, that if one died for aU, then all were dead. And Christ died for all, that they also who live may not live to themselves, but unto Him who died for them and rose again.''f And as the Incarnation of the Son of God and His death are put forward as the standard of the » 1 John iv. 9-11 ; iii. 16. t I'o™- v. 8 ; 2 Cor. v. 13. 136 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. diAdne love to man, and as the motive of an answer ing love on the part of man to God, so the love thus called forth is a quality produced in man's AviU by that Third Person who is the Love of the Father and the Son: for "the charity of God is poured forth in our hearts by the Holy Spirit, who is given to us."* Thus it is not only a special virtue, but, as extending itself to all the acts and habits of the soul, is the root at once and the per fection of aU Adrtues. It produces so exactly the fruits of divine grace that theologians have a hard matter to distinguish the habit of charity from grace itself. And it has a single object before it, God ; its relation to creatures being determined by its relation to God. Thus, being the first operation of grace, it as completely penetrates and underhes the whole Christian character as the soul is in every part of the body, the Hfe of the whole. And so charity alone is called at once "then^AV crea tion," " the fulfilment of the law," " the bond of perfection."! To complete our view of this Adrtue, we must remark how entirely new it was to aU the heathen nations. There is not in Greek and Roman life, nor in any system of philosophy, the remotest ap- ^ Rom. V. 5. t Compare together Gal. vi. 15, v. 6, 1 Cor. vii. 19, with Rom. xiii. 8-10, and Col. iii. 14. By the former three texts it appears that St. Paul names " the new creation," " faith which works by love,'' and " the keeping the commandments of God," as equivalents. In the fourth he calls charity " the fulfilment of the law ;" and in the fifth " the bond of perfection.'' NEW CREATION OF INDIVIDUAL MAN. 137 proach to any virtue Hke Christian charity. And the reason of this is plain. For there being two rules of human actions, the reason of man, and the absolute reason of God, or the eternal Law, they had lost the conception of any rule but the former. They had ceased to conceive of God as the supreme rule which should regulate human reason; ceased to aspfre to Him as the absolute good. Nor, in deed, so far as they held His unity, did they hold Him to be a personal God at all. Thus that move ment of the soul towards Him and towards the rational creature for His sake, which is the proper act of charity, was not only far beyond their power as a supernatural act, but found no disposition of their Avill or their understanding to it. And here we might terminate this portion of our argument ; for if Charity be in such sense the seal and character of the Christian, that Avithout it aU other vfrtues are of no avail in the sight of God, and if it have so intimate a connection Avith the Jncarnation and Death of Christ as to be a gift of God resulting from these, it might seem that nothing further could be said. Yet it AviU be well to continue our review so far as to see how other vfrtues are exhibited in relation to the same great objects of faith. And I AvUl take next the virtue of moral purity, because it was one almost as Httle knoAvn to the whole heathen world as charity. It was here that the degradation of man was most complete. In 138 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. the mass of men the body had made the mind its subject, and men had becom^e the slaves of sensual • enjoyment. On the other hand, and as a reaction from this, the highest phUosophy denied that the body was a part of the man, or that together with the mind it made up the man, and asserted that the real man was the reasonable soul, which used the body as an instrument. But here, from the opposite side, it dishonoured the body, for an in strument is but a means to an end and has no in- trmsic value. Noav the Son of God, by assuming a human body, consecrated the body for ever : by taking it, as weU as the soul, into indivisible union Avith His Godhead, He showed it to be a part of human nature which has its own intrinsic value and dignity. And His disciples inculcated the virtue of moral purity as based upon the Incarna tion and its result, union vdth God. It was the whole man who was taken into this union, not the rational soul only, but the body HkeAvise. And more even than this. It was from the Body of the Lord, in Adrtue of its personal union with His God head, that the union of His members Avith Him proceeded: for "we are members of His Body, of His flesh, and of His bones ;"* from His Body that thefr perpetual food was draAvn in the greatest of Christian mysteries. And so, as a part of this teaching. Christians Avere told, "the body is for the Lord, and the Lord for the body; and God, « Ephes. V. 30. NEW CREATION OF INDIATCDUAL MAN. 139 who raised up the Lord, shall hkcAvise raise us up through His power. Know you not that your bodies are members of Christ ?^ — Now he who ad heres to the Lord is one Spirit with Him. — Know you not that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have from God, and are not your OAvn : you have been bought Avith a price. Therefore glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God's."* This is the ever- abiding source of Christian ptirity ; and the fixing of this doctrine with aU its consequences in the minds and hearts of men was of itself a moral revolution. It is a direct result of the Incarna tion, and not only grew out of it at first, but rests for ever upon it. Pass next to the first and tenderest relations of the famUy. The love of husband and wife is placed on the basis of Christ's love to the Church, and the obedience ofthe Avife to the husband on that of the Church's obedience to Christ. Thus these duties, forming the ground- work of natural society, have a supernatural motive given to them. "Wives, be subject to your oavu husbands as to the Lord ; because the man is head of the woman, as Christ also is head of the Church, and He is Saviour of the body : but Uke as the Church is subject to Christ, so also let Avives be to thefr OAvn husbands in every thhig. Husbands, love your OAvn Avives, as Christ also loved the Church, and « 1 Cor, vi. 13, 15, 19, 20 140 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. gave Himself for her."* And he proceeds to exalt marriage by representing it as a type of the most sacred and intimate of all conceivable unions, the union ofthe Incarnate God Avith His Church. What a doctrine to be promulgated out of the midst of that Rome whose emperor at the time had mur dered an innocent and vfrtuous wife, and had taken the profligate wife of another, to become presently her murderer likcAvise : of that Rome, where the satirist says, that Avives counted thefr divorces by the years of their marriage. We have touched on the Christian treatment of man as an individual, and in the society of home. Let us now continue the delineation of that treat ment as it affected man in ciAdl society. We Avill begin with the deepest humihation of man as viewed in his natural rights. What did the Apostles say to this outcast of Roman society, this refuse of the heathen world, the slave? Slaves formed, it must be remembered, a pro bably large majority ofthe human race : and, more over, the institution made an essential part of Greek and Roman civUisation, which shnply could not exist Avithout it. For society is buUt upon manual labour, and such labour was deemed unworthy of freemen. And the character of the institution it self was, that men were regarded not as persons but as things. Did the Christian teachers set them selves to reverse directly this enormous Avrong? » Ephes. V. 22-6. NEW CREATION OF INDIVIDUAL MAN. 141 Did they urge upon the slave to claim and to re cover his indefeasible rights as man? The way in which they dealt Avith this remarkable difliculty, which met Christianity at the threshold and en countered it everywhere, offers a striking illustra tion of the entirely iuAvard genius of the Christian faith, and how completely it sought to restore so ciety by remoulding individual man. " Slaves," was the command, "be obedient to your masters after the flesh Avith fear and trembhng, in simphcity of your heart, as tmto Christ ; not with eye-service, as men-pleasers, but as slaves of Christ, doing the Avill of God from the heart with good-AvUl, as being slaves to the Lord and not to men ; knowing that whatever good thing any one may do, this he shaU receive from the Lord whether he be a slave or a freeman."* Thus it feared not to consecrate the most unhallowed relation of man to man by repre senting that the slaA'-e's obedience to the master, if performed Avith pure intention, was an obedience to Christ Himself. The Prince of the Apostles extends this duty specially to unkind masters, supplying the supernatural motive. " Servants, be subject in aU fear to your masters, not merely to the good and kind, but to the perverse. For this is praiseworthy if for conscience-sake towards God any one endure pahis, suffering wrongfuUy. Since what glory is it if, when committing faults and being buffeted for them, you endure it: but if you suffer for doing good, and endure it, this is pleashag » Ephes, vi. 5-8. 142 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM, before God. For unto this you were caUed, inas much as Christ also suffered for us, leaving to us an example that you should foUow upon His foot steps,"* But the most instinctively and sublimely Christian recommendation concerning slavery is perhaps that given by St, Paul, when he says: " Let every one remain in the caUing in which he was caUed, Wast thou caUed being a slave ? care not for it : but even if thou mayest become free, use rather thy slavery; for the slave that is caUed in the Lord is the Lord's freeman; and so he who is called, being a freeman, is the slave of Christ. You have been bought -with a price : become not the slaves of men."f Now, bearing in mind what slavery was ; to what perUs and sufferings it exposed both man and woman, and how at any moment it might requfre the sacrifice of life itself for the preserva tion of moral purity; could any reUgion use this language unless it came directly from God, and felt itself able to renew human nature from its very heart's-core, by the supply of a boundless grace from its Author? These words bear Avitness to the implanting of an inward and spiritual freedom in the slave's inmost heart. Whatever he might suffer, he could put himself in the place of the Lord of heaven and earth suffering unjustly before PUate and Herod; and he had the couAuction that every one who suffered vnth Him and for Him should likewise reign with Him. The exhortation given to masters is the coun- '-> 1 Pet. ii. 18-21. f 1 Cor. vii. 20. NBW CREATION OF INDIVIDUAL MAN. 143 terpart of that given to slaves. " Masters, afford to your slaves that which is just aud fafr, giving up threats, knowing that you also have a Master in heaven, and Avith Hun there is no respect of persons."* Thus Christianity did not command the slave holder to enfranchise his slave, but it commanded him instead to treat that slave as a brother : that is, leaAdng the legal bond as it was, it imposed a moral check, making the slave a person, not a thing, ha the eye of his master; and a person equaUy dear as himself to the common Master; a person for whom account was to be rendered by him to the common Master ; and a person likewise to whom a kindness done would be interpreted by Christ as done to Himself. Such was the doctrine which the Cross, the punishment of slaves, brought into the Ergastulum and the PEedagogium of the Romans. How long would the underground prison-house, and the stUl fouler den of infamy ha the palace, last before it? As we hear these words of St. Peter and St. Paul, we feel that the bright Hght of heaven had shot into the darkest nook of earth, and kindled a never- dying flame of faith and hope m breasts long con demned to a misery Avithout rehef An imperious Fabiola would henceforth be no match for a loving Syra. The mistress of Christian slaves might, m- deed, make her apartment a place of martyrdom; « Col. iv. 1 and Ephes. vi. 9. 144 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. but it could not henceforth be a mere torture- chamber or slaughter-house. HaAdng thus, by a wholly internal restoration, repafr ed the basis of man's society with man, in his treatment of inferiors. Christian teaching went on to deal with him in his relation to equals. Thus it placed the obligation to truth not on a conventional point of honour, but upon the Incarnation itself. " Putting off falsehood, speak truth each Avith his neighbour; for we are members one of another."