The gifts of civilisation and other sermons and lectures, delivered at Oxford and at St. Paul's

Presented to the
library of the

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO

hy
The Estate of the late

PROFESSOR A. S. P. WOODHOUSE

Head of the

Department of English

University College

1944-1964

/

THE GIFTS OF CIVILISATION

3— •

THE

GIFTS OF CIVILISATION

AND OTHER

SEEMONS AND LECTUEES

©sltberetj at ©iCort an* at St. Paul's

BY THE LATE

E. W. CHUECH, MA., D.C.L.

dean of st. Paul's, honorary fellow of oriel

ILotttiott

MACMILLAN AND CO

AND NEW YORK
1891

All rights reserved

£133

m i

First Edition, 1880
Reprinted, 1891

JAN 41966

'"fSlTY OF "V°

103652?

TO

HENRY PARRY LIDDON

IN GRATEFUL REMEMBRANCE OF MANY BENEFITS

AND NUMBERLESS KINDNESSES

THIS VOLUME

IS WITHOUT HIS SANCTION

INSCRIBED

CONTENTS

SERMONS PREACHED BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY OF
OXFORD

SERMON I

THE GIFTS OF CIVILISATION

Preached Nov. 18. Twenty-fifth Sunday after Trinity. 1866.

PACE

Covet earnestly the best gifts: and yet shew 1 unto you a more
excellent way. — 1 Cor. xii. 31 . . . . . .3

SERMON II

CHRIST'S WORDS AND CHRISTIAN SOCIETY

Preached May 5. Second Sunday after Easter. 1867.

Then Jesus beholding him loved him, and said unto him, One thing
thou lackest : go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give
to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven : and come,
take up the cross, and follow Me. — St. Mark x. 21 . . 32

vin CONTENTS

SERMON III

cheist's example

Preached Oct. 13. Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity. 1867.

PAGE

Be ye followers of me, even as I also am of Christ. — 1 Cor. xi. 1 . 67
SERMON IV

CIVILISATION AND RELIGION

Preached March 29. Fifth Sunday in Lent. 1868.

Ye are the salt of the earth : but if the salt have lost his savour,
wherewith shall it be salted ? it is thenceforth good for nothing,
but to be cast out, and to be trodden underfoot of men. Ye are
the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be
hid. . . . Let your light so shine before men, that they
may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in
heaven.— St. Matt. v. 13, 14, 16 96

LECTURES DELIVERED AT ST. PAUL'S CATHEDRAL

CIVILISATION BEFORE AND AFTER CHRISTIANITY

1872

LECTURE I
Roman Civilisation 125

CONTENTS IX

LECTURE II

PAGE

Civilisation after Christianity 151

ON SOME INFLUENCES OF CHRISTIANITY UPON
NATIONAL CHARACTER

1873

LECTURE I

Influence of Christianity on National Character . .181

LECTURE II

Christianity and the Latin Races 218

LECTURE III

Christianity and the Teutonic Races .... 258

THE SACRED POETRY OF EARLY RELIGION

1874

LECTURE I
The Vedas 299

LECTURE II
The Psalms 336

SEEMONS AND LECTUEES

1

s

SEBMONS

PREACHED BEFORE

THE UNIVEKSITY OF OXFOKD

0 Sapientia, quae ex ore Altissimi prodiisti, attingens a fine usque
ad finem, fortiter suaviterque disponens omnia : veni ad docendum
nos viam prudentiae.

SEKMON I

THE GIFTS OF CIVILISATION

Covet earnestly the lest gifts • and yet shew I unto you a more excellent
%vay. — 1 Cor. xii. 31.

By these " best gifts " St. Paul meant the miraculous
endowments which attended that outpouring of the
Spirit in which Christianity as a distinct religion
began. Nothing can be more astonishing, yet nothing
more natural, than his picture of the feelings and
behaviour of those who found themselves in possession
of these spiritual powers. The gifts were novelties.
The subject which received them and had to use them,
and was influenced by the consciousness of their
presence and the sight of their effects, was that human
nature which had long formed its habits of dealing
with whatever enlarged its capacities and its sphere of
action, and whose deportment under this sudden
change of condition might be predicted from an old
and sure experience. What came to pass at Corinth,

THE GIFTS OF CIVILISATION

strange as it seems at first sight, was in reality no
more than there was reason to expect. Speaking of
what he saw on a large scale, the Apostle describes
men thrown off their balance and carried away by
feeling their natural faculties transformed and exalted
under that Divine influence which was pervading the
Christian Church. The purpose was lost sight of in
their keen appreciation of the instrument, and in the
personal satisfaction of possessing and using it; and
St. Paul's words disclose a state of feeling more
absorbed by the interest of a new and strange endow-
ment than impressed by the awfulness of its immediate
source and the responsibilities of having been called to
hold it. Side by side with gifts from heaven and
" powers of the world to come," were the levity and
frivolity of man, surprised and dazzled, measuring
them by his own scale, pressing them into the service
of his vanity ; — childish delight in a new acquisition ;
childish insensibility, childish excitement, childish dis-
play, childish rivalries, mistaking the place and worth
of the gifts themselves, altering their intended pro-
portions, inverting their end and intention. This was
the disorder which the Apostle had to redress. In
these chapters he bids the Corinthian Christians

THE GIFTS OF CIVILISATION

remember the source and the reason of this dis-
tribution of varied gifts. He recalls them from
their wild extravagance and selfish thoughtlessness,
to soberness and manliness, and a recollection of
the truth. "Brethren, be not children in under-
standing : be babes in wickedness, but in sense grown
men." Claiming a use for every gift in its own place,
he bids them set on each its right comparative value.
He corrects their estimate, and urges them to measure,
not by personal considerations, but by larger and
nobler ones of the general benefit. * Forasmuch as ye
are zealous of spiritual gifts, seek that ye may abound
to the edifying of the Church." Their eagerness was
roused at the sight of the new powers which the
kingdom of God had brought with it into the world ;
and St. Paul does not discourage their eagerness.
Only, he warns them to direct their zeal wisely, and
to be eager about the greatest and best : " Covet
earnestly the best gifts," those which may serve
most widely the good of the whole body, those
which influence most fruitfully the ends for which it
exists.

Yet — as he interrupts himself to add — there is
even a higher point of view than this. It is good to

THE GIFTS OF CIVILISATION

" covet earnestly the best gifts." It is good to wish
to be entrusted with those high gifts which are the
fruits of the Lord's ascension and reign. It is good to
be intent on their exercise, intent on the great purpose
for which they were bestowed, anxious to push them
to their full effect. Yet the subject has to be lifted
to a higher level still. There is something greater
than the greatest of gifts — than wisdom in the choice
of them, zeal in their exercise, usefulness in their
results. When we are speaking of how Christians
ought to feel and act, it is a maimed view which
leaves out that which is the characteristic spring of
Christian action, the principle which covers all cases,
the " new commandment " which is to be henceforward
the quickening spirit of all morality. " Covet earnestly
the best gifts : and yet shew I unto you a more
excellent way." And then he goes on to give that
description of charity — charity in contrast with the
greatest powers and most heroic acts, — charity, as the
root of all the strength and all the charm of goodness,
— charity, as the one essential and ever-growing
attribute of the soul amid the provisional and transi-
tory arrangements of this present state — which has
made the thirteenth chapter of this Epistle one of the

THE GIFTS OF CIVILISATION

landmarks of man's progress in the knowledge of
truth and right.

I hope it is not disrespectful handling of the words
of our great teacher to pass from the occasion which
so deeply stirred his thoughts to the actual conditions
and necessities amid which our own life is placed, and
to see in what he wrote about spiritual gifts now passed
away a meaning in relation to very different circum-
stances, which were beyond his range of view, and
which he could not anticipate. We have long been
accustomed to accept, in theory at least, the principle
laid down by another apostle : " Every good gift and
every perfect gift," writes St. James, "is from above,
and cometh down from the Father of Lights, with
whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning."
It is not, then, I trust, forcing the language of St.
Paul or desecrating it, to apply his words to what he
was not directly thinking of; to apply them in the
most extended sense to all the powers with which men
have been endowed ; to make the words of apostolic
truth and soberness stretch beyond the temporary
interest of the religious question with which he dealt,
to the universal interests of human society, which is
not indeed coextensive with the Church, but which

THE GIFTS OF CIVILISATION

the Church was founded to embrace and restore, and
St. Paul preached his gospel to fill with light and
hope. Those awful gifts, which were at once the
privilege and the snare of the Christians whom St.
Paul had immediately to teach, have passed away ;
they were of their age ; they did their work ; they
left their results behind. But God's wonderful gifts
to man are not gone. They are as real, as manifest,
as operative, as ever. In what surrounds us in that
condition of society in which we are actually passing
our life, we see a world fuller of gifts — in one very
real sense spiritual gifts of God — than was the Church
of Corinth. " Covet earnestly the best gifts," the
" greater " ones, the higher : " and yet shew I unto
you a more excellent way." In these words St. Paul
seems at once to put his sanction on all the great
results of human civilisation, and at the same time to
open a wider view beyond it, and to claim for man a
higher end and a higher law of life, than even it can
give.

I use the word " civilisation," for want of a better,
to express all that trains and furnishes man for
that civil state which is his proper condition here :
all skill, and endeavour, and achievement, all exercise

THE GIFTS OF CIVILISATION

and development of thought, restricted to the sphere
of present things; the high and improving organisa-
tion of society, primarily for the purposes of the
present life. The contrast has often struck observers,
and has been drawn out by some of the deepest as
well as of the most superficial, between civilisation
and the religion of the New Testament ; and it often
makes itself felt secretly and importunately, even
where the feeling is not avowed or suffered to come
to light. It is true that civilisation and religion
have worked together, have acted on one another
and produced joint results ; but in their aims and
in their nature they are distinct, and may be, as they
have been before now, in a right cause or a wrong,
arrayed in opposition to one another. And it cannot
be denied that minds strongly under the influence
of the one, and keenly appreciating its vast relations,
are apt to fear or shrink from the other. From the
religious point of view, and where religious impressions
are clear and paramount, it seems often strange — I
do not say always as a matter of conscious reflection,
but of unexplained distaste and wonder — to see men
giving their lives to business, or science, or political
life, the pursuits which civilisation cherishes and

THE GIFTS OF CIVILISATION

which advance it. We are all of us perforce em-
barked in it ; we all use and enjoy it and profit by-
it ; and yet uneasy misgivings about it come upon
us from time to time ; we are suspicious about its
tendencies and jealous of its claims ; and the things
we do every day, and feel satisfied that they are
right for us to do, we sometimes find it hard to
reconcile with the deeper and more uncompromising
of the religious views of life. And as civilisation
grows more powerful and self- sustained, more com-
prehensive in its aims, more sure of its methods and
perfect in its work, we must not be surprised if there
grows with it, among those in whom its influence
is supreme, distrust and impatience of religion.
There have always been religious despisers of civilisa-
tion, and they have sometimes been its revilers.
And there have been, and always will be, those
who would raise it to an exclusive supremacy, the
substitute for religion, and destined to clear away
that which it replaces. But this supposed antagonism
is but one of the many reminders to us of our own
weakness and narrowness. Civilisation and religion
have each their own order, and move in their own
path. Perhaps the more clearly we keep in view

THE GIFTS OF CIVILISATION

their distinctness the better. They are distinct.
But no religious man, at least, can feel difficulty in
believing that, distinct as they may be, and in the
hands of men sometimes opposed, they have essen-
tially one origin, and come both of them from Him
who has made man for this world, as well as intended
him for another.

We hear civilisation both admired and disparaged
by those who do not duly think whence it comes.
That great spectacle amid which we live, daily before
our eyes, and with so much that we could not do
without, — so familiar, yet so amazing when we think
of the steps and long strange processes by which it
has grown, and the vast results beyond all human
anticipation which it has come to ; that fruitful
elaboration of the best arrangements for the secular
wellbeing of man, not material only, not intellectual
only, productive not merely of comfort and light, but
goodness ; that complex and delicate social machinery,
the growth of centuries, and oar inheritance and
possession — let us make all abatements for its defects
and inconsistencies, all reserves for its blemishes and
drawbacks — yet deserves more respect than it has
always received from religious people, as the great work

THE GIFTS OF CIVILISATION

of God's providence and order. The world easily sug-
gests very awful views of its own condition, which
we may call overcharged or morbid, but which it is
not so easy to answer and get rid of. But the world
would indeed be far more dreadful, if we must not
see in its civilisation the leading and guiding hand
of God, the real gifts of the Author and Giver of
all good things. He who gave us the gospel of
immortality, He who gave us His Son, gave us also
civilisation and its gifts. His gifts are not necessarily
dependent one on another, however much they may
be allied. It is not necessary to trace all our civilisa-
tion up to Christianity ; no one can doubt how largely
the temporal has been indebted to the spiritual ; but
it is true that our civilisation has other sources, wide
and ancient ones, besides. Nor do I see why we
should be deterred from recognising it as God's work
and blessing, because of its sure ill use, by luxury
and pride, for impurity and wrong. It is but what
happened with the gifts at Corinth ; they were
foolishly and wrongly used. However our civilisation
comes, and however it is used, it is one of God's
ways, as real as the sun and air and rain, of doing
good to men. Surely a Christian need not be afraid

I THE GIFTS OF CIVILISATION 13

to honour all that is excellent in civilisation, as being,
in whatever way, from his own Master, whose awful
mind and will is reflected in the universe. Surely he
need not be afraid to say that it is not by religion
only that tones of goodness are struck from the
human soul which charm and subdue us, and that
God has yet other ways, secret in working yet un-
deniable in effect, of bringing out the graces which
tend to make men like Himself. The Apostle's call *
— if I may quote his familiar words in the less
familiar but not less forcible Latin version of them —
" Quaecumque vera, quaecumque pudica, quaecumque
justa, quaecumque sancta, quaecumque amabilia, quae-
cumque bonae famae, si qua virtus, si qua laus
disciplinae, haec cogitate," finds indeed its deepest and
truest response in that faith of which he was the
preacher ; but shall we say that it finds no true re-
sponse apart from it and beyond it ?

God teaches us about His gifts not only by His
word but by His providence ; and His providence,
working in many ages, has unfolded such a lavish
munificence of gifts to men as might well deserve the
praises even of an apostle. We are unreal, we talk

1 Phil. iv. 8.

THE GIFTS OF CIVILISATION

loosely and deceive ourselves, when we ignore the gifts
of our civilised order, in all that they have to amaze
us, in all that they do to bless us ; or, when profiting
by all the appliances with which they furnish us, we
speak superciliously of their worth. Civilisation has
indeed its dark side — a very dark one : there is much
that is dreary and forbidding in the history of its
growth ; and who can look without anxiety at the
dangers of its future ? But the irreligious and worldly
tendencies of civilisation are not to be combated by
simply decrying it. .What it has of good and true
tells of its Author too clearly, and bids us accept its
benefits and claim them as coming from God, though
they do not come directly through religion. Let us
look at the world as we know it, with honest but not
ill-natured eyes, calmly and fairly, neither as boasters
nor as detractors — as those who were put here to
" refuse the evil and choose the good." Let us not be
driven off from the truth, because in the growth of
human civilisation there is so much which must make
a Christian, or any one who believes in God and in
goodness, shudder and tremble. Let us look at it with
its terrible concomitant of men made worse by what
ought to make them better. Yet look at it as it is.

THE GIFTS OF CIVILISATION

Follow the history of a great people, and consider
what it brings forth. Observe that one great fact, the
progressive refinement of our human nature, passing
unconquerable when once begun, even through ages of
corruption and decline, to rise up again after them
with undiminished vigour ; keeping what it had gained,
and never permanently losing ; bringing of course new
sins, but bringing also new virtues and graces of a
yet unwitnessed and unthought-of type. Observe
how, as time goes on, men gain in power, — power
over themselves ; power to bring about, surely and
without violence, what they propose ; power to have
larger aims, to command vaster resources, to embrace
without rash presumption a greater field. See how
great moral habits strike their roots deep in a society ;
habits undeniably admirable and beneficial, yet not
necessarily connected with the order of things belong-
ing to religion ; the deep, strong, stern sense of justice
as justice ; the power of ruling firmly, equitably, incor-
ruptly ; the genius and aptitude for law, as a really
governing power in society, which is one of the most
marked differences of nations, and which some of the
most gifted are without ; the spirit of self- devoting
enterprise, the indifference to privation and to the pain

1 6 THE GIFTS OF CIVILISATION I

of effort, the impulses which lead to discovery and
peopling the earth with colonies ; patriotism and keen
public spirit, which some religious theories disparage
as heathens, but which no theories will ever keep men
from admiring. If nations have what, judging roughly,
we call characteristic faults, there grow up in them
characteristic virtues ; in one the unflinching love of
reality, in another the unflinching passion for intellect-
ual truth, in another purity and tenderness, or large-
ness of sympathy. This is what we see ; this, amid all
that is so dark and disappointing, has come of God's
nurturing of mankind through the past centuries.

"We can but speak generally ; and civilisation has
many shapes, and means many things. But let us
speak fairly, as we know it. Civilisation to us means
liberty and the power of bearing and using liberty ; it
means that which ensures to us a peaceful life, a life
of our own, fenced in from wrong and with our path
and ends left free to us ; it means the strength of
social countenance given on the whole to those virtues
which make life nobler and easier ; it means growing
honour for manliness, unselfishness, sincerity, — grow-
ing value for gentleness, considerateness, and respect
for others; it means readiness to bear criticism, to

THE GIFTS OF CIVILISATION

listen to correction, to see and amend our mistakes ;
it means the willingness, the passion, to ameliorate
conditions, to communicate advantages, to raise the
weak and low, to open wide gates and paths for them
to that discipline of cultivation and improvement which
has produced such fruit in others more fortunate than
they.

And it has disclosed to us in the course of its
development more and more of what is contained in
human characters and capacities. We are, in this age,
drawing forth with amazement discoveries which seem
to be inexhaustible from the treasure-house of material
nature. When we cast our eyes back over history
and literature, it seems to me that the variety and the
disclosures there are as astonishing. Think of the
great forms of history, so diversified, so unlike one to
another, so unexpected in their traits ; think of all that
a great portrait-gallery represents, doubtless in but too
rank abundance, of vile and bad, but also of high and
venerable, of what the world had never yet known but
was never more to forget, of originality, of power, of
goodness. The examples of actual history are but
part in this great spectacle. Think of what fiction,
with all its abuses, has done for us, — creating pictures

c

THE GIFTS OF CIVILISATION

of character, of infinite novelty and interest, in which
imagination reflects the real, endless play of life ;
multiplying and unfolding for the general knowledge
types which would otherwise have been lost where
they grew up : think of its world of ideal histories,
revealing to man himself ; showing him with subtle
and searching truth things unsuspected or dimly felt,
making him understand, better sometimes, as it has
been said, than graver teachers, his temptations and
self-deceits ; — the parables of each generation. Think
again what has been bestowed on man in the perfecting
of language, its growth and changes, its marvellous
acquisition of new powers, in the hands of the great
masters who have forged it anew for their thoughts ;
the double process going on at once of deepening
scientific analysis and continual enlargement by actual
use ; as in an instrument of music, ever attaining im-
provement in mechanism, ever, under refined or powerful
handling, surprising us with fresh secrets of what it can
do. Think of the way in which new faculties, as it
were, spring up in us of seeing and feeling, and how
soon they are made over to the common stock ; how,
by art, by poetry, by the commentary of deep and true
sympathy and deep and true knowledge, our eyes are

i THE GIFTS OF CIVILISATION 19

more and more opened to discern in new ways the
beauty of hill and plain, of sky or sea, the wonders of
the physical universe and their meaning. Think of
the wealth that any great literature enshrines of true
observation and diversified emotion, and of thoughts
that live for ever, ever widening and purifying men's
minds. Count over all our great possessions. Shall
we venture to say that all this does not come from
the Source of all beauty and all wisdom and all light —
from Him by whom alone the great are great, and the
good are good ? Shall we say that all these things
ought not to excite in men passionate admiration and
interest — that men ought not to desire and follow
them — to wish to advance the progress and to share
in the gifts ?

What we see, then, is a profusion, overwhelming to
contemplate, of what, if we trace them to their source
and author, we must call the gifts of God to man for
this life ; most varied, most manifold, ever increasing,
changing their shape, growing one out of another, un-
folding and expanding as new ends appear and shape
themselves. It is not wonderful that such a spectacle
should win involuntary admiration even from those
whose thoughts go most beyond it, and who wish to

20 THE GIFTS OF CIVILISATION I

measure all things here by the measure of Jesus
Christ. It is not wonderful, either, that when we
come fresh from the New Testament, it should seem
too dazzling. But whether or not our thoughts are
baffled when we try to embrace God's different ways
of working, this we none of us doubt, that all that
tends to educate and improve and benefit man comes
from the goodness of the Divine Euler who guides his
fortunes. And what He gives, it is for us to accept
and improve. It is an easy thing to say, as has
before now been said, Leave it. A wiser thought-
fulness, a braver and deeper faith will say Use it,
only believe that there is something greater beyond.
Surely we may hear in the words of the Apostle, not
only the warrant, but the call, of his Master, who
Himself had not where to lay His head, to take and
prize and carry on to its perfection all that His provi-
dence has created of so different an order for us, the
talent of our trial. " Covet earnestly the greater, the
better gifts." Measure and compare them wisely.
Fearlessly choose them, fearlessly give them full play.
This is indeed one side of the matter. But there is
another and a higher. Covet earnestly what most
raises man's part here ; what would be to be most

THE GIFTS OF CIVILISATION

desired and followed, even if his part ended here ; —
but remember also, that besides all this, there is a yet
more excellent way. Above God's greatest gifts here
is that which He is essentially : above them all is
charity, for " God is love."

" A more excellent way." It would still, I suppose,
be true, — though it would be unaccountable how it
should ever have been said, — even if this world were
all: it would still be true, that the perfection of
character which St. Paul describes under the name of
charity is the highest achievement of human nature,
and that above knowledge, or power, or great acts, is
the. unfolding of pure goodness as the universal
principle of action. But we believe that this world,
with all its wonderful results, is not all. We look
forward. And we believe that we have a place in
something wider and more lasting. Our ties are not
those only of this world, nor the duties we acknow-
ledge, nor the hopes. We believe in the relation of
men to God as a Father as well as a Creator, as a
Divine Saviour and Guide and Eedeemer, as well as
the Infinite Cause of all things and the Euler and
Judge of all that is. We believe that we have been
told, as far as it concerns us and we could bear it, the

THE GIFTS OF CIVILISATION

truth about ourselves, and the strange aspect of this
world and our condition in it. We believe that all
we are brethren, sharers together in a great wreck and
disaster, sharers too in a great recovery, even now
begun. We believe that He has been with us, and
of us, who made us, and by whom we live. In Him
and from Him we learnt the mind of God ; from
Him we know God's value for man, and what God
thought it not too much to do that man should be
restored to that for which God made him. " God so
loved the world, that He gave His only-begotten Son,
that whosoever belie veth in Him should not perish,
but have everlasting life." In making Himself known
to us, He has not indeed kept out of sight those awful
attributes, in virtue of which we, and everything we
know and see, are so fearfully and wonderfully made.
But that by which He makes us to understand Him
and draw near to Him is His love for us. Henceforth
the world knows Him irrevocably, if it knows Him at
all, in the Cross of Jesus Christ. The world never
can be the same, after that, as it was before it, as it
would be without it. It has brought a new spirit
into the world, with a divine prerogative of excellence,
to which all other things excellent and admirable must

I

I THE GIFTS OF CIVILISATION 23

yield the first place. Civilisation runs its great and
chequered course, influenced by religion, or indepen-
dent of it. As great things have been done, so still
greater may be done, for the wise and just and
generous ordering of society, while this life lasts ; and
what God has given to men to know and to do may
be little to what He has yet to give them. Yet after
all, henceforth that will always be more excellent
which comes nearest to the spirit of Jesus Christ.
That must always remain for man, rj tcaO1 v7rep/3o\rjv
6$6s, the way in which our Master walked, the love
in which He lived, and by which His religion lives.

" Covet earnestly the best gifts : and yet shew I
unto you a more excellent way." And then, after
having shown the more excellent way, reversing the
order of the precept, St. Paul proceeds — " Follow
after charity ; but covet earnestly the spiritual gifts."
They were to be prized and coveted by those who were
so earnestly taught how far charity was above them
Nor can we prize too much the so different gifts which
our own generation sees with wonder increasing upon
us. We cannot honour them too sincerely ; we cannot
set them at too high a rate ; we cannot take too much
trouble to master all that is true and real in them ;

24 THE GIFTS OF CIVILISATION I

we cannot spend ourselves better than in making the
world the richer for what God has given us. But
when we feel dizzy with the marvellous spectacle
around us, carried away with the current of those great
changes which with good reason make us hope for so
much more for man in his life here, let us remind
ourselves that this is not all. There is something else
to be thought of besides the objects and pursuits of a
successful civilisation. These things are to have their
time and service, and then pass away. There are
interests beyond them ; and each one of us knows that
what he is reaches beyond them. "We are not necessarily
growing better men, though we may be doing a great
work, when we are hiving up or dispersing abroad
God's manifold gifts of knowledge or ability. And
what we are here for is, if anything, to become good ;
and goodness, since Christ has come, means essentially
that spirit of love which joins man to man and lifts
him to God. Whatever happens, whatever may be
done in reducing this present state to greater reason
and order, in drawing forth its resources, in curing its
evils, the Cross of Christ is there, standing for ever
the Cross of One who came to seek and to save that
which was lost, who was among us as " one that

I THE GIFTS OF CIVILISATION 25

serveth," our pattern, our warning, in the end our last
consolation. For consolation we want at last, be our
triumphs what they may. There is no need to colour
or overstate. Side by side with our brilliant successes
and hopes abide the certain and commonplace con-
ditions of our state, inexorable, unalterable — pain,
moral evil, death. Serious and thoughtful men, how-
ever much they may be the children and the soldiers
of an advancing civilisation, must feel, after all, their
individuality. As one by one they die, so one by one
each must live much of his life. And when a man
enters into his closet and is still ; — if ever, from the
glories and the occupations of a great part in the
world's business — (I say not from its temptations and
entanglements ; they need not be this, they may be
his proper engagements) — if ever from these he with-
draws up into the mount, and in silence and by
himself looks in the face his awful destiny, the awful,
endless road which lies before him, the purpose for
which he was called into being, the law he was meant
to live by ; when he feels himself confronted alone with
the object of his worship, out of all reach and passing
all knowledge, yet the most familiar and customary of
all familiar thoughts, — he can hardly help feeling that

26 THE GIFTS OF CIVILISATION I

the gifts of God for this life are for this life ; they
cannot reach beyond ; they cannot touch that which is
to be. As St. Paul argues, they are incomplete, and
they are transitory : they are, compared with what we
are to look for, but the playthings and exercises of
children ; they share our doom of mortality. There is
a link which joins this life with the next ; there is
something which belongs equally to the imperfect and
the perfect, and which we carry with us from the one to
the other. We know little what will become of our
knowledge ; we do know what will become of our
power: one thing only "never faileth." The charity
which seeks the good of all to whom it can do
good; the charity which detects good wherever it is
to be found or to be advanced; the charity which
opens and enlarges the human soul to conceive, and
long for, and set up for its standard, and contemplate
with adoring and awful gladness the perfect goodness
of God, — that belongs to the world where we are going,
when all is over, and, as Christians believe, conies even
now from that world. There is the direction in which
we look to be perfect ; there aspirations are secure
against disappointment, and the object is not inadequate
to the affection, nor fails it. In the next world, as in

I THE GIFTS OF CIVILISATION 27

this, it is by love that creatures receive and show
forth the likeness of their Maker.

There is, then, one great order of things which
pertains to the present scene of man's activity ; and
there is another, not indifferent indeed to the present,
but primarily and above all directed to the future of
mankind. In both we have our parts. For the
purposes of both God has been lavish in His gifts.
We distinguish them, and they are distinguishable in
thought and in fact also. But each of us in truth has
his part in both ; and our life ought to combine them.
We ought not to be afraid of God's gifts ; we ought
not to make as though we saw them not, as we ought
not to mistake their place or reverse their order. We
are as much bound to be faithful to the full as the
stewards of our civilisation, as we are responsible for
our knowledge of the light and for our gifts of grace.
Here especially, what are we here for ? — we who are
connected with this place, or who have ever tasted of
its benefits, — what are we, or were we here for, but. to
desire earnestly, and seek with hearty effort and use
with fidelity for the service of our brethren, the choice
and manifold gifts which a place like this stores up
and distributes ? " Covet earnestly the best gifts."

28 THE GIFTS OF CIVILISATION i

Surely the gifts which God's providence puts within
our reach here are among His higher, His better gifts ;
surely they are meant to kindle our enthusiasm, to call
forth our strong desire, as they awaken the longing of
numbers outside of us. When we think of the work
and the opportunities of this place — its far-reaching
influences, its deep and lasting effects on English
society ; how here thought and character and faculty
are fashioned in those who are to lead thousands of
their brethren and control their fate ; with what
prodigal abundance the means and helps are supplied us
by which men may make things better in society, may
make things more sound and wholesome and strong; how
time is ensured and leisure fenced off from outward
calls ; what may be learned ; how the door of real and
large and grounded knowledge is opened to men ; how
men may train themselves to think and to judge, to
discern the true and to choose the best ; — indeed we
must have dull minds and poor spirits not to see the
great chances given us of work and service, not to be
stirred to eager and emulous thoughts about these
great gifts. St. Paul is our warrant for being in
earnest about them, and our teacher how to use them.
" Covet them earnestly." Open your eyes to their

I THE GIFTS OF CIVILISATION 29

greatness and charm; remember their purpose, remember
their variety. Follow after them, — only do not be
children about them ; do not idly extol them and
vaunt about them ; do not be jealous if you have little;
do not be proud if you have much : there are differ-
ences, and all have their use ; and " God hath set the
members, every one in the body, as it hath pleased
Him." Cultivate, as good servants, your great gifts.
Be zealous for great causes which carry in them the
hopes of generations to come. Appreciate all you may
find here, to help you to interpret the works and the
thoughts of God, to understand yourselves and the
world in which you are. But there is something
more. Surely there are times to most of us when, in
the midst of the splendour and the hopes of visible
things, it is with us as the Psalmist says : " Like as
the hart desireth the water-brooks, so longeth my soul
after Thee, 0 God. My soul is athirst for God, even
for the living God : when shall I come to appear
before the presence of God ? " We want a tie and
bond deeper than that of society. We want a standard
and exemplar above this world. God has placed us to
develop our full nature here ; but He has placed us
here, we believe, still more to become like Himself.

30 THE GIFTS OF CIVILISATION I

So, while learning to understand, to value, to use the
last and greatest endowments which the course of
things has unfolded in human society, learning to turn
them honestly to their best account for the world for
which they were given, remember that there is a way
for you to walk in which carries you far beyond them,
and opens to you even wider prospects, more awful
thoughts, a deeper train of ideas and relations and
duties which touch us in what is most inward, to the
very quick. We are sinners who have been saved by
a God who loved us. There is a religion which is our
hope beyond this time, and the incommunicable
character of it is love. That which its Author thought
necessary to be and to do, for a remedy and comfort
to man's misery and weakness — unless man's misery
and weakness are a delusion — reveals a love which
makes us lose ourselves when we think of it. Love
was the perpetual mark of all His life, and of the Act
in which His work was finished. His religion came
with a new commandment, which was love. That
religion has had great fruits, and their conspicuous and
distinctive feature is the love which was their motive
and support. Its last word about the God whom it
worshipped was that " God is love." It is the Gospel

I THE GIFTS OF CIVILISATION 31

of One, " who, being in the form of God, thought it
not robbery to be equal with God, but made Himself
of no reputation, and took upon Him the form of a
servant, and became obedient unto death, even the
death of the Cross." " Let this mind be in you, which
was in Him," — love for those made in the image of
God and whom God has so loved — love, self-surrender-
ing, supreme, ever growing at once in light and
warmth, of Him who made them. Let us pray that He
who has crowned our life here with gifts which baffle
our measuring, and which daily go beyond our hopes,
but who has "prepared for them that love Him such
good things as pass man's understanding," would indeed
" pour into our heart such love towards Himself that
we, loving Him above all things, may obtain His
promises which exceed all that we can desire, through
Jesus Christ our Lord."

SEEMON II

CHRIST'S WORDS AND CHRISTIAN SOCIETY

Then Jesus beholding him loved him, and said unto him, One thing thou
lackest : go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor,
and thou shalt have treasure in heaven : and come, take up the
cross, and follow Me. — St. Mark x. 21.

The lesson for this Sunday l set before us the Prophet
Baalam, that extraordinary character of the Old Testa-
ment in whom the experience of modern times has
seen the great typical instance of self - deceiving
obedience. But he is the type not only of the char-
acter which hides the truth from itself, but of that
which sees it in vain. Balaam, admiring but unable to
believe, looking at the order and beauty of the sacred
camp, and plotting to tempt and corrupt ; feeling the
full grandeur of the spectacle, but able to keep from
his heart, though he could not from his intellect and
his lips, the confession that it was Divine, — is the
warning we meet with, earlier than we should have

1 Second Sunday after Easter.

II CHRIST'S WORDS AND CHRISTIAN SOCIETY 33

expected to find it, against every form of insincere
homage to truth and religion.

It seems to me that we must always feel some fear
of this danger, when, living as most of us do, we turn
to our acknowledged standards of life in the New
Testament, and meet with such texts as that which I
have just read. We live one kind of life, an innocent,
it may be, a useful, improving, religious life ; but it is
not the life we read of in the New Testament ; and
yet that life is the one which Christians, in some sense
or other, accept as their rule. We honour it, extol it,
make our boast of it. But a thinking and honest
man must sometimes have misgivings, when he asks
himself how far his life in what he deliberately
sanctions is like that set before us in the New Testa-
ment, and how much of the Gospel morality he is able
practically to bring into his own. One lesson taught
us by the varied experience, inherited by those on
whom the ends of the world are come, is a quickened
sense of the incredible facility of self-deceit. Is there
not reason to be anxious, whether, when we own the
New Testament as our rule of life, we are not merely
making a compromise, — admiring, and not taking the
responsibility of our convictions ; contemplating the

D

34 CHRIST S WORDS AND CHRISTIAN SOCIETY II

New Testament with perhaps longing or respectful or
wondering awe, but at an infinite distance from it in
spirit and temper ?

This is a large subject ; and though it is much
too large to be dealt with now as it should be, I will
venture to say a few words about it this afternoon.

What I mean is this. Here is the New Testament,
the confessed source of Christian morality, with its
facts and language, about which there is no dispute,
and with its spirit and tone equally distinct and
marked. And on the other hand, here is the ordinary
life of Christian society, with its accepted principles,
its familiar habits, its long-sanctioned traditions ; the
life of Christian society, not particularly in this or
that age, but as on the whole it has been from the
time when Christianity won its place definitively in
the world ; with its legitimate occupations, its interests,
its objects, its standards of goodness, of greatness.
When we put the two side by side, the mind must be
dull indeed which is not conscious of a strong sense of
difference and contrast. What does this feeling mean,
and to what does it point ? So obvious a question has
been variously answered ; but an answer of some sort is
wanted by us all.

ii CHRIST'S WORDS AND CHRISTIAN SOCIETY 35

The life set before us in the words and deeds of
the New Testament is, we all confess, the root of all
Christian life. Consider steadily what that was. The
life which our Lord led He enjoined : His words are
nothing more than generalisations of what He did. It
was not that His life had in it difficulties, pain, self-
denial, and that He taught men to expect them ; all
lives have that, and all teaching must arm men for it :
but the regular, ordinary course of that life was nothing
but hardness, abstinence, separation from society or
collision with it. Such a life a great reformer indeed
always must go through : others have gone through it.
But here, not to speak of the degree of it, it appears as
much imposed on the taught as welcomed by the teacher.
He was a King, and announced a kingdom and claimed
subjects ; but it was a kingdom of heaven, not one of
earth : and this kingdom and its members, both King
and subjects, are represented as in open and deadly
enmity with what is called the " present world."1 They
are few compared with the many ; the way is narrow
that leads to life, and few find it ; they are not to
marvel if the world hates them ; the blessing is with
those whom men revile and speak ill of ; the woe is for

1 Gal. i. 4.

36 Christ's words and christian society ri

those of whom all men speak well. We read how the
lesson was learned, how the disciples understood their
teacher. "Be not conformed to this world/'1 says
one ; " Whosoever will be the friend of this world," says
another, " is the enemy of God ; "2 " Love not the world,
neither the things that are in the world," says another ;
" if any man love the world, the love of the Father is
not in him."3 The claim was for undivided allegiance :
" No man can serve two masters : ye cannot serve God
and mammon." And what was our Lord's call ? What
were His leading maxims ? He bids His disciples count
the cost, as those who embark in great projects full of
risk. " So likewise, whosoever he be of you that for-
saketh not all that he hath, he cannot be My disciple."4
He warned the multitudes that followed Him, " If any
man come to Me, and hate not his father, and mother,
and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea,
and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple."5
" One thing thou lackest," is the answer to the young
man who had kept the commandments from his youth,
and whom Jesus " beholding loved "; " If thou wilt
be perfect," " go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast,

1 Rom. xii. 2.

2 St. James iv. 4. 3 1 St. John ii. 15.

4 St. Luke xiv. 33. 5 Ibid. 26.

ii CHRIST'S WORDS AND CHRISTIAN SOCIETY 37

and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure
in heaven : and come, take up the cross, and
follow Me." This was no isolated command ; it
was given in a general form to the whole of the
" little flock ": " Sell that ye have, and give alms ;
provide yourselves bags which wax not old, a treasure
in the heavens that faileth not."1 And what He said,
they did — "they left all and followed Him." With
such a call it is not surprising that there were corre-
sponding precepts. " Take no thought for the morrow,
for the morrow shall take thought for the things of
itself ; " " Take no thought for your life, what ye shall
eat, neither for the body, what ye shall put on. . . .
Seek not what ye shall eat nor what ye shall drink,
neither be ye of doubtful mind. For all these things
the nations of the world seek after ; and your Father
knoweth that ye have need of these things." Consider
what is involved in these words ; how they touch the
common occupations of mankind in "the nations of
the world"; what a sweep they made to those who
heard them of the most ordinary motives and business
of life. True, what came in His way He took ; He
blessed the marriage -feast at Cana; He refused no

1 St. Luke xii. 33.

38 CHRIST'S WORDS AND CHRISTIAN SOCIETY n

invitation from Pharisee or Publican, from rich or
poor ; He cared so little for the current austerities of
religion, that His enemies could sneer at one whom
they called a gluttonous man and a winebibber, a
"friend" and "guest" of sinners. But such passages
only throw into stronger relief the general character
of His words and life. He who had less a place that
He could call His own than the birds which have
their nests and the foxes that have their holes, had
but stern warnings of judgment for the man who built
large barns for his increasing harvests, for those who
have their reward now, for him who has received his
good things here. " How hardly shall they that have
riches " — or, take it in its softened form — " that trust
in riches, enter into the kingdom of God." " I say
unto you, swear not at all." " I say unto you, that ye
resist not evil ; give to him that asketh thee ; turn the
right cheek to him who has smitten the left ; to him
that would sue thee at the law for thy coat, give up
thy cloke also." He forbids His disciples to seek
high places, to claim their own, to assert their rights.
He gives them as their portion slander, misunder-
standing, persecution. He breaks their ties with the
world. He scarcely allows them an interest in it,

ii CHRIST S WORDS AND CHRISTIAN SOCIETY 39

beyond their work as His delegates. His first fol-
lowers took Him at His word, and very literally.
All His disciples were called to follow this, and they
did follow it. Their first instinct was to have all
things common. The religion taught by St. Paul and
St. John is a religion of poverty, with little or no
interest in the present life ; which submits to violence
and ill-usage as a matter of course ; which accepts the
loosening of family ties ; which preaches indulgence
without limits, even to seventy times seven, " as God
for Christ's sake hath forgiven " ; in which devotion to
the unseen, a sense of the citizenship in heaven, fills
the thoughts and throws into the background — ought
I not to say into utter insignificance ? — things visible
and temporal. It discourages wealth, and says hard
things of the love of money ; it is shocked at appeals
to law, and holds it far " more blessed to give
than to receive"; it regards industry as a moral
remedy against idleness, and riches only as what may
be turned into "the treasure in heaven";1 it contem-
plates a state of mind in which war between Christians
is inconceivable and impossible; it brands ambition
and the "minding of earthly things."2 I need not say
1 1 Tim. vi. 19. 2 Thil. iii. 19.

40 CHRIST'S WORDS AND CHRISTIAN SOCIETY n

how severely it looked upon mere enjoyment. It
was more in earnest against human selfishness than
even against what caused human suffering. It
seemed to be irreconcilable with litigation and the
pursuit of gain, but it did not seem to proscribe
slavery.

What an astonishing phenomenon would it have
appeared to the Christians of the first century, could
they have looked forward and seen in vision the
Church and Christian society as it was to be, as we
know it, and as it has been for the greater part of its
history. I do not speak of scandals, of invasions of
worldliness, of confessed corruptions. Those were
then also, and we know must be always. But the
change is not only one of fact, but in the general
sense of what is right and lawful, in the general view
of the conduct of life. Christian society was then
almost as separate from the society by which it was
surrounded as a ship is from the sea, or a colony in a
foreign land from the strangers about it. And now
Christianity claims to have possession of society. Not
only is the Church no longer opposed, as it then was,
to society, but we find a difficulty in drawing the line
between them. It seems impossible to conceive three

ii CHRIST'S WORDS AND CHRISTIAN SOCIETY 41

things more opposite at first sight to the Sermon on
the Mount than War, Law, and Trade ; yet Christian
society has long since made up its mind about them,
and we all accept them as among the necessities or
occupations of human society. Again, Christianity
has been not only an eminently social religion, but a
liberal religion. It has been so, not merely from
slack indifference, but with its eyes open, and with
deliberate reason given to itself for what it did. It
has made large allowance for the varieties of character.
It has naturalised and adopted in the boldest way — (I
say this, looking at the general result of what has
come to pass, and not forgetting either narrow fears
and jealousies, or very terrible abuses and mischiefs) —
art, literature, science. It has claimed to have a
charm which could take the sting out of them. We
educate by the classics, and are not afraid of Shake-
speare. We may say, and say truly, that where there
is society, these things must be ; but Christian society
began in the life of the New Testament, and they are
not there. In all directions we see instances of the
necessities of things enforcing an enlarged interpreta-
tion of its language ; and we believe that the common
sense and instinct of Christians have on the whole

42 CHRIST S WORDS AND CHRISTIAN SOCIETY n

caught its true meaning. If this is a compromise,
remember that every portion of the Church, every age,
every class in it is implicated. Even monastic religion,
though it declined society, implied that there was a
legitimate form of it, however hard to find, out of the
cloister. Even the sect which denounces war and
titles has not shrunk from the inconsistency, at least
as great, of being rich. "We are all involved. We
may draw arbitrary lines for ourselves, and say that
all outside them shall be called the world. But these
distinctions we do not always recognise ourselves, and
no one else does.

It seems to me impossible to exaggerate the
apparent contrast between Christian society in its first
shape, and that society which has grown out of it ;
between the Church, as it was at first called forth out
of the world, at open war with it, condemning its
morality, rejecting its objects, declining its advantages,
in utter antipathy to its spirit — and Christian society
as we know it, and live in it, and on the whole take it
for granted. The Sermon on the Mount was once
taken very literally : it is easy to say, take it literally
still, with the Poor Men of Lyons or the Moravians ;
only then you sacrifice society. So it is easy to say

ii CHRIST'S WORDS AND CHRISTIAN SOCIETY 43

that it is for a few, that its words are counsels of
perfection ; only then you sacrifice the universal
interest of it ; you seem to admit two rules, and lower
the whole aim of Christian morality. And it is easy
to soften it down and say that it merely inculcates
justice, humanity, forgiveness, humility, self-command ;
only then you are in danger of sacrificing its special
meaning altogether. It is true that it lays down
principles ; but this does not account for the instances
chosen to exemplify the principle. It is not satisfac-
tory to call such language figurative ; for nothing can
be less figurative than the commands, " Lay not up
treasure on earth," " Take no thought for the morrow,"
" Sell all thou hast," " Eesist not evil." Such words
do indeed embody the spirit of Christian morality ;
only they do more, — they express what, to those
who heard them, were the most literal of facts and
duties.

