Christian history in its three great periods ...

PRINCETON, N. J.

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BR 145 .A4 1882 v. 3
Allen, Joseph Henry, 1820

1898.
Christian history in its

three great periods » . .

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The Series of which this volume is a part cotisists
of the following : —

I. HEBREW MEN AND TIMES, from the Patri-
archs to the Messiah. (With BibHography, and
Introduction on recent Old Testament Criticism.)

II. CHRISTIAN HISTORY IN ITS THREE
GREA T PERIODS (in three volumes) : —

First Period — Early Christianity (including
" Fragments." With Introduction on the Study
of Christian History, and a brief Bibliography).

Second Period — The Middle Age.

Third Period— Modern Phases.

III. OUR LIBERAL MOVEMENT IN THEOLOGY,
chiefly as shown in Recollections of the History
of Unitarianism in New England : being a Clos-
ing Course of Lectures delivered in the Harvard
Divinity School.

CHRISTIAN HISTORY

IN ITS

Three Great Periods

MODERN PHASES

BY

JOSEPH HENRY ^ALLEN

Late Lecturer on Ecclesiastical History in Harvard University

Though all the vvindes of doctrin were let loose to play upon the earth,
so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licencing and prohibiting to
misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falshood grapple : who ever knew
Truth put to the wors, in a free and open encounter?

Milton, Areopagitica

BOSTON

ROBERTS BROTHERS

1883

Copyright, 1882,
By Joseph Henry Allen.

University Press:
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge.

PREFACE

lyrODEEN CHEISTIANITY offers to the histor-
-^^^ ical student this unique phenomenon : that it
is found equally alive and vigorous at both poles
(so to speak) of the intellectual sphere in which our
religious life is cast. At one end of the scale it
shows the most rigid adhesion to authority and
dogma ; at the other end it expands in the widest
mental liberty. No subjection of the intellect is
more complete than that with which Leo the Thir-
teenth enjoins upon his subjects to abide by the
Mediaeval system of Aquinas; no philosophic spec-
ulation is more unrestrained than that associated
with the Christianity of a Schleiermacher, a Marti-
neau, or a Colenso. ISTay, while it is the nature of
Science to disown any theological designation, the
last results of Science and its boldest theories are
eagerly embraced by many who assert their birth-
right and their choice in whatever may be implied
by the Christian name.

IV PEEFACE.

I am not aware that any attempt has yet been
made, for the religious student, to reconcile these
o]3posing aspects in a single view. At all events,
this — which might well appear the most important
field in Christian history — has not ordinarily been
even surveyed in our courses of theological instruc-
tion. It would be too much to claim for the follow-
ing chapters that they aim to supply the want thus
indicated. They are, however, an essay designed to
show, in some detail, how that want should be met.
Of the topics presented, five include the purely
ecclesiastical or dogmatic phases of the Eeformation
Period, — that is, from 1500 to 1650; five trace
the several lines followed since, in the direction of
free thought and modern scholarship ; while an in-
termediate chapter describes the bridge connecting
the earlier and later, across a gulf that might seem
impassable, — the passage from dogma to pure rea-
son. This mode of treatment may serve at least
to hint what should (in my view) be the method
pursued, to bring the more valuable lessons of our
history within hail of contemporary thought.

It would be idle to affect an unaided first-hand
knowledge of the many names with which I have
had to deal, such as to justify the tone of confidence
in which I have been obliged to speak of them. As
to this, I wish to say two things : that I should be

PREFACE. V

sorry to belie, by the necessary brevity and free-
dom of the criticisms expressed, the real veneration
and homage I feel towards these great names in
theology, philosophy, and science; and that — ex-
cepting some details of the physical sciences —
whatever judgments are spoken or hinted rest upon
a degree of direct study or acquaintance sufficient
to make the judgment in all cases my own, and
not the echo of another mind. I have (in other
words), while following the best guides within my
reach, sought to know these masters of thought from
their own witness of themselves, and not from hear-
say of other men. So much, I conceive, is due in
common respect to the great and illuminated minds
that have won for us, under hard conditions, the
larger sphere of thought in which we live.

In general, I have interpolated few opinions of
my own, except so far as these are necessarily
implied in speaking of the views of others. But I
should be ashamed to study such a field as this,
or to offer anybody else the fruits of study in it,
if the whole thing were a matter of moral indiffer-
ence to me. On the contrary, I hold that the les-
sons of history are .eminently lessons of practical
conviction and duty ; and, moreover, that the motive
which this implies is the only deliverance of the
soul from the dilettanteism, the scepticism, and

VI PREFACE.

finally the pessimistic fatalism, which are the beset-
ting peril of studies followed in a spirit merely
scientific or merely critical. I have accordingly
given at the end, briefly and with such emphasis
as I can command, what seem to me the true les-
sons of our subject, most in accordance with the
religious conditions and demands of the present
day, — the general result, to which so many par-
ticular inferences appear to lead. With this hint
I here take leave of my task.

J. H. A.

Cambridge, August 21, 1883,

CONTENTS.

PAGE

I. The Protestant Keformation 1

II. The Catholic Keaction 26

III. Calvinism 48

IV. The Puritan Commonwealth ....... 74

Y. Port Eoyal 100

YI. Passage from Dogma to Pure PiEAson .... 126

YII. English PwATIONAlism 155

YIII. Infidelity in France 185

IX. The German Critics 214

X. Speculative Theology 242

XI. The Reign of Law 272

Chronological Outline . 311

Eminent Names 314

Index 315

MODERN PHASES OF FAITH.

I.

THE PEOTESTANT EEFOEMATIOK

ACUESOEY view of the event we call the Eefor-
mation, with the Eeligious Wars that followed
close upon it, shows us at jfirst sight one of the great,
unaccountable, awful calamities of human history, —
an era of anger and hatred, of wreck and change.
It came not to bring peace, but a sword. So far from
gladness and triumph, it would seem that we could
think of it only with horror and lamentation.

And none the less, because it was an ttnavoidahle
calamity. We cannot explain to ourselves wdiy a
single incompleted step in si)iritual progress must be
taken at so frightful a cost of human suffering and
guilt. We are apt to think of it simply as an his-
torical event : of its incidents, as scenes in a drama ;
of its results, only as they have affected us, — in the
main so largely for our benefit ; of its principles, as
we applaud or sympathize with the leading actors in
it, on one side or the other. But we look at it again,
or from another point of view, and it is all alive with
passion and with pain. " If I had known what was

1

2 THE PROTESTANT EEFOEMATION.

before me/' said Luther, '* ten horses would not have
drawn me to it ! "

The deepest tragedy of the thing was, that, as in
all great conflicts of history, there was equal sincerity
and equal passion on both sides. It was the sincere
devotion of both parties that made the conflict obsti-
nate and bitter. If we ask why it must be so, per-
haps our only answer is, that it always is so, — in
Puritan England, as in America twenty years ago,
and in all Europe then. It is part of the universal
struc^qle for existence, in which the fittest survive
only in virtue of the courage, cunning, and strength
by which they prove their fitness.

It is not easy to see at this distance why the ascetic
fervor of Savonarola ; the intellectual honesty of the
early German scholars ; the group of earnest and cul-
tivated reformers at Oxford ; the keen satire and
common-sense ethics of Erasmus ; the rude wit of
Hutten ; the humble, patient, faithful piety of at any
rate a very large part of the Catholic priests and peo-
ple, along with the anxious efforts of all the better
class of ecclesiastics in every age, — why all these
should have failed to bring about reform within the
Church ; why what we call " The Eeformation " had
to come about through a century of bloodshed and
horror. The wisest men of that day did not see the
need. Erasmus and Sir Thomas More (perhaps the
two wisest men of their time) alike deplored the
struggle as a mere calamity. Most likely we should
have deplored it too. But it was as in the Apostles'
time ; and none were more ready than Luther to be
amazed, with Paul, that " God had chosen the foolish

AN IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT. 3

things of the world to confound the wise, and weak
things to confound the mighty."

All the great revolutions of history seem to show
that certain necessary changes which the wise and
good have looked forward to longingly and helplessly,
and tried ineffectually to bring about, have come at
length in some flame or tornado of popular passion ;
have become the watchword of fanaticism ; have been
carried forward to victory under the banner of hosts
who were very much in earnest, but mostly neither
very wise nor very good. It was so with the French
Eevolution, and with our Civil War. And so it was
with the Eeformation. All that was really good in it
had been longed for, demanded, attempted, a hundred
times, in a hundred ways ; but it had to wait for a
crisis and a storm, which swept away, along with the
evil that had grown intolerable, the peace, prosperity,
and joy which seem in our ordinary mood the things
best worth having in this human life.

Two things made that storm inevitable.

The first was the determination of the Catholic
Church, at every cost, not to let go anything of its
pretensions, its power, or its sources of wealth. It
had come, frankly, from being a purely spiritual
force, an organizer and guide of the higher civiliza-
tion, to include everything that we mean under the
name of secular government. Its head was Sovereign
as well as Pontiff. Like Alexander Borma, he mioht
spend his revenues to build up the fortunes of a
family infamous for the variety and atrocity of its
crimes. Like Julius II., he micjht stake all his de-
sires and ambitions on military conquest and the

4 THE PPtOTESTANT REFORMATION.

splendors of a princely capital. Like Leo X., lie
might notoriously disclaim all pretensions of Chris-
tian faith, and be known at best as a patron of so-
called religious art, at worst as a patron of the secret
vices of a papal court.*

All this was publicly known, to the grief, scandal,
and shame, we cannot doubt, of multitudes who, like
Erasmus, lacked the courage, or like Savonarola the
power, to stay the tide tliat must seem irresistible.
For the Church was implicated, in a thousand ways,
with the political system of Europe. The nature of
its authority made every sovereign, in some sense, a
retainer, an ally, or else an open enemy ; and its wdll
was as merciless as its hand was strong. In the
premature war of revolt that broke out in Bohemia,
after the Church had sealed its act of unity by the
martyr death of Huss, forty thousand were slain in
battle ; and a resolute, hardy population were com-
pletely crushed. Europe might well wait a century
after that, before the bloody experiment could be
dared asjain ; and — with all the trained skill of an
ecclesiastical police that took in the birth-festival, the
marriage-sacrament, the death-bed scene, the states-

* " An elegant lieathen Pope, who carried on Tusculan disputa-
tions ; Cardinals, who adorned their walls with scenes from Ovid's
]\Ietamorphoses, and devoted themselves to Ciceronian Latin ; and
a whole scene of luxurious intellectuality in Rome, contrasted bit-
terly with the palpable superstitions and abuses of the out-of-doors
world ; and the centre of Christendom, putting itself quietly and
unconcernedly ah extra to a whole system for which it was responsi-
ble, while it taught men to despise that system, provoked at the
same time disgust and rebellion against its own hypocrisy." —
MozLEY, Essays, etc., vol. i. p. 355.

PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 6

man's cabinet, the council of war, and the daily espial
of the confessional for part of its field — we may be
sure that the Church would watch and guard very
warily, would strike secretly, swiftly, and sharply,
against any symptom of a thought more free and a
conscience more bold than seemed consistent with
its peace.

In the second place, that peace of the Church, as
we ought not to forget, was very dear to great multi-
tudes of its disciples and subjects. Whatever the
Eoman Church has lacked in its instructions, it has
never lacked the piety of sentiment, the devotion, the
adoration, the fanatical and abject loyalty, at need, of
the vast majority of its adherents. Its iniquities and
oppressions were to most men a far-away and uncer-
tain rumor ; its comforting words, its chanted prayers,
its sacred processions, the magic of its solemn bells,
the myriad links by which it fastened itself to every-
thing that was holy, sweet, and dear in the daily
life of millions, — all these were very near. By a
thousand years of sleepless, incessant activity, it had
woven a spell about the very conscience and thought
of men ; while in its invisible presence it haunted
every step of their common walk. It had possessed
their minds with its own scheme of creation and re-
demption, of heaven and hell.

In a community like ours, of twenty sects equal be-
fore the law, of popular science, and intellectual lib-
erty, think how timidly, even here, a serious-minded
man or a pious woman listens to a word which
seems to invade the secret charm that resides in
church authority, — thin ghost that it is of what was

6 - THE PKOTESTANT EEFOEMATION.

once overshadowing and irresistible ; and the wonder
will then be, not that the Church bore the attack with
so little loss of power, but that the attack was dared
at all. The very logic, philosophy, and morals by
which the attack had to be made were the creation,
invention, instruction, of schools founded by the
Church and consecrated to its defence. That par-
ticular spell was broken, in part, by the new Greek
and Eoman learning. But in the realm of religion
proper the Church still held its own, almost undis-
puted ; and, for authority, " the least papist," said
Luther, " is more capable of government than ten of
our court nobles."

Even the most daring of the Eeformers did hardly
more than to draw a doctrine slightly different from
the same Scripture, and to deny the Church's claim
to be its only interpreter. Their intellectual limita-
tion shows us more clearly than almost anything else
can do the degree to which that Church had prepos-
sessed men's minds. The sort of spiritual authority
they affected, which is held by their successors in Pro-
testant countries even to this day, proves how natural
such authority seemed then, and at what a disadvan-
tage any must stand who tried to break it down where
its prestige was so incomparably strong.

And if we think how helpless we should be, even
at this day, against such spiritual dominion as still
exists, without the help of the steadily increasing
light that streams from modern science, it can be no
wonder to us, the power of superstition then. For
the astronomical spaces of our sky, they had the trim
fields or palace-splendors of Paradise ; for the geo-

STRENGTH OF THE CHURCH. 7

logical depths of our earth, the dreadful and intensely-
real gulfs of hell, whose fires roared in the under-
ground thunder and blazed in the flaming eruption
of Vesuvius or ^tna. And so with everything.
There is a whole chapter, for example, of ghastly
terror in the sorcery and witchcraft of the Middle
Age, — relics, perhaps, of old Paganism lingering
among the people, which the Church had vainly
put forth all her merciless power to suppress.

Nothing illustrates more vividly the great horror
with which she had the skill to possess men's imagi-
nation than this. The Church had built up, about
them and within them, a spiritual structure, which
they clung to with passionate love and reverence, or
else feared to question with a fear as passionate and
intense, — where the very thought of doubt was a
crime, to be burned out by the fires of the stake, or
purged away by the flames of purgatory.

It is not likely that at any time in its history the
Eoman Church felt surer of its strength than the
moment before the blow was struck. Its capital was
never so splendid, its treasury never so rich, its
priesthood never more numerous, w^ell-trained, and
confident. The very blunder by which it invited
the most formidable attack was the blunder of abso-
lute self-confidence, at the point where it was in
closest contact with irreverent and hostile feeling,
most exposed whether to bitter satire or to grave
rebuke, most w^eak in making its appeal to the worse
rather than the better side in human nature. In fact,
its vulnerable point was in its absolute, stupid dis-
belief that there was such a better side in human

8 THE PROTESTANT REFOEMATION.

nature ; its assumption that it could trade openly in
vice, and sell indulgences to sin, — in short, that
every man Avas bad enough to wish to do all the evil
he could at the cheapest rate, if he could only be
satisfied that the license he bouoht would hold 2;ood
in the other world.

Of course, it is not the Catholic theory of Indul-
gences that men can be ransomed by money from the
pains of hell : that is, no Catholic in his senses would
ever admit that it is so. The real theory of Indul-
gences is simply the remission of ecclesiastical pen-
alties, the counterpart and the relief of penance.
Besides tliis, not directly, but by intercession of pur-
chased prayers, the Church may promise relief from
the pains of purgatory. But, by its own claims, it
holds the keys of heaven and hell. It is not likely
that the ignorant laity would draw any fine distinc-
tions, any more than that a rude, unscrupulous monk
like Tetzel would hesitate at any assurance to drive
a trade. This he did ''at a horrible rate," says Luther.
St. Peter's Church was to be built and glorified in
Eome ; and at all risks gold must be had from Ger-
many. The salesman was blatant and impudent.
Commit what sin you will, said he, were it the vio-
lation of the Holy Virgin herself, ''as soon as the
gold chinks in the Pope's coffer, it is all wiped out."
Luther, then "a young doctor, fresh from the forge,
glowing and cheerful in the Holy Ghost " (as he de-
scribes himself), was amazed with horror. He de-
manded that Tetzel should be silenced ; tried vainly
to force on tlie ecclesiastics of the day the distinc-
tion between outward penance and inward penitence;

INDULGENCES. 9

and then, to the conf asion of the prelates, made a pub-
lic debate of what they would hush up as a private
scandal.

Years before, while toiling painfully, as a pilgrim,
on his knees up the sacred stairway in Eome, the
words had flashed upon his mind like a revelation,
"The just shall live by faith." What was all this
toilsome penance worth in the eye of God ? " That
journey to Eome," he used to say afterwards, " I would
not have missed for a hundred thousand florins." It
had revealed to him the depth of the mystery of
Pagan iniquity in the Christian capital. He had
gone there a pious enthusiast, saying in his heart,
as he entered the gate, " Hail, holy Eome ! holy by
the memory of martyrs, and by the sacred blood here
spilt ! " He had left it, burdened with a weight upon
his conscience, and perplexed by a problem he could
not solve. If we can see that problem as he saw it,
we have a key to the heart of the Eeformation.

It may be put in some such way as this.* IS'o man
can satisfy divine justice, or be reconciled to God, by
any merit of his own ; for as his conscience grows
more clear, he sees more plainly the gulf between
himself and the Infinite. Theologically speaking,
that gulf can be bridged only by imputation of the
merits of Christ. So far, Anselm's view. But how
shall he appropriate those merits ? By formalities
of ritual, fast, and penance ? Eome has shown him,
behind the veil, what that means. The Church, then,
cannot solve the problem for him. He cannot solve

* This point is admirably developed in Canon Mozley's "Essays
Historical and Theological," vol. 1. pp. 326-339.

10 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION.

it for himself. He cuts it, frankly and audaciously,
by an act of faith. Believe that you are a child of
God ; and in that act you are his child.

I cannot go into the psychology of this solution,
but must hasten to the result. At Wittenberg, on
the 31st of October, 1517, Luther nailed up against the
church door his ninety-five " theses," or queries, on the
theory of Indulgences. He professed to be astonished
at the noise they made. He had given no opinion of
his own : he had only proposed, in the usual way, a
few questions of abstract theology. What was all the
ado about ? So, with a crafty show of innocence and
submission, he evaded and disguised the controversy
for some three years : thorning the papal emissaries
in debate; steadily appealing to the Pope; steadily
declining to go to Eome in person, whither he was
blandly invited, and where there were sure remedies
for such complaints as his, — till he forced a position
that made him known and powerful everywhere as
spokesman of the German people. In this crisis he
is two men at once: to-day, absolute deference and
submission; within a week, doubting in his private
letters if the Pope be not Antichrist. His doctrine
is condemned by Leo X., and his books are ordered
to be burned. Six months later, in December, 1520,
he answers by publicly burning the papal bull, and
with it the entire code of Decretalism ; and the event
we call the Preformation has entered upon the field
of history.

At Worms next year, at the Imperial Diet (April
17 and 18, 1521), Luther gives his immortal answer*
to the demand that he shall retract : " Since you seek

LUTHER AT WORMS. 11

a plain answer, I will give it without horns or teeth.
Except I am convinced by holy Scripture, or other
evident proof, — for I trust neither Pope nor Council :
I am bound by the Scripture by me cited, — I cannot
retract, and I will not, anything; for against con-
science it is neither safe nor sound to act." And
here he breaks from the formal Latin of his defence
into his sturdy Saxon mother-tongue, intelligible and
plain enough, I think, for our ears to understand:
''Hie stehe icli: Ich han nicJit anclers : Gott Jielff
mir : Amen ! " *

It would not be possible here to trace, in the brief-
est outline, the story of events that followed ; or even
— which is much more tempting — quote the anec-
dotes and phrases that point out to us, with a curious
vividness, the character of this great popular leader.
A single thing is enough. The power, the terror, the
prestige, the fascination, the grandeur and splendor
of the Church, all are weighed against the solitary
conviction of one man, himself a sworn servant of
the Church, and penetrated to the soul by awe of her
authority. In these scales that one man's conscience
overweighs. In all history, I am not sure that there
is another example quite so clear, that "One, with
God, is a majority." Equal courage and sincerity,
it may be, had been shown by Wiclif, by Huss, by
Savonarola ; but now the hour has come, as well as
the man. Even when the little company met in the
upper chamber at Jerusalem, — at any rate, there
were a hundred and twenty; and they did not, by
any means, stand so openly against everything august

* Works, Ed. of 1562, vol. ii. p. 165 5. I copy the old spelling.

12 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION.

and formidable in the world. They could have had
no such awe of the Eoman Empire as he must have
had of the Eoman Church, and no such conviction
that they were committed to its overthrow. Luther
is the one great figure which represents just that thing
on the stage of history ; and, in ever so slight view
of the circumstances, it is impossible not to pause an
instant to point out that moment, that example, of
the very highest moral courage. Luther is in no
sense, in our view, a great intellectual leader. The
forms of thouglit he clung to the world is letting
slip without a pang. In his career it is often doubt-
ful whether piety or policy, whether craft or passion,
whether reason or prejudice, were stronger in him.
It may be doubted whether he had the pure physical
courage of several other leaders of the Eeformation, —
Zwingli or Latimer, for example. But this great act
of his life put him worthily, as Captain, at the head
of the great army which just then was setting out to
march under the banner of Light.

If we speak thus of the courage of the Leader, what
shall we say, on the other hand, of those who were
only followers — obscure, inconspicuous, unknown ?
For this great revolution has its humbler, tenderer
side. The new faith finds its warmest disciples
among the numerous population of the industrious
poor, in lower Germany and along the lower Ehine.
Among the heresies of the later Middle Age, none
had been more dreaded than the mystic and senti-
mental piety — Beghard or Lollard — that was forever
emancipating itself from ritual and dogma, seeking
only the inward assurance of Divine love. This was

KEFORM AMONG THE LOWLY. 13

the spirit in wliich the Eeformation found now its
natural ally, — a spirit which the Church must exter-
minate at all cost. And so we read of mothers who
were burned alive for teaching their child the Lord's
Prayer in its mother-tongue ; of children compelled
with their own hand to light the fagot of their fathers'
martyrdom ; of women, who did not cease to sing their
hymn of sweet and patient trust as they lay in the pit
where they were just going to be buried up alive.

It is in the hymns that rise amid the hum of daily
toil, that keep time to the darting of the shuttle and
the pulses of the loom, that cheer the lace-weaver's
busy task, that swell from the broad plain where con-
gregations gather in the open air to their out-door
Sunday worship (men, women, and children, forty
thousand sometimes at once), or that float in the
manly tones of the wayfaring laborer, as lie goes from
city to city, perhaps at hazard of his life, bearing with
him those precious versions of the Psalms set to music,
which the press at Geneva is scattering through all
Christendom, — it is in these pious hymns and sacred
melodies that the living religion of the time becomes
blended with all affections and tasks of home, and
sanctifies the daily life of thousands. This is the
soil, often drenched with blood, in which our modern
liberties have their root. Through this channel of
humble toil, and pain, and tears, the forms of modern
piety are taking shape, and the tone is given to the
tenderest, purest, deepest faith of the modern world.

A better name could not have been taken to de-
scribe the principle on which Luther now, deliberately .
and consciously, staked his very salvation, than the

14 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION.

phrase which he borrowed from Paul, " Justification
by Faith." The facts of religious history teach us
very little, unless they teach us that a time of spirit-
ual crisis has always to be met in just that way.
The strong conviction of one man must be brought
face to face with whatever we can understand by the
phrase "powers of the world," — whether prejudice
of education, government authority, temptation of
indolence, sympathy, friendship, interest, personal
peace and quiet, — and must be strong enough to
overcome.

It must be the conviction of one man standing
alone. A thousand more may do as he does, but each
man's act must be his own. The encouragement of
example, the sympathy of friends, the thousand whole-
some influences that surround one, and keep his heart
whole, — these are for ordinary men and ordinary
times. The moment of crisis, whether in a conspicu-
ous epoch of history, or in one man's lonely struggle
in the dark, demands a faith that absolutely dispenses
with them all. A ship is good to sail in ; a raft, plank,
or float may keep you, at need, from drowning ; but
you never learn to swim till the moment you trust
yourself absolutely to the buoyancy of the water:
then it is no matter to you how deep it is. It is
only by such a faith as this that, in the true religious
sense, any man living can be justified. It must be,
in other words, that fact in the soul which Paul
means, when he says one must have his salvation
by the direct grace of God. It is his own solitary
relation, and not another man's, to that ultimate
spiritual or moral truth.

JUSTIFICATION BY FAITH. 15

The phrase in which Luther stated this great fact
of personal experience — faith in the Scriptures, faith
in Christ — was full of meaning and power ; because
it took at once the place of the form, the symbol, the
technicality, with which the Church had covered it,
in the multiplicity of her symbols, in the tradition
heaped on tradition of her interpretation, in the mi-
nute, incessant exactions of her discipline. So that
the phrase "faith in the Scriptures," "faith in Christ,"
expressed the pure freedom of the religious life. But
as soon as that phrase in turn is overlaid with form
and technicality, — as soon as it prevents us from
seeing, instead of helping us to see, that tliere is
literally nothing between the conscience of such a
man and the Infinite itself, with whatever he can
conceive or know of the sense of moral obligation, —
then it becomes a falsehood and not a truth. When
Garrison stood out against the church-powers of his
day on what to him was an absolute moral conviction,
it was he, not they, that kept all which was worth
keeping in the phrase "Salvation by Christ," — un-
derstanding by "Christ" the highest symbol we know
of a ransomed nature. When John Stuart Mill said,
" I will call no being good, who is not what I mean
when I apply that epithet to my fellow-creatures;
and if such a being can sentence me to hell for not
so calling him, to hell I will go," — it was he that
was justified by faith, not the theologians who drove
him to use that phrase. In seeking to understand
the great phases of human history, let us endeavor,
once for all, to deal not with names but with things.

It is not, then, the symbol of theology, but the fact

16 THE PEOTESTANT EEFORMATIOK

of life that we try to understand in Lutlier's sublime
doctrine of Justification by Faith. What it meant at
that time we must endeavor to see not by the detail
of study and interpretation so much as by the exer-
cise of historical sympath}^, — by comprehending, if
we can, the feeling of fearful joy, of trembling hope, of
grateful freedom, of increasing courage and strength,
in the minds of those who responded to Lutlier's
appeal, and who struck like strong swimmers, or else
were borne as trusting voyagers, into that deep stream
of a new mental life.

Helps to such imaginative sympathy we have in
lives of the Reformers ; in hymns, correspondence,
and other pious writings of the time ; in tender tales,
half-fictitious, which show how the new influence
radiated first in those quiet home-circles grouped
nearest about the centre from which it issued. But
my present aim is only to point out tliis one thing in
the same line of thought that we have been following :
how the declaration of Luther suddenly made men
aware of a new relation in which they stood, person-
ally, to God himself and all divine realities. That
word carried them right back to the Bible itself, es-
pecially to the Psalms and Epistles, in which tliey
found the very fountain-head of religious truth. All
the enormous mass of tradition, ceremony, penance,
that had intervened, was suddenly swept away, as a
mist by a gust of wind ; and there was open to them,
very literally, a new sky and a new earth, quite hidden
from them till then. They, too, were face to face with
the Infinite. In the joy and strength of that thought,
they were emancipated from the yoke of fear.

FIDELITY OF THE PROTESTANTS. 17

What astonishes me most in it all is, that these
men and women, — humble, devout souls, that by
nature and training must have been among the most
devoted of the children of the Church, — that they,
when once this liberating word has been spoken,
seem never to have felt a single doubt. All their
lives they had been told that to distrust the slightest
word of the Church was heresy, deserving infinite
wrath and torment, more heinous than any other sin.
Yet at a word that great dread passes utterly away ;
and in the deadly warfare of a hundred years against
ecclesiastical power, hedged as it was with so much
of ancient reverence, and having on its side the ap-
palling yet cowardly alternative, "If you are right,
we at least are safe ; but if we are right, then you
are lost forever," — in all that long and bitter war,
the faith of the Protestants in their own cause never
once wavered. Individuals fell away, but the heart
of Protestantism was never vexed by the shadow of
any doubt.

This, I say, is the great fact that amazes me. And
yet the creed of Protestants themselves was vacilla-
ting and inconsistent on that very point of liberty
of conscience. Calvin burned Servetus, believing his
heresy to be damnable. "I killed Mlinzer," said
Luther, "and his death is a load round my neck;
but I killed him because he sought to kill my Christ."
Yet, with all these differences, with the numberless
"variations" which Bossuet charged against them,
orthodox and heterodox alike, Protestants never wa-
vered in their faith, that the way they had found was
the right and the safe way. That way certainly was

2

18 THE PROTESTANT EEFORMATION.

not the way of accurate opinion ; it was, so far as it
was a true way, the way of free conscience. And
their justification, too, before the great tribunal of
history, is what Luther's had been at the bar of God,

— the "Justification of Faith."

The Eeformation-period may be reckoned, very
broadly, as covering about a hundred and fifty years,

— that is, from early in the sixteenth to the middle
of the seventeenth century. This term, again, may
be pretty accurately divided into three periods of not
very unequal length, — that of theological controversy,
of religious wars, and of civil or diplomatic struggles
culminating in the Thirty Years' War. The close of
these periods is marked respectively by the treaty of
Cateau-Cambresis, in which France and Spain were
mutually pledged to the armed extermination of
heresy (1559), shortly following the religious peace
of Augsburg (1555), and when the Council of Trent
was just approaching its end ; the Truce with Spain
(1609), in which the Dutch Eepublic secured its
virtual independence ; and the Treaty of Westphalia
(1648), which makes the point of departure for the
diplomatic history of modern Europe. This last date
also corresponds with the captivity of Charles I., and
the establishment of the Puritan Commonwealth in
England.

The first thing that strikes us in this rapid review
is, that it is a period not of construction but of trans-
ition. The work it had in hand, it necessarily left
incomplete. It launched the political and social fabric
of Europe upon a course of revolution and reconstruc-
tion, of which it is far too soon, even now, to predict

THE REFORMATION PERIOD. 19

the end. Its protest in the name of Free Conscience
was only a far-away anticipation of our era of Free
Thought. The political arrangements that resulted
from it were only earlier steps in that era of revolu-
tion which is upon us now. Its chaotic struggles for
better social justice were only the harbinger of that
broad popular movement, which has come to one
crisis already in America, and to another in France,
and which is only beginning, at this late day, to find
its interpretation in what we have learned to call
Social Science.

Thus the event we call The Eeformation is not so
simple in theory as the inauguration of Protestant
theology. It is the transition from the imperial-
ecclesiastical system of the Middle Age to the free
thought, democratic policies, and social levellings of
the modern world. The ashes of its theological war-
fare are still liot ; the fires of its revolutionary prin-
ciples still burn. The last French Empire went down
in 1870, in an attempt to recover something of that
old dominion ; and the lost cause of the temporal
power of the Pope is held by some good Catholics
to be no unlikely occasion of another religious war
in our own day.

There is, however, a certain dramatic unity and
completeness in the period just defined, which is not
at all apparent since. For then there was a definite
issue, clearly understood by all the contending par-
ties, — the victory or defeat of the Mediaeval sys-
tem, in Church and State, which was the real object
of attack. So that, during this period, we may say
that not only aU thinking men, but all governments.

20 THE PROTESTANT EEFORMATION.

states, and towns, all bodies of armed men, almost
we might add all trades, all professions, and every
man, w^ere forced to take sides for or against the
Pope. Such tides of revolutionary thought and pas-
sion work out very widely on institutions and events ;
and we may compare the track they cleave in the
field of history to a glacier's path through the valley,
which we trace by the boulders and drift it piles
along its edge. Its present action is purely destruc-
tive. Only its later effect is seen in the deeper soil
and the increased fertility.

The events of the Eeformation-period belong to
the field of general history, and it would be impos-
sible to give ever so brief an outline of them here.
Some of them will meet us from time to time, in the
view we shall have to take of a few conspicuous
objects in that wide field. For the present, we have
only to look at a few consequences of the working
out of the Protestant idea.

And here we are struck, first of all, by seeing how
quickly Protest runs out to Individualism. The wide
flood beats, we say, like waves upon a sea-wall, until
it is ruined and undermined. But each wave beats
at its particular stone. There are as many protests
as there are types of mind and conscience. Each has
its own point to carry ; each is independent of all
the rest. At first Luther stands alone. AVhen he is
no longer alone, but head of a great host, he finds the
errors of his fellows as dans^erous as those of the com-
mon enemy. At Marburg he turns his back when
Zwingli, a bolder and a clearer-headed man than he,
offers his right hand in token of fraternity. Carlstadt

LIBERTY AND UNION. 21

and Calvin have a will as well as he, and respect his
decision no more than he the Pope's. The logic of
all this is soon seen. As the first Eeformer stood
alone, confronting the world of Catholic Christendom,
and meeting the Pope's excommnnication by an ex-
communication of his own, so Protestantism itself
comes down fast to the condition of strife among
numberless jealous individualisms, with as many sects
as there are men to make them or names to call them
by, till many a church is literally cut down to the
gospel minimum of two or three.

But, again, if it were only to make its own exist-
ence possible, Protestantism must find some check to
this dispersion. There must be some common ground
of attack and defence. The interior history of Pro-
testantism is by no means so simple a thing as a
history of opinions branching out more and more
widely asunder, tapering from dogmatism towards
scepticism at one pole and sentimental mysticism
at the other. On the contrary, it is the history of
a conflict between two opposing tendencies. Over
against the demand of liberty is set the need of
union. The process is not random and chaotic, as it
looks at first, but is eminently dramatic. The fatal
division of Lutheran and Eeformed in Germany is
quelled in the terror of the Thirty Years' War. The
quarrelsome sectaries in Puritan England are sharply
disciplined under the military rule of Cromwell. But
without such outside pressure, the dispersion is as
sure as that of steam in the open air. The weakness
of Protestantism is from the same source as its
strength, — tliat elasticity, which means the mutual
repulsion of its particles.

22 THE PEOTESTANT REFOEMATION.

Naturally, the Protestant forces attempt in self-
defence to rally under some one standard of authority.
And at first the problem seems an easy one. From
the Churcli in its corruption fall back upon the Church
in its simplicity. From Councils and Priests appeal
to inspired Prophets and Apostles. For the false
Yicar of God take the infallible Word of God.
"The Bible, the Bible only, is the religion of Pro-
testants 1 " But quickly it appears that the Bible
may be read in almost as many ways as there are
minds to read it. If Luther and Calvin differ as to
some of its plainest words, what must be the effect
of offering to millions the whole array of history,
prophecy, proverb, appeal, and fervid inward experi-
ence, that go to make up that book ? Some formula
of belief — something more than the simple watch-
word Justification by Faith — might seem a clear
necessity of the position. At first a Confession, then
a Creed. And, the Creed once defined and taken for
authority, soon follows the whole long story of big-
otry, exclusion, religious hate, sectarian jealousy and
feud ; till many frankly choose the yoke of Eome again
before tliis mockery of freedom, and many more aban-
don all hope of felloAVship or strength or meaning in
religion itself To such melancholy straits the human
mind must pass in the evolution of a great idea !

Asain, the weakness of Protestantism is seen in its
narrowing of the field and meaning of Religion as a
power in the world. It was the glory of the great
Catholic structure of the Middle Age, that — with all
its evil ambition and its crimes against humanity —
it did meet the problem of political and social life in

THE CHURCH AND SOCIETY. 23

a broad way, so far as it could be comprehended at
that day, and with inflexible courage tried to solve it.
It did this in a Name before which all differences of
social level absolutely disappeared. Emperor or king,
peasant or serf, priest or noble, it knew men only as
equal subjects of its spiritual empire. It declared
the state of slavery impossible for a Christian, and
did in fact practically abolish slavery in Europe by
embracing all ranks and conditions within its fold.
It established the Truce of God, setting a bound to
the rage of private wars, and winning society slowly
towards a reign of peace. It created charities on a
scale with which the world had till then known
nothing to compare. In an age of strife, ravage,
destitution, and disease, far worse than what we suf-
fer now, it grappled as it could with that hopeless
question of Pauperism : on false principles, indeed
— by adopting and consecrating Mendicancy ; but
perhaps no other way was possible then. At least,
it was better than brutal and pitiless neglect, — the
old Pagan way. It assumed the charge of educating
every child, — not in the way we think right, but at
least so far as was needful to make him a subject of
its empire and an heir of its hope ; and so, of meeting
hand-to-hand the vice, ignorance, and savagery of the
lowest order in the State. In the Catholic system
once, as in Papal countries still, every man, however
guilty or wretched, is in theory at least to be met
by the formal offices of the Church for instruction,
for comfort, for rescue from sin, at least for absolu-
tion at his death-hour. This splendid ideal it has
always professed, of what Eeligion has to do for so-
ciety as well as for every man.

24 THE PKOTESTANT REFORMATION.

As against this, not only we have to l3e reminded
that in all Protestant countries more than half the
population, numerically, stand in no acknowledged
religious connection at all with their fellow-men, and
are only approached, at hazard as it were and uncer-
tainly, by the voluntary efforts of a few, moved indi-
vidually by the power of the gospel and by love for
souls. That, perhaps, is the inevitable consequence
of respecting as we do the private conscience. But
we see, too, that Protestantism does not understand
the energies it has evoked. It fears them, shrinks
from them, makes terms with them, does not so much
as attempt to educate and control them. Liberty of
opinion it has sought vainly, by every expedient, to
pacify, overawe, and hush. The portentous birth of
Democracy, which sprang up at its side, it began to
fear and hate, as soon as that outran the cautious
limits the Pteformers had proposed. When the ISTobles
scorned Luther's counsels of mercy, and the Peasants
rejected his words of peace, he — a man of the people
if any man ever was — was sharp and implacable to
side with authority against rebellion. "A pious Chris-
tian," he said, " should die a hundred deaths, rather
than give way a hair's-breadth to the Peasants' de-
mands ! " In America we have seen in our own day
the encroachments of a despotism as sordid and mer-
ciless as any in Naples or Vienna, erected on the
basest of all possible foundations, property in man,
— a despotism which under forms of popular govern-
ment insulted every instinct of liberty, and under
forms of law violated every principle of justice, —
yet how slightly held in check by the Protestant

OUTWORKING OF PROTESTAXTISM. 25

Church, spite of its birth-right of freedom ! how
largely helped by the alliance of a degenerate Eo-
man Church, with its instinct of servility !

The ecclesiastical life of Protestantism is thus
weak and narrow. Its strength and its glory have
been in another field. The history of Protestant na-
tions is the history, with scarce any exception, of the
enterprise, discovery, arts, science, invention, learning,
and philanthropy most characteristic of modern times.
Set aside the one great enterprise of the Jesuit mis-
sions, — whose best strength was spent two hundred
years ago, — it would be hard to show one great
movement of the last three centuries, of permanent
and marked success, affecting deeply the welfare of
mankind at large, dating from the Eoman Church or
from any people within its communion, to set off
against the great political reforms of England, the
colonizing of free States in America and Australia,
the thought and skill given to popular education, the
revolution in commerce wrought by steam, the con-
quest of nature inaugurated by modern science.

All these are not, of course, to be credited to Pro-
testantism consciously working out as such. They
are not its product as an organized spiritual force.
Far from it. But they are trophies of the emanci-
pated energy, the wider intelligence, the individual
force of conviction, the moral courage, which it was
the mission of Protestantism to set free as an agency
in the world's affairs. And widely as the spell of
Pome has remained unbroken, so widely this energy
has continued latent, inert, impossible.

11.

THE CATHOLIC EEACTIOK

THEEE is some truth, no doubt, in the saying
that what Eome has lost of temporal dominion,
in consequence of the great Protestant schism, she
has gained, or widened, as a purely spiritual power,
in the reoion of conscience, emotion, and doctrinal
belief. The two dogmas added to the Catholic creed
in these last few years — the Immaculate Conception
(1854) and Papal Infallibility (1870) — are cited by
fervent Eomanists as a proof of this. And it is very
likely true that Eome never had a more absolute hold
upon the devotion of a larger multitude of subjects
than to-day, or anything like so large. If it is so, it
is one result of the remarkable reaction in the six-
teenth century, which we have now to consider.

Eor the era of the Eeformation was in one sense
a new birth for Eome, as well as for tlie forces on the
other side. It is not merely a Protestant charge, that
the Church of Eome at this period was flagrantly,
perhaps fatally, corrupt. Catholic authorities, also,
declare that its degradation was very deep, and that
to all appearance its very existence was staked on a
radical reformation. Both parties are agreed that the
reform was needed. Each asserts that it was genuine
and wholesome on its own side. Each charges that it
was deceptive and unreal on the other.

THE TWO EEFOEMS. 27

But, in fact, two very genuine reformations were
going on together, impelled by the same general mo-
tive, though radically different in their method. We
have seen how that which we call Protestant was
staked on individual conviction and justification by
faith. Even the reactionary moods in Luther's own
life, even the surprising compromises accepted by
Melanchthon, do not alter the main fact. Eeform
within the Church, on the contrary, — as demanded
by Erasmus and Sir Thomas More, — was staked on
the reinforcing of discipline, the expanding and fix-
ing of dogma, and the perfecting of the ecclesiastical
system considered as a piece of religious machinery.

Looking at the tremendous passions and obstinate
convictions arrayed upon the field, and the life-and-
death struggle in which they felt themselves engaged,
nothing seems at first sight more pitiably irrelevant
and weak than the plan of campaign laid down by
the Catholic authorities, and developed into the weary
technicalities of the Acts and Canons of the Council
of Trent.

But to judge the situation so would be a hasty
judgment. We must still keep in view that image
of the forces of the Church as of an Army trained in
fixed rules of discipline, and acting under a single
recognized command. Whatever makes that disci-
pline more perfect, adds so much to the power of
attack and defence. Whatever makes more clear the
plan of the campaign which is to be fought, does so
much to make the officers intelligent, resolute, and
united. Whatever exalts the authority of the su-
preme command, goes so far to make the force a

28 THE CATHOLIC REACTION.

unit, and irresistible. Only — and here will be the
real criticism from the modern point of view — the
best disciplined army may be sent out into the wil-
derness, or in the wrong direction ; and so may be
doing only mischief, or may waste its strength in
" fio'htinf' so as one beateth the air."

This, perhaps, is only to say that the modern mind
is likely to fail in recognizing the objective i^oint which
the Catholic strategy aims at, moving as it does on
a different level, and towards other things. But at
least the modern mind cannot fail to see the splendid
perfection of that equipment, or to admire the com-
plete discipline and devotion of that army. It may
also grant — if it is wise as well as logical — that,
whatever the atrocities of the method, the modern
world could not spare this great factor in its life;
that society, in its common moralities and in its po-
litical order, owes a vast debt to the modern Church
of Eome. The new world of thought is not the only
thincr. Institutions and moralities, which are the slow
work of civilization, float, after all, at the mercy of
the great sea they are embarked on, which is human
nature itself; and this is but a chaos of passions
and desires, when not under check of one form or
another of spiritual force. Just now, the Roman
Church has still in reserve the greatest supply of
that force, available for very large spaces and popu-
lations. Amonsf the two hundred millions of its
nominal subjects, it is likely that her discipline is
none too strong, and none too skilfully organized and
handled, for the security of modern life from still worse
catastrophes than have already overtaken it.

FAILUKES OF PROTESTANTISM. 29

At any rate, that motive was urgent enough in the
moral disorders of the sixteenth century. Wliatever
else the Eeformation had done, it had found no remedy
for those disorders. In some directions, it had defi-
nitely added to them — as, with a sort of dismay,
Luther often declared. To say nothing of Antinomian
extravagances, or the fury of the Peasants' War, there
was an unsettlement of morals as well as beliefs, for
which the Eeformation was clearly responsible. It
could not fail to shock men's sense of the sanctity of
oaths, that Luther's own marriage was the violation
of his monastic vow. He could peril the whole cause
of the Eeformation by his break with Zwingli and
the Swiss reformers on a question of ritual ; but did
not see his way clear — setting Scripture as he did
above the Church — to forbid the bigamy of so im-
portant a partisan as Philip of Hesse. As a remedy
for some of the worst evils of society, whatever it
may have been for the cheer and strength of single
lives. Protestantism had completely failed ; or if not
completely, at any rate so far tliat Italy or France
could not well be challenged to adopt the course of
Germany, or the Church bidden to relax her rides of
discipline as guide of the common conscience. Add
to all this, that men's piety and reverence, which
touch them nearer than their moral sense, were ap-
palled by the free handling of sacred things, or things
deemed sacred, in the incredible coarseness — beastli-
ness is not too strong a term to use now and then —
of the Lutheran polemics.

So much for the negative side. And for the posi-
tive, the Cathohc reaction had in it the genuine ele-

30 THE CATHOLIC REACTION.

ments of a religious and moral revival. As is the
way with every vital religious movement, it began
with personal conviction of a definite moral evil and
of its remedy ; with a power of personal piety and
devotion, also, that kindled to the flame of a genu-
ine passion, and so created the force that presently
brought into play a new, complete, and very power-
ful system of machinery.

We must call to mind here what we have seen so
often in the life of the Mediseval Church, — its im-
mense advantage in having close at hand, ready at
every crisis, an organized type or ideal of the reli-
gious life, according to its own conception of it, in
the Eeligious Orders. The forces of any new awak-
ening of conscience, or reform of morals, play easily
in channels whose shape and direction were con-
structed for them,'' with infinite pains and skill, while
the Church still had the vigor of its growth. The old
form is taken possession of by the new spirit, and
is embarked on a new career under another name.
Thus is saved the expenditure of force needed to
frame itself a new body, when spirit takes on flesh.
An institutional religion always has the advantage
over free religion in this prodigious economy of its
strength.

We do not often reckon the enormous drain on
vital force needed to create a new organization, even
of the simplest. Two thirds of the food we eat, say
the physiologists, go merely to keep the vital ma-
chinery in order. Consider what it costs a growing
child to put forth a single tooth, for example ; or a
grown man to repair a broken bone. It is not hard,

NEW RELIGIOUS OEDEES. 31

perhaps, to fabricate the shape ; but to get tlie life
into it is very hard. And it can be done only by
vital connection, at some point, with an organization
which is already alive.

But the spirit must still go before the form. And
nothing is more interesting, at the period we are con-
sidering, than to see how the personality of a few re-
markable men comes in just here to bridge over the
space, and to make the revolution possible. What
was wanted was, that religion should be as real a
thing within the lines of the corrupt and decrepit
Church of Eome, as in the lives of those who had
caught the new inspiration of Eeform, and were
brought close to the very Source of all life by their
doctrine of a personal and immediate salvation.

The story of the organizing of a new religious
Order is always essentially the same : intensity of
feeling on the part of its leader or founder ; the con-
tagion of that feeling among kindred minds ; a special
practical aim that makes a little divergence — not too
great — from the beaten track of existing institu-
tions ; a shaping out of rule after the familiar model,
but with provision for the new object in view ; some
fresh device of austerer discipline, answering to the
fervor of the motive freshly felt. All these we find
in the case of the two new Orders which were the
most characteristic groAvth of this period, the Thea-
tines and the Jesuits. The date of the former (1524)
shows it as emerging from the very heat and dust
of the first conflict with the Lutheran protest. The
date of the latter (1540) is a little after the armed
league of Protestant nobles and the counter-league

32 - THE CATHOLIC REACTION.

of Catholic, a little before the outbreak of those armed
forces in the Smalcaldic war.

In fact, a doctrine very much like Luther's had
spread widely, and was zealously professed in Italy.
A style of enlightened religious thought, — best known
to us through the name of Vittoria Colonna, the friend
of ^lichael Angelo, and through his own religious
sonnets, — devout, intelligent, refined, and somewhat
austere, was in superior minds fast taking the place
of the set forms of churchly piety ; so perilously fast,
indeed, that the very pln^ase " faith in Christ," or any
special fervor or originality of spiritual exercises, be-
came matter of suspicion and alarm. Partly to enlist
this force, partly to check its escape into forbidden
channels, there emerges a sudden energy of ecclesias-
tical reform.

The leader in this direction was a man of the most
austere and rigorous type of Catholic piety, — Caraffa,
afterwards Cardinal and (1555-1559) Pope Paul IV.
As priest and as bishop he had labored with great
zeal to reform the morals and remove the abuses of
his charge ; and he gained leave to lay down his rank
and office, and give himself to the one work of found-
ing and directing a new religious Order, — the Thea-
tines, so called from the name of the diocese whicli
he had left.

Besides the customary vow of poverty, like that of
other Mendicant orders, it was enjoined that these
new brethren might not even beg. Besides the set
office of preaching, like the Dominicans, they became
street-missionaries, — from bench, platform, or wayside
stone, or in the market-place, arresting the ear of the

THEATINES. — LOYOLA. 33

populace of Italian cities. Besides the office of con-
solatiou of the sick and dying, there was the special
duty laid on them of attending on condemned crimi-
nals, and carrying into the dungeon the warning or
comforting message of the Church. The new Order
was never large in numbers. It is almost unknown
now, except in a few localities. Its recruits were
mostly from men of education and rank. It was
never, like the Franciscan, broadly popular ; or, like
the Jesuit, the agent of vast enterprises for the
Church. It interests us rather as the first strom?
effort in that direction, and as bringing into the field
one or two marked men, who did much to shape the
policy and guide the action of the new Eomanism.

With the story of Loyola's early life, and his amazing
self-inflictions, we have nothing here to do. One in-
cident in his career, that which shows him as the link
between the two religious orders already named, is
thus told by Macaulay : * —

'^ In the convent of the Theatines at Venice, under the
eye of Caraffa, a Spanish gentleman took up his abode,
tended the poor in hospitals, went about in rags, starved
himself almost to death, and often sallied into the streets,
mounted on stones, and, waving his hat to invite the
passers-by, began to preach in a strange jargon of mingled
Castilian and Tuscan. The Theatines were among the
most zealous and rigid of men; but to this enthusiastic
neophyte their discipline seemed lax, and their movements
sluggish ; for his own mind, naturally passionate and im-
aginative, had passed through a training which had given
to all its peculiarities a morbid intensity and energy. . . .

* Miscellanies : "Eanke's History of the Popes."
3

34 THE CATHOLIC EEACTIOX.

" Dissatisfied with the system of the Theatines, the en-
thusiastic Spaniard turned his face towards Rome. Poor,
obscure, without a patron, without recommendations, he
entered the city where now two princely temples, rich with
painting and many-colored marble, commemorate his great
services to the Church ; where his form stands sculptured
in massive silver ; where his bones, enshrined amidst jew-
els, are placed beneath the altar of God. His activity and
zeal bore down all opposition ; and under his rule the Order
of Jesuits began to exist, and grew rapidly to the full
measure of his gigantic powers. AVith what vehemence,
with what policy, with what exact discipline, with what
dauntless courage, with what self-denial, with what forget-
fulness of the dearest private ties, Avith what intense and
stubborn devotion to a single end, with what unscrupulous
laxity and versatility in the choice of «neans, the Jesuits
fought the battle of their Church, is written in every page
of the annals of Europe during several generations. In
the Order of Jesus was concentrated the quintessence of
the Catholic spirit ; and the history of the Order of Jesus
is the history of the great Catholic reaction."

Ignatius Loyola, a young and brilliant Spanish
cavalier, had been grievously wounded by a cannon-
ball in the siege of Pampeluna, early in the year
1521. Of all the pious or romantic legends by which
he fed his fancy during the year of extreme suffering
while in the agony of the crude and cruel surgery he
endured,* none can be more extraordinary or more
romantic than the story of his own life. Its incidents
are familiar, and need not be retold. Its results are
all that concern us now.

* In the course of which his shattered leg had to be rebroken
and reset more than once, in the vain hope to straighten it.

THE JESUITS. 35

Modern Eomanism is something in many points
quite different from the Mediaeval institution which
has occupied us before. It is commonly said to have
in the Jesuit Order not its Champion only, but its
Master. If this is true, at least that master appeared
first in the guise of the humblest of servants. Besides
the ordinary vow of obedience common to all monas-
tic bodies, this Order must always be at the imme-
diate service of the Papacy, in any direction, or for
any mission, to wdiich its members might be sent.
Besides the ordinary offices of piety, a most elaborate
system of education was developed, — on Catholic
principles, as opposed to the free intellectual train-
ing of the modern world; so that the Jesuits have
become perhaps the most accomplished guild of Teach-
ers ever known. The two vast missionary enterprises
to the East and West — in India, China, and Japan
on the one hand ; from Canada to Paraguay on the
other — wdiich are the wonder and the boast of Mod-
ern Eomanism, are the exclusive glory of the Jesuits.
And there is nothing in the old stories of Pagan per-
secution, or in the martyrdoms and torments inflicted
by religious bigotry ever since, which has not been
voluntarily encountered — or would not be, to-day —
by the extraordinary body of men trained and dis-
ciplined under the rule, and fortified by the " spiritual
exercises," of St. Ignatius.*

It is the more remarkable that a foundation so
fervent and so loyal should have barely escaped in

* Of the illustrations of this which might be given, none are
more interesting or more heroic than those in Parkman's "Jesuits
in North America."

36 THE CATHOLIC REACTION.

the beginning that sleepless and intolerant persecu-
tion, of which it has been the most active agent ever
since. The unwonted fervor, and doubtless some nov-
elty of phrase, in Loyola's manual of devotion, caused
him to be arrested and incarcerated at Salamanca.
The merciless Inquisition of Spain was in full vigor
there, and its all-suspecting vigilance detected signs
of heresy in the book. His orthodoxy was hardly
established, and he had but just escaped from those
menacing fangs, when he found himself again under
surveillance in Paris, and was three months in mak-
ing good his claim to be a true Catholic, or tolerated
as a defender of the faith.

It is very characteristic of the age, the cause, and
the man, that once arrived in Home, a little later, he
urged upon the Pope the need of a " Supreme and
Universal Tribunal of Inquisition," subject to no less
authority than the Head of the Church himself, to
have in its charge the suppression of heresy through-
out the world. Such a tribunal was founded in Eome,
in the year 1542, by Pius III., a few weeks after his
summons of the great Eeform Council which met three
years later in Trent. Only the Spanish Inquisition,
which for something more than sixty years had proved
itself too faithful and efficient to be distrusted, was
exempt by special privilege from its jurisdiction.

And so we meet face to face, at this moment of
crisis, the most startling phenomenon of the Catholic
reaction. Eeformation, in its view, means a revival of
Mediseval piety, nourished and organized under mo-
nastic discipline, used to strengthen the ecclesiastical
power, and having for its method the well-understood

THE INQUISITION. 37

processes of the Inquisition. We must keep this
latter fact in sight. An illustration or two will en-
able us to do this more distinctly.

The series of popes for sixty years, down to the
massacre of St. Bartholomew in 1572, from the "re-
forming " Paul III. to the " savage " Pius V., were aU
known for some special zeal or service in the cause
of religious j)ersecution, — not in the mild way we
sometimes understand that phrase, but by the horri-
ble and sometimes literally unspeakable methods of
misery invented by the Inquisition.

Cardinal Caraffa, the great leader of " reform wdth-
in the Church," was equally great as an inquisitor :
at his death a Eoman mob, with ferocious joy, rushed
to tear down the prisons of the Holy Ofhce, with loud
curses on his name.

Another great and famous inquisitor, Bartholomew
Carranza, Archbishop of Toledo and Primate of Spain,
high in honor in the Council of Trent, — the same
who undertook the reforming of the English Church
under Philip and Mary, and with his own lips con-
demned the English Primate Archbishop Cranmer to
the flames, — himself a few years later fell under the
sleepless and remorseless jealousy of that terrible
Ofhce ; was treacherously arrested ; suffered the hor-
rors of imprisonment for eighteen years; and died
at his release, having with difiiculty established his
soundness in the faith.

We hear, in 1547, of a "terrific episode" in Naples,
where the populace rose to resist the introduction of
the hated tribunal there, and fought so furiously, that
before night the last man of a body of three thousand

38 THE CATHOLIC REACTION.

soldiers sent in to quell the riot lay slaughtered in
the street.

To understand the fury of the English at the very
name of Spaniard, in this time of terror, we may read
the story of one Burton, an English shipmaster at
Cadiz, — for the Inquisition respects no foreign flag,
but treats heresy as a local crime, — who was seized
on some pretence of heretical expressions, thrown into
a duno'eon, submitted to torments and threats, and
finally burned alive at Seville (December 22, 1560).
The story was told at length by one Frampton, sent
out to be his advocate, who was seized in the same
way, was put to the rack after witnessing his cli-
ent's martyrdom, and was hardly released under con-
dition of living in Spain under that eye of tyranny,
but afterwards escaped. The real crime was the
ship-master's rich cargo : the Inquisition profited by
its seizure to the amount of fifty thousand pounds
sterling.

