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THE CLAIMS OF CHKISTIANITY

WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR.

ANCIENT RELIGION AND MODERN THOUGHT.
Second Edition. Demy Svo, 12s.
CHAPTERS IN EUROPEAN HISTORY. With
an Introductory Dialogue on the Philosophy ot History.
2 vols. Demy 8to. 24s.
A CENTURY OF REVOLUTION. Second Edition,
Revised. Demy 8vo, 12*.
ON RIGHT AND WRONG. Second Edition, Revised.
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ON SHIBBOLETHS. Demy Svo, 12s.

THE CLAIIS OP CHEISTIAIITY

BY
WILLIAM SAMUEL LILLY
HONOBAEY FELLOW OP PETEBHOUSE, CAMBEIOGE

" Nihil de causa sua [veritas] deprecatur, quia nee de conditione miratur,
Scit se peregrinam in terris agere, inter extraneos facile inimicos invenire,
ceterum genus, sedem, spem, gratiam, dignitatem, in coelis habere. Unum
gestit iuterdum, ne iguorata damnetur." — Teetullian.

LONDON. CHAPMAN AND HALL, LD-
1894

TVESTMINSTEK :
riUN'l'ED BT NICHOLS AND SONS,
25, PARLIAMENT STltEET.

My dear Wilfrid Ward :
This book is largely due to a suggestion
made to me by your father, when I was on a
visit to him at Weston Manor, some sixteen years
ago. Had he been still alive, I should have asked
permission to dedicate it to him, in recognition not
only of its origin, but ofthe great debt which stu
dents of philosophy owe to his labours. Whether he
would have assented to all that I advance, I do not
know. No doubt I should, from time to time, have
heard from him that interrogative " Because ? "
with which his friends were so familiar. But what
I have said, in my Seventh Chapter, as to the need
of widening and supplementing the philosophy
current among Catholics, would, I feel sure, have
had his hearty approval. That was a frequent
theme of his conversation and of his letters, as, no
doubt, you know better than I do. I remember
once citing to him, in this connection, St. Augus
tine's dictum, " Adde sedificium sed noli relinquere
fundamentum." He said, "That is quite right.
The scholastic philosophy is the foundation. We
must maintain this against our opponents ; and we

must try to convince our friends of the necessity
of building on it — perhaps a harder matter."
With that view you will, I think, be in full accord.
Indeed, in your own philosophical writings, you
have acted on it with a felicity and a success
which have obtained general recognition. You
have taken up and have carried forward, in your
own brilliant way, your father's work. You have, at
the same time, done much to diffuse a true estimate
of his massive intellectual gifts, and of his singularly
attractive character. To your filial reverence and
appreciative devotion, we owe the two volumes
which give so admirable an account of his life and
thought, and the two others containing his contri
butions — the value of which is not easily overrated
— to the great metaphysical questions in which he
victoriously defended the right side.
Such were the thoughts which led me to wish
that this book should be associated with your name.
And I thank you for the kind readiness with which
you have allowed me to gratify that wish. I
would that the volume were worthier of you and
of your father's memory. No one can be more
sensible than I am how inadequate is its treatment
of the great subject with which it deals. I may,
however, plead in extenuation, that my design has
been pretty much that described in the words of
Montesquieu : "II ne faut pas tellement dpuiser

Vll

un sujet qu'on ne laisse rien a faire au lecteur. II
ne s'agit pas de faire lire, mais de faire penser." If
the following pages are of use in that way, you
will, I trust, pardon their many imperfections. " In
magnis voluisse sat est."
I am, my dear Wilfrid Ward,
Ever yours sincerely,
W. S. LILLY.
May ist, 1894.

Portions of this work, which have appeared in the Quarterly,
Dublin, English Historical, and New Reviews, now take their
proper place here, by the kind permission ofthe respective Editors.

SUMMARY.

CHAPTER I.

CHRISTIANITY AND THE WORLD.

PAGE
1. It is not intended, in this work, to consider what
Christianity requires men to believe and to do : or
to scrutinize the grounds whereon it bases its claims
as a teacher of faith and morals . . .1
2. The point of view here taken is what may be called
the publicist's : and this book deals with Christianity
as a fact in the world's history . . ,1
3. The Claims which, as an unquestionable matter of
history, Christianity has from the first made against
the world may be reduced to two : Pirst, as a religion
it claims to be the the sole and sufficient oracle of
divine truth, superseding all other- modes of faith.
Secondly, as a Church it claims to be a polity,
perfect and complete in itself, counting its subjects
in all lands, collateral with secular States, but
belonging to none of them ." . . .2
4. In this volume these Claims of Christianity will be
considered, first as regards the two other creeds,
besides the Christian, which claim universality,

SUMMABY.

PAGE

Buddhism and Islam : and then as affecting, and
affected by, civil society, in the Middle Ages, in the
epoch of the Renaissance and the Reformation, and
in this New Age ... .4

CHAPTER II.
CHRISTIANITY AND BUDDHISM.

Buddhism is the most prevailing of all religions, if
judged by the vague and fallacious standard of
statistics. But as a faith, it is decadent and mori
bund, and cannot be considered an effective rival to
the ecumenical Claims of Christianity.
There is, however, another point of view from which
Buddhism merits consideration in the present volume.
There are those who tell us that the Evangelical
narrative is largely plagiarised from Buddhism. And
the Claims of Christianity are inseparably bound up
with the historical character of that narrative
The plan of this Chapter is first to set forth the Buddhist
Gospel in its essential features ; and secondly to
leave the discussion of the question which has arisen
regarding the analogies between it and the Christian
Gospel, to two authorities whose words will carry
special weight : Cardinal Newman and Mr. Rhys
Davids ......
The Buddhist Gospel .....
Between this narrative and the Evangelical, there are
numerous and very striking parallelisms, which

SUMMABY.

PAGE

attracted Cardinal Newman's attention. His letter
asking for information regarding the authorities for
the Buddhist legend .... 25
Mr. Rhys Davids' letter on this subject . . .27
Cardinal Newman's further exposition of the coincidences
which he thought "so startling." . • .29
Mr. Rhys Davids cannot believe that the Buddhist tradi
tions had any influence at all over Christian belief.
The resemblances between the two Gospels, striking
at first sight, are shown by the slightest examination,
to rest on a basis of belief quite contradictory. We
may conclude, then, to the untenableness of the
objection urged from Buddhism against the Claims
of Christianity . . . . .36

CHAPTER III.

CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM.

Islam is not, like Buddhism, a decadent and moribund
faith ; it is still true to its dominant idea, and the
greatness of its missionary work is universally
acknowledged . . . . . .37
At a very critical moment in the fortunes of Europe,
Islam narrowly failed to wrest from Christianity
the control of Western civilization. And there is
nothing intrinsically irrational in the supposition
that it will achieve, in the future, the triumph which
escaped it in the past . • . • . . - .38

SUMMARY.

PAGE

Such a view is unfamiliar to us. But there are fifty
millions of our fellow subjects who hold it. They
have recently found' an effective spokesman in a
member of their own Church. Syed Ameer Ali's
elaborate work, The Life and Teachings of Mohammed,
enables us to contemplate Christianity from without
and Islam from within . . . .39
It is in fact an Apology for Islam which deserves full
and fair consideration . . . . .39
In the present age such full and fair consideration may
be asked for with good hope of success . . 40
In this Chapter Syed Ameer Ali's apology for
Mohammed's life will first be considered ; and then
his claims for Mohammed's religion . . .43
The career of Mohammed falls into three divisions.
Pirst, his life to his fortieth year— the year 610 of
our era — when he entered upon his public ministry.
Next the twelve years, ending with 622 — the date
of the Hijra — in which he devoted himself to the
peaceful propagation of his doctrine. And lastly
his ten years as chief, warrior, supreme magistrate,
and law-giver, until his death in 632 . . .43
With regard to the first of these stages of Moham
med's existence, there is little difference of opinion
among his biographers : all agree in ascribing to his
youth a correctness of deportment and a purity of
manners rare among the people of Mecca . . 44
The second period in his life begins with his fortieth
year, in which the prophetic call came to him.
Persecution arises, as bis doctrine spreads, and he

SUMMABY. xiii
PAfiE
sends his disciples to Medina, which city he himself
reaches after many perilous adventures- on the 2nd of
July, 622 . .49
With the Hijra begins that last act in Mohammed's life
which ends with his death in 632. It is certain that
the net result of his work during that decade was
to cleanse Arabia from foul idolatry and gross
immorality. Equally certain is it, that during this
time of triumph "plain living and high thinking"
marked his life . . . . .53
Still, it is this last act of the Prophet's career which
presents the greatest difficulties to his apologist.
Intolerance, imposture, sensuality, and cruelty are
alleged againsb him . . . . .54
None of these charges, however, if fully and fairly ex
amined, seems sustainable . . . .55
Such examination is not superfluous. No conclusion as to
the merits or demerits of a particular religious
system can justly be derived from the vices or virtues
of individual professors of it. But religious innova
tors occupy a peculiar position. Their doctrine is
one manifestation of their personality, and is best
judged of in connection with other manifestations . 67
A certain spaciousness of thought is absolutely necessary
if we would rightly judge of these questions. The
fundamental principles of the moral law are eternal
and immutable. Its apprehension varies indefinitely
in different states of civilization ; and a man is
bound by it, in practice, only so far as he may, and
therefore, should, apprehend it . . .68

xiv SUMMARY.
We must discern persons and things in their time, not
out of it. And " their time " is not a mere question
of chronology. Mohammed must be judged by the
ethical standard of his own age and country, not of
ours ....•••

68

So much concerning Mohammed as a man. Next, re
garding him as a teacher, was the declaration false
that he was a prophet, in the proper sense of the
word, commissioned from on high for a work of
spiritual and moral revelation ? . ¦ .17
That he, himself, believed this is not open to doubt. And,
in a certain sense, his belief seems warranted . . 72
But Syed Ameer Ali claims that Mohammed is " the
grandest of figures upon whom the light of history
has ever shone": that he "concentrated into a focus
all the fragmentary lights which had ever fallen upon
the heart of man": that Islam " represents the latest
development of the religious faculties of our being " . 76
These claims are untenable. It cannot be allowed that,
considered as a universal religion, Islam represents
an advance upon Christianity . . . .77
Mohammed's great work was, first, that in his native
country, he substituted for Polytheism, a Theism
akin to that of the Hebrew prophets ; and secondly,
that he substituted a higher morality for a lower.
His ethics flowed from his Theism. Religion meant
for him submission to the will of a moral governor of
the universe . . . . . .77
This is not fatalism. The existence of God and the free
will of man are the postulates on which all his
teaching is based . . . . .79

SUMMARY. xv
I' AGE
We may fully admit the value of the great fundamental
truths taught by Mohammed. But Christianity
possesses them as fully as Islam. And it possesses,
in rich abundance, much else which Islam does not
possess . ...... 80
Islam lacks " that gift of fascination, strange, mysterious,
truly divine, which has united all civilized mankind,
without distinction of race, in the veneration of one
and the same ideal issuing from Judaea." This, in
truth, is the incommunicable prerogative of Chris
tianity ..... .80
There is a universe between the crude realism of
Mohammed and the perfect idealism of Christ.
In Him we have the all-sufficient standard, the
absolute pattern of human life . . .81
Syed Ameer Ali regards it as a fundamental defect in
Christianity that the work of its Founder was left
unfinished, and contrasts with this inchoate achieve
ment, "the complete though simpler system of
Mohammed." But the simplicity of Islam is the
cause of its intellectual barrenness. It has not,
like Christianity, a principle of development . 81
Islam is one of the poorest of religions. Christianity is
the richest, the heir of all the ages, and the nursing
mother of all the higher forms of moral and spiritual
life  82
So much might suffice to show why Syed Ameer Ali's
view of the comparative merits of Islam and Chris
tianity seems untenable. There is, however, more to
be said. The creed which he advocates would hardly

SUMMARY.

PAGE

be recognized as their own by the vast majority of
Mohammedans. It is a sort of sublimated essence of
Mohammedanism, a rationalised Islam . . 83
But an apologist for a religion should deal with it as an
existing fact ; should take it as it is, not as he
thinks it ought to be . . . . .83
Islam may have still before it centuries of fruitful
activity, but it is the religion of a low civilization
destined to give way in the long run to a nobler faith ;
for the conception of the family which Mohammed
has stereotyped is incompatible with the "higher
stages of human development . . . .84
The position of women among Moslems is not a mere
excrescence on Mohammed's system. It proceeds,
as an inevitable consequence,- from the essential
defect in the conception whereon that system is
based . . . . . . .85
Mohammedanism does not recognize that " man has
demands for himself which will not be satisfied by
being told that he is the servant of an absolute will."
Hence the destruction, as of the family bonds of civil
society, so of the family itself . . .86

CHAPTER IV.
CHRISTIANITY AND CHRISTENDOM.

It is a fundamental idea of Christianity that " man has
demands for himself which will not be satisfied by
being told that he is the servant of an absolute will."

SUMMARY. xvii
PAGE
Christianity is the perfect law of liberty ; and the
obedience which it demands is not the mechanical
acquiescence of slaves, but the reasonable service of
freemen. It is based upon the claims and preroga
tives of conscience . . . . .87
It teaches that every member of the human race is, by
an indefeasible divine right, independent of all
earthly power in that sacred domain. In C hristianity
alone has been found a force able to destroy the
domination of the State over the immaterial part of
our nature, by a separation between temporal and
spiritual -authority . . . . . r .87
The conception of the Church as a divine kingdom,
distinct from, though existing side by side with the
kingdoms of this world, is its unique characteristic.
And this conception, realised as a fact, it was, which
rendered Christianity so detested by the rulers of the
Roman Empire. It was as a Church that the new
faith was the object of persecution . . .88
Constantine conceived the thought of using the new
spiritual commonwealth as a bond to hold together
his shattered realm. For a brief while this policy
was successful. But it was reserved for a later time
to witness the complete alliance of the Catholic
Church and the Christian State. That alliance — the
special feature and the chief interest of the Middle
Ages — will be the subject of this Chapter . . 88
The almost total neglect and absolute discredit to which
the period intervening between the fall of Paganism
and the Renaissance was so long consigned, is one of
the mosli singular phenomena of history . . SS
b

xviii SUMMARY. PAGE
In the second half of the last century the old evil tradi
tion regarding the Middle Ages began to be ques
tioned, and from that time until now much has been
done to purge away the darkness that overlay them,
and to let in the light of science . . 96
The net result is that materials are now available from
which the student, who rightly uses them, may
derive a pretty accurate conception of human life
and its conditions, in the different periods and
regions of medieval Europe. A few suggestions
will be offered here which may perhaps help in such
use . . . , . .96
The great rock upon which most students strike is genera
lization. The vulgar error is to regard the Middle
Ages as an organic whole presenting the same social
and political characteristics throughout ... 96
But it is equally a mistake to allow the constant changes,
of almost every kind, in the condition of Europe,
traceable from the beginning of the ninth to the
middle of the fifteenth century, — which may be
taken as the true limits of the medieval period, —
to obscure the fact that from a most important
point of view, those centuries may properly be
regarded as a whole . . . . .96
Between these two opposite and fundamental errors, there
exists the ground for almost every variety of mis
conception, and it is hardly too much to say that
every variety of misconception may be met with 96
The besetting danger is "not so much of embracing false
hood for truth, as of mistaking part of the truth for
the whole " . . . . # -.qq

SUMMARY

PAGE

It is only when the student learns the connection of part
with part, separates what is in progress from what
does not move, abstracts, analyzes, and defines, that
the dimness of his mind's eye is removed, and in the
mighty maze he traces the plan . . 103
Of course, some central point is necessary to him round
which to group the objects which present themselves.
That point may be differently chosen ; but the only
way of obtaining a just view of European history
during the medieval period is by regarding it in the
light of its dominant idea . . . .103
There is one great fact running through it to which it
owes its entity as a period, and which is imprinted
on all its epochs, authorities, and customs : that fact
is the prevalence of Catholic unity. Medieval
history is beyond and before all things the history
of the growth, empire, and decline 'of the idea which
is conventionally expressed by the word Christen
dom, and the perpetual recognition of this truth is
essential to its philosophical study . . . 103
This idea was the principal factor in European civiliza
tion from the time when it was distinctly manifested
to the world by Leo III. and Charles the Great, to
the time when the great religious and political
changes associated with the names of the Renais
sance and the Protestant Reformation proclaimed its
downfall . . . . . .104
And therefore in the study of the medieval period
it should ever be kept in view . . . 106
The history of the world presents us with three distinct
conceptions of the relation of religion to human
52

xx SUMMARY.

PAGE

society, conceptions which, for the present purpose,
may be designated the ancient, the medieval, and the
modern. The chief characteristics of these concep
tions are respectively nationality, universality, and
individuality ....•¦ -^"D
In the political communities of antiquity religion played
a very important part. Its public profession was
deemed essential to corporate existence ; it was both
the basis on which political communities rested and
the tie which held them together. This public
profession of religion was strictly national, a nation
being a community united by the fact or the fiction
of blood relationship ..... 107
The conception now most widely prevailing among us is
the exact contrary of this. It regards religion rather
as a subjective speculation than as an objective fact :
as a mere matter of individual concern : as a mere
private thing for each man's own conscience . 108
The great and distinguishing peculiarity of the Middle
Ages is that in them, throughout Europe, the whole
structure of man's life, both jDublic and private, was
built upon religion .... 109
In those Ages, then, the religion of Europe was indi
vidual, for its call was personally addressed to each
soul. But that call was a calling into a spiritual
kingdom, the Catholic Church, with which Chris
tendom was conterminous. The phrase " Christian
commonwealth " was a reality, and the several
European states were sections of it . . . 110
The first consequence of the religious unity of the
medieval period is the position which, throughout
it, was held by the Papacy. Although the actual

SUMMARY.

PAGE

influence of the Pope varied with the circum
stances of the time and the character of the man,
Europe was considered as one vast moral territory,
of which he was the supreme magistrate . 113
Hardly less important than the legislative and judicial
functions of the Pope, in the Ages of Faith, was his
indirect temporal influence as the guide and father
of the Christian family. In the civil and domestic
life of Europe the consequences of religious unity are
equally striking. Medieval religion was eminently
constructive . . . . . .119
Thus, it transformed the feudal system from a regime of
violence and brute force into a hierarchy of duties . 121
And if religious unity was the bond of the medieval
frame of civil society (which was not the Church's
creation), much more was it the life of those
institutions due mainly to her, which assured
municipal prosperity as well as rational freedom . 121
A main characteristic impressed upon the Middle Ages
by Catholic unity is the spirit of the family. Gilds,
for example, were nothing but families artificially
enlarged ...... 126
Hence the high place given in those ages to the feeling
of loyalty and the extreme blackness held to attach
to.the crime of treason .... 129
And here is to be found the explanation of their
intolerance . • • • ¦ 130
This is the distinguishing note of the Middle Ages :
they were, before and beyond all things the Ages of

xxii SUMMARY.

PAGE

Faith. But the undoubted fact, that the men of
medieval times breathed an atmosphere of belief,
is quite consistent with the equally indubitable fact
that they perpetrated an enormous amount of
wickedness . .... 133
The object of this Chapter is not, however, to
present an " abstract and brief chronicle " of
the Middle Ages, but to exhibit the idea which
dominated them, the idea expressed by the word
Christendom . . . . . .135

CHAPTER V.
CHRISTIANITY AND THE RENAISSANCE.
The decline of the Medieval Period may be dated from
the beginning of the Fourteenth Century ; its close
at the middle of the Fifteenth . . . 136
The condition of the Papacy offers striking evidence of
the change that was taking place in the European
order . . . .. . . .137
Its influence throughout Europe is greatly impaired by
the Avignonese Popes ..... 138
And the Great Schism almost obliterates the Church's
notes of unity and universality . . . 140
Under Martin V. the Papacy puts on some semblance of
its former greatness ..... 140

SUMMARY.

xxm
PAGE

But the European mind was greatly alienated from the
Papal See ...... 140
One main reason why this was so, is found in the in
veterate abuses of the Curia Roinana, which proved
too strong for the efforts of reforming Pontiffs . 140
As it was in the Lead, so was it in the members. The
Religious Orders were in decadence, and the secular
clergy were, more or less, infected by the prevailing
degeneracy ...... 142
In the intellectual domain, the dissolution of the old
order was proceeding. Scholasticism, the great
work of the medieval mind, was effete . . 143
The Church was ceasing to be the one instrument of
culture. A lay movement manifests itself in
society. "Profane" knowledge gradually conquers
an ample territory. There is a renascent interest in
antiquity. Dante, Petrarch, and Boccacio are the
precursors of the Fifteenth Century Avfklarung . 144
In the domain of art,' the workings of the new spirit are
most clearly traced ..... 146
An intellectual unity was gradually taking the place of
the old religious unity. In 1453 Christendom had
ceased to exist ...... 147
From that year the Renaissance epoch may be best dated.
But the chronology of ideas is, necessarily, to a great
extent arbitrary ..... 147
We may say the same of the formulas which we employ
to describe ideas. It is impossible to express a move
ment like the Renaissance in a definition . . 148

xxiv SUMMARY.
PAGE
But if we wish to characterize it in a single phrase, we
cannot perhaps find a happier one than Mill's : " that
great breaking loose of the human faculties " . 149
The consequences of that " breaking loose " were momen
tous in every province of intellectual activity. But
we are here confined to the consideration of its effects
upon those Claims of Christianity which are the
special subject of this volume . . . 149
Some eminent writers endeavour to distinguish between
a Christian and a Pagan Renaissance . . . 150
What a Christian Renaissance might have been . . 150
But, as a matter of fact, we nowhere find, in the men
of that time — not even in Nicholas V. — an adequate
idea of a Christian Renaissance . . 152
The Renaissance, whatever else it may or may not have
been, was an eminently secularizing movement : and
it secularized the Papacy, as it secularized every
thing else . . . . . .153
It is this aspect of the Renaissance that is indicated by
the term Humanism. The essence of Humanism, we
are told, " consisted in a new and vital perception of
the dignity of man as a rational being, apart from
theological determinations, and in the further per
ception that classical literature alone displayed
human nature in the plenitude of moral and in
tellectual freedom " . •

The leading representatives of Humanism who flourished
in Italy certainly put aside theological determina
tions, but they can hardly be said to have manifested

153

SUMMARY.

PAGE

a new and vital perception of the dignity of man as
a rational being ... . . . 154
And the "freedom" which they sought in classical litera
ture was not moral but immoral : not intellectual
but sensual ...... 157
Italian Humanism was, speaking generally, a movement
away from Christian Spiritualism : it was not to
Classicalism, but to Paganism, that the Humanists
returned ...... 161
Its leaders paid to the existing religion a certain amount
of outward homage, with whatever reservations of
opinion, or derelictions of conduct. They did not
attack the Church as a spiritual empire. On the
contrary they gladly entered into her service . 161
And they gradually infected the Papacy with their spirit.
No doubt the depravity of the Renaissance Pontiffs
induced moral scepticism .... 161
In Alexander VI. " the Papacy stood forth in all the
strength of its emancipation from morality." In
Leo X. we have the " most pagan of Popes " . . 162
Singular mixture of Pagan and Christian traditions in
this period ..... 162
Humanism was, however, certainly less hostile to faith
than to morals. It engendered philosophic doubt,
but that doubt was not pushed to a negative con
clusion; and it was combined with a respect for
Christianity which was not wholly external . .164
Montaigne is an excellent and not an unfavourable repre
sentative, of its spirit . , . . ,165

SUMMARY.

PAGE

So far the Renaissance was hostile to the Claims of
Christianity as a religion . 166
Savonarola, with the instinct of a Saint, had detected and
denounced the Pagan tendencies of the movement.
In him we must recognise the precursor of the great
revival which was to the Catholic Church as life from
the dead ...... 166
The special function of the Jesuits in that great reaction
was to combat the renascent Heathenism with
arms furnished by itself .... 166
The exigencies of the age called the Jesuits into existence,
and the charges that may be urged against them, if
impartially examined, amount to this : that they
faithfully represented the intellectual characteristics
of the age, and sought to combat it with its own
weapons ...... 167

CHAPTER VI.
CHRISTIANITY AND THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION.
The view that the Protestant Reformation was the work
of the Renaissance is tenable, if at all, only with
large reservations ..... 180
The Renaissance served the cause of the Protestant
Reformation in three ways : (1) By the discredit
which the Italian Humanists cast upon the Papacy
and the Catholic Church ; (2) By the exposure of
ecclesiastical abuses and popular superstitions ;
(3) By translations of and commentaries upon the
Sacred Scriptures . ... 180

SUMMABY. xxvii
PAGE
But the ethos of the two movements was different . 180
This is clearly shown by the career of Erasmus ; the
ripest fruit, and the wholesomest, of the Revival of
Learning, and, in the extreme complexity of his
character, a true representative of the epoch . . 181
Erasmus inveighs against the ignorance of the decadent
Religious Orders and the secularity of the Pajsacy,
and desires a reform of .the Church . . . 182
But he utters no word against the monastic institute,
recognizes the Papacy as of divine institution and
ecclesiastical necessity, and knows of no rule of faith
outside of the Catholic Church . . .185
He sympathized with Luther's protest against the scandals
of indulgences ..... 186
But with Luther in rebellion against the Pope he was
far from sympathizing . . . .186
And he devotes his pen to combating the Lutheran
schism and to defending the Catholic Church . 187
His polemic is attended by a large measure of success . 188
In him we may see the Renaissance definitely taking
part against the Protestant Reformation . . 188
The true cause of the Lutheran Reformation was not
doctrinal : it is to be found in the crying ecclesiastical
abuses of the time, and especially in the scandals
attending the preaching of indulgence . . 188
Luther's theological opinions are in themselves entitled
to small consideration. But their practical conse
quences were of the utmost gravity . . . 192

SUMMARY.

TAGE

His antinomian tenet of justification was productive of
worse consequences in the lives of men than had
been the traffic in indulgences which he denounced.
It was fatal to the Claim of Christianity as a
teacher of morality ..... 192
And his doctrine of the subjective interpretation of the
Sacred Scriptures by individuals was fatal to the
Claims of Christianity both as a teacher of religion
and as a Church" . ... 193
The true spheres of private judgment and of public judg
ment ....... 193
While, proclaiming the autonomy of private judgment
Luther was in fact — perhaps half unconsciously —
endeavouring to substitute in faith and morals for an
authority universally r'ecognizted, and claiming a
divine warrant, his own personal dictatorship resting
merely on his own personal affirmation . . 196
It was manifestedly an insecure foundation. As he had
applied his private judgment to Catholic dogmas, so
his opponents, nay his disciples, applied their private
judgment to his dogmas, with still more destructive
results . . .... 196
Luther was driven, by the necessity of the case, to seek
for some positive jurisdiction, " ut sit finis contro-
versiarum " . . . . . . 197
He could find it only in the civil power . . . 197
It became the recognized Lutheran doctrine that princes
had the highest juridical office over religious doctrine
and the Church : they became Popes, and more than
Popes, in, their own dominions , , t 1 95

SUMMARY. xxix
PAGE
The practical outcome of Luther's Reformation, in the
countries which received it, was to obliterate from
the minds and consciences of the people the belief
that Christian men live under another and a higher
law than the law of the State, to efface the distinc
tion between the secular and the spiritual domain,
and to deny the Claim of the Church as a spiritual
empire, one and universal .... 198
The effect of the Protestant Reformation in England was
similar and is more easily seen: for the ecclesiastical
revolution began in this country where it ended in
Germany .... . 199
This fact has been long obscured by the tradition which
represented the Anglican Reformation as having been
wrought for the sake of doctrine, a tradition of which
Our popular histories have been the vehicles . . 199
But this tradition has almost completely disappeared.
Every schoolboy now knows that in the ecclesiastical
changes wrought by Henry VIII. religious motives
had no place. He left the Catholic Creed as it was,
merely detaching the Church in England from
Catholic unity, and making himself its Supreme Head 202
The essence of the Protestant Reformation, in England
as elsewhere, is not the denial of one or another
article of the Catholic Creed, but the rejection of
ecclesiastical unity and universality, and of the
Papacy, which is the Sacramenhim Unitatis . . 206
In comparison with Protestantism, all former schisms
seem inconsiderable ..... 207
After the first popular movement in its favour had died
away, ifc allied itself with monarchical absolutism ;

xxx SUMMARY.
PAGE
and by the middle of the sixteenth century it had
detached half Europe from the Holy See . . 208
The effect was to weaken in the general mind the idea of
Catholicity : to deprive the Papal Chair of its inter
national influence ; to Italianize, in some sort, the
whole Church, and to force her into a defensive
attitude, whereby she was made to appear reaction
ary and obscurantist ..... 209
But the result of Protestantism on the Catholic Church
was not wholly disastrous. It brought about the
Council of Trent, where the long deferred reforms
were effected ...... 211
In the fifty years immediately succeeding the Council,
Catholicism regained much of the territory it had
lost . . . . . . .212
The great instrument of its triumph was the Society of
Jesus ....... 212
The Jesuits were especially happy in the opportunity
which the condition of Protestantism, particularly in
Germany, offered for their mission . . 212
The progress of the Catholic Reaction was arrested by
the Thirty Years War . . .213
The Peace of Westphalia, which established the principle
" Cujus est regio, ejus est religio," sealed the
spiritual slavery of half the German people . . 213
Unfortunately, the Church did not confine herself to
spiritual weapons for the vindication of her claims
which Protestantism made void. Paul III. re
established the Inquisition . . . 214

SUMMARY. xxx;
PAGE
Judging with the wisdom easy of attainment after the
event, we must pronounce this recourse to the secular
arm a monstrous blunder ... 214
But to blame the men of those days for not seeing with
our eyes is unphilosophical. The doctrine of tolera
tion was strange to them .... 215

CHAPTER VII.

CHRISTIANITY AND THE NEW AGE.

The French Revolution aspired to remake man and
society upon a model supplied by the teachings of
Rousseau ...... 218
The two primary postulates of his doctrine are the natural
goodness of man and the absolute sovereignty of
the individual ..... 219
These postulates are directly opposed to the Claims of
Christianity both as an idea and as a phenomenon . 219
Christianity, as a religion, is based upon the fact of sin,
which it claims " to treat universally, and to heal " . 219
Christianity, as a Church, claims an allegiance quite
incompatible with absolute sovereignty, either in
the one or the many ..... 219
Absolute sovereignty belongs only to absolute perfection,
and "there is none good, save One, that is God " . 219

xxxii SUMMARY.
PAGE
And conscience is His "Aboriginal Vicar" and perpetual
indefeasible representative on earth . . . 219
An essential part of the mission of Christianity is to
vindicate these prerogatives of conscience . . 220
And its faithfulness to this part of its mission brought it
into conflict with the French Revolution . . 220
The issue of Rousseau's doctrine is the omnipotence of
the State in virtue of the Social Contract. He ex
pressly charges Christianity with breaking up the
unity of the civil- polity, and claims that it is the
office of the Sovereign, in every country, to fix both
worship and dogma ..... 220
The Civil Constitution of the Clergy was the translation
into fact of Rousseau's teaching. It was a direct
negation- of the Claim -of Christianity to be a uni
versal spiritual kingdom .... 221
The political teaching of Rousseau issues, then, in the
same complete subordination of religion to the State
which had been the outcome of the Lutheran and the
starting point of the Anglican Reformation . . 222
And his teaching as to man's natural goodness illustrates
the falsehood of extremes as signally as the teaching
of Luther and Calvin that man is by nature entirely
depraved ...... 222
Lutheran and Calvinistic theologies are now of little
practical influence, but the spurious individualism
which lies at the root of them, as of Rousseau's
doctrine, has deeply infected modern thought . 222

SUMMARY. xxxiii
PAGE
The autonomy of the individual reason is now a very
widely accepted first principle. Its consequences are
chiefly negative. Outside the Catholic Church there
are hardly any recognized first principles of thought
and action ...... 222
The apotheosis of the individual, of the State, of the race,
are varying aspects of the pantheistic humanitarian-
ism which is a vast fact of the present day . . 224
Such is the spirit of the age with which Christianity ia
confronted. And the Claims which it makes, through
the Catholic Church, both as a universal religion and
a universal polity, are precisely what they were in
the beginning ...... 224
" Through the Catholic Church " : for, whatever the ex
cellences of the communions separate from her, she
alone, in fact, sustains these claims. No other body
of Christians even pretends to ecumenical attributes 225
She alone judges the world in the exercise of her pro
phetical office ...... 226
She cannot come to terms with, and reconcile herself to,
the opinions which specially characterize the age . 227
Nor can she allow that "the best constitution of the State
and civil progress require human society to be con
stituted and governed without regard to religion " . 227
But a fact is not altered by a hundred texts. Society is
so constituted and governed .... 227
The legitimate consequence of the incompetence of the
State in the matter of cults is to restore to the
Church the plenitude of her sovereignty in her own
domain ...... 228

xxxiv SUMMARY.
TAGE
In the exercise of that sovereignty it is inevitable that
she should come into conflict with the State ; for the
two polities exist, side by side, for different ends, and
exercise sovereignty over the same persons . . 228
For example!, marriage and education are obvious occasions
of conflict . . . . . .229
And the difficulty is increased by the fact that the New
Liberalism is, to a large extent, fanatically anti-
Christian ...... 231
The Catholic Church, then, has to maintain the Claims of
Christianity in an age when Christianity is widely
impugned as an idea and hated as a phenomenon.
What are her prospects in fulfilling that mission ? . 232
The question may be met with another. Can the world
do without Christianity ? . . . . 232
Belief in the supernatural is an instinct of our nature.
Religion is necessary as " a vaccine against super
stition " . . . . . .233
The supernatural principle which the Catholic Church
represents in its most concrete form is alone sufficient
for the healing of the nations .... 234
No adequate life philosophy can be framed apart from
the great spiritual truths which she teaches, and if
— as is here assumed — her teaching is impregnable
by physical and metaphysical science, it has the
promise of the future ..... 235
So much concerning the prospects of Christianity as an
idea. But we do not live in a world of mere ideas.
We live in a world of phenomena : and one of the
vastest of these phenomena is Christianity as re
presented by the Catholic Church. What are the
prospects of the Catholic Church in this new age ? . 235

SUMMARY. xxxv
PAGE
Every year that passes over us brings out, more and more
clearly, the essential need of a universal spiritual
polity, such as the Catholic Church and the Catholic
Church alone presents .... 236
The tendency is everywhere to strengthen the State
against the individual. Nowhere, except in the
Catholic Church, is an organised spiritual power,
extending throughout the world, which can stand
forth as the champion of the rights .of conscience
against the dechristianised State . . . 236
An admirable illustration of this power of resistance in
the Catholic Church, is supplied by the Kulturkampf 238
The probability is that, in this New Age, the office of the
Catholic Church in vindicating the rights of con
science, the immunities of the City of God, will be
of even more importance to mankind then in the
Primitive, and Medieval Ages .... 240
But we must ever remember that it is a New Age. The
old regime has vanished in the ecclesiastical as in
the civil sphere ..... 240
The intellectual conditions of life have changed as well
as the political. And it is a grave question how far
Catholicism has as yet responded to the needs of
modern thought ..... 243
Philosophy must expand in order to deal with the fresh
problems raised by modern physics and modern meta
physics, collecting and collating the elements of truth
scattered through systems the most incongruous . 246
To rear such a philosophical edifice is the great archi
tectonic work lying before us in th e order of thought 246

THE CLAIMS OF CHRISTIANITY.

CHAPTER I.
CHRISTIANITY AND THE WORLD.
It is not my object, in this volume, to consider
what Christianity requires men to believe and to
do : or to scrutinize the grounds whereon it bases
its claims as a teacher of faith and morals. I
propose to regard it from what I may call a
publicist's point of view, and there is a passage in
St. Cyril of Jerusalem which may serve as the
keynote of what I am about to write. " The
Church," he says, " is called Catholic because it
extends throughout all the world, from one end of
the earth to the other; and because it teaches
catholically, and without defect, all dogmas which
ought to come home to the knowledge of all men,
whether concerning things visible and invisible, con
cerning heavenly and earthly things ; and because
it subjects every race to the true religion, both
governors and governed, learned and unlearned; and

2 CHRISTIANITY AND THE WORLD. [ch.
because it universally treats and heals every species
of sins that are committed by soul and body ; and
because it has in possession every kind of virtue
that is named, in deeds and words, and every sort of
spiritual gifts."* Now the Claims of Christianity,
as set forth in these words, may be reduced to
two. First, as a religion, Christianity claims to be the
sole and sufficient oracle of divine truth, supersed
ing all other modes of faith, a system of moral
discipline for mankind, transforming every human
relation by its remedies for sin and its incentives
to goodness : the guardian of that tree of life
whose leaves are for the healing of the nations.
This- is what Hume, in a well-known passage, has
called "the intolerance of Christianity, by which
it refused alliance with other religions, and insisted
on reigning alone or not at all."
Secondly ; Christianity is not merely^an idea : it
is also a phenomenon : it is not only a theology :
it is also a community. It is a Church, as well as
a religion : and as a Church it claims to be a uni
versal spiritual empire. It takes man as he is, a
member of a family, a member of a civil incorpo
ration, a member of the human race, and it makes
him a member of an ecclesiastical society, a cha
racter which affects him in all his other capacities.
Its office is, in the words of an ancient liturgy, " to
bring men into a polity in belief of the truth."
* Catechetical Lectures, xviii. 23.

i.J A RELIGION AND A CHURCH. 3
Its Founder speaks of His kingdom over and over
again : it is one of the fundamental ideas of His
teaching ; and a kingdom implies officers, laws, a
stable organisation. His disciples are described by
St. Peter, in an undoubtedly genuine epistle, as
"gens sancta," a holy nation ; * and however obscure
the details of their earliest organisation, certain it is,
if anv historical fact be certain, that from the first
they possessed this corporate character. Hence the
ancient expressions " corpus Christianorum," to
"edvos xp<>°~T<-avov '• an(i St. Chrysostom speaks of the
creation of this Christian people as the one miracle
of Christ which no heathen opponent could gain
say, f It is not easy for us, to whom the conception
of a universal Church is familiar, to understand how
passing strange it must have appeared to the ages
in which it was first realised : a polity perfect and
complete in itself, of which the bonds were not
race, language, nor local contiguity, but spiritual
beliefs and affections, hopes and fears: a divine
state — civitas Dei — counting its subjects in all
lands, and existing side by side with secular states,
of diverse regimen, with varying customs, laws,
and institutions, alien from, and apt to conflict
with its own : a kingdom not, indeed, of this world
but in it, and so, of necessity, brought into close
* Wiesing rightly points out that the word yevos implies
" eine in Lebensgemeinschaft stehende geschlossene Gesammt-
heit." Quoted in de Wettes' Handbuch zum Neuen Testament,
vol. iii. part i. p. 52 (3rd ed.).
f Opera, vol. i. p. 558 (Benedictine edition).
b2

4 CHRISTIANITY AND THE WORLD. [ch. i.
and constant relations with the kingdoms o£ this
world.* Such are, as a matter of historical fact, the Claims
which Christianity has from the beginning made.
The following pages will be devoted to an examina
tion of those Claims, first as regards other competing
religions, and then as affecting and affected by
secular society. There are in the world two creeds
besides the Christian which claim universality,
Buddhism and Islam. I shall first inquire how
Christianity stands in respect of these faiths. I
shall next go on to contemplate the alliance made
between Christianity and the secular state in that
medieval public order which we call Christendom.
Then I shall consider how the Claims of Chris
tianity have been affected by the great intellectual
and religious changes indicated by the words Re
naissance and Reformation, which marked the
downfall of that order. Lastly, I shall speak of
them as they present themselves to us in this New
Age, wherein our lot is cast.
* I have in my mind the following passage of St.
Augustine : " Hesc ergo coelestis civitas dum peregrinatur in
terra, ex omnibus gentibus cives evocat, atque in omnibus
Unguis peregrinam collegit societatem ; non curans quidquid
in moribus, legibus, institutisque diversum est, quibus pax
terrea vel conquiritur vel tenetur ; nihil eorum rescindens, nee
destruens, imo etiam servans ac sequens : quod licet diversum
in diversis nationibus, ad unum tamen eundemque finein
terrense pacis intenditur, si religionem qua unus summus et
verus Deus colendus docetur, non impedit. Utitur ergo ctiam
coelestis civitas in hac sua peregrinatione pace terrena." — De
Civitate Dei, xix. 17.

CHAPTER II.
CHRISTIANITY AND BUDDHISM.
Judged by the vague and fallacious test of statistics,
Buddhism must be accounted the most prevailing
of the world's religions. Berghaus reckons some
500,000,000 — a third of the human race— as pro
fessing it, while Christians of all sorts are set down
by this eminent authority at 327,000,000, and the
votaries of Islam at 155,000,000. But in this cal
culation all the inhabitants of China are counted
as Buddhists. So they may be, in a sense. Sir
Alfred Lyall has pointed out that " whereas in
other countries the chief religion is one but the
interpretations of it are many, so that the faith is a
moral system, a mysterious revelation or a simple
form of propitiating the supernatural, according to
each man's feelings or habits of thought, in China
a man may go to different religions, for specialities
of various sides or phases of belief ; " whence it
comes to pass that " three modes of worship, and
three philosophies, are found side by side, not only
in the same locality, but in the belief of the same

6 CHRISTIANITY AND BUDDHISM. [ch.
individuals." * Or, as Dr. Edkins puts it tersely,
" The Chinese believe in three religions at once."f
But however large the number of professors of
the Buddhist faith, few persons, I take it, would
seriously maintain that Buddhism is really an effec
tive rival to the ecumenical Claims of Christianity ;
and those few hardly merit a serious reply, j Great
as may be our admiration for the noble figure of
Gotama — surely one of the purest and most
winning in all history — it is perfectly clear that his
religion is decadent, nay, moribund. The chief
tests of the vitality of a creed are its fidelity to
its original idea and its power of propagation.
Those are the true criteria " stantis vel cadentis
ecclesise." Now certain it is that the noblest
elements of the Buddha's teaching have long been
buried under childish fables, and that the mission
ary activity of his religion is extinct.
There is, however, another point of view from
which Buddhism certainly does seem entitled to
consideration in this volume. It is asserted that
Christianity is largely plagiarized from that older
religion : that the obligations of the Gospel of
* Asiatic Studies, pp. 131 and 130. The three religions are,
of course, Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism.
f Religion in China, p. 58.
$ No doubt the pessimistic doctrines of Buddhism have
largely influenced Western philosophic thought from the time
of Schopenhauer. But I have here in view the eccentric sect
of American origin, which is by way of professing a Buddhist
or pseudo-Buddhist religion.

n.] THE TWO GOSPELS. 7
Christ to the Gospel of Gotama are beyond
dispute. Thus we are told by M. Emile Bur-
nouf — who, if not himself of much authority
in Oriental studies, bears the name of one who
certainly was so — that " the details of the Buddhist
legend were applied to Jesus during his life and
after his death": that "the doctrine of the Incar
nation is borrowed from Buddhism, while the
Ascension recalls Nirvana " : that only " at Nicsea
did the Christain faith officially break with Bud
dhism " : and that even in the creed named after
the Council held at that place " may be found the
development of the formula ' The Buddha, the Law,
and the Church.' " I must refer to M. Emile
Burnouf's own pages those who desire to follow him
in what I take leave to call the entirely unsuccess
ful and hardly intelligible argument* whereby he
attempts to establish these assertions. I quote
him here merely as the exponent, in an influential
and largely read publication, of a view somewhat
widely, if somewhat hazily, held. Now it is
manifest that if this view were true, the historical
character of the Evangelical narrative could no
longer be maintained. And assuredly the Claims
of Christianity are inseparably bound up with the
* In his article " Le Bouddhisme en Occident ": Revue des Deux
Mondes, July 15, 1888. Whatever there is in this paper worth
answering had been answered by anticipation in Dr. Estlin
Carpenter's very learned and most able essay, " The New
Testament and Buddhism," published in the Nineteenth Century,
of December, 1880. 1 shs-U refer to it later on,

8 CHRISTIANITY AND BUDDHISM. [ch.
historical character of that narrative. Goethe has
somewhere remarked, with entire truth, that the
religion of Jesus Christ depends upon the person
ality of Jesus Christ. What I shall proceed to do
in this Chapter is first to set forth the Buddhist
Gospel in its essential features; and secondly to
leave the discussion of the question which has
arisen regarding the analogies between it and the
Christian Gospel, to two authorities whose words will
carry weight that cannot possibly attach to mine :
Cardinal Newman, whom I take to be the most
considerable spokesman for the Christian religion
in these latter days, and Mr. Rhys Davids, who is
certainly the greatest living authority on primitive
Buddhism.* (i.) The Buddhist Gospel. f
The birth | of the Buddha was on this wise. There
reigned in the city of Kapilavastu, in the Rajpoot
country, over the Aryan people called Sakyas, a
king named Suddhodana. For many years his two
* Mr. Rhys Davids kindly permits me to publish his two
letters. For permission to publish Cardinal Newman's two, I
am indebted to the courtesy of the Rev. Father Neville, of the
Birmingham Oratory, the Cardinal's literary executor.
f In order to avoid a multitude of references, it may suffice
to say that the statements given in this narrative are all taken
from authoritative Buddhist texts — chiefly those published in
The Sacred Rooks of the East and in Triibner's Oriental Series.
I am permitted to add that Mr. Rhys Davids finds the narra
tive correct.
\ It took place, most probably, about six hundred years before
Christ.

n. J THE INCARNATION- OF THE BUDDHA. 9
wives bore him neither son nor daughter. Then,
the elder of them, Maya, found herself with child.
But it was of no earthly father that the holy thing
which should be born of her was begotten.
During countless previous existences * a Great
Being had exercised in the highest degree the ten
virtues, the five renouncings, and the three mighty
works of perfection, in the hope of reaching omni
science for the salvation of mankind. And now
the fulness of the time was come for him to descend
from his high estate in the Tusita heaven, for the
redemption of the world from sin and sorrow, by
attaining the sublime dignity of Buddhahood.f
The virtues of the glorious princess, Maya, who,
during a hundred thousand worlds, had lived in
the practice of righteousness, keeping with a perfect
heart all the rules and observances of the law,
merited for her the great office of his mother. In
a dream she beheld him under the figure of a white
elephant, open her right side and conceal himself
in her bosom, and the Brahmins to whom she told
the vision interpreted it that she should bear a son
* Five hundred and ten of these former existences are
narrated in the Buddhist Scriptures. " They range," says
Bishop Bigandet, "through the whole series of the animal
kingdom, from the dove to the elephant." — Life or Legend of
Gaudama, vol. i. p. 47, note.
f Buddha is not, strictly speaking, a proper name, but a title,
meaning the Perfectly Enlightened One. Twenty-five previous
Buddhas are supposed to have appeared in this world. The
term Sakya-Muni means Sage of the Nation of the Sakyas, and is
one of the many epithets given by his followers to the Buddha
of the present era. " His family name was certainly Gotama,"
Mr. Rhys David3 says {Buddhism,^. 27), in Burmese, Gaudama.
Following the best Oriental authorities, I shall here speak of
him as Siddhartha until he attains the Buddhaship, after that
as the Buddha.