Is then the history of Christian society the history
of a great evasion ? We Christians of this day believe
that in its earlier and later forms it is one and the
same.; that the later has not forfeited the mind and
the hopes of the earlier. Unless we are apostates
without knowing it and meaning it, we accept the

44 CHRIST S WORDS AND CHRISTIAN SOCIETY n

difference as being, in spite of enormous and manifest
faults, the result of natural and intended changes.
Are we mistaken ? Are we insincere and double-
minded, triflers with our belief, for allying Christianity
with civilised society, for letting it take its chance,
so to speak, with the inevitable course and pursuits of
human life ? It is the very meaning of an active and
advancing state of civilisation that men should be
busy with things of this present time : yet between the
best side of Christian civilisation and the Sermon on
the Mount there seems to be a great interval. Is
Christian civilisation a true and fair growth ? or is it,
as it has been held • to be, a deep degeneration, a great
conspiracy to be blind ? Are we Christians to our own
shame as honest men, and to our Master's dishonour
— "Christiani ad contumeliam Christi"?1 Has the
Christian Church, in its practical solution of these
questions, come near to the likeness of Balaam, who
can neither be called a false prophet nor a true ? Has
Christian society fallen away from what it was meant
to be; or may we think that, with all shortcomings
and very great ones, it is fulfilling its end, and that its

1 Salvian, De Gub. Dei, viii. 2, qu. by Bossuet, Serai. "Surla
haine de la verite. "

ii Christ's words and christian society 45

rule, with such astonishingly different applications, is
still essentially the same ?

The obvious answer is, and we hope the true one,
that God has appointed society, and that society means
these consequences : that society, as well as religion,
is God's creation and work. If we have anything to
guide us as to God's will in the facts of the world, — if
we see His providence in the tendencies and conditions
amid which we live, and believe that in them He is
our teacher and interpreter, we must believe that
social order, with its elementary laws, its necessary
incidents and pursuits, is God's will for this present
world. He meant us to live in this world. And for
this world — unless there is nothing more to be done
than to wait for its ending — what we call society, the
rule of law, the employments of business, the cultiva-
tion of our infinite resources, the embodiment of public
force and power, the increase of wealth, the continued
improvement of social arrangements — all this is indis-
pensable. There is no standing still in these matters ;
the only other alternative is drifting back, into
confusion and violence. If the necessities of our
condition, with all the light thrown on them by long
experience, are no evidence of God's purposes, we are

46 CHRIST'S WORDS AND CHRISTIAN SOCIETY n

indeed in darkness ; if they are, it is plain that man,
both the individual and the race, has a career here,
that he has been furnished for it, I need not say how
amply, and was meant to fulfil it. It is God's plan
that in spite of the vanity and shortness of life, which
is no Christian discovery (it was a matter for irony or
despair long before Christianity), and in spite of that
disproportionateness to eternity which the Gospel has
disclosed to us, men should yet have to show what
they are, and what is in them to do ; should develop
and cultivate their wonderful powers ; should become
something proportionate to their endowments for this
life, and push to their full limit the employments
which come to their hand. The Church by its
practice, its greatest writers by their philosophy and
theories, have sanctioned this view of the use and
divine appointment of the present life. This natural
order of things was once interrupted. It was when
Christ came to begin society anew. But as soon as
the first great shock was over, which accompanied a
Gospel of which the centre was the Cross and Eesur-
rection, it became plain that the mission of the Church
was not to remain outside of and apart from society,
but to absorb it and act on it in endless ways ;

ii CHRIST'S WORDS AND CHRISTIAN SOCIETY 47

that Christianity was calculated and intended for even
a wider purpose than had been prominently disclosed
at first ; that in more refined and extended ways than
any one then imagined, it was to make natural human
society, obstinate and refractory as it was, own its
sway, and yield to an influence, working slowly but
working inexhaustibly, over long tracts of time, not for
generations but centuries. Then was made clear the
full meaning of such sayings as those of the net gather-
ing of every kind, and the great house with many
vessels. May it not be said that our Lord has done
to human society — even that society which is for this
world, and which in so many of its principles and
influences is so deeply hostile to His spirit — what He
did among men on earth ? He came to widen men's
prospects of thought and hope to another world. And
yet His great employment here was healing their
bodies and comforting their present sufferings ; com-
forting sorrows that must soon be again, healing
sicknesses which were to come back worse, restoring
to life bodies which were again to die. He is now
above, " giving gifts to men " ; and now as then the
great ends of His religion are the things of God and
the soul. But as then He healed men's bodies when

48 CHRIST'S WORDS AND CHRISTIAN SOCIETY n

He sought their souls, so He has taken possession of
that world which is to pass away. He has sanctified,
He has in many ways transformed that society which
is only for this time and life ; and while calling and
guiding souls one by one to the Father, He has made
His gracious influence felt where it could least be
expected. Even war and riches, even the Babel life
of our great cities, even the high places of ambition
and earthly honour, have been touched by His spirit,
have found how to be Christian. Shadows as they are,
compared with the ages that are before us, and tainted
with evil, we believe that they have felt the hand of
the Great Healer, to whom power is given over all
flesh ; all power in heaven and on earth.1

The Tempter offered all the kingdoms of the world
to Christ, and He refused them, and chose poverty
instead. And yet they have become His, with all
the glory of them, with all their incidents. Such has
been the course which God's providence has appointed
for that company, which looked at first as if it was
intended to be but a scanty and isolated band of wit-
nesses, living, like the Rechabites, in the wilderness
till their true destiny was unfolded in the world to

1 St. John xvii. 2; St. Matthew xxviii. 18.

ii Christ's words and christian society 49

come, — among men but not of them. It was meant,
if we see in history the will and the finger of God, to
have here a higher flight and a higher action. Through
the whole lump of civilised society the leaven was to
spread and work. The great overshadowing tree,
sheltering such different inhabitants, was to rise out
of the mustard seed. Christendom has grown out of
the upper room. The Catholic Church was to be the
correlative to the unity of all tribes of man. It was
to expand and find room for all, as they all were em-
braced by it, with much margin for their differences,
with all their fortunes and their hopes, with all that is
essential and necessary in all human communion and
society, with all that belongs to man's perfection and
gives exercise to his great gifts here, with much, too,
that belongs to his imperfection.1 Was this an acci-
dent ? Was this a great miscarriage ? Have the
purposes of God once more, and in His final dispen-

1 If " the world " with which Christians have to fight meant simply,
as it seems sometimes in words taken to mean, " society," this is the
same thing as admitting Christianity to be anti-social. There is no
help for it, and we must say, " Come out of it and be ye separate," as,
to a great extent, it had to be said of society in the first days. For
society, as we term the world and its conditions, must make much of
trade and industry, must have cares for the future, and make a virtue
of prudence ; must accumulate wealth, must go by law, must take care
for liberty, must accept the necessities of war. But Christianity is

E

50 CHRIST S WORDS AND CHRISTIAN SOCIETY n

sation, been turned out of their path by the perversity
and sin of man ? Is all this acceptance of society by
the Church, with all that society brings with it — its
wars, its profession of arms, its worldly business, its
passion for knowledge, its love of what is beautiful and
great, its paramount rule of law — and not the mere
acceptance only, but the Christian consecration of
these things of the world, — is all this not as it should
have been ? It is manifest that in all this there is
much that is unchristian, and that Christians have often
tolerated what it was unpardonable to tolerate ; but
unless the whole Church has absolutely failed in vital
principle and in understanding its mission and charge,
— unless not only the Divine arrangements of the
world in natural society, but the Divine interpositions
to restore them have been defeated, and produced, as
the poet says, "not works but ruins,"1 — we must
believe that what we have seen worked out with such
irresistible tendencies and uniform effects, in the fusing
of society with the Church, has been according to the

not anti-social, if on certain occasions it has adopted a strong attitude
about the ordinary pursuits and objects of men in civil society ; about
riches, or about life itself. This is no more than the soldier does,
who is not anti-social, though there are times when all he does and
thinks of is against the common ways of society.
1 ' Non arti ma ruine." — Dante, Far. 8.

ii CHRIST'S WORDS AND CHRISTIAN SOCIETY 51

original law and purpose of its existence. That is to
say, the Church was not meant to be always in its first
limitations and conditions. Christian society was
meant to take in, as avowedly legitimate, other forms
of life than those insisted on and recognised at first.
It was not always to have all things common. It was
not always to live by the literal rule, " Take no thought
for the morrow." It was not always to set the least
esteemed to judge, or to turn the other cheek. It
was not always to decline the sword. It was not
always to hold itself bound by the command, " Sell all
that thou hast." Probably it is not too much to say that
Christianity helped largely in that break-up of ancient
society out of which modern society has grown. But
society, broken up, was reorganised ; and as, while time
lasts, society must last, the common, inevitable laws of
social action resumed their course when society entered
on its new path with the Christian spirit working in
it, sometimes more, sometimes less ; ebbing or advanc-
ing, but manifestly, in the long run, influencing, im-
proving, elevating it. Certainly the history of
Christendom has fallen far short of the ideal of the
New Testament. Yet I do not think we can doubt
that true Christian living has had at least as fair

52 Christ's words and christian society u

chance, in the shape which the Church has taken,
as it could have had if the Church had always been
like one of those religious bodies which shrink from
society. It has had its corruptions : we may be quite
sure that it would have had theirs, if it had been like
them. In its types of goodness it has had what is
impossible to them — greatness and variety. And its
largeness and freedom have not been unfruitful. I
am not thinking of exceptional lives of apostolic saint-
liness, like Bishop Ken's. But in all ages there have
been rich men furnished with ability, busy men occu-
pied in the deepest way with the things of this life, to
whom Christ's words have been no unmeaning message,
— students, lawyers, merchants, consumed with the
desire of doing good ; soldiers filled with the love of
their neighbour; " men," as we call them, "of the world "
following all that is pure and just and noble in the
fear and love of God ; of whom if we cannot say that
they are men in earnest to follow in the steps of Jesus
Christ, it is difficult to know of whom we can say so.

Christianity, then, claims now to make occasions
and instruments of serving God out of things which at
first were relinquished as inconsistent with His service ;
and there is no doubt that at first the call to relinquish

ii CHRIST'S WORDS AND CHRISTIAN SOCIETY 53

them was absolute and unqualified. The austere
maxims of privation and separation from secular
things which we find in the New Testament, have
seemed at times to raise an impassable bar between
its religion and society. If then, in their original
severity, they were not to be universal, why are they
there at all ? But let us go back and see how it
could have been otherwise. Consider who the Good
Shepherd was who gave His life for the sheep ; who
Christ was, and what He came to do. Consider what
Christianity was, and that what it had in view was
something which was to be for ever. Who that
remembers that it was the Eternal Son of God who
was here, and remembers what He was here for, can
wonder at His putting aside all that we are so busy
about as irrelevant and insignificant ? Can we
conceive Him speaking differently of the things of this
life and what they are worth ; or can we conceive His
putting in a different shape His call to human beings
to be like Him and to share His work ? Who can be
surprised at the way in which the New Testament
seems to overlook and despise what is most important
in this world, when we consider that its avowed object
was to break down the barriers of our present nature,

54 CHRIST'S WORDS AND CHRISTIAN SOCIETY u

and reveal an immortality before which all that now
is shrinks into a transitory littleness of which nothing
known to our experience can give the measure ? Who
can be surprised at what it seems to sacrifice, who
thinks what the change was which it professed to
make in what concerns mankind, and all that that
Sacrifice embraced by which the change was made ?
Indeed the tone and views of the New Testament
about the present life are very stern ; but they are in
harmony with that awful dispensation of things which
is recorded in the Apostles' Creed : it is not too much
to say that they are the only ones that could be in
harmony with it. Measured against its disclosures
and declared purpose, we can hardly conceive the
demands of the New Testament other than what they
are. Say that it claimed from the individual the
absolute surrender of all interest in the ordinary
objects of life : it did so for manifest ends, the highest
the human mind can conceive, — only to be obtained
at the highest cost, and for which the highest cost was
little. But it did no more than society itself, in its
degree, is forced to do for its greatest and most critical
triumphs. This world was sacrificed — sacrificed for a
great object : just as the soldier is called on to sacrifice

ii CHRIST'S WORDS AND CHRISTIAN SOCIETY 55

it ; just as great patriots, when they have to suffer in
trying to improve human society, have themselves to
sacrifice it. These maxims and precepts belong
specially to the days when the Lord had just been
here, the days of His miraculous interposition, the
days when the Church was founded. There never can
be such a time again. Those to whom the words were
then said were to be the salt, the light, the leaven, in
an eminence of meaning to which nothing later can
approach. They were to surprise the world with
something unheard of, both in claims, and in end, and
in power. And it seems to me that we undervalue
the greatness of the time, the occasion, the necessities
of the thing to be done, when we loosely take these
sayings, softening and accommodating them, as meant
in the same average sense for all periods, and fail to
recognise their special bearing then. We are indeed
commanded humility, self-denial, forbearance, an un-
worldly mind ; they are always necessary. It is quite
true to say that the texts we quote for them embody,
as in instances, universal principles of duty in the
most emphatic form, and raised to their highest power
and strain ; but the texts we quote for them did mean
something more for those days than they do for ours.

56 CHRIST'S WORDS AND CHRISTIAN SOCIETY n

What, then, are they to us ? What are we to
think of that severe aspect of the New Testament
which looks at us out of every page ; its detachment
from present things, its welcome for privation, its
imperious demand for self-denial, its blessing on pain
and sacrifice, which went so deep, not only into
passionate souls of quick sensibility, like St. Francis of
Assisi and the countless votaries of poverty, Catholic
and heretic, of the middle ages, but into the large
mind of Augustine and into the clear mind of Pascal ?
In our changed times* what is their place in our
thoughts and consciences ?

This meets us at the outset, and no change of
times can alter it. These sayings come to us in the
train of that eternal example of the Cross, of which
they are but the faint shadow, and which to us is the
key and centre of all religion. All that they say is
but little to what is involved in that ; and that is what
is before the eyes of mankind henceforth. Turn their
eyes where they will, wherever Christianity comes, it
must bring this with it — Jesus Christ and Him
crucified : and the Cross can mean but one thing. Can
we imagine the Cross standing alone ? These sayings
are not the abstract doctrines of philosophy ; they

ii CHRISTS WORDS AND CHRISTIAN SOCIETY 57

reflect a real life and work the most astonishing ever
heard of on earth. While the world lasts and Christ is
believed in, come what changes may over society, what
tells us of the Cross must oblige us to remember all that
went with it, all that inevitably surrounded it, all that it
drew after it. " Jesus Christ," we are told, and it must
be so, " is the same yesterday, and to-day, and for ever."
Further, the stern words which in the midst of a
high civilisation remind us of the foundations on
which our religion were laid, give us the ultimate
measure of all that we are engaged in here. We
believe that society is meant by Him who made it
to be always improving ; and this can only be
by ends being followed and powers developed, each in
their own sphere with deep and earnest devotion, and
for their own sake. The artist's mind must be full of
his art, the merchant's of his trade. So only are things
to be done, and objects which are great in their place
and order, to be attained. But when all this is allowed
for, and the largest room is made for all human work
and progress, we know the limits of our working here.
We know our end ; we know the conditions of our
power and perfection ; in the race, and in the highest
specimens of it, the law of humiliating incompleteness

58 CHRIST'S WORDS AND CHRISTIAN SOCIETY n

is inexorable. Here then comes in the severity of the
New Testament ; not mocking us, not insulting us, not
even merely telling us the plain certain truth about
what we are ; but while giving us indeed the measure
of things here, giving us, too, that which compensates
for their failure and completes their imperfection. For
if Christianity is true, and not only there is another
world, but we know it, and the way is opened to it
by the Eesurrection of Jesus Christ, it is plain that
nothing can ever reverse or alter the proportion
established in the New Testament between what is
and what is to be. No progress here can qualify the
words, "Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His
righteousness," or make unreasonable St. Paul's view
of life, " The things that are seen are temporal, the
things that are not seen are eternal ; " " What things
were gain to me those I counted loss for Christ." In
St. Augustine's words, " Christiani non sumus, nisi
propter futurum sseculum." We hope that this world,
as we know it and have a part in it, is something
better, in spite of all its disorders, than the " City of
Destruction " of the great Puritan allegory ; but after
all, we can but be pilgrims and strangers on the road,
and something else is our true country. Be this world

ii CHRIST'S WORDS AND CHRISTIAN SOCIETY 59

what it may, the only true view of it is one which
makes its greatness subordinate to that greater world
in which it is to be swallowed up, and of which the
New Testament is the perpetual witness.

Even when least consciously remembered, its
maxims are in the background and tacitly influence
our judgments, which would be very different if they
were not there. But besides, they are the unalterable
standard of the Christian spirit. As long as Christian-
ity lasts, the heroic ideal must be the standard of all
human life. Christianity can accept no other ; what-
ever it may tolerate, its standard is irremovable. The
Be Imitatione Christi can be written only in one way.
The Christian spirit is a free spirit, and has, we believe,
affinities with strangely opposite extremes. It can ally
itself with riches as well as with poverty ; with the
life of the statesman and the soldier as well as of the
priest ; with the most energetic as well as with the
most retired life ; with vastness of thought, with
richness of imagination, with the whole scale of feeling,
as well as with the simplest character and the humblest
obedience. It can bear the purple and fine linen ; it
can bear power ; it can bear the strain and absorption
of great undertakings. But there is one thing with

60 CHRIST'S WORDS AND CHRISTIAN SOCIETY n

which it will not combine. Its antagonist is selfishness.
Be it where it may, it is the spirit which is ready in
one way or another to give itself for worthy and noble
reasons. As long as the New Testament is believed
in, we must believe that the Christian spirit is that
which seeks not its own, which is not careful to speak
its own words, or find its own pleasure, or do its own
ways. It is not merely the spirit of self-denial and
sacrifice ; it is the spirit of self-denial and sacrifice for
the great objects put before it. For the great and
rare thing is when purpose and self-denial answer to
one another, and one by its greatness justifies the
other, and animates it. Doubtless it is hard to have
self-denial ; but it is harder still to have a great object
which shall make self-denial itself fall into a subordinate
place, indispensable there, but not thought much of for
its own sake. The heroic mind and the Christian
mind are shown not simply in the loss of all things,
in giving up this world, in accepting pain and want,
but in doing this, if it must be done, for that for which
it is worth a man's while to do it ; for something of
corresponding greatness, though unseen ; for truth, for
faith, for duty, for the good of others, for a higher life.
And this view the words of the New Testament keep

ii CHRIST'S WORDS AND CHRISTIAN SOCIETY 61

continually before us. There is plenty of temptation
to give up the heroic standard. It often fails. It is
easily counterfeited. Its failure is scandalous. And
not only our self-indulgence, but our suspicion and
hatred of insincere pretence, our moderation and
common sense, bid us content ourselves with something
short of it, and take our aim hby what we call our
nature. But the New Testament will not meet us
here. The heroic standard is the only one it will
countenance for its own, as proportionate to the great-
ness of its disclosures. It is a standard which lends
itself to very various conditions. It may be owned in
society or out of it; in solitude or in the press of
affairs ; in secret wrestlings or in open conduct ; by the
poor and ignorant or the great and wise. But everywhere
it makes the same call. Everywhere it implies really
great thoughts, great hopes, great attempts ; great
measures of what is worthy of man, and great willing-
ness to pay their price.

The Sermon on the Mount continually reminds
us all that we are disciples of a religion which was
indeed founded in a law of liberty, but began also
in poverty and the deepest renunciation of self. We
need the lesson. We believe, surely not wrongly,

62 CHRIST'S WORDS AND CHRISTIAN SOCIETY u

that God meant this world to be cultivated and
perfected to the utmost point to which man's energy
and intelligence can go. We trust that the Christian
spirit can live and nourish in society as we know
it, different as it is from the first days. But it is
clear that, as society goes on accumulating powers
and gifts, the one hope of society is in men's modest
and unselfish use of them ; in simplicity and noble-
ness of spirit increasing, as things impossible to our
fathers become easy and familiar to us ; in men
caring for better things than money, and ease, and
honour ; in being able to see the riches of the world
increase and not set our hearts upon them ; in being
able to admire and forego. And we need such
teaching as the Sermon on the Mount to preach to
us the unalterable subordination of things present
to things to come, to remind us of our object and
our standard. This it is to all of us. But it was
in its own time more than this. It was the call
to the great revival of the world. And is it not
true that in proportion as that impulse from time
to time reawakens sympathy, the meaning of that
call comes home with more vivid light and force ?
I am sure that there are numbers who follow the

ii CHRIST'S WORDS AND CHRISTIAN SOCIETY 63

work of this life in simplicity of heart and purity of
intention. But there is besides a more direct and
conscious service of the kingdom of heaven. There
are those whose hearts God has touched, who feel
that they are not merely men blessed by all that
the Gospel has done for them, but that they have a
special business and duty as servants of that Gospel.
They feel the necessity of something deeper than this
world's blessings, of greater aims than this world's
business. They feel that there are evils which it
needs something stronger than even civilisation to
cure, sufferings which ask for more than an average
self-devotion to comfort, wants which nothing but
a full compliance with the New Testament standard
can meet. The words of the New Testament, which
seem so austere to us common men, are intelligible and
natural to them. These words are the secret voice and
sign of Christ to those elect spirits for whom He has
higher work than the highest works of this world.

What, after all, are these words but the expression
of the universal law, that for great effects and great
works a proportionate self-dedication is necessary —
the single eye, the disengaged heart, the direct pur-
pose, the concentrated will, the soul on fire, the mind

64 CHRIST'S WORDS AND CHRISTIAN SOCIETY

set on the invisible and the future, in love with things
great and pure and high. And we shall only think
that the time is over for such a call, if we are satisfied
with what has been and what is. But it is the
peculiarity of the religion of the Bible that, whatever
may be the aspect of the past and the present, in
spite of all glories of what we look back to, and all
discouragements in what we see now, it ever claims
the future for its own. If we have the spirit of our
religion, it is on the future that we must throw
ourselves in hope and purpose. But if we dare to
hope in the future for a greater triumph for
Christianity than the world has ever seen (and why
should we not if we believe our own creed ?) we
shall come to see that the language of the New
Testament has not yet lost its meaning. For the
world is not to be won by anything — by religion,
or empire, or thought — except on those conditions
with which the kingdom of heaven first came. What
conquers must have those who devote themselves to
it ; who prefer it to all other things ; who are proud
to suffer for it; who can bear anything so that it
goes forward. All is gladly given for the pearl of
great price. Life is at once easier in its burdens

II CHRIST'S WORDS AND CHRISTIAN SOCIETY 65

and cheaper in its value with the great end in view.
Such devotion to an object and cause is no unfamiliar
sight in the world which we know. We must not
think it is confined to Christians. We must not
think that Christians only are enamoured with
simplicity of life, with absolute renunciation of wealth
and honour for the sake of a high purpose ; that they
only can persevere, unnoticed and unthanked, in hard,
weary work. The Great Master, who first made men
in earnest about these things, has taught some who
seem not to follow Him. But if Christians are to
hold their place and do His work, they must not
fall behind. They have an example and ideal of
love and sacrifice, to which it is simply unmeaning
to make anything of this world a parallel. Their
horizon is wider than anything here can be. They
have a strength and help which it is overwhelming
to think of and believe. And theirs is the inherit-
ance of those words and counsels by which at first
the world was overcome. If great things are ever
to be done again among us, it must be by men who,
not resting satisfied with the wonderful progress of
Christian society, yet not denying it, not undervaluing
it, much less attempting to thwart it, still feel that

66 CHRIST'S WORDS AND CHRISTIAN SOCIETY n

there is something far beyond what it has reached to,
for our aims and hopes even here. It must be by men
who feel that the severe and awful words of the
New Testament, from which we sometimes shrink,
contain, not in the letter it may be, but in the spirit,
not in a mere outward conformity to them, but in a
harmony of the will, not as formal rules of life, but
as laws of character and choice, — the key to all
triumphs that are to be had in the time to come.
Those who shall catch their meaning most wisely and
most deeply, and who are not afraid of what it in-
volves, will be the masters of the future, will guide
the religion of serious men among those who follow us.
May our Lord give us grace to open our eyes to
the full greatness of His inestimable benefit, and,
each of us according to his own place and order
and day, daily to endeavour ourselves to follow the
blessed steps of His most holy life.

SERMON III

CHRIST'S EXAMPLE
Be ye followers of me, even as I also am of Christ. — 1 Co it. xi. 1.

Once in the course of the world's history we believe
that there has been seen on earth a perfect life. It
was a life not merely to admire, but to follow. It
has been ever since, for the period of man's existence
of which we know most, and during which the race
has made the greatest progress, the acknowledged
human standard ; the example, unapproachable yet
owned to be universally binding, and ever to be
attempted, for those who would fulfil the law of their
nature.

And we have the spirit and principles of that
perfect life made applicable to men in our Lord's
numerous words about human character, behaviour,
and views of life. We have not only the perfect
example ; but we have it declared, in words of equal
authority, why and how it is perfect. Lessons, teach-

68 CHRIST'S EXAMPLE m

ing and enforcing, accompany each incident of our
Lord's ministry; they are drawn together into a
solemn summary in the Sermon on the Mount.
Here we have the highest moral guidance for the
world. It is impossible to conceive any life more
divine than that thus shown us. All the more
amazing is the contrast, when once we master it
in our minds, between what is shown us and the
form in which it is clothed. That inimitable acting
out of perfect goodness speaks in homely and, at
first hearing, commonplace words, without any ap-
parent consciousness of its own greatness, as if it
belonged to the rudest life of the people, and were
something within everybody's reach. It takes no
account of what we pride ourselves upon, as the
finer parts of our nature, our powers of thought,
our imagination, our discrimination of beauty. In
illustration and phrase and argument, it uses nothing
but what is of a piece with the first necessities of
life, with the speech and cares, the associations and
employments of the humblest. That appeal of the
Supreme Goodness for man's allegiance and love was
to what was primary and common and elementary
in his nature. It was far too real to be anything else.

in Christ's example " 69

For that example and law of life were nothing less
than universal. They were meant for all men. Yet,
when we say universal, how are we at once reminded
of the vast and infinite differences among those for
whom there is this one Pattern. For what profound
and broad contrasts divide men from men ; what gulfs
separate one race from another, earlier from later ages,
any one state of thought and social progress from what
went before it and follows it : and, within narrower
limits, what endless variety, baffling all imagination to
follow, of circumstances and fortune, of capacity and
character, of wealth or poverty, of strength or weak-
ness, of inclinations and employments, of a kindly or
an unkindly lot. Yet for all, one life is the guiding
light, and the words which express it speak to all. A
life, the highest conceivable, on almost the lowest con-
ceivable stage, and recorded in the simplest form, with
indifference to all outward accompaniments attractive
whether to the few or to the many, is set before us as
the final and unalterable ideal of human nature, amid
all its continual and astonishing changes. Differing as
widely as men do, Christ calls them all alike to follow
Him : unspeakably great as His example is, it is for
the many and the average as much as for the few ;

70 CHRIST'S EXAMPLE in

homely as is its expression, there is no other lesson for
the deepest and most refined. The least were called
to its high goodness : the greatest had nothing offered
them but its brief-spoken plainness.

This combination, in the most practical and
thoroughly in earnest of all rules of living, that its
pattern is nothing less than the highest, and also
nothing less than universal, is one of the proofs of the
divine character of the Gospel. But no doubt questions
suggest themselves in connection with it, though the
honest and true heart will never find them in its way.
For it may be asked, and is asked, how such an
example can seriously be meant to claim the efforts of
those who make up the great majority, the middle
class in the moral scale, ordinary in character, ordinary
in their views of life ? It is not difficult to under-
stand how it was the rule of saints ; but how was it
to be that of all the world ? How can it fit in with
the infinite differences of tastes, and powers, and work ?
How can it follow the changes of living human
society ? So again, how is it to be a model at once to
the poor and to the rich ? How is the life of the
Great Sufferer and Sacrifice to be the rule for those,
who, though they are serious, religious people, self-

CHRIST S EXAMPLE

disciplined and earnest in doing good, yet live, we
cannot deny it, in comfort and enjoy life ? How does
the morality of the Sermon on the Mount fit in with
and apply to the actual and accepted realities of our
modern social state ? It seems the natural rule for
what used to be called by way of distinction the
" religious life " ; yet is it not also the rule for the
soldier, the trader, the philosopher, for the life of men
of the world ? Is not that example one not merely
for clergymen but for laymen ?

How is it, equally and really, to be the measure
for one and the other ?

Christianity makes itself universal by making its
moral standard, not verbal rules, but a character. It
has often been said that Christian morality is a system
of principles, not of laws ; that its definite rules are
most scanty, that its philosophy of life is of the
simplest and most inartificial. This is so. In it a
law has been exchanged for a character. It professes
to aim at doing without laws, and substituting for
them the study of a living Person, and the following
of a living Mind. " The law is not for a righteous
man." " Be ye perfect, as your Father in heaven is
perfect." More definitely, more plainly within our

72 CHRIST'S EXAMPLE in

comprehension, that character is one who is called in
Scripture, in an incommunicable sense, the Image of
God. In the face of Jesus Christ the glory and the
goodness of God shone with a new light to the
consciences and reason of men. All that He did and
said, the Sermon on the Mount, the Lord's Prayer,
His sentences on men and things and thoughts that
came before Him, formed one whole, were the various
expressions of one mind and character, which was the
reflection of the perfect goodness of the Father. And
that character is the Christian law.

And this is what fits the Christian standard to be
a universal one. Indeed, it is not easy to see how an
example and rule for the world can be, except in the
form of a character. For a character, if it is great
enough, carries its force far beyond the conditions
under which it may have been first disclosed. If
shown under one set of circumstances, its lesson can
be extended to another, perfectly different : a character
is to rules, as the living facts of nature are to the
words by which we represent them. It will bear
being drawn upon for the application of its truth to
new emergencies ; it adapts itself with the freedom
and elasticity of life, which is very different from the

in CHRIST'S EXAMPLE 73

accommodations of theories, to the changes which meet
it. When by thought and sympathy we have entered
into it, we feel that there are still depths beyond, that
we have not exhausted what it has to suggest or teach.
We can follow it on, from the known, to what it would
be, in the new and strange. It unfolds itself in fact ;
and we can conceive its doing so in idea, as things
round it alter. It is not tied to the limitations and
exigencies of its first development : change them, and
its action changes too. We see that Character, in
which we know that we behold perfect goodness, and
which has in fact drawn up the soul of man to heights
unknown before, — we see it, as we see all things here,
only in part. We see it only in a special dispensa-
tion or economy ; acting, speaking, judging, choosing,
only in reference to one particular set of conditions,
according to what the occasion and end called for. It
is the supreme and essential goodness ; but we see it
unfolding itself under the conditions of the supreme
humiliation, meeting the demands on it of what the
humiliation involved, ^tcevaxrev kavrov. He "emptied
himself" indeed. What was the greatest of the
miracles He vouchsafed to us, to that Almighty and
Infinite Power which in His proper nature He was ?

74 CHRIST'S EXAMPLE III

What were the most overwhelming instances of His
love and wisdom which we see, compared with that
inexhaustible wellspring of goodness and truth from
which they flowed forth ? We witnessed that absolute
goodness, as He spoke and acted in the state which
He had chosen for our redemption and restoration ; as
was called for and was fit, under the circumstances in
which our Maker descended to be one of us. But we
know that that perfect goodness does not show itself
only under such conditions ; it shows itself equally in
Christ creating, in Christ reigning, in Christ judging :
and when we raise our thoughts to what He is there,
we know that His goodness must wear an aspect,
which, though essentially the same, would look very
different to us. " Jesus Christ is the same yesterday,
and to-day, and for ever "—the same in glory as in the
form of a servant. But there are other ways in which
His goodness shows itself to those who worship Him
on the throne of nature, besides those in which they
saw it who beheld Him preparing for the Cross. To
us on earth it is revealed in sorrow and sympathy ;
but we know that it must be exhibited too in the
heaven of the divine bliss. The veil has fallen from
Him ; that temporary partial state of circumstances

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75

under which His goodness was shown on earth in that
narrow space of time that He was with us, has passed
away. And the same goodness moves in different
lines, comes with different claims and judgments, now
that, no longer despised and rejected, He has taken
His own place, and has all things for His own.

Still, under conditions utterly changed, His good-
ness is that same very goodness which we saw. And
so we can derive from that Character lessons for our
state, which is so different from His ; and for our
imperfection make His perfection the law. And not
only so, but we can derive lessons from it for conditions
of human life very far removed from those conditions
under which His goodness was manifested to us here.
The interval is indeed great between those conditions
and circumstances, and the state of things amid which
we believe that He has called us to run our course.
We, instead of being the company of poor men, separate
from the world, whom He gathered round Him, and of
whom He was one, belong to a varied society of the
most complicated order. Functions, gifts, vocations,
differ endlessly : we include the extremes of outward
fortune, of place and office, and personal cultivation.
But under all these different conditions, there is, if we

76 CHRIST'S EXAMPLE

hi

know how to find it, the way in which that perfect
goodness would teach us how to feel and how to
behave. Literal imitation may be impossible, but it is
not impossible to catch its spirit and apply its lessons
to altered circumstances. It is true, we have only as
it were part of the curve actually traced for us ; but
the fragment is enough to show him who can learn its
real law what, in spaces far removed, is the true line
and direction of its prolongation. And so the con-
formity to the character of Jesus Christ extends, not
only to a life like His in its lot and duties, but to one
which on earth is called to tasks outwardly as different
as can be conceived. In that character, though shown
to us in the form of servant, we know that everything
is gathered which could make human nature what it
ought to be. That perfect goodness was potentially all
that the sons of men can ever be called to be by the
course of that Providence which appoints their lot and
the order of their life. His example enfolds them all.
It will bear being appealed to for guidance under
whatever different circumstances they are called to live :
they may learn from it, if we may venture so to speak,
how He would have acted in their place, and how He
would have His followers to act.

in CnRIS7^S EXAMPLE 77

1. Consider, for instance, what was the first and
prominent feature of that perfect life as we saw it : it
was, I suppose, the combination in it, most intimate
and never interrupted, of the work of time and human
life with that which is beyond sight and time. It is
vain to try to express in words that of which nothing
but the Gospels open before us can adequately convey
the extent — the impression left on our minds of One
who, all the while that He was on earth, was in heart
and soul and thought undivided for a moment from
heaven. He does what is most human ; but He lives
absolutely in the Divine. However we see Him —
tempted, teaching, healing, comforting hopeless sorrow,
sitting at meat at the wedding or the feast, rebuking
the hypocrites, in the wilderness, in the temple, in the
passover chamber, on the Cross, — He of whom we are
reading is yet all the while that which His own words
can alone express, " even the Son of man which is in
heaven." The Divine presence, the union with the
Father, is about Him always, like the light and air,
ambient, invisible, yet incapable, even in thought, of
being away. And yet, with this perpetual dwelling
and conversing with God, to which it were blasphemy
to compare the highest ascents of the saintliest spirit,

78 CHRIST'S EXAMPLE III

what we actually see is the rude hard work and
the sufferings by which He set up among men the
kingdom of God. What the most devout contemplation,
detached from all earthly things, could never attain to,
was in Him compatible with the details and calls of
the busiest ministry : yet labour and care, and the
ever-thronging society of men, came not for an instant
between Him and the Father ; and even we, with our
dim perception of that Divine mystery, cannot think
of Him without that background of heaven, not seen,
but felt in all that He says or does.

Men have compared the active and the contem-
plative life. And they have compared also the life of
practical beneficence with the life of devotion, of
religious interest and spiritual discipline. We see
great things done without the sense of religion, perhaps
with the feeling towards it of distrust and aversion.
We see the religious spirit sometimes unable to cope
with the real work of life, failing in fruit and practical
direction, failing to command the respect of those who
have other ways of ministering to men's wants. But
in Him, who is onr great Ideal, we have both lives
combined. No recluse conveys so absolutely the idea
of abstraction from the world as our Lord in the thick

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CHRIST'S EXAMPLE 79

of His activity. Than that heavenly-mindedness, it
is impossible to conceive anything more pure and
undisturbed. Than that life of unwearied service, it
is impossible to conceive anything more absolute in
self-sacrifice. Our Lord was the great example of man
working for his fellows ; of a consuming desire to raise
and bless mankind. " The zeal of thine house," as He
says, in the loftiest sense of the words, " hath devoured
Me." But He was also, at the same time and in equal
measure, the proof to the end of time, that the highest
degree of the divine life is not opposed to, but in
natural alliance with, the highest and noblest service
of man. The world had seen instances of human good-
ness cut off, except in the most indirect and precarious
way, from that conscious communion with God which
is religion. It was incomplete and maimed. Morally,
as well as theologically, without faith man cannot, even
as man, be perfect. But when He came, who was to
show mankind a perfect life, there was the great gap
filled up ; there was goodness, the goodness of human
nature, with the part restored which had been wanting
— its link with the Divine ; its consciousness of its
relation to the Father, and capacity for communion
with Him. In Jesus Christ we see man serving to

80 CHRIST'S EXAMPLE in

the utmost his brethren ; but we also see man one
with the thought and will of God.

Here we see how character in itself, irrespective of
circumstance, is adapted to be a guide ; here is an
example, shown under the most exceptional conditions,
yet fit to be universal. Of such a life what truer key
than the words, " Seek ye first the kingdom of God
and His righteousness " ? what more expressive
account than the words, " Ye cannot serve two masters ;
ye cannot serve God and mammon " ? But on what
outward circumstances does such a life depend ? Why
is it not equally to be realised in the calling of the
ruler, the rich man, the student ? How need their
outward conditions affect their relationship to God,
their sense of it, their grasp by faith of what He is
and what they are, and what He has called them to —
the unfolding in their hearts of reverence and devotion
and love; their sense of what their work is for, and what
makes its value ? He whom they worship came in the
deepest poverty, separate from the world and its order ;
and they are at the opposite social extreme, perhaps
born to rule, commanding wealth, endowed with great
faculties. The mind of man cannot, indeed, help
being, as it ought to be, touched with the contrast.

in CHRIST'S EXAMPLE 81

But His example is as full of meaning to them as it
would be if they, like Him, had been born in poverty.
Why should not that combination of union with God
and the utmost activity of all powers of soul and body
go before them, as their guiding light and encourage-
ment, as well as before the priest or the sister of
charity ? How is it less adapted to be the animating
and governing pattern to those in whose hands are the
greatest interests of mankind, and their course and
fate for times to come ? Was not Jesus Christ,
though we saw Him but for a short time in abasement
and poverty, in reality the Lord of all things, and the
Prince of the kings of the earth ?

2. As His life was the pattern for the life of faith,
so it was the great instance of the life of truth. For
to all, quite apart from the accidental conditions of
their state, it shows what alone is real and great in
life. The imitation of Jesus Christ, even in the
highest form in which we can conceive it, must always
be but by way of proportion. When we are called to
be like Him, it is obvious that the impassable distance
between His ends and works and ours, limits the
command. To imitate Christ, being what He was ; to
imitate Him who joined in Himself what He alone

G

82 CHRIST S EXAMPLE III

ever joined ; to imitate Him whose life and work were
absolutely by themselves, both in that part which we
can see, and in that larger part, impossible to be
known by man, of that mystery which oppressed and
baffled the illuminated intellect of St. Paul, — this, even
in idea, eludes the utmost stretch of imagination. We
cannot follow His steps, who for our sakes became
poor that we through His poverty might be rich ; who
died for us, that we might live. Like Him, in what
makes Him the hope of the world, we cannot be : and
any attempted outward conformity of circumstances, or
lot, or discipline, has in it the danger attending every
attempt at what is in the nature of things impossible
— the delusion, of which the extreme instance is the
state of thought represented in the story of the stigmata
of St. Francis.

And yet it is true that in every page of the New
Testament we are called to be like Him ; to be
renewed into His image ; to put on Christ. An
apostle is not afraid to express this conformity by that
very image which we shrink from in the hard literal
form of the middle age legend.1 And how can we be
like the Infinite Being who made and saved and shall

1 2 Cor. iv. 10.

in CHRIST'S EXAMPLE 83

judge mankind, except so far as in our work and life
— whatever it be matters but little — we bear a mind
and spirit proportionate, as He did, to our calling and
our end ? For surely there are ends and purposes in
the life of each of us which are literally as real as the
ends of His life. One is high and another low ; one
has much and another little ; one is born to govern, to
acquire, to call forth new powers in the world of man
or nature ; another to pass his days unknown, to carry
on the detail of necessary labour in his time, to make
no mark and leave no memorial. But to every one
who believes in God and providence, the work of each
is equally real : a call, a commission, a talent, a
stewardship from God ; and who is too high or too
low to say that the inexpressible seriousness and
earnestness of the life described in the New Testament
is not suited to guide him how to think and feel about
his own life ?

For what we see in that life is not only a purpose
and work passing man's understanding, but that
purpose followed and that work done, in a way which
man can understand. It is a life governed by its end
and purpose, in which shows or illusions have no place,
founded on unshrinking, unexaggerated truth, facing

84 CHRIST'S EXAMPLE in

everything as it is without disguise or mistake; and
further, a life in which its purpose is followed with
absolute indifference to whatever sacrifice it may cost.
The Gospels show us One, with the greatest of works
to do, a work so great that it sounds unbecoming to
qualify it with our ordinary words for greatness ; One,
never diverted from His work, never losing its clue,
never impatient, never out of heart, who cries not, nor
strives, nor makes haste ; One, whose eye falls with
sure truth and clear decision on everything in the
many-coloured scene of life ; One, around whom, as He
passes through the world, all things that stir man's
desire and ambition take their real shape and relative
place and final value ; One, to whom nothing of what
we call loss or gain is so much as worth taking account
of, in competition with that for which He lived. He
has put all this into words which mark for ever the
change He made in our views of life — " My meat is to
do the will of Him that sent Me, and to finish His
work ; " "I must work the works of Him that sent Me
while it is day ; " and when all was over, " I have
finished the work that Thou gavest Me to do." Such
a life He generalises in such words as, " What shall a
man give in exchange for his soul ? " in His sayings

in CHRIST'S EXAMPLE 85

about the treasure in heaven, the single eye, the pearl
of great price, the violent taking the kingdom of heaven
by force.

Unless it is all one at last to be a trifler or in
earnest, and unless a high standard of life involves no
more cost or foregoing of what we like than a low one,
that life is the one which all conditions want, and all
may use as their guide. For the great vice of human
nature is slackness about what is good ; not insensi-
bility, not want of admiration, not want of leanings
and sympathies, but feebleness and uncertainty of
will ; that in moral character, which would be repre-
sented in intellectual work by looseness and laziness,
disinclination to close with things, being content with
what is superficial and inexact. Every work and
calling of life has a high side and a low one. In one
extreme difference as in another, down to the smallest
and humblest sphere, the trial of duty and high
purpose is equally real, and it is equally costly.
Bring the Sermon on the Mount into a life of activity
or of riches, that is, of power : is it simply, as it may
seem at first, a discord ? or may not the two, though
so far apart, be made to answer truly to one another,
as the differing parts of a harmony ? What it does

86 CHRIST S EXAMPLE in

is to impose upon riches, or business, or learning, or
art, the severe and high view of life, instead of the
low and self-indulgent one. What it does is to hold
up, in its inexorable claims, the highest end, and to
preach the truth that the greatest liberty is the
greatest trust. Far beyond the limitations of out-
ward circumstances it speaks of an inward foundation
of character, of simplicity, thoroughness, completeness
of the man himself, answering to the facts amid which
he lives and their extreme seriousness ; which, like
the house on the rock, can endure its appointed trials,
and can take care of itself wherever it has to serve
God, in high place or low. The estimate in it of the
value of outward things, its warnings against their
temptations — what are they but the counterpart, in
infinitely more solemn tones, of the voice of all
experience ? The Master of truth and reality, who
passed by these outward things as valueless to Him-
self, surely knew what was in man, when He spoke so
earnestly of their immense and fatal abuse. The
difficulties, so great and so affecting, which they create
in the way of better things, wring from Him, as it
were, cries and bursts of pain — " Many are called but
few are chosen ; " " Strait is the gate and narrow the

in CHRIST'S EXAMPLE £7

way ; " " How hardly shall they that have riches enter
into the kingdom of God." They dictate those prefer-
ences for the hard lot and the bitter side of life, for
mourning, for poverty, for persecution, the blessing on
those of whom men speak ill. Can we say that the
world did not want those plain truths and those sharp
words? But the sacrifices and self-denials of the
Sermon on the Mount are not dependent on outward
conditions. They simply represent the price which
must be paid, in some shape or another, for all true
and pure living. The alternative of loss, of pain, of
being ill thought of, meets from time to time every
one, wherever he is placed, who aims at anything
above the dead level of custom, much more at such a
standard as the Christian. And those higher ends of
life may be the object of deep and fervent effort, where
the eye of the looker-on rests upon what seems too
busy, too exalted, or too humble to be the scene of the
greatest of earthly endeavours, the inward discipline of
the soul. Surely it may be there, where nothing is
the token of its presence ; it may be there, with its
bitter surrenders of will, its keen self-control, its brave
and deliberate welcomings of pain, masked behind the
turmoil of public life or the busy silence of study ; it

CHRIST S EXAMPLE

may be there, stern and high in its choice, stern in its
view of the world, stern in its judgment of itself, stern
in its humility, yet nothing be seen but the per-
formance of the common round of duty, nothing be
shown but the playfulness which seems to sport with

life. j, , .