* And the same idea is elsewhere expressed as to the peculiarly Christian grace of truth. " Do not use falsehood towards one another ; because you have put off the old man Avith his deeds, and have put on the new, who is renewed unto knowledge accord ing to the image of his Creator ;"f where falsehood seems made of itself the criterion of faUen man. In the same way the vdrtues of gentleness, mercy, long-suffering, meekness, and humility, are urged by the example of Christ. " Put on, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, tender compassion, goodness, humihty, meekness, long-suffering, sup porting one another and forgiving one another, if any have a complaint against another; as Christ also forgave you, so do you also. "J So likeAvise the standard of Hberahty in assisting the poor, which is set before men, is no less than the act of Christ Himself in becoming man for us. " You know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, » Ephes. iv. 25. -f Col. iii. 10. + Col. iii. 12-13. NEW CREATION OF INDIVIDUAL MAN. 145 who for our sakes became poor, being rich, that by His poverty you may become rich."* In short, every act of daily Hfe, however seem ingly hasignificant or indispensable, was to be pe netrated' Avith this thought. " Whether you eat or drink, or do any thing, do aU to the glory of God." "Whatever you do in word or in deed, do aU in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to our God and Father through Him." And every condition in which man might be Avas to be sea soned vnth the reflection, that what was present was merely temporary. " This I say, the time is short. It remains that those who have Avives be as though they had not ; and those who weep, as though they wept not ; and those who, rejoice, as though they rejoiced not; and those who buy, as though they possessed not ; and those who use this world, as though they used it not; for the fashion of this world passes away,"f But the temper and habit of mind towards others which Christianity speciaUy created out of the example of our Lord Himself, and Avhich may be said to sum up the whole of man's conduct to his feUow-man,J is brotherly love, kindness, or charity. Thus it is dfrectly out of thefr filial re lation to God, obtained for them by the unspeak- o 2 Cor. viii. 9. t 1 Cor. X. 31 ; Col. iii. 17 ; 1 Cor. vii. 29-31. J This is expressly said by St. Paul, Rom. xiii. 8-10. See also 1 Pet. i. 17-23, and 2 Pet. i. 5-7, and 1 Thess. iv. 9. The first and last make ^ihaSe\ia and ceyd-ir-ij identical. 146 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. able sacrifice of His Son, and in vfrtue of the power given by Him through that Son, which he terms "regeneration from an incorruptible seed,"* that St. Peter calls onthe disciples to "purify thefr souls in the obedience ofthe truth, through the Spfrit, unto unfeigned brotherly love, and so out of a pure heart to love one another earnestly." No such conception as this of the relation between man and man is to be found in the whole heathen world. They had neither the thing nor the name for it. It is a derivation to man from the Sonship bestowed on him by God in Christ, which encfrcles the Avhole brotherhood Avith a new tie, and draws them together in a bond unknoAvn to those for whom Aristotle thought, or Cicero compiled the thoughts of others. WhUe thus creating a new Adrtue for the prac tice of those who were to be associated in a new brotherhood, the attitude of the Christian society to the existing civU society is speciaUy remarkable. It was a new doctrine to aU the heathen subjects of Nero, when St. Paul declared that " every soul should be subject to higher powers; for there is no power but from God," and "the powers that are are ordained by God, so that he who resists this power resists the ordinance of God,"f Thus the duty of obedience to civU government was es tablished on its only true basis by declaring that civil authority is not the result of agreement be- '- 1 Pet. i. 22. t Rom. xiii. 1. NBW CREATION OF INDIVIDUAL MAN, ' 147 tween men, but of- diAdne appointment, and there fore claims submission to itself, not on account of the temporal consequences only which would at tend denial, but for conscience-sake. This principle alone could stay the interminable fight of adverse factions, which rent asunder cities and repubhcs in old times, and supply the only stable foundation of a really Christian order. Here again the super natural motive reinforced the natural conditions of society. And the example of our Lord Himself was before men, who recognised the diAdne authority of govemment when unjustly accused, by observ ing to His judge, who represented the Roman em peror, " Thou wouldst not have any power against Me unless it were given thee from above."* Yet the same Christian teaching which thus consecrated civU authority and fulfiUed the whole cfrcle of duties between man and man by the divine virtue of fraternal love, removed by a consequence of that very virtue that exclusive regard to the greatness and welfare of one's own country which formed the heathen's patriotism. No other con sideration AvUl bring out more fuUy the kind of that supernatural order which our Lord estabhshed by the teaching of His Church, or exhibit more distinctly how the spiritual and most inward re newal of the indiAudual man is connected Avith the advance of the whole society. For instance, if there be any relation which is dear to men in the * John xix, 11. 148 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. natural order, it is that of country ; which indeed to those who have consciously or unconsciously rejected the supernatural order becomes the lead ing passion, devotion to which is their standard of what is great and good. Patriotism to the Ro mans was the first of virtues ; and there is a nation of modern times which often recaUs to mind the heathen greatness of old Rome, in the minds of whose people patriotism likewise seems to be the symbol ofall greatness and the test of character in man. Now it can scarcely be doubted that Christianity did not aUow this exclusive feeling of patriotism at aU. It would not allow the denizen of an eternal kingdom to give to an object of the natural order the devotion which is due only to the mystical body of Christ. " Our commonwealth, or citizenship, or poHtical life," for the word means aU this, says St. Paul, "is in heaven ;" and again: " You are feUow-citizens of the saints and of the household of God." "You have approached Mount Sion and the city of the Uving God, the heavenly Jerusalem;" whereas here you have "no abiding city, but seek that which is to come."* The peo ple of Romulus beUeved in the immovable rock of the Capitol ; the people of God believe in the im movable rock of Christ. The Christian's country, so far as he could have one in Avhat was represented " Phil. lii. 20, TjfiZv rh iroXfreu/xa ; Ephes. ii. 20, trv/jmoXTTai twv aytav ; Heb. xii. 22, irpotreATjAiflare -iv6\ei @£ov ^Hvtos ; xiii. 14, ou yap cx"!'-^'' ^^^ fiemvo-ay t:6Kiv, NEW CREATION OF INDIVIDUAL JMAN. 149 to him as a journey, was the Church of God, in its vast extent of all the souls who had been, are, or are to be of that divine commonwealth. For these he laboured and prayed, suffered and died; Avith these was aU his sympathy ; and to add to thefr number his highest joy. In that magnificent Ad sion of the City of Peace he swept away as un worthy of a thought the divisions which had arisen from human sin. To him there was neither Greek nor Jew, cfrcumcision nor uncircumcision, barba rian, Scythian, slave nor free ; but Christ was all things and in aU. For the very idea under which Christianity presented itself in the teaching of the Apostles was the new creation of aU things springing out of the love of God, exhibited in the Incarnation of His Son, and implanted in the hearts of men by His Spfrit as a consequence of the Birth, the Life, the Death, and the Resurrection of Christ. The whole order of morahty was based upon the personal union of the Godhead and Manhood in the God- man. The natural Sonship of Christ as man led to the adopted Sonship of men His brethren. The work which the Holy Spirit wrought ha the high est degree in our Lord's Incarnation, effecting the union of the divine and human natures in the Per son of the Eternal Son, He worked in a lower degree, but in the same order, in the redemption of each individual. For it is the participation of the divine nature communicated to the soul by 150 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. the gift of habitual grace which constitutes that adopted Sonship, on which rests the whole opera tion of the Christian, the whole merit of etemal Ufe. This divine generation was declared by our Lord in His words to Nicodemus to be necessary for every one who would even enter into His king dom. Of this entrance He spoke as a new bfrth, as true and real as the natural birth, for "that which is born ofthe Sjoirit is spirit," just as "that which is born of the flesh is flesh." The state of man in it is caUed by St, Paul " a new creation." For creation is the passage from not being into being. And being is twofold; the being of nature, and that of grace. Noav the first creation was that in Avhich creatures were made by God from nothing in a natural being. The new creation is that by which they are produced in the being of grace, because those who are Avithout grace are nothing before Him, Thus the infusion of grace is a creation. The sons of this ncAv creation are viewed and de scribed coUectively by St. James, in words which rather shadow out than delineate distinctly some untold ancl inconceivable magnificence of design, while he connects them Aviththe Incarnation ofthe Son and the gift of the Spirit. For, after declaring that -CA^ery good giving and CA'ery perfect gift is from aboA^e, descending from the Father of Lights, he adds : "Of His oavu avUI has He begotten us, ui order that we might be a sort of beginning of NEW CREATION OF INDIVIDUAL MAN. 151 His creatures."* By entrance into this state of adoption, all relative superiority or inferiority aris ing from nation, sex, or cIaoI condition is done away;f for what are these to a creature renewed after the Hkeness of his Creator ? Again, let us compare what this adoption is in the individual with what it is in the mass. In the individual, as we have seen, it is "a new creation;" in the mass it is entitled " the Body of Christ."J For as the origin and seed are supernatural, so are the growth and termination. The soul, new cre ated in grace, has new desires, affections, hopes, and fears, directed towards the objects now dis closed to it, and the mass of souls thus new created grows up into a Body, which takes the name of its Head, because it is first formed and then ruled by the Spirit of its Head. Further, let us contrast both the individual in this state of adoption with the individual as he was before in the broken and impaired state of the Gentile world, and the Christian commonwealth with the GentUe commonwealth. As to the indiAudual, there is man in his state of fallen nature wasting himself away in desires which deceived him Avith a false appearance of good; the pendant to which is man in his new state of adoption created according to God in jus tice and true sanctity, § ^ John iii. 6 ; Gal. vi. 15 ; James i. 16, 17. t See Gal. iii. 26, and Col. iii. 9. i 1 Cor. xii. 27. § Ephes. iv. 22-24. 152 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. As to the mass, the Apostle collects in one view the whole heathen world, summing them up in clear decisive words as "the nations walking in the vanity of their minds, haAdng their understand ing darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the bhndness of their hearts, who in their callous ness have given themselves up to lasciviousness to work every uncleanness with greediness." As a contrast he sets before men the Church, as springing directly from the gifts of Christ at His ascension; for as part of these gifts, administered through aU time by the Holy Spirit, came the whole arrangement of the ecclesiastical ministry, the appointed guard against error, "until we aU arrive into the unity of the faith and of the knoAV- ledge of the Son of God unto a perfect man, unto the measure ofthe age ofthe fulness of Christ."