10 CHBISTIANITY AND BUDDHISM. [ch.
who should be a Mighty Ruler, and of whose
kingdom there should be no end. When her time
drew near, she set out, according to the custom of
her race, for her father's house, and while she was
journeying thither her days were accomplished,
and in the shade of a grove of satin trees she
brought forth her son. The Blessed Child left his
mother's womb with his feet and hands stretched
out, his countenance as that of a Pundit descending
from a place where he has expounded the law.
And all marvelled when he freed himself from the
hands of those who ministered to him ; and then,
looking East and West, North and South, through
out the universe, present to the eye of his perfect
reason, like a level plain, he exclaimed, " This is
my last birth : there shall be to me no other state
of existence : I am the greatest of all beings." On
that day the choirs of gods * in the Tavatinsa heaven
were astonished and joyful, and waved their robes
in exultation, saying: "In Kapilavastu, to Suddho-
dana the King, this day a son is born, w7ho seated
under the Bo-tree, will become a Buddha. He shall
bring joy and peace to men, he shall shed light in
the dark places, and shall give sight to the blind."
At that time an ascetic, Kala Devala by name, a
counseller much honoured by Suddhodana the King,
* It may not be superfluous to point out that Buddhism does
not possess the conception of the Supreme Creative Personal
God, so familiar to us. The place that this conception fills in
Monotheism is held in the Buddhist system by the moral order
of the universe : a Supremely Just and Perfect Law ruling
absolutely throughout the three worlds. Nor does Buddhism
recognise specific differences between living beings, any of
whom may be a man in one existence, a beast in another, a god
in a third, a fish in a fourth ; and so ad infinitum. Differing
from Mr. Rhys Davids, I venture to think " god " a better
rendering than "angel" of the word deva.

ii.] THE JOY OF THE HEAVENLY HOST. 11
had eaten his midday meal, and had gone to the
Tavatinsa heaven to rest during the heat of the
day. As he sat there, resting, he saw these gods
rejoicing, and asked them, " Why do ye thus
rejoice and are glad at heart ? Make knowrn to
me the cause." They answered, " Sir, to Suddho-
dana the King, is born a son, who seated under the
Bo-tree, will become a Buddha, and will found a
Kingdom of Righteousness. To us it will be given
to see his infinite grace and to hear his word.
Therefore do we rejoice and are glad."
The ascetic, hearing these words, came down
quickly from the Tavatinsa heaven, and, entering
the King's house, sat down on the seat appointed
for him, and said, " A son, they say, is born to you,
0 King ! let me see him." The King ordered his
son to be clad in beautiful garments and brought
in to salute Kala Devala. But the future Buddha
turned his feet round and planted them on the
matted hair * of the ascetic. Then the ascetic did
homage to the Buddha, and the King, seeing the
wonder, also did homage to his own son.
Now, Kala Devala had the power of calling to
mind the events of forty ages in the past and of
forty ages in the future. Looking at the marks of
prosperity on the Child's body, he considered with
himself: "Will he become a Buddha, or not?"
And, perceiving that he would most certainly be
come a Buddha, he smiled, saying: "This is a
most wonderful child." Then reflecting: "What
* It was considered among the Brahmins a sign of sanctity
to wear matted or plaited hair. This is referred to in one of
the Buddhist Scriptures : " What is the use of plaited hair, O
fool ? What of a garment of skin ? Tour low yearnings are
within you, and the outside thou makest clean." — Dhamma-
pada, v. 394.

12 CHBISTIANITY AND BUDDHISM. [ch.
happiness shall result from the birth of this child !
The time of my departure is close at hand. Will
ifc be given to me to behold him when he has be
come a Buddha ? " he perceived that it would not.
" Dying before that time, I shall be re-born in the
Formless World. And it will not be my good
fortune to behold this wonderful child when he has
become a Buddha. Great indeed is my loss."
And he wept sore. Then reflecting: "Will it be
granted to any one of my kinsmen to see him as a
Buddha ? " he saw that it would be granted to his
nephew Nalaka. So he went straightway to his
sister's house, and said, "Where is your son
Nalaka ? " And she said, " In the house, brother."
And he said, " Call him." And when the young
man came forth, he said, " To Suddhodana the
King a son is born, who, after thirty-five years,
will become a Buddha. To you it will be given to
see him. This very day forsake the world." And
Nalaka believed the wrord which his uncle spoke,
and forsook all, and put on the robe of a religious
mendicant, and went to the Himalaya Mountains,
and lived the life of a monk.
Now, when the Blessed Child was born into the
world, there were born at the same time with him
the beautiful woman Yasodhara, who was to be his
wife ; Ananda also, his cousin, who was to be his
beloved disciple and evangelist; thehorse, Kantika,
who was to bear him away from the pomps and
vanities of this evil world, when the time appointed
had come for the Great Renunciation ; and the
nobleman Channa, his faithful friend, who should
be the companion and confidant of his flight. On
the fifth day, the Brahmins most versed in the
science of astrology assembled for the ceremony of
washing the child's head and giving him a name.
Divining his future destiny as the Deliverer of man

n. J GROWTH IN WISDOM AND STATURE. 13
from the changes and troubles of existence, they
called him Siddhartha, which, being interpreted, is,
" The Establisher." * Two days afterwards his
mother, Maya, died, not from any ill effect of that
pure and painless birth, but because her appointed
term was accomplished and her hour had come ; for
the womb in which a future Buddha has dwelt, like
a sacred shrine, can never be dwelt in by another.
The sister of Maya, King Suddhodana's second
wife, took charge of the Blessed Child. He grew
in wisdom and stature : he taught his teachers. It
had been foretold to his father that he should re
nounce the world, and these four signs were given:
An Old^Man, a Sick Man, a Dead Man, and a
Monk. The King thought : " From this time
forth let no such things come near my son. There
is no good of my son's becoming a Buddha. I
should like to see him exercising sovereignty and
rule : " and gave orders that none of these fatal
signs should ever meet his eye. The child grew
up amid the pomp of the King's palace, and when
he was sixteen years of age he took to wife his
cousin Yasodhara. His father then ordered three
palaces to be built for him, one for each season of
the year : and innumerable damsels, skilful in play
ing upon all sorts of instruments, ever attended
upon him, and charmed all his moments by unin
terrupted dances and music. His kinsmen, seeing
him devoted to the pleasures of home life, com
plained to the King that he neglected the acquisi
tion of attainments proper for his station. When
his father made known to him this complaint he
said : " Let proclamation be made by beat of drum
in all the land that on such a day I will show to
my kinsmen, in the presence of the most learned
" Or rather, perhaps, The Accomplisher of the Aim.

14 CHRISTIANITY AND BUDDHISM. [ch.
doctors, my full acquaintance with the eighteen
kinds of arts and sciences." On the appointed day
he displayed the extent of his knowledge, and they
weresatisfied and their doubts removed.
Now, when the future Buddha was in his twenty-
ninth year, the gods who ministered to him unseen
thought : "The time for young Siddhartha to attain
enlightenment is near. Let us place before him the
appointed signs." On a certain day he ascended
his chariot to drive to his pleasure gardens, when
he discovered a figure with body bent, with teeth
decayed, with hair grey, with skin shrivelled, with
limbs trembling, and supported by a staff. Then
he asked his charioteer, " What manner of man is
this, whose very hair is not like that of other men?"
And the charioteer answered, " O Prince, he is an
Old Man : everyone who is born is appointed to
become like unto him." When he heard this he
said, " Birth, then, must be a great evil, if it
conducts beings to so wretched a condition." And,
with agitated heart, he turned back and went to his
palace. Again, one day, as he was driving to his
pleasure gardens, he saw a figure emaciated, weak,
with faculties impaired, whose body was filled with
a sore disease. Siddhartha inquired concerni.no- him
of his charioteer, who told him it was a Sick Man,
and when he received the answer he went back to
his palace with agitated heart. Once more, as he
was driving to his pleasure gardens, he met some
thing wrapped in many-coloured stuffs, and borne
on a litter, amid burning torches and the wailing of
women. He inquired concerning it of his charioteer,
and when he received answer that it was a Dead Man,
and that to this state all must come, he went back
to his palace with agitated heart. Last of all, as
he was driving to his pleasure gardens, he met a
mendicant friar, shaven and shorn, of humble mien

n. j THE VISION OF PEACE. 15
and sweet aspect, bearing an alms-bowl, and going
from door to door. And words were put into the
mouth of the charioteer to declare the merits and
dignity of the religious profession. Siddhartha
straightway desired to embrace it.
He went apart to a garden by the riverside to
meditate. There a messenger came to him, bring
ing tidings that Yasodhara had brought forth a son.
"That child," he said, "is a new and strong tie,
which I must now break." He ascended his
chariot and returned to the city, where the streets
were thronged with a multitude rejoicing over the
new-born prince. At that time a noble virgin,
Kisa Gotami by name, had gone to the flat roof of
the upper storey of her palace, whence she beheld
the beauty and majesty of Siddhartha as he went
through the city. Then her heart was filled with
delight, and she lifted up her voice and sang :
" Blessed, indeed, is that mother,
Blessed, indeed, is that father,
Blessed, indeed, is that wife,
Who owns this lord so glorious."
And when he heard this, Siddhartha thought to
himself : ' ' On seeing such a one the heart of his
mother is made happy, the heart of his father is
made happy, the heart of his wife is made happy !
This is all she says. But by what can every heart
attain to lasting happiness and peace ? " And to
his mind, estranged from sin, the answer came :
" When the fire of lust is gone out, then peace is
gained ; when the fires of hatred and delusion are
gone out, then peace is gained ; when the troubles
of mind arising from pride, credulity, and other
sins, have ceased, then peace is gained ! Sweet is
the lesson this singer makes me hear, for the
Nirvana of Peace is that which I have been trying

16 CHRISTIANITY AND BUDDHISM. [ch.
to find out. This very day I will break away from
household cares. I will renounce the world. I will
follow after only the Nirvana itself." Then, taking
from his neck a string of pearls, he sent it to Kisa
Gotami as a teacher's fee. Delighted, she thought :
"Prince Siddhartha has fallen in love with me, and
has sent me a present."
Siddhartha entered his palace and reclined upon
his couch. Then there came before him his nautch
girls, clad in beautiful garments, and lovely as
heavenly virgins, and, ranging themselves in order,
they danced and sang. But, his heart being
estranged from sin, he took no pleasure in them,
and fell asleep. Then the women said to them
selves : " He, for whose sake we were performing,
is asleep. Why should we play any longer ? "
And they laid aside their instruments and slept.
A little before midnight Siddhartha awoke, and sat
cross-legged on the couch, and he looked on the
damsels, with their tinkling ornaments laid aside,
as they slept ; some foaming at the mouth, some
grinding their teeth, some yawning, some mutter
ing in their sleep, some with their garments in
disorder. Seeing this woful change in their appear
ance, he became more and more disgusted with
lusts, and the chamber was to him a charnel
house full of loathsome corpses. Life, whether in
the world subject to passion, or in the world of
form, or in the formless worlds, appeared to him
like staying in a house that had become the prey of
devouring flames. He said : "It all oppresses
me ; it is intolerable." His mind turned ardently
to the state of those who have renounced. the world;
and he resolved on that very day to accomplish
" The Great Renunciation."
He went to the door, and found there his
chamberlain Channa. " Rise up quickly," he said

ii. J THE TEMPTER. 17
to him. " I am now ready to leave the world and
retire to the desert ; go and prepare the swiftest
of my horses." Channa went straightway, as his
lord commanded him, and saddled the mighty
steed, Kantika. The horse, knowing the in
tentions of the Prince, testified his inexpressible
joy by loud neighing, but the gods hushed the
sound, so that none heard it.
Now, while Channa was making ready for their
departure, Siddhartha thought : "I will just look
on my son " ; and he went to the room where his
wife lay. The mother was sleeping, having one
of her hands placed over the head of her babe.
"If I lift her hand to take my son," he said to
himself, " she will awake, and that will prevent
my going away. I will come back and see him
when I have become a Buddha." And when he
had left tlie palace, he went to his horse and said,
" 0 Kantika, do thou save me this once to-night,
so that I, having become a Buddha by your help,
may save the world of men, and the world of gods
too." Then he mounted him, and Channa followed.
The great gate of the city, which a thousand men
could hardly turn, opened to them of its own
accord, and they rode away into the darkness.
Scarcely had he left the city when Mara,* the
spirit of evil, met him, and endeavoured to turn
him back, promising him all the kingdoms of
the world and the glory of them. Siddhartha
answered, "I want not an earthly kingdom:
depart ; I will become a Buddha, and make the
ten-thousand-world system shout for joy." Then
that Wicked One left him for a season, but ever
* My friend, Professor Sayce, points out to me that Mara
is still with us in the Western World. We have him in
the English Nightmare, and in the French Cauchemar.
C

18 CHRISTIANITY AND BUDDHISM. [ch.
watched him, striving to throw every obstacle in
his path, pursuing him like a shadow that follows
the object from which it falls. Siddhartha rode
through the night, until he reached the banks of
the river Anoma, and there he took off his rich
habit, with his sword cut off the long hair which
adorned his comely head, and, putting on the
dress of a religious mendicant, bade Channa take
back the horse Kantika to his father and tell the
King the things which he had seen. But Kantika,
hearing these words, and thinking, " From this
time forth I shall never see my master any more,"
was unable to bear his grief. And, going out of
their sight, he died of a broken heart, and was
re-born in the Tavatinsa heaven as a god.*
Six years did Siddhartha abide in the desert
of Umveli, performing the uttermost penance, until
he was wasted to a shadow. There abode with
him Kondanya and four other monks. And his
fame went abroad, as when the sound of a
great bell is heard in the sky. Then he per
ceived that penance is not the way to Wisdom,
and, taking up his mendicant's bowl, he went to
the neighbouring village to beg food. When he
had eaten it, he received strength, but the five
ascetics who had continued with him in the desert
were offended, and forsook him. Alone he went
to the banks of the Nairanjara, and sat down to
meditate under the Bo-tree. There did the Prince
of the Power of the Air make an assault upon him,
* " The various accounts that are given of this horse,
Kantika," says Bishop Bigandet, " and the grief he feels at
parting with his master, may appear somewhat extraordinary,
puerile, and ridiculous to everyone except to Buddhists. The
great principle of that religions system is that man does not
differ from animals [or gods] in nature, but only in relative
perfection." — Life or Legend of Gaudama, vol. i. p. 66, note.

n. J THE VICTORY. 19
with ail his hosts. When the conflict began be
tween the Saviour of the World and the Evil One,
a thousand appalling meteors fell : clouds and
darkness prevailed. Even the earth, with the
oceans and mountains it contains, though it is
unconscious, quaked like a conscious being ; like
a fond bride when forcibly torn from her bride
groom ; like the festoons of a vine, shaking under
the blast of a whirlwind. The ocean rose under
the vibration of this earthquake ; rivers flowed
back towards their sources ; peaks of lofty moun
tains rolled crumbling to the earth ; and a fierce
storm howled all around. The roar of the con
cussion became terrible. The very sun enveloped
itself in awful darkness, and a host of headless
spirits filled the air. Siddhartha sat with heart
untroubled, and by the merits gained in his
previous existences, triumphed over the Enemy
of Mankind. Even the famous charger of Mara
bent his knees before the Deliverer, and that
Wicked One fled away. It was a little before
sunset that the Great Being thus put to flight the
powers of evil. At that time he was wrapped in
the profoundest meditation. Then, whilst the
Bo-tree paid him homage, as it were, by its shoots,
like sprigs of red coral, falling over his robe, he
acquired in the first watch of the night the Know
ledge of the Past, in the middle watch the Know
ledge of the Present, and in the third watch the
Knowledge of the Chain of Causation which leads
to the Origin of Evil.
Now, the chain is this : Old Age and Death,
grief, lamentation, suffering, dejection, and despair
spring from Birth ; Birth springs from Existence ;
Existence springs from Attachment ; * Attachment
* Upadiina : the combining of affections calculated to bring
into existence.
c 2

20 CHRISTIANITY AND BUDDHISM. [ch.
springs from Desire ; Desire springs from Sensation ;
Sensation springs from Contact ; Contact springs
from the Six Senses — eye, ear, nose, tongue, the
palpable body, and the impalpable mind; the Senses
spring from Name -and- Form ; Name - and - Form
spring from Consciousness ; Consciousness springs
from the Mental and Moral Predisposition ; which
are illusions springing from Ignorance. Not to
know suffering, not to know the cause of suffering,
not to know the cessation of suffering, not to know
the Path which leads to the cessation of suffering —
this is Ignorance. Having followed in his mind
the succession of the twelve causes and effects, and
reached the last link of that chain, Siddhartha said
to himself: "Ignorance is the first cause which
gives rise to all the phenomena I have successively
reviewed. From it springs the world and all the
beings it contains. It is the cause of that universal
illusion in which man and all beings are miserably
lulled. By what means can this ignorance be
done away with ? Doubtless by knowledge. The
knowledge of the Four Great Truths is the true
light that can dispel ignorance and procure the
real science, whereby the coming out from the
whirlpool of existences, or from the state of illusion,
can be perfectly effected. These four truths are :
I. The miseries inseparable from existence ; II. The
cause productive of misery, which is the desire,
ever renewed, never accomplished, of pleasure, of
existence, of prosperity; III. The destruction of
that desire, or the estranging oneself from it, is
the principal thing, deserving the most serious
attention ; IV. The means of obtaining the in
dividual annihilation of that desire is supplied
solely by the Eight Paths of Holiness : right views ;
right feelings ; right words; right behaviour; right
mode of livelihood ; right exertion ; right memory ;

n. J THE EIGHT PATHS OF HOLINESS. 21
right meditation and tranquillity. This is the
Noble Eightfold Path, which opens the eyes, which
bestows understanding, which, leads to* peace of
mind, to the higher wisdom, to Nirvana." It
was then that the heart of Siddhartha acquired
an unshakeable firmness, a perfect purity or
exemption from all passions, an unalterable meek
ness, and a strong feeling of tender compassion
towards all beings. Urged by the merciful
and compassionate dispositions of his soul, Sidd
hartha said to himself : " All is misery and
affliction in this world; all beings are miserably
detained in the vortex of existences ; they float
over the whirlpool of desire and concupiscence ;
they are carried to and fro by the deceitful
cravings of a never-obtained satisfaction. They
must be taught to put an end to desire by freeing
themselves from its influence. Their minds must
be imbued with the knowledge of the Four Great
Truths. The Noble Eightfold Path that I have
discovered inevitably leads men and gods to that
most desirable end. This Path ought to be pointed
out to them, that by following it men and gods
may obtain their deliverance."
Whilst these thoughts thronged through his
mind, a little before break of day, did he attain to
the full insight of that wisdom that is unsurpassed
in heaven or earth, among gods or men. The
emancipation of his heart was established. He
became the Buddha. When this great wonder
took j)lace the blind received their sight, the lame
walked, the deaf heard, the captives were freed
from their chains and restored to liberty : and
innumerable other miracles were wrought. More
over the Buddha was transfigured and his body
shone like the light.
Seven times seven davs did the Buddha then

22 CHRISTIANITY AND BUDDHISM. [ch.
spend, enjoying the bliss of emancipation; in the
solitude of him who is full of gladness, who sees
the Truth, who is free from malice, who is self-
restrained towards ail beings that have life, who is
delivered from lust in this world, who has got
beyond desires, who has put away that pride which
comes from the thought " I am." The Blessed
One said to himself, "With great pains have I
acquired this doctrine : why should I now preach
it ? This doctrine will not be easy to understand,
to beings that are lost in lust and hatred." When
the Blessed One pondered these things, his mind
became inclined to remain in quiet and not to
preach the doctrine. Then Brahma Sahampati,
the chief of the gods, understanding, from the
power of his mind, the reflection which had
occurred in the mind of the Blessed One, ap
peared before the Blessed One, and, putting his
right knee on the ground, raised his joined hands
towards the Blessed One, and said : " Lord, may
the Blessed One preach the doctrine ! may the
Perfect One preach the doctrine ! there are beings
whose mental eyes are darkened by scarcely any
lust; but if they do not hear the doctrine they
cannot attain salvation. These will understand the
doctrine." And the Blessed One granted the
request of Brahma Sahampati.
Then the Blessed One thought, " To whom shall
I preach the doctrine first ? What if I were to
preach the doctrine first to the five monks who
continued with me in the desert?" And the
Blessed One, seeing, by the power of his divine
clear vision, that these five monks were living at
Benares, in the Deer Park, went forth to Benares.
There did he preach to them his law, and they
gave ear, and fixed their mind on the knowledge
that he imparted to them, and believed on him.

n.] THE KINGDOM OF BIGIITEOUSNESS. 23
Thus did the Blessed One set up his Kingdom of
Righteousness. And this is the doctrine of the Buddha. A man
is what he does. His works are his true self. Of
these is made his Karma. These drop from him at
death. His Karma remains. According to it. is
he re-born, in heaven, on earth, or in hell. What
wre are, is the fruit of the deeds done in our former
births. What we shall be, will be the fruit of the
deeds which we now do. Two things are immu
tably fixed : that good actions bring happiness, and
that bad actions bring misery. We pass awav
according to our works. The cause of siu and
sorrow is desire : the lust of the flesh, the lust of
the eye, and the pride of life. To root out desire
is the only way of escaping from the evil which is
of the essence of existence : of deliverance from
the yawning gulf of perpetual birth and death.
For everywhere death reigns. There is no rest in
either of the three worlds. The gods, indeed,
enjoy a period of bliss. But their happiness must
also end, for it is appointed unto them to die. To
consider this as the end of being, that there is
nothing born but must die, and therefore to aim at
escaping birth and death — this is to exercise one
self in religious truth. Scrupulously to avoid all
wicked actions, reverently to perform all virtuous
ones, ever to purify our intentions from selfish ends
— this is the doctrine of all the Buddhas. Thus
does a man conquer himself, and when he has
conquered himself, and desire is extinct, he hath
ceased from, sin, there is no further ground for re
birth. This is the peace that they have who love
the law of the Buddha : and them even the gods
envy. Forty and five years did the Buddha go up and
down the country round about the Ganges, preach-

24 CHRISTIANITY AND BUDDHISM. [ch.
ing the Noble Eightfold Path, whereby we are
delivered from the tyranny of desire and obtain
Nirvana ; receiving all that came to him, but seek
ing specially the poor, the distressed, the sinful.
Then, perceiving that the hour of his departure
had come, he spoke these words to Ananda, his
beloved disciple : " O Ananda, do not let yourself
be troubled. Do not weep. Have I not told you
that we must part from all we hold most dear
and pleasant ? No being soever, born or put to
gether, can overcome the dissolution inherent in it,
no such conditions can exist. For a long time,
Ananda, you have been very near to me by kind
ness, in act and word, and thoughtfulness. You
have always done well. Persevere, and you too
shall be quite free from this thirst of life, this chain
of ignorance." Then the Blessed One turned to
the other disciples, and said: "Behold, now,
brethren, I exhort you, saying, Decay is inherent in
all component things ! Work out your salvation
with diligence." This was the last word of the
Buddha. (n.) Copying or Coincidence ?
The parallelisms between this narrative and the
Evangelical history, cannot have escaped the most
careless reader. And they might be largely multi
plied if the life and work of the Buddha were
described in greater detail. For example, the
Buddha, like the Founder of Christianity, preaches
a Sermon on the Mount, sends forth his disciples
by two and two to teach what they had learnt
from him, and appeases the jealousy that arises
among them when one is privileged to sit on his
right hand and another on his left. The teaching

n.J COBYING OR COINCIDENCE ? 25
of both is marked by the same insistence on self-
sacrifice, on inward purity, on universal charity,
and is illustrated by like similitudes and parables.*
What is the explanation? The question attracted the
attention of Cardinal— then Dr. — Newman, and he
addressed to me the following letter concerning it :

May 2, 1882.
I have been much interested in your able and
learned article in the Nineteenth Century, but am
startled at your granting so much to Buddhism.
The following questions suggest themselves :
1. Did not Buddha live about five centuries before
the Christian era ?
2. How far are the notices of him contemporary,
and what part of his history and biography do they
cover ?
3. Are they mss. documents, or inscriptions, and
contemporary with him, or at least with a known
relation of time to him ?
4. Or are they simply traditional, from mouth to
mouth, generation after generation ?
5. Can they be satisfactorily fixed, in the details
which you and other writers give of them, to a
date prior to the spread of Nestorianism in the
East, say the middle of the fifth century, or came
before the date of the probable apostolic teaching,
e.g. St. Thomas's ?
You will understand from the above what my
difficulty is, without my asking a treatise from
you. * Thus the parables of the sower, of the house which could
not resist the storm, and of the treasure hid in a field, bear a
striking resemblance to passages in the Dhammapada.

26 CHRISTIANITY AND BUDDHISM. [ch.
In reply to these questions I said that the
Buddha certainly lived before the birth of Christ
— probably five or six centuries before it ; that
there are no contemporary notices of him ; that
the oldest Buddhist documents we have are the
three Pali Pitakas — literally Baskets — which, in
the opinion of the best authorities, received their
present form at about the beginning of the Christian
era, but were not reduced to writing for two or
three centuries afterwards. I added : "It was not
until the third century B.C. that Buddhism was
introduced into Ceylon by missionaries whom Asoka,
King of Megadha, sent to that island. Thence it
was propagated to Burma and Siam. It is from
these three countries that we derive our knowledge
of its original form. It became a tolerated religion
in China during the fourth century of our era,
suffering, however, considerable changes in its
introduction into that empire. Three or four
centuries later — the precise date, I understand,
cannot be fixed — it was received by the people
of Thibet, and transformed into the shape in which
it now exists among them. The whole subject of
the relations between Buddhism and Christianity
has been discussed by Dr. Estlin Carpenter in a
very learned article, contributed by him to the
Nineteenth Century of December, 1880. I send
it herewith. As you will see, he maintains that
' no clue has, as yet, turned up which may serve,
in any way, to connect Christianity with Buddhism,

ii.] DIFFICULT PROBLEMS. 27
and he points out, what is of course undeniable, that
1 they are different systems of thought and life.'
The conclusion he arrives at is that ' humanity
produced, independently, the two careers of Gotama
Buddha and Jesus Christ.' I should like to
show your questions, if I may— and I will presume
that I may unless you tell me not — to my friend
Mr. Rhys Davids, who, I should say, is far and
away the most competent man living to answer
them." I accordingly put Cardinal Newman's questions
before Mr. Rhys Davids, and received from him the
following letter: — May 2 1882.
The questions of your revered correspondent
raise the most important, and at the same time the
most difficult problems in the history of Buddhism.
The oldest evidence we have is contained (a) in the
Pali Pitakas, (/3) in the Asoka inscriptions, and the
Barhut and other bas-reliefs. The former (with the
exception of some supplementary portions already
sufficiently ascertained and forming a very small
proportion of the whole) date, in the unanimous
opinion of Pali scholars, within one hundred and
fifty years of the Buddha's death. And they contain
a number of older documents, some of them preserved
in their entirety, which belong to the very earliest
portion of that period of one hundred and fifty
years. These oldest documents are alone amply
sufficient to show what were the principal points
in Gotama's system of ethics and in the regulations
of his Order of Recluses.

28 CHRISTIANITY AND BUDDHISM. [ch.
The stone records are firstly as regards the
edicts of the great Buddhist Emperor Asoka,
within a few years of 250 B.C. ; and secondly as
regards the extensive series of bas-reliefs, about
fifty years later. They show what occupied the
minds of Buddhists of the third century B.C., and
confirm the older details in the Pali Scriptures.
The very numerous illustrations of the Buddhist
legend still preserved to us on these stones show
that it existed practically in its entirety at that
early date. And the date of Asoka is fixed not
only by Indian chronology, but also, by the evidence
of contemporary Greek writers.
The mss. have been handed down in Ceylon,
Burma, and Siam, and there being no Pali alpha
bet in common use in those countries, they are
written in the different alphabets in use there.
One consequence of this is that it is comparatively
easy to ascertain the right original readings. But
the books so written were not at first written at all.
They were committed to mss. in the first century
a.d. Up to that time they were handed down in
the order by members of the order whose duty it
was to learn them by heart. This is not mere
tradition. There is all the difference between
stories or sermons being handed on from one man
to another without any special importance being
attached to the form in which they were related ;
and stories or sermons the very words of which,
and of commentaries upon them, were regarded as
sacred, being learnt by heart, and handed down
word for word. And we have evidence of the
accuracy with which the early Buddhists thus
transmitted their sacred books — (a) in the fact
that they have preserved the exact words of the
oldest documents to which I have referred, even
when those words contained opinions which were

ii.] THE BUDDHIST SACBED BOOKS. 29
no longer accepted by those who transmitted them;
and (/3) in the fact that those oldest documents as
still extant contain no reference to disputes — as
important in the history of Buddhism as the Arian
controversy in the history of Christianity — which
arose about 300 B.C. It would be impossible to set
out these points in a letter. But even if we place
no reliance upon the accuracy of this verbal trans
mission, and accept therefore the Pali Scriptures as
evidence only of Buddhist belief when these Scrip
tures were actually written, that is enough to show
that there can have been no borrowing from
Nestorian or other Christian teachers. No one
supposes that the Nestorians had penetrated into
Ceylon in the year 88 B.C. As to the authenticity
of the records on stone there is no doubt, and
though the chain of reasoning in the case of the
Pali mss. will always seem weak to the lay mind,
it is one that appeals convincingly to critical
scholars. The details of this chain of evidence are
set out in the introduction to the translation of the
Vinaya Texts by Professor Oldenberg and myself,
now being published for the University of Oxford.
I am afraid the results stated without the details
will seem to be very meagre and not very certain.
But if the notes I have been able to put together
should be of any service to you, I shall be more
than compensated.
Cardinal Newman, to whom I forwarded the
foregoing letter, returned it with these remarks : — :
May 10, 1882.
Many thanks for the letter of Mr. Rhys Davids,
which 1 herewith return. I have opened so large a
question, that it is no wonder that he has not hit

30 CHRISTIANITY AND BUDDHISM. [ch.
the points which constitute my difficulty in the
matter. Dr. Carpenter says, " It is not the Fourth Gospel
only which has drawn upon itself the suspicion
of not being a native product of the Palestinian
soil." He goes on to say that the resemblance in life
and teaching between Buddha and " The Galilean
Prophet " is, at first sight, so close as to have given
rise to the crude suggestion "that the later is but
the reproduction of the earlier." He says the facts
of history do not allow of this explanation of the
coincidence, but he allows the coincidence itself
and he accounts for it by the "pious fancy of
Buddhist disciples," leaving it apparently to be
inferred that to the pious fancies of Christian
disciples was owing the other side of the parallel.
But I cannot follow him in this solution of the
difficulty. The coincidence of biographical notices
in the memoirs severally of our Lord and of
Buddha is so close and so minute, that it seems
to me plain that the record of our Lord's life,
our written Gospel, is taken from biographies of
Buddha, or the biographies of Buddha from Chris
tian sources. I am, then, naturally led to ask :
What is the trustworthiness of the account of the
life and actions of Buddha, as contained in Dr.
Carpenter's article ?
Now what is the coincidence which I think so
startling? Not the mere claim to a supernatural
sanction. A divine birth, a gift of miracles, an
heroic life, a great success, are the claims historically
of every great moral teacher and social reformer.
Nor again is there a difficulty in a close resemblance
in the accounts left us of the ethical code promul
gated by our Lord and Buddha. There is little in
the ethics of Christianity which the human mind

n.] WHAT WANTS EXPLAINING. 31
may not reach by its natural powers, and which,
here and there, in the instance of individuals, great
poets, and great philosophers, has not in fact been
anticipated. It is not this which I want explained,
but it is the series of details wrought into the life
of Buddha, so parallel to that which we find in the
Gospels, it is this which leads me to ask for the
authority on which it is reported to me, and on
first hearing to meet it with deep suspicion of
its untrustworthiness, and to ask whether it is not
posterior to Christianity and referable to Christian
teaching. For instance, I am told that Buddha came on
earth with the object of " redeeming the world " ;
that he " voluntarily descended from his high
estate " ; that his descent was the last of a series
of "incarnations" with one object from first to
last of delivering mankind " from sin and sorrow ";
that he became incarnate in a married woman ; that
he was born when his mother was journeying to her
paternal home ; that, on its taking place, the gods
in the heavens sang, " This day a son is born" to
"give joy and peace to men, to shed light in the
dark places," and to " give sight to the blind."
When the child was presented to his father, an
aged saint wept as he predicted his future greatness,
saying, "What happiness shall ensue from the birth
of this child. My time of departure is close at
hand." He had the name ofthe " Establisher";
"he grew in wisdom and stature; he taught his
teachers." The Tempter appeared and promised
him universal sovereignty; but he replied, "I
want not an earthly kingdom, depart ! " On his
attaining Buddhahood there followed miracles ; " the
blind saw, the deaf heard, the lame walked, and
the captives were restored to liberty," he himself
was "transfigured," &c, &c.

32 CHRISTIANITY AND BUDDHISM. [ch.
Now, what is the authority, what the evidence
for all this ?
Buddha came "to redeem the wrorld" ; (we must
keep to the very words ; else, there will be no diffi
culty to be solved). Then I ask, who told us this ?
The Gospels were written, say ten, or twenty,
suppose fifty or one hundred years after the events
they record, and are separate witnesses for those
events : — is the Buddhist Gospel as near the time
of Buddha as the Christian to Christ ? Who tells
us that the gods sang on Buddha's birth and
proclaimed peace to men ? Who were the witnesses
or at least the reporters of the fact of Buddha's
fight with the Tempter ? To prove the authenticity
and the date of one of our Gospels, we are plunged
into a maze of mss. of various dates and families,
of various and patristic testimonies and quotations,
and to satisfy the severity of our critics, there
must be an absolute coincidence of text and con
cordance of statement in these various mss. put
forward as evidence. If a particular passage is not
found in all discoverable mss., it is condemned.
There are mss. of St. John which omit the
account of the Angel of Bethesda, as it stands in
his fifth chapter ; accordingly the exegetical lecturer
thinks himself at liberty to disbelieve the narrative.
The termination of St. Mark is wanting in other
mss. ; in consequence, as if this omission was an
actual disproof of its authenticity, a critic expresses
his gratification that we are no longer bound by
the text, " He that believeth not," &c. And in
vain are the "Three Witnesses" found in the
Latin text of St. John's first Epistle ; it is fatal to
their reception that they are not found in the Greek.
Why are we not to ask for evidence parellel to this
before we receive the history of Buddha? Perhaps
you will answer, But he lived so long ago ; how
can you expect a contemporary life of one who

n.] THE ABSENCE OF EVIDENCE. 33
lived in the days of Darius Hystaspes ? True, but
I remark that the mere absence of evidence is not
itself evidence ; may it not rather be urged from
the parallel of Roman history, that the absence of
historical evidence is the sure forerunner and token
of myths ?
There is nothing producible, as far as has been
brought home to me, to show that the words and
deeds and history attributed to Buddha form a
whole, such as the Gospels, and existed in detail for
earlier than one thousand years after Buddha ;
nothing to show that the passages in the Buddhist
books which are now received do not belong to
Christian sources ; nothing to show that the very
best reason for thinking that they were in existence
as early as seven or eight hundred years after
Buddha is the fact of Christianity having spread
through the East by that time, as the Aristotelian
Saracens and Moors in the Middle Ages are a proof
of their influence on the Catholic Schoolmen.
There is more evidence that Christianity influenced
the Buddhist traditions than that the history of
Buddha, as now reported, existed as it now exists
before the Christian era.
I write this as an empirical view, as a case which
has to be investigated. I am quite unlearned in
the subject, but I want to know whether my
question can be satisfactorily answered. I do not
of course deny the singular greatness of Buddha ;
it is the details of his history which I am sceptical
about. Meanwhile, in order to prove that my belief
in the influence of Christianity in the East in our
first centuries is not unwarranted, I quote the
following passage from Gibbon about the Nes-
torians : —
" From the conquest of Persia, they carried their spiritual
arms to the north, the east, and the south ; and the simplicity
of the Gospel was fashioned and painted with the colours of
D

34 CHRISTIANITY AND BUDDHISM. |_ch.
the Syriac theology. In the sixth century, according to the
report of a Nestorian traveller, Christianity was successfully
preached to the Bactrians, the Huns, the Persians, the Indians,
the Persarmenians, the Medes, and the Elamites. The Barbaric
Churches, from the Gulf of Persia to the Caspian Sea, were
almost infinite ; and their recent faith was conspicuous in the
number and sanctity of their monks and martyrs. The pepper
coast of Malabar and the isles of the ocean, Socotra and Ceylon,
were peopled with an increasing multitude of Christians, and
the bishops and clergy of those sequestered regions derived
their ordination from the Catholic of Babylon. In a subse
quent age, the zeal of the Nestorians overleaped the limits
which had confined the ambition and curiosity both of the
Greeks and Persians. The missionaries of Balch and Samar-
cand pursued without fear the footsteps of the roving Tartar,
and insinuated themselves into the camps of the valleys of
Imaus and the banks of the Selinga." — Ch. 47.

Another letter from Mr. Rhys Davids closes the
correspondence. June 19, 1882.
Many thanks for allowing me to read Dr.
Newman's very interesting letter, which I return.
I cannot believe that the Buddhist traditions had
any influence at all over Christian belief. It is
much more likely that the later Buddhist writers
were influenced by Nestorian and other Christian
missionaries. But of this too there is no evidence
as yet. The resemblances between the two
accounts are often very striking at first sight,
but they are shown by the slightest examination to
rest on a basis of belief quite contradictory. Thus,
the Buddhists did not ascribe to Gotama any
divine birth in the Christian sense. Before his
descent into his mother's womb he was a deva;
that is, one of the innumerable spiritual beings who

n. J DESCRIPTIONS AND EXPRESSIONS. 3r>
were supposed to people the Tusita heavens.
When Buddhism arose the Hindoos believed in a
Great First Cause, in whom and by whom all
things exist. The Buddhists established no connec
tion between their Master and this Being.
So again of miracles. The oldest research in
the Pali Suttas do not ascribe to the Buddha any
such actions as are designated in Christian writings
by the word " miracle." In a similar way all that
exact identity of phraseology which is necessary to
support the hypothesis of a borrowing either from
one side or the other, seems to me to fade quite
away when the supposed resemblances between
Christian and Buddhist accounts are examined.
" Buddha came on earth to redeem the world."
Well, I can quite imagine a Christian writer so
describing the Buddhist belief. But, though the
description is fair enough, the expression cannot be
found, so far as I am aware, in any Pali Sutta.
The expression used in the Nalaka Sutta, by the
devas in their song of joy at the birth of the child,
comes near to it, but it is not the same. They say
" The Bodisat, the excellent pearl, the incom
parable, is born for a good and for a blessing in
the world of men," &c. And it is only to the Pali
Suttas that we can go for any evidence of Buddhist
expressions actually used (before the Christian
era) to describe events in Gotama's life. Asoka's
edicts have not a word about the life of Buddha.
The bas-reliefs at Barhut are certainly pre-Christian,
but they give pictures, not words. And the Chinese
and other accounts are all post-Christian. It is in
these Chinese books (or rather in the English
phraseology of our particular translator of them)
that the supposed Christian phrases are usually
found. I have the honour therefore to find myself
in agreement with your revered correspondent as
D 2

36 CHRISTIANITY AND BUDDHISM. [ch.ii.
to the uncertainty of any conclusions that might be
drawn from the coincidence in expression of these
later Buddhists with the much older Christian
writers. This does not, of course, at all prevent
me from welcoming the very instructive parallel *
which you have so fully drawn out between the
tendency of the Buddhist ethical system and the
" goal of modern thought" — the husk, without the
beauty and the poetry of the older conception.
We may conclude then, I think, to the untenable-
ness of the objection urged from Buddhism, against
the Claims of Christianity as a universal religion.
* The parallel to which Mr. Rhys Davids is so good as thus to
refer will be found in chapter i. of my work Ancient Religion
and Modern Thought.

CHAPTER III.
CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM.
I come now to the other great religion of the
world which contests the Claims of Christianity
wherewith we are concerned in this volume.
Islam is not, like Buddhism, a decadent and
moribund faith. It is still true to its dominant
idea that "there is no God but God, and that
Mohammed is the Prophet of God," which pene
trated the minds, and ruled the lives, and gave
victory to the swords of the earliest Moslems. Of
that idea it is still the faithful and effective preacher.
Its converts, during the last half-century, beyond
all question, vastly outnumber those of Christianity.
Nay, it has made far more proselytes from us than
we have from it. The greatness of its recent
missionary work in Africa is universally acknow
ledged. And Mr. Talboys Wheeler, a singularly
well qualified judge, tells us,* "The people of
India are drifting slowly but surely towards the
religion of Islam: few competent observers will
deny the fact." It may, indeed, be objected that
not many wise men, after the flesh, not many
* In the Preface to his History of India.

38 CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. [ch.
mighty, not many noble, are called into its fold :
that its votaries are found, chiefly, among the
lower races. We should remember, however, that
not unfrequently, in the annals of the human race,
it has been given to the foolish things of the world
to confound the wise, and to the weak things of the
world to confound the things that are mighty, and
to the base things of the world, and things which
are despised, yea, and things which are not, to
bring to nought things that are. Nor is Mr.
Pearson by any means alone in believing that for
the races which we call "lower" a great part is
destined in a by no means distant age. Certain it
is, that at a very critical moment in the fortunes
of Europe, Islam narrowly failed to wrest from
Christianity the control of Western civilisation.*
And, assuredly, there is nothing intrinsically irra
tional in the supposition that it may achieve, in the
future, the triumph which escaped it in the past.
* It may be noted that some accomplished and authoritative
persons regard that failure as matter for regret. Landor may
serve as a specimen of them. He writes : " How flourishing
was Spain under the Saracens during great part of a mil
lennium ! What pleasure and politeness, what chivalry and
poetry, what arts and sciences, in her cities ! What archi
tecture within her walls, and round about ! What bridges !
What fountains ! What irrigation ! Look at her now under
her Bourbons. Look off from her, look toward Italy. Who,
tell me, who, M. le Marquis, hath held down men unimproved,
unprogressive, motionless ? No, not motionless — nor was the
wheel of Ixion." — Conversation between Beranger and La
Roche-Jaquelin. Works, vol. vi. p. 583.

in.] A MOHAMMEDAN APOLOGIST. 39
Such a view is, of course, unfamiliar to us. But
there are fifty millions of our fellow subjects to
whom a belief in the superiority of Islam over
Christianity is as much a first principle as the
opposite belief is with us : who hold that it is the
faith of Mohammed, not the faith of Christ, which
possesses valid claims to be the universal religion
and to set up a universal society. They have
recently found an effective spokesman in a member
of their own Church. Syed Ameer Ali's elaborate
work, The Life and Teachings of Mohammed,
enables us to contemplate Christianity from without
and Islam from within. And the Syed's great
intelligence and wide culture, literary skill and
manifest sincerity, no less than his distinguished
position as a Judge of the High Court in Bengal,
well qualify him for the grave task he has
undertaken. He must have been often confronted
with the claims of the Christian religion. No doubt
some of the zealous men who are labouring for its
diffusion in India have urged him to embrace it.
In six hundred and sixty-five admirably written
pages he explains, in effect, why he has not
embraced it. He gives his reasons for the
Mohammedan faith that is in him. But his purpose
goes beyond that. He thinks that the considerations
which satisfy him of the superiority of Mohammed
over the rest of the world's religious teachers, and
of Islam over the rest of the world's religions, may
satisfy others. He expresses the hope that his

40 CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. [ch.
work " may prove of some practical value to those
Seekers of Truth in the West, whose minds have
gone forth in the quest of a positive and eclectic
Faith, suited for the noblest, and, by its disciplinary
character, also for the lowest natures." * He
judges it probable that the " creed of the Arabian
Prophet [may] receive acceptance among European
Communities." f His book is, in fact, an Apology
for Islam. I shall, in this Chapter, ask my readers
to give it the full and fair consideration which it
deserves. We live in an age when this request may be
made with good hope of success. One great
achievement of the modern mind has been almost
entirely to reconstruct historical science. With
very few exceptions, the historians of the three
centuries immediately preceding the French Revo
lution were little more than annalists. That any
moral significance underlay the tale of sound and
fury which they related, that the spiritual and
intellectual movements running through the ages
are the most important elements in the career of
humanity, that the phenomena of history are not
isolated and fortuitous, but are connected, are co
ordinate, and are the expression of laws, they
never so much as dreamed. Here, as in so many
other spheres of thought, Voltaire is the herald of
the modern spirit. His erudition was incon
siderable. His philosophy was not very profound.
* Preface, p. viii. f Ibid.

in.] THE REWRITING OF HISTORY. 41
But in originality of ideas, in knowledge of human
life, in keenness of vision, and in clearness of
conception, he stands alone among his contem
poraries. How admirable the manner in which he
blends with his narrative of important events the
most luminous sketches of the literary charac
teristics of an age, of the state of arts and sciences,
of the material elements of civilization ! How
penetrating his apprehension of the springs of
political action, of the real causes of great revolu
tions ! How acute his examination of the received
fables, the accredited traditions with which passion
and credulity had encumbered the story of nations
and the exploits of heroes ! In all this, he was the
precursor of the more patient and philosophic, if
less brilliant intellects, whose searching criticism of
long-received narratives, whose patient investiga
tions of hidden causes, whose laborious employment
of analysis, comparison, deduction, have rewritten
the history of well-nigh every nation under heaven.
Islam is certainly one of the subjects in which
the employment of this "large discourse looking
before and after," has been singularly success
ful. Fifty years ago the stereotyped view of
that great religion, as we find it, for example, in
the quaint pages of Ockley, was generally received.
Here and there, the more sagacious account of it
given in Gibbon's masterly chapters found ac
ceptance. But its real sources, its true character,
its actual place in the evolution of religious thought,

42 CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. [ch.
were as little understood as were the earliest years
of Rome before Niebuhr wrote ; as was the making
of the English nation in the days of Hume. The
works of Sprenger and Weil, of Dozy and Kremer,
of Deutsch and Palmer, of Muir and Bosworth
Smith, to mention only a few out of many who
have laboured abundantly in this field, have let in a
flood of light upon these subjects. Thanks to them,
our information concerning the life and deeds of the
Arabian Prophet, and the sources of his religion, is
as complete and exact as is our information regard
ing the authors and the antecedents of the Protestant
Reformation. Of course in their estimates of the last
born of the world's great faiths, and its originator,
there is considerable diversity. But certain it is
that a general result of their labours has been
largely to modify in the common mind the adverse
judgment of him and it, once unquestioningly
received. Probably Mr. Freeman represents, with
substantial accuracy, the view most widely current
among intelligent persons in the Western world
when he writes, "the camel-driver of Mecca, the
conqueror of Medina, call him Prophet, Reformer,
or impostor as we will, soars far above every other
man in the history of the East ; his religion is the
truest of false religious systems." * This view, of
course, falls very far short of that which Syed
Ameer Ali expounds. Still those who hold it may
be said to have gone one mile in his direction. He
* The History and Conquests of the Saracens, p. 6.

in. J THE CAREER OF MOHAMMED. 43
does not despair of inducing them to go twain.
And now let us turn to his pages.