Se sub serenis vultibus

Austera virtus occulit,

Timens videri, ne suum,

Dum prodit, amittat decus.1

3. The life of faith means the life which comes
nearest to His in never forgetting the unseen Father
in the activities of the present. The life of truth and
purified will means the life which comes nearest to
His in holding fast, amid the infinite and intrusive
shadows which crowd the path of life, the severe
realities of our appointed lot, the unspeakable realities
of our further destiny. But this is not all that that
character invites us to copy. There were those who
had walked with God before He came, though none
ever walked with God as He did. And many had
spoken wonderfully the truths concerning our state,
and even concerning our hopes ; they had sounded
great depths in the sea of wisdom ; they had drawn
the line between what is solid and what is vain in
1 Motto to Froude's Remains.

life ; they had caught firmly and clearly what was
worth living for ; they had measured truly the relative
value of the flesh and the spirit. But none but He
had so combined with the sternest reason the deepest
love. This was what made Him new and without
parallel in the world. It was that, in Him, truth,
duty, religion, ended in love — love inexhaustible, all-
pervading, infinitely varied. With Him, reason did
not, as it so often does with the clearest and ablest of
the sons of man, stop in itself ; it passed over into the
sphere of the affections, and kindled into the manifold
forms in which the play of the living heart shows
itself. Eeason with Him — severe, inexorable reason —
was translated into the diversified and elastic activity
of doing good ; compassionating, making allowances,
condescending, consoling ; healing the sick, casting out
devils ; forgiving sins and cleansing them ; " preaching
the gospel to the poor, binding up the broken-hearted,
preaching deliverance to the captives and recovery of
sight to the blind, setting at liberty them that are
bruised ; " calling the weary and heavy-laden to rest
— to make proof of His " meekness and lowliness," and
take His yoke upon them : laying down His life for
the world.

90 CHRIST'S EXAMPLE in

It is this new commandment, new to the world,
but as old as the eternal Word who brought it, which
turns the Sermon on the Mount from a code of precepts
into the expressions and instances of a character. Its
words do not stand by themselves ; they are not as the
definite commandments of a law ; they cannot be
represented or exhausted by any rules ; they have
their interpretation and their reason in that divine
temper which had come with Jesus Christ to restore
the world. The purity, the humility, the yielding and
forgiving mind, the ungrudging and unflagging good-
ness they speak of, were but some among the
infinitely varied Ways of acting out the meaning of
His last charge — " That ye love one another, as I have
loved you ; " l and of his last prayer — " That the love
wherewith Thou hast loved Me may be in them, and
I in them." 2 His life, and the character revealed in
it, is the interpreter of what He means by love. A
great deal may be said of love without ever really
touching what is its vital essence. But here our
sympathies are appealed to. We see how Jesus Christ
showed what it is to lead a life of love. He showed
how it could be carried out to the uttermost in what

1 St. John xv. 12. 2 Ibid. xvii. 26.

in CHRIST'S EXAMPLE 91

we call an extreme case of our human condition. But,
as it has been said, " glorious in His darknesses," x He
showed that mind and spirit which He had brought
into the world for mankind at large ; for all conditions
in which man is placed; which is not tied to the
circumstances in which it was first disclosed ; which
was something too real, too free, too universal to be
restricted to any outward state ; which was to inspire
and govern character in all forms of the social order ;
fit to be the ruling principle in him who commands
the results and powers of the last stage of civilisation,
as in him whom nothing raises above barbarism but
his Christian love, or in him who parts with society
for the present, to sow seeds from which society shall
be the better in the future.

The mutable shapes of society, unfolded by God's
providence, fix almost without our will our outward
circumstances. But for the soul, wherever it is, Christ
our Lord has one unchanging call, " Be perfect ; " and
He has one unchanging rule for its fulfilment, "Be
what I am, feel what I felt, do as I should do." How
shall we ? How but by looking steadfastly at Him
and trying to see and know Him ? Yet we have to

1 Taylor, Life of Christ, vol. ii. p. 59 ; Heber's ed.

92 CHRIST'S EXAMPLE III

remember that that Divine Character is what it is,
apart from our ways of looking at it ; and that our
ways of looking at it and understanding it depend on
our own characters. We behold Him through the
medium of our own minds and hearts. It holds true,
in the things of the spirit as in those of the imagina-
tive intellect, that " we receive according to what we
give " ; the light, the landscape, the features are the
same, but the eye, the capacity, the knowledge, the
feeling differ. It is but saying that He is shown to
us under the conditions of all human things, to say
that we do not all see Him in the same way. But,
however we may mistake, that Divine manifestation
still remains the same, to teach other and wiser men,
and ourselves if we become wiser ; and however true
our view may be, there is still, beyond what we see
and grasp, more to be known and loved and copied.
We see this in the history of the Church. We talk
indeed with admiration of His being the one standard
to the endlessly differing conditions of society, to rich
and poor, wise and ignorant, strong and weak, the few
and the many ; but what is this to the wonder of His
having been the constant standard to distant and
different ages ? In the same Living Person each age

CHRIST'S EXAMPLE

93

has seen its best idea embodied ; but its idea was not
adequate to the truth — there was something still
beyond. An age of intellectual confusion saw in the
portraiture of Him in the Gospels the ideal of the
great teacher and prophet of human kind, the healer
of human error, in whom were brought together and
harmonised the fractured and divergent truths scattered
throughout all times and among all races. It judged
rightly ; but that was only part. The monastic spirit
saw in it the warrant and suggestion of a life of self-
devoted poverty as the condition of perfection : who
can doubt that there was much to justify it ; who can
doubt that the reality was something far wider than
the purest type of monastic life ? The Eeformation
saw in Him the great improver, the breaker of the
bonds of servitude and custom, the quickener of the
dead letter, the stern rebuker of a religion which had
forgotten its spirit : and doubtless He was all this,
only He was infinitely more. And now in modern
times there is the disposition to dwell on Him as the
ideal exemplar of perfect manhood, great in truth,
great in the power of goodness, great in His justice
and His forbearance, great in using and yet being
above the world, great in infinite love, the opener of

94 CHRIST'S EXAMPLE

men's hearts to one another, the wellspring, never to
be dry, of a new humanity. He is all this, and this
is infinitely precious. We may " glorify Him for it,
and exalt Him as much as we can ; but even yet will
He far exceed."1 That one and the same Form has
borne the eager scrutiny of each anxious and imperfect
age ; and each age has recognised with boundless
sympathy and devotion what it missed in the world ;
and has found in Him what is wanted. Each age has
caught in those august lineaments what most touched
and swayed its heart. And as generations go on and
unfold themselves, they still find that Character answer-
ing to their best thoughts and hopes ; they still find
in it what their predecessors had not seen or cared for ;
they bow down to it as their inimitable pattern, and
draw comfort from a model who was plain enough and
universal enough to be the Master, as of rich and poor,
so of the first century and the last. It has been the
root of all that was great and good in our fathers.
We look forward with hope to its making our children
greater and better still. " Eegnum tuum regnum
omnium saeculorum ; et dominatio tua in omni
generatione et generationem." 2

1 Ecclus. xliii. 30. 2 Ps. cxliv. 13.

in CHRIST'S EXAMPLE 95

"What is the lesson ? Surely this : to remember
when we talk of the example of Christ, that the inter-
pretations and readings of it are all short of the thing
itself; and that we possess, to see and to learn from,
the thing itself. We should be foolish and wrong to
think ourselves above learning from all that wise and
holy men have seen in it. But the thing itself, the
Divine Eeality, is apart from, and is ever greater than,
what the greatest have thought of it and said of it.
There it is in itself, in its authentic record, for us to
contemplate and search into, and appropriate, and adore.
Let us not be satisfied with seeing it through the eyes
of others. Mindful how we ought to look at it —
remembering what, after all, have not ceased to be
the unalterable conditions of knowing truth, — purity,
humility, honesty, — let us seek to know Him directly
more and more, as He is in the New Testament ; as
those saw Him, whose souls took the immediate im-
pression of His presence and His Spirit. So does the
Apostle describe the progress of the great transformation,
by which men grow to be like their Lord and their God.
" But we all, with open face, beholding as in a glass the
glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image,
from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord."

SEKMON IV

CIVILISATION AND RELIGION

Ye are the salt of the earth : but if the salt have lost his savour, where-
with shall it be salted ? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be
cast out, and to be trodden underfoot of men. Ye are the light of
the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid. . . . Let
your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works,
and glorify your Father which is in heaven. — St. Matt. v. 13,
14, 16.

One of the purposes for which our Lord instituted the
Christian Church was that it might exercise a distinct
moral influence on the society round it. Separate in
idea from the world, and at first separate from it in a
great measure in fact, it was to be in the world, to
touch the world, and to make great changes in it ; to
attract, and win, and renew. It was to be a principle
of health and freshness, the antagonist of corruption
and decay. And it was to work, not at a distance,
but by contact, by subtle and insensible forces, which
combined with what they acted on and modified.
" The kingdom of heaven was to be like unto leaven,

iv CIVILISATION AND RELIGION 97

which a woman took and hid in three measures of
meal, till the whole was leavened." In that great dis-
course with which the Gospel teaching opens, the first
thing is the character of the children of the kingdom,
the second their relation to the world around them.
After the Beatitudes comes, thus early, long before the
disciples were an organised body, or were yet fitted for
the greatness of what they were to be, the picture of
their office to society, in its two powers of purification
and light, and with its attendant responsibility, answer-
ing to its greatness. For it was in no partial or tem-
porary sphere that they were to affect mankind. " Ye
are the salt of the earth," says their Master. And
then, investing them with one of the most transcendent
of His own titles, before He had yet claimed it Himself,
— " Ye are the light of the world." It is simply a
fact of history that Christianity and the Christian
Church have exerted on human society a moral influ-
ence which justifies the figures by which it was de-
scribed— an influence more profound, more extensive,
more enduring, and more eventful than any that the
world has seen.

But there has always been a tendency in society in
its higher forms to produce, apparently by its own

H

CIVILISATION AND RELIGION

forces, some degree, at least, of that moral improve-
ment and rise which the religious principle has pro-
duced. It is this rise and growth of moral standard
and effort, this aim and attempt at higher things in
life, and not merely in the instruments and appliances
of life, which enters as the essential element into the
true notion of civilisation, and alone deserves the name.
Civilisation cannot be said to be the same thing as
the influence of Christianity, or to be purely a result
derived from it ; for these tendencies to moral improve-
ment existed before Christianity, and showed them-
selves by unequivocal signs, however much they were
thwarted, neutralised, or at last destroyed. There are
certain great virtues which social life loudly calls for,
and tends to foster ; which as thought grows and
purposes widen, are felt more clearly to be the true
and imperative conditions of all human action. Civil-
isation, whether or not it presupposes and assists in
keeping in view another life, arranges primarily and
directly for this one ; and these virtues it produces in
increasing force and perfection, as its fruit and test.
It is no disparagement to that which we believe to be
as infinitely greater than civilisation as the future
destiny of man is greater than his present state, to

iv CIVILISATION AND RELIGION 99

acknowledge gladly that these beneficial tendencies
were originally implanted in society by the author of
society. But the effect has been, that alongside of the
influence of Christianity has grown up another influ-
ence, not independent of it, yet not identical with it ;
owing much — it would be bold to limit how much —
to Christianity, yet having roots of its own ; not in its
own nature hostile to religion, yet moving on a sepa-
rate line ; sometimes wearing the guise of a rival,
sometimes of a suspicions and uncongenial associate,
with diverging aims and incommensurate views ; but
always, even when most friendly, with principles and
methods of its own. It has many names, and perhaps
none of them happy ones ; but it is that power, distinct
from religion, however much it may be affected by it,
which shapes our polity, and makes our laws, and rules
in our tribunals, and sets the standard in literature,
and impregnates our whole social atmosphere. In our
days we seem to witness a great triumph of this influ-
ence. Many of the characteristic phenomena of our
time seem to point to great and salutary results, brought
about without calling on the religious principle. Most
of us, I suppose, have our reserves about our actual
civilisation ; most of us, I should think, must have

ioo CIVILISATION AND RELIGION iv

our misgivings and anxieties ; but it seems beyond
dispute that where we see justice, honesty, humanity,
honour, the love of truth, and that moderation in word
and act which is so akin to truth — where we see
these things aimed at with no unsuccessful efforts, and,
in spite of infinite failure and alloy, taking stronger
hold on society, we see what we ought to welcome and
be thankful for ; and it seems also beyond dispute that
this kind of improvement goes on, and goes on with
vigour, where it is often difficult to trace the influence
of religion, and supports itself, as far as can be seen,
independently of that influence, and without reference
to its claims.

Accordingly, it may be said, and certainly is
sometimes thought, that civilisation does all that
Christianity claims to do. It is suggested or an-
nounced that society has outgrown Christianity ; that
whatever benefits it once derived from Christian ideas
and motives it needs no longer ; that even if it
learned its lessons from Christianity, yet now it is
able to walk alone, to judge and deal without its
teacher ; that there is nothing left for the Church
to do, as a moral influence on society, but what can
be as well or better done by other influences, not

iv CIVILISATION AND RELIGION 101

holding of religion, or, at any rate, of definite
Christianity. The virtues which men want will now
grow on their own roots ; civilisation is become strong
enough to maintain itself, and to provide in the
healthiest way for the perfection of human character.
It is a claim, as we know, which excites equally
hopes and fears ; hopes and fears often, surely, far in
excess of their grounds. This claim is sometimes met by
the assertion that civilisation, as such, cannot do with-
out Christianity ; that owing so much to Christianity,
it would ultimately lose, if parted from Christianity,
even the virtues of its own proper sphere. It is
likely. But forecasts of this sort are hazardous ; and
I am not so sure of this, as that I should like to
venture on it the claim of Christianity to the con-
tinued allegiance of the world. Certainly the highest
and most varied civilisation that men have ever
known has not come into being without Christianity.
But what it might do, when once started, is another
matter. I think it is possible that very excellent
things, planted in the first instance by Christianity,
may yet thrive and grow strong, where there is little
reference to their historical origin. Still less does it
seem wise or right to rest on extreme and one-sided

102 CIVILISA TION AND RELIGION iv

statements of effects and tendencies, such as it is easy
enough to make, either way ; denunciations of what we
fear, panegyrics of what we value. Alas ! we have
had too much experience of such expedients, and paid
dearly for their hollowness. Let us keep from these
rash contrasts, these rash disparagements, which
provoke overwhelming rejoinders ; rejoinders which
derive their power, not from their intrinsic force and
reason, but from their rhetorical truth and justice, as
answers to exaggeration and over-statement. It is
enough to say that there are things of the deepest
import to man and society which civilisation does not
pretend to give, and which nothing can give but
Christianity. Admit that society has learned a great
deal ; that, apart from the direct impulse of religion, it
does a number of things well ; that, independently
of religion, there are reasons and motives for high
morality which are listened to and act powerfully :
but when all is admitted, we are a long way from the
conclusion that Christianity has nothing more to do,
and that its significance and interest are over. Put
the improvement of society and its hopeful prospects
at the highest. Assume, as it is most reasonable, that
it is according to the order of Him who is Lord of

iv CIVILISATION AND RELIGION 103

the Ages, that truth and humanity and justice should
grow and increase, even where His direct influence is
unrecognised or unfelt. Yet that is not all that He
came to claim of man and society, nor all that man is
capable of being made. The Church is His witness
to something more, even when courts and parliaments
have learned to deal justly, rulers to govern in equity,
men in general to be considerate and sincere, thinkers
to value and toil for truth.

It would, indeed, be either very shallow or very
faint-hearted — a great mistake, whoever makes it,
whether from premature confidence in civilisation, or
from short-sighted fears for religion — to think that as
civilisation increases in vigour and range, and its
inevitable consequences show themselves, it must
displace Christianity, and narrow its influence. It is
conceivable that the changes which are going on may
make the work of the Church more difficult : no doubt
all changes have this, that they make some things
difficult which were not so before. But things change
for the easier as well as for the harder. We all of us
have the benefit of the one law of change, as well as
have to accept the necessities of the other. It is
possible that mere civilisation may more and more do

104 CIVILISATION AND RELIGION iv

many things which in past times Christianity did;
that it may assert its independence ; that it may take
things out of the hands of religion, which have hitherto
been under its government. This may alter the form
and direction of the work of religion ; but it need not
cripple it, as it certainly cannot exhaust its purpose
and scope. Before now, civilisation, while raising the
most formidable obstacles to Christianity, had already
removed others as serious, and in almost equal degree
made its way easier. Why should we not still look
upon the civilisation of Christendom, as we are
accustomed to look upon the civilisation of Heathenism,
which we know to have been as much the minister as
the antagonist of the Gospel conquest ? Why should
we not be thankful that if it raises dangerous
pretensions, it has broken up for us all much rugged
soil, and tamed many of the old brutalities of man ?
Why should we be niggardly in confessing what it has
done to our hands, in refining, ordering, calming ?
Ought we not to see in its conquests the opening of a
new world to the inexhaustible energies and hopes of
faith, — a new world, with its new dangers and troubles,
but not without abundance to outweigh and reward
them ? As civilisation increases, makes things easier,

iv CIVILISATION AND RELIGION 105

does many things of its own accord that religion used
to teach it, so the work of the Church is not superseded
by all this : its sphere is widened ; its tasks, it may
well be, are increased ; there is more to do, and
perhaps some of the old facilities are removed ; but
others come in their place. If any of its old work is
done to its hand, it is so far put more forward for
higher functions ; it may have to do different things
and in a different way : but certainly its room is not
occupied. If ever the Church was the salt of the earth,
the light of the world, the leaven of society, there is
just as much place for it to be so still. The world still
wants it ; and it only can supply the want. Civilised
society can do many things for itself which it could
not do once ; but there is much which it is not in the
nature of things that it can do. Civilisation is the
wisdom and the wit of this world ; and its office is for
this world. If it makes the best of this world, in the
highest sense of the word, this is the utmost it can do.
Beyond the present — and I include in this the futurity,
as far as we can conceive it, of our condition here — it
does not pretend to go. And when the perfection of
our present state is arrived at, even if we could imagine
the law of our intellectual and moral and civil perfec-

106 CIVILISATION AND RELIGION iv

tion carried out far beyond what we have reached to
yet, there would still remain something more. " Man,"
says Hooker, " doth not seem to rest satisfied, either
with fruition of that wherewith his life is preserved,
or with performance of such actions as advance him
most deservedly in estimation ; but doth further covet,
yea, oftentimes manifestly pursue with great sedulity
and earnestness, that which cannot stand him in any
stead for vital use ; that which exceedeth the reach of
sense ; yea, somewhat above capacity of reason, some-
what divine and heavenly, which with hidden exulta-
tion it rather surmiseth than conceiveth ; somewhat
it seeketh, and what that is directly it knoweth not,
yet very intentive desire thereof doth so incite it, that
all other known delights and pleasures are laid aside,
they give place to the search of this but only suspected
desire. If the soul of man did serve only to give him
being in this life, then things appertaining unto this
life would content him, as we see they do other crea-
tures. . . . But with us it is otherwise. For although
the beauties, riches, honours, sciences, virtues, and
perfections of all men living were in the present pos-
session of one, yet somewhat beyond and above all this
there would still be sought and earnestly thirsted for."

iv CIVILISATION AND RELIGION 107

In speaking of what Christianity has yet to do in
civilised society, where high moral ideas have estab-
lished themselves and bear fruit, I do not now refer
to what is of course at the bottom of all that it does
— of that assumed foundation of fact and creed (with-
out which Christianity is nothing), by which we believe
and declare what God has done for the recovery of
man, and which, whether in sight or only in the back-
ground, makes all the difference, as to the influence
under which we live. I am not speaking of the ex-
ample held up in making the great venture (for such
it must be) that faith makes, as to what has been and
what is to be ; nor of the effects on men of such awful
truths as those of which Christianity is the message,
the truths connected with what we are at this season
specially % thinking of, the only truths that can bring-
light to pain and sorrow and ill-success, that conquer
death, that can take the sting out of the irrevocable
record of sin. These, it is plain, are what they are,
whatever civilisation may come to. I am on much
lower and narrower ground. I am quite aware that
even that is too large for me here. We all know how
hard it is to draw broad outlines, at once adequate and
exact ; how, in general statements, qualifications and

108 CIVILISATION AND RELIGION iv

exceptions start up at every step, which need to be
kept in view and allowed for ; and broad outlines are
all that are attempted now. Yet I will venture to
notice generally one or two points which seem to me
to open serious reflections ; points in which any of
us may see that Christianity is still wanted as the
" salt " and " light " of society ; points of great import-
ance ; points in which I cannot see that civilisation
has anything to take the place of what Christianity
does, or can pretend to make up for it, if it is away.
I shall be only recalling familiar thoughts. But even
very familiar thoughts may be worth recalling ; and it
is part of the business of this place to recall them.

1. We are in danger, even in the highest condition
of civilisation, from the narrowing of man's horizon,
and we need a protection against it which civilisation
cannot give. I call a narrowing of man's horizon
whatever tends to put or drop out of sight the supreme
value of the spiritual part of man, to cloud the thought
of God in relation to it, or to obscure the proportion
between what is and what we look forward to, — the
temporary and provisional character of the utmost we
see here. To have fought against and triumphed over
this tendency is the great achievement of Christianity.

iv CIVILISATION AND RELIGION 109

We hardly have the measure to estimate the great-
ness of it ; of having kept alive, through such centuries
as society has traversed, the faith, the pure and strong
faith, in man's divine relationship : of having been
able to withstand the constant enormous pressure of
what was daily seen and felt ; not only of the solemn
unbroken order of the natural world, but of the clogs
and fetters of custom, of the maxims taken for granted
in the intercourse of life, of the wearing down, the
levelling of high thought and purpose which is always
going on in society ; of the perpetual recurrence,
with the tides and weather, of the same story of pro-
mise and disappointment, of far-reaching attempts
and poor success ; of evil in high places ; of the noble
mingled with the vile ; of good ever tending either to
extravagance or decay ; of character in men or bodies
of men insensibly deteriorating and falling away from
its standard ; of wisdom hardly won and wasted ; of
great steps taken and thrown away ; of the old
faults obstinately repeated in the face of ever-accumu-
lating experience ; of the bewildering spectacle of vice
beyond hope and without remedy ; of the monotonous
dead level of the masses of mankind. For a religion
to have been proof against all this, — still, through it

no CIVILISATION AND RELIGION iv

all, to have preserved itself the same and unworn out,
and still to be able to make men hold fast by faith
and hope in the invisible, is, among the wonders of
human history, one of the greatest and most impres-
sive.

But the pressure is still going on ; and to yield
to it, and let that faith and hope pass from the
common heritage, would be a disaster for which
nothing conceivable could make up. There is still
the weight of all we see and are accustomed to,
making it unnatural to us to trust our spiritual
ideas, calling for a strong effort to resist the spells
of imagination, and to grasp as real the convictions
of reason about what we can never hope to see or
test. There is still the inevitable temptation to
make our experience — our one-sided experience, and
accidental habits of thought — the measure of what
is possible, the measure of the Eternal Laws of the
Most High. Against this weight and pressure of
the actual, the customary, the natural, civilisation,
by itself, is not able to help us. For its main work
and claim is to regulate this present scene. This
is its confessed province ; here is its glory and
triumph. I am not forgetting the value of whatever

CIVILISA TION AND RELIGION

strengthens character and refines thought. I do not
forget the enlargement of even religious ideas as
knowledge widens. I, for one, hope never to speak
but with respect and the deepest thankfulness of that
dispensation of order and light — no doubt with much
of evil and danger, yet fruitful of blessings and bright
with hope — under which God has appointed us at
this day to live. But civilisation in its professed
aim is content with the present ; and they whom it
monopolises will be content with it too. In its
highest forms, it is of the earth, earthy; mistress
and minister of the truths and marvels of this earth,
but, like this earth, only to last its time and pass
away. And yet, there is " the natural," and there is
" the spiritual " ; the First Man and the Second ; the
two ideals, man made for this life, and " the Lord
from heaven." Against the tendency to look at
everything from its own point of view it cannot
protect us ; and to confine ourselves to its point of
view is to lose sight of all that is highest in man's
reason, all that is noblest in man's hope. Every
occupation, every province of human interest, has its
special temptations to narrowness of view and short-
ness of thought. We are all accustomed to be told

ii2 CIVILISATION AND RELIGION iv

this about theology ; and who can doubt its truth ?
But just as true is it that the same vice infests as
deeply the generalisations of the philosopher and the
judgments of the statesman. There are worthier and
wider thoughts of God, the soul, man's calling and
purpose, in the Psalms, than often under the highest
light of modern culture ; it could not produce them,
and sometimes hardly understands them. To pass to
them from many a famous book of modern specula-
tion, is like passing into the presence of the mountains
and the waters and the midnight stars, from the
brilliant conversation of one of our great capitals.
There is no narrowing so deadly as the narrowing
of man's horizon of spiritual things ; no worse evil
could befall him in his course here than to lose sight
of heaven. And it is not civilisation that can pre-
vent this ; it is not civilisation which can compensate
for it. No widening of science, no conquest, — I say
not, over nature and ignorance, but over wrong and
selfishness in society, — no possession of abstract truth,
can indemnify us for an enfeebled hold on the highest
and central truths of humanity. " What shall a man
give in exchange for his soul ? " — the soul which feels
itself accountable, that owns sin and aspires after

iv CIVILISATION AND RELIGION 113

goodness, which can love and worship God and hope
for immortality ; the soul which can rejoice with
trembling in God's grace, and dare to look forward
to be like Him. What is it which keeps alive this
estimate of man's soul but that unearthly power
which first proclaimed it to mankind ?

2. Once more : we think much of purity, with
all its consequences ; that idea and family of thoughts,
which is perhaps the most characteristic distinction
between the old world of morality and feeling and
the new ; that idea, which, in its essential nature,
apart from political necessities, or ceremonial restric-
tions, or social expediencies or tastes, we owe absolutely
to the religion of the Bible ; which had its birth for
us in that wonderful mixture of severity with tender-
ness, of inexorable and exacting holiness with boundless
pity for the sinner, tolerance for the weak, and welcome
for the penitent, which marked the Son of man ; that
most mysterious of the virtues, as its opposite is the
most mysterious of the sins, which we have not yet
found the way to talk much about, without danger to
that which we most wish to guard. It is the flower
of the Christian graces : witnessed by the care with
which it has been fostered from the first ; witnessed,

I

ii4 CIVILISATION AND RELIGION iv

alas ! in other and sadder ways, in the mistaken and
wild expedients to cherish it, in the monstrous
machinery brought into action to make up for the
sluggishness or perversions of conscience, in the very
magnitude of the scandals and shame inflicted on the
Church, when the avowed ideal has cast a deeper
shade on the bad and apostate life. The Christian
idea of purity has still a hold on our society, im-
perfectly enough ; but who can tell what it contributes
to the peace, and grace, and charm, of what is so
large a part of our earthly happiness ? Can we ask
a more anxious question than whether this hold will
continue ? No one can help seeing, I think, many
ugly symptoms ; the language of revolt is hardly
muttered ; the ideas of purity which we have inherited
and thought sacred are boldly made the note and
reproach of "the Christians." And — vital question
as it is, one which, if solved in the wrong way, must,
it is evident, in the long run be ruinous to society —
yet there is no point of morality on which it is easier
to sophisticate and confuse, easier to raise doubts of
which it is hard to find the bottom, or to make re-
straints seem the unwarrantable bonds of convention
and caprice. It is eminently one of those things,

I v CI VI LISA TION AND RELIGION 1 1 5

as to which we feel it to be absolutely the law of
our being as long as we obey, but lose the feeling
when we do not obey. Civilisation in this matter
is by itself but a precarious safeguard for very sacred
interests. By itself, it throws itself upon nature, and
in some of its leading and most powerful represent-
atives, looks back to paganism. It goes along with
Christianity as to justice and humanity ; but in the
interest of. individual liberty it parts company here.
What trenches on and endangers ideas of purity, it
may disapprove, but it declines to condemn or brand.
At least, it does not condemn, it does not affect to
condemn, in the sense in which religion condemns ;
in the sense in which, with religion, it condemns
injustice, cruelty, and falsehood. It is too much to
hope that civilisation by itself will adopt and protect
these ideas. And the passions which assail them are
not among those which wear out with civilisation
and tend to extinction ; they are constant forces, and
as powerful as they are constant. Argument is
hardly a match for them. They are only to be
matched successfully by a rival idea, a rival fire, the
strength of a rival spring of feeling with its attrac-
tions and antipathies, a living law and instinct of

1 1 6 CI VI LISA TION AND RELIGION i v

the soul. Civilisation supplies none such but what
it owes to Christianity. Purity is one of those things
which Christian ideas and influences produced ; it is
a thing which they alone can save.

Here seem to be two points in which civilisation
by itself cannot guarantee us from great loss ; instances
in which is manifest the need for a " salt," a " light "
of the world, higher than what anything of this world
can give. If there are great functions which civilised
society takes over from the Church, there are others
which none but the Church can discharge; which,
without the Church, are lost to mankind. And, at
the same time, there is no reason why, if ever the
Church discharged them, it should not now. Here is
our hope and our responsibility. When we talk of the
influences of Christianity on society, we use large and
vague words, which we are not perhaps always able
to explain and develop ; but there is one form and
element of this influence which is not too subtle and
fugitive for us to grasp. The influence of a system is
brought to a point in the personal influence of indi-
viduals. It is not by any means the whole, or perhaps
the greatest part of that influence ; but it is the most
definite and appreciable part. When men live as they

i v CI VI LIS A TION AND RELIGION 1 1 7

think, and translate ideas into realities, they make an
impression corresponding to the greatness of the ideas,
and the faithfulness and intensity of their embodi-
ment in life. " Ye are the salt of the earth ; " " Ye are
the light of the world ; " so it was said at first, so it is
now. Truth, incorporate in human character, allying
itself with human feeling and human self - devotion,
acting in human efforts, is what gains mankind. In
the great, movements of the past, and in what is
around us now, we are often baffled when we attempt
to compare and distinguish, amidst the vast play of
forces. But when the course of things has been
turned, whatever is intricate and confused, we can
seldom miss the men who, by what they were, turned
it ; indeed it is almost appalling to observe how it has
often hung on the apparent accident of a stronger
character or a weaker, one equal to the occasion or
unequal to it, on some great unfaithfulness which lost
the game, or some energetic conviction which won it,
whether some vast change should be or not. When
everything has been in favour of a cause — reason,
truth, human happiness — only dearth of character has
ruined it. There are many things which we have not
in our hands ; what we have is this, whether we will

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act out pur belief. Our heart sometimes fails us when
we contemplate the new world of civilisation and
discovery. What are we to do against the advancing
tide of what seems to us unfriendly thought, so
impetuous, yet so steady and so wide ? There are
reasons for looking forward to the future with solemn
awe. No doubt signs are about us which mean some-
thing which we dare scarcely breathe. The centre of
gravity, so to speak, of religious questions has become
altogether shifted and displaced. Anchors are lifting
everywhere, and men are committing themselves to
what they may meet with on the sea. But awe is
neither despair nor fear ; and Christians have had bad
days before. Passi graviora. A faith which has come
out alive from the darkness of the tenth century, the
immeasurable corruption of the fifteenth, the religious
policy of the sixteenth, and the philosophy, comment-
ing on the morals, of the eighteenth, may face without
shrinking even the subtler perils of our own. Only
let us bear in mind that it is not an abstraction, a
system, or an idea, which has to face them ; it is we
who believe. The influence of the Church on society
means, in its ultimate shape, the influence of those
who compose it. The Christian Church is to be the

iv CIVILISATION AND RELIGION 119

salt of the nations, if Christians are true to their
belief and equal to their claim ; nothing can make it
so, nothing can secure that what has been, shall be, if
they are not. And so we are brought back to the
secret which our Lord's words intimate ; the great
secret of personal influence ; the key of great move-
ments ; the soul of all that is deep and powerful, both
in what lasts and in what makes change. It is of
infinitely less consequence what others are and do
against us, and what we do to resist and defeat them,
and what we are as Christians ourselves. We ask a
great thing, when we talk of influencing the world ; let
us believe that it imposes obligation, and must have
its cost. Our Master's sentence, " Ye are the salt of
the earth ; ye are the light of the world," has been
before now the bitterest of sarcasms, the deepest "of
shames. The wrath and scorn of men have trodden
under foot, as He said, the salt that had lost its
savour ; and when the light became darkness, it has
been darkness indeed. May we try so to live, that
these words may not ring in our ears and thoughts as
a mockery, or, what is worse, a hollow, self-complacent
boast. Let us hear in them our Lord's claim on us.
How each generation fulfils this call can never be

120 CIVILISATION AND RELIGION iv

known to itself; it must be left to the judgment of
posterity and the account of the Great Day. But we
have in them the announcement that to the personal
influence of Christians our Lord commits His cause ;
in personal influence His Church was founded, and by
this it was to stand. May we never _ forget, amidst
the contests and searchings of heart round us, that
these words are the measure of what we were meant
to be ; the standard by Which we shall all be tried.

CIVILISATION
BEFORE AND AFTER CHRISTIANITY

TWO LECTURES
DELIVERED IN ST. PAUL'S CATHEDRAL

AT THE

TUESDAY EVENING SERVICES
January 23 and 30, 1872

PEEFACE

The two following Lectures are part of an unfinished series

which was begun in St. Paul's on Tuesday evenings during the

winter of 1871-72, and which the preparations in the Cathedral

for the Queen's visit to return thanks for the recovery of the

Prince of Wales made it necessary to discontinue. The Lectures

were an experiment, arising out of the desire of the Chapter to

make the Cathedral of service to the large body of intelligent

young men who follow their business around it, by treating, in

a spirit not unbecoming the place and its purpose, subjects of

interest and importance which are often assumed to be out of

place in the pulpit. I have reprinted these two Lectures as a

remembrance of an occasion of great interest to us at St. Paul's,

and as being in some degree connected with the subjects of the

preceding sermons.

E. W. C

LECTURE I

ROMAN CIVILISATION

I propose to bring before your thoughts, in fulfilment
of my part in this series of lectures, the subject of
Civilisation — first, as it was, in probably its highest
form before Christian times, in the Eoman State ; and
next, as it has been since Christianity has influenced
the course of history and the conditions of human life.
In doing this, I have to remember several things. I
have to remember the vastness of the field before us,
the huge mass of materials, the number, difficulty, and
importance of the questions which arise out of the
subject, or hang on it. I have to remember that
civilisation is a thing of more or less, and that general
statements about it are ever liable to be misunderstood
or excepted to, because the speaker is thinking of one
phase or degree of it, and the listener and critic is
thinking of another. One may have his thoughts full
of its triumphs, and the other of its failures and

126 ROMAN CIVILISATION 1

shameful blots. I have to remember that it is a
subject which has tasked the powers and filled the
volumes of learned, able, and copious writers — Mont-
esquieu, Guizot, Buckle, to name only these, who have
made it their special theme — and that they have left
much unsaid, much unsettled, about it. And I have to
remember that I have only two short lectures — circum-
stances have made this necessary — to say what I can
say about it. Perhaps for what I have to say it is
enough. But, with such a subject, I should gladly have
had more time both for preparation and for discourse.
We who pursue our business in this great city, we
who come to hear or to worship in this great cathedral,
have continually before our eyes, in some of its most
striking and characteristic forms, a very complex but
very distinctive fact in the conditions of human exist-
ence— the vast complex fact to which we give the
name of civilisation. It is, we all know, a vague and
elastic word, and I am not going to be so venturous as
here to analyse it and define even its outlines ; but it
expresses a substantial idea, it marks a real difference
in what men are and can be ; and if loose and idle
thinkers throw it about as if it was a glittering
counter, it is so real, and so important in its meaning,

I ROMAN CIVILISATION 127

that the most accurate ones cannot dispense with the use
of it. The distinction between man in the barbarian
state, and man in the state of civil life and civil society,
is no imaginary one, though civilised life may be pene-
trated and disgraced with elements of barbarism, and
gleams of civilisation may be discerned far back in terms
which are rightly called barbarous. A cloudy sky and a
bright sky are different things, though one may be bright-
ening and the other darkening, into its opposite ; though
there may be uncertainty about their confines ; though
clouds may be prominent in the clear, and though there
be light breaking through the dulness and gloom. Civil-
isation is a sufficiently definite and a sufficiently interest-
ing thing to speak about, even though we find, as we
must if we think at all, how much of the subject eludes
our grasp, and how idle it is, on an occasion like the
present, to attempt to work upon it, except in the way
of rough and imperfect sketching.

I include under the word Civilisation all that man does,
all that he discovers, all that he becomes, to fit himself
most suitably for the life in which he finds himself here.
It is obviously possible, for the fact stares us in the face,
now as at all times, that this moral being, endowed with
conscience and yearning after good, whom we believe to

128 ROMAN CIVILISATION iv

be here only in an early and most imperfect stage of his
existence, may yet live, and feel, and act, as if all that
he was made for was completed here. He may also,
with the full assurance of immortality, yet see, in this
present state, a scene and stage of real life, in which that
life is intended to be developed to the full perfection of
which it is capable ;— a scene, intended, though tem-
porary only, and only a training place, to call forth his
serious and unsparing efforts after improvement ; just
as at a school, in playtime as well as in work, we
expect as much thought, as much purpose, as much
effort, proportionate of course to the time, as we expect
in grown-up life. There is, I need not say, a further
question — whether this life can become all that it is
capable of becoming, without reference to something
beyond and above it : that, of course, is the question
of questions of all ages, and emphatically of our own.
But into that I am not now entering. All that I
want to insist upon, is that there is such a thing as
making this present life as perfect as it can be made
for its own sake ; improving, inventing, adjusting,
correcting, strictly examining into detail, sowing seeds
and launching deeply-laid plans of policy, facing the
present and realising the future, for the sake of what

I ROMAN CIVILISATION 129

happens and must happen in time, under the known
conditions of our experience here. To all such
attempts to raise the level of human life, to all such
endeavours to expand human capacity and elevate
human character, to all that has in view the bettering
of our social conditions, in all the manifold forms and
diversified relations of the society in which we grow
up and live, till our senses come to an end in death ;
to all that. in the sphere, which is bounded to our eyes
by the grave, tends to make life more beautiful, more
reasonable, more pure, more rich both in achievement
and felicity, up to the point when pain, and sorrow,
and death claim their dread rights over it, and that
even in the presence of pain and death, imparts to life
dignity, self-command, nobleness — to all this I should
give the name of civilisation.

I do not, therefore, take civilisation to consist in
the mere development, and extension, and perfection,
either of the intellectual faculties, or of the arts which
minister to the uses and conveniences, or even the
embellishment of life. The intellectual faculties, some
of them at least, may be strong and keen in what I
should still call a low stage of civilisation, as hitherto
in India. I cannot call the stage to which man has

K

1 3o ROMAN CIVILISATION I

reached in Egypt, in China, or Japan, a high one,
though there he has been singularly ingenious, singularly
industrious, and in many ways eminently successful in
bringing nature under his control. The fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries in Italy were brilliant centuries ;
they witnessed a burst of genius in art which was
absolutely without its match. It was civilisation, I
cannot deny it. But I cannot call that other than a
corrupt and base one, of which the theory was
expounded, with infinite ability, by Machiavelli, and
the history told by Guicciardini. I do not call it a
true civilisation, where men do not attempt to dis-
charge their duties as men in society. Not even the
presence of Leonardo, Michel Angelo, and Eaffaelle
can persuade me to rank it high, as a form of civilisa-
tion, in which life, amid all its splendours, was so pre-
carious and so misguided, in which all the relations
and rights of society were so frightfully confused, and
in which the powers of government were systematically
carried on by unlimited perfidy, by the poison bowl
and the dagger. I should not consent to call the rail-
way, or -the telegraph, or even the newspaper of our
own age, a final test of civilisation, till I knew better
how the facilities of intercourse were employed, — what

I ROMAN CIVILISATION 131

was flashed along the wires or written in the columns ;
nor, again, the wonderful and intricate machinery of
our manufactures and trade, till I knew how the wealth
produced by it was used. Civilisation, the form, as
perfect as man can make it, of his life here, needs
these appliances, welcomes them, multiplies them ;
man needs all the powers that he can get for help, for
remedy, for the elevation of his state. But the true
subject of. civilisation is the man himself, and not the
circumstances, the instruments, the inventions round
him. " A man's life consisteth not in the abundance
of the things which he possesseth." The degree
of civilisation in a society, high or low, rising or
going back, depends, it seems to me, on the actual
facts of civil life, political, social, domestic, not on the
machinery of outward things of which men can dispose ;
on what men try to be one to another ; on what they
try to make of themselves, not of their goods and
powers ; on the words which they speak, really speak
from their hearts, not imitate or feign ; on the indica-
tions of will and purpose, of habits of life, of self-govern-
ment or indulgence — in a word, of character. The
degree of civilisation depends a great deal more on
whether they are manly, honest just, public-spirited,

i32 ROMAN CIVILISATION 1

generous, able to work together in life, than on whether
they are rich, or hardworking, or cunning of hand, or
subtle of thought, or delicate of taste, or keen searchers
into nature and discoverers of its secrets. All these
things are sure to belong to civilisation as it advances ;
and as it advances it needs them, and can turn them
to account, more and more. All I say is, that they
are not civilisation itself, as I understand it.

Our own civilisation, it is not denied, has been
greatly influenced by religion, and by the Christian
religion; by the close connection of this present life
with a life beyond it, and by what Christianity teaches
of our relations to the unseen. But civil life of a
high character has undoubtedly existed, at any rate
for a time, without such connection. I will venture
this evening to put before you the hasty sketch of
such a civilisation, and follow it to its fate.

In the ancient world, as we call it, two great forms
of civilisation appear, with which we must always
have the liveliest sympathy. They have deeply in-
fluenced our own : and we must become quite other
men from what we are when we forget them. The
civilisation of Greece, with Athens for its standard,
and in a main degree its source, still lives in our civil

ROMAN CIVILISATION

33

and political, as well as in our intellectual life. The
great idea of citizenship, with all that flows from it
of duty and ennobling service and cherished ties,
found there its clear and complete expression in real
fact and spontaneous action, before it was portrayed
and analysed by writers of extraordinary force and
subtlety, and of matchless eloquence, who are our
masters still. But the civilisation of Athens, though
not too precocious for its place in the world's history,
was too precocious for its own chance of life. On
that little stage, and surrounded by the ambitions and
fierce energies of a world of conquest, — in its first
moment of weakness and mistake, it was oppressed
and crushed. It lasted long enough to plant a new
conception of human society among men, to disen-
gage and start upon its road a new and inextinguish-
able power, destined to pursue its way with the most
momentous results, through all the times to come. It
did not last long enough to work out in any propor-
tionate way a history for itself.

It is to civilisation as exhibited in the Eoman
State that I invite your attention. There you have
the power of growth, of change, and yet of stability
and persistent endurance. There you have an ideal

134 ROMAN CIVILISATION I

of social and civil life, a complex and not always a
consistent one, yet in its central elements very strongly
defined ; keeping its hold on a great people with
singular tenacity through the centuries, amid all their
varying fortunes ; undergoing great transformations in
the vicissitudes of good and evil days, yet at the bottom
unchanged, and frequently reasserting its unimpaired
vitality at moments when we least expect it. It grew
to impress itself on mankind as the power which had
a unique right to command their obedience and to
order their affairs ; it made its possessors, and it made
the nations round, feel that Eomans were, in a very
real sense, the " Lords of the human race." To our
eyes, as we look back upon it, it represents, as nothing
else does, the civilisation of the then world.

Why does it deserve this character ? What in it
specially has a claim on our interest ? The Eomans,
we know, left their mark on the world ; much of what
they did is still with us, defying all our centuries of
change. We live in the cities which they founded :
here, at St. Paul's, one of their great roads runs past
our doors. But I do not dwell on Eoman civilisation,
because they were builders who built as if with the
infinite idea of the future before them ; because they

i ROMAN CIVILISATION 135

covered the face of the earth with famous and endur-
ing cities ; because their engineers excavated harbours,
drained marshes, and brought the waters of the hills
along miles of stupendous aqueducts ; because they
bound together their empire with a network of roads
and postal services ; because they were the masters
of organised and scientific war ; because they were
great colonial administrators, subduing the earth, to
subdue its rudeness, and plant in it the arts of life.
Not for all this ; but because, in spite of the crimes,
which come back to our minds when we name the
Eomans, they were yet keenly alive to what men, as
men, ought to be, — men, as men, not for what they
had, but for what they were — not as rich, or clever,
or high in dignity, or even as wielding power, but as
citizens of a great commonwealth and city, the Mother
and Lady of them all. Not because they possessed in
large measure the arts and the expedients by which
the social machine is made to move more easily, much
less for the pride and sensuality which squandered
these arts in ostentation and fabulous luxury ; but
because, amid all the dark tragedies which fill their
history, in spite of the matchless perfidy and the match-
less cruelty which contradicted their own ideals, and

136 ROMAN CIVILISATION I

seem to silence us when we talk of Eoman virtue, it is
yet true that deep in the minds of the most faithless, the
most selfish, the most ruthless, was the knowledge that
justice and public spirit were things to which a Eoman,
by the nobility of his birth, was obliged ; because the
traditional, accepted popular morality of Eome placed
among its first articles, however they were violated in
practice, that fortitude, honesty, devotion, energy in
service, were essential things in a society of men ;
because popular opinion, loose as the term may be,
had the sentiment of honour, and owned the bond of
duty, even to death ; because Eomans recognised a
serious use of life, in doing, and doing for the common
weal — not merely in learning, or acquiring, or enjoy-
ing for themselves alone.