Scenes and wrongs like these prompted the great
raids of Hawkins and Drake upon the Spanish power,
as the common enemy of mankind ; and stirred the
English conscience to a passion that even craved and
courted martyrdom. For in 1581 we hear again of
a Puritan mechanic from the south of England, one
Eichard Atkins, who went to make his protest first
to the Jesuit College in Piome, where he was speedily
delivered to the tribunal ; then, being set free, — per-
haps as being deemed insane, — went to repeat his
protest by assailing the idolatrous service in St. Peter's,
well knowing the fate it would lead him to. For
when he was paraded half-naked through the streets.

BORROMEO. oJ

and lighted torches were thrust against his bare flesh,
he would grasp the torches in his hand, and hold
them to his side, despising the pain, still exhorting
the crowd in his broken Italian to faith in Jesus, and
so went smiling to his martyrdom.

Charles Borromeo is the saintliest name of this era,
perhaps of the whole modern Church of Rome. He
is justly held in universal reverence for the sweetness
of his piety, the simplicity of his self-devotion, the
fidelity of his service as ecclesiastic and archbishop of
Milan, the untiring charity and beneficence, courageous
and heroic as w^ell as tender, which, shown in a season
of plague, has made his memory forever dear and ven-
erable? Created cardinal at the age of twenty-two, he
found himself, four years later, appointed judge of one
Fra Tommaso di Mileto, a Franciscan monk, charged
with such heresies as these : the lawfulness of eating
meat on Friday ; doubts about image-worship and in-
dulgences ; questioning of the Pope's authority ; hints
of predestination, and denial of the Lord's "true body"
in the Host. And, besides minor penalties, here is the
sentence rendered by this tender-hearted saint : "That
you be walled up in a place surrounded by four walls,
where, with anguish of heart and abundance of tears,
you shall bewail your sins and offences committed
against the majesty of God, the holy mother Church,
and the religion of the founder St. Francis." *

The man thus cruelly immured succeeded in mak-
ing his escape. But not so all. For, in the ruins of
dismantled Inquisition prisons, skeletons have been

* Sentence rendered December 15, 1564. See Rule's "History
of the Inquisition."

40 THE CATHOLIC REACTION.

found in like " places snrrounded by four walls," nar-
row cells, where the prisoner is supposed to have been
confined upright, till he perished out of mere rotten-
ness and misery.

Into other details of the horror of these dungeons,
such as were laid bare in Spain, and afterwards in
Eome, we need not enter. Our business is only with
the Institution, and with the measures it demanded
for its defence. The reform that goes under the name
of "the Catholic reaction" was a campaign under-
taken against the spirit of the age, — that is, against
the clearest religious conviction and the most in-
trepid conscience of the time. And the measures it
demanded were such as \ve have seen. The purest,
the most pious and gentle, the most self-sacrificing
saints of the Reaction were compelled to do that thing
here described. There is no need to deny their piety
or their tenderness of heart. But their piety did not
stick at the gigantic murder of Saint Bartholomew.
Their tender mercies did not shrink to wall live men,
" with ano-uish of heart and abundance of tears," in
the misery of that hideous sepulchre.

But I have said that the Church was conducting
a campaign, and that it had in view a well-defined
objective point. It is essential to our purpose to see,
if we can, what was the nature of that objective point
of the campaign. We have seen something of its ar-
senal and its weapons. We know something, through
later history, of the extraordinary success of its war-
fare, in securing certain things which it really had at
heart. We wish to know more exactly what those
things were.

LATER POLICY OF ROME. 41

The completed structure of Modern Eomanism, as
distinct from Mediseval Catholicism, is understood to
be tlie work of the Council which sat at Trent, in the
Tyrol, at intervals from 1545 to 1563 ; including also,
as corollary or supplement, the dogmas of the Im-
maculate Conception and of Papal Infallibility.

The first thing that strikes us, as we look at this
result in a general way, is the policy it shows of a
concentration, instead of an expansion, of the forces
in the field. It is intensive, not extensive. Each
definite step taken has served to narrow the field ; to
throw off a part of the apparent force, for the sake of
a more vigorous grasp upon that which is left. Each
point of doctrine established has been at the cost of a
vehement interior struggle ; it has been a triumph
over opposition, with the risk and with the result of
creating a great disaffected party. As long as the
Immaculate Conception could be debated within the
lines by Thomist and Scotist, the freedom of opinion
was a ground of peace : since 1854, to follow the logic
of their opinion, the great learning and strength of
the Dominican Order should be lost to Eome. Infal-
libility might be ever so much the legitimate goal to
which the Church was tending ; yet its triumph, in
1870, cost it the formidable revolt signified in such
names of learning as Dollinger, and such names of
authority as Dupanloup.

And yet the Church, bound " for better for worse "
to an idea, has not hesitated. It began by inviting
Protestant attendance and co-operation in its Council ;
and the danger of compromises likely to follow was
the chief hindrance to the Council's meeting?, and the

42 THE CATHOLIC REACTION.

chief cause of its delays. Doubtless it hoped — like
a political caucus — to hold those bound by its deci-
sions who should join in its debates. And there was
something in the strangely compromising attitude of
the Eeformers — after Luther's death, especially, and
under the irresolute lead of Melanchthon — which
might justify that hope. But the concessions were
soon found to be all on one side, — unless in such ex-
ternals as in the very rare, doubtful, and reluctant
allowance of the Cup to the laity. And the rigid
fixing of its boundaries then, walled out all Protest-
ant Europe as sharply, and with as little prospect of
its recovery, as the previous walling off of the Eastern
Church by the unyielding and intolerable claims of
Eome.

But this narrowing of its ground was really, in
another way, a policy of strength. Like the "Old-
School Abolitionists " in the Antislavery crusade, the
Eoman Church has persistently denounced the least
remonstrance or dissent within its lines ; has unhesi-
tatingly thrown over the faithfullest of friends, the
moment his zeal seemed lukewarm, or his loyalty in
danger of waxing cold. The great debate of Eeason
must be carried on within wide boundaries, and with
open doors. The great battle of Eaith must be fought
with closed ranks, where a whisper of mutiny is death.
A thousand blind partisans, so standing alone, are far
stronger than the same number, increased by ten
thousand more, who may dare question a word or act
of the commander.

Besides, the selfishness of power must feel a certain
relief at being discharged of responsibility for such

MEASUKES OF REFOEM. 43

turbulent and intractable subjects as those in the
populations of the North. Italy, Spain, and — at
heavy cost — France were kept within the circle of
command. But the war in the Netherlands must
have taught the lesson which power is so slow to
learn; and the truce of 1609 must have been as
welcome to the assailants as to the assailed. The
Scottish people under such a lead as that of Knox
and Melville, the Puritans of England represented
not merely by their fierce seafaring champions, but
by such poor martyrs as Eichard Atkins, multiplied
by hundreds in every district, — such evidences would
give pause to the most towering ecclesiastical am-
bition. Such men would be far more dangerous as
rebellious subjects than as alien enemies. And there
is reason to believe that the modern Church of Eome
has been well content with such success as it has had,
which it would not wisely risk for a wider sway.

It is to the same effect when we look at the par-
ticular measures of reform aimed at. Still we find
the sharper drawing of boundaries, the throwing off
of the neutral or disloyal, the tightening of the reins
of authority. The objects to be effected we find enu-
merated thus : to reinforce ecclesiastical Discipline
among the clergy ; to establish Seminaries for the
instruction of youth, ivith austere training — in sharp
contrast to the Mediaeval University ; to insure the
incessant administration of the Sacraments in every
parish, with special emphasis laid on preaching and
auricular confession ; to insist on the personal super-
vision of the clergy by the Bishop, to the restoring
and enhancing of episcopal authority ; and to make

44 THE CATHOLIC REACTION.

more precise and ample the profession of faith, by
authoritative exposition of the Creed, especially on
the points then most debated, — justification, predes-
tination, and sacraments.

Except in the last of these — which it was the
special business of a Council to determine — there is
absolutely nothing here which we can regard as an
attempt to meet the case as it lay broadly before the
secular intelligence of the time ; nothing which indi-
cates any attempt to win the lost ground, unless it
might be by dint of armed conquest, when the forces
of the faith should be sufihciently drilled. All looks
to holding more securely and ruling more severely
the ground that is within the visible boundaries of
obedience ; all looks to repelling more sharply those
who chose to stay beyond those boundaries, and re-
fusing more imperiously all suggestions of unity or
peace.

JSTow this harsh and uncompromising attitude may
be taken by a power, a party, or a person, perfectly
convinced that a given position is absolutely right,
and that to yield it would be a crime. That, in fact,
is what the language of the Church necessarily means,
— the very point in dispute between the Church and
its opponents. It may also be held by a power aware
that its position is weak in point of fact and of reason,
and can only be made strong in logic : that is, who-
ever can be got to accept its premises may be held to
abide by its conclusions. Either ground is sufficient
to explain the attitude taken by the Roman Church
during the Catholic reaction, and held by it since.

Virtually, this is to abandon the claim of Univer-

MODERN ROMANISM. 45

sality; since not the wildest dreamer supposes that
tlie premises in question are going to be accepted by
everybody. But, on the other hand, it is very greatly
to brace and confirm the claims of Authority. By
the theory of the Church, it regards all men, if not as
the objects of its instruction, at least as the subjects
of its rule. It demands not assent of the reason, but
obedience of the will : at any rate, not assent first,
and therefore obedience ; but obedience first, and then
assent. But obedience is a moral act, and is rendered
to the object of one's moral homage or choice. How
to win that moral homage, or choice, has not, so far,
entered much into the Eomanist conception of reform.

And yet there is a certain moral homage paid to
the ministers of that Church, often in quarters we
should least expect. The discipline of the Catholic
reaction has had, unquestionably, a powerful effect on
the lives of the humbler clergy, whose duties it has
rigidly defined, and whose virtues it has energetically
prescribed. The}^ at least, are not responsible for the
craft of prelates, or for the atrocities which monastic
rule has invented or put in force. Probably we shall
never find a comparison between the morals of Catho-
lic and Protestant countries intelliGjent and fair enouqii
to satisfy both sides. The type, or standard, is the
real object of comparison ; and into this considera-
tions of race, or the " personal equation," will enter too
deeply to give much standing-ground in common.

But there are easily -recognized and very winning
qualities, which have always distinguished the body
of the lower Catholic clergy, and which have often
been glorified in the more illustrious names of the

46 THE CATHOLIC REACTION.

Eoman Church. We must remember, it is true, that
these virtues — charity, patience, humility, beneficence
unstiuted — are not inconsistent with policies and
acts which we recoil from with horror. The saintly
Bori'omeo was a merciless arbiter in the Court of
Faith. The Port-Eoyalists were advocates of perse-
cution, as well as sufferers from it. Fenelon, that pure
type of sentimental piety, did not hold aloof from the
policy of Louis XIV. in expulsion or in torment of
the Huguenots.*

But in common, lowly, quiet life those qualities are
inestimable, and infinitely dear. Once fallen below
earthly ambition and hope, there is probably nowhere
such wide-spread and abounding consolation as may
be, or has been, found with the parish priest, or the
saintly bishop. I do not know that a famous French
romancer is the best of authority on points of moral
judgment ; but I have been more struck by the inci-
dental and unintended testimony of Balzac to the
reality of a certain " power that makes for righteous-
ness " in the Catholic village clergy, than I should be
with any amount of set argument to prove or dis-
prove the same.

This power, whatever of it really exists, it is fair
enough to call one result of the Catholic reaction
which I have attempted to describe. We must make
generous allowance for this on one hand, while we
remember, because we cannot help it, the horrors and
enormities of that reaction on the other hand. We
are not called on to pass a verdict of " guilty or not
guilty " on the Church of that day, or on the remark-

* See Douen, VIntolerance de Fenelon. Paris, 1875.

RESULTS. 47

able effort by wbicb it recovered so mudi of its lost
ground, and restored so much of its diminished
strength. The single acts, the policies, the men, are
fit objects of our judgment. The historical phenome-
non at large is beyond that judgment. Our only busi-
ness is to understand it, if we can, in the circumstances
it grew out of, and the results it led to.

It did not defeat the Eeformation. That had its
message to deliver, and its prodigious moral power to
transmit to the life of the modern world. But it did
save to modern life something of the rich and deep
life of a remoter time, which was in danger of being
lost. And this it did, first, by drawing from sources
of genuine religious life within the old sanctuary
limits ; then, by kindling with a new fervor a group
or a series of men whose mental resource was equal
to their zeal; and finally, by fixing in institutions
and defining by formula and confirming by discipline
certain moral forces derived from the fading life of
the Middle Age, which thus make an element in the
life of the world to-day.

There are a few ecclesiastical virtues precious,
nay, indispensable, to mankind, the hardest of all to
human nature, and so they are often by religious
writers called " supernatural ; " and these it was the
service of the Catholic reaction to hold in trust for a
larger religion, which we have not yet lived to see.

III.

CALVINISM.

CALYI:N'ISM as a system of thought has had its
day. Two hundred years ago it was a very im- "
portant factor in the opinions of mankind : by which
I mean, opinions of the most advanced and most
highly instructed thinkers, — Milton, for example,
and Eichard Baxter, neither of whom w^as strictly
Calvinist in belief, while with both that system made
the deep background of religious thought. But it is
not too much to say now that nothing wdiatever of
that importance is left. Intellectually, Calvinism is,
so to speak, a dead issue. The real controversies of
our time turn upon quite other points, and take no
account whatever of it.

I do not mean by this that Calvinism has not
believers at the present day, — believers in profes-
sion, and doubtless in reality, — perhaps as numerous,
possibly more numerous, than ever. But the belief
of advanced and aggressive thought is one thing ; the
belief of tradition, of assent, of apology, is quite an-
other thing. Calvinism fifty years ago was standing
on its defence. ISTow, except in the writings of its
professional apologists, or in small local controversies,
it is never alluded to or thought of except as a thing
of the past. Look through every modern review,

A FADING BELIEF. 49

scientific argument, work of philosophy, history, or
general literature, — everything outside a narrow,
technical, theological circle, — and scarcely its name,
never once its dogma or its system of faith, will be
found, except possibly as a reminiscence or an illus-
tration. No philosophic writer of the present day
ever thinks of the answer it gave once to the awful
riddle of the universe, as the key to fit any one of
those locks wliich bar from us the deeper mysteries
of existence.

I say this in advance, lest I should be suspected of
any sectarian or polemic motive in the review I shall
attempt to take of Calvinism as a force in history.
As a system of thought it is dead. But systems of
belief, once strong and great, long retain their form
and outward seeming after the life has gone out of
them. It is dead, — not like a human body, which
soon moulders and disappears ; but rather like a great
hardy tree, which was girdled near the root many
years ago. It puts forth no new branches. Xo green
leaf has grown from its sap for many a spring. But
as yet it is perished only in a few of its remoter boughs
and twigs ; only a limb here and there has fallen to
the ground from inner decay. Its shape is almost as
sturdy and vigorous as ever. It gives almost as good
shelter, to almost as many flocking under it, who look
to it with almost as much reverence and awe as of
old ; and the wreaths they hang upon its branches,
or else the living vines they have twined about it,
might almost persuade us that it is still alive. Such
is the figure that best represents to us the condition
in which we find Calvinism at the present day.

4

50 CALA^INISM.

My task is, therefore, not to attack it and confute
it, but simply to see why it grew up when and where
it did, and what v/ere its services to mankind while
it was flourishing and strong. For I hold those ser-
vices to have been very great. Indeed, it seems to
me hardly too much to say tliat we owe to it, on the
whole, the best and noblest features of the last three
centuries, including our own. Its natural counterpart
is what we call Liberalism. Now liberalism is a very
enticing thing. It is, we may even say, the necessary
condition of the advent of that new intellectual and
moral life which we hope will one of these days do
even better service to mankind than Calvinism has
done. But as yet, if we will think of it, liberalism
has very little to boast of in what it has done, how-
ever large its promise or its hope. Its coming we
may take to have been inevitable, and its advance
irresistible. Free thought found the creed of Calvin
incredible ; free conscience found his moral doctrine
an offence ; free religion found his interpretation of
the divine decrees blasphemous and intolerable. The
Eeformation itself had set free a spirit that was thus
sure, in time, to repudiate this its own most carefully
constructed work. But, aside from this negative,
provisional, and (as we may say) inevitable service,
liberalism has done as yet no great thing for the
human race, as Calvinism has done. I^ay, what it
seems to have done has been rather by setting loose
other great forces, — literature, philosophy, science,
zeal. for popular right, — which have been the real
teachers and workers.

Liberalism for the intellect we may take to be, like

JOHN CALYIX. 51

freedom in politics, a privilege, an opportunity, a right,
possibly a duty. But it may be slothful, complacent,
sufficient to itself; or it may be strenuous, girded for
work, armed for battle. Only in the latter case can
it compare itself with the great forces that have
wrought and fought in the field of history. And of
these forces Calvinism is to be reckoned among the
chief.

As to the man Calvin, and the opinions which make
up his theological system, very few words need here
be said. He was born in 1509, and died in 1564, at
the age of fifty-five. Observe these dates. The first
is the year when Henry VIII. became king of Eng-
land; the last, the sixth of the reign of Elizabeth.
Events on the Continent, particularly in France, are
still more suggestive; but they are less familiar to
us, and will not serve so well. AVe see, then, that
Calvin's mature years were passed among the earlier
preliminary struggles of the Eeformation, but before
its smothered passions burst out, as they soon did,
into armed conflict on a great scale. He was born
and educated a Catholic, in a provincial town of
ISTorthern France; had a lawyer's professional train-
ing, but with a strong leaning to theology ; was
marked very early by a keen, precocious ability ; and
somewhere about the age of twenty-tin ee, or a little
older, found himself a confirmed Protestant in belief.
His special service as legislator, and in some sense
ruler, almost dictator, at Geneva, then the city of
refuge for opponents of the Eoman Church, I need
not dwell on ; or on that strange and cruel yet con-
sistent act of his administration, the burning of Ser-

52 CALVINISM.

vetus. It is only of his system of belief (sketched
out, we must remember, at the age of twenty-six) —
that sad, sharp, intolerant, uncompromising system
known since by his name — that a few words are
here required.

The turning-points of this system are the immutable
Divine Decrees ; the Fall of Man in Adam ; inherited
guilt, wdtli native universal depravity ; condemnation
of the human race at large to endless misery; the
rescue of the elect by the sacrifice of Christ ; salva-
tion by faith, in the strict technical definition of that
phrase. These make the common ground of Protes-
tant orthodoxy. The distinctive " Five Points " of
Calvinism are absolute foreordination, natural ina-
bility (corruption of the will), irresistible grace, par-
ticular election, and perseverance of the saints.

Here let me say that the language of Calvin on
these points is almost verbally that of Paul, though
of course with immense dilation and repetition. His
doctrine — by his dry, positive, legal style of argu-
ment, interpreting the record just as he would a
statute or a will — is made out, fairly and logically
enough, from the language of the Testament, especially
that of the Epistles. The difference lies in two very
important things. First, the language of Paul is that
of a man of strong emotion, struggling with words to
express his own religious experience, particularly his
deep sense of contrition and dependence, — language
which it is very dangerous to interpret by the rigid
method of leG;al deduction, as Calvin has done. Sec-
ondly, Paul nowhere brings in the imagery of heaven
and hell, which gives such fiery and lurid emphasis

THE CREED OF CALVIN. 53

to the later doctrine. The doctrine of Predestination
was also put in strong and uncompromising terms by
Augustine, the one Catholic theologian whom Calvin
cites constantly and with respect. But it was re-
served for Calvin to put it fairly in the front, and to
state all its terms nnflinchingiy. It cannot be given
better than in his own w^ords. He says : —

. " We assert, that by an eternal and immutable counsel
God has once for all determined both whom he would
admit to salvation, and ivhom he would condemn to destruc-
tion. We affirm that this counsel, so far as concerns the
Elect, is founded on his gratuitous mercy, totally irre-
spective of human merit ; but that to those whom he de-
votes to condemnation the way of life is closed by his own
just and irreprehensible (doubtless), but incomprehensible
judgment."*

He frankly acknowledges that the natural heart
shrinks from this. " I confess," he says, " it is im-
possible ever wholly to prevent the petulance and
murmurs of impiety." I should think so ! But, as
we see, he takes the bull fairly by the horns. Some-
thing may be added for effect upon the imagination
in the frightful rhetoric of Jonathan Edwards's " Sin-
ners in the Hands of an Angry God," or of Boston's
" Fourfold State," but nothing of clear, definite appeal
to the understanding. Now I venture to assert that no
man living uses such terms at this day, with any seri-
ous attempt to attach distinct meaning to them. Will
any of those who talk so fluently about endless tor-
ment, inflicted " totally irrespective of human merit,"

* Institutes, iii. 21, 7. The standard translation qualifies the
sense by omitting the word "doubtless" {quidem).

54 CALVINISM.

say that they have ever tried to conceive even so
much as the agony of a toothache, lasting six months
together ? Nay, they would think it a -horrible thing
to torture a dog needlessly for a quarter of an hour.
Possibly we might have to except some cases of igno-
rant fanaticism, so far down in the intellectual scale
that they never come within hearing of educated ears.
But the common-sense as well as the common mercy
of mankind has agreed to cover up these words, and
the horrible images they suggest, with a decent veil of
allusion and reserve.

We need not at all suppose that they were so
shocking to Calvin and his contemporaries as they
necessarily appear to us. The whole theory of sove-
reignty in the Middle Age was grim and cruel. If
Ptichard of England or Philip "the Good" of Bur-
gundy would sweep his rebellious provinces with
sword and flame, and stay his hand only when he
had spent his strength ; if the sovereign of largest
intelligence and finest political genius of all that
time, Frederic 11. of Germany, cut off his prisoners'
hands and feet, put out their eyes, and so cast them
into the fire ; if the Christian Church did tlie same
thing, as far as lay in its power (witness the bloody
fields of Bohemia and the smokino; ruins of Lanoue-
doc 1) — what more natural than the notion that re-
bellion against the Almighty should be punished with
like vengeance, and on an infinitely grander scale ?
Calvin's hell could never have been invented in a
democratic republic.

Again, the penalty of treason specifically was that
it wrought "corruption of blood." The children of

CRUELTY AND MISERY OF THE AGE. 55

the guilty man were punished with him, or at least
deprived of their inheritance. What more natural
than to think that all the posterity of Adam were
" attainted " by his guilt ?

Again, the doom of heresy and schism — that is,
rebellion against the spiritual power — was well un-
derstood to be death by fire. Those who heard, as a
daily matter of fact, of the Spanish aiitos da /e, of
which the smallest incident nowadays would chill us
with horror and stir a tempest of avenging wrath ; or
who could stand quietly by, as they did in Geneva,
to hear Servetus calling in his agony upon Christ,
while his flesh was slowly crisped and shrivelled by
fagots of green wood, — could not possibly feel the
compunction and compassion which in a milder age
have blotted out or at least covered up that hideous
and blasphemous conception of Divine justice. The
gentle Melanchthon gloried in that horrible business
of Servetus, as a " pious and memorable example for
all posterity ! "

And, once more, the notion that happiness is, if
not " our being's end and aim," at least every man's
lawful pursuit, is quite a modern notion, never thought
of in those days of almost universal physical wretch-
edness. Eead of the horrors of the border wars of
Flanders in the fifteenth century, or of those un-
speakable miseries in the fourteenth that led to the
outburst of the French Jacquerie ; or listen to the
patlietic simplicity of the German peasants' appeal
in Luther's time for what to us are the merest pri-
mary rights of every man, even the criminal, the
savage, or the public enemy, — and you feel at once

56 CALVINISM.

that you are in a time not only of different facts, but
of different conceptions of the possibilities of those
facts. Misery, as men saw on every side, was the
natural, inevitable condition of a great majority of
mankind. It was an easy generalization to say it was
the natural or inherited condition of the human race
for all eternity. The only notion of happiness or
blessing as resting on physical condition that one
could get then was in the lives of the few, who, by
a privilege that seemed arbitrary and was certainly
undeserved, were lifted into a position which con-
trasted with that of the vast majority almost as
Paradise and the Pit.

It is important to bear in mind, then, that the Cal-
vinistic conception of the Universe was the natural,
all but inevitable reflection, upon the vast curtain of
Immensity, of the only condition of things which men
had seen as real, or perhaps had even thought of as
possible. And the same reasoning which shows how
inevitable that view was then shows also how and
why it is impossible to-day.

1 emphasize this view of Natural Evil, as it is re-
flected in the Calvinistic system, because it prepares
us for that view of Moral Evil which was, after all,
the root of the strength and tenacity we find in the
system. Its power came, as Mr. Froude has forcibly
shown, from its looking the facts of evil directly in
the face ; from doing its endeavor to work up those
facts into a theory, and set them forth in an orderly
and consistent plan.

After all, it is the evil in the world that wants
asserting or accounting for, much more than the good

IT FACED THE FACTS. 57

in the world. That Hand optimism, which we are
so apt to associate with the name of Liberalism,
goes but a very little way, and satisfies us only for a
very little while. Indeed, it is apt to lead straight to
mental effeminacy and self-indulgence, and so rather
to spoil us than help us for the good which it pro-
claims. It is a doctrine which could have originated
only among the comfortable classes in a self-indulgent
age. It is mere mockery and insult to the miserable
classes, or in an age of struggle and suffering. Pope
says, —

" And spite of pride, in erring reason's spite,
One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right" *

The fact is, as every serious man sees, that most
things are wrong, or at least stand in continual need
of mending ; and that it is the very business of our
lives, from the daily tasks of housekeeping up (or
down), to set as mauy of them right as we can, not
to recite the praises of tliem as they are.

First of all, then, the strength of Calvinism lay in
this, — that it faced the facts. It did not deny, it did
not cover up, it did not explain away. Eather, it
exaggerated the evil, projected it upon an appalling
scale, mad-e it the portal and key to a universe of
horror. Its explanation was very frightful. To the
modern mind it is both impious and incredible. But
it came nearer to men's thoughts then. Above all, it
came nearer to their experience, their passion, their

* "Whatever Pope meant by this, he was at any rate a sharp
satirist of a good many things in his own time, which doubtless
appeared to him quite wrong. Most likely these lines are only a
flourish, to glorify the fashionable philosophy of the day.

58 CALVINISM.

pain, their conflict, their fear. In this, then, — the
terror and the pain that haunt so many of the deep
places of human life, — it had the main foundation of
its strength. What tenacious hold it had, we see in
those words of sublime irony (as they come to us)
which Milton set in the proem to his grand poetic
exposition of that creed, whose motive is that he

" may assert eternal Providence,
And justify the ways of God to men ! "

But not only, as opposed to a pious or epicurean
optimism, it thus came nearer to men's experience.
It came closer home to their sense of duty, too. Only
in its degeneracy does Calvinism speak of men's being
passive recipients of divine grace. In its age of vigor
it meant an incessant, untiring, unrelenting war —
w^ar with sword in hand and hot hate and couraoe in
the heart — against that Evil of which its only defi-
nition was " enmity to God." It is most important
of all, in considering Calvinism as a force in history,
to see it — like Bunyan's Pilgrim, its finest imagina-
tive embodiment — in full armor and in fighting atti-
tude. Calvin himself was a man of incessant, restless,
strenuous activity ; not a man to love, we should say,
— irritable, dyspeptic, of thin acrimony, and morbid
jealousies, and outbursts of passionate temper. Still,
he was a man to respect in his way a good deal, and
perhaps to fear a little.

But we have to consider not his personal character,
which in most men, in its infinite details, is so much
a matter of circumstance ; rather, it is the stamp he
put on the religion of his time, — that which closely
allies itself with his outward activities and his thought.

PREDESTINATION. 59

That stamp is unmistakable. Nay, the very phrase
'' The Eelicrion," -used in his native tonsrue in distinc-
tion from the system of the Koman Church, means,
simply and as matter of course, the system of Calvin.
In its very nature it is aggressive. And this means
that it is intolerant, narrow, antagonistic, fitted to
attack.

ISTotice, too, that this fighting quality in Calvinism
lies in its very fundamental dogma, of absolute Pre-
destination. Can a serious man ever once think of
salvation as resting on his own merit ? If he has
been snatched- as a brand from the burning, he is the
Lord's once for all, to do witli as He will. In the
white heat of that conviction all fears, all pains, all
scruples disappear.* He may be a mere weapon of
vengeance — as Poltrot, to cut oft* the cruel and crafty
Duke of Guise. He may be a victim of oppression —
but as Coligny, who writes to his wife very simply of
some fresh outrage, that so the good Lord has seen
fit once more to try his servants. He may be a mark
of assassination — as Orange was for years ; but utter-
ly fearless, not taking even the simplest precaution,
because he cannot fall till his time is come. Of that
sword of Divine justice, which Calvinism was, we may
say that the sharp point was the Eternal Decree, and
that the two keen edges were Free Grace and Salva-
tion by Faith.

But observe, again, that it is but a weapon, unfit
for the services of peace. When peace comes, it

* "I had no more to do with the course pursued than a shot
leaving a cannon has to do with the spot where it shall fall." —
John Brown,

60 CALVINISM.

loses its temper, and must be beaten somehow into
a pruning-hook. The Church of England asserts
Predestination in its Seventeenth Article ; but with
a caveat against its dangerous use by " curious and
carnal persons." The Synod of Dort adopts it, but
with distinct mitigation of its rigid supralapsarian
sense. The Westminster Assembly repeats it, but with
a still more distinct protest against making God the
author of evil, or impairing the moral liberty of man.
We, for our part, think of the dogma chiefly for the
great part it has played in human history, as " the
sword of the Lord and of Gideon," by which the
Midianites of that day were to be struck down.

The spirit and nature of Calvinism, just described,
are best seen when we consider what were the objects
of its attack. I shall mention two.

First, of course, was the Eoman Church itself, —
its whole system of doctrine and ceremony, of dis-
cipline, confession and absolution, and especially its
claim of domination and supremacy. This Calvin
attacked in his character as Protestant ; and it is
curious to see, in his treatment of it, how he loses
that clear, impassive, legal tone which marks the rest
of his exposition, and becomes acrimonious, thinly
vindictive, and in point of fact slightly libellous.
There was unquestionably good reason for this. ISTo
doubt the Protestants believed with all their hearts
that Eome was Antichrist : their curious phrase " the
scarlet woman " is pretty familiarly descriptive, down
to our day. Calvinism was the sharp edge of Protest-
antism, and it meant attack. Considered in reference
to some of its opinions, — such as its doctrine of the

ITS WAR WITH ROME. 61

Sacraments, then a very vital thing, — it may be called
the religious radicalism of the day. And, taken so, it
contrasts strongly with the conservative, politic, com-
promising temper of Lutheranism, which always made
good friends with the powers of the world, and even,
on occasion, allied itself with Eomanism against its
truculent and uncomfortable yoke-fellow.

Calvinism then, first of all, found itself committed
to an unrelenting warfare against the Pope, as " the
Man of Sin," and all his works. To trace this in
detail would be to tell the story of the great religious
wars, especially in France and the Netherlands, and
the whole history of Puritanism in England. For the
present, and to illustrate the stern consistency of its
logic, I will only mention that the modern theory of
Eepublicanism was sketched very early by a Calvin-
ist of Geneva in a work carefully suppressed by his
fellow-religionists, and reappeared from time to time
among the Eeformers until it came to full vigor under
the English Commonwealth.* Besides this, as we
know, it was Calvinism that laid the corner-stone of
American democracy.

But, even without this challenge to the sovereigns
of the day, the attitude of Calvinism was one then of
very great daring. It was a sharp thorn in the side
of the still mighty Empire-Church. It chose its home,
or rather the spot for its intrenched camp, right on
the frontier of Catholic France, right under the shadow
of the mountains that bounded Papal Italy. Its his-

* A sketch of the early history of the republican doctrine, and
its connection with the Calvinists of Geneva, will be found in Isaac
Disraeli's Life of Charles /., vol. 11. pp. 318-345.

62 CALVINISM.

tory for forty years before the great wars came is the
very romance and adventure of religious biography,
as full of romance and adventure as that of the
Spaniards' struggle against the Moors. In the great
wars, especially those of the Dutch in the Low Coun-
tries and of the Huguenots in France, what was its
intrepid, fierce, unquenchable valor, there is no need
to remind any who have heard the name of William
the Silent, or Coligny, or Henry of Navarre,* whose
battle against Eome was very literally battle to the
death, — all three, victims of assassination directed
by priestly hands. The one man who represents the
largest thought and finest culture of Puritan England,
John Milton, and the one man who represents the most
sober and liberal opinion of the next generation, John
Locke, can find no tolerance for papists in a free com-
monwealth. And the Calvinists who colonized New
England could not suffer such a one to live among
them. For their young State, as they well knew,
Poper}^ was in that day a thing of life and death.
The other object — possibly not of conscious hos-
tility, but of real attack — was what it is customary
to call " the spirit of the Eenaissance," or, better per-
haps, " the Pagan Eevival." By this we mean, in a
very broad way, that spirit of culture, learning, art,
refinement, and personal luxury which came in during
the two centuries before the Eeformation, and has
made so marked a thingr in modern life.

o
* Observe that I say " Henry of Navarre," not "Henry IV. of
France," which he became after his faith had gone out of him in
the acceptance of a creed he never believed. But he was still man
enough to resist intolerance, and to be honored with the deadly en-
mity of the Church.

ITS WAR WITH ART. 63

One must read the eloquent tirades of Euskin, to
get — in a very idealized way, and with much superb
rhetoric — a notion of the suspicion, hostility, and
hate which this spirit provoked, at that time of earn-
est controversy, in all serious-minded men. Now we
ourselves owe so much to this spirit of what is com-
fortable, beautiful, and refined in our daily life, and
the new passion for adornment and the finer arts of
luxury has taken so strong hold on our generation,
that we are apt to think of the Calvinistic protest
against it all as merely rude and barbaric. In two
ways, however, it was something different, and was
necessarily a part of the war against Evil, which was,
so to speak, the essence of Calvinism. The first was
the way of attack upon what is called Eeligious Art,
used mainly for the decoration of churches, and so con-
tributing to the vitality and strength of the system
which Calvinism assailed as the great source of evil.
This way led to the lamentable destruction of churches,
statues, pictures, and other decorations, under the fury
of reforming zeal, in England, Scotland, and the Neth-
erlands. The second was directed against the spirit of
revived Paganism itself, as expressed in literature and
art generally. This is what we know as Puritanism.

Even religious Art, so called, from being wholly
grave and serious, had become mere ostentatious
luxury and splendor. The Eeformers could not for-
get that the building of St. Peter's in Eome had
occasioned that very scandal of indulgences which
called out the first protest. The Pagan art which fol-
lowed threw off all pretensions to sanctity, and with
appalling frankness reproduced the most seductive

64 CALVINISM.

and sensual side of the Greek mythology, itself a
degrading travesty of serious old myths of the primi-
tive Aryan nature- worshi]3. The trained mind of
modern scholarship sees in those myths what they
j)robably meant at first, — a sort of undisguised and
unsophisticated poetry, dealing now with phenomena
of earth and sky, now with what we should prefer to
convey in physiological lectures and scientific treatises.
But not so the emancipated thought of .the sixteenth
century, before modern popular science had begun to
be. To this the old mythology had simply the charm
of a certain fresh appeal to fancy, a sensuous grace
and fascination, which long ages of monastic asceti-
cism had covered out of sight ; which issued forth,
to the amazement and horror of serious -minded men,
along with the revived classic learning.

The name of Eabelais is cited as the pioneer of
this spirit in French letters. Its extreme degrada-
tion is to be found in the literature of a lower period,
which may be fitly enough characterized by that suc-
cinct phrase of Scripture, " earthly, sensual, devilish."
But without going down so low as that, it may be
enough to mention the pictures of Correggio, as an
example at once of the most exquisite grace that
resides in grouping, coloring, and sentimental love-
liness, as one sees in his fairest of Madonnas and his
loveliest of infant cherubs ; and, at the same time, of
a subtly insinuated charm in his Pagan compositions,
— his Ledas, Danaes, los, — a beguilement of merely
sensual beauty, which to the stern iconoclast must
seem that very " lust of the eye " against which he
had declared unrelenting war.

IT IS THE HEAKT OF PROTESTANTISM. 65

In terms, I do not know that this war was ever
outspoken against statues, pictures, and poetry, at
least in Calvin's time. Bat it is plain that the Pagan
revival, whatever its merits or its faults, had no more
bitter and unpardoning enemy than the spirit of his
followers. I^ow Art — duly limited to the fringing
and adorning of the temple of life, or made the serious
business of those to whom it is the natural language
of thought, emotion, and fact— is a thing as good as
it is beautiful. But as between that art which fills
no small part of European galleries, and is fitly named
Pagan, — as between that and the temper of mixed
hostility and dread with which Calvinism met it, I
have little hesitation in saying that Calvinism had
the right. The witchcraft of that sensuous and se-
ductive charm, and the hard, inexorable temper of
that hostility are brought straight before us in the
picture — so full of tender, mournful, tragical sug-
gestion — of John Knox, stern and menacing, as he
stands before the guilty Queen of Scots, whose femi-
nine fears and fascinations shrink alike before the
glance of that unpitying eye.

The foregoing illustrations are all we have time for
now, to show the nature and spirit of the warfare in
which Calvinism found itself engaged. Two views of
it are still remaining to complete the outline of it
which I have attempted to trace.

For the first we have the striking fact that Calvin-
ism embodied all the aggressive, what we may call
the positive, force of the Pteformation westward of the
Ehine. Lutheranism had in it from the start a certain
spirit of compromise. It found its home in the North

5

66 CALVINISM.

German courts and populations, where its strength is
to this day. Anglicanism is, at its broadest and best,
a national and not a universal religion. Socinianism
struck too directly, with its dry rationalism, at what
was felt at the time to be tlie vital centre of Christian
life ; and its name, with whatever honor it really de-
serves for genuine piety and straightforward honesty,
has remained ever since a byword of reproach, dis-
owned by Unitarians and contemned by Orthodox.

The real strength of the Eeformation lay in about
half of France, till it was extinguished in a cruel
religious war, and its relics were brutally trampled
down, both before and after the "Eevocation" of
1685 ; in the Netherlands, w^here it fought for fifty
years the most obstinate and glorious fight on record,
till it triumphed under Maurice and Barneveldt ; in
England, where Puritanism was the power behind the
throne of Elizabeth, and its alliance of Presbyterian
and Independent was victorious under Cromwell ; in
Scotland, where under Knox it forbade the banns of
papist alliance with France, and established with
Melville the most rigid system of instruction and
discipline that ever constrained the energies of a
valiant, restless, hard-headed, and intelligent people ;
in America, where the northern seaboard was held by
a hardy and devout race of pioneers, who faithfully
served God and man in a certain hard, forbidding
way, held their own invincibly in the savage border-
war waged on them by the Jesuit settlements of
Canada, planted in little local liberties the germ of
what has grown out into an immense political sys-
tem, and communicated a certain astringent flavor to

ITS SABBATAKIANISM. 67

the home-brewed piety, which you taste to-day from
the briny waters of Maine to those of California.

All over the spaces just indicated Calvinism has
given the tone and type of Protestantism, so that
even the scientific Liberalism of the present day is
perhaps best known by its antagonism to that. This
predominance of the Calvinistic spirit appears very
curiously in one thing, — the Sabbatarian temper of
all Protestant communities that have taken their tone
from it. ]^ow Calvin was by no means himself a
Sabbatarian, in our sense. When John Knox (I have
read) once called upon him, he found him playing a
game of ball on a Sunday afternoon, — a thing some
of us liberals might rather hesitate to do. In Catho-
lic countries, Sunday — at least half of it — is frankly
made a holiday. It is hardly different in Lutheran
countries : at least, I remember at Dresden a popular
fair, with wild-beast shows and shooting at a mark,
when the weary Sunday-morning service was done.
In Puritan New England we have gone so far as to
open free libraries and art galleries on that day, though
by sufferance, as it were, and under strong protest.
Calvinism — the system, not the man — is the source
of that sad, still, ascetic observance of the day, more
common once than now, and of calling it strangely
by the Jewish name of Sahhath, instead of its Chris-
tian name of Lord's Day, or its good old heathen one
of Sunday. It is, so to speak, the genius of the sys-
tem, protesting in a certain blind, hard way against
the spirit of the Pagan revival, — the spirit that re-
joices in "the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes,
and the pride of life ; " that addicts itself to ungodly

68 CALVINISM.

and sensual delights ; that loves Beauty for its own
sake, and not merely, if at all, as a symbol of some-
thing else ; that would multiply the pleasures of life,
careless of the risk of incidental harm; that lets a
childlike, unthinking joy in natural sights and sounds
run too easily into an indulgence all the more danger-
ous, perhaps, because under the ban and outside the
sjanpathy of excellent, scrupulous, self-denying, joy-
less men.

But, again, we find Calvinism not merely as an
austere type of piety. It is also a fountain-head of
stern, aggressive, self-sacrificing virtue, rising often to
the heights of moral heroism, so necessary to brace up
the tone of morals in an age of license, and even, at a
crisis, to save the very life of a State, political as well
as social. Take, for one type of it, the self-devotion
shown in the missionary enterprise : divest it of the
horrible dogma it proceeds upon, — that the souls of
the unconverted heathen, without it, must drop in-
cessantly, or rather pour, in a perpetual cataract of
eighty thousand souls a day, into the gulf of endless
perdition, — and see it only in its spirit of endurance,
courage, sympathy, enthusiasm, such that to a young
man looking forward to a career it shall seem the
highest joy to die a martyr in tropical swamps (and
I have myself known such) ; and where else shall we
look for a type of character which does more honor to
what is highest in human nature ?

Or take, again, a movement like the Antislavery or
Temj^erance crusade, — assuming, as under the con-
ditions of human society we may fairly do, that at a
given time and place such a crusade is necessary, —

ITS PASSING AWAY. 69

and where shall we find the agents and weapons for
such a warfare, hearts hot and valiant, weapons tem-
pered and keen, except from that enormous reservoir
of moral power which it has been the great mission
of Calvinism to keep from running dry ? As an
intellectual system (as I began by saying) its day is
long past. But as a moral force, there was never
perhaps more need than now of the spirit it repre-
sents. The forms of Puritanism cannot long survive ;
but from the heart of it, even yet, are some of the
best issues of our life.

And this leads me directly to the last point of which
I propose to speak. The system of Calvinism is cer-
tainly destined to pass away, and possibly before very
long, in the revolutions of human thought. I do not
think it needs any argument to show this to a thought-
ful and observant person, and I shall offer none. But,
if we will think of it, its passing away is a very serious
thing, and one not altogether, perhaps, to be received
with cheers and shouting. That depends greatly on
what is coming to take its place. Now I am as far
as possible from any partiality to the scheme itself
I learned early in childhood to dread and dislike the
mean temper of petty persecution it had run into, to
think of it as the one thino' to be resisted in the field
of religious thought. It is only by reflection and a
wider view of thino-s that I have come to see it in the
light I have attempted to throw upon it. This shows
bearings in the matter not so clear before.

There are three great Scottish names, which may
stand for three phases of the very difficult question I
have tried to state.

70 CALVINISM.

A hundred years ago, in Scotland, Calvinism had
run out, in many quarters, into a dry, intolerant dog-
matism, hard alike to all free thinking and to all free
joy in life. It was little past the middle of the life
of Eobert Burns, then a youth of twenty-one, with
sixteen years yet before him to live as a man. We
know what that system made of him : the bitter pro-
test, the pitiless satire, the mocking unbelief, all hot
from an honest heart ; and, along with them, the dis-
repute, the loss of self-respect, the reckless indulgence,
that clouded and blurred his splendid genius, until he
died in early manhood, discarding and discarded by
the austere creed that had been the glory and strength
of Scotland in her heroic days. To quote the pathetic
language of his biographer, who is also both his eulo-
gist and his countryman, —

"He has no religion. In the shallow age where his
days were cast, religion was not discriminated from the
Xew and Old Light forms of Eehgion, and was, with
these, becoming obsolete in the minds of men. His heart,
indeed, is ahve with a trembling adoration ; but there is
no temple in his understanding. He lives in darkness,
and in the shadow of doubt. His rehgion, at best, is an
anxious wish, — like that of Eabelais, a great Perhaps."

A few years later, we have the illustrious example of
Thomas Chalmers, — in religious energy, after Knox,
probably the greatest son of Scotland. With him,
after a j^eriod of mere formal belief, the system came
home with personal conviction ; and all the force of
his powerful nature went out into the glorious work
he did in his Glasgow parish of twenty thousand
souls, — one of the grandest proofs of what moral

THREE SCOTTISH NAMES. 71

forces were latent there, allied with the ancient faith,
and of what one live strong man can do for men.

Again, after one more generation, we have the
shrewd thinker, the sad humorist, the cynical phi-
losopher, the marvellous expounder of history, the
vigorous declaimer against all sorts of mental effemi-
nacy and self-indulgence, the despairing propliet of
England's future, Thomas Carlyle, — whose deeply
religious nature still keeps loyal to tlie memory of
his early faith ; who refuses to think of religious
things except in the phrases and formularies of the
Calvinism he has outgrown ; whose immense range
of culture makes his old beliefs impossible, while the
stern, sad tone of them survives in the bleak pessi-
mism, the disdain of human weakness, the haughty
deference to a mere mighty or else almighty Force,
that have given him his unique place among men of
letters.

I bring these names together not for their likeness,
but for their unlikeness, yet all as illustrations of what
we have to think of when old things are passing
away and all things are becoming new. They bring
straight before us, in a threefold way, the variety of
influences that may flow out from a system nominally
one. They suggest what will perhaps appear, if we
think of it, the gravest question a thinking man can
ask himself, — how, in parting from outgrown and
pernicious error, we may yet keep the Truth, which
converts the soul and saves the world.

Of those three greatest Scottish names of the last
hundred years, — greatest, certainly, as representing
personal or moral force, — the first was unquestiona-

72 CALVINISM.

bly the finest genius. The second was noblest in
personal character, and of best — at least, most de-
voted — service to his own immediate generation.
But of Carlyle this in particular may be said : that
his is at once the most powerful and the manliest
influence that has gone out upon the English mind
of our time. Sometimes, indeed, it seems hard to
imagine what form or degree of effeminacy might
not have held the field but for that one influence.
"Wrong-headed, violent, eccentric, unjust at times, liis
voice has rung like a trumpet against everything cow-
ardly, degenerate, and base. Scornfully intolerant of
religious bigotries, hypocrisies, and false pretensions
of every sort, his prodigious personal force has always
weighed, if not for the gentler humanities, at least
against the cruel inhumanities, of modern life.* That
wholesome, bracing, pungent, northern air has swept
before it many a reeking fog and poisonous exhala-
tion. And when we think of the manliest and sound-
est word that is spoken to-day in the English tongue
on any one of the great questions that lie open, — po-
litical, moral, philoso2:)hical, religious, — w^e think first
of " Past and Present," of tliose marvellous Histories,
of those volumes of Carlyle's " Essays ; " and to these
we add the small but vigorous group that, with some-
thing of his wilfulness, have show^ed something also

* It is a pity to have to except from this the ignorant and con-
temptuous tone in which Carlj'le always spoke of American slavery,
and of our civil war. Still, something may be pardoned to his
hatred of that cant to which sucli distant issues were nearer than
the sufferings and inhumanities close at home. And Carlyle's hon-
est hostility was at least better than Kingsley's surprising conver-
sion when the crisis came which he had just been preaching to us
to meet like men.

CAELYLE. 73

of his strength, — among them Charles Kingsley, and
John Euskiu, and James Anthony Froude, and Ealph
Waldo Emerson.

I would not go to Carlyle — so far as I know or
care — for a single opinion upon any topic, or for
sound judgment on any historical person or event.
Mere contact with that powerful intelligence is the
one sufficient thing. It illustrates better than any-
thing else I can call to mind the immortal soul that
survives from a body of opinion intellectually dead.
Such mental virility is one more item of the great
debt our generation owes to the faith which nurtured
it and made it possible. It confirms the hope that,
while the system associated with the name of Calvin
must pass away, the mental vigor, the moral courage,
the intolerant hate of Evil under all disguises, tlie
stern loyalty to Truth, will yet remain, an imperisha-
ble possession of mankind.

IV.

THE PUEITAN COMMONWEALTH.

COMMONWEALTH is good old English for that
later and much abused word " Eepublic," which
hardly once appears * in the writings of the time
we are considering. And it expresses, better than
any other term, the oneness of life, the community
of interest, the reciprocity of rights and duties, what
in modern phrase we have learned to call the " soli-
darity," of the State. The term " Commonwealth " is
therefore as near a rendering as we can easily get,
from the modern, human, or political point of view, of
the old religious phrase " Kingdom of Heaven," which
made the first Christian ideal of human society.

It is probable that the complete break-down of tlie
Mediaeval theory, which sought to realize this ideal by
its splendid fiction of a universal Empire-Church, had
much to do with the suddenness and the passion with
which this new ideal, at once political* and religious,
took possession of serious minds. That "the king-
doms of this world should become the Kingdom of our
Lord " was no longer possible, nor could it be even
hoped for, under the old ecclesiastical rule.

* " Republic " is cited as used in poetry by Drayton and by Ben
Jonson. It is not found in Shakspeare, who uses the word "com-
monwealth" or its equivalent "commonweal" nearly forty times.

UTOPIA. 75

And so, as soon as the fury of ecclesiastical strife
had abated, before the faith in a divinely revealed
order of government had waned, there grew up, nat-
urally, a form of opinion which held that the con-
stitution of human society itself must be avowedly
religious, and Jesus Christ the only rightful king.
So he had been proclaimed by Savonarola in Florence ;
and so Antinomian and Anabaptist fury had declared,
with savage fanaticism, in the era of the Eeformation.
It was a natural sequel that, when Puritan Eeform
had once got the ascendency in England, the name in
which it proclaimed itself was "Commonwealth;" and
its most consistent zealots, the Fifth Monarchy Men,
"lookinc^ on the Covenant as the settinsj Christ on
his throne, seemed," says Burnet, "to be really in
expectation every day" when He should personally
appear.

Besides, the great discoveries that came just before
the time of the Eeformation had stimulated men's
imagination, as well as widened the visible horizon.
The New World invited out their fancy, to play in
dreams of a social state pure from the violences and
wrongs with which the Old World was too familiar.
More's " Utopia " and Bacon's " Atlantis " are both in
the vague wonderland beyond the sea.* These dreams
are crude and vague, as we might expect. The com-
munism of Utopia, which is a sort of humanitarian
Sparta, is upheld by such innocent devices as making
gems into children's baubles, and fabricating from the

* It is curious to note that in "Utopia," wliicli was WTitten while
the discoveries were very fresh, Americus Yespucius is the recognized
explorer, while Columbus is quite unknown.

76 THE PURITAN COMMONWEALTH.

precious metals vessels of clislionor and chains for
slaves. But there are noble and kindly thoughts of
a State which (as our modern States profess) should
feed the poor, cure the sick, and care for the public
health ; while, in contrast to the ecclesiastical terror
under which men groaned, perfect freedom of con-
science is a fundamental right of every man.

The ideal Commonwealth, as distinct from the po-
litical forms of a Eepublic, happens to have had a
peculiar fascination for the best English minds. Per-
haps it is easier to idealize the life of a nation so
completely rounded and separated in its boundaries
as Britain. Sliakspeare often makes us think so, in
his splendid appeals to the honor and pride of Eng-
land. And in this Shakspeare is the voice of that
great age of national uplifting in which he lived.
Moral idealism, however, was no part of Shakspeare's
faculty, and to an3^thing like religious heroism he felt
a distinct repugnance. He nowhere shows human
character on anything so high a level as we see it in
some of his great contemporaries, — Sidney, Orange,
and Coligny, to say nothing of those humbler country-
men of his, the Puritan martyrs. His hero-prince was
the vindictive persecutor of the Lollards, as well as
the truculent and unscrupulous invader of France.
It was martial and feudal Enoiand that kindled his
fancy, not any large dream of what England might
come to be, as a land of organized liberty and justice,

" Where freedom slowly broadens down
From precedent to precedent."

For that, we go to a class of minds less poetic and

AN ARISTOCRATIC REPUBLIC. 77

impassioned, more vigorous and masculine, dealing
more closely with the outworking of the nation's
political and social life.

Quite in contrast to the way in which the idea of a
Commonwealth was afterwards worked out, we find it
first illustrated in a series of aristocratic names. Sir
Thomas More, Sir Philip Sidney,* Sir Walter Ealeigh,
and Sir Francis Bacon are the men we should have
to study, if we would learn the earlier phases which
that idea took in English thought. These names, at
first view, represent the pride and vigor of a ruling
class, much more than they do the popular sympathy
or the religious ardor which proved the working forces
in that field.

And their fortunes were singularly apart from any
such achievement. More died a martyr of his fidelity
to the Pope against the King. Sidney perished the
victim of ill-advised bravery on a petty foreign field.
Bacon " chose all learning for his province," and be-
came a great light to the secular understanding of
his age, strong to think and very weak to execute.
Ealeigh was kept for those years of his life which
should have been his noblest and best close prisoner
in the Tower, and at length lost his head, partly (it
would seem) on suspicion of the bigoted and jealous
James, that he had schemed an aristocratic Eepublic

* This motive in Sidney is best seen in his Letters, especially that
addressed to AValsingham. One who has attempted to traverse the
tiresome pathways of his "Arcadia " is surprised to learn that it is
"a continual gi'ove of morality, shadowing moral and jwlitical re-
sults under the plain and easy emblems of lovers." This at least
shows what Sidney's character and motive were believed to be by
those who knew him.

78 THE PURITAN COMMONWEALTH.

whicli should set aside the ill-omened succession of
the House of Stuart.*

It is, indeed, tempting to reflect what the history
of England might have been with Ealeigh for an
earlier Lord Protector ; if that evil succession had
been set aside for a brilliant secular Kepublic, whose
constitution-maker had been Bacon, its poet Shak-
speare, and its executive chief the heroic Prisoner
himself. And something of this, it is not impossi-
ble, may have been among the thoughts of his long
captivity.

It is this same aristocratic tradition, strong against
the divine right of Monarchy, which we find long
after in Harrington, whose " Oceana " is a hardly dis-
guised England of the Commonwealth, — under an
idealized Protector, — resented by the real CroniAvell
as a lecture of political pedantry aimed at him ; and
in that haughty and choleric scion of nobility, Alger-
non Sidney ,f who speculated at large, under the Pies-
toration, of the supreme authority of Parliament above
any King, — speculations which brought him to the
block in 1683. Cromwell, says Burnet, J "studied to

* "At a consultation at Whitehall after Queen Elizabeth's death,"
says Aubrey, " how matters were to be ordered, and what ought to be
done, Sir Walter Raleigh declared his opinion, 't was the wisest way
for them to keep the staff in their own hands, and set up a Common-
wealth." — Raleigh : Works, vol. viii. p. 740.

+ A characteristic anecdote of him is that, when in France, a
very fine horse he rode attracted the eye of King Louis, who offered
a generous sum for its purchase. Refusing ,this, and seeing that the
wilful king would liave his way, he dismounted and shot the horse
through the head, saying that the noble creature had borne a freeman
hitherto, and should never be the slave of a despot.

X In the "History of his own Times."

THE COURT AND THE PURITANS. 79

divide the Commonwealth party among themselves,
and to set the Fifth Monarchy Men and the enthusi-
asts against those who pretended to little or no re-
ligion, and acted only upon the principles of civil
liberty, such as Algernon Sidney and Harrington."

But these proud and great men did not guess the
forces which were preparing to give a triumph to the
revolutionary idea, which they could imagine as little
as they could share. The Eeformation had been taken
very much to heart by the English people, in a form
which the sovereigns of the Eeformation regarded
with about equal alarm, jealousy, and contempt. The
Lollards had had their early martyrs under the writ
" for burning heretics," passed by the House of Lan-
caster, and cruelly put in force by the House of Tudor.
Before Elizabeth had been six years on the throne,
the name " Puritan " began to be known in something
of the sense, political as well as religious, which made
it afterwards so formidable. Elizabeth doubtless dis-
liked the Puritans more, though she happily feared
them less, than she did the Papist conspirators against
her life. She knew, she said, what would content the
Papists ; but never knew what would content the
Puritans. AVhitgift, her "little black husband" as
she called him, schemed and partly effected an Eng-
lish prelacy as arbitrary and despotic as that of
Eome. And she thought, no doubt, to checkmate
the rising spirit of Eepublicanism, as much as to
maintain the divine right of the Queen she had be-
headed, when she signified that the crown must pass
to James,*

* Sometime towards tlie end of her life cheers had been given

80 THE PUKITAN COMMONWEALTH.

The visionary aristocratic Commonwealth at once
collapsed. AYhatever hopes the Puritan party may
have had in a king of Presbyterian training were
suddenly crushed at Hampton Court (1604), where
James conceived and uttered liis famous phrase, " N'o
bishop, no king." Episcopacy became more and more
the fast ally of Monarchy, leading straight to the
"Thorough" policy of Laud and Wentworth (1629-
1641). To Laud's phrase "Thorough" the Puritans
soon opposed their own " Pioot-and-Branch." Parties
so minded have not long to wait for a cause of quar-
rel ; and the Presbyterians were the first to declare
openly against the King.