The learned Judge has divided his work into two
parts. The first ten chapters deal with the life of
Mohammed. The remaining nine with the tenets
of Islam. The division is not, indeed, strictly
preserved. The second part of the book contains
a vindication of the Arabian Prophet from certain
charges of sexual licence commonly brought against
him. The first presents various fragments of his
teaching. I do not complain of this. In the case
of the founder of a religion, as I shall have occasion
hereafter to insist more at large, it is impossible,
rigidly to separate the man from his doctrine.
In estimating the Syed's book I shall follow, as
much as possible, his method. I shall consider,
first, his apology for Mohammed's life; and,
secondly, his claim for Mohammed's religion.
The career of Mohammed falls naturally into
three divisions. First, there is his life to his
fortieth year — the year 610 of our era — when he
entered upon his public ministry. Next there are
the twelve years, ending with 622, in which he
devoted himself to the peaceful propagation of his
doctrine. The close of this period is marked by
the Hijra or flight to Medina; a turning-point in
his existence, from which the Mohammedan Calendar
appropriately dates. And lastly there are the ten

44 CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. [ch.
years in which we behold him as chief, warrior,
supreme magistrate and law-giver, until his strange
eventful history ends in 632. With regard to the
first of these stages of Mohammed's existence, there
is little difference of opinion among his biographers.
It is worth while, however, as indicative of Syed
Ameer Ali's point of view, to note his attitude in
respect of the signs and wonders by which, according
to the early historians of Islam, the advent of its
founder was accompanied : —
" His birth, they say, was attended with signs and portents
from which the nations of the earth could know that the
Deliverer had appeared. The rationalistic historian smiles ;
the religious controversialist, who, upon a priori grounds,
accepts without comment the accounts of the wise men follow
ing the star, scoffs at these marvels. To the critical student,
whose heart is not devoid of sympathy with earlier modes of
thought, and who is not biassed with preconceived notions, "the
portents and signs " which the Islamist says attended the birth
of his Prophet are facts deserving of historical analysis. We
moderns perceive in the ordinary incidents of the lives of
nations and individuals the current of an irresistible law.
What wonder then that, thirteen hundred years ago, they
perceived in the fall of a nation's memorial the finger of God,
pointing to the inevitable destiny which was to overtake it
in its iniquity ? " *
What were the religious convictions and practices
among which Mohammed grew up to manhood is a
question by no means easy to answer with precision.
The substratum, so to speak, of the old religion of
Arabia, was the cult of a Supreme Deity (Allah
taala). But there were many lesser gods to whom
* P. 70.

in.] IN THE HOUSE OF ABU TALIB. 45
homage was also paid, and whose worship was
accompanied by a multitnde of superstitions, which
found expression in coarse and impure idolatry. A
movement, however, was in progress, aiming at a
religious reformation, however confusedly and
uncertainly. In the searchings after a purer
faith made by men like Zaid and Waraka,
Obaidullah and Osman, we may trace the work
ings of " The Spirit of the years to come,
Yearning to mix himself with Life."
No doubt Mohammed fell under these influences,
in his youth and early manhood, of which I shall
here present our author's account, taking leave,
however, somewhat to abridge it : —
" In the house of Abu Talib, Mohammed passed his early
life. We can almost see the lad, with his deep wistful eyes,
earnest and thoughtful, looking as it were into futurity,
moving about in the humble unpretentious household of his
uncle, or going often into the desert to look upon the beauteous
face of nature ; sweet and gentle of disposition, painfully
sensitive to human suffering, this pure-hearted child of the
desert was the beloved of his small circle, and there ever
existed the warmest attachment between uncle and nephew.
' The angels of God had opened his heart and filled it with
light.' .... Deeply versed in the legendary lore of his
nation, education, in the modern sense of the term, he had
none. With all his affection for his people, in his ways and
mode of thought he seemed far removed from them, isolated in
the midst of a chaotic society with his eyes fixed intently on
the moving panorama of an effete and depraved age. The
lawlessness rife among the Meccans, the sudden outbursts of
causeless and sanguinary quarrels among the tribes frequenting

46 CHBISTIANITY AND ISLAM. [ch.
the fairs of Okadh, the immorality and scepticism of the
Koreish, naturally caused feelings of intense horror and
disgust in the mind of the sensitive youth. In the twenty-
fifth year of his age, Mohammed travelled once more * into
Syria, as the factor or steward of a noble Koreishite lady
named Khadija, a kinswoman of his. The prudence with
which he discharged his duties made a deep impression on
Khadija, which gradually deepened into attachment. A
marriage which proved a singularly happy one was soon after
arranged between Mohammed and his noble kinswoman, and
was solemnised amid universal rejoicings. In spite of the
disparity of age between Mohammed and his wife, who was
much the senior of her husband, there always existed the
tenderest devotion on both sides. This marriage ' brought him
that repose and exemption from daily toil which he needed in
order to prepare his mind for his great work. But beyond
that, it gave him a loving woman's heart, that was the first to
believe in his mission, that was ever ready to console him in
his despair, and to keep alive within him the thin flickering
flame of hope when no man believed in him — not even himself
— and the world was black before his eyes.' Khadija is a
notable figure — an exemplar among the women of Islam. The
calumny which is levelled at Mohammed's system, that it has
degraded the female sex, is sufficiently refuted by the high
position which his wife and youngest daughter, ' our Lady of
Light,' occupy in the estimation of the Islamist."
This is not at all bad rhetoric, and I am far
from saying that it may not be substantially true.
I doubt, indeed, whether the learned Judge would,
upon reflection, maintain the thesis which has
escaped him in the fervour of composition, that the
charge of degrading the female sex urged against
Islam is " sufficiently refuted " by the reverence of
* Abu Talib carried on a considerable trade with Syria and
Yemen, and Mohammed had previously accompanied him on
one of his mercantile journeys thither.

in.] AL-AMIN. 47
pious Moslems for Khadija and Fatima. It wants
a great deal more refutation than that. But what
cannot be doubted is the blameless life and high
character of Mohammed during this first period of
his career. Sir William Muir is entirely warranted
when he tells us " all authorities agree in ascribing
to the youth of Mohammed a correctness of deport
ment and a purity of manners rare among the
people of Mecca." * Nor does Syed Ameer Ali
exaggerate in affirming, more floridly, that during
those fifteen years of his married life which
preceded his assumption of the prophetic office,
" his gentle, sweet disposition, his austerity of
conduct, the severe purity of his life, his scrupulous
refinement, his ever-ready helpfulness towards the
poor and the weak, his noble sense of honour, his
unflinching fidelity, his stern sense of duty, had
won him, among his compatriots, the high and
enviable designation of al-Amm, the Trusty." j1
Of the details of his outward life during this time,
we know nothing except that, upon a few occasions,
he intervened in the public affairs of his city as a
" vir pietate gravis," to compose differences and
repress lawlessness, with the authority attaching to
unsullied reputation and recognised wisdom. Of
the workings of his mind no account whatever
exists, and the conjectures in which various writers
have indulged are of small value. No doubt in
his two journe}7s into Syria he must have seen
* Life of Mahomet, vol. ii. p. 14. t P- 78.

48 CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. [ch.
something of the degenerate Christianity which
existed there, described, not too strongly, by the
Syed, as "a scene of unutterable moral and social
desolation ; rival creeds and sects tearing each
other to pieces ; wrangling over the body of the
God they pretended to worship." * But to what
extent he was really acquainted with the creed and
cult of the Catholic Church, or with the doctrines
and practices of Judaism, "we know not, and no
search will make us know." Certain, however, it
is, that, from the first, religious questions vividly
interested him ; that his temperament was essen
tially meditative and introspective, and that he
was by no means exempt from that melancholy
which seems ever to accompany deep passion and
high thought. His was one of those minds,
stronger in the intuitive than in the ratiocinative
faculty, to which are given from time to time
sudden and brief openings of truth that may
properly be called mystical.
Such was Mohammed when in the fortieth year
of his life the call came to him with which the
second period of his career opens. But concerning
this memorable event let us hear Syed Ameer
Ali:— " Often in the dark and benighted pathways of concrete
existence, the soul of every great man has been conscious of
* P. 79.

in.] UCRY IN THE NAME OF THE LORD." 49
unrealised yet not unseen influences, which have led to some of
the happiest achievements of humanity. From Samuel, that
ancient seer, wild and awful as he stands, deep in the misty
horizon of the past, to Jesus in the wilderness, pondering over
the darksome fate of his people and the magnitude of his work,
listening to the sweet accents of the God of Truth ; from Jesus
to Mohammed in the solitude of his mountain retreat, there is
no break in the action of these influences." " For years after
his marriage it had been [Mohammed's] habit to betake
himself, sometimes with his family, at other times alone, for
prayer and meditation to a cave on the Mount Hira, ' a huge
barren rock, torn by cliff and hollow ravine, standing out
solitary in the full white glare of the desert sun, shadowless,
flowerless, without well or rill.' Here, in this cave, he often
remained whole nights, plunged in profoundest thought, deep
in communion with the unseen yet all-pervading God of the
Universe. Slowly the heaven and the earth fill with pre
destined vision and command. ... The mental visions and the
apparition of angels at these moments were the bright though
gradual dawnings of those truths with which he was to quicken
the world into life. . . . Whilst lying self-absorbed, he is called
by a mighty Voice, surging like the waves of the ocean, to cry.
Twice the Voice called, and twice he struggled and waived its
call. But a fearful weight was laid upon him, and an answer
was wrung out of his heart. ' Cry ! ' called the Voice for the
third time. And he said, ' What shall I cry ? ' Came the
answer, ' Cry in the name of thy Lord.' When the Voice had
ceased to speak, telling him how from the minutest beginnings
man had been called into existence, and lifted up by under
standing and knowledge of the Lord, who is most beneficent,
and who by the pen had revealed that which men did not know,
Mohammed woke from his trance, and felt as if the words spoken
to his soul had been written in his heart. A great trembling
came upon him, and he hastened home . . . exhausted in mind
and body, to the bosom of his devoted wife, praying only to be
covered from the overwhelming Presence." *
It was not without many an inward struggle that
* Pp. 80-86.
E

50 CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. [ch.
Mohammed attained to certitude of his prophetic
mission. His wife Khadija was the first to believe
him — " she made his burden lighter to him," the
tradition finally says. The next convert was his
cousin Ali, one of the noblest characters in the
history of Islam. "0 father," the young man said,
when Abu. Talib asked him concerning this new
religion, " I believe in God and His Prophet."
" Well," replied the venerable patriarch, " thou art
free to cleave to Mohammed ; he will not lead thee
to aught but what is good." Zaid, the Prophet's
enfranchised slave, was the next convert ; and he
was followed by Abu Bakr, a wealthy merchant of
great probity. Slowly the little band increased, as
one after another of the Meccans believed the word
which Mohammed spoke, and turned away from
idols. Persecution arose. The Prophet and his
disciples were insulted and calumniated : they were
pelted with dirt when engaged in their devotions :
thorns were scattered in the places whither they
were wont to resort. Gradually, as in spite of
these hindrances, the new Church grew, the perse
cution assumed a severer character, and the first
martyrs of Islam sealed their faith with their blood.
At last, in the fifth year of the Prophet's ministry,
one hundred and one of his disciples, eighty-three
men and eighteen women, fled their country and
sought refuge in the Christian kingdom of Abyssinia.
The Koreish despatched an embassy, to demand
the surrender of the fugitives. The King sent for

in. J " I WOULD NOT DESIST." 51
them, and questioned them concerning the new
religion. And Jaffar, the brother of Ali, made
answer : —
" 0 King, we were plunged in the depth of ignorance and
barbarism ; we adored idols ; we lived in unchastity ; we ate
dead bodies, and we spoke abominations, we disregarded every
feeling of humanity, and the duties of hospitality and neigh
bourhood; we knew no law but that of the strong; when God
raised up to us a man of whose birth, truthfulness, honesty and
purity we were aware. And he called us to the unity of God,
and taught us not to associate anything with Him ; he forbade
us the worship of idols, and enjoinod us to speak the truth, to
be faithful to our trusts, to be merciful and to regard the rights
of our neighbours ; he forbade us to speak evil of women, or to
eat the substance of orphans ; he ordered us to fly vices and to
abstain from evil, to offer prayers, to render alms and to
observe the fast. We have believed in him ; we hare accepted
his teachings and his injunctions to worship God and not to
associate anything with Him. For this reason our people have
risen against us, have persecuted us in order to make us forego
the worship of God, and to return to the worship of idols and
stones and other abominations. They have tortured us and
injured us, until finding no safety among them, we have come
to thy country ; and we hope that thou wilt protect us." *
The King did protect them . But the unsuccessful
issue of the embassy served to increase the madness
of the people against Mohammed; and his uncle
Abu Talib urged him to give up his task. He
made answer, " 0, my uncle, if they placed the sun
on my right hand, and the moon on my left, to
force me to renounce my work, verily I would not
desist therefrom, until God made manifest His
cause, or I perished in the attempt." His
* P. 100.
E 2

52 CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. [ch.
"persistive constancy" impressed many men of
energy, talent, and worth ; and in spite of violent
opposition from the rulers of the people, Islam grew
and multiplied. In 619 of our era — "the year of
mourning," Moslems call it — Khadija was taken
from the Prophet's side ; and in his uncle Abu Talib
he lost not indeed a disciple— the old man never
gave his adhesion to the new faith — but a protector
who had often effectually shielded him from
outrage. The great majority of the people of
Mecca still turned a deaf ear to his message. But
among the pilgrims who came from Medina some
believed on him, and spread his doctrine in that
city. It is of this period in the Prophet's career
that Sir William Muir writes, " Mahomet, thus
holding his people at bay, waiting in the still
expectation of victory, to outward appearance
defenceless, and with his little band, as it were, in
the lion's mouth, yet trusting in His Almighty
power, whose messenger he believed himself to be,
presents a spectacle of sublimity paralleled only in
the sacred records of such scenes as that of the
Prophet of Israel, when he complained to his
Master : ' I, even I only, am left.' " * The new
faith found, however, many adherents in Medina,
and thither when the signs multiplied that a final
effort would be made to crush it out in Mecca, the
Prophet sent his disciples, remaining himself at his
post, with Ali and Abu Bakr. It was then that a
* Life of Mahomet, vol. ii. p. 228.

in.] PLAIN LIVING AND HIGH THINKING. 53
plot for his assassination was laid. But Mohammed
and his two companions escaped, and after many
perilous adventures entered Medinn in safety on the
2nd of July, 622.

With the Hijra begins that last act in Mohammed's
life which ends with his death in 632. The net
result of his work during that decade was to cleanse
Arabia from foul idolatry and gross immorality,
and to diffuse throughout it a Monotheistic religion
and a somewhat severe ethical code ; in a word, to
work the moral and spiritual regeneration of his
country. So much is certain. Equally certain is
it, that during this time of triumph — and conse
quently of trial — the same "plain living and high
thinking " marked the days of the Prophet. His
mode of life, his dress, and his furniture retained to
the very last a character of patriarchal simplicity.
Many a time, Abu Huraira reports, he had to go
without a meal. Dates and water frequently
formed his only nourishment. Often, for months
together, no fire could be lighted in his house, from
scantiness of means. " God," says the Moslem
historian, " had indeed put before him the key to
the treasures of the world, but he refused it."
This witness is true. Still, it is the last act of the
Prophet's life which presents the greatest difficulties
to his apologist. Few candid critics, few intelligent
men whose judgment is not fatally biassed by

54 CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. [ch.
religious, or — what is in the present day commoner —
irreligious prejudice, will deny his sincerity and
goodness up to the date of the Hijra, or will with
hold from him their respect and admiration as they
behold him — " thro' all this tract of years
Wearing the white flower of a blameless life,"
and devoting himself, with unwavering singleness
of purpose, to the work of religious and moral
reformation concerning which his disciples gave
such striking testimony to the Abyssinian king.
" As yet," writes Mr. Freeman, "nothing could be
alleged against his life. A thoroughly good and.
righteous man according to his light," he, " in his
own person fulfilled the duties which he taught. . . .
[But now], gradually he appears in a new character.
The persecuted apostle is transformed into the
triumphant warrior. . . . He who had once asked
for mere toleration for himself, now applauded, as
heaven sent, a judgment which condemned seven
hundred captives to the slaughter. He who in his
youth had lived as the faithful spouse of the aged
Khadijah, now, in his old age, multiplies wives to
himself, and brings forth divine revelations to
justify in himself the passions which he condemned
in others. . . . [In this] period of his career it is
impossible not to recognize a deterioration. . . .
With his first appeal to the sword there seems to
have come upon him a general unscrupulousness as

hi.] THE INDICTMENT OF MOHAMMED. 55
to the means by which his ends were compassed. . . .
That he fell off in many respects is clear. He may
have fallen off even so far as to put forth as divine
revelations, mere excuses for his own frailty or
devices to obtain his ends. Yet I would not
willingly believe this. . . . His moral sense was
evidently obscured ; but I do not believe that at any
moment he was the conscious deluder of others." *
Such is the indictment, very temperately and
fairly stated, which Syed Ameer Ali has to meet.
We will see presently how he answers it. But I
should first observe that to two of its counts no
defence seems to be really required. Mr. Freeman
himself allows, — "Under his circumstances, it is
really no very great ground for condemnation that
Mohammed did appeal to the sword. He did no
more than follow the precedents of his own and
every surrounding nation." And Carlyle has
pointed out with undeniable truth, "We do not
find that the Christian religion either always
discarded the sword — when once it had got one."
Toleration is an essentially modern notion. To
expect it in the time of Mohammed is an ana
chronism. Again, the more closely and carefully
Mohammed's career is scrutinised, the clearer is it,
in my judgment, that the accusation of imposture
cannot, in any degree, be sustained against him ;
that it must be rejected, even more decidedly and
completely than Mr. Freeman rejects it. The end
* The History arid Conquests of the Saracens, pp. 43-59,

56 CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. [ch.
is the trial. And there are few things in religious
history nobler than the picture presented to us of
the last days of the Prophet; conscious that the
time of his departure was at hand ; that he must
soon undergo " ce terrible tete-a-t^te avec Dieu,"
which he well knew awaited him. It was in the
prevision of his approaching dissolution that he
made that last pilgrimage to Mecca, when, to the
multitudes assembled for the sacred rites, he
delivered, from the top " of Jabal-ul- Arafat, that
remarkable discourse, which is to Moslems what the
Sermon on the Mount is to Christians. After
bidding them give good heed to his words, "for I
know not whether another year will be vouchsafed
to me, after this year, to find myself among you,"
he proceeded to remind them of the great religious
and ethical duties which he had taught. And
when he finished his exhortation with the appeal to
Heaven, " O Lord, I have delivered my message
and accomplished my work," all the people cried
out, " Yea, verily, thou hast." And then the
Prophet answered, " 0 Lord, I beseech thee, bear
thou witness to it." This was on the 7th of March,
632. At the end of May he fell into the sickness
which was to prove fatal to him. On one sleepless
night, in the course of his malady, he arose and
went to the cemetery of El Bakir, where many of
his friends were resting, and prayed and wept by
their tombs, invoking God's blessing for his " com
panions sleeping in peace " whom he was soon to

in.] THE HYPOTHESIS OF IMPOSTURE. 57
rejoin. Until the third day before his death he
attended the public offices of religion. And upon
the last occasion of his appearing in the mosque,
when the "usual praises and hymns to God" were
ended, he addressed the congregation, thus : " Mos
lems, if I have wronged any one, I am here to
answer it ; if I owe aught to any man, all I may
happen to possess belongs to you." " Yes," replied
a voice from the crowd, "thou owest me three
dirhems of silver which I gave to a poor man,
at thy request." They were immediately paid
back with the words, "Better to blush in this
world than in the next." After this his strength
rapidly failed, until the end came. Broken words
of prayer escaped from him in his last agony ;
"Eternity of Paradise:" "Pardon:" "Yes; I
come : " " The blessed companionship on high."
"Truth sits upon the lips of dying men."
Assuredly, we may utterly reject, for good and all,
the old hypothesis of imposture in the case of
Mohammed. With regard to the documents where
by it is commonly supported, the chapters in the
Qu'ran which he is supposed to have produced in
order to justify the incidents in his career deemed
most blameworthy, we will presently hear Syed
Ameer Ali. Here I may remark that even sup
posing the view of them commonly accepted among
the Prophet's Western critics well founded, he
would but illustrate naively' — with the naivete of
good faith — a curious but undeniable tendency of

58 CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. [ch.
human nature, manifested as clearly by many
sincerely religious men before him ; for example,
by Cromwell. Amiel has justly observed, ' On fait
toujours Dieu complice, afin de legaliser par la ses
propres iniquites. Les Te Deums sont le bapteme
de tous les carnages reussis, et les clergds ont eu
des benedictions pour tous les scandales victorieux.
Cela s'applique de peuple a peuple et d'homme a
homnie." And now let us turn to the Syed, and consider how
he answers the charges of sensuality and cruelty
to which Mohammed, in this last portion of his
career, seems justly liable in the judgment of
Mr. Freeman, whom I have selected as a type of
the Arabian Prophet's fairest and most competent
critics. The worst instance of Mohammed's sensuality,
Mr. Freeman appears to consider, is afforded in the
matter of Zainab, the wife of his freedman Zaid.
And almost from Mohammed's own days, this inci
dent has been much used against him by his Christian
opponents. Thus, we find St. John Damascene,
writing about the end of the first Mohammedan
century: " Zeid had a handsome wife. Mamed
fell in love with her. As they sat together, Mamed
said, ' God has charged me to take thy wife.'
Zeid answered, ' Thou art the apostle ; do as God
told thee.' Or to go further back, he said, ' God
charged me that thou divorce thy wife.' Zeid
divorced her. After some days Mamed said, ' God

in.] ZAINAB. 59
also charged me to take her.' So he took her and
made her an adulteress. And then he enacted that
every one who will, may divorce his wife, and
after the divorce, if she return to him, another
must marry her first." * And Sprenger, who indeed
is not exactly a Christian, writing in our own days,
gives much the same account of the matter,
dismissing the alleged Qu'ranic revelation as the
production of pious scoundrel dom. f The following
is the Syed's version of the incident : —
" Mohammed had married his devoted friend and freedman,
Zaid, to a high-born lady of the name of Zainab, descended
from two of the noblest families of Arabia. Proud of her
birth, and perhaps also of her beauty, her marriage with a
freedman rankled in her breast. Mutual aversion at last
culminated in disgust. Probably this disgust on the husband's
part was enhanced, by the frequent repetition, in a manner
which women only know how to adopt, of a few words which
had once fallen from the lips of Mohammed. He had occasion
to visit the house of Zaid, and upon seeing Zainab's unveiled
face had exclaimed, as a Moslem would say, at the present day
when admiring a beautiful picture or statue, ' Praise be to
God, the ruler of hearts ! ' These words, uttered in natural
admiration, were often repeated by Zainab to her husband, to
show how even the Prophet praised her beauty, and naturally
added to his displeasure. At last he came to the decision not
to live any longer with her, and with this determination he
went to the Prophet and expressed his intention of being
divorced, ' Why,' demanded Mohammed : ' hast thou found
any fault in her ? ' ' No,' replied Zaid, ' but I can no longer
* Opera, vol. i. p. 114.
f " Der Stil des Mohammed unterscheidet sich nicht von
dem anderer frommelnder Schurken : Gott im Munde, die
Welt im Herzen." (Vol. i. p. 404.)

60 CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. [ch.
live with her.' The Prophet then peremptorily said, ' Go
and guard her life ; treat her well and fear God, for God has
said, "Take care of your wives and fear the Lord." ' But Zaid
was not moved from his purpose, and in spite of the command
of the Prophet he divorced Zainab. Mohammed was grieved
at the conduct of Zaid, more especially as it was he who had
arranged the marriage of the two uncongenial spirits. After
Zainab had succeeded in obtaining a divorce from Zaid, she
commenced importuning Mohammed to marry her, and was not
satisfied until she had won for herself the honour of being one
of the wives of the Prophet." " This marriage created a
sensation among the idolaters, who, whilst marrying their
step-mothers and mothers-in-law, looked upon the marriage of
the divorced wife of an adopted son (as Zaid at one time was
regarded by Mohammed) by the adoptive father as culpable
To disabuse the people of the notion that adoption creates any
such tie as real consanguinity, some verses of Chapter XXXIII.
were delivered. . . . One of the greatest tests of the
Prophet's purity, is that Zaid never swerved from his devotion
to his master."
It must be owned that the story as told by the
Syed Ameer Ali — who founds himself upon the
considerable authority of Tobari — has a much
better look than as told by St. John Damascene.
" II n'y a rien qui s'arrange aussi facilement
comme les faits." The Seyd's arrangement . of
these facts is certainly more probable than the
Saint's. Next, as to the Coptic Mary, one of the two
damsels sent, together with a white mule, by
Mackondas, the Roman Governor of Egypt, as a
present to the Prophet, in whose eyes her curly
* P. 335,

in.] MARY THE COPT. 61
hair and fair features found favour. The story, as
told by Western writers — the most amusing and
least decorous version of it may be read in Gibbon
— is that Hafsa, one of Mohammed's wives, and
the termagant of his household, entering unex
pectedly one day into her chamber, surprised him
there in the embraces of the young Egyptian, and
gave vent to her indignation in bitter reproaches :
whereupon the Prophet engaged to renounce for
the future the possession of Mary, and his outraged
spouse promised forgiveness and secrecy, which
promise she failed to keep ; whence a domestic
squabble of much bitterness, only to be appeased
by a special revelation given in Chapter sixty-six of
the Qu'ran : " O Prophet, why boldest thou that to
be prohibited which God hath made lawful, seeking
to please thy wives ? " The Syed tells us that " the
story is absolutely false and malicious, and is repu
diated by all respectable commentators on the
Qu'ran." The verse, he adds, which has been
supposed to refer to it, refers, in truth, to a wholly
different circumstance. Mohammed in his boyhood,
when he tended the flocks of his uncle, had acquired a
fondness for honey, which was often supplied to him
by Zainab. Hafsa and Ayesha set to work to make
him give up honey, and they succeeded in inducing
him to vow that he would never touch it. But after
he had made the vow, there came to him the thought
that he was making something unlawful, in which
there was nothing unlawful, simply to please his

62 CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. [ch.
wives. His conscience smote him as to his weak
ness, and then came the verse which I have cited.
In support of this view the Syed quotes the com
mentator, Zamakhshari.* One feels inclined to say
with the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet, " 0, what
learning is ! " learning, which can dissolve the
Coptic Mary into honey. To which may be added
the judicious reflection of M. Renan : "Quel pro-
phete tiendrait contre la critique, si la critique le
poursuivait, comme le notre, jusque dans son
alcove ? " t But whatever it may be that the
Qu'ranic verse refers to, certain it is that this
damsel bore Mohammed a son, Ibrahim, by whose
death his hope of male posterity was finally extin
guished. As certain is it that Mohammed considerably
exceeded the number of wives and concubines
allowed to the faithful by the Qu'ran. Some
dozen ladies— the Syed confesses to eleven — had
the honour of calling him lord. " In his private
conduct," writes Gibbon, " Mahomet indulged the
appetites of a man and abused the claims of a
prophet." The Syed has little difficulty in re
futing this too sweeping rhetoric. The majority
* P. 334. Zamakhshari, an illustrious Doctor of Islam, was
born in the year 4G7 of the Hijra, and died in the year 538.
His Keschaf is regarded as the most authoritative of all the
commentaries on the Qu'ran.
t Etudes d'Histoire Religieuse, p. 268.

in.] MOHAMMED'S MABBIAGES. 63
of the Prophet's wives were helpless or widowed
women, well stricken in years.* And
"by taking them into the bosom of his family, Mohammed
provided for them in the only way which the circumstances of
the age and people rendered possible." " Unlimited plurality of
wives was the custom which he found in his country." " All his
marriages were contracted before the revelation came restrict
ing polygamy : and with that came the other which took away
from him all privileges. Whilst his followers were free (sub
ject to the conditions imposed by the law) to marry to the
limit of four, and by the use of the power of divorce, which, in
spite of the Prophet's denunciations, they still exercised, could
enter into fresh alliances, he could neither put away any of his
wives, whose support he had undertaken, nor could he marry
any other. Was this the assumption of a privilege ? Or was
it not a humane provision for those already allied to him — and
to himself a revelation of perfect self-abnegation in his prophe
tic task ? " t
If Syed Ameer Ali is as accomplished a Judge as
he here proves himself an advocate, the High
Court in Bengal is to be congratulated. He has
certainly made out a very good case for his
Prophet in this matter.
Let us now pass to the charge of cruelty urged
against the Arabian Prophet. There is overwhelm
ing evidence that from first to last his private life
* Mr. Freeman has certainly made a slip in talking of
Mohammed's " seraglio of youthful beauties." All his wives.
except two, or it may be three, were ladies " of a certain age '' ;
and he had no seraglio at all.
f Pp. 338-343.

64 CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. [ch.
was marked, in a singular degree, by benevolence
and benignity, which extended even to the lower
animals ; nay, which extended even to his enemies.*
This is unquestionable. Still many of his Western
critics, most favourable in their general estimate of
him, find it difficult to justify certain severities in
the last period of his career. The chief of these is
the execution of some hundreds of the Banu-
Kuraizha. This Jewish tribe, after swearing
alliance with Islam, had, at a critical moment,
proved faithless to their bond. They were besieged
and surrendered, merely stipulating that their fate
should be left to the discretion of Saad, the Moslem
General. Saad decided that the fighting-men
should be put to the sword, and that the women
and children should become the slaves of the
victors. Mohammed approved of the decision,
and it was executed. Even Mr. Lane Poole
accounts it "a harsh, bloody sentence, worthy of
the Episcopal generals of the army against the
Albigenses :" even Mr. Bosworth Smith calls it
"an act of cold-blooded and intense atrocity:"
while Sir William Muir judges that it "leaves
a dark stain of infamy upon the character of
Mohammed." The Syed admitting that " the
sentence passed upon the Banu-Kuraizha was,
from our point of view, severe," pleads that " it
was in perfect consonance with the laws of war as
* See some admirable pages in Syed Ameer Ali's book (pp.
219-24).

in.] THE BANU-KURAlZHA. 6/5
then understood by all the nations of the world " ;
that the victims " had themselves chosen Saad as
the sole arbiter and judge of their fate " ; that if
" they had succeeded, they would have massacred
their enemies without compunction " ; and that as
"people judge of the massacres of King David
according to the lights of his time," so " the
defensive wars of the early Moslems should be
judged of from, the same stand-point." Moreover,
he cites, not however as representing his own
opinion, a passage from a well-known sermon of
Dr. Arnold, merely substituting " Arab " for
" Israelite." " It is better that the wicked should
be destroyed a hundred times over than that they
should tempt those who are as yet innocent to join
their company. Let us but think, what might have
been our own fate, and the fate of every nation
under heaven, at this hour, had the sword of the
Arab done its work more sparingly. The Arab's
sword, in its bloodiest executions, wrought a work
of mercy for all the countries of the earth, to the
very end of the world." * Which, it must be
owned, is very neat.
There is yet another grave allegation of cruelty
against Mohammed as to which it will be well
briefly to hear his apologist. It is that about the
year 627 of the Christian era, what have been
called certain "assassinations" were deliberately
* P. 172. v

60 CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. [ch.
planned by him, and their perpetrators were
blessed and rewarded. The Syed denies the pro
priety of the term " assassinations." The persons
killed, he maintains, were traitors upon whom
sentence of outlawry had been passed. He points
out that there existed then no police court, no
judicial tribunal, nor even a court-martial to take
cognizance of individual crimes — which is no
doubt true ; that in the absence of a state execu
tioner, any individual might become the executioner
of the law ; and that the maintenance of peace and
order within the city dej)ended upon the prompt
execution of the sentence passed upon the culprits
before they could rally their clansmen round them.
He adds, " our Christian historians forget that even
the laws of Christian England alloAV any person to
pursue and kill an outlaw." * The learned Judge
is doubtless a great authority on Mohammedan
jurisprudence, for the elucidation of which he has
written several much-esteemed text-books. His
acquaintance with the laws of England is probably
less exact. At all events, he is in error here.
True it is that un outlawry in treason or felony has
been held to amount to a conviction and attainder
of the offence charged in the indictment, as much
as if the offender had been found guilty by his
country. True also is it that anciently an outlawed
felon " was said to have caput lupinum, and might
* P. 162.

in.] THE MAN AND THE PROPHET. 67
be knocked on the head like a wolf, by any one
that might chance to meet him. Yet now, to avoid
such inhumanity, it is holden that no man is en
titled to kill him wantonly or wilfully, but in doing
so is guilty of murder, unless it happens in the
endeavour to apprehend him." *
I make no apology for lingering so long over
these considerations. Even the question of the
haughty beauty Zainab, or of the too fascinating
Mary the Copt, cannot be dismissed with Hallam's
dictum that "prurient curiosity about obsolete
scandal is unworthy of the dignity of history."
With the dictum itself I entirely agree. I have no
sympathy whatever with a class of writers who
make it their business to rake up the personal
faults, defects, and sins of their political or theo
logical opponents ; who do not scruple to let their
pen " rage like a fire among the noblest names,"
and who from the private failings of persons hold
ing opinions which they dislike, proceed to draw
unfavourable inferences as to the modes of faith, or
the public acts of those persons. It is a species of
ratiocination which is essentially bad and vicious.
No conclusion as to the merits or demerits of a
particular religious system can justly be derived
from the vices or virtues of individual professors of
it. But religious innovators occupy a peculiar
position. Bad men do not found good churches.
* Blackstone's Commentaries, vol. iv. c. 24.
F 2

68 CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. [ch.
It is with spiritual births as with physical. The
child is like the parent. The originators of reli
gions and philosophies give us, in their formal
teaching, an expression of themselves ; an exterior
embodiment of their interior being. Their doctrine
is one manifestation of their personality, and is
best judged of in connection with other manifesta
tions. Their lives often throw a flood of light on
their dogmas. Syed Ameer Ali is well warranted
in endeavouring to clear awray the aspersions on
the fair fame of his Prophet. And he may be con
gratulated upon the large measure of success with
which he has done so.
At the same time, it appears to me that a certain
spaciousness of thought is absolutely necessary if
we would rightly judge of these questions ; and
that other and profounder considerations might
have been very properly and effectually urged by
the Syed. The fundamental principles of the moral
law are eternal and immutable. If morality is not
absolute, it is nothing. The difference between
Right and Wrong is not of degree, but of kind.
The laws of ethics are, as the tragic poet speaks,
"from everlasting, and no man knows their birth
place." "God," Dean Mansel excellently said,
" did not create absolute morality, it is co-eternal
with Himself." The ideas of morality, according
to Kant's most true teaching, " are to be sought
a priori among the pure ideas of tlie reason." All
this is of primary importance, and must be strenu-

in.] AN ABSTRACT RATIONALISM. 69
ously maintained, if morality is to be anything
more than a matter of latitude and longitude, of
temperament and cuisine. Not less important is it
to remember that if the authority of tlie moral law
is unconditioned, unchangeable, absolute, its appre
hension varies indefinitely in different states of
civilization ; and that a man is bound by it, in
practice, only so far as he may, and therefore
should, apprehend it. The moral ideal is slowly-
developed. It lives and grows in the minds of
men as the fundamental principles of ethics are
more clearly discerned and more firmly grasped.
And so in judging of the character of any man
we must be on our guard against what Littre has
well called " an abstract rationalism, which does
not take into account conditions." It is precisely
with the conditioned that history deals. Human
life is concrete, complex, contingent, and is not to
be explained by balancing abstractions. We must
discern men and things in their time, not out of it.
And " their time," let us remember, is not a mere
question of chronology. One race may be in its
ethical infancy when another has attained to moral
maturity, and to judge both by the same measure
would be absurd. St. Augustine, in a truly philo
sophical passage of his Confessions, supplies an
admirable exposition of the verity whereon I am.
insisting. Vindicating against the Manicheans the
righteousness of polygamous and homicidal Hebrew
patriarchs, he insists, indeed, that true justice judges

70 CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. [ch.
not after human custom, but after that perfect
Divine law, always and everywhere the selfsame,
whereby the customs of places and times were
disposed according to those places and times ; yet
points out that the practice of a more enlightened
age is no measure for the practices of the whole
human race.* The nineteenth-century critics of
Mohammed commit a blunder like that of the
Manichees, whom St. Augustine was confuting,
when they expect from the Arabian Prophet the
mild virtues of the British "lower middles," the
peculiar tenderness, of the Nonconformist con
science. The true norm of the relations of the
sexes is monogamy, as admirably defined by the
great Roman jurisprudent: " Nuptise sunt con-
junctio maris et feminse et consortium omnis vitas:
divini et humani juris communicatio." No lower
conception than this sufficiently respects and
guarantees the rights of the two persons whom
matrimony blends in a single organism embracing
their whole existence. Again, human life is
properly held to be invested with a peculiar
* " Et non noveram justitiam veram interiorem, non ex con-
suetudine judicantem, sed ex lege rectissima Dei omnipotentis,
qua formarentur mores regionum et dierum pro regionibus et
diebus : cum ipsa ubique et semper esset, non alibi alia, nee
alias aliter : secundum quam justi essent Abraham, et Isaac, et
Jacob et Moyses, et David, et illi omnes laudati ore Dei : sed
eos ab imperitis judicari iniquos, judicantibus ex humano die,
et universos mores humani generis ex parte moris sui metienti-
bus." — Confess., 1. iii. c. 7.

in.] MOHAMMED'S PROPHETIC MISSION. 71
sacredness: "homo res sacra homini": and the
reason is because man is a person. In proportion
as, in the course of ethical evolution, the fact and
significance of personality become more deeply
apprehended, is the stringency of the moral
obligation to respect it, increased. Assuredly,
Mohammed, if judged by the ethical standard
prevailing in his age and country, was no libertine,
no man of blood. As assuredly he wrought a great
work in elevating that standard, both as to the
relations of man with woman, and as to the re
lations of man with man. The movement which
he initiated was, in the best sense of the word,
democratic. " No religion," says Sprenger, " is
so completely the vox populi as Islam." *

So much concerning Mohammed as a man. Let
us now consider him as a religious teacher.
Gibbon, in his epigrammatic way, declares that
the faith of Islam is compounded of an eternal
truth, and a necessary fiction : that there is only
one God, and that Mohammed is the Prophet of
God. With the first part of this dictum we may
entirely agree. What are we to say of the second ?
Was the declaration false that Mohammed was a
prophet in the proper sense of the word, a irpocf>rJTr)<;
or teller forth of divine truth, commissioned from
on high for a work of spiritual and moral reve-
* Vol. iii. p. 177

72 CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. [ch.
lation ? That he himself believed this, with all
his heart, we cannot, I think, doubt. Was he
right in so believing ? There are those who tell
us — Sprenger and Dozy are among them — that
his visions, his trances, his communings with the
Unseen, were mere phenomena of epilepsy. It is
a curious exhibition by those learned men of that
abounding Materialism of the day, which will have
a physical explanation of everything ; and which
finds that explanation satisfactory, precisely in
proportion as it is degraded and degrading.
Deutsch has sufficiently disposed of it with the
quiet remark: "Epilepsy never made a man
appear a prophet to himself, or even to the people
of the East, or inspired him with the like heart-
moving words, and glorious pictures," * which we
find in the Qu'ran. Gibbon observes, correctly,
that the story of Mohammed's epilepsy is an in
vention of the Greeks: and adds, "The energy
of his mind, incessantly bent on the same objects,
would convert a general obligation into a particular
call : the warm suggestions of the understanding
or the fancy would be felt as an inspiration of
heaven : the labour of thought would expire in
rapture and vision : and the inward sensation, the
invisible monitor, would be described with the
form and attributes of an angel of God."f No
doubt there is much weight in these remarks,
* Literary Remains of the late Emanuel Deutsch, p. 82.
f Decline and Fall, c, 1.

m.] REVELATION A UNIVERSAL GIFT. 73
But can we accept them as a complete explanation?
There are more things in heaven and earth than
were dreamed of in Gibbon's philosophy. Are we
to put aside, as the mere phantasmagoria of sense,
the whole cycle of emotions connected with the
belief that men are in contact with the Infinite
and Eternal, that they may in very truth hold
communion with the Father of their spirits ? Or
are we to account of this apprehension of the
Supreme Reality transcending sense, as the ex
clusive prerogative of a single creed ? It was one
of Laurence Oliphant's sharp sayings, I think,
that the only monopoly of which any religion
can boast is a monopoly of the errors peculiar
to itself. Without committing ourselves to that
dictum, we may safely affirm with Cardinal
Newman that " Revelation, properly speaking, is
a universal, not a local gift"; that "there is
something true and divinely revealed, in every
religion, all over the earth ; " * and with St.
Augustine: "Nee quisquam, prseter Te, alius est
doctor veri, ubicumque et undecumque claruerit." f
In the grandest of Latin hymns the Sibyl is men
tioned, side by side with the Psalmist, as illumi
nated from on high. St. Paul describes a poet of the
Greeks as "a prophet of their own." Nay, must
we not hold that in every man there is something
of the prophetic gift — ^avTevyud tl, Plato and
* The Arians of the Fourth Century, 3rd ed. (1871), p. 82.
\ Confess., 1. v. c, 6,

74 CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. [ch.
Aristotle call it, " a certain divination, presage
and parturient divination," according to Cudworth's
interpretation ? And here we have the soundest
explanation of those instinctive repugnances, in
explicable presentiments, inspira tions of conduct
and the like of which we are all sometimes con
scious, and for which we can find no motive. For
most of us, the babble of men overpowers, during
most of our lives, the whisperings from the Infinite.
Inspiration of any kind, artistic, philosophical, or
religious, is impossible if we are always struggling
in a crowd. It is in the solitude, whether of Mount
Horeb, Mount Carmel, Mount Hira, that the Voice
from on high is most clearly heard. May we not
believe, without absurdity, that to Mohammed,
also, brooding over the abysses of space and being,
" voyaging through dark seas of thought alone,"
that ineffable Reality was verily revealed which
thenceforth was to be to him the light of life?
Surely he, too, might say, with Columbus, —
"God
Hath more than glimmered on me. 0 my Lord,
I swear to you I heard His voice in days
Of doubt, and cloud, and storm, -when drowning life
Sank all but out of sight. I heard His voice,
' Be not cast down ; I lead thee by the hand ;
Fear not.' "
Very fine is the story of his reply to Abu. Bakr,
when the two, flying from Mecca, were concealed
in a cave of Mount Thorus, and the heart of his
companion quaked with fear, as they heard the

m.] MOHAMMED'S DOMINANT THOUGHT. 75
steps of the pursuers. "We are but two," said Abu
Bakr. "Nay," answered Mohammed, "we are
three : God is with us." And, upon another occa
sion, late in his life, we find the same dominant
thought manifested. The Prophet was sleeping at
the foot of a tree, at some distance from his camp.
He awoke and beheld Durthur, a hostile warrior,
standing over him with drawn sword, and heard
the challenge, " 0 Mohammed, who is there now to
save thee?" " God," was the reply. The sword
dropped from the hand of the awe-stricken soldier.
Mohammed grasped it, and in turn held it over
him. " Who is there now to save thee, Durthur ? "
"Alas! no one." "Then, learn to be merciful."
Surely we may hold concerning this man, that he
" endured as seeing Him who is invisible ": seeing,
indeed, "per speculum in senigmate": "through
a glass darkly." " Broken lights," we must say of
these revelations of his. But is it not true that
"the best in this kind are but shadows"? "I
cannot conceal my conviction," writes Mr. Free
man, " that in a certain sense, his belief in his own
mission was well founded. Surely a good and
sincere man, full of confidence in his Creator, who
works an immense reform both in faith and prac
tice, is truly a direct instrument in the hands of
God, and may be said to have a commission from
Him." *
* The History and Conquests ofthe Saracens, p. 59.