* Thus it is that the Christian commonwealth, — ^in order to show how entirely supernatural a crea tion it is, how absolutely the work of God redeem ing, how exactly and definitely an organic Avhole, — is termed "the Body of Christ." And of such a title there is fuU justification in the fact that in every indiAudual composing it the root is the grace of adoption, not an imitation merely, but an actual participation of that immeasurable grace which is bestowed on Christ incarnate, which in the mass grows up to what the Apostle calls by the name " Ephes. iv. 17-19 and 13. NEW CREATION OF INDIVIDUAL MAN. 153 of the material created thing most wonderful in the universe of God, the Body of His Son. In what other words was it possible to show so clearly how the Christian people was the redupHcation of the incarnate God? Let us trace some of the social consequences hence arising. How could those whose whole spiri tual existence lay in the possession of this adopted Sonship — of this brotherhood embracing the re deemed out of aU races and countries— suffer their hopes, desfres, and sympathies to be confined Avithin the limits of a particular nation? Man, no doubt, wUl ever love his country with a natural love : but it is a natural love alone. It cannot rise above its source. The nation is a result of the dispersion of the human family at Babel, and therefore a result of human diAusion and sin. Its attraction, its mani fold ties and organisation, begin and end with this world. The hopes and fears participated in it have their beginning and their end here. With this life it ceases itself, and is never reproduced. How could those who were exalted by their very state as Chris tians to be "fellow-citizens ofthe saints and of the household of God " make the nation their home, and sink to be mere citizens of Romulus ? And descending from the commonwealth to the indiAddual, let us trace the conception of virtue itself as it would be formed by man in his faUen state, and as it is formed by the Christian. Plato and Aristotle, Cicero and Epictetus, whom 154 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. we name as representing the whole heathen world, had no other rule for thefr actions than the natural reason of man. By nature, as we have already said, their inteUect tended to truth, and their AviU to good; but the truth and the good were confined to the natural order which they saw around them. Thus they had weU divided the whole sphere of human action among the four cardinal Aurtues : pru dence, which is the reason directing itself rightly in the choice of means; justice, directing man to what is due and right in aU his conduct towards others ; temperance, which restrains all the passions of the part in him which desires; and fortitude, which arms him with firmness against aU passions of the part which fears. And the good which they had in view was the good of the individual and of society as Hmited to this present Hfe. And as, when so limited, the good of the multitude is superior to that of the individual, the highest form of good which they could set before them was the AveU- ordered human commonwealth, and to this there fore, if need were, the good of the indiAddual must in aU cases be sacrificed. Thus the wealth, power, and extension of the state, and its just govemment, were the highest result of the virtue which they contemplated, and man had in himself no intrinsic value which could outweigh or vie Avith this result. Their Avhole virtue consisted, therefore, in obedience to the dictates of reason Avithin this sphere. But now Christian Grace came upon this same NEW CREATION OF INDIVIDUAL MAN. 155 natural reason, elevating all its powers to a higher end and a superior good, and bestoAving on it, in accordance with such end and good, a rule above itself, the divine reason, which is the absolute good. In and by the gift of adoption it disclosed God to the soul as loving each soul with an infinite love; and as the love of God is not barren, as bestowing on its object a quahty answering to that love. This was the virtue of Charity, the affection on man's part answering to its cause, the previous love of God, the creature's movement to meet the Crea tor's embrace. The Holy Spfrit Hunself, the per fect Gift, began all by implanting grace in the soul, and in this grace charity rooted itself, and became the mother of all other vfrtues, because it directed them all to the end of pleashag God. The paraUel between Nature and Grace is complete.* Just as the natural Hght of reason is something before and beside the Adrtues acquired by the right use of it, and directed to the end which it sets before them, so this infused Hght of grace, this participation of the diAdne nature, is something before the virtues which spring from it, before even Charity, which, however, taking possession of the wUl, becomes the exact representative of Grace. And as the political good was the highest object at which natural reason aimed, so reason, informed by Grace, aimed at an object connatural to grace, the possession of God Himself, the fuU « St. Thomas, Summa, 1, 2, q. 110, a. 3. 156 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. inheritance belonging to the adoption. Yet it did not exclude those vfrtues of human society, pru dence, justice, temperance, and fortitude ; but whereas in their natural state they are tendencies rather than virtues, and do not always cohere to gether in the bond of prudence, but rather men are brave, or temperate, or just, or prudent, by a sort of natural disposition, here on the other hand. Charity, the mover of the avUI by Grace, produced these virtues on a new stock, Avith a perfect ripe ness, cohesion, and completeness; produced them with the spontaneity of an affection, and the un failing force of a diAone origin. It produced them on a ncAV stock, for in the eyes of Charity the poU tical good, to which in their natural condition they were related, was in itself transitory, and subor dinate to a higher good ; and so Charity bestowed on their acts the value of this higher good. And it produced thefr several acts with perfect ripeness, cohesion, and completeness, because it took posses sion of the whole avUI, and was the motive power of all actions. And here again the highest form of Christian excellence Avas seen in prophecy as attached to the Person of Christ, its well-head and fountain, and streaming forth from Him upon His brethren, when it was said* that on the Flower arising from the root of Jesse should rest the sevenfold spfrit of wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, know- ® Isai. xi. 1, 2. NEW CREATION OF INDIVIDUAL MAN, 157 ledge, piety, and fear. For inasmuch as the rea son of man has two perfections, one natural, ac cording to the light of reason, and one super natural, according to the light of grace, though this second perfection is greater than the first, the first is more perfectly possessed by man.* For whereas he has fuU and complete possession of reason, he knows and loves God but imperfectly by the light of Grace in the reason. So that a special diAdne instinct is necessary to quicken the action of reason, and therefore the Holy Spirit breathes these gifts as a Spfrit, transforming the inteUectual and moral vfrtues, which the heathens themselves named and in some sort possessed, into movements of His own in the will. Thus the motives respectively guiding the heathen and the Christian were, for the first reason in its rectitude, for the second the Holy Spirit moving the reason in perfect accordance Avith its freedom. The virtue of Charity held all these gifts together, by which all the powers of the human soul were guided into AviUing obedience to the divine prompting. And the bestowal of them on each Christian in various degrees was an emanation from the fulness with which they rested on His divine Head. And to complete what we have to say we must add that so far as the virtue of Christian Grace ex ceeded the Adrtue of natural reason in the indiAd dual, so much did its consummation in the mass » St. Thomas, Summa, 1, 2, q. 68, a. 2. 158 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. exceed any thing which the human commonwealth could reach. These virtues are of a different origin, a different order, and point to a different end, both in the individual and in the mass ; but further, in the natural polity the good of the individual and the good of the whole do not concur. The State is perpetually sacrificing for objects of its OAvn those whom it treats not as members, but as in struments, and this Avithout respect to thefr moral goodness, as, for instance, the Auctims of war, and those who perish in the conflict Avith their Aviser or stronger feUows in the struggle for advancement in Hfe. But in the divine poUty of sons adopted through the grace of the only-begotten Son, the good of the individual and of the whole perfectly concur. There none are treated as instruments to be used, broken, and throAvn aside, on whose ruins others may rise, but the incorruptible Seed grows up into an impregnable Kingdom.* Thus when Christianity came into the ruined fabric of human nature and society, it appealed to no violated rights ; it set up no poHtical means of redressing wrong; but haAdng presented the one God in an effulgence of moral glory, it attached itself to the individual human soul as a counter part to this vision of God : and the doctrine of a dependent immortahty, a continual but never-ceas ing gift of a self-eternal Giver, drew man, as a magnet, upwards : this faith knit again the creature' * 1 Pet. i, 23, cTiopa, &ipeapros ; Heb. xii. 28, pacn\ila aaiKivras. NEW CREATION OF INDIVIDUAL MAN. 159 to the Creator by the bond of the Redeemer ; and wove all round about dislocated, enfeebled, per ishing human nature and coUapsing society these " cords of a man," who was Hkewise God : until, as those minute creatures in the eastern seas by infi nitesimal accretions form beds of coral which rise to be isles and continents, so this mass of human souls, each one of whom was leavened Avith a di Adne life, formed a society of which Hkewise that divine Hfe became the standard and aU-pervading force. In the time of heathenism the world of sense which surrounded man flattered and caressed aU his natural powers, and sohcited an answer from them; and in retum he flung himself greedUy upon that world, and tried to exhaust its treasures. Glory, wealth, and pleasure intoxicated his heart Avith their dreams : he croAvned himself with the earth's flowers, and drank in the air's perfume: and in one object or another, in one after another, he sought enjoyment and satisfaction. The world had nothing more to give him ; nor Avill the latest growth of civiHsation surpass the profusion with which the earth poured forth its gifts to those who consented to seek on the earth alone their home and thefr reward: though indeed they were the few, to whom the many were sacrificed. The Ro man noble, Avith the pleasures of a vanquished world at his feet, with men and women from the fafrest climes ofthe earth to do his bidding, — men, 160 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. who, though slaves, had learnt all the arts and letters of Greece, and were ready to use them for the benefit of their lords, and women the most beautiful and accomplished of thefr sex, who were yet the. property of those same lords, — ^the Roman noble, as to material and even inteUectual enjoy ment, stood on a vantage-ground which never again man can hope to occupy, however " Through the ages an increasing purpose runs, And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns." Cassar and Pompey, LucuUus and Hortensius, and the fellows of their order, were orators, statesmen, jurists and legislators, generals, men of Hterature, and luxurious nobles at the same time : and they were this because they could use the minds as weU as the bodies of others at their pleasure. Not in this direction was an advance possible. But man's exaltation came upon another level, and was of a different order. He had long knovni the excess of sensuous, artistic, and mental enjoyment, and wasted away under it : he was noAv to learn the greatness of sufferhig for a moral end, and to rise by it. The sum of the teaching I have so sUghtly sketched above was this : that in aU this world, so brUliant and enticing when untried, yet so fleeting and fallacious upon trial, there was but one thing of real and abiding value, the personaUty of man : and this personaUty resided ha something, the opera tions of which mdeed met the eye, while the sub stance was mvisible. The soul of man, his person, NBW CREATION OF INDIVIDUAL MAN. 161 the chief work of his Maker, stood out over against the now disclosed being of that Maker Himself, the source of all personality. This soul the new doc trine took as its basis, and leaving for the time the mass, addressed itself to the unit of which the mass was composed. It laid hold of that in man which was at once most his ovm yet most diAdne, his OAVU character, and the copy of God's imagQ, his spirit. National divisions, divisions of caste and class, diAusions of freemen and slaves, vanished be fore an identity which underlay them aU, which not only made all equal who possessed it, but raised them aU to a divine brotherhood. For the force with which this idea struck the world lay in the fact that this soul, the body's eternal indweller, was once more revealed to man at the moment that the Word of God, executing the counsel which had been intended before the world's foundation, joined it to His DiAdne Person by a most unspeak able and transcendent union. The equahty and brotherhood contained in man's descent from a common father became of quite another value when that common father himself was seen to be but the type and first sketch as it were of the Restorer, the Man from heaven, the true Father and Head of the race. But Avhat shaU we say, when to this Hkewise was to be added that He waa its Redeemer? When Adam sunk into mystical sleep, and Eve in that slumber came forth from his side by the word of the Most High, it cost the M 