Now, immediately that I have said all this, the
picture of Eoman history rises up before our thoughts,
as it is painted in Gibbon, or Milman, or Merivale.
We remember the hard and rapacious times of the
Eepublic, with their resolute and unflinching vindic-
tiveness, their insolent affectations and hypocrisies of
moderation and right. We are met by the enormous
corruption and monstrous profligacy of the states-
men of the age of transition; and under the Empire

I , ROMAN CIVILISATION 137

we find a system fruitful, normally fruitful, of a suc-
cession of beings, the most degraded, the most detest-
able, the most horrible, of all that ever bore the name
of man. Is it worth while to talk in Christian days
of a civilisation with such fruits as these ?

I venture to submit that it is — that the subject is
most interesting and instructive, and that it is our
own fault if, in spite of the evil, we are not taught
and braced by so much that is strong and so much
that is noble. We pass backwards and forwards from
admiration to horror and disgust as we read the story
in Gibbon, who, in his taste for majesty and pomp, his
moral unscrupulousness, and his scepticism, reflected
the genius of the Empire of which he recounted the
fortunes ; but who in his genuine admiration of public
spirit and duty, and in his general inclination to be
just to all, except only to the Christian name, reflects
another and better side of Eoman character. For
there was this better side. Eoman civilisation pro-
duced not only great men, but good men of high stamp
and mark ; men with great and high views of human
life and human responsibility, — with a high standard
of what men ought to aim at, with a high belief of
what they could do. And it not only produced indi-

138 ROMAN CIVILISATION • I

viduals ; it produced a strong and permanent force of
sentiment ; it produced a character shared very un-
equally among the people, but powerful enough to deter-
mine the course of history, in the way which suited it.
I think it may be said with truth that the high ideal
of Roman civilisation explains its final and complete
collapse. A people with a high standard, acted on by
the best, recognised by all, cannot be untrue to the
standard with impunity ; it not only falls, but falls to
a depth proportionate to the height which it once was
seeking ; it is stricken with the penalty which follows
on hollow words and untrue feelings, — on the deser-
tion of light and a high purpose, on the contradiction
between law and life. A civilisation like that of
China, undisturbed by romantic views of man's nature,
and content with a low estimate of his life, may flow
on, like one of its great rivers, steady, powerful, useful ;
unchanged for centuries, and unagitated by that which,
more than wars and ambition, is the breaker up of
societies, — the power of new ideas, of new hopes and
aims. But because Roman civilisation became false
to its principles, there was no reversing its doom.

The reason why I put Roman civilisation so high
and in so unique a place is, that it grew out of and

ROMAN CIVILISATION

[39

cherished, age after age, with singular distinctiveness
and tenacity, two great principles. One of these was
that the work of the community should be governed
by law ; the other, that public interest and public
claims were paramount to all others.

Where you have in a society a strong and lasting
tendency to bring public and private affairs under the
control of fixed general rules, to which individual
wills are expected and are trained to submit ; where
these rules are found to be grounded, instinctively
perhaps at first, methodically afterwards, on definite
principles of right, fitness, and sound reason ; where
a people's habitual impulse and natural disposition is
to believe in laws, and to trust them, and it is
accepted as the part of common sense, duty, and
honour to obey them, — where these characteristics, of
respect for law as an authority, of resort to it as an
expedient and remedy, are found to follow the progress
of a great national history even from its beginnings,
it cannot be denied that there you have an essential
feature of high civilisation. They, of whom this may
be said, have seen truly, in one most important point,
how to order human life. And Law, in that sense in
which we know it, and are living under it, in its

1 4o ROMAN CIVILISATION I

strength, in its majesty, in its stability, in its practical,
businesslike character, may, I suppose, be said to have
been born at Eome. And it was born very early ;
very different, of course, in its rude beginnings, from
what it grew to be afterwards, but showing, from the
first, the serious, resolute struggles of the community
to escape from the mischiefs of self-will and random
living, without understood order and accepted rules.
The political conflicts of which Eoman history is full,
centred, in its best days at least, round laws : they
assumed a state of law, they attempted to change it ;
the result, if result there was, was expressed in a law ;
violent and extreme measures might be resorted to,
and not seldom, in those fierce days, something worse ;
but it was presupposed by public opinion, whatever
violent men might dare, that law was to continue
and to be obeyed, till it was changed, and that it
would only be changed by lawful authority and
by lawful processes. Eoman law was no collec-
tion of a certain number of vague constitutional
articles ; it was no cast - iron code of unchanging
rules ; but it was a real, living, expansive system,
developing vigorously as the nation grew, coextensive
with the nation's wants in its range and applicability,

I R OMAN \ CI VI LISA TION 1 4 1

searching and self - enforcing in its work, a system
which the people used and relied upon in their private
as much as in their public affairs. And so grew up,
slowly and naturally, through many centuries, in the
way familiar to us in our law, the imposing and
elaborate system of scientific jurisprudence, which the
Eomans, when they passed away, bequeathed to the
coming world ; the great collections of Theodosius and
Justinian, in which are gathered the experiences of
many ages of Eoman society, played upon, illuminated,
analysed, arranged, by a succession of judicial intellects
of vast power and consummate accomplishment ; that
as yet unequalled monument of legal learning, compre-
hensive method, and fruitfulness in practical utility,
which, under the name of Civil Law, has been the
great example to the world of what law may be,
which has governed the jurisprudence of great part of
Europe, which has influenced in no slight degree our
own jealous and hostile English traditions, and will
probably influence them still more. ". The education
of the world in the principles of a sound jurispru-
dence," says Dean Merivale, " was the most wonderful
work of the Eoman conquerors. It was complete ; it
was universal ; and in permanence it has far out-

1 42 ROMAN CIVILISATION I

lasted, at least in its distinct results, the duration of
the Empire itself." A civilisation which, without
precedent and unaided, out of its own resources and
contact with life, produced such a proof of its idea and
estimate of law, must, whatever be its defects, be
placed very high.

Again, when, with this strong and clear and perma-
nent sense of law, you also have in a society, among
its best men, a strong force of public spirit, and among
all a recognition that in this the best reflect the
temper and expectations of the whole, its civilisation
has reached a high level. It is the civilisation of those
who have discerned very distinctly the great object
and leading obligation of man's fellowship in a state —
of his life as a citizen. And- certainly in no people
which the world has ever seen has the sense of public
duty been keener and stronger than in Eome, or has
lived on with unimpaired vitality through great
changes for a longer time. Amid the accumulation of
repulsive and dark elements in Eoman character, amid
the harshness and pride and ferocity, often joined with
lower vices, meanness, perfidy, greed, sensuality, there
is one which again and again extorts a respect that
even courage and high ability cannot — a high, un-

i ROMAN CIVILISATION 143

deniable public spirit. Not always disinterested, any
more than in some great men in our own history, but
without question, for all that, thoroughly and seriously
genuine. It was a tradition of the race. Its early
legends dwelt upon the strange and terrible sacrifices
which this supreme loyalty to the commonwealth had
exacted, and obtained without a murmur, from her sons.
They told of a magistrate and a father, the founder of
Eoman freedom, dooming his two young sons to the
axe for having tampered with conspiracy against the
State ; of great men, resigning high office because they
bore a dangerous name, or pulling down their own
houses because too great for citizens ; of soldiers to
whose death fate had bound victory, solemnly devoting
themselves to die, or leaping into the gulf which
would only close on a living victim ; of a great
family purchasing peace in civil troubles by leaving
the city, and turning their energy into a foreign war,
in which they perished ; of the captive general who
advised his countrymen to send him back to certain
torture and death, rather than grant the terms he was
commissioned to propose as the price of his release.
Whatever we may think of these stories, they show
what was in the mind of those who told and repeated

141. ROMAN CIVILISATION I

them ; and they continued to be the accredited types
and models of Koman conduct throughout Roman
history. Even in its bad days, even at its close, the
temper was there, the sense of public interest, the fire
of public duty, the public spirit which accepted with-
out complaint trouble and sacrifice. It produced, at
a time when hope seemed gone, a succession of noble
and high-souled rulers, whose government gave for a
moment the fallacious promise of happiness to the
world. It produced a race of now nameless and un-
remembered men, who, while they probably forgot
many other duties, forgot not their duty to the public,
of which they were the servants.

" The history of the Caesars," writes Dean Merivale,
"presents to us a constant succession of brave,
patient, resolute, and faithful soldiers, men deeply
impressed with a sense of duty, superior to vanity,
despisers of boasting, content to toil in obscurity, and
shed their blood at the frontiers of the Empire, un-
repining at the cold mistrust of their masters, not
clamorous for the honours so sparingly awarded to
them, but satisfied with the daily work of their hands,
and full of faith in the national destiny which they
were daily accomplishing. If such humble instruments

I ' ROMAN CIVILISATION 145

of society are not to be compared, for the importance
of their mission, with the votaries of speculative
wisdom, who protested in their lives and in their
deaths against the crimes of their generation, there is
still something touching in the simple heroism of
these chiefs of the legions. . . . Here are virtues not
to be named indeed with the zeal of missionaries and
the devotion of martyrs, but worthy nevertheless of a
high place in the esteem of all who reverence human
nature."

For these reasons, and more might be added —
among them, the real reverence with which these
fierce and successful soldiers regarded the arts, the
pursuits, the dress of peace, and readily and willingly
returned to them, — we may look back to the civilisa-
tion of Kome with an interest which we might not
give to its buildings, its wealth, or its organisation
of empire. It was a signal and impressive proof of
what men might rise to be ; of the height, too, to
which the spirit of a nation might rise. The world is
not rich enough in greatness to afford to forget men
who, with so much that was evil and hateful about
them, yet made the idea of law a common thing, and
impressed on the world so memorably the obliga-

146 ROMAN CIVILISATION' I

tions of public duty and the sanctions of a public
trust.

How did such a civilisation come to nought ? It
is wonderful that it should have arisen ; but it is
more wonderful that, having arisen, it should have
failed to sustain itself. How did a civilisation so
robust, aiming at and creating, not the ornamental
and the pleasurable, but the solid and laborious, a
character so serious and manly, austerely simple and
energetic in men, pure and noble in women — how did
it fail and perish ? What was the root of bitterness
which sprung up amid its strength, and brought it,
through the most horrible epochs the world ever saw,
of terror and tyranny, and the foulest and most insane
licentiousness — epochs which St. Paul's words in his
Epistle to the Eomans are hardly strong enough to
describe — to the most absolute and ignoble ruin ? Of
course there was evil mixed with it from the first ;
but evil is mixed with all human things, and evil was
mixed to the full with the life and institutions out of
which the best days of Christian civilisation have
come, whether you put these days in what are called
the ages of faith, or the age of the Eeformation, or the
ages of civil liberty. Pride and selfish greed, hypo-

I ROMAN CI VILISA TION 1 47

crisy, corruption, profligacy, fraud, cruelty, have been
as abundant in the centuries after Christ as they were
in those before. But the civilisation of Europe is not
ruined, in spite of its immense dangers ; I see no reason
to think that it will be ; — why was that of Borne ?

To answer this question duly would be to go
through the Eoman history. I must content myself
with one general statement. Eoman civilisation was
only great. as long as men were true to their principles;
but it had no root beyond their personal characters
and traditions and customary life ; and when these
failed, it had nothing else to appeal to — it had no
power and spring of recovery. These traditions, these
customs of life, this inherited character, did keep up
a stout and prolonged struggle against the shocks of
changed circumstances, against the restless and un-
scrupulous cravings of individual selfishness. But
they played a losing game. Each shock, each fresh
blow, found them weaker after the last ; and no
favouring respite was allowed them to regain and
fortify the strength they had lost. The high instincts
of the race wore out : bad men had nothing to do but
to deny that these instincts were theirs. The powers
of evil and of darkness mounted higher and higher,

148 ROMAN CIVILISATION I

turning great professions into audacious hypocrisies,
great institutions into lifeless and mischievous forms,
great principles into absurd self-contradictions. Had
there been anything to fall back upon, there were
often men to do it; but what was there but the
memories and examples of past greatness ? Eeligion
had once played a great part in what had given
elevation to Eoman civil life. It had had much to
do with law, with political development, with Eoman
sense of public duty and Eoman reverence for the
State. But, of course, a religion of farmers and
yeomen, a religion of clannish etiquettes and family
pride and ancestral jealousies, could not long stand
the competition of the Eastern faiths, or the scepticism
of the cultivated classes. It went ; and there was
nothing to supply its place but a Philosophy, often
very noble and true in its language, able, I doubt not,
in evil days to elevate, and comfort, and often purify
its better disciples, but unable to overawe, to heal, to
charm a diseased society ; which never could breathe
life and energy into words for the people ; which
wanted that voice of power which could quicken the
dead letter, and command attention, where the des-
tinies of the world were decided. I know nothing

I ROMA N CI VI LIS A TION 1 49

more strange and sorrowful in Eoman history than to
observe the absolute impotence of what must have
been popular conscience, on the crimes of statesmen
and the bestial infamy of Emperors. There were
plenty of men to revile them ; there were men to
brand them in immortal epigrams ; there were men to
kill them. But there was no man to make his voice
heard and be respected, about righteousness, and
temperance, and judgment to come.

And so Eoman civilisation fell, — fell, before even
the eager troops of barbarians rushed in among its
wrecks, — fell because it had no salt in it, no whole-
some and reviving leaven, no power of recovery.
Society could not bear its own greatness, its own
immense possessions and powers, its own success and
achievements. It fell, and great was the fall thereof.
The world had never seen anything like Eome and its
civilisation. It seemed the finish and perfection of all
things, beyond which human prospects could not go.
The citizens and statesmen who were proud of it, the
peoples who reposed under its shadow, the early
Christians who hated it as the rival of the Kingdom
of God, the men of the Middle Ages who looked on
it as the earthly counterpart and bulwark of that

150 ROMAN CIVILISATION i

kingdom, and insisted in believing that it was still
alive in the world, — Augustine who contrasted it with
the city of God, Dante who trusted in it as God's
predestined minister of truth and righteousness where
the Church had failed, — all looked on it as something
so consummate and unique in its kind, that nothing
could be conceived or hoped for which could take its
place. Before the tremendous destructions in which
it perished the lights of man's heaven, of all human
society, seemed to disappear. Cicero had likened the
overthrow and extinction of a city and polity, once
created among men, to the ruin and passing away of
the solid earth. When the elder civilisation of Eome
went to pieces, rotten within and battered by the
storms without, it was a portent and calamity which
the human imagination had almost refused to believe
possible. It was indeed the foundering of a world.

How this lost civilisation was recovered, renewed,
and filled with fresh and hopeful life, we may try to
see in the next lecture.

LECTUEE II

CIVILISATION AFTER CHRISTIANITY

The failure of Koman civilisation, its wreck and
dissolution in the barbarian storms, was the most
astonishing catastrophe the world had yet seen in its
history ; and those who beheld the empire breaking
up, as blow after blow was struck more home, ceased
to look forward to any future for society. In this
strange collapse of the strongest, in this incredible
and inconceivable shaking of the foundations of what
was assumed to be eternal, the end seemed come ; and
as no one could imagine a new and different order,
men thought it useless to hope anything more for the
world. It is not wonderful, — but they were too
despairing. It is not wonderful, — for they had no
example within their knowledge of the great lights of
human life, which seemed destined to shine for ever,
being violently extinguished, and then being rekindled,
and conquering once more in heightened splendour the

152 CIVILISATION AFTER CHRISTIANITY ir

gloom and confusion. They had seen empires perish,
but never before the defeat of a matchless structure of
law and administration without example in history,
which was to provide security for empire. But they
were too despairing. They thought too little of
powers and principles new in the world, to which
many of them trusted much, both in life and in death,
but of which no one then living knew the strength or
suspected the working. They guessed not how that
while the barbarian deluge was wasting and sweeping
away the works of men, God was pouring new life into
the world. They guessed not that in that Gospel,
which consoled so many of them in the miseries of
this sinful world, which to so many seemed but one
superstition the more, to which so many traced all
their disasters, there lay the seeds of a social and civil
revival, compared with which the familiar refinement
and extolled civilisation of Eome would one day come
to seem little better than an instance of the rudeness
of antiquity.

The decay and fall of the old Eoman civilisation,
and the growth out of its ruins of a new one, infinitely
more vigorous and elastic, steady in its long course,
patient of defeat and delay, but with century after

ii CIVILISATION AFTER CHRISTIANITY 153

century witnessing, on one point or another, to its
unrelaxed advance, — the giving way of one great
system and the replacing it by another, — form a great
historical phenomenon, as vast as it is unique and
without parallel, and to practical people not less full
of warning than it is of hope.

Let us cast a hasty glance upon it, — it can be
but a most hasty and superficial one. What was the
change, what was the new force, or element, or aspect
of the world, or assemblage of ideas, which proved able
to make of society what Koman loftiness of heart,
Eoman sagacity, Roman patience, Koman strength had
failed to make of it ? What power was it which took
up the discredited and hopeless work, and, infusing new
energies and new hopes into men, has made the long
history of the Western nations different in kind from
any other period of the history of mankind ; different
in this, that though its march has been often very
dark and very weary, often arrested and often retarded,
chequered with terrible reverses, and stained by the
most flagrant crimes, it has never been, definitely and
for good, beaten back ; the movement, as we can see
when we review it, has been on the whole a uniform
one, and has ever been tending onwards ; it has never

154 CIVILISATION AFTER CHRISTIANITY 11

surrendered, and has never had reason to surrender,
the hope of improvement, even though improvement
might be remote and difficult.

We are told sometimes that it was the power of
race, of the new nations which came on the scene ;
and I do not deny it. But the power of race seems
like the special powers of a particular soil, in which
certain seeds germinate and thrive with exceptional
vigour, but for which you must have the seed, and
sow it, before the soil will display its properties. It
is very important, but it is not enough to say that
Teutons took the place of Latins ; indeed, it is not
wholly true. But what planted among Teutons and
Latins the seeds and possibilities of a renewed
civilisation was the power of a new morality. It
is a matter of historical fact, that in the closing-
days of Borne an entirely new set of moral ideas
and moral purposes, of deep significance, fruitful
in consequences, and of a strength and intensity
unknown before, were making their way in society,
and establishing themselves in it. It is to the
awakening of this new morality, which has never
perished out of the hearts of men from that day
to this, that the efforts and the successes of modern

ii CIVILISATION AFTER CHRISTIANITY 155

civilisation are mainly due ; it is on the permanence
of these moral convictions that it rests. What the
origin and root of this morality really are, you will
not suppose that in this place I affect to make a
question ; but the matter I am now dwelling on is
the morality itself, not on its connection with the
Christian creed. And it is as clear and certain a
fact of history that the coining in of Christianity
was accompanied by new moral elements in society,
inextinguishable, widely operative, never destroyed,
though apparently at times crushed and paralysed,
as it is certain that Christian nations have made on
the whole more progress in the wise ordering of
human life than was made in the most advanced
civilisation of the times before Christianity.

Eoman belief in right and law had ended in
scepticism, whether there was such a thing as good-
ness and virtue : Eoman public spirit had given
place, under the disheartening impression of continual
mistakes and disappointments, to a selfish indifference
to public scandals and public mischiefs. The great
principles of human action were hopelessly confused ;
enthusiasm for them was dead. This made vain
the efforts of rulers like Trajan and the Antonines,

1 56 CIVILISATION AFTER CHRISTIANITY n

of scientific legislators like Justinian, of heroes like
Belisarius ; they could not save a society in which,
with so much outward show, the moral tone was so
fatally decayed and enfeebled. But over this dreary
waste of helplessness and despondency, over these
mud-banks and shallows, the tide was coming in and
mounting. Slowly, variably, in imperceptible pulsa-
tions, or in strange, wild rushes, the great wave was
flowing. There had come into the world an enthusi-
asm, popular, widespread, serious, of a new kind ;
not for conquest, or knowledge, or riches, but for
real, solid goodness. It seems to me that the
exultation apparent in early Christian literature,
beginning with the Apostolic Epistles, at the prospect
now at length disclosed within the bounds of a sober
hope, of a great moral revolution in human life, —
that the rapturous confidence which pervades these
Christian ages, that at last the routine of vice and
sin has met its match, that a new and astonishing
possibility has come within view, that men, not here
and there, but on a large scale, might attain to that
hitherto hopeless thing to the multitudes, goodness, —
is one of the most singular and solemn things in
history. The enthusiasm of the Crusades, the en-

ii CIVILISATION AFTER CHRISTIANITY 157

thusiasm of Puritanism, the enthusiasm of the Jacobins
— of course I am speaking only of strength and depth
of feeling — were not its equal. "We can, I suppose,
have but a dim idea of the strange and ravishing novelty
with which the appearance of Divine and unearthly
Goodness, in real human form, burst upon eyes ac-
customed, as to an order of nature, to the unbroken
monotony of deepening debasement, wearied out with
the unchanging spectacle of irremediable sin. The
visitation and presence of that High Goodness, making
Himself like men, calling men to be like Him, had
altered the possibilities of human nature ; it was
mirrored more or less perfectly in a thousand lives ; it
had broken the spell and custom of evil which seemed
to bind human society ; it had brought goodness,
real, inward, energetic goodness of the soul within
the reach of those who seemed most beyond it — the
crowds, the dregs, the lost. That well-known world.,
the scene of man's triumphs and of his untold sorrows,
but not of his goodness, was really a place where
righteousness and love and purity should have a
visible seat and home, and might wield the power
which sin had wielded over the purposes and wills
of men. To men on whom this great surprise had

158 CIVILISATION AFTER CHRISTIANITY n

come, who were in the vortex of this great change,
all things looked new. Apart from the infinite
seriousness given to human life by the cross of Christ,
from the infinite value and dignity given to it by the
revelation of resurrection and immortality, an awful
rejoicing transport filled their souls, as they saw that
there was the chance, — more than the chance, — the
plain forerunning signs, of human nature becoming here,
what none had ever dared it would become, morally
better. When they speak of this new thing in the
earth, the proved reality of conversion from sin to
righteousness, of the fruits of repentance, of the sup-
planting of vice by yet mightier influences of purity,
of the opening and boundless prospects of moral
improvement and elevation, — their hearts swell, their
tone is exalted, their accent becomes passionate and
strong. It was surely the noblest enthusiasm — if it
was but rooted in lasting and trustworthy influences
— which the world had ever seen. It was no wonder
that this supreme interest eclipsed all other interests.
It is no wonder that for this glorious faith men
gladly died.

This second springtide of the world, this fresh
start of mankind in the career of their eventful

II CIVILISATION AFTER CHRISTIANITY 159

destiny, was the beginning of many things ; but
what I observe on now is that it was the beginning
of new chances, new impulses, and new guarantees
for civilised life, in the truest and worthiest sense
of the words. It was this, by bringing into society
a morality which was serious and powerful, and a
morality which would wear and last; one which
could stand the shocks of human passion, the
desolating spectacle of successful wickedness, the
insidious waste of unconscious degeneracy, — one
which could go back to its sacred springs and
repair its fire and its strength. Such a morality,
as Koman greatness was passing away, took pos-
session of the ground. Its beginnings were scarcely
felt, scarcely known of, in the vast movement of
affairs in the greatest of empires. By and by its
presence, strangely austere, strangely gentle, strangely
tender, strangely inflexible, began to be noticed. But
its work was long only a work of indirect preparation.
Those whom it charmed, those whom it opposed, those
whom it tamed, knew not what was being done
for the generations which were to follow them.
They knew not, while they heard of the household of
God, and the universal brotherhood of man, that the

i6o CIVILISATION AFTER CHRISTIANITY

most ancient and most familiar institution of their
society, one without which they could not conceive its
going on, — slavery, — was receiving the fatal wound
of which, though late, too late, it was at last to die.
They knew not, when they were touched by the new
teaching about forgiveness and mercy, that a new
value was being insensibly set on human life, new care
and sympathy planted in society for human suffering,
a new horror awakened at human bloodshed. They
knew not, while they looked on men dying, not for
glory or even country, but for convictions and an in-
visible truth, that a new idea was springing up of the
sacredness of conscience, a new reverence beginning for
veracity and faithfulness. They knew not that a new
measure was being established of the comparative value
of riches and all earthly things, while they saw, some-
times with amazement, sometimes with inconsiderate
imitativeness, the numbers who gave up the world,
and all that was best as well as worst in it, for love
of the eternal heritage — in order to keep themselves
pure. They knew not of the great foundations laid
for public duty and public spirit, in the obligations of
Christian membership, in the responsibilities of the
Christian clergy, in the never -forgotten example of

ii CIVILISATION AFTER CHRISTIANITY 161

One whose life had been a perpetual service, and who
had laid it down as the most obvious of claims for
those to whom He had bound Himself. They little
thought of what was in store for civil and secular
society, as they beheld a number of humble men, many
of them foreigners, plying their novel trade of preachers
and missionaries, announcing an eternal kingdom of
righteousness, welcoming the slave and the outcast as
a brother,- — a brother of the Highest, — offering hope
and change to the degraded sinner, stammering of
Christ and redemption to the wild barbarian, worship-
ping in the catacombs, and meekly burying their dead,
perhaps their wronged and murdered dead, in the sure
hope of everlasting peace. Slowly, obscurely, imper-
fectly, most imperfectly, these seeds of blessing for
society began to ripen, to take shape, to gain power.
The time was still dark and wintry and tempestuous,
and the night was long in going. It is hard even now
to discern there the promise of what our eyes have
seen. I suppose it was impossible then. It rather
seemed as if the world was driving rapidly to its end,
not that it was on the eve of its most amazing and
hopeful transformation. But in that unhappy and
desponding and unhonoured time, borne in the bosom

M

162 CIVILISATION AFTER CHRISTIANITY n

of that institution and society which the world knew
and knows as the Christian Church, there were pre-
sent the necessary and manifold conditions of the most
forward civilisation ; of its noblest features, of its sub-
stantial good, of its justice, its order, its humanity, its
hopefulness, its zeal for improvement : —

There is a day in spring
When under all the earth the secret germs
Begin to stir and glow before they bud.
The wealth and festal pomps of midsummer
Lie in the heart of that inglorious hour
Which no man names with blessing, though its work
Is blessed by all the world. Such days there are
In the slow story of the growth of souls.1

And such a day there was in the "slow story" of the
improvement and progress of civilised Christendom.

The point I wish to insist on is, that with Christi-
anity, as long as there is Christianity, there comes a
moral spring and vitality and force, a part and conse-
quence of its influence, which did not and could not
exist before it. You cannot conceive of Christianity
except as a moral religion, requiring, inspiring morality ;
and it was just this spring, this force of morality, which
was wanting, and which could not be, in Eoman civil-

1 Story of Queen Isabel. By Miss Smedley.

II CIVILISATION AFTER CHRISTIANITY 163

isation. Morality there was, often in a high degree :
but it came and went with men or with generations,
and there was nothing to keep it alive, nothing
to rekindle it when extinct, nothing to suggest
and nourish its steady improvement. At any rate
there was not enough, if, when we remember the
influence of great examples and great writers, it
is too sweeping to say there was nothing. But
with Christianity the condition was changed. I am
sure I am not unmindful of what shortcomings,
what shames and sins, what dark infamies, blot
the history of Christian society. I do not forget
that Christian morality has been a thing of degrees
and impulses, rising and falling ; that it has been at
times impracticably extreme, and at times scandal-
ously lax ; that there have been periods when it seemed
lost ; that in some of its best days it has been unac-
countably blind and perversely stupid and powerless,
conniving at gross and undeniable inconsistencies,
condoning flagrant wrong. This is true. Yet look
through all the centuries since it appeared, and see if
ever, in the worst and darkest of them, it was not there,
as it never was in Eome, for hope, if not for present
help and remedy. There was an undying voice, even

1 64 CIVILISATION AFTER CHRISTIANITY n

if it came from the lips of hypocrites, which witnessed
perpetually of mercy, justice, and peace. There was a
seriousness given to human life, by a death everywhere
died in the prospect of the judgment. I am putting
things at the worst. Christian morality lived even in
the tenth century ; even in the times of the Borgias and
Medici. The wicked passed — the wicked age, the wicked
men ; passed, with the evil they had done, with the good
which they had frustrated, with the righteous whom
they had silenced or slain. And when they were gone,
" when the tyranny was overpast," the unforgotten law
of right, the inextinguishable power of conscience, were
found to have survived unweakened through the hour
of darkness, ready to reassert and to extend their em-
pire. Great as have been the disasters and failures of
Christian society, I think we have not yet seen the
kind of hopeless collapse in which Eoman civilisation
ended. Feeble and poor as the spring of morality
might be in this or that people, there has hitherto been
something to appeal to, and to hope from, which was
not to be found in the days of the Antonines, the most
peaceful and felicitous of Eoman times.

In this great restoration of civilisation, which is
due mainly to the impulse and the power of Christian

II CIVILISATION AFTER CHRISTIANITY 165

morality, a great place must be given to the direct
influence of Christian aspects of life and ideas of duty.
Christian ideas of purity acted directly on all that was
connected with family and domestic life. They forbade,
with intense and terrible severity, before which even
passion quailed, the frightful liberty in the relations of
the sexes which in Greece, and at last in Eome, had
been thought so natural. Here was one great point
fixed : the purification of the home, the sanctity thrown
round the wife and the mother, the rescuing of the
unmarried from the assumed license of nature, the
protection given to the honour of the female slave and
then of the female servant, were social victories well
worth the unrelenting and often extravagant asceticism
which was, perhaps, their inevitable price at first.
They were the immediate effects of a belief in the
Sermon on the Mount ; and where that belief was
held, they would more or less consistently follow. So
with the fiercer tempers and habits of men ; against
cruelty, against high-handed oppression and abuse of
strength, there was a constant, unyielding protest in
the Christian law of justice and charity, continually
unheeded, never unfelt ; even war and vengeance were
uneasy under the unceasing though unavailing rebuke

1 66 CIVILISATION AFTER CHRISTIANITY n

of the Gospel law, and made concessions to it, though
too strong, too fatally necessary, to submit to it.
Further, under the influence of Christian morality,
later civilisation showed a power of appropriating and
assimilating all that was noble and salutary in its
older forms. It appropriated the Eoman idea of law,
and gave it a larger and more equitable scope, and a
more definite consecration to the ends of justice and
the common good. It invested the ancient idea of
citizenship and patriotism with simpler and more
generous feelings, and with yet holier sanctions. It
accepted from the ancient thinkers their philosophic
temper and open spirit of inquiry, and listened rever-
entially to their lessons of wisdom. It reinforced the
Eoman idea, a confused and inconsistent though a
growing one, of the unity of the human race ; and
though the victory over custom and appearances is
hardly yet won, the tendency to recognise that unity
can never fail, while the belief prevails that Christ
died for the world. And once more, it is not easy
to say what Christian belief, Christian life, Christian
literature have done to make the greatest thoughts of
the ancient world " come home to men's business and
bosoms." No one can read the wonderful sayings of

ii CIVILISATION AFTER CHRISTIANITY 167

Seneca, Epictetus, or Marcus Aurelius, without being
impressed, abashed perhaps, by their grandeur. No
one can read them without wondering the next
moment why they fell so dead — how little response
they seemed to have awakened round them. What
was then but the word of the solitary thinker has now
become the possession, if they will, of the multitude.
The letter of great maxims has been filled with a
vivifying .spirit. Their truths have been quickened
into new meaning by the new morality in which they
have found a place, by the more general and keener
conscience which has owned them.

The direct effects of Christian morality on modern
civilisation would be allowed by most people to be
manifest and great. I wish to call attention to one
or two points of its indirect influence. Civilisation,
the ordering with the utmost attainable success, of
civil and secular life, is one thing; and Christian
religion is another. They are two currents, meeting
from time to time, inosculating, sometimes confused,
at other times divergent and possibly flowing different
ways ; but, anyhow, they are two currents. Take
such a picture of real daily human interests and
human activity as is presented to us in so wonderful,

1 68 CIVILISATION AFTER CHRISTIANITY n

so overwhelming, though so familiar a shape, in the
columns, and quite as much in the advertisements, of
a great newspaper; or again, when we thread the
streets and crowds of a great city, and try to imagine
the infinite aims and divisions of its business. There
is the domain of civilisation, its works, its triumphs,
its failures and blots ; and its main scope is this life,
whatever be the affinities and relations by which it
has to do with what concerns man's other life. But
the point that seems to me worth notice is this : the
way in which the Christian current of thought, of aim,
of conscience, of life, has affected the other current,
even where separated and remote from it. We are
told that the presence of electrical force in one body
induces a corresponding force in another not in con-
tact with the first, but adjacent to it ; that one set of
forces is raised to greater than their normal power and
intensity by the neighbourhood of another ; that cur-
rents passing in a given direction communicate, as
long as they continue, new properties to a body round
which they circulate : the neutral iron becomes a
magnet, attracting, vibrating, able to hold up weights,
as long as it is encircled by a galvanic circuit, which
does not touch or traverse it. So the presence of

II CIVILISATION AFTER CHRISTIANITY 169

Christian forces acted, by a remote and indirect
sympathy, even where they did not mingle and pene-
trate in their proper shape. Much of civilisation has
always been outside of Christianity, and its leaders
and agents have often not thought of Christianity in
their work. But they worked in its neighbourhood,
among those who owned it ; among those who saw it,
among those who lived by it : and the conscientious-
ness, the. zeal, the single -mindedness, the spirit of
improvement, the readiness for labour and trouble, the
considerateness and sympathy, the manly modesty,
which are wherever Christianity has " had its perfect
work," have developed and sustained kindred tempers,
where aims and pursuits, and the belief in which a
man habitually lives, have been in a region far away
from religion. Take the administration of justice. It
has been, it must be, in society, whether there is
religion or not. It was found in Eoman times, up to
a certain point, in a very remarkable degree of per-
fection. It has been, it may still be, in Christian
times, carried on, and admirably carried on, by men
who do not care for Christianity. I am very far
indeed from saying that in these times it has always
been worthy either of Christianity or civilisation. But

170 CIVILISATION AFTER CHRISTIANITY n

I suppose we may safely say that it has been distinctly
improving through the Christian centuries. We may
safely say that in its best and most improved stages
it is an admirable exhibition of some of the noblest
qualities of human character ; honesty, strength
without show, incorruptness, scrupulous care, un-
wearied patience, desire for right and for truth, and
laborious quest of them, public feeling, humanity,
compassion even when it is a duty to be stern.
There were great and upright Eoman magistrates ;
but whatever Eoman jurisprudence attained to, there
was no such administration of justice, where men
thought and felt right, and did right, as a matter of
course. And is it too much to say that the growing
and gathering power of ideas of duty, right, and mercy,
derived from Christianity, have wrought and have
conquered, even when their source was not formally
acknowledged, even when it was kept at a distance ;
and that they have given a security for one of the
first essentials of civilisation, which is distinctly due
to their perhaps circuitous and remote influence ?

But, after all, it may not unreasonably occur to
you that I am claiming too much for the civilisation
of Christian times ; that my account of it is one-

II CIVILISATION AFTER CHRISTIANITY 171

sided and unfairly favourable. Putting aside the
earlier centuries of confusion and struggle, when it
might be urged that real tendencies had not yet
time to work themselves clear, what is there to
choose, it may be said, between the worst Koman
days and many periods of later history, long after
Christianity had made good its footing in society ?
What do we say to the dislocation, almost the
dissolution, of society in great wars, — the English
Invasion, the Wars of the League, in France, our
own civil wars, the municipal feuds in Italy, the
Thirty Years' War in Germany ? What to the
civilisation of the ages like those of Louis XIY
and Louis XV, full of brilliancy, full of most loath-
some unrighteousness and corruption, gilded by the
profoundest outward honour for religion ? What
shall we say of Inquisitions, and Penal Laws, and
here, in our own England, of a criminal code which,
up to the end of the last century, hanged mere children
for a trifling theft ? What shall we say of the huge
commercial dishonesties of our own age, of our
pauperism, of our terrible inequalities and contrasts
of wealth and life? What shall we say of a great
nation almost going to pieces before our eyes, and

172 CIVILISATION AFTER CHRISTIANITY n

even now moving anxiously to a future which no one
pretends to foresee ? What advantage have we, how is
civilisation the better for the influence on it of Christi-
anity, if this, and much more like this, is what is shown
by the history and the facts of the modern world ?

It will at once suggest itself to you that when
we speak of civilisation we speak of a thing of
infinite degrees and variety. Every man in this
congregation stands, probably, at a different point
from all his neighbours in the success with which,
if I may use the words, he has made himself a man ;
has developed the capacities and gifts which are
in him, has fulfilled the purpose and done the work
for which he was made to live, has reached " the
measure of the fulness of that stature " which he
might and was intended to attain. And so with
societies, and different times in the history of a
society. There have been in Christian times poor
and feeble forms of civilisation, there have been
degenerate ones, as there have been strong ones ;
and in the same society there have been monstrous
and flagrant inconsistencies, things left undone, un-
righted, unnoticed, the neglect of which seems
unaccountable, things quietly taken for granted

n CIVILISATION AFTER CHRISTIANITY 173

which it is amazing that a Christian conscience
could tolerate. Think how long and how patiently
good men accepted negro slavery, who would have
set the world in flame rather than endure slavery
at home. Human nature is wayward and strange
in the proportion which it keeps in its perceptions
of duty, in its efforts and achievements. But for
all this it seems to me idle to deny that men in
Christian times have reached a higher level, and have
kept it, in social and civil life, than they ever reached
before, and that this is distinctly to be traced to the
presence and action in society of Christian morality.

But this is not what I wanted specially to say.
What I want you to notice, as new, since Christianity
began to act on society, as unprecedented, as charac-
teristic, is the power of recovery which appears in
society in the Christian centuries. What is the
whole history of modern Europe but the history of
such recoveries ? And what is there like it to be
found in the ancient world ? Dark days have been,
indeed, in Christendom. Society seemed to be break-
ing up, as it did at last at Eome. But wait awhile,
and you saw that which you looked for in vain at
Eome. The tide began to turn ; the energy, the

174 CIVILISATION AFTER CHRISTIANITY II

indignation, the resolute, unflinching purpose of
reformation began to show itself; and whether wise
or not, whether in its special and definite work a
failure or even a mischief, it was at least enough to
rouse society, to set it on a new course, to disturb
that lethargy of custom which is so fatal, to make
men believe that it was not a law of nature or of
fate, that "as things had been, things must be."
That terrible disease of public and stagnant despair
which killed Eoman society has not had the mastery
yet in Christian ; in evil days, sooner or later, there
have been men to believe that they could improve
things, even if, in fact, they could not. And for that
power of hope, often, it may be, chimerical and
hazardous, but hope which has done so much for
the improvement of social life, the world is indebted
to Christianity. It was part of the very essence of
Christianity not to let evil alone. It was bound, it
was its instinct, to attack it. Christian men have
often, no doubt, mistaken the evil which they at-
tacked ; but their acquiescence in supposed evil, and
their hopelessness of a victory for good, would have
been worse for the world than their mistakes. The
great reforms in Christian days have been very mixed

ii CIVILISATION AFTER CHRISTIANITY 175

ones ; but they have been reforms, an uninterrupted
series of attempts at better things ; for society, for
civilisation, successive and real, though partial re-
coveries. The monastic life, which was, besides its
other aspects, the great civilising agent in the rural
populations ; the varied and turbulent municipal life
in the cities ; the institutions in the Middle Ages,
on a broad and grand scale, for teaching, for study,
for preaching, for the reformation of manners ; the
determined and sanguine ventures of heroic en-
thusiasts, like St. Bernard, Savonarola, or Luther,
or of gentler, but not less resolute reformers, like
Erasmus and our own Dean Colet ; the varied schemes
for human improvement, so varied, so opposed, so
incompatible, yet in purpose one, of Jesuits, of
Puritans, of the great Frenchmen of Port Eoyal, —
all witness to the undying, unwearied temper which
had been kindled in society, and which ensured it
from the mere ruin of helplessness and despair.
They were all mistakes, you will say perhaps, or
full of mistakes. Yes, but we all do our work
through mistakes, and the boldest and most suc-
cessful of us perhaps make the most. They failed
in the ambitious completeness, the real one-sicledness

176 CIVILISATION AFTER CHRISTIANITY n

and narrowness, of their aim ; but they left their
mark, if only in this — that they exhibited men in
the struggle with evil and the effort after improve-
ment, refusing to give up, refusing to be beaten.
But indeed they were more than this. There are
none, I suppose, of these great stirrings of society,
however little we may sympathise with them, which
have not contributed something for which those who
come after are the better. The wilder or the feebler
ones were an earnest of something more reasonable
and serious. They mark and secure, for some im-
portant principle or idea, a step which cannot easily
be put back. They show, as the whole history of
Christendom, with all its dismal tracts of darkness
and blood, seems to me to show, that society in
Christian times has somehow or other possessed a
security, a charm against utter ruin, which society
before them had not ; that it has been able to go
through the most desperate crises, and at length
throw off the evil, and continue on its path not
perhaps unharmed, yet with a new chance of life ;
that following its course from first to last, we find
in it a tough, indestructible force of resistance to
decay, a continual, unworn -out spring of revival,

ii CIVILISATION AFTER CHRISTIANITY 177

renovation, restoration, recovery, and augmented
strength, which, wherever it comes from, is most
marked and surprising, and which forms an essential
difference between Christian society and the conditions
of society, before and beyond Christian influences.

I must bring to an end what I have to say. I
know quite well that the subject is not finished.
But there are various reasons why at present I am
unable to finish it. Yet I hope I shall not have
quite wasted your time if I have said anything to
make you wish to inquire and to think about this
supreme question ; the relations of our modern
civilisation, not only so refined, and so full of arts
and appliances and great organisations, but so serious,
to those eternal truths which lead up our thoughts
to the ultimate destinies of man, to the Throne of
the Most High and the Most Holy. Society is
debating whether it shall remain Christian or not.
I hope that all who hear me, the majority of whom
twenty years hence, when I and my contemporaries
shall have passed from the scene, will belong to the
grown-up generation which then will have the fate of
English society in their hands, will learn to reflect on
that question with the seriousness which it deserves.

N

ON SOME

INFLUENCES OF CHKISTIANITY

UPON

NATIONAL CHARACTER

THREE LECTURES

DELIVERED IN ST. PAUL'S CATHEDRAL
February 4, 11, and 18, 1873.

LECTUKE I

INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY ON NATIONAL CHARACTER

I propose on this occasion to invite you to consider
some of the ways in which national character has been
affected by Christianity, and to trace these effects in
certain leading types of national character which
appear to have been specially influenced by Christi-
anity : — The character of the European races belong-
ing to the Eastern Church, particularly the Greeks ;
that of the Southern, or, as they are called, the Latin
races, particularly the Italians and French ; and,
lastly, that of the Teutonic races. These three
divisions will supply the subjects of the three lectures
which it is my business to deliver.

It is obvious that within the limits to which I am
confined, such a subject can be treated only in the
most general outline. Within these great divisions
national character varies greatly. And national
character, real as is the meaning conveyed by the

i82 CHRISTIANITY AND NATIONAL CHARACTER i

term, is yet, when we come to analyse and describe it,
so delicate and subtle a thing, so fugitive, and so
complex in the traits and shades which produce the
picture, that its portraiture tasks the skill of the
most practised artist, and overtasks that of most.
But yet, that there is such a thing is as certain as
that there is a general type of physiognomy or expres-
sion characteristic of different races. One by one, no
doubt, many faces might belong equally to English-
men or Frenchmen, Italians, Greeks, or Russians. But,
in spite of individual uncertainties, the type, on the
whole, asserts itself with curious clearness. If you
cannot be sure of it in single faces, it strikes you in
a crowd. In one of the years of our Exhibitions,
an illustrated paper published an engraving — it was
the border, I think, of a large representation of the
Exhibition building — in which were ranged in long
procession representatives of the chief nationalities
supposed to be collected at the Exhibition, or contri-
buting to it. Dress and other things had, of course,
much to do with marking them out one from another ;
but beyond dress and adjuncts like dress, there was
the unmistakable type of face, caught with singular
keenness of discrimination, and exhibited without

I CHRISTIANITY AND NATIONAL CHARACTER 183

exaggeration or a semblance of caricature. The types
were average ones, such as every one recognised and
associated with this or that familiar nationality ; and
the differences were as real between the more
nearly related types as between the most strongly
opposed ones, — as real between the various members of
the European family as between European and Chinese,
though the difficulty of detecting and expressing the
differences is greater in proportion as these differences
pass from broad and obvious ones to such as are fine
and complicated. So it is with national character.
The attempt to define it, to criticise it, to trace its
sources, to distinguish between what it is and what it
seems, to compare and balance its good and its bad —
this attempt may be awkward and bungling, may be
feeble, one-sided, unjust. It may really miss all the
essential and important features, and dwell with dis-
proportionate emphasis on such as are partial and
trivial, or are not peculiarities at all. Bad portrait-
painting is not uncommon. Yet each face has its
character and expression unlike every other, if only
the painter can seize it. And so, in those great
societies of men which we call nations, there is a
distinct aspect belonging to them as wholes, which the

1 84 CHRISTIANITY AND NATIONAL CHARACTER i

eye catches and. retains, even if it cannot detect its
secret, and the hand is unequal to reproduce it. Its
reality is betrayed, and the consciousness of its
presence revealed, by the antipathies of nations, and
their current judgments one of another.