But behind the political conflict which drifted fast
towards the Great Ptebellion was the religious motive,
kept fresh and hot by sharp repressions on one side,
increasing fanaticism on the other. The Presbyteri-
ans would have made a party of aristocratic reform,
vigorous and resolute for political ends, but loyal, if
possible, to the King. True Puritanism, with its in-
tensity of religious zeal, and its contempt of precedent
and consequence, went over more and more to the
ranks of the Independents.

The Independents, as Bacon in his large intelligence
had regarded them, were " a very small number of very
silly and base people, here and there in corners dis-
persed." The large intelligence, which had taken all
knowledge to be its province, was quite blind to that

for the Queen and State : "this the Queen saw and hated." — Dis-
raeli : Life of Charles I. chap. xii. The great struggle for the in-
dependence of the Netherlands was having its effect on the English
popular imagination.

THE PLYMOUTH COLONY. 81

power (not of knowledge but of faith) which consists
in the fervent heat of religious conviction, not in the
dry light of human science. In another generation,
the " very silly and base i^eople " had grown so as to
furnish regiments of Ironsides, which triumphed un-
der Cromwell at Naseby and Marston Moor, in 1645 ; *
and from that date Puritanism was master of the field
for fifteen years.

One of the " corners " into which Independency had
been dispersed, was that obscure birthplace of our
Pilgrim Colony, Scrooby in Nottinghamshire, whence
the persecuted congregation fled to Holland in the
early years of James (1608). It was just when the
successes of the Netherlands forced PhiHp of Spain
to a twelve years' truce, which gave great hope not
only of peace but of religious liberty. When the
wiser heads, such as Barneveldt's, saw the ominous
approach of the dreaded war w^hich was to afflict
Europe for thirty years, — perhaps, too, we may add,
when the Synod of Dort, by its condemnation of the
patriot Barneveldt, showed that religious liberty was
no longer to be hoped for, — it was time for the little
congregation to plan and carry out its daring winter
migration to America.

The fortunes of the Plymouth Colony would take
us too far from the path we have to follow. Only it
should be said, just here, that that Colony was strictly
in the line of advance which the best religious thought

* This is the date given by Hallam for the first appearance of
republican ideas in Parliament. But, as bis words imply, the idea
of the Commonwealth, both political and religious, is much older
than that.

6

82 THE PURITAN COMMONWEALTH.

of England was making towards a Commonwealth.
It was meant to effect " the practical part of Eefor-
mation." Its motive was not simple freedom of wor-
ship, as is sometimes said, but to create " a civil body
politic." Its first corporate act was not ecclesiastical,
but political : it was to form that " Covenant " which
was, in fact, the earliest formal organizing of Democ-
racy. The powerful attraction of this idea is seen in
the fact that the task of colonizing was virtually com-
pleted within twenty years ; and the vigor and effect
with which it was done is seen in the fact that from
those who came there were born (it is reckoned) no
less than a third of the entire population of the
United States as it existed before the Civil War.
The tenacity of purpose which carried the nation
through that awful struggle in our own day was in
the most literal sense the strain of the same blood
that flowed in the Puritan Commonwealth of Crom-
well.

The governing idea on both sides tlie ocean, quite
as much republican as religious, meets us constantly
in the early records of Xew England. AYe find it in
the incessant reference to Christ — not the Church —
as the real authority in religious things. We find it
in a certain jealousy of clerical control in matters of
general concern, — as marriage, which is made a civil
contract, not a sacrament. It is political sagacity,
quite as much as any particular intensity of religious
feeling, which prescribes tliat the infant Common-
wealth shall be not only Cliristian, but Congregation-
al ; which identifies citizenship with church-member-
ship; which even goes into the sphere of personal

NEW ENGLAND CONGREGATIONALISM. 83

religion, by demanding a declaration of "the work
of grace " from every candidate for the political fran-
chise. It was the apprehension of civil disorders
which, growing out of sectarian division, might be
fatal to the Colony, — not ecclesiastical bigotry and
oppression, — that checked the rising rage of contro-
versy by the cruel exile of Ann Hutchinson and
Eoger Williams, and afterwards of the Quakers.

It was, again, the spirit of Independency that took
the alarm, when the Presbyterian party, victorious in
Parliament, undertook to found a national establish-
ment, in which the church-polity of the Covenant with
Scotland should be enforced upon all subjects and
colonies of England ; and that, to foil what it deemed
a dangerous plot, sent its envoys into England, where,
in 1645, they joined hands with the Independents,
just now victorious under Cromwell.

Thus Congregationalism remained the established
Order, in State as well as Church, till in 1662 the
new Charter of Charles 11. required that all should
be recognized as equal citizens who were " orthodox
in their religion, and not vitious in their lives." Even
in our own day, and since the disappearance here of
the last relic of the ecclesiastical establishment in
1833, something of the old jealousy remains, which
has prevented the Presbyterian Order from gaining
any strong foothold in 'New England ; and the name
Commonwealth still remains the oJB&cial title of the
two oldest of our States.*

* Massacliusetts and Virginia. It will be noticed that the latter
in its history represents the aristocratic republicanism of Raleigh,
as the other does the religious democracy of John Robinson.

84 THE PURITAN COMMONWEALTH.

But tlie Commonwealth, as an outgrowtli of the
Eeformation, does not belong to England alone, or to
the party we know as Puritan. It was in a broader
sense the spirit of that revolutionary age. The be-
ginnings of Democracy in Europe have been referred
to Calvin's " Discipline," which displaced the old aris-
tocratic rule in Geneva, and was carried over by John
Knox into Scotland. One might even plausibly sup-
pose that it had an earlier origin yet, and was allied
with some tradition of the stormy democracy of the
Italian and Flemish towns in the Middle Age. Its
new birth, at any rate, was due to the immense re-
ligious revival, and to the revolutionary passions of
the century of the Eeformation. The Peasants' War
and the disorders of the Anabaptists had brought to
the front a complete code of democratic socialism in
Luther's time, which with much pains had been blood-
ily suppressed. These were among the earliest first-
fruits of the new liberty.

In France, the Protestant cause had kept on living
terms with the Monarchy till the fatal date of 1559,
when the kings of France and Spain entered into
their secret treaty for its extirpation,* and the ill-
concerted plot of Amboise in the following year, which
gave the Court its pretext for cutting off the chief
heads of that cause. As early as 1574 — stimulated,
no doubt, by the monstrous murder of St. Bartholo-

* This was the famous treaty of Cateau-Cambresis, whose secret
was unwarily betrayed to William of Orange, and his wary keeping
of the secret earned him the celebrated title of "the Silent." See
Motley's "Dutch Republic," and Baird's " History of the Eise of
the Huguenots of France."

THE HUGUENOTS. 85

mew — writings were widely circulated in France,
questioning or denying all royal authority, except
what was founded in the public good* It may have
been by royalist reaction, or it may have been a bitter
satire on the maxims of monarchy in that day, when a
counter-memorial, addressed to Catherine de Medicis,
set forth the methods of a perfect despotism on the
model of Turkey, — a despotism which would sup-
press all class privileges, reduce all subjects to an
absolute level, and admit no right of property, even,
in private hands ; asserting that all wealth should
(as in the imperial times of Rome) belong in full
ownership to the king.f These symptoms, emerging
amidst the wars of religious passion, and the terrors
of conspiracy and massacre, show that dissensions
perilously radical, touching the very source of justice
and the foundation of authority, were fast coming to
the front.

One effect of these dissensions was to foment that
obstinate feud between the Court of France and some
of the most powerful nobles which gave the Huguenot
party its military chiefs, which made it distinctly a
political as much as a religious party, which intoxi-
cated it with the dream and the fatal ambition of
creating a Eeformed Ptepublic by partition of the
realm, or even by league with Spain. It is not likely
that any of these noble chiefs — the Bourbons, the
Eohans, and the Condes — cared much for the Eefor-

* See De Thou, book Ivii., chap. viii.

+ Disraeli thinks that the proposal was "bitter satire." But it
does not go at all, in theory, beyond the doctrine asserted by the
" thorough " advisers of Charles I. See Hallam, chap. viii.

86 THE PURITAN COMMONWEALTH.

mation religiously : in a generation or two these great
Houses were frankly in alliance with the Eoman
Church. For forty years or more, however, the Pro-
testant cause in France aimed distinctly at a republic,
both military and aristocratic, — wdiich at one time it
seemed fairly to have established, when the murder
of Henry IV. left that for their only chance. But
Eichelieu's policy — unity of France and suppression
of the nobles — was carried out with that appalling
severity and craft which soon paralyzed all enemies
of the Monarchy ; and the kingdom lay disarmed be-
fore such exercises of royal policy as the Eevocation
of the Edict of Toleration in 1685.

The political by-play between the courts of France
and England, and the dread of something very like
a popish league between the two, must count for
something in the deadly w^rath and suspicion of the
Pteforming party, wdiich drove Charles from all his
defences, and forced the issue of a Puritan Common-
wealth. The parliamentary leaders would have been
satisfied with their defeat of Eoyalty in the death of
Strafford. The Presbyterian clergy would have been
satisfied with their defeat of Prelacy in the death of
Laud. But the Independents had another end in
view. The execution of the king was closely followed
by the suppression of the House of Lords, and the
lodging of all power with the Commons, — which soon
proved the supremacy of the Army and of its plebeian
Chief.

We have nothing here to do with the political story,
or with that crafty policy of Cromwell which suffers
in our esteem by nothing more than by what Carlyle

MILTON. 87

meant for its vindication, — the bare assertion of un-
scrupulous and remorseless will. The real vindica-
tion of Cromwell is partly a great name which, like a
bonfire, shines with a clearer blaze as you get farther
away from it ; but, still more, that he kept to the last
the steady admiration and esteem of the one man who
represents to us in all its splendor the political and
religious ideal of his day, and has left to the great
Protector, for all after time, the verdict of that grand
phrase, " Our Chief of Men."

Milton is one of the few heroic names in literary
history. Both in the romance of his early verse and
in the lofty severity of his great poem, he is naturally
compared to Dante. But his real greatness, more dis-
tinctly and far more purely than that of Dante, is in
the sphere of action, — not in active politics, and not
in the field, but in acting through his writings upon
the mind and temper, of his time. There is no other
great name in letters that would suffer so much in-
justice if judged mainly by literary standards. Liter-
ature, as such, he distinctly renounced, when it came
to the deliberate choice of the work of his manhood.
All the splendid promise of his youth ; the personal
gifts that made him welcome among the best poets
and scholars of his time, in Italy as well as England ;
the scholarly culture, fostered by his father's wise in-
dulgence, ripe and deliberate as few young men have
ever had the mind or time for ; the accomplishments
of the day, including music, and such skill in fencing
that "the lady of his college" (as for his shapely
beauty he was called) could give a good account of
himself with his weapon " to a much stouter man,"

«8 THE PURITAN COMMONWEALTH.

he says, if he had been wantonly attacked ; the am-
bition and the dream of his early life, that he " might
perhaps leave something so written to after-times, as
they should not willingly let it die," — all this was
his, only to enhance the value of the gift he brought,
when he made haste to offer his life to the service of
the nation. He had "determined to lay up as the
best treasure and solace of a good old age the honest
liberty of free speech from his youth." *

In all literary biography there is probably not an-
other example so splendid, of the sacrifice which a
mind so trained must find it hardest of all to make.
The five years following his college life had been spent
" in the quiet and still air of delightful studies ; " and
that rare training was to be completed now by some
years of travel upon the Continent, especially in Italy
and Greece. He was still in Italy, where he was taken
at once to the heart of the most noble and cultivated
circles ; and Athens, still glorious with the undimin-
ished splendors of the Parthenon, was waiting to be
visited, — when the news came that the struggle had
begun which was to lay the foundation of a free Com-
monwealth in England.-j- It is in referring to tliis

* The autobiographical hints in which Milton speaks with an
unreserve which few authors have ever ventured, are in the Intro-
duction to the Second Part of " Eeasons of Church Government
urged against Prelaty " (1641), and in the " Second Defence of the
English People," composed in 1654, after his blindness. The sj-mp-
toms of his blindness are described in the fifteenth of his ' ' Familiar
Letters."

+ " While desirous to cross over into Sicily and Greece, a sad
message from England of ci\dl war called me back. For I held it
base to be travelling at ease, for my own fancy, when my countrymen

MILTON. 89

time — when the dreams of youth must be harshly
put aside for the tasks of manhood — that Milton
uses those remarkable words to define the nature of
the call he was obeying : " But when God commands
to take the trumpet and blow a dolorous or jarring
blast, it lies not in man's will what he shall say, or
what he shall conceal."

He was now (1639) at the age of thirty-one ; and
for more than twenty years — that is, throughout
the vigor of his manhood — all his thought, all his
strength, and finally his eyesight, were deliberately
given up to what he regarded as a sacred service.
Anxiously as he was warned of blindness by his
friends, he would not, he says, " have listened to the
voice of ^sculapius himself, but to a diviner monitor
within." To enable himself to do his task with hon-
est independence, he undertook the very uncongenial
drudgery of instructing boy-pupils in his own house,
where his irascible and haughty temper, Dr. Johnson
thinks, made the charge about equally painful to
master and pupil.* It is this laborious life, chosen
and lived for years, till the Commonwealth appointed

at home were fighting for lihertj." ~ Defensio Secunda. This was
in 1639. War was not actually on foot till three years later. The
terms he uses are, however, explicit : belli civilis nuntius.

* The Puritan temper in such self-denials is pleasantly given in
Morse's Memoir of J. Q. Adams: "The fact that such action in-
volved an enormous sacrifice would have been to his mind strong
evidence that it was a duty ; and the temptation to perform a duty,
always strong with him, became ungovernable if the duty was ex-
ceptionally disagreeable."

Milton, says Aubrey, " pronounced the letter r very sharp, — a
sure sign of a satirical disposition."

90 THE PURITAN COMMONWEALTH.

the obscure but eloquent schoolmaster for its Latin
Secretary of State, which makes the true commentary
of those lines in Wordsworth's noble sonnet : —

" Thy soul was hke a star, and dwelt apart :
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was hke the sea :
Pure as the naked heavens — majestic, free —
So didst thou travel on life's common way
In cheerful godliness ; and yet thy heart
The lowliest duties on herself did lay."

Milton is our highest example of a consecrated in-
tellect in the field of letters ; and it will not be amiss
to copy here, familiar as they are, the lines in which
he has recorded the earlier and the later form of his
consecration. The earlier is in the flush of his young
hope, at the age of twenty-three : —

" Yet be it less or more, or soon or slow,

It shall be still in strictest measure even

To that same lot, however mean or high,

Toward which Time leads me, and the will of Heaven.

All is, if I have grace to use it so.

As ever in my great Task- Master's eye."

The other is wdiat he had learned to say in the calm
but stern composure of later years, in blindness, old
age, desertion, penury, and pain : —

" God doth not need
Either man's works or his own gifts. Who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly : thousands at his bidding speed.
And post o'er land and ocean without rest.
They also serve, who only stand and wait."

There is no author, aoain, whom it is more neces-
sary to judge by that ideal which he kept so loftily
pure, which he worshipped with so absolute a homage,

MILTON. 91

and so austerely true a consecration. For, as soon as
we judge him by any common standard, we find tliat
this heroic temper has its faults, which give the un-
friendly critic only too easy a handle. His political
writings, it must be confessed, are often turbulent,
unreadably tedious, even virulent sometimes, under
the stress of personal controversy as it was then
carried on. Something of this last may be pardoned,
when we remember the insults brutally cast against
his blindness, and the calumny that wantonly assailed
his morals.

We do not expect, either, to gain political instruc-
tion from such a mind. " His scheme of government
is that of a purely ideal Commonwealth, and has the
fault common to the greater part of such conceptions,
that it never could be practised except among beings
for whom no government at all would be necessary." *
It is just as well to begin by admitting thus much, so
as to clear the way for recognizing the qualities which
put his controversial writings in the very front rank of
English prose, and make them, on the whole, a grander
monument of his genius than all his verse. At least
they are a monument more unique and distinct than
any that he has built in verse ; while they are at once
the complement and the commentary by which we
read what is most characteristic in his poetry.

It is not, however, as a man of letters that we
are to regard him here, but as the interpreter to all
time of the profoundest conviction and passion of his
age. Indeed, when we take together the heat, the
glow, the splendor of diction, and the lyrical bursts of

* Sterling's Essays.

92 THE PURITAN COMMONWEALTH.

religious eloquence here and there, we have to go as
far back as the Hebrew Prophets to find anything to
compare fitly with these remarkable writings.

The finest examples which best illustrate this last
quality would require too much space to copy here.
They are passages which Macaulay calls "a perfect
field of cloth of gold. The style is stiff with gor-
geous embroidery." In particular the prose Ode (as
it has been called) in the form of prayer, which ends
the first of his essays, " Of Reformation in England,"
is perhaps the most extraordinary illustration to be
found anywhere of poetic and religious genius in
perfect blending, kindled to a white heat in the very
stress of controversy by the ardor of a passionate de-
votion to the interest at stake.

A few sentences, however, it is necessary to give,
to show how this interest was identified in Milton's
mind with that idea of a Christian State which made
the finest inspiration of Puritanism. He says, —

" A Commonwealth ought to be but as one huge Chris-
tian personage, one mighty growth and stature of an honest
man, as big and compact in virtue as in body."

And again, of the Puritan Colonies across the
sea : —

" What numbers of faithful and free-born Englishmen
have been constrained to forsake tlieir dearest home, their
friends and kindred, whom nothing but the wide ocean
and the savage deserts of America could hide and shelter
from the fury of the bishops ! Oh, Sir, if we coukl but see
the shape of our dear mother England, as poets are wont
to give a personal form to what they please, how woidd

MILTON'S POLITICAL WRITINGS. 93

she appear, tliink ye, but in a mourning weed, with ashes
on her head, and tears abundantly flowing from her eyes,
to behold so many of her children exposed at once, and
thrust from things of dearest necessity, because their con-
science would not assent to things which the bishops
thought indifferent 1"

Again he says, —

" Let us not, for fear of a scarecrow, or else through
hatred to be reformed, stand hankering and politizing,
when God with spread hands testifies to us, and points us
out the way to our peace." *

The finest examples of Milton's political eloquence
— one is tempted to say, the finest in any language —
are naturally to be found in the Areopagitica, "a Speech
for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing." A few words
may be copied here, to show the splendid enthusiasm
with wdiich he contemplates bis vision of an English
Commonwealth : —

" Lords and Commons of England ! Consider what a
nation it is whereof ye are, and whereof ye are the gov-
ernors, — a nation not slow and dull, but of a quick, in-
genious, and piercing spirit ; acute to invent, subtle and
sinewy to discourse, not beneath the reach of any point
the highest that human capacity can soar to. . . . ^N'ow
once again, by all concurrence of signs, and by the general
instinct of holy and devout men, as they daily and sol-
emnly express their thoughts, God is decreeing to begin
some new and great period in his Church, even to the
reforming of Eeformation itself : what does he then but
reveal himself to his servants, and as his manner is, first
to his Englishmen ] "

* Of Reformation in England, Part Second.

94 THE PURITAN COMMONWEALTH.

"Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant
nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and
shaking her invincible locks. Methinks I see her like
an Eagle muing her mighty youth, and kindling her
undazzled eyes at the full midday beam, purging and
unsealing her long-abused sight at the fountain itself of
heavenly radiance ; while the whole noise of timorous and
flocking birds, with those also that love the twilight, flut-
ter about, amazed at what she means, and in their envious
gabble would prognosticate a year of sects and schisms ! "

It is not merely the splendid rhetoric which clothes
in such figures the facts that looked quite otherwise to
a profaner eye ; but that these last words, especially,
give a glimpse of the party passions and alarms that
beset the revolutionary State, and in time brought
the magnificent dream to nought. Within two years
after this great defence of religious liberty, an angry
Presbyterian speaks of toleration as " the grand design
of the Devil, — his masterpiece and chief engine he
works by at this time, to uphold his tottering king-
dom." * In two years more, " Pride's purge " had
cleared the Parliament of the Presbyterian party, with
its helpless reactions and protests. The victorious In-

* Thomas Edwards, in his "Gangrsena" (1646), a long and very-
dull but curious and instructive tirade against the mischiefs of re-
ligious Independency. One cannot quite spare this inside view of
the sects and " sub-dichotomies of petty schisms " as Mihon calls
them, with which England was at this time afHicted. The lewd and
hypocritical Eoundhead in Scott's "Woodstock" only hints the
scandals told of these sectaries, especially the Anabaptists, who
appear to have revived the primitive custom of naked baptism of
adults. The most radical heresies of the nineteenth century ap-
pear full-grown, rampant, and aggressive, as soon as the pressure
of church authority is taken off.

Milton's last appeal. 95

dependents submitted their petty strifes and divisions
to be controlled by the genius of Cromwell ; and for
ten years more the Commonwealth became a Military
Republic, strong, full-armed, and resolute, — a despotic
Monarchy in everything but the name, but far enough
from the Fifth Monarchy, for which the enthusiasts
prayed and of which they dreamed.

The tenacity and courage of Milton's republican
faith are best seen in the last of his political tracts,
published in 1660, in the very moment of the Ees-
toration, on "the ready and easy way to establish
a Free Commonwealth, and the excellence thereof,
compared with the inconveniences and dangers of
readmitting Kingship) in this Nation," — "now that
nothing remains," he thinks, " but in all reason the
certain hopes of a speedy and immediate settlement
forever in a firm and free Commonwealth." He will
not doubt " but all incjenuous and knowino- men will
easily agree tliat a free Commonwealth — without
single Person or House of Lords — is by far the best
government, if it can be had," — the form of govern-
ment, so far as we can make it out, being a Parliament
of elective life-members in perpetual session ; in short,
a Revolutionary Convention like that of France in
1793, without its revolutionary passion. Here are
the closinof sentences : —

o

" What I have spoken is the language of that which is
not called amiss The good old Cause, If it seem strange
to any, it will not seem more strange, I hope, than con-
vincing to backsliders. Tlius much I should perhaps have
said, though I were sure I should have spoken only to
trees and stones ; and had none to cry to but with the

96 THE PUEITAN COMMONWEALTH.

Prophet, 0 Earth, Earth, Earth ! to tell the very soil itself
what its perverse inhabitants are deaf to. I^ay, though
what I have spoke should happen — which Thou suffer
not, who didst create man free ! nor Thou next, who didst
redeem us from being servants of men ! — to be the last
words of our expiring liberty. But I trust I shall have
spoken persuasion to abundance of sensible and ingenuous
men ; to some, perhaps, wliom God may raise to these
stones to become children of reviving Liberty, — and may
reclaim, though they seem now choosing them a captain
back for Egypt, to bethink themselves a little, and con-
sider whither they are rushing ; to exhort this torrent also
of the people not to be so impetuous, but to keep their due
channel ; and at length recovering and uniting their better
resolutions, now that they see already how open and un-
bounded the insolence and rage is of our common enemies,
to stay these ruinous proceedings, justly and timely fearing
to what a precipice of destruction the deluge of this epi-
demic madness would hurry us, through the general de-
fection of a misguided and abused multitude."

It was a vain protest against the madness — as he
deemed it — of the Eestoration. It was the more ex-
asperating, as coming from one who had volunteered
and gloried in the defence of regicide ; and we still
find it strange that the dauntless republican reached,
in his pemuy and blindness, a shelter from the re-
actionary storm that now set in.

The Presbyterians had invited, and still hoped to
control, the Eestoration. But within two years more
the Act of Uniformity destroyed in the English Church
the last vestige of the work of the Puritans ; and a new
Saint Bartholomew (Aug. 24, 1662) saw that great
act of stanch aud sober courage, the voluntary seces-

THE NONCONFORMISTS. 97

siou of two thousand of the clergy * The era of Puri-
tanism was past ; and from this date the freedom of
conscience which it sought is to be known under the
title — not so heroic, perhaps, but not less honorable
— of " jSTonconformist."

The loss was not all on the side of the Establish-
ment, which had so cast off many of its bravest and
truest children. The conception of the religious life
itself which came to prevail in England was distinctly
narrowed and lowered by the failure of that sublime
dream of an ideal Commonwealth. The forms of re-
ligion were left to the State Church ; the soul of piety
was oftener found in what that Church excluded and
disowned. English religious history is unique in hav-
ing two parallel movements so clearly recognized, so
distinct, and with so little tendency to run together, —
one of secular indifference, one of a narrow pietism.

How cynically worldly the Establishment had grown
in the eighteenth century, is almost the only impres-
sion of it left with us to-day.-f On the other hand,
the great work of Nonconformity has been among the
lower Middle Class, to whom religion is a very serious
thing, because it is the only outlook from the mo-
notony of a hopelessly narrow and dreary life. To

* The series of Acts by which Puritanism was driven from the
English Church was the following : Act of Uniformity (1662) ;
Conventicle Act (1664) ; Five-Mile Act (1665) ; Test and Corpora-
tion Act (1673 : abolished 1718).

t "Gentlemen," said Lord Thurlow to a Dissenting deputation,
" I am for the Established Church : not that I care for one damned
religion more than another, but because it is the Established Church ;
and if you can get your damned religion established, I will be for
that too."

7

98 THE PUEITAN COMMONWEALTH.

such as the inspired tinker Bunyan, for example, re-
ligion is not merely creed and practice, — it is poetry,
vision, hope ; it is all that life in those humble ways
can know of poetry, vision, hope. For more than a
century following the Eestoration, Dissenters were
practically disfranchised : no share in the glory or
power of the public life of England could be theirs.

So came first exclusion from secular and political
affairs, then repugnance to them. On the one hand
religion was the only thing to them worth thinking
of or living for ; and so what was passionate and nar-
row went straight to make that " other-worldliness "
which Coleridge reproached as a bane of religious
life in England, while a sincere but timid suspicion
shrank from the most innocent of pleasures or any-
thing like a sunny breadth of thought.* On the other
hand, those natural and easy ways by which men
broaden in their interests and sympathies, while the
mind grows clear and vigorous in healthy action, —
the cares of equal citizenship, and the opportunity
of the higher education, — the Nonconformists were
debarred from by the iniquity of laws they had .no
hand in makino- and no streno'th to break. The crude
and barbarous theology of orthodox Dissent would
never have been the religion of those good souls, but
that they lived an unreal life, shut in by high walls
from the large life of thought and action in the world
outside. The life of humble piety they led showed
often great courage and sincerity ; and the very force
that compelled it into its narrow channel made of it

* The ATritmgs of the Nonjuror William Law did most to create
the peculiar type of piety here spoken of.

ENGLISH DISSENT. 99

something^ as f;renuine and beautiful in its kind as
anything that Christian history has to show, — some-
thing of which we still have the echo in many an
eighteenth-century hymn, and in the record of many
a religious biography of that time. The two halves
of that powerful and fervid national life are cut asun-
der. That is why the saints and heroes of Dissent
never appear in the pages of history, while domineer-
ing prelates, with no heart of faith at all, give an evil
eminence to the Church of that period.

It has been the fashion of historians and critics to
scorn the lack of ideality and heroism in the eigh-
teenth century. But its best qualities do not stand
out on the surface. What was heroic in its antece-
dents had lost the battle. The flaof of " the ojood old
cause " was down. The dream of a Christian Com-
monwealth had been roughly broken. The best life
of England had been driven back into obscure by-
ways. The age of Puritanism, which is the heroic
age of Christian history, had passed away ; and such
a City of God as men could still believe in was —
what it had been to Saint Augustine at the fall of
Eome — not the strength and splendor of an earthly
State, but only the faint and far-off vision of one
"eternal in the heavens."

V.

PORT EOYAL.

PORT-EOYAL is the old name of a little valley
about twenty miles to the west of Paris.* As
early as 1204 it was made over to pious uses by a
crusading baron, lord of the estate, or by his wife, and
was long occupied by a convent of nuns of the order
of St. Bernard. The religious house thus founded has
linked '^the name of the little valley with a remarkable
movement of thought in the Roman Church, as well
as witli one of the most interesting chapters of mo-
nastic life to be found in all Christian history. -I*

In the year 1599 there was inducted as novice
among the nuns of Port Royal a child eight years
old, grave and precocious, second daughter of a cele-

* The original name is said to be Poi^ois, and to signify, as near
as may be, a bushy pond, or swamp. The easy transmutation of
the word to Port-Royal is connected with a courtly but unlikely
story of a visit paid to the spot by Philip Augustus, in 1214.

t The admirable study of the whole subject by Sainte-Beuve (5
vols., Hachette, Paris, 1860) is well known, as one of the most per-
fect of special histories. A more condensed narrative, composed
with excellent skill and knowledge of the ground, by Rev. Charles
Beard ("Port Eoyal, a contribution to the History of Religious
Literature in France," 2 vols., Longman, London), leaves nothing
to be desired by the Englisli reader. An earlier narrative by ]\Irs.
Schimmelpennink gives an interesting description of the recent ap-
pearance of the valley.

LA MERE ANGELIQUE. 101

brated advocate named Arnauld, and grandchild of an
equally celebrated advocate, Marion. In the view of
both father and grandfather, this was simply a con-
venient way of providing for one of a family of chil-
dren, which in course of years increased to twenty.
To secure for the child the succession to the convent
rule, they did not even scruple, a little later, to state
her age as at least six years more than it was ; and
further, to disguise her name by giving, instead, that
which she had taken as a sister in the little commu-
nity. This pious fraud had its effect, not only on the
king's good-nature, but also upon the grave dignitaries
of the Church. At the age of eleven, the child Jaque-
line Arnauld, famous in religious history as La Mere
Angelique, became Abbess, invested with full authori-
ty over the twelve or fifteen young women who then
constituted the religious house. Until her death in
1661, at the age of seventy, the story of Port Eoyal is
almost the personal biography of her who was during
all that time its heart and soul.

For the first few years, we may well suppose that it
was something like playing at the austerities of con-
vent life. Very quaint and pretty pictures have come
down, to illustrate this period. A morning call of
that gay and gallant king Henry IV., who knowing
that her father was visiting there rode up, curious to
see the pious flock under their child-shepherdess ; the
little maid herself, in full ecclesiastical costume, and
mounted on high pattens to disguise her youth, at
the head of her procession to meet her royal visitor
at the gate ; the kiss he threw over the garden-wall
next day as he passed by on a hunt, with his compli-

102 PORT ROYAL.

ments to Madame la petite Ahhesse, — these are bright
and innocent episodes in the stormy story of the
time.

But a great and sudden change came about a few
years later. The young abbess, now nearly eighteen
years of age, became converted to the most serious
and rigid view of the duties of her calling. Gently
and kindly, but without an instant's wavering of pur-
pose, inflexible to all temptation and entreaty, she re-
solved to restore the primitive austerity of the rule
of their pious founder Saint Bernard. For one thiug,
this rule demanded that the time of morning prayer
should be carried back to two o'clock from the self-
indulgent hour of four ; and, for another, that all little
personal treasures and belongings should be given up
for that perfect religious poverty wliich is the ideal of
monastic life. In this, the example of the girl-abbess,
cheerful and resolute in choosing the hardest task
always for herself, easily won the day. The crisis of
the reform was when, with passionate grief, with tears
and swooning, she steadily refused admittance to her
own father and brother, hardening herself against their
entreaties, anger, and reproach, and would only see
them at the little grating that separated the life with-
in from the life without.

The true history of Port Royal dates from this
crisis, "Wicket-Day," September 25, 1609. Just one
hundred years and a few days later, early in October,
1709, the malice of the Jesuit party, which for more
than half that time had shown a strangely persistent
and malignant hostility, had its way. The grounds
were laid waste. The sacred buildings were destroyed.

FORTUNES OF THE HOUSE. 103

Even the graves were dug open, and the hodies that
had been tenderly laid in them were cast out to be
torn by dogs. All was done which insult and wanton
desecration could do, to show that the heroic and
eventful life of Port Eoyal was no more.

So far, it is simply the fortunes of a Eeligious House,
perhaps no more famous than many others, and not
greatly different from them in the sort of story it has
to tell. In this view, it is chiefly notable for being
as it were a family history, connected at every point
with the character and fortunes of a single household.
Not less than twenty of the family of Arnauld — An-
gelique herself, her brothers and sisters, and children
of a brother and sister — belonged to it, whether as
simple nun, as of&cial head, as lay -brother, champion,
director, or adviser. Of these the most eminent in the
lists of theology was " the great Arnauld," youngest
child of the twenty, famous in controversy, indefa-
tigably busy as a writer, scholar, logician, and polemic,
stanch in persecution and in exile to the very close of
his long life of eighty-two years (1612-1694). But
there is hardly a day or an event in that story, for
more than ninety of the hundred years, in which the
most conspicuous name on the record is not that of
a son or daughter of the family of Arnauld.

A very characteristic feature in the history is the
single-hearted fidelity and unwavering courage of the
female members of this religious community, which
quite surpasses, at one and another crisis, that of their
chosen champions and advisers. At least, these re-
ligious heroines would neither understand nor admit
certain terms of compromise which theological sub-

104 PORT ROYAL.

tilty found it easy to prove and accept. The point at
issue was not so much one of opinion as of conscience
and honor ; and, to the amazement of friend and ene-
my, a score of these gentle and timid women went
without hesitation into prison or poverty for what in
humility of spirit they made not the least pretension
to understand ; or if they did waver, turned back with
agonies of remorse to share the poverty or the prison
of the rest. It came at length to be a mere question
of fact, — whether five given propositions were con-
tained in certain Latin folios they had never read and
could not have understood ; but the Pope and the
Jesuits had challenged the conscience of the little
community, and to give way on one point was to be
guilty of alL

This unique fidelity on so fine-drawn a line of con-
science has to do in part with the general discipline
of Port Eoyal, and with simple loyalty to a Eeligious
House. But, in particular, it was created by the sin-
gular confidence and weight that were given in that
discipline to the counsels of the spiritual Director.
The Confessional had been developed to a system in-
conceivably vigilant and minute, touching every step
of daily conduct. The skill trained under that sj^s-
teni had become a science. It had its recognized
adepts, masters, and professors, as wxU known as those
of any other art or mystery. No less than three,* each
of whom may be called a man of genius in this voca-
tion, are identified with the history of Port EoyaL
That passive heroism which is the great glory of these
humble confessors is a quality most of all to be had

* Saint-Cyran, Singlin, and De Saci.

THE CONFESSIONAL. 105

and strengthened in the air of the confessional. It
goes naturally with the tender piety and the vow of
implicit obedience, which make the atmosphere of
monastic life. One of the saints of the period, a man
of great emotional piety, of fertile and poetic fancy,
charitable and tender-hearted to those who might be
gained to the faith, and of pitiless rigor to those who
would not,* — St. Francis de Sales, — had set that
mark deep upon the mind of Angelique Arnauld, and
through her it became a quality of the house. Noth-
ing in the religious life, as we see it under such a
discipline, is so foreign to our notion as the abject
submission of a strong and superior mind to one in-
ferior perhaps in every other quality except the genius
and the tact of moral guidance. But nothing is so
near the heart of that wonderful power held and ex-
ercised by the Eoman priesthood.f

A special circumstance brought this religious com-
munity more conspicuously to the front in the history

* As shown in the exile forced upon those who were not won by
his persuasions, w^ho fled in the night across the Lake from his
parish of Annecy, in Switzerland. In 1599 "he got the Duke of
Savoy to expel the Protestant ministers from several districts." He
is said to have made 72,000 converts to the Roman faith.

t Here is the w^ay it looks to the Catholic eye : "The Catholic
religion does not oblige one to discover his sins indifferently to all
the world. It suffers him to live concealed from all other men ; but
it makes exception of one alone, to whom he is commanded to dis-
close the depths of his heart, and to show himself as he is. It is
only this one man in the world whom we are commanded to unde-
ceive; and he must keep it an inviolable secret, so that this knowl-
edge exists in him as if it were not there. Can anything be desired
more charitable and gentle ? Yet the corruption of man is such,
that he finds hardship in this command." —Pascal : Thoughts,
eh. iii. H 8.

106 POET EOYAL.

of the time than its humble locality might promise.
As the fame of its disci2:)line spread, its numbers
grew. The narrow cells were crowded, and the un-
wholesome damps bred fever. These pious recluses
were content to accept sickness and death for their
a2:)pointed discipline. But the better sense prevailed,
and an estate in the ed^'e of Paris was bou2,ht, built
on, and occupied. The most critical events in the
story, accordingly, have their place, not in the rude
valley, but in the tumultuous capital. There are
two Port Royals, one " in Paris," one " in the Fields ; "
and the scene keeps shifting from one location to
the other.

Then, too, it was Paris of the Eegency and of the
Fronde, where some of the most critical years were
passed. This brought the Religious House upon the
scene of sharp conflicts in Church and State, and so
exposed it to dangers which in time grew threatening.
Some of the famous women of the day, who had been
pets of society, or had been deep in political intrigue,
found shelter and comfort among the nuns of Port
Royal, — notably the famous and too charming
Madame de Longueville, sister of the great Conde, —
drawn, perhaps, by ties of old friendship, or reminis-
cence of early pious longings, or that recoil of feeling
deepening to remorse when a course of vanity and am-
bition has been run through. Such guests might easily
bring upon the most devout of monastic retreats a
p)erilous suspicion of disloyalty to the Court.

These are the points of interest we find in the
annals of Port Royal simply as a monastic institu-
tion, as a group of persons bound by general sympa-

THE JANSENIST CONTROVERSY. 107

thy in religions views. These alone make it a unique
subject of religious biography. But these alone are
not what make its real importance in Christian his-
tory. The hundred years covered by the life of this
community are the chronological frame which incloses
a very remarkable phase in the development of mod-
ern Romanism. The controversy on the doctrine of
Grace, brought so sharply to the front in the conflicts
of the Reformation ; the long and bitter warfare of
Jesuit and Jansenist ; vivacious and eager debate on
the ground and form taken in the intricate science
of Casuistry ; acrimonious discussion as to the exact
meaning and import of Papal Infallibility, — these,
no less than the heroic and indomitable temper ex-
hibited by a group of pious recluses in defence of
what was to them a point of conscience as well as a
point of faith, are what give the story its significance
to us.

Port Royal was the centre and soul of what is
known as the Jansenist controversy. Jansenism was
the last great revolt or protest against official domi-
nation, within the lines of the Roman Church ; and
it was effectually suppressed. The story of its sup-
pression is the most striking illustration we find any-
where of that unyielding hardihood in the assertion
of authority, which that Church has deliberately
adopted for its policy; of that unrelenting central-
ism, which does not stick at any inhumanity or any
sacrifice, to secure the servile perfection of ecclesias-
tical discipline. The best intelligence and the truest
conscience of the time were clearly on the side of the
Jansenist protest ; but such reasons weighed not one

108 PORT KOYAL.

grain against tlie hard determination of Pope, Jesuit
and King to crush, in the most devout and loyal sub-
jects of the Church, the meekest and humblest asser-
tion of mental liberty.

For the origin of this controversy we must go back
a little way, to the earlier polemics of the Eeforma-
tion. The doctrine of Divine Decrees had come, as
we have seen, to be not only a main point in the
creed of Calvin, but a test of fidelity in the Protestant
faith. Its strong point, morally, was in setting a di-
rect and explicit command of God to the conscience
over against the arbitrary and minute directions of
the Church, which were sure to run out into a quib-
bling casuistry. Its weak point was that it declared,
or seemed to declare, a downright religious Fatalism.
The Church, on the other hand, in demanding obedi-
ence to its rule, must alloAv something for the liberty
of the subject to obey or disobey ; while the doctrine
of moral freedom known as Pelagian, or even the semi-
Pelagian compromise of it, had always been stigma-
tized as heresy. Here was a fair and open field for
never-ending controversy.

A topic so inviting to scholastic subtilty and po-
lemic ardor could not be neglected by the Jesuits.
They became eager champions of free-will. Their
skill in the confessional had made them masters of
the art of casuistry. The whole drift of their method
was to make religion a matter of sentiment and blind
obedience, rather than of conscience and interior con-
viction. The Pelagian heresy they must at the same
time repudiate, in terms at least ; and it was a party
triumph when the Spaniard Molina, an eminent

JANSEN AND ST. CYRAN. 109

doctor of their Order, published, in 1588, a treatise to
reconcile the sovereignty and foreknowledge of God
with the moral liberty of man. The key-word of his
argument we shall express accurately enough by the
plirase contingent decrees. Our acts themselves are
not in fact predetermined, though the Divine fore-
knowledge of them is infallible. This fine point was
seized as a real key to the position. The name " Mo-
linist " is used to define a system of thinking which
holds that " the grace of God wdiich giveth salvation "
is not sufficient of itself, but requires, to make it effi-
cient, the co-operation of the human w^ill. And this
may be understood to be the position of the Jesuits
in the debate that followed.

But an uneasy sense was left, in many pious minds,
that this was not the genuine doctrine of the Church.
In particular, two young students of theology at Lou-
vain were drawn, about the year 1604, into deep dis-
cussion of the point at issue. These were Saint-Cyran,
afterwards confessor of Port Eoyal, and Cornelius Jan-
sen, a native of Holland. They were well agreed that
the point must be met by the study of Saint Augustine ;
and the one task of their lives — particularly of Jan-
sen, till his death in 1638 — was little else than the
exploring and the expounding of this single authority.
Jansen is said to have studied all the writings of
Augustine through ten times, and all those pertaining
to the Pelagian controversy thirty times.

The strict Auo-ustinian doctrine of the Divine De-

o

crees thus became the firm conviction of these two
friends, and through them the profession of Port Eoyal.
It differs barely by a hair's-breadth — if indeed any

110 POET EOYAL.

difference can be found — from the Calvinistic dogma.
Jansenism is accordingly often called Calvinism, or
Protestantism, within the Church of Eome. Profess-
ing to be the most loyal and sincere of Catholics, the
Port-Royalists of course denied the charge. The dis-
tinction they made was this : * The Fatalistic doctrine,
or Calvinism, asserts that there is no such thing as
moral liberty at all. The Pelagian doctrine, or Mo-
linisra, holds that man's natural freedom suffices to
take the first essential step to his own salvation.
The true Augustinian doctrine is that man's freedom
is (so to speak) dormant and impotent, till it has been
evoked by Divine " prevenient " grace ; then, and not
till then, it is competent to act. In short, in the most
literal sense, " it is God that worketh in us both to
will and to do." f

This thin line of opinion, stretched along the sharp
boundary between two gulfs of error, made (as it were)
the conducting wire which attracted the sharp light-
ning of Jesuit intolerance, so as to strike, and at length
to shatter, the institution of Port Eoyal.

The controversy broke out upon the publication, in
1640, of the heavy folios in which Jansen had summed
up the labor of his life ; and these folios were searched
with jealous eyes, till five propositions were found in
them, or were said to be found in them, on which a
charge of heresy could be laid. Only two are im-

* See "The Provincial Letters," Letter xviii.

t One of the anecdotes of the time when Port Eoyal was under
the darkest cloud is that a Jesuit prelate, happening to come into
church when this text was being read, at once silenced the utterance
of the flagrant Jansenist heresy !

THE FIVE PROPOSITIONS. Ill

portant enough, or clear enough of technicality, to
occupy us here. They are these : (1) That there are
duties required of man which he is naturally unable
to perform ; (2) That Christ died, not for all mankind,
but only for the elect.

In the course of the debate these "Five Propo-
sitions " became very famous. Whether they did or
did not exist in Jansen's folios was the point on which,
as we have seen, the faithful women of Port Eoyal
staked their loyalty and underwent their martyrdom.
The Pope's bull, condemning the volumes, asserted
that the heresies were there. As good Catholics, the
Port-Eoyalists condemned the propositions ; but as
loyal members of the community they declared that
they were not there. The Pope, they said, was doubt-
less infallible on a point of faith, but not on a point
of fact.* To this it was replied, that religious faith
was demanded for the one, only ecclesiastical or hu-
man faith for the other.

On such poor quibbles as these all that long story
of persecution turns. It was, to be sure, the prover-
bial rancor of theological hate that made the attack
so bitter. But what made it effectual and deadly was
that a Jesuit confessor held the conscience (such as it
was) of the young king ; and that a vague dread of
disloyalty, with memories of the time when he and
his mother were barred out of Paris by the Fronde,
made the point a test not only of religious but of po-
litical soundness in the faith.

It would be a weary and needless task to trace the
changes of fortune that befell the little community

* The distinction, famous in those days, o{ fait and droit.

112 POET ROYAL.

during those fifty evil years. Our concern is only
with the movement of thought in which tliose for-
tunes were involved. A group of very cultivated,
able, and devoted men had gathered in close relations
with the Eeligious House. They included brothers,
nephews, friends of the women who had assumed its
vows, as well as their clerical advisers. They had
founded a famous School at Port Eoyal in the Fields,
and made the estate beautiful and productive by the
labor of their hands. We find among them, as pupils
or associates, several of the eminent men of letters, —
including Eacine, Boileau, and La Fontaine, — w^ho re-
flected back upon the religious community something
of the lustre of that famous and brilliant age.

Bright on the list is the illustrious name of Blaise
Pascal, certainly the most vigorous and original genius
of the day. At twelve, he was feeling his own way,
in his play-hours, in the forbidden field of mathemat-
ics, — forbidden because his father wished first to make
him master his Latin and Greek ; and when detected
he was trying to prove to himself what he seems to
have divined already, that the three angles of a tri-
angle make just two right angles. At eighteen, to
save his father labor in accounts, he devised and with
infinite pains — making with his own hands something
like fifty models — constructed a calculating machine,
which was held a miracle of ingenuity, as if he had
put mind into brass wheels and steel rods, and actu-
ally taught machinery to think.* At twenty-four he

* This notion (if it were really held) was a logical enough result
from the Cartesian dogma which then prevailed, that animals were
mere machines. "There was hardly a solitary [at Port Royal] who

PASCAL. 113

was in advance of all the natural philosophers of the
day, including Descartes, then in the height of his
fame, in devising the true test of Torricelli's theory
of the weight of the atmosphere, in the famous ex-
periment of the Pity cle Doine, a high hill in his na-
tive Auvergne : the mercury, which stood at some-
thing over twenty-six (French) inches at the foot of
the hiU, showed less than twenty-four inches at its
summit. Later in life, he relieved the distresses of
an agonizing disease by working out the true theory
of the Cycloid, and challenging the mathematicians
of the day to a solution of its problems.

These feats of a singularly sagacious and pene-
trating intellect interest us as showing the high-water
mark of the science of the day ; but still more, in this
particular connection, as a contrast or relief to the
share which Pascal had in the religious life of Port
Eoyal, and to the unique place he holds as a religious
thinker.

He was by nature seriously inclined. His health
broke down early under the strain of study and dis-
cipline, and for more than half his life he was a
nervous dyspeptic and a paralytic. " From his eigh-

did not talk of automata. To beat a dog was no longer a matter of
any consequence. The stick was laid on with the utmost inditfer-
ence, and those who pitied the animals, as if they had any feeling,
were laughed at. They said they were only clockwork, and the
cries they uttered when they were beaten were no more than the
noise of some little spring that had been moved : all this involved
no sensation. They nailed the poor creatures to boards by the four
paws to dissect them while still alive, in order to watch the circula-
tion of the blood, which was a great subject of discussion." — Fon-
taine's ifemoires (Cologne, 1738), ii. 52. These delightful Memoirs,
more than anything else, bring us near to the heart of Port Eoyal.

114 PORT ROYAL.

teenth year to the hour of his death, he never passed
a day without pain." He had partly recovered under
a change of habit, and seems to have enjoyed the
gay life of Paris, even with a touch of extravagance ;
for he chanced one day to be driving a carriage with
six horses, when the leaders plunged over an unrailed
bridge into the river Seine, and only the breaking of
reins and traces saved him from being drowned. He
appears never to have recovered from tlie shock of this
accident ; and the tradition afterwards current was
that he always saw a chasm close at his left hand,
and could not sit easy in his seat, unless a chair or a
screen were set beside him.

The impression went deep and strong, naturally
enough, in the way of a profound piety and contrition.
A younger sister was already one of the religious com-
munity of Port Eoyal. He himself, at twenty-four,
in a time of religious revival, had come under the
powerful influence of the confessor Saint-Cyran. At
thirty-one, in the autumn of 1654, after experiencing
all the intensity of that spiritual crisis which is termed
" conversion," he devoted his life, with absolute fervor
of conviction, to the tasks and disciplines of piety.
This rare mind, prematurely great and prematurely
lost, — for Pascal died at the age of thirty-nine, worn
out W' ith cruel austerities * and long disease, — is the

* As if all the rest were not enough, his sister Jacqueline relates
that he wore an iron girdle next his skin, armed with sharp points,
which he would drive into his flesh with his elbow, if he ever de-
tected in himself any thought of vanity. In short, he as eagerly
courted pain for its own sake as the Eastern saints and anchorites
had done in their fanatical austerities. See " Early Christianity,"
pp. 173-178.

MIRACLE OF THE HOLY THORN. 115

radiant centre in that circle of genius, of profound
and devout thought, which makes the intellectual
glory of Port Eoyal.

The story of this religious crisis would not be quite
complete, without some mention of the " miracle of
the Holy Thorn," which took place in the spring of
1656. A fragment of the Crown of Thorns had come
into the possession of a pious enthusiast, who could
not rest content without passing it about through
several Eeligious Houses, to receive their veneration
as an inestimable relic. A little niece of Pascal,
pupil at Port Eoyal, was suffering with a painful
swelling of the eyelid, which seemed incurable ; but
when touched by the holy thorn it presently dis-
charged, and " the child w^as healed in the self-same
hour." Pascal made no doubt that the miracle was
real. The mocking sarcasms of the enemies of the
House only rendered the belief in it more fixed and
dear. It was the beginning of what grew into a long
series of extravagances and scandals, which disfigure
the later history of Jansenism down to its dregs in
the days of the Convulsionnaircs. But now the faith
was natural, genuine, and sincere ; and it marks the
starting-point of that remarkable volume of Fragments
which we know as " Pascal's Thoughts." *

A full descriptive title of Pascal's Thoughts would

* In the earlier editions of the "Thoughts," veiy much was
altered, suppressed, transposed, or added from other sources. A
convenient summary of the literary history may be found in the
variorum edition of Louandre ( Charpentier, Paris, 1854). A com-
parison of texts is absolutely necessary, to see how the precision and
vivacity of Pascal's style have often been smoothed into vague com-
monplace by the early editors.

116 PORT ROYAL.

be " Hints and Fragments of an Essay in Defence of
the Christian Eeligion." Some of the " hints " are
expanded into chapters, or brief essays; and some
of the " fragments " consist of broken phrases, or
even single words, written almost illegibly as loose
memoranda, and faithfully preserved as they were left
by the writer at his death. When the " Thoughts "
were first published, some of the keener poiuts were
trimmed away, so as not to disturb the "religious
peace " by thorning the Jesuit sensibilities ; many of
the fragments were omitted, and the whole was made
over into an artificial order. Even this smooth ma-
nipulation, however, did not disguise the vivacity, the
emphasis, the shrewdness and point of these famous
paragraphs, which have kept, in the line of theology,
a repute something like that in social life of the con-
temporary "Maxims" of La Eochefoucauld. With
equal vigor, they often have almost equal acridity
and sharpness.

This quality comes from what might almost be

* called the key-note of the Essay, — an incessant

brooding on the paradoxes of human nature. Whole

pages may be described as an expansion of those

vio'orous lines in Youni^'s " iSI'io'ht Thoughts " : —

*' How poor, how rich — how abject, how august —
How complicate, how wonderful is Man ! "

Pascal puts this paradox in the figure of a self-con-
scious and sentient Reed, — a figure which, by much
revision, he has brought at length into this shape:

" Man is but a reed, the frailest thing in nature, — but
a reed that thinks. To crush him, does not need the

pascal's "thoughts." 117

weapons of all the universe : a breath, a drop of water,
is enough. But though the universe should crush him,
yet man would still be nobler than his destroyer ; for he
knows that he is mortal, while the universe knows nothing
of its own dominion over him" (chap. ii. ^10).

Another aspect of the paradox is given, pungently
enough, in this very subtile justitication of the con-
ditions of civil government : —

" Summum jus, summa injuria. The ride (yoie) of the
majority is best, because we can see what it is, and be-
cause it has the power to make itself obeyed ; still it is
the rule of the incompetent. If it had been possible, force
would have been put into the hands of Justice. But force
is a material quality, and will not let itself be handled
according to our will ; while justice is a mental quality,
directed by our choice. Hence, justice has been com-
mitted to the hands of Force ; and what we must obey,
that we call riglit. Herein is found the right of the
sword : which is, indeed, a genuine right, since without
it violence would be on one side, and justice on the other "
(chap. vii. IT 8).

One other example of this epigrammatic turn :

*' One who would clearly perceive the nothingness of
man, has only to consider the causes and effects of Love.
The cause is a trifle {je-ne-sais-quoi) ; the effects are fright-
fid. That trifle, so slight a thing that you cannot trace it,
stirs up all the earth, — princes, armies, the world itself.
If Cleopatra's nose had been a little shorter, the whole
face of the earth would have been difi'erent " (chap. viii.
51 29).

That there is something cynic and saturnine in this
contemptuous wit there is no denying. But there is

118 PORT EOYAL.

nothing in the character of the Essay, taken broadly,
to show Pascal as a sceptic in matters of faith, as is
sometimes said, or to hint that his austerities were a
sort of penance, to exorcise the spirit of unbelief.
E"ot only a considerable part of the " Thoughts " are
a defence of Christianity on the familiar ground of
the modern Apologists, — the argument from history,
prophecy, and miracle, — but in all tins ]Dortion the
tone has absolutely the calm and contented assurance
of a pious believer. The very simplicity with which
the argument is put, free from all suspicion of the
flaws a later time has found in it, is token of a faith
that — in this direction at least — has not yet learned
to question.

We should probably state the case more fairly
thus. The mind of Pascal had been brought to feel
with singular keenness tlie contrast (which, as we
have seen, never occurred to the Mediaeval mind)
between the two forms of assurance which we call
Knowledge and Faith ; one resting on outward evi-
dence, the other on interior conviction. In Geometry
he followed precisely, even as a child, the line of pure
mathematical demonstration. In Physics he demand-
ed and devised the most accurate processes of experi-
ment, to prove the theory which he already held as a
truth of reason. It is a waymark of the advance we
have made in the development of religious thought,
that just here, in the keenest and most reflective in-
tellect of the time, the contrast of the two methods,
scientific and intuitive, had come sharply and clearly
into consciousness. Pascal was in the very front rank
of the scientific advance of his age, — an age of widen-

pascal's scepticism : -science and faith. 119

ing discovery and exact observation. But there is no
reason to think that rehgious belief was not just as
real and true to him as any demonstrations of natural
science. The whole method of the life he had adopt-
ed, the experiments in living which he saw constantly
close about him, made that life as real, and the foun-
dation it rested on as sure, as anything that could
possibly be proved in the way of geometry or physics.
In truth, was not that realm of faith, for which those
humble devotees were so loyal to live and die, at least
as real a thing as that celestial realm which Galileo
saw afar off, " through a glass darkly " ?

In fact, Pascal seems to have held natural science
very cheap. It was far, in that age, from having
reached the point where it begins to furnish a ser-
viceable rule of conduct. Its widening fields of dis-
covery served for little more than mental expansion
and delight. To such a mind as his the system of
Copernicus and Galileo was simply a wider void, over
against the intense reality he was conscious of in the
world of emotion, belief, and hope. " Nature," he said,
" confounds the sceptic, and reason confounds the dog-
matist." But neitlier nature nor reason could anni-
hilate that realm of interior reality in which he lived.
Nay, the very confusion of doubt and dogma only
made this reality more apparent.