162 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. Creator nothing: but when the true Eve came forth from the true Adam asleep upon the cross, it cost the Ahnighty suffering unspeakable, itself the last fruit and crown of long labours and sorrows. Thus the knowledge of the soul was linked in this teaching with the knowledge ofthe human birth, the toUsome life, and the painful death ofthe soul's Maker and Redeemer : and it was only from the mouth of God, first incarnate and then dying on the cross, that this knowledge had power and fruit fulness to restore and new-create man. And the one adequate object which instead of all "this palpable array of sense on every side en countered" was now presented to man was an eternal union Avith this God who had so wonder fuUy created and redeemed him. This teaching preached to him labours, troubles, and sufferings on earth, instead of the paradise which the heathen sought there: but it made earth the way and not the end; the exile, not the home; the place of merit, not of reward : and it fixed the drooping eye and discouraged heart upon that Person who had Himself bome the burden and heat of the day, and now waited to crown, after a short period of conflict, those who followed Him. And as the whole restoration sprung from the act of God re deeming, so in every man it consisted in the work of God sanctifying. There was exact correspond ence between the source and the quaUty of the salvation thus brought. As the source ofit was NEW CREATION OF INDIVIDUAL MAN. 163 the eternal Son of God entering into the world as man, and becoming the new Head of the human race, so the quahty of it was the eternal Spirit of God planting in each man the gift of Sonship, that divine quality of grace, which should be the root of all the affections and actions of man, the guarantee and the earnest of his union with God. The decay ha4 reached man's heart, and the remedy reached it too : the decay had touched the powers of life, and the remedy poured Ufe in fnU stream on the seat of the disorder. Man himself had faUen to pieces, and man himself was restored by the hand of God, not as of old creating, but now suffering; not caUing out of nothing, but from a ruin drawing a masterpiece. This force there was in almighty power assuming weakness, and divine majesty clothed in humihty. LECTURE III. HEATHEN AND CHRISTIAN MAN COMPARED. Having dAvelt upon the principles which distin guished the great heathen world of nations before our Lord's coming from the principle which was the mother idea and the generating force of the society which He came to found, let us now pass from precept to example and from doctrine to life. Let us sUghtly review the former principles as they showed themselves in the conduct of men, and contrast them Avith the latter in the characters formed by it. When we look over the five hundred years which elapsed from Solon to Christ, we are at first sight confused by the multipUcity and contradic tion of religious and moral opinions and doctrines which arose in them. Of seeds so diverse it would seem that the harvest must be equaUy various. When, again, we look at the conduct and actions of men, how great in one respect is the divergence ! Gather up, as far as human scrutiny can, and ponder on an indiAddual human Hfe as it lies be fore you in history, and then what a distance, for instance, between a Socrates and an Alcibiades, a JuHus Csesar and a Cato of Utica ! Some would HEATHEN AND CHRISTIAN MAN COMPARED. 165 seem to follow with more or less fidehty a moral rule before them and a moral law within them, re sisting their passions with more or less success. Others with equal knowledge seem to discard obe dience to any moral rule or law, and to give them selves up to the pursuit of whatever appears to them valuable or desirable without stint or limit. There is obviously room here for an unerring judgment to pronounce sentence of very different degrees. But if we look beneath the surface of these rival philosophies and various systems of thought, and if we further endeavour to range these various Hves under certain points common to them aU, we shall find, I think, that of the whole mass of the Greek and Latin races during the five hundred years mentioned above, certain things are true in common, which are of no sUght importance or in considerable bearing on the lives and actions of men. I will put them under six heads. First, neither men in their conduct nor authors in their writings recognise one God, the Creator and Rewarder of men. And by this I do not mean that many philosophers did not seek to re duce the vulgar idolatry of the day to the n'otion of one God; but that, even if they did so, thefr god was a physical, not a personal God; not the Creator of men, but at the utmost the former of them out of pre-existent matter, coequal and coeval vrith the divine being or essence infused 166 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. through it; and further, not thefr Rewarder, but rather something which precluded the very notion of retribution, because it did away vrith a distinct existence, namely, the World-soul, into which after death their separate lives were sooner or later ab sorbed. Secondly, none of them dfrect their actions in view to a future Hfe. By which, again, I do not mean that the vdsion of a future life did not hover before the minds of many, and the possibUity even of reward and punishment after death, but that these truths were no longer grasped vrith a hearty faith, nor asserted vrith unhesitating confidence. They were theories, which Plato might propound or Zeno deny, and Cato study the night before his suicide ; but from a Hving behef they had become Ausions out of the ivory gate, which man, walking in the broad and palpable Ught of day, disregarded. PracticaUy the thoughts and desfres of men were limited to this present life and its objects. Thfrdly, the best and most virtuous, those who were looked upon as models in their day, proposed to themselves no higher standard than the vdrtues of prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance, within the sphere of the actual society in which they Hved, that is, as Umited to the course of this world. Fourthly, they looked to no higher good than the good of the poHtical Hfe, as the end of these Adrtues. The human commonwealth's security and HEATHEN AND CHRISTIAN MAN COMPARED. 167 weU-being, progress in physical strength and wealth, in order, peace, and the enjoyments of Hfe, was the object to be obtained. Those were the least selfish and the most virtuous who kept this end in view, rather than any private advance ment of their own. Fifthly, in practising these Adrtues, and in at taining this end, as their starting-point was human reason, the inteUectual principle in man, so they looked to no other force to sustain them. They had lost the notion of any diAdne assistance given and infused into man in addition to his natural powers. And in saying this I am mindful of the Stoical notion of the demon or genius of each man. But this was a part of himself, the diviner part, by which he shared, as it were, a spark of that great fire which animated the universe. Sixthly, the notion of sin, that is of disobe dience to a law and a lawgiver superior to man and to the whole constitution of human society, but impressed upon man's inmost nature, eternal and unchangeable, was grievously impaired and almost extinct Arithin them. There was substi tuted generaUy for it the notion of crime, that is, infringement of positive law enacted by man. These then are six heads of that general re semblance which, in spite of thefr indiridual dif ferences, the great men of Greek and Roman antiquity bore to each other. These constitute a certain level, out of which they do not rise, and 168 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. they make the choice of a representative man, in whom to consider that great world of human thought and action, of less importance than at first sight it might seem. The character which perhaps first of aU others presents itself for selection is that of Socrates. His name as a moral teacher, and the lustre of a death unequaUed for sublimity in the whole range of heathen history, point him out at once. Yet are there great difficulties in his case. Not only is his period too remote for a reAuew which closes four hundred years after his death, but the real Socrates is stUl a problem of history. We have him as depicted by two of his chief disciples, and it is hard to say in their portrait how much is artistic effect and how much the real man, I vrill not dwell upon the fact that popular reports of immorality rested on his fair fame from his OAvn time downwards. Put it, if you like, that these were slanders so often tracking the footsteps of the great and good. But the plain old soldier, who is the less imaginative, and perhaps therefore more trustworthy, delineator of his character, does teU us things of him which make it hard to beUeve that he had any sense of moral purity at aU. Those who study the position assigned to him by Xenophon in the visit which he volunteered to the hetaara Theodota, and that which he occupies ua the same writer's Banquet, can only, I think, come to this conclusion. There are expressions abun- HEATHEN AND CHRISTIAN MAN COMPARED. 169 dantly scattered through the Dialogues of Plato which tend to the same point. It is for all these reasons therefore, of time, of uncertainty as to the real man and what he taught, and of the dubious moral Hght in which he stands in the Avork« of his own disciples, that I pass him ov^er. Now, passing to the generation immediately preceding our Lord, Ave find a school at Rome which laid especial claim to the possession of a vfrtue equal to all the emergencies of life. And in that very school we find a noble Roman, in heritor of a great name, who may be considered the most faithful representative of old Roman poli tical traditions, as well as of the higher morality which the corruption of Universal empire had so grievously impafred : a senator who in evil times was a worthy specimen of what the Senate had been when that body was the greatest tribunal of justice in the world, the most devoted to the good of the state which it governed. Cato of Utica's life, as it lies for us sketched in Plutarch, may be considered the model of a Hfe grounded on the dictates of natural reason. Of dauntless cour age, and of no mean capacity in the field, in his civil life he is inflexibly incorrupt. A devoted brother, kind and considerate towards all with whom he is brought into relation, that is, being citizens and equals; for of his conduct to slaves, the blow given to one on the night of his death, so severe that it caused an inflammation of his 170 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. hand, impafring the force vrith which he dealt his own death-stroke, does not give a pleasant impres sion. In the whole course of his Hfe he has before him the good of his country as a constraining mo tive. Once he seems to rise above even this, where he censures Csesar's attack upon the Germans on grounds of universal justice, telUng the Senate that they ought to deliver Csesar into the hands of those who had been thus unjustly assaulted, that they might expiate the offence, and not bring a curse upon the city.* There are but two blots in aU this life recorded. The one, that this ge nerally high-minded senator, whUe he prosecuted Muraana for obtaining the consulship by corrupt means, let off the other candidate SUanus, who was equally ,guilty, but was his brother-in-law ; the other that he made use of the unHmited right of divorce possessed by the Romans of his time to repudiate his Arife Marcia, in order to gratify his friend Hortensius, who had faUen in love Arith her, though after his death, when she Avas a rich Aridow, he took her back again. With these exceptions, perhaps, it may be said that whatever Roman virtue could do, Cato of Utica, up to the time of his death, had done. Why, then, not take him for a representation of heathen man ? In this I am influenced by two reasons: first, that his Avritings having perished, we have no means of fuUy judg ing his principles from his own mouth; secondly, * Plutarch's Life of Cato of Utica. See also Merivale, i, 453. HEATHEN AND CHRISTIAN MAN COMPARED, 171 that the mode of his death undoes much of his life's grandeur, and sets him lower than many others apparently greatly inferior to him in thefr personal character and in the conduct of thefr do^ mestic and civil life. For consider what his suicide meant. Agonized at the issue of the civU war, he had exclaimed, " How dark and uncertain is the vriU of heaven! Pompey when he did no thing vrisely or honestly was always successful, and now that he would preserve his country and de fend her Hberty he is altogether unfortunate."