The character of a nation, supposing there to be
such a thing, must be, like the character of an indi-
vidual, the compound result of innumerable causes.
Eoughly, it may be said to be the compound product
of the natural qualities and original tendencies of a
nation, and of a nation's history. The natural quali-
ties and tendencies have helped largely to make the
history out of circumstances and events, partly, at
least, independent of these inherent forces ; and the
history has then reacted on the natural qualities.
What a nation has come to be has depended on the
outfit of moral, intellectual, and physical gifts and
conditions with which it started on its career in the
world ; and then, on the occurrences and trials which
met it in its course, and the ways in which it dealt
with them ; on the influences which it welcomed or
resisted ; on critical decisions ; on the presence and
power of great men good and bad ; on actions which
closed the old, or opened the new ; on the feelings,

I CHRISTIANITY AND NATIONAL CHARACTER 185

assumptions, and habits which it had allowed to grow
up in it. All this needs no illustration. The Greeks
never could have been what they have been in their
influence on human history if they had not started
with the rich endowments with which nature had
furnished them ; but neither could they have been
what they were, wonderfully endowed as we know
them to have been, if Athens had not resisted and
conquered at Marathon and Salamis ; if those victories
had been mere patriotic assertions of independence
and liberty, like the great Swiss victories of Morgarten
and Sempach, and had not stimulated so astonishingly
Athenian capacities for statesmanship, for literature,
for art ; if they had not been followed by the his-
torians, the moralists, the poets of Athens ; if there
had been no Pericles, no Phidias, no Socrates ; if there
had been no Alexander to make Greek mind and
Greek letters share his conquest of the Eastern world.
So with the nations of our living world. The sturdiest
Englishman must feel, not only that his country
would have been different, but he might himself have
been other than he is, if some great events in our
history had gone differently ; if some men had not
lived, and if others had not died when they did ; if

1 86 CHRISTIANITY AND NATIONAL CHARACTER I

England had been made an appendage to the Spanish
Netherlands in 1588, or a dependency of the great
French King in 1688, or of the great French
Emperor in 1805 ; if Elizabeth had died and Mary
lived. It is idle to pursue this in instances. It is
obvious that a nation's character is what it is partly
from what it brought with it on the stage of its
history, partly from what it has done and suffered,
partly from what it has encountered in its progress ;
giving to an external or foreign element a home and the
right of citizenship within it, or else shutting its doors
to the stranger, and treating it as an intruder and an
enemy. And among these influences, which have
determined both the character and history of nations,
one of the most important, at least during the centuries
of which the years are reckoned from the birth of our
Lord, has been religion.

I state the fact here generally without reference to
what that religion is, or of what kind its influence
may have been. Everybody knows the part which
Mahometanism has played, and is still playing, in
shaping the ideas, the manners, and the history of
nations in Asia and Africa. In its direct and un-
ambiguous power over the races in which it has taken

,

i CHRISTIANITY AND NATIONAL CHARACTER 187

root, and in the broad and simple way in which it has
mastered their life and habits, and dominated in the
direction of their public policy, I suppose that there is
no religion which can compare with it. Its demands,
devotional and moral, are easily satisfied but strictly
enforced ; and to a genuine Mahometan a religious
war is the most natural field for national activity.
As has been justly said 1 — "It has consecrated
despotism ; it has consecrated polygamy ; it has
consecrated slavery ; " it has done this directly, in
virtue of its being a religion, a religious reform. This
is an obvious instance in which national character and
national history would not have been what they have
been without the presence and persistent influence of
the element of religion. The problem is infinitely
more complicated in the case of those higher races,
for such they are, which escaped or resisted the
Mahometan conquest; but there, too, the power of
this great factor is equally undeniable, and is much
richer and more varied in results, though these results
are not so much on the surface, and are often more
difficult to assign amid the pressure of other elements,
to their perhaps distant causes.

1 Freeman, Saracens, p. 246.

1 88 CHRISTIANITY AND NATIONAL CHARACTER I

To come, then, to my subject this evening. What
have been the effects of Christianity on what we call
national character in Eastern Christendom ? I must
remind you, once more, how very roughly and im-
perfectly such a question can be answered here. The
field of investigation is immense, and in part very
obscure ; and the utmost that I can do is, if possible, to
make out some salient points, which may suggest, to
those who care to pursue it, the beginnings of further
inquiry. I propose to confine myself to one race of
the great family. I shall keep in view mainly the
Greek race, as a typical specimen of Eastern Christen-
dom. I am quite aware how much I narrow the
interest of the subject by leaving out of direct con-
sideration a people with such a strongly marked
character, with such a place in the world now, and
such a probable future, as the great Eussian nation,
— a nation which may be said to owe its national
enthusiasm, its national convictions, its intense coher-
ence, and the terrible strength it possesses, to its being
penetrated with religion. But, having to choose a
field of survey with reference to the time at our
disposal, I prefer to keep to the Greek race, because the
impression made on them was a primary and original

i CHRISTIANITY AND NATIONAL CHARACTER 189

one, and was communicated by them to other nations,
like Eussia, because they have had the longest history,
and because their history has been more full than that
of others of the vicissitudes of circumstance and fortune.
It requires an effort in us of the West to call up
much interest in the Eastern Christian races and. their
fortunes. They are very different from us in great
and capital points of character, and our historians
have given them a bad name. Many persons would
regard them as decisive instances of the failure of
Christianity to raise men, even of its liability under
certain conditions to be turned into an instrument to
corrupt and degrade them. The Greeks of the Lower
Empire are taken as the typical example of these
races, and the Greeks of the Lower Empire have
become a byword for everything that is false
and base. The Byzantine was profoundly theological,
we are told, and profoundly vile. And I suppose
the popular opinion of our own day views with small
favour his modern representatives, and is ready to
contrast them to their disadvantage with the Mahom-
etan population about them. There is so much truth
in this view that it is apt, as in many other cases, to
make people careless of the injustice they commit by

190 CHRISTIANITY AND NATIONAL CHARACTER I

taking it for the whole truth. Two things, as it
seems to me, — besides that general ignorance which is
the mother of so much unfairness and scorn in all
subjects, — have especially contributed to establish
among us a fixed depreciation of all that derives its
descent from the great centres of Eastern Christianity.
One is the long division between Western and Eastern
Christendom, which, beginning in a rift, the conse-
quences of which no one foresaw, and which all were
therefore too careless or too selfish to close when it
might have been closed, has widened in the course of
ages into a yawning gulf, which nothing that human
judgment can suggest will ever fill up, and which, be-
sides its direct quarrels and misfortunes, has brought
with it a train of ever -deepening prejudices and
antipathies, of which those who feel them often know
not the real source. Another thing which has con-
tributed to our popular disparagement of these races
is the enormous influence of Gibbon's great History.
It is not too much to say that the common opinion
of educated Englishmen about the history and the
character of everything derived from Byzantium or
connected with it is based on this History, and, in
fact, as a definite opinion dates from its appearance.

I CHRISTIANITY AND NATIONAL CHARACTER 191

He has brought out with incomparable force all that
was vicious, all that was weak, in Eastern Christendom.
He has read us the evil lesson of caring in their
history to see nothing else ; of feeling too much
pleasure in the picture of a religion discredited, of a
great ideal utterly and meanly baffled, to desire to
disturb it by the inconvenient severity of accuracy and
justice. But the authority of Gibbon is not final.
There is, after all, another side to the story. In
telling it, his immense and usually exact knowledge
gave him every advantage in supporting what I must
call the prejudiced conclusions of a singularly cold
heart ; while his wit, his shrewdness, and his pitiless
sarcasm gave an edge to his learning, and a force
which learning has not always had in shaping the
opinions of the unlearned. The spell of Gibbon's
genius is not easy to break. But later writers, with
equal knowledge and with a more judicial and more
generous temper, have formed a very different estimate
of the Greek Empire and the Greek race, and have
corrected, if they have not reversed, his sentence.
Those who wish to be just to a form of society which
it was natural in him to disparage will pass on from
his brilliant pages to the more equitable and conscien-

192 CHRISTIANITY AND NATIONAL CHARACTER i

tious, but by no means indulgent, judgments of Mr.
Finlay, Mr. Freeman, and Dean Stanley.

One fact alone is sufficient to engage our deep
interest in this race. It was Greeks and people im-
bued with Greek ideas who first welcomed Christianity.
It was in their language that it first spoke to the
world, and its first home was in Greek households and
in Greek cities. It was in a Greek atmosphere that
the Divine Stranger from the East, in many respects so
widely different from all that Greeks were accustomed
to, first grew up to strength and shape ; first showed
its power of assimilating and reconciling ; first showed
what it was to be in human society. Its earliest
nurslings were Greeks ; Greeks first took in the mean-
ing and measure of its amazing and eventful announce-
ments ; Greek sympathies first awoke and vibrated to
its appeals; Greek obedience, Greek courage, Greek
suffering first illustrated its new lessons. Had it not
first gained over Greek mind and Greek belief, it
is hard to see how it would have made its further way.
And to that first welcome the Greek race has been
profoundly and unalterably faithful. They have passed
through centuries for the most part of adverse fortune.
They have been in some respects the most ill-treated

I CHRISTIANITY AND NATIONAL CHARACTER 193

race in the world. To us in the West, at least, their
Christian life seems to have stopped in its growth at
an early period ; and, compared with the energy and
fruitfulness of the religious principle in those to whom
they passed it on, their Christianity disappoints, per-
haps repels us. But to their first faith, as it grew up,
substantially the same, in Greek society, in the days
of Justin and Origeti, as it was formulated in the great
Councils, as it was embodied in the Liturgies, as it
was concentrated and rehearsed in perpetual worship,
as it was preached by Gregory and Chrysostom, as it
was expounded by Basil, Cyril of Jerusalem, and John
of Damascus, as it prompted the lives of saints and
consecrated the triumphs of martyrs, they still cling,
as if it was the wonder and discovery of yesterday.
They have never wearied of it. They have scarcely
thought of changing its forms.

The Eoman Conquest of the world found the Greek
race, and the Eastern nations which it had influenced,
in a low and declining state — morally, socially, politi-
cally. The Boman Empire, when it fell, left them in
the same discouraging condition, and suffering besides
from the degradation and mischief wrought on all its
subjects by its chronic and relentless fiscal oppression.

0

194 CHRISTIANITY AND NATIONAL CHARACTER I

The Greek of Koman times was the admiration and
envy of his masters for his cleverness and the glories
which he had inherited ; and their scorn for his utter
moral incapacity to make any noble and solid use of
his gifts. The typical Greek of Juvenal's satire an-
swered to the typical Frenchman of Dr. Johnson's
imitation of it, the ideal Frenchman of our great grand-
fathers in the eighteenth century. He was a creature
of inexhaustible ingenuity, but without self-respect,
without self-command or modesty, capable of every-
thing as an impostor and a quack, capable of nothing
as a man and a citizen. There was no trusting
his character any more than his word : " unstable as
water," fickle as the veering wind, the slave of the last
new thing, whether story, or theory, or temptation, —
to the end of his days he was no better or of more
value than a child in the serious things which it be-
comes men to do. Full of quickness and sensibility,
open to every impulse, and a judge of every argument,
he was without aim or steadiness in life, ridiculous in
his levity and conceit, — even in his vice and corrup-
tion more approaching to the naughtiness of a reckless
schoolboy than to the grave and deliberate wickedness
which marked the Koman sensualists. These were

I CHRISTIANITY AND. NATIONAL CHARACTER 195

the men in whose childish conceit, childish frivolity,
childish self-assertion, St. Paul saw such dangers to
the growth of Christian manliness and to the unity of
the Christian body — the idly curious and gossiping
men of Athens ; the vain and shamelessly ostentatious
Corinthians, men in intellect, but in moral seriousness
babes ; the Ephesians, " like children carried away
with every blast of vain teaching," the victims of every
impostor, and sport of every deceit ; the Cretans, pro-
verbially, " ever liars, evil beasts, slow bellies ; " the
passionate, volatile, Greek-speaking Celts of Asia, the
" foolish " Galatians ; the Greek - speaking Christians
of Eome, to whom St. Paul could address the argument
of the Epistle to the Eomans, and whom yet he judged
it necessary to warn so sternly against thinking more
highly of themselves than they ought to think, and
against setting individual self - pleasing against the
claims and interests of the community. The Greek
of the Roman times is portrayed in the special warn-
ings of the Apostolic Epistles. After Apostolic times
he is portrayed in the same way by the heathen
satirist Lucian, and by the Christian preacher Chry-
sostom ; and such, with all his bad tendencies, aggra-
vated by almost uninterrupted misrule and oppression,

196 CHRISTIANITY AND NATIONAL CHARACTER I

the Empire, when it broke up, left him. The prospects
of such a people, amid the coming storms, were dark.
Everything, their gifts and versatility, as well as their
faults, threatened national decay and disintegration.
How should they stand the collision with the simpler
and manlier barbarians from the northern wastes, from
the Arabian wilderness, from the Tartar steppes ?
How should they resist the consuming and absorbing
enthusiasm of Mahometanism ? How should they
endure, century after century, the same crushing ill-
treatment, the same misgovernment and misfortune,
without at last breaking up and dissolving into some-
thing other than they were, and losing the thread of
their national continuity ?

Look at the same group of races, and especially at
the leading and typical one of the group, the Greeks
in Europe and Asia, after the impending evils had
fallen, after century after century had passed over it of
such history as nations sink under, losing heart and
union and hope. Look at them when their ill-fortune
had culminated in the Ottoman conquest ; look at them
after three centuries and a half of Ottoman rule. For
they have not perished. In the first place, they exist.
They have not disappeared before a stronger race and

I CHRISTIANITY AND NATIONAL CHARACTER 197

a more peremptory and energetic national principle.
They have not, as a whole, whatever may have hap-
pened partially, melted into a new form of people
along with their conquerors. They have resisted the
shocks before which nations apparently stronger have
yielded and, as nations, have disappeared. And next,
they have not only resisted dissolution or amalgama-
tion, but in a great degree change. In characteristic
endowments, in national and proverbial faults, though
centuries of hardship and degradation have doubtless
told on the former, they are curiously like what their
fathers were. But neither faults, nor gifts reinforcing
and giving edge to faults, have produced the usual
result. Neither their over - cleverness, nor their
lamentable want in many points of moral elevation
and strength, have caused the decay which ends in
national death, have so eaten into the ties which keep
a society together, that its disorganised elements fly
apart and form new combinations. The Mahometan
conquest has made large inroads on the Christian
populations — in some cases, as in Bosnia and parts of
Albania, it absorbed it entirely. But if ever nation-
ality— the pride of country, the love of home, the tie
of blood — was a living thing, it has been alive in the

198 CHRISTIANITY AND NATIONAL CHARACTER I

Greek race, and in the surrounding races, whatever
their origin and language, which it once influenced,
and which shared the influences which acted on it.
These races whom the Empire of the Caesars left like
scattered sheep to the mercy of the barbarians, lived
through a succession of the most appalling storms, and
kept themselves together, holding fast, resolute and
unwavering, amid all their miseries and all their de-
basement, to the faith of their national brotherhood.
Nothing less promised endurance than their tempera-
ment and genius, so easily moved to change, so quick
to the perception of self-interest, and ready to discover
its paths. Nothing seemed more precarious as a bond
than national traditions and national sympathies. But
at the end of our modern ages, the race on which
Christianity first made an impression still survives,
and, though scarred by disaster and deeply wounded
by servitude, is now looking forward to a new and
happier career.

What saved Greek nationality — saved it in spite
of the terrible alliance with external misfortunes, of
its own deep and inherent evils ; saved it, I hope, for
much better days than it has ever yet seen — was its
Christianity. It is wonderful that, even with it,

I CHRISTIANITY AND NATIONAL CHARACTER 199

Greek society should have resisted the decomposing
forces which were continually at work round it and in
it ; but without its religion it must have perished.
This was the spring of that obstinate tenacious,
national life which persisted in living on though all
things conspired for its extinction ; which refused to
die under corruption or anarchy, under the Crusader's
sword, under the Moslem scimitar. To these races
Christianity had not only brought a religion, when all
religion was worn out among them and evaporated
into fables, but it had made them — made them once
more a people, with common and popular interests of
the highest kind ; raised them, from mere subjects of
the Eoman Empire, lost amid its crowd, into the
citizens of a great society, having its root and its end
above this world, and even in the passage through this
world binding men by the most awful and ennobling
ties. Christianity was the first friend and benefactor
of an illustrious race in the day of its decline and low
estate ; the Greek race has never forgotten that first
benefit, and its unwavering loyalty has been the bond
which has kept the race together and saved it.

I think this is remarkable. Here is a race full of
flexibility and resource, with unusual power of accom-

200 CHRISTIANITY AND NATIONAL CHARACTER I

modating itself to circumstances, and ready to do so
when its interest prompted, not over-scrupulous, quick
in discovering imposition and pitiless in laughing at
pretence — a race made, as it would seem, to bend
easily to great changes, and likely, we should have
thought, to lose its identity and be merged in a
stronger and sterner political association. And to
this race Christianity has imparted a corporate tough-
ness and permanence which is among the most
prominent facts of history. Say, if you like, that it
is an imperfect form of Christianity ; that it is the
Christianity of men badly governed and rudely taught
for centuries, enslaved for other centuries. Say, if
you like, that its success has been very qualified in
curing the race of its ancient and characteristic faults.
Say, too, that in hardening the Greek race to endure,
it has developed in them in regard to their religion,
an almost Judaic hardness and formalism and rigidity
of thought, a local idea of religion which can scarcely
conceive of Christianity beyond its seats and its forms
in the East. Yet the fact remains, that that easy-
going, pliable, childishly changeable Greek race at
whom the Eomans sneered, has proved, through the
deepest misfortunes, one of the most inflexible nation-

CHRISTIANITY AND NATIONAL CHARACTER 201

alities that we know of; and that the root of this
permanence and power of resisting hostile influences
has been in Christianity and the Christian Church.

In this consolidation by Christianity of a national
character, in itself least adapted to become anything
stable and enduring, we may trace a threefold in-
fluence : —

1. In the first place, Christianity impressed on the
minds of men with a new force the idea of the eternal
and lasting. Into a world of time and death and
change, in strange and paradoxical contrast with it, it
had come announcing a one everlasting Kingdom of
God, and a final victory over the worst that death can
do on man. Eome and the Empire claimed to be
eternal and unchanging; but they were too visibly
liable, as other human greatness, to the shocks of
fortune, and the inevitable course of mortal decay.
But that everlasting order which was the foundation
of all that Christianity supposed and taught, that
" House not made with hands," that " Kingdom which
cannot be moved/' that Temple of souls dwelt in by
the Eternal Spirit of God, that Throne of the world on
which sate One, " the same yesterday, and to-day, and
for ever " — this was out of the reach of all mutability

202 CHRISTIANITY AND NATIONAL CHARACTER I

With their belief in Christianity, the believers drank
in thoughts of fixedness, permanence, persistency,
continuance, most opposite to the tendencies of
their natural temperament. The awful seriousness
of Christianity, its interpretation of human life and
intense appreciation of its purpose, deeply affected, if
it could not quell, childish selfishness and trifling ; its
iron entered into their veins and mingled with their
blood. I am not now speaking of the reforming and
purifying effects of Christianity on individuals : this is
not my subject. But it put before the public mind a
new ideal of character ; an ideal of the deepest earnest-
ness, of the most serious purity, of unlimited self-
devotion, of the tenderest sympathy for the poor and
the unhappy, of pity and care for the weak, for the
sinner. And it prevailed on the public mind to
accept it, in exchange for more ancient ideals. Even
if it failed to wean men from their vices and lift them
to its own height, yet it gave to those whom it could
not reform a new respect for moral greatness, a new
view of the capabilities of the soul, of the possibilities of
human character. It altered permanently the current
axioms about the end and value of human life. At least
it taught them patience, and hardened them to endure.

i CHRISTIANITY AND NATIONAL CHARACTER 203

2. In the next place, the spirit of brotherhood in
Christianity singularly fell in with the social habits
and traditions of equality, ineradicable in Greece, and
combined with them to produce a very definite feature
in the national character. Greek ideas of society and
government were always, at bottom, essentially popular
ones : Greek revolutions and Greek misfortunes, from
the Peloponnesian war to the Eoman Conquest, if they
had extinguished all hope of realising any more those
democratic institutions under which Athens had
achieved its wonderful but short-lived greatness, had
developed and strengthened the feeling, that Greeks,
while there was a broad line between them and those
who were not Greeks, themselves stood all on the same
social level one with another, and that only personal
differences, not differences of birth, or even of con-
dition or wealth, interfered with the natural equality
which was assumed in all their intercourse. When
Christianity came with its new principle of a unity, so
high and so divine as to throw into the shade all, even
the most real, distinctions among men — " Greek and
Jew, barbarian and Scythian, bond and free," for all
were one in Christ — and when in the Christian Church
the slave was thought as precious as the free man in

204 CHRISTIANITY AND NATIONAL CHARACTER I

the eyes of his Father above, as much a citizen of the
heavenly polity and an heir of its immortality — then
the sense of popular unity and of common and equal
interests in the whole body, which always had been
strong in Greeks, received a seal and consecration,
which has fixed it unalterably in the national character.
This personal equality existed, and could not be
destroyed, under the despotic governments by which,
from the time of the Eoman Empire till the emancipa-
tion of Greece from the Turks, in one shape or another,
the nation has been ruled. It marks Greek social
relations very observably to this day.

3. Finally, Christianity, the religion of hope, has
made the Greek race, in the face of the greatest
adversities, a race of hope. In its darkest and most
unpromising hours, it has hoped against hope. On the
bronze gates of St. Sophia, at Constantinople, may still
be seen, — at least it might be seen some years ago, —
the words, placed there by its Christian builder, and
left there by the scornful ignorance or indifference of
the Ottomans — I. X. NIKA, Jesus Christ conquers. It
is the expression of that unshaken assurance which in
the lowest depths of humiliation has never left the
Christian races of the East, that sooner or later theirs

i CHRISTIANITY AND NATIONAL CHARACTER 205

is the winning cause. They never have doubted of
their future. The first greeting with which Greek
salutes Greek on Easter morning, 'Kpcarb^ avearrjy
Christ is risen, accompanied by the Easter kiss, and
answered by the response, akrjOoos avearr], He is risen
indeed, is both the victorious cry of mortality over the
vanquished grave, and also the symbol of a national
brotherhood, the brotherhood of a suffering race,,
bound together by their common faith in a de-
liverer.

This, it seems to me, Christianity did for a race,
which had apparently lived its time, and had no
future before it — the Greek race in the days of the
Csesars. It created in them, in a new and character-
istic degree, national endurance, national fellowship
and sympathy, national hope. It took them in the
unpromising condition in which it found them under
the Empire, with their light, sensual, childish existence,
their busy but futile and barren restlessness, their life
of enjoyment or of suffering, as the case might be, but
in either case purposeless and unmeaning ; and by its
gift of a religion of seriousness, conviction, and strength
it gave them a new start in national history. It gave
them an Empire of their own, which, undervalued as.

206 CHRISTIANITY AND NATIONAL CHARACTER I

it is by those familiar with the ultimate results of
Western history, yet withstood the assaults before
which, for the moment, Western civilisation sank, and
which had the strength to last a life — a stirring and
eventful life — of ten centuries. The Greek Empire,
with all its evils and weaknesses, was yet in its time
the only existing image in the world of a civilised
state. It had arts, it had learning, it had military
science and power ; it was, for its day, the one refuge
for peaceful industry. It had a place which we could
ill afford to miss in the history of the world. Gibbon,
we know, is no lover of anything Byzantine, or of
anything Christian ; but look at that picture which he
has drawn of the Empire in the tenth century — that
dark century when all was so hopeless in the West, —
read the pages in which he yields to the gorgeous magni-
ficence of the spectacle before him, and describes not
only the riches, the pomp, the splendour, the elaborate
ceremony of the Byzantine Court and the Byzantine
capital, but the comparative prosperity of the provinces,
the systematic legislation, the administrative experience
and good sense with which the vast machine was kept
going and its wealth developed, its military science
and skill, the beauty and delicacy of its manufactures,

i CHRISTIANITY AND NATIONAL CHARACTER 207

— and then consider what an astonishing contrast to
all else in those wild times was presented by the
stability, the comparative peace, the culture, the
liberal pursuits of this great State, and whether we
have not become blind to what it vxis, and appeared
to be, when it actually existed in the world of which
it was the brilliant centre, by confusing it in our
thoughts with the miseries of its overthrow : —

" These princes," he says, " might assert with dignity
and truth, that of all the monarchs of Christendom
they possessed the greatest city, the most ample
revenue, the most flourishing and populous state. . . .
The subjects of their Empire were still the most
dexterous and diligent of nations ; their country was
blessed by nature with every advantage of soil, climate,
and situation ; and in the support and restoration of
the arts, their patient and peaceful temper was more
useful than the warlike spirit and feudal anarchy of
Europe. The provinces which still adhered to the
Empire were repeopled and enriched by the misfor-
tunes of those which were irrecoverably lost. From
the yoke of the Caliphs, the Catholics of Syria, Egypt,
and Africa retired to the allegiance of their prince, to
the society of their brethren : the movable wealth,

208 CHRISTIANITY AND NATIONAL CHARACTER I

which eludes the search of oppression, accompanied
and alleviated their exile ; and Constantinople received
into her bosom the fugitive trade of Alexandria and
Tyre. The chiefs of Armenia and Scythia, who fled
from hostile or religious persecution, were hospitably
entertained, their followers were encouraged to build
new cities and cultivate waste lands. Even the bar-
barians who had seated themselves in arms in the
territory of the Empire were gradually reclaimed to
the laws of the church and state." " The wealth of
the province," he proceeds, describing one of them,
" and the trust of the revenue were founded on the
fair and plentiful produce of trade and manufactures ;
and some symptoms of a liberal policy may be traced
in a law which exempts from all personal taxes the
mariners of the province, and all workmen in parch-
ment and purple."

And he goes on to describe, with that curious
pursuit of detail in which he delights, the silk looms
and their products, and to trace the silk manufacture,
from these Greek looms, as it passed through the hands
of captive Greek workmen, transported by the Nor-
mans to Palermo, and from thence was emulously
taken up by the northern Italian cities, to the work-

I CHRISTIANITY AND NATIONAL CHARACTER 209

shops of Lyons and Spitalfields. Who would think
that he was describing what we so commonly think of
as the wretched and despicable Lower Greek Empire,
without strength or manliness ; or that the rich pro-
vince is what the Turks made into the desolate
Morea ?

We are accustomed to think only of its corruption
and pedantry, its extravagant disputes, its court in-
trigues and profligacies, its furious factions. But there
was really no want of heroic men and noble achieve-
ments to show in the course of its annals. Even
Gibbon tells us, though he tells us, as usual, with a
sneer, of " intrepid " 1 patriarchs of Constantinople,
whom we speak of as mere slaves of despotism,
repeating towards captains and emperors, impatient
with passion, or in the flush of criminal success, the
bold rebukes of John the Baptist and St. Ambrose.
And these captains and emperors appear, many of
them, even in his disparaging pages, as no ordinary
men. There were lines of rulers in those long ages
not unworthy to rank with the great royal houses of
the West. There were men, with deep and miserable
faults no doubt, but who yet, if their career had been

1 Chap, xlviii. vol. vi. pp. 105, 106.
P

210 CHRISTIANITY AND NATIONAL CHARACTER i

connected with our history, would have been famous
among us. Belisarius, Heraclius, Leo the Isaurian, —
the Basilian, the Comnenian line, — have a full right to
a high place among the rulers and the saviours of
nations. The First and the Second Basil of the Mace-
donian line, the Lawgiver, and the Conqueror : the
Comnenian dynasty ; Alexius, who " in a long reign
of thirty-seven years subdued and pardoned the envy
of his equals, restored the laws of public and private
order," cultivated the arts of wealth and science, " and
enlarged the limits of the Empire in Europe and Asia " ;
John, " under whom innocence had nothing to fear
and merit everything to hope," and " whose only
defect was the frailty of noble minds, the love of
military glory " ; Manuel, " educated in the silk and
purple of the East, but possessed of the iron temper
of a soldier, not easily to be paralleled, except in the
lives of Pdchard I. of England and Charles XII of
Sweden " : — I am quoting in each instance the epithets
and judgment of Gibbon — these are men whom a differ-
ence of taste and historical traditions makes us under-
value as Greeks of the Lower Empire. Let us not be
ungrateful to them. Unconquered, when the rest of the
Empire fell before the new powers of the world, Byzan-

I CHRISTIANITY AND .NATIONAL CHARACTER 211

tium kept alive traditions of learning, of scholarship, of
law and administration, of national unity, of social order,
of industry, which those troubled and dangerous times
could ill afford to lose. To the improvable barbarians
of the North, to whom Old Eome had yielded,
succeeded the unimprovable barbarians of the East and
Central Asia, and against them, Saracens, Mongols,
Turks, the New Eome was the steady and unbroken
bulwark, behind which the civilisation of Europe, safe
from its mortal foes, slowly recovered and organised
itself. Alaric's Goths at the sack of Eome, Pla toff's
Cossacks at the occupation of Paris, were not greater
contrasts to all that is meant by civilisation than were
the Latins of the Eirst and Fourth Crusade, the bands
of Godfrey de Bouillon, Bohemond, and Tancred, and
those of the Bishop of Soissons, the Count of Flanders,
and the Marquis of Montferrat, in the great capital of
Eastern Christendom, which they wondered at and
pillaged. What saved hope for ages, on the edge of
the world which was to be the modern one, was the
obstinate resistance of Christian nationality to the
mounting tide of Asiatic power.

But it was when the Empire perished that it fully
appeared how deeply Christianity had modified the

212 CHRISTIANITY AND NATIONAL CHARACTER I

national character. All the world was looking forward
to the impossibility of that character holding its own
against the pressure of Mahometanism, and to the dis-
appearance by slavery, or forced conversion, of the repre-
sentatives, in the East, of the Christian family. But the
expectation has been falsified. It had not entered into
the calculation how much of stubborn, unyielding faith
and strength Christianity had introduced beneath the
surface of that apparently supple and facile Greek
nature. The spring of life was too strong to be
destroyed ; and now, after steel and fire have done
their worst, fresh and vigorous branches are shooting
up from the unexhausted root-stock. Then, when the
greatness of Constantinople was gone, it appeared how
the severe side of Christianity, with its patience and
its hopefulness, had left its mark on Greek character,
naturally so little congenial to such lessons. Then it
appeared what was the difference between a philosophy
and literature, and a religion and life. Then, when
philosophy and literature, the peculiar glories of the
Greek race, may be said to have perished, was seen
what was the power of the ruder and homelier teach-
ing— about matters of absorbing interest, the unseen
world, the destiny of man — of teachers who believed

I

I CHRISTIANITY AND NATIONAL CHARACTER 213

their own teaching, and lived and died accordingly.
Then was seen on the whole nation the fruit of the
unpretending Christian virtues which grow from great
Christian doctrines, the Cross, the Kesurrection —
compassionateness, humbleness of mind, self-conquest,
zeal, purity. Self-sacrifice became the most natural
of duties — self-sacrifice, in all its forms, wise and
unwise, noble and extravagant, ascetic renunciation of
the world,, confessorship and dying for the truth as
men died for their country, a lifelong struggle of toil
and hardship for a cause not of this world. The lives
of great men profoundly and permanently influence
national character ; and the great men of later Greek
memory are saints. They belong to the people more
than emperors and warriors ; for the Church is of
the people. Greeks saw their own nature and their
own gifts elevated, corrected, transformed, glorified,
in the heroic devotion of Athanasius, who, to all
their familiar qualities of mind, brought a tenacity,
a soberness, a height and vastness of aim, an inflexi-
bility of purpose, which they admired the more
because they were just the powers in which the race
failed. They saw the eloquence in which they
delighted revive with the fire and imagination and

214 CHRISTIANITY AND NATIONAL CHARACTER l

piercing sarcasm of Chrysostom, and their hearts
kindled in them when they saw that he was one of
those who can dare and suffer as well as speak, and
that the preacher who had so sternly rebuked the
vices of the multitudes at Antioch and Constantinople
was not afraid of the consequences of speaking the
truth to an Empress at an Imperial Court. The mark
which such men left on Greek society and Greek
character has not been effaced to this day, even by
the melancholy examples of many degenerate successors.
They have sown a seed which has more than once
revived, and which still has in it the promise of life
and progress.

Why, if Christianity affected Greek character so
profoundly, did it not do more ? Why, if it cured it
of much of its instability and trifling, did it not also
cure it of its falsehood and dissimulation ? Why, if it
impressed the Greek mind so deeply with the reality
of the objects of faith, did it not also check the vain
inquisitiveness and spirit of disputatiousness and
sophistry, which filled Greek Church history with
furious wranglings about the most hopeless problems ?
Why, if it could raise such admiration for unselfish-
ness and heroic nobleness, has not this admiration

CHRISTIANITY AND NATIONAL CHARACTER 215

borne more congenial fruit ? Why, if heaven was felt
to be so great and so near, was there in real life such
coarse and mean worldliness ? Why, indeed ? — why
have not the healing and renovating forces of which
the world is now, as it has ever been, full, worked
out their gracious tendencies to their complete and
natural effect ? It is no question specially belonging
to this part of the subject : in every other we might
make the same inquiry, and I notice it only lest I
should be thought to have overlooked it. " Christi-
anity," it has been said, " varies according to the nature
on which it falls." That is, in modern philosophical
phrase, what we are taught in the parable of the Sower.
It rests at last with man's will and moral nature how
far he will, honestly and unreservedly, yield to the
holy influences which he welcomes, and let them have
their " perfect work." But if the influence of Christi-
anity on Greek society has been partial, if it has not
weaned it from some of its most characteristic and
besetting sins, it has done enough to keep it from
destruction. It has saved it ; and this is the point on
which I insist. Profoundly, permanently, as Christi-
anity affected Greek character, there was much in that
character which Christianity failed to reach, much that

216 CHRISTIANITY AND NATIONAL CHARACTER i

it failed to correct, much that was obstinately refractory
to influences which, elsewhere, were so fruitful of
goodness and greatness. The East, as well as the
West, has still much to learn from that religion, which
each too exclusively claims to understand, to appreciate,
and to defend. But what I have tried to set before
you is this : the spectacle of a great civilised nation,
which its civilisation could not save, met by Christianity
in its hour of peril, filled with moral and spiritual
forces of a new and unknown nature, arrested in its
decay and despair, strengthened to endure amid pro-
longed disaster, guarded and reserved through centuries
of change for the reviving hopes and energies of happier
days. To a race bewildered with sophistries, and
which by endless disputings had come to despair of
iny noble conduct of life, Christianity solved its ques-
tions, by showing it in concrete examples how to live
and to walk ; how, in the scale of souls, the lowest
might be joined to the highest. Into men, whom
their own passions and subtlety had condemned to
listless moral indifference, it breathed enthusiasm ;
the high practical enthusiasm of truth and a good life.
And for a worship, poetically beautiful, but scarcely
affecting to be more, it substituted the magnificent

I CHRISTIANITY AND NATIONAL CHARACTER 217

eloquence of devotion and faith, the inspired Psalms,
the majestic Liturgies. It changed life, by bringing
into it a new idea, — the idea of holiness, with its
shadow, sin. That the Greek race, which connects us
with some of the noblest elements of our civilisation,
is still one of the living races of Europe, that it was
not trampled, scattered, extinguished, lost, amid the
semi-barbarous populations of the East, that it can
look forward to a renewed career in the great com-
monwealth of Christendom — this it owes mainly to
its religion.

What great changes of national character the Latin
races owed to Christianity will be the inquiry of the
next lecture.

LECTUEE II

CHRISTIANITY AND THE LATIN RACES

Under the discipline of Christianity in the Eastern
Church the Christians of the East were trained to
endurance, to a deep sense of brotherhood, to a faith
which could not be shaken in great truths about God
and about man, to the recognition of a high moral
ideal, to a purer standard of family and social life, to
inextinguishable hope. They learned to maintain,
under the most adverse and trying circumstances, a
national existence, which has lasted more than fifteen
centuries. They have been kept, without dying, with-
out apostatising, without merging their nationality in
something different, till at last better days seem at
hand ; and to welcome these days there is vigour and
elasticity, a strong spirit of self-reliance, even of am-
bition. But what appears, at least to us, distant and
probably superficial observers, is this. Their religion
has strengthened and elevated national character : it

ii CHRISTIANITY AND THE LATIN RACES 219

seems to have done less to expand and refine it. At
any rate, we do not see the evidence of it in what is
almost the only possible evidence of it to strangers, in a
rich and varied literature. To their ancient treasures,
to the wisdom and eloquence of the great Christian
teachers and moralists of the early centuries, such as
Basil and Chrysostom, the Greeks have added nothing
which can be put on a level with them ; nothing
worth speaking of in secular literature ; nothing of
real poetry ; nothing with the mark on it of original
observation or genius ; nothing which has passed local
limits to interest the world without. Learning of a
certain kind they have ever maintained. Up to the
capture of Constantinople by the Ottomans, Greek
learning certainly did not contrast unfavourably with
the learning of the West ; and it was Greek teachers and
scholars, flying from the Ottoman sword and the Otto-
man tyranny, who brought Greek letters to the schools,
the Universities, and the printing presses of the eager
and curious West. But it was all ancient learning,
or intellectual work connected with ancient learning.
There was little to show the thought, the aspirations,
the feelings, the character of the present time. All
seems dry, stiff, pompous, pedantic, in curious contrast

220 CHRISTIANITY AND THE LATIN RACES n

to the naturalness, the perception of the realities of
character, the humour, the pathos, which are so often
seen in the roughest monastic writings of the same
period in the West. Echoes of what seems native
poetry, the original expression, more or less graceful
or pathetic, of feeling and imagination, come to us
from portions of Eastern Christendom — from Eussia,
from Servia, perhaps from other Sclavonic races ; but
little from Greece itself. Besides a few fragments,
marked occasionally by genuine touches of feeling, its
national poetry, exclusive of the noble but often florid
ecclesiastical hymns, consists mainly of Klephtic
ballads, recording feats of prowess against the Turks.
In curious contrast with the versatility of the old
Greeks, the character of their later representatives,
with all their liveliness, has in it, along with its
staunchness and power of resistance, a stereotyped
rigidity and uniformity — wanting play, wanting growth.
Looked at by the side of their Western brethren, they
resemble the shapes and branch systems of the ever-
green pines and firs of their own mountains, so hardy,
so stern, often nobly beautiful, but always limited in
their monotonous forms, when compared with the
varied outline and the luxuriant leafage, ever chang-

ii CHRISTIANITY AND THE LATIN RACES 221

ing, ever renewed, of the chestnuts of the Apennine
forests, or of the oaks and elms of our English fields.

It is in Western Christendom that we must look
for the fuller development of the capacities and the
originality of man, in those broad varieties of them,
which we call national character. There can be no
doubt that in the later ages of the world men and
nations have been more enterprising, more aspiring,
more energetic in the West than in the East ; that
their history has been more eventful, their revolutions
graver; that they have aimed at more, hoped for
more, ventured on more. And the subject of my
lecture to-night is the effects of Christianity on the
character of what are called the Latin races, especially
in Italy and France.

The Latin races occupy the ground where Eoman
civilisation of the times of the Empire had its seat
and main influence. When the Empire fell, its place
and local home were taken by nations, closely con-
nected by blood and race with its old subjects, which
were to become, in very different ways, two of the
foremost of our modern world. We know them well,
and they have both of them been very intimately
connected with us, in our history, and in the progress.

222 CHRISTIANITY AND THE LATIN RACES I

of our society and our ideas. With one we have
had a rivalry of centuries, which yet has not pre-
vented much sympathy between us, or the manifold
and deep influence of one great rival on the in-
tellectual and the political life of the other. To
Italy, long bound to vis by the ties of a great
ecclesiastical organisation, we have, since those ties
were broken, been hardly less closely bound by the
strong interest created by Italian literature and art,
and by the continual personal contact with the
country of a stream of travellers. We all of us form
an idea, more or less accurate and comprehensive, of
what Frenchmen and Italians are like. Take the
roughest and rudest' shape of this idea, so that it has
any feature and distinctness about it, and compare
it with whatever notions we can reach of the people
of the same countries in the days of the Empire ;
with the notion which scholars can derive of them
from reading their letters, their poetry, serious and
gay, their plays, their laws, their philosophical essays,
their political treatises, — with the notion which those
who are not scholars get of them from our own
historical writers. Two strong impressions, it seems
to me, result from such a comparison. The first is,

ii CHRISTIANITY AND THE LATIN RACES 223

how strangely modern in many ways these ancient
Eomans look ; what strangely modern thoughts they
think ; what strangely modern words they say. But
then, when we have realised how near in many ways
their civilisation and culture brought them to our
own days, the next feeling is how vast and broad
is the interval which lies between our conceptions,
when we think of French or Italian character, its
moral elements, habits, assumptions, impulses, its
governing forces, with the ways in which it exhibits
itself, and when we think of the contemporaries of
Cicero, of Seneca, of Marcus Aurelius. Much is like ;
much in the modern form recalls the past ; but in
the discriminating and essential points, how great a
difference.

I am not going to attempt anything like a survey
and comparison, even of the most general kind, of
these contrasted characters. All I propose to do is
to take one or two important points of difference
between them, and trace, if possible, where and from
what causes the differences arose.

Let us, then, take the two chief peoples of what
is called — what they themselves call — the Latin race ;
the Italians and the French. Rome had so impressed

224 CHRISTIANITY AND THE LATIA RACES n

her own stamp on the populations which inherited
what was then called Gaul, that no revolutions have
effaced it. Though there has been since the fall of
the Empire so large an infusion into them of Teutonic
blood, and the name by which they are now known
is a Teutonic one, yet Latin influence has proved
the prevailing and the dominant one among them ;
a language of Latin stock and affinities expresses
and controls their thoughts and associations : in the
great grouping of modern nations, France, as a whole,
goes with those of her provinces which geographically
belong to the South, and claim a portion of the
Mediterranean shore. Not forgetting their immense
differences, still we may for our purpose class these
two great nations together, in contrast with the
people who, before them, in the great days of Eome,
occupied the south of Europe, and ruled on the
Mediterranean. And in those times, when Gaul was
still but a province, we must take its provincial
society, as represented by the better known society
of the governing race and of the seat of empire, whose
ideas and manners that provincial society undoubtedly
reflected and copied. Comparing, then, the Italians
and French of modern times and history with the

ii CHRISTIANITY AND THE LATIN RACES 225

Romans of the Imperial city, of the Imperial peninsula,
and of the provinces, one striking difference seems' at
once to present itself before our eyes.

1. It is the different sphere and space in national
character occupied by the affections. I use the word
in the widest sense, and without reference now to the
good or bad, the wise or unwise, the healthy or morbid
exercise of them. But I observe that in the Roman
character the affections — though far, indeed, from
being absent, for how could they be in a race with
such high points of human nobleness — were yet
habitually allowed but little play, and, indeed, in their
most typical and honoured models of excellence jeal-
ously repressed — and that in the modern races, on the
other hand, which stand in their place, character is
penetrated and permeated, visibly, notoriously, by a
development and life of the affections and the emo-
tional part of our nature to which we can see nothing
parallel in ancient times. I suppose this contrast is
on the surface, in the most general and popular con-
ceptions of these characters. One observation will at
once bring up into our minds the difference I speak
of. Take some of our common forms of blame and

depreciation. We frequently attribute to our French

Q

226 CHRISTIANITY AND THE LATIN RACES n

neighbours, and still more to Italians, a softness of
nature, a proneness to indulge in an excessive, and
what seems to us unreal, opening and pouring forth of
the heart, a love of endearing and tender words, an
exaggerated and uncontrolled exhibition of feeling,
which to us seems mawkish and unmanly, if not in-
sincere ; we think we trace it in their habits, in their
intercourse, in their modes of address, in their letters,
in their devotions ; we call it sentimental, or effeminate ;
we laugh at it as childish, or we condemn and turn
away from it as unhealthy. But who would dream of
coupling the word "sentimental " with anything Roman?
Who, for instance, though we have a plaintive Tibullus
and a querulous Ovid, could imagine a Roman Rous-
seau ? That well-known idea which we call " senti-
ment " did not exist for them any more than that
which we call " charity." They might be pompous ;
they might profess, as men do now, feelings in excess
and in advance of what they really had ; they could,
for they were men, be deeply moved ; they could be
passionate, they could be affectionate, they could be
tender. I do not forget their love poems, gay, playful,
or melancholy ; I do not forget their epitaphs on their
dead, the most deeply touching of all epitaphs for the

ii CHRISTIANITY AND THE LATIN RACES 227

longing and profound despair with which they bid
their eternal farewell ; I do not forget the domestic
virtues of many Koman households, the majestic
chastity of their matrons, all that is involved of love
and trust and reverence in their favourite and
untranslatable word pietas ; the frequent attachment
even of the slave, the frequent kindness of the master.
It was not that there were not affections in so great a
people. But affections with them were looked on
with mistrust and misgiving ; it was the proper thing
to repress, to disown them ; they forced their way,
like some irresistible current, through a hard stern
crust, too often in the shape of passion, and were not
welcomed and honoured when they came. Between
Koman gravity and Koman dignity on the one hand,
and Koman coarseness and brutality, Koman pride,
Roman vice, on the other hand, there was no room for
the danger and weakness of sentimentalism — for it is
a danger which implies that men have found out the

depth, the manifoldness, the deep delight of the affec-

1

tions, and that an atmosphere has been created in
which they have thriven and grown into their innu-
merable forms. The one affection which the true
Koman thought noble and safe and worthy, the one

228 CHRISTIANITY AND THE LATIN RACES n

affection which he could trust unsuspected and un-
checked, was the love of his country, — his obstinate,
never -flagging passion for the greatness and public
good of Home.