76 CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. [ch.
So far, then, as it appears to me, we may sub
stantially agree with Syed Ameer Ali. We now
come to the parting of the ways. Our author is
not content with vindicating the personal rectitude
and prophetic mission of the founder of his religion.
It is not enough for him that Islam was a true
reformation, specially adapted to the needs of the
country and age in which it was introduced. The
Syed will have it that Mohammed is " the grandest
of figures upon whom the light of history has ever
shone":* that he "concentrated into a focus all
the fragmentary lights which had ever fallen upon
the heart of man " : t that " the wonderful adapta
bility of the Islamic precepts to all ages and
nations ; their entire concordance with the light of
reason ; the absence of all mysterious doctrines to
cast a shade of sentimental ignorance round the
primal truths implanted in the human heart — all
prove that Islam represents the latest development
of the religious faculties of our being" :| that "of
all the religions of the world that have ruled the
consciences of mankind, the Islam of Mohammed
alone combines the conceptions which have, in
different ages, furnished the mainsprings of human
conduct — the consciousness of human dignity, so
valued in the ancient philosophies, and the sense
of human sinfulness so dear to the Christian apolo
gist." § "In Islam," he maintains, "is joined a
* P. 130. + P 212.
| P. 275. § P 277.

in.] IS THE FULNESS OF MOHAMMED ? 77
lofty idealism with the most rationalistic practica
bility." * "It was reserved for Mohammed to
fulfil his mission and that of his predecessors." t
"Why," he enquires, "should not the true Chris
tian do honour to the Preacher who put the
finishing stroke to the work of the earlier Masters?
Did he not call back the wandering forces of the
world into the channel of Progress ? "$
To these enquiries of Syed Ameer Ali the answer
must be No. We may cheerfully admit, nay we
should strenuously contend, that, considered as a
reforming movement in Arabia, Islam represents an
advance in religious thought. We cannot admit,
but must most strenuously deny, that, considered as
an universal religion, it supersedes the Claims of
Christianity. It may be worth while to enlarge a
little on this point.
The great merit of Mohammed, as a religious
reformer, is commonly taken to be that he substi
tuted Theism for Polytheism in his native country,
and a higher morality for a lower. But to say
this, is to say too little. In order really to under
stand the true place of Mohammed in the world's
religious history, we should understand of what
kind his Theism was. Deutsch has called Islam,
" Judaism, as adapted to Arabia." And no doubt
this is true. The central thought of Mohammed's
religious teaching is identical with what we may
call the kernel of the Mosaic theology. The great-
* P. 278. t P- 211. % P- 282.

78 CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. [ch.
est single step ever made by the world in religion
was the attainment of that conception of the Divine
Nature embodied in the formula "Ego Sum Qui
Sum "— " I Am That I Am." The essence of the
Divine Concept is not goodness, not power, not
wisdom. Man may be good and powerful and
wise. The incommunicable attribute of Deity is
self-existence. He is the Being, the Life, the
Absolute. These words denote, or rather adum
brate, His unthinkable* prerogative. But this
concept of Being implies the concept of Cause, and
finds therein its explanation. Kant, it will be
remembered, agrees with those who hold that we
are compelled to conceive the existence of God, as
" the idea of something on which the supreme and
necessary unity of all existence is based " : a some
thing " which we represent to ourselves as standing
in a relation to the whole system of phenomena,
analogous to that in which phenomena stand to
each other." It is merely a translation into philo
sophical language of the living and life-giving
truth whereof Mohammed's mind was full. The
Divine Unity making, upholding, .governing, per
fecting all things, was the rock on wrhich he built.
He felt that the mysteries encompassing us are
great, are ineffable ; but that, however dark to us,
they are not darkness in themselves : that at the
heart of existence, is Mind, Personality, Law. This
is the faith stamped upon every line of the Qu'ran,
* Unthinkable as to the mode; the fact is, of course, thinkable.

in.] ALLAH AKBAR. 79
inspiring its finest poetry, and piercing through its
most turgid rhapsodies, in virtue of which it has
been for thirteen centuries a pillar of the cloud by
day, and a pillar of fire by night, guiding, through
the wilderness of life, countless millions of our race.
Such was Mohammed's Theism. His ethics
flowed from it. Of Islam we may say, borrowing
a phrase from Neander, that " das Bewusstsein der
Abhangigkeit von Gott der Grundton ist." But
this dependence upon the Infinite and Eternal does
not imply fatalism. 1 fully agree with Seyd
Ameer Ali that fatalism, in the proper sense of
the word, has no place in Mohammed's doctrine,
although it was largely infused therein by his
disciples. That everywhere there reigns an inex
orable order, that the supreme duty of man is to
apprehend it and to conform to it — this is the great
truth which gifted souls in all ages, and of all
creeds, have, more or less clearly, apprehended and
set forth. It is "the law ruling in the three
worlds," which is the underlying thought of
Gotama's teaching : it is that " Queen and Mistress
of mortals and immortals," Avhich Pindar celebrates.
It is that law which Hooker called "the voice of
God," and which he cannot abrogate, for " He
cannot deny Himself." And this law is summed
up for Islam in the pregnant words " Allah akbar."
Religion meant for Mohammed submission to the
will of a moral Governor of the universe. And
what is that will but what we commonly call

80 CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. [ch.
de'stiny ? To accept what is allotted to us in
this life, humbly and trustingly, doing the duty
which lies before us, is what "Allah akbar"
really means. Between this, and the mechanical
Determinism just now so popular, which excludes
alike Providence and Free-will, there is an abyss.
That is real fatalism. And from it Mohammed
would have shrunk in horror, as a blasphemy at
which — to use his own emphatic words — " the
heavens might tear open and the earth cleave
asunder." The existence of God and the free
will of man are the postulates on which all his
teaching is based. The two truths are inseparably
connected. It is by the attribute of free will that
we hold of the Divine. " Est Deus in nobis."
We may fully admit, then, the value of the great
fundamental truths taught by Mohammed. But
Christianity possesses them as fully as Islam. And
it possesses, in rich abundance, much else which
Islam does not possess. M. Renan has well pointed
out that while Islam sums up, with an unexampled
unity, the moral, religious, and aesthetic ideas, in a
word, the whole spiritual life of a great family of
humanity — it lacks "that gift of fascination, strange,
mysterious, truly divine, which has united all civil
ized mankind, without distinction of race, in the
veneration of one and the same ideal issuing1 from
Judsea." * This, in truth, is the incommunicable
* Eludes d'llistoire Religievse, p. 295.

in.] THE PREROGATIVE OF CHRISTIANITY. 81
prerogative of Christianity, marking it off by a
difference, not of degree but of kind, from all the
other religions of the world. In contemplating the
Divine Figure set before us in the Gospels, one
seems to be borne beyond phenomena ; to gaze, if
but for a moment, straight into the transcendent
realms of spirit and deity; nay, in a sense, to taste
and touch eternal realities, so as almost to warrant
us in speaking with St. John, of " That which was
from the beginning, wThich we have heard, which
we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked
upon, and our hands have handled of the Word of
Life." There is a universe between the crude
realism of Mohammed and the perfect idealism of
Him who said, " My kingdom is not of this world."
In Him we have the all-sufficient Standard, the
absolute Pattern of human life. Time and space
do not condition him. Every generation has found
in Him the type which fulfils its highest aspirations,
inspires its deepest devotion, satisfies its innermost
needs. Of His fulness have eighteen centuries
received. And He is still the source and fount of
all that is purest and noblest in modern civilization.
Syed Ameer Ali regards it as a fundamental defect
in Christianity that the work of its Founder was
left unfinished; that His teachings were not placed
upon a more systematic basis by Himself; and
contrasts with this inchoate achievement, " the
complete though simpler system of Mohammed."
But, in truth, the very simplicity of Islam is the
G

82 CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. [ch.
cause of its intellectual barrenness. Neither poetry,
nor philosophy, nor science has taken deep root
in its thin soil. It has no principle of development.
It is monotonous and inflexible. But to live is to
change. And the fact that the Founder of Chris
tianity inculcated principles rather than laid down
rules, is one main source of its marvellous fecundity.
The Divine word spoken in Galilee was the seed
which was to assimilate nourishment from all sides,
and to spring up and bring forth fruit, some an
hundredfold, some sixtyfold, some thirtyfold, in the
varying soils that received it. Islam is certainly
one of the poorest of religions. As certainly Chris
tianity is the richest: "rich with the spoils of
time " as treasured in Hebrew theology, Greek
philosophy, Roman jurisprudence, Teutonic and
Celtic traditions. It is the heir of all the ages,
and the nursing mother of all the higher forms of
moral and spiritual life. Truly the kingdom of its
Founder is not of this world. His throne is esta
blished for ever in the religious and ethical con
sciousness of mankind. " Thronus tuus, Deus, in
sasculum seculi ; virga eequitatis, virga regni tui."
So much might suffice to show why Syed Ameer
Ali's view of the comparative merits of Islam and
Christianity seems to me untenable. But there is
one word more which ought to be said on this
subject. I described him in an earlier portion of this
Chapter as well entitled, by his eminent position
and wide culture, to be the spokesman of the fifty

in.] RATIONALIZED MOHAMMEDANISM. 83
millions of Mohammedans who owe allegiance to
the Empress of India. And so he certainly is.
But, as certainly, the creed which he advocates
would hardly be recognised as their own by the
vast majority of those fifty millions. It is a
sort of sublimated essence of Mohammedanism, a
rationalized Islam, bearing much the same relation
to the beliefs of orthodox Moslems, whether Sunnis
or Shiahs, as the religious opinions held, let us say,
by M. Renan bear to the beliefs of the great
mass of Christians, whether Catholic, Greek, or
Protestant. M. Renan, it should be noted, did
not renounce the name of Christian. " Dieu nous
garde," he writes, " de repudier ce beau nom de
chretien qui nous met en rapport avec Jesus et
l'id^al de l'Evangile, avec l'Eglise et tous les
tresors de saintete qu'elle a produits." * Well,
if M. Renan liked to call himself a Christian,
he was, I suppose, at liberty to do so. And I
have no sort of objection to make against Syed
Ameer Ali calling himself a Mohammedan. Nay,
I am not concerned to deny that it is possible to
be Christian or Moslem quoad the sum of things
and the soul in them : " sub specie seternitatis," if
I may be permitted so to speak. But Christianity
and Islam are existing facts in the world's history.
And an apologist for either must deal with them as
existing facts ; must take them as they are, not as
* Novvelles Etudes d'Histoire Religieuse, p. 11.
G 2

84 CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. [ch.
he thinks they ought to be. I am far from deny
ing that, taking Islam as it is, there may still lie
before it centuries of fruitful activity in idealising
life, and in strengthening the sacred claims of
duty, among the populations which now profess
it ; in expelling from many dark places of the
earth, which shall embrace it, barbarous and
impure fetichism ; and in training millions of its
converts to better things by its doctrines of right
eousness, temperance, and judgment to come. Still,
allowing all this, we must surely say that it is the
religion not of a high but of low civilization ;
destined, in the long run, to give way to a nobler
faith. It is on the family that civilization is
based. And the conception of the family which
Mohammed has stereotyped is incompatible with
the higher stages of human development. The
charge so lightly passed over by Syed Ameer Ali,
that Islam " has degraded the female sex," rests
upon only too good grounds. Perfectly true it is
that Mohammed, by his matrimonial legislation,
curbed the unlimited sexual licence which he
found prevailing in Arabia. It is equally true
that his partial reform, exhibited as the true norm
of the relations between the sexes, has been an
insuperable obstacle to the vindication of woman's
personality, and to the elevation of her office, in
the nations which have received his faith. Cardi
nal Lavigerie, an unsuspected witness, has left us

m.] MOHAMMEDANISM'S ESSENTIAL DEFECT. 85
his testimony that the Mussulman women of Central
and Northern Africa "are scarcely human beings
in the eyes of the men who oppress them " ; that
"they are born slaves, and are from infancy
deprived of all moral ideals ; that they are brought
up as they have to live, merely as animals, with
only two sentiments in their heart — sensuality and
fear." No doubt those regions of the earth exhibit
Islam at its worst. But certain it is, that in no
Mohammedan country is woman's rightful place
assigned to her ; and no less certain is it that a
social system which refuses to her that place can
never advance beyond semi-barbarism. This is
the blot upon Mohammedanism which no skill of
advocacy can efface. This is the cancer which no
reformer's knife can ever eradicate. For we must
not suppose, with Syed Ameer Ali, that the position
of women among Moslems is a mere excrescence
upon Mohammed's system. It proceeds, as an
inevitable consequence, from the essential defect in
the conception whereon that system is based. I
know not who has pointed this out with greater
clearness or power than Mr. Maurice in words —
certainly among the best that ever proceeded from
his gifted pen — which may fitly serve to conclude
this Chapter. Recognising, [no less fully than I
have done, the greatness and vitality of the
Theistic doctrine upon which Islam rests, he
rightly insists that "man has demands for him-

86 CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. [ch. hi.
self which will not be satisfied by being told
that he is the servant of an absolute Will," and
proceeds : —
" See now how all that gave glory and dignity to this system
becomes, from its want of some other element, the very cause
of its degradation. The absolute government of the unseen
Being had presented itself to the Mussulman, in every age, in
the absolute, visible government of his caliph or sultan. While
the divine feeling was strong and alive, the subjection to the
human rule was an affectionate, dutiful, entire submission.
The ruler was, in very deed, the centre of his warriors. He
felt towards them as a protector, sharing their toils, bound to
the same Master, enduring hardships in the same cause. But
the battle over, he becomes the absolute monarch in the midst
of his seraglio — they are merely his slaves. There is no such
connection between him and the Being whom he worships as
permanently to check this tendency — to make the monarch feel
that he is set over them to do them good, or the subjects that
they have an appeal against him to a higher Ruler. The very
nature of the Ottoman Government — and that government is
the perfect development of the Mohammedan idea — excludes
the possibility of orders and gradations in society. Its strength
lies in all being simple subjects of the one ruler ; holding their
offices not in virtue of any hereditary ranks or privileges, but
only at his pleasure. When, therefore, the one principle which
quickened the whole society waxes feeble, of necessity it
becomes the most intolerable of despotisms. Elsewhere there
is a balance and conflict of powers, which even in the dreariest
periods produces struggles or paroxysms of life ; here, if the
monarch do not inspire his people with strength, all is dead.
And the same cause which destroys what may be called the
family bonds of civil society, destroys equally the family itself.
Polygamy is no accident of Mohammedanism : a careful consi
deration of the system will show that it must fall to pieces the
moment any reformer shall attempt to remove this characteris
tic of it." *
* The Religions of the World and their Relation to Christianity,
p. 29, *

CHAPTER IV.
CHRISTIANITY AND CHRISTENDOM.
One great difference between Christianity and
Islam is indicated by the words of Mr. Maurice
which I quoted on the preceding page. It is a
fundamental idea of Christianity that " man has
demands for himself which will not be satisfied by
being told that he is the servant of an absolute
will." Christianity is the perfect law of liberty ;
and the obedience which it demands is not the
mechanical acquiescence of slaves, but the reason
able service of freemen. It is based upon the
claims and prerogatives of conscience. It teaches
that every member of the human race is, by an
indefeasible divine right, independent of all earthly
power in that sacred domain, and responsible to
Him only whom it is better to obey than man.
In Christianity alone has been found a force
able to destroy the domination of the State over
the immaterial part of our nature. The separation
between temporal and spiritual authority was its
great gift to civilization, a gift purchased with the
blood of its Founder and of His countless martyrs,

88 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRISTENDOM. [ch.
The conception of the Church as a divine king
dom, distinct from, though existing side by side
with the kingdoms of this world, is its unique
characteristic. And this conception, realised as a
fact, it was, which rendered Christianity so detested
by the rulers of the Roman Empire, even the best
and the wisest among them. It was not as a set
of theological beliefs, held by individual persons,
but as a Church, that the new religion was the
object of persecution. The Imperial Government
hated it as a rival and vigorously endeavoured to
exterminate it. The endeavour failed. The might of
Rome yielded to " the invincible nation " * which
Christianity had created. The Empire decayed.
The Church grew. And at last the sagacious
mind of Constantine conceived the thought of using
the new spiritual commonwealth as a bond to hold
together his shattered realm. For a brief while,
under that great prince and his immediate successors,
this policy was successful. Christianity no doubt
delayed the fall of the Roman Empire. But it
was reserved for a later time to witness the com
plete alliance of the Catholic Church and the
Christian State. That alliance — the special feature
and the chief interest of the Middle Ages — will be
the subject of this Chapter.

The almost total neglect and absolute discredit to
* to apaxpv yivos. The expression is St. Chrysostom's.

iv.] " A MILLENNIUM OF DARKNESS." 89
which the period intervening between the Renais
sance and the fall of Paganism was consigned during
the last three centuries, is one of the most singular
phenomena of history. The prevailing tradition
was that it was a " millennium of darkness," of
mere savagery and ignorance, in which the sun
of civilization was under an eclipse — a " misty
time," an "uncivil age," as Sir Philip Sidney-
speaks, in his Defence of Poesy, overhung with
" dust and cobwebs." And from his time to almost
within our own day, the " dust and cobwebs "
remained undisturbed ; medieval history, if investi
gated at all, was approached with prepossessions
fatal to intelligent study, and was regarded as a
barren field, worthy only of the musty toils of
antiquarianism ; medieval institutions were mis
understood and were ignorantly condemned ; even
the monuments of medieval art, on which, as it
wTould seem to us, the evidence of the greatness
of those ages is so plainly written, shared in the
indiscriminating disdain heaped upon them. Not
much more than a century ago one of the
literary chiefs of the day, writing of the most
glorious of English churches, observes that its
" external appearance cannot be but displeasing to
the eye of every man who has any idea of pro
priety or proportion, even though he may be
ignorant of architecture as a science " ; * and this
* Smollett's Works, vol. xi. jp. 246, edition 1824.

90 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRISTENDOM. [ch.
judgment of York Minster is correct enough,
according to the canons of criticism then prevail
ing.* Indeed, it was fortunate wdien the taste of
the age contented itself with mere verbal expres
sions of its hostility to the priceless relics of
medieval art. Too frequently such sentiments
were translated into action, to the irreparable loss
of future generations. Thus, in the centre of the
Christian world, the very piety of the Pontiffs was
converted into an instrument of destruction, and
august sanctuaries underwent a process of trans
formation, fatal alike to their pristine beauty and
to their historical associations. Even the venerable
Lateran Basilica did not escape. The alterations
of Borromini and the additions of Galilei have so
completely destroyed the original character of the
" mother and mistress of all the churches," that
it is now most difficult for us to figure to ourselves
the edifice which Clement V- restored and which
Giotto decorated. Nor was it only to the archi
tectural glories of the Middle Ages that this process
was applied. The " lofty rhyme," in which so
many generations of saints had enshrined their
* In his Travels through France and Italy, Smollett remarks,
" The implements of Popish superstition, such as relics of
pretended saints, ill-proportioned spires and belfries, and the
nauseous repetition of the figure of the cross, which is in itself a
very mean and disagreeable object, only fit for the prisons of
condemned criminals, have contributed to introduce a vicious
taste into the external architecture, as well as in the internal
ornaments of our temples." (Vol. x. p. 295.)

iv J THE DECLINE OF THE OLD TRADITION. 91
highest aspirations and their deepest experiences,
was stretched upon the Procrustean bed of classical
metre, and was hopelessly mangled and mutilated
to satisfy the tyrannical requirements of the
dominant fashion. The plain song of the Catholic
Church was happier than her hymns, inasmuch as
it was the object of deeper contempt, and, by
utter neglect, escaped "reformation." Painting
fared no better than the sister arts. The works
of the great masters of the medieval schools were
abandoned to dishonour and decay. They were
without meaning for generations who could con
ceive of no sublimer mission for a painter than to
minister to the senses by the delineation of the
visible ; whose highest artistic aspirations were satis
fied by the pompous inanities of the Manieristes,
the pretty imbecilities of the Paysagistes, or the
vulgar trivialities of the Genristes.
These were some of the evidences and fruits of
the great tradition as to the darkness and barbarism
of the Middle Ages which so long maintained an
undisputed reign throughout Europe. The first
attempt at questioning its sway may perhaps be
traced to that dilettante school of which the most
considerable representatives in England were
Horace Walpole and Gray ; men who are entitled
to our respect for their genuine though ill-instructed
admiration of the monuments of medieval archi
tecture, and to our warmest gratitude for their
earnest protests against the "rage of repairing,
beautifying, whitewashing, painting, and gilding,

92 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRISTENDOM. [ch.
which threatened to be little less fatal " * to those
venerable structures "than the Reformation and
the Civil Wars." It is observable, however, that
nothing like a serious study of the medieval
period seems to have been dreamt of even by
Gray. He delights, indeed, in Froissart ; so
delights in him, he says t in one of his letters,
that at one time he "can read nothing else;" but
he is evidently half ashamed of his devotion
to this " Herodotus of a barbarous age." { So
Percy, wdio did excellent service by publishing
his Reliques, when dedicating the volume to the
Countess of Northumberland, speaks deprecatingly
of them as the " barbarous productions of unpolished
ages," " that had been almost lost to memory had
not the gallant deeds of" that lady's "illustrious
ancestors preserved them from oblivion."
Percy's Reliques, which appeared in 1*765, were
not at first highly appreciated by English critics,
but in Germany they obtained a speedy success
through the labours of Burger and other translators
and imitators. § Eight years afterwards a far more
* See Gray's Letter to the Rev. Mr. Bentham, Works, vol.
iv. p. 74 (Pickering's edition).
t Vol. v. p. 116. See, also, vol. iii. p. 230.
j Vol. iv. p. 190.
§ See Wordsworth's Essay, in vol. vi. of Moxon's Centenary
edition of his Works, p. 373. " Germany is much indebted to
Percy's ' Reliques,' " Wordsworth remarks: "and, for our own
country, its poetry has been absolutely redeemed by it. I do
not think there is an able writer in verse of the present day,

iv.] GOTZ VON BEBLICHINGEN. 93
significant indication of the breaking up of the old
tradition proceeded from a young law-student of
Frankfort, who was destined in lafer years to
exercise an unrivalled influence over the higher
thought of Europe, and to occupy, by an un
questioned title, its intellectual throne. Goethe's
first work, Gotz von Berliehingen, was given to
the world in 1773, and, as Carlyle has justly
remarked, " it stands prominent among the causes,
or at the very least among the signals, of a great
change in modern literature." * Not only was it
" the parent of an innumerable progeny of chivalry
plays, feudal delineations, and poetico-antiquarian
performances," in its own country, but it aroused
the genius of Sir Walter Scott, whose first literary
enterprise was a translation of it ; and thus it may,
in some sense, be regarded as the beginning of the
romanticist school, of which his is still the most
popular and indeed the greatest name. Scott's
romances of chivalry, whether metrical or prose,
are indeed far enough from being true pictures of
the times in which their scene is laid. He is the
most charming of story-tellers : he realized vividly
the picturesque aspects of the age of chivalry, and
he used them most effectively to colour his narra
tives. It is an ungracious task to use language
who would not be proud to acknowledge his obligations to the
' Reliques ' ; and for myself, I am happy on this occasion to
make a public avowal of my own " (p. 377).
* Miscel., vol. i. p. 341.

94 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRISTENDOM. [ch.
sounding like disparagement wdth regard to com
positions which have so strong a claim on our
gratitude as the delight of boyhood, and the solace
of many an hour of ennui or pain in maturer life.
Still it must be confessed that, if tried by a severe
standard, and apart from the circumstances of the
age wdien they were given to the world, all the
praise that can honestly be bestowed upon them
ends here. Their knights and barons and abbots
no more resemble the real warriors and churchmen
of the Middle Ages than Fonthill Abbey resembled
a medieval religious house. But Fonthill Abbey
was not without its merits, and, like the TFaverley
Novels, it marked an immense advance upon the
age of Strawberry Hill and the Castle of Otranto.
Superficial, however, as Sir Walter Scott's
sketches of the medieval period are, they were
of immense service in awakening public .in
terest in that period, and have been fruitful
in results the practical importance of which it
is not easy to overrate. " The general want of
something deeper and more attractive than what
had offered itself elsewhere," remarks one who
speaks with peculiar authority on this matter,
" may be considered to have led to his popularity,
and by means of his popularity he reacted on his
readers, stimulating their mental thirst, feeding
their hopes, setting before them visions, which,
when once seen, are not easily forgotten." *
* Cardinal Newman's Essays, Crit. and Hist., vol. i. p. 267.

iv.] SCOTT AND WORDSWORTH. 95
Another writer less widely popular, but of far
higher claims than Scott, was at the same time
exerting a vast influence in the same direction
over the most cultivated minds of his day. The
poems of Wordsworth are full of evidence how
deeply he felt the spell of the ages of faith, how
his strong poetic vision, piercing through the
cloud of misconceptions which had so long en
compassed them, discerned, at all events in outline,
the tokens of their true greatness and glory.
Scott, then, and Wordsworth are conspicuous
among the instruments and evidences of the decline
among us of the old evil tradition regarding the
medieval period and of the growth of a different
tone of thought regarding them. The first English
historian of this century who made a serious
effort to judge them fairly was Hallam. And his
book, though written nearly eighty years ago, with
scanty materials, and after slender studies, is still
not without a certain value. How much has been
done during those eighty years by scholars in
every European country for all the epochs of the
Middle Ages, to purge away the old darkness and
to let in the light of science, I will not attempt
to describe. The net result is that materials are
now available from which the student, who knows
how to use them, may derive a pretty accurate
conception of human life and its conditions, in the
different periods and regions of medieval Europe.
And here I shall take leave to offer a few sugges-

96 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRISTENDOM. [ch.
tions, derived from my own experience, which may
possibly be of service to others.*

First, then, I would observe that the great rock
upon which most students strike is generalization.
The vulgar error is to regard the Middle Ages
as an organic whole presenting the same social and
political characteristics throughout. But it is
equally a mistake to allow the constant changes,
of almost every kind, in the condition of Europe,
traceable from the beginning of the ninth to the
middle of the fifteenth century, — which I take to
be the true limits of the medieval period,— to
obscure the fact that from one, and that a most im-

* It is instructive to recall how Hallam. with his usual
candour, tells us that he "hardly pretends to any direct
acquaintance " with the works in which are the original
sources of medieval history. — Middle Ages, iii. p. 290, n. q.
His chief modern authority for the contest between the
Papacy and the Empire is Schmidt's Hist, des Allemands. —
Ibid., vol. ii. p. 236, n. k. Of the great philosophical and
theological writers whose influence over medieval thought
was so vast, he knew next to nothing ; he expresses his
surprise at having, " within a short time met with four
living English writers who had read parts of Thomas Aqui
nas," but cannot bring himself to think that there are four
more in this country who can say the same. — Ibid., iii. p. 428,
n. i. It is observable that, in a note dated 1848, he confesses
his fear that he has " fallen a little too much into the fashion
of exaggerating the crimes and follies of the Middle Ages," — a
fashion which, he justly adds, " prevailed in the eighteenth
century." — Ibid., iii. p. 301, n. o.

iv.] TWO OPPOSITE ERRORS. 97
portant point of view, those centuries may properly
be regarded as a whole. Between these two
opposite and fundamental errors, there exists the
ground for almost every variety of misconception,
and it is hardly too much to say that every variety
of misconception may be met with. There are,
indeed, few writers of the present day, possessing
any pretensions to scholarship, who are blind to
the constant mutations in the public order, the
diverse and conflicting currents of thought, the
steady widening of the field of private enterprise
and personal action, during those seven hundred
years. But there are many who found them
selves on one or two authorities, and who look
through their spectacles at their contemporaries, or
at the whole medieval period; many more who
mistake local for general customs, and draw uni
versal conclusions from particular premises. Thus,
to take an example from a writer who has
deservedly won much popularity, Green, in his
Short History of the English People, writes thus of
Walter de Map : " Picture after picture strips the
veil from the corruption of the medieval Church,
its indolence, its thirst for gain, its secret immo
rality." * Now, putting aside, for the present,
the question as to the value of the testimony of a
writer like Walter de Map, regarding the ecclesias
tical abuses of his time, it is quite certain that his
Short History of the English People, p. 120.
H

98 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRISTENDOM. [ch.
evidence, even if accepted without reserve, is
utterly inadequate to tlie sweeping condemnation
of "the medieval Church" which Mr. Green
founded upon it. Or, to ascend to a higher authority,
Mr. Furnivall in a note to Dr. Brentano's admirable
essay on the history and development of Gilds,*
talks of " the days of Chaucer and Wyckliffe, of
William who had the vision of Piers the Plowman,
and others, who have left us records of what
Romanism, with its monks and friars, practically
then was in England." The designation of four
teenth century Catholicism as "Romanism," is not
very happy ; but, without dwelling upon that, it
may surely be objected, with the plainest justice,
that the testimony of a theological writer noto
riously disaffected to the Church, and of two
satirical poets, however great their literary excel
lence, is hardlv conclusive as to what the Catholic
religion practically was in their time. I quite allow,
as will be seen in my next Chapter, that there was
much corruption of life among " monks and friars"
at the period in question. Still the charges of the
religious innovator ought to be received with the
greatest caution ; and as regards Piers Plowman
and Chaucer we should remember Gray's very
sensible remark, that it was " the custom of those
* The Original Ordinances of more than one hundred English
Gilds, 8fc, edited by the late Toulmin Smith, with a prelimi
nary essay, in five parts, by Lujo Brentano. Published for the
Early English Text Society. Int., p. lxxxvi.

iv. J A VICE OF GENERALIZATION. 99
times," that " satire and irony should fall either
upon the women or upon the clergy." * In point
of fact, the former of those classes is, at the least,
as severely dealt with by medieval poets and story
tellers as the latter. No one, however, would
think, I suppose — I am sure Mr. Furnivall would
not think — of drawing thence a general conclusion
as to the unchastity of the female sex at the epoch
in question. Why should different measure be
dealt to the ecclesiastical order ?
Hallam carries this species of generalization
still further. In a long passage " on the vices of
the monks and clergy," which aptly ends with the
garbled passage from St. Eloy — long the stock
quotation on the subject — he remarks, " I know
not by what right we should disbelieve the docu
ments of the visitation under Henry VIII." ; and
from these reports, together with "the solemn
declaration of councils, the reports of judicial
inquiry, the casual evidence of common fame in

* Works, vol. v. p. 310. Gray gives the following account of
" the causes which directed the satire of our old writers to
these two objects." " As the religious were the principal
scholars of their age, they probably gave the tone in writing
or in wit to the rest of the nation. The celibacy imposed upon
them by the Church had soured their temper, and naturally
disposed them (as is observed of old bachelors in our day) to
make the weaknesses of the other sex their theme ; and though
every one had a profound respect for his own particular order,
yet the feuds and bickerings between one order and another
were perpetual and irreconcilable."
H2

100 CHRSITIANITY AND CHRISTENDOM. [ch.
the ballad and romance," and "the farrago of
evidence in Fosbrooke's 'British Monachism,'" * he
draws a conclusion as to the "general corruption of
monastic institutions" in the Middle Ages. The
evidence establishing the abandoned character of
Henry VIII.'s " Visitors," was not brought to light
until long after Hallam wrote : still, the fable of the
wolf and the lamb might have suggested a reason for
hesitation as to the value of their reports. That
scandals did exist in religious houses, from time to
time, during the Middle Ages, no candid person
would seek to deny. There is conclusive evidence
of the fact in the public documents referred to by
Mr. Hallam, and elsewhere. But to draw from such
occasional derelictions from their high standard, and
from the testimony of officials expressly hired to
work their destruction by Henry VIII., the inference
ofthe "corruption" of those institutions throughout
the Middle Ages, is most unwarrantable. The error
of generalizing from particular customs is as common
as that of generalizing from particular authorities,
and forcibly illustrates Mill's sagacious remark,
that the "besetting danger" of the "student of
man and society " is " not so much of embracing
falsehood for truth, as of mistaking part of the
truth for the whole." f It would be easy to adduce
examples of that fault; but, perhaps, it is not worth
while so to encumber these pages. The reader may
* Middle Ages, vol. iii. p. 303.
f Dissert, and Discus., vol. i. p. 399.

iv.] DIVERSITY OF CUSTOMS. 101
find them in sufficient abundance in a voluminous
history of France given to the world by an author
who has "obtained great pensions and great praise,"
M. Henri Martin, and he will be greatly aided in
his search by a temperate and well-written little
volume of Critiques et Refutations, by M. de
l'Epinoz, in which many of M. Martin's errors are
pointed out. M. de l'Epinoz aptly quotes * the
following weighty reflections of Biot: — " Quand
les ecrivains modernes mentionnent quelque usage
local, quelque particularite isolee du moyen age,
c'est presque toujours pour en prendre occasion de
les faire contraster, en bien ou en mal, avec ce qui
existe aujourd'hui. De pareils rapprochements
sont en general faux dans leur principe et sans
justesse dons leurs consequences . . . Tachons,"
Biot adds, " que notre philosophie ait la patience
de bien connaitre ces faits avant de se mettre a
les juger." It may be added that " to be well
acquainted with the facts " is no easy task. Feudal
customs were exceedingly diversified, especially in
France, where, as Beaumanoir tells us, "on ne
pourroit pas trouver deux chasteleries qui de toz cas
uzassent d'une meisme coustume." f
The student of medieval history will then require
to be ever on his guard against rashly generalizing
from particular authorities or customs. He will
ever also keep in view the great fact that the
* P. 111. t Page 107.

102 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRISTENDOM. [ch.
period which we call the Middle Ages divides itself
into many epochs, each possessing peculiar and
distinguishing features, and each differing from the
rest, both in point of time and character, in the
various regions of Europe. The scene which
presents itself to us wdien we first try to take (in
Hallam's phrase) " a view of Europe during
the Middle Ages," is striking but illusory. Like
the man in the Gospel whose eyes were opened,
we see " men as trees walking." All is enveloped
in mist, and is not without a certain misty
grandeur; nor are our conceptions ever likely to
be clearer and more real unless wre rigidly apply
to our investigations the rules of intellectual dis
cipline. A good example of the notions of the
medieval period which ardent but unscientific
research is likely to produce, is supplied by
Digby's Mores Catholici. As we fall under the
spell of those fascinating volumes the centuries
swim before our eyes ; we are transported from one
end of Europe to the other : time and space are
annihilated for us by the author's happy magic.
It is delightful, but it is not history ; * as indeed it
hardly professes to be. The laws of historical
science are severe, and one of the most fundamental
of them is a rigid attention to local and chrono
logical limits. It is only when the student learns
* This is very largely true of the writings of Montalambert,
who, significantly enough, judged Digby's book " le livre le
plus propre a faire connaitre et aimer le moyen age,"

iv.] A DOMINANT FACT. 103
the connection of part with part ; separates what
is in progress from what does not move; abstracts,
analyzes, and defines, that the dimness of his
mind's eye is removed; in the mighty maze
he traces the plan, and the kaleidoscope becomes
p. picture. Of course, some central point is
necessary to him round which to group the objects
which present themselves. The point may be
differently chosen ; but obviously the choice of it
is a matter of much importance. And that brings
me to the especial theme of this Chapter.

It appears to me that the only way of obtaining
a just view of European history during the medie
val period is by regarding it in the light of its
dominant idea. There is one great fact running
through it to which it owes its entity as a period,
and which is imprinted on all its epochs, authori
ties, and customs: that fact is, the prevalence of
Catholic unity. Medieval history is beyond and
before all things the history of the growth, empire,
and decline of the idea which is conventionally
expressed by the word Christendom, and the per
petual recognition of this fact is essential to its
philosophical study.* This idea was the principal
* This appears to have, more or less, struck Hallam. " No
one," he writes, " can take a philosophical view of the Middle
Ages without attending more than is at present fashionable to
their ecclesiastical history." — Mid. Ages, vol. iii. p. 299.

104 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRISTENDOM. [ch.
factor in European civilization, from the time when
it was distinctly manifested to the world by
Leo III. and Charles the Great, to the time when
the great religious and political changes associated
with the names of the Renaissance and the Pro
testant Reformation proclaimed its downfall to a
generation which little understood the tidings.
Here, too, it holds good : —
" The ample proposition, that hope makes
In all designs begun on earth below,
Fails in the promised largeness : checks and disasters
Grow in the veins of actions highest reared."
Of the "promised largeness," indeed, we find some
realization in the two centuries and a half from
St. Gregory VII. to Boniface VIII. The rest of
the history is full of " checks and disasters." The
chronicle of the two centuries from the death of
Nicholas I. is little more than a tissue of cata
strophes. The social order only emerged from the
chaos * (to use Guizot's expression) which had
engulfed it after the death of Charles the Great to
enter into the feudal system. Christian bishops
were metamorphosed into military barons ; eccle
siastical unity seemed to be breaking up into local,
partial, and individual distributions. " The period
was distinguished for the greatest abuses of simony,
for the completest arbitrary disposition of ecclesias
* Lect. on Civilization, vi,

iv.] • GROWTH AND DECAY. 105
tical benefices, and for the most deplorable corrup
tion among the priests." * In the see of Peter it is,
at times, hard to recognize the Apostolic lineaments,
and, under more than one Pontiff, the Lateran Palace
became infamous for scandals parallel to those
of the sons of Eli. But throughout these ¦ evil
times the idea of Christendom was silently growing.
The revival of imperial authority under Otto the
Great delivered the Papacy from its bondage to
the Tusculan barons and vindicated its ecumenical
character. To the moral reform initiated by the
great Cluniac congregation, it owed that "new
light which seemed to have risen for the world " f.
in St. Leo IX. : it owed that lover of righteousness
and hater of iniquity, St. Gregory VII., whose
destined work it was to rescue liberty of conscience
— the most precious of all our liberties — at a
very critical moment in European history, the
turning point of the Middle Ages.|
Far otherwise was it in the ever-thickening
gloom of the last century and a half of the
medieval period. The steady dying out from
society of the supernatural principles on which
so many generations had lived, and the con
stant advance of a revived Paganism, are
* Ibid.
f It is his contemporary Desiderius, Abbot of Monte Casino —
afterwards Pope under the title of Victor III. — who thus writes
of Leo. Dialog., i. 3.
J See my Chapters in European History, chap, ii., " The Turning
Point of the Middle Ages."

106 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRISTENDOM. [ch
conspicuous notes of those times ; and their
course is faithfully imaged in the story of the
Papacy. The Apostolic Chair removed from
Rome, and its occupant subjected to the influence
of the French monarchy ; then its disputed
possession, and the household of faith distracted
by the Great Schism ; and, lastly, its almost
complete secularization — such are the three suc
cessive steps in the degradation of the Papacy,
which mark accurately the stages in the decay
of the idea of Christendom. Far more dreary is
this age than that earlier period which Baronius *
has so severely characterized ; for then beneath
rank exterior corruption and the similitude of
death, the idea was germinating until the time
appointed for its bursting forth into full life under
the Hildebrandine reformation. Here is the reality
of decay ; and the issue is the destruction of the
religious unity of Europe. It is, however, with
that unity, as still existing, that I am concerned in
this Chapter ; and the point immediately before us
is the importance, in the study of the medieval
period, of ever keeping it in view as the cardinal
fact running throughout that period. I proceed to
offer a few remarks in elucidation of this point.
The history of the world presents us with three
distinct conceptions of the relation of religion to
human society, conceptions which, for our present
* Annates, ad ann. 900.

iv.] RELIGION AND SOCIETY. 107
purpose, may be designated the ancient, the me
dieval, and the modern. The chief characteristics
of these conceptions are respectively nationality,
universality, and individuality. In the political
communities of antiquity religion played a very
important part. The state is, as a matter of fact,
the expanded family, and the patriarchal principle
that the paterfamilias is the religious as well as the
civil head of his house, naturally extended itself
to the community in primitive times. The con
ception of an atheistic state without recognised
gods and sacred rites would have appeared mon
strous to the ancients. The public profession
of a religion was deemed essential to corporate
existence ; it was both the basis on which political
communities rested and the tie which held them
together. Thus Plato, in his Republic,* describes
"the erection of temples and the appointment of
sacrifices and other ceremonies in honour of the
gods," and " all the observances we must adopt
in order to propitiate the inhabitants of the other
world," as " the most momentous, the most august,
and the highest acts of legislation " ; and Cicero
held the greatness of Rome to be built "upon
piety and religion, and on the one wisdom of
recognising that all things are ordered and
governed by the power of the immortal gods." f
Very numerous passages to a similar effect might
* Book iv, c, v. f De Har. Res., 9.

108 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRISTENDOM. [ch.
be quoted from other classical writers of Greece
and Rome. It should be observed that this public
profession of religion was strictly national, a nation
being a community united by the fact or the
fiction of blood relationships. No dream of any
system of religion wider than race cults ever
crossed the mind of the ancient world. " The
heathen religions," writes Jowett, " were the
bonds of nations and of society, giving majesty
to kings and authority to laws, linking men
together in common acts of worship, arising out of
an inward necessity for communion of gods and
men, just as language is a necessity of the social
state. As the religions, not of individuals, but of
nations, . . . they could not but be political and
local in their character." *
Such was the conception of religion which
obtained in the ancient world. The conception
now most widely prevailing among us is its exact
contrary, and regards religion purely as a matter
of individual concern. This is, indeed, the legiti
mate, nay, the necessary outcome of what is loosely
called the principle of private judgment. I am
well aware that those to whom we owe the intro
duction of this principle into the religious sphere
by no means intended such a result. The design
* I have mislaid my reference to this passage, and, curiously
enough, Mr. Jowett could not give it me. " The words are
certainly mine " he wrote, " but I do not in the least remember
where they occur."

iv.] THE CHIEF NOTE OF THE MIDDLE AGES. 109
of the authors of the Protestant Reformation incon-
testably was to revert to the pre-Christian system
of national religions. Such religions, it was justly
considered, might serve as useful appendages to
government, and might play much the same part
in the politics of the modern world as that which
they played in the politics of antiquity. But ideas
develop themselves according to laws of their own,
and live on after their authors, working oftentimes
the destruction of the institutions they were at first
used to support. The neo- Christianity of the
Reformation has been largely fatal to the churches
which the reformers established. It has tended
more and more to reduce religion from an objective
fact to a subjective speculation, to make it a
mere private thing for each man's own con
science. I shall have to touch again upon this subject, in
my Sixth Chapter. I am here specially concerned
with the great and distinguishing peculiarity of the
Middle Ages, which is this: that in them, throughout
Europe, the whole structure of man's life, both public
and private, was built upon religion. In the utter
wreck of society which followed upon the dissolu
tion of the Roman Empire, the several states con
structed from its fragments, although originally
Pagan or Arian, had eventually submitted to the
Catholic Church, receiving from her the Divine
Law as the rule of their institutions and the basis
of their legislation ; and she had crowned the

110 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRISTENDOM. [ch.
edifice when her Supreme Pontiff chose the great
monarch of the Franks as her " Advocate," invest
ing him Avith the majesty of the Caesars, and
"anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord.* "
In the Middle Ages, then, the religion of Europe
was individual : it could not but be so, for it dealt
primarily with each man's conscience : its call was
personally addressed to each soul. But that call
was into a spiritual kingdom, in which each
soul found its own portion and inheritance. Thus
the medieval conception of religion was also
national: all Christian men were " cives sanc
torum," subjects of the " Civitas Dei," the world-
* " I must call your attention to a fact which stands at the
head of all others, and characterizes the Christian Church in
general — a fact which, so to speak, has decided its destiny.
This fact is the unity of the Church, the unity of the
Christian society, irrespectively of all diversities of time,
of place, of power, of language, of origin. Wonderful
phenomenon ! It is just at the moment when the
Roman Empire is breaking up and disappearing that the
Christian Church gathers itself up and takes its definite
form. Political unity perishes, religious unity emerges.
Populations endlessly different in origin, habits, speech,
destiny, rush upon the scene ; all becomes local and partial ;
every enlarged idea, every general institution, every great
social arrangement is lost sight of ; and in this moment this
Christian Church proclaims most loudly the unity of its teach
ing, the universality of its law. And from the bosom of the
most frightful disorder the world has ever seen has arisen the
largest and purest idea, perhaps, which ever drew men
together, — the idea of a spiritual society." — Guizot, Lee. XII.
p. 230.

iv.] THE CHRISTIAN COMMONWEALTH. Ill
wide kingdom of Him to whom had been given
" the heathen for His inheritance, and the uttermost
parts of the earth for his possession." And as in
the ancient world, so in the medieval, the notion
of citizenship was based upon the family. The
" populus Dei," was a "gens sancta," into which
men were admitted by the new birth of baptism :
the members of this "gens" were " domestici
Dei," and the first of facts to them was their place
in His family. Hence Christendom, rather than
the particular region of it in which they happened
to dwell, was regarded as their true country and
the first object of their patriotism. The rigid lines
of demarcation which in the ancient world had
separated races, and had made the words stranger
and enemy synonymous, were broken down. The
phrase " Christian commonwealth " was a reality,
and the several European states were sections of it.
For the first time in the world's history, as a
learned writer has well observed, " We see not
merely man, but humanity. The citizen and the
helot, Greeks and barbarians have disappeared :
and in their place is a family of brothers, with one
Divine Father." *
This, then, was the idea of Christendom, an idea
which, as I have pointed out, in its several stages
* " Si non vide pur 1' uomo, ma l'humanita : ne pur appar-
vero il citadino e 1' ilota, i greci ed i barbari, ma si vide una
famiglia di fratelli con I'unico padre ch' e Dio." — De Renzi,
Collectio Salernitana, vol. i. p. 6.