* But the mode of death which he selected was an act in accordance indeed with the Stoical doctrine carried out by Zeno and Cleanthes, approved after wards by Epictetus and Marcus AureHus, of " the open door," but in itself the definitive rejection of a behef in a proAddence over the affafrs of men. It was a practical admission that man had no inward freedom of the wiU which tyranny could not reach ; a practical assertion, moreover, that so far from being a creature placed by God in a certain post which he was not to desert — an image repeatedly used by the better heathen— he was his own mas ter, an independent being, who had nothing to Hve for if he were deprived of poHtical Hberty, Cicero, so often timid in action, so often a moral coward, redeemed ha his death much that was wanting in his Hfe, and when he stretched his neck out of his Utter to meet vrithout swerving the blow of * Plutarch's Cato of Utica, 172 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. Antony's assassin, is far more human, more reli gious, and more noble than Cato, who ponders during the night over the immortahty of the soul, and kUls himself in the morning because he can not stoop to meet the wrath or the clemency of Ccesar, his equal once, now the lord of his once- free country, and the disposer of his oavu lot. This same Stoical school presents us at a later period two persons, one remarkable as a master of thought, one as uniting thought vrith action in a sphere the most exalted and most difficult, the government of the Roman empire at the period of its greatest extension, — Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius; the former a phUosopher of no mean name, whose conduct seems to have been consis tent with his theory ; the latter a ruler who, Arith his adopted father and predecessor, stands at the very head of aU heathen sovereigns. Why not take one of these as a specimen of what heathenism could do? I reply, as to Epictetus, that he left nothing in Avriting; and we only know him by the remains gathered up by disciples, which are, however, sufficient to convey accurately his philo sophical system, whUe at the same time. his life is very obscure, the particulars of it Uttle known and the chief events uncertain. But many might think Marcus Aurelius, as combining both thought and action, as ruling for nearly twenty years Arith ab solute power, yet Arith general justice, clemency, fortitude, and vigour, the greatest of empfres, to HEATHEN AND CHRISTIAN MAN COMPARED. 173 be the very person in whom heathen virtue culmi nated. Nevertheless, I think an examination of those private thoughts called his Meditations — perhaps the most interesting book which heathen Hterature has left to us, because it discloses the secret recesses of a heathen soul — would show that such a choice would not be the best that could be made. In truth, there are the same objections at the bottom to Marcus Aurelius and to Epictetus. Their religious system is a complete materialism. It recognises only two principles. Matter, and an active Force eternally indwelling in matter and forming it. It knows of no incorporeal things, save as our OAvn abstractions. God is the unity of a Force embracing the whole universe, penetrating all things, assuming all forms, and as such, a sub tle Fluid, Ffre, ^ther, or Spirit, under which the Stoics understood a fifth element, to which the air served as a material basis. In this etherial fiery force all modes of existence of the World-body ani mated by it are contained beforehand, and develop themselves regularly out of it : it Hves and moves itself hi every thing, is the common source of aU Hfe and all desire. Now as in this system God and necessity are one, every thing ethical becomes phy sical. The soul of man is of Hke substance, and so is a breath or fire Hke the World-soul, of which it is a portion ; but it manifests itself in man at the same time as the Force from which Knowledge and Ac tion proceed, as InteUigence, WUl, and Self-consci- 174 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. ousness. Thus it is of nearer kin to the Divdne Being, but at the same time a corporeal being, and so stands in reciprocal action Arith the human body. It is Heat-matter, communicating Life and move ment, and tied to the blood. It is transitory, though it outlasts the body, perhaps so long as to the con flagration of the world. Accordingly it has in the naost favourable circumstances the duration of the world-period; but Arith the running out of this period it must return into the universal aether or Godhead, Its individual existence and consciousness end,* In short, Marcus AureHus and Epictetus know nothing not only of a future world and of a moral or a personal God, but of morality itself as a work of free-wUl, They preach the nothingness of every human action and affection, and under cfrcumstan ces advocate suicide, as Zeno, Cleanthes, and Cato, their fellow Stoics practised it. I think them there fore, on the whole, inferior to another whom I shaU choose not because his personal character is unim peachable, not because he has not many defects and weaknesses, not because he is not even want ing in the religious mhid. AU this is true, and yet he is both nearer to the mass of men among whom he Hved, and higher in his views upon morality and rehgion than those I have mentioned. Further, out of all the great men of anticpity I * Drawn from the analysis of Stoical docti-ine in DoUinger's Seiden- thum und Judentlium, pp. 153, 159, 161. This will be found fully borne out by the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, and the Enchiridion and Dis courses of Epictetus, HEATHEN AND CHRISTIAN MAN COMPARED, 175 choose Cicero partly because among the Romans it would be hard to find either a higher inteUigence or a kindher disposition ; but more stiU on account of the time at which he Hved. His life terminated about a generation before our Lord's advent; and when driven from his occupation as a Roman noble and statesman by the break-up of the RepubUc, he spent his last years in reviewing the systems of Greek phUosophy, and in presenting abstracts of them to his countrymen. He had before him and was famihar vrith all the riches of the Greek mind from Plato doAvn to his oavu time, so large a part of which has perished to us. Thus, though he has no pretensions to be a phUosopher, or to have a phUosophic system of his own — though no student of Aristotle can be satisfied with his vague eclecti cism, or study it as a science — ^yet his sketches of moral and poHtical phUosophy and of theology, if it can be so termed, possess this special and, so far as I know, unique interest, that they are copies made in the very last period of ancient heathenism by a great Roman mind of what he considered most noticeable on the theory of Hfe, morals, and human society, out of a vast number of Grecian originals which are othervrise lost. In the majesty of his own matchless style, and the undefinable rhythm of those perfect numbers which show us that prose as weU as poetry possesses a hidden harmony of its own — ^for Cicero's fehcity of diction and rhythm is as unattainable as Shakspere's, and 176 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. more equable — ^he has transcribed for us the best, according to his judgment, which twelve genera tions of thinkers among the countrymen of Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, Carneades, and Pansetius, had to say upon man, society, govemment, and God. Of this great course of human thought during four hundred years we have but fragments : Cicero had not only the complete web of outward teaching, but the inner soul of Uving tradition. I remember being struck in a great French cathedral Arith the idea of a medigeval artist, who has placed in the windows the Evangelists on the shoiUders ofthe four great Prophets. Noav that expresses Cicero's position Arith regard to the great Ughts of heathen ism who went before him, and why I select him as a representative of the heathen mind. There is no man whose writings are more thoroughly penetrated vrith his character: we vrill therefore consider his Ufe and his doctrines together. The son of a citizen of Arpinum, he began his public life at Rome just as the domination of SyUa portended the ruin which was to happen to the great commonwealth. In the interval of compa rative tranquUHty which ensued after SyUa's re- estabUshment of it, he, a new man, by the force of his great poAvers as an orator and lawyer, worked his way, between the twenty-seventh and the forty- fourth year of his life, through the great offices of state up to the croAvn of all, the consulship, which HEATHEN AND CHRISTIAN MAN COMPARED. 177 he attained in the last-mentioned year, the first in which he was legally capable of it — an honour so great and rare that a MeteUus, an ^EmUius, or a Claudius might have been proud of it; while in the maker of his oavu fortunes it was marvellous. Now the new man, who became at forty-three Consul of Rome at the very height of her great ness, what does he set forth as the grand principle of human action? What else but glory; that is, the approval of his fellow-men; "the consentient praise of the good; the uncorrupt expression of those who judge rightly upon excellent Adrtue; that which is Adrtue's echo, and, as being generally an attendant upon upright actions, is not to be re^ jected by good men."* For indeed there was an object which fiUed and dUated his mhad; there was a work which was the work of his Ufe. The great fabric of the Roman commonwealth — that struc ture of ages, the Ausible home and embodiment of power, law, and dignity, on this his mind's eye loved to rest ; and to hold his own in this, to be beloved and respected as a chief and influential citizen of it, this was the work of his life. In the year succeeding Caesar's death, at the ripe age of sixty-three, he compUed a treatise on social duties, * Tuso. Disp. ii. 32. Compare Aristotle's character of the ncyaKi- ^u^os, Ethic. Nic. iv. 3, 15. ttjs dpeTrjs yap SidKoy ti ti/i);, Kal a-iroveii^Tai toIs aycSots : and just before, 9. ei Se 5); fieyixav laurby Sjioi S|ios &v, itaX lidKtffTU Tav iieylaraiv, irepl ev fuiXurra Sk rfr). ij 5' o|io \4ycTai irphs rh iKrhs ayaSd. /leyurToy Se tovt' hv Bei-riiiev t to'ls 8eo7s awovijioiiev, Kal ov fukXiaT' i^Uvrai ol ev a^idjxaTt, Kal rh M tois KaW/oTois S,e\ov- tolovtov Se ^ Ti/i^' aeyiffrov yap S^ tovto tuv iKrhs ayadav. N 178 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. which is highly instructive, as giving us a vdew of the moral and hateUectual world in which he Uved. In this treatise man comes before us as endued vrith reason and speech, and thereby broadly dis tinguished from all classes of brute animals, which, like the sun, moon, and stars, and the revolution of the heavens, are made for his service. Thus he is capable of prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude, virtues of the greatest importance for the maintenance of human society, which is the highest end contemplated by the writer. This hu man society, indeed, in one place he states to have been "constituted by the immortal gods ;"* and that they who destroy it, destroy 'vrith it beneficence, Hberahty, goodness, and justice; and are therefore to be deemed impious towards the gods : but this great fact remains barren in his hands. For the idea of God is singularly absent from the whole treatise : where his division of subjects would seem naturaUy to introduce it, it is not found. For in stance : " Since, as Plato admirably wrote, we are born not for ourselves alone, and our country claims a part of us, a part our friends ; and, as the Stoics say, all the earth's productions are created for the use of men; whUe men are generated for men's sake, to have a capacity of helping each other : in this we ouo;ht to foUow nature for our guide, to throw into a common store what may be useful for all, by the interchange of kind offices, by giving * De Ofaciis, iii. 6. HEATHEN AND CHRISTIAN MAN COMPARED. 179 and receiving, and so to make the arts of Ufe, our labour, and our faculties, the bonds of man's society vrith man."* Observe here the absence of man's re lation to God. The writer does not seem to be aware that he is a creature, at the moment that he uses the very word 'creation ' ofthe earth's products. Again, " the society and union of men vriU be best pre served, if kindness be shown to each person in pro portion to the nearness of his coimection vrith us. But we must seek higher the source of the natural principles of human community and society. For the first is that which is discerned in the society of the whole human race. Now of this the bond is reason and speech, which, by teaching, learning, communicating, discussing, and judging, draws men together, and joins them in a certain natural society. Nor are we in any thing further removed from the nature of brutes than in this. Of them we often say that they have courage, as horses and Uous; never that theyhave justice, equity, or good-,. ness, for they are devoid of reason and speech."f He then proceeds to mark the various degrees of relationship: after the degree of humanity itself, that of tribe, nation, language ; closer stUl, that of the same city; and yet closer, the ties of blood. From marriage springs the family, which is the principle of the city, and the seed-plot of a com monwealth. No union surpasses that of good men in friendship. "But," he adds, "when you have » De Oflaous, i. 7. f Id. i. 16. 