I have spoken of the unfavourable side of this
increased development of the emotional part of the
character in the Southern nations, because I wished to
insist strongly on the fact itself of the change. But
though this ready overflow of the affections can be
morbid and may be weak, we should be not only
unjust, but stupid and ignorant, to overlook the truth,
that in itself it is also at the bottom of what is charac-
teristically beautiful and most attractive in the people
of the South. If you have ever met with anything in
character, French or Italian, which specially charmed
you, either in literature or in real life, I am sure that
you would find the root and the secret of it in the
fulness and the play of the affections ; in their unfold-
ing and in their ready disclosure ; in the way in which
they have blossomed into flowers of strange richness
and varied beauty ; in the inexpressible charm and
grace and delicacy and freedom which they have in-
fused into word and act and demeanour, into a man's
relations with his family, his parents, his brothers and

ii CHRISTIANITY AND THE LATIN RACES 229

sisters, into his friendships, and if he has been a
religious man, into his religious life. In good and
bad literature, in the books and in the manners which
have half ruined France, and in those which are still
her redemption and hope, still you find, in one way or
another, the dominant and animating element in some
strong force and exhibition of the affections. You
will see it in such letters as those of Madame de
SeVigne. You may see it in the pictures of a social
life almost at one time peculiar to France — a life so
full of the great world and refined culture, and the
gaiety and whirl of high and brilliant circles in a great
capital, yet withal so charmingly and unaffectedly
simple, unselfish, and warm, so really serious at bottom,
it may be, so profoundly self-devoted : such a book as
one that has lately been lying on our tables, Madame
Augustus Craven's B6cit d'une Smut, a sister's story of
the most ordinary, and yet of the deepest family union,
family joys, family attachments, family sorrows and
partings, — a story of people living their usual life in
the great world, yet as natural and tender and unam-
bitious as if the great world did not exist for them.
You may see the same thing in their records of pro-
fessedly devotional lives, — in what we read, for

230 CHRISTIANITY AND THE LATIN RACES n

instance, about the great men and women of Port-
royal, about F^nelon, about St. Francis de Sales, or,
to come later down, about Lacordaire, or Eugenie de
Guerin, or Montalembert. In French eloquence, very
noble when it is real — in French bombast, inimitable,
unapproachable in the exquisiteness of its absurdity
and nonsense ; — whether it is what is beautiful or
contemptible, whether it subdues and fascinates, or
provokes, or amuses you, the mark and sign is there of
a nature in which the affections claim and are allowed,
in their real or their counterfeit forms, ample range and
full scope ; where they are ever close to the surface, as
well as working in the depths ; where they suffuse all
life, and spontaneously and irresistibly colour thought
and speech ; where they play about the whole character
in all its movements, like the lightning about the
clouds of the summer evening.

And so with the Italians. The great place which
the affections have taken in their national character,
and the ways in which the affections unfold and reveal
themselves, are distinctive and momentous. More
than genius by itself, more than the sagacity and
temperate good sense which Italians claim, or than the
craft with which others have credited them, this

ii CHRISTIANITY AND THE LATIN RACES 231

power of the affections has determined the place of
Italy in modern civilisation. The weakness of which
her literature and manners have most to be ashamed,
and the loftiness and strength of which she may be
proud, both come from the ruling and prominent
influence of the affections, and the indulgence, wise or
unwise, of their claims. From it has come the inde-
scribable imbecility of the Italian poetasters. From it
has come the fire, the depth, the nobleness of the
Italian poets ; and not of them only, but of writers
who, with much that is evil, have much that is both
manly and touching — the Italian novelists, the Italian
satirists. It has given their spell not only to the
sonnets of Michel Angelo, but to the story of Man-
zoni, and to the epigrams, so fierce and bitter, but so
profoundly pathetic, of Leopardi and Giusti. And you
must not think that this is a thing of comparatively
modern times. This spectacle of the affections burst-
ing in their new vigour from the bands or the dead-
ness of the old world soon meets us in the middle
ages. Take, for instance, — an extreme instance, if you
will, — one of the favourite Italian saints, St. Francis ;
one who both reflected and also evoked what was in
the heart of the people ; one who to us is apt to seem

232 CHRISTIANITY AND THE LATIN RACES n

simply an extravagant enthusiast, but was once a
marvellous power in the world, and who is beginning
once more to interest our own very different age, —
witness Mrs. Oliphant's life of him in the Sunday
Library. In him you may see the difference between
the old and the new Italians. An old Roman might
have turned stoic or cynic : an old Roman might have
chosen to be poor, have felt the vanity of the world,
have despised and resigned it. But when St. Francis
resolves to be poor he does not stop there. His pur-
pose blossoms out into the most wonderful develop-
ment of the affections, of all that is loving, of all that
is sympathetic, of all that is cheerful and warm and
glad and gracious. Poverty he speaks of as his dear
and glorious Bride, and the marriage of Francis and
Poverty becomes one of the great themes of song and
art ; there must be something along with his tre-
mendous self-sacrifice which shall invest it with the
charm of the affections. Stern against privation and
pain and the face of death as the sternest of Romans,
his sternness passed on into a boundless energy of
loving, a fulness of joy and delight, which most of us
feel more hard to understand than his sternness. " He
was a man," says Mrs. Oliphant, " overflowing with

ii CHRISTIANITY AND THE LATIN RACES 233

sympathy for man and beast — for God's creatures —
wherever he encountered them. Not only was every
man his brother, but every animal — the sheep in the
fields, the birds in the branches, the brother ass on
which he rode, the sister bees who took refuge in his
protection. He was the friend of everything that
suffered and rejoiced. . . . And by this divine right of
nature everything trusted in him. . . . For he loved
everything that had life.

He prayeth best who lovetli best
All things both great and small,

For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.

" Such was the unconscious creed of the prophet of
Assisi ; " which made him salute the birds as his
sisters in praising God, and the defenceless leveret
as his brother ; which inspired the legends of his
taming fierce " Brother Wolf " in the streets of Gubbio ;
which dictated his " Canticle of the Creatures," praising
God for all things He had made to give men help and
joy — our brother the sun, our sisters the moon and the
lovely stars, our " humble and precious " sister water,
our brother fire, " bright and pleasant and very
mighty ; " praising his Lord for those who pardon one
another for His Son's sake, and stilling with the spell

234 CHRISTIANITY AND THE LATIN RACES n

of his song the rage of civil discord ; praising his Lord,
as the end drew near, " for our sister the death of the
body, from which no man escapeth." This is what
you see in one who in that age, among those people,
had access, unabashed and honoured, to the seats of
power ; who cast a charm over Italian democracies ;
who woke up a response in the hearts at once of
labourers and scholars. He is a man who in ancient
Kome is inconceivable at once in his weakness and his
strength. This is what I mean by the changed place
of the affections in the new compared with the old
Italians.

2. I will notice another point of difference between
the ancient and modern nations of the south of Europe.
It can hardly be said that the Eomans were, in any
eminent sense, an imaginative people. I know that I
am speaking of the countrymen of Lucretius and
Catullus, of Virgil and Horace. And of course there
was imagination in the grand ideas of rule and empire
which filled the Eoman mind. But they had not that
great gift of which art is born ; the eye to discern the
veiled beauty of which the world is full, in form, in
numbers, in sounds, in proportion, in human expres-
sion, in human character, the sympathy which can

ii CHRISTIANITY AND THE LATIN RACES 235

unveil and embody that beauty in shapes which are
absolutely new creations, things new in history and in
what exists. They had not that wonderful native
impulse and power which called into being the
Homeric poems, the stage of Athens, the architecture
of the Parthenon, the sculpture of Phidias and
Praxiteles, the painting of Polygnotus, the lyric poetry
of Simonides and Pindar. I hope you will not suppose
that I am insensible to the manifold beauty or magni-
ficence of what Eoman art produced in literature, in
building, in bust and statue, in graceful and fanciful
ornament. But in the general history of art, Eoman
art seems to occupy much the same place as the age
of Dryden and Pope occupies in the history of our
own literature. Dryden and Pope are illustrious
names ; but English poetry would be something very
different from what it is if they were its only or its
chief representatives. They might earn us the credit
of fire, and taste, and exquisite and delicate finish of
workmanship ; nay, of a cautious boldness of genius, and
chastened venturesomeness of invention ; they would
not entitle our literature to the praise of imagina-
tiveness and originality. For that we must look to
Chaucer and Shakespeare and Milton, and to names

236 CHRISTIANITY AND THE LATIN RACES n

which are yet recent and fresh among us ; and I can
hardly count the beautiful poetry of Kome to be of
this order, or to disclose the same kind of gifts. The
greatest of Koman poets, in the grandest of his bursts
of eloquence, confessed the imaginative inferiority of
his people, and bade them remember that their
arts, their calling, their compensation, were to crush
the mighty, to establish peace, and give law to the
world.1

I need not remind you how different in genius and
faculty were the later nations of the south of Europe.
Degenerate as their Koman ancestors would have
accounted them for having lost the secret of conquest
and empire, they won and long held a supremacy, in
some points hardly yet contested, in the arts, in which
imagination, bold, powerful, and delicate, invents and
creates and shapes. In the noblest poetry, in paint-
ing, in sculpture, in music, Italians led the way and
set the standard ; in some provinces of art they have

1 Excudent alii spirantia mollius £era ;
Credo equidem : vivos ducent de marmore vultus ;
Orabunt causas melius, coelique meatus
Describent radio, et surgentia sidera dicent ;
Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento :
H?e tibi erunt artes ; pacisque imponere morem,
Parcere subjectis, et debellare superbos.

ii CHRISTIANITY AND THE LATIN RACES 237

been rivalled ; in some, in time, surpassed ; in some
they are still unapproached. But without laying-
stress on their masterpieces, the point is that
in the descendants of the subjects of the Empire,
so hard and prosaic and businesslike, the whole
temper and tendency of these races is altered. A
new and unsuspected spring in their nature has been
touched, and a current gushes forth, no more to fail,
of new aspirations and ideas, new feelings to be
expressed, new thoughts to be embodied. Imaginative
faculty, in endlessly varying degrees of force and
purity, becomes one of the prominent and permanent
characteristics of the race. Crowds of unknown poets
and painters all over Italy have yielded to the im-
pulse, and attempted to realise the ideal beauty that
haunted them ; and the masterpieces which are the
flower and crown of all art are but the picked and
choice examples out of a crop of like efforts — a crop
with numberless failures, more or less signal, but
which do nothing to discourage the passionate wish to
employ the powers of the imagination. The place of
one of the least imaginative among the great races of
history is taken by one of the most imaginative —
one most strongly and specially marked by im-

238 CHRISTIANITY AND THE LATIN RACES n

aginative gifts, and most delighting in the use of
them.

Whence has come this change over the character
of these nations ? Whence, in these races sprung
from the subjects of the sternest of Empires and
moulded under its influence, this reversal of the
capital and leading marks, by which they are popularly
known and characterised ; this development of the emo-
tional part of their nature, this craving after the beau-
tiful in art ? Whence the inexhaustible fertility and
inventiveness, the unfailing taste and tact and measure,
the inexpressible charm of delicacy and considerate
forethought and exuberant sympathy, which are so
distinctly French, and which mark what is best in
French character and French writing ? Whence that
Italian splendour of imagination and profound insight
into those subtle connections by which objects of the
outward senses stir and charm and ennoble the
inward soul ? What was the discipline which wrought
all this ? Who was it, who in the ages of confusion
which followed the fall of the Empire, sowed and
ripened the seeds which were to blossom into such
wondrous poetry in the fourteenth century, into such a
matchless burst of art in the fifteenth and sixteenth ?

II CHRISTIANITY AND THE LATIN RACES 239

Who touched in these Latin races the hidden vein of
tenderness, the "fount of tears," the delicacies and
courtesies of mutual kindness, the riches of art and
the artist's earnestness ? Who did all this, I do not
say in the fresh natures of the Teutonic invaders, for
whom the name barbarians is a very inadequate and
misleading word, but in the spoiled and hardened
children of an exhausted and ruined civilisation ?

Can there be any question as to what produced this
change ? It was the conversion of these races to the
faith of Christ. Eevolutions of character like this do
not, of course, come without many influences acting
together ; and in this case the humiliations and long
affliction of the Northern invasions produced their
deep effects. Hearts were broken and pride was
tamed, and in their misery men took new account of
what they needed one from another. But the cause
of causes, which made other causes fruitful, was the
presence, in the hour of their distress, of the Christian
Church, with its message, its teaching, and its discip-
line. The Gospel was — in a way in which no religion,
nothing which spoke of the unseen and the eternal,
ever had been or could be — a religion of the affections,
a religion of sympathy. By what it said, by the way

240 CHRISTIANITY AND THE LATIN RACES n

in which it said it, Christianity opened absolutely a
new sphere, new possibilities, a new world, to human
affections. This is what we see in the conversions,
often so sudden, always so fervent, in the New
Testament, and in the early ages. Three great
revelations were made by the Gospel, which seized on
human nature, and penetrated and captivated that
part of it by which men thought and felt, their
capacities for love and hope, for grief and joy. There
was a new idea and sense of sin ; there was the
humiliation, the companionship with us in our mortal
life, of the Son of God, the Cross and the Sacrifice, of
Him who was also the Most Highest ; there was the
new brotherhood of men with men in the family and
Church of Christ and God. To the proud, the
reserved, the stern, the frivolous, the selfish, who met
the reflection of their own very selves in all society
around them, there was disclosed a new thing in the
human heart and a new thing in the relations of men
to God and to one another. There woke up a hitherto
unknown consciousness of the profound mystery of
sin — certain, strange, terrible ; and with it new
searchings of heart, new agonies of conscience, a new
train of the deepest feelings, the mingled pains and

ii CHRISTIANITY AND THE LATIN RACES 241

joys of penitence, the liberty of forgiveness, the
princely spirit of sincerity, the ineffable peace of God.
And with it came that unimaginable unveiling of the
love of God, which overwhelms the imagination which
once takes it in, alike whether the mind accepts or
rejects it ; which grave unbelief recoils from, as " that
strange story of a crucified God " ; which the New
Testament expresses in its record of those ever-amazing
words, " God so loved the world that He gave His only
begotten Son, to the end that all that believe in Him
should not perish, but have everlasting life," — the
appearance in the world of time of the everlasting
Word, of Christ the Sacrifice, Christ the Healer,
Christ the Judge, Christ the Consoler of Mankind and
their Eternal Portion. And then it made men feel
that, bound together in that august and never-ending
brotherhood with the Holy One and the Blessed, they
had ties and bonds one to another which transformed
all their duties into services of tenderness and love.
Once caught sight of, once embodied in the words of a
spokesman and interpreter of humanity like St. Paul,
these revelations could never more be forgotten.
These things were really believed ; they were ever
present to thought and imagination, revolutionising

R

242 CHRISTIANITY AND THE LATIN RACES ir

life, giving birth to love stronger than death, making
death beautiful and joyful. The great deeps of man's
nature were broken up — one deep of the heart called
to another, while the waves and storms of that great
time of judgment were passing over the world.
Here was the key which unlocked men's tenderness ;
here, while they learned a new enthusiasm, they
learned what they had never known of themselves, the
secret of new affections. And in the daily and yearly
progress of the struggling Church, these affections
were fed and moulded, and deeply sunk into character.
The Latin races learned this secret, in the community
of conviction and hope, in the community of
suffering, between the high-born and the slave, —
they learned it when they met together at the place of
execution, in the blood-stained amphitheatre, in the
crowded prison-house, made musical with the " sweet
solemnities of gratitude and praise," with the loving
and high-hearted farewells of resignation and patience ;
they learned it in the Catacombs, at the graves of the
martyrs, in the Eucharistic Feast, in the sign of the
Eedeemer's Cross, in the kiss of peace ; they learned it
in that service of perpetual prayer, in which early
Latin devotion gradually found its expression and

ii CHRISTIANITY AND THE LATIN RACES 243

embodied its faith, — in those marvellous combinations
of majesty and tenderness, so rugged yet so piercing
and so pathetic, the Latin hymns ; in those unequalled
expressions, in the severest and briefest words, of the
deepest needs of the soul, and of all the ties which bind
men to God and to one another, the Latin Collects ; in
the ever-repeated Psalter, in the Miserere and Be Pro-
fundis, in the Canticles of morning and evening, and the
hour of rest and of death, in the Magnificat and Nunc
Dimittis, in the " new song " of the awful Te Deum —

Deep as the grave, high as the Eternal Throne.

They learned it in that new social interest, that
reverence and compassion and care for the poor,
which, beginning in the elder Scriptures, in the
intercessions of the Psalms for the poor and needy, and
in the Prophetic championship of their cause against
pride and might, had become, since the Sermon on the
Mount, the characteristic of Christ's religion. They
learned it in that new commandment of the Divine
Founder of the Church, the great all - embracing
Christian word, charity. These are things which,
sinking deep into men's hearts, alter, perhaps without
their knowing it, the staple of their character. Here
it is that we see, unless I am greatly mistaken, the

244 CHRISTIANITY AND THE LATIN RACES n

cacount of one great change in the population of
the South in modern and ancient times ; of the
contrast caused by the place which the affections
occupy, compared with the sternness and hardness
alike of what was heroic and what was commonplace
in ancient Italian character. Imagine a Eoman of the
old stamp making the sign of the cross. He might
perhaps do it superstitiously, as consuls might go to
see the sacred chickens feed, or angurs might smile at
one another ; but imagine him doing it, as Dante, or
Savonarola, or Pascal might do it, to remind himself
of a Divine Friend, " Who had loved him and given
Himself for him."

And the same account, it seems to me, is to be
given of the other great change in Southern character ;
the development of imaginative originality and of
creative genius in all branches of art in later times.
It was that the preaching and belief of the Gospel
opened to these races a new world, such as they had
never dreamed of, not only of truth and goodness, but
of Divine beauty. Eugged and unlovely, indeed, was
all that the outward aspect of religion at first pre-
sented to the world : it was, as was so eloquently said1

1 By Professor Lightfoot.

ii CHRISTIANITY AND THE LATIN RACES 245

some time ago in this place, the contrast presented by
the dim and dreary Catacombs underground to the
pure and brilliant Italian sky and the monuments of
Roman wealth and magnificence above. But in that
poor and mean society, which cared so little for the
things of sense and sight, there were nourished and
growing up — for, indeed, it was the Church of the God
of all glory and all beauty, the chosen home of the
Eternal Creating Spirit — thoughts of a perfect beauty
above this world ; of a light and a glory which the sun
could never see : of types, in character and in form, of
grace, of sweetness, of nobleness, of tenderness, of per-
fection, which could find no home in time — which
were of the eternal and the unseen on which human
life bordered, and which was to it, indeed, " no foreign
land." There these Romans unlearned their old hard-
ness and gained a new language and new faculties.
Hardly, and with difficulty, and with scanty success,
did they at first strive to express what glowed with
such magnificence to their inward eye, and kindled
their souls within them. Their efforts were rude —
rude in art, often hardly less rude in language. But
that Divine and manifold idea before them, they knew
that it was a reality ; it should not escape them,

246 CHRISTIANITY AND THE LATIN RACES n

though it still baffled them ; — they would not let it go.
And so, step by step, age after age, as it continued to
haunt their minds, it gradually grew into greater
distinctness and expression. From the rough attempts
in the Catacombs or the later mosaics, in all their
roughness so instinct with the majesty and tenderness
and severe sweetness of the thoughts which inspired
them — from the emblems and types and figures, the
trees and the rivers of Paradise, the dove of peace, the
palms of triumph, the Good Shepherd, the hart no
longer " desiring," but at last tasting " the water-
brooks," from the faint and hesitating adumbrations
of the most awful of human countenances — from all
these feeble but earnest attempts to body forth what
the soul was full of, Christian art passed, with per-
sistent undismayed advance, through the struggles of
the middle ages to the inexpressible delicacy and
beauty of Giotto and Fra Angelico, to the Last Supper
of Lionardo, to the highest that the human mind ever
imagined of tenderness and unearthly majesty, in the
Mother and the Divine Son of the Madonna di San
Sisto. And the same with poetry. The poetry of
which the Christian theology was full from the first
wrought itself in very varying measures, but with pro-

CHRISTIANITY AND THE LATIN RACES 247

found and durable effort, into the new mind and soul
of reviving Europe, till it gathered itself up from an
infinite variety of sources, history and legend and
scholastic argument and sacred hymn, to burst forth
in one mighty volume, in that unique creation of the
regenerated imagination of the South, — the eventful
poem which made the Italians one, whatever might
become of Italy, — the sacred song which set forth the
wonderful fortunes of the soul of man, under God's
government and judgment, its loss, its discipline, its
everlasting glory — the Divina Commedia of Dante.

I will illustrate these changes by two comparisons.
First, as to the development of the imaginative faculty.
Compare, and I confine the comparison to this single
point — compare, as to the boldness, and originality,
and affluence of the creative imagination — the JEneid
of Virgil and the Divina Commedia of Dante, whose
chief glory it was to be Virgil's scholar. The Divina
Commedia may, indeed, be taken as the measure and
proof of the change which had come over Southern
thought and character since the fall of the Empire.
There can be no question how completely it reflected
the national mind, how deeply the national mind
responded to it. Springing full formed and complete

248 CHRISTIANITY AND THE LATIN RACES n

from its creator's soul, without model or precedent, it
was at once hailed throughout the Peninsula, and
acknowledged to be as great as after ages have thought
it ; it rose at once into its glory. Learned and un-
learned, princes and citizens, recognised in it the same
surpassing marvel that we in our day behold in some
great scientific triumph ; books and commentaries were
written about it; chairs were founded in Italian Uni-
versities to lecture upon it. In the Divina Commedia
Dante professes to have a teacher, an unapproachable
example, a perfect master and guide ; — Virgil, the
honour and wonder of Eoman literature. Master and
scholar, the Mantuan of the age of Augustus, and the
Florentine citizen of the age of the Guelfs and Ghibel-
lines, his devout admirer, were, it need not be said,
essentially different; but the point of difference on
which I now lay stress is the place which the affec-
tions, in their variety and fulness and perpetual play,
occupy in the works of writers so closely related to
one another. From the stately grace, the "supreme
elegance," from the martial and senatorial majesty of
the Imperial poem, you come, in Dante, on severity
indeed, and loftiness of word and picture and rhythm ;
but you find the poem pervaded and instinct with

ii CHRISTIANITY AND THE LATIN RACES 249

human affections of every kind; the soul is free, and
every shade of its feelings, its desires, its emotions,
finds its expressive note; they pass from high to low,
from deep to bright, through a scale of infinite range
and changefulness ; you are astonished to find moods
of feeling which you thought peculiar and unobserved
in yourself noted by the poet's all-embracing sympathy.
But this is no part of the Latin poet's experience, at
least of his poetic outfit ; such longings, such anxieties,
such despair, such indignation, such gracious sweetness,
such fire of holy wrath, such fire of Divine love,
familiar to our modern world, to our modern poetry,
are strange to Virgil. Nay, in his day, to the greatest
masters of the human soul, to the noblest interpreters
of its ideals, they had not yet been born. I suppose
that in Virgil the places where we should look for
examples of this bursting out of the varied play of the
affections, native, profound, real, would be the account
of the last fatal night of Troy, the visit to the regions
and shades of the dead, the death of Pallas and his
slayer Turnus, the episode, above all, of the soldier
friends, Nisus and the young Euryalus. Who shall
say that there is any absence of tender and solemn
feeling ? The Italian poet owns, with unstinted and

250 CHRISTIANITY AND THE LATIN RACES n

never-tiring homage, that here he learnt the secret and
the charm of poetry. But compare on this one point
— viz. the presence, the vividness, the naturalness, the
diversity, the frankness, of human affection, — compare
with these passages almost any canto taken at random
of the Divina Commedia, and I think you would be
struck with the way in which, in complete contrast
with the uEneid, the whole texture of the poem is
penetrated and is alive with feeling; with all forms of
grief and pity and amazement, with all forms of love
and admiration and delight and joy. In the story of
Francesca, in the agony of the Tower of Famine, in
the varied endurance and unfailing hope of the Pur-
gatorio, in the joys and songs of the Paradiso, we get
new and never -forgotten glimpses into the abysses
and the capacities of the soul of man.

In the next place, what I seek to illustrate is the
difference in the place occupied by the affections in
men of the old and the new race, in the same great
national group, a difference made, as I conceive, by
Christianity. Let us take, as one term of the com-
parison, the great and good Emperor Marcus Aurelius.
His goodness is not only known from history, but we
also have the singular and inestimable advantage of

ii CHRISTIANITY AND THE LATIN RACES 251

possessing "a record of his inward life, his Journal, or
Commentaries, or Meditations, or Thoughts, for by all
these names has the work been called." I take this
description from an essay on him by Mr. Matthew
Arnold, which gives what seems to me a beautiful and
truthful picture of one of the most genuine and earnest
and elevated souls of the ancient world. I cannot
express my wonder, my admiration, my thankfulness,
every time I open his book, and remember that it was
written by a Koman Emperor in the midst of war and
business, and remember also what a Koman Emperor,
the master of the world, might in those days be, and
what he often was. What is so touching is' the
mixture of heroic truth and purpose, heroic in its self-
command and self-surrender, with a deep tenderness
not the less evident because under austere restraint.
"It is by its accent of emotion," says Mr. Arnold,
" that the morality of M. Aurelius acquires its special
character, and reminds one of Christian morality. The
sentences of Seneca are stimulating to the intellect ;
the sentences of Epictetus are fortifying to the
character ; the sentences of Marcus Aurelius find their
way to the soul." In his opening pages, written
apparently in camp in a war against the wild tribes

252 CHRISTIANITY AND THE LATIN RACES n

of the Danube, he goes over in memory all his friends,
remembering the several good examples he had seen
in each, the services, great and small, to his moral
nature he had received from each, and then thank-
fully refers all to the Divine power and providence
which had kept his life, thanking the gods, as Bishop
Andrews thanks God in his devotions, for his good
parents and good sister, " for teachers kind, benefactors
never to be forgotten, intimates congenial, friends
sincere . . .for all who had advantaged him by
writings, converse, patterns, rebukes, even injuries"
..." for nearly everything good " — thanking them
that he was kept from folly and shame and sin —
thanking them that "though it was his mother's fate
to die young, it was from her," he says, "that he
learned piety and beneficence, and abstinence not only
from evil deeds but from evil thoughts" — "that she
had spent the last years of her life with him;" "that
whenever I wished to help any man in his need, I
was never told that I had not the means to do it ; . . .
that I have a wife, so obedient, so affectionate, and
so simple ; that I have such good masters for my
children."

Two centuries later we come upon another famous

ii CHRISTIANITY AND THE LATIN RACES 253

book, Latin in feeling, and in this case in language,
— the record of the history and experience of a
soul thirsting and striving after the best. After
the Meditations of the Roman Emperor come the
" Confessions " of the Christian saint — St. Augustine.
It is not to my purpose to compare these two remark-
able books except in this one point. In Marcus
Aurelius, emotion there is, affection, love, gratitude to
a Divine Power which he knows not ; but his feelings
refrain from speaking, — they have not found a
language. In St. Augustine's Confessions they have
learned to speak, — they have learned, without being
ashamed of themselves, without pretence of unworthi-
ness, to pour out of their fulness. The chain is taken
off the heart ; the lips are unloosed. In both books
there is a retrospect, earnest, honest, thankful of the
writer's providential education; in both, the writers
speak of what they owe to their mother's care and
love. Both (the words of one are few) are deeply
touching. But read the burst of passionate praise and
love to God with which Augustine's Confessions open
— read the account of his mother's anxieties during
his wild boyhood and youth, of his mother's last days,
and of the last conversations between mother and son

254 CHRISTIANITY AND THE LATIN RACES n

in "the house looking into the garden at Ostia"; and
I think we shall say that a new and hitherto unknown
fountain of tenderness and peace and joy had been
opened, deep, calm, unfailing, and that what had
opened it was man's new convictions of his relation
to a living God of love, the Lord and object and
portion of hearts and souls. "Thou madest us for
Thyself," is his cry, " and our heart is restless till it
repose in Thee." Here is the spring and secret of this
new affection, this new power of loving : —

" What art Thou, 0 my God ? What art Thou, I
beseech Thee, but the Lord my God? For who is
God, besides our Lord, — Who is God, besides our
God ? 0 Thou Supreme ; most merciful ; most just ;
most secret, most present ; most beautiful, most mighty,
most incomprehensible ; most constant, and yet chang-
ing all things ; immutable, never new and never old,
and yet renewing all things ; ever in action, and ever
quiet ; keeping all, yet needing nothing ; creating, up-
holding, filling, protecting, nourishing, and perfecting
all things. . . . And what shall I say ? 0 my God,
my life, my joy, my holy dear delight ! Or what
can any man say, when he speaketh of Thee ? And
woe to those that speak not of Thee, but are silent in

ii CHRISTIANITY AND THE LATIN RACES 255

Thy praise; for even those who speak most of Thee
may be accounted to be but dumb. Have mercy upon
me, 0 Lord, that I may speak unto Thee and praise
Thy name.'"

To the light - hearted Greeks Christianity had
turned its face of severity, of awful resolute hope.
The final victory of Christ, and, meanwhile, patient
endurance in waiting for it — this was its great lesson
to their race. To the serious, practical, hard-natured
Roman, it showed another side — " love, joy, peace " ;
an unknown wealth of gladness and thankfulness and
great rejoicing. It stirred his powerful but somewhat
sluggish soul ; it revealed to him new faculties, dis-
closed new depths of affection, won him to new
aspirations and new nobleness. And this was a new
and real advance and rise m human nature. This
expansion of the power of feeling and loving and
imagining, in a whole race, was as really a new
enlargement of human capacities, a new endowment
and instrument and grace, as any new and permanent
enlargement of the intellectual powers ; as some new
calculus, or the great modern conquests in mechanical
science, or in the theory and development of music.
The use that men or generations have made of those

256 CHRISTIANITY AND THE LATIN RACES n

enlarged powers, of whatever kind, is another matter.
Each gift has its characteristic perversions ; each
perversion has its certain and terrible penalty. We
all know but too well that this change has not cured
the Southern races of national faults ; that the ten-
dencies which it has encouraged have been greatly
abused. It has not extirpated falsehood, idleness,
passion, ferocity. That quickened and fervid imagina-
tion, so open to impressions and eager to communicate
them, has debased religion and corrupted art. But if
this cultivation of the affections and stimulus given to
the imagination have been compatible with much evil, —
with much acquiescence in wrong and absurdity, with
much moral stagnation, much inertness of conscience,
much looseness of principle, — it must be added, with
some of the darkest crimes and foulest corruptions in
history, — yet, on the other hand, it has been, in the
Southern nations, the secret of their excellence, and
their best influences. This new example and standard
of sweetness, of courtesy, of affectionateness, of gener-
osity, of ready sympathy, of delight in the warm out-
pouring of the heart, of grace, of bright and of pathetic
thought, of enthusiasm for high and noble beauty —
what would the world have been without it? Of

ii CHRISTIANITY AND THE LATIN RACES 257

some of the most captivating, most ennobling instances
which history and society have to show, of what is
greatest, purest, best in our nature, this has been the
condition and the secret. And for this great gift and
prerogative, that they have produced not only great
men like those of the elder race, captains, rulers,
conquerors, — not only men greater than they, lords
in the realm of intelligence, its discoverers and its
masters, — but men high in that kingdom of the Spirit
and of goodness which is as much above the order of
intellect as intellect is above material things, — for
this the younger races of the South are indebted to
Christianity,

LECTURE III

CHRISTIANITY AND THE TEUTONIC RACES

At the time when the Roman Empire was the greatest
power in the world, and seemed the firmest, a race was
appearing on the scene which excited a languid feel-
ing of uneasiness among Roman statesmen, and an
artificial interest among Roman moralists. The states-
man thought that this race might be troublesome as a
neighbour, if it was not brought under the Roman
rule of conquest. The moralists from their heights of
civilisation looked with curiosity on new examples of
fresh and vigorous nature, and partly in disgust, partly
in quest of unused subjects for rhetorical declamation,
saw in them, in the same spirit as Rousseau in later
times, a contrast between their savage virtues and
Roman degeneracy. There was enough in their love
of enterprise and love of fighting to make their wild
and dreary country a good exercise -ground for the
practice of serious war by the Legions; and gradually

in CHRISTIANITY AND THE TEUTONIC RACES 259

a line of military cantonments along the frontier of the
Rhine and the Danube grew into important provincial
towns, the advanced guard of Roman order against the
darkness and anarchy of the wilderness outside. When
the Roman chiefs were incapable or careless, the daring
of the barbarians, their numbers, and their physical
strength made their hostility formidable ; the Legions
of Varus perished in the defiles of the German forests,
by a disaster like the defeat of Braddock in America,
or the catastrophe of Afghanistan : and Roman Em-
perors were proud to add to their titles one derived
from successes, or at least campaigns, against such
fierce enemies. The Romans — why, we hardly know
— chose to call them, as they called the Greeks, by a
name which was not their own ; to the Romans they
were Germans ; to themselves they were Diutisc,
Thiudisco, Teutsch, Deutscher, Latinised into Teutons.
What they were in themselves, in their ways and
thoughts, the Romans in general cared as much as we
in general care about the black tribes of the interior
of Africa or the Tartar nomads of Central Asia, — must
we not almost add, about the vast and varied popula-
tions of our own India. What struck the Romans
most was that alternation of savage energy and savage

26o CHRISTIANITY AND THE TEUTONIC RACES in

indolence and lethargy, which is like the successive
ferocity and torpor of the vulture and the tiger.
What also partly impressed them was the austerity
and purity of their manners, the honour paid to their
women, the amount of labour allotted or entrusted to
them. But, after all, they were barbarians, not Aery
interesting except to philosophers, not very menacing
except to the imagination of alarmists ; needing to be
kept in order, of course, as all wild forces do, but not
beyond the strength, the majesty, and the arts of the
Empire to control and daunt. Tacitus describes the
extermination of a large tribe by the jealousy and
combination of its neighbours ; he speaks of it with
satisfaction as the riddance of an inconvenience, and
expresses an opinion that if ever the fortunes of the
Empire should need it, the discord of its barbarian
neighbours might be called into play. But not even
he seriously apprehended that the fortunes of the
Empire would fail before the barbarian hordes. There
was one apparently widespread confederacy among
the tribes, which for a time disquieted Marcus Aurelius ;
but the storm passed — and this " formidable league, the
only one that appears in the two first centuries of the
Imperial history, was entirely dissipated, without

1 1 1 CHRIS TIANITY AND . THE TE U TONIC RA CES 26 1

leaving any traces behind in Germany." No one then
dreamed that they beheld in that race the destroyers
and supplanters of the ancient civilisation. Still less
did any one then dream that in the forests and
morasses of that vast region — " peopled by the various
tribes of one great nation, and comprising the whole
of modern Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Fin-
land, Livonia, Prussia, and the greater part of Poland "
— were the fathers of a nobler and grander world
than any that history had yet known ; that here was
the race which, under many names, Franks and Alle-
manns, Angles and Saxons and Jutes, Burgundians,
Goths, Lombards, was first to overrun, and then revivify
exhausted nations ; that it was a race which was to
assert its chief and lordly place in Europe, to occupy
half of a new-found world, to inherit India, to fill the
islands of unknown seas ; to be the craftsmen, the
traders, the colonists, the explorers of the world.
That it should be the parent of English sailors, of
German soldiers, this may not be so marvellous.
That from it should have come conquerors, heroes,
statesmen, " men of blood and iron," — nay, great rulers
and mighty kings — the great Charles, Saxon Ottos,
Franconian Henrys, Swabian Frederics, Norman

262 CHRISTIANITY AND THE TEUTONIC RACES III

Williams, English Edwards, seems in accordance with
the genius of the countrymen of Arminius, the
destroyer of the legions of Augustus. But it is
another thing to think that from the wild people
described by Tacitus, or in the ninth chapter of
Gibbon, should have sprung Shakespeare and Bacon,
Erasmus and Albert Diirer, Leibnitz and Goethe ; that
this race should have produced an English court of
justice, English and German workshops of thought
and art, English and German homes, English and
German religious feeling, and religious earnestness.

I need not remind you of the history of this
wonderful transition— a transition lasting through
centuries, from barbarism to civilisation. The story
is everywhere more or less the same. First came a
period of overthrow, wasting, and destruction. Then,
instead of the fierce tribes retaining their old savage
and predatory habits, they show a singular aptitude for
change ; they settle in the lands which they have over-
run ; they pass rapidly into what, in comparison with
their former state, is a civil order, with laws, rights,
and the framework of society. Angles and Saxons and
Danes in Britain, Norsemen by sea, and Franks and
Burgundians across the Bhine in Gaul, come to ravage

in CHRISTIANITY AND THE TEUTONIC RACES 263

and plunder, and stay to found a country ; they arrive
pirates and destroyers, urged on by a kind of frenzy
of war and ruin, a kind of madness against peaceful
life ; and when the storm in which they come has
passed away, we see that in the midst of the confusion
they have created the beginnings of new nations ; we
see the foundations distinctly laid of England, Nor-
mandy, and France. And next, when once the bar-
barian is laid aside, and political community begins,
though the early stages may be of the rudest and most
imperfect, beset with the remains of old savagery, and
sometimes apparently overlaid by it, yet the idea of
civil society and government henceforth grows with
ever-accelerating force, with ever-increasing influence.
It unfolds itself in various forms and with unequal
success ; but on the whole the development of it,
though often retarded and often fitful and irregular,
has never been arrested since the time when it began.
The tribes of the same stock which continued to occupy
the centre of Europe had the same general history as
their foreign brethren. The great events of conquest,
the contact of civilisation outside, the formation and
policy of new kingdoms, all reacted on the home of
the race ; Germany became the established seat of an

264 CHRISTIANITY AND THE TEUTONIC RACES ill

Empire which inherited the name and the claims of
Rome, the complement and often the rival of the new
spiritual power which ruled in the ancient Imperial
city.

Many causes combined to produce this result. The
qualities and endowments of the race, possibly their
traditional institutions, certainly their readiness to
take in new ideas and to adapt themselves to great
changes in life and manners ; their quickness in seiz-
ing, in the midst of wreck and decline, the points
which the ancient order presented for building up a
new and advancing one ; their instinct, wild and un-
tamed as they were, for the advantages of law ; their
curious power of combining what was Eoman and
foreign with what was tenaciously held to as Teutonic
and ancestral ; their energy and manliness of purpose,
their unique and unconquerable elasticity of nature,
which rose again and again out of what seemed fatal
corruption, as it rose out of defeat and overthrow ; —
all this explains the great transformation of the invad-
ing tribes, the marvellous history of modern Europe.
It was thus, no doubt, that the elder civilisations of
Greece and Rome had arisen out of elements probably
once as wild and unpromising as those from which our

in CHRISTIANITY AND THE TEUTONIC RACES 265

younger one has sprung ; it was thus that, coming

from the mountains and the woods, from the chase or

the pasture-grounds, they learned, in ways and steps

now hidden from us —

To create
A household and a father-land,
A city and a state.

But the fortunes of the elder and the newer civil-
isations have hitherto been different in fruit and in
permanence, and a force was at work in moulding the
latter which was absent from the earlier. The Teu-
tonic race found an unknown and unexpected spiritual
power before them, such as early Hellenes and Latins
had never known. They found, wherever they came,
a strange, organised polity, one and united in a vast
brotherhood, coextensive with the Empire, but not of
it, nor of its laws and institutions ; earthly in its out-
ward aspect, but the representative and minister of a
perpetual and ever-present kingdom of heaven ; un-
armed, defenceless in the midst of never-ceasing war,
and yet inspiring reverence and receiving homage, and
ruling by the word of conviction, of knowledge, of
persuasion ; arresting and startling the new conquerors
with the message of another world. In the changes
which came over the invading race, this undreamt of

266 CHRISTIANITY AND THE TEUTONIC RACES m

power, which they met in their career, had the deepest

and most eventful share.1 That great society, which

had half converted the Empire, converted and won

over its conquerors. In their political and social

development it took the lead in conjunction with their

born leaders. Legislation, political and social, the

reconstruction of a society in chaos, the fusion of old

things with new, the adaptation of the forms, the laws,

the traditions of one time to the wants of another, the

1 In the new era, the first thing we meet with is the religious
society ; it was the most advanced, the strongest ; whether in the
Roman municipality, or at the side of the barbarian kings, or in the
graduated ranks of the conquerors who have become lords of the land,
everywhere we observe the presence and the influence of the Church.
From the fourth to the thirteenth century it is the Church which
always marches in the front rank of civilisation. I must call your
attention to a fact which stands at the head of all others, and charac-
terises the Christian Church in general — a fact which, so to speak, has
decided its destiny. This fact is the unity of the Church, the unity
of the Christian society, irrespectively of all diversities of time, of place,
of power, of language, of origin. Wonderful phenomenon ! It is just
at the moment when the Roman Empire is breaking up and disappear-
ing that the Christian Church gathers itself up and takes its definitive
form. Political unity perishes, religious unity emerges. Populations
endlessly different in origin, habits, speech, destiny, rush upon the
scene ; all becomes local and partial ; every enlarged idea, every general
institution, every great social arrangement is lost sight of ; and in
this moment this Christian Church proclaims most loudly the unity
of its teaching, the universality of its law. And from the bosom of
the most frightful disorder the world has ever seen has arisen the largest
and purest idea, perhaps, which ever drew men together, — the idea of
a spiritual society. — Ghdzot, Lee. xii. p. 230.

in CHRISTIANITY AND. THE TEUTONIC RACES 267

smoothing of jars, the reconciling of conflicting interests,
and still more of conflicting and dimly grasped ideas,
all that laid the foundations and sowed the seeds of
civil order in all its diversified shapes, as it was to
be, — was the work not only of kings, princes, and
emperors, but, outwardly as much, morally much
more, of the priests, bishops, and councils of the
Christian Church.

These results and their efficient causes are in a
general way beyond dispute. But can we trace, be-
sides these political and social changes, any ethical
changes of corresponding importance ? Such changes,
of course, there must have been, in populations alter-
ing from one state to another, where the interval
between these states is so enormous as that between
uncivilised and civilised life. But it is conceivable,
though, of course, not likely, that they might have
been of little interest to those who care about
human goodness and the development of the moral
side of human nature. China has passed into a
remarkable though imperfect civilisation, but without
perceptible moral rise. Or the changes may be per-
ceptible only in individual instances, and not on that
large scale which we take when we speak of national

268 CHRISTIANITY AND THE TEUTONIC RACES in

character. Do we see in the Teutonic races changes
analogous to those which we believe we can trace in
the Greek and the Latin races since they passed under
the discipline of Christianity ?

I think we can. We must remember that we are
on ground where our generalisations can but approxi-
mate to the true state of the case, and that when we
speak of national character we speak of a thing which,
though very striking at a distance and in gross, is
vague and tremulous in its outlines, and in detail is
full of exceptions and contradictory instances. Come
too near it, and try to hold it too tightly, and it seems
to elude our grasp, or, just when we have seized a
distinct thought, to escape from us. We are made to
feel by objectors that what is shared by so many
individual and definite characters, and shared in such
endlessly varying proportions, must be looked upon
more as an ideal than as anything definitely and
tangibly realised. And, again, when we speak of
something common to the Teutonic race, we must
remember the differences between its different great
branches, — in Germany, in the Netherlands, in the
Scandinavian countries, in England and its colonies.
But for all that, there seem to be some common and

in CHRISTIANITY AND THE TEUTONIC RACES 269

characteristic features recognisable in all of them, in
distinction from the Latin or Latinised races; gifts
and qualities to be found, of course, in individuals of
the other races, but not prominent in a general
survey ; ideals if you like, but ideals which all who
are under the ordinary impressions of the race welcome
as expressing what they think the highest and pre-
suppose as their standard. There must be some
reality attaching to such ideals, or they would never
have become ideals to which men delight to look.
Fully admitting all the reserves and abatements
necessary, we can speak of general points of char-
acter in the Teutonic race and try to trace their
formation.