Accordingly, we find that it was not the contrast
of the outward and inward world — so clear to us as
we look back upon the mental conditions of his day
— which really impressed his mind. It was rather
the moral contrast between two methods, both purely
intellectual. This contrast he discusses, with genu-

120 PORT EOYAL.

ine interest, under the names of Epictetus and Mon-
taigne. The Stoic method he admires, but condemns
because it leads to pride. The Sceptic or Epicurean
method he hates, because it leads to contemj)t. *' Epic-
tetus is very harmful to those who are not deeply
persuaded of the corruption of all human virtue which
is not of faith ; Montaigne is deadly to those who
have any leaning to impiety and vice." How far
Science is from giving him any light, he shows in
the following words : —

" I had spent much time in the study of abstract sci-
ences, and was weary of the solitude which I found in it.
When I began the^tndy of man, I saw that those abstract
sciences do not meet his case ; that I was more astray in
exploring them than others were in ignorance of them ;
and so I pardoned their imperfect knowledge. But I
thought at least to find many associates in the study of
man, and that this is the proper study for human crea-
tures. I was deceived. There are still fewer who study
man than geometry. It is because we do not know how
to study ourselves, that we search out other things. But,
after all, even this is not the knowledge which man needs ;
and, for his own welfare, he had best remain in ignorance
of it" (chap. viii. II 11).

All this shows, to be sure, a fundamental scepticism
as to the grounds of intellectual belief, so far as they
can be determined by the study of nature, even of
human nature. Such study, it asserts, can but mock
the soul with stones instead of bread. But it does
not indicate that Pascal ever wavered in the least as
to the grounds of religious verity.

The fame of Pascal as a writer rests not so much

THE PROVINCIAL LETTERS. 121

on the " Thoughts," which are broken and incomplete,
but on the " Provincial Letters," which, for both style
and argument, are reckoned among the most perfect
of literary compositions. They are claimed in fact to
have created, as it were, by one master stroke, that
clear, graceful, piquant, and brilliant prose style which
is the particular boast of the charming language in
which he wrote.

These Letters give us, so to speak, the interior his-
tory of the conflict of Port Koyal against tlie Jesuits.
That is, without telling any of the incidents, they give
the line of debate on morals and dogma which shows
the course and spirit of that controversy. To the
charges of the Jesuits a labored reply had been made
by Arnauld, which fell quite flat and dead when he
read it by way of trial to his colleagues. Pascal saw
the point, and was persuaded to try his hand. And
so came, at due intervals, this series of inimitable
"Letters addressed to a Provincial," — probably the
most perfect example of grave, sustained, and pungent
irony in all literature.

Specimens would not serve to show their quality,
as in the case of the " Thoughts." The impression,
like the expression of a face, must be caught, if not
by studying, at least by glancing at, the whole. A
large part is taken up with those details of casuistry
which have given an evil odor to the very name of
what is really nothing but a study of "cases in
morals," — as if it meant apologies for what is im-
moral,— and have added the word "Jesuitry" to the
world's vocabulary of contempt. And these are given
in the blandest of dialoc^ue between the modest in-

122 POET ROYAL.

quirer on the one part, who represents the author,
and the Jesuit Father on the other part, who brings
out, with a droll complacency, all the ingenious apolo-
gies for usury, perjury, theft, and murder, to be found
in those famous casuists, Molina, Sanchez, and Esco-
bar. Another large part is taken up with those fine-
drawn distinctions of philosophic dogma which define
the true faith between the Calvinist peril on the right
hand and the Moliuist on the left. These have been
sufficiently indicated in the story of the Jesuit assault
and the Jansenist controversy.

Now that the glow of controversy has gone out of
these Letters, they in their turn have grown tame and
dull. It is as impossible to recall the helpless and
smarting w^rath that chafed under the keen whiplash
of moral satire, as it is to revive the polemic interest
of the debate on "sufficient" and ''efficient" grace, or
the true meaning of the phrase " proximate power," or
on the question — which Eichelieu himself had in an
evil hour turned aside to argue — w^hether "attrition"
without " contrition " entitles the penitent to absolu-
tion. The interior conflicts of the Eoman Catholic
theology two hundred years ago have small interest
for us now.

But there is another aspect of the case, which has
a very vital meaning to our history, take a view of it
as surface-broad as we will. The century which em-
braces the heroic and tragic story of Port Eoyal is
also the century of splendor to the French Monarcliy ;
of chief pride and strength to the Gallican Church,
which sunned itself in the rays of that glittering orb.
When our story begins, Henry IV. is concerting an

THE GALLICAN CHUKCH. 123

armed league of European powers, by which he means
to break the streDgth of Spain and compel a religious
peace. The next year (1610) he is stabbed to death
by a Jesuit assassin, and the way is open that leads
into the horror of the Thirty Years' War beyond the
border, and on the hither side to the long tragedy of
the extermination of Protestantism and the crushing
of all free thought in France.

It is the age of the great Court Preachers. Bossuet
and Bourdaloue died five years before, and Fenelon six
years after, the final desolation of Port Royal. The
Ee vocation of the Edict of jSTantes (1685) — which
exiled half a million of Protestants,* hunted out by
the terrors of search-warrant and dragonnade ; which
carried misery and dread unspeakable among a whole
population, pious, thriving, and pathetically loyal —
took place during the height of the Jesuit persecution
of Port Eoyi^l, while "the great Arnauld" was in
hiding or in exile. To make the tragedy more som-
bre, these horrors were approved, if not incited, not
only by those great prelates, but by the bold contro-
versialist Arnauld himself, who was the victim of their
hostility.

Still to enhance the irony of the situation, the
same alliance of Court and Jesuit, which persecuted
the women of Port Royal for not consenting to the
Pope's infallibility in matters of fact as well as in
matters of faith, had nearly, by a new revolt against
the Pope's authority, made the Church of France in-
dependent of the Church of Rome. It was heresy
not to sign the " Formulary," in which Jansen's five

* The number is variously stated at from 300,000 to 800,000.

124 PORT EOYAL.

propositions were condemned by Alexander YII. ; it
was disloyalty not to uphold the King in the Four
Articles * of the " Declaration," which had been con-
demned and annulled by Alexander VIII. Nothing
is wanting to proclaim the absolute divorce of ecclesi-
asticism at tliat day from humanity and from faith.

To make the evidence of that divorce complete
needed only the tragic and pitiful story of the latter
days of Port Eoyal. It is but from a long distance,
and very imperfectly at that, that we can know how
the cruelty sti-uck into those patient hearts. It was
ingeniously aimed just where their tenderest sensibility
would feel it most. To be debarred for years from
that "Frequent Communion" which was both the
joy and the most sacred duty of their lives ; to have
the Sacraments withheld through suffering months of
sickness, because they would not sign with the hand
what was a lie to the heart ; to come to the hour of
death, and still submit to the cold refusal of the words
which to them were pass- words and the comforting
assurance of eternal blessedness, — all this was realit}^
to them, in a sense we can hardly understand. It is
quaintly touching to hear, too, how they flocked "as
doves to their windows" near the convent wall, in
midwinter nights, to listen to the voice of their Con-
fessor as he preached to them, perched in a tree out-
side, — and that by stealth, and as it were in flight,
for fear of the implacable pursuer. Scenes of this
sort show us, indeed, that the faith of that day was
not dead. But they seem to show that, wlien we

* Constituting the so-called " Gallican Liberties." See below,
under the title *' Infidelity in France."

THE GEEAT FRENCH PREACHERS. 125

would find it, we must look for it quite outside that
circle illuminated by the burning and shining lights
of the official faith.

This inference would not be quite true. We know
that Bossuet was an able and, in his way, an estimable
champion of the Church he believed in. We can read
for ourselves the words of Bourdaloue. which come
home genuine and straight to our own conscience.
We know that Fenelon was an angel of charity in the
diocese to which he had been exiled from the Court.
But we know, too, that the Church which these men
served had lost " that most excellent gift of charity ; "
and, even while they served, it was treasuring wrath
against the coming day of wrath, which overtook it in
the Eevolution.

VI.

PASSAGE FEOM DOGMA TO PUEE EEASOK

AEADIKG interest in theological speculation,
which the fourteenth century had cast into the
chill of a certain intellectual despair, was suddenly
roused to a fervent heat in the flame of the great Eefor-
mation. There followed a period of polemics, — active,
virulent, and voluminous. Nothing would content
the mind now but absolute certainty upon the most
unsearchable of problems. Predestination, election,
grace, the terms of escape from the sharpest of tor-
ments in this life, or torments infinite in the life to
come, — matters remote from all possibility of human
knowledge, — made the most familiar and the most
practical questions of debate, and continued so for
something more than a century.

A single glance upon this hundred years of contro-
versy is all that we can spare. On the Catholic side,
speculative differences are hushed, for the present, in
the stress of the battle that has to be fouoht asjainst
the Eeformers ; and, under the authority of the great
Council, we find at least a nominal harmony and con-
sent. On the other side, no sooner is the Catholic
unity once broken, than opinion runs out into the
hundred or more " variations " which the student must
take note of, and which the loyal Catholic finds the
easiest object of his attack. Speaking broadly, we

THE BIBLE. 127

may say that the Eoman Church had the larger phi-
losophy of life, while the Protestant had the deeper
and intenser conviction of the higher law of life. Now
it was this conviction which made both the motive
and the strength of Protestant dogmatism ; and so we
have to follow out the movement of thought we are
attempting to trace, chiefly in the debates on the
Protestant side.

Again, all parties are agreed, at starting, in taking
the Scriptures as final authority on all matters of spec-
ulative belief. This is -just as true of the Council of
Trent, which assumes as the standard of Catholic
verity the Vulgate Bible under official interpretation,
as it is of Luther's demand to be tried by " the word
of holy Scripture," or the arguments of Socinus against
the pure humanism of Francis David in Eastern Hun-
gary, or Chillingworth's assertion that " the Bible, and
the Bible only, is the religion of Protestants." The
point of difference is not that Protestantism has a dif-
ferent standard of ultimate appeal. But Protestantism
allows in theory the right of private judgment, with-
out the steadying pressure of a recognized tribunal by
which that judgment shall be guided. It was no doubt
illogical for Protestants to persecute dissenters, like
their opponents : tlie death of Servetus was a shock to
their principle as well as to their humanity ; and, in
fact, except where political dangers made the motive or
pretext (^s under Elizabeth), religious persecution was
extremely rare on the Protestant side, contrasting at
infinite distance with the systematic policy of torture
and suppression which the Catholic theory demanded.
Still, neither side was clear of the erroneous assump-

128 PASSAGE FRO.^[ DOGMA TO PURE REASON.

tion that tlie soul's destiny is staked on Tightness of
ojDinion ; or could be, until the passage from dogma to
philosophy had been fairly made, and opinion was left
to be shaped by the free intelligence of mankind.

The change implied in these words is far more radi-
cal and fundamental than most theologians have been
willing to admit. Indeed, it is only of late years that
one comes to see how radical and fundamental it is.
The difference as to the standard of authority, or the
terms of salvation, is as notliing beside the fundamen-
tal postulate in which both parties were agreed. ISTo
controversy had risen, as yet, of natural and super-
natural. 'No doubt was felt as to the objective exist-
ence of that celestial realm, with its shining courts,
and its legions of ministering spirits about the throne,
which to the modern mind is the region of pure poetry
or religious metaphor ; no doubt as to the real agency
of angels and devils in the daily business of men's
lives ; no doubt as to the fiery horrors of the world
below, which must prove the doom of the great ma-
jority of the human race. All these, to the Christian
mind, had their distinct local habitation. The new
cosmology of Copernicus, indeed, threatened to invade
that realm ; but this heresy in science Melanclithon
thought should be suppressed forcibly by the State,
like any other heresy.

So too the conception held of revelation. It followed
that religious doctrine — the " inspired Word " — was
thought to be definitely a communication from that
outside world to this, — as definitely as the orders
sent by special messenger, or the bulletin forwarded
by telegraph, from a commanding officer to the forces

REVELATION. 129

under his command. Absolutely, the only business
of those who receive them is to understand them in
their exact import, and obey them on the peril of
their lives. Any hint that they come within the
range of free opinion, or make part of the common
body of human thought, to be interpreted by the com-
mon maxims of criticism, is "heresy" — that is,
" free-thinking " — necessarily and at once.

Thus it is the characteristic of this stage of religious
opinion that there can be strictly no modification and
no compromise. Opinion is a test of loyalty. Only
one mode, one shade of opinion, can insure acceptance.
And, in the heroic temper so engendered, there is no
hair's-breadth of variation for which men would not
be, and have not been, as free, nay, eager, to go to mar-
tyrdom or exile as any soldier whose valor is appealed
to, to man the forlorn hope in battle or siege.

This, I say, follows from the conception of a revela-
tion as accepted in the mind of that time. It is need-
less to disguise the gravity of the change that has
come about. I will not say simply among those whose
method of religious thinking is frankly naturalistic,
who knowingly accept and consistently abide by the
maxims and canons of natural science. The state of
mind we call " liberalism " is possibly even more com-
mon now among those of professed orthodox opinion
(as in the latitudinarianism of the German universi-
ties, or amono' the more intelligent Eomanists them-
selves) than it is with the most advanced of modern
thinkers, who are apt to be most positive and dogmatic.
The realm of the Unseen may be fully accepted as an
article of faith \ but it is all left by common under-

9

130 PASSAGE FEOM DOGMA TO PUEE REASON.

standinsj for the relicfious imas^ination to illustrate or
define. Belief in revelation may be as fervently pro-
claimed as ever ; but the contents of revelation are
left to be shaped and interpreted by the current
philosophy of the day. Truth may be held as sacred,
and the violation of it as unpardonable, as before ; but
no sane man of our day would risk his reputation of
sanity by hinting at the eternal consequences, much
less the eternal doom, of honest error.

This complete difference of mental atmospliere be-
tween the Keformation period and ours is the result
of three centuries of controversy, analysis, and criti-
cism, which have fairly brought the contents of relig-
ious thought within the recognized field of pliilosophy.
For the present, we need have nothing to do with the
sudden widening of that field in our day by the study
of comparative religions. Our business is strictly
within the Christian field, and within the boundaries
of modern Europe.

In less than a century and a half from the first
movement of reform, the most essential step in the
passage from dogma to pure reason had been taken.
Descartes (159G-1650), not Luther nor Calvin, is now
tiie name of the recognized leader of thought. That
sharp and penetrating solvent of philosophic specula-
tion has at length brought all the old problems into
a new form, to be studied under new conditions, and
settled (if ever) on a basis radically different from
that defined of old.

Of philosopiiy, in its broader sense, as thus taking
the place of dogma in the common thought of men,
there are two sides. One is a side of pure specula-

PHILOSOPHY. 131

tion ; the other is a side of pure observation or practice.
Philosophy, then, in the sense we have to consider,
has two departments, — metaphysics on one side, psy-
chology and ethics on the other ; and we have first to
see how the germs of these two may be traced in the
doctrinal system of that day.

In general terms, it may be said that speculative
dogma — involving the Divine nature and attributes
and the conditions of the eternal life — is represented
to the modern mind in the problems of Metaphysics ;
while the human side of dogma, involving the nature
of sin and the method of redemption, is represented by
the purely practical department of Ethics and the
scientific, ex positions of Psychology.

Now the form in which we find the Protestant
dogma at the very start brings us at once upon the
ground, and in view of the problems and methods, of
these two departments of philosophy. The watchword
of Luther, " Justification by Faith," hints that every-
thing at issue in the destiny of the soul — that is,
practically speaking, the entire significance of Christ-
ianity — is staked on the helievers state of mind.
Introspection, self-questioning, the interpreting of
experience, — in short, all the processes of religious
and moral psychology, — necessarily take the place
of that definite and intelligible system of rules, by
which the Church has explained and directed the
religious life.*

* Historically, the course of thought m which this is exhibited
is known as the Osiandrian controversy, which starts ^vith the ques-
tion, Is grace irresistible ? It proceeds by declaring faith to be " the
medium of the indwelling Christ " (suggesting the pure mysticism

132 PASSAGE FROM DOGMA TO PURE REASON.

And, in tins process, it speedily proves absolutely
hopeless that any two serious thinkers should think
just alike. In short, aside from one or two broad pro-
positions held in common, anything like dogmatism
in the field of practical religion becomes futile and
impossible. This consequence, naturally enough, was
not accepted, or even discerned, by those whose own
course is a very clear proof of it to us. They held
for a century or two, and perhaps some of them still
hold, that justification by faith can, in the long run,
mean something else than sincerity and freedom of
relisrious thouo-ht. But, to the intelligence of the
present day, that result is absolutely plain.

Again, the speculative dogma of the Eeformation
presently took, in the system of Calvin, the still more
ric^id form of Predestination. Its formula was the
Eternal Divine Decree. In short, speculatively, it is
a system of pure religious Fatalism. This is the cen-
tral dogma, about which are grouped all those concep-
tions which go to make up the system of Calvinism.*
The first sharp speculative controversy among Protes-

of Eckhart), and asserts that " Christ is our righteousness only in
his human nature," having, for his work of redemption, discharged
himself of his divine attributes (hence the term Kenotist). Osiander,
an interpreter of Luther's doctrine in a somewhat more subjective
and less dogmatic sense, died in 1552.

, Again, Luther's doctrine of consubstantiation opened up a con-
troversy on the dogma of "the ubiquity of Christ's body," as
asserted by Flach (Flacius), which was soon found to involve
unwelcome consequences. The points of difference were compro-
mised in the formula of Torgau (1576), by the virtual condemnation
of Melanchthon. Flach (1575) also held the highly mediaeval opin-
ion that sin is " something substantial in man" (Paul's a/juxpria).
* See page 52, above.

DOCTRINE OF DECREES. loo

tants (that of the Arminian Remonstrants at the Synod
of Dort in 1618) turns on the nature of Divine decrees
and the possibility of moral freedom ; * and a large
part of the discussions and decisions of the Council of
Trent show that the Catholic mind was equally exer-
cised with the Protestant upon this unsolvable ques-
tion of the metaphysical relation of human life with
Infinite Sovereignty. Still further, side by side with
the Arminian controversy, almost exactly coincident
with it in time, we find the moral problems started
by the Molinists on the Catholic side, with their lax
interpretation of Christian ethics, leading to the re-
vived Augustinism of the Jansenists, who are properly
enough called Calvinists within the Church.

Now a controversy of this nature may begin with
texts and their interpretation ; but it must very soon
get upon metaphysical ground, and involve differences
not so much of dogmatic opinion as of philosophical
method. Remember, however, that it is by the
nature of the case religious pliilosophy. We are still
a century or two from a philosophy which may be
properly termed scientific. There is this difference
between a religious Fatalism like that of Calvin, and
the scientific Determinism of our day, that the former

* In the earlier stages of the controversy, the rigid Determinism
of Flach is opposed to the " Synergism " of Melauchthon, which
asserts the co-operation of the divine with the human will. This
is followed, somewhat later (1589), by the protest of certain theolo-
gians of Delft against the strict supralapsarian dogma of Beza (de-
claring that sin and all its consequences were ordained before the
Fall). The controversy, being submitted to Arminius, of Leyden,
soon developed the antagonism which bore deadly fruit at Dort. —
See, as to this whole period, Gieseler, vol. iv. pp. 435-512.

134 PASSAGE FROM DOGMA TO PURE REASON.

implies a living relation between Divine Will on one
side and a sinful humanity on the other. Such a, rela-
tion can never be purely fatalistic and unmoral, like
that to which mere scientific speculation so steadily
drifts. Logically or not, it demands Obedience, not
blank Submission merely, of the human subject.

And, argue how we may, Obedience means to the
human mind something of choice and will. It im-
plies, if it does not assert, — nay, if in terms it denies,
— moral liberty. This appeal to the inextinguishable
sense of moral freedom may be illogical in theory, or
the will may be enthralled in practice ; but it is
necessary to the system, so long as it remains and
calls itself a religious system. Except religion is
primarily a law of life, its dogma becomes pure
fatalism, and its sentiment lapses straight to Quiet-
ism, — that ignoblest of heresies, which was, in fact,
the degeneracy of the later Eomanism,* just as it is
the peril of a boneless antinomian sentimental Cal-
vinism now.

From the hot religious controversies of the six-
teenth century we thus find ourselves emerging, in
the seventeenth, into a field of debate on the broad
open ground of modern metaphysics. It is very
interestinGj, in this view, to find that the tracrical and
ferocious struggle of the Thirty Years' War — which
committed to the wager of battle that issue between
Catholic and Protestant Germany which it was vainly
hoped to define by the Augsburg Peace in 1555 —
had its part in training the keen faculty, and afford-

* See an interesting little volume, " Molinos the Quietist," by
John Bigelow. Scribner : New York.

DESCARTES. 135

ing the special opportunifcy, to whicli we owe what
historians commonly regard as the new birth of phi-
losophy.

" When [says Descartes] I had spent some years in
studying thus in the hook of the world, trying to gather
some experience, I took the resolution one day to study
also in myself, and to bestow all the strength of my mind
in fixing the course I had to follow ; and in this I suc-
ceeded far better, as I think, than if I had never with-
drawn from my country and my books.

" I was then in Germany, summoned thither by occa-
sion of the war which was not yet over ; and, as T was
returning to the army after the coronation of the Emperor,
winter set in, and confined me to a spot where I found no
entertaining company ; and as, fortunately, there were
neither cares nor passions to trouble me, I stayed aU day
long shut up in a close room {poele), where I had full
leisure to talk with my own thoughts. And one of the
first I set myself to consider was this." *

We need not follow the easy-going and chatty
illustration in which he tells us how he came to
reflect that what he wants first of all is unity of
method in his opinions. With the slender scientific
outfit of that day, " geometry, algebra, and logic,"
only one method is open to him, which is the deduc-
tive, as opposed to generalizing from observed facts.
The question of real moment is, How shall he find
the premises from which he can reason in perfect
confidence ?

We must bear in mind, also, that he does not re-

* Discourse de la Methode. Part I. chap. 2.

136 PASSAGE FROM DOGMA TO PURE REASOX.

gard himself as " one of the elect few, whom Divine
grace has endowed with the faculty " of dealing with
the higher ranges of speculation. His aim is modest
and practical, the safe conduct of his own life. Oar
interest here, then, is in the maxims or practical rules
of thinking w^hich he lays down, with the " firm and
constant resolution never in a single instance to
swerve from them." They are as follows : —

" First, never to accept anything as true which I do not
clearly know to he such ; that is, carefully to avoid haste
and prejudice, and to include nothing in my judgment but
what is so clearly and distinctly presented to my thought
that I have no ground whatever to call it in doubt.

" Secondly, to divide every difficult matter I have to
investigate into as many portions as it can be, and as may
be needed better to resolve those difficulties.

" Thirdly, to proceed in due course, beginning with the
simplest objects and easiest to understand, and mounting,
little by httle, by steps as it were, to the understanding of
the more complex ; assuming also an order [of sequence]
among those which have no natural [obvious] precedence
among themselves.

"Lastly, to make everywhere such complete enumera-
tion and so broad revision, that I shall be sure that I have
left nothing out."

In these rules, seemingly so plain and easy, we
appear to notice, first of all, the childlike uncon-
sciousness of the difficulty they will lead to in prac-
tice ; that is, if we take them as a method of the
discovery of truth. At first sight, for example, noth-
ing comes nearer our notion of a simple substance
than clear water, which, in common parlance, is " the

DESCAETES. 137

element " to this day ; while chemistry and physics
both pause, as it were, on the threshold of the mar-
vels it contains. It is quite in keeping with the
childlikeness of this method, that Descartes himself
despatches his speculative philosophy in a single
youthful sketch ; while the work of his manhood
and his real intellectual strength lay in the field of
positive science, where his system (not his method)
satisfied the most advanced minds of Europe till more
than half a century after his death.

The historical importance of the method lies not in
any definite result that came from it, but in its offer-
ing the first well-known example of the intellectual
boldness which went behind the received opinions of
the day, and the external authority they rested on, to
find a ground of certitude in the mind itself. It is
true tliat, in the matter of speculative opinion, one
can (as the homely saying goes) "take out in the
grist only what has gone in at the hopper." Descartes
himself began his speculations as a devout Catholic,
at least as one who preferred to be thought so ; and
to this complexion, naturally enough, his opinions
came round at last. As a child, he may have heard
of the burning of Giordano Bruno,* who had carried
free-thought into his opinions as well as his meth-
ods ; and that would serve as ample warning when
he came to be a man.

The next thing we note is that Descartes, while
professing a method perfectly original and indepen-
dent, is in fact fettered, without knowing it, by older
systems of philosophy, which furnish, so to speak,

* February 17, 1600.

138 PASSAGE FROM DOGMA TO PURE REASON.

the matter of liis sub-conscious thought. It is clear
that the value of a speculative system depends quite
as much on the correctness of its data as on the
accuracy of its deductions. What a man assumes he
seems to himself to prove ; but, really, the proof is
already contained in the assumption. ISTow the pos-
tulates of Descartes — not those he supposes himself
to start from, but those which turn up in his results
— belong to that very Scholasticism which he thinks
to explode and supersede.

In the first place, the method is purely subjective.
The material it works upon is what the mind finds
by looking in upon itself. In other words, the thought
of the mind is assumed to represent t7nith of fact. This
is, in short, the Mediaeval realism, which regards the
mind as a mirror open to a sphere of spiritual or ideal
truth, which truth is to be discerned by looking at its
reflection in the mirror. Thus, in his celebrated proof
of the Divine existence, Descartes holds it established
" as a general rule that all things which we conceive
very clearly and very distinctly are all true." This is
his major premise. The minor consists in finding in
his thought the idea of " a Being (suhstance) infinite,
eternal, immutable, independent, omniscient, omnipo-
tent, by whom both myself and all other things that
exist (if it is true that there are any which exist)
have been created and produced." His conclusion is
that, " since this idea is very clear and distinct, and
contains in itself more objective reality than any
other, there is none which is in itself more true, or
can be less suspected of error and falsity. '' * Such is

* Third Meditation.

DESCARTES : DOCTRINE OF IDEAS. 139

the Cartesian syllogism. It reminds us at once of
Anselm's confident demonstration,* though it does
not contain the curious play of words on which that
seems to turn.

We may observe, again, that the term " idea," here
employed as if it were the easiest thing in the world,
belongs to old philosophical systems, and has to un-
dergo severe analysis in a really scientific method.
It signifies simply " image," or " likeness." A " clear"
or " simple " idea is supposed to be a true one, — that
is, to represent the fact, — precisely as the image of
a planet in a reflecting telescope is held truly to rep-
resent the body in proportion as it is clearly defined,
not doubled or blurred. No fallacy is in fact more
constant or more subtile than that which thus takes
a single sense as representing all forms of perception.
Many philosophers never get so far as to see this
fallacy, and reason from the visual image as if it were
something more than the mere metaphor it is. What
serves for a sight does not serve for a sound or a
smell. If philosophers had happened to be blind, we
should never have heard of " ideas" beinof "stored"

o

or " residing " in the mind like microscopic photo-
graphs. As a source of knowledge, the term " idea "
is narrow and misleading. It is, in short, a pure
figure of speech. It denotes a process, not a fact.
And it gradually gave way before the more vague and
general term " impression."

Again, this system makes much of the terms " sub-
stance" and "attributes." Unable to reconcile the
qualities of matter with those of mind, Descartes sup-

* See The Middle Age, p. 199.

140 PASSAGE FROM DOGMA TO PURE REASON.

poses two primary and incommunicable " substances,"
one having for its primary attribute " thought," and
the other " extension." Having thus got a foundation
for the two phenomenal realms of spirit and matter,

— holding them as he does to be absolutely incapable
of acting on each other, — he proceeds, by another
metaphysical fiction, to invent a process by which
spirit may act on matter ; or rather, by which the
motion of spirit may seem as if it caused a corre-
sponding motion of matter. This device consists in
a name, — another bit of unconscious realism, — the
imaginary solution of the imaginary difficulty being
called " assistency," and the doctrine which assumes
it being known later as " occasionalism ; " terms which
signify that the -two act, indeed, quite independently
(but for the direct interposition of the Deity in every
act) though with absolute correspondence, like a watch
and a clock running together side by side in perfect
time.

But the term "substance," assumed all along, is
itself a pure metaphysical fiction, as we have seen in
discussing tlie doctrines of the Schoolmen.* " Sub-
stance " and " attribute " are a mere though necessary
piece of verbal analysis.! To make them anything
more than a convenient device of logic is to fall

* The Middle Age, p. 212.

+ For example, water may be thus anah'zed, logically, into its
imaginary " substance " and its manifest " attributes " or qualities

— fluidity, transparency, and the like. Modem analysis describes
it as compounded of hydrogen and oxygen, or by the symbols HO
(or HgO), because it can go no farther ; not that these sj'^mbols are
in the least more intelligible than water itselt : they only introduce
us to a different and wider set of relations.

DESCARTES: MATTER AND SPIRIT. 141

back, unconsciously, upon the old scliolastic realism,
whicli held, for example, in the line of theology, that
the " substance " of a piece of bread could be taken
away, and something different put in its place, with-
out disturbing any one of its " attributes." Science
knows nothing of. substance and attributes in this
sense. It knows only of things with their qualities.
Some of these qualities may be seen at a glance ;
some of them may be beyond the reach of our finest
analysis. But here is the thing itself, with all its
qualities, discovered and undiscovered. If it lacked
any of them, it would be something else. It cannot
possibly be thought of apart from them.

Each of these qualities, again, probably means
some inherent force of attraction or repulsion, —
force being precisely the thing which is not recog-
nized in any of these metaphysical systems. There
is no such thing known to science as a "dead,"
" inert," or " passive " matter. Every element of it is
essentially active, within its limited sphere of force.*
Thus, the assumed difficulty of spirit acting on matter,
or the reverse, is purely an imaginary difficulty, — a
mere metaphysical ghost, which the Cartesians think
to lay by the magic word "assistency," implying that
the direct aid of God is needed, to give effect to the
act of will.

What are the properties of any given object is,
again, purely a matter of investigation and of fact.
The distinction of Matter and Spirit is a convenient
one, because it answers to our consciousness, or our
notion, of a free originating power in the human
* See below, p. 287-

142 PASSAGE FEOM DOGMA TO PUEE EEASON.

mind, which makes moral distinctions possible, as well
as merely phenomeual ones. But, aside from this,
there is not the least difficulty, or objection, in say-
ing that " matter thinks," or " matter acts," any more
than in saying that the loadstone attracts or that heat
expands. It merely means that thought, as well as
motion, occurs in a given series of events, under fixed
" laws of similitude and succession." The origin of
thought, like the origin of any form of motion, is to
us totally unimaginable and unknown. The only
difference between materialism and spiritualism, of
any relevancy to us, is that the former denies, or
seems to deny, the fact of moral freedom. In other
words, the difference is not speculative, but purely
ethical.

These metaphysical quibbles are not by any means
a measure of Descartes' genius. This is shown, how-
ever, in his developed algebra, in his generalized ge-
ometry, and in the magnificent physical conception
(known as Voiiices) by which he would interpret the
motions of the planets, much more than in the merits
of the speculative method that goes by his name.
Still, it is this method, not his advance in the ways
of positive science, that brings him into the line of
theological development, and shows him as a pioneer
in modern thought. It is the more necessary, there-
fore, to notice how completely, in this new line of
departure, we find ourselves still in the range of those
fundamental ideas which have been, consciously or
not, involved in the conceptions of the Christian
theology all along.

A few steps, rapidly retraced, will bring us down

SPINOZA. — LEIBNITZ. 143

to tliat revolution of pliilosopliic metliod which goes
by the name of Kant, and makes the startiDg-place
of modern speculation.

Working on the material of Descartes, employing
substantially the same phraseology, and fettered by the
same philosophic tradition, Spinoza simplifies the sys-
tem by assuming as sufficient one metaphysical " Sub-
stance " possessing hoth the fundamental attributes of
thought and extension ; that is to say, the substantial
identity of mind and matter. Eeally, this was a very
harmless metaphysical fiction, and should have been
so regarded. But, in the view of his age, it meant
pantheism, fatalism, the complete destruction - of re-
ligion and morality. I do not know that Spinoza
himself made much account of it. At any rate, he
found better work in his geometry, his optics, and
the really great achievement of a body of scientific
ethics. His piety was real, patient, and serene ; and
the independence he claimed as an honest thinker he
found easiest to win in great simplicity of living and
in the exercise of humble manual industry.

What Spinoza had done to advance the discussion
opened by Descartes seemed, meanwhile, to give it a
warp away from Christian theology and from practical
piety. And the same, perhaps, may be said of Leib-
nitz's extremely elaborate recast of the old metaphys-
ical fiction in his " Monadology," and his system of
"pre-established harmony," — all pure phantoms of
the speculative intelligence. It is true that — as was
said of him — he " complimented Orthodoxy as if it
had been a lady;" and that he gave his system a
religious turn in his " Theodicy," or elaborated optirn-

144 PASSAGE FROM DOGMA TO PURE REASON.

ism, meant to prove that this is " the best of possible
worlds." The proof of all this, it is needless to say,
is found in the premises he starts with, not in the
facts he would explain it by. The system itself seems
to invite the ghastly parody of it which Voltaire
gave in his Candide. Leibnitz was a man of vast
erudition, — the last, they say, and perhaps the wid-
est, of really encyclopaedic minds. His real genius
w^ent into the higher mathematics, and gave the most
intellectual form to the most advanced calculus that
had so far been conceived. But, except for a few
famous and helpful phrases (as the axiom of "the
sufficient reason," for example), it does not appear
that in his sublimer speculations he did much more
than revolve in the orbit already traced by those who
went before him.

The same fictitious difficulties before spoken of
haunted those two admirable religious thinkers, of
brilliant, homely, and penetrating genius, Male-
branche and Berkeley, who returned upon the prob-
lem as Descartes had left it, and sought to give it an
interpretation in the interest of Christian theology.
Their solution is in the terms of a very refined specu-
lative theism ; and they are so nearly alike to the
common eye, that the latter of them found it neces-
sary to explain that he had not copied from the other.
Both are foiled by the imaginary difficulty of mind
dealing directly with matter ; both meet it by a pure
metaphysical fiction conveyed in a phrase of speech,
— the unknowable interpreting the unknown. Ac-
cording to Malebranche, " we see all things in God,"
who is '' the place of spirits/' and who is in imme-

MALEBRANCHE. — BERKELEY. 145

diate relation with all things that He has made,
including our own spirits, which are embraced in his.
According to Berkeley, the act of perception is an
immediate act of God upon the mind, all external
objects being purely phenomenal, devoid of " sub-
stance." Their esse (lie says) is percijn ; that is, they
have no other existence than in the fact of their
being perceived.

The logic by which Berkeley comes to this assertion
is very simple and direct. His syllogism may be
stated thus : First, the only objects which we directly
perceive are Ideas {i^hilosophic postulate). But, sec-
ondly, what we really perceive are the things them-
selves {common-sense.) Hence, thirdly. Ideas are the
only things : which accordingly exist only in the per-
ceiving mind and may be conceived as impressions
made upon it by the Universal Mind. He says :
'' My endeavors tend only to unite and place in a
clearer light that truth which was before shared
between the vulgar and the philosophers : the former
being of opinion that those things they immediately
perceive are the real things ; and the latter, that the
things immediately perceived are ideas ivhich exist only
in the mind. Which two notions, put together, do in
effect constitute the substance of what I advance."
Again, he says : " I do not pretend to form any hy-
pothesis at all. I am of a vulgar cast, simple enough
to believe my senses, and leave things as I find them."
He does not see, however, that the *' idea," which he
retains, is as much a fiction as the " substance," which
he rejects.

Or, to restate the point a little differently. All ma-

146 PASSAGE FROM DOGMA TO PURE REASON.

terial things are to us necessarily purely plienomenal.
That is, it is their qualities we perceive, not the things
themselves ; or, in" scholastic phrase, we know their
"attributes," not their "substance." To the non-
metaphysical mind this appears to be the very recon-
dite truth, that, if we were blind, we could not see
the object ; if we were deaf, we could not hear it, and
so on; and that, so far forth, the thing would not
exist to us. In the region of metaphysical fiction
where Berkeley conducts his argument, the mind per-
ceives not things, but " ideas " of things ; that is, the
images (so to speak) or impressions stamped upon the
mind itself. These are all that we can know in our
own consciousness ; and it is easy enough to infer
that the "substance," which is nothing to us, is
nothing at all in itself, — a very harmless truism, or
else very blank nonsense, according as we take it. If
a man has had a leg shot off by a cannon-ball, for
example, it neither instructs him, nor comforts him
much, to be told that God is merely producing a
series of impressions on his mind ; that the cannon-
ball has no " substance," nor his leg either ! Byron's
famous sarcasm is as true as it is witty : —

" When Bishop Berkeley said there was no matter —
And proved it — 't was no matter what he said."

Eemembering that, in fact and common-sense, w^e
deal with objects and their properties, not with the
fictions of "substance" and "attribute," neither the
truism nor the nonsense will be likely to trouble us.
The instructive thing for us to observe is that a very
able and clear-headed man, in the interest of religious

HUME. 147

philosophy, should persuade himself that these phrases
convey a useful and intelligible truth. In fact, read-
ing and re-reading the charming dialogues in which
this theory is developed, I can hardly persuade myself
that Berkeley is not hoaxing his disciples, — disprov-
ing, in short, by delicate irony, the " subjective ideal-
ism " which he seems at so much pains to urge.

A clear and passionless intelligence, like Hume's,
with no such religious bias, found no difficulty in
persuading itself that, if the metaphysical "sub-
stance " is not needed for the phenomena of matter,
no more is it needed for the phenomena of mind.
" What we call a mind!' he says, " is nothing but a
heap or collection of different perceptions, united
together by certain relations, and supposed, though
falsely, to be endowed with a perfect simplicity and
identity." * This reads like a parody of Berkeley,
who says : "A cherry is nothing but a congeries of
sensible impressions, or ideas perceived by various
senses. . . . Take away the sensations of softness,
moisture, redness, tartness, and you take away the
cherry." Again,! " the doctrine of the immateriality,
simplicity, and indivisibility of a thinking substance,
is a true atheism," like that of Spinoza, to whose
"hideous hypothesis" Hume considers that he has
dealt an effective blow. " Generally speaking," he
says, " the errors in religion are dangerous ; those in
philosophy only ridiculous."

As Berkeley, then, has reduced the material world
to a series of perceptions, with nothing to perceive,
so Hume reduces the whole realm of intellect and

* Essays, vol. i. p. 260. ■ + Ibid., p. 293.

148 PASSAGE FROM DOGMA TO PUEE REASON,

emotion to a sequence of thoughts and feelings, with-
out anything to think and feel. This is, of course,
purely a logical redudio ad ahsurdttm. So Hume,
unquestionably, regarded it himself. To quote his
own words : " I dine, I play a game of backgammon,
I converse, and am merry with my friends ; and when,
after three or four hours' amusement, I would return
to these speculations, they appear so cold and strained
and ridiculous that I cannot find it in my heart to
enter into them any further. Here, then, I find my-
self absolutely and necessarily determined to live and
talk and act like other people in the common affairs
of life." His universal and consistent scepticism is
simply a final word of protest against the vanishing
fictions of scholastic metaphysics. It applies no-
where else, except in the field of transcendental spec-
ulation, dealing with no human interest whatever.

This bland negation of the scholastic entities was
the sagacious apprehension of his youth, not the seri-
ous business of his manhood.* Hume soon turned
from these barren meditations to the positive work
of history, and the social or ethical phenomena allied
wdth history. His " Essays " were felt to mean deadly
mischief to the old dogmatic and metaphysical the-
ology. And, so far as his work was merely negative,
it met, naturally enough, more resentment than intel-
ligent recognition.

The radical and systematic scepticism of Hume, it
wdll be noticed, is simply a scepticism as to certain
fixed notions ingrained in the Mediaeval philosophy,

* The Essay on Human Nature, from winch these si^eculutious
are taken, was written at the age of tweuty-five.

DESPAIR OF METAPHYSICS. 149

and assumed without question in all schemes of dog-
matic theology. The terms "substance" {vTroaraat^,
or substantia) and " idea " (elSo? or ISea), with the
signification attached to them, may stand as the type
of those notions. The scholastic dialect deals largely
with other terms of logic or metaphysics, such as
entity, quidditij, and the like, which are treated as if
they too somehow had an objective existence ; and
it is hardly an extravagant caricature, when Milton,
in a college poem, introduces Ens, as father of the
ten " predicaments," and a live person in the dialogue,
— like Adam, in the old German play, "going across
the stage to be created." These were the conceptions
of that highly elaborated and artificial style of thought
called Scholasticism. They have become gradually
attenuated and ghostlike through the long process we
have just traced, — taking the most important and
vivacious of them all, " substance," as an example, —
until, in the analysis of Hume, we have seen them
fade out entirely, and disappear.

The position we have now come to is a despair of
metaphysics as a method of ascertaining truth. This,
it is perhaps needless to say, is a necessary stage in
the progress of thought. The ground must thus be
cleared for the advance of positive knowledge, and
the establishing of a scientific method. Philosophy
(as generally understood) reduces itself to a " science
of thought." It is an analysis of subjective states of
consciousness and operations of the mind ; no longer
an organon for the discovery of the unknown. Pos-
itive knowledge can deal only with observed fact.
Knowledge of the Absolute has no place in the

150 PASSAGE FROM DOGMA TO PURE REASON.

human understanding.. And, along with metaphysical
dogmatism, the province of theological dogmatism is
by this process swept utterly away.*

The reputation of Hume as a universal sceptic,
and the theological antipathy felt towards his name
to this day testify to the bewildered surprise with
which thinking men — particularly, serious and sin-
cerely pious men — suddenly found themselves bereft
of the foundations on which they supposed them-
selves to be standing all along. It was easy enough
for an ordinary thinker to accept Hume's argument
on the negative side. That superficial scepticism
which consists in accepting such a result is, in fact,
the symptom by which the mind of the eighteenth
century is best known to us. Only one man seems
to have been at once clear-sighted enough to follow
out the principle to its consequences, patient and
strong enough to work out the method which philo-
sophy is hereafter bound to follow, if it is not to be a
purely arbitrary fabrication, quite apart from the real
beliefs and lives of men.

We have nothing here to do with what is sys-
tematic and technical in the Critique of Kant, any
more than with the asperities of his nomenclature.
Our only concern is to see how the revolution he

* As, for example, the scholastic doctrine of the Trinity. The
trinity as sjmibol ( Vorstellung) of the Divine life in humanity,
meanwhile, remains as perhaps the best that we can get. Thus, ac-
cording to Dean Stanley (" Christian Institutions"), God the Father
signifies natural religion, God the Son historical religion, and God
the Holy G\\o%i 2'>ersonal religion, " and these three are one." Hei'e
all controversy is forestalled at once ; for who would care to deuy
such a trinity as that ?

KANT. 151

introduced stands related to religious thought, and
affects the future of theology. Many a dogmatic
scheme has been hazarded since his day, building
professedly on his foundation, — here a scheme of
elaborated metaphysics, and there a great growth of
religious sentiment and fancy. Both these have their
powerful fascination to large classes of minds relig-
iously disposed ; and both, no doubt, have their real
value and preciousness to such minds. But it is to
be observed that such value is jjurely personal, sub-
jective, experiential, noway scientific. Of objective
validity, of scientific verification, they are quite in-
capable ; and so, more than they really deserve, they
forfeit the, respect of the modern scientific mind.
The chief masters of abstract thought have been
masters also of the positive science of their day.
Their task has been to methodize and legitimate
men's actual knowledge or belief Without that
marriage of thought and fact philosophy is neces-
sarily sterile. Its formal structures match, at best,
the theories of transcendental physics : to the adept,
a pure play of technical skill ; to the untrained, a
blank mystery or barren curiosity ; to neither, the
solution of any vital problem.

The result of real moment to us from the philo-
sophical movement that goes by the name of Kant is
that it brings back religion upon the solid ground of
ethics, from which it had been whirled away by the
breezes of speculation, for so many centuries, into the
region of metaphysical dogma. His " great thought,"
as touching our own subject, has been stated in quite
a variety of ways. His own statement of it is very

152 PASSAGE FROM DOGMA TO PURE REASON.

simple and direct. The neatest and clearest para-
phrase of it that I have seen is this : " That only the
practical reason moves in a world of certainties ; that
pure thought is pure scepticism ; that we know, only
inasmuch as we act on our knowledge." *

This wholesome maxim required, as we have seen,
a century and a half of discussion among the ablest
minds to bring it into the clear and definite form it
now bears. It required a mental revolution to bring
it into general acceptance among thinking men. It
is not, however, anything quite new ; only the revival
of a very old truth. " If any man will do His will,
he shall know of the doctrine," is a warning delivered
at the very fountain-head of Christian history. Ee-
ligious life as against speculative dogma was the very
point at issue between the Christian confessors of the
second century and the arrogance of Gnostic thought.
The incapacity of the human mind to deal with the
Absolute is stated by Novatian, in the most orthodox
treatise of the third century, as an accepted maxim
of Christian philosophy. Nothing but the immense
construction of Christian dogma afterwards, and its
legitimation by a system of philosophy which we call
scholastic, — supposing ourselves to be free from its
sophisms and assumptions, — would have caused the
surprise and alarm that were felt, when the metliod
of dogma itself was challenged, and the human mind
was bidden to return to the safe forsaken paths.

Something more than a century has passed since
that challenge was thrown down to the human rea-
son ; and as a result we see, more plainly than was
* The Spectator, Kov. 12, 1881.

THE RESULT. 153

possible then, what I began by stating : that the dog-
matic part of the Christian creed passes into pare
metaphysics, and its practical or human part into
pure psychology and ethics. We have also seen that
the process which has led to this result was involved
in the Protestant formula itself, and the nature of
the discussions which ensued as to its interpretation.
Once afloat upon the wave of that interminable con-
troversy,— of predestination, divine decrees, the bond-
age of the human will, and the saving efficacy of faith,
— the way was open to the course of thought which
has been widening out ever since.

Two side influences, however, have contributed to
this result. One is the indirect effect of the growth
of positive science, first interpreted by Bacon, of
wliich I have not spoken here, because it seemed
best to deal only with that which was spontaneously
developed within the sphere of pure thought itself*
The other, which is here briefly traced, is the impulse
given to the movement by a series of very vigorous,
able, and independent thinkers, — men who, not con-
tent with the accepted theories, reasoned in their own
way upon the data given them in current dogma, until
one by one the old spectres of metaphysics were laid ;
and, without wishing or even suspecting it, men found
themselves walking together upon the plain ground
of fact.

This result constitutes what we may call the posi-
tive side of the Kantian method, as distinct from the
critical or negative. It is, in fact, an emancipation
of the intellect in the direction of pure thought, quite

* See below, The Reign 6f Law.

154 PASSAGE FROM DOGMA TO PURE REASON.

as much as in the direction of positive science. For it
is to be observed that the most complete and vital
systems of speculative philosophy : — those which give
best satisfaction to abstract thinkers, and claim high-
est authority as interpreters of human thought —
belong to the century which has followed the great
work of Kant, and are part of the movement initiated
by him. Certainly, the science of Thought is the
noblest and most serviceable of all the sciences, un-
less we should except the scientific interpretation of
History, which, indeed, it may be held to include.
Its perfect work would be to bring harmony and order
in all the infinite complexity of men's knowledge and
opinion. And, for that final result, not even the
foundation could be rightly laid, until the era of dog-,
matism had been left behind, and the old metaphysi-
cal fictions dissolved into the metaphor and symbol
which in fact they are.

VII.
ENGLISH EATIONALISM.

PARALLEL with the line of speculative thought
that runs from Descartes to Kant is an independ-
ent movement of Rational Theology. That line of
speculation, so far as concerns the current belief, was
purely critical. Constructive theology, of any sort,
was far from being either its motive or its immediate
result. The opinion on such matters of those leaders
in pure thought, when it happens to be expressed, is
mostly conventional. Even Spinoza, when he uses the
religious phraseology of his day, hardly varies from the
terms of a rather mystical orthodoxy ;* and Hume, in
his cool disdainful way, wishes to be understood as
having no quarrel of his own with the popular belief •]•
It is different with that movement of rational
theology which we have to consider now. It is, for
one thing, essentially English. At least, it will be
most conveniently treated as the growth of English

* " I say," he writes to a friend, " that it is not absolutely neces-
sary to salvation to know Christ after the flesh ; but it is altogether
otherwise if we speak of the Son of God, that is, the eternal Wisdom
of God which is manifested in all things, and chiefly in the human
soul, and most of all in Jesus Christ. Without this Wisdom, no
one can come into a state of blessedness. "

t Those essays of Hume which might be regarded as a direct
attack on revelation were not published till three years after
his death.

156 ENGLISH RATIONALISM.

soil, and as the characteristic achievement of English
minds. , It has the gravity, the common-sense, the
practical aim, the impatience of mere speculation,
mere emotion, or ecclesiastical authority, which are
held to be qualities of the best English thought.

To a singular degree this movement is not only inde-
pendent, but even, we might almost say, unconscious,
of the other. Descartes and Leibnitz, it is true, were
both of them eagerly studied by the better minds
in England ; but mostly in the line of physics, not
of metaphysics, and mostly too in the w^ay of contro-
versy. Both of them are best known, in this connec-
tion, by their collision with I^ewton's magnificent
Celestial Mechanics : Descartes — that is, the later
school of his disciples — being worsted in obstinate
fight against the new physical theory of the Universe ;
and Leibnitz as discredited, in his later life, by his
most unworthy jealousies and assaults against the
great name of Newton.* As to that process of men-
tal emancipation, in which both names are so illus-
trious, it was neither needed nor much felt in the
attempt to establish a rational theology, as that was
now followed out in England.

For here the shock of the Eeformation had of old
set men's minds more completely free than tliey appear
to have been upon the Continent, from the conven-

* This jealousy, on the part of Leibnitz, arose with a dispute as
to which was the real inventor^ of the Calcuhis, which had really-
been discovered by both, approaching it from different directions.
And it amounted to a petulance that not only refused to accept
Newton's theory of the celestial motions, but sought, in private
correspondence, to injure him by the charge of irreligion. Universal
Gravitation, as opposed to Vortices, was "atheistical."

THE ELIZABETHAN ERA. 157

tional limits of religious opinion.* Not only theology
was subordinate to statesmanship with the great
ministers of Elizabeth '-s reign, who were a good deal
more secular than ecclesiastical in their style of piety.
But the bright intellects of that day in the world of
letters were wonderfully emancipated from dogma.
The great Elizabethan Eevival had its pagan side, —
without the grosser moral offences of that in Italy a
century before, but quite as far, perhaps, from the
serious temper of the Eeformers.f

'No wonder if Puritanism repelled those genial,
brilliant, and intrepid spirits, as much as their native
good sense and English loyalty saved them from the
Catholic reaction. Shakspeare leaves us no hint to
guess what his creed might be, or what his choice
between the creeds. He was alike remote, it is
probable, from either. His wide, calm, and perhaps
rather sombre view of the deeper things in life —
what Schlegel calls his scepticism — gave the largest
field to the free play of his genius. Sir Philip Sidney
was a friend of Giordano Bruno, who inscribed to him
his audacious attack on superstition.^ Their great
contemporary Ealeigh was charged on his trial with

* For example, the amazing attempts to effect a compromise
between Lutlieranism and the Papacy, so as to combine harmoniously
in one system of state-religion, into which Bossuet and Leibnitz
had been drawn by way of correspondence, may be compared with
the much sincerer attempts of the High-Church party in England
to vindicate its own Catholicity. Archbishop Laud is even claimed
to have been the real barrier that protected the Church of England
against Popery.

+ Described with singular vigor in Taine's " History of English
Literature," book ii. chap. i.

+ The Spaccio della Bcstia trionfante.

158 ENGLISH RATIONALISM.

atheism, whicli reproacli he might well enough share
with many another illustrious name. But the faith he
really had at heart appears to have been a very grave
and reverent natural theism, too far in advance of his
time to be recognized as piety. He was too resolute
a man of action to be either a denier or a sceptic ; and
he is cited as first on the list of those English worthies
who led the way to the pure rationalism of the
eighteenth century. These sober and devout ante-
cedents separate that movement very widely, even
the most radical forms of it, from the revolutionary
thous^ht of France.

The great intelligence of Bacon did not overcome
a conventional — what we might even call a courtly
— way of dealing with religious questions, which
disappoints us of finding in him the natural leader
we mio-ht have looked for. Besides, he and minds of
his cast were frightened from anything that lay that
way by the portentous shapes which the new religious
liberty was bringing forth. The great wave of national
uplifting spent itself in an unfulfilled vision of the
Christian Commonwealth. Not one who shared in
that grievously foiled effort of creative genius in the
religious life of England remained to be its interpreter,
or to carry its spirit over into the larger intellectual
life of another century.

The two names of independent thinkers in that
time of revolution are Lord Herbert of Cberbury and
Thomas Hobbes. It is necessary here to say a word
of eacli.

Lord Edward Herbert (1581-1648) is very irrele-
vantly put first in the catalogue of English Deists, as

LORD HEKBERT. — HOBBES. 159

if lie had led the revolt of reason which made so much
noise a century later. His real creed was a very se-
rious, positive, refined theism, in temper not widely
remote from that of his brother, the saintly poet. The
motive of his Essay was to find in natural religion
as close a parallel as might be with the inward life
of ecclesiastical piety, of which one element always is
the near and tender sense of moral evil. Thus, in his
system of a purely natural religion (as he regards it),
a genuine sense of Sin and craving for Divine forgive-
ness are even more marked features than that awe
before the unknown and appalling Forces of I^ature,
which is so much more apparent in our study of
early religious phenomena. More, perhaps, than in any
other writer who approaches the subject from the
point of view of Eeason, his motive is a tenderly
nurtured, and what we may well call a Christian,
piety.*

Hobbes (1588-1679) is a sort of seventeenth-cen-
tury Schopenhauer, — like the famous pessimist of
our day in his surly view of things in general and his
keen, surly way of stating it; in his somewhat
cowardly appeal to pure despotism as the only thing to
keep other men in order and make him safe in his per-
sonal prosperities ; and in his large, ostentatious, and
aggressive self-conceit, as well as in the extraordinary
vigor and penetration of his statement of truth on low
levels, as if it were good for all levels. His trenchant
and masculine intelligence, if it had been backed by
any moral force, might well have brought about the

* Lord Herbert's "Life " gives one of the most curious glimpses
to be found of the court and person of Louis XIIL

160 ENGLISH RATIONALISM.

philosophical new birth which he seems to have at-
tempted. Fortunately, character is for such an issue
even more important than intellect. The impression
he made on the mind of his time was strong, compel-
ling a respect that shaded towards dismay. Pungent
and quotable, he was looked up to by smaller men,
and cited as an oracle. So great, indeed, is his repu-
tation for a certain rude and insolent strength, that
one is disappointed to find, when he comes to touch on
religious things, that he is quite in tlie trodden track
of conventional opinion ; is even ostentatiously ortho-
dox, so far as language goes. Convictions of his own
he probably had not any. The State, according to
his theory, was founded " not in the mutual good-will
men had towards each other, but in the mutual fear
they had of each other."* His solution of the reli-
gious difficulty is that the Sovereign shall find his
subjects in their creed, and that the practices of piety
shall be enforced by the strong arm of Law. Specu-
lations of this nature could not help much towards
the settling: of reliG^ious issues.

But the same storm which drove Hobbes to the
Continent to brood over his creed of despotism, while
it called Milton home to battle for his faith of liberty,
had its share also in training the youth of that grave
wise thinker, who did more than any other man to
educate the next generation into the way of thinking
most fit for Englishmen.

The philosophy of Locke (1632-1704) has been
very much disparaged in our day. Brutally crude
De Maistre calls it, railing at its homely terminology.

* Essay on liberty.

' LOCKE. 161

It is thin and superficial, leading straight to material-
ism and unbelief, says the transcendental philosophy,
which claims acquaintance with the Absolute. It
would be idle to attempt an answer to either charge.
Our business is with Locke as an educator of English
thought at a particular religious crisis, aud as leader
in a movement which has had great results in critical
theology ; not with the adequacy of his opinions or
his method to the greater intellectual demands of the
present day.

Looking, then, at the writings of Locke for the
positive qualities to be found in them, we are struck
first of all by the familiar modern tone in which they
speak to us. Something of this, no doubt, is from
the pure homeliness of his diction, which is some-
times, too, about as pungent and caustic as that of
Hobbes, without his cynicism and rancor. But, stiU
more, it is from the fact — which we are getting
slowly wonted to — that the era of storm and revolu-
tion is at length behind us, and we have emerged
into the atmosphere of modern life.

Taking the convenient 'boundary of the Eeforma-
tion-period at 1650, we meet John Locke as a studi-
ous and grave youth of eighteen, — too young to have
shared with Milton in the passion of the revolution-
ary struggle, but not too young to have had his own
reflections upon the strange chaos of religious opinions
which that storm had drifted into view. The modern-
ness of his thought begins to appear as soon as we
compare the earliest of his writings with the latest
of Milton, — perhaps not ten years apart : in one a
style antique as Plato, an idealism and a rhetoric that

11

162 ENGLISH RATIONALISM.

have at their nearest a foreign and far-off tone to ns ;
in the other a plainspoken and level prose, dealing
precisely with those questions of reflection, of educa-
tion, of political economy, closest at hand in our
every-day thoughts on the conduct of life. This easy
and familiar diction deceives us by making the man
seem nearer to us than he is ; and so it keeps us from
doing justice to the real originality and merit of the
work he did.