180 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. carefully surveyed aU, no society is more effective or more affectionate than that which every one of us has with the commonwealth. Dear are our pa rents, dear our chUdren, our relations, our friends ; but our single country embraces all the tenderness we have for all. Where is the good man who would hesitate to die for it, ifhe could serve it?"* Thus human society and our country are viewed as ultimate facts, beyond which the writer does not go. That they themselves exist for any further end does not occur to him. That they are made up of persons who have a good of thefr own dis tinct from the good of the local or general society in which they are' placed, is a tru.th which he does not come upon: not one which he discusses and rejects, but which Hes out of his field of vision. In the whole of this first book, treating specially ¦on the cardinal virtues, the only glimpse which I can find of any thing Hke personal religion, of any thing discerned in the individual man to be supe rior to society itself, is in one sentence of the last section. " There are some things so foul, and partly so criminal, that the vrise man would not do them even to preserve his country, "f And a little further on he says, " In the community itself there are degrees of social duties, by which we may understand their order of precedency: first come those to the immortal gods ; secondly, those to our country; thirdly, those to our parents; and * De OfBoiis, 1. 17. f Id. i, 45, HEATHEN AND CHRISTIAN MAN COMPARED. 181 SO the rest," This is the only mention of the gods in the book. Of God, as one ruUng, ordering, pre serving power, there is none. Of man's responsi bUity to such a being not a vestige. For though these duties to the immortal gods are mentioned as the first in order, there is not a word said of what they consist in. This is the only reference to any beings above man in the book; and with these two words it stops. But there is a passage in the second book vvhich, more than any other I have met vrith, expresses the infinite distance of Cicero's mind from any true conception ofthe God head, It is the following : "Of those things which concern the maintenance of human life, part are inanimate, as gold, silver, the productions of the earth, and the like; part are animals, which have their impulses and appetites. Of these, some are vrithout reason ; some make use of it. Those with out reason are horses, oxen, other cattle, bees, by whose work any effect is produced for man's use and life. Of those who have the use of reason, two kinds are given; one of gods, the other of men. Piety and sanctity Arill propitiate the gods; but next, and after the gods, men can be most useful to men. There is the Uke division of things hurt ful and profitable ; but as they do not believe the gods to hurt, excepting these, they consider that men are of the greatest advantage or detriment to each other,"* From this expression, that there are * De Officiis, ii, 3, 182 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM, two classes of beings who have the use of reason, gods and men, it would seem that, in Cicero's thought, the former were a sort of men endued vrith immortal life and superior strength.* With regard at least to those for whom his stereotyped phrase is " the immortal gods," he would seem to be at infinite distance from any notion of attributing to them creative poAver, Perhaps he may have a no bler view of what in Stoical language he so often calls "nature," or the mind ofthe universe: but then this power would appear to be material, and most certainly impersonal. And the phrase "using reason," appHed to gods and men alike, would seem to convey the notion that they both, in different degrees, participated in a common faculty ; shared, that is, were portions of this so-caUed mind of the universe. Now we should certainly expect to find in a treatise of moral phUosophy the creature's obhga tion to the Creator; and, in fact, St, Ambrose, writing on the same subject, notes this absence of a reference to a supreme Ruler and a future life ; and points out how the Holy Scripture, on the contrary, placed eternal hfe in two things, the knowledge of the Godhead, and the fruit of good livdng ; and refers to two psalms of Davidf as hav- * From Cicero's modo of quoting, it is often difficult to know whe ther what he says is his opinion, or that of others ; here, I imagine, his o-wn opinion agrees with that of the "summa auctoritate philosophi" whom he is citing. t Psalms xciii. 12, and cxi. 1, 3, 5, 6. HEATHEN AND CHRISTIAN MAN COMPARED. 183 ing plainly insisted on this long before the times of the heathen phUosophers.* However, as Cicero has written a treatise professedly on the Nature of the Gods, which too belongs to the same year of his Ufe, let us see what Hght this throws upon his beUef. And the first thing I should here remark is the total absence of any thing like reverence in the position which he takes himself in his treatment of such a subject. He assumes the character of an Academic of the later school, vrith whom there is no such thing as certainty, but only probabUity. And the way in which he Ulustrates this is to put in the mouth of YeUeius, as an Epicurean, in the first book, a scornful statement of aU the ridiculous di versities of behef which existed as to the nature of the gods. This serves as a prelude to introduce the atheism ofthe speaker, whose own tenets are answered by Cotta. In the next book Balbus is used as the expositor of Stoic doctrine. And here, indeed, there is a long, eloquent, and seemingly serious statement of the argument from design, as indicating the world to have been arranged by one ordering mind. "For who would caU him a man who, after beholding the exact certitude of the heavenly motions, and the fixed order of the stars, and the connexion and adaptation of aU these things vrith each other, should deny there to be any reason in these, and assert those things to hap- * S, Ambrose, De Officiis Ministronim, ii. 2. A friend has pointed out to me that this treatise is the Christian counterpart to that of Cicero. 184 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. pen by chance, when no vrisdom of ours is equal to the task of measuring the Arisdom by which they are governed?"* The demonstration is carried out through the physical world, and the bodUy struc ture of man himself, and would seem to be com plete. But in the third book Cotta is put up to refute this doctrine ofthe Stoics, as he had done that of the Epicureans. All this argument of the one ordering mind fails entirely to convince him. Nevertheless he is a priest, and highly conserva tive ; and before he confutes Balbus he begins by assuring him: "I always vrill defend, and always have defended the sacred rites and ceremonies deli vered down to us concerning the immortal gods from our ancestors : nor will the speech of any one, learned or unlearned, move me from my ancestral opinion respecting the worship of the immortal gods. As to religion I foUow Coruncanius, Scipio, and Scaevola, pontifices maximi, not Zeno, or Cle anthes, or Chrysippus."f We are reminded here of the answer of our own Scipio Africanus to a fervent spirit who invited him to join in prayer for the unity of all professing Christians. " I pre sume," he said, "you do not expect me, as her Majesty's adviser, to state to her that I do not con sider the religion established by law to be true." Now this was just the case with the Romans whom Cicero puts on the stage, and with himself Cicero the statesman would maintain the Roman rehgion * De Kat. Deor. ii. 38. f Id. iii, 2. HEATHEN AND CHRISTIAN MAN COMPARED. 185 " concerning the immortal gods" on the basis of tradition, for the sake of state policy: Cicero the phUosopher thinks it more probable that there is a ruling mind in the moiverse than that there is not, though not a word is hinted as to that mind being personal: but Cicero the man remains untouched in all this. He is perfectly calm and impassive, bal ancing opposite opinions as to there being gods or not, Arith a preference for their existence; but to fall on his knees as a creature, and adore the God who made heaven and earth, whose life Arithin sup ports him, whose gift is the body which he has elaborately described, and the mind Avhich is his pride and delight : this is a thought which he never comes near. His writings are full of experience of social life, knowledge of the political world, appre ciation of men and things, fuU of vrit, liveliness, and observation. He had even in a sort of rhetori cal way of his own run over a large part of the circle of human knowledge, and studied a great variety of phUosophical systems, which compre hended the whole universe. But there are two ideas which simply never occurred to him : the idea of God as the Creator, Preserver, and Rewarder of men ; and the idea of the soul of man as havdng a personal, enduring, responsible existence. Such is the beUef ofthe greatest orator and ge nius of Rome, the head ofthe conservative party, the Latinizer of HeUenic phUosophy; of whom there is every reason to think that his disposition was more 186 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. kindly and his life more moral than the disposition and the life of by far the greater number, at least of eminent pubhc men, among his contemporaries. But there are three critical points in his life at Avhich we must glance in order to observe the effect which his behef had upon his conduct. The first is his exUe. HaAdng by his consul ship saved Rome, and taken the first rank in the Senate, he was felt to be an obstacle in the way of the man who was bent on ruling aU. As Cicero was not prepared to become the tool of Csesar, Clodius was set upon him. Betrayed by Pompey and by all his friends, he is driven from the city which he had saved. ForthArith that vision which made the sunshine of his life, "the consentient praise of the good, the uncorrupt expression of those who judge rightly upon exceUent Adrtue, that which is vfrtue's echo," becomes overclouded. Driven back into himself, away from Rome, the con tests and the triumphs ofthe forum and the senate- house, and reduced to the testimony of his own con science, this man proclaimed of late the father of his country coUapses utterly. He whines and begs for his soul's daUy food a Httle human praise : no smUe of earth or sea in his enforced wandering, no caress of wife or chUd, can win from him an answer ing glance : untU having been sufficiently humbled and broken for the purpose of those wto had ban ished him, he is aUowed to return, and to fancy himself again the first man in Rome. HEATHEN AND, CHRISTIAN MAN COMPARED. 187 Twelve eventful years succeed, in which Cicero is doomed to vritness the growth of Cesar's inordi nate power : the flight, defeat, and death of Pompey, the final destruction of the Senate's authority. He has learnt to bend his neck to the conqueror, to abuse his dominion in private as the ruin of aU honour and dignity, and extol him as the most clement of men in pubhc, when the severest of domestic afflictions overtakes him — he loses his favourite daughter TulUa. Here was a trial re qufring aU the consolation which religion and piety could give. He threw himself upon books; his friends comforted him to their utmost. We have extant a letter from Servius Sulpicius, glowing vrith poetry and eloquence, but betraying the utter inan ity of the friend's power to console, the utter hope lessness ofthe father's grief. "If there be any sense even in those under the earth, such was her love, such her affection to aU her friends, that she would not desire you to mourn."* If there be any sense even ha those under the earth, — this was the mea sure of the comfort which Sulpicius could give and Cicero receive. Here is the practical value of those Platonic disquisitions on the immortality of the soul. Cicero is uncertain whether his daughter has any sense after death, and finally re solves to buUd a temple wherein he may worship her: in which he vvould only have exercised a Uberty such as any heathen then possessed, and * Cio. ad Fam. iv, 5. 188 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. such as many used; "and thee," he cries, "0 best and most learned of women, admitted into the as sembly of the gods with their own consent, I wUl consecrate to the regard of aU mortals."