112 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRISTENDOM. [ch.
of existence and differing degrees of vitality, rules
throughout the medieval period. It is an idea
not easy for us to grasp, because, as Mr. Bryce has
admirably remarked, "Here, as in so many other
cases, the continued use of traditional language seems
to have prevented us from seeing how great is the
difference between our own times and those in
which the phrases we repeat were first used, and used
in full sincerity." Men "do not, cannot, under
stand the intense fascination which the idea of one
all-pervading Church exercised upon their medieval
forefathers." * The prevalence of religious unity
in undoubting submission to the teaching of this
all-pervading Church is the chief note of the Middle
Ages. Whatever men questioned, they did not
question that ; whatever they were at issue about,
they were at one on that subject. That the
Catholic religion was the complete revelation of
the wdll of God, the supreme test of right and
wrong, the absolute standard of life, whether
public, family, or individual, was the cardinal
truth, the fundamental axiom of human existence, '
which men then believed as simply as we now
believe the multiplication table. This is the great
fact about that period of the world's history,
distinctly marking it off "from all other periods.
The practical consequences of this fact it is hardly
possible to overrate. Let me attempt to trace in
* Holy Roman Empire, pp. 373-4, 8th edition.

iv.] GROWTH OF THE PAPACY. 113
the faintest outline a few of the more obvious of
them, which, however, obvious as they are, are too
frequently overlooked or misapprehended.
The first consequence of the religious unity of
the medieval period on which I shall touch, is the
position which, throughout it, was held by the
Sovereign Pontiff. The idea of the Papacy,
inherent from the beginning, had grown through
the ages by an imperceptible and natural process,
" occulto velut arbor sevo," to use De Maistre's
happy quotation ; or, as Cardinal Newman has
expressed it, " The Infinite Wisdom, which sees
the end from the beginning, in decreeing the rise
of an universal empire .... decreed the develop
ment of a ruler." * Of his independence, the
temporal principality, at first unwillingly received,
was the instrument and pledge. Dante describes
Constantine as founding his new capital on the
Bosphorus that "he might give the Shepherd
room." Whether or no this was his intention in
the transfer of the seat of Empire, such, unques
tionably, was its result. Free from the oppressive
proximity of the secular ruler, the Pope consoli
dated his spiritual sovereignty ; and Rome became
the centre of a vaster realm than any which had
owned the Imperial sway, the seat of a monarch
* Essay on Development, c. iii. sec. iv. I may perhaps be
permitted to say that I think there is not anything more
masterly in Cardinal Newman's writings than the fourteen
pages in which this point is discussed (pp. 164-179).
1

114 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRISTENDOM. [ch.
invested with more august prerogatives than any
associated with the majesty of the Caesars. " Tu
es primatu Abel, gubernatu Noe, patriarchatu
Abraham, ordine Melchisedec, dignitate Aaron,
autoritate Moyses, judicatu Samuel, potestate
Petrus, unctione Christus," * writes St. Bernard to
Eugenius III., and these oft-quoted words are not
the language of rhetoric ; they do but express the
serious conviction of Christendom during the well-
nigh seven centuries of its existence. Men " saw in
the Pope not merely the type, but also the real and
highest earthly organ of a power not of this
world ; " f and although the actual influence of the
Papacy varied with the circumstances of the time and
the character of the Pontiff, the Chair of the Apostle
was ever regarded as the centre of Christendom.
Nothing can be more misleading than the
term "foreign power," which a certain school of
writers on the medieval period delight to apply to
the Holy See. If used with regard to earlier cen
turies of that period, the phrase is absolutely unmean
ing, and in respect of the last century and a half, it
must be taken in a very qualified sense. j Even
* St. Bernard de Consid., 1. ii. c. viii. n. 15.
f Essays and Reviews, by R. W. Church, p. 159.
X Sanders states that in this country men began to call the
Roman Pontiff a foreign power at the time when the clergy
were in a praemunire for submitting to legatine authority,
i.e. in 1531. — De Schis. Ang., book i. c. 13.

iv.] PREROGATIVES OF THE POPE. 115
when the practical authority of the Holy See
was at its lowest, the theory of its august
prerogatives as the head of the Christian family
was unquestioned. Men looked to it, whether they
obeyed it or not, as the oracle of the divine law,
the organ of the just judgment of God. " It
is not matter of theory," writes Dean Church,
" but a fact of history, that in the time of
which we speak, the cause of the Popes wras
that of religion and holiness. With whatevei
amount of mistake, misdoing, or corruption
among its supporters — however feebly they may
often have realised their own principles — it was
based on faith in the Unseen ; it resisted and
rebuked the world ; it set a true value on
the things of time." * Hence it was that their
legislation, based on a higher reason and prin
ciples more righteous than those which informed
the customs prevailing with the force of law
throughout Europe, obtained general acceptance
by its intrinsic excellence. Hence the system of
appeals to Rome, often the object of censure
as ignorant as it is passionate, was, in spite of
vast abuses, the safeguard of Christendom. For
there was the recognition of "a standard higher
than that of political expediency ; a commonly
* Church's Essays and Reviews, p. 159. The time of which
Dean Church speaks is the time of St. Anselm, but I take leave
to adopt his words in a wider sense.
i2

116 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRISTENDOM. [ch.
acknowledged law able to reach and visit crimes
which national laws were ready to screen or were
too weak to punish. An appeal to the See of
Rome was not only virtually an appeal to the
whole of Christendom, it was also an appeal to the
judgment seat of our Lord."*
" The character assigned to the Bishop of Rome by the
framers of the canon law," a learned writer has observed, "is
as august and venerable as any that it has ever entered into
raan's imagination to conceive. Europe was considered in their
system as one vast moral territory, of which the Pope was the
supeme magistrate, on whom the eyes of all were fixed, and to
whom every one could appeal as the tutelary and incorruptible
guardian of truth and justice. Beyond the reach of the clash
ing passions and numberless temptations by which the children
of men are beset, the sole object of his authority was to secure
for every Christian that future happiness which is the certain
reward of virtue. Por this grand end he promulgated laws
dictated by the spirit of unerring wisdom, which prevented
crime while they purified intention, and which no one, without
violating his duty to the great European family, could venture
to disobey. Greater than monarchs by his functions, humbler
than the lowest by his inclinations, his officers were peace, and
his exactors righteousness. Unlike the reluctant services
wrung from their miserable serfs by the oppressors among
whom Europe had been cantoned out, the homage which the
Pope received from submissive millions was the willing,
unforced obedience of grateful children ; and the power he
exercised was to guide the ignorant in the way, and to protect
him that had no helper against the mighty and the terrible.
Thus, while the face of Europe was disfigured by a thousand
ridiculous and discordant customs, the offsping of violence and
barbarity, there was above them all a law transcendent and

Church's Essays and Reviews, p. 159.

iv.] THE POPE AND THE CANON LAW. 117
sublime, guarded by sanctions which all revered, enforced by
an authority which all acknowledged, by which the conqueror
and the conquered, the warrior and the peasant, the layman
and the priest, nay, by which the judge and the criminal who
trembled before the seat of justice, were knit together in one
common bond of brotherhood and affection ; and if compelled
by the perverseness of his subjects, he with whom this divine
prerogative had been deposited was obliged to exchange the
voice of paternal tenderness for that of admonition and rebuke,
he addressed the wanderers like children whom he sought to
reclaim, rather than as rebels whom it was his duty to chastise ;
nor was it till admonition after admonition had been despised,
till warning after warning had been set at nought, till entreaty
after entreaty had been rejected, that the spiritual sword was
at length unsheathed to strike, and that, armed with the same
awful power which smote ' Gehazi with a leprosy and Simon
Magus with a curse,' the universal bishop and common father
of Christian men, amid tears and wailing, cut off the rotten
branch to save the tree, and cast out the incorrigible offender
from the law's protection, and all intercourse with the species
to which he was a reproach. Such was the theory of canon
law." *

Hardly less important than the legislative and
judicial functions of the Pope, in the ages of faith,
was his indirect temporal influence as the guide
and father of the Christian family. "Auctoritate
Moyses," he was ever interposing between rival
States and conflicting parties with the words of
the leader of Israel, " Sirs, ye are brethren." It
has been justly remarked by Lingard, " Writers
have not always sufficiently appreciated the benefits
* " Influence of the Canon Law," by John George Phillimore,
in Oxford Essays, 1858, p. 216.

118 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRISTENDOM. [ch.
which mankind derived from the pacific influence
of the Roman Pontiffs. In an age which valued no
merit but that of arms, Europe would have been
plunged in perpetual war had not Pope after Pope
laboured incessantly for the preservation or resto
ration of peace. They rebuked the passions and
checked the extravagant pretensions of sovereigns.
Their character, as the common fathers of Christians,
gave to their representations a weight which no
other mediator could claim ; and their legates
spared neither journey nor fatigue to reconcile
the jarring interests of countries, and interpose
the olive of peace between the swords of con
tending armies." * And the same truth has
been forcibly expressed by Guizot : "By
methods of various kinds," he writes, " the
Church strove to check the tendency of society
to violence and continual wars. It is matter of
notoriety that by the Truce of God, and many
measures of the same kind, the Church struggled
against the employment of force, and devoted itself
to the introduction into society of a greater degree
of order and mildness. These facts are so well
known," he adds, " that I am spared the trouble
of entering into detail regarding them." f But
what is too often lost sight of, or imperfectly
*Hist. of England, vol. iii. chap, iii The occasion of Lingard's
remark is the armistice concluded between Edward III. and
Philip VI. in 1349, at the instance of Clement VI.
^Lectures on the Hist, of Civilisation in Europe, Lect. VI.

iv.] CIVIL AND DOMESTIC LIFE. 119
apprehended by those who are well acquainted
with these facts, is that the exercise of the inter
national influence of the Pope depended upon
the religious unity of Christendom. The weapons
of his warfare were not carnal, but spiritual ; his
power was wholly moral ; and its sanctions were
found in the consciences and spiritual instincts of
men. Turning from the political and public order of
medieval Europe to its civil and domestic life, we
find the consequences of their religious unity
equally conspicuous and important. This is a
subject so large that I shall here only dwell
briefly upon one aspect of it — the constructive
character of medieval religion. A common creed
is a quite unique principle of association. It makes
men, as nothing else can, to be " unius moris in
domo," of one mind in a house. And this is
pre-eminently true of the Catholic religion, with
its doctrines of the one origin of the human race,
of the brotherhood and spiritual equality of all
baptised persons, of the absolute necessity of self-
sacrifice, of the impartial justice of God, with His
tribunal of penance, before which all must come in
this world, and His judgment-seat awaiting all in
the next. In common interests and destinies such
as these, existing not as opinions or speculations,
but as the prime facts of life, men found a bond
of common action such as nothing else could
supply. The chief obstacles to the unity of the

120 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRISTENDOM. [ch.
human race in the Middle Ages were slavery and
war. I have already observed how from reli
gious unity sprang efforts, more or less successful,
to repress war, or to curtail its duration, or to
mitigate its horrors. As to slavery, it was felt,
ever more and more deeply as the influence of the
Church prevailed, that for a Christian man to hold
his Christian brethren in a servile condition was
monstrous. And the constant tendency of religion
throughout the medieval period was to level the
artificial barriers which sever man from man.
Guerard has somewhere remarked, " It made a
continual appeal to the emancipation of the
peoples ; it brought the various grades of life
together ; and although men did not cease to
oppress one another, still they regarded themselves
as the members of one family, and were led by
religious equality to civil and political equality."
But this equality wras not the equality of
isolation ; it was the equality of degree ; — the
equality of the many members with diverse offices
constituting the one body. The Church certainly
had no great cause to love the feudal system. It
was the stronghold of her oppressors, and supplied
the never-failing pretexts for their encroachments
on her liberties. For example, " the whole
history of the imperial Franconian line is that
of one long struggle between the Western Church
as represented by the Papacy and the principle
of a feudal classification of society .... which

iv.] THE FEUDAL SYSTEM. 121
threatened to reduce her to the state of a merely
human and subordinate institution." * But still,
taking that classification as she found it, her en
deavour was to bring it under the obedience of faith,
and not only to adorn it with those Christian virtues
which enter so largely into the ideal of the chival-
ric character, but also to transform it from a regime
of violence and brute force into " a hierarchy of
duties ; " — duties strictly reciprocal, for while obe
dience was due from inferiors, provision was in
turn no less imperatively d ue from superiors ; of
duties consecrated by a religion which was im
planted in each soul— the source of its dearest
hopes and of its deepest terrors.
And if religious unity was the bond of the
medieval frame of civil society (which was not the
Church's creation), much more was it the life of
those ordinances which owed their origin expressly
to her, and by which she sought to counteract the
evils of the time, and to ameliorate the condition
of mankind. "Grave mother of majestic works,"
the municipal liberties, the gilds, and confraternities
of the Middle Ages sprang directly from her fertile
bosom, were made in her image, and breathed her
spirit. Beneath the shadow of the Apostolic throne
arose that glorious group of Italian republics which
maintained the sacred cause of civil freedom and

* Bowden's Life of Gregory VII., vol. i. p. 106. See also
vol. ii. p. 49.

122 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRISTENDOM. [ch.
religious liberty against Teutonic despotism, and
whose greatness,* built upon the common faith of
their citizens, may be read in the imperishable
monuments they have left us. Who, for example,
can visit the " City of the Virgin " and fail to read
the lesson which is written alike on her palaces and
her pictures, her public buildings and her churches ?
" Siena," remarks Mr. Hemans, kindled by his
subject into unwonted enthusiasm, "Siena seems
an abstract of the Italian Middle Ages, here
scarcely breathed upon by the spirit of modern
times. Eloquent proofs of the domination of
religion in the past, its elevating presence and
all-pervading power, here meet us on every
side. The whole architecture and general phy
siognomy of this picturesque city form a noble
evidence to the civilizing influences of the Church,
in her association with institutions that assured
municipal prosperity as well as rational freedom. "f
The history and character of those institutions
is ever becoming better known, and they all
tell the same tale. The Communal movement
* Montalembert has truly observed : " Dans la vie publique,
com me dans la vie prive'e, . . . ce qui eel ate surtout, e'est la
force et la grandeur d'ame : ce qui abonde, ce sont les grand
caracteres, les grands individus. C'est la, qu'on le sache bien,
la vraie, 1 'incontestable superiorite du Moyen Age. C'etait un
epoque feconde en hommes. ' Magna parens virum.' " — Les
Moines d' Occident, Int. eclvi.
f Med. Christianity and Sacred Art, p. 450.

iv.] MEDIEVAL LIBERTIES. 123
which shattered feudal tyranny, and initiated in
Europe municipal self-government, is, to a very
great extent, traceable to the direct intervention of
prelates and monks. Those sturdy burghers who
rebuilt the walls and revived the civilization of
the old free cities, and who, Auguste Thierry
judges, " went far beyond us in the pursuit of
public liberties," * ever worked under the invocation
of their patron saint, and consecrated their chief
corporate acts by sacrifice and prayer. The
ordinances of the corporations and gilds, by
which "the principle of association" was in use
as "a living practice of the common folk " f of
the Middle Ages, still remain, and are now acces
sible to us; and among their "most pleasing
traits " their accomplished editor notes " the
evidences of a simple piety and a faith that
entered into everyday life." J It was that faith,
in the undoubting unity of which men lived,
worked, and died, that rendered such associations
possible; upon that faith they were directly founded.
And — what is more remarkable still — the first
place in their statutes and ordinances was given to
* "Nous avons ete precedes de loin, dans la recherche
des libertes publiques, par ces bourgeois du moyen-age, qui
releverent il y a six cent ans, les murs et la civilisation des
antiques cites muuicipales." — Lettres sur VHistoire de France,
p. 6, 5th edition.
f The Original Ordinances of more than one hundred English
Gilds, 8fc. Early English Text Society, Int., p. xiii.
% Ibid., p. xxix.

124 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRISTENDOM. [ch.
that supernatural end, the recognition of which
by traders appears to a brilliant writer of this
century so grotesque, that he thought the bare
suggestion of it a sufficient reductio ad absurdum.
" If," Lord Macaulay observes, "the doctrine that
every association of human beings which exercises
any power whatever is bound, as such association,
to profess a religion, .... every stage-coach
company ought, in its collective capacity, to
profess a religion. Railway directors must offer
prayer and praise in their collective capacity.
Joint-stock banks and clubs, having a personality,
lie under the necessity of sanctifying that person
ality by the offices of religion." * Of course I am
not concerned with the value of the particular
arguments which Lord Macaulay is here combating.
I merely wish to point to the fact that what he,
and the world in general in this nineteenth century,
deem so palpably absurd, was the universal rule of
the Middle Ages. "In the accounts of the origin
of the Company of Grocers," writes Dr. Brentano,
"it is mentioned that at their very first meeting,
they fixed the stipend for the priest, who had to
conduct their religious services, and to pray for
their dead. In this respect," he adds, "the craft
gilds of all countries are alike, and in reading their
statutes one might fancy sometimes that the old

* "Essay on Gladstone's Church and State." Works, .vol.
vi. p. 334.

iv.] MEDIEVAL ART. 125
craftsmen cared only for the well-being of their
souls." *
It would be beyond the scope of the present
Chapter to follow out into tho various paths of
medieval life the traces of this " elevating
presence and all-pervading power ; " to mark
how, as Mr. Ruskin has finely said, t " Medieval
art is but the expression of the joy of those
who have found the young child with Mary his
mother ; " j how the literature of the Middle Ages
in spite of the grossness and licentiousness, which
often disfigure it, is informed by great Christian
verities ; how the poetry of common life so rich
and abundant in that epoch, springs from the same
source, and " the birds, the plants, everything that
man meets on his way through the world]are marked
by his faith and his hope ; " § nay more, how the
churches serve as theatres, and those very amuse
ments || which we now deem most distinctively
secular, are made religious. There is, however, one
consideration of great importance closely connected
with the point I have last dwelt upon, — the construe-
* English Gilds, Int., p. exxxiii.
f In an unpublished lecture, quoted at page 487 of Miss
Owen's Art Schools of Medieval Christendom.
X So Alfred de Musset, in his graceful way : — " autrefois, le
temple des arts etait le temple de Dieu meme. . . . Ces tableaux,
ces chapelles, ces melodies suaves et plaintives c'etaient des
prieres que tout cela." — Melanges, p. 4.
§ Montalembert, Vie de Ste. Elisabeth, Int., p. 154.
|| Por some very just remarks on the miracle plays see
Miss Toulmin Smith's York Mystery Plays, Int., p. Iv.

126 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRISTENDOM. [ch.
tive character of medieval religion — upon which
a few words should be said. It is this, that a main
characteristic impressed upon the Middle Ages by
Catholic unity, is the spirit of the family.
Christian men, as we have seen, were regarded
as " domestici Dei " ; the various states were sections
of the one household of faith, Christendom; and
governments, whether regal or republican, stood
"in loco parentis." The king was the father of
his people ; senates were, according to the old
Roman phrase, " patres conscripti"; the duty of
obedience to civil authority was deduced directly
from the precept of the Decalogue: "Honour thy
father and thy mother." Thus it is observed by
the most eloquent of Anglican divines, whose mind
was saturated with the teaching of the great
masters of the medieval schools: "This duty to
parents is the very firmament and bond of common
wealths. He that honours his parents will also
love his brethren, derived from the same loins ; he
will dearly account of all his relatives and persons
of the same cognation ; and so families are united,
and of them, cities and societies are formed. And
because parents and patriarchs of families and of
nations had regal power, they who by any change
succeeded in the care and government of cities and
kingdoms, succeeded in the power and authority of
fathers, and became so in estimate of law and true
divinity to their people." * And this principle
* Life of Christ, part. ii. dis. 9.

iv.] MEDIEVAL GILDS. 127
runs throughout medieval society. Gilds, for
example, were nothing but families artificially
enlarged. " The family appears as the first gild,"
remarks Dr. Brentano ; " or, at least, as an arche
type of the gilds. Originally, its providing care
satisfies all existing wants ; and for other societies
there is, therefore, no room. As soon, however,
as wants arise, which the family can no longer
satisfy .... closer artificial alliances immediately
spring forth to provide for them, in so far as the
state does not do it. Yet .... whatever and how
ever diverse be their aims, the gilds take over from
the family the spirit which held it together and
guided it ; they are its faithful image, though only
for special and definite objects." *
And here I would point out that the secular
organisation of medieval Europe on this basis of
the family was the direct consequence of its
religious organisation in the Catholic Church. It
is the teaching of theology, remarks a learned
French prelate, that " the human race was origin
ally intended to develop without loss of its unity.
If the original fall had not turned aside the primal
plan of Providence, slavery, war, barbarism, all
that breaks the unity of humanity, would not have
desolated the world. It would be hazardous to
attempt to guess the form of organisation which
that development would have taken. But we may,
* English Gilds, Int., p. lxxx.

128 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRISTENDOM. [ch.
at all events, conclude that its two constituent
principles — principles which are necessarily in
cluded in the ideas of human society and unity —
would have been the authority of the Father of the
Family and a supreme central authority, and that
between these two degrees, social hierarchs would
have been established. This idea has been realized
in the Catholic Church, so far as the spiritual
reconstruction of the human race is concerned.
The Bishops, in whom the sacerdotal character is
complete, and who alone have the power of trans
mitting it, are the fathers of the spiritual families,
centres of unity, but they kept in unity by their
connection with and subordination to the central
paternity, the Head of the Church and Father of
Fathers." * Thus, according to Mgr. Gerbet,
whose words I abstract rather than translate, the
constitution of the Catholic Church implies the
restoration of the human race to that unity which
sin and its consequences have broken. The secular
organisation of Christendom, as contemplated by
the Popes, was the complement of this idea. The
revived Roman Empire was manifestly intended by
them to be in things temporal what the Church was
in things spiritual. The Emperor was to be the
antitype of the Supreme Pontiff ; his subordinate
authorities were to correspond to the ecclesiastical
hierarchy. It was felt — to use Dr. Arnold's well-
* Rome Chretienne, chap. vii.

iv.] THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE. 129
known words — that "a society of Christians should
be a Christian society " : that the heavenly and the
earthly commonwealths should sustain each other,
that the sword of the spirit should defend civil
society, that the temporal sword — the bearer of it
being also God's minister — should be used for "the
punishment of wickedness and vice, and for the
maintenance of true religion and virtue." * The
Holy Roman Empire was, no doubt, but a splendid
failure, " not answering the aim,
And that unbodied figure of the thought
That gav't surmised shape."
But that thought, although unexecuted in its fulness,
was still at the root of the organisation of medieval
society. The association of men for the various
needs of civilized life was held to have something
divine in it. The State was built upon fatherhood;
it was a hierarchy of families ; its head being the
representative of Him of whom "all paternity in
heaven and earth is named." Hence the supreme
* Thus St. Gregory VII., writing to Rodolph Duke of
Suabia, in 1073, observes : " The sovereign reigns most gloriously
and the vigour of Holy Church is established, when priesthood
and empire are joined in the unity of concord. There should be
nothing feigned, nothing impure, in that concord  As the
human body is directed, in the natural light, by two eyes, so when
these two dignities are united in the harmony of pure religion,
the body of the Church manifestly appears ruled and illuminated
by spiritual light." — Registrum, book i. Ep. 19.
K

130 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRISTENDOM. [ch.
place given to the feeling of loyalty — a feeling
very different in the Middle Ages from that
" rational attachment to the guardian of the laws "
which Junius defines it to be.* The loyalty of the
Middle Ages was no matter of cold calculation ; it
was the spontaneous, ungrudging devotion of a
child to a parent. Hence, too, the extreme black
ness of the crime of treason to which, as King
Alfred explains, " no mercy was assigned, because
Almighty God adjudged none to them that de
spised Him, nor did Christ adjudge any to them
which sold Him to death ; and he commanded that
a lord should be loved like Himself." t
Here, it should be noted, is the explanation
of the " intolerance " of the Middle Ages. If the
true constitution of medieval society is once really
apprehended, its legislation against heresy is in
telligible enough. To generations which regarded
religion as the prime objective fact of life — the
bond of the social and political order — heresy must
have presented itself in a very different aspect from
that which it wears to an age of religious individual
ism. The Middle Ages were beyond all things dog
matic. To the men of those times, doubt as to the
clearness and sufficiency of the doctrine preached
by the Catholic Church seemed mere blasphemy.
* Letter I., " Loyalty in the heart and understanding of an
Englishman is a rational attachment to the guardian of the
laws." t Quoted in Maine's Ancient Law, p. 399.

iv.] MEDIEVAL INTOLERANCE. 131
That every man has a natural right to form by his
own judgment, and independent of all authority,
the opinions upon which his intellectual, moral, and
social life depends, is, with a large class of persons
at the present day, a first principle ; and in sur
veying the mediaeval period, it more or less biases
their judgment. Balmez * complains of the bad
faith with which the question of toleration has been
approached. I doubt, however, whether, in the
great majority of cases, deliberate dishonesty can
be imputed to the writers of whose unfairness he
justly complains. Their fault rather arises from
their forgetting the immense difference between the
social, political, and religious condition of that age
of the world and of this, whence they are led to
" people past history with phantasms and colour it
with lines which belong to our own days."
If we once fairly grasp the truth that to the men of
medieval times the will of God, as they conceived of
it, was the fount of all right and all duty — the source
from which all human laws derive their obligation
— we shall be in little danger of falling into this
error. In the Ten Commandments is the key to
the penal legislation of the Middle Ages. The
conception of crime current then was very different
from the conception now commonly entertained.
The offences which the civil magistrate was called
upon to punish were infractions of the divine law,
* Europ. Civil., c. xxxiv.
K2

132 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRISTENDOM. [ch.
and were penal rather as breaches of duty than as
violations of rights. In administering justice he was
considered to be acting as " an avenger to execute
wrath upon him that doeth evil," * punishment being
chiefly regarded as the divinely appointed sequence
of crime, its first end the vindication of the Divine
honour. And the supreme evil which a man
could do was held to be the denial of the faith
which God had revealed, for it appeared to com
bine all the worst elements of wickedness. "It
was treason against the Sovereign Lord ; it was a
capital injury to the commonwealth, whose pros
perity depended upon His favour, " Dis te minorem
quod geris imperas" being the most axiomatic
principle of statecraft ; it was the most grievous
of wrongs to one's neighbour, for heresy was as
a canker eating away the body politic : it was
worse than murder, in the degree that the soul
which it slew is more excellent than the body." f
* The conception now generally prevalent is very far
removed from this. "The object of human punishment,"
writes Blackstone, " is not by way of atonement or expiation
for the crime committed, for that must be left to the Supreme
Being ; but as a precaution against future offences of the same
kind." — Stephen's Commentaries, vol. iv. p. 13. " Crimes "
according to the same authority, " are the violations of rights "
(" rights " being "liberties secured to the individual by the
compact of civil society "), when considered in a "particular
point of view, viz., in reference to the evil effects of such
violation on the community at large."— Ibid vol iv p
201. ¦ ¦ ?¦
t A Century of Revolution, p. 29.

iv.] DARK ASPECTS OF MEDIEVAL LIFE. 133
The lawgivers of the Middle Ages prescribed for
this offence the highest penalty they knew of ; and
their penal code was severe, nay, savage. They
thought lightly of inflicting and of undergoing
physical suffering. To which we should add, that
real, earnest belief, even if it be a belief that
nothing ought to be believed, is impatient of
contradiction. The Communists of our own day,
assassinating "les serviteurs d'un nomme Dieu;"
the earlier champions of liberty, equality, fraternity-,
massacring the priests, and hurrying the laity by
thousands to the scaffold or the river, may serve as
illustrations of this fact. The toleration fashionable
in this age is largely the outcome of indifference.

This then is the distinguishing note of the Middle
Ages, that they were before and beyond all things
the Ages of Faith. But as in the individual so
in the mass, faith is only one of the theological
virtues ; it may exist, nay in practice it often
does exist, without the others. The undoubted
fact, that the men of medieval times breathed an
atmosphere of belief, is quite consistent with
the equally indubitable fact that they perpe
trated an enormous amount of wickedness.
The great verities of Christianity were every
where externally honoured, and were interiorly
received with unquestioning submission by the
masses. All men recognised and confessed them ;

134 CHRISTIANITY AND CHRISTENDOM. [ch.
many turned aside from the confession to sin
grossly and habitually in the teeth of them. Men's
abuse of religious truth was rendered more flagrant
by the very firmness with which they held it.
The sins and scandals of the Middle Ages were
on the same scale with their virtues. The age of
Innocent III. was also the age of King John.
St. Anthony of Padua and Eccelino were contem
poraries. The firmest faith and the grossest
corruption of life met together; nay, more, were
found united in the same person, giving birth to
that rank superstition which is so marked a feature
of the medieval period. " Great men would not
go out to hunt without hearing Mass, but were
content that the priest should mutilate it, and
worse, to bring it within limits  Tourna
ments," breathing the spirit of the ancient gladia
torial shows, " were held in defiance of the
excommunications of the Church, yet were
conducted with a show of devotion ; ordeals,
again, were even religious rites, yet in like
manner undergone in the face of the Church's
prohibition  The Troubadour offered tapers
and paid for masses, for his success in some lawless
attachment ; and the object of it in return painted
her votary under the figure of a saint  The
Crusaders had faith sufficient to bind them to a
perilous pilgrimage and warfare; they kept the
Friday's abstinence, and planted the tents of their
mistresses within the shadow of the pavilion of the

iv.J AN ESSENTIAL TO PHILOSOPHIC STUDY. 135
glorious St. Louis." * It would be easy to fill
volumes with sketches of still darker aspects of
medieval life. But I need not enlarge upon that
topic. My object in this Chapter has been not to
present an " abstract and brief chronicle " of the
Middle Ages, but to exhibit the ideal which
dominated them: an ideal essential to be kept
in view in order to their philosophic study : the
ideal expressed by the word Christendom.
* Cardinal Newman's Anglican Difficulties, p. 245.

CHAPTER V.
CHRISTIANITY AND THE RENAISSANCE.
It is a fine saying of De Maistre : " Dieu n' efface
que pour ecrire." We might, however, say with
equal warrant, Dieu n'ecrit que pour effacer/. All
our institutions are of the earth, earthy; and, sooner
or later, are turned again to their dust. This is
so even with the intellectual representations —
Vorstellungen — in which we embody for our use
in time — our own time — truths that are eternal.
They are subject to decline, decay, and dissolution.
" They have their day and cease to be." In the
region of thought, as of action, it holds good
that here we have no continuing city. As the
thirteenth century draws to a close the medieval
order begins to show signs of exhaustion. Its
decline may be dated from the beginning of the
fourteenth century. Then is first manifest the en-
feeblement of the ancient Catholic unity. Thence
we may trace the gradual decadence of the social
structure based on tliat unity, until in the middle
of the succeeding century the world definitely

chap, v.] THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 137
enters upon a new era. Even in the fourteenth
century itself we find more of the coming than of
the closing age. It is not at first that new ideas
are distinctly before men's minds : that fresh aims
and objects definitely shape themselves. Neither
in the sphere of religion nor of morals, of
physical science nor of industry, is there any
movement which may properly be called revolu
tionary. It is rather that the old doctrines and
principles on which preceding centuries had lived,
which shaped their legislation, animated their art.
informed their literature, governed their social
life, seem to have lost vivifying influence. And
so ever more and more, until the medieval period
closes, society ceases to seek its guide in the
Church, and the Church ceases to see itself reflected
in society.
We find, as we might expect, striking evidence
of this change in the altered condition of the
institution around which Christendom was centered.
The growth of the. new nationalities was un
favourable to the old conception of a Christian
republic. And as they gradually develop fuller
life, and their rulers become greater potentates, so
does the position of the Papacy decline in the
European order. Philip the Fair succeeds where
monarchs of far more account than he, had, in by
gone times, ignominiously failed. It is true that
Boniface VIII. was not of the intellectual or
spiritual stature of Gregory VII., of Alexander III.,

138 CHRISTIANITY AND THE RENAISSANCE. [ch.
of Innocent III. But it is also true that the condi
tions of the combat were changed. The earlier
Pontiffs had behind them the communis sensus,
the public opinion of Christendom. That was
lacking to Boniface VIII., partly, no doubt, from
his own fault, but partly, and still more, from no
fault of his own. With him the decadence of the
Papacy begins. It is immensely accelerated by
the enforced departure of the Pontiffs from the
Papal city. The divisions of Italy, the turbulence
of the Roman factions, had rendered their residence
there almost impossible. It had become for
them a veritable house of bondage. And in 1308
—six years after the death of Boniface — Clement V.
transfers the Papal Court to Avignon. In him,
writes Mill, who had made of this period a
special study, "for the first time, the Church sank
into the abject tool of secular tyranny ; with him
commenced the new era of the Papacy which made
it the horror and disgust of the rapidly improving
European mind, until .... the period which we
commonly call the Middle Age " * closes.
No one who knows the facts can assert that this
vehement language is unwarranted. It is not easy
too strongly to reprobate the part played by
Clement V. in the suppression of the Templars.
Doubtless the order had lost its reason for existence
since the capture of the last Christian fortress in
* Discus, and Dissert., vol. ii. p. 162.

v.] DECLINE OF THE PAPACY. L39
Syria. Weighty consideration might have been
urged for its abolition. Nothing can be urged in
defence of the means whereby it was abolished.*
And it cannot be questioned that Clement's share
in this great wickedness seriously impaired the.
moral influence of the Papacy throughout Europe.
The six Popes who immediately followed him re
sided at Avignon. And whatever may be said of.
the good qualities displayed by some of them — by
Gregory XL, for example — certain it is that their
abject dependence upon the French monarch
gravely undermined their ecumenical authority,
and alienated from the Apostolic See much of the
unquestioning reverence with which men had once
regarded it. The Defensio Pacis — 1328 is its date
— in which the Paduan physician Marsilio openly
challenged the claims of the Papacy, is a most
significant sign of the times. To quote the well-
weighed words of Ranke, " There was a common
opposition to the principles of the Pontifical juris
prudence  We see one nation after another
realise its independence and unity. The civil
power will no longer acknowledge any higher
authority. The Popes no longer find allies in the
middle classes. Their interferences are resolutely
repelled by princes and legislative bodies." f
* M. Renan in his interesting article, " La Papaute hors de
l'ltalie " (Revue des Deux Mondes, March, 1880), expresses a
somewhat more favourable view of Clement V. than is usually
taken.
f Die romischen Papste, book i. c. 1.

140 CHRISTIANITY AND THE RENAISSANCE, [ch.
In 1376 Gregory XI. returned to Rome, and the
Babylonish Captivity came to an end. It is
succeeded by the Great Schism, which, as Dollinger
has truly pointed out, had its origin in purely
national interests : and the effect of which was to
shake the authority of the Papacy to its foundations,
to convulse the Church for more than forty years,
and almost to obliterate, for the time, her essential
notes of unity and universality. That too came to
an end by the election of Martin V. in 1417, at the
Council of Constance. In this learned and pious
Pontiff we are bidden to behold " the second
founder, of the Papal monarchy and the restorer
of Rome." It is perfectly true that the Papacy
now put on some semblance of its former great
ness. Professions of high reverence and of
universal obedience were once more made to the
Pontiff. But it is equally true that he might have
justly applied to himself the words of the sacred
writer : " This people draweth nigh unto me with
their mouth and honoureth me with f heir lips : but
their heart is far from me." No doubt one of the
causes which largely alienated the European mind
from the Papal See is to be found in the monstrous
abuses of the Curia Romana. There were not
wanting, even among the Avignonese Popes, those
who would gladly have set their house in order.
But no Hercules able to cleanse so foul an Augean
stable was found among them. Even Martin V.
was insufficient for the task, " Christendom."

v.] POSTPONEMENT OF REFORM. 141
Dr. Pastor writes, " might have abandoned itself
to unqualified joy at his election, if he had taken
the question of Church Reform vigorously in hand
- — a question entangled, indeed, in the greatest
difficulties." The real obstacles, the learned author
intimates, were what he euphemistically calls " the
tenacious resistance offered by interests once estab
lished " — the vested interests, that is, of the Curia
Romana — and the needs of the Papal exchequer.
And he adds, " It was an unspeakable calamity that
ecclesiastical affairs still essentially retained the
secular aspect which they had assumed in the
dreadful time of the Schism, and that the much-
needed reform was again deferred." * Deferred it
was, however, both by this Pope and his successors.
However strong their conviction of the need of
reformation when they ascended the Papal throne,
it failed to find practical expression after they
were once firmly seated there. Even in Nicholas
V., "the reforming zeal which had animated him
in the beginning of his reign, quickly, and ever
more and more, became inoperative. The blame
falls less upon this learned and morally unimpeach
able Pope, than upon the Italians surrounding him,
who thought their incomes depended entirely upon
abuses, and who, accordingly, hung like a leaden
weight upon every attempt at reform." t
* Geschichte der Pcipste seit dem Ausgang des Mittelalters,
book ii. § 1, p. 164
t Ibid., book iii. § 2, p. 304.

142 CHRISTIANITY AND THE RENAISSANCE, [ch.
As it was in the head, so also was it in the
members. Fleury says of the religious orders in
the fourteenth century — and the words are as
applicable to the fifteenth — " Cette sainte institution
e^ait alors en se plus grande decadence." Even of
the two of them most recently founded this is true.
That love of "holy poverty" which had inflamed
St. Francis of Assisi and his immediate disciples,
had degenerated into professional mendicancy or
" able beggary," as Wicklif not unwarrantedly
called it : and the whole Franciscan body was a
prey to anarchy, partly political, partly theological.
The Dominicans, on the other hand, seemed to
have passed from an Order of Preachers into an
Order of Inquisitors : and the ruthless severity with
which they executed their terrible office can hardly
have failed to shock the public conscience. How
could it have been otherwise, when a debtor was
condemned for paying money to a creditor suspected
of heresy, when a sister was condemned for giving
food to a starving brother, when a girl of fifteen was
condemned for not denouncing heretical parents ?
Of the condition of the secular clergy it is difficult
to speak in general terms. Doubtless there were
among them a great multitude of holy and
humble men of heart like the " poor parson
of a town" whom Chaucer has so winningly
depicted for us. Still, there is a vast amount
of evidence that at particular times, and in
particular places, they too were infected by the

v.] THE SCHOOLMEN. 143
general degeneracy as the Middle Ages ran to
an end.
The dissolution of the old order was fast
proceeding in the intellectual domain also. The
great work of the medieval mind had been to
elaborate the vast structure of the scholastic
philosophy. The limitations of that philosophy
had been imposed upon it by the actual conditions
of thought. Classical literature was, to a great
extent, lost or buried. Physical science was "an
infant crying in the night." Criticism was not
even born. The only philosophy which the school
men knew was Aristotle's, as filtered through the
Arabian intellect. It came to them as a sort of
revelation. Their special work was to use it for
systematizing theology. By its aid they embodied,
in Sums or Compend iums, reasoned expositions of
the Christian doctrines. Nor, as Archbishop Trench
happily expresses it, "did these spiritual freemasons
leave off till there had risen up under their hands
structures as marvellous in an architectonic com
pleteness of their own, as the magnificent domes
and cathedrals which, at the same time, were
everywhere covering the face of Europe with
novel forms of grace and beauty." * Carrying
on the metaphor we may say that in the decadent
architecture of the closing medieval period is figured
the decadence of its philosophy. The Perpen-
* Lectures on Medieval Church History, p. 200.

144 CHRISTIANITY AND THE RENAISSANCE, [ch.
dicular, or as we find it in France the Flam
boyant style, in its cold rigidity, is a true image
of the dry and barren disquisitions of the later
schoolmen. But, further, the medieval Church had been the
one and the universal instrument of culture. Not
only religious dogma, but philosophy, physics, art,
education, had depended upon her alone. She had
been the all-sufficient guide of life. As the four
teenth century wore on, men began to question
whether her guidance was sufficient. And soon
they decided that it was not. A lay movement
manifests itself in society. Commercial and secular
interests assume new importance. There are every
where tokens that the intellectual domain is ceasing
to be a province of the ecclesiastical. "Profane"
knowledge gradually conquers an ample territory of
its own. A quickened, a renascent * interest in the
thought and lore of the antique world manifests
itself and grows rapidly. It is curious — and sig
nificant of the contrary currents of thought which
traverse the epoch — that the rise of the modern
tongues of Europe into completer symmetry and

* In Italy the study of the Latin classics had always been
kept up to a much larger extent than used to be commonly
supposed. Much interesting information on this subject is
given by Giesebrecht in his De Litterarum studiis apud Italos
primis medii cevi seculis. But Giesebrecht, who wrote nearly
half a century ago, undervalued the teaching of the ecclesiastical
schools.

v.] PRECURSORS OF THE NEW SPIRIT. 145
ampler form, is coincident with this new-born
devotion to the classical world. In the fourteenth
century the langue d'oll definitely gives way to
modern French, of which the first great monument
is Froissart's Chronicles ; our English tongue
assumes the shape in. which Chaucer used it for
his Canterbury Tales; and Dante "fixed for
thousands of years and myriads of men a lan
guage far richer and more beautiful than ....
Italy ever knew before, in any of her regions,
since the Attic and the Doric contended for the
prize of eloquence on her southern shores." *
It is in Dante, Petrarch, and Boccacio, we are often
told, that we must recognise the precursors of the
fifteenth-century Auf/cldrung. No doubt this is so.
Dante, however, belongs much more to the old order
than to the new. Notwithstanding his quarrel with
the Papacy, he was ever the devoted and unques
tioning son of the Church. Coleridge has truly
said "his imagination was as medieval as his
theology and philosophy." He was before and
beyond all things dogmatic. Petrarch's mind was
cast in another mould. It was saturated with the
poets and philosophers of antiquity, and disdainful
of the scholastic teaching. His celebrated remark,
" After all Aristotle was a man, and did not know
everything," has been characterised as "memorable
indeed : the most daring saying, perhaps, heard in
* Landor : Pentameron, Works, vol. iii. p. 485.
L

146 CHRISTIANITY AND THE RENAISSANCE, [cu.
the Middle Ages." * Boccacio dallied even more
than Petrarch with the antique divinities. Dr.
Pastor speaks, not unjustly, of his writings as
"breathing an atmosphere of heathen corruption."
Ecclesiastics, monks, and nuns are the chosen
objects of his ridicule ; and he does not hesitate to
barb the shafts of his sarcasm with the most sacred
names and allusions. Dr. Pastor no doubt is right
in holding that "Boccacio was no unbeliever";
there is not in the Decameron one word which is
decidedly hostile to the Christian faith ; and Landor
was wrong in judging that he dissimulated heterodox
opinions, as " hardly worth the ceremony of being
burnt alive for, although it should be at the expense
of the Church." Still his story of the Three Kings'
Rings significantly indicates the absence of the
dogmatism which was so strong in Dante. But
it is in the domain of art that we most clearly
trace the workings of the new spirit : the breaking
away, more and more, from the conventional me
dieval manner, the ever closer and freer study of
nature, the application, with constantly advancing
success, of the laws of perspective and of anatomical
science, and of the various methods of painting in
oil and tempera, the enthusiasm for antiquity which
inspires each successive generation in ampler
measure. The works of the Quattrocentisti — of
Paolo Ucelli, of Filippo Lippi, of Sandro Boti-
* See Meziere's Petrarque, p. 302.

v.] THE END OF CHRISTENDOM. 147
celli, of Domenico Ghirlandaio, of Luca Signorelli
— are the outward visible signs of a great change
unconsciously wrought in man himself. Europe
had ceased to be ecclesiastical and had become
secular. An intellectual unity was taking the
place of the old spiritual unity. It is not too
much to say that when in 1453 Constantinople
fell, Christendom had really ceased to exist.
"Pope and Emperor," wrote iEneas Silvius the
year after the event, " are nothing but fictitious
names and splendid figure heads." * Europe had
entered upon the new phase of existence which
we call the Renaissance.

It is the custom f to date this new phase from the
memorable year that witnessed the event of which
I have just spoken : an event surely of great
importance in the European order : for it was
"the destruction of that bulwark which had stood
for twelve centuries" in defence of "the faith
and civilization of Christendom," + while "it
brought to Italy the literary wealth of Greece." §
* Epis. 1. i. 127.
t The custom is recognised by Littre. The Renaissance
epoch, he tells us in his Dictionary, " began at the taking of
Constantinople in 1453, which caused the emigration of many
learned Greeks to Italy."
X Bp. Creighton's History ofthe Papacy during the Reformation,
vol. ii. p 344.
§ Ibid., p. 334. l2

148 CHRISTIANITY AND THE RENAISSANCE, [ch.
No doubt the chronology of ideas is, and must
necessarily be, to a great extent, arbitrary and
inexact. We must say the same of the formulas
in which we try to express them. Who, for
example, can define the word Renaissance ? I
remember hearing a very gifted person speak of
"the avatars, the endless metempsychoses" of the
movement we call by that name. He was well
warranted in so speaking, for it presents itself to
us in a vast variety of form, and in a constant
succession of transformations. It was an inno
vating movement, certainly. It served the cause
of the Protestant Reformation — as I shall have to
note in the next Chapter— by its onslaughts on
superstition, its freedoms with authority, its trans
lations of the Sacred Scriptures. It was as certainly
a Conservative movement. One of its brightest
sons — Sir Thomas More — died a martyr to the
doctrine of the Papal Supremacy : and the Church
in a sense adopted it and used it as a weapon against
her foes. It was at once gay and grave, frivolous
and studious, sensuous and intellectual, cynical
and earnest. Consider its various types as repre
sented by Aretino, Erasmus, Pomponazzi, Cornelius
Agrippa, Leo X., Cervantes, Giordano Bruno, Michel
Angelo, Rabelais, Montaigne. All assuredly were
its children. But how difficult to trace in them a
family likeness. What was its genius, its domi
nant idea, its Zeitgeist?
Before we answer that question regarding a move-

v.] "A GREAT BREAKING LOOSE." 149
ment so far-reaching, so complex, so many-sided, we
shall do well to remember what a vast number of
actions, in the life of every individual, are the
outcome of obscure and indefinable agencies,
which seem to lie close to the very source of
life and to form part and parcel of our personality.
It is just the same in the life of collective
humanity, in the history of nations. It happens
often — I by no means say always — that we cannot
trace events to this or that principle, or sentiment,
or aspiration, that we cannot exhibit the working
or estimate the share of the complicated currents
of thought and springs of action which we know
to underlie them. But if we wish to characterize
the Renaissance in a single phrase, I do not
know of a happier one than Mill's: "that great
breaking loose of the human faculties." * How
momentous were the consequences of that
"breaking loose" in every province of intellec
tual activity, I need not say. It is not my purpose
to follow, even in outline, so vast a subject. My
object is to indicate the relation of the Renaissance
to those Claims of Christianity which are the
special theme of this volume. Of course I must
* Dissert, and Discus., vol. i. p. 57. " Breaking loose " does
not necessarily imply freedom, as Goethe's dictum, " Ereiheit
ist keine Losung " may serve to remind us. In my Chapters in
European History (chap, iv.) I- have examined at some length
the account very often given of the Renaissance as a new
birth unto liberty.