That revolutionary storm — the Great Eebellion
in England, coinciding with the Thirty Years' War
abroad — had proved the impotence of ecclesiastical
methods or state alliances or authority of creeds or
sectarian processes and protests to deal with ques-
tions tliat must, after all, be brought before the bar
of individual reason. A century and a half of strug-
gle had been spent in demonstrating, on a grand
scale and in sight of all men, what was really implied
wdien the Eeformation announced for its first principle
the integrity of the private conscience, and for its
watchword. Salvation by Faith. Leaving all that
controversy out of sight, the true task for a religious
thinker is — the more coolly, the more devoid of
religious passion or emotional fervor, so much the
better — to take up the subject at first-lmnd, in the
light of plain and practical common-sense. And for
such a task the time had plainly come.

This we may conceive to be the state of the case
as it lay in the mind of Locke. He approached the
question deliberately, late in life, and when he had
already painfully wrought out the principles of his
intellectual method. His argument is a natural se-

LOCKE. 163

quel to the "Essay on the Understanding."* We
cannot praise the brilliancy of the result. His
" Eeasonableness of Christianity " is doubtless (as the
phrase goes) an epoch-making book. But it is also
a disappointing book. Its chief merit is in its having
been written at all ; that is, in having been written
with that motive, and from that point of view. Still,
this is a real merit, and a great one. It took the
grandest and most fundamental of all practical ques-
tions — one which governments, armies, and folios
innumerable had dealt with vainly, and were dismiss-
ing as hopeless — out of the limbo of metaphysical
polemics, and committed it once for all to the practi-
cal understanding of men, let the result be what it
would.

In religious opinion Locke was a sober and devout
Englishman, of an average type, his rationalizing
temper sliding easily to what is often claimed as the
Unitarian dogma. It was, really, a form of Arianism,
like Milton's. And, like his, it was the result of a
literal rendering of texts, without any conscious natu-
ralistic bias, or any suspicion of what at this day we
should call a rationalizing criticism. Unlike Milton's,
however, which remained for more than a century
and a half unknown, the Arianism of Locke had a
great and immediate effect on English thought, and
is reflected pretty constantly in the Anglican theology
for a century or more, till driven out by the winds
of more recent speculation, German or other. Of
biblical criticism, unless it might be the verifying

* This " Essay" was published in 1689 ; the " Eeasonableness "
in 1695.

164 ENGLISH RATIONALISM.

of texts, he knew and could know nothing. Hia
method of investigation was the very simple and ob-
vious one, — which only needed that clear, sagacious,
and honest understanding to suggest, — to search the
record, and by the canons of plain sense to determine
ivliat Christianity is. Its reasonableness and its
authority will depend on the answer we give this
question first.

The answer is simple. It is, that Jesus is the
Messiah in the precise and literal sense in which he
was announced to the Jewish people. Only, we must
interpret that sense to the understanding of our day.
So interpreted, it will mean that he is the Divinely
appointed sovereign of human life, especially of
conscience and conduct, which are the ultimate thing
in human life. His teachings are, in the strictest
official sense, the Laws of his Kingdom ; and these
are readily shown to be rules for the regulation
of human conduct, with penalties duly annexed and
specified for their violation.

Apart from detail, and from the obvious deduc-
tions wliich follow, this is the sum of the argu-
ment of Locke's " Eeasonableness." The illustra-
tions from history and prophecy, the adaptation to
the common needs and conditions of human life,
we easily take for granted as they are here urged
and dwelt on.

As to the profounder conviction, the passionate emo-
tion, the inward conflict and crisis, which make so
large a part in the religious life as it is commonly
known to us, or as it is seen as one of the mighty
agents in human affairs, — all that is passed over,

LOCKE. 165

purposely as we may suppose, and studiously. It
was not in Locke's temperament to enter much, either
by sympathy or imagination, into that view of the
case. It would be rather his wish to avoid what had
been so lately the signal for fanaticism and strife, just
as his main position is a barrier thrown up against
any possible pretension of religion in the sphere of
politics. His business is to get a solid foundation
for religious belief and the practice of righteousness
in the Christian record soberly interpreted ; and so
to save Christianity itself, as he might well think,
to the sober and rather sceptical understanding of
his own day.

Now a defence of religion which does not take into

o

view any such features of it as religious passion, enthu-
siasm, fanaticism, may indeed furnish an excellent
practical rule of life for quiet times, for well-regulated
minds. Perhaps the religious battle whose smoke and
din had hardly passed off might make this view of it
seem the best and only safe view. But how far it is
from being a complete view, every page of religious
history tells. That extreme repugnance to anything
like " enthusiasm," so conspicuous in the religious
dialect of English respectability, down even to our
own time, if not the direct consequence of the turn
given by Locke to religious discussion, is at any rate
in close keeping with it. In short, while the moral
debasement of the religious life in England during
the last century may be laid to the State Church,
and the infinitely discreditable mingling of sacred
things w^ith politics, — the frigid rationalism of relig-
ious thought in the same period is the logical follow-

166 ENGLISH KATIONALISM.

ing-out of the method of treatment brought into vogue
by the great authority of Locke.

Locke, however, does not stand alone in his attempt
to bring religion within the bounds of human reason.
There were two other influences working in the same
general direction, though from quite opposite quarters
of the intellectual sky. These two were the specula-
tive philosophy of a group of thinkers whom w^e know
as the English Platonists ; and the method of Geom-
etry and Physics, which had achieved such splendid
results in the realm of natural science as interpreted
by Newton.

In a quiet and studious retreat from the storm
of political revolution that had raged so long, we find
the company of " latitude-men about Cambridge."
They are cultivated scholars. Plato was doubtless
much nearer to them than Descartes or Newton. They
are men of a serene, devout, and intellectual type of
piety, dwelling far from thoughts and things of their
ow^n day. Eeligious indifterentism they attacked
under the classic name of E^Dicurus, and the materi-
alizing tendencies of science they sought to confute
by patient examination of the system of Democritus.
These ancient names seem far enough away from the
practical issues of their stormy century ; and it w^ould
not appear that this admirable school of Christian
philosophers had much effect, outside a narrow circle
of elect souls.

The best known names among them are those of
Ptalph Cudworth (1617-88) and Henry More (1614-
87). Their great monument is Cudworth's "True In-
tellectual System of the Universe." Tliis magniloquent

THE PLATONISTS. — THE NEW PHYSICS. 167

title is fairly enough matched by the wealth of erudi-
tion, the ponderous logic, the fertility of illustration,
the independent and even eccentric line of specula-
tion,* which make that remarkable treatise a ser-
viceable authority to the student in philosophy to
this day.

Very different, however, from the effect of this
elaborate and esoteric school of learned thought was
the splendid advance now made in the line of physical
discovery. This had at length touched the common
imagination. It seemed fairly to have endowed the
intellect with a new instrument for finding out truth.
Bacon in his Novum Orgaiion had proclaimed its
coming afar off; and now Bacon began to be known
as the characteristic, splendid, and transcendent genius
of the English intellectual world. If not the dis-
coverer, he was at any rate the prophet and the fore-
runner. It is not likely that the men who really
led in this great movement of Science — Newton at
their head — felt any obligation of their own to that
masterly and brilliant rhetoric which had heralded
their achievements. But unquestionably it had done
very much to prepare the intellectual soil in which
this particular plant was now to flourish.

ISTay, more. Not only science, so interpreted,
promised the conquest of Nature to men's uses : it
promised still greater things in the reign of pure
thought. It would not only subdue the earth, but
would scale the heavens. What it had done, trium-
phantly, in explaining the system of the physical

* As in the argument about the "Plastic Nature," a sort of
Gnostic Demiurgus.

168 ENGLISH RATIONALISM.

universe was done all the more triumphantly because
it was, as it were, a national victory ; and so an
Englishman's adopting of it had in it the pride of
loyalty to his flag as well as a simple accepting of the
fact. It was, besides, an earnest of what it would do
in a still more obscure and controverted realm. What,
indeed, should be impossible to a method that had
already accomplished so much ? Geometry and Phy-
sics had been victorious in explaining the visible
system of the heavens. Would not the method of
geometry and physics prove the solvent, after all, of
the theological problem ? Would it not, at least,
show how religious truth can be made to stand on
the same solid ground of demonstration ?

It is to some such motive as this, though perhaps
not consciously thought out, that we may fairly enough
ascribe the next marked step in the development of
a rational theology. Samuel Clarke (1675-1729)
was a disciple of Xewton, a mathematician of real
eminence, strong in his conviction that truth of all
sorts should be proved by way of axiom, postulate,
and geometrical deduction. His argument for the
" Being and Attributes of God," as the foundation of
Natural Eeligion, is to this day an accepted text-
book of the method of demonstration as applied to
truths which really appeal rather to the conscience
and imagination.*

In what we may call the physical attributes of Deity

— that Infinitude, Almightiness, Omnipresence, which

we predicate of Absolute Being — the method serves

well enough. At least, step by step, it challenges

* Read as the ** Boyle Lectures " of 1704-1705.

CLARKE. 169

the intellect to make a formal denial, or to retreat
from any of its positions. Tiie logical gap appears
as soon as we come to deal with those moral attri-
butes, which are precisely what make the difference
between the Absolute which we assert and the
God whom we adore. Here these processes of the
understanding break down. Conscious intelligence,
free-will, and moral choice are attributes which we
can know only by our own experience of them ; which
we ascribe to God only because we project our thought
or emotion upon the backgrwmd of Infinity, — not
because our geometry can prove them, or because we
find them in our conception of Universal Law.

The value, then, of any such scheme as Clarke's lies
in its premises, not in its deductions. One must be
a very confirmed theist indeed, to find satisfaction in
the argument.* The religious data which it affects
to prove are either taken for granted unconsciously,
at the outset, and so are really data of religious expe-
rience put in logical form and sequence ; or else they
are interpolated, more or less awkwardly, in the course
of the argument. In fact, when it comes to the criti-
cal turn he confesses as much, and frankly steps out
of the logical circle to gather up new material by
the way. Nay, when he goes on to apply his reason-
ing to historical revelation, — the real goal which he
would reach, — we find him dealing no longer with
assumed certainties, but with slender probabilities.

The saving point in his argument is the fact that

* Clarke liimself was such a sincere and revering theist. It was
especially noted of him by Voltaire, that he never spoke the nam*
of the Deity but with a certain manner and tone of awe.

170 ENGLISH RATIONALISM.

it is addressed to a state of miud which has no motive
to detect the fallacy, but rather a strong interest the
other way. To a mind in that state the logical form
disguises the substantial defect. The truth, which is
believed already, is supposed to be confirmed by a
process that betrays its weakness the moment it is
submitted to a critical or unbelieving mind. Such
as it was, however, the argument of Clarke held for
more than a century its place in the Schools, where
it was accepted in entire good faith, and where, very
likely, it is still appealed to as a real demonstration
of religious truth.

A mind grave, slow, serious, exceedingly candid,
fundamentally ethical in tone, and somewhat sombre
in its cast of thought — such was the mind of Bishop
Butler (1692-1752) — must see the case too wisely to
stake belief on such an issue. Butler's real eminence
is as a moral psychologist. His chief constructive
work is the vindication of ethical conceptions as a
fundamental fact in human nature. When a man
sees and obeys the right, as against the prompting of
self-love, or any interest of his own which he is able
to calculate or foresee, then he proves the existence of
that fundamental fact, feutler's " Sermons on Human
Nature" have the conceded merit of bringing this
point, on which all the possibilities of personal religion
turn, clearly into the foreground, and of fixing it in
the consciousness of all who are willing to follow him
in his argument.

To such a mind the geometric method of establish-
ing religious truth must needs be painfully inadequate.
Butler does not enter into any controversy with Clarke.

BUTLER. 171

In one sense, they had both the same thing to prove,
and only different ways of proving it. One deals with
the smoothest abstractions of pure thought ; the other
with the hardest facts of real life. Clarke approaches
historical Christianity by way of axiom, postulate, and
deduction. Butler achieved the theological master-
piece of his century by a course of illustrative reason-
ing, to show the " Analogy of Eeligion, natural and re-
vealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature."*

One is tempted, just here, to contrast his treatment
with the spontaneity and joyousness which we find in
the great expressions of ancient faith, — in the He-
brew Psalms and Prophets, for example; or with
that infinitely more serene and cheerful faith which
we constantly find associated with the liberal thought
of our own day. But the contrast would not be just
to the position which Butler holds. He was committed,
by public station and doubtless by sincere belief, to
the defence not of the glad and comforting convictions
of a natural piety, but of a system which had in it
many things which the natural reason finds hard to
accept, hard to be reconciled to, hard even to pardon
in those who sincerely hold them. His own mind
was naturally of a sombre cast, as was just said ; and
these difiiculties, moral even more than intellectual,
were very present to his thought. The key-note to
his whole discourse is the words found in the intro-
duction : that, granting the system of N'ature and the
Christian scheme of salvation to have proceeded from
the same Author, " we must expect to find the same
difiiculties " in the one as in the other.

* Published in 1736.

172 ENGLISH RATIONALISM.

This, it must be confessed, is a harsli and discour-
aging key-note. To add to the plaintiveness of it,
Butler is keenly conscious that he is addressing a
generation which, with undoubting profession of natu-
ral theism, was fast growing disaffected to the whole
scheme of that official theology, which he is bound to
uphold. One may easily find something depressed
and reluctant in tlie tone in which so excellent a man
finds himself obliged to hint at the terrors and menaces
which that theology has in reserve. He feels at heart
that an argument ad terrorem is bad in logic, however
useful it may be to serve a desirable end.*

Besides, the nature of the argument, as he himself
puts it, obliges him to bring the " difficulties " to the
front. Those in our common experience of things,
which cannot be denied, must be set off against those
in the articles of dogma, which men are very eager to
deny. " If plagues and earthcj^uakes break not Heaven's
design," — and you will admit (he says) not only that
such things are, but that they are Heaven's design, —
then on what ground can you possibly object to the
likelihood of judgments infinitely more dreadful in the
unseen world ? If we ever}^ day find the innocent
suffering for the guilty, and the tender-hearted con-
tinually taking up the burden of others' calamity and
grief, then what have we to say against the scheme
of the Vicarious Atonement, which asserts that the
same holds good as the universal law? How do we

* It is obsei'vable that, while Butler speaks of retribution in the
future life as the result of general (spiritual) laws, he nowhere hinto
— as he so easily might — at their possible disciplinary or even pur-
gatorial character, thougli this last is the familiar doctrine of the
Eastern Church.

BUTLER. 173

know that it is not the only condition by which the
Divine wrath may be pacitied, and the Elect received
into eternal joys ?

Truly this argument is not an amiable persuasive
to piety ! Our natural feeling about such things is
not any better reconciled to infinite horrors by finding
ever so many finite ones that cannot be gainsaid ; or
to a scheme which on the face of it is the deification
of favoritism and injustice, by seeing that justice is
ever so imperfectly carried out before our eyes. The
natural man, if he has the average courage along
with a rough sense of right and wrong, resents being
lullied into accepting what looks to him both unrea-
sonable and unfair, by hints (such as abound in Butler)
that it will be for his interest to accept it and make
the best of it. This moral difftculty lies at the very
threshold of Butler's method; and he knows it.

One thing more. I have spoken of the probable
effect of this argument with the rude average mind,
half inclined to religious belief of some sort, — which
we may assume to have been the ordinary scepticism
of Butler's day. It is still another thing when we con-
sider the scepticism of our own day, which has learned
to talk glibly of an unconscious Absolute, and a law
of impersonal evolution, even if it has not accepted
the dogma of a downright pessimism. To such scepti-
cism as this, Butler's argument is, as Dr. Martineau
has called it, " a terrible persuasive to atheism." If it
is true that natural and moral evil are the prevailing
thing in human life, — if they are to be thrust in our
faces and compelled upon our thought in the very
front of our discussion of religious verities, — then

174 ENGLISH KATIONALISM.

surely our best refuge is to believe in no governing
Mind at all, and in no Future which is so prodigiously
to exaggerate the horrors and wrongs of this life. Best
content ourselves as we may with the narrower hori-
zon, wdiich at least allows us to forget that Universe
of despair.

This would not be quite a complete answer to But-
ler's argument, since he both keeps veiled the more
shocking features of his creed, and includes a good
many considerations not covered by that bald state-
ment of his main position, — particularly the funda-
mentally moral character of the Divine judgments.
Still less would it be a fair charQ-e as^ainst the man,
who was excellent to the core, just, humble-minded,
and merciful. But it is a fair charge against that
wliich is, after all, the fatal tiling in the scheme of
theology which he professed. At least, it helps us
to see how that scheme is already discredited to the
human reason ; how it is standing on its defence in
the face of formidable attack ; how the burden of
proof is now thrown upon that side ; how it can no
longer dictate terms to the common mind, as a cen-
tury before, but must accept such terms as it can get
admitted in equal debate.

In short, the appeal to Keason, which w^as made by
Locke in perfect simplicity of good faith, has served
to invite a new enemy into the field. The discussion
he has opened is far wider than the narrow limits
which he had proposed for it. The three works
whicli I have briefly noticed may be said to com-
plete the task of English constructive theology in the
last century. Down almost to our own day, that

THE APPEAL TO REASON. 175

theology has stood on the defensive. Its literature
is a literature of apology. .It -is sometimes very
learned and able, as conspicuously in the " Credibil-
ity " of Lardner. Sometimes it deals hard and telling
blows at the adversary, as in the heat of the Deistical
controversy. Sometimes it brings a vigorous good
sense, a clear and manly conviction of right and
wrong, into the business of religious exposition, as in
a great body of practical divinity of which Sherlock
may be taken as the best type.

In general, however, the theology of the eighteenth
century is not reckoned to do the highest honor either
to the mind or heart of England. It is too much
embarrassed by the falsity of its position, as having
taken a brief to defend an official creed. It is too
conscious of a hostile teuaper in the mental and lit-
erary atmosphere. It yields to the fatality that besets
a campaign too purely defensive, and finds itself, as
the century wears on, getting discouraged, attenuated,
and thin. From the vigorous sense of Locke, from
the generous ethics of Butler, it is a long way down
to the '' Evidences " and the " Moral Philosophy" of the
wise and excellent Archdeacon Paley (1743-1805).

In all this wide and ratlier sluwish current of Eno-
lish theological literature of the eighteenth century,
there runs an undertone which betrays an uneasy
consciousness of the presence of an enemy. This en-
emy might be stigmatized, or silenced, or overawed ;
but he would never own himself defeated in fair battle.
The challenge of Eeason had invited a line of attack
against which the old weapons did not serve. That
challenge had been taken up — with no conspicuous

176 ENGLISH RATIONALISM.

ability, but with great pertinacity and in entire good
faith — by a series of writers who have attracted more
fame, perhaps, than they deserve, under the name of
the English Deists.

The Deistical Controversy, so called, occupies almost
exactly the first half of the eighteenth century. It
began in 1696, with the argument of Toland, who
proposed only to follow out more consistently the
views of Locke, put forth the year before. It ended
with the publication in 1748* of a treatise on Mira-
cles by Conyers Middleton,f which may be held to
mark the position taken at length by the most ration-
alizing of the English conservative divines.

The general aspect which the controversy presents,
considered as a chapter in the history of thought, has
been thus described by Mr. Leslie Stephen : —

" It would he difficult to mention a controversy in
which there was a greater disparity of force. The physi-
ognomy of the hooks themselves hears marks of the differ-
ence. The deist writings are but shabby and shrivelled
little octavos, generally anonymous, such as lurk in the
corners of dusty shelves, and seem to be the predestined
pre}'- of moths. Against them are arrayed solid octavos
and handsome quartos, and at times even folios, — very
Goliaths among books, — too ponderous for the indolence
of our degenerate days, but fitting representatives of the
learned dignitaries who compiled them. J

* Hume's "Essays" were published the same year ; his "Dia-
logues on Natural Eeligion " in 1779.

t University librarian at Cambridge, and author of the " Life
of Cicero."

X A full illustration of tliis capital picture may be found in tbe
alcoves of Harvard University Library, which is disproportionately
rich in this department of literature.

THE DEISTS. 177

" On the side of Christianity, indeed, appeared all that
was intellectually venerable in England. Amongst the
champions of the faith might be reckoned Bentley, incom-
parably the first critic of the day ; Locke, the intellectual
ruler of the eighteenth century ; Berkeley, acutest of Eng-
lish metaphysicians and most graceful of philosophic writ-
ers ; Clarke, whom we may still respect as a vigorous glad-
iator, and then enjoying the reputation of a great master of
philosophic thought ; Butler, the most patient, original,
and candid of philosophical theologians ; Waterland, the
most learned of contemporary divines ; and Warburton,
the rather knock-kneed giant of theology, whose swashing
blows, if too apt to fall upon his allies, represented at least
a rough intellectual vigor. Around these great names
gathered the dignitaries of the Church, and those who
aspired to church dignity ; for the dissection of a deist
was a recognized title to obtaining preferment. . . .

" The ordinary feeling for the deist was a combination
of the odium theologicmn with the contempt of the finished
scholar for the mere dabbler in letters. The names, indeed,
of the despised deists make but a poor show when com-
pared with this imposiiig list. They are but a ragged
regiment, whose whole ammunition of learning was a
trifle when compared with the abundant stores of a single
light of orthodoxy ; whilst in speculative ability most of
them were children by the side of their ablest antag-
onists. . . .

"At the end of the deist controversy, indeed, there
appeared two remarkable writers. Hume, the profound-
est as well as the clearest of English philosophers of the
century, struck a blow the echo of which is still vibrating ;
but Hume can scarcely be reckoned among the deists. He
is already emerging into a higher atmosphere. Conyers
Middleton, whose attack upon [ecclesiastical] miracles

12

178 ENGLISH RATIONALISM.

eclipsed for a time that of his contemporary, was a formi-
dable though covert ally of Deism, but belongs to the
transition to a later period." *

* " History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century," vol.
i. pp. 86-88. Few writers can have had both the motive and the
patience to master this rather dreary chapter of modern literature ;
and it is matter of thankfuhiess that it has been done for once, with
such intelligent vigor, by Mr. Stephen. I have examined, I believe,
all the writers of this class whom he cites except Annet.

A list of some of the best known deistical writings, prepared
with the aid of Mr. Stephen's book, may here be convenient. The
entire controversy, it Avill be seen, turns in general on speculative
argument, not on historical criticism.
ToLAND : "Christianity not Mysterious" (1696). Sequel to Locke :

" Rationalism applied to Dogma, not to Fact."
Collins : " Discourse on Freethinking " (1713). Implying (but not

asserting) denial of Supernaturalism.
WoLLASTON : " The Religion of Nature Delineated" (1722). Sequel

to Clakke : including the moral argument for Immortality from

the misery in the world.
WooLSTOiN- : *' Six Discourses " (1727). Absurdity of the Argument

from Miracles (coarse ridicule).
Tindal : "Christianity as old as the Creation" (1730). The

difficulties of an historical revelation.
Chubb : "Tracts" (8 vols., 1730). Anti-sacerdotal : the simplic-
ity of Christ's doctrine.
Morgan : " The Moral Philosopher" (1737). A " Christian Deist " :

weakness of the argument from Miracles.
Dodwell, H. : " Christianity not founded on Argument" (1742).

Faith is the abnegation of Reason.
Annex: "The Resurrection of Jesus examined" (1744). Reply
"to Sherlock's "Trial of the Witnesses" (violently hostile and

scornful).
Middleton : "Free Inquiry" as to early Ecclesiastical Miracles

(1748). There is " no breach of continuity between sacred and

profane history."
Bolingbroke : " Letters on History" (1753). An attack on The-
ology generally.
Hume: "Natural History of Religion " (1779). Including the

Argmnent against Miracles from the Universal Order.

THE DEISTS. 179

The details of this long controversy must be left to
the literary historian. A very brief view of certain
points suggested in it, or of impressions that result
from a general study of it, is all that can be admitted
here.

Coming to the reading of the deistical writings
with the ordinary prepossessions about them, one
finds, with some surprise, that most of them are not
— in profession at least — attacks upon Christianity.
At least, there is nothing on the face of it to convict
the writers of ill faith in what they profess to mean
as defence and not attack. It is hard to see how
Toland's "Christianity not Mysterious," or Tindal's
" Christianity as old as the Creation," is not fully as
legitimate a vindication as Locke's " Eeasonableness
of Christianity." They do not, as yet, assail even the
supernatural element in the biblical record. Doubt-
less they go farther on the same road that Locke had
travelled ; and doubtless the more modest beginning
led the way to sharper and more radical attacks.

The ostensible defence may even have been really
a covert attack. Locke had already gone in that
direction as far as it was safe to go ; and the profes-
sional theologians who followed him preferred to keep
the discussion within the lines they deemed prudent,
and resented that unwelcome intrusion on their do-
main. But, after making every allowance, the sur-
prise remains that the alarm was sounded so soon,
and that the discussion at once bred so much ill blood.
It was a thin boundary, at best, that parted the
rationalizing theologian from his rationalistic oppo-
nent. From the point of view of our own day, the

180 ENGLISH RATIONALISM.

" Deist " of the eighteenth century would easily retain
his " Christian " standing without reproach.

This remark does not apply, of course, to some of
the later deists, as Annet, Woolston, and Chubb ; still
less to the downright revolutionary assault of Thomas
Paine, at the end of the century. But, on the other
hand, as the discussion deepened in acrimony, it
brought out things quite as bad on the orthodox side
as anything they were meant to answer. Waterland's
defence of the Bible, at the points which had been
assailed by a criticism that at least was made in tlie
name of morals, decency, and humanity, — such, for
example, as the atrocities of the Conquest, — is full
as brutal as anything he replied to. It is far more
damaging to the cause of religion than tlie worst
things that can be quoted from the deists.*

The best excuse that can be made for such things
is that they are, after all, but following in the steps
of Butler ; and, by the standard of that day, Butler
is both a wise man and a saint. It is but running
out, into gross exaggeration and unconscious travesty,
the argument of the " Analogy ; " and this had been
amply sanctioned by the best esteemed theologians of
the time. In its moral effect, the controversy thus
did the great service, that it forced the hand of the
popular theology. Surely, it was quite as important
that Eeligion should be reconciled with the general
conscience of men, as with the exigencies of an estab-
lished Church, or with those of its official defenders.

Intellectually, the effect of the controversy is most

* See Stephen's " History of English Thought," vol. i. pp. 258-
260.

THE HISTORICAL METHOD. 181

plainly seen in the pre-eminence now given to the
historical evidences of Christianity. In one way, this
was a great gain. The attitude of self-defence is at
best a humiliating one ; all the more, when a creed
dominant for a thousand years must defend itself
before the very tribunal which it has created and
invoked. The historical method opened up, in com-
parison, a dignified and healthy occupation for the
theological mind. In such works as Lardner's " Cred-
ibility " (1723-43), it shows not only a genuine learn-
ing, but an intellectual modesty, patience, and breadth,
which very much redeem the. damaged reputation of
this period in theology. Most of the better-known
names in this field, for something like a century, are
the names of those who took that track. Leslie's
"Short and Easy Method" (1697), Sherlock's "Trial
of the Witnesses" (1729), West "On the Eesurrec-
tion " (1727), and Paley's " Evidences " (1794), all fol-
low the historical method with more or less success,
and hold their ground in some quarters as authorities
till now.

But the historical method has perils of its own, no
less than the metaphysical. If the element of reason
is to be admitted at all, history offers it the widest
and most inviting field. Historical criticism, in fact,
means nothing else than unsparing rationalism applied
to alleged facts of history. It speedily leaps the boun-
dary set to separate sacred from profane. It must
not refuse to apply its canons, as to fact and legend,
with absolute impartiality. Once quit the realm of
metaphysics, once abandon the defences of church
authority, the result is plain. Virtually, modern criti-

182 ENGLISH RATIONALISM.

cism accepts the method of the Deists, while it cavils
at their positions, and treats their poor scholarship
with a pitying disdain. It is very significant that
the two Enolish historians of recocrnized eminence, in
this age of the Apologists, are Hume and Gibbon.

It is still more sisrnificant, that what the contro-
versy could not do by the crude and acrid processes
of party warfare has been peacefully done, almost
without controversy, by the solvent of a more radical
philosophy and a riper scholarship. The English
Church, which a century ago thought it must find
salvation by such discreditable methods as those of
Waterland and Warburton, now accepts unchallenged
in its highest places of preferment such names as
those of Professor Jowett, Dean Stanley, and Bishop
Colenso. These names represent a rationalism far
more intelligent and thorough-going than that which
their predecessors of the last century dared not
tolerate.*

The solvent which has soaked all hardness out of
the Articles of that Church, leaving them to take any
shape or meaning that may be in demand, was elabo-
rated by a long course of critical study, directed by a
very plastic and refined philosophy, peculiar to our
century. We may condemn the casuistry which per-
mits a man to sign Articles he pretends to no belief

* The Eev. Stopford Brooke (it is understood) was urgently
pressed by Dean Stanley not to abandon his position in the Church,
after his rationalistic attitude had been openly pronounced ; and
Archbishop Tait was as urgent to retain Mr. Voysey, by any possi-
ble latitude of interpretation, as the churchmen of a hundred years
ago would have been to exaggerate and stigmatize Ms heresies. —
See London Inquirer of Dec. 23, 1882.

TEMPER OF THE DEISTS. 183

in, — the stigma of Broad-Church liberalism. At
least, the insolent bigotry, which Johnson gloried in
and Burke was not quite free from, is no longer pos-
sible to-day. The deistical controversy had its full
share in bringing the new liberty to pass.

One other thought occurs, in looking back upon
that acrimonious and weary battle. It was, as before
hinted, a drawn battle. Neither side abandoned any
of its positions. Neither party gained any perceptible
advantage upon the other. At least, whatever ad-
vantage there was went into the general advance of
human thoucrht, and furnished material to be worked
up in other forms.

One thing survived. The indomitable and perti-
nacious temper of the attack will not confess defeat,
and rallies fresh after each encounter. To what shall
we ascribe the obstinate vitality of this insurgent
temper? How shall we explain this indefatigable
assault upon all that was honorable and of good report
in conventional English piety ? We see a small and
despised group of men, none of them very learned
or wise or able, who for some reason are willing to
stand out, for some small shred of truth, against all
the respectability and most of the learning of their
time. It is easy enough to disparage their work and
the men who did it. They may have been driven by
a spirit of restless vanity and mere adventure, like
Toland ; or by an irregular literary ambition, like
Tindal ; or by some feeling of human pity, like Wol-
laston. They may have been heady and crackbrained
theorists, like Woolston ; or rancorous polemics, like
Annet ; or crude and ignorant dogmatists, like Chubb.

184 ENGLISH RATIONALISM.

Truly, these are neither the names nor the men whom
mankind delights to honor.

All the more, there is something in the mere perti-
nacity of their warfare to command our respect. The
warfare is often sterile and pitiful in the petty points
it raises. These points may be and often are crudely
and blunderingly put. We wonder, sometimes, at
the contrast between the mean ability of the com-
batants and the loud noise they made. But one other
thing is still better deserving of our notice. It is,
that men no more distinguished in learning, temper,
and understanding than the English Deists, — men
so little esteemed in their own day, and by common
reckoning so contemptible ever since, — were yet found
worthy, by the mere hardihood of their loyalty to
their poor fragment of truth, to furnish one indispen-
sable link in the widening tissue which that age was
weaving in the religious evolution.

VIII.
INFIDELITY IN FEANCE.

INFIDEL is a term not of intellectual difference,
but of moral reproacli. It is, especially, a term of
theological hate. It is often used, wrongly, to imply
simple unbelief, or even difference in belief Eightly
used, it means either enemy of the faith, or trcdtor to
the faith. And it is chiefly in this last sense that I
shall take it now.

That infidelity, of one sort or another, was the
source of the great catastrophe which befell France a
century ago, is one of the commonplaces of the his-
torian. Perhaps it has never been illustrated more
vividly than by Carlyle in his " French Eevolution."
In a certain way, too, everybody is agreed upon the
symptoms of it, and agreed in associating it with the
general national decline. Political honor and social
morals were quite as thoroughly diseased as religious
faith. Such symptoms always go together. When
general virtue is decayed, when men have lost confi-
dence in one another, when there is a blunted sense
of what makes the real welfare of a people, or a hard-
ness of heart that does not care for it, — which are
everywhere and always the painful signs of social
degradation, — there will also be a loss of faith in
what we may call Eternal Justice and the Universal
Life. To the minds of men at such a time God is, so

186 INFIDELITY IN FRANCE.

to speak, dead. And of all calamities that can hap-
pen to a man or a people this is to be reckoned the
worst. As it proved then, it opens the way to every
other calamity.

In a general way, this has always been connected
with the moral corruption of the Church in France
d uring the eighteenth century. The names of Cardinal
Dubois, early in the century, and of Bishop Talley-
rand, at its close, are understood to represent that
state of things spiritual, which was assailed by the
galling criticism of such men as Voltaire and Diderot.
By a monstrous misuse of terms, these last have been
called " the infidels " of their period, as if there were
no other ; and have been made to bear the odium of
its religious decay. But the root of the disease was
in the Church itself. It was ecclesiasticism divorced
from humanity that led the way to all the rest. And
for this we need not look beyond the French Church,
as distinct from the Catholic world at large. Voltaire
is usually represented as a mocker, an unbeliever in
anything holy, at best as a brilliant man of letters.
But when he was received in that wonderful popular
ovation in Paris, a little before his death, the withered
old man of eighty-four was pointed out to the crowd
as the same generous enthusiast who once saved the
family of Calas, — a Protestant, whose death was a
frightful judicial murder, the most conspicuous crime
of the French priesthood in that century. It was
such crimes as these, such attacks and defences as
these, that created what we call the era of Infidelity
in France.

The disease was long ripening, and for some even

REVOCATION OF THE EDICT OF NANTES. 187

of its later symptoms we must go a great way back.
It would be convenient to take for our starting-place
that most cruel act of despotic authority, the Eevo-
cation of the Edict of Nantes, in 1685. This date
alone is very significant. Only three years before,
Louis XIV. had won the co-operation of his clergy in
asserting what are called the " Galilean Liberties," *
which virtually gave him just such a national Church
as Henry VIII. had sought to establish in England,
— independent of Eome, a political tool of the Sov-
ereign, and at the same time savagely tenacious of its
Catholic Orthodoxy. We might suspect, if we did
not know, that this immense concession to royal power
was the pledge of alliance to some evil end. It was
so. The Galilean Liberties were the purchase-money
of religious persecution. And the first act of that
alliance of crown and mitre was to repudiate what
little was left of the policy of toleration solemnly
adopted in the religious peace of 1598.

But we must go still a few steps farther back. The
Edict of Nantes -|- had granted to the Protestants cer-
tain local liberties and powers, which their political
chiefs seem to have abused, so as to threaten secession
from the Kingdom and an independent Protestant
Eepublic. Thirty years later (1628), this ill-conceived

* These liberties were registered in the famous Four Articles,
which were substantially these : 1. The abolition of the Pope's
temporal power in France ; 2. That the Council is of authority su-
perior to the Pope ; 3. That ancient usage shall not be infringed
(a very elastic article) ; 4. That the Pope's decision is subject to
ratification by the Church. Virtually, however, these liberties did
not outlast the lifetime of their founders.

t This was at best, says Lanfrey, ' ' a derisory compact between
the strong and weak, to be interpreted by the strong."

188 INFIDELITY IN FRANCE.

political dream was dispelled by the capture of La
Eochelle, the Huguenot capital by the sea.* The
local liberties were destroyed, but Pdchelieu honorably
protected the freedom of Protestant worship. "While
those restless nobles, the Eohans and Condes, speedily
forsook the cause of their fellow-religionists, and
ranked among their persecuting enemies, the main
body of the Huguenots became the pious, peaceful,
non-resistant, industrious, middle-class population best
known by that name in later history. Their modest
prosperity stirred the greed of their Catholic neigh-
bors, and their harmless privileges kept up the rank-
ling jealousy of the Church authorities ; for the
Church was fest bound by interest and tradition to
the policy of an all-engrossing centralism, which
made it the natural ally of a despotic Court.

The Protestants were shielded in part by the inter-
ests of the State, represented by such financiers as
Colbert, who managed to persuade the king that he
could not afford to ruin these peaceable, convenient,
and profitable subjects of taxation. It was to break
down this shield that the effort of the Church was
now turned.

The king's treasury, what with his wars and his
dissipations, was always hungry. Tlie most conve-
nient source of supply, at particular times of need,
was the treasury of the Church. Once in five years

* It is said that when this city had, in 1621, to signify its loy-
alty, chosen the motto " pro christo et rege " for the public
seal, an engraver, to gratify the more zealous of that party, inserted
a G in very faint lines, so as to read " grege " to the instiiicted eye :
not Christ and tlu King, but Christ and his Flock. (See Disraeli's
Charles I.)

THE COURT AND THE CHURCH. 189

an ecclesiastical convention was held, and at these
times the royal messenger would present himself, to
solicit voluntary gifts from the representatives of the
Church. It will be interesting to listen a moment to
his high-flown and complimentary harangue. It is
in 1660, and the clergy have made complaint of cer-
tain privileges granted to the Protestants three years
before. The king, he claims, ought not to be bound
by conditions in receiving what is his by right.

"Still," he adds, "the conditions you have annexed
have not checked his Majesty's good- will. He grants them
liberally, and in anticipation of your gift. The vapors
raised in his mind by this little heat [of the dispute] have
but caused a dew, which has congealed in a gentle shower
of decrees and declarations, which I bring you as tokens
of his regard. . . . Here are the letters which revoke the
grant of 1657. In a word, I bring you all you have de-
manded."

The purchase-money of this concession was two
million livres. Again, five years later : —

" My lords {Messeigneurs), on entering this hall I felt,
from the splendor of your presence and the purple of your
robes, the effect of those rays of the rising Aurora upon
the Egyptian statue of her son, which each morning she
touched with life and moved to melody. . . . The reser-
voirs of the king are void and dry. It is for you, my lords,
to consider the rank of him who asks, and the justice of
his demand."

The clergy reply with very severe conditions,
especially the exclusion of Protestants from certain
posts of education and law. These the king yields

190 INFIDELITY IN FRANCE.

at the price of four millions. Again (after some
prefatory phrases), in 1670 : —

" The overwhelming splendor of this celestial constella-
tion dazzles me, and makes me for the moment incapable
of speech, but for the friendly aspect of our sovereign Sun,
which invigorates my vision by the assurance that I rep-
resent his will. . . . By the sovereign Sun, I mean our
incomparable monarch of France ; and this title I think
belongs to him of right, not only as the first luminary of
France but of the entire world ; before whose glittering
rays the brightest lights of other monarchies feel their
shining beams grow dim."

This means money, and a great deal of it, for which
" the king will deal with them royally." But offence
has been given by some relaxing of persecution, and
a long list of conditions, signed in blank beforehand,
brings into the royal treasury not much more than
two millions. Twenty years later, when bigotry had
done its perfect w^ork, this was increased to the then
" enormous " figurie of twelve millions.

Five years before the final act of Eevocation, the
king had so far conceded to the Church as to au-
thorize the " dragooning " of his subjects into piety.
What this horrible word means in its literal and hap-
pily almost forgotten sense, let us try imperfectly to
understand.

"It was in this year 1G80 that Marillac invented the
dragonnade. The soldier lends his hand to the priest ;
the dragoon turns missionary ; all goes now by tap of
drum. This is the way of proceeding of these soldiers in
cassocks, these mounted priests, these extemporized preach-
ers for the glory of the Lord ! Their sermon is composed

THE DRAGONNADES. 191

in several heads. First head : a company and a half of
cavalry is quartered on a family, and the household is
ruined within a week. Second head : as this does not
suffice for its conversion, they try severer measures (ques-
tion extraordinaire *) ; the dragoons beat the men, abuse
the women, and drag them to the church-doors by the
hair of their heads. Thirdly : if this does not succeed,
they burn the feet or hands of the sufferers with slow fire,
— an invention of their own, or rather a reminiscence of
the Inquisition : this is thirdly and lastly. Yet not all ;
for, as the soldier is naturally gay, he will vary the pro-
gramme with jests and entertainments of his fancy. De-
tachments are set about the Huguenot, to keep him from
sleeping for days together. They pinch, prick, and pull,
till the poor wretch yields to the long torture, and sells
his faith for a little slumber. They do it all with a clear
conscience : they have their dispensations. And have they
not the approval of the court ladies % ' The dragoons make
the best of missionaries,' says Madame de Sevigne, who has
looked into the matter. What need of more ? " f

Such poor privileges as were left, under this atro-
cious system, were taken away by the " Eevocation "
of Oct. 15, 1685. Even this, while forbidding the
public exercise of worship, permitted the Protestants
"to remain in the kingdom without liability to be
troubled on account of their relio-ion." But a mouth
later — on a complaint that this proviso might check
conversions — came a proclamation removing this
last frail defence ; and then "the persecution began!"
There are degrees in estimating the horrors that en-

* A technical term of judicial torture.

+ The above illustrations, with several which follow, are taken
from Lanfrey's L'Eglise et les Philosophes mi Dix-Tiuitieme Sihcle.

192 INFIDELITY IN FRANCE.

sued, as we compute the number of exiles at less or
more. The accounts vary by some half a million.
But the nature of the act, with the detestable bargain-
ing and chaffering that led to it, we have seen plainly
enough already.

It is not the mere act of persecution that makes
the chief horror of this thing. It is the debauching
of the ecclesiastical conscience : Bossuet, who holds
mixed marriages a sacrilege, to be broken off at all
cost, palters with the king's flagrant vices, saying,
" I do not demand. Sire, that you quench in a mo-
ment so hot a flame, — that would be impossible; but
at least, Sire, endeavor to check it by degrees." It is
the en.slaving of a noble nature to be a tool of cru-
elty and injustice : Fenelon, who would fain try the
way of persuasion only, must propitiate the Court,
and writes : " There are hardly any of the Eeligion
left in Rochelle, since I offer rewards to the inform-
ers. ... I am putting the men in prison, women
and children in convents, by authority of the bishop."
And again, a few months later, "I think the king's
authority ought not to relax at all." It is the dead-
ening of common charity and mercy : Madame de
Sevigne, the loveliest woman of her time, ravished
with joy that the king has led her out to dance one
day, says of the Kevocatiou, " Nothing is so noble as
that Act ; no king has done or will do anything so
memorable ! " It is the stifling of every generous
sense of justice : Arnauld, who knows what perse-
cution is, thinks, perhaps, to ward off the reproach of
a Protestant leaning of his own when he says, " These
ways are something rude, but not at all unjust."

THE REGENCY. 193

These four names represent to us all that is ablest,
noblest, fairest, boldest, in the great age of the French
monarchy. " If they have done these things in the
green tree, what will they do in the dry ? "

So far, the Church of France may plead, perhaps,
that though her acts may have been mistaken, yet at
least they were sincere. But very early in the fol-
lowing century that poor plea comes to naught. Mas-
sillon, one of the few court preachers whose tone
really touches the conscience, was also the last of
the great French ecclesiastics who can be said to
have retained his faith. His hand had helped to con-
secrate that paragon of hypocrisy and craft, the Abbe
Dubois, whose strange intrigues to buy a cardinal's
hat make the comedy of this age of the Church, as
the persecuting acts make its tragedy.*

The flaunting infidelity of the Orleans Eegency
(1715-1723), of which Dubois may be taken as the
type in things spiritual, at least gave a little respite
to the rigor of ecclesiastical law. It gave, too, the
opportunity for those two keen strokes of satire aimed
at the reign of Hypocrisy, — Voltaire's " CEdipus "

* At the table of George IV., when Prince ofWales, the conver-
sation once turned upon the question, "Who was the wickedest man
in history ? Rev. Sydney Smith, being present, gave his voice for
the Regent Orleans, adding a little awkwardly, '* and he was a
prince." The Prince, with ready tact, replied, *'I should give the
preference to his tutor;" adding, "and, Mr. Sydney, he was a
clergyman." (Fitzgerald's Life of George IV.) Dubois, said the
Duke St. Simon, " exuded mendacity at every pore." " You could
see the falsehood in his eyes, as in those of a young fox," said the
mother of the Regent. She could not pardon the levity with which
Dubois had treated the early vices of his royal pupil. {Nouvelle
Biograplde Geiierale).

13

194 INFIDELITY IN FEANCE.

(1718), which attacks an official priesthood in a few
vigorous lines by the offended Queen ; and Mon-
tesquieu's "Persian Letters" (1721), which make a
piece of irony upon French society of the period,
from a man-of-the-world's point of view, as smooth
and eifective as Pascal's Frovinciales against the
Jesuits from the point of view of a moralist.

But religious liberty had nothing to hope at such a
time and from such a source. Tlie infamies of the
Eegency were immediately followed (1724) by a sharp
turn of persecution against the Protestants. "On the
mere deposition of a priest, their pastors were put to
death, their dead dragged upon the hurdle, their dis-
ciples chained in galleys, their women shaven, beaten
with rods, cast into prisons, or into wet dungeons,"
whence, long years after, a few of them were deliv-
ered, insane with griefs and miseries. These horrors
were perpetrated in an age which had forgotten even
the decencies of the profession of Christian belief.
It is impossible to suspect the men guilty of such
things of being moved to them by either of those
chief pretexts of persecuting cruelty, faith or fear.

A few years later (1730) the edict of intolerance*
was revived against the Jansenists. But this, instead
of opening directly a new period of persecution, led
the way to a strange outbreak of fanaticism, which
lasted in various shapes for more than thirty years,
and may be regarded as the expiring effort of the so
greatly degraded ecclesiastical faith of France. Two

* Contained in the Biill [Unigenitus) of Pope Clement XL, in
1713, condemning in tlie lump one hundred and one maxims of
Jansenist piety.

WORSHIP OF THE SACRED HEART. 195

forms of it, in particular, are associated with the two
rival religious parties. The "Worship of the Sacred
Heart" belongs to the story of the Jesuits. The
" Convulsions," wdth the atrocious cruelties that fol-
lowed, aud make the last worst chapter in that long
story of intolerance, are the special stigma of the
Jansenists.

The " Sacred Heart " — a sort of grotesque parody of
Mediaeval realism — is a symbol, to be taken in its
most gross, literal, and bloody sense, revealed (1688)
in the disordered dreams of a sickly, ignorant, and
half-witted girl, Maria Alacoque. It figures a literal
exchange of hearts between the devotee and Jesus,
who plucks his own, bleeding, from his bosom, — an
ignoble travesty of the words, " My child, give me
thy heart." It signifies the religion of mere senti-
ment, in its most morbid and debased condition.
The phrase by which it asserts itself is that " Love —
mere love — is the object, the motive, and the end."
We easily see what debauching of the intellect, what
enslaving of the will, is sure to follow from this
exaggerating of the blind emotion. The worsliip of
the Sacred Heart, assiduously nursed by the bigotry
which so easily finds its opportunity, was consecrated
at length by papal edict (1765), and became a type
of those debasing forms of sentimental piety out of
which modern Eomanism has sought, in France es-
pecially, to -made a religion for the ignorant, pro-
tected by fanatical stupidity against all assaults of
reason, and all invasions of a sense of right.

The Jansenist party had long outlived the heroic
memories of Port Eoyal. Their shield from persecu-

196 INFIDELITY IN FEANCE.

tion now was made up of inordinate fanaticism with-
in, and a hard cruelty without. In 1727, when they
were threatened with new severities, it chanced that
one of their popular saints, the Abbe Paris, died and
was buried. A crippled beggar bethought him soon
after of finding a remedy by lying upon the tomb-
stone of the holy man, which he did daily, to the
jest, scandal, or admiration of the gathered crowd.
The healing did not come to pass ; but in the course
of some weeks came nervous convulsions, real or
assumed, which daily more and more stirred the mul-
titude as something miraculous ; and, in a tempest of
popular frenzy, it was given out tliat the shrunken
limb had begun visibly to lengthen, — a report duly
chronicled and improved upon from day to day.

This was the beginning of what makes a very hu-
miliating but only too familiar chapter in the history
of superstition, the story of the Convulsionnaires, with
a long array of astounding miracles, duly vouched and
verified.* How long it lasted, and just what shapes
it took, we cannot tell. Its most extraordinary exhi-
bition was in a scene which took place on Good
Friday of 1759, and was recorded in detail by duly
accredited witnesses : the crucifixion of Sister Frances.
This poor girl lay in a sort of trance, having kissed
tlie crucifix, and touched the relics of the holy Paris.
After she had been scourged with some sixty blows,
on back and breast, and laid out flat upon a light
wooden cross, and her hands — which had been
pierced in the same way about six months before —

* Five of the most signal of these were afterwards judicially
investigated and condemned.

THE CONVULSIONNAIRES. 197

had been wet with a rag steeped in holy water, this
is a part of what followed : —

"Having wiped the hand the director proceeded, with
four or five blows of a hammer, to drive a square iron nail,
nearly three inches long, through the middle of the palm
of the left hand, till it entered several lines into the wood,
as I afterwards verified. After an interval of two minutes,
the same priest nailed the right hand in the same way.
She appeared to suffer much, but without sigh or groan,
only her face showed signs of pain. This was at seven
o'clock. At half-past seven her feet were nailed to the
foot-rest with square nails over three inches long. A
quarter of an hour later, the head of the cross was raised
three or four feet ; and after half an hour the other end
was raised in like manner. At half-past eight the cross
was lowered, then raised again, and the points of naked
swords were set to her breast. At ten she was laid down
again, and the nails drawn out with pincers, when she
ground her teeth with pain ; but previously the right side
was laid bare, and pierced with a spear. She asked for
drink, and was given a mixture of vinegar and ashes."

Such performances might move the pity, but must
certainly deepen the contempt, of those mocking
philosophers who were now the only champions of
Eeason in France. After all, an age must have such
prophets and apostles as it can get. Most likely
they will be as good as it deserves, and, possibly, tlie
best fitted to its needs. The sharpest weapon to be
lifted against that system of cruelty and unreason
which now bore sway in the name of Eeligion, was
the weapon of contempt. In that warfare our sym-
pathy goes with him who is daring enough to strike

198 INFIDELITY IN FRANCE.

the blow. If he is not quite such a man as we should
have chosen, or quite such a man as we can honor, it
is a fair question how such a man was likely to exist,
out of prison, in such a state of things. At any rate,
something had to be done, unless the w^hole fabric of
morals and free intelligence was to rot away inwardly.
Voltaire and Diderot might possibly do a better work
than better men. At need, God can make the mock-
ery as well as the wrath of man to serve him.

The first open protest of reason against the popular
superstition is generally regarded as having been
Bayle's treatise on the Comet (1682), — this erratic
visitant being then first distinctly registered in the
system of unvarying celestial law, not as a miracu-
lous token of Divine wrath. This was a declaration
of hostilities against the existing religious order ; and
Bayle had to live as a fugitive in the free States of
Holland, — a hero of letters, too, in his way, — toil-
ing meanwhile at the enormous task of his " Diction-
ary " (1696-1702). When this came out, " so great
was the avidity to have sight of it, that long before
the doors of the Mazarin library were open, a little
crowd assembled in the early morning of each day,
and there was as great a struggle for the first access
to the precious book as for the front row at the per-
formance of a piece for which there is a rage." * Even
the learning accumulated in the numberless encyclo-
psedias of our day still leaves space for the curious
scholar, now and then, to search this audacious and
amazing treasure-house of old-fashioned erudition, in
which every item is (so to speak) pointed and barbed,

* Morley's Voltaire, p. 273.

BAYLE. — THE ENCYCLOPEDISTS. 199

— less a mere vehicle of information than a dart to
sting old prejudice.

Towards the middle of the century, contemporary
with the strange revival of piety just spoken of, there
is a distinct attempt to metliodize and popularize the
new intelligence. Montesquieu's "Spirit of Laws,"
(1748) is a comparative study of institutions, wide if
not very deep, holding up the spectacle of Constitu-
tional liberties in England over against that "slow
strangling of French civilization" which was going
on under a corrupt and stolid despotism. But the
great work in this direction w^as the " Encyclopaedia "
of Diderot and D'Alembert (1751-1765). This, pre-
pared as it was under the jealous restrictions of
authority, is not that complete circle of learning
and science which w^e now understand by the term,
but rather an immense number of separate essays,
arranged alphabetically, including what for that time
w^as a truly wonderful variety of information on all
sorts of topics, digested with extraordinary industry
by the compilers.* It was different from Bayle's
great achievement, in addressing not scholars but the
mass of men ; and lively anecdotes of the period tell
of the mark it made, when science and learning were
thus brought down among the affairs of daily life.
Especially it was felt — as its authors meant it should
be — that here was a ponderous and very effective
artillery against that mental tyranny, built on popular
ignorance, which made the strength of the corrupted

* Carlyle's article on Diderot shows this aspect of it veiy well.
Morley's "Diderot" (2 vols.), as well as his "Voltaire," is, how-
ever, a far more just and valuable study than Carlyle's.

200 INFIDELITY IN FRANCE.

Church. The name " Encyclopedists " speedily came
to stand for all that was most daring and radical in
the assault.

We have nothing, however, to do directly with this,
except so far as it was one symptom in a time of
intellectual revolt, one act in the long and most labo-
rious process of popular enlightenment. In a general
way it may be true that growing enlightenment in
the common mind is the surest cure of superstition,
and the only thing on which religious freedom ulti-
mately can rest. But the process never goes on
smoothly. Old interests and old prejudices are there,
for it to chafe against ; and when the course of things
begins to tln^eaten seriously, these will rally, and
strike back sharp blows.

Intolerance was not dead. The most active aerents
of it, the Jesuits, were, it is true, getting out of favor.
They had made themselves, in one way and another,
odious to the authorities, so that about this time
(1764) we find their establishments broken up in
France, and a few years later (1773) the Order itself
was dissolved by sentence of the Pope.* It was the
Jansenists who now found themselves in the place of
authority and responsibility. Something in the logic
of persecution had charms, it would seem, for the
legal mind ; and the " Parliament of Paris," the High
Court of the kingdom, was under Jansenist control.
It might be thought fit to set an example of new
religious zeal, over against the old charge of heresy.
It might be that the fanaticism of the Coiivulsionnaires

* Clement XIV., who signed the sentence with a heavy heart,
and, by a marvellous judgment, died the next year !

GALAS. 201

really reflected a sincere bigotry in the higher orders.
At any rate, it is the Jansenist party, and no longer
the Jesuit, that is held responsible for the tragedy
which now ensues.

It happened, late in the year 1761, that John Galas,
a Protestant tradesman of Toulouse, a man of sixty-
four, and father of a grown-up family, was arrested
on the charge of murdering his eldest son. The son,
a man of morose and moody temper, and ill content
with the sphere in life he was likely to fill, hung
himself at night in his father's shop. The family, in
an evil hour, protested that it was not suicide, which
was then recrarded as if the worst of crimes. The
only alternative was murder ; and the report spread
that the young man was just going to turn Catholic,
and was murdered by his family to prevent it. Evi-
dence there was none, and the defence was perfect ;
yet there have not been wanting, even in our time,
apologists for the charge. An example must be had
to strike terror to the unbelieving heart, and Galas
was made the victim ; put through the form of trial ;
then tortured, and broken on the wheel, — a brutal
and horrid mode of punishment, in which the wretch
(unless sooner despatched by strangling or the " stroke
of grace ") might be made to writhe all day under
the blows of the executioner, who, turning the wheel
slowly, broke his bones one by one.*

* As an illustration of the horror inspired by this barbarity, see
the liist'orical instance of the execution of the young Count Horn in
1720, by act of Dubois, in the very interesting (fictitious) Me-
moires de la Marqidse de Cr^quy (Paris, 10 vols.). Some curious
details on this subject are given in Professor Frederic Huidekoper's
" Indirect Testimony," p. 210.

202 mFIDELITY IN FRANCE.

A little later (1765), a wayside cracifix near Abbe-
ville was found to have been mutilated during: the
night. There was no one to suspect ; but two boys
of eighteen or twenty had given offence by singing
rude songs ; by omitting to show respect to some
religious procession ; by — who knows what ? They
were accordingly charged with the sacrilege, and
hunted for arrest. One succeeded in escaping out of
France. The other, one La Barre, was seized, and for
his suspected crime condemned to have his hand
struck off, his tongue torn out, and then to be burned
alive. By special mercy he was beheaded before
burning. Such atrocities must be remembered, in
thinking of the horrors of the Eevolution. The
execution of La Barre was less than twenty-four
years before the takiug of the Bastile. Those fero-
cious crowds were used to the sight of just such
things as these.