* Once more. A few months pass: Julius, the noblest of tyrants, falls by the hands of conspfra- tors, who dare not trust Cicero with thefr secret, but whose deed he applauds to the echo. Cicero looks round him, and beholds,- in spite of Caesar's disappearance, his temple of glory in ruins: his great model commonwealth, whose growth through ages, whose ancestral wisdom and long-descended piety he set forth with his utmost power, is gone for ever, frretrievably ruined by internal corrup tion. Antony the reveller seizes hold of it on one side, and the boy OctaAuus draped in Caesar's cloak on the other ; and before him looms a gigan tic despotism steeped in blood. This is the thfrd and crowning trial of his life. And what does it find in him to meet this brunt of fortune? This is the occasion when the inward man comes ont; when Liberty, driven from her outward court of public life, retires and enshrines herself ua the sanctuary of the conscience. Myriads of Chris tians have carried out all the sanctities of moral life, and exhibited a courage proof on the one hand against every form of death, and on the * Quoted by Lactantius from " the Consolation." See Seid, und Jud. p. 607, where other instances are given ; especially of a Spartan lady named Epicteta, who deified herself beforehand, with her defunct hus band and her children. HEATHEN AND CHRISTIAN MAN COMPARED. 189 other against every seduction of worldliness, when they could not participate in political power, and when that power was wielded despotically either by friendly or unfriendly hands: but Cicero can only cry, " When the Senate has been extin guished, and the tribunals swept away, what is there for us to do worthy of ourselves in the senate-house or the forum?"* So he retired to his country-houses, and sketched the camps of contending Stoics and Epicureans from his small academical watch-box, which he could shift as oc casion served to all points of the compass. Yet this man did not want physical courage: once more he returned to Rome; he tried to breathe Ufe and unity into those whose selfishness was too great for freedom; and when this failed, and his name was the first on the Hst of the proscribed, he looked his murderer in the face, and died vrith out swervdng. What he needed was, belief in a personal God, in whom he was to Uve, and for whom he was to die, and a wUl which would have rested secure upon that immutable truth. Cicero Hved in the agony of the Roman re public: let us pass on four hundred and fifty years, untU we come to one who Uved in the agony of the Roman empire. The Senate's suc cessor was the stern miUtary monarchy of the Csesars; the Caesars' successors were the barba rians of the north. If the change from the first * De OfBoiis, ii. 1. 190 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. to the second was a great crisis in the world's af fafrs, assuredly the change from the second to the third was a greater still. The former change avUI be for ever one of the most instructive points in ancient history; from the latter, aU Europe, and we ourselves as a portion of it, are sprung. We have seen how a great heathen Roman met the former change : what resources he found in so ciety, in letters, in his ovm heart : how far, when a bUght passed over his outward world, he was able to find a new world vrithin. Now let us consider a great Christian Roman at the time of the latter change : let us see what were his hopes and fears ; what vdew he took of society and man, of the world and government; above aU what, was his own in ward life, the core and marrow of the man. Augustine was bom in the year 354 at Tha- gaste, a town of Africa, in which his father was a burgess of very moderate fortune. He completes his education at Carthage, and becomes a teacher of rhetoric, that is, one who made Uterature his profession, first at Thagaste, from his twenty-first to his twenty-fourth year ; next at Carthage, from his twenty-fourth to his twenty -ninth year ; thirdly at Rome for a short time, whence, in his thfrtieth year, he moves to MUan, where for two years he holds a public professorship, and is, as he says him self, a " seller of words." A catechumen from his birth, through his mother's piety, and brought up in the Catholic faith, he fell at mneteen into the HEATHEN AND CHRISTIAN MAN COMPARED. 191 Manichean heresy, and remained in it during nine years. He has given us a picture of himself drawn to the Ufe during these two years at MUan, Hsten ing vrith pleasure to St. Ambrose, first attracted by his eloquence, and graduaUy won over to the truth which he set forth. With infinite labom' he disengages himself from one prejudice after another which the Manichean heresy had instilled into him against the Catholic faith. And now, in deed, he was no longer a Manichean, but he had fallen into Cicero's state of doubt, and could see truth and certainty nowhere: and he was bound as vrith an fron chain by the three concupiscences of the world. " I longed," he says, " after honours, wealth, and wedlock ; and Thou," addressing God, " didst mock me. I suffered under these desfres the bitterest difficulties, in which Thou wast the kinder by not permitting any thing to become sweet to me which was not Thyself. See my heart, 0 Lord, whose AviU it was that I should remember this and confess it to Thee. Now let my soul lay firm hold of Thee, the soul which Thou didst extricate from the tenacious grasp of death. How wretched it was! and Thou didst prick my wound in order that, deserting every thing, it might be converted to Thee, who art over aU, vrithout whom aU else is nothing; might be converted and be healed."* And his friends Alypius and Nebridius were Uving vrith him: he * St. Aug. Conf. vi. 6. 192 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. caUs hunself and them "three hungry mouths gasping out to each other their wants, and wait ing upon Thee to give them food in due season. And in all the bitterness which, through Thy mercy, foUowed our acts of worldliness, when we considered the end for which we were suffer ing this, dark phantoms met us, and we tumed away groaning and saying. How long shaU this last? And this we said very often, but did not desert the objects we were pursuing, because no thing distinct shone out before us which we could lay hold upon after relinquishing the other."* He was astonished at himself to think that for eleven years he had been in passionate pursuit of wisdom; and still for two years more he re mained struggling to be free from every fetter of the world, " yet bound," he says, " by the closest chain of desire for female love, and the servdtude of secular business."! For it must be added that, when only seventeen, he had attached himself, not in marriage, to a person with whom he had now lived thirteen years; that a marriage had been arranged for him, for which, however, on account of the bride's youth, it was requisite to wait two year-s. With a view to this he had discarded his mistress, who left him to return into Africa, and led evermore a single Ufe; whUe he, unable, as he says, to imitate her, took another in the interval before his intended marriage. Thus » Conf. vi, 18, t Id- viii. 15. HEATHEN AND CHRISTIAN MAN COMPARED. 193 torn asimder between the desire oftruth, certainty, and peace, on the one side, and the tyranny of worldly passions on the other, he was approaching the end of his thfrty-second year. A friend, by name Pontitianus, called upon him, and the conversation feU upon the Egyptian monks and the fathers of the desert. The subject was new to Augustine and Alypius : " We Ustened," he says, " in intense sUence. He told us, then, how one afternoon at Treves, when the emperor was taken up vrith the cfrcensian games, he and three others, his compan ions, went out to walk in gardens near the city walls ; and there, as they happened to walk in pairs, one went apart vrith him, and the other two wan dered by themselves ; and these in thefr wanderings lighted upon a certain cottage inhabited by servants of Thine, poor in spirit, of whom is the kingdom of heaven, and there they found a little book con taining the life of Antony. This one of them began to read, admire, and kindle at it; and as he read to meditate on taking up such a life, and giving over his secular service to serve Thee. And these two were of those whom they style agents for the pubUc affairs. Then suddenly filled vrith a holy love and a sober shame, in anger vrith himself he cast his eyes upon his friend, saying, ' TeU me, I pray thee, what seek we to attain by aU these labours of ours? What aim we at? What serve we for? Can our hopes in court rise higher than to be the emperor's favourites? And in this what is there 0 194 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. not fraU and fuU of perUs? And by how many perUs arrive we at a greater peril? And when arrive we thither? But a friend of God, if I vrish it, I become now at once.' So spake he; and in pain vrith the travaU of a new life, he tumed his eyes again upon the book and read on, and was changed inwardly, where Thou sawest, and his mind was stripped of the world, as soon appeared. For as he read, and rolled up and down the waves of his heart, he stormed at himself awhUe, then discerned, and determined on a better course ; and now being Thine said to his friend, ' Now have I broken loose from those our hopes, and am re solved to serve God; and this I enter upon, from this hour, in this place. If thou Hkest not to imi tate me, yet oppose me not.' The other answered, that he would cleave to him to partake so glorious a reward, so glorious a service. Thus both being now Thine were buUding the tower at the neces sary cost, the forsaking aU that they had and fob lovring Thee. Then Pontitianus and the other vrith him, that had walked in other parts of the garden, came in search of them to the same place ; and finding them, reminded them to retum, for the day was now far spent. But they, relating thefr resolution and purpose, and how that vriU was be gun and settled in them, begged their comrades, if they would not join, not to molest them. Then the others, though nothing altered from thefr former selves, did yet bewaU themselves, as he HEATHEN AND CHRISTIAN MAN COMPARED. 195 affihned, and piously congratulated them, recom- mendmg themselves to their prayers; and so, vrith hearts lingering on the earth, went away to the palace. But the former two, fixing their heart on heaven, remained in the cottage. And both had affianced brides, who, hearing of this, Hkevrise de dicated their vfrginity to God."* This was the bolt, shot seemingly at a ven ture by a chance hand, which reached Augu.stine's heart. When his acquaintance left, he went Arith Alypius into the garden ofthe house where they resided, and there foUowed that great conflict be tween the flesh and spirit which ended in his con version. The wonderful pages of Augustine him self describing this are both too long and too weU known for me to quote. At length he hears a voice, as of a boy or gfrl from a neighbouring house, chanting and oft repeating, " Take up and read, take up a,nd read." " Returning to the place where Alypius was sitting, for there had I laid the volume of the Apostle when I arose thence, I s:eized, opened, and in sUence read that section on which my eyes first feU : ' Not in revelling and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and emulation; but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not proAdsion for the flesh in its desfres.' No further would I read, nor needed I: for instantly* at the end of this sen tence, by a Hght as it were of serenity infused * st, Aug. Conf. viii, 15. 196 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. into my heart, aU the darkness of doubt vanished away." From this time forth Augustine triumphs over that triple bondage ofthe world which hitherto had triumphed over him. Receiving baptism the next year, he declines marriage; he rejects all hope of wealth or honour from his profession. Cicero in riper years returned from his exUe to seeming honour and consideration, in reality the humblfed slave of the world which had trampled on him, waiting for his daUy bread on its applause. Au gustine, in the bloom of manhood, goes forth from his conversion into what seems a humble retfre- ment and obscurity, but possessing inward Hberty, a soul collected back into itself from the distrac tion of confficting desfres, but above aU resthig imperturbably on the Immutable One. There is in these two, upon the common foundation of human nature, great gerdus, a passion for knowledge, an ardent love of truth, as a Uberal curiosity : but is it possible to conceive a completer revolution of the individual man than the one presents to the other? Who can express so weU as Augustine the change which had passed over him? "Too late have I loved Thee, 0 Beauty, so old and yet so new. Too late have I loved Thee. And behold, Thou wast within and I vrithout; and vrithout I sought Thee, and rushed ia my deformity on those fair forms which Thou hast created. Thou wast vrith me, and I was not vrith Thee. Thmgs held HEATHEN AND CHRISTIAN MAN COMPARED. 197 me far from Thee, which would not be at aU, if they were not ua Thee. Thou caUedst ; Thou ut- teredst Thy voice; Thou brokest through my deafness. Thy Hghtning flashed; Thy splendour shone ; my darkness was scattered. Thy scent came forth, I drew my breath, and I pant for Thee. I tasted, and I hunger, and I thfrst. Thy touch reached me, and I burnt after Thy peace."