There is a great and important difference in
the conditions under which Christianity came to
the different populations of the old world. To
(Ireeks and to Latins it came as to people who
had long been under a civilisation of a high
order, whose habits and ideas were formed by it, and
who had gone further in all that it can do for men
than had ever been known in the world before. To
the Teutonic races, on the contrary, it came when
they had still to learn almost the first elements of

270 CHRISTIANITY AND THE TEUTONIC RACES in

civilised life ; and it was along with Christian teaching
that they learned them. It took them fresh from
barbarism, and was the fountain and the maker of
their civilisation. There was yet another difference.
Christianity gained its hold on the Greeks and
Eomans in the time of their deep disasters, in the
overthrow and breaking up of society, amid the suffer-
ing and anguish of hopeless defeat. It came to them
as conquered, subjugated, down- trodden races, in the
lowest ebb of their fortunes. It came to the Teutonic
races as to conquerors, flushed with success, in the
mounting flood of their new destiny. In one case it
had to do with men cast down from their high estate,
stricken and reeling under the unexampled judgments
of God ; it associated itself with their sorrows ; it
awoke and deepened in them the consciousness of the
accumulated and frightful guilt of ages ; it unlocked
and subdued their hearts by its inexhaustible sympathy
and awful seriousness ; it rallied and knit them once
more together in their helplessness into an unearthly
and eternal citizenship ; it was their one and great
consoler in the miseries of the world. In the
Christian literature of the falling Empire in the fourth
and fifth centuries, in such books as St. Augustine's

in CHRISTIANITY AND THE TEUTONIC RACES 271

City of God, or Salvian's book on the Government of
God, we may see, in its nascent state, the influence of
Christianity on the shattered and afflicted race which
had once been the lords of the world. But with the
new nations which had arisen to be their masters the
business of Christianity and the Church was not so
much to comfort as to tame. They had not yet the
deep sins of civilisation to answer for. The pains and
sorrows of all human existence had not to them been
rendered more acute by the habits, the knowledge,
the intense feeling of refined and developed life. They
suffered, of course, like all men, and they sinned like
all men. But to them the ministry of Christianity
was less to soothe suffering, less even, as with the men
of the Koman world, to call to repentance for sins
against conscience and light, than to lay hold on fresh
and impetuous natures ; to turn them from the first in
the right direction ; to control and regenerate noble
instincts ; to awaken conscience ; to humble pride ; to
curb luxuriant and self-reliant strength ; to train and
educate and apply to high ends the force of powerful
wills and masculine characters. And, historically, this
appears to have been its earliest work with its
Teutonic converts. The Church is their schoolmaster,

272 CHRISTIANITY AND THE TEUTONIC RACES III

their legislator, their often considerate, and sometimes
over-indulgent, but always resolute, minister of discip-
line. Of course, as time went on, this early office was
greatly enlarged and diversified. But it seems to me
that the effects of Christianity on their national
character, as it was first forming under religious
influences, are to be traced to the conditions under
which those influences were first exerted.

I have said that the great obvious change observ-
able in the Latin nations since they passed under
Christianity seemed to me to be the development of
the affections ; the depths of the heart were reached
and touched as they never were before ; its fountains
were unsealed. In the same school the German races
were made by degrees familiar wTith the most wonder-
ful knowledge given here to man to know, — an insight
into the depths of his own being, the steady contem-
plation of the secrets, the mysteries, the riddles of his
soul and his life. They learned this lesson first from
Latin teachers, who had learned it themselves in the
Psalms, the Gospels, the Epistles of St. Paul and St.
John, and in whom thought had stirred the deepest
emotions, and kindled spontaneously into the new
language of religious devotion. How profoundly this

in CHRISTIANITY AND THE TEUTONIC RACES 273

affected the unfolding character of the Teutonic
peoples ; how the tenderness, the sweetness, the
earnestness, the solemnity, the awfulness of the Chris-
tian faith sunk into their hearts, diffused itself through
their life, allied itself by indestructible bonds with
what was dearest and what was highest, with their
homes, their assemblies, their crowns, their graves —
all this is marked on their history, and reveals itself
in their literature. Among them, as among the Latin
races, religion opened new springs in the heart, and
made new channels for the affections ; channels, as
deep, as full, as diversified, in the North as in the
South ; though they were less on the surface ; though
they sometimes wanted freedom and naturalness in
their flow ; though their charm and beauty, as well as
their degeneracy or extravagance, forced themselves
less on the eye. "We may appreciate very variously
the forms and phases of religion and religious history
in the Northern races. You may find in them the
difference, and the difference is immense, ranging
between mere vague, imaginative, religious sentiment,
and the profoundest convictions of Christian faith.
The moment you touch particular questions, instantly
the divergences of judgment and sympathy appear, as

274 CHRISTIANITY AND THE TEUTONIC RACES in

to what is religion. But the obvious experience of
facts and language, and the evidence of foreigners
alike attest how, in one form or another, religion has
penetrated deeply into the national character both of
Germany and England ; how serious and energetic is
the religious element in it, and with what tenacity it
has stood its ground against the direst storms.

But the German stock is popularly credited with
an especial value for certain great classes of virtues,
of which the germs are perhaps discernible in its early
history, but which, in their real nature, have been the
growth of its subsequent experience and training. It
is, of course, childish and extravagant to make any
claims of this kind without a vast margin for signal
exceptions ; all that can justly be said is that public
opinion has a special esteem and admiration for
certain virtues, and that the vices and faults which it
specially dislikes are their opposites. And the virtues
and classes of virtues which have been in a manner
canonised among us, which we hold in honour, not
because they are rare, but because they are regarded
as congenial and belonging to us, — the virtues our
regard for which colours our judgments, if it does not
always influence our actions, — are the group of virtues

in CHRISTIANITY AND THE TEUTONIC RACES 275

connected with Truth ; the virtues of Manliness ; the
virtues which have relation to Law ; and the virtues
of Purity.

I mean by the virtues connected with Truth, not
only the search after what is true, and the speaking
of what is known or believed to be true, but the
regard generally for what is real, substantial, genuine,
solid, which is shown in some portions of the race by
a distrust, sometimes extreme, of theories, of intel-
lectual subtleties, of verbal accuracy, — the taste for
plainness and simplicity of life and manners and
speech, — the strong sense of justice, large, unflinching,
consistent ; the power and will to be fair to a strong
opponent, — the impatience of affectation and pre-
tence ; not merely the disgust or amusement, but the
deep moral indignation, at shams and imposture, —
the dislike of over -statement and exaggeration ; the
fear of professing too much ; the shame and horror of
seeming to act a part ; the sacrifice of form to sub-
stance ; the expectation and demand that a man
should say what he really means — say it well,
forcibly, elegantly, if he can ; but anyhow, rather say
it clumsily and awkwardly than say anything hut
what he means, or sacrifice his real thought to his

276 CHRISTIANITY AND THE TEUTONIC RACES in

rhetoric. I mean, too, that unforced and honest
modesty both of intellect and conduct which comes
naturally to any man who takes a true measure of
himself and his doings. Under the virtues of Manli-
ness, I mean those that belong to a serious estimate of
the uses, the capacities, the call of human life ; the
duty of hard work ; the value and jealousy for true
liberty ; independence of soul, deep sense of responsi-
bility and strength not to shrink from it, steadiness,
endurance, perseverance ; the power of sustaining
cheerfully disappointment and defeat ; the temper not
to make much of trifles, whether vexations or
pleasures. I include that great self- commanding
power, to which we give the name of moral courage ;
which makes a man who knows and measures all that
his decision involves, not afraid to be alone against
numbers ; not afraid, when he knows that he is right,
of the consciousness of the disapprobation of his
fellows, of the face, the voice, the frown, the laugh, of
those against him ; — moral courage, by which a man
holds his own judgment, if reason and conscience bid
him, against his own friends, against his own side, and
of which, perhaps, the highest form is that by which
he is able to resist, not the sneers and opposition of

in CHRISTIANITY AND THE TEUTONIC RACES 277

the bad, but the opinion and authority of the good.
All these are such qualities as spring from the deep
and pervading belief that this life is a place of trial,
probation, discipline, effort, to be followed by a real
judgment. I mean by the virtues having relation to
Law, the readiness to submit private interests and
wishes to the control of public authority ; to throw a
consecration around the unarmed forms and organs of
this authority; to obey for conscience sake, and out of
a free and loyal obedience, and not from fear: the
self-control, the patience, which, in spite of the
tremendous inequalities and temptations of human
conditions, keep society peacefully busy ; which enable
men, even under abuses, wrong, provocation, to claim a
remedy and yet wait for it ; which makes them have
faith in the ultimate victory of right and sound reason ;
which teaches men in the keen battles of political life,
as it has been said, to " quarrel by rule " ; which
instinctively recoils from revolution under the strongest
desire for change. The phrase, a " law-abiding " people,
may as a boast be sometimes very rudely contradicted
by facts ; but it expresses an idea and a standard. I
add the virtues of Purity — not forgetting how very
little any race or people can venture to boast over its

278 CHRISTIANITY AND THE TEUTONIC RACES in

neighbours for its reverence and faithfulness to these
high laws of God and man's true nature ; but remem-
bering also all that has made family life so sacred and
so noble among us ; all that has made German and
English households such schools of goodness in its
strongest and its gentlest forms, such shrines of
love, and holiness, and peace, the secret places where
man's deepest gladness and deepest griefs — never, in
truth, very far apart- — meet and are sheltered. These
are things which, in different proportions and different
degrees of perfection, we believe to have marked the
development of character in the German races. I do
not say, far indeed from it, that all this is to be seen
among us, — that we do according to all this ; but I do
say that we always honour it, always acknowledge it
our only allowable standard.

These things are familiar enough. But it is not
always so familiar to us to measure the immense
interval between these types of character and the rude
primitive elements out of which they have been
moulded, or to gauge the force of the agencies which
laid hold of those elements, when it was quite within
the compass of possibility that they might have re-
ceived an entirely different impulse and direction ; —

in CHRISTIANITY AND THE TEUTONIC RACES 279

agencies which turned their wild, aimless, apparently
1111 tamable, energies from their path of wasting and
ruin, into courses in which they were slowly to be
fashioned anew to the highest uses and purposes of
human life. There is nothing inconceivable in the
notion that what the invading tribes were in their
original seats for centuries they might have continued
to be in their new conquests; that the invasion might
have been simply the spread and perpetuation of a
hopeless and fatal barbarism. As it was, a long time
passed before it was clear that barbarism had not
taken possession of the world. But the one power
which could really cope with it, the one power to
which it would listen, which dared to deal with these
terrible newcomers with the boldness and frankness
given by conviction and hope, was the Christian
Church. It had in its possession, influence, ideas,
doctrines, laws, of which itself knew not the full
regenerating power. We look back to the early acts
and policy of the Church towards the new nations,
their kings and their people; the ways and works of
her missionaries and lawgivers, Ulfilas among the
Goths, Augustine in Kent, Eemigius in France, Boni-
face in Germany, Anschar in the North, the Irish

280 CHRISTIANITY AND THE TEUTONIC RACES ill

Columban in Burgundy and Switzerland, Benedict at
Monte Cassino ; or the reforming kings, the Arian
Theodoric, the great German Charles, the great English
Alfred. Measured by the light and the standards they
have helped us to attain to, their methods no doubt
surprise, disappoint — it may be, revolt us ; and all
that we dwell upon is the childishness, or the imper-
fect morality, of their attempts. But if there is any-
thing certain in history, it is that in these rough
communications of the deepest truths, in these often
questionable modes of ruling minds and souls, the
seeds were sown of all that was to make the hope
and the glory of the foremost nations. They im-
pressed upon men in their strong, often coarse, way
that truth was the most precious and most sacred of
things, — that truth seeking, truth speaking, truth in
life, was man's supreme duty, — the enjoyment of it his
highest blessedness on earth; and they did this, even
though they often fell miserably short of the lesson of
their words, even though they sometimes, to gain high
ends, turned aside into the convenient, tempting paths
of untruth. Truth, as it is made the ultimate ground
of religion in the New Testament ; Truth, as a thing
of reality and not of words ; Truth, as a cause to con-

in CHRISTIANITY AND THE TEUTONIC RACES 281

tend for in lifelong struggle, and gladly to die for —
this was the new, deep, fruitful idea implanted, at the
awakening dawn of thought, in the infant civilisation
of the North. It became rooted, strong, obstinate ; it
bore many and various fruits ; it was the parent of
fervent, passionate belief — the parent, too, of passionate
scepticism ; it produced persecution and intolerance ;
it produced resolute and unsparing reformations, in-
dignant uprisings against abuses and impostures. But
this great idea of truth, whatever be its consequences,
the assumption of its attainableness, of its precious-
ness, comes to us, as a popular belief and axiom, from
the New Testament, through the word and ministry of
the Christian Church, from its first contact with the
new races ; it is the distinct product of that great
claim, for the first time made to all the world by the
Gospel, and earnestly responded to by strong and
simple natures — the claim of reality and truth made
in the words of Him who said, " I am the Way, and
the Truth, and the Life."

I have spoken of three other groups of virtues
which are held in special regard and respect among
us — those connected with manliness and hard work,
with reverence for law and liberty, and with pure

282 CHRISTIANITY AND THE TEUTONIC RACES in

family life. The rudiments and tendencies out of
which these have grown appear to have been early
marked in the German races ; but they were only
rudiments, existing in company with much wilder and
stronger elements, and liable, amid the changes and
chances of barbarian existence, to be paralysed or
trampled out. No mere barbarian virtues could by
themselves have stood the trial of having won by con-
quest the wealth, the lands, the power of Rome. But
their guardian was there. What Christianity did for
these natural tendencies to good was to adopt them,
to watch over them, to discipline, to consolidate them.
The energy which warriors were accustomed to put
forth in their efforts to conquer, the missionaries and
ministers of Christianity exhibited in their enterprises
of conversion and teaching. The crowd of unknown
saints whose names fill the calendars, and live, some
of them, only in the titles of our churches, mainly
represent the age of heroic spiritual ventures, of which
we see glimpses in the story of St. Boniface, the apostle
of Germany ; of St. Columban and St. Gall, wandering
from Ireland to reclaim the barbarians of the Burgun-
dian deserts and of the shores of the Swiss lakes. It
was among men like these — men who were then

c

TV AND THE TEUTONIC RACES

285

$f death, while the weak

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<& suppose that

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termed e,
new races \
great and seriy
ambition or the
erate and steady hv
labour ; a life as full
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011 the march, in the ba
and in the Christianity whi\
inspired and governed them,\
modern nations first saw exemx
human responsibility, first learned
ruled and disciplined life, first enlarged their thoughts
of the uses of existence, first were taught the dignity
and sacredness of honest toil. These great axioms of
modern life passed silently from the special homes of
religious employment to those of civil ; from the
cloisters and cells of men who, when they were not
engaged in worship, were engaged in field-work or
book-work, — clearing the forest, extending cultivation,
multiplying manuscripts, — to the guild of the crafts-
man, the shop of the trader, the study of the scholar.
Religion generated and fed these ideas of what was
manly and worthy in man. Once started, they were

282 CHRISTIANITY AMD THE TEUJpQNIC RACES

family life. The rudim£fCes ; thought and experience
which these have0a, and co-ordinated them. But it
marked in^er and sanction of a religion and a creed
rudimi first broke men into their yoke that now seems
so easy, gradually wrought their charm over human
restlessness and indolence and pride, gradually recon-
ciled mankind to the ideas, and the ideas to mankind,
gradually impressed them on that vague but yet real
thing which we call the general thought and mind of
a nation. It was this, too, that wrought a further
and more remarkable change in elevating and refining
the old manliness of the race. It brought into the
dangerous life of the warrior the sense of a common
humanity, the great idea of self-sacrificing duty. It
was this religion of mercy and peace, and yet of strength
and purpose, which out of the wild and conflicting
elements of what we call the age of chivalry gradually
formed a type of character in which gentleness, gene-
rosity, sympathy were blended with the most daring
courage, — the Christian soldier, as we have known
him in the sternest tasks and extremest needs, in con-
quest and in disaster, ruling, judging, civilising. It was
the sense of duty derived from this religion to the tradi-
tions and habits of a great service, which made strong

Ill

CHRISTIANITY AND THE TEUTONIC RACES 285

men stand fast in the face of death, while the weak
were saved, on the deck of the sinking Birkenhead,

So with respect to law and freedom. I suppose that
it may be set down as a characteristic of the race, that
in very various degrees and proportions, and moving
faster or slower in different places and times, there
has been throughout its history the tendency and per-
sistent purpose to hold and secure in combination both
these great blessings. Of course there are tracts of
history where this demand of the national conscience
seems suspended or extinguished ; but it has never
disappeared for a time, even under German feudalism
or despotism, without making itself felt in some shape,
and at last reasserting itself in a more definite and
advanced form. It involves the jealous sense of per-
sonal rights and independence along with deference,
respectful, and perhaps fervently loyal, to authority
believed to be rightful ; a steady obedience to law
when law is believed to be just, with an equally steady
disposition to resent its injustice. How has this temper
been rooted in our race ? The quick feelings and
sturdy wills of a high-spirited people will account for
part, but not for all ; where did they learn self-com-
mand as well as courage, the determination to be

286 CHRISTIANITY AND THE TEUTONIC RACES 111

patient as well as inflexible ? They learned it in those
Christian ideas of man's individual importance and
corporate brotherhood and fellowship, those Christian
lessons and influences, which we see diffused through
the early attempts in these races to state principles of
government and lay down rules of law. They learned
it in the characteristic and memorable struggles of the
best and noblest of the Christian clergy against law-
lessness and self-will, whether shown in the license of
social manners, or in the tyranny of kings and nobles ;
in their stout assertion against power and force, of
franchises and liberties, which, though in the first
instance the privileges of a few, were the seeds of the
rights of all. We see in the clergy a continued effort
to bring everything under the sovereignty of settled,
authoritative law, circumscribing individual caprice,
fencing and guarding individual rights ; from them
the great conception passed into the minds of the
people, into the practice and policy — in time often the
wider and more comprehensive policy and practice —
of civil legislators and administrators. The interpre-
tation of the great Christian precepts connecting social
life and duties with the deepest religious thought
passed into the sphere of political principles and order :

in CHRISTIANITY AND THE TEUTONIC RACES 287

" to Caesar the things that are Caesar's ; "« — " let even-
soul be subject to the higher powers ; " — " as free yet
not using your liberty for a cloke of maliciousness ; "
" God hath set the members in the body as it hath
pleased Him . . . and the eye cannot say to the hand,
I have no need of thee; nor again the head to the
feet, I have no need of you." These and such like
great rules of order and freedom, coupled with the
tremendous, words of the Psalms and Prophets against
oppression and the pride of greatness, found sympa-
thetic response in Teutonic minds and germinated in
them into traditions and philosophical doctrines, the
real root of which may be forgotten, but which indeed
come down from the Christian education of the bar-
barian tribes, and to the attempts of their teachers to
bring out the high meaning of the Christian teaching
about what is due from man to man in the various
relations of society. Be it so, that these attempts
were one-sided and crude ones, that the struggles to
seize this meaning were often baffled. But all history
is the record of imperfect and unrealised ideas ; and
nothing is more unphilosophical or more unjust
than to forget the place and importance which such
attempts had in their time, and in the scale of

288 CHRISTIANITY AND THE TEUTONIC RACES III

improvement. We criticise the immature and narrow
attempts of the ecclesiastical champions of law. Let
us not forget that they were made at a time when, but
for them, the ideas both of law and of liberty would
have perished.

And one more debt our race owes to Christianity
— the value and love which it has infused into us for
a pure and affectionate and peaceful home. Not that
domestic life does not often show itself among the
Latin races in very simple and charming forms. But
Home is specially Teutonic, word and thing. Teutonic
sentiment, we know, from very early times, was proud,
elevated, even austere, in regard to the family and the
relations of the sexes. This nobleness of heathenism,
Christianity consecrated and transformed into all the
beautiful shapes of household piety, household affection,
household purity. The life of Home has become the
great possession, the great delight, the great social
achievement of our race ; its refuge from the storms
and darkness without, an ample compensation to us
for so much that we want of the social brilliancy and
enjoyment of our Latin brethren. Eeverence for the
household and for household life, a high sense of its
duties, a keen relish for its pleasures, this has been a

in CHRISTIANITY AND THE TEUTONIC RACES 289

strength to German society amid mueh to unsettle it.
The absence of this taste for the quiet and unexcited
life of home is a formidable symptom in portions of our
race across the Atlantic. And when home life, with
its sanctities, its simplicity, its calm and deep joys and
sorrows, ceases to have its charm for us in England,
the greatest break up and catastrophe in English
history will not be far off.

And now to end. I have endeavoured to point out
how those great groups of common qualities which we
call national character have been in certain leading
instances profoundly and permanently affected by
Christianity. Christianity addresses itself primarily
and directly to individuals. In its proper action, its.
purpose and its business is to make men saints ; what,
it has to do with souls is far other, both in its discip-
line and its scope, from what it has to do with nations
or societies. Further, its effect on national character-
istics must be consequent on its effect on individuals ;:
an effluence from the separate persons whom it has
made its own, the outer undulations from centres of
movement and tendency in single hearts and con-
sciences. Of course such effects are quite distinct ;:
they differ in motive, in intensity, in shape, and form..

2QO CHRISTIANITY AND THE TEUTONIC RACES in

What is immediate and full in the one case is second-
ary and imperfect in the other, largely mixed and
diluted with qualifying, perhaps hostile, influences.
But nations really have their fortunes and history
independently of the separate individuals composing
them ; they have their faults, their virtues, their
crimes, their fate ; and so in this broad, loose, and yet
not unreal way, they have their characters. Christi-
anity, which spoke at first to men one by one, went
forth, a high Imperial power, into the " wilder-
ness of the people," and impressed itself on nations.
Christianity, by its public language and public efforts,
made man infinitely more interesting to man than
ever he was before. Doubtless, the impression was
much more imperfect, inconsistent, equivocal, than in
the case of individuals. But for all that, the im-
pression, within its own conditions and limits, was
real, was strong, was lasting. Further — and this is
my special point now, — it was of great importance.
National character is indeed a thing of time, shown on
the stage of this earthly and transitory scene, adapted
to it and partaking of its incompleteness. The in-
terests, the perfection of souls, are of another order.
But nothing can be unimportant which affects in any

in CHRISTIANITY AND THE TEUTONIC RACES 291

way the improvement, the happiness, the increased
hopes of man, in any stage of his being. And nations
and societies, with their dominant and distinguishing
qualities, are the ground in which souls grow up, and
have their better or worse chance, as we speak, for
the higher discipline of inward religion. It is all-
important how habits receive their bias, how the
controlling and often imperious rules of life are
framed : with what moral assumptions men start in
their course. It is very important to us, as individuals,
whether or not we grow up in a society where poly-
gamy and slavery are impossible, where veracity is
exacted, where duelling is discountenanced, where
freedom, honour, chastity, readiness for effort and
work, are treated as matters of course in those with
whom we live.

We have seen that Christianity is very different in
its influence on different national characters. It has
wrought with nations as with men. For it does not
merely gain their adherence, but within definite limits
it develops differences of temperament and mind.
Human nature has many sides, and under the powerful
and fruitful influence of Christianity these sides are
brought out in varying proportions. Unlike Mahomet-

292 CHRISTIANITY AND THE TEUTONIC RACES in

anism, which seems to produce a singularly uniform
monotony of character in races, however naturally
different, on which it gets a hold, Christianity has
been in its results, viewed on a large scale, as
singularly diversified — not only diversified, but
incomplete. It has succeeded, and it has failed. For
it has aimed much higher, it has demanded much
more, it has had to reckon with far more subtle and
complicated obstacles. If it had mastered its special
provinces of human society as Mahometanism has
mastered Arabs and Turks, the world would be very
different from what it is. Yes ; it has fallen far short
of that completeness. The fruits of its power and
discipline have been partial. It is open to any one,
and easy enough, to point out the shortcomings of
saints ; and, much more, the faults and vices of
Christian nations. But the lesson of history, I think,
is this : not that all the good which might have been
hoped for to society has followed from the appearance
of Christian religion in the forefront of human life ;
not that in this wilful and blundering world, so full of
misused gifts and wasted opportunities and disappointed
promise, mistake and mischief have never been in its
train ; not that in the nations where it has gained a

in CHRISTIANITY AND THE TEUTONIC RACES 293

footing it has mastered their besetting sins, the
falsehood of one, the ferocity of another, the char-
acteristic sensuality, the characteristic arrogance of
others. But history teaches us this : that in
tracing back the course of human improvement we
come, in one case after another, upon Christianity
as the source from which improvement derived its
principle and its motive ; we find no other source ade-
quate to account for the new spring of amendment ;
and, without it, no other sources of good could have
been relied upon. It was not only the strongest
element of salutary change, but one without which
others would have had no chance. And, in the next
place, the least and most imperfect instance of what it
has done has this unique quality — that Christianity
carries within it a self-correcting power, ready to act
whenever the will arrives to use this power ; that it
suggests improvement, and furnishes materials for
a further step to it. What it has done anywhere, what
it has done where it has done most, leaves much to
do ; but everywhere it leaves the ground gained on
which to do it, and the ideas to guide the reformer in
doing it. We should be cowards to think that those
mighty and beneficent powers which won this ground

294 CHRISTIANITY AND THE TEUTONIC RACES in

for us, and produced these ideas in dark and very
unhappy times, cannot in our happier days accomplish
even more. Those ancient and far-distant ages, which
have been occupying our attention here for a little
while, amid the pressure and strain of our busy
present, we may, we ought, to leave far behind, in
what we hope to achieve. But in our eagerness for
improvement, it concerns us to be on our guard
against the temptation of thinking that we can have
the fruit or the flower and yet destroy the root ; that
we may retain the high view of human nature which
has grown with the growth of Christian nations, and
discard that revelation of Divine love and human
destiny of which that view forms a part or a conse-
quence ; that we may retain the moral energy, and
yet make light of the faith that produced it. It
concerns us to remember, amid the splendours and
vastness of a nature, and of a social state, which to
us, as individuals, are both so transitory, that first and
above everything we are moral and religious beings,
trusted with will, made for immortality. It concerns
us that we do not despise our birthright, and cast
away our heritage of gifts and of powers, which we
may lose, but not recover.

THE SACKED POETRY

OF

EARLY RELIGIONS

TWO LECTURES
DELIVERED IN ST. PAUL'S CATHEDRAL

January 27 and February 3, 1874

I

NOTICE

My excuse for venturing to speak in these lectures on matters
about which I have no knowledge at first hand, is that these
matters have lately been brought very fully before English
readers in a popular form by those who have. In essays of
great interest, from time to time inserted in the Times and other
widely read periodicals, one of the chief living masters of Ori-
ental scholarship, Mr. Max Muller, has made us familiar with
some of its most important achievements. My authorities are
his History of Sanscrit Literature, 1860 ; his Essays on the Vedas,
the Zendavesta, and Semitic Monotheism, republished in the first
volume of Chips from a German Workshop, 1868 ; his transla-
tion, of which one volume has appeared, of the Kig-Veda-SanhM,
1869 ; his Lectures on the Science of Religion, 1872 ; the first
volume of Bunsen's God in History, translated by Miss Wink-
worth, 1868 ; and Barthelemy St. Hilaire, Le Bouddha et sa
Religion, 1862.

K. W. C.

LECTUEE I

THE VEDAS ■

The subject on which I propose to speak to you is the
sacred poetry of early religions. I need hardly tell
you that the subject is a very wide one, and that we
have not much time at our disposal. In what I have
to say I can but deal with it very generally, and by
way of specimens and examples.

The sacred poetry of a religion is the expression of
feeling, in its more elevated and intense forms, towards
the object of its worship. A creed expresses belief.
Prayers set forth needs, present requests, ask for
blessings, deprecate evils. Psalms and hymns are the
voice of the religious emotions, the religious affections,
it may be the religious passions. They assume what
a creed asserts. They urge what a prayer urges, but
they do it under more vivid impressions of the power
addressed, from the larger and more inspiring aspect
given by an awakened imagination or a heart deeply

300 EARL Y SA CRED ROE TR Y i

stirred. They carry to the highest point whatever
there is in a religion ; they mark the level to which in
idea and faith, in aspiration and hope, it can rise.
The heart of a religion passes into its poetry, — all its
joy, its tenderness and sweetness, if it has any, its
deepest sighs, its longings and Teachings after the
eternal and unseen,' whatever is most pathetic in its
sorrow or boldest in its convictions. Its sacred songs
give the measure of what it loves, what it imagines,
what it trusts to, in that world out of sight, of which
religion is the acknowledgment, and which it connects
with this one.

With the sacred poetry of one ancient religion, the
religion which as a matter of history enshrined and
handed on from primitive times the faith and worship
of the One Living God, we are familiar. The Psalms
of those far distant days, the early utterances of their
faith and love, still form the staple of the worship and
devotion of the Christian Church. But side by side in
the course of the centuries with this religion were
other religions of unknown antiquity, the religions of
great tribes and races and multitudes, forefathers of
nations which have come down, from the days before
history, into the days when history began to be written,

THE VEDAS

301

and at length to our own. With the earliest forms of
these religions, all of them religions of Asia, with
their ideas of the divine, with their ways of worship,
we have only of late years become even partially
acquainted. But Oriental learning, in the hands of
great scholars of this century, from .Sir W. Jones,
whose monument faces me under this dome, to
Burnouf and Max Muller, has opened to us a glimpse
of that primeval and mysterious world. They believe
themselves to have succeeded in disengaging the
earlier and primitive documents from those of later
date, and in reproducing with approximate accuracy
the religious language and ideas of ancient races in
China, in India, in Persia.

The early religions of China, the great Indian
reform of Buddhism, are full of a strange and melan-
choly interest ; but they are mostly didactic in form
and expression, and there seems to be little in them
which can be called poetical. In the case of the
primitive religions of India and Persia their earliest
language is poetry, and speaks in the form of hymns.
This primeval poetry is, we are assured, perfectly
distinct, — in its natural freshness and comparative
simplicity, in its apparent effort really to recognise

302 EA RL Y SA CRED FOE TR Y I

and express the mystery of what is seen in nature and
believed beyond it — from the coarse mythologies and
gross idolatry of subsequent ages. It is to this early
poetry that I venture to invite your attention this
evening ; and it is of this, viewed in comparison with
the sacred poetry of another early age, the collection
which we call the Psalms, that I propose to speak in
the lecture of next Tuesday.

You will understand that I have no pretence to
speak about it from first-hand study. But we have
in our hands the results of the work of most patient
and sagacious scholars ; and we may be assured that,
under their guidance, we know as much as any one can
know in the present state of our information. I take
for granted — and I suppose that we are safe in doing
so — the general accuracy of their statements as to
the character and meaning of what they cite and
translate.

The most ancient relics of primitive Indian religion
are the hymns of the Vedas, the sacred books of
Brahman religion. The age of these hymns can only
be guessed at, but by those who know best it is carried
back some 3000 years, to the centuries between 1200
and 1500 before our era. They are over a thousand

THE VEDAS 303

in number, and they represent the early religious
thoughts and feelings of a great race in Central Asia,
the Aryan branch of the human family, the stock
which was to people not only India and Persia, but
the greater part of Europe — the fathers of Greeks and
Italians, of the Teutonic, the Celtic, the Slavonic
nations, as well as of those who crossed the Himalayas
to the banks of the Indus and the Ganges. The
language of these Vedic hymns is the oldest form of
that which is often spoken of as the oldest of
languages, the sacred language of the Brahmans, the
Sanscrit. They are too old to have anything of a
history besides what can be gathered from their
language and matter. "We know next to nothing of
their authors, or the condition under which they were
first uttered : in reading them, " we stand in the
presence of a veiled life," on which nothing external
of record or monument throws light. It is only of
late years that scholars have been able successfully to
decipher what Mr. Max Miiller calls " the dark and
helpless utterances of the ancient poets of India."
The clue, however, has been found. The difficulties
of interpretation have, we are assured, yielded in great
degree to the skill and patience which have been

304 EARL Y SA CRED FOE TR Y i

expended on them ; and the exceeding interest of the
knowledge thus for the first time opened of these early
thoughts of men has been an ample reward.

And certainly it is most remarkable and most
impressive that though, as I have said, they have
no history, though there is not the slenderest thread
of surrounding or accompanying record to connect
them with the men who must have lived and the
events which must have happened before they could
be composed, though they stand out like constellations,
projected, singly and in isolation, against an im-
penetrable depth of dark sky behind them, yet the
poems bear in themselves the evidence of a very high
advance in men's mastery of the faculties of their
own mind and the arts of speech. When they were
composed, the interval had already become a long one,
from the rudeness and grossness of savage existence.
Thought had learned to grasp and express feeling,
and language had found out some of its subtlest
expedients. They are the foundation of the later
forms of Indian religion ; but they are, we are told,
absolutely distinct in ideas and spirit from the cere-
monial and the mythologies afterwards built on them.
The common and prominent element in these hymns

THE VEDAS 305

is their sense of the greatness and wonder and mystery
of external nature. The composers of them were pro-
foundly impressed by the conviction that in its familiar
but overpowering magnificence and behind its screen
there was a living presence and power greater than
itself and its master, to which, though out of sight and
beyond reach, man could have access : —

A presence that disturbed them with the joy
Of elevated thoughts : a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man ;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

And what they so keenly felt and so awfully acknow-
ledged, they had attained an adequate instrument to
body forth in words.

Whence their religious ideas came must still be
counted among the unsolved, if not the hopeless, pro-
blems of human history. Indeed, what these ideas
distinctly were must always be imperfectly known, for
this reason, if for no other — that the thoughts and the
words of men living in times so far apart as ours from
theirs are practically incommensurable. The great

306 EARLY SACRED POETRY I

wastes of time lie between us and them. We cannot,
with the utmost helps of scholarship, with the
highest effort of imagination, see things as they
saw them, and think with their thoughts, with their
knowledge, their habits, their associations. What
we and the centuries before us have passed through,
what we know, what we have become, prevents us.
But we can know something, though not all. The
most elaborate investigations, the most indefatigable
and refined comparisons, have sorted out and approxi-
mately arranged for us these ancient hymns. Many
of them have been translated ; in the last instance by
one who moves with ease under an accumulation and
weight of the most varied and minute knowledge suffi-
cient to crush most minds, but who brings to it a
power and versatility of genius and interpreting
imagination which invests his learning with the grace
of poetry, and who, a German, has gained a command
over the resources of English which an Englishman
may envy. In Mr. Max Miiller's translations of the
Vedic Hymns we may feel confident that we come, as
near as we can come, to an authentic representation of
these earliest utterances of Indian religion.

What then do these hymns of the Veda show us of

THE VEDAS 307

that which is the foundation of all religion ? They
are the language of fervent, enthusiastic worshippers.
"What do they tell us of the worshippers' thoughts
about God ?

The hymns of the Veda are addressed to various
names of divine beings, which may be in the first
instance described as personifications of the phenomena
of external nature. It is not unreasonable to call
this, as it has been called, a worship of nature. But
we are cautioned that this may not be an adequate
representation of what was really meant, and that it
would be more justly called a worship of God in nature,
" of God appearing behind its veil, rather than as
hidden in the sanctuary of the human heart and con-
science." At any rate, in a great number of these
hymns, such as those which compose the first volume
of Mr. Max Mliller's translation of the Rigveda, the
Hymns to the Maruts, the Storm Gods (attendants on
the Sun and the Dawn), we may watch, to use his
words, " the almost imperceptible transition by which
the phenomena of nature, if reflected in the mind of
the poet, assume the character of divine beings." In
these hymns it seems to me that the effort to employ
imagination to the utmost in order to express and do

308 EARLY SACRED POETRY I

justice to the wonders of the Wind and the Storm is
much more distinct and characteristic than the reli-
gious sense of divinity. So, again, with the hymns to
the Dawn, on which Mr. Max Mliller comments. We,
he reminds us, on whom the ends of the world are
come, have mostly lost that early feeling of surprise
and admiration of the daily wonder of sunrise. The
feeling was strong when minds were fresher and life
more simple. " The Dawn," he says, " is frequently
described in the Veda as it might be described by a
modern poet. She is the friend of men, she smiles
like a young wife, she is the daughter of the sky.
She goes to every house ; she thinks of the dwellings of
men ; she does not despise the small or the great ; she
brings wealth ; she is always the same, immortal, divine ;
age cannot touch her ; she is the young goddess, but
she makes men grow old. All this may be simply
allegorical language. But the transition is so easy
from Devi, the Bright, to Devi, the Goddess ; the
daughter of the Sky assumes so readily the personality
given to the Sky (Dyaus), her father, that we can only
guess whether in each passage the poet is speaking of
a bright apparition, or a bright goddess ; of a natural
vision, or of a visible deity : " —

THE VEDAS 309

" She shines on us like a young wife, rousing
every living being to go to his work. The fire
had to be kindled by men ; she brought light by
striking down the darkness.

" She rose up, spreading far and wide, and
moving towards every one. She grew in bright-
ness, wearing her brilliant garment. The mother
of the morning clouds, the leader of the rays, she
shone gold-coloured, lovely to behold.

" She, the fortunate, who brings the eye of
the gods, who leads the white and lovely steed
[of the Sun], the Dawn was seen, revealed by her
rays, with brilliant treasures she follows every
one.

" Thou who art a blessing where thou art near,
drive far away the unfriendly ; make the pastures
wide, give us safety ! Eemove the haters, bring
treasures ! Eaise up wealth to the worshipper,
thou mighty Dawn.

" Shine for us with thy best rays, thou bright
Dawn, thou who lengthenest our life, thou the
love of all, who givest us food, who givest us
wealth in cattle, horses, and chariots.

" Thou, daughter of the Sky, thou high-born

310 EARLY SACRED POETRY i

Dawn, whom the Yasishtas magnify with songs,
give us riches high and wide : all ye gods, pro-
tect us always with your blessings."

This hymn, we are told, is an example of " the
original simple poetry of the Veda. It has no
reference to any special sacrifice. It contains no
technical expressions ; it can hardly be called a hymn
in our sense of the word. It is simply a poem,
expressing without any effort, without any display of
far-fetched thought or brilliant imagery, the feelings
of a man who has watched the approach of dawn with
mingled delight and awe, and who was moved to give
utterance to what he felt in measured language." It
is, in fact, the poetical counterpart of Guido's Aurora.

Hymns such as these make up a great portion of
the collection. But there are others more distinctly
intended as expressive of worship, invocations of
beings regarded as divine, the objects of religious faith
and reverence and hope. They are described in
language applicable only to the Highest of all Beings.
They are addressed in words fittingly spoken by man
only to his Maker and Almighty Buler. Do we find
here the worship of one or of many gods ?

Now the remarkable feature about these early

THE VEDAS

3ii

hymns is the absolutely indeterminate character of
the object of worship and praise. Different names
appear of the divine powers addressed in them. They
are names, as I have said, denoting, or taken from, the
primary phenomena or powers of the natural world —
the Sky, the Light, the Sun, the Dawn, the Winds,
the Fire. The divinity, who is in the sky or the
fire, or whom they veil, or whom they symbolise, is
separately invoked, adored, magnified. But yet it
seems that it is impossible to tell whether these names
are thought of as names of really separate powers ;
whether they are the same essential power, invoked
under separate names, according as the manifestation
of his marvellous doings impresses the mind of the
worshipper ; whether, if they are different, or different
aspects of the Supreme and Infinite, there is gradation
or subordination between the divine powers, or the
several phases of the one ; whether they do not pass
into one another, and now one of them, now another,
does not take the place in the composer's thoughts of
the one Most High. The distinctness of the later
Hindu pantheon, with the definitely assigned characters
and names and functions of its gods and goddesses, is
not here ; certainly not at least as regards the highest

312 EARLY SACRED POETRY I

names. The pictures given of the doings and the
glories of the Being celebrated in each hymn are drawn
with the most vivid and brilliant imagery, freshly
derived from sights of nature, watched and gazed on
and remembered with admiration and delight ; but
who is the unknown reality behind the name ?

In the worshipper's mind apparently, certainly in
the minds of those who after centuries attempt to
understand it, the idea dissolves into a luminous mist,
baffling all attempt to make it assume shape and
substance. "When the individual gods," says Mr.
Max Muller, " are invoked, Varuna (the Heaven), Agni
(Fire), the Maruts (the Storm Gods or the Winds),
Ushas (the Dawn), they are not conceived as limited
by the power of others, as superior or inferior in rank.
Each god is to the mind of the suppliant as good as
all the gods." ..." It would be easy to find, in the
numerous hymns of the Veda, passages in which
almost every single god is represented as supreme and
absolute." " What more could human language achieve
in trying to express the idea of a divine and supreme
power, than what the poet says of Varuna ? " " Thou
art Lord of all, of heaven and earth;" or, in another
hymn, " Thou art King of all, of those who are gods

THE VEDAS 313

and those who are men." He knows all the order of
nature and upholds it ; he looks not only into the past,
but the future. But, more than this, Yaruna watches
also over the order of the moral world. Sin is the
breaking of his laws; but he can be approached in
prayer for his mercy, and in his mercy he pardons
sinners. Can there be any other god who can be thus
thought of and spoken of ? Yes, a whole brotherhood
of gods (the Adityas) are addressed in the same way.
Indra, called the greatest of gods, is addressed in the
same way as the pardoner of sin. "We can hardly
understand," says Mr. Max Miiller, "how a people
who had formed so exalted a notion of the Supreme
God, and embodied it in the person of Indra, could at
the same time invoke other gods with equal praise.
When Agni, the Lord of Fire, is addressed by the
poet, he is spoken of as the first god, not inferior even
to Indra. While Agni is invoked, Indra is forgotten ;
there is no competition between the two, nor any
rivalry between them or any other god."

Explain it as we will, the poets and psalmists of
this early religion looked with a dizzy and uncertain
eye upon that marvellous spectacle of man and nature,
in which undoubtedly they believed that they saw

314 EARLY SACRED POETRY I

manifest tokens of the Divine and Eternal, signs of a
Presence at which their hearts kindled, and their heads
bowed, and their humble offerings were presented.
They recognised the " witness " of what was greater
and higher than all things seen and known, tokens of
the "Eternal Power and Godhead"; they recognised
the Hand " which did them good, and gave them rain
from heaven and fruitful seasons, filling their hearts
with food and gladness." But they looked with un-
steady and wavering vision ; they saw, and they saw
not; one impression came and was chased away by
another; all was full of confusing appearances and
fitful glimpses and interfering lights ; they spoke in
words of stammering enthusiasm of wonders which
only raised in them inconsistent and contradictory
images. They seem like men striving after a great
truth apparently within their reach, but really just
beyond it. Serious questioners, I do not doubt that
many of them were, of what they saw, of their own
souls, of what had been handed down from their
fathers ; seekers after God, and of " the invisible things
of Him," they may have been. But who will say
that they were -finders ?

This " feeling after God " among the works of His

THE VEDAS 315

hands — this anxious and perplexed, yet resolute
groping in the light for Him who is equally above
the light and the darkness, is expressed in a remark-
able hymn of early date. It has been often cited by
recent writers. " This yearning after a nameless
deity/' says Baron Bunsen, " who nowhere manifests
himself in the Indian Pantheon of the Vedas, this
voice of humanity groping after God, has nowhere
found so sublime and touching an expression : " —

" 1. In the beginning there arose the Source
of Golden Light — He was the only born Lord
of all that is. He stablished the earth and this
sky; —

"Who is the God to whom we shall offer our
sacrifice ?

" 2. He who gives life, He who gives strength;
whose blessing all the bright gods desire ;
whose shadow is immortality ; whose shadow si
death ; —

" Who is the God to whom we shall offer our
sacrifice ?

"3. He who through His power is the only

316 EARLY SACRED POETRY i

King of the breathing and awakening world ; He
who governs all, man and beast ; —

" Who is the God to whom we shall offer our
sacrifice ?

" 4. He whose power these snowy mountains,
whose power the sea proclaims, with the distant
river — He whose these regions are, as it were,
His two arms ; —

" Who is the God to whom we shall offer our
sacrifice ?

" 5. He through whom the sky is bright and
the earth firm — He through whom the heaven
was stablished — nay, the highest heaven — He
who measured out the light in the air ; —

" Who is the God to whom we shall offer our
sacrifice ?

" 6. He to whom heaven and earth, standing
firm by His will, look up trembling inwardly —
He over whom the rising sun shines forth ; —

" Who is the God to whom we shall offer our
sacrifice ?

" 7. Wherever the mighty water-clouds went,

THE VEDAS 317

where they placed the seed and lit the fire,
thence arose He who is the only life of the
bright gods ; —

" Who is the God to whom we shall offer our
sacrifice ?

" 8. He who by His might looked even over
the water-clouds, the clouds which gave strength
and lit the sacrifice, He who is God above all
gods ;- —

" Who is the God to whom we shall offer our
sacrifice ?

" 9. May He not destroy us — He the Creator
of the earth ; or He the righteous, who created
the heaven ; He who also created the bright and
mighty waters ; —

" Who is the God to whom we shall offer our
sacrifice ? "

There was the question, the misgiving; but where
was the answer ? Instead of the one only answer,
firmly given and never let go*, there were the multi-
plied, hesitating, varying alternatives, in which the
true answer was but one among many, and the one
finally abandoned. " They call him Indra, Mitra,.