150 CHRISTIANITY AND THE RENAISSANCE, [ch.
speak in general terms. But I shall be as precise
as the subject and my limits allow. And I shall
be satisfied if I can indicate lines of thought and
inquiry which my readers may follow out at their
own leisure and in their own way.
Dr. Pastor, in his important work from which I
have already quoted, makes an attempt to distin
guish between the Christian and the Pagan Re
naissance. With all respect for this learned and
conscientious writer, I must take leave to say that
the attempt does not seem to me specially success
ful. No doubt the true idea of the Renaissance
would have been to have pressed the rediscovered
wisdom of the ancient world into the service of
men's highest interests and loftiest aspirations, to
have made it minister to the spiritual development
of humanity, individually and socially. "All men
by nature desire knowledge," says Aristotle in the
well-known sentence which opens his Metaphysics.
To have made that desire subserve the mission of
Christianity, as the new era opened, would have
been a vast step in the progress of our race. The
old bottles of Scholasticism could not contain the
new fermenting wine. In Plato there lay hid
treasures of wisdom and knowledge neglected, or
rather unknown, since the brief days of the Alex
andrian School, with its broad and bold doctrine
of the Logos. If those treasures could have been
made available for the needs of the time, if the
intellect of Europe could have been informed by

v.] WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN. 151
the teachings of the most religious mind of
antiquity, the gain would have been incalculable.
Again, if the age could have learnt what —
" The lofty grave tragedians taught
In chorus or iambic, teacher's best
Of moral prudence with delight receive
In brief sententious precept  "
the " sensuous tumult," which so eminently
characterized the age, might have been largely
hushed. The work of the masters of the tragic
stage had been to bring out into relief the deep
truths which lived in the old national legends of
Hellas : to reset them in the forms furnished by
creative genius ; "to exhibit the sorrows and
sadnesses of the world as part of a vast scheme of
purificatory chastisement ; " to present the sterner
aspects of man's existence transfigured and ideal
ised, so that he might " above himself erect him
self." Make abstraction of death, and what is
human life but a comedy in which vices of tem
perament and illusions of self-love play the prin
cipal parts ; a tale of sound and fury, signifying
nothing ? But add the thought of death, and the
poor play is transformed. It becomes a tragedy.
"La fin est toujours sanglante." In the final
catastrophe lies the key to the whole fable. This
is what the great tragedians of Greece knew. In
the discordant concert of every-day life they struck
that deep and sinister note, to purge the emotions
by terror and pity,

152 CHRISTIANITY AND THE RENAISSANCE, [ch.
But these things wrere alien from the Renais
sance mind. It was not to the Greek tragedians,
nor to Plato, that its Italian representatives turned
for intellectual and spiritual nutriment ; or, if
they did so turn, Ficino and the Florentine Aca
demy may suffice to show their ill success. No
doubt among its children of the Deutsche Stamm,
a more serious and elevated tone of thought pre
vailed, as Cusa, Brandt and Trithemius, Erasmus
and Sir Thomas More, may serve to show.
But I find nowhere any in whom we may dis
cern an adequate idea of a Christian Renaissance.
Certainly we do not see it in Pope Nicholas V.,
of whom Dr. Pastor truly tells us — "he put
himself at the head of the artistic and literary
Renaissance : it is in this that the real importance
of his Pontificate consists " * " All that Nicholas
undertook," writes Gregorovius, " was directed
towards the exaltation of the Holy See ; the one
object of his ambition was to increase its dignity
and authority, by the visible splendour of its monu
ments, and the intellectual influence it would exert,
in becoming the centre of the learning of the
world." t And Dr. Pastor's account is substantially
the same. " Rome, the centre of the Church — this
was Nicholas V-'s great plan — should be elevated
to a centre of literature and art, to a great
monumental city, with the finest library in the
* Geschichte der Papste, &c, book iii. § 5, p. 383.
f Geschichte der Stadt Rom im- Mitlelalter, book vii. p. 137.

v.] HUMANISM. 153
world, while at the same time it should be trans
formed into a firm, secure seat for the Papacy." *
None of the Renaissance Popes soared beyond this
conception. Most of them sank very far below it.
The truth is that the Renaissance, whatever else
it may have been, was eminently a secularizing
movement. And it secularized the Papacy, as it
secularized everything else.
It is this aspect of the Renaissance wdiich is
indicated by the word Humanism, in the sense it
now usually bears. Formerly our English word
"humanist," like the French " humaniste," and
the Italian " umanista," denoted a student or
teacher of the Uteres humaniores or "humanity,"
a term still employed in the Scotch Universities.
But Humanism, in its now generally accepted sig
nification, means something very different from
that. It denotes a creed, a philosophy, a rule of
life. And I do not know who has given a fuller
account of it than the late Mr. Symonds. It was
the congenial task of that diligent and accom
plished writer, for the best years of his life, to set
forth the sources of this doctrine, to narrate the
labours of its apostles and evangelists, to glorify
"the humanistic impulse " f and to recommend
"the revelations of Humanism to the modern
world." % ll The essence of Humanism," according
* Geschichte der Papste, Sue., book iii. § 5, p. 385.
| Revival of Learning, p. 72. J Ibid., p. 70.

154 CHRISTIANITY AND THE RENAISSANCE, [ch.
to Mr. Symonds, " consisted in a new and vital
perception of the dignity of man as a rational
being, apart from theological determinations, and in
the further perception that classical literature alone
displayed human nature in the plenitude of moral
and intellectual freedom " * Now this has a very
grand sound. It is lepbv, kcu aefivov, kciX TepaTcoSes.
But is it true ? Let us look at it a little.
And first, as to " the dignity of man as a rational
being, apart from theological determination." Of
course there are theologies and theologies ; but
taking the word in the largest and most proper
sense, as the science of things divine, it is simple
matter of historical fact, apart from all theories,
that we owe to "theological determinations" all
the ideas commonly prevailing among men as to
the supersensual side of man's nature. Of that
side physical science knows nothing. The physi
cist is occupied with phenomena and the material
world. Philosophy, no doubt, has for its primary
object the explanation of the supersensuous side of
man's nature : yvwOi aeavrbv indicates accurately
its function. But theology is philosophy applied to
religion. And, as a matter of fact, for the vast
majority, who cannot lay hold of a system of
abstract thought, theology supplies the place of
metaphysics. Theology it is which has made
current a very clear and distinct conception of
"the dignity of man," a dignity which clings
* Ibid., p. 71.

v.] " THE DIGNITY OF MAN." 155
inseparably to the humblest and most ignorant,
the most marred and degraded of our race, as
being, in Goethe's phrase, " half god." But apart
from its determinations, and taking man as the
experience of life reveals him to our senses, what
room is there for talking of his " dignity as a
rational being " ?
Here it is eminently necessary to clear one's
mind of cant ; to put altogether aside the
abstraction which doctrinaires intend when they
speak of " man." Contemplate, not this individuum
vagum, but the ordinary Englishman, Frenchman,
German, or Italian, the ordinary Hindoo, Tartar,
or Yankee, as he lives, moves, and has his being
upon the face of this planet, bibulous, esurient,
concupiscent, mendacious, and consider whether
apart from theological determinations, either
"rationality" or "dignity" can be predicated
of him. Or if we turn to the annals of any
nation under heaven, what is the spectacle that
meets us ? A few choice specimens of wisdom and
virtue light up, from age to age, the world's dreary
fasti. Apart from them, is not the picture pretty
much what Heine has described it: "Human
stupidity, always the same ; modified only by
time or circumstance." " What does civil history
acquaint us with," asked Warburton of another
Right Rev. Prelate, "but the incorrigible rogueries
of mankind, or ecclesiastical history more than their
follies ? " *
* Correspondence with Hurd, Let. cclx.

156 CHRISTIANITY AND THE RENAISSANCE, [ch.
The question is perhaps too truculent. But'
this much is certain, that the mind of every
profound historian, ancient or modern, has been
turned to gloom, as he has unfolded the story which
he has set himself to tell. A mere accomplished
narrator — for example, a Macaulay — glides lightly
over the surface of events, and presents us with a
series of brilliant pictures. It is far otherwise
with a Tacitus. A "sseva indignatio," not less deep,
although more restrained, than that wdiich con
sumed the soul of our own great satirist, informs
his pages ; and it is so, in greater or less measure,
with all the more philosophic historians — with
Thucydides, with Guicciardini, with Gibbon. Who
can turn away from them and talk, except in the
bitterest irony, of "the dignity of man as a rati6nal
being " ? And do those sublime Italian Humanists
whose achievements adorn the page of Mr,
Symonds, exhibit a higher type of humanity?
Consider a Lorenzo de' Medici, conventionally
" magnificent," but, judged by the ordinary canons
of morality, a debauchee of the worst kind, an un
principled swindler, and an unscrupulous tyrant ; or
take a Valla, " vir clarissimus " on the title-page of
his works, but, according to "a terrible array of
evidence," * a liar, a forger, a coward, and a filthy
liver of the most odious description ; or — not to
prolong unduly the vile catalogue — survey the
* Symonds' Revival of Learning, p. 242, note.

v-~] FREEDOM. 157
great Filelfo himself, the most famous Humanist
of the day, and a fair representative of all the
tribe.* Contemplate him as Mr. Symonds has
depicted him, " restrained by no scruples of reli
gion and morality," "vulgar in style," "mean,"
"impudent," " ostentatious in tastes," "unclean in
his indulgence," " disgusting in his rapacity," " im
passioned in his hatred," of " unparalleled foulness
in his recrimination." Such were the men to whom
we are asked to believe there was revealed " a new
and vital perception of the dignity of man as a
rational being, apart from theological determina
tions." Then, as to that further perception which
Mr. Symonds considers to be of the essence of
Humanism, namely, that up to the date of this
movement " classic literature alone displayed
human nature in the plenitude of moral and in
tellectual freedom," a few words must be said, and a
very few will suffice. The question at once arises,
What do you mean by "freedom" ?f The con-
* " The typical Humanist of his age," according to Mr.
Symonds' Revival of Learning, chap. v. p. 288. This chapter
contains a very full and instructive account of him.
f It is a question which we have constantly to ask. Free
dom is a word commonly used in the loosest way and serving
generally to confound thought. Its meaning should never be
taken on trust. There are really three kinds of freedom : (1)
freedom of the will, in the metaphysical and traditional sense ;
(2) exterior freedom, juridical and political; (3) freedom in the
moral and Stoic sense of liberation from the tyranny of passion.

158 CHRISTIANITY AND THE RENAISSANCE, [ch.
ception of man in a state of absolute liberty is as
fantastic as tlie notion of a bird without feathers, or
as Herr Teufelsdrockh's wild imagination of a
naked Duke of Windlestraw addressing a naked
House of Lords. I take it that the distinction of
a rational being, whereby he is altogether dif
ferentiated from irrational nature, is, in Kant's
admirable phrase, " tlie faculty of acting according
to the consciousness of laws : " that free action means
action from a rational not an animal motive. If
this be a true account of freedom, it is clear that
we do not find it in its plenitude in classic litera
ture, whether in the moral or intellectual province :
not in its plenitude ; scarcely in its germ. Un
speakably valuable as much is which that literature
yields us, it does not yield us this. And, in truth,
it was not in quest of this that the masters of the
"new wisdom" of the fifteenth century resorted
to classic literature. It was quite another sort of
freedom that they sought there, and found; a
freedom not intellectual, but sensual; not moral,
but immoral.
There is a certain class of feelings and emotions
by which man (I speak of no abstraction, but
of man as actual life presents him) is specially
distinguished from animate beings deemed lower
in the scale of existence. Those feelings and
emotions may be indicated with sufficient accuracy
for the present purpose by the word " modesty " —
" la plus belle des craintes apres celle de Dieu,"

v.] A NEW MORAL SENSE. 159
Chateaubriand has finely said, and of vital impor
tance to the moral life of humanity. How obscured
— nay, more, at certain periods how nearly effaced
— this virtue was in the ancient classical world is
sufficiently testified by its literature and its art, and
recent excavations have afforded only too ample a
confirmation of that testimony. To bring back
and to develop the idea of purity among men was
one of the most important parts of the work of
Christianity in the world. Let any man compare
Prudentius * with Horace in this respect, and it
will seem as though, during the three centuries
which intervene between the two poets, the world
had gained a new moral sense ; and so, in effect, it
was. The conception idealised in St. Agnes or
St. Eulalia would have been absolutely unintelli
gible to the ancients. It was precisely this defect
in classic literature which was its great attraction
to the Humanists of the fifteenth century. To
undo the work of Christian spiritualism and to
" rehabilitate the flesh"; to take up, and revive,
and bring not merely into practice, but into credit,
the most abominable vices of Paganism, was their
self-imposed task. " Morality is an empty and
imaginary thing:" "all pleasure is good," Valla
taught, f Beccadelli applied himself in his Herma-
phroditus to celebrating " the voluptuous grace of
the ancients " : and he acquitted himself with, a
* The "Horace of the Christians,'' Bentley called him.
| See his De Voluptate passim.

160 CHRISTIANITY AND THE RENAISSANCE, [ch.
shameless cynicism, a base animalism not easy to
parallel. It was Filelfo's canon, that "what was
good enough for Greeks and Romans was good
enough for him " ; * and it was this "perception,"
not any lofty theory of the " dignity of man as a
rational being apart from theological determina
tions," that was the essence of the doctrine of the
Italian Humanists. To the exposition and praise
of foulness they devoted their best energies, and it
may be truly said that they succeeded in surpassing
their masters among the ancients.
This was " the intellectual and moral freedom"
which they revealed to the world, and great was
the company of the preachers of it. The practical
results of the "new wisdom" shall be told,
as far as they can be told, in Mr. Symonds'
words. We read in his pages of the " ener
vation of society in worse than heathen vices." t
He thinks " it almost impossible to over
estimate the moral corruption of Rome at the
beginning of the sixteenth century." " Virtuous
women," he asserts, "had no place there; but
Phryne lived again in the person of Imperia, and
dignitaries of the Church thought it no shame to
parade their preference for Giton." J "The imi
tation of the ancients in thought, sentiment, and
language was no mere affectation  The
standards of moral and aesthetic taste were
* Revival of Learning, p. 281.
t Ibid., p. 407. X Ibid., p. 406.

v.] CLASSICALISM AND PAGANISM. 161
paganised." * This " moral corruption " was
accompanied by " political debility ; " f and finally
"the Humanists came to be dreaded as the cor
rupters of youth." X
It may be safely asserted then that, speaking
generally, Italian Humanism was practically a
rejection of the claim made by Christianity to
supply the true standard and rule of human action.
It was, on the whole, a movement away from
Christian morality. It was a return, Rio has well
observed, not so much to Classicalism, as to
Paganism. § Its leaders indeed paid to the exist
ing religion a certain amount of outward homage,
with whatever reservations of opinion, or dere
lictions of conduct. It by no means attacked,
as did Protestantism, the unity and universality
of the Church as a spiritual empire. On the
contrary, its chiefs gladly entered into her
service and were welcomed by her Pontiffs. Even
Nicholas V., whose piety is not open to question,
made Valla apostolic notary, and conferred valuable
and responsible offices on Poggio and Filelfo. Nor
does their position appear to have struck their
contemporaries as anomalous. Of course the in
fluence exercised by the Humanists at the Papal
Court varied with the character and tastes of the
* Ibid., p. 396.
f Ibid., p. 407.
j Ibid., p. 515. .
§ De VArt Chretien, vol. ii. p. 61.
M

162 CHRISTIANITY AND THE RENAISSANCE, [ch.
Pontiffs. But, on the whole, it was considerable,
and no doubt largely contributed to that increas
ing secularization * of the Papacy which marked
the reigns of the nine Popes who successively
followed Nicholas V. " In Alexander VI.," Bishop
Creighton remarks, " the Papacy stood forth in all
the strength of its emancipation from morality." f
In Julius IL, the founder of the Papal States, as
they existed down to our own day, who indeed was
himself no Humanist, the Vicar of Christ seems
merged in the militant Italian prince unscrupulous
in his greed of territory. Under Leo X. the
Humanistic movement culminates, and perhaps
Carlyle, who possessed a curious felicity in
adjectives, was not far wrong in calling him the
most Pagan of Popes. It is not too much to say
that under such Pontiffs moral scepticism must
have radiated from those who sat in the Apostolic
Chair. One of the most singular signs of these times is
the curious mixture found everywhere of Pagan
and Christian traditions. Thus in the bronze
gates which Filar ete made for St. Peter's, and
which still adorn its main entrance, side by
side with Christ and His Saints are represented
Jupiter and Ganymede, Leda and the Swan, Hero
* Of course Adrian VI., during his short Pontificate,
endeavoured to withstand this secularization. His complete
insuccess is most significant.
t History of the Papacy during the Reformation, vol. v. p. 52.

v.] A GOOD FRIDAY SERMON. 163
and Leander. Dr. Pastor mentions choir books
belonging to the Papal Chapel of Nicholas V- in
which are to be seen most unseemly pictures.*
Even in Boccacio we find an extraordinary con
fusion of heathen names and Christian sentiments.
In the culminating period of the Renaissance,
Cardinals are described as " Patres Conscripti " :
excommunication is "ignis et aquae interdictio : "
" Our Lady of Loretto " is turned into " the God
dess of Loretto " — dea Lauretana — and even Christ
himself is transformed into Jupiter, as by Pulci :
" 0 Sommo Giove per noi crocifisso." Erasmus,
in one of his letters, tells us of his attending the
Papal Chapel to hear a sermon delivered before
Julius II. , and a congregation, chiefly of distin
guished ecclesiastics, on Good Friday. The
preacher began with a panegyric on the Pope,
whom he qualified as Jupiter Tonans hurling from
his potent hand the thunderbolt of war, and shaking
the earth by his nod. Then Decius, Curtius,
Regulus, and even Iphigenia were introduced in
order to illustrate the Sacrifice of the Cross : and
parallels were drawn between Socrates, Epami-
nondas, Phocion, Scipio, and the Author of Chris
tianity, who, however, was not expressly named, the
word Jesus not being in the Ciceronian vocabulary,
to which the reverend orator strictly confined
* " Ganz unpassende Darstellungen." — Geschichte der Papste,
S) c, book iii. § 6, page 412, note.
M 2

164 CHRISTIANITY AND THE RENAISSANCE. [en.
himself. It would seem certain, however, that
Humanism was less hostile to faith than to morals.
Pope's lines, " A very heathen in the carnal part,
Yet still a sad good Christian at her heart,"
correctly express most of its votaries. Baylc,
indeed, when telling us how Leo X. sent for
Pomponazzi to Rome for the purpose of hearing
him dispute with Niphus about the immortality of
the soul, adds, " not one of the three believed in
it." I do not know that there is sufficient evidence
for this assertion even as regards Pomponazzi.
Certainly, there is no evidence at all for it as
regards Leo X. or Niphus. No doubt there were
among the leaders of the Renaissance those who
looked upon Christianity as a fable. But they
were not very numerous, nor can they be deemed
specially characteristic of that period. Even in
the Ages of Faith we find, from time to time,
crass disbelief in the generally accepted dogmas
or subtle scepticism regarding them. The pre
vailing tone of thought among the cultured classes
in Italy, to whom the Renaissance movement
appealed, was philosophic doubt not pushed to a
negative conclusion, and combined with a respect
for Christianity not wholly external, which was
unaccompanied by any sense of discrepancy.
And this gradually became the tone of thought

v.] . MONTAIGNE. 165
throughout the Latin races as from Italy human
istic culture overspread Europe. I do not know
that I can find a fairer or more respectable repre
sentative of it than Montaigne. Hallam tells us
that his essays " make an epoch in literature,
less on account of their real importance, or the
novel truths they contain, than of their influ
ence upon the taste and the opinions of Europe." *
No doubt their influence upon the taste and
opinions of Europe was considerable, but it seems
to me that the vast popularity they so soon
obtained renders them particularly valuable as an
index of the actual condition of the European
mind. Montaigne, then, is very far from repu
diating Christianity. On the contrary, he steadily
professes it, and, in a halting perfunctory manner,
practises its external obligations : he goes to Mass,
and to confession, and eventually dies with the last
Sacraments about him. But his religion has small
hold over his thoughts or actions. It is apparently
little more than conventional. His licentiousness
is sometimes gross. Too many pages of his
writings are stained by deliberate filthiness and
obscenity. He felt indeed " the attractions of
truth, but he felt none of its obligations." " The
idea of duty was his bugbear and scarecrow." f He
does not logically follow out his scepticism, nor
* Introduction to the Literature of Europe, vol ii. p. 123.
f Church, Essay on Montaigne in Oxford Essays for 1857,
p. 276.

166 CHRISTIANITY AND THE RENAISSANCE, [ch.
consciously introduce it into the sphere to which he
relegates religion. " But his views of life and
death are absolutely unaffected by his professing
the Gospel." *
So much may suffice regarding the relation
of the Renaissance to the Claim of Christianity as
a religion. Savonarola with the instinct of a
saint had detected the Pagan tendencies of the
movement, and his prophet voice of denunciation
and warning resounds through the closing decade
of the fifteenth century. He received a prophet's
reward. But the fire which consumed the martyr's
body did not burn out his teaching. In him we
must doubtless recognise the precursor of the great
revival which was to the Catholic Church as life
from the dead. It would take me beyond my
present limits to trace, even in outline, the growth
of that marvellous reaction. I shall conclude this
Chapter by touching upon one aspect of the work
done by the Jesuits, whose special function was to
combat the renascent Heathenism with arms
furnished by itself. In the next Chapter we shall
have to look at their action from another point of
view. Here I shall confine myself to indicating
their true position in respect of the Renaissance,
and the true answer to the accusations brought
against their methods : accusations which are
repeated not merely by the popular Protestant

Ibid,

v.] THE JESUITS AND HUMANISM. 167
controversialist — "a country gentleman, a navy
captain, a half-pay officer with time on his hands
[who] will undertake by means of one or two
tracts and a set of extracts against Popery, to
teach the Pope his own religion " — but by writers
of culture and research, in whom, however, pre
judices and prepossessions seem hardly less mas
terful than they are in the sages of the Protestant
Alliance. Now we may say that the exigencies of the age
called the Jesuits into existence. And the charges
that may be urged against them, if impartially
examined, seem to me to amount to this : that they
faithfully reflected the intellectual characteristics of
their age, and sought to combat it with its own
weapons. A short time ago a learned writer
dogmatically declared, in a publication specially
devoted to higher historical studies: "It is
to the Jesuits that we owe the substitution of
the study of words for the study of things, of a
pedantic scholarship and antiquarianism for the
attempt to enter into and appreciate the true spirit
of the ancients, which has been made the reproach
of modern classical education : all this is very
trite." * It is very trite no doubt, but it is not very
true. The blame is here put upon the wrong
shoulders. The word-spinning and pedantry and
antiquarianism — by which, I suppose, is meant
* English Historical Review, vol. i. p. 560,

168 CHRISTIANITY AND THE RENAISSANCE. [ch.
servile worship of antiquity — were not the inven
tion of the Jesuits, but of those Humanists, at
whose achievements we have glanced. Erasmus — -
in his Dialogus Ciceronianus, I think it is — intro
duces us to one of them, who told him "Decern annos
consumpsi in legendo Cicerone"; and echo answered
ove I The Jesuits adopted the educational tradi
tions and methods which they found ready to their
hands, and tried to make the best of them. Mr. John
Morley, from whom we should hardly expect any
praise of the society, feels himself bound to testify,
" The wise devotion of the Jesuits to intellectual
education in the widest sense then possible, is a
partial set off against their mischievous influence
on politics and morals." * The former part of this
sentence is undoubtedly true. As to the latter,
their not holding the political and ethical opinions
of Mr. Morley,f can hardly be matter of reproach
to the Jesuits. Let us turn to another authority
who, not undeservedly, is accounted an oracle of
that saving common sense upon which Englishmen
pride themselves. " The expulsion of the Jesuits,"
the Duke of Wellington told Dr. Whewell,
" was an evil to Spain and Portugal. It ruined
the education of the upper orders. They are
now men of no education, no moral and reli-

* Voltaire, p. 45.
t Which I have investigated, at some length, in Chap. III.
of A Century of Revolution,

v.] JESUIT TASTE. 169
gious education .... and are a worthless
set." *
But it is to Mr. Symonds that we must go for
the fullest indictment against the Jesuits. In the
work which concludes his studies in the Renais
sance, they are solemnly arraigned for "their
hideous churches, daubed with plaster painted
to resemble costly marbles, encrusted with stucco
polished to deceive the eye, loaded with geegaws
and tinsel, and superfluous ornaments and frescoes,
turning flat surfaces into cupolas and arcades ; the
conceits of their pulpit oratory, its artificial cadences
and flowery verbiage, its theatrical appeals to gross
sensations ; their sickly Ciceronian style, their
sentimental books of piety, ' the worse for being
warm,' the execrable taste of their poetry, their
flimsy philosophy and disingenuous history." f Let
us look a little at these accusations, taking them
in reverse order. And first I must confess that I
have never read any Jesuit poets, and that I have
no intention of reading any. I am quite sure,
however, that their taste cannot have been more
execrable than was the taste of Mr. Symonds's
favourite Humanists, who, indeed, were their
models of style. Historical science has never been
the special domain of the Society. I suppose
Pallavicino is their most considerable representative
* Mrs. Stair Douglas's Life of Dr. Whewell, p. 270.
t The Catholic Reaction, by John Addington Symonds, part i.
p. 307.

170 CHRISTIANITY AND THE RENAISSANCE. [ch.
in this intellectual province. . He is a dull writer,
certainly. But, as certainly, he is not open to the
charge of disingenuousness. Of Jesuit philosophers
I believe Mr. Symonds knew as little as I know of
Jesuit poets. At all events I am certain that if he
had perused any treatise of any of the more notable
of them— say, for. example, Suarez De Legibus — .
"flimsy " is the last adjective he would have used
to describe it. Sentimental books of piety and
theatrical appeals to gross sensations are by no
means an invention or a monopoly of the Society
of Jesus. They are no more to my taste than they
Were to the taste of Mr. Symonds. Clearly they
were to the taste of the age which found in them
its spiritual nourishment, and which materialised
religion as it materialised poetry and architecture
and everything else. Surely it is patent that the
Jesuits got their pseudo-classicalism from the
intellectual movement, the glorification of which
appears to have been the chief purpose of
Mr. Symonds's life; And if the Jesuits, by
pressing the new Paganism of the Humanists
into the service of religion, " wrought miracles
and converted thousands," * as Mr. Symonds
allows they did, they might appeal to the authority
of the Apostle who said : " I am made all things
to all men, that I might, by all means, save some."
That this was their guiding principle appears to

Ibid.

v.] JESUIT MORALITY. 171
me open to no manner of doubt, whatever we
may think of some of the applications which they
gave to it.
But there are other counts in Mr. Symonds's in
dictment against the Jesuits. And it may be well
to take the present opportunity of briefly consider
ing them. He is not content with what may be
urged against Jesuit taste. " The same critique,"
we are told by him, " applies to Jesuit morality." *
He devotes much eloquence to a description of " the
Jesuit labyrinth of casuistry, with its windings,
turnings, secret chambers, whispering galleries,
blind alleys, issues of evasion, the whole vicious
and monstrous edifice being crowned with the
saving virtue of obedience and the theory of the
end justifying the means." And he proceeds :
" Thus the inventive genius of the casuist, bent
on dissecting immorality and reducing it to classes ;
the interrogative ingenuity of the confessor
pruriently inquisitive into private experience ; the
apologetic subtlety of the director, eager to supply
his penitent with salves and anodynes ; were all
alike and all together applied to anti-social con
tamination in matters of lubricity, and to anti
social corruption in matters of dishonesty, fraud,
falsehood, illegality, and violence." t
As to the " theory of the end justifying the
* Ibid., p. 308.
f The Catholic Reaction, part i. p. 309.

172 CHRISTIANITY AND THE RENAISSANCE, [ch.
means," I may content myself with observing that
no such theory, in Mr. Symonds's sense, has ever
been held by any school of moral theologians in the
Catholic Church. The commonplaces, "licitus est
finis, etiam licita sunt media," and "cui licitus est
finis, licita sunt media," merely assert the general
philosophical principle that if the end, the complete
optis, is a good one, due means may be taken for its
attainment : not all nor any means, but first inno
cent means, and secondly means which are not
in themselves evil, and which the end, and the
end alone, can justify. Examples of this second
class are afforded by dangerous surgical operations,
such as tracheotomy, lithotomy, amputation. The
end of saving life justifies these means. But
neither that end, nor any other, would justify
adultery or blasphemy.* Of casuistry I will only say
that it is an essential part of the science of morals,
a necessary dialectic of conscience. In my own
very un Jesuitical university of Cambridge there is
still a professor of it. In itself it is a good thing.
Like all good things, it may be abused. I confess
that as I turn over the pages of Sanchez
and Escobar, I stand aghast at the unsur
passable crudity of their language, and the
deplorable fecundity of their imagination. But
" abusus non tollit usum." Most people, I suppose,
form their opinion of Jesuit casuistry from Pascal.
* Ibid., p. 314.

v.] "THE PROVINCIAL LETTERS." 173
For myself, my sympathy with the ethical passion
which breathes through the Provincial Letters is
as great as is my admiration of their literary
excellence. But assuredly I cannot accept them as
a fair statement of the case against the Jesuits.*
And here I may claim Voltaire as being on my
side. " De bonne foi," he asked, " est-ce par le satire
des Lettres Provinciates qu'on doit juger la morale
des J^suites " ? f You might as fairly judge of it by
the satire of Voltaire's own novel L'Ingenu, which
* Nor could Dean Church, and he certainly would have
been the last to abandon any point which he thought
could be honestly maintained on behalf of a teacher to
whom, he was so devoted. " Pascal was by no means always
fair, especially in the detail of his proof. His letters
have the exaggeration inseparable from an able, earnest,
passionate attack — the exaggeration of a clear statement and
lucid arrangement of the case on one side ; the exaggera
tion of ridicule and irony ; the exaggeration of strong
and indignant feeling. Further, they leave unsaid how the
system which they attacked grew up; how long custom,
and a general use, not confined to the Jesuits, if it had
made this system dangerous, had also in all probability, in a
measure, corrected it, as it certainly in a degree excused it ;
and they leave the impression that that was a distinct intention,
which was mainly a result, not very coyly accepted and
followed up. Further, he leaves unsaid, for he did not on
principle acknowledge them, the practical necessities of a
popular, and much more of a fashionable religion — much the
same under all circumstances, whether resisted as temptations or
accepted as facts." — Essays and Review s,\>j R. "W. Church, p. 487.
t Lettre au pere Latour, 1746, quoted by Cretineau-Joly,
Ilistoire de la Compagnie de Jesus, vol. iv. p. 43. I cannot find
the letter in my own fine copy of Voltaire, in sixty-four
volumes (Paris, Antoine-Augustus Renouard, 1819).

174 CHRISTIANITY AND THE RENAISSANCE, [ch.
is also a literary masterpiece in its way. Every
scholar who has investigated the subject is per
fectly well aware that very considerable deductions
must be made before Pascal's indictment of the
Jesuits can be accepted as even approximately fair.
As to " the interrogative genius of the confessor,"
and his anxiety to minister salves and anodynes
to inward wounds, I venture to assert that
Mr. Symonds might have resorted daily for
twelve months to any Jesuit confessor without
being asked a single question, and without expe
riencing the application of any flattering unction
to his soul, or of any ethical laudanum to his con
science. And the practice of the confessional in
these matters in the nineteenth century is precisely
what it was in the sixteenth, the seventeenth, and the
eighteenth. Louis XV. and Madame de Pompadour
did not find the fathers of the society merchants of
salves and anodynes.* Mr. Symonds is of opinion
that all this was " applied to anti-social contamina
tion in matters of lubricity and to anti-social cor
ruption in matters of dishonest}^ fraud, falsehood,
illegality, and violence." When I read this vehe
ment rhetoric I ask myself whether Mr. Symonds
could possibly have realised what his words mean.
They mean this : that men whose whole lives were
penance, and pious aspiration, and perpetual toil
* See Jervis's History of the Church of France, vol. ii. p. 365.

v.] THE OBJECT OF THE JESUITS. 175
for others, were all the time engaged in a diabolical
conspiracy against religion and morality. No one
ever hated the Jesuits worse than Voltaire, who
rightly discerned in them the most formidable
defenders of the Infdme. But Voltaire's strong
common sense was enough to preserve him from
the grotesquely absurd theory which found favour
with Mr. Symonds. " On tachait," he writes,
" de prouver qu'ils avaient un dessein forme de
corrompre les mceurs des homines, dessein qu'aucune
secte, qu'aucune societe, n'a jamais eu, ni peut
avoir." * Surely it is a more rational explanation
that these devoted men, whose " obvious enthu
siasm and holy lives," f Mr. Symonds confesses, were
anxious not to make sin easy but penance possible,
in the frightful decadence of morality which, as
he himself confesses, was brought about by the
Renaissance. J To open wider the strait gate so
that more might go in thereat, to broaden the
narrow way so that more might find it, was
unquestionably their object, whatever may be said
of some of the modes by which they sought to
effect it.
But " the whole vicious and monstrous edifice,"
according to Mr. Symonds, " was crowned with the

* Siecle de Louis XIV., chap, xxxvii.
f The Catholic Beaction, part i. p. 261.
X See p. 160-1.

176 CHRISTIANITY AND THE RENAISSANCE. [ch.
virtue of obedience." " The obedience of the
Jesuit," he insists, " was to be absolute, extending
even to the duty of committing sins at a superior's
orders." * The Constitutions of the Society, he tells
us, expressly provide that "A sin, whether venial
or mortal, must be committed, if it is commanded
by the superior in the name of our Lord Jesus
Christ, or in virtue of holy obedience." f Mr.
Symonds was, doubtless, rather an elegant than an
accurate scholar. Still, he ought not to have fallen
into this "idiomatic mantrap " as Lord Acton once
called it. A writer dealing magisterially with such
a subject might have been fairly expected to know
that peccati obligatio does not mean an obliga
tion to commit sin. Obligare ad peccatum is the
common ecclesiastical phrase by which is expressed
the extent of the obligation of a rule or precept,
that is how far it can be disobeyed without sin.
The words on which Mr. Symonds founds himself
are as follows : "Visum est nobis in Domino prseter
expressum Votum quo Societas Summo Pontificipro
tempore existenti tenetur, ac tria alia essentialia
Paupertatis, Castitatis, et Obedientise, nullas Con-
stitutiones, Declarationes, vel ordinem ullum vivendi
posse obligationem ad peccatum mortale vel veniale
inducere, nisi Superior ea in Nomine Domini Nostri
Jesu Christi, vel in virtute sanctse Obedientise
* The Catholic Reaction, part i. p. 264
t Ibid., p. 284.

v.] " PECO ATI OBLIGATIO." 177
juberet." * The English of these words is : " It has
seemed good to us in the Lord, that saving the
express vow f by which the society is bound to the
Sovereign Pontiff for the time being, and the three
other essential vows of poverty, chastity, and
obedience, no constitutions, declarations, or any rule
of life, shall bind, under pain of mortal or venial
sin : unless the superior should enjoin the same
in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ or in virtue
of holy obedience." Or, to put the .matter less
technically, except the vows of poverty, chastity,
* The words occur in the Fifth Chapter of the Sixth Part of
the Constitutions. I will give the chapter in its entirety.
" Quod Constitutiones Peccati Obligationem non inducunt.
" Cum exoptet Societas universas suas Constitutiones,
: Declarationes, ac vivendi ordinem omnino juxta nostrum
Institutum, nihil ulla in re declinando, observari ; oportet
etiam nihilominus suos omnes securos esse, vel certe adjuvari,
ne in laqueum ullius peccati, quod ex vi Constitutionum hujus-
modi, aut ordinationum proveniat, incidant : Visum est nobis
in Domino prsster expressum Votum, quo Societas Summo
Pontifici pro tempore existenti tenetur, ac tria alia essentialia
Paupertatis, Castitatis, et Obedientise, nullas Constitutiones,
Declarationes, vel ordinem ullum vivendi posse obligationem
ad peccatum mortale vel veniale inducere ; nisi Superior ea in
Nomine Domini Nostri Jesu Christi, vel in virtute sanctaa
Obedientias juberet ; quod in rebus, vel personis illis, in quibus
judicabitur, quod ad particularem uniuscujusque, vel ad uni
versale bonum multum conveniet, fieri poterit ; et loco timoris
offensse succedat amor omnis perfectionis et desiderium: ut major
gloria et laus Christi Creatoris, ac Domini Nostri consequatur."
f This vow is peculiar to the Society of Jesus. See the bull
of Pius III., Regimini militantis ecclesice.
N

178 CHRISTIANITY AND THE RENAISSANCE, [ch.
and obedience, common to the Jesuits with all
religious orders, and the special vow of obedience
to the Pope peculiar to the society, no rules or
regulations — bylaws we may say — are of such a
solemn nature that non-compliance with them
would amount to a sin, save in those very special
cases where the superior formally commands
compliance in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ
or in virtue of holy obedience. In many old
orders all breaches of the rule were considered sins,
as such, that is qua breaches. In the Jesuit order
the obligation is limited. Breach of the three
essential vows, or of the one special vow, is a sin.
Breach of the provisions of the constitutions,
declarations, or other regulations, is not in itself
sin, although it may become sin in the case stated,
because a superior who commands in the name of
our Lord Jesus Christ, or in virtue of holy obedi
ence, cannot be disobeyed without sin.
What good should follow this if this were done ?
What harm undone ? Deep harm to disobey,
Seeing obedience is the bond of rule.
Of course there is no question whatever of obeying
a command to commit a sin. No such command
could be lawfully either given or executed. It
would be void ipso facto. To comply with it
would be sin. The vows, that of obedience
included, bind only to good, and to the greater
good. It is almost humiliating to have to expend

v.] "HOLY OBEDIENCE." 179
so many words upon so plain a matter. One might
surely have thought it too monstrous an absurdity
to be seriously entertained by any intelligent man,
that commands to commit sin could be given, I
will not say by persons whose saintly lives are
beyond question, but by any rational being, " in
the name of our Lord Jesus Christ " — of all
names ! — or "in virtue of holy obedience " — of all
things ! But this amazing blunder of Mr Symonds
affords a painful instance of the way in which a
mind, not naturally uncandid, may be completely
warped by prejudice, and hopelessly misled by
implicit reliance upon untrustworthy authorities.
So much may suffice, for the purposes of this
Chapter, concerning the Jesuits and the Renaissance.
I shall now go on to speak of that other movement,
which is often described a further Act in the same
great European drama — the Protestant Reformation.

n2

CHAPTER VI.
CHRISTIANITY AND THE REFORMATION.
We are sometimes told that the Protestant Re
formation was the work of the Renaissance. It
appears to me that this view is tenable, if at all,
only with large reservations. The Renaissance
served the cause of the Protestant Reformation in
three ways. In the first place, as I have observed
in the last Chapter, the Roman Court was deeply
infected by the Paganism of the Italian Humanists,
and this, doubtless, cast much discredit upon the
Catholic Church, and afforded an ample theme for
the invectives of those who separated themselves
from her. Again, the leaders of the new learning
were indefatigable in exposing religious abuses and
in ridiculing popular superstitions, and unques
tionably one effect of their labours was to impair
popular respect for ecclesiastical institutions and
authority. Once more their translations of and
commentaries upon the Sacred Scriptures doubtless
supplied weapons to the preachers of the new
doctrines. But certain it is, also, that the Renais
sance never allied itself with the religious revolt

chap, vi.] EBASMUS. 181
of which Luther may be considered the initiator.
The spirit of the Renaissance was universal, not
particular ; and, so far, it was in sympathy with
the ecumenical idea of Catholicism. Its tone was,
so to speak, aristocratic. It addressed itself to the
intelligent, the cultivated — to statesmen, artists,
philosophers, savants. Protestantism, on the
contrary, originally appealed to popular instincts,
good and bad, and especially to that suspicion of
authority and love of change ever latent in the
multitude. Perhaps the relation between the two movements
is nowhere more clearly illustrated than in the
career of Erasmus. He is the chief representative
of the Renaissance in its best aspects : in breadth of
erudition, refinement of taste, suppleness of intel
lect, and probity of life, the foremost man of all
that world. In him we have a scholar of a very
different type and temper from any of the Italian
Humanists. We now regard him as the ripest
fruit, and the wholesomest, of the Revival of
Learning, embodying in himself all that the
Western nations had really gained by the study
of the ancients for over a century. And M.
Nisard does not speak too strongly in asserting
" Toute ISl renaissance litfce'raire et religieuse
do l'Europe occidentale, au XVI.e siecle a con
verge vers Erasme." * The more I survey his
* Renaissance et Reforme, vol. i. p. 110.

182 CHBISTIANITY AND THE REFORMATION, [en.
life and study his writings, the deeper is my
respect for his " great, injured name." He was not
a profound thinker — it was not an age of profound
thought — but he was an eminently sane thinker.
He was no religious mystic ; and I can quite
understand St. Ignatius Loyola, who was one,
complaining of the aridity of his writings. He
dwelt on the lower levels of humanity, and is well
portrayed in Pope's line, " Good Erasmus in an
honest mean." He was a preacher of rational
godliness, a form of religion quite as legitimate as
the more spiritual form : and better suited to tem
peraments such as his, not naturally enthusiastic :
a form which, too, has its saints, among whom Sir
Thomas More, ascetic as he was, is eminently seen.
But Erasmus, if not gifted with the intuitive percep
tion of truth, the ardent spiritual affections, which
are the endowment of some exalted spirits, was of
an eminently sensitive and receptive nature. He
strongly experienced and accurately reflected the
currents of thought which passed through his time.
In the extreme complexity of his character he is
again a true representative of the epoch ; and most
helpful for the right understanding of the two great
movements found in it.
Now Erasmus was first and before all things a man
of learning. And he saw in the decadent religious
orders the stronghold of ignorance.* He was pro-
* Professor Brewer, whose impartiality is as indubitable as
his learning, gives the following account of the condition of

vi.] A GRAVE CRISIS. 183
foundly versed in Christian antiquity. And he found
essential verities of religion overlaid in the popular
mind by superstitions at best puerile and often
degrading. He was well aware that the age was an
age of intellectual fermentation. He could not
help seeing that the Church was passing through
a grave crisis. When he visited Italy in 1506
one of the first spectacles which he met was
Julius II. at the head of an army. The spectacle
made a deep impression upon his mind, as signally
illustrating the secularity into which the Papacy
had sunk. What other tokens of it, and how
abundant, he encountered during his three years'
residence in Italy may be inferred from the last
the Religious Orders in England at the beginning of the
sixteenth century, and the account would, on the whole, fairly
apply to the rest of Europe : " Their influence over public opinion,
at least in the southern counties of England, had been entirely
eclipsed, and they had done nothing to recover it. That in so
large a body of men, so widely dispersed, seated for so many
centuries in the richest and fairest estates of England, for
which they were mainly indebted to their own skill, per
severance, and industry, discreditable members were to be
found (and what literary chiffonier, raking in the scandalous
annals of any profession, cannot find filth and corruption ?) is
likely enough ; but that the corruption was either so black oi
so general as party spirit would have ns believe, is contrary to
all analogy, and is unsupported by impartial and contemporary
evidence. The general complaint against them is that of
ignorance and bigotry ; and — what an Englishman would now
consider as the root of all evil — the absence of any ostensible
employment." — Letters and Papers Foreign and Domestic, vol. i,
p. Ixxix., &c, Intro.

184 CHRISTIANITY AND THE REFORMATION, [ch.
Chapter. But side by side with worldly and
dissolute prelates given over to the new Paganism,
with slothful and ignorant monks dishonouring the
great names of St. Augustine, St. Benedict, and
St, Francis, there were many ecclesiastics, at once
highly cultured and deeply religious, looking for
and hastening unto the Catholic revival. With
these the sympathy of Erasmus was complete.
The tone of his mind is accurately reflected in
his Praise of Folly, published shortly after his
return from Italy, in 1509, and dedicated to his
illustrious friend Sir Thomas More. It must,
of course, be remembered that this pungent
pamphlet is avowedly satire. And no satirist is tied
to precise presentation of facts. It is Folly who
praises herself — " Encomium audietis meum ipsius,
hoc est Stultitise "— and she claims the largest
licence : " I must have liberty
Withal, as large a charter as the wind,
To blow on whom I please : for so fools have :
Invest me in my motley: give me leave
To speak my mind, and I will, through and through,
Cleanse the foul body of- the infected world,
If they will patiently receive my medicine."
They did not patiently receive it; and no
wonder. The Praise of Folly contains as many
exaggerations as Pascal's Provincial Letters. And,
doubtless, it was not specially felicitous in the time
of its publication. It was bad policy, as his friend

vi.J THE PRAISE OF FOLLY.
Dorpius warned Erasmus, "to adorn with asses'
ears the heads of theologians and priests just when
they were manifesting for him a sincere admira
tion." And, Unquestionably, Erasmus paid dearly
for his imprudence in the distrust with which he
was thenceforth regarded by the vast majority of
the clergy. The substantial truth of the indict
ment of ecclesiastical abuses contained in his
Declamation — that is the name which he himself
gave his pamphlet — is as indisputable as its
literary power. Notable too is it how the author,
from time to time, laying aside his habitual tone of
reasoned irony, rises into scathing denunciation
which recalls the prophetic utterances of Dante and
Savonarola. Take, for example, that fine passage
— perhaps the finest in the work — in which he
brands as the most dangerous enemies of the
Church, " those impious Pontiffs whose silence
concerning Christ makes Him forgotten ; who
enchain Him by their venal laws ; who disfigure
Him by their false interpretations; and who by
their scandalous lives crucify Him afresh." We
must ever remember that in the devotion of
Erasmus to religion was the source of his keen
sense of the corruptions in the Church, of his ardent
longing for her reformation. In his hardiest
phrases he never fails in respect for her constitu
tion and dogmas. While satirising ignorant and
slothful monks he utters no word against the
monastic institute. While denouncing the vices

186 CHRISTIANITY AND THE REFORMATION, [ch.
of Popes, he recognises the Papacy as of divine
appointment and of ecclesiastical necessity. It is
not too much to say that he was even animated by
the feeling expressed in the words of the sacred
writer — " Pray for the peace of Jerusalem ;
they shall prosper that love thee." But he is
indignant with sophistical theologians who say
Peace, Peace, where there is no peace : or if peace
at all, the peace of paralysis and decay. He knew
that the only way to true peace was through the
truth : that the purification of the Church was the
only means to her preservation, and he believed —
rightly, as the event showed — that she possessed a
power of moral recovery.
Such was the attitude of Erasmus towards
the Catholic Church from first to last. And it
sufficiently accounts for his attitude towards
Luther. Between the two men there can have
been little in common. They were too com
pletely opposed in character and intellect. With
Luther the reformer, inveighing against the
scandals of indulgences, Erasmus cordially sym
pathised. With Luther the heresiarch, rejecting
Papal authority and manipulating at his pleasure
Catholic dogmas, Erasmus was far from sym
pathising. Writing in 1529, in anticipation of
approaching death, he protests that never, for one
moment, has he thought of disturbing the hierarchical
constitution of the Church, or been wanting in
veneration for her Sacraments : that sects and

vi.] ERASMUS AND LUTHER, 187
schisms had ever been his special abhorrence : — " a
sectis et schismatibus unice semper abhorrui " :
and that the sins of men supplied no warrant for
rejecting the doctrines of the faith — " non oportuit
quemquam, ob hominum improbos mores, a piis
Ecclesise dogmatibus recedere." * The testimony
which he thus bears of himself is true. The course
pursued by Luther shocked alike his reason and his
religion. It is from the publication of Luther's book On
the Captivity of Babylon in 1520 that we may date
the breach between the two men. And the breach
ever widened, as Luther was hurried on by the
logic of his own acts to desert one after another of
the ancient religious traditions of Europe. Up to
the time of Luther's declaration of revolt, the
work of Erasmus had been largely apologetic and
evangelical. He aimed at softening the manners of
men ; at diffusing the true spirit of the Gospel ;
he was by habit and temperament averse from
theological controversy. It was at the request of
Pope Adrian that he undertook to write against
Luther and in defence of the Catholic faith.
Unwillingly he turned aside from contemplating
" the bright countenance of truth in the quiet and
still air of delightful studies" and embarked "in
a troubled sea of noises and hoarse disputes "
wherein his course was thenceforth to lie. He had
desired reform, not revolution : the cleansing of
* Ep. 1034.