We have come now to the culminating acts which
called forth the tempest of wrath that never stayed
till the day of full expiation came. From this time
forth, the system which could be guilty of it is known
as " the Accursed Thing " {VInfdme) among those who
took upon themselves the task of assailing and crush-
ing it. Hitherto their method had been an intellect-
ual protest, and its sharpest weapon was mockery.
Henceforth it is to be moral wrath, hot and unspar-
ing ; and its weapon is hate. The wretched family of
Galas, after suffering torture and imprisonment, were
sheltered, maintained, and energetically defended by
Voltaire, now an old man of near seventy. For three
years his efforts for them were unceasing, till he com-

VOLTAIRE. 203

pelled the sentence to be reversed and their confiscated
estate restored.

For these three years, he said, he should have
thought himself guilty if he had allowed himself to
smile. " This is no longer a time for jesting," he
wrote. " Is this the home of philosophy and delight ?
Kay, rather, it is the land of the St. Bartholomew.
The Inquisition would not dare to do what these Jan-
senist judges have done." D'Alembert writes bitterly
that they must make the best of the situation, mock-
ing at what could not be helped. "What!" replied
Yoltaire, " you would be content to laugh ? We ought
rather to resolve on vengeance ; at any rate, to leave
a country where day by day such horrors are commit-
ted. . . . No, once more I cannot bear that you should
finish your letter by saying you mean to laugh. Is
this a time for laughing ? Did men laugh when they
saw the bull of Phalaris heating red hot ? "

Voltaire (1694-1778) was no martyr, and never
meant to be. He was not of the stuff that martyrs
are made of. He was, on the contrary, the shiftiest
of mortals, the very type of that '' wise man " of the
Book of Proverbs, who " seeeth the evil and hideth
himself" He never hesitated, at need, to make pro-
fession of Catholic orthodoxy, or to go through the
forms of Catholic piety. To the last, he could on
an emergency lie with an enticing simplicity and
directness that might deceive the very elect, and
did deceive his best friends. He paid assiduous court
to the king's mistresses, and diligently made friends
of the popes and bishops of unrighteousness. Once,
it is said, Madame Pompadour proposed, for better

204 INFIDELITY IN FEANCE.

security, that he should be made a cardinal ! His
scruple drew the line at that.

But his flights — into England, into Prussia, into
Switzerland — were bits of strategy in a long cam-
paign ; and from each he came back armed with new
weapons to fight the adversary. His retreat in the
superb situation at Ferney, — which takes in the
magnificent landscape like a map, from Jura to Mont-
Blanc, where he gathered an industrious and thriving
village, in which his bust now adorns the public foun-
tain as that of a questionable patron saint, and where
the stone chapel still stands, hard by his garden gate,
with the inscription Deo crcxit Voltaire, — ■ was at once
a sort of castle or garrison to carry on the fight,
and a refuge for many a miserable exile flying from
oppression. And, wdiatever we think of his shrewd-
ness and thrift, as the one man of letters in that time
who in the midst of so much misery kept a clear eye
to his own interest, and steadily improved upon the
fortune he inherited,* and never lost his faith that
money was worth more than most of the things men
lose it for, — he keeps at least this title to our respect,
that his rare fortune was the means of a still rarer
generosity.

The faults of Voltaire are familiarly enough known :
his implacable mockery, which spared nothing human
or divine ; his looseness of living, which recognized
no standard of morals, and of writing, which knew
no law of decency ; the void of all heroic traits in
his character, except that single one, of an inextin-

* His income the year before liis death, Mr. Parton estimates,
was equivalent to $200,000 now.

VOLTAIRE. 205

guishable moral wrath at hypocrisy and inhumanity ;
with the absolute disbelief in the nobler qualities
which belong to the religious life, — in short, what
Mr. Morley calls the utter lack of " holiness " in him.
Still, what we rightly enough call — and what he
himself perhaps would glory in calling — his "infi-
delity," was strictly a reflex of the official Christian-
ity of his age. E"o mockery of his could do it such
deadly mischief as the long game of bribery and
intrigue by which Abbe Dubois had gained his ec-
clesiastical preferment. No attack he could make
so struck at the heart of Christianity as its absolute
divorce, in judicial hands, from common charity and
mercy as well as justice. No immorality he was
guilty of matches the iniquity of that state of things
he attacked, in which the counsel gravely given by
the Eegent to a young candidate for " holy orders "
was virtually this : " It is not safe to live openly in
adultery for a simple priest; wait till you are a
bishop 1 "

In short, it was the official religion — it was not
what we understand by Christianity — which made
the object of Voltaire's implacable attack. It was this
— not (as has been libellously said) the memory of
Christ, the Son of Man — that he meant in his famous
phrase, ^crasez VInfdme, which we should best ren-
der, " Down with the Accursed Thing ! " It is unfor-
tunately true that the name of Christianity was still
so far identified with the law of morality that, in
assailing the one, Voltaire and his associates also
defied the other ; that their revolt against the system
included revolt against the Ten Commandments,

206 INFIDELITY IN FRANCE.

especially the Seventh. Along with the austerities
of early Christianity, they hated and despised such
poor shreds of its morality as were left. But the
official Church of France had kept no terms with
Eeason, and left no door open by which it could
enter. Christianity — so far as that could do it —
was forbidden to widen out into a religion of hu-
manity and justice. There could be no compromise,
no gradual evolution from one into the other, such as
took place in Protestant countries. And so this great
calamity befell, — that Eeason, distorted and dwarfed,
could only speak through the lips of the sworn
enemies of Eeligion.

Just then, the words Imimanit'ij and justice, and the
thing which these names represent, made the particu-
lar need of the religion of the time. These words
had, for want of better, to be spoken in the way of
defiance and witli sharp emphasis by Voltaire and
those of his school. He has been called " an impas-
sioned .Bayle." But we see at once the weakness
and limitation of any word, even the most needed,
spoken so in mockery and hate. It is at best a neg-
ative word, a protest, provisional and preparatory.
The gospel of the time, such as it was, must find for
itself a positive expression, such as it could. What
Voltaire had spoken in anathema, for the destruc-
tion of inhumanity and unreason, must be said in
another tone, constructively, by Eousseau, and thus
become the popular manifesto of a positive, a revo-
lution ar}^ faith.

Eousseau (1712-1778) belongs to a younger gene-
ration than Voltaire ; and there was radical alienation

ROUSSEAU. 207

between them, though their later years ran smoothly
enough together, and their deaths, only a few weeks
apart, linked them still more closely in the common
memory. The vices and scandals of Rousseau's life
offend us a good deal more tlian those of Voltaire;
and the morbid and irritable jealousy at a more
shining literary name, which he took no pains to
disguise, is an unpleasant contrast to the gay and
brisk wit that makes us half pardon the sins of the
great scoffer. But there came a time when all hearts
seemed to open suddenly to his influence, and even
his inordinate claim was satisfied by finding himself
the chief literary pov/er in France.

His fame as the great Sentimentalist of his age,
and as the precursor of a School of Sentiment which
has hardly expired in our day, does not concern us
now. A better merit is claimed for him, that he was
the first to develop, in his " Emile," the rational and
humane method of children's education which is so
thoroughly adopted in our best school-systems now.
But what gives his name its real significance for us is
that he set forth, with genuine conviction and with
immense popular effect, the two main articles of the
Eevolutionary Creed. These may be said to have
inspired whatever was living and true in the great
popular revolt which came afterwards to take so
bloody a shape. Still more, purified by the dreadful
winnowing of the Eevolution, they prove to be fun-
damental and essential truths, which the Christianity
of a later day must recognize or perish.

These two articles of faith are, one religious and
one political. They are laid down, respectively, in

208 INFIDELITY IX FRANCE.

the " Confessions of a Savoyard Yicar," and in the
" Social Contract."

In the first of these, Eeligion is represented in the
form of a natural piety, a religion purely of senti-
ment, which allies itself easily enough with ecclesi-
astical forms, and is content to let people keep and
cherish such outward symbol of it as they will.
The good Vicar, who discourses eloquently on the
God of Nature among the splendors of a mountain
sunrise, has been touched with the Eevolutiouary idea,
and has wrestled with doubts ; but he has taken into
his heart this sweet solvent of a natural piety, and,
ignoring the creeds, finds more than his old joy in
ministering to his simple-minded flock. This made
the gospel of the early Eevolutionists, down to Eobes-
pierre, and his theatrical worship of the Eire Bwprime,
That it could even be a bloody faith at need, we see
not merely in the acts of those sanguinary theorists,
but, in particular, that at one crisis it cut off at a
blow the whole party of anarchists, — Hebert and the
rest, — to whom such parade of piety was a mockery
and an offence. And so they perished as " deniers
of God and immortality ! " The axe fell faster than
ever, just when Eousseau's creed received its final
consecration.

The theory of the " Social Contract " entered still
more deeply into Eevolutiouary politics, even if it may
not be said to be, at bottom, the theory of republican
France to-day. To give it distinct relief, we sliould
compare it with one or two earlier expositions some-
thing of the same cast. According to Hobbes, men
to whom their natural condition of war has become

THE SOCIAL CONTRACT. 209

iutolerable agree to surrender their liberty into the
hands of their chief, who thus becomes the absolute
authority for their laws, conduct, and belief. The
common English notion, explained by Locke, is that
by mutual compact men waive such natural rights as
would do others harm, keeping the largest measure of
individual freedom that would be safe. According to
Eousseau, the " Social Contract " makes society into an
organic whole, as despotic as the despotism of Hobbes,
and more popular than the constitutionalism of Locke.
In short, it is the social ideal, of which the only real-
ization would appear to be the artificial dead-level and
the immitigable tyranny of Communism.

It was the calamity of France and of the world,
that these two great positive conceptions — natural
piety as the basis of Eeligion, and natural justice as
the basis of the State — could not be grafted upon a
stock still green and vigorous, which had in it the life
of the Past. The theorists who maintained them
were perhaps as bigoted and narrow as the upholders
of the ancient order. At any rate, such ideas were
for the present revolutionary, not constructive. They
were a manifesto of defiance to existing authority, a
declaration of hostilities against Church and State.

There is no need to go over again the ground of
that wild, blind conflict ; or to show where the fallacy
or the defect lay in the new gospel of Sentiment.
That makes part of the often told story of the time.
It is the story, too, of all times. The evolution of
Thought is not the logical and peaceful process
which our theories are apt to suppose. On the con-
trary, the new thought has generally to attack the

14

210 INFIDELITY IN FRANCE.

old in its intrencliments. Interest and custom and
autliority do not give way, except under heavy
blows. What came into the field, modestly enough,
as a simple challenge to fair debate soon shows
itself as deadly defiance, to be determined by that
war of passion and brute force which we call the
Eevolution.

But we must look for a moment at one or two
political results, which show by how wide spaces the
Christian history of our century is separated from
that which went before.

Under a sudden impulse of revolutionary fervor,
under the direct inspiration (as we may say) of the
gospel according to Eousseau, on the 4th of August,
1789, the privileges of Noble and Ecclesiastic were
voluntarily surrendered. This amazing act of sacri-
fice upon the Eevolutionary altar left the field clear
to organize such a religion as the time might demand,
on such a foundation as the time might accept. The
clergy of France were compelled to take oath to the
new Constitution; and such as refused underwent
the same relentless persecution, or escaped into the
same bitter exile, that had been the portion of the
Protestants a hundred years before. So the guilt of
a former generation was expiated in the suffering of
one comparatively innocent. And the loyalty, the
courage, the patience, of the exiles of the eighteenth
century did something to redeem the memory of the
oppressors of the seventeenth.

It proved, besides, that the Christian religion was
not dead in France. The Eevolution itself must by
its own showing respect the voice of the people ; and

THE CONCORDAT. 211

this voice signified that iniquity in high places had
not rooted out the popular faith, which still clung to
altar and ritual. A few years later, when Democracy
had grown " terrible as an army with banners," and
its Chief could dictate terms to sovereigns, the new
Power found it expedient to appeal to that popular
faith, and plant itself upon the old foundation. On
Easter week of 1802, the " Concordat," negotiated
with Pope Pius VIL the preceding year, was pro-
claimed with ostentatious splendor, and Christianity
was again declared the national religion.

But in yielding this Napoleon, in his most imperi-
ous fashion, exacted two conditions, which made it
the creation of a new system, not the restoring of the
old. The Eoman Catholic religion was no longer
" the religion of France," — as the Pope even abjectly
and piteously entreated it might be styled, — but
" the religion of a majority of the French people."
Political — nay, popular — right was thus substituted
at a stroke for ecclesiastical or divine right. France
was "Christian" just as, in a different turn of things,
it miglit have been declared Protestant or Mahometan ;
and such a change of title would have been prevented
by no scruples of a Bonaparte. Down to this day
the Eoman Church is sustained by the State on the
same terms, and by the same endowment in the ratio
of its numbers, with the Protestants and the Jews.

The second concession wruni? from the reluctant
Pope was the recognition of the Eevolutionary or
" Constitutional " clergy. To the loyal exiles, faithful
to the ancient memories, no draught could have been
so bitter. The hate of Catholic against Protestant,

212 INFIDELITY IX FRANCE.

the jealousy of Jesuit and Janseuist, were mild be-
side the flaming and deadly passions of the Eevolu-
tionary period, which had tested their faith. Others,
by a cowardly yielding to the storm, or by taking
strange and hasty vows, held, as bishops and pastors,
the places they had left. And now they must fain
content themselves with " evangelical poverty," and
yield as they might to the Pope's exhortations of
humility and self-abnegation for the cause of Christ
among his people. A few exceptions were haughtily
conceded by Napoleon ; but for the majority of the
exiled clergy the only reward was in the praise (which
many of them well deserved) that they did obedi-
ently humble themselves, and submit. No wonder
the terms of this famous treaty, with the humiliations
that followed, stirred such wrath and contempt in I)e
Maistre, brilliant champion of papal autocracy as he
was, that his long retreat in St. Petersburg was more
tolerable to him than a return to Italy or France.*

Still, the Concordat did open the way to a Catholic
revival in France, which has been in the main Ultra-
montane in its drift, and has from time to time held,
or seemed to hold, the destinies of France in its con-
trol. Twice it has defeated the Ptepublic, and set it
back; and possibly the terrible crisis of 1870 was
not the last. It has at least served to do one great
mischief, in forcing political freedom into open en-
mity with religion again in our day. By the exposi-

* The best account of this affair is in the extended and most
interesting work of D'Haussonville (8vo, 5 vols. ). That of Thei-
ner (2 vols. ) gives the point of view of a zealous Catholic. Thiers
has included an excellent chapter on the Concordat in his " History
of the Consulate."

THE REVOLUTIONARY GOSPEL. 213

tion of Michelet, the Revolution was fundamentally
and necessarily Antichristian, — liberty as against
despotism, equality as against privilege, Justice as
opposed to Grace.

This view of the conflict is an inheritance from the
Infidelity of the last century in France. Here, with
Protestant antecedents, in a republic more than a
century old, we tliink no such thing. The doctrine
of Rousseau went into the American Declaration of
Independence, and so has given us one article of
our political faith. But the same thing went into
the heart of the people, in perfect harmony with the
Christianity they still believed in ; and through the
most devout of interpreters — especially Channing
and his school — it has had its full share in shaping
the liberal gospel of to-day.

IX.

THE GEEMAN CEITICS.

A HISTORY of the course of Biblical Criticism
would be a task of no small labor, and might
easily be made the driest of human compositions.
It would have to betrin at least as far back as Ori-
gen's '' Sixfold " coUation of texts and versions ;
and it w^ould have to take a new departure from
Jerome's correspondence with Augustine, touching
some points of interpretation in the Latin transla-
tion he was then completing.

The names and the times just mentioned give us,
in fact, the double point of view which must be kept
in mind in our dealing with the subject. Compari-
son and revision of the text only prepare the ground
for the work of interpretation; and, as soon as this
is once undertaken in a critical spirit, the way is
open to the later, larger task of historical and scien-
tific criticism, which makes the proper business of
biblical scholarship to-day.

It was essential to the Catholic theory of authority
that the Bible — assumed to be the ultimate standard
of religious truth — should be hidden from the com-
mon mind in a sacred tongue, and subject only to
official interpretation. Tins however did not, as is
sometimes said, prevent its free, familiar, and ex-
tended use, in popular exhortation and address.

AUTHORITY OF THE BIBLE. 215

throughout the Middle Age. To judge from the
incessant citation of it at that time, I do not see
why the substance of it — whether history, doctrine,
or religious meditation — may not have been as fa-
miliar to the popular mind then as now ; allowing,
of course, for the general slowness of mental move-
ment in those days. And it is this Mediaeval use of
the sacred books which the Council of Trent has sanc-
tioned in defining, as the highest standard of appeal,
the Latin Yulgate Bible, on the basis of Jerome's
version, subject to the official interpretation of duly
appointed ministers of the Church.

If the end in view were to preserve the Scriptures
as a recognized standard of authority, and to employ
that standard only for doctrinal or practical uses, —
which the common language of religionists seems to
imply, — then the Catholic method is clearly right.
It is meant to keep the critical spirit from intruding
upan the things of faith ; and, within its limits, it
succeeds in doing so. But in the era of the Prefor-
mation two great blows were struck against this
smooth and plausible theory. The first was struck
by Erasmus, who opened the way of modern criti-
cism by learned comparison of texts. The second
was struck by Luther, v/ho put the Bible before the
people in their own tongue ; and so made inevitable
that search into its true character and meaning wdiich,
in Germany especially, has been so busily followed
since.

The first task of the modern criticism might seem
simple enough, — to ascertain the true text, as nearly
as may be, by comparison of manuscripts ; and then to

216 THE GEEMAN CRITICS.

explain it by the better learning, exactly as the Greek
and Latin classics are explained. But even in the
time of Erasmus some alarm was raised by finding
that the Scripture authority for certain fundamental
doctrines was much weakened by the loss of favorite
texts, or the doubt thrown on them. Quite early in
the eighteenth century, long before the question of
tlie divine authority of Scripture was seriously raised,
this alarm went higher, when it was found that by
diligent search and comparison the number of "va-
rious readings" had been brought as high as thirty
thousand. This seemed to sliow that the Bible had
not, according to the favorite hypothesis, been mirac-
ulously kept from change all those centuries as the
one infallible Word of God. That the alarm was real,
and Avas felt by the gravest minds, is shown in the
following passage, which I copy from John Owen, a
theologian of that day (1616-1683), whom Coleridge
praises in particular, as one of the soundest and ablest
of English divines : —

" If these hundreds of words were the critical conjec-
tures and amendments of the Jews, what security have we
of the mind of God as tridy represented to us, seeing that
it is supposed also that some of the words in the margin
were sometimes in the line ? And if it he supposed, as it is,
that there are innumerable other places of the' like nature
standing in need of such amendments, what a door would
be opened to curious 'pragmaticall wits to overturn all the
certainty of the truth of the Scripture, every one may see.
Give once this liberty to the audacious curiosity of men
priding themselves in their critical ahilitij, and we sliall
quickly find out what woful state and condition the Truth

EARLIER CRITICAL EDITIONS. 217

of the Scripture shall be brought unto. . . . But he that
pulleth down an hedge, a Serpent shall bite him ! "

These words set before us very clearly that con-
dition of the religious mind which the modern move-
ment of thouo'ht has had to meet. The occasion of
them, it will be noticed, is not that daring specula-
tion, and not that scientific exposition, with which
we have become familiar since ; but simply that text-
ual criticism which is the humblest, but yet a neces-
sary, task of sacred letters, — the modest preliminary
task of comparison of copies, and settling minute
probabilities among the various readings.* This is
a task whose importance depends almost wholly on
the theory of verbal inspiration, dear to minds like
Owen's; so that, with the dying out of that theory, it
comes to be little else than the exercise of a sterile
erudition, or perhaps an idle curiosity. Considering
the admirable and patient scholarship still spent upon
it, there is perhaps no other department of mental in-
dustry of which it may be so truly said, that the value
of the chase is incomparably more than the value of
the game.

The first advances of any note towards a rational-
izing treatment of the Bible were made by the English
Deists. Their treatment was very crude and igno-
rant, if we judge it by the standard of our day ; and
it was thought, in its own time, to have been sufh-

* Walton's "Polyglott," which called forth Owen's plaintive
remonstrance, was published in 1654-57. The chief steps taken in
the ensuing century were in INIill's critical edition of the New Tes-
tament (1707), Wettstein (1751), and Griesbach (1774-75), whose
comjileted work was published in 1796-1806.

218 THE GERMAN CRITICS.

ciently confuted. Common English opinion, as rep-
resented by Edmund Burke, looked at it with serene
contempt as a thing dead. But on the Continent it
was quite otherwise. Voltaire, while in England, had
taken an eager interest in whatever looked like a
rational and free exercise of thought on religious
things. Clarke and Boliugbroke, at the two ends of
the scale, were perhaps the names that interested him
most ; but the whole style of thinking included in the
vague term " deistical " had a great effect on his own
mind, and, through him, became part of the current
opinion among the freethinkers of France, — who,
indeed, took it as an impulse to something much more
radical. It was also throuoh Voltaire, then the one
great literary power on the Continent, that Deism
found its way into Germany, and began to engage the
attention of the more thoughtful minds there.

Still, the first movements of criticism in Germany
were grave and constructive, not revolutionary. They
were in the direction, so far, merely of intelligent
interpretation ; not suspicious, as yet, of any funda-
mental change in theory. The names which repre-
sent tliis stage of the process are those of Semler
and Eichhorn; and of these two we may say that
Semler represents a more rationalizing, and Eichhorn
a more erudite, manner of discussion. And it is
interesting to remark that both took for their point
of departure' the illustration of the Bible given in the
manners and customs of Oriental life. Each aimed
at the same thing, — to take the Hebrew race and
development from its strange isolation, and introduce
it into the wider family of nations. The criticism of

LESSING. 219

the first was more felt upon the Old Testament ; that
of the other, upon the New.

The father of modern scientific criticism is held,
accordingly, to be Semler, whose investigations on
the Canon were published in 1771. His rationalistic
temper, singular for that time, was the reaction from
a period of morbid and gloomy pietism, in which he
would pass whole days with groans and tears, —
effectually stanched in the somewhat arid processes
of his exposition. His work, it will be noticed, pre-
cedes by just ten years the profound movement in
the German mind set on foot by the Critical Philos-
ophy of Kant. It was during these ten years that
the birth of Criticism, in its modern sense, may be
said to have taken place.

But the circumstances of that birth were far more
dramatic, and had in them far more of human inter-
est, than the academic lectures of Semler at Halle,
or of Kant at Konigsberg. That eminent man of
letters, Lessing (1729-1781) — who seems to have
been scourged by destiny into taking up, one by one,
the tasks just then most necessary to the mental
unfolding of Germany — was now librarian of that
vast and magnificent collection of books which by a
sort of caprice had been stored up at Wolfenbilttel.
He had been recognized as the one masterly and for-
midable critic of his time ; and the eager diligence in
the devouring of books, which he kept up everywhere
in a life of painful wandering, made him about equally
at home in the matter of debate, in whatever direc-
tion it might turn up. The same curious, easy, and
minute erudition, from the obscurest sources, which

220 THE GERMAN CRITICS.

oozes so copiously through the argument of his
"Laocoon," never fails him when he comes to deal
with the dry out-of-the-w^ay learning of theology.
Let the moving force come upon him from any quar-
ter, and he appears on the instant, fully armed and
equipped, to take his share in the battle, and always
to give a good deal more than he takes.

It is not likely that this champion of literary debate
would have been drawn so deeply into the theological
discussions of his time, except as a sort of refuge and
healino- from that blow which makes the cruellest
episode in all literary biography, — the tragic death of
his wife and child. It is very characteristic of the
man, that — after the one passionate cry, wdiich may
be still read as it was " written in a clear firm hand "
on the faded leaf in his own library at Wolfenbtittel
— the consolation he found was intellectual w^ork in
his strongest and best vein, impelled by a generous
motive, striking for mental emancipation and religious
liberty. For the occasion of this work, it will be
necessary to look back a little way.

Earl}^ in life, when he had definitely turned his
back on theology to seek a career of letters, Lessing
had become very intimate wdth the Jew^ Mendelssohn,
one of the most esteemed philosophers of the day,
whose personal traits, of gravity, sweetness, and
moral dignity, are thought to be reflected in what is
reckoned to be Lessing's masterpiece, " Nathan the
AVise." The plan of this noble work, the most
famous and effective argument for toleration in all
literature, is sketched, in a letter to a friend, a little
less than seven months after his wife's death ; and in

LESSING. — REIMARUS. 221

the same year almost all his writings of controversial
theology were published.

The theological discussions of the time seem to
have been running upon quite a low level, whether
we take it mentally or morally ; and Lessing would
hardly have been drawn into them by any sentiment
less strong than a passionate and powerful sense of
justice. The Lutheran preachers of the day insisted
stiffly on the strict construction of the official faith ;
and, while general thought on higher themes was
stagnant, a man of letters might well think that he
could do more and better for the world on other lines,
though with a secret anger and contempt for the
whole field of theological disputation.

It happened that a few years before there had died
in Hamburg, while Lessing. was living there, a learned
Oriental professor, " a great and famous scholar, Her-
mann Samuel Eeimarus." He had adopted, in a very
serious and deliberate way, the opinions- commonly
called deistical, and had written out a careful and
elaborate Essay, called "An Apology for Eational
Worshippers of God." This was not meant for
publication, but to circulate in private as it might
be copied out by hand. Lessing, who knew the
family intimately, and had (so to speak) consecrated
his life to the cause of open debate on everything,
eagerly sought, with the help of Mendelssohn, an
opportunity to publish the work. For this, however,
the time was not ripe, even in the Prussian capital of
Frederick the Great. The publisher, indeed, was
willing, but the censor weak.

But Lessing's privilege as Librarian included, among

222 THE GERMAN CRITICS.

other things, the right to put forth such manuscript
treasures of the great Library as lie might deem worth
publishing. He reckoned it a piece of justifiable
craft to add to these treasures the manuscript of
Eeimarus, and then publish it by instalments as
" Anonymous Fragments," with misleading guesses as
to their authorship. The earliest appeared in 1774,
the others in 1777. Their subjects were, Toleration
of Deists ; Decrying of Eeason in the Pulpit ; A Uni-
versal Eevelation impossible ; Passage of the Red Sea ;
the Old Testament not a Revelation; Narratives of
the Resurrection. These were the famous " Wolfen-
biittel Fragments." And with their publication the
long battle of Reason and Revelation in Germany
was fairly begun.

" iSTo one," says Mr. Sime, " could complain that
these essays were not sufficiently drastic and plain-
spoken. The worst that Voltaire had ever said was
equalled, if not surpassed ; only, while the force of
Voltaire's objections lay in the incisive wit with
which they were urged, that of the German scholar
lay in the thoroughness of his inquiries and his
obvious moral earnestness." * It may be worth while
to add that the year when most of these " Fragments "
were published was the one year of Lessing's su-
premely happy married life.

In the controversy which followed, Lessing did
not make himself an advocate of the opinions of the

* "Lessing," by James Sime, 2 vols. (Tiiibner, London), giving
a very full and admirable study of Lessing's literary work. The
"Life," by Stahr, translated by Professor Evans (2 vols.), leaves
nothing to be desired on the biographical side.

THE WOLFENBUTTEL FRAGMENTS. 223

Fragmentist. He was attacked sharply for the mis-
chief he was doiDg in letting them come before the
public ; and it was on that ground that he made his
defence. One point he makes is a little curious.
Such discussions as these, it was urged, should be
addressed to men of learning and professional theo-
logians only, and in Latin, not in the vulgar tongue.
To which he replies — not that the common mind
is just what should be interested in such things; but
that the Devil, who is on the watch for souls, " would
be the gainer, since for the soul of a German clod-
hopper, who could be seduced only by German writ-
ings, he would win the soul of an educated Englishman
or Frenchman ! " And then, " What of tlie countries
where, as in Poland and Hungary, the common man
understands Latin pretty well ? Must freethinkers
there be compelled to limit themselves to Greek ? "
So, by mockery and sarcasm as well as by serious
argument, he insists on his one point, — the liberty of
open and free debate. It is in this connection that
his characteristic and most often quoted confession of
faith occurs : —

" Not the truth which a man has, or thinks he has,
makes his worth ; hut the honest pains he has taken to
come at the truth. For the jDOwers in which alone his
increasing perfection lies, expand not through the posses-
sion of truth, but the search for it. Possession makes one
easy, sluggish, and proud. If God should hold shut up in
his right hand all truth, and in his left only the ever-eager
effort after truth, though with the condition that I shoukl
always and forever err, and shoukl say to me, Choose ! I
would humbly fall at his left hand, and say, Father,

224 THE GERMAN CRITICS.

give ! pure truth is for Thee alone {ist ja dock nur fur
Dicli €11161)1) y *

We have nothing here to do with Lessing's opinions,
as such. These, indeed, were still chaotic and un-
formed upon many points which later study has made
tolerably clear. The interest for us is the spirit with
which he broke ground in the debate, the mental
courage and decision with which he looked out upon
the cloudy track that lay close before him. Indeed,
he lived barely long enough to enter upon that track,
and summon others to follow.

One point — which we may call the point of his
fundamental religious faith — he kept steadily in view :
his faith, which was like Milton's, that the honest
search for truth is a right and safe thing, whatever it
leads to. In his own understanding of it, this did
not lead him outside the limits of Christianity.
When he tries to put it in his own words, it becomes
the finest formal definition ever given of what we
mean by Divine Providence in the realm of Thought,
as found in his little Essay on " the Education of the
Human Eace," in its opening sentence : ^' What Edu-
cation is to the Individual, that Eevelation is to
]\Iankind." The illustrations by which he follows up
this hint are found in the paragraphs which have
been called " Lessing's Hundred Thoughts."! Shrewd,
suggestive, eloquent, profound, tender by turns, they
express not only his opinions, — many of which were
provisional, and are outgrown, — but his deep religious
conviction also, the ripe fruit of his long brooding

* From the DiipliJc ("Rejoinder," 1778).
+ In Harriet Martineau's "Miscellanies."

lessing's critical theory. 225

upon the lessons of human history, interpreted by the
experience of life.

For it was a favorite thought with him, that noth-
ing of the great beliefs which have come to men for
strength and comfort in the stress of life — beliefs
which he was content to hold as given first, outright,
by direct and special communication from God — is
contrary to human reason, and that none of them can
be lost. What was first a truth of revelation becomes
in time a truth of reason. What the mind could not
discover, it is fully competent to verify and defend ;
even to re-discover, as it were, by going back upon its
own experience, and following out the laws of thought.
That it is so with the moral law, with the one life of
humanity, witli the Divine Unity, wdiich is oneness of
the Universal Life, all men see. So (he thinks) it is,
even now, with the belief of immortality, and with the
symbol of the Christian trinity ; and so — he grasps
and strives for some adequate expression, which he
seems to find in a sort of metempsychosis — with his
faith in a larger religion of Humanity.

Lessing's positive contribution to the literature of
biblical criticism was in the form of a " ISTew Hypoth-
esis concerning the Evangelists regarded as merely
Human Writers." Of this it has been said that " the
fragment we now possess consists only of about
twenty pages, yet it is not too much to say that it was
the most valuable contribution made to biblical litera-
ture in the eighteenth century." The " hypothesis "
was the same that was afterwards worked out in detail
by Eichhorn, of a " primitive Gospel," or early body of
written tradition, from which each of the four Evan-

1.5

226 THE GERMAN CRITICS.

gelists drew the material which best served his imme-
diate purpose in waiting.

An hypothesis is, by intention, a starting-place,
not a goal. IsTo one would now maintain this par-
ticular theory in the shape it had in Lessing's mind.
But it served two uses, indispensable then. It
brought the whole matter in debate out of the field
of dogma into that of literary criticism ; and it led
men to think of the Four Gospels no longer as so
many fixed irreducible facts, but as phenomena sub-
ject to the same laws of genesis and construction
that we apply to all other growths of human thought.
To appreciate the value of this service, we should
remember that it was nearly twenty years earlier
than Wolf's famous Prolegomena to Homer (1795),
which is generally held to be the point of depar-
ture of the later, or scientific, criticism.

Incidentally, the work of Lessing did another thing.
It limited the field of biblical criticism — or rather,
defined the spot on the field where its chief work was
to be done — to the story of the Evangelists. This
means not only that the battle must be fought about
the very inmost sanctuary of traditionary or historic
belief; but that all the questions of the so-called
higher criticism — philosophic, historical, scientific —
are speedily seen to be involved.

To meet such questions as these required a class of
minds trained in intellectual methods more profound
and independent than those of the eighteenth-century
theology. The intellectual revolution signified by the
birth of the Critical Philosophy and by the name of
Kant was heralded, in the very year of Lessing's

THE CRITICAL SCHOOLS. 227

death, by the publication of the "Critique of Pure
Eeason." We have nothing to do with the schemes
of Philosophy, negative or constructive, that have
risen since that date. But it is distinctly to be under-
stood that the three best known scliools of biblical
criticism appearing in the present century are more
or less directly the product of the great impulse to
speculative thought given by Kant and his successors.

The three schools of biblical criticism just spoken
of are known as the Eationalistic school, represented
by the name of Paulus ; the Mythic school, repre-
sented by tlie name of Strauss ; and the Scientific or
Historical school, represented by the name of Baur.
All the forms of what is sometimes called '' German
rationalism " or " German infidelity," so far as regards
the interpretation of the biblical record, belong with
more or less modification to some one of these three
recognized schools. These are what w^e are to try to
understand, and we must do this rather in their
methods than in their details or their results.

In one point they are all agreed, — which, indeed,
may be called a maxim of any scientific method, —
that the miraculous, as such, can have no place in the
critical interpretation of the facts of history.* In
other words, if we are to have any intelligent exposi-
tion of those facts, w^e must treat them exactly as we
would the alleged facts of any other narrative, or any
other period, which w^e may have to examine. And
then, b}^ the principles universally admitted, it only
depends on the strength of our solvent, how many of

* The rationale of Miracles is briefly considered in "Our Liberal
Movement," pp. 129-142.

228 THE GEEMAN CRITICS.

them we shall reduce to " the natural order." What
cannot he reduced will remain as the foothold of a
" supernaturalism " which, in the view of the modern
critic, is seen to be only temporary and provisional.
Kant's own dictum on this subject is that " Miracles
may be admitted in theory, and for the past ; but not
in practice, and for the present."

The critical method — as implied in these words
of Kant — does not, then, directly attack the dogma
of supernaturalism. It only, so to speak, displaces it
by degrees, as one class of facts after another is seen
to yield before the solvent, which it continues to
apply in doses of increasing strength. It is from
this point of view, not that of outright dogmatic
denial of the supernatural, that we have briefly to
review the three successive schools of criticism
already mentioned. The first, that of Paulus, is
generally referred to the impulse given directly by
the philosophy of Kant. The second, that of Strauss,
is regarded as an application of the method and the
principles of Hegel. The third, that of Baur, is to
be viewed as the fruit of a more advanced growth
of critical learning generally, and in particular of
scientific criticism as applied to the interpretation
of history.

Tlie methods of Paulus and of Strauss are both
what we may call speculative, or dogmatic. Each
takes his own principle, or rule of interpretation, and
fits the facts of the case to it as he best can. Each
applies his own method to the most intricate and
difficult form in which the problem can be put, — to
the Four Gospels as they stand. These are assumed as

PAULUS. 229

literary data. They are compositions having a defined
character, date, and authorship, in whicli the facts
recorded are, for the purposes of the critic, ultimate
and fixed facts. Either of these interpretations can
subsist only by denial or extinction of the other.
And accordingly we find tliat the most radical and
remorseless confutation of the rationalism of Paulus
is contained in the introductory argument of Strauss.

They differ in this. To Strauss the supernatural-
ism which shows everywhere on the face of the New
Testament narrative is the play of a free creative
imagination, the reflex of traditions, beliefs, religious
ideals, and national hopes. It is, in short, to be read
as a strain of pure poetry. To Paulus the same nar-
rative of facts is to be read as the most literal, natu-
ral, and simple prose.

The mind of Paulus was prepared to take this view
not only by the school of philosophy in whicli he had
been trained, but by the circumstances of his own
home life. His father — a worthy and somewhat
sentimental, while very orthodox, religionist — was
broken in mind and heart by the death of his wife
when his boy was only six years old. He began, with-
in no long time, to be comforted by visions in which
she was brought back to him, and they held discourse
together familiarly as of old. These visions presently
became part of his religious faith, no doubt tlie most
lively and genuine part of it ; and he gave great scan-
dal by insisting on his private revelations, and even
printing books about them, till in the judgment of
his religious fellows he was held to be insane.

As often happens in the immediate family of those

230 THE GERMAN CRITICS.

whose religion runs to such visions and visitations,
his son was made only the more sceptical and the
more rationalizing in temper the more the visions
multiplied. He, too, was a preacher, acceptable and
devout ; and with him too, as with Kant, the real
significance of religion was not in " visions and reve-
lations of the Lord " (of which the Apostle Paul speaks
a little doubtfully), but in the plain and perhaps
rather dry moralities of human life. He did not go
very deep into the criticism of the Gospel text. He
rather took it as it stood without demur, and held
himself to be an honest and straightforward inter-
preter of its meaning. Anxiously, and apparently
with perfect honesty, he sets himself to the task of
expounding the narrative, verse by verse, phrase by
phrase, patiently and ingeniously faithful to exj^lain
away all that can afiront the sober reason.

He does not charge the wonders to any dishonesty
in those who told them ; only to credulity in those
who believed there was any miracle in them. ]\Iiracle
is to be admitted only in the last resort, — like the
proof of guilt in a criminal court. It is not only per-
fectly legitimate, it is a clear duty, to try every other
explanation first. The principle is quite simple and
clear: the applications of it are always ingenious,
often plausible. They are given in little dissertations,
which are sometimes masterpieces of skill.*

In many cases, the result is what we might easily

* Particularly the detailed exposition of the raising of Lazarus,
which, as well as the case of the young man at Nain, is treated as
a. rescue from the horrors of premature burial : for to bring back a
departed spirit to this life of pain (he says) would be sheer cruelty.

PAULUS. 231

anticipate ; and, as we might also expect, the poetic
beauty and tenderness have vanished in the exposi-
tion. Thus the Shepherds were well acquainted at
the " inn " or hostelry where the child's birth was
hourly looked for, and what they took for angels were
flickerings in the sky. The Wise Men heard of the
event, quite accidentally, at Jerusalem, most likely
through Anna the prophetess. The Temptation is " a
dreamlike vision." The Transfiguration is a secret
conference with certain confidential messengers, who
disappear just at the sudden glow of sunrise. The
feeding of the Five Thousand is a generous love-feast :
those crowds journeying to some great festival always
took abundance of food with them. The penny is
never even said to have been found in the fish's
mouth : it was evidently the market-price it sold for.
Jesus did not walk on the sea, but by the sea : the
common understanding of it would make a miracle
turn on a preposition (philologisches Miralxel). The
daughter of Jairus was " not dead but sleeping," as
Jesus said she was. All the stories of the Eesurrec-
tion are elaborately harmonized and explained, in
view of the supposition that Jesus himself revived
from the apparent death of swooning and exhaustion,
and himself pushed back the stone from the mouth
of the sepulchre ; and for the Ascension we have a
scene in which he is at last tenderly led away, to be
cared for by near friends.

In all this, Paulus means no offence to religious
feeling. On the contrary, he is profuse, and mani-
festly quite sincere, in urging the divine — at least
the paramount — claims of Jesus himself, and the

232 THE GERMAN CRITICS.

good faitli of the Gospel narrative. To him this is
tlie natural and sensible interpretation of the facts.
It is also their religious interpretation. A great
stumbling-block (he thinks) is taken out of the way
of true Cliristianity if other men will only consent
to see these things as he does.

While the theological world was wrangling over
this plain-spoken rendering, and the question seemed
to be, how far reason could be allowed to take a hand
in the discussion, if at all, suddenly a new challenge
was thrown down by " a young doctor, hot and glow-
ing from the forge," as Luther once described himself.
That challenge w^as Strauss's "Life of Jesus." The
tone of this was curiously confident, even haughty
and disdainful. It asked and gave no terms whatever^
as to either party in the debate. The supernaturalist
it treated w4th brief contempt ; the rationalist it re-
futed with perhaps superfluous labor.

Strauss was the disciple and champion of a philoso-
phy no longer merely critical, but constructive and
doL,anatic. The school of He^el claimed to find in
their method a universal solvent for all matters of
fact or dogma. Everything was to be taken in the
terms of the new metaphysics. Everything was to
be regarded as only a step in the process of evolution
of the Absolute, and to be interpreted as the symbol
of an Idea. All opinions were true, so far forth as
they were held as " presentation " ( Vorstellung) of the
incomprehensible, or at least uncomprehended, spir-
itual fact ; all w^ere false which pretended to be more
than that.

The doctrines of the Orthodox creed, the facts of

STEAUSS. 233

the Gospel legend were all true ; only they must be
taken in a transcendental sense. The Incarnation,
Eesurrection, Ascension, Atonement, Immortal Life,
state to our thought the poetic symbol under which
we are to apprehend the intellectual conditions and
laws of human life, or the eternal unfolding of the
Absolute Idea. The Idea survives, though the symbol
has passed away. The ghost remains, when the body
of doctrine is long dead. And we had best continue
to call the ghost by the old familiar name.

In the sphere of history, — notably in a history
purely religious and symbolic, like that of the Gos-
pels, — we are not, according to Strauss, dealing with
anything so gross as facts, to be either accepted or
denied in their carnal sense. AVe are dealing with
that halo of poetry, fable, or " myth " — that is, the
narrative embodiment of an ideal or moral truth —
which Christian fancy, working at a time that was
creative and revolutionary, not critical, had caught
from Jewish dreams, and woven about the sub-
stance — measure and all but foro'otten — of the
historical life of Jesus.

The entire, even disdainful, confidence with which
this view was put forth, as well as the singular wealth
and facility of learning in the exposition, made in
the face of gray pedantry by a theologian of twenty-
seven, had much to do with the fact that Strauss was
spokesman of a dogmatic school of philosophy, in the
flush of its early intellectual triumph ; and that his
work was even less an original essay than it was the
application of a ready-made order of ideas to a sub-
ject which had been beaten thoroughly into shape

234 THE GERMAN CRITICS.

under the blows of a half-century of debate. The
Leben Jcsu was called " an epoch-making book." It
was so, especially, in the sense that it lifted the
whole subject of discussion off the plane of wrang-
ling literalism, where it had been lying, and dealt with
it on the higher levels of abstract philosophy.

Of course, the argument was misunderstood. The
word " myth," Avhich signifies an unconscious poetry,
was popularly thought to mean a wilful lie ; and,
where it was rightly understood, it naturally roused
only the deeper repugnance. To the earlier belief
the marvels of the Testament were both poetry and
fact. Spare them as fact, and even if you put a low
interpretation upon them, still you have something
left, — the nucleus, possibly, of what will at least
have a moral value, out of which a religious meaning
may grow at length. But dissolve them into poetry
and myth ; make them mere " presentations " of an
idea ; turn them, in other words, into mere illustra-
tions of the laws of human thought, having neither
historic reality nor moral significance, — and, truly,
Christianity itself has passed away in a dissolving
view. This notion, more or less obscurely conceived,
embittered the animosity of attack ; and it seems to
be reflected in the gloom of Strauss's later "Eetro-
spect," as well as in his haughty withdrawal from the
better sympathies of his own age.

It will be noticed that both the methods just de-
scribed agree in attacking the critical problem in its
most intricate and difficult forms. Each, naturally,
solves it by a certain off-hand dogmatism, which ad-
mits no compromise or reconciliation. On such terms

BAUR. 235

as these tlie debate might go on forever, without posi-
tive result. One other way remains, which we may
call the scientific or historical ; and of this the essen-
tial thing will be to approach the same problem indi-
rectly, by aid of premises and inductions obtained in
some other quarter. This is the method represented
by the eminent name of Ferdinand Christian Baur.

The starting-point consists in the definite concep-
tion of Christianity as an historical religion, — a
development, in the field of history, of certain reli-
gious, moral, or speculative ideas. The first decisive
step will be taken, when we seize some one moment
of this development, in which we can get the facts at
first-hand, and trace the conditions intelligently.

Such a moment — the earliest we can get — is at
the date of the first Christian writings of undisputed
genuineness. And it was what we may call the
Columbus's egg of criticism, — the sudden practical
solution of a problem that had seemed insoluble, by
a process so simple that it seemed impossible it should
not have been tried before, — when Baur transferred
the discussion from the obscure and disputed ground
of the Evangelists to the acknowledged writings of the
Apostle Paul. Whatever else may be in doubt, at all
events the argument of Galatians, Corinthians, and
Eomans was addressed to the Christian mind not
long after the middle of the first century ; and these
writings certainly reflect the beliefs, the disputes, tlie
intellectual conditions of the Christian community at
that time.

It is unnecessary to follow here, in any detail, the
inferences and discussions that ensued, developed

236 THE GEEMAN CEITICS.

with an industry, ability, and massive learning, which
soon gave a marked and preponderant weight to the
"Tubingen School" of critics. One or two charac-
teristic features, or tendencies, in this school come
by right within the briefest historical review.

What first attracts our notice in these writings of
Paul, especially the earliest, is the collision between
what we have learned to call the " Petrine " and the
"Pauline" interpretation of Christianity, — one mak-
ing it a Jewish sect ; the other aiming at a universal,
or at any rate an independent, religion. We have,
then, at the outset, a conflict of ideas, — which, in
fact, we follow easily down to their reconciliation, past
the middle of the second century. This conflict, as we
may assume, gives us a clew to the motive and spirit
of all the Christian writings of that period ; and it
especially throws light, in a very instructive way,
upon the composition of the several Evangelists,
and of the Book of Acts.

In particular, by studying the conditions of this
conflict, we are very much helped in fixing approx-
imately the dates of the several compositions, — a
fundamental and essential thing in the understanding
of the earlier Christian history. Por example, the
historical metliod may be almost said to supersede
that of literary criticism, in making it certain that
the Fourth Gospel was not the work of the Apostle
John, but belongs to a time when Greek speculation
was fully naturalized in the Christian body, — in a
word, almost certainly, after the final destruction of
the Jewish people in A. D. 135 * Earlier dates are

* The lack of historical sense and the purely speculative motive

BAUE. 237

fixed with less precision ; but the tentative or pro-
visional assignment, which this theory makes prob-
able, gives the highest interest and value to the study
of the first movements of Christian thought. With-
out committino" ourselves to the result, we shall at
least acknowledge the inestimable service of the
method.

The literary problem of the Gospels is thus ap-
proached indirectly. The positions occupied are not
forced : they are such as fall of themselves before the
advance of constructive criticism. Properly sj)eaking,
this does not aim to establish a foregone conclusion ;
only to ascertain, as nearly as may be, the fact of the
case as the mist slowly passes off. The old question
of natural and supernatural is not even raised, any
more than it is in studying the antiquities of Eome
or the geological strata of the globe. All that is
wanted is a groundwork, however slender, of ascer-
tained fact. There is absolutely no reason why the
most rigid supernaturalist should not take the full
benefit of this method, as far as it will go, without
disturbing his previous opinions in the least, — unless
they should happen to give way before the different
mental habit that will have been slowly growing
up. No room is left for that particular line of
controversy.

But every method has its own w^eakuess, as well as
its own strength. Peril aps the most fruitful idea ever
introduced into this field of discussion was that of the

in Strauss, on the contrary, are seen in his admission of the prob-
able authorship of John in the third edition of the Lcbcn Jcsu, and
his retraction of it in the fourth.

238 THE GERMAN CRITICS.

early conflict of Petrine and Pauline Christianity >
cropping out here and there, more or less consciously,
all over the ground of investigation. Tlie fault would
appear to have been in forcing it, unnecessarily, into
every detail. Surely, a very large part of the early
Christian writings are as far as possible from being
controversial. They are practical, sentimental, sym-
pathetic, pious, ethical. They have always been
used for edification, not dispute. They are, to the
common eye at least, quite innocently unconscious of
any polemic motive (Tendenz), such as this theory
constantly aims to force upon them. It is likely,
even, that far tlie largest part of the Christian thought
was bestowed upon, and that far the largest part of
the Christian writings reflect, no such controversies
whatever as are here assumed, but were occupied
with quite a different set of interests and conflicts ;
so that they suffer great distortion through the pow-
erful refractino- lens of scientific criticism, as it has
been employed. The vital is constantly, and quite
wrongly, overlaid by the polemic. The great service
of this school of critics lay in conquering the field.
Its reduction and tillage are likely to find something
for other hands to do.

The admirable and most fruitful results of this
method, applied in the kindred province of Old Tes-
tament criticism, by the so-called " Dutch School," I
have detailed before.* It only remains to hint at the
chief lack which has still to be supplied.

So far, the subject of Biblical Criticism has been
kept almost wholly witliin pretty shar|)ly marked and

* See Hebrew Men and Times, lutrod. pp. xx.-xxiv.

COMPARATIVE STUDY OF RELIGIONS. 239

well understood boundaries. It has made a province
of erudition by itself, — too far apart from contact
and comparison with other provinces. Christianity
as an historical religion, particularly in its origin and
first development, was powerfully stamped by the
genius, temper, and traditions of a very peculiar
people. For a really scientific study of it, we should
need comparison with the genius, temper, and tradi-
tions of many other peoples. This was not possible
while that one field was marked off, as " sacred learn-
ing," for professional theologians. And the habit of
regarding themselves as somehow confined within its
boundaries has been kept up, quite needlessly, by the
more independent scholars and critics who have had
their training as professional theologians.

In short, it still remains to make Biblical Criti-
cism a recognized thing in the cosmopolitan realm of
learning. Such scholars as Max Mtlller and Ernest
Eenan, — not primarily theologians, but one of them
a philologist, and the other a man of letters, —
will have more weight with the next generation of
Christian students than Paulus or Strauss or Baur
or Ewald or Kuenen.

Hitherto, again, the interest taken in the compar-
ative study of Eeligions has been mostly specula-
tive, — a comparison of ideas ; of manners, perhaps ;
possibly, of men. What is further needed is to find
a real ground of comparison in the origin of historical
religions ; the facts and conditions of their genesis,
growth, and transformations ; the develojDment, in
short, of the great Faiths of Humanity, studied with
a purely scientific motive, from an historical or psycho-

240 THE GEEMAN CRITICS.

logical point of view. No phenomenon can be rightly
understood, if studied separate and alone. The prob-
lem of the rise of Christianity is to be regarded, then,
not as a thing apart, but as one illustration — certainly
the most signal and impressive illustration — of a
very wide range of fact and law.

Nor would this be so far to seek, if scientific critics
would only open their eyes to what is directly about
them, instead of looking through a narrow tube at
phenomena more than eighteen hundred years away.
Quite within my own recollection, all the conditions
have been found for the rise of an historical religion in
at least four cases, and I know not how many more :
that of the Mormons and Spiritists in America, the
Bab in Persia, and the Brahmo Somaj in India; to
say nothing of Comte's " Eeligion of Humanity," or
the revolutionary faith of Socialism. Probably all of
these will soon be crushed out (if they have not been
already) by special circumstances, or else absorbed in
wider faiths. But under other circumstances either
of them might well grow to be historically as inter-
esting, if not so important, as Parsism, Buddhism, or
Islam.*

Nor do they lack their accompaniment of marvel.
Mormonism has its clumsy legend, which is an article
of faith with myriads ; and in the circles of Spiritism
many of us have witnessed phenomena which two or
three centuries a^o we should not have hesitated to

* The "Spectator" of March 17, 1883, mentions an official re-
port " that a tribe in Orissa has adopted Qneen Victoria as its
deity ; " and adds, that " there is absohitely no impossibility in its
spread, and if it spread, the consequences would be incalculable."

THE SERVICE OF CRITICISM. 241

ascribe to miracle or to inspired prophecy. All these,
scientifically studied, would make historical parallels
of approach to the 'investigation of the first Christian
age.

Most of the controversies that have risen about the
Origin of Christianity, considered as an isolated phe-
nomenon, are already sterile. They repel instead of
attracting many of the ablest and most highly culti-
vated minds of our time. But, if the superhuman
interest fails, at least the human interest remains.
The circumstances under which a great and victorious
faith was born into the world, — a faith which shaped
the civilization and trained the best thought of man-
kind for more than a thousand years ; a faith which,
in all manner of disguises, is as alive to-day as ever, —
cannot possibly lack interest to any one who is capable
of taking an intellectual interest in anything.

To restore that interest, if it be possible, and to
make it of service in a nobler way than merely to
gratify a barren curiosity, or yield material to scho-
lastic pedantry, or furnish fresh weapons to polemic
rancor, is the proper task of that which may still call
itself the higher Christian scholarship. A needful
preparation for this broader task is found in the work
done by those schools of Biblical Criticism which we
have briefly reviewed. They were the necessary out-
growth of speculative philosophy, in tire attitude it
has held in the last hundred years ; and tlieir prelim-
inary work has been required, in order that Eeligion
— free from technical and unscientific limitations —
may find its right place in the world of modern

thouii^dit.

16

X.

SPECULATIVE THEOLOGY.

ACENTUEY and a half of destructive analysis
had begun with Descartes and ended with
Kant; and this had involved, as side-issues, those
movements of radical criticism which w^e have seen
in England, France, and Germany. The authority of
Church and the authority of Creed had both been
thoroughly undermined. To preserve the structure
built upon them might still seem possible if, before
it quite collapsed, a new foundation could be substi-
tuted for the old, by one of those ingenious processes
known to our modern engineering : in short, a trans-
sichstantiation of the creed.

That structure — tlie visible fabric of Christian
theology — includes two things: a system of Belief,
or speculative dogma ; and a system of Morals, or
practical ethics. In real life, the two are found
closely bound together; so that where belief was
most completely shattered, as in France, the decay
of morality was also most profound.* And, in pro-
portion to its sincerity, men's belief has always been
asserted to be inseparably bound up with the inter-
ests of general morality.

Still, in theory at least, the two are quite distin-

* That Germany was not at all events far behind, see Bieder-
mann, Deutschland im achtzehnten Jahrhundert, vol. ii. p. 28.

AN ECCLESIASTICAL KEVIVAL. 243

guishable ; and, while they may be threatened by the
same danger, they will defend themselves in very dif-
ferent ways. The speculative dogma will seek to
fortify itself by some constructive system of philoso-
phy ; the practical ethics will seek to establish itself
on a scientific base. In the era of reconstruction
which follows the crisis of a revolution, we shall
therefore find — looking from the religious point of
view — a movement of speculative theology, attended
or followed by an effort to find in positive science a
practical guide of life. These two will, accordingly,
make the closing topics in the historical survey which
is here attempted.

But, before dealing directly with the former, — the
problems or the systems of speculative theology, — it
is well to glance for an instant at those signs of the
times which show that the first half of the nineteenth
century was a period of vigorous ecclesiastical revi-
val. In fact, the brilliant and imposing systems of
religious philosophy, which to many have seemed to
give a new life to the old creeds of Christendom, are
only symptoms, among many others, of the powerful
reaction that set in after the great storms of the rev-
olutionary era. In Politics we find, as a chief symp-
tom, the Holy Alliance ; in Letters, the conservative
swing shown so strikingly by Wordsworth in Eng-
land, by Chateaubriand in France, and by the Schlegels
in Germany ; in Art, the sudden effulgence and pre-
dominance of Eomanticism. This reactionary drift
may be said, in a general way, to be as distinctly
characteristic of the first half of the century as it has
yielded suddenly since, before the new invasions of

244 SPECULA.TIVE THEOLOGY.

the scientific spirit. Its most marked and interesting
exhibitions, however, have been within strictly eccle-
siastical lines, at what we may call the two poles
of the sacerdotal sphere : in the Ultramontanism of
Home, and in the Tractarianism of Oxford.

The conservative instinct of the hierarchy, which
found itself threatened in the Eevolution with such a
deadly blow, naturally took refuge in a Centralism
that made Eome more and more the one seat of au-
thority, till it culminated in 1870 by forcing the
dogma of Papal Infallibility upon the reluctant as-
sent of Catholic Christendom. The political symp-
toms of it are found in the Concordat of 1801, rein-
forced after the fall of Napoleon ; the formal league
between the Church and Absolutism in the Holy
Alliance (1815) ; the restoring of the Jesuits at the
same date, with the renewed actiA^ty of the Inqui-
sition and the Propaganda ; the bitterly repressive
policy of Gregory XYI. (1831-1846), with his decla-
ration of hostility against natural science and popular
liberty ; the long papacy of Pius IX. (1846-1878),
including the suppression of 'his own liberal leanings
under Jesuit control ; the famous Syllabus of Errors,
which denounced the whole spirit of modern civiliza-
tion and intelligence ; and the crowning dogma of
Infallibility (1870), which was instantly followed by
the abolition of the Temporal Power.