* This is the whole. Cicero and his world were vrithout; Augustine and his world Arithin. Cicero is the model of hmumerable heathens; Augustine the type of myriads among Christians of both sexes, and of every age and condition of life. This is the change which had passed upon man in those four hundred and fifty years. Take another scene in his Ufe. He is return ing, a year after his conversion, to Africa with that mother, of whose prayers and tears, continued through long seemingly unhopeful years, he was the chUd, rather than of her natural throes. They are at Ostia about to embark, and gazing doAvn from a window over the garden of the house where they rested. "We were discoursing then together alone very sweetly, and, forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forth unto those things which are before, we were inquiring be tween ourselves, in the presence of the Truth which Thou art, of what sort the eternal Hfe of the saints was to be, which eye hath not seen, nor » Conf. X. 38. 198 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. ear heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of man. But yet we gasped vrith the mouth of our heart after those heavenly streams of Thy fountain, the fountain of life, which is vrith Thee ; that be ing bedewed thence, according to our capacity, we might in some sort meditate upon so high a mys tery. We were saying then: If to any the tu mult of the flesh were hufehed, hushed the images of earth and waters and afr, hushed also the poles of heaven, yea, the very soul be hushed to herself, and by not thinking on self surmount self, hushed aU dreams and imaginary revelations, every tongue and every sign, and whatsoever exists only in tran sition, since, if any could hear, aU these say. We made not ourselves, but He made us who abideth for ever, — If then, having uttered this, they too should be hushed, havdng roused only our ears to Him who made them, and He alone speak, not by them but by Himself, that we may hear His Word not through any tongue of flesh nor angel's voice, nor sound of thunder, nor in the dark riddle of a simihtude, but might hear Him whom in these things we love, might hear His very self Arithout these (as we two now strained ourselves, and in svrift thought touched on that eternal Wisdom which abideth over aU); could this be continued on, and other visions of kind far unlike be vrith- drawn, and this one ravish and absorb and wrap up its beholder amid these inward joys, so that Hfe might be for ever Hke that one moment of under- HEATHEN AND CHRISTIAN MAN COMPARED. 199 standing which now we sighed after ; were not this, Jlnter into the joy of thy Lord" ?* A few days after this conversation St. Monica sickens of a fever and dies : she dies fuU of hope, vrith one request : " Lay this body anywhere : let not the care for that any way disquiet you: this only I request, that you would remember me at the Lord's altar, wherever you be." And when she was asked whether she was not afraid to leave her body so far from her own city, she repHed, " Nothing is far to God : nor is it to be feared lest, at the end of the world, He should not recognise^ whence He has to raise me up." You wiU not forget how bent Cicero was on buUding a temple to his daughter TuUia after her death, and how Sul picius tried to soothe him by remarking that if there be any sense even in the dead, his daughter would not vrish him to grieve over her. Augusthae too had tears for the dead, and has recorded his prayers that her sins might be forgiven : " And I beUeve," he says (he was writing thirteen years after her death), " Thou hast already done what I ask; but accept, 0 Lord, the freewiU offerings of my mouth. For she, the day of her dissolution now at hand, took no thought to have her body sumptuously wound up, nor desfred she a choice monument, or to be buried in her own land. These things she enjoined us not; but desfred only to have her name commemorated at Thy altar, which * Conf, ix. 23, 25. 200 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. she had served vrithout intermission of one day, whence she knew that holy Yictim to be dispensed by which the handwriting that was against us is blotted out. May she rest then in peace, vrith the husband before and after whom she had never any, whom she obeyed, vrith patience bringing forth fruit unto Thee, that she might vrin him also unto Thee. And inspfre, 0 Lord my God, inspire Thy servants my brethren, thy sons my masters, whom vrith voice and heart and pen I serve, that so many as shall read these .Confessions may at Thy altar remember Monica thy handmaid, vrith Patri cius her sometime husband, by whose bodies Thou broughtest me into this life, how I know not. May they vrith devout affection remember my parents in this transitory light, my brethren under Thee our Father in our CathoHc mother, and my feUow- citizens in that eternal Jerusalem which Thy pU- grim people sigheth after from thefr exodus unto their return. That so my mother's last request of me, through my Confessions more than through my prayers, be, through the prayers of many, more abundantly fulfilled to her."* The conversion of Augustine was followed by forty -four years of almost unexampled mental ac tivity. His life was based henceforth on the denial- of. those three concupiscences under the dominion of which he had groaned for fifteen years. He found it no longer impossible to carry out, together * Conf, ix, 36, 37. HEATHEN AND CHRISTIAN MAN COMPARED. 201 vrith friends minded like himself, a course of life made up of study, retfrement, and meditation, which he had tried in vain with the same friends before. For the presence of women in their company then broke up this design.* With these friends, having given up his only property, a few paternal fields, he led a sort of ccenobitic life. In a short time he was made a priest, and a few years later bishop. By far the greatest number of his works were produced during this episcopate, which lasted five-and-thfrty years, whUe he became more and more eminent for a sanctity which increased as his genius unfolded itself We have many thou sand pages on a vast variety of subjects from his hand, of which I vriU only say that it is perhaps not possible to find one in which the writer does not show that he has steadUy before him two objects — his own soul, and the immutable truth on which that soul rests and lives, the personal being of God. Exactly the two ideas which never occurred to Cicero make up Augustine's conscious ness. And here I camiot but admit the advantage which Augustine possessed over Cicero in natural genius as distinct from the gifts of divine grace. The contrast which he himself marks between Cicero and Yarro, that they who loved words found thefr * Conf. vi. 24. " Sed posteaquam coepit (Romanianus) cogitari utrum hoc muliercul^ sinerent, quas et alii nostrum jam habebant, et nos habere volebamus, totum illud placitum quod bene formabamus, dissUuit in manibus, atque confractum et abjeotum est," 202 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. pleasure in the former, whUe they who loved things found instruction ha the latter,* might serve to ex press the difference between the genius of the Ro man rhetorician and the Christian thinker. Augus tine's mind is every way deeper and larger than the mind of Cicero, more acute, and more accurate; and, what is marveUous, he works greater wonders vrith his old, refuse, worn-out Latin of the fifth cen tury than the master and maker of Roman style did vrith the vfrgin ore of Latium, which he fused in the laboratory of his mind, and poured out tem pered and wrought to express Grecian thought. For Augustine took up these half-defaced lumps of metal, which had served to express the images of common things, and made them express metaphy sical truths which never were disclosed to Cicero's eye. Cicero, indeed, phUosophises ; but Augustine is the parent of mental phUosophy; in him our own ages seem to Hve and breathe, gazing inwards vrith intense introspection. Cicero is acquainted vrith outward society, is a man of vrit, learning, and letters, but he never seems to break through the crust of human nature into the man; whereas it may be doubted whether any human eye saw deeper than St. Augustine into the soul's secrets, or exposed them more lucidly to view. Cicero's letters give us a faithful picture of a great man's * Be Cw. Bei, vi, 2, " Varro tametsi minus est suavis eloquio, doctrina tamen atque sententiis ita refertus est, ut in omni eruditione, quam nos SKCularem, illi autem liberalem vocant, studiosum rerum tantum iste doceat, quantum studiosum verborum Cicero delectat." HEATHEN AND CHRISTLi^ MAN COMPARED. 203 petty weaknesses, vanity, and dissimulation, of all the falsehood and corruption which saddened Roman society at the time. Thanking Caesar publicly in the Senate for the pardon of MarceUus, he cries : " Such gentleness, a clemency so unvvonted and unheard of, so imiversal a moderation united vrith absolute power, vrisdom so incredible and almost divine, it is impossible for me to pass over ia sUence."* This. tyrant, whovriU not leave us even our thoughts free, he whispers to Atticus. But St. Augustine's letters and confessions, whUe they ex pose his natural weakness vrith a scalpel which un covers the most secret fibres of our being, show the same man corrected and exalted, untU he became a fountain-head of knowledge to every inqufrer, an instructor in virtue to every wrestler vrith his own heart. There is scarcely a question of human or divdne govemment of which he does not treat; and where he does not solve, because solution is imposi- sible to man in his state of trial, he diffuses peace now in the reader's heart, as of old he did in the Hstener's, by the subHme unfaltering resignation of a great inteUect, and a stUl more loving heart resting upon God. Take as an instance of what I mean the foUovring. What is the practical value in human conduct of the probabilit-y that there is a providence? Cicero the Academician thought it more probable that a divine mind ruled the affafrs of the world than that things went by chance. * 1^0 Marcello, 1, 204 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM. And the effect of the probabUity on his Hfe is, that his politics were a series of shifts and shufflings, a caressing in pubhc of those at whom he sneered in private ; and when great calamities, banishment, loss of chUd, loss of Hberty, feU upon him, his very heathen friends are ashamed of his pusillanimity. St. Augustine sees the Roman world sinking into a chaos, in the midst of which his daUy life is exact and unfaltering in the discharge of every duty, a continual sacrifice to fraternal charity, a holo caust to divine love. Now, in one of his letters he faUs on one of those questions which lie in wait for us on every side: a question belonging to that curiosity of the eyes which is the proper temptation and continual cross of speculative minds : a ques tion such as a chUd may ask, and no man Hving can answer. Why, he asks, does God give souls to those who, as He knows, AviU presently die? He suggests a reason, but adds, "We can Hkevrise rightly leave these things to the rule of Him whom we know to bestow the most admfrably beautiful and orderly arrangement upon aU transitory things in time, among which are the springing up and the passing away of Hving creatures: whUe we know also that we are incapable of feeling that beauty and order, which, had we a sense to perceive them, would wrap us in unutterable deUght. For it was not vrithout a purpose said by the prophet, who learnt this by inspfration concerning God, ' that He bringeth forth His moiverse according to a precon- HEATHEN AND CHRISTIAN MAN COMPARED. 205 ceived harmony.'* And thus music, that is, the knowledge or the sense of correct modulation, was by God's bounty granted even to jdjdng creatures who possess rational souls, to remind them of so great a fact. For if man, artificer of verse, knows the proper vocal intervals to be given to words, so that his composition, by a continual succession of emerging and departing sounds, may flow on in fafrest order and pass away, how much more does God, whose wisdom, by which He made aU things, is far superior to every art, in the case of natures which are born and pass away, aUow no spaces of time, which stand in the position of syllables and words to the subordinate parts of this world, in this marveUous song of fleeting things, to pass vrith slower or longer pause than His foreknown and fore-estabUshed modulation requires? As this is true even of the tree's leaf, and the number of our hafrs, how much more is it true of man's bfrth and death, whose temporal Hfe endures not a shorter or longer time than God, the Disposer of all times, knows how to make to harmonise vrith the govern ment ofthe universe."f This thought ofthe divine providence is in so complete possession of his mind that it starts up on the sUghtest occasion. In the sketch of his mother, he notices that when sent by her parents to draw wine in the ceUar, she had got * Is, xl, 26, "Qui prof ert numerose sseoulum: secundum LXX, 6 iK