188 CHRISTIANITY AND THE REFORMATION, [ch.
the Church from within, not her destruction from
without. When Luther's movement falsified his
hopes, he separated himself from it and opposed
it. In him we may see the Renaissance definitely
taking part against the Protestant Reformation.
His Epistles are full of complaints concerning its
disastrous effects alike on religion and learning.
Its consequences, both ethical and political, shocked
his moral sense. "Erasmus can do nothing but
cavil and flout" said Luther in his Table Talk.
But Erasmus did much more than that, as Luther
knew full well. It can not be doubted that in
throwing the weight of his unique personal
influence, and of the intellectual movement of
which he was the chief, against the Protestant.
Reformation, he largely contributed to check its
progress, and to bring it into discredit with the
cultivated and thoughtful. And the offer of a
Cardinal's hat, made to him by Pius III., was a
fitting, however tardy, recognition of his services
in vindicating the unity of the Catholic Church,
and the prerogatives of the Pope as the instrument
of that unity.

And here I am led to notice a strange remark
of Dr. Dollinger in the Introduction to his learned
and thoughtful book The Church and the Churches.
"The separation," he tells us, "did not result
from the abuses in . the .Church. It was for the

vi.] " A GENTIL PARDONER." 189
sake of doctrine that the separation took place."
He is speaking specially of the Protestant Reforma
tion in Germany. And surely this is not an
accurate account of it. Had it not been for the
abuses — the crying abuses — attending the preach
ing of Leo X.'s pardon, Luther would, humanly
speaking, never have swerved from the rigid
orthodoxy which characterised his early years.
Niebuhr was of opinion that if those abuses had
been promptly discountenanced, the Protestant
Reformation might have been retarded for a long
time.* No doubt Luther's ninety-five theses
concerning indulgences contained propositions
which accomplished theologians, like Cardinal
Cajetan, could not fail to regard as untenable and
unsound. Equally certain is it that on the
practical question his view]'was [sound enough.
There is a vast amount of testimony concerning
the reality and gravity of the scandals which
called forth Luther's protest. The " gentil
pardoner," who lives for us in the verse of
Chaucer, is no invention of the poet.
" For my entent is'nat'but for to winne,
And nothing^for correccioun of sinne."
There seems to be no sufficient reason for
doubting the story that Tetzel, after pourtraying
all manner of enormities, would end his sermon,
* Reminiscences of M. Niebuhr, by F. Lieber, p. 153.

190 CHRISTIANITY AND THE REFORMATION, [ch.
"Well all this is expiated the moment your
money chinks in the Pope's chest." * It was one
of the sharp sayings of Erasmus, "Christ drove
out of the Temple those who bought and sold :
but those who buy and sell have driven Christ
out of the Church." The saintly Adrian VI. has
left on record his conviction that the troubles
which he was called upon to face had arisen
" propter peccata hominum, maxime sacerdotum
et ecclesise prselatorum.t As a matter of fact,
there is much evidence to support Professor
Brewer's statement: "The sale of indulgences
was a project devised between the temporal
and spiritual rulers of Europe for collecting
subsidies from the poor and labouring classes.''^
* Erasmus writes in his Praise of Folly : " Nam quid dicaiu
de iis, qui sibi fictis scelerum condonationibus suavisime
blandiuntur, ac purgatorii spatia veluti clepsydris metiuntur,
SEecula, annos, menses, dies, horas, tanquam e tabula mathe-
matica, citra ullum errorem dimetientes. . . . Hie mihi puta
negociator aliquis, aut miles, aut judex, abjecto ex tot rapinis
unico nummulo, universam vitte Lernam semel expurgatam
putat, totque perjuria, tot libidines, tot ebrietates, tot rixas, tot
caedes, tot imposturas, tot perfidias, tot proditiones existimat
velut ex pacto redimi; et ita redimi ut jam liceat ad novum
scelerum orbem de integro reverti."
f In his letter to his legate Chieregato, as to which see
Pallavicino, 1. ii. c. vii. The original of the letter is given iu
Fasciculus Serum expetendarum et fugiendarum, printed in 1535.
X Letters and Papers Foreign and Domestic, vol. ii. p. i.
(Intro.). He also observes, with truth . " The temporal
sovereigns of Europe made it a condition of allowing the
indulgence to be preached, that they were to receive a portion
of the money realised by it." — Ibid,, p. cciv.

vi. J "THE SHOUT OF AWAKENED NATIONS." 191
It cannot be doubted that the rulers of the Church,
in their greed of these disreputable gains,* were
blind to the real significance of Luther's move
ment, and were largely responsible for the cata
strophe which ensued. Whether or no it be true
that Leo X. on his election observed to his brother
Giuliano, "Since God has given us the Papacy let
us enjoy it," these words express, aptly enough,
the spirit he was of. His Bull against Luther is
said to have been drawn up by the most eminent
Ciceronians of his court. Its Latinity is unimpeach
able. But it manifests an appalling misapprehension
of the gravity of the situation. Carlyle did not as a
rule write wisely about matters affecting the Catholic
Church. But he appears well warranted when
after telling us how Luther burnt the Papal Bull
at the Elster Gate of Wittenberg, while Wittenberg
looked on with shoutings, he adds : " The Pope
should not have provoked that shout : it was the
shout of awakened nations." It was the signal for
a revolt against accumulated abuses which had
grown intolerable. Moral debts increase with com
pound interest. The perpetual postponement of
their payment does but mean eventual bankruptcy.
It appears to me, then, that Luther's revolt was
directly due to abuses. And in this connection it
is necessary to remember the venerable dictum, "He
is the schismatic who causes the schism." As for
* " Pravos quasstus." It is the expression used by the
Council of Trent. Sess. xxv. Dec/ret. de Indul.

192 CHRISTIANITY AND THE REFORMATION, [ch.
Luther himself, I confess that, quite apart from his
opinions and his works, I do not like him. I dislike
his arrogance and self-sufficiency; his ignorance and
coarseness ; his violent imagination and bellicose
temperament; and the curious mixture of mysticism
and materialism which is ever cropping up in him.
His sincerity, his personal religiousness, I see no
reason to doubt. And certainly he possessed in a
heroic degree that virtue of courage — Tapferkeit —
claimed by Goethe as the characteristic of his race.
There are few finer spectacles in history than that
which he offered at the Diet of Worms : " Here
stand I ; I can do no other ; so help me God ;
Amen." His theological opinions seem entitled
in themselves to small consideration. That he pre
served some Catholic doctrines, rejected others,
and invented some new dogmas of his own, is not
intrinsically a very important or a very interesting
fact. But the practical outcome of his action in
this respect was of the utmost gravity. The
antinomian tenet of justification which he fabri
cated, was productive of far worse results in
the lives of men, than had been the traffic in
indulgences so strongly denounced by him. It
Avas a direct blow to the Claim of Christianity as
a teacher of morality, for, as Erasmus pointed out*
it overthrew fundamental ideas of our reason — the
ideas of merit and demerit, of Divine Justice and
* In the work De libero arbitrio.

vi.J PRIVATE JUDGMENT. 193
of human freedom, which enter into the ethical con
cept. Again, his doctrine as to the Sacred Scrip
tures and private judgment was directly hostile to
the Claims of Christianity both as a teacher of
religion, and as an organised polity, a Church.
Here, indeed, is the chief significance of his
career. That every man should examine for him
self theological questions, taking as his standard
the Bible, and decide them, according to that
standard, by his private judgment — such is the
substance of his teaching as to the rule of faith.
I am writing here, from the point of view, not
of a theologian but of a publicist. And my object
just now is to show the outcome of this doctrine
of the subjective interpretation of the Bible by
individuals. To do that I must, however, say a
very few words concerning the doctrine itself.
That a right of private judgment exists, then,
I am far from denying. It springs from the in
dividuality of intelligence, from the very fact of
human personality. The question is, what are the
subjects on which the right is properly exercised?
Manifestedly there are things of which the in
dividual intelligence is in a position to judge with
individual authority. Such are — for example — our
own private affairs, facts which may be called
portions and parcels of us, as existing in our own
particular life and experience: "the things of a
man," as St. Paul speaks, which " the spirit of a
man that is in him " alone knows. Such are, again,
o

194 CHRISTIANITY AND THE REFORMATION, [ch.
matters scientific, critical, aesthetic, which we have
specially made our own. Here our private judgment
is entitled to give sentence, not indeed infallibly,
absolutely, and irreformably, but with a peculiar
prerogative, a recognised, right. But if such
things, manifestedly, fall within the domain of
private judgment, others there are which, as
manifestedly, fall within the domain of public
judgment. Take, as instances of them, the
affairs of a trading company, or the affairs of a
nation. This public judgment is, of course, made
up of many private judgments, of very varying
value, and operative for what they are worth. The
individual shareholder has a right to his private
judgment concerning the business of his company;
the individual subject to his private judgment about
the concerns of the State. More, they have a right
that their individual judgments shall contribute
in due measure to the formation of the ' general
judgment. Just so is it in the ecclesiastical polity, the
religious incorporation, the Civitas Dei. The
judgment of the Catholic Church in matters of
faith and morals represents the sensus fidelium, the
collective judgment of the corpus Christianum, the
public opinion of the world-wide religious com
munity. The doctrines of the Catholic Church
are not the arbitrary inventions of Popes or
Councils. They lived in her consciousness before
they were formulated in decrees and enjoined

vi.J PUBLIC JUDGMENT. 195
in canons. They are the expressions of the
religious beliefs and pious instincts of "the
Christian people," cast into dogmatic decisions,
and published with solemn sanction. This is
what is meant by the Catholic principle that the
Church judges in faith and morals. Such judgments
are public judgments, and are religiously believed
to be protected from error by a Divine promise.
Luther's principle is that each individual is
competent to form a theological creed and a moral
code for himself by consulting the Bible : that —
according to his own forcible exposition — " even a
miller's wench, or a child nine years of age, who
decides according to the Gospel,* may understand
the Scriptures better than Pope and Councils, and
all scholars collected together." It is obviously
a principle of disintegration. A method of obtain
ing religious truth it, as obviously, is not : for
truth is one : but the results thus obtained are
multitudinous and irreconcilable. Nor can it be
otherwise, since the minds which judge are con
stituted with almost infinite differences ; and the
different evidence accessible to each of them is
apprehended differently, construed differently, esti
mated differently by each.
To which we must add that the book proposed
by Luther as the subject whereon private judgment
* " According to the Gospel " is, in Luther, a technical ex
pression, and means according to his doctrine of justification.
o 2

196 CHRISTIANITY AND THE REFORMATION, [ch.
should be exercised— a book, or rather a miscellany
of books, so far off in details from modern life, yet
in essence ever nigh to the human heart — lends
itself to endless interpretations. Vinet has well
observed : "On ne voit dans la Bible que ce qu'on
veut. On abonde dans le sens de la v^rite" qu'on
a choisie : en sorte que, dans le fait, chacun a sa
Bible. Tous les oiseaux de l'air, depuis l'oiseau
de la nuit jusqu' a l'aigle l'ami du soleil, font leurs
nids dans les rameaux de cet arbre immense."*
The old distich sums the matter up :
" Hie liber est in quo quserit sua dogmata quisque ;
Invenit et pariter dogmata quisque sua."|
This is a truth of which Luther soon became
aware. While proclaiming the autonomy of private
judgment, he was in fact — perhaps half uncon
sciously — endeavouring to substitute in faith and
morals for an authority, universally recognized,
and claiming a divine warrant, his own personal
dictatorship resting merely on his own personal
affirmation. It was manifestedly an insecure
* See the fine passage in L'Eglise et les Confessions de Foi,
p. 29.
t I do not know to whom we are indebted for these lines, or
for the free and effective English version of them :
One day, at least, in every week,
The sects of every kind,
Their doctrines here are sure to seek
And just as sure to find.

vi. J LUTHER AND THE CIVIL POWER. 197
foundation. As he had applied his private
judgment to Catholic dogmas, so his opponents,
nay his disciples, applied their private judgment
to his dogmas, with still more destructive results.
More, even in his lifetime, they began to apply
it to the volume which he had sought to substitute
for the teaching Church. The instinct which led
him to regard Erasmus as a most dangerous foe
was not at fault. For Erasmus, by his edition of
the Greek Testament, was the founder of scientific
Biblical exegesis, the pioneer of the modern
critical method, destined, in the event, to shatter
hopelessly the view of the Sacred Writings which
is the very corner stone of the Lutheran system.
But to dwell on that matter would take me far
beyond my present point, which is this : that
Luther was driven, by the necessity of the case,
to seek for some positive jurisdiction, " ut sit
finis controversiarum." Where was he to find it ?
Obviously he himself did not possess it in his own
private judgment, and to a prophetic mission and
direct revelation from on high, he made no pre
tence. The jurisdiction of the Universal Church,
claiming, in St. Cyril's words, quoted in the Eirst
Chapter, " to teach catholically, and without defect,
all dogmas which ought to come home to the
knowledge of all men," he had repudiated.
Nothing remained but to invoke the aid of the
civil power. And this he proceeded to do, with
his wonted vigour and violence, " It became the

198 CHRISTIANITY AND THE REFORMATION [ch.
recognized Protestant doctrine," Dollinger ob
serves, " that princes had the highest juridical
office over religion, doctrine, and the Church : and
that it was their right and their calling to sup
press every opinion in matters of faith differing
from their own. . . . And so arose a despotism
the equal of which had never been seen before. . . .
The Protestant princes were not only Popes in
their own country, they were more : they were
able to do what no Pope had ever dreamed of
doing. Every Pope knew that his power was
conservative, given for the preservation of the
doctrine that had been transmitted to him, and
that any attempt by him to alter the teaching of
the Church would infallibly be frustrated by a
universal resistance. To the Protestant princes,
however, it had been said, and they themselves
believed and declared it, that their power in
religious matters was entirely unlimited : and that
in the use of it they need attend to no other
standard than their own consciences. . . . Luther
himself reckons it as a matter to his especial credit
that he had, in this way, benefited the temporal
powers." * The practical outcome of the Lutheran
Reformation in the countries which received it,
was to obliterate from the minds and consciences
of the people the belief that Christian men live
under another and a higher law than the law of
* Kirche und Kirchen, pp, 53-56,

vi.] THE BEGINNING OF ANGLICANISM. 199
the State: to efface that distinction between the
secular and the spiritual domain, the things of
Caesar and the things of God, which had been the
great gift of Christianity to civilization: a gift
purchased with the blood of its Founder and of His
countless martyrs : to deny the claim made by the
Church as a spiritual empire one and universal, a
world-wide society perfect and complete in herself.

The effect of the Protestant Reformation in
England was similar, and is more easily seen : for
the ecclesiastical revolution began here where it
ended in Germany. The tradition dominant in
this country for three centuries represented the
Anglican Reformation, just as Dollinger repre
sents the Lutheran Reformation, to have been
wrought for the sake of doctrine. Thus Johnson
defined the word Reformation as " the change of
religion from the corruptions of Popery to the
primitive state," and our popular histories have
been the vehicles and mouthpieces of that belief.*
* So also, the Book of Homilies : " Honour be to God, who
did put light in the heart of His faithful and true minister of
most famous memory, King Henry the Eighth, and gave him
the knowledge of His word, and an earnest affection to seek
His glory, and to put away all such superstitious and pharis-
aical sects " [viz. the religious orders] " by antichrist invented,
and set up again the true word of God and glory of His most
blessed name, as He gave the like spirit unto the most noble
and famous princes, Josaphat, Josias, and Ezechias," — The
Third Part of the Sermon of Gqgd Works,

200 CHRISTIANITY AND THE REFORMATION, [ch.
" They have presented the Anglican Reformation
from the Elizabethan point of view," * the point
of view taken by Foxe and Strype, defended by
Burnet, assumed, as a matter of course, by subse
quent writers down to almost within our own time,
and impressed upon the mind of the people, as is
usual, by epithets. Englishmen were taught from
their childhood to talk of Henry VIII. as " bluff,"
of Elizabeth as " good," of the Reformers as
"glorious," of Cranmer, in particular, as "honest,"
of Mary I. and Bonner as " bloody " ; of the
religious changes of the sixteenth century as
"happy"; of the thousand years England passed
in Catholic unity as " the dark times of Popish
superstition." The day, we may well hope, is now fairly over
when this view would be put forward by any
writer of repute. The actual facts, so long buried
under a mass of misconception and fable, have to
a very great extent been brought to light, and
established beyond the possibility of doubt. The
guides so long unquestionably followed, have been
effectually discredited.! Of Foxe, the martyro-
* Brewer, Letters and Documents, &c, vol. ii. parti, p. ccxxvii.
(Intro.), note. So Dr. Maitland : "We have received almost
all that is popularly known of things and persons belonging to
the Reformation from Puritan sources." — Essays on the Refor-
mation in England, p. 22.
f Curiously enough Sanders, long under reprobation as a
strange and extravagant liar, has been proved singularly well

vi. ] FOXE, STRYPE, AND BURNET. 201
logist, the very fountain-head of the tradition for so
many generations in possession of the English mind,
Mr. Brewer observes, " Had he been an honest
man, his carelessness and credulity Avould have
incapacitated him from being a trustworthy his
torian. Unfortunately he was not honest ; he
tampered with the documents that came into his
hands, and freely indulged in those very faults of
suppression and equivocation for which he con
demned his opponents." * Strype, a writer of
higher character, has not fared well in the
examination to which he has been subjected by
Dr. Maitland and others. Burnet is convicted
of habitual carelessness and inaccuracy by a
informed and accurate. Thus, in an article which appeared in
the Saturday Review oi October 3, 1868, and which is understood
to be from the very competent pen of Mr. Pocock, we read :
" Sanders is in general, as regards facts, trustworthy, and his
work must take rank as a first-class authority  We would
recommend any one who wishes to get a clear idea of the
political and religious movements of the sixteenth century to
read Sanders' book, De Schismate Anglicano, as presenting a
more discriminating account of the various disturbances of the
Church and State than can be found in so small a compass any
where else."
* Brewer, Letters and Papers, &c, vol. i. p. Ix. (Intro.), note.
Foxe appears to have acquired very soon the reputation he
enjoyed. Thus Warner writes (temp. Eliz.) : —
" So dyde the gracious mother of
Our now most gracious Queen,
Whose zeale in reverent Fox his works
Authenticall is seen.
Albion's England, book viii. chap, xxxviii.

202 CHRISTIANITY AND THE REFORMATION, [ch.
multitude of critics, among whom Mr. Pocock is
conspicuous. And with the credit of Foxe,
Strype, and Burnet, the credit of their copyists has
also disappeared, while other and more trustworthy
sources of information have been opened. In
particular, access has been open to a vast mass of
original authorities, by which a flood of light has
been shed upon well nigh every point of doubt and
difficulty. The general result is that the old Protestant
tradition has almost completely disappeared. In
the early years of the century Lord Macaulay,
writing in the Edinburgh Review, declared that the
Reformation in England " sprang from brutal
passion," and was "nurtured by selfish policy;"
that the "bluff" monarch who originated it was
a "shameless tyrant"; that "of those who had any
important share in bringing it about, Ridley was,
perhaps, the only person who did not consider it a
mere political job ; " and in a few pages, perhaps
among the most masterly which ever came from
his pen, disposed, finally, of the pretensions to
honesty, made on behalf of the singular martyr,
who " rose into favour by serving Henry in the
disgraceful affair of his first divorce;" who, "a
supple, timid, interested courtier;" was "equally
false to political and religious obligations " ; who
" conformed backwards and forwards as the king
changed his mind;" and who "died solely
because he could not help it," "never retracting

vi.J HENRY VIII. 203
his recantation till he found he had made it in
vain," and that he could not succeed in pur
chasing "by another apostasy the power of burn
ing men better and braver than himself." * These
utterances aroused much consternation at the time,
and were regarded, very generally, as little better
than flat blasphemy. They are now the commonest
of commonplaces, familiar, as Macaulay would
have said, to every schoolboy. If any fact of
history is certain it is this : that in the ecclesiasti
cal change wrought by Henry VIII. no religious
motive had place. Lust of woman, lust of lucre,
lust of power, were Henry's sole springs of action.
The Catholic Creed he left as it was, merely
detaching the Church in England from Catholic
unity and proclaiming himself its Supreme Head.f
* See his " Essay on Hallam's Constitutional History,"
Works, vol. v. pp. 172-175.
f The change wrought by Henry VIII. involved his assump
tion of the entire spiritual jurisdiction, the whole ecclesiastical
authority previously exercised in this country by the Supreme
Pontiff. This is absolutely clear from the language of the
26 Henry VIII. c. 1 — the Act of Supremacy. Elizabeth did
not revive that Act, no doubt because as a woman she shrank
from assuming the title of Supreme Head of the Church
bestowed by it upon the Sovereign. But although she did
not take to herself that title, she took all the authority
implied therein, by the first Act of her reign : " An Act to
restore to the Crown the ancient jurisdiction over the estates
ecclesiastical and spiritual, and abolishing all foreign powers
repugnant to the same." I may be permitted to refer, in this
connection, to chap. i. of A Manual of the Law specially affecting
Catholics, by W. S. Lilly and J. E. P. Wallis, where the subject
is fully discussed.

204 CHRISTIANITY AND THE REFORMATION. [ch.
Nothing is more misleading than to speak of the
ecclesiastical policy of Henry VIII. or of Elizabeth
as emancipatory. It was indeed emancipatory as
regarded themselves, for it freed them from the last
restraints wdiich hung loosely enough upon their
authority. But it was not emancipatory as regarded
the people. For them it simply substituted King
Henry for Pope Clement, Queen Elizabeth for Pope
Pius, as supreme governor in matters ecclesiastical.
Henry VII. had overthrown well-nigh all the civil
liberties of his subjects. Henry VIII. crushed the
spiritual power*- — he found it reduced to a shadow
* Professor Blunt, in a work which was long, and pos
sibly is still, a text-book on its subject at Cambridge,
writes: "In transferring the supremacy from the Pope to
the King, the Church of England did not act unadvisedly.
Nothing could be more inexpedient for the good govern
ment of the country or its spiritual improvement, than that
there should be in it two sovereign heads ; and how was the
inconvenience to be avoided, except by making one and the
same person, in all causes, ecclesiastical as well as civil,
supreme ? " — Sketch of the Reformation in England, 18th ed.,
p. 131. The statement that the Church of England did not act
unadvisedly in transferring the supremacy from the Pope to the
King is curious. One might as well say that an unarmed
traveller does not act unadvisedly when handing his purse to
the highwayman who, pistol iu hand, demands his money or
his life. It is a notorious fact that, the act of Convocation
which Prof. Blunt had in view, was extorted by the penalties
of praemunire hanging over the heads of the clergy. The
subject is exhaustively discussed in an article contributed to
the Dublin Review by Dr. Lingard in May, 1840. The last free
act of the old spiritualty of England was their petition, in 1554,
for reconciliation with the Holy See.

vi.J THE ROYAL SUPREMACY. 205
— which in earlier ages had been strong enough to
curb the licence of Norman and Angevine. It was
the finishing stroke of Tudor absolutism, bringing,
as it did, the consciences of men into captivity to
the royal authority. And this was why Catholic
and Puritan alike resisted it unto death. The
whole battle between Henry VIII. and the
Holy See turned upon the question of the royal
supremacy : and that question meant this : whether
the spiritual or the secular power 'should be
supreme in the domain of religion.
" Every man," writes Professor Brewer, " who cares to read
the history of those times feels, at once, that this is the question,
this is the keystone of the Reformation; all other topics dwindle
into insignificance beside it. This is the real point at issue
between the advocates of the old and the new system. . . . No
distinction [between civil and religious crimes] existed at the
time in the mind either of sovereign or of people ; the King, as
spiritual head of the Church, assumed to himself the right of
punishing such offences, not as contrary to the laws of the State,
but as contrary to what he was pleased to determine was the
law of God — offences as much against his spiritual as against
his temporal power. . . . When he transferred to himself the
supremacy of the Church, he transferred with it all the powers
which the Church had ever exercised for the punishment of
heresy or disobedience to its authority. If the Pope was the
Bishop of bishops, so was he : if the Pope could of himself
determine controversies of faith, so did he. Whether the
doctrine of purgatory, or of the sacrament of penance, or of the
worship of saints were or were not to constitute part of the
creed, and of the teachings of the Church of England, depended
upon the King alone. It is true that he did not administer the
sacraments and ordain priests and bishops ; but if any mail had
questioned his power to do so, he would have incurred the

206 CHRISTIANITY AND THE REFORMATION, [ch.
penalty of high treason. ' A bishop,' says Cranmer, ' may
make a priest by the Scripture, and so may princes and
governors also, and that by the authority of God committed to
them.' In common with other reformers, Cranmer looked upon
all spiritual functions as absolutely dependent on the will of
the King, as temporal commissions, like those of any other
magistrate." *
In England, as elsewhere, Protestantism, repre
sents — such is its inner meaning — the disallowance
of that Claim of Christianity to be a spiritual
empire, whole in itself, and extending throughout
the world, which had been accepted as an integral
part of its mission from the days of its Divine
Founder. " The essence of the movement called
the Reformation, in all the different forms which
it assumed in various European countries, is not
the denial of one or another article of the Catholic
creed, but the rejection of ecclesiastical unity and
universality, and of the Supreme Pastorate which
is the Sacramentuni Unitatis. Hence the appro
priateness of the name Protestant, because it implied
nothing positive, and might be used, indifferently,
by all who protested against and threw off the
authority of the Church. "t
So much may suffice to exhibit what appears to
me the real significance of the Protestant Reforma
tion : an event, in some respects, of a calamitous
* English Studies, pp. 302-333.
f A Manual of the Law specially affecting Catholics, p. 2. On
this subject see Mohler's Kirchengeschichte, vol. iii. p. 132.

vi.J FORMER SCHISMS, 207
importance unequalled in the annals of Christianity.
In comparison with it all former schisms seem incon
siderable. The Donatists drew away from Catholic
unity the Christians of North Africa, and at one time
numbered in their communion some four hundred
sees. But the secure judgment of the world con
demned them, and the event justified the condem
nation : in the seventh century of our era they are
gone : we seek them, and their place can nowhere
be found. The Monophysite schism, once so pre
vailing, still lives, if life it can be called, in the
Coptic and Armenian, the Abyssinian and Jacobite
Churches. Of the Nestorian community, which in
the eleventh century extended from China to
Jerusalem, and whose Patriarch had twenty-five
metropolitans under him, only a remnant of some
seventy thousand is left. The Greek Church
indeed is with us to this day as a vast body of
professing Christians. And its eigb^-five millions,
as they are reckoned, holding well-nigh all Catholic
doctrines, but separate from Catholic unity, make
it an imposing phenomenon, on paper. But prac
tically, since the fall of Constantinople, it has
done little to prejudice the ecumenical claims of
Catholicism. It is manifestly local or national :
the creature, in the Turkish Empire, of the
Sultan, in the Russian, of the Czar. It lacks that
power of propagation which, as I have observed
in a former Chapter, is a note of a Church's life.
De Maistre has remarked, with equal force and

208 CHRISTIANITY AND THE REFORMATION, [en.
truth, "All the Churches separated from the Holy
See at the beginning of the twelfth century may
be compared to frozen carcasses, the form of which
cold has preserved. This cold is the ignorance
that was destined to last longer for them than
for us : for it has pleased God to concentrate,
until a new order of things shall arise, all human
science in our Western countries. As soon as its
warm breath shall have blown on those Churches
then will happen what according to the laws of
nature ought to happen : the ancient form will be
dissolved, and only dust will remain."*
But let us look a little at the actual effect of
Protestantism on the Catholic Church. When the
popular impulse in its favour had waned, and the
bodies of a hundred thousand peasants slaughtered
in the Rebellion which was the direct outcome
of Luther's doctrines, showed how little it could
be regarded as a movement towards liberty, it
was sustained by nobles who coveted ecclesi
astical property, and by princes who saw in it an
instrument for the advancement of their own
prerogative.! It allied itself with the monarchical
absolutism which was then arising throughout
Europe, upon the ruins of the free institutions that,
in one form or another, had prevailed throughout
the Middle Ages. It invented, to support the
* Le Pape, book v. c. 2.
t So Erasmus had foretold in 1526. See Ep. 843.

vi.] THE CHURCH AND THE CHURCHES. 209
pretensions of kings, the monstrous doctrine of
their immediate divine right — a doctrine utterly
opposed to the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas,
and the other great lights of the medieval school —
the effect of which was to place the liberty of the
subject at the mercy of the ruler. By the middle
of the sixteenth century it had detached from
Catholic unity, England, Scotland, Denmark,
Sweden, Prussia, Saxony, Hesse, the Palatinate,
and a large part of Switzerland. In France it
was a power in the state, treating on almost equal
terms with the king. In the Low Countries its
adherents were counted by hundreds of thousands.
In Bavaria it had a majority in the estates. Poland
and Hungary seemed on the verge of embracing it.
True it is, as I shall presently point out, that
some of the territory thus lost to Catholicism was
soon regained. But the effect of the loss in weaken
ing the idea of Christian unity and universality was
enduring. The concept of the Church was largely
supplanted by the concept of the Churches. The
Papal Chair forfeited — and never recovered — its
international influence. How could that influence be
recovered when the old public order of Christendom,
which was the essential condition of its exercise, had
passed away? When half Europe was withdrawn
from the obedience of the Roman Pontiff, and the
other half whs ruled by absolute monarchs, who
repelled every interference with their prerogative,
and who gradually possessed themselves of a great

210 CHRISTIANITY AND THE REFORMATION, [ch.
number of ecclesiastical rights and privileges?*
More, one effect of the Reformation was to clothe
the Papacy with a specially Italian character.
Since the Reformation no member of any other
nationality has filled it, and the Italian element has
largely preponderated in the Church. This was
conspicuously seen, even at the Council of Trent.
The gain to the cause of Catholicism from the
labours of that venerable synod was great ; it
would undoubtedly have been far greater if the
august assembly had been as ecumenical in its
composition as in its authority. Again, the in
evitable effect of the Protestant revolt was to throw
the Catholic Church into a defensive attitude. From
the necessity of the case it became reactionary.
It viewed with suspicion every departure from the
old ways, in science and literature, every advance
on medieval thought. A familiar example of this
spirit is afforded by the affair of Galileo. It is hard
to see how, placed as they were, the ecclesiastical
authorities could have acted otherwise than they
did in respect of that illustrious man, who may be
taken to have made an end of the old cosmogony,
with which popular theological conceptions were so
* Card. Hergenrother gives a long list of concessions made
by the Church to various monarchs. " The Civil Power," he
observes, "had acquired a de facto supremacy over her: and, to
avoid worse evils, she was compelled, as far as she could, to yield
to the menacing demands of princes." — Katholishe Kirche und
Christlicher Staat, Essay I. p. 2, § 6,

vi.J THE COUNCIL OF TRENT.

211

closely bound up. It is certain that in the event—
and no very remote event— the effect of their action
was to fix upon the Church the reproach of obscu
rantism : of aversion from the intellectual progress
of the world. " The starry Galileo and his woes "
have been, for two centuries, a commonplace, and
a very effective one, of anti-Catholic disputants.
The famous " E pur si muove " is now relegated to
the domain of legend. But it is one of those
legends that are truer than most facts. The man
was silenced. And, as was said at the time, " the
Church triumphed." Such triumphs are pyrrhic
victories, disastrous, in the long run, to the con
querors. But the results of Protestantism on the Catholic
Church were not wholly disastrous. It was a stern
monition, and an effectual one, that her long
deferred reform must be delayed no longer. The
Council of Trent has been called the greatest work
effected by Luther. It is not easy to overestimate
the salutary fruits of the Council's labours. It
suppressed scandals, purified ecclesiastical life,
defined Christian dogmas in general, and, in par
ticular, put forward a luminous and cogent con
futation of Luther's antinomianism : it vindicated
the constitution of the Church and the prerogatives
of the Papacy. A very common conrplaint against
it is that it sacrificed the future to the present.
The sufficient answer is that its members did not
possess the power attributed to the Buddhist sage,
p 2

212 CHRISTIANITY AND THE REFORMATION, [ch.
of calling to mind the events of forty ages that had
passed and of forty ages to come. They did their
work in their day, and, primarily, for their day.
And the event abundantly shows their success. In
the fifty years which immediately followed the
close of the Council of Trent, Catholicism regained
nearly all it had lost in France, in the Low
Countries, in Bavaria, in Bohemia, in Austria, in
Hungary, and in Poland.
The great instrument of its triumph was the
Society of Jesus, which received pontifical sanction
in the year 1540-1543. The Jesuits took up
the work of teaching and preaching which had
fallen from the hands of the Franciscans and
Dominicans at the close of the Middle Ages, and
did it in a way congruous with the spirit of the
new age. " To fight against heresies and vice
under the standard of Christ " was the work,
Ignatius told his companions, to which they were
called. And it is matter of history with what
success they accomplished it. Their unquenchable
zeal, their unlimited self-sacrifice, their unassail
able sanctity, are admitted on all hands. They
were especially happy in the opportunity which
the condition of Protestantism, particularly in
Germany, offered for their mission. The dis
solvent principle which is of the essence of
Luther's doctrine had abundantly manifested itself
in sterile strifes and rivalries of hate between
disputing theologians, and in the decay of the

vi.J THE THIRTY YEARS WAR. 213
moralities essential to the maintenance of civilised
life. As Mr. Gardiner well puts it, " In the face of
a divided people, of self-seeking princes, and of
conflicting theories, the Jesuits" " stepped forward
to bid silence in the name of the renovated Papal
Church, alone, as they urged, able to give peace
instead of strife, certainty instead of disputation."
They " made their way. Step by step the Catholic
reaction gained ground."* The ground which it
gained, it never again lost. But it was arrested
by the Thirty Years War. To dwell upon that
internecine conflict would be beside my present
purpose. I will merely observe first that in the
quarrel which was its proximate cause, the
Catholics were, beyond doubt, formally in the
right. The question was simply this : Whether
the claim of Protestant potentates could be
admitted to hold Catholic bishoprics, and to secu
larize the lands of the Catholic Church within their
territories. The claim was monstrous, on the face
of it, and was in flat contradiction to the provisions
of the Peace of Augsburg. Even Mr. Gardiner,
whose sympathies are not usually with the
Catholics, does not defend it. He allows that
" the whole thing had an ugly look." f I observe,
secondly, that the Peace of Westphalia, by which
the war was brought to an end, really established
* The Thirty Yea.rs War, p. 13.
t Ibid., p. 12.

214 CHRISTIANITY AND THE REFORMATION, [ch.
the principle " Cujus est regio illius est religio,"
than which no more direct negation of the Claims
of Christianity, no more fragrant violation of the
rights of conscience on which Christianity is
founded, can be imagined. It riveted the
authority of the prince over the religion of the
subject. It sealed the spiritual slavery of half
the German people. It made of them, as Gforer
has observed, " ein Bedientenvolk," a nation
of servants, with no rule of right and wrong but
their master's pleasure, until Eant rediscovered
for them the moral law, and proclaimed the
categorical imperative of Duty. It was congruous,
it was necessary that the Pope should protest
against the Peace of Westphalia. He would have
been false to his office if he had failed to protest.
For "the championship of the moral law and
conscience is his raison d'etre." *
Unfortunately the Church did not confine herself
to spiritual weapons for her vindication against
the Protestant Reformation. On the 21st of
July, 1542, Paul III. established by Bull "the
Supreme Tribunal of the Inquisition, universal in
its jurisdiction," and having for its object "to
suppress and uproot the errors that have found place
in the Christian community." Judging with the
wisdom so easy of attainment after the event, we
must surely say that this recourse to the secular
* Cardinal Newman's Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, p. 67.

vi.] REVIVAL OF THE INQUISITION. 215
arm was a monstrous blunder, destined, in after
times, to injure most disastrously the cause it was
intended to serve. But to blame the men of that
age for not seeing with our eyes, is, in the last
degree, unphilosophical. The doctrine of tolera
tion, as we now account of it, was strange to them.
We find it stated, indeed, in Sir Thomas More's
Utopia* But that wise and good man — surely
among the wisest and the best that the world has
ever known— by no means supposed that his
philosophic speculation could be carried out in
practice. On the contrary, the spectacle of the
actual fruits of Protestantism on the Continent
led him to advocate stringent measures for the
repression of heresy in England, t I need not
* Erasmus also glances at it in his Praise of Folly. " I " — it
is Folly who speaks — " was lately at a theological disputa
tion, as, indeed, I frequently am. Some one there proposed the
question what scriptural authority there was for overcoming
heretics by means of the stake, instead of persuading them by
argument. A certain severe old gentleman, whose frown
proclaimed him a theologian, answered, much in wrath, that
St. Paul had given authority for the practice when he wrote :
' Haereticum hominem, post unam et alteram correptionem,
devita.' And after shouting out the words again, while many
present were wondering what was the matter with him, he at
last explained, ' de vita tollendum heereticum.' Some laughed :
but there were not wanting those to whom this comment
seemed entirely theological." The old gentleman offered
another proof of the syllogistic kind. " Scriptum est maleficum
ne patieris vi vere. Omnis hEereticus maleficus. Ergo, &c."
t But it would seem that none were condemned to death by
him for their religious opinions. See Nisard's Renaissance et
Reforme, vol. ii. § 8.

216 CHRISTIANITY AND THE REFORMATION, [ch.
say that the various communions professing the
new religion persecuted dissidents with a severity
rivalling that employed in defence of the old.
English Protestantism racked, hung, cut down alive,
and ripped open any Jesuits, seminary priests, or
laity loyal to the ancient faith, on whom it could
lay its hands, and Puritans received from it hardly
less rigorous treatment. In Protestant Geneva, the
stake awaited any who offered to believe other
wise than Calvin. The executioner's axe was
red, throughout Protestant Germany, wdth the
blood of those who differed from the opinions of
Luther. Religious persecution has been called "the
deadly original sin of the Reformed Churches."
Assuredly Protestants were less excusable than
Catholics in resorting to it, because they used it to
punish others for maintaining that very principle
of private judgment on which Protestantism was
founded. All which must ever be borne in mind in
dealing with this subject. Still, if there is any one
lesson written more clearly than another upon the
annals of Europe, it is the inexpediency, in the long
run, of attempting to repress, by penal legislation,
religious beliefs and practices, save such as are
manifestedly subversive of civilised society. Even
the most enthusiastic Inquisitors, who accompanied
Giordano Bruno to the Campo dei Fiori on that
bright February morning of 1600, would probably
have desired to turn back the ghastly procession,
if they could have foreseen how, in less than three

vi.J GIORDANO BBUNO. 217
centuries, the image of the martyr of pantheistic
idealism would be reared, amid tumult of acclaim,
upon the site of his stake, and his doctrines taught
from the philosophic chairs of well-nigh every
Italian university.

CHAPTER VII.
CHRISTIANITY AND THE NEW AGE.
Half a century ago Mill wrote, " It must be the
shallowest view of the French Revolution wdiich
can now consider it as anything but a mere inci
dent in man himself, in his beliefs, in his principles
of conduct, and, therefore, in the outward arrange
ments of society — a change so far from being
completed that it is not clear, even to the more
advanced spirits, to what goal it is tending." *
Perhaps the time has at length arrived when the
nature of the change has become clearer, and its goal
more distinct. One thing is certain : the Revolu
tion has swept away from France, and from the
countries into which it penetrated — and where has
it not penetrated ?— the vestiges of the old medi
eval order which lingered until the end of the
eighteenth century. It aspired to remake society
upon a new model, and that model was supplied by
the speculations of Rousseau.
* Dissert, and Discus., vol. i. p. 57.

chap, vii.] ROUSSEAU'S TWO POSTULATES. 219
The two primary postulates of Rousseau's
doctrine are the natural goodness of man, and
the absolute sovereignty of the individual. They
are postulates which are directly opposed to
the Claims of Christianity both as an idea and
as a phenomenon. Christianity, as a religion,
rests upon the fact that there is within us what
Kant called "a radical evil" : a fault, a taint, a
vice of nature. And it claims to being a remedy
for this innate evil, and for the evils that spring
therefrom: "to treat universally and to heal," as
St. Cyril wrote, in the words quoted in the First
Chapter, "every species of sins that are com
mitted by soul and body." Again, Christianity,
as a Church, claims an allegiance quite incom
patible with the existence of absolute sovereignty,
either in the one or in the many. For absolute
sovereignty belongs only to perfection : and " there
is none good save One, that is God." To Him alone,
the High and Holy One, that inhabiteth Eternity,
is the kingdom and the supremacy over all : whose
will is perfect reason, perfect truth, perfect justice.
And conscience is His "Aboriginal Vicar" and
perpetual, indefeasible representative upon earth,
under whose law every man is born. The special
characteristic of our ideas of reason, truth, justice,
is that their sway is absolute. The " ought "
which commands us to follow reason, to speak
truth, to do justice, is not limited in its autho
rity, because it is divine in its character. An

220 CHRISTIANITY AND THE NEW AGE. [ch.
essential part of the mission of Christianity, as I
have' insisted throughout this volume, is to vindi
cate this prerogative of conscience: to maintain that
into its sacred sphere secular sovereignty may not
intrude. It was precisely through faithfulness to
this part of its mission, that Christianity was
originally brought into conflict with the Revo
lution. Let us consider it a little. The sovereignty of
the individual is the corner stone on which the
revolutionary political edifice is reared. " Sachez-
vous," demanded Chalier, "que vous etes rois, et
plus que rois ? Ne sentez-vous pas la souverainte
qui circule dans vos veines " ? Rousseau conceives
of civil society as the result of a contract between
these sovereign units, whence results, in the public
order, the collective sovereignty of all. And thus
another Jacobin orator, one Isnard : " Le peuple
connait aujourd'hui sadignite: il sait que d'apres
la Constitution le deVise de tout Francais doit etre
celle-ci, vivre libre, l'£gal de tous, et membre du
souverain." Rousseau himself reduces all the
clauses of his Social Contract to this one, as its
quintessence and elixir: " Chacun de nous met en
commune sa personne et toute sa puissance sous la
supreme direction de le volonte* generale." Thus
the State is armed with limitless power. True
it is that, in the Jacobin theory, this power
is exercised by au elective assembly. But des
potism is despotism, whether the despot be one

vii.] THE OMNIPOTENT STATE. 221
man or a roomfull of men. The Roman Emperor
claimed his irresponsible dictatorship as the chosen
representative of the people.* The members of
the Jacobin Sovereign Assembly claim theirs on
exactly the same ground.
Are we told that the electors are, after all,
the real sovereigns ? So they are in theory.
Happily, they are not so in practice. A
Sovereign Assembly means oppression. A Sove
reign mob means anarchy, which is worse.
But what I am concerned to point out here is that
this theory of the omnipotence — la toute-puissance
— of the State necessarily brought it into conflict
with the Church. Rousseau expressly complains
that the Christian religion broke up the unity of
the civil polity: "qui fit que l'Ǥtat cessa de etre
un," is his expression. And he claims that it
is the office in every country of the sovereign
only, to fix both worship and dogma.f The Civil
Constitution of the Clergy was the translation into
fact of Rousseau's teaching. Its authors protested
that they merely called upon the priesthood to
obey the law. This was true. But it was a
law which violated the ecumenical character of
the divine community whereof the clergy were
ministers, and reduced the Church to a mere depart-
* " Quod principi placuit legis habet vigorem, quum lege
reo-ia quse de ejus imperio lata est, populus ei et in eum omne
suum imperium et potestatem concessit." — Int. I., tit. 3, 6.
f Du Contrat Social, 1. iv. c. 8.