This last event, while a great seeming defeat of the
Papacy, brings into clearer relief the measures by
which the Church of Rome has sought to confirm
itself as a spiritual power. This has been, especially,
by making its appeal more and more to emotional

KOME AND OXFORD. 245

piety, and confirming its hold on the ignorant and
sentimental as a religion of the imagination and the
heart. Symptoms of this are found, on one side, in a
great revival of ecclesiastical and romantic Art under
the auspices of the Church ; and, on another side, in
the renewal by Leo XII. (1823-1829) of the " wor-
ship of the Sacred Heart ; " in miracles such as that
of Lourdes, and pilgrimages such as that of the Holy
Coat at Treves ; in emotional and impassioned preach-
ino-, such as that of Lacordaire at Paris.* These
things do not make our subject ; and I only speak of
them, in passing,. to reinforce the thought that we are
dealing with a period of ecclesiastical reaction, not
merely with a phase of speculation which we might
treat as if it were accidental and alone.

The Oxford movement would give us, biographi-
cally considered, one of the most tempting of themes.
Such a noble vindication of its motive as we find in
Newman's Aijologia, such a personal record as that
of Keble, such curious side-glimpses as come to us
in Mozley's " Eeminiscences," above all the clear and
vigorous exhibitions of it given by Mr. Froude,! might
charm us to linger on the road with them. But it
w^ould be taking us, after all, out of the path of our
argument. Tractarianism is only an episode, even in
the ecclesiastical life of England. What was most
logical and vigorous in it went at length to Eome ;
and the whole of its fascinating story illustrates
much better a mood of mind requiring to be met,

* This subject is very fully treated by Laurent : Le Catholicisine
et la Religion de VAvsnir (2 vols, Paris),
t Short Studies, Fourth Series.

246 SPECULATIVE THEOLOGY.

than it does any ^yell-considered and skilful way of
meeting it.

The special movement of thought in which we are
now interested may be said to date back as far as
the vehement and rather febrile protest of Eousseau
against the materialism of his own day. For it hap-
pened that in 1761 Frederic Henry Jacobi, then a
youth of eighteen, was living in Geneva as a business
clerk, and that here he was powerfully influenced by
Eousseau's writings, particularly " Emile " and the
" Savoyard Vicar." Personally he was repelled from
Eousseau by the " Confessions," and came under quite
a different influence ; * but he kept a great esteem
for w'hat he regarded as the finest genius of France,
and owed to that example his " leap " {Sprung) from
materialism to the condition of mind which takes
spiritual realities for granted. " You see," said he
to a friend, in his old age, " I am still the same ; a
pagan in my understanding, but a Christian to the
bottom of my heart."

Jacobi (1743-1819) is generally recognized as the
earliest witness, or interpreter, of that powerful move-
ment of religious thought in Germany, wdiich is still
one of the most vital intellectual forces of the day.
In particular, his name is held to stand for the
opinion that spiritual things are " perceived " by an
interior or transcendental sense, — as precisely and

* In particular, Jacobi came under the powerful influence of Bon-
net, a Genevan jireaclier, who seems to have been the recognized
head of an emotional religious movement, and author of certain
pious meditations upon Nature, which the young Jacobi "knew
almost by heart." See Hettner's History of German Literature, vol.
iii. pp. 316-324.

jACOBi. 247

legitimately as, for example, visible things are per-
ceived by the eye. ^ If he did put his doctrine in that
form, it must have been, apparently, by way not of
dogma but of illustration. At twenty-one he had
" plunged into Spinoza," and he is considered to have
done the German mind the service of reviving^ the
memory of the great Pantheist. But he is far from
being satisfied with that line of thought. " Specula-
tion alone," he says, " attains only to [the idea of]
Substance, — a blank Necessity." " What I need," he
says again, " is not a truth which should be of my
making, but that of which I myself should be the
creature." *

Far from the logical consistency which most Ger-
mans affect in their religious pliilosophy, Jacobi is
very impatient of method. All logic, he holds, leads
to fatalism ; and to each of the great speculative
schools of his day he finds himself equally opposed.
" All philosophy," he says, " built upon thought that
can be clearly stated to the intellect (begriffsmdssige)
gives for bread a stone, for God's living personality
the mechanism of Nature, for free-will a rigid Neces-
sity." " In proceeding from Nature we find no God :
God is first, or not at all." " We know the truth not
[according to Kant] by reason, but by faith, feeling,
instinct," — for he employs all these terms to convey
his meaning. " Words, dear Jacobi, words," said the
cool critic Lessing.

It is the first step that costs. This " first step,"
Jacobi seems never to have been able to make clear
to his own mind, much less to other minds. It is,

* Biedermann, vol. iv. p. 850.

248 SPECULATIVE THEOLOGY.

after all, a " leap/' — a feat impossible to logic, and
good only in fact to him who is already on the other
side of the logical gulf At least, it is a reality he is
striving for, not a figment of the brain : he " would
fain keep the pearl, while materialist and idealist
divide the shell between them." His thought is true
in this : that religion is, as he says, a matter not of
theory but of life ; known not by inference from
some other thing, but as a primary fact of expe-
rience ; '' given in our own free act and deed." Per-
haps his best statement of the thought is that " Eea-
son, a distinct from sense, perceives not only objects
that are good, beautiful, and true, but that which is
primarily or ideally good, beautiful, and true;" and
" because one sees this face, he knows that a spirit
lives in him and a Spirit above him." Again, let us
do Jacobi the justice of hearing him in his own
words : —

"As religion makes a man a man, and as that alone lifts
him above the brutes, so too it makes him a pliilosopher.
As piety strives by devout purpose to fulfil the will of
God, so religious insight seeks to know or understand the
unknown (Verborgene). It was the aim of my philosophy
to deal with this rehgion, the centre of all spiritual life ;
not the acquisition of further scientific knowledge, wdiich
may be had without philosophy. Communion with Na-
ture sliould help me to communion with God. To rest in
Nature, and learn to do without God, and to forget him
in it, I w^ould not."

" I have been young and now am old ; and I bear
witness that I have never found thorough, pervading,
enduring virtue with any but such as feared God, — not in
the modern, but in the old childlike, waj. And only

JACOBI. 249

with such, too, have I found joy in life, — a hearty, vic-
torious gladness, of so distinct a kind that no other is
to he compared with it."

" Light is in my heart ; hut as soon as I would hring
it into my understanding, it goes out. AVhich of these
two lights is true, — that of the understanding, which
indeed shows clearly-defined forms, hut back of them a
bottomless abyss ; or that of the inward glow, which gives
promise of outward light, but lacks clear intelligence?
Can the soul of man win truth, except by combination of
the two 1 And is that combination conceivable, uidess by
miracle 1 "

"We are already on the high road to mysticism.
But Jacobi, we should bear in mind, was not a phi-
losopher trained in the methods of the Schools. He
was educated (as we have seen) to business life ; and
only by strong bent of genius became a man of
thought and a man of letters. Naturally, his illogical
methods scandalized the university men, those aristo-
crats and monopolists of learning. " This reckless
fashion," says Kant, " of rejecting all formal thought
as pedantry betrays a secret purpose, under the guise
of philosophy, of turning in fact all philosophy out of
doors ! "

In short, the real aim of Jacobi w^as — as he very
frankly says himself — not to give a logical and
coherent philosophy of religion. This, he was firmly
convinced, was to belie its very nature, — as Kant
himself seems to grant, when he puts it in the field
of practical and not of speculative reason. What he
would do is to register a fact of psychology, not a
process of logic. The " act of faith," as we call it, by

250 SPECULATIVE THEOLOGY.

whicli the mind plants itself on truth of the spiritual
order, is in fact, as he states it, a "leap " — into the
dark.* The psychology is precisely the same as Lu-
ther's : " Believe that you are a child of God, and in
that act you are his child."

No process of demonstration, it is likely, ever con-
vinced anybody of what we must take to be the
primary data of the religious life. Belief — in the
sense in which religionists use the word — is not an
intellectual process : it is a vital one. A man shall
listen half a lifetime to the most faultless argument
in proof of some system of doctrine. He accepts the
premises, he assents to the conclusions, perhaps ; but
he remains at heart a doubter. Some xlay a thought
strikes him suddenly, and shows things in another
light. Or he goes into a conventicle, or is surprised
by a sudden peril, or some unexpected word of sym-
pathy melts him ; and from that hour he believes.
Not only the one point that is touched, but all the
latent creed in him becomes luminous in the glow of
that emotion ; as when an electric spark leaps from
point to point, making a device or a picture of vivid
light. It has suddenly become true to him, and he
implicitly accepts it all. Without a particle of new

* This "leap" is often (perhaps oftenest) connected, in reli-
gious experience, with what theologians call conviction of sin, —
that is, the powerful wakening of moral consciousness in the form
of an interior conflict, as distinct from simple moral judgment of
things good as opposed to evil. Compare the testimony of Paul and
of Augustine, " Early Christianity," pp. 44, 133, 137. The "feel-
ing of dependence," on which Schleiermacher and others stake it,
is both feebler in itself, and likely to lead rather to a sentimental
quietism. The true foundation of religious conviction is moral,
rather than speculative or emotional. (See above pp. 10, 14.)

FAITH AS A MORAL ACT. 251

evidence, he believes in the popular vision of heaven
and hell, which was a horrid dream to him before ;
in the Trinity and Atonement, which till now were
downright falsehood to him ; in the absolute author-
ity of Bible or Creed, which he had held to be the
heicjht of unreason. All at once these thinsrs have
become vivid and intense realities to his mind. As
an intellectual process it is worthless. As a vital
one, it may carry with it the most far-reaching con-
sequences, and be, what it is generally called, the
regeneration of the man.

All this is the every-day experience of what is
technically known as "conversion." It takes place
not only on the lower levels of intelligence or cul-
ture, as we might be apt to think ; but in a mind of
force, gravity, and breadth, like that of Chalmers ; in
a mind brilliant, social, worldly, like that of Wilber-
force. These deep springs of life are not touched by
a logical process. That, in general, only trims and
pares down the spontaneous growth. The chance
always is tliat it will cut so deep to the quick, as to
maim the life. It is by sympathy, by reverence,
by the kindling of affection, tliat men believe. Then
their faith, like a flame, seizes and appropriates such
material as lies nearest at hand.

We may easily conceive this faith, in great inten-
sity, combined with very simple elements of intellec-
tual belief The mere emotion of piety, however,
will hardly subsist without something in the mind
to feed on. Some intellectual element appears to
be involved in the experience itself ; some article of
faith, implicitly if not explicitly held. What this is,

252 SPECULATIVE THEOLOGY.

in the most simple and fundamental form, we find
asserted and (if it may be) legitimated in Jacobi's
philosophy of religion. Of this we have now two
things to observe.

In the first place, it includes two things quite dis-
tinct from each otlier, — the psychological fact and
the logical inference. The fact of experience is
undeniable ; but what can it be said to prove ? Evi-
dently, not all the beliefs associated with it in the
believer's mind : not the Scotch Calvinism of Chal-
mers ; not the evansrelical creed of Wilberforce.
The interior vision, which is asserted to behold
eternal realities, views them (as Paul says) "in a
mirror." That mirror cannot possibly be anything
else than the mind of the beholder. What he sees
is, primarily, his own thought. The Object seen is
simply the reflection of the Subject which sees.*
" God," said Fontenelle, " made man in his own im-
age ; but then, man does the same by Him." In the
language of the Psalmist, God shows himself to the
merciful as merciful, to the upright as righteous,
to the pure as pure, to the violent as wrathful.
Probably no case of such interior perception on rec-
ord is more vivid and genuine than Loyola's vision
of the Trinity, or the disordered fancy that both saw
and handled the Sacred Heart. Yet we do not hold
such things as testimony of any fact beyond the
mental condition of those to whom they were the
most convincing of realities.

In the second place, not only the experience can

* The reader will recall that Speculation is derived from Specu-
lum, which means "a mirror." (Compare p. 305, below.)

THE TESTIMONY OF FAITH. 253

be no evidence to any other than the believer him-
self: it is not, strictly speaking, evidence to him.
It is rather a state of mind which feels no need of
evidence. Very likely the believer will allege it, to
prove or confirm in other minds the thing of wdiich
he is fully assured in his own. But, after aU, he
can only assert the fact that so he thinks. The
moment we bring it to the test of comparing the
objects of faith in different minds, of equal vigor
and perspicacity, we find that the objective validity
disappears. At most we can say this : that a very
vivid and intense conviction, in a gifted mind, has
an incalculable power of creating the like conviction
in other minds, — like induced electricity, or the mag-
netizing of a needle ; and that all the great historic
faiths of mankind have in fact had this origin. And
it is not difficult, once assuming a profound and vital
experience in such a mind, to see how what was
vision there becomes faith, then symbol, then creed,
as it passes down through other minds. In the first
it was a primary fact of consciousness, which had no
need of proof. In the others it becomes an article
of belief, resting either on the authority of the first,
or else on a mood of experience which has in like
manner kindled the emotion of the believer to a
radiant heat.

Now it is interesting to observe, in this whole
chapter of religious history which we are reading,
that systematic dogma is absolutely lost sight of,
while the single aim is to vindicate the experience
itself of the religious life. We are far as yet from
any new structure, however spectral, of a speculative

254 SPECULATIVE THEOLOGY.

theology. The ground is only getting ready. It is,
as yet, only a single step out of blank materialism.
The next step in that direction was taken by a man
widely different in mental outfit, training, and way
of life from Jacobi, whose testimony is, however,
fundamentally the same.

All the profounder schools of religious thought in
this century date, it is said, from Schleiermacher(1768
-1834). The great impulse received from him was
at the very dawn of the century, in his " Discourses "
{Beden, 1799) and "Monologues" (1800), both com-
posed in the very crisis of reaction from materialism
and revolutionary violence. With him, too, religion
is no system of dogma, but an ultimate fact of expe-
rience. Nay, he seems not even to appeal to it as
evidence of any fact or opinion except such as is
contained in the experience itself. " Eeligion," he
says, "was the mother's bosom, in whose sacred
w^armth and darkness my young life was fed and
prepared for the world which lay before me all un-
known ; and she still remained with me, when God
and immortality vanished before my doubting eyes."
And even in his later career it remained, to many,
" quite uncertain whether Schleiermacher believed or
not in revelation, miracle, the divinity of Christ, the
trinity, the personality of God, or the immortality of
the soul. In his theological phrases, he would avoid
all that could distinctly mean this or that."

All this, we notice with some surprise, is said of a
man who is confessedly a great religious leader, and
of that period in his life when his influence is most
powerfully felt in the revival of religious faith. He

SCHLEIERMACIIEIi. 255

addresses his argument to " the educated despisers
of- religion ; " and we involuntarily contrast it with
the way a similar phase of unbelief was met two
generations earlier by Butler, who thinks it essential
to begin by showing the probability of a future life
and its penal judgments, in the hardest form of posi-
tive dogma. Eeligious thought in England had kept
" the terror of the Lord " quite visible in the back-
ground of argument. Here, on the contrary, we deal
only with the primary fact of an experience having
its root in " a feeling of dependence." Christianity
itself is defined as " pure conviction," quite apart
from any historic testimony. We are asked to be-
lieve only this : that the emotional experience itself
is genuine and vital.

If now we compare Schleiermacher with Jacobi, we
shall find in him less of the busy and restless intel-
ligence, aiming to legitimate his thought in a clear
and coherent statement ; more of the vehement and
impassioned utterance of the experience itself ; more
of the ardent appeal to kindred feeling in other
minds. Here, too, we find in the doctrine an out-
growth of what was most intensely personal in the
life. The father of Schleiermacher was a good old-
fashioned Calvinistic preacher, chaplain to a regi-
ment ; and, for convenience in some of his wander-
ings, he put the boy at school among the Moravian
Brethren. These made the most pious of religious
communities. In spiritual descent their tradition
came down from Bohemian exiles, who carried into
their retreat the same relisjious ardor that had flamed
with such obstinate fury in the Hussite wars ; but in

256 SPECULATIVE THEOLOGY.

them, or in tlieir followers, it was tempered to a
sweet, somewhat austere, and most nobly self-sacri-
ficing piety. It was the placid faith of a group of
Moravian missionaries in a storm at sea, that had
touched John Wesley more profoundly than ever
before with the reality and power o'f a religious life.
And this obscure community was the "mother's
bosom, warm and dark," which nourished the germs
of that young life given to its charge.

The boy proved a boy of genius, of splendid, capa-
cious, and indefaticjable intelligence, who soon out-
grew his masters. By his father's consent he was
duly transferred to a German university ; and here,
against his father's vehement remonstrance, he made
a deliberate study of the objections which free-
thinkers had ur£^ed aerainst the Christian faith. " I
have been over all that ground myself," his father
writes, " and know how hard it is to win back the
peace you are so ready to throw away. Faith is the
immediate gift of God : go to Him for it on your
knees, and do not tempt him by making light of that
gift." He bids his son study Lessing, especially " The
Education of the Human Eace ; " and is sure, if he
has intellectual difficulties, he will find them an-
swered there.

But books speak one thing to the grave, experi-
enced man, who reads the running comment of his
own life between the lines ; quite anothel* thing to
the eager student, who has eyes and ears only for
what meets the present demand of his impatient
spirit. He will know all that can be said in doubt
or denial of the faith he is so sure of. At least, the

SCHLEIERMACHER. 257

one miracle of redemption {Erlosung), wliicli he is
conscious of in his own soul, — there can be no
doubting or denying that ! Still, he seems to have
misreckoned his strength of mind ; and he confesses
to his father a sort of despair, in seeing so much give
way that was built in v/ith his faith, which there is
little prospect that he can ever win back. His father
can only answer, as before, that faith is the imme-
diate gift of God, and must be had again on the same
old terms, — none other.

This experience, in which everything external had
been cut down to the quick, happening to him on the
verge of manhood, was what prepared the way for
that sino^ular and unalterable religious confidence
which runs through all the phases of his later mental
life. These we see, most intelligibly, in his autobi-
ographic Letters ; for by temperament he eagerly
craved sympathy, and his correspondence is all trans-
lucent to the liglib that beams steadily at the centre.
There is something sensitive, emotional, feminine, in
his style of piety. We find it too sentimental. We
miss a certain manliness in the tone. Especially we
are surprised to find so free a thinker — one who has
perhaps done more than any other man to dissolve
away the shell of dogma from the religious life — so
keenly sensitive to external rites and ecclesiastical
symbolism. We have followed him, it may be,
through the widest ranges of Pagan and Christian
speculation, into regions where the creed and the
very name of Christianity seem sublimated to a
viewless ether; yet his last act is to call for cup
and platter, to administer the eucharist, feebly, with

17

258 SPECULATIVE THEOLOGY.

dying hands and lips, and even then to justify him-
self against the imaginary charge that he has neg-
lected some lesser formularies of the evangelical
Church.

In reading a biography which exhibits so much
more the sentiment of the religious life than the
dignity and massiveness of character we might have
looked for, we must still bear in mind, to do him
justice, the great wealth of his scholarly attainment,
and the vast intellectual service he has rendered to
his generation. His translating and expounding of
Plato is reckoned one of the great exploits of Ger-
man learning ; his works are a considerable library
of professional and historic lore ; and his volumes of
systematic theology, in particular, are the fountain-
head of much of the "liberal orthodoxy" of our day.
For our present subject, there are two points of view,
from which we have to regard his work.

The first is the genuine, unquestionable, and pow-
erful impulse which he gave to the educated mind of
Germany by his earlier "Discourses." These were
not delivered as Addresses, but were printed and
circulated as Essays. It is not easy to describe or
account for the effect they are said to have had on
the general mind. One is inclined to ascribe this
effect less to anything they say than to their way of
saying it. Not in respect of literary style, for to
our mind at least that is vague and long-drawn, as is
the manner of most German prose. Nor is it vivid-
ness and force of diction, which, with rare exceptions,
we hardly find in them. But, more than almost any
writings of their class, they give the rush of abrupt

SCHLEIERM ACHER. 259

and unpremeditated discourse, a frank boldness of
appeal, a torrent of impetuous conviction, a passion
and glow of moral earnestness, wliich transfigure
and irradiate the dull forms of speech, and fully
explain the emotion with which they were received.
It is as if the young man — now thirty-one — had
sprung by an uncontrollable impulse to some spot by
the wayside, where his eager speech, his impassioned
gesture, his prophetic glow, suddenly arrest the idle
crowd, and he is felt to speak " as one having author-
ity." It is but a single thing he has to say. He has
only to add his word of testimony to the reality of
the religious life ; to urge that testimony in face of
the events that make the time grave ; to show what
is the one thing needful in the intellectual life of
Germany at such a time. And in doing this he has,
perhaps without knowing it, taken the first step in
a great and unique phase of religious development
in all Protestant Christendom.

The other thing that comes within our view is the
method which Schleiermacher applies in the treat-
ment of religious questions ; in particular how, from
data so vague and formless as seem to be indicated
thus far, he attempts to body forth the forms of
Christian faith.

Everything, in such a task as this, depends on the
material in hand to start with. Of matter properly
speculative or dogmatic, as we have seen, Schleier-
macher has almost nothing. To the last he left it a
matter of doubt whether any of the points of com-
mon Christian doctrine were matters of belief with
him or not. He starts, however, as his postulate,

260 SPECULATIVE THEOLOGY.

with this plain matter of fact : / am a Christian.
By introspection and analysis he will see what that
fact implies ; and this shall be his Christian creed.

Now religion means to him "communion of life
with the living God." This Deity may be Spinoza's,
— which in fact it seems greatly to resemble. But, at
all events, God is no dead phrase, no empty name.
He is the Universal Life ; and dependence on that
Source is necessarily an element in all our profounder
consciousness. ]N"ow it is in our dependence on the
Universal Life that we first find ourselves emanci-
pated from the world of sense, so that morality be-
comes possible ; * and in this feeling of our depen-
dence we have the first essential germ of that
spiritual life which in its unfolding is Pteligion.

Again, following the same method, we find our
body of doctrine in the data of Christian conscious-
ness. Here Schleiermacher parts from what is abso-
lute or universal. It is impossible, from his point of
view, to find any dogmatic necessity in the Christian
body of doctrine as such. Such a phrase as that be-
lief in it is ''' necessary to salvation " has no longer
any meaning, — unless it be that a realizing of what
our best thought is, is necessary to our best intellect-
ual life. If SchlQiermaclier had been a Mussulman
or Buddhist, he must by his own method have ana-
lyzed the Mussulman or Buddhist consciousness, and
not the Christian. There is, accordingly, a seeming
sophism, or else an illogical narrowing of the ground,
when, as we presently find, he takes not the human

* Compare the experience of St. Augustine : "Early Christian-
ity," 13. 138.

SCIILEIERMACHER. 261

but the Christian consciousness — not even broadly
the Christian, but the German-Protestant-Lutheran-
Moravian-Eefornied religious consciousness — as his
base of operations, and spends thick volumes in
building upon it a structure as little differing from
the old theology in shape and proportion as the land-
scape reflected in a lake differs from the landscape
seen beyond the shore.

Facts of the religious life lend themselves not
easily, and only by a sophistry perhaps unconscious,
to be shaped into a dogmatic system. The system
can at best only co-ordinate, it cannot legitimate, the
facts. We shall probably not be far wrong, if we con-
sider that Schleiermacher's essential work, as a man
of original religious genius, was done in the powe^ul
impulse he gave at starting to the higher thought of
Germany; and if we consider that which followed
as the valuable but only incidental and subsidiary
service of a long, devoted, and useful life.

Strictly speaking, it would appear that the value
of his service consists more in what he has added to
our knowledge of the facts of religious experience in
themselves, than in any system of philosophy built
upon those facts. The experience itself is the most
obscure and disputed ground in our study of human
nature. It is also the highest ground. When we
find ourselves in the range of those thoughts and
emotions expressed by such words as contrition, as-
piration, reverence, reconciliation, religious peace, —
to say nothing of such more passionate emotions as
moral heroism, poetic enthusiasm, spiritual ecstasy,
— then we know that we are dealing with the upper

262 SPECULATIVE THEOLOGY.

ranges of experience and character. We touch that
which is most characteristically human, as distinct
from the motives and limitations of animal life.
And he helps us most, for what is best in life, who
makes us feel, most distinctly and powerfully, that
that rano-e of it is botli attainable and real.

o

Now from that reo-ion of thouQ;ht and emotion
there emerge two or three strongly defined convic-
tions, which appear to be taken for granted in that
range of experience just as the reality of the out-
ward world is taken for granted in every act of per-
ception. These convictions are what we call the
fundamental data of religious consciousness ; and they
are commonly stated to be these three : the Being of
God, Moral Freedom (or better, perhaps, in this con-
nection, the Law of Holiness), and the Immortality
of the Soul.* In what sense are these convictions
implied in our religious consciousness ? and in what
sense can they be said to be verified by the facts of
that consciousness ? These two questions state the
fundamental problem of speculative theology, as dis-
tinct from mere psychology on one side, or mere
dogmatism on the other.

In approaching this problem, we are met at the out-
set by two opposite schools, or tendencies of thought,
— the '' positive," which limits us strictly to the facts
themselves, with the laws of sequence and associa-
tion to be traced among them; and the "transcen-

* In the dialect of Kant, moral freedom belongs only to the
homo noumcnon as distinguished from the homo phcenomcnon. The
"actual man," it would appear, cuts a pitiful figure in presence of
the demand made upon him by the Kantian ethics.

DATA OF RELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSI^ESS. 263

dental," which holds that the object of belief is, as
much as any external object of perception, a reality
independent and (so to speak) outside of the mind
which apprehends it. We have only to do, at pres-
ent, with the latter.

We might put the question, already stated, in
another form, namely : " Are the objects of religious
conviction — God, Freedom, Immortality — truths of
reason ; or are they only the moods, or the reflections,
of our experience ? " But this turn given to the ques-
tion has the difficulty, that it introduces us to the
phrases and the distinctions of philosophical schools,
which are apt to be misleading. In particular, it is
in danger of hiding from us the point at issue. The
question we have raised is not one of certitude, but
of certainty ; not one of " truth," but of " fact."

Again, in stating the question to ourselves, we find
that we have to deal not merely with three objects of
belief, but with three different orders of belief; and
that each of them is to be met by a different process
from the rest. The same criterion will not apply to
them all. One is the object of intellectual contem-
plation or moral reverence ; one, of the special emo-
tion of loyalty and obedience ; one, of that bold hope
which will recognize no limit to the life that seems
opening immeasurably before it.

What we can possibly call proof, or evidence, from
a given state of mind, will apply in very different
measure to the three. Thus we may speak, accu-
rately enough, of a ^' consciousness of God." We do
speak with the strictest conceivable accuracy of a
"consciousness of moral freedom." We can speak

264 SPECULATIVE THEOLOGY.

only by a violent figure (as is often clone) of a " con-
sciousness of immortality," — which means, if it
means anything, consciousness now of endless fu-
ture states of consciousness. Cicero's expression,
"a fore-feeling" (j9?^6?^se?^•s^o), is a much better expres-
sion, and is perhaps the nearest approach we can
make to a true account of that phase of experience.
Strictly speaking, then, the conviction of immortality
remains, as to its speculative ground, not a conscious
knowledge but at best a fore-feeling or apprehension,
— more probably a hope or dread, as the case may
be. What we can be really conscious of is not the
duration, but the quality, of the life we call spiritual.
And the more intense our realizing of it, the more
we shall find that the quality is a far more important
matter than the duration.

Moreover, when we deal with that deepest of re-
ligious convictions, the Being of God, the answer we
find will depend on the " attributes " or limitations
we attach to that Name. If we mean by it (what
many have found in it) simply an expression for
the Universal Life, the consensus of all laws and
forces, known or unknown, — then the existence of
God is a self-evident truth. It is, in short, merely
one term of an identical equation. It is a verbal
definition which we are agreed beforehand to accept.
Our intellectual assent may well enough be taken
for granted. It only remains, by increase of know-
ledge or play of imagination, to comprehend as best
we may the universe of fact which we have embraced
in our definition.

But this " cosmic theism " (as it has been called)

THE BEING OF GOD. 265

leaves out of sight precisely the one thing whicli
makes the name of God venerable and dear to the
religious feeling. The attribute of Holiness can have
no possible meaning to our mind, unless it is set over
against that which is unholy, base, profane. In other
words, it reflects one mood of that moral conflict in
which we find ourselves plunged as human beings.
To such a mood the thought of God as the Absolute

— which swallows up all distinctions, so that the
hint of conflict is a contradiction in terms — brings
no satisfaction : it is rather the keenest affront. To
say that God is the source of all life, all force, is
perfectly satisfying as a postulate of speculative
theology. That poetic pantheism, that fair unmoral
Paganism, fits well enough the wide and placid land-
scape of mental contemplation. But when it comes
to mean (as it must mean) not only that the germi-
nating life and the law of social evolution are acts of
God, but just as much the explosive force of dyna-
mite, and the ferocity that woidd use it to wreck the
social fabric ; the hideous disease alike with the heal-
inoj skill that fio'hts it ; the crime and the criminal on
exactly equal terms with the heroism and the saint,

— then we find how worthless for any religious uses
is that fine-sounding definition, after all. The term
" God " in this sense has only one advantage, that I
can see, over " The Absolute " or " The Unknowable "
or " Persistent Energy " or " Stream of Tendency,"

— that it is shorter, and easier to speak or spell.
In one sense, then, — and that sense the deepest

and most practical, — the interpretation given us in
a cosmic theism (which is the best that speculative

266 SPECULATIVE THEOLOGY.

theology alone can do) is not an interpretation that
meets any religious need. It is seen to be not only
independent, but even destructive, of that other co-
ordinate term in the religious experience, the recog-
nition of a Law of Holiness. The two are not only
distinct, but hostile. The speculative Dualism which
was once their way of reconciliation has always, since
Augustine, been hateful to the Christian sense, and
in the eye of any modern philosophy would be intol-
erable. To many of the best and most serious minds
it has therefore seemed unavoidable to throw up the
speculative problem ; at least, to leave it for the play-
thing of the understanding, not as hoping by its so-
lution to cast lioht on the real business of life. Of
the three elements, or data, of the religious conscious-
ness, that central one, which declares the Law of
Holiness (or the reality of moral obligation), has
appeared to such minds the only one that can have
a permanent religious value as a basis of scientific
deduction or as an object of speculative thought.

This does not, however, mean that we forfeit or
deny any object of our religious contemplation, rever-
ence, aAve, or hope. It only means that the problem
of the Universe is too vast to be reduced within rauge
of the speculative understanding. It means that any
intellectual statement is worthless, which pretends to
make the Infinite Intelligence, or its way of working,
comprehensible to human thought. When we say
that " the mind is free " in presence of the insoluble
problem of the universe, we must necessarily mean
not only the pious mind, but the secular, the scien-
tific, the agnostic mind. Each will find its own

THE LAW OF HOLINESS. 267

thought reflected, "as iu a glass, darkly/' in that
strangely multiplying mirror which the Universe
must always be to us.

And I do not see why we should be in the least
anxious to prove a speculative theism, in the way in
which that feat has usually been performed. After
all, our best notion of that which is infinite and uni-
versal must always be a sort of poetry. Who, or what,
or how God is, can be spoken only in symbols to
human thought. And in all our thought upon that
matter we have to remember that the symbol is not
the thing, — any more than when in the poetry of
the Hebrews it was spoken of God's hands and feet
and eyes and fingers. Our language, too, upon this
topic is symbol, not science ; is poetry, not prose ; is
song, not creed.

Let us apply the same thought to the second ele-
ment of the religious consciousness. God, we are
told, — also in language of poetic symbol, — is "the
Eternal, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness."
Some metaphysicians say that there is no power, not
ourselves, which makes for righteousness ; that good-
ness, justice, mercy, love, are only thoughts, emotions,
qualities, of our own souls. Still, let us not quarrel
about the phrase. All such phrases are only hints
and symbols of the fact. Of God outside of us — in
the universe, in the realm of visible things — it is im-
possible for us to know anything at all, except so far
as we can see order, method, purpose, in tlie laws of
Xature, in the processes of Evolution. It is that
within us which makes for righteousuess, — or, in the
Christian symbol, " the Word made flesh and dwell-

268 SPECULATIVE THEOLOGY.

iugr amono- us, full of OTace and truth," — that alone
gives us a true image or revelation of the God we
really adore. That power "makes for righteousness,"
it is true. But it is by aiding us in the struggle with
what we know is evil ; in the effort to establish what
we know is right. So, then, except we hold fast that
fundamental distinction of Eight and Wrong, we can-
not know anything truly about God; we cannot even
think of any God ivortli knowing. Our conviction of
this "element of the religious consciousness" may
take the noblest form of intellectual statement, —
that Infinite Good exists in the person of a Divine
AVill, sovereign, fatherly, gracious ; but it is still " evi-
dence of things not seen." The belief, so far fortli as
it is religious, is in One who " worketh in us, both to
will and to do."

All this does not help us in the least, so far as I
can see, to what we may call a distinct speculative
theism ; that is, to an understanding of the being and
attributes of God, or of his way of working as a Con-
scious Agent behind the phenomena of the universe.
As to tliat, we are unable to see that the human mind
has made any advance at all, since the days of the
w^orld's childhood. Except for the greater wealth of
subject-matter contributed by science and the expe-
rience of mankind, the speculations of the Stoics are
exactly as good as the speculations of the Hegelians,
and no better.

If we were to be asked to give an intellectual expres-
sion to our religious belief, doubtless we should not
do it in the form of Paley's argument for a Contriving
Mind, or any expositions of the metaphysical Abso-

THE SERVICE EENDERED. 269

lute, or the scientist's demonstration of a Cosmic
Theism. Either of these we may take for symbol, as
far as they will go. But we might do better to go
back even as far as the language of the Bible, which
contains the frankest and noblest symbolism that has
yet gone into human speech. This \vould be truer to
us : not because it is clearer in argument than Paley,
or nicer in metaphysical subtilties than Hegel, or
more convincing than the processes of modern science ;
but because it carries our thought by more lines of
sacred association, and by a greater uplifting of tlie
reliG;ious imaoination, to tliat Universal Life, of which
the truest thing we can say is, by a sublime personi-
fication, this : that " in Him we live and move and
have our being."

But we cannot forget here the great service which
Schleiermacher, and those who have worked in the
same ^^eneral direction with him, have done for the
religious life of this latter time. The mere fact that
for dogmatic theology they have substituted specu-
lative theology, — that for a cruel and despotic Creed
they have given us its insubstantial and harmless
reflection in the mirror of Christian experience, — is
a revolution such as the early Eeformers could never
have dreamed of. It is all there : the Incarnation, the
Trinity, the Atonement, Election, and the Judgment ;
but as different from the menacing and imperious
dogmas of the past as the fair reflection in a lake,
or the bright landscape on canvas, is from the bleak
precipices and horrible chasms of an Alpine range.
In color and shape you could not tell the difference.
That difference is in the lack of substance and of life.

270 SPECULATIVE THEOLOGY.

'No mobs, like those at Ephesus, will fight for the
honor of the spectral Second Person of this spectral
Trinity. No tires, like those of Seville and Geneva,
will be kindled to suppress the heresies that may as-
sail the dim Phantasmagory. The dogma has become
simply a fact of religious consciousness ; and, as such,
a constituent part of modern philosophic thought.
Here is its harmlessness ; for nobody is afraid of a
reflection in a mirror. Here, too, is its security ; for
nobody can hurt a shadow.

The chief service, however, is done, not by merely
making the dogma harmless and spectral, but by
linking modern forms of thought and experience with
the old sanctities of the religious life. Those wonder-
ful Triads which Coleridge borrowed (it is said) from
Schelling, and took to be a sort of mystic Trinity, may
seem to us, it is true, a mere play of words ; but they
greatly widened the horizon of English thought, and
led the way to a far larger and freer intellectual life
among those whose narrow orthodoxy has been sub-
limated into the rare ether of his transcendental
speculation. The thin formularies which Cousin and
his school of Erench Eclectics translated out of
Hegel are already a little the worse for wear; but
fifty years ago they were full of a kindling vigor for
minds that had grown discontented with the narrow
issues of the New England Unitarian controversy.
And, of more value than either of these effects, it
may well be believed that the most intelligent and
vital piety in American or Scottish orthodoxy to-day
is where its teachers have been, without knowing it,
emancipated from the cramps of a sterile bigotry by

RESULTS. 271

the mellower and tenderer atmosphere of the German
speculative theology.

This result was the easier, because Schleiermacher
was no bleak and arid metaphysician, but a man full
of a sweet piety, a steady patriotism, a noble integ-
rity, and moral earnestness. Historian, critic, scholar,
theologian, his great function was to be the most
eminent of preachers to the souls of his own people ;
the tenderest of friends and counsellors to his nearer
circle of friends. So that, with all his intellectual
eminence, and his fame as a constructor of the new
theology, it remains his true glory that he sought its
foundations in his own experience, and that he made
it a fresh testimony and help to the reality of the
religious life.

XI.

THE EEIGN OF LAW.

UNIVEESAL Law, in the sense we give to
that phrase, is a very modern notion. It is
hardly more than two hundred years since the first
completed step was taken towards that conception, in
what we call the Law of Gravitation ; and it is not
thirty, since that other great stride was made towards
it, which we call the Law of Jlvolution. Especially,
it is not till lately that we have come to see with
some distinctness its bearings upon our religious
thought. And it is from this point of view, not the
purely scientific, that we have to regard it now.

Practically, it is true, the regular sequences in
ISTature — such as day and night, the change of sea-
sons, the moon's phases, eclipses, and the like — have
been known and acted on from a very early time;
and the heavens have thus always been held as signs
of a Cosmic or Divine Order, which could not be
traced in thins^s terrestrial. It is in this sense that

o

they are said to " declare the glory of God," in the
nineteenth Psalm, whose theme is the exaltation of
" the Law of the Lord." This is all that is really
meant in the famous paragraph of Hooker, in which
he might at first sight seem to be speaking of what
we mean by Universal Law : —

HOOKEK. 273

" Of Law there can be no less acknowledged than that
her seat is in the bosom of God, her voice the harmony of
the Avorld. All things in heaven and earth do her hom-
age : the very least as feeling her care, and the greatest as
not exempted from her power. Both angels and men,
and creatures of what condition soever, though each in
different sort and manner, yet all with uniform consent,
admiring her as the mother of their peace and joy."

These noble words follow a highly rhetorical pas-
sage, which admits such suppositions as the follow-
ing, which the scientific mind is wholly unable to
conceive or entertain : —

" If Nature should intermit her course, and leave alto-
gether, 'though it were for a while, the observation of her
own laws ; ... if celestial spheres should forget their
wonted motions, and by irregular volubility turn them-
selves any way as it might happen ; . . . if the moon
should wander from her beaten way, the times and seasons
of the year blend themselves by disordered and confused
mixtures, the winds breathe out their last gasp, the clouds
yield no rain, the earth be defective of heavenly influence,
tlie fruits of the earth pine away, as children at the with-
ered breasts of their mother, no longer able to yield them
relief, — what would become of man himself, whom these
things do now all serve ] "

The whole passage is, in short, a vigorous and
splendid personification to magnify the glory of God
as Sovereign, who holds as it were the planets in a
leash, and by personal guidance and control keeps
all things to their appointed track. The conception
is as purely poetic, and as little modern, as that in

18

274 THE REIGN OF LA^Y.

the fortieth chapter of Isaiah, or in the nineteenth
Psalm.

There is one great name in English literature,
which is generally thought to stand for the first dis-
tinct advance to the modern or scientific view. But
one who should look for this in Bacon would look in
vain. He would find a great many fine and eloquent
things, but no conception whatever of Law in its
modern sense. Bacon had visions of wliat might be
effected, in a utilitarian way, by turning men's minds
from logical puzzles to discovery and experiment in
the field of Nature ; and he had a brilliant way of
putting these visions to the imagination. But his
motive is wholly that of a statesman, a man of letters,
a theorist of restless, sagacious, and versatile ' intelli-
gence. Of what we should call scientific contempla-
tion — still more, of harmonizing the wider generali-
zation with the conception of religious truth — he is
wholly void and incapable. Intellectually, the task
he sets about is " the Advancement of Learning ; "
that is, of interesting' and curious information. Prac-
tically, his aim is to turn that knowledge to useful or
delightful ends, — health, wealth, art, comfort. Pie-
ligiously, he rather widens the gulf betw^een what
can be shown by the " dry light " of reason and w^hat
is assumed in the offices of faith. He even exagge-
rates the paradoxes of his creed over against the
plain teachings of the understanding. "Theology,"
he says, " is grounded only upon the word and oracle
of God, and not upon the light of Xature." Most of
his " ISTew Organon " consists in emptying upon the
page the contents of a commonplace-book, gathered

BACON. — GALILEO. 275

with curious and painstaking industry, interspersed
with vivacious and penetrating hints, and illuminated
here and there by phrases and figures that have
stamped themselves upon the speech of the world.
His mind was as completely shut to the great work
of positive science going on in his day as it was to
the religious and moral forces then at the heart of
English life. He refused to accept the Copernican
system of the heavens. Although he recommended
vivisection, he believed nothing, or cared nothing,
about Harvey's great discovery of the circulation of
the blood. He seems never to have heard of the
revolutionary work in experimental physics then
going on in the Italian schools. To employ his own
phrase, no man living in his day was more completely
than he subject to " Idols of the Market " and " Idols
of the Theatre." If Goethe ever said that " Bacon
drew a sponge over human knowledge," — in the
sense that he led the way in a revolution of thought
on the higher matters of contemplation, — it is not
likely that Goethe ever read him.

That revolution of thought was going on, exactly
contemporaneous with Bacon's brilliant career in pol-
itics and letters, under the patient and ingenious labors
of a very different class of minds. In 1602 Galileo
demonstrated by his experiments that falling bodies
pass through space with a motion uniformly accel-
erated. This established two facts, which we may
regard as the first steps towards the conception of
natural law in its strict modern sense ; namely, that
such bodies are acted on constantly by a uniform
force of some sort (known as "terrestrial gravita-

276 - THE KEIGN OF LAW

tion ") drawing them that way ; and that the spaces
they traverse will be " directly as the squares of the
times " through which they fall.

What made this step a revolutionary one w^as, that
for the first time a numerical ratio was clearly estab-
lished between the two elements of time and space
concerned in the experiment. This signal achieve-
ment w^as the key by which, it is not too much to
say, the path of modern scientific discovery — mean-
ing by this the discovery of law, not merely of fact
— was opened to the human mind. It w^as the veri-
fying of a new method ; and so was of far higher
intellectual value than those discoveries and verifica-
tions of fact which Galileo made a few years later
(1610), in his observations of the phases of Yenus
and the satellites of Jupiter, and which appealed so
much more quickly to the common imagination.

Again, at the same time with Galileo's experi-
ments, Kepler was demonstrating, by his ingenious
and patient analysis, the true paths of the heavenly
bodies. It was in 1609 that he "led Mars captive to
the foot of Eodolph's throne," having triumphantly
established those two out of the three "Laws of
Kepler," which alone concern us now; namely, that
the true path of the planet is an ellipse, having the
sun in one of the foci ; and that " the radius vector
describes equal areas in equal times," — in other
words, the nearer the planet is to the sun the faster
it goes. Here, again, is a most important numerical
ratio established between the apparently independent
conditions of space and time ; and it was in consid-
eration of the transcendent importance of this as a

TERKESTRIAL GRAVITATION. 277

step in the progress of human thought, not in vain
exultation at having discovered a barren fact, that he
uttered the famous boast, that he might well wait a
generation for readers, since God himself had waited
six tliousand years for an interpreter.*

The physical theories of Descartes, based on purely
geometrical conceptions, fill up the next half-century
in the history of science after Kepler's death ; but
— with immense advances in method, and with such
interesting discoveries in detail as those of Torricelli
and Pascal before spoken of f — no great step had as
yet been taken towards defining the conception of
Universal Law. It was surmised, indeed, that the
same force of gravitation, established by experiments
on falling bodies, might hold good in the heavens;
and even the law of the diminution of its force in
the ratio of the square of the distance — so that a
body twice as far from the earth's centre would
weigh only one fourth as much — had been pretty
confidently maintained as theory. So that the work
done by Newton, in 1682, in establishing the theory
of universal gTavitation, was by no means (what is
sometimes popularly supposed) a happy guess, con-
firmed by later observations. It was a careful and
patient induction, bringing to a decisive test what

* It is curious to remember, in connection with this great step
ill positive science, that it was Kepler who cast the horoscope for
the imperial but superstitious Wallenstein. ''Nature," said he,
" who has bestowed on every creature the means of subsistence, has
given Astrology as an adjunct and ally to Astronomy." It may be
well here to recall that Galileo was but three years, and Kepler ten
years, younger than their great contemporary Bacon.

t See above, p. 113.

278 THE REIGN OF LAW.

had before seemed hopelessly out of the reach of
any proof ; and, as before, the test is that of accurate
mathematical ratio.

What is necessary in order to explain the method
l^ewton followed in his discovery, with sufficient
accuracy for the general student of thought, can be
told in a few words. Suppose the law of gravitation
already taught by Galileo to hold good to an indefi-
nite distance from the earth ; and suppose the moon
to be (which in fact she pretty nearly is) sixty times
as far from the earth's centre as we are upon its
surface, — it will follow that she falls, or is drawn,
towards the earth in a minute as far as a stone would
fall in a second ; that is, sixteen feet. If at this
moment she were to " go off on a tangent," in an hour
she would be as much farther from the earth than
her proper orbit, as a stone would fall through free
space in a minute, — that is to say, about ten miles
and a half In two hours she would have been
deflected four times as much ; that is, about forty-
two miles. Now the moon goes round the earth
once in about twenty-seven days — that is, one
degree in rather less than two hours — with a radius
of about two hundred and forty thousand miles ; and
a table of " angular functions " enables us to calcu-
late in a moment the distance she actually " falls," or
is deflected, in that time. This is, in fact, almost
exactly the distance just supposed, of forty-two miles-
Taken in this rough way, the figures do not corre-
spond quite closely enough to prove the theory. But
the correspondence is near enough, for our present
purpose, to illustrate the method of demonstration on

NEWTON. 279

whicli Newton relied.* The process, so far, was very
simple ; and it is not likely it cost him one tenth the
mental labor which he spent on his splendid experi-
ments in Optics.

That Newton himself was well aware of the intel-
lectual revolution implied in this great step of dis-
covery is shown in two very interesting points of his
biography, one of them first made clear (I believe) in
his " Life " by Sir David Brewster. He had shaped
the theory, in this general way, in a vacation-season
in 1666, when he left London to avoid the plague ;
and spending the summer in the country, he saw
(what was very likely a rare sight to him) the fall
of a real apple from a real tree, which, it is said, set
him to reflecting. But the distance of tlie moon can
only be known, indirectly, when we know the size of
the earth first ; and as this had been very imper-
fectly measured in those days (Newton assuming
sixty miles, instead of nearly seventy, for the length
of a degree), his figures would not fit. So, with
wonderful modesty and patience, he laid aside his
calculations, as if they had no further use. But in
1682, after w^aiting more than sixteen years, he heard

* The "natural secant" of one degree, after subtracting the
radius, is 0.000152, which gives, with sufficient accuracy, the result
above stated {i. e., 36.48 miles, to which one nin^h should be
added, as the lunar revolution is twenty-seven days, and not thirty).
This result, multiplied by the squares 4, 9, 16, may be easily fol-
lowed up for a series of 2, 3, and 4 degrees in the moon's motion.
Newton's own statement, with the figures he used, is given in the
Third Book of the Principia, Prop. iv. Theor. 4.

A most instructive view of the steps by which Astronomy advanced
from scattered observations to the comprehension of universal law is
given in Whewell's " Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences."

280 THE EEIGN OF LAW.

that more accurate measurements of the length of a
degree had been made in France. He now took his
pa]3ers from their place ; he examined the figures
again ; and then, as the approximation drew closer
and closer, he fell into a great trembling, and gave
over the calculation to a friend, who easily completed
the final steps. We, too, if we try to bring back the
fact as it was then, may well share the profound
awe of that emotion. For, indeed, it was one of the
solemn moments of human history. It must have
seemed to him as if at that one instant he were in
contact with the very Life of things ; as if, to use
Kepler's phrase, he were just then "thinking the
thoughts of God ! "

For N'ewton's mind was reverent and humble ; and
he was quick, both to himself and to the world, to
give a religious meaning to his conception of univer-
sal law. This is contained in the celebrated " Gen-
eral Scholium " at the end of his Principia : —

" This most admirable (^elec/anfissima) system of Sun,
planets, and comets could not have arisen except by the
contrivance and command of an intelligent and mighty
Being. ... He rules all, not as Soul of the World, but as
Lord of the Universe. . . . The Supreme God is a Being
eternal, infinite, absolutely perfect ; but, without dominion,
a Being, however perfect, is not the Lord God. . . . From
his actual dominion it follows, that the true God is living,
intelhgent, and mighty. He is eternal, infinite, almighty,
and all-knowing."

In an age of ever so rapid and brilliant discoveries
of fact, it is of still far higher intellectual interest to
watch the slow and painful evolution of an Idea. It

WHAT IS LAW ? 281

is not too nmcTi to say tliat the very notion men have
of natural law underwent a slow revolutioD, as they
came to understand the meaning and reach of New-
ton's great discovery. For, to the scientific mind, Law
is not only the most general expression of a fact : it
is also the expression of an ultimate fact. It is only
by a figure of speech — it is, in fact, by a misconcep-
tion of the idea — that we sometimes hear it said
that " Law implies a Lawgiver ; " and so, that it is fur-
ther proof of the existence of God. Unless the exist-
ence of God is taken for granted first, the contem-
plation of Law has even, as we constantly see in the
history of science, a distinct effect to draw the mind
away from any thought of Him.

In the purely scientific sense, the first notion we
get of Law is that which we find in certain sequences
of numbers, and in the truths of geometry. But no
one supposes that a law has been appointed to deter-
mine that the differences of consecutive squares shall
always increase by two, or that the three angles of a
triangle shall always equal two right angles. Py-
thaojoras is said to have sacrificed a hundred oxen
in gratitude for the discovery of the " forty-seventh
proposition ; " but it was to the Power not that had
decreed the fact, but that had given him intelligence
to understand the fact.

Now the last and highest generalizations of science
always tend to figure themselves in our mind both as
ultimate and as necessary facts. Newton himself is
wholly baffled in the attempt to state to himself a
possible cause of gravitation : liypothcscs non Jingo, he
declares, in speaking of it. To him it is simply, as

282 THE REIGN OF LAW.

we have seen, " an act of God." Once vigorously
conceived, any denial of these generalizations, or the
imagination of anything different, becomes as impos-
sible as to think of a triangle whose angles should
make more or less than two right angles. It is
important to see, at the outset, this meaning in what
we call universal law. It does not forbid us to hold
the purely religious conception of a Power, or a Life,
beyond or above the realm of natural Law. But it
does forbid us to think of the law itself as in any
sense arbitrary or repealable. It compels us, with the
present limitation of our powers, to regard the law
as (so far as it goes) an expression of the ultimate
constitution of things ; as an eternal Attribute (if
we may express it so) of whatever we mean by the
phrase " Eternal Being."

It cannot be denied that tliis view is in violent
conflict with those opinions about the Divine Life
which have generally been thought essential to piety.
We are greatly helped, therefore, if we would see the
matter just as it is, by the fact that the revolution
of thought involved in N'ewton's grand generalization
had to do with a sphere of being quite out of men's
reach, which had always been regarded as cosmic and
eternal ; and that it has long been accepted with per-
fect acquiescence — nay, with devout expansion and
joy — by the most religious minds, as a positive help
in their pious contemplation of the universe. So
the sober English mind accepted it from the first.
Theologians like Clarke, trained in Newton's Physics,
were for applying his method at once to the solution
of the profoundest problems in speculative theology.

THE COSMIC ORDER. 283

Critics like Bentley sought iSTewton's correspondence,
so as to make clearer to their own minds their con-
ceptions of fundamental truth. Addison wrote his
melodious Hymn under the immediate inspiration of
the J^ewtonian physics. And it was, no doubt, with
the applause of the polite companies who listened to
his brilliant talk, that Young wrote, in his senten-
tious verse,

" An imdevout Astronomer is mad."

But there is a class of minds, to which the very
precision of the scientific view seems to take aw^ay
the halo of a great glory from their contemplation of
the universe. Astronomers tell us there is nothino-
so fine to be seen through their telescopes as what we
see for ourselves every clear night with the naked
eye.* The heavens have always been, to the com-
mon mind, a free range for poetry and fancy, and
the abode of a very idealized but intensely real life.
As the older mythologies faded out of them, their
place was filled by the crystalline celestial spheres,
such as we find in Dante, which made a vivid and
sacredly cherished article of Mediaeval faith. In the
earlier invasions of astronomy, so long as the con-
ception of Force was absent, the very intricacy and
perfection of the celestial geometry might seem all
the more to demand a Divine Pilot to guide those
splendid luminaries in their vast orbits, in their
unfailing periods. Kepler was not so illogical as he
may appear to us, when he clung to the notion that
Astrology might, after all, be a sort of handmaid to
Astronomy.

* See Searle's Outlines of Astronomy, p. 207.

284 THE EEIGN OF LAW.

Even the vast sweep of the Cartesian " vortices "
might seem to need the intelligent interposition of
a guiding Hand to keep them uniform, untrouhled,
and strong. Leibnitz (who was four years younger
than Newton) remained better content with that way
of explaining things ; and we may suppose that it
was quite as much from an honest conservative ap-
prehension of the revolution coming to pass in the
higher thought as from personal jealousy of a rival
fame, when in his private correspondence he warned
the Princess Caroline * of the religious consequences
that would be sure to follow from the new Celestial
Mechanics. His deep sagacity foresaw that the time
would come when it should no longer be said that
" the lieavens declare the glory of God ; " but that (as
Comte puts it) " they declare the glory of Hipparchus,
of Kepler, and of New^ton ! "

In fact, Newton's own conception — of " tangential
motion " having been given at first, outright, to the
planets,f which were thereafter to be controlled by
the central attraction of the Sun — gave way in course
of time to the " nebular liypothesis " of Laplace, who
show^ed very clearly how shape, as well as motion,
could be given to the Solar System by that universal
force acting freely on an irregularly diffused body of
nebulous matter in the open sky. Less than forty
years ago religious thinkers were still struggling with
that new conception, and considering how it might

* Afterwards tlie Queen Caroline of "Tlie Heart of Midlothian."
+ He himself says tliat he cannot conceive of this tangential
motion having been given excejit by the direct act of Deity. (Let-
ter to Dr. Beutley.)

CHEMISTRY: D ALTON. 285

possibly be held along with any theistic faith.*
That little ruffle of controversy is almost forgotten
now ; and, for a generation at least, all thinking
minds have become wonted to the idea that the
heavens are controlled, to all intents and purposes,
by universal, unvarying, and impersonal Law. And
the same may be said of " the uniformity of cosmic
forces " through incalculable periods of time, as
shown in the science of Geology, — which, in this
regard, is simply a portion, or a sequel, of physical
Astronomy.

In the century and a half of physical discovery
and widening generalization that has followed since
Newton's death, it is not necessary to point out the
single steps which mark the cardinal dates of the
revolution.! There is only one which, though in a
far obscurer sphere, appears to involve consequences
equally radical and far-reaching with those of New-
ton's great discovery. This is Dalton's law of Defi-
nite Proportions and Elective Affinities in Chemistry.
It is not quite so well adapted for popular illustra-
tion as the sublime generalizations of Astronomy.
But, if we will think of it a moment, it carries the
thought of guiding Intelligence still more intimately
and deeply into the constitution of things.

As we know now, most of the differences we find
among objects — in color, texture, weight, and other
apparent properties — depend on numerical propor-
tions (measured by so-called " atomic weights " )

* In the "Christian Examiner" of 1845, Dr. Lamson admitted
that the nebular liypothesis " is not necessarily atheistic " !

t These are briefly rehearsed iu "Our Liberal Movement," pp.
192, 193.

286 THE KEIGN OF LAW.

among the two, three, or more so-called " elements "
of which they are made up. And when we go over
into organic chemistry, we find the same thing hold-
ing good, though with such amazing intricacies and
complexities of proportion as to baffle us completely,
when we try to think what must be that synthesis,
or stable equilibrium among them, which we call
Life.