222 CHRISTIANITY AND THE NEW AGE. [ch.
ment of the omnipotent state : which tore them from
the centre of unity, and made them the officers of the
secular power. It was the direct negation of the
Claim of Christianity as a universal spiritual
kingdom. It was a resuscitation of that Csesarism
which the Church, in her early centuries, en
countered and broke in pieces. And it is notable
that the new tyranny, like the old, complained of
the recalcitrant Christians as "unsociable," for de
clining to obey the law of the human polity to
which they belonged, when it contravened the
law of the divine commonwealth of which they
were also members.
The political doctrine of Rousseau, then, issues in
the same complete subordination of religion to the
State which had been the outcome of the Lutheran
and the starting point of the Anglican Reformation.
And his teaching concerning the unalloyed good
ness of human nature illustrates " the falsehood
of extremes," as signally as Luther's teaching that
there is in man an organ of sin which must act,
and whose every act is sin. I suppose this Lutheran
dogma, and the cognate dogma of Calvin, are now
of little practical influence. But assuredly the
spurious individualism which lies at the root of
the speculations of both those Reformers, as of
Rousseau, has deeply infected modern thought.
I take it that the autonomy of the individual reason
is now a very widely accepted principle. It is
curious that while the ancients regarded this faculty

vn. ] INDIVIDUALISM. 223
as an instrument wherewith to subdue the passions,
the school of thinkers dominant for the last century
view it chiefly as a weapon for combating autho
rity, whether in the political or the intellectual,
the ethical or the religious domain. The conse
quences have been little more than negative. Can
we say that there are now throughout Europe —
outside of the Catholic Church — any recognised
first principles of thought and action in which we
may find an anchor of the soul sure and steadfast ?
Nay, are we not told by teachers in the greatest
credit, that there are, in reality, no such first
principles for us : that truths absolute, necessary,
and eternal — if such there be — are beyond us ; that,
as all our knowledge is relative, so are all our rules
deducible from it ?
I remember a gifted Frenchman — himself the
freest of freethinkers — describing current philo
sophical speculation in Europe as a " debris
de doctrines surnageant pele-mele." I think
the description just. Moral guidance there is
none in society. Force and chance take the
place of generally accepted ethical and religious
maxims. This is the necessary consequence of the
doctrine of the all -sufficiency of the individual
reason : of placing it in the throne which belongs
rightly to the abstract reason. Perhaps the great
ness of the change which has come over the general
mind may best be realised by glancing back to the
Ages of Faith. The tendency of the medieval

224 CHRISTIANITY AND THE NEW AGE. [ch.
world was to see all things in God : the tendency
of the modern world is to see all things in man.
Then the eternal, immutable Creator was recognised
as the beginning and final end of the creature ;
now, there is a widespread school which refuses to
look beyond the visible scene, which makes life
its own end, which exalts man's mortal, ever-
changing self into a present Deity; so that we may
say, with a deeper meaning than the words bore
upon the lips of the Attic poet, Atvos jSacrtXeuei rbv
A" efeXijXa/cw?. The apotheosis of the individual,
the apotheosis of the State, the apotheosis of the
race, are aspects of this humanitarian pantheism
which is a vast fact of the present day, traceable
clearly in the contemporary literature of every
civilised nation under heaven.

Such is the Spirit of the Age : the Zeitgeist with
which Christianity is confronted. And here I am
reminded of a fine passage of Lamennais, which,
though written more than half a century ago, is as
true now as it was then.

"Apres dix-huit cents ans de combats et de triomphe, le
Christianisme eprouve enfin le meme sort que son fondateur.
Cite, pour ainsi dire, a comparaitre non pas devant un pro
consul, mais devant le genre humain tout entier, on l'interroge,
' Es-iu roi ? est-il vrai, comme on t'en accuse, que tu pretendes
regner sur nous ? ' ' C'est vous-meme qui I'avez dit,' repondit-
il, ' Ovd,jesuis roi; je regne sur les intelligences en les eclair.

vn.J WHAT IS TRUTH? 225
ant, sur les coeurs en reglant leurs mouvements et jusqu'a leurs
desirs ; jo regne sur la socie'te par mes bienfaits. Le monde
ctait enseveli dans les tenebres de l'erreur : je suis venu lui
apporter la ve'rite ; voiltt mon titre ; quiconque aime la vvrite
mecoute.' Mais deja ce mot n'a plus aucun sens pour une
raison pervertie ; il est necessaire qu'on le lui explique : ' Qu'est-
ce que la verite ? ' demande le juge distrait et stupide : et sans
attendre la reponse, il sort." *
But whether men will hear, or wdiether they
will forbear, the reply of Christianity now to the
question, What is truth ? is essentially what it was
at the beginning. Christianity in the nineteenth
century, just as in the time of St. Cyril, claims
to " teach catholically and without defect all
dogmas which ought to come home to the know
ledge of all men, whether concerning things visible
and invisible, concerning heavenly and earthly
tilings." It claims " to extend throughout all the
world, from one end of the earth to the other :
and to subject every race to the true religion," '• to
bring men into a polity in belief of the truth."
These are the Claims which Christianity still
' makes through the Catholic Church, and which it
cannot keep from making, without ceasing to be
itself. I say " through the Catholic Church," for,
in fact, she alone of all bodies of Christians sustains
these Claims. I have no wish to disparage — I am,
in fact, very far from undervaluing — the labours
of Christian communions separate from her. So
far as they teach her doctrines, they are fellow-
# Essa! sur V Indifference, Intr. p. 27.
Q

226 CHRISTIANITY AND THE NEW AGE. [ch.

workers together with her. But none of them so
much as pretends to her ecumenical attributes.
It was remarked a century ago by South that the
Church of England alone made Protestantism con
siderable in Europe. Surely it is a patent fact of
the present da}^ that the Catholic Church alone
makes Christianity considerable in the world.
She alone judges the world in the exercise of her
prophetical office. Cardinal Newman, in his
Grammar of Assent has catalogued, with his
inimitable skill and singular fairness, the opinions
which specially characterize modern civilization.
They are these —
That "moral evil and physical " are "nothing more than
imperfections of a parallel nature ; " that " the difference in
gravity between the two is one of degree only, not of kind ;
that moral evil is merely the offspring of physical, and that as
we remove the latter, so we inevitably remove the former ; that
there is a progress of the human race which tends to the
annihilation of moral evil; that knowledge is virtue, and vice
is ignorance ; that sin is a bugbear, not a reality ; that the
Creator does not punish except in the sense of correcting ; that
vengeance in Him would of necessity be vindictiveness ; that
all that we know of Him, be it much or little, is through the
laws of nature ; that miracles are impossible ; that prayer to
Him is a superstition; that the fear of Him is unmanly; that
sorrow for sin is slavish and abject ; that the only intelligible
worship of Him is to act well our part in the world, and the
only sensible repentance to do better in future ; that if we do
our duties in this life, we may take our chance for the next ;
and that it is of no use perplexing our minds about the future
state, for it is all a matter of guess." *
* Grammar of Assent, p. 416 (Fifth Edition).

vn.] CHURCH AND STATE. 227
These are the opinions wdiich are presented to
us every day, in a thousand forms, as the outcome
of Modern Civilization, Liberalism, and Progress.
The late Pope included the proposition that he
ought to come to terms with and reconcile himself
to them, in that much abused and little understood
document, the Syllabus or List of Errors condemned
by him from time to time. How could he pos
sibly have done otherwise ? Is it not the duty
of the Church to testify to the world against
such teaching ? teaching which strikes at the
heart of Christianity. Again, in his Encyclical
Letter, accompanying this List, he reprobated the
principle " that the best constitution of the State
and civil progress require human society to be con
stituted and governed without regard to religion."
Well, I know not of one considerable writer on
politics who would not have agreed with Pius IX.
here, from the time of Plato, who, in his Laws,
tells us that a community founded on faith in
unseen and supersensuous realities is the true
type of society, to the time of Mr. Gladstone, who,
in his treatise on Church and State, denounces as
' " practical atheism " the claim of " masses invested
with political power .... to banish themselves from
the Divine protection and regard."
But "a fact is not altered by a hundred texts."
Whatever the ideally best constitution of society
may be, it is indisputable that the spirit of
the age aims everywhere at constituting the com-
Q 2

228 CHRISTIANITY AND THE NEW AGE. [ch.
monwealth without regard to religion. Formerly,
the alliance of the Catholic Church and the
Christian State was regarded as a condition and
pledge of the stability of governments, nay, of the
coherence of civil polity. In these days it is put
aside as an outworn arrangement, prejudicial to
human liberty and to the welfare of society.
Now there can be no question that in the three
hundred years preceding the French Revolution
this alliance, in every country where it prevailed,
had become, more and more, au instrument for the
oppression and enslavement of the spiritual order.
For my own part, I consider the position of the
Catholic Church, as the last century drew to its
close, more abject and degraded than at any pre
vious period in her history. The French Revolution,
little as its leaders intended this, was, in the event,
as regards the Catholic Church, an emancipation.
And the legitimate outcome of the principle of the
incompetence of the State in the matter of cults, is
to restore to her the plenitude of her sovereignty
in her own domain. But in the exercise of that
sovereignty it is almost inevitable that she should
come into contact, and into conflict, with the civil
power. The Church and the State are polities,
existing side by side, for different ends, and
exercising sovereignty over the same subjects.
The ends of the State are properly secular : such as
the peace and order of society: the development
and increase of national resources : the diffusion

vn.J TWO VIEWS OF LIFE. 229
and enhancement of material comfort. But besides
these ends — these legitimate ends — of mankind,
there are others after which many men aspire not
less, but more eagerly. " Sors tua mortalis, non
est mortale quod optas." Men have spiritual as
well as material, immortal as well as temporal ends.
And it is for these spiritual and immortal ends that
the Catholic Church exists. It sets out with the
view that '' Life is probation, and this earth no goal
But starting point of man : "
a view of human existence quite different from
the State's. It has been founded, I say, for ends
transcending the ends of civil polity : it proceeds on
principles diverse from those of the secular society :
and therefore its laws breathe another spirit.
Again, it is universal, whereas the State is muni
cipal, and it cannot conform its doctrines and
discipline to national demands.
This being so, conflict between it and the State
is occasionally unavoidable. To give two familiar
instances. The State accounts of marriage as a civil
contract, and claims to regulate its inception and
dissolution. The Catholic Church regards it as a
sacramental state of life, indissoluble, if once rightly
entered upon, save by the death of husband or wife.
Again, the State insists upon the education of
children in view of their becoming useful members
of the community. But the Church has her own

230 CHRISTIANITY AND THE NEW AGE. [ch.
view of the religious constitution of the family.
She holds that to bring up children " in the nurture
and admonition of the Lord" is a sacred duty bind
ing upon parents — a duty which she alone can
enable them adequately to perform. It is often
said that the Catholic Church claims to disobey the
laws of any country at her pleasure. This is not
so. Obedience to the powers that be, as divinely
ordained, is a first principle with the Catholic
Church. She knows nothing of any " sacred right
of insurrection." Except in grave cases, carefully
specified by her theologians, she condemns rebellion
as a sin. It is only when the law of the State
comes into conflict with the higher law of con
science, that disobedience to it becomes a duty.
And of such conflict she claims, and cannot but
claim, herself to be judge. I am far from denying
that her rulers have in this matter sometimes
judged wrongly, that they have overstepped the
true bounds of ecclesiastical jurisdiction. I am
merely stating the principle. It will be seen, then,
that the formula of a free Church in a free State,
so lauded in the present day — and not without
grounds — by no means promises unbroken harmony
between the two. It must be remembered a^ain —
¦what is too often forgotten — that the State is not
a machine dealing with dead matter. It is an
organisation of living men, in many of whom the
hopes and the fears with which religion is con
cerned, 'supply the mightiest and most masterful

vii.] THE NEW LIBERALISM. 231
motives of their lives. The security and order
of the State are the conditions of civilized life.
It is manifest — all history teaches the lesson — that
religion, more than anything else, makes for or
against that security and order. It is the greatest
instrument of union or division. It may be either
peace or a sword.
But the matter is further complicated. We are
sometimes told that if the State is not Christian,
it need not be anti-Christian : that there is what
is called " the Theism of the Natural Order " to
save it from blank Materialism ; that recognizing
in man something more than matter in motion,
it may leave him to seek his highest good in
his own way, no more interfering with his
religion, and with the liberties which his religion
involves, than with his choice of literature or his
fashion of dress ; and maintaining an attitude of
benevolent neutrality to all forms of faith. It is
a comfortable doctrine ; but it is far from being
the practice, or indeed the theory, of the New
Liberalism, which decrees injustice as a law,
and seeks to impose upon peoples, through a
compulsory system of primary education, and
otherwise, the irreligion of the State. We must
recognise the fact that the anti-Christian sectaries
of Europe are largely animated by fanaticism.
" It is a lie — their priests, their Pope,
Their saints, their . . all they fear or hope
Are lies."

232 CHRISTIANITY AND THE NEW AGE. [ch.
That is their firm conviction about the Church,
and the source of their hatred to her. There can
be no doubt of their sincerity, in a vast number of
cases. Like the late Professor Clifford they regard
Christianity as "that awful plague which has
destroyed two civilizations and but barely failed
to slay such promise of good as is now struggling
to live among men."*

Such are the actual conditions of modern life in
which the Church has to fulfil her mission. She
has to maintain the Claims of Christianity in an
age when Christianity is Avidely impugned as an
idea, and hated as a phenomenon. What are the
prospects before her in fulfilling that mission ?
That question may be met by another. Can the
world do without Christianity ? Human nature is
ever essentially the same. And the spiritual needs
of human nature are precisely what they were
when Christianity was introduced into the world.
There are those who maintain that physical science
can supply these needs : that it is sufficient in the
intellectual and ideal as in the material and
industrial order : that the time is gone by for
the dreams of metaphysics and theology: that
sensible experience, and the verification of the
phenomena of sensible experience, will yield the
* Lectures and Essays, vol. i. p. 253,

vii. J . MAN'S NEED OF RELIGION. 233
life philosophy of the future. A curious comment
upon this view is supplied by the fact that
Spiritualism or Dsemonism finds among the
votaries of physical science its most eminent
recruits, as the names of Messrs. Wallace, Crookes,
and Varley may suffice to show. There are said
to be 10,000,000 Spiritualists in the United States ;
and Mr. Bryce has not failed to note "the tendency
of this shrewd and educated people to relapse into
the oldest and most childish form of superstition." *
Yes: man's need of religion is abiding and will
find satisfaction. We have but to look around the
world to discover everywhere abundant evidence
of that fact. It is a fact which warrants the First
Napoleon's dictum that religion is the true vaccine
of superstition.
And here I would note a mistake into which the
late M. Renan, with all his cleverness, fell. He
made of religion a mere poetic aspiration, a mere
conception of the ideal. But religion is not that.
It holds and must hold of the supernatural. Now
the supernatural is one thing. The poetical, the
ideal is another. And belief in the supernatural is
an ineradicable element of our nature. It is no
mere play of the fancy : it is no mere conception of
the intellect. It is rather like the expectation of
something which we instinctively know to exist,
but which has not been manifested : something far
* The American Commonwealth, vol. iii. p. 639.

234 CHRISTIANITY AND THE NEW AGE. [ch.
off but ever nigh, in search of which we are
imperiously driven by the inability of human life
to satisfy human aspirations. For who that
contemplates life as it really is, and always must
be, can help arriving at conclusions tinged with
Pessimism ? Modern thought has not changed,
and cannot change, its essential conditions. Con
sider the part which error, ignorance, folly, crime,
vice, disease, and death play, and always will play,
in it. True, on the other hand must be set off
health, wisdom, love, and virtue. But certainly,
for the vast majority of us, passions and pain
are the most conspicuous facts of our sojourning
here. As certain is it that Christianity supremely
corresponds with these stern realities, and brings
the antidote to them. Suffering is the fundamental
idea of Christianity — " tlie religion of sorrow "
—and the supreme act of Christian worship, the
Sacrifice of the Mass, is the liturgical expression of
that idea. " Croyez-moi," says the Abbe Taconet,
in Bourget's powerful novel, as he points to the
Crucifix, "Croyez-moi que personne n'en dira plus
que celui-la sur la souffrance et sur les passions, et
vous ne trouverez pas le remede ailleurs."
It is this supernatural principle, alone sufficient for
the healing of the nations, that the Catholic Church
represents in its most precise and concrete form.
And if — as I believe — her teaching is impregnable
whether by metaphysical or physical science, that
teaching, as it appears to me, has the promise of

vii.] THE ESSENTIAL BASIS OF MORALITY. 235
the future. I do not see how any adequate life
philosophy can be framed apart from the great
spiritual truths that she maintains : truths founded,
as I hold, in the Eternal Consciousness of which
Christ is the image to mankind : truths which
supremely enforce and illuminate the moral sig
nificance of life, so greatly obscured in an age when
material civilization dominates ethical civilization,
and interests triumph over principles. Professor
Huxley in a passage which is not without pathos,
observes, " I have been seriously perplexed to know
by what practical measures the religious feeling,
which is the essential basis of conduct, Avas to be
kept up."* I well understand Mr. Huxley's per
plexity, and I deeply sympathize with it. For
myself I feel very sure that the religious feeling, the
importance of which he rightly estimates, will not
be kept up by secularism, by selfishness, or even
by "science." It will be kept up by Christianity
alone, the depositary and dispenser of the great
ethical and spiritual traditions from which the
higher life of the European nations has sprung,
and with which that life is indissolubly bound.
So much concerning the prospects of Christianity
as an idea. But we do not live in a world of mere
ideas. We live in a world of phenomena. And one
of the vastest of those phenomena is Christianity as
represented by the Catholic Church. What then
* Critiques and Addresses, p. 51.

236 CHRISTIANITY AND THE NEW AGE. [ch.
are the prospects of the Catholic Church in this
new age ? Well, it seems to me that every year
which passes over us, brings out more and more
clearly the essential need of a universal spiritual
polity, such as the Catholic Church, and the
Catholic Church alone, presents. The tendency
everywhere is to strengthen the State against the
individual. This is a theme on which Mill uttered
many words of warning in his interesting book on
Liberty. And before Mr. Spencer there has arisen
the vision of an impending " socialistic adminis
tration," "a regime of status," "a revival of
despotism," with "the mass of the people con
trolled by grades of officials." * The tendency is
differently manifested in different countries : in one
way in England, in another in France, in a third
in Germany. But, unquestionably, throughout the
civilized world, the State is becoming more meddle
some, more inquisitorial, and is ever extending its
domain. I by no means affirm that this is an un
mixed evil. It is, to some extent, a reaction against
a spurious individualism which was fast obliterating
the true conception of the social organism.
But all reactions are apt to be carried too
far. And where, except in the Catholic Church,
is there an organised spiritual polity which can
stand forth as the champion of the rights of con
science, of the liberty of the spiritual order against
* The Man versus the State, p. 42

vii. J THE REFORMED CHURCHES. 237
the overweening power of the dechristianised State?
The Greek Church is in abject subjection to the
Sultan in Turkey, to the Czar in Russia. Since
the martyrdom of Nicon no stirrings of independent
life have been visible in it. The Evangelical Church
of Prussia is the creation of King Frederick William
III., who, in 1817, formed it out of the Lutheran
and Calvinistic Communions hitherto existing side
by side in his territories, and endowed it with
formularies of his own composition, but left it
without a definite creed. The other Protestant
Churches in Germany have a like origin, and are
in a like condition. Assuredly not one of them
would venture to question the dictates of the
Government in matters of religion. How should
they, when "a breath can make them, as a
breath has made " ? The Anglican Establishment,
no doubt, occupies a Avorthier and more dignified
position than any other Communion which issued
from the Reformation. This is due to two causes.
In the first place, the Church of England has
preserved the episcopal form of government, and
thereby has, to some extent, retained an organic
character. Again, Henry VIII. was a far better
instructed theologian than Luther or Calvin. And
although Anglicanism, to its great loss, has departed
largely from the doctrinal standard prescribed by
that prince, it has yet in the event preserved a
larger amount of Catholic teaching than any other
of the " reformed " confessions.

238 CHRISTIANITY AND THE NEW AGE. [ch.
But the Catholic Church alone possesses the
note of universality, she alone is endowed Avith
the independence of a spiritual empire, ex
tending throughout the kingdoms of this Avorld,
but subject to none of them. The other Christian
communities that have separated from her, how
ever venerable for their antiquity, however illus
trious for their zeal in good works, for the
intelligence and piety of their clergy, for their
missionary activity at home and abroad, do not
so much as claim to be more, at the most, than
local or national institutions. They are what the
canonists call collegia, " bodies politic or societies,
Avithin the civil communities in which they are
found, and therefore of a municipal character."
And being such, they can be effectively dealt with
by municipal law. But the Catholic Church is
constituted in the form of an universal spiritual
monarchy; her episcopate now, as in the time of St.
Cyprian, "one through the see of Peter."* And it
is precisely tliis characteristic which renders her an
effective check on the usurpations of the State in
the domain of conscience. Recent history supplies
an instance Avhich admirably illustrates what I am
writing. What communion but the Catholic could
have successfully resisted the Avhole power of the
Prussian monarchy, wielded by a statesman of the
energy and determination of Prince von Bismarck ?
* De Utilitate Credendi, § 3.

vii. J THE KULTURKAMPF. 239
The knowledge, that they were members of a world
wide spiritual empire, the consciousness of the
sympathies of their brethren in. all lands, the
material help * Avhicli poured in upon them from
many nations, upheld the hands and strengthened
the hearts of the Catholics of Germany through
the great tribulation of the Kulturkampf from
which they at last victoriously issued. Prince von
Bismarck in entering upon that ignoble persecution
made one great mistake. He judged Catholic
bishops and priests by the standard of Protestant
court chaplains. He forgot that Catholic popu
lations were not accustomed, like Protestants, to
take their religion from the State. He forgot the
ecumenical character of the spiritual polity which
he attacked : its hierarchy an organic whole through
the Papacy — the Sacramentum Tfnitatis : its sub
jects prepared to resist, at any sacrifice, the demand
that they should render unto Caesar the things
that are God's. He utterly failed in detaching
the German Catholic clergy from the Pope, or the
German Catholic people from their clergy. Not
a single chapter would fill the place of a deposed
* I happened to be one of the trustees of a fund which sent
to their help from this country between £7,000 and £8,000 : a
large sum when the extreme poverty of the great majority of
Catholics in England is borne in mind. And I have before
me, as I write, letters from German Bishops, fully warranting
what I have said above as to the moral effect on their flocks of
this manifestation of our admiration for, and sympathy with
them, in their hard struggle for the rights of conscience.

240 CHRISTIANITY AND THE NEW AGE. [ch.
bishop : not a single parish Avould avail itself of
the poAver given by the Falk laws to elect a new
pastor in the place of its imprisoned or exiled
priest.

It appears to me, then, that in this New Age
the office of the Catholic Church in vindicating
the rights of conscience, the prerogatives of the
spiritual order, the immunities of the City of God,
will be of even more importance to mankind than
in the Primitive and Medieval Ages. But we
must remember that it is emphatically a New
Age.
" Das Alte stiirzt, es lindert sich die Zeit,
Und neues Leben bliiht aus den Ruinen."
This is true both politically and intellectually.
The magnitude of the changes wrought in the
public and social order of the civilized world
during the last two generations has been immense.
And who can doubt that they are the prelude to
vaster transformations soon to come ? Forty years
ago Gioberti, in his last book,* prophesied of the
European rinnovamento Avhicli he saw approaching.
It would consist, he thought, in the triumph of
three ideas, in the satisfaction of three aspirations,
held down and stifled since the Treaty of Vienna :
* Del Rinnovahiento civile d'ltalia.

vn.] THE EMPIRE OF PUBLIC OPINION. 241
the re-establishment of intellect in its natural
supremacy (maggioranza del pensiero), the recon-
stitution of nationalities, and the redemption
(redenzione) of the masses, by a juster distribution
of property, by the recognition of every man's
right to live by his labour, and by the diffusion
of popular education. Time has largely justified
these vaticinations. Everywhere the forms of the
old order are disappearing. And whatever shapes
Democracy may assume, one thing is certain, that
it means the universal empire of public opinion.
One of the wisest and most illustrious prelates that
have adorned the Catholic Church in this century
wrote in 1861 : " The entirely altered circumstances
of the times necessarily require a completely
different ordering of the relations between Church
and State. This is the object after which the
present age is striving ; from the time of the
Reformation to the present day we have not
succeeded in attaining it. The recollections of
the old Catholic unity still survived in men's
minds, and they endeavoured in every little
State to establish things anew, in accordance with
these recollections, without suspicion that the old
conditions had disappeared. Hence arose, very
often, a truly absurd imitation of medieval rela
tions, and that which, viewed from the point of
Catholic unity, had been grand and legitimate,
became, in completely changed circumstances,
unjustifiable and intolerable. The world may
E

242 CHRISTIANITY AND THE NEW AGE. [ch.
arrange its relations with the Church once more
in medieval fashion, if, through the mercy of God,
it returns once more to the unity of religious
conviction. Till that time another foundation is
necessary." * That foundation can nowhere be
found save in the establishment of religious
freedom in the amplest sense : in the complete
independence of the spiritual order.
It is notable how the ecclesiastical policy of the late
Pontiff has proved successful exactly in proportion as
it recognised this fact. His measures for the consoli
dation and advancement of the Church in England,
in Holland, in the United States, in virtue of the
religious liberty prevailing in these countries, have
been, and are still, full of good fruits. The
Concordats concluded by him with certain States
after the events of 1848 — with Tuscany, Spain,
Austria for example — are long dead : nay, to speak
more accurately, they never were alive. The
ancient regime has vanished in the ecclesiastical as
in the civil sphere. In the Middle Ages the Church
judged the individual. Now the individual judges
the Church. Yet the Church still claims a right
— she cannot help claiming it, without denying
herself — to rule, direct, rebuke, exhort, denounce,
condemn. The Civil Power no longer executes
her decrees. Their sanctions are in the conscience
* " Soil die Kirche allein rechtlos sein?" A Pastoral Letter
addressed to the Faithful of the Diocese of Mainz by William
Emmanuel von Ketteler, Bishop of Mainz. — P. 30.

vii.] THE POPE'S MORAL INFLUENCE.

243

of her children. It is to public opinion that she
appeals : public opinion in its highest and worthiest
sense of the public conscience. I believe Vinet —
certainly the most considerable writer produced by
Continental Protestantism in this century — well
founded when, in his Essay on the Manifestation
of Religious Opinions, he arrives at the conclusion
that in these days the ecclesiastical polity should
be perfectly independent of the State, and bound
to it by no ties of gratitude or fear. I see no
prospect that the Catholic Church will again
hold the position in Europe which she held in
the Middle Ages : that the Pope will once more
occupy the great international office assigned him
in the canon law. But it is well conceivable that
in the New Age, which is even now upon us, the
Pontiff's moral influence will be of unparalleled
greatness, as from his seat by the tomb of the
Apostles he surveys his ecumenical charge, and
" Listening to the inner flow of things,
Speaks to the age out of eternity : "
reproving the world of sin, of righteousness, and
of judgment : maintaining the divine testimonies
before kings and democracies : upholding the
rights of conscience and of the moral law, amid
the social tyrannies, the national jealousies, the
political animosities, which will doubtless be the
staple of future history, as they are of past.
But not only have the political conditions of life
R 2

244 CHRISTIANITY AND THE NEW AGE. [ch.
changed. The intellectual conditions haAre changed
also. I said just now that I believe the Catholic
Church impregnable whether by physical or meta
physical science. If I did not believe that, I should
not have set myself to write the present book. Of
course I speak of Catholicism as rationally under
stood. I do not speak of it as understood by
Neapolitan lazzaroni or Spanish peasants. But
the grave question is, How far has Catholicism
responded to the needs of modern thought ?
What effort has it made towrards such response,
since the days of — say — Friedrich Schlegel,
Chateaubriand, and Lacordaire ? I know that
there have not been wanting among Catholics men
of learning, and even of genius, who have set them
selves candidly to deal with, and to answer, the
problems specially characteristic of this New Age.
But how far have their voices found an echo ? Is
it not clear that the tone of the great masters of
modern literature, through whom those problems
have found concrete expression, from Goethe until
now, is, on the whole, alien from Catholicism, if not
opposed to it ? I think I am well warranted in
calling this a grave question : a question worthy of
being most deeply pondered. To examine and
understand is a need of human nature. True
is that word of Hellenic wisdom that it is
not in our own choice whether we will philo
sophise or not, for philosophise we must. Pious
practices, works of charity, the duties of civil

vn.J NEW HEAVENS AND A NEW EARTH. 245
life are not enough to satisfy men's minds.
There are exigencies of thought which must also
be satisfied. Nothing is more disheartening than
the frivolous, disingenuous treatment of questions
ever growing in seriousness, by a certain class of
writers— personally, I am sure, most excellent and
well-intentioned men. In this department, too, it
is necessary to look facts in the face, with open
eyes that desire the truth. We cannot tie up
modern thought iu medieval formulas. The school
men no doubt did their work not for an age but for
all time. But they did it in their own day, and
according to the methods of their day, and with
especial reference to the needs of their day. They
did not exhaust the resources of the human intel
lect, nor speak the last word of human reason. Of
many subjects which they treated — for example the
relation of the organism to its activities — their
treatment is inadequate. And many of the ques
tions Avhich so greatly occupy us — such for instance
as those dealt with in Cardinal Newman's Grammar
of Assent — were extremely remote from their habit
of mind. There are more things in heaven and
earth than were dreamed of in their philosophy.
Nay, may we not say that, since they wrote, new
heavens and a new earth have been revealed to us ?
And philosophy must expand in order to deal with
the fresh problems raised by modern physics and
by modern metaphysics. We must cheerfully, nay
thankfully, accept all verities that the newer

246 CHRISTIANITY AND THE NEW AGE. [ch. vii.
schools of philosophy have to teach us about the
intellectual constitution of man : all facts that the
masters of physical science, who have arisen in
these latter days, have to teach us concerning the
physical universe — of which man forms part on one
side of his being — with its illimitable and subtle
modifications. Leibnitz has described as the cri
terion of a true philosophy, that it should at once
collect and collate the fragments of truth scattered
through systems the most incongruous. To rear
such a philosophical edifice is the great architec
tonic work in the order of thought, which lies
before us. In this domain too, doubtless, the
Catholic Church will make good the Claim of
Christianity in the New Age.
" Anima viva
Partiti di cotesti che sono morti."

INDEX.

iEneas Silvius, on the position of Pope and Em
peror in 1454 ... ...
Alexander VI., Pope, Bishop Creighton on
Alfred, King, on treason .....
Ameet- Ali, Syed, on Islam ....
Anaftel, on a certain tendency of human nature
Arnold, Dr., on the massacres of King David .
on a Christian society ....
Augustine, St., on the Civitas Dei .
on the moral law and its apprehension
Beaumanoir, on diversity of feudal customs
Beccadelli, his Hermaphroditus ....
Bernard, St., on the prerogatives of the Pope .
Biot, on erroneous comparisons between medieval
and modern times .....
Blackstone, on the killing of an outlaw .
on punishments and crimes
Blunt, Professor, a curious statement of .
Boccacio, his intellectual position
Boniface VIII., the decadence of the Papacy begins
with .......
Brentano, Dr., on medieval Gilds
Brewer, Professor, on the Religious Orders at the
beginning of the sixteenth century
on the preaching of indulgences
on the popular historians of the Anglican Re
formation ......
Bruno, Giordano

147
162130
35-86 5865
129 4
70
101159114
101 67
132
204
146, 163
138
124, 127
183 190
200-201 216

248'

INDEX.

PAGE
Bryce, Mr., on the medieval Church . . . 112
Buddha, the, legend of  8-24
Buddhism, its statistics ...... 4
considered as a religion is moribund . . 6
its Gospel  8-24
parallelisms between it and Christianity considered 24-36
Carlyle, on the use of the sword by Christianity . 55
on Gotz von Berlichingen .... 93
on the burning of Leo X.'s Bull by Luther . 191
Casuistry, use and abuse of ... . 172
Christendom, idea expressed by the word . . 103, 111
growth and decay of . . . . . . 104-106
position of the Pope in .... . 113-119
civil and domestic life in  117-125
art in ........ 125
spirit of the family in .... . 126-130
intolerance in . . . ... 130-133
wickedness in ...... . 133-134
decline and fall of  136-147
Christianity, is both a religion and a Church . . 2
the assertion that it is plagiarised from
Buddhism examined ..... 6-36
Islam's rivalry with ...... 37-86
gift of fascination in .... 80
is the richest of religions ..... 82
is based on the claims and prerogatives of
conscience ....... 88
its alliance with the medieval State . . . 103-135
effect of Humanism on  161-166
effect of Protestant Reformation on . . . 192-214
and Rousseau's doctrine ..... 219-224
its position in the nineteenth century . . 224-246
Chrysostom, St., on the Christian people ... 3 88
Church, Dean, on the medieval papacy . . . 114 115
on Montaigne ....... 165
on the Provincial Letters ..... 173
Church, the Anglican, and the Royal Supremacy . 204-206
in the last century ...... 224

INDEX.

249

148.

137

150-153,

Churdh, the Anglican — continued.
its superiority to the other Reformed Com
munions .....
Church, the Catholic, why so called
allied with the Christian State .
in the fourteenth century .
in the fifteenth century
and the Inquisition .
and the Renaissance .
and the Jesuits .....
and the Protestant Reformation
and the French Revolution
in the nineteenth century .
Church, the Evangelical, of Prussia
Cicero, on the source of Rome's greatness
Clement V. impairs the moral influence of the
Papacy ......
Coleridge, on Dante. ....
Communal movement in the Middle Ages
Cranmer, Archbishop, true character of ,
on the power of princes to confer Holy Orders
Creighton, Bishop, on the Fall of Constantinople
on Pope Alexander VI'. ....
Crime, conception of, in the Middle Ages
Cyprian, St., on the unity of the Episcopate
Cyril of Jerusalem, St.', on the Claims of Christianity

237 1
87-134
¦139, 144140
142, 214
161-164
166, 212
206-212
219-222225-246 237 107
139145122
202205147162
131-132 238 1

Dante, his work for the Italian language . . 145
his intellectual position . . " . . 145
Davids, Mr. Rhys, on the documents of Primitive
Buddhism  27-29
on the parallelisms between Buddhism and
Christianity ....... 34-36
Defensio Pacis, the, a significant sign of the four
teenth century  139
Desiderius, on St. Leo IX  105
Digby, unhistorical character of his Mores Catholici 102
Divine Right of Kings, Protestant doctrine of . . 209
Dollinger, Dr. von, on the origin of the Great Schism 140

250

INDEX.

Dollinger, Dr. von — continued.
curious statement of, regarding the Lutheran
Reformation . . . . . . . . . 188
on the outcome of the Lutheran doctrines . 198
Donatists, the, their schism ..... 207

Education, .different views of Church and State
concerning . .
Erasmus, his account of a Good Friday sermon in
the Papal Chapel .....
the chief representative of the Renaissance in
its best aspects
a preacher of rational godliness
his visit to Italy .....
his Praise of Folly .....
and Luther ......
largely checks the progress of the Protestant
Reformation ......
on the abuses of indulgences
on Luther's doctrine of justification
the founder of modern critical exegesis
foretells the issue of the Lutheran movement
on the persecution of heretics .

229
163
181182
183184
186-187 188190
192197
208
215

Fatalism, in the proper sense, has no place in
Mohammed's teaching  79
real  80
Feudal system, the, and the Catholic Church . . 120
Filelfo, his character ...... 157
his canon ....... 160
Foxe the martyrologist, his character . . . 200
Freedom, different meanings of the word . . 157
Freeman, Mr., his view of Mohammed . 42, 54, 55, 58, 63, 75
Furnivall, Mr., on fourteenth- century Catholicism . 98

Galileo, affair of  210
Gerbet, Mgr., on the spiritual reconstruction of the
human race ....... 127
on the unifying tendency of Catholicism . . 128

INDEX.

251

Gforer, on the Peace of Westphalia.
Gibbon, on. the N~estorians . . . . .
his vie.w of Mohammed .... 41
Giesebrecht, on , the .study of $he classics in the
Middle Ages 
Gioberti, his prophecy of the European rinnova-
menfo .........
Gladstone,. Mr., on the Atheistic state
Goethe, on Christianity and the personality of
Christ 
influence of, his Gotz vpn Berlichingen
on the characteristic virtue of the Germans
Gray, his admiration for the Middle Ages
his delight jn Frpissart
on medieval satirists .....
Greek Church, the ......
Green, J. R., an erroneous generalization of
Gregorovius, on Pope Nicholas V. .
Gregory VII., St., his work ....
on the concord of Church and State .
Guizot, on the Feudal system ....
on the religious unity of the Middle Ages
on the, pacific influence of the medieval Church

PAGE 214 33
61, 71, 72
144240227

93
192 9192
99
207, 237 97
152
105
129
104 110118

Hallam, wprk d.one by, in connection with medieval
history ........
vicious generalization in .
Hemans, Mr. Charles, on the Italian Middle Ages
Henry VIII., The Book of Homilies on
Lord Macaulay on .... .
his motives in separating from the Holy See
his Supreme Headship ....
his theological attainments
Hergenrother, Cardinal, on concessions made by the
Church to various monarchs .
Holy Roman Empire, the, idea of .
Humanism, what it really was ....
Hume, on the intolerance of Christianity
Huxley, Professor, a. serious perplexity of

95-96, 103 99
122 199
202 203
203-205 237210
104, 129
153-161 2
235

252

INDEX.

Ignatius Loyola, St., his complaint of the writings
of Erasmus ....•¦
Indulgences, abuses attending the preaching of
Intolerance, medieval .
in the sixteenth century . .
Erasmus on ... • ¦ ¦
Islam, not a decadent faith ....
is true to its dominant idea
the greatness of its missionary work
once a formidable rival to Christianity in Europe
changed views concerning ....
Syed Ameer Ali's apology for .
precursors of
first martyrs of .
growth of .
democratic character of
Gibbon on the faith of ...
substance of .....
compared with Christianity
position of the family in .
the ineffaceable blot on ...
the essential defect in the conception whereon
it is based ......
Jesuits, the, and the Renaissance
on education .......
their taste ......
their morality ......
their doctrine of- obedience
and the Protestant Reformation
John Damascene, St., on the affair of Zainab .
Jowett, on the heathen religions
Julius IL, his secularity .....
a Good Friday sermon before .
Junius, on loyalty ......

182
189-191130-133 215 215 373737 38
41
43-86 45 50
52 7171
77-8080-82 84 85
85-86 166
166-167 169
171-175
175-179 212-213 58
108183163 130

162.

Kant, his account of freedom ..... 158
rediscovers for Protestant Germany the moral
law  214

INDEX.

253

Ketteler, Bishop von, on Church and State
Kulturkampf the, significance of
Lamennais, on the trial of Christianity .
Landor, Walter Savage, on Islam .
on Dante's work for the Italian language
on Boccacio .....
Law, the moral, principles of absolute
apprehension of, varies indefinitely .
obliteration of in Protestant Germany after the
Thirty Years War ....
the championship of, the Pope's raison d'etre
Leibnitz, on the criterion of a true philosophy
Leo X., Carlyle's description of
hears Pomponazzi and Nrphus dispute
his spirit .......
his Bull against Luther ....
Liberalism, the New, its anti-Christian character
Lingard, on the pacific influences of the medieval
Popes
Luther, and Erasmus
cause of his revolt .
burns the Papal Bull
his character
practical outcome of his doctrine of justification
and of his doctrine of private judgment .
his movement not towards liberty .

Macaulay, Lord, on collective profession of religion
on the Anglican Reformation ....
de Maistre, on the ancient Churches separate from
the Holy See 
Maitland, Dr., on popular knowledge of the Anglican
Reformation .......
Mansel, Dean, on absolute morality . . .
de Map, Walter, on corruption of the medieval
Church .....••¦
Marriage, different views of Church and State con
cerning ....••¦•

PAGE 241 239 224 38
145146 68
69
214
214, 243246
162164 191 191
231 117
186-188 187 191192192
193-199 208 124
202
208 200 68 97
229

254

INDEX.

Martin, M. Henri, errors into which he has fallen
Martin V., Pope, his work .....
Maurice, Frederick Denison, on Islam
Mass, the, a liturgical expression of suffering
Mill, John Staart, on a besetting danger of the
student of man and society .
on Pope Clement V. ....
his definition of the Renaissance
on the French Revolution
Mohammed, three divisions in his career
his birth .......
his youth and early manhood .
his assumption of the prophetical office .
progress of his doctrine ....
his flight to Medina .....
net result of his work ....
his way of life ......
Mr. Freeman's indictment of
his death .......
no impostor . . ...
allegation against, of sensuality
and of cruelty .....
his claims as a religious teacher
defects of his doctrine . . . .
Monophysites, the, their schism
Montalembert, on Digby's Mores Catholici
on the true greatness of the Middle Ages .
on the poetry of common life in the Middle
Ages 
More, Sir Thomas, and the. Renaissance. . . 152
and toleration ......
Morley, Mr. John, on the Jesuits as educators .
Muir, Sir William, on Mohammed
Musset, A., on the religious character of medieval
art .....

PAGE 101
140 86
234100
138
149
218 43
44
44-48 48
50-52 535353
54 56
57
58-63 63 67
71 80
81-86 207
102122
125
182,184 215 168
52,64 125

Nestorians, the, their schism .... 207
Newman, Cardinal, on the parallelisms between
Christianity and Buddhism . . . . ,25 29-34

INDEX.

255

Newman, Cardinal — continued.
on Revelation as an universal gift
on Sir Walter Scott's novels ....
on the development of the Papacy .
on medieval superstition ....
his catalogue of the opinions specially charac
terizing modern civilization ....
Nicholas V., Pope, his reforming zeal becomes in
operative .......
his main object ......
and the Humanists ......
Nisard, M., on Erasmus ......
on Sir Thomas More. .....

73
94
113 134
226 141
152
161, 163
181 215

Orders, the Religious, in the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries .....
at the beginning of the sixteenth century
Pantheism, contemporary • .
Pascal, exaggerations in his Provincial Letters
Pastor, Dr., on the obstacles to ecclesiastical reform
in the fifteenth century .
on Boccacio ....
attempts to distinguish between a Christian and
a Pagan Renaissance ....
Paul III., Pope, re-establishes the Inquisition .
Peccati obligatio ......
Percy's Beliques ......
Peter, St., on the corporate character of Christianity
Petrarch, a precursor of the Renaissance
Phillimore, J. G., on the position of the Pope in the
canon law ....
Philosophy, the scholastic
Plato's
present condition of in Europe
need for its expansion
Leibnitz's criterion of a true
Pius IX., Pope, his Syllabus .
his ecolesiastical policy .

142183
224
173 141 146
150, 152214
176-177 92 3
145
116-117
143, 245 150
223 245
246227 242

256

INDEX.

Plato, on the public profession of a religion .
long neglect of . . ' .
Pocock, Mr., on the popular historians of the
English Reformation ....
Poole, Mr. Lane, on the execution of the Banu
Kuraizha ......
Pope, the, development of his authority .
rise of his temporal power
St. Bernard on his prerogatives
his authority in the Middle Ages
character assigned to in the Canon Law .
his indirect temporal influence in the Middle
Ages .......
his pacific functions in the Middle Ages .
central paternity of .
decline of his authority in the fourteenth
century .......
a splendid figure-head in 1454 .
and Humanism ......
his power conservative and limited .
his raison d'etre ......
his prophetical office .....
his position in the New Age
Private judgment, use and misuse of
Protestantism, inner meaning of
calamitous importance of .
actual effects of on the Catholic Church .

PAGE
107, 227150
201, 202 64
113113
114 115
116
117 118128137 147 162
198
214227243
193-195 206 206
208-211

Quattrocentisti, the, significance of their work

146

Ranke, on decline of Papal authority in the four
teenth century .....
Reformation, the Lutheran ....
the Anglican ......
Renaissance, the, difficulty of defining
a Christian, not discoverable
aspect of indicated by the word Humanism
and the Jesuits . . ...
Renan, a judicious reflection of

139
188-199
199-206 148
150-153 153-166
166-179 62

INDEX.
Renan— continued.
on Islam and Christianity .
did not repudiate the name of Christian
his erroneous conception of religion
de Renzi, on the idea of Christendom
Rousseau, his primary postulates
his complaint of the Christian religion
issue of his doctrine ....
Ruskin, Mr., on medieval art .

257
PAGE 8083
233111
219 221 222125

Sanders, on the designation of the Pope as " a
foreign power " .
value of his De Schismate Anglicano
Schoolmen, the, their work .....
its deficiencies .......
Scott, Sir Walter, an effect of his Waverley Novels
Sidney, Sir Philip, on the Middle Ages .
Siena, lesson taught by 
Smollett, his judgment of York Minster .
on " the implements of Popish superstition "
South, on the Church of England in the last century
Spencer, Mr. Herbert, on the tendency of the State
to strengthen itself against the individual
" Spiritualism," its prevalence and significance
Sprenger, on the affair of Zainab ....
Syllabus, Pius IX. 's ......
Symonds, Mr. J. A., his account of Humanism
examined .......
his indictment of the Jesuits examined

114200143245 9389
122 89
90
226 236
233 59
227
153-161 169-179

Taylor, Bishop Jeremy, on the origin of the duty of
civil obedience
Templars, the, suppression of .
Thierry, Auguste, on medieval liberties
Thirty Years War, the .
Toleration, an essentially modern notion
Tragedians, the Greek, their work .
Trench, Archbishop, on the Schoolmen S

126 138
123
213
130, 215 151 143

258

INDEX.

Trent, the Council of, condemns the disreputable
gains made from indulgences
its reforms ......
Valla, his character ......
his account of morality ....
Vinet, on the endless interpretations of the Bible
on the necessity of religious freedom in the
nineteenth century ....
Voltaire, the herald of the modern spirit .
on the Jesuits ......

191
210, 211 156 159
196
243 40
173, 175

Warburton, Bishop, on the lessons derivable from
history ........
Warner, on Foxe .......
Wellington, the Duke of, on the results of the ex
pulsion of the Jesuits from Spain and
Portugal .......
Westphalia, the Peace of .
Wheeler, Mr. Talboys, on Mohammedanism in India
Wiesing, on the word yevos .....
Wordsworth, on Percy's Beliques ....
influence of, in promoting a juster view of the
Middle Ages 

155201

168
213 37 3
92 95

Zamakhshari, his explanation of a certain passage in
the Qu'ran .......

62

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