It will be convenient then, for our present pur-
pose, to keep ourselves to what is most simple and
familiar. The " symbols " of chemistry are perfectly
easy to understand, and those of any consequence to
us are very few. Moreover, for the uses of our argu-
ment, we need have nothing to do with the more
difficult and staggering conceptions of " the new
chemistry," * with the strange theories of " molecular
physics," •[• or with the troublesome nomenclature
invented to describe the higher orders of compounds.
It is not with the encyclopsedia of facts in any
science, but only with one or two of its fundamen-
tal truths, that we have to deal, if we would trace
its bearing's in other fields of thought, motive, or
belief

Now, if we look attentively at one of the very
simplest chemical phenomena, — say the reactions
which take place when we pour vitriol upon chalk,
— we find that the base (lime) instantly and ener-
getically elects the sulphuric acid, rejecting the car-
bonic in the form of gas, and turning into quite

* Sucli as the swift and incessant movements of the molecules of
vapor.

t Such as Helmholtz's "vortical rings."

ELECTIVE AFFINITY. 287

another substance (gypsum). Why ? Only (it would
seem) because such is its own " elective affinity," —
carried out, too, with an infallible accuracy of meas-
ure and proportion, which in human acts would show
a high though strictly limited order of intelligence.

We find, in a different example, that four elements
in solution, two from each of the substances em-
ployed, have rushed eagerly, and with unerring sa-
gacity, crossiuise into a new arrangement ; * each
forsaking its former partner, and combining, in some
haste and violence, with the other, the new com-
pound having hardly a single property in common
with the old.

There is, so far as we can see, no external force to
compel them to this, and none to direct them in it.
All depends on what we call the " properties " of the
ingredients themselves. The thing we note, with
constantly deepening wonder and surprise, is that
the process is one of unfailing and (seemingly) abso-
lute intelligence in each of the constituents, within
its own narrow sphere of action. Of the elements
concerned in the experiment we know absolutely
nothing (beyond their atomic weights and a few
simple properties), except that they are liable to
such escapades as these, with resulting qualities and
effects which in some degree we have ascertained be-
forehand and can determine. Of the process itself

* This is easily illustrated by pouring together a clear solution
of nitrate of silver and of chloride of sodium (common salt). A
chalk-white mass of chloride of silver instantly falls to the bottom,
and what remains in solution is nitrate of sodium (soda-saltpetre),
which is then crystallized by evaporation.

288 THE EEIGN OF LAW.

we know absolutely notliing, except that it results
from the (apparently) free choice, the " elective affin-
ities," which may exist among these bodies, so that
without external constraint they take one in prefer-
ence to another ; and that there is infallible precision
in determining, by " definite proportions," the quanti-
ties in which they will mingle. It would require
the most scrupulous care of the most skilful chemist
to weigh them out with anything like the intelligent
accuracy they show of themselves, as soon as the
opportunity is oftered them.

Here again, on the minutest and most intricate
scale, as before on the broadest and most sublime,
we come upon the universal Intelligence which
makes the cosmic order, shown in the same way, of
accurate numerical ratio, — not, this time, between
elements of time and space, but between " atomic
weights," that is, different and independent manifes-
tations of force. And if anything could deepen the
awe with which we stand in presence of this ulti-
mate fact, or cosmic law of thino's, it would be that
we live in a world made up of such compounds, —
in equilibrium stable enough to give us innumerable
substances solid and familiar to our handling ; but
unstable enough to show how, under conditions some-
what different, but perfectly conceivable, they might
all fly away in vapor, or else build for us "new
heavens and a new earth," w^ildly remote from any-
thing we have seen or known.

To complete the conception just given in the
sphere of chemistry, we need to look at it from two
opposite points of view, one of them showing it in

FACTS OF PHYSIOLOGY. 289

the range of cosmic immensity, the other in the in-
tricacy of vital processes.

We should take on the one hand the revelations
of the spectroscope as to the light of sun, stars, and
nebulie. This order of discovery simply means, to
us, that the elements of which the heavenly bodies
are composed would be subject, under similar condi-
tions, to precisely the same chemical reactions which
we are continually reproducing in our experiments.
Thus we find, in chemistry as well as in astronomy
and mechanics, the exhibition not only of terrestrial
but of universal law.

On the other hand, we should try to realize to our-
selves some of the conceptions of modern physiology.
And here we find that we are quite unconsciously
bearing about in our bodily structure a laboratory of
enormous power, which with an energy of chemical
action we can noway conceive is turning out every
day four or five gallons of its highly elaborated com-
pounds. We find a pailful of hot blood rushing, as
fast as a strong man walks, through innumerable
arteries and veins, propelled by a muscle weighing
less than a pound, that shall not pause a single sec-
ond in its energetic contractions and expansions, for
a lifetime of more than eighty years. We find a
chemistry of digestion so potent as — by the aston-
ishing solvent which it brews daily to the amount of
one-tenth the weight of the entire body — in a few
hours to change the beggar's crust and the epicure's
banquet of fifty flavors into the same indistinguish-
able vital fluid. We find an electric battery to do
our thinking by, made up of more than twelve hun-

19

290 THE REIGN OF LAW.

died million cells connected by five thousand mil-
lion filaments of nerve. We find all this stupendous
apparatus undergoing every day a process of slow
burning down and building up, measured in part by
the muscular, mental, and emotional force put forth,
but far the greater part by the vital heat developed
in the destruction of its tissues, and the astonishing
creative or building process by which they are re-
newed from day to day.

All the phenomena thus grouped in the widening
circles of our knowledge, the scientific mind comes
to regard as simple facts, as ultimate facts. We
are as little capable of imagining to ourselves the
method of operation of the superior Power which
has brought them into being, acting (as it were) from
the outside, as we are of creating them outright our-
selves. To pretend to " account " for them amounts
simply to giving that Power a name, and so to save
ourselves the trouble of thinking, by refusing to see
the blank mystery which it involves.

As John Stuart Mill has said, the argument from
the intelligence and skill seen throughout this world
of wonders is, after all, the best proof we have of the
existence of a God. To deny intelligent design in
the universe is like denying sunshine in the land-
scape : it stares us in the face everywhere. But, as
he further shows, this argument is beset by so many
moral difficulties, as soon as we follow it into detail,
that it lias little or no religious value. We may
even say that — so fat as any value of tliat sort is
considered — the logic of final causes had better not
be studied too closely, except by a religious mind.

PHYSICAL AND MORAL ORDER. 291

That is, as Bacon miglit say, the Medusa wliicli has
turned many a living man to stone. The scientific
motive is, after all, a good deal safer than the teleo-
logical. And this is, simply to ascertain the facts,
with the " laws of similitude and succession " that
can be established among them ; and, having done
this, to regard them as ultimate and (in any philo-
sophical sense) unaccountable.

We have thus, both in the cosmic order of the
heavens and in the bodily conditions of human life,
come to take frankly the view which sees in them
the working out of universal law. In what concerns
the higher life of humanity — intellect, emotion,
spiritual beliefs, and historic evolution — we do not
as yet seem to see traces of the same unvarying
order. The nearest we have come to that is in as-
certaining the physiological conditions under which
we think and feel; but it would be begging the
whole philosophical question if we should assume
that these conditions produce, or in fact do anything
more than limit and qualify, the higher mental and
moral activities we are conscious of. And the ques-
tion which remains is. Whether, or how far, these
ranges of our life may be taken in and comprehended
under the same universal Order which we recognize
in the domain of physics.

Speculatively, we should say at once that they can.
And from the point of view of pure speculation
there has never, in fact, been any doubt. Whether
an eternal Necessity, or a Divine Decree, or a scien-
tific Determinism, or a doctrine of universal Evolu-
tion, the presumption is still in favor of the same

292 THE EEIGN OF LAW.

invariable and unalterable sequence, in all ranges of
being, absolutely without exception. If logical con-
sistency were all, the case stops here.

But logical consistency is not scientific proof The
assertion of law — that is, absolute uniformity of
sequence — within a given sphere is purely an hy-
pothesis, until it is verified by certain tests. The
chief of these tests, perhaps the only valid ones, are
these two, — ^^rt^^ic^/o^i and control. The final proof
of the law of gravitation prevailing throughout the
Solar System w\as considered to have been given
when, in 1846, Leverrier made the prediction which
was verified by the discovery of Neptune. Hitherto,
the law had explained all the known phenomena ;
now, it predicted one that, was unknown and unsus-
pected. If the weather could be predicted in like
manner, we should know that we had the true law
of atmospheric changes. In both these cases the
phenomena are out of our reach, and accurate predic-
tion is our only test. In such matters as chemistry,
we submit the case in hand to our experiments ; we
reproduce the conditions, as well as we can, in our
laboratory; and only when we can say with confi-
dence that we can produce certain results, do we
know that we have the law.

This test is what makes the difference between a
scientific truth and a mere accumulation of facts ob-
served and registered, which (for example) geology
was so long ; or a probable generalization from an
immense number of observations, which is the con-
dition of the Darwinian theory to-day. The ijwccss
of the genesis of species by natural evolution, and

COMTE. 293

even by way of natural selection, is made (it may
be) increasingly probable ; but it is only rhetorically
that we can speak of it as a law^ Of two inconceiv-
ables, one seems less inconceivable than the other.
In these departments of science the larger and the
lesser ranges of observation may do much to help
each other out. Still, no one, excej)t within very
narrow limits, is able to predict the facts, and no
one is able to control the facts. We can only estab-
lish a probable sequence among the facts.

I have tried to state that conception of what makes
scientific certainty, which is necessary in order to
judge fairly the work done just here by Auguste
Comte. I^ow Comte was a man of great eccentric-
ities and of peculiar limitations. He had strictly
marked out the limits within which he considered
that he could work to advantage ; and (except in his
professional department of mathematics) he banished
from his thought, as far as he could, everything out-
side those limits. Thus he w^as scornfully intolerant
of the waste of force (as he regarded it) in theologi-
cal contemplation, or the insoluble problems of meta-
physics,— wdiich have been and still are some of
the noblest exercises of human thought. He was
irritated and impatient that science should not keep
within its proper "beat" of the Solar System, and
had an active antipathy to stellar astronomy, —
which we see now to be the finest range of specula-
tive physics. He had an ignorant contempt of paltB-
ontology, as savoring of barren inquiry into the origin
of things, — which proves, since his day, to be the
most fruitful study of embryology on the grandest

294 THE REIGN OF LAW.

scale. That infinitely skilful and patient working up
from first principles, through molecular physics into
the ranges of organic life, so splendid and impres-
sive in Herbert Spencer's philosophy of Evolution,
he not only knew nothing about, from the fact of its
coming up since his day, but he would most likely
have repudiated it angrily as " materialism ; " that is,
as turning men's thoughts to the inferior levels, away
from those laws and constructions of human society
which to him made the only fit or pardonable goal of
" positive philosophy."

Besides, it is not w^ith impunity that one shuts
himself up, as he did, in an intellectual hermitage
for twenty years. Grant that it was the necessary
condition on which one indispensable task could be
done, and so that lie was justified in imposing it on
himself. Still, that long solitary confinement must
have its ill effect in a morbid irritability, an intoler-
ant doo-matism, an inordinate conceit of the work he
had to do, verging on insanity, and making him at
length soberly regard himself as the higli-priest of
a new " Eeligion of Humanity," and the Supreme
Pontiff of mankind.*

In dealing with a singularly massive and domi-
natin^r intelliu'ence, like that of Comte, it seems best
to admit at the outset those limitations and faults,
which have created even a bitter prejudice against
his name among most men of science, and which are
too abundantly illustrated both in his autobiograph-

* I visited M. Comte three times in Paris, in the summer of
1855, and have given such personal impressions and recollections as
seemed worth iiotincj in the " Christian Examiner" of July, 1857.

COMTE. 295

ical prefaces, and in the details of his biography.
Having made these very damaging admissions, it
remains true that his is, unquestionably, by far the
greatest personal force that has gone into the scien-
tific thought of the century; and that his name is
significant, before every other, of the intellectual rev-
olution which we are passing tln^ough. It must be
left for the exceedingly vigorous and intelligent school
of his professed disciples to vindicate this judgment in
detail. My own purpose will be met, more briefly and
simply, by pointing out those characteristics of his
work which lie in the line of my general argument.
It will be shown, I think, that in the particular path
he took he does not come into comparison or compe-
tition with tliose eminent scientists who have given
special glory to this time ; while his true work is in
the purely intellectual comprehension of what w^e
mean by Universal Law.

The work, then, to be properly credited to Comte
has been done, not in the gathering and classifying of
scientific facts, as to which he is relatively weak. It
has been done by keeping steadily in view the largest
generalizations of science, and so helping in its intel-
lectual interpretation. In particular — sooner, more
firmly, and more consistently than any other eminent
thinker — he conceived and held that interj^retation
of Law which Newton held, though waveringly, in
the line of the higher physics, and which has been
established with such difficulty and so recently on
the plane of physiology. I do not say that his con-
ception of it is final, or is satisfactory. With that
argument, as yet, I have nothing to do. But that

296 THE REIGN OF LAW.

notion whicli lie aimed to fix and make clear in his
title, " Positive Philosophy," must be conceived as
clearly and firmly as he has stated it, in order to
make any further step in the interpretation of nature
possible.

This conception, in the form he has given it, was
lodged in his mind (as such dominating germ-thoughts
are wont to be) by a sudden act of reflection or intu-
ition, or what at any rate seemed so. It was when
he was not far from the age of twenty. The prob-
lem, as it presented itself, was — in the line of widest
generalization — to find the law of evolution in the
field of pure intelligence, both philosophic (the indi-
vidual consciousness) and historic (the consciousness
of mankind at large). To work up from physiologi-
cal data, as the strict evolutionist would do, would
be to falsify the conditions of the problem as he
understood them. Physical data may serve for phy-
sics ; but in the field of thought we must have those
which are purely intellectual.

The law which he announced — which announced
itself to him, we may say, in the course of twenty-
four hours' strained and unremitting bent of thought
— we shall very likely fmd crude and vague ; at all
events, most of the criticisms of it have proceeded
upon a very crude and vague understanding of what
it implies. It is commonly called '' the law of the
three states," or stages of mental progress. Its mean-
ing is something like this : that the highest general
conceptions which men are able to attain will be at
first Theological, ascribing phenomena to direct acts
of will, — either in the thing itself (fetichism), groups

COMTE. 297

of divine powers (polytheism), or a single controlling
mind (monotheism) ; then Metaphysical, accounting
for phenomena by general principles or abstractions,
— as attraction, repulsion, caloric, electric fluid, vital
force, and the like, — which we see presently to be
merely disguising the unknowable under a preten-
tious name; and finally Positive, in which the most
comprehensive fact we can attain in any group of
facts, the " law of similitude and succession " of that
order of phenomena, stands to the mind as an ulti-
mate fact, — any attempt whatever to explain or
account for it (except by comprehending it under
some larger generalization) being necessarily barren
and futile.

!N"ow this law (as he regarded it) would be not
only crude and vague, but manifestly false, unless it
were combined with, and used to interpret, what
Comte calls the " hierarchy of the sciences," — that
is, the series of generalized facts, or large scientific
inductions, in the order in which they yield to the
forementioned law.

Here, again, it is necessary to say that the motive
is not to give the most complete or serviceable
schedule, as Mr. Spencer appears to assume in com-
menting upon it in his "Classification of the Sci-
ences." One takes the point of view of intellectual
contemplation, and the other of objective relation.
Each is best for its own purpose. We need not try
to judge between them, as Mr. Mill does, who decides
that Comte's is on the whole the better scheme.
At any rate it is the simpler. And it is perfectly
clear, in the history of the sciences, that these have

298 THE REIGN OF LAW.

emerged into the " positive stage " of interpretation
in the order in which he gives them. This order is
as follows : pure and applied Mathematics, Astrono-
my, Physics (heat, light, electricity), Chemistry, and
Biology. The law of development in the intellectual
history of mankind is exhibited, by way of illustra-
tion, in this series ; but his treatment of the sciences
themselves is only a preliminary, or by-play, to the
work which Comte really means to do.

It was for the sake of this work that he shut him-
self up (as we may say) in that intellectual hermit-
age, and for nearly twenty years — from twenty-five
to forty-five — made himself voluntarily a stranger
to the advance of science and to all contemporary
literature, whether of thouglit or art. The great
price which this seclusion cost him, intellectually
and morally, I have before spoken of It was the
price that had to be paid for what is perhaps the
most massive, luminous, and instructive survey ever
given of the intellectual development of mankind, —
meaning by that, as he explains, the most advanced
of the populations of Western Europe ; those who
have inherited all the past had to give, and who
control the forces that will shape the future desti-
nies of the human race.

It is an exposition that has its limitations of a too
imperfect knowledge, since after the age of thirty
Comte ceased to learn ; and of a too dogmatic theory,
since he carried into the interpretation all tliat hard
orderliness which marked the style of Catholic dog-
ma, and since the Catholic system always stood to
him as the type of that intellectual and moral Order

comte's religion of humanity. 299

which we must seek to realize, on penalty of perpet-
ual revolution and social chaos.

A better knowledge of the facts, or one from a dif-
ferent point of view, would probably show that his
notion of the Middle Age is excessively idealized ;
and that he is as unjust as he is stiff in the Catholic
prejudice, which views the whole Eeformation move-
ment as outside the lines of progress, or a mere plun-
ging into the chaos of metaphysics. But if we take
him for suggestion, not for dogma, there shall hardly
be found anywhere an equally instructive view ; while
the parallel chapters on the intellectual disintegration
and the scientific reconstruction of the modern era,
are essays of almost unequalled breadth, fertility, and
power.*

I have but a word to say here of the so-called
"Eeligion of Humanity," which was the dream of
Comte's later years. It has been treated by the
majority of its critics with quite undeserved con-
tempt, but with still more unpardonable ignorance.
Grant that the attempt is absurd, even grotesque,
to restore the forms of Mediaevalism under modern
conditions ; that a scientific priesthood would be as
mischievous to mankind as an ecclesiastical one ;
that Kenan's nightmare of pessimism is merely the
reverse side of Comte's sacerdotal dream. Still, the
absurdity is harmless, and the mischief is one there
is no danger of. That " Positivist Church " — " three

* I cannot be sure that a review of these chapters under present
lights would confirm the lirst impression. But I have reason to
know that what has been said above was the judgment also of so
sober a critic as President "Walker, who first directed my attention
to them.

300 THE EEIGX OF L^^V.

persons and no God," as was scoffingly said of it —
is too small in numbers to frighten anybody; while
from it have come some of the wisest and humanest
of air expositions of contemporary politics. Take
even its mucli-ridiculed forms of worship. There are
two features in this droll burlesque of Catholicity (if
we choose to call it so), which should redeem it
from contempt. One is certainly interesting and
noble : the aim to hold in perpetual remembrance
all those of every time who have done best service
or. honor to humanity. The other is genuinely pa-
thetic, when we think of that lost world of affection,
emotion, and faith, which this feeble attempt would
fain restore. We might pardon much to a ritual
whose chief sacrament consists in a crust of dry
bread laid beside the plate at every meal in per-
petual memory of the poor and needy.

Comte's childhood was trained amidst the fervors
of the Catholic reaction in the South of France. His
mother, a woman of genuine devotion, was his " guar-
dian angel " and his type of saintliness : it was one
of his last wishes to be buried by her side. The
Catholic type of piety he not only held to be the
most precious thing in the life of the past ; but he
assiduously cultivated it in himself, keeping Dante
and the " Imitation of Christ " always on his man-
tel (where I saw them), and devoting two hours
of every day to his " spiritual exercises." Far from
desiring or praising mere assent to his intellectual
method, he vehemently and jealously insisted that
his Eeligion was the one thing in his system that
gave value to the rest; and he died, I suppose, in

THE PvELIGIOUS INTERPRETATION. 301

the belief, whicli he expresses somewhere, that if he
could reach the age of Fontenelle, he should see him-
self generally recognized as (what he chose to call
himself) "Founder of the Eeligion of Humanity,"
and a sort of Chief Pontiff of the human race.

But now, takinof the intellectual results to which
we have been led, it remains to give them our reli-
gious interpretation. This is widely different from
that of Comte ; and yet, as I think, we must come
squarely up to his position before we can get beyond
it. We must learn to look at the fact purely as
fact. There is no capacity in the human mind to
get behind it. We have not to account for the
Universe, or to apologize for it ; only, if we can, to
see it as it is. A speculative theodicy is as much
out of our province as a speculative teleology.

The right attitude of the religious mind is exactly
the same as that of the scientific mind, — to humble
itself before the fact. Oilly, religion does not stop
here, as science does. For, in the view of religion,
the fact itself is not the ultimate tiling ; it is the
condition under which the higher intellectual and
moral life is to be attained, — that life, of which the
watchwords are not science and wealth, but obedience
and trust and help.

In the next j^lace, it is not of the smallest conse-
quence whether we give to the fact a materialistic
or an idealistic interpretation ; whether, as Mr. Hux-
ley has worded it, we interpret the Universe in terms
of thought, or in terms of matter and motion. Either
of these is simply a reverse view of the other ; each
is, so to speak, the other's reflection in a mirror. For

302 THE KEIGN OF LAW.

our religious interpretation, it is absolutely indiffer-
ent which we take. Some of Mr. Spencer's disciples
have thought to vindicate him from the charge of
materialism, and have spoken as if he made a sub-
stantial concession to the religious mind, when he
declared that his system could be expounded just as
well in terms of idealism. Of course it could. It is
only " beholding his own natural face in a glass."
Philosophical idealism, so far as it is true at all, is
simply the double, or ghost, of scientific materialism.
The sequence of facts may be seen just as well in a
mirror, which reflects them, as through a lens, which
refracts them. We have no religious interest what-
ever in discarding or in choosing either. It is simply
a question wdiich of the two more accurately presents
to us the orderly sequences of fact. And it is the
thinnest of sophisms to say that, for any religious
value they may have, "terms of mind" are one jot
the better, "or terms of matter" are one jot the
worse.

The real antithesis of materialism is not idealism,
which is only its ghost or double ; but spiritualism,*
or some other term by which we express the moral
freedom of an intelligent agent. So long as we stop
short with the fact, or concern ourselves only with
the " laws of similitude and succession of phenome-
na," we are in the circle of Necessity ; as Comte puts
it, of " Destiny, which is the sum of known laws, and
Chance, which is the sum of those laws which are
unknown." That is, we are on the plane of material-
ism, or its reflex idealism, — it matters not which.

* Not Spiritism, which is a different thing.

MORAL FREEDOM. 303

But no sane man does stop short with the fact, or
concern himself only with those unalterable sequences
which represent to us nothing but an eternal neces-
sity. Whatever else philosophers differ in, they all
agree in applying to human actions language which
would be wildly absurd if applied to mere necessary
sequences. Expressions of love, blame, praise, con-
tempt, can only by a violent stretch of fancy be used
of a flower, a landscape, or a waterfall. Appeals to
conscience, or urgings to an ideal aim, would be wasted
upon the most intelligent of brutes. The naturalist
knows no such emotions in his line of study as the
moralist must constantly take for granted in his.
The anatomist must study his human " subject" when
the life is well out of it : his representative man, as
Dr. Wilkinson expresses it, is " a corpse, not a gen-
tleman." In the logic of certain physiologists, the
normal human being should be a sleepwalker or a
mesmeric patient. A critic of human acts, or human
institutions, though he call himself necessarian or
fatalist, inevitably takes for granted moral agency
on one part, and moral judgment on the other. We
have only to consider what this implies, to know
what is meant when we speak of the universal, un-
conscious, perpetual testimony of the human race to
the fact — whatever name we choose to call it by —
of Moral Freedom.

Nor, again, do we find this testimony contradicted
in the least by what we have come to understand
in the phrase "the Reign of Law." If we did, we
should have to reconsider our premises very careful-
ly, before venturing to deny that universal fact of

304 THE REIGN OF LAW.

consciousness. Give to the sphere of Law all the
expansion we can possibly conceive; still it does
not, necessarily, mean anything more to us than to
define the conditions under which we act. Probably
no living man ever realized to himself what it would
mean if the Universe were a mere machine of me-
chanical evolution, instead of being what it is, a field
for the play of living force and intelligent will*

Of course, the range of moral liberty is strictly cir-
cumscribed. If not, wilful and passionate creatures
as we are, we should soon have nothing but chaos to
live in, — as indeed it seems to threaten, sometimes,
if passion should once arm itself with modern explo-
sives. We may not, perhaps, even say that we throw
the warp upon the woof which Nature gives us. It
may be that we can only stitch in the faintest em-
broidery upon the destined web woven by law and
circumstance : still, that is enough to employ all our
skill Our game of chess is limited by the edges of
the board, the powers of the pieces, and some twenty
or thirty arbitrary rules which we had no hand in
making ; but there is enough left to give play to all
our faculty of choice in determining the moves.

It is thus that, standing in the midst of this Di-
vine or natural circle of Necessity, we are entitled,
without the least trouble to our confidence, to assert
all we can possibly want or mean in the phrase
"Moral Freedom." As soon as we once vigorously
conceive this, we necessarily reflect it back upon the
Universe, whose laws we have been attempting to

* An attempt at sucli realization is found in that strange night-
mare known as Eichter's " Dream."

ETHICAL BASIS OF THEISM. 305

understand ; and so, in place of a pitiless Law, a life-
less Order, a nietaphysical Absolute, a cosmic Theism
ineffectual and pale, we find the Living God.

Not, necessarily, that we can grasp the intellectual
conception by the way of a speculative theology. If
we can, so much the better. Bat all that the reli-
gious interpretation of the universe demands is given
us, as soon as we feel ourselves living agents, not
blind cogs and pinions in the " grind " of blind and
eternal Law.

The Theism which accords with the highest con-
ceptions of our Science is thus seen to be — what
from the laws of human thought it has all along been
shown to be — the reflex of our moral conscious-
ness, not of our intellectual contemplation. It is
in this sense true that " Conscience is the conscious-
ness of God," — which as a mere phrase of specu-
lative philosophy might well seem arrogant and
futile. It signifies that, constituted as we are, we
cannot vividly conceive the fact of moral freedom,
but that the Universe suddenly (so to speak) be-
comes alive, with life from an eternal source. The
blank wall of Necessity is seen as a vast transpar-
ency, illuminated from a light beyond, which shows
dim hints and traces of a design, intricate and harmo-
nious, that was invisible before. For it is impossible
even to think of conscience and moral freedom, or
moral law, in a universe that is mechanical and
dead.

We find in this experience, it is true, no philo-
sophic definition, and no demonstration of Divine
Attributes ; but the voluntary, devout, inevitable ac-

306 THE REIGN OF LAW.

ceptance of the fact. And, again, it is not simple
intellectual acceptance, which is equally good once
and always. It depends on moral conditions, and so
will vary with our moral mood. It is less acceptance
than attainment. It has so much of intellectual ap-
prehension, and no more, as to serve for the ground-
work of that discipline which we call the method of
the religious life.

Without this fundamental axiom of the moral
consciousness, the cosmic Order becomes to us, in-
evitably, a bleak and terrible Fatalism. So far as
we can see, the everlasting play of its machinery
does not grind out eitlier virtue or happiness to the
great mass of sentient being. We should say rather,
with Paul, — with Schopenhauer, who in this consents
with Paul, — that " the whole creation groaneth and
travaileth in pain together until now." * The solu-
tion, for us, can only be in the words that complete
Paul's phrase : " loaitiiig to he delivered^ Fatalism,
which is the last word of all purely speculative or
evolutionary schemes, means either a futile Optim-
ism, of which we can see no proofs, or else a hard
Pessimism, which is the message of despair. But
just here comes in that paradox of our better nature :
that the instant we set about to right any wrong,
to make the crooked straight, or diminish the suffer-
ing and injustice that prevail, the mystery and the
terror disappear. The feeblest act that wakens the
moral consciousness works that miracle at wliich
theory toils in vain : to make the man, as in Emer-

* Compare what is said of Paganism in "The Middle Age,"
pp. 179, 180.

IS CHEISTIANITY PERPETUAL? 307

son's generous gospel, a counterpoise against the
universe.

This result appears to follow from two principles,
which have been implied all along : * that, from the
law of our being, we necessarily reflect back upon
the universe our own sense of right, so that the
Living God becomes to our thought inevitably a
Eighteous God, whether or not we understand his
ways ; f ^i^d secondly, that the religious life leads
of itself into tliat range of the higher emotions, —
adoration, gratitude, hope, resting on absolute sub-
mission to a higher Will, — which are a chief solvent
of such pain and wrong as may fall to our own pri-
vate lot.

The point to be borne in mind, however, is that the
germ of this higher life is not speculative but ethical.
It begins with the distinct recognition and choice of
right as against wrong. If it should attain no more
than is given in George Eliot's rather feeble phrase
of " meliorism," even here it finds what, for the indi-
vidual need, may be a calm, a deep, and a sufficing
faith : a faith, too, which, raying out from that live
centre, may come at length to embrace every spirit-
ual need.

For the present, I find in this the conclusion of
the whole matter. It does not come within my plan

* See the foregoing chapter.

t This does not by any means imply that Hedonism, or the
"greatest-happiness principle," is the law of the universe. On the
contrary, the Divine holiness was never more vividly conceived than
by the Puritans, whose creed was quite the opposite. In the splen-
did paradox of Carlyle, "There is in man a higher than the love of
happiness. He can do without happiness, and instead thereof find
blessedness ! "

308 THE REIGN OF LAW.

to speak here of what is doing, or what may be done,
to build religion up again on the new foundations.*
I wish onl}^, as distinctly as may be, to see just where
that evolution of thought, which is the intellectual
interpretation of Christian history, has brought us.
This evolution is the result of innumerable special
forces ; but behind them all is that prodigious moral
or spiritual force, which we call the revelation of God
in human history. In that Word was life ; and the
life was the light of men.

It does not, in this view, matter in the least
whether we regard Christianity under any formal
definition tliat can be given of it, as a perpetual
dispensation, or as destined to be absorbed and lose
its separate identity in coming growths of religious
thought. For the present, at all events, it has a
recognizable character of its own, under all its diver-
sities, and an unbroken line of tradition which con-
nects its freest and broadest forms at once with the
simplicity of its origin, and w-ith its most imperial
constructions in the so-called Ages of Faith. There
is no reason whatever to think that its first disci-
ples expected for it anything like the duration it has
had already, or the expansion it shows at this hour.
Those proud constructions of ecclesiasticism and dog-
ma are, it may be, sure to perish ; but it is of the
nature of a Force to persist, though in new^ forms and
under other names, without any loss of continuity.
The only immortality we can imagine upon earth is
the transmission of one life through many forms.

* The sequel of these pages will be found in " Our Liberal Move-
ment," especially under the titles — A Scientific Theology, The Reli-
gion of Humanity, and The Gospel of Liberalism.

CONCLUSION. 309

With this conviction I complete a task which was
planned nearly thirty-five years ago, and which has
been held, as opportunity seemed to open, steadily in
view ever since. These thirty-five years have been
said on high authority to be revolutionary in the
current religious thought, more than any other period
of equal length, unless we should except the first
Christian century. It has been the privilege of my
birthright in Liberal Christianity, that the intellec-
tual conditions of religious faith have remained in
my mind fundamentally the same as when my task
was first projected. And it will be still more my
privilege, if there shall be others to whom this fulfil-
ment of it may prove in any way a help or a comfort,
such as it has been to me.

CHRONOLOGICAL OUTLINE.

Popes.
1500. 1492. Alexander VI.

1509-47. Eeign of Henry YIII. 1503. Pius III.

1510. Luther in Rome. " Julius II.

1517. Controversy of Indulgences ; Luther's Theses. 13. Leo X.
1519-55. Charles V., Emperor.

1521. Luther at Worais. 22. Adrian VI.

1525. Battle of Pa via. — Peasants' War. 23. Clement VII.

1529. Conference of Marburg ; Luther and Zwingli.
1531. War of the Cantons: Death of Zwingli. 34. Paul III.

1536. Calvin at Geneva. — 39. " Six Articles " of Henry VIII.
1540. Jesuit Order. — 42. General Inquisition.
1545-63. Council of Trent.

1547. Smalcaldic War. —Edward VI. ; Henry II.
1553. Burning of Servetus in Geneva. 50. Julius III.

1553-58. Philip and Mary.

1555. Peace of Augsburg: Abdication of Charles V. 55. Paul IV.
1558-1603. Elizabeth.

1559. Treaty of Cateau-Cambresis. 59. Pius IV.

1560-98. Religious Wars in France.

1566-1609. War of Netherlands. 66. Pius V.

1572. Massacre of St. Bartholomew. 72. Gregory XIII.

1584. Murder of Orange.

1588. Destruction of the Spanish Armada. 85. Sixties V.

1589-1610. Henry IV. 90. Gregorij XIV.

1598. Religious Peace : Edict of Nantes. 91. demerit VIII.

Note. - The Council of Trent sat at intervals determined by political
considerations, and held in all twenty-five sessions. The topics were in
general these: 1546. The Creed, the Canon of Scripture (which is defined
to that of the Latin Vulgate), and the doctrines of Original Sin and Bap-
tism.—1547. Doctrines of Justification and Sacraments. — 1551. The
Eucharist, Penance, Extreme Unction. — 1562-3. Celebration of Mass,
Holy Orders, Matrimony, Purgatory, and Worship of Saints.

312 CHRONOLOGICAL OUTLINE.

Popes.
1600, Martyrdom of Giordano Bruno.

1603-25. James I. 1605. Paul V.

1608. Independents emigrate to Holland.
1610. Murder of Henry IV. — Catholic League.
1610-43. Louis XIII. (Mary deMedicis).
1615. War of Huguenots under Conde.
1618. Synod of Dort. — 19. Execution of Barneveldt.
1618-48. Thirty Years' War.

1620. Pilgrim Colony at Plymouth. 21. Gregory XV.

1624-42. Ministry of Richelieu. 3. Urban FIJI.

1625-48. Charles I.

1628. Rochelle taken ; Huguenot power destroyed.
1629-41. *' Thorough " policy of Laud and Stafford.
1632. Battle of Liitzen ; Death of Gustavus.
1640. Publication of Jansen's Augustinus.
1642-48. Civil War in England.

1643-1715. Louis XIV. 44. Innocent X.

1645. Battle of ISTaseby ; Supremacy of Independents.

1648. Peace of Westphalia.

1649. Execution of Charles I. : Commonwealth.

1653. Jansen's Five Propositions condemned. 55. Alexander VII.

1660. Restoration of Charles II.

1662. Act of Uniformity: Nonconformists.

1662. " Half-way Covenant " in New England.

1664. Conventicle Act.

1665. Persecution of Jansenists.

1665. Five-Jklile Act. • 67 Clement IX.

1673. Test Act (abolished, 1828). 70. Clement X.

1681-87. Sect of Quietists : Molinos. 76. Innocent XL

1682. '* Gallican Liberties" asserted.

1685. Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
1685-89. James II.

1686. •* Declaration of Indulgence " to Catholics.

1689. English Revolution: William III. 89. Alexander VIII.

1696-1748. Deistical Controversy. 91. Innocent XII.

1700. Act of Succession : Non-juring Clergy. 1700. Clement XI.

1709. Destruction of Port-Royal.

1714. George I. — Jacobite and Papist plots.

1722. Moravian Community (Herrnhut).

CHRONOLOGICAL OUTLINE. 313

Popes.
1715-74. Louis XV. (1715-23. Orleans Eegency.)
1717. Baiigodian Controversy (Hoadly and Non-jurors).
1727. Ahhe Vkvis i — Convulsionnaires. 21. Innocent X III.

1735. " Great Awakening " in New England. 21. Benedict XIII.

1739. Secession of Wesley : Methodism. 30. Clement XII.

1740. Rise of Swedenborgianism. 40. Benedict XIV.
1751-65. The Encyclopsedia (Diderot and D'Alembert).

1755. Earthquake at Lisbon : Persecution of Jews.

1760-1820. George III. 58. Clement XIII.

1762. Execution of Galas.

1764. Jesuits expelled from France. 69. Clement XIV.

1774. Jesuit Order abolished (restored, 1814).

1774-92. Reign of Louis XVI. 75. Pms VI.

1781. Publication of Kant's Philosophy.

1789. French Revolution: Privileges abolished.

1790. Suppression of Monastic Houses in France.

1791. Oath to Constitution required.

1 793. Reign of Terror : Persecution of French Clergy.

1795. Festival of :ktre Suprime.

1797. Sect of Theophilanthropists established.

1800, Victories of Napoleon. 1800. PiiLS VIL

1801. Concordat of Napoleon.

1806. " Holy Roman Empire " abolished.

1808. Inquisition abolished in Italy and Spain.

1809. Captivity of Pius VII. ; Temporal Power abolished.

1814. Jesuits and Inquisition restored.

1815. Holy Alliance : Russia, Austria, and Prussia.

1828. Repeal of Test Act. 23. Leo XII.

1829. Catholic Emancipation in England. 29. Pius VIIL
1832. Passage of Reform Bill. 31. Gregory XVI.
1833-41. Tractarianism at Oxford.

1843. Free Church in Scotland. 46 Pius IX.

1854. Doctrine of Immaculate Conception.

1864. Syllabus of Errors (Encyclical of Pius IX.)

1869. Irish Church Disestablished.

1870. Papal infallibility declared ; Temporal Power abolished.

1871. German Empire restored. 78. Leo XIII.
1880. Unauthorized Congregations forbidden in France.

EMINENT NAMES.

Theology and Philosophy,
Erasmus, 1467-1536.
Luther, 1483-1546.
Zwingli, 1484-1531.
Loyola, 1491-1556.
Calvin, 1509-1564.
Knox, 1505-1572.
Molina, 1535-1601.
Arminius, 1560-1609.
Jansen, 1585-1638.
Arnauld, 1612-1694.
Bossuet, 1627-1704.
Locke, 1632-1704.
Malebranche, 1638-1715.
Fenelon, 1651-1715.
Clarke, 1675-1729.
Berkeley, 1684-1753.
Butler, 1692-1752.
Hume, 1711-1776.
Kant, 1724-1804.
Jacobi, 1743-1819.
Sehleiermaclier, 1768-1834.
Coleridge, 1772-1834.
Channing, 1780-1842.
Lamennais, 1782-1854.
Lacordaire, 1802-1861.

Science and Letters,
Copernicus, 1473-1543.
Montaigne, 1533-1592.
Giordano Bruno, 1550-1600.
Raleigh, 1552-1618.
Bacon, 1561-1626.
Shakspeare, 1564-1616.
Galileo, 1564-1642.
Kepler, 1571-1630.
Hobbes, 1588-1679.
Descartes, 1596-1650.
Milton, 1608-1674.
Pascal, 1623-1662.
Spinoza, 1632-1677.
Leibnitz, 1646-1716.
Newton, 1642-3 727.
Bayle, 1647-1706.
Voltaire, 1694-1778.
Rousseau, 1712-1778.
Lessing, 1729-1781.
Laplace, 1749-1827.
Dalton, 1766-1844.
Chateaubriand, 1769-1848.
Comte, 1798-1857.
Carlyle, 1795-1881.
Darwin, 1809-1882.

INDEX

I. The Protestant Reformation, 1-25. — Tragedy of the Refor-
mation, its causes: ambition of the Church, 3; moral influence of the
Church, 5. Indulgences, 8. Luther: his experience, 9; at Worms, 10;
his followers, 12. .Justification by Faith, 14. Reformation-period, 18.
Results : individualism, 20 ; relation to society, 22 ; weakness and
strength of Protestantism, 24.

II. The Catholic Reaction, 26-47. —Two reformations, 27. Prot-
estant errors, 29. New Religious Orders: Theatines, 32; Jesuits (Loy-
ola), 33. The Inquisition, 36. Borromeo, 39. Campaign of the Church,
40. Its policy, 42. Its self-limitation, 44.

III. Calvinism, 48-73. — Its decay, 49. Calvin, 51; his creed, 52.
Spirit of the time, 54. Natural and moral evil, 56. The creed a weapon,
59; objects of attack : Rome, 60; Art, 62. Aggressive force, 65; Sab-
batarian spirit, 67 ; missionary spirit, 68. Its destiny, 69. Modern rep-
resentatives, 70.

IV. The Puritan Commonwealth, 74-99. Political ideal, 75.
Republicanism in England, 76; the Puritans, 79; Independents, 80.
New England colony, 81. France: the Huguenots, 84. Cromwell, 86.
Milton, 87 : his political faith, 91 ; Areopagitica, 93 ; last appeal, 95. The
Restoration, 96. Nonconformists, 97.

V. Port Royal, 100-125. — Jacqueline Arnauld, 101. The commu-
nity, 103. The confessional, 105. Two Port Royals, 106. Jansenist
controversy, 107. Molina, 109. Pascal, 112 : Thouyhts, 115 ; knowledge
and faith, 118. Provincial Letters, 121. Age of Louis XIV., 123.

VI. Passage from Dogma to Pure Reason, 126-154. — Century
of controversy, 126. Authority of Scripture, 127. Idea of Revelation,
128. Appealto Reason, 130. Doctrine of Decrees, 133. Descartes, 135:
his method, 136; its limitations, 138; ideas, 139; substance and attri-
bute, 140, 146 ; matter and spirit, 141. Spinoza, Leibnitz, 143. Male-
branche, Berkeley, 144. Hume, 147. Kant, 150. Results of Kantian
movement, 152.

VII. English Rationalism, 155-184. — Freedom of English thought,
156. Era of Elizabeth, 157. Hobbes, 159. Locke, 160 : his " Reason-

316 INDEX.

ableness," 163; its limitations, 165. Cud worth, 166. Influence of New-
ton, 167. Clarke, 168. Butler, 170. Eighteenth-century theology, 174.
Deistical controversy, 176. Results: historical method, 181; Broad-
church liberalism, 182.

VIII. Infidelity ix France, 185-213. — The Galilean Liberties;
Edict of Nantes, 187. Church and King, 189. Dragonnades, 190. The
Revocation, 191. Regency, 193. Sacred Heart, 195. Convulsionnaires,
196. Bayle, 198. The Encyclopedists, 199. Persecution: Calas, 201:
La Barre, 202. Voltaire, 203. Rousseau, 206. Revolutionary creed,
208. Napoleon's Concordat, 211.

IX. The German Critics, 214-241. — Authority and use of the
Bible, 215. Owen, 216. Earlier criticism, 218. Lessing, 219-226. The
"Fragments," 222. Later schools, 226. Paulus, 229. Strauss, 232.
Baur, 235. Historical criticism: its present task, 239.

X. Speculative Theology, 242-271. — Ecclesiastical revival, 243.
Ultramontanism, 244; Tractarianism, 245. Jacobi, 246; value of his
method, 249; an act of Faith, 250. Schleiermacher, 254: his early
training, 255; Discourses, 258. Data of Christian consciousness, 260;
of the Religious consciousness, 262. Speculative theism, 264. The law
of holiness, 267. Service of Schleiermacher, 269.

XI. The Reign of Law, 272-309. — Earlier conception: Hooker,
273. Bacon, 274. Galileo, 275. Kepler, 276. Newton, 277. True idea
of Law, 281. Chemical affinity, 285. Law as ultimate fact, 290. Comte,
293 : his development of the idea of Law, 295 ; his religion of human-
ity, 299. Materialism and Idealism, 301. Religious conception, as
grounded on the sense of moral freedom, 303. Practical results, 306.

Abolitionists, 15, 42, 68. Berkeley, 144-147.

Absolute, idea of, 149, 152. Bible, authority of, 22, 127, 215.

Affinit}', in chemistry, 286. Bohemia, Hussite war, 4, 255.

Analogy (Butler), 171-174. Borromeo, 39, 46.

Anselm: on justification, 9; on di- Bossuet, 123, 125, 192.

vine existence, 139. Broad Church, 182.

Areopagitica (Milton), 93. Bruno, Giordano, 137, 157.

Arminian controversy, 133. Burns, 70.

Arnauld : Jacqueline, 101-103 ; An- Butler, 170-174, 180.

toine, 103, 121, 123, 192.

Art and Religion, 62-65. Calas, 186; story of, 201.

Authority : of Church, 5, 44; of Bi- Calvin, 51-54, 58, 67.

ble, 6,^27, 215; of creed, 22. Calvinism, 48-73, 108, 110, 132.

Cambrdsis, treaty of, 84.

Bacon, 75,77, 80, 153, 158, 167, 274. Caraffa (Paul IV.), 32, 37.

Baur, F. C, 235. Carlyle, 71, 86, 185, 199.

Bayle, 198. Carrauza (Archb'p of Toledo), 37.

INDEX.

317

Casuistry, 107, 121.

Catholic Church (modem), as a po-
litical power, 4; its hold on its
subjects, 5; its blunder, 7; its
aims, 28, 40; its temper, 42-45;
inferior clergy, 45.

Catholic Reaction (of Sixteenth
Century), 26-47; (of Nineteenth),
244.

Chalmers, 70, 251, 252.

Chemical affinity, 285-288.

Clarke, Samuel, 168-170.

Coleridge, 98, 216, 270.

Commonwealth (Puritan), 74-99.

Comparative stud}^ of religions, 239.

Comte, 284, 293-301.

Concordat of Napoleon, 211, 244.

Confessional, power of, 104.

Congregationalism in New Eng-
land,^82, 83.

Constitutional clergy of France,
210, 211.

Conviction of sin, how related to
religious belief, 250.

Convulsionnaires, 115, 196.

Correggio, 64.

Cosmic theism, 264, 305.

Criticism, task of, 215, 226, 241;
textual, 217 ; birth of, 219.

Cromwell, 86.

Cudworth, 166.

Dalton, laws of chemistry, 285.
Declaration of Galilean liberties,

124, 187.
Decrees (divine), doctrine of, 52,

108, 109, 132.
Deistical ' controversy, 176-182 ;

writers, 178 ; result, 183.
Democracy in Europe, its origin,

75, 84; "its creed, 208.
Descartes, 130, 135-142, 156.
Design in nature, 290.
Discipline in the Roman Church,

27, 43, 45, 105.
Discoveries in America, 75.

Dissent in England, 98.
Dort, Synod of, 81, 133.
Dragonnades, 190.
Dubois, 186, 193.

Elizabeth, 79, 127, 157.
Encyclopedists, 199.
English Rationalism, 155-184.
Enthusiasm, English dislike to, 165.
Evil, natural and moral, 56-58.

Faith, justification by, 14-16 ; battle
of, 42 ; an act of, 250, 251.

F^ielon, 46, 123, 125, 192.

Fifth Monarchy, 75, 95.

Final causes, argument from, 290.

Five points of Calvinism, 52; prop-
ositions of Jansen, 104, 111.

Flach (Flacius), 132, 133.

Formulary against Jansen, 123-

Francis de Sales, St., 105.

Free-will asserted by Jesuits, 108.

Galileo, 119, 275.
Galilean liberties, 124, 187.
Gangraena (T. Edwards), 94.
German Ckitics, 214-241.
Gravitation : Galileo, 275 ; Newton,
277-280.

Hegel, 232.

Henry IV. (of France), 62, 86, 101,

122.
Herbert, Lord Edward, 158.
Hierarchy of the Sciences, 297.
Historical method in criticism, 181,

235-238, 240.
Hobbes, 159, 208.
Holy Thorn, miracle of, 115.
Hooker, praise of Law, 273.
Huguenots in France, 85, 188,
Hume, 147-149, 150, 155, 177, 178.
Hymns of the Reformers, 13.

Idealism, 145, 146, 302.
Imputation, doctrine of, 9.

318

INDEX.

Independents in England, 80, 86.
Indulgences, theory of, 8.
InfalUbility, 26, 41, 107, 111, 244.
Infidelity in Franck, 185-213.
Inquisition, 36-40, 244.

Jacobi, 246-254.

Jansen, 109.

Jansenist doctrine, 133; controver-
sy, 107-111.

Jansenists, a persecuting part}-, 201,
203.

Jerome's translation of the Bible,
127, 214, 215.

Jesuits, 35 ; in America, 66 ; hostil-
ity to Port Royal, 102, 111; Mo-
linist doctrine, 108 ; Sacred Heart,
195; the order abolished, 200.

Justification by faith, 9, 14-16, 18,
22, 131.

Kant, 143, 150-154, 219, 226, 228.
Kepler, 276.

La Barre, execution of, 202.

Lardner, 175, 181.

Latitude-men, 166.

Law, conceptions of, 273, 281, 295;
verification of, 292.

Leibnitz, 143, 156, 284.

Lessing, 219-226.

Leverrier, 292.

Liberalism, contrasted with Calvin-
ism, 50 ; in English Church, 182.

L'Infame, 202, 205.

Locke, 160-166, 179, 209.

Louis XIV., Ill, 123, 187-192.

Loyola, 33-38.

Luther, on indulgences, 8 ; at Rome,
9; at Worms, 10; his position, 11,
131; his compromises, 29.

Malebranche, 144.
Marburg, conference of, 20, 29.
Melanchthon, 27, 42, 128, 133.
Metaphysics discredited, 149.

Middleton, 176, 178.
Mill, J. S., 15, 290, 297.
Milton, 87-96, 161, 163.
Missionary spirit, 35, 68.
Molina, 108; his doctrine, 109, 110,

122, 133.
Molinos, 134.
Montesquieu, 194, 199.
Moral freedom, as basis of religious

ideas, 304.
Moravian Brethren, 255.
Mythology (Greek), 64.

Nantes, Edict of, 187; revocation,

19L
Netherlands, war of, 66, 81.
New England colony, 66, 81-83.
Newton, 156, 167, 277-281.
Nonconformists, 97.

Obedience as a moral act, 134.
Oceana (Harrington), 78.
Organization in Roman Church, 30.
Orleans Regency, 193.
Osiandrian controversy, 131.
Owen (John), 216.

Paganism, 7 ; in art, 63.

Paley, 175.

Pascal, 105, 112-122 ; Thoughts,

115; knowledge and faith, 118;

Provincial Letters, 121.
Passage fkom Dogma to Puke

Reason, 120-154.
Paulus, 229-232.
Persecution in Roman Church, 36-

40, 46, 105, 127 ; under Louis

XIV. 188-193; later examples,

194, 201.
Physiology, facts of, 289.
PlA-mouth' Colony, 81-83.
Port Royal, 100-125.
Positive Philosophy, 2D4, 296.
Predestination, 59, 108, 132.
Presbyterians in England, 80, 83,

86. 96.

INDEX.

319

Protestantism, variations, 17 ; indi-
vidualism, 20 ; weakness, 21 ;
compromises, 24, 29 ; strengtli
and gl»)ry, 25 ; moral disorders,
29 ; right of private judgment,
127.

Protestants, their fidelity, 17.

Provincial Letters (Pascal), 121.

Puritan Commonwealth, 74-99.

Puritanism in art, 63.

Puritans in England, 66, 80.

Quietism, 134.

Raleigh, 77, 78, 157.
Rationalism, English, 155-184.
Reason, appeal to, in England, 174;

in France, 197; truths of, 225,263.
Reformation, Protestant, 1-25.
Reformers, earlier, 2; in humbler

classes, 12.
Reign of Law, 272-309.
Reimarus, 221.
Religion of Humanity, 299.
Religious art, 63.
Religious Orders, 30.
Republicanism, modern doctrine of,

61; in France, 85, 188.
Revelation, conception of, 128.
Revolution: method, 3; creed, 207,

210.
Romanism, 35, 41, 44; compared

with Protestantism, 22, 126.
Rousseau, 206-209.

Sabbatarianism, 67.

Sacred Heart, worship of, 195.

Salvation by faith, 15, 162.

Scepticism of Hume, 150.
Schleiermacher, 254-262, 269, 271.
Semler, 218, 219.
Sentiment, religion of, 195, 208;

new gospel of, 207.
Shakspeare, 76, 157.
Sidney, Algernon, 78; Philip, 77,

157.
Social contract, 208.
Social ideal of church, 23.
Speculative Theology, 242-271.
Spinoza, 143, 247, 260.
Strauss, 232-234.
Substance and attribute, 139, 145,

147, 149.
Symbolic character of religious
'thought, 233, 267, 269.

Teleological argument, 290.

Tetzel, 8.

Theatine Order, 31-33.

Theism, speculative (or cosmic),

264; moral basis of, 305.
Theodicy (Leibnitz), 144.
Thirty Years' War, 18, 81, 134, 162.
Thurlow (Lord), 97.
Toland, 176.
Trent, Council of, 41, 127, 311.

Ultramontanism, 212, 244.
Unigenitus (Bull of Clement XL),

194.
Utopia (Sir Thomas More), 75.

Voltaire, 144, 169, 186, 193, 198,
203-206, 218.

Waterland, 180.

University Press : John Wilson & Son, Cambridge.

Messrs. Roberts Brothers' Publications,

CHRISTIAN HISTORY

IN ITS THREE GREAT PERIODS.

By JOSEPH HENRY ALLEN,

Late Lecturer on Ecclesiastical History in Harvard University.

First Period. "EARLY CHRISTIAISITY." —

Topics: i. The Messiah and the Christ; 2. Saint Paul;
3. Christian Thought of the Second Century ; 4. The Mind
of Paganism ; 5. The Arian Controversy ; 6. Saint Augus-
tine ; 7. Leo the Great ; 8. Monasticism as a Moral Force;

9. Christianity in the East ; 10. Conversion of the Barba-
rians ; II. The Holy Roman Empire; 12. The Christian
Schools.

Second Period. "THE MIDDLE AGE." —
Topics: i. The Ecclesiastical System; 2. Feudal Society;
3. The Work of Hildebrand ; 4. The Crusades ; 5. Chiv-
alry ; 6. The Religious Orders ; 7. Heretics ; 8. Scholastic
Theology; 9. Religious Art; 10. Dante; 11. The Pagan
Revival.

*** The above are tiow in type, and will be piillished in April.

Third Period. " MODERN PHASES." — Topics :
I. The Protestant Reformation ; 2. The Catholic Reaction ;
3. Calvinism ; 4. The Puritan Commonwealth ; 5. Port
Royal ; 6. Passage from Dogma to Philosophy ; 7. English
Rationalism; 8. Infidelity in France ; 9. The German Critics;

10. Speculative Theology ; 11. The Reign of Law.

Each volume contains a Chronological Outline of its Period, with a
full Table of Contents and Index, and may be ordered separately. The
series will be issued, complete, in the course of the coming autumn.

Volume I. (" Early Christianity ") is, with a few additions, — the most
important being a descriptive List of Authorities, — the same that was
published in 1880, under the title, " Fragments of Christian History."
3 volumes. i6mo. Cloth. Price, $1.25 per volume.

Mr. Allen's writings, "Christian History in its Three Great Periods," 3
vols., ^375 ; " Hebrew Men and Times from the Patriarchs to the Messiah,"
^1.50; "Our Liberal Movement in Theology chiefly as shown in Recollec-
tions of the History of Unitarianism in New England," ^1.25, may be had,
the five volumes, for ^5.50.

Sold by all booksellers. Mailed, post-paid, on receipt of advertised price, by
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Messrs, Roberts Brothers' Publications.

-^■' — — •■ • — ~- _^.^__^^^^^^-_-_— _

HEBREW MEN AND TIMES

FROM THE

ipatriarcl)5 to tl)e i^lessial^.

By JOSEPH HENRY ALLEN,
Lecturer on Ecclesiastical History in Harvard University.

New Edition, with an Introduction on the results of recent Old
Testament criticism. Chronological Outline and Index. i6mo.
Price, $1.25.

Topics: i. The Patriarchs; 2. Moses; 3. The Judges;
4. David ; 5. Solomon ; 6. The Kings ; 7. The Law ; 8. The
Prophets; 9. The Captivity ; 10. The Maccabees; 11. The Alex-
andrians; 12. The Messiah.

Extract from the Preface: "... There seemed room and need of a clear,
brief sketch, or outline ; one that should spare the details and give the re-
sults of scholarship ; that should trace the historical sequences and connec-
tions, without being tangled in questions of mere erudition, or literary
discussions, or theological polemics ; that should preserve the honest inde-
pendence of scholarly thought, along with the temper of Christian faith ;
that should not lose from sight the broad perspective of secular history,
while it should recognize at each step the hand of ' Providence as manifest
in Israel.' Such a want as this the present volume aims to meet."

Rev. O. B. FrotJmigham in the Christian Examiner.

" We shall be satisfied to have excited interest enough in the theme to induce
readers to take up Mr. Allen's admirable book and trace through all the richness
and variety of his detail the eventful history of this Hebrew thought. His pages,
with which we have no fault to find save the very uncommon fault of being too
crowded and too few, will throw light on many things which must be utterly dark
now to the unlearned mind ; they will also revive the declining respect for a ven-
erable people, and for a faith to which we owe much more than some of us suspect.
For, however untrammelled Mr. Allen's criticism may be, his thought is always
serious and reverential. And the reader of his pages, while confessing that their
author has cleared away many obstructions in the way of history, will confess also
that he has only made freer the access to the halls of faith. There is no light or
loose or unbecoming sentence in the volume. There is no insincere paragraph.
There is no heedless line. And this perhaps is one of the greatest charms of the
book ; for it is rare indeed that both intellect and heart are satisfied with the
same letters."

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Christian history in its three great

Princeton Theological Seminary-Speer Library

1 1012 00066 7057