318 EARLY SACRED POETRY I

Varuna, Agni, the Light, the Sun, the Sky, the Fire ;
that which is One, the wise call it many ways." Just
that which He was, separate from all things, and
above all things, beyond compare, unique, alone, — if
they confessed it one moment, the next they had lost
it. They looked — we are told apologetically — they
saw, they thought, they spoke, as children ; it was the
childhood of the world, and the childhood of religion,
seeking as it could by inadequate instruments to give
body to impressions themselves imperfect. " The
spirit was willing, but the language weak. It was a
first attempt at defining the indefinite impression of
deity by a name that should approximately or meta-
phorically render at least one of its most prominent
features " — infinity, brightness, awfulness, beneficence.
" And this is not all. The very imperfection of all
the names which had been chosen, their very in-
adequacy to express the fulness and infinity of the
Divine, would keep up the search for new names, till
at last every part of nature in which an approach to
the Divine could be discovered was chosen as a name
of the Omnipresent. If the presence of the Divine
was perceived in the strong wind, the strong wind
became its name ; if its presence was perceived in the

THE VEDAS 319

earthquake and the fire, the earthquake and the fire
became, its names." It was the " infantile prattle " of
that early world on the deepest of all subjects.

Thus, in eloquent pages, does a great scholar plead
for " charitable interpretation " of this " childish "
faith. But we must not confound the manner of
expression with the substance of the thing expressed.
The manner of expression may be strange, rude,
indicative of a primitive and imperfect state of thought
and language ; the thing itself, the idea, may be clear,
distinct beyond mistake, steadily held without wavering
or confusion. Doubtless, we must make allowances
for all ancient language, its metaphors, its modes of
expressing the unseen by the seen, the divine by the
natural. But this is a question not of language, but
of substance — of the central substance of an idea,
upon which the whole meaning, and fate, and history
of a religion depend. There is no bridging over the
interval between the one Supreme, Almighty, Most
Holy God, and any idea of divinity or of divine
powers, many or few, which comes short of it. The
belief is there, or it is not ; and if it is there, no
weakness or imperfections of language will stand in
the way of its expression. Language which belongs

320 EA RL Y SA CRED ROE TR Y i

to a very early period of the world's history did not
prevent the thought of the one living God, " I am
that I am," from being grasped and held fast by
another Asiatic people, did not for a moment cloud or
perplex it — that thought which the poets of the Veda
just saw, without recognising its value, its final and
supreme truth.

The analogy of childish thought and speech applied
to periods of human history is partly just, but partly
misleading. The Aryan singers in Central Asia or by
the rivers of the Punjab were in mind and mental
outfit at least as much men as the Hebrews ; the
Hebrews in the imperfection and immaturity of
language and intellect, just as much children as their
Aryan contemporaries. But the Hebrews, limited as
they might be in speech, had and kept the one
adequate idea of God ; no imagery about voice, and
hands, and mouth, and countenance, for a moment
obscured or disguised it. The Veclic poets, with all
the genius and enthusiasm of which we seem to dis-
cern the traces, missed the way. They lost the great
central truth, of which from time to time they seem
to have had glimpses. They took the wrong turn in
the eventful road along which their people and their

THE VEDAS 321

religion were to travel. Their poetic names were
condensed, dulled, petrified, debased into the increas-
ingly grotesque and evil idolatry of Brahmanism, from
which there was no return, no recovery, except in the
mournful reform of Buddha, which swept away ancient
idols by extinguishing the idea of God. The religion
of the Vedas could not save itself or India ; whatever
may have been its beginnings, it led by irresistible
steps to what Bunsen calls the " great tragedy of
India and of humanity," and to the " tragic catas-
trophe" which saw in annihilation the only refuge,
the single hope of man ; which raised the great
Oriental faculty of resignation to the power of absolute,
universal, passionless despair.

I will pass from the object of faith and worship in
these hymns to their moral views. What do they
show of the relations of man to God, and to the law
of right and wrong ? We find in them unquestion-
ably the idea of righteousness and sin; we find, also,
less distinctly, the idea of a life after death. " The
keynote of all religion, we are assured, natural as well
as revealed, is present in the hymns of the Veda, and
is never completely drowned by the strange music
which generally deafens our ears, when we first listen

Y

322 EARLY SACRED POETRY I

to the wild echoes of the heathen worship." Doubt-
less it is " a mistake to deny the presence of moral
truths in the so-called nature-worship of the Aryans."
But it is also true, and very observable, that the
expressions of these moral ideas occupy but a very
small space, compared with the prolonged and some-
times gorgeous descriptions of natural phenomena,
uttered with enthusiasm in praise of the Being whom
the poem celebrates. And further, the moral ideas
themselves are rudimentary, general, vague to the last
degree.

The value of moral terms must depend on what is
involved in them, on the standard that governs them,
on the power of conscience, on the earnestness of will
and purpose, which they presuppose. Children divide
the world easily into good people and bad people ;
such divisions do not tell us much of the characters
or the qualities thus rudely classified. And though in
these ancient hymns sin is confessed and its conse-
quences deprecated, though they praise the righteous
and denounce the deceitful and the wicked, there is
but little to show what was the sin, and what con-
stituted the righteousness. Of that moral conviction,
that moral enthusiasm for goodness and justice, that

THE VEDAS 323

moral hatred of wrong and evil, that zeal for righteous-
ness, that anguish of penitence, which has elsewhere
marked religious poetry, there is singularly little
trace.

Here is a hymn addressed to Varuna, " the Greek
ovpavos, an ancient name of the sky and of the god
who resides in the sky " : —

"Let me not yet, 0 Varuna, enter into the
house of clay ; have mercy, Almighty, have
mercy.

" If I go trembling, like a cloud driven by the
wind ; have mercy, Almighty, have mercy.

" Through want of strength, thou strong and
high God, I have gone on the wrong shore ; have
mercy, Almighty, have mercy.

" Thirst came upon the worshipper, though he
stood in the midst of the waters ; have mercy,
Almighty, have mercy.

"Whenever we men, 0 Varuna, commit an
offence before the heavenly host ; whenever we
break Thy law through thoughtlessness ; have
mercy, Almighty, have mercy."

I will take as another example a hymn specially

324 EARL Y SA CRED ROE TR Y I

commended to our notice by men who from knowledge
and learning are most competent to do so. "The
presence," says Bunsen, * of a moral and spiritual
apprehension of God is most vividly brought out in
Vasishta's magnificent hymn to Varuna, which will
even remind our readers of the 51st Psalm." Let me
read it. The hymn is a striking one. But I think
that you will say, when you hear it, that only uncon-
scious prepossession could blind a sagacious and
religious mind to the immeasurable interval between
it and such a Psalm as the 51st. Here is Mr. Max
Midler's translation of the hymn : —

"Wise and mighty are the works of Him
who stemmed asunder the wide firmaments. He
lifted on high the bright and glorious heavens :
He stretched out apart the starry sky and the
earth.

" Do I say this to my own self ? How can I
get near to Varuna ? Will he accept my offer-
ing without displeasure ? When shall I, with
quiet mind, see him propitiated ?

" I ask Varuna, wishing to know this my sin :
I go to ask the wise. The wise all tell me the
same : Varuna it is who is angry with thee.

THE VEDAS 325

" Was it for an old sin, 0 Varuna, that thou
wishest to destroy thy friend, who always praises
Thee ? Tell me, thou unconquerable Lord, and
I will quickly turn to Thee with praise, freed
from sin.

" Absolve us from the sins of our fathers, and
from those which we have committed with our
own bodies. ... It was not our own doing, 0
Varuna, it was a slip ; an intoxicating draught,
passion, vice, thoughtlessness. The old is there
to mislead the young ; even sleep is not free
from mischief.

" Let me without sin give satisfaction to the
angry God, like a slave to his bounteous lord.
The Lord God enlighteneth the foolish ; He, the
Most Wise, leads His worshippers to wealth.

" 0 Lord Varuna, may this song go well to
thine heart ! May we prosper in keeping and
acquiring. Protect us, 0 God, always with your
blessings."

I have dwelt upon what seem to me the most im-
pressive features of this ancient religious poetry of
India. There is much besides, which to us, after the
utmost allowances made for immense differences of

326 EARL V SA CRED POETR Y i

time and thought, for " mental parallax," must appear
unintelligible, grotesque, repulsive. But I wanted
here to do justice to the higher and better side of it.

And I have confined myself to this Vedic poetry,
partly because my space is limited, and next because
this poetry is, on the whole, the most remarkable of
what m the earliest stage of the heathen world has left
us. In no others that I am acquainted with does the
poetical element hold so large a place. I could refer,
no doubt, to wonderful passages — wonderful both in
their religious feeling and their moral earnestness and
depth, from the lyric and tragic poetry of Greece, and
even from its epic poetry ; but this is the poetry, not
of an early stage of human society and thought, but of
a very advanced and mature one ; and I am concerned
only with the earliest. Fragments have come down to
us from the old religions of China ; but they are rather
moral reflections, or simply prayers, than what we call
hymns. The Buddhist books, again, as many of you
last year heard in a singularly interesting historical
survey of Buddhism given from this place by Dr.
Liddon, are full of thoughts and words that astonish
us, by the awful sense of duty, the moral insight and
power which they express, and by the tremendous

THE VEDAS 327

daring with which Buddhism faced the vanity and evil
of the world, and met it with the completeness of
religious despair. But I do not see that these pas-
sages can be called hymns.

In the Zendavesta, on the other hand, the ancient
book of the disciples of Zoroaster, the teacher and
prophet of Persia, who is described like Elijah, calling
on his King and people to choose for good between
truth and falsehood, there have been deciphered what
from their form and manner of expression may be
better termed hymns. In these compositions we come
upon a moral force and purpose which is but little
apparent in the hymns of the Veda. The religion
of Zoroaster is regarded as a reaction against that
of the Vedas, and there is a seriousness about its
language which is very significant. The hymns —
they are but few and hard to interpret — attri-
buted to Zoroaster are marked by a solemn earnest-
ness, an awestruck sense of the deep issues of right
and wrong, which contrasts with the delight in
nature, the vivid imaginativeness, the playful fancy
of the Vedic poems. There is a profound reverence
for an All- wise and Living God : there is a terrible
consciousness of the conflict going on between good

328 EARLY SACRED POETRY I

and evil, and of the power of both. Under the
pressure of that consciousness, Zoroaster took refuge
in that fatal theory which was to develop in after ages
into such portentous and obstinate mischiefs ; the
theory of two eternal and co-ordinate principles. He
believed in an eternal God of Goodness ; but he taught
also, uncreated and everlasting, a coequal " Twin "
principle and Power of Evil. He taught men to take
their side with truth and right in the great battle ; he
taught them to trust to the God of Goodness, and to
nourish a high confidence that the victory must be His.
But at the bottom of his religion was the poison-root
of a Dual Divinity ; of a divided idea, framed of moral
opposites, of the divine government of the world, and
of the law which ruled it.

It is not surprising that these mysterious utter-
ances, breaking on us by surprise from the dawn of
time, should have awakened a very deep interest.
They seemed to require us to revise our judgments and
widen our thoughts, about what we vaguely call
heathen religion. It was obvious that, even if they
were the words of those " who worshipped what they
knew not," and worshipped under divers names and
forms, still there was the greatest difference between

THE VEDAS 329

their ideas of the Divine, and the mythology of Brahma,
Vishnu, and Siva ; between their hymns to the Storm
Gods and the Sky, and the Homeric mythology and
hymns to Apollo and Aphrodite — the mythology of
any of the countries or ages by which we commonly
know heathenism.

These utterances have been read to mean, not a
worship of nature or natural objects, but of God, un-
known but yet instinctively and irresistibly believed
in, behind the veil of Nature. They have been pointed
to as consoling proofs that there was more religion in
the world than we knew of, even if it was but a religion
of children : " praise from the weak lips of babes and
sucklings," who knew not the greatness of which they
spoke. They rebuke us at once, and they encourage
us, by showing that heathenism, so multitudinous and
so ancient, was not all the base superstition and wild
idolatry which it seemed ; but under it, as under a
true dispensation, the Gentiles had much that was
needful, perhaps as much as was possible ; that they
had deeper thoughts in reality, and more earnest long-
ings after their hidden yet present Father, than we
knew before, and drew nigh to Him, if not yet to see
behind the veil, yet at least to show that in wish

330 EARL Y SA CRED FOE TR Y I

and intention they sought to know and honour
Him.

I for my part am only too glad to believe all that
can be shown of what is unexpectedly noble and hope-
ful in these ancient remains. Prophets and Apostles,
face to face with the gross darkness of idolatry, appeal
beyond it to man's deeper faith in God ; and here we
have marks of it.

If that was all, we are but acknowledging what
they have taught us. But there is besides this a dis-
position to place these remains on a level with what
Christians consider as the authenticated records of
God's inspiring guidance, to merge in one common
category, differing endlessly in degree, but at bottom
and essentially the same in kind, at least in origin and
authority, the words, the documents, the ideas of all
religions. But if there is one rule to be kept in view
in the pursuit of truth, it is this : that differences are
as important as points of likeness, and that we must
never give way to tempting and seductive analogies
till we have thoroughly investigated the perhaps ob-
scure and intractable distinctions which so inconveni-
ently interfere with our generalisations.

Are there any such differences, do any such broad

I

THE VEDAS 33]

and undeniable distinctions present themselves between
these earliest utterances of heathen religion and the
early religious poetry of the Old Testament as to make
it impossible to confound the one with the other, as
expressions of religious thought and faith and trust ?
Surely the differences are obvious and enormous.
There are two things, which, apart from their sub-
stance, deprive these Indian and Persian hymns of the
value which is sometimes put upon them.

1. They are and have been for ages dead relics.
No one pretends that they are now used as they were
when they were composed, and as a living part of
worship. Those who actually felt and meant them in
their real sense have passed away long ago ; and
" then all their thoughts perished." The poems have
been enshrined as sacred foundations and originals in
systems unsympathetic and at variance with them ;
and the life that is in them is drawn out by anti-
quarian and philosophic labour in the West, and has
long ceased to breathe in the worship of the East.

2. Whatever these religions were at first, and I
am quite ready to see in them " grains of truth," — to
believe that there were in them often honest, earnest
attempts to " feel after " and win " Him who is not far

332 EARL Y SA CRED FOE TR Y 1

from any one of us " — they all have a common and an
unvarying history. They end in hopeless and ignoble
decay. Their singers sought Him, it may be ; but it
was in vain. In all cases, among all races, it is only
at their first beginning that their words command our
reverence.

In all instances, in all races, Aryan, Semitic,
Turanian, as far as we see, the original religion, or
the religious reform, failed, dwindled, passed into a
formal and pedantic ceremonial — passed into coarser
and yet coarser forms of undisguised idolatry, mon-
strous, impure, or cruel. In the stir and changes of
life from generation to generation, the old spirit could
not hold its own ; new necessities, new appearances,
new feelings clamorously exacted a place for new
creations of the restless mind, new ventures of worship,
new ways of dealing with the problems of the world.
In the uncertainty of decaying traditions and altering
points of view, the process of interpretation hardened
into a prosaic literalness and formality the play
of imagination, the enthusiasms, the raptures, the
sportive audacities of fresher and simpler times.
" Who is the God to whom we shall offer sacrifice ? "
was the refrain of the early Vedic Hymn : the in-

THE VEDAS 333

genuity of Brahman commentators turned the inter-
rogative pronoun into the name of a god, and the
interrogative sentence into a command to sacrifice to
a god whose proper name was "Who."

It is impossible, it seems to me, to overlook, to
over-estimate the contrast. There is a collection of
sacred poetry, not so old, it may be, certainly not in
parts, as the Vedic and Zend hymns, but belonging to
very early times — belonging certainly to what we now
call the childhood of the race. The Vedic hymns are
dead remains, known in their real spirit and meaning
to a few students. The Psalms are as living as when
they were written ; and they have never ceased to be,
what we may be quite certain they have been to-day,
this very day which is just ending, to hundreds and
thousands of the most earnest of souls now alive.
They were composed in an age at least as immature
as that of the singers of the Veda ; but they are
now what they have been for thirty centuries, the
very life of spiritual religion — they suit the needs,
they express, as nothing else can express, the deepest
religious ideas of " the foremost in the files of
time."

The Vedic hymns, whatever they have meant

334 EARL Y SA CRED POETR Y I

originally, stand at the head of a history not yet over
— and never once broken, except by atheism — of
irretrievable idolatry.

The Psalms too stand, in a very important sense,
at the head of a great religious history, as the first
great outburst of the religious affections and emotions
in the people of Israel. But what they once pro-
claimed, as the truth of truths, about God and
righteousness, that they kept alive, unquenched, un-
mistaken, undoubted to this hour. The Jewish
religion, of which they were the soul and the guardian,
passed through as many disasters, as many dangers, as
any other. Its tendencies to degenerate were as
obstinate ; none ever sunk at last under a more tre-
mendous catastrophe. But the faith which was at its
heart never was utterly lost in the darkest days and
the foulest apostasies. It went on from one step to
another, of higher thought and clearer light. It had
risen from the Law to the Psalms ; it went on from
the Psalms to the Prophets, from the Prophets to the
Gospel. And the Psalms, which had expressed, in so
many strains and in so many keys, the one unwavering
belief of the people of Israel, — that belief which
neither idolatry, nor its punishment, the captivity, nor

THE VEDAS 335

the scepticism of Sadducees, nor the blindness of
Pharisees, had impaired or shaken, — passed on, un-
changed but transfigured, to be the perpetual language
of the highest truth, of the deepest devotion, in the
Christian Church.

LECTUKE II

THE PSALMS

There is one book of sacred poetry which is unique of
its kind, which has nothing like it or second to it.
It expresses the ideas and the feelings of a religion of
which the central and absorbing object of faith is One
who is believed to be the absolute, universal, Living
God, the one God of the world and all things, Al-
mighty, All-Holy, Supreme. It not only expresses
this religion, but as a matter of fact, it has been one
of the most certain means of maintaining unbroken
the tradition and fullest conviction of it. From age to
age this book has been its companion and its minister.
And there is this to be observed about it. It has
been equally and in equal measure the prayer-book of
public and common worship, and the chosen treasury
of meditation, guidance, comfort to the individual soul.
To each of these two purposes, in many respects widely
different, it has lent itself with equal suitableness ;

THE PSALMS 337

and it has been to men of the most widely different
times and ideas what no other book has been. When-
ever the Book of Psalms began to be put together, and
whenever it was completed, from that time in the
history of the world, the religious affections and the
religious emotions, the object of which was the One
Living God of all, found their final, their deepest,
their unsurpassed expression. From that time to this
there never has been a momentary pause, when some-
where or other the praises of His glory and the prayers
of His worshippers have not been rehearsed in its
words.

There are other collections of ancient religious
poetry venerable for their age, for which our interest
and respect are bespoken. In the preceding lecture I
glanced at two examples of them, the primitive
utterances of two great religions of Asia — the Indian
hymns of the Veda, the Persian hymns of the Zenda-
vesta. Separated as we are from these by great
chasms of time and still greater differences of ideas,
we have been taught, rightly I think, to see in them
the words of men "feeling after" Him whom they
could not see but could not help believing, and ex-
pressing, as best they could, their thoughts of His

z

338 EARLY SACRED POETRY n

footsteps and His tokens. But put at the highest what
they were in religious significance to their own age,
they were so to their own age alone. They were the
seeds of no spiritual truth to the ages after them or to
mankind ; whatever there was of it in them, though
they were themselves preserved with jealous reverence,
was overlaid and perished. There were, I am ready
to believe, in the ancient world, many attempts to
know God, to learn His mind, to rest under His
shadow, to lay hold on His hope. There was only one
which as a religion attained its end ; only one acknow-
ledged by God, by the blessing of vitality and fruitful-
ness. Compared with the Psalms of that religion
which was going on, side by side with them, in a little
corner of the world, the preparation for the " fulness
of time " — these remains of early heathen religion are
like the appearance of the illuminated but dead surface
of the moon, with its burnt-out and extinct volcanoes,
contrasted with the abounding light and splendour
of the unexhausted sun, still, age after age, the source
of life and warmth and joy to the world, still
waking up new energies, and developing new
wonders.

We find in these hymns a high imaginative sense

THE PSALMS 339

of divine power and goodness to man ; an acknowledg-
ment of human weakness and dependence ; a sense of
sin and wrong-doing, childish and vague, yet sincere,
and leading men to throw themselves on Divine
compassion for forgiveness ; — and a growing sense,
more observable in the Zend hymns ascribed to Zoro-
aster than in the songs of the Veda, of the greatness
of the moral law, of truth, of righteousness, of duty.
But that of which, as it seems to me, we do not find
the faintest trace, is the meeting and, so to speak, the
contact of the spirit of man with the God whom
he worships and celebrates. The position of the
worshipper and the singer is absolutely an external
one ; and he thinks of no other. He gazes up with
wonder and it may be hope at the Sky, the Sun, the
Fire, the Storm ; he invokes That of which they are
the garment, the manifestation or the disguise ; he
urges the fulfilment of the Divine moral rule of right
and wrong ; he loses sometimes the thought of power
shown in the fire or in the sky, in the deeper and all-
embracing thought of the Father in heaven. But to
approach Him with the full affections of a human
soul — to draw nigh in communion with Him, heart to
heart — to rejoice in Him, to delight in Him, to love

34o EARL Y SA CRED FOE TRY 1 1

Him — all these inward movements of the unseen spirit
of man to the one unseen source and centre of all good
— this, as far as my knowledge goes, is an unknown
experience, an undiscovered sphere, to the poets of the
Veda or the Zendavesta. When in later times Nature
ceased to satisfy, and the riddles of the world became
importunate and overwhelming in their hopelessness,
the religious feeling which worshipped God, hidden
and veiled in nature, could not endure the strain ; it
passed away, and the refuge was Pantheism or Anni-
hilation.

To pass from the Veda to the Psalms is to pass at
one bound from poetry, heightened certainly by a
religious sentiment, to religion itself, in its most serious
mood and most absorbing form; tasking, indeed, all
that poetry can furnish to meet its imperious and
diversified demands for an instrument of expression ;
but in its essence far beyond poetry. It is passing at
one bound from ideas, at best vague, wavering, un-
certain of themselves, to the highest ideas which
can be formed by the profoundest and most cultivated
reason, about God and the soul, its law, its end, its
good.

The contrast is absolute as to the object of worship.

THE PSALMS 34i

I am ready to see in the early Indian hymns something
very different from the idolatry and the Pantheism of
later times — a genuine feeling after the Unseen and
the Almighty Father, a glimpse caught from time to
time of His glory, an awful belief, not unnatural
though mistaken, that He, a God that hideth Himself,
was in the wind, and in the fire, and in the storm,
rather than in the still small voice. But the best
that can be said is that " they did not know what
they worshipped." They failed to seize firmly the
central truth, without which religion cannot live;
if ever they saw it, it faded immediately ; it melted
away into endless changes. What a gap between that
and the steady, clear, unwavering thought of the
Psalms : — He, and He only, the One Living God, from
first to last the burden and the worship of each
successive Psalm — He and He only, addressed without
doubt, confounded with nothing else, invoked without
misgiving or possibility of the thought of another : He,
the foundation and maker and hope of all things,
recognised in His glorious works, yet never for a
moment identified with them ; worshipped without
fear under various names, spoken of without fear in
His mighty doings in such phrases as human language

342 EARL Y SA CRED FOE TRY 1 1

in its weakness could supply, surrounded without fear
in thought by powers awful in their unseen and un-
known greatness to human imagination — " God stand-
ing as a Judge among gods " — vnthout fear, I say,
because there was no risk of the supreme, central,
immovable idea of the Godhead being disturbed or
impaired — the Lord of Hosts, the God of Gods, the
King of Glory. This one marvellous belief (assump-
tion, tradition, revelation, according to our point of
view) runs through the Psalms, clearly, naturally, with
the freedom and steady force of the stream of a great
river. Do those who are for putting all ancient
religious poetry on the same general level take in the
significance of this characteristic of the Psalms ?

The first volume of Mr. Max Muller's translation
of the Kig-Veda is composed of Hymns to the Storm-
Gods, or the Winds, awful in their might and terror,
and yet the givers of rain and fruitfulness. Under
this aspect, veiled under these natural wonders, the
Infinite, it is supposed, was worshipped. The frequent
power and beauty of these songs, in the midst of
passages to us unintelligible and grotesque, is undeni-
able. The Storm-Gods are invoked along with Indra,
" Him who created light when there was no light,

THE PSALMS 343

and form when there was no form, and who was born
together with the dawns : " along with Agni, the Fire-
God, whose might no god or mortal withstands. They
are the " wild ones who sing their song, unconquerable
by might," companions of those " who in heaven are
enthroned as gods, who toss the clouds across the
surging sea." They are pictured as an " exulting and
sportive host," riding in their chariots, with swift
steeds, with their spears and bright ornaments, driving
furiously, rejoicing in their fierce career, darkening the
earth under the storm-cloud, dealing the thunderbolt
and the abundance of rain : —

" I hear their whips (the thunder peals)
almost close by, as they crack them in their
hands ; they gain splendour on their way.

"Who is the oldest among you here, ye
shakers of heaven and earth, when ye shake
them like the hem of a garment ?

" At your approach the son of man holds him-
self down ; the wreathed cloud fled at your fierce
anger. . . . They at whose racings the earth,
like a hoary King, trembles for fear on their
ways.

" From the shout of the Storm-Gods over the

344 EARL Y SA CRED FOE TRY 1 1

whole space of the earth men reeled for-
ward.

" They make the rocks to tremble, they tear
asunder the trees of the forest. Come on, ye
Storm -Gods, like madmen, ye gods with your
whole tribe."

And their blessings are invoked, their anger depre-
cated ; wielders of the lightning, they are besought to
aim their bolts at the enemy and the wicked : —

" What now, then ? When will you take us
as a dear father takes his son by both hands ?
Whither now ? On what errand of yours are
you going in heaven, not on earth ; where are
your newest favours, 0 ye Storm-Gods ; where
the blessings ? Where all the delights ?

" Let not one sin after another, difficult to be
conquered, overcome us : let it depart, together
with evil desire. . . . Give to the worshippers
strength, glorious, invincible in battle, brilliant,
wealth -giving, known to all men. Grant unto
us wealth, durable, rich in men, defying all
onslaughts — wealth, a hundred and a thousand-
fold, ever increasing."

THE PSALMS 345

I add an extract given by Mr. Max Mliller from
the Zendavesta : —

"I ask thee, tell me the truth, O Ahura (the
Living one) ! Who was from the beginning the
father of the pure world ? Who made a path
for the sun and for the stars ? Who but thou
makest the moon to increase and decrease ?
That, 0 Mazda (the Wise) and other things, I
wish to know.

" I ask thee, tell me the truth, 0 Ahura !
Who holds the earth and the clouds that they
do not fall ? Who holds the sea and the trees ?
Who has given swiftness to the wind and the
clouds ? Who is the creator of the good spirit ?

" I ask thee, tell me the truth, 0 Ahura !
Who has made the kindly light and the dark-
ness ? Who has made the kindly light and the
awaking ? Who has made the mornings, the
noons, and the nights, they who remind the wise
of his duty ? "

The Psalms are full of the glory of God in the
"heaven and earth and sea and all that is therein."
Their writers are not insensible to those wonders, so

346 EA RL Y SA CRED ROE TRY 1 1

familiar, yet so amazing, which woke up a " fearful
joy " in the singers of the far East : —

" The day is Thine, and the night is Thine ;
Thou hast prepared the light and the sun.

" The heavens declare the glory of God, and
the firmament showeth His handy -work. One
day telleth another, and one night certifieth
another. . . . Their sound is gone out into all
lands, and their words to the ends of the world.

" Thou hast set all the borders of the earth.
Thou hast made summer and winter. Who
covereth the heaven with clouds, and prepareth
rain for the earth ; and maketh the grass to grow
upon the mountains, and herb for the use of
men.

" Praise the Lord upon earth, ye dragons and
all deeps : fire and hail, snow and vapour, wind
and storm, fulfilling His word."

But there is one Psalm where the awful might and
grandeur of the storm fills the writer's mind, the
Psalm, as it has been called, of the " Seven Thunders " ;
of the seven times repeated " Voices of God," over the
sea and the mountains, the forest and the wilderness,

THE PSALMS

347

as the storm travels onward ; " beginning with Gloria
in Excelsis and ending with In terris Pax" — the
29 th:—

" Give unto the Lord, 0 ye mighty, give unto
the Lord glory and strength.

" Give the Lord the honour due unto His
name ; worship the Lord with holy worship.

" The voice of the Lord is upon the waters ; it
is the glorious God that maketh the thunder.

" The voice of the Lord is upon many waters.

" The voice of the Lord is mighty in operation.

" The voice of the Lord is a glorious voice.

" The voice of the Lord breaketh the cedar
trees ; yea, the Lord breaketh the cedars of
Libanus.

" He maketh them also to skip like a calf ;
Libanus also and Sirion like a young unicorn.

" The voice of the Lord divideth the flames of
fire. The voice of the Lord shaketh the wilder-
ness; yea, the Lord shaketh the wilderness of
Kades.

" The voice of the Lord maketh the hinds to
calve, and discovereth the forests ; in His temple
doth every one speak of His glory.

348 EARL Y SA CRED FOE TRY 1 1

" The Lord sitteth above the waterflood ; the
Lord remaineth a King for ever.

" The Lord shall give strength unto His people ;
the Lord shall give His people the blessing of peace."

Am I not justified in saying that, in passing from
the hymns of the Veda to the Psalms, we pass from
poetry to serious and grave religion ?

And yet it is in the fresh and bold expression of
an indefinite religious sentiment, of indefinite yet real
religious awe and delight and admiration in the
presence of the glories and wonders of nature, an
expression not troubling itself about logical con-
sistency, and not yet stiffened and cramped by the
rules and forms of definite superstitions, that the
charm and interest of the Vedic hymns chiefly consist.
If the contrast is great between them and the Psalms,
in respect to the way in which each sees God in
Nature, it is immeasurably greater between what each
understood by religion, both as regards God and as
regards man ; in what each thought of God, in what
each desired of Him and trusted Him for ; in what
each thought of man's relation to God, of the meaning
and the law of man's life, of man's capacities, of his
sin, his hope, his blessedness.

THE PSALMS 349

The following is not from the Eig-Veda, but from
the Zendavesta, in which a moral earnestness is more
observable. It is part of what is supposed to be a hymn
of Zoroaster. I give it in Mr. Max Miiller's transla-
tion : —

" 1. Now I shall proclaim to all who have
come to listen, the praises of Thee, the all-wise
Lord, and the hymns of Vohumano (the good
spirit). Wise Asha ! I ask that (thy) grace
may appear in the lights of heaven.

" 2. Hear with your ears what is best, per-
ceive with your minds what is pure, so that every
man may for himself choose his tenets before the
great doom ! May the wise be on our side !

" 3. Those old spirits who are twins, made
known what is good and what is evil in thoughts,
words, and deeds. Those who are good distin-
guished between the two, not those who are evil-
doers.

" 4. When these two Spirits came together,
they made first life and death, so that there
should be at last the most wretched life for the
bad, but for the good blessedness.

"5. Of these two Spirits the evil one chose

350 EARL Y SA CRED ROE TRY n

the worst deeds ; the kind Spirit, he whose gar-
ment is the immovable sky, chose what is right ;
and they also who faithfully please Ahuramazda
by good works.

6. Those who worshipped the Devas and
were deceived, did not rightly distinguish between
the two ; those who had chosen the worst Spirit
came to hold counsel together, and ran to Aeshma
in order to afflict the life of man.

u 7. And to him (the good) came might, and
with wisdom virtue ; and the everlasting Armaiti
herself made his body vigorous ; it fell to thee
to be rich by her gifts.

" 8. But when the punishment of their crimes
will come, and, oh Mazda, thy power will be
known as the reward of piety for those who
delivered (Druj) falsehood into the hand of Asha
(truth).

" 9. Let us then be of those who further this
world ; oh Ahuramazda, oh bliss - conferring
Asha ! Let our mind be there where wisdom
abides.

" 10. Then indeed there will be the fall of
the pernicious Druj, but in the beautiful abode

THE PSALMS

351

of Vohumano, of Mazda, and Asha, will be
gathered for ever those who dwell in good
report.

"11. Oh men, if yon cling to these command-
ments, which Mazda has given, . . . which are
a torment to the wicked, and a blessing to the
righteons, then there will be victory through
them."

Beyond this these hymns do not go ; above this
they do not rise. Compare with their meagreness on
these points, the fulness of the Psalms : compare these
hesitating though deeply touching essays at religion,
halting in the outer courts of the Temple, with the
majestic and strong confidence of the Psalms, leading
the soul through the manifold experiences of the
spiritual life to the inmost shrines. Compare the idea
of God. He is not only the One, and the Everlasting,
and the Most Highest, the living God, but He has
what in default of a fitter phrase we call a character.
He is not only the Maker, the Wonder-worker of the
world ; He is its Holy Pailer and King ; " its right-
eous Judge, strong and patient," " set in the throne
that judgest right;" the Hand that feeds all its
creatures; the Eye that watches all its revolutions,

35 2 EARLY SA CRED ROE TRY 1 1

and pierces to all its lowliest corners ; its Joy, its Hope,
its Eefuge. He is " the God of Truth," " the God that
hath no pleasure in wickedness, neither shall any evil
dwell with Him." He is the " Lord that hath never
failed them that seek Him." He is the " Helper of
the friendless," " the Father of the fatherless," " the
Hearer of the complaint and the desire of the poor ; "
He is " the God that maketh men to be of one mind
in an house." "Who is like to Him, who hath His dwel-
ling so high, and yet humbleth Himself to behold the
things in heaven and earth ? " And so, from end to end
of the Psalms, we have the clear, varied, unstudied
recognition of a moral character. In the certainty and
consciousness of this most holy sovereignty, the trust
and joy of the Psalmists are without restraint. The
enthusiasm and imagination of the Vedic poets were
kindled at the greatness of nature ; the enthusiasm
and imagination of the Psalmists, not insensible to that
greatness, were far more inspired by the everlasting
righteousness of the Kingdom of God.

" 0 come, let us sing unto the Lord, let us
heartily rejoice in the strength of our salvation
... for the Lord is a great God, and a great
King above all gods. In His hand are all the

THE PSALMS

353

corners of the earth, and the strength of the hills
is His also. ... 0 come, let us worship and fall
down, and kneel before the Lord our Maker.
For He is the Lord our God, and we are the
people of His pasture and the sheep of His
hand." " Thou didst cause thy judgment to be
heard from heaven : the earth trembled, and was
still. "When God arose to judgment, and to help
all the meek upon earth." " Let the heavens
rejoice, and let the earth be glad ; let the sea
make a noise, and all that therein is. Let the
field be joyful and all that is in it ; then shall
all the trees of the wood rejoice before the Lord.
For He cometh, for He cometh to judge the earth
and with righteousness to judge the earth, and
the people with His truth."

The deep, insisting faith in God's righteousness
cannot find strength enough in language for its trium-
phant conviction, and never tires of reiteration : —

" The Lord is King, the earth may be glad

thereof: yea, the multitude of the isles may be

glad thereof. Clouds and darkness are round

about Him ; righteousness and judgment are the

2 A

3 54 EARL Y SA CRED FOE TRY 1 1

habitation of His seat. The hills melted like
wax at the presence of the Lord ; at the presence
of the Lord of the whole earth."

Great as is the earth, great as is nature, its mag-
nificence, its fearful and tremendous powers, One is
still seen a King above them, to whom they are but
part of the adornment of His royalty : —

" The Lord is King, and hath put on glorious
apparel ; the Lord hath put on His apparel and
girded Himself with strength. Ever since the
world began hath Thy seat been prepared : Thou
art from everlasting. The floods are risen, 0
Lord, the floods have lift up their voice ; the
floods lift up their waves. The waves of the sea
are mighty, and rage horribly ; but yet the Lord
who dwelleth on high is mightier."

Great, too, are the uprisings and storms of the
moral world, the shock of nations, the breaking up of
empires, the madness of raging peoples, the fury of
tyrants ; but — " the Lord is King, be the people never
so impatient : He sitteth between the cherubims, be
the earth never so unquiet. The Lord is great in
Sion and high above all people." And it is not in

THE PSALMS 355

"power that the Psalmist finds the matchless prerogative
of this kingdom — it is in power, thought of always
with absolute moral goodness, power with a yet higher
greatness belonging to it, the greatness of righteous-
ness and holiness : —

" They (all nations) shall give thanks unto
Thy name, which is great, wonderful, and holy.
0 magnify the Lord our God, and fall down
before His footstool, for He is holy." " Thy
testimonies are very sure ; holiness becometh
Thine house for ever." "Thou, Lord, art higher
than all that are in the earth. Thou art exalted
far above all gods. 0 ye that love the Lord, see
that ye hate the thing that is evil. . . . There
is sprung up light for the righteous, and joyful
gladness, for such as are true-hearted. Eejoice
in the Lord, ye righteous, and give thanks for a
remembrance of His holiness."

The God of the Psalms is the gracious God of the
Present, " whose mercy endureth for ever " ; the God
not only of Sion and His chosen people Israel, but of
all the heathen, of all the nations, of all the islands of
the sea and the ends of the earth : the God of the

3 56 EARL Y SA CRED FOE TRY 1 1

Future, from generation to generation ; the God of the
future to them that love Him, their certain hope and
Saviour, in some unexplained way, in spite of the
visible ruin and vanishing of death ; the God of the
future, also to the mighty, the cruel, and the
proud, their certain judge and avenger. Over all
human power, however irresistible, over all human
pride, however beyond rebuke, over all human wrong-
fulness and oppression, however unchecked, there is
ever present the all -seeing God of judgment, ever be-
holding, ever trying the hearts and reins, ever waiting
His time of deliverance and retribution, ever preparing
the refuge which shall at last shelter the innocent, the
doom which must at last smite down the proud : —

" For the sin of their mouth, and for the words
of their lips, they shall be taken in their pride.
'The Lord also is a defence for the oppressed,
even a refuge in due time of trouble.' His eyes
consider the poor, and His eyelids try the child-
ren of men. 0 put your trust in Him always,
ye people ; pour out your hearts before Him, for
God' is our hope. 0 trust not in wrong and
robbery, give not yourselves unto vanity; if
riches increase, set not your heart upon them.

THE PSALMS 357

God spake once, and twice I have also heard
the same ; that power belongeth unto God. And
that Thou, Lord, art merciful : for Thou re-
wardest every man according to his work."

I say nothing here of the prophetic element in the
Psalms. It is most characteristic — the way in which
they look onward, the way in which they dare to be
prophetic — to tell of one, in whom, through suffering
and through glory, the world should find its redemption
and its peace — " Desire of me, and I shall give the
heathen for thine inheritance, and the utmost parts of
the earth for thy possession." It is characteristic,
unique. But I do not dwell on it here. What I
wish to point out is, that all that what is called
natural religion, even in its highest speculation, has
concluded, of the power, the justice, the goodness of
God, is found, clothed with life and recognised in
actual deed, with joy and love, in the Psalms, cen-
turies before natural religion was heard of. The
Psalm of Creation (civ.) sets forth the magnifi-
cence of His bounty over all His works, from the
light with which He "decks Himself as with a gar-
ment," to the rivers running among the hills, from
which the wild asses quench their thirst, the grass for

358 EARLY SACRED POETRY n

the cattle, and the green herb for the service of men,
the wine that maketh glad, the bread that strength -
eneth his heart, the lions roaring after their prey,
man going forth to his work and his labour till the
evening, the great and wide sea also, with its creatures
great and small innumerable, " the ships, and that
leviathan," whom Thou hast made " to play and take
his pastime there." The Psalm of Mercy (ciii.) —
mercy, as high as the heaven is in comparison with
the earth, forgiveness, putting away sins as far as the
west is from the east, — sets forth His dispensations of
compassion and remedy, — forgiving all our sins, heal-
ing all our infirmities, satisfying our mouth with good
things, making us young and lusty as an eagle, exe-
cuting righteousness and judgment for all them that
are oppressed with wrong, long-suffering, and of great
goodness — "Like as a father pitieth his own children,
even so is the Lord merciful to them that fear Him."
I will only call attention to one other feature of these
expressions of joy and awful exultation at feeling our-
selves encompassed by the mercy and righteousness of
God; and that is the way in which, as in the 65th
Psalm, the thought of His power and His overflowing
bounty in Nature — " Thou makest the outgoings of

THE PSALMS 359

the morning and evening to praise Thee — Thou visitest
the earth and blessest it — Thou crownest the year
with Thy goodness — the valleys laugh and sing " —
how this is entwined and enwreathed with the thought
of His moral empire, providing for the cravings, over-
ruling the turmoil, of the world of souls : —

" Thou that nearest the prayer, to Thee shall
all flesh come. Thou shalt show us wonderful
things in Thy righteousness, 0 God of our sal-
vation ; Thou that art the hope of all the ends
of the earth and of them that remain in the
broad sea. . . . Who stilleth the raging of the
sea, and the noise of His waves, and the madness
of the people."

Or, again, as in the 147th Psalm, the supreme
wonders of the universe are strung and linked to-
gether in successive verses with His sympathy for the
daily sorrows of mankind. "He healeth those that
are broken in heart, and giveth medicine to heal their
sickness. He telleth the number of the stars, and
calleth them all by their names."

Compare again in the Psalms their idea of man ;
there is nothing even approaching to it in that early
religious poetry which is sometimes classed along with

360 EARLY SACRED POETRY n

them. Take, for instance, the view which pervades
them of the unity of mankind. The horizon of the
Vedic hymns, e.g. is confined to the worshipper who
sings them. The Psalms, the songs of that chosen
people which God "led like sheep by the hand of
Moses and Aaron," and expressing in every form the
glory and the blessing involved in that wondrous
election — " In Jewry is God known, His name is
great in Israel, at Salem is His tabernacle, and His
dwelling in Sion " — yet claim as the subjects of their
King, and the sharers in their worship, every nation,
every family of mankind. No feature is more striking
in the Psalms than the unquestioning and natural
directness with which they embrace the heathen, the
nations, as equally included with Israel, in the pur-
poses and the Kingdom of God. The question asked
by the Apostle in a degenerate age of Judaism, " Is
He the God of the Jews only ? Is He not also of the
Gentiles ? " was never a question to the writers of the
Psalms, even under the bitterness of heathen op-
pression, even under the keenest sense of the pre-
rogative of God's people, whether in triumph or in
punishment. There is no lack of sorrowful sighing to
the God of Israel against the heathen that " do not

THE PSALMS *6i

know Him " — no lack of the stern joy of victory and
vengeance, when the day of the heathen came. But
this does not interfere with the primary belief that the
whole human race belongs to God now, and has to do
with Him now ; that it is destined for Him more com-
pletely hereafter. "He who is praised in Sion 'is
also' the hope of all the ends of the earth, and of
them that remain in the broad sea : " —

" I will give thanks unto Thee, 0 Lord, among
the people ; I will sing praises unto Thee, among
the nations." " The Lord's name is praised from the
rising up of the sun unto the going down thereof.
The Lord is high above all nations, and His
glory above the heavens." " All nations which
Thou hast made shall come and worship Thee, 0
Lord, and shall glorify Thy name." " God
reigneth over the heathen ; God sitteth upon His
holy seat. The princes of the people are joined
unto the people of the God of Abraham. God
is very high exalted ; all the shields of the earth
are His."

And with this universal idea of human nature and
its relation to God, there is joined an equally charac-

362 EARL Y SA CRED ROE TRY 1 1

teristic view of its depths and heights, of its greatness,
of its vanity. Nothing is more easy than to take a
high view of it, alone, or a low view, alone : there are
facts and appearances in abundance to account for and
justify either. But the view of the Psalms combines
them ; man's littleness and insignificance, in relation to
the immense universe about him, and to its infinite
and everlasting God ; man's littleness in his relation
to time, to his own short passage between its vast
before and after, his feebleness, his misery, his sin : —
on the other side, man's greatness, as the consummate
work of God's hands, thought worthy of His care, His
choice, His provident and watchful regard ; man's
greatness and responsibility, as capable of knowing
God and loving Him, of winning His blessing and
perishing under His judgment : man's greatness even
as a sinner able to sink so low, and yet to rise by
repentance out of the deepest degradation and most
hopeless ruin. The riddle of man's existence could be
no unfamiliar subject, wherever men reflected at all :
it certainly was not in India, in China, in Greece.
Those deep and awful strains of the 88 th and 90 th
Psalms have their counterpart in the profound despair
of the sacred books of Buddhism, in the solemn, mea-

THE PSALMS 363

sured truth, in the plaintive perplexities of the choruses
of Greek tragedy. But they painted it to the life,
and there they stopped short. The Psalms confessed
it and laid it up in the bosom of God, confident, re-
joicing, that though they saw not yet the light, " all
would at last be well."

And then think of the high moral ideal of what
they look for in those whom God approves ; the hunger
and thirst after righteousness which they reveal : —

" Lord, who shall dwell in Thy Tabernacle,
and who shall rest upon Thy holy hill ? Even
he that leadeth an uncorrupt life, and doeth the
thing that is right, and speaketh the truth from
his heart. He that hath not slandered his
neighbour — he that sitteth not by himself, but is
lowly in his own eyes — he that sweareth unto
his neighbour and disappointeth him not, though
it be to his own hindrance." " Examine me, O
Lord, and prove me ; try out my reins and my
heart." " Who can tell how oft he offencleth ? —
0 cleanse thou me from my secret faults."

Think of the boldness with which they take hold
of the great depths and problems of man's existence,

364 EA RLY SA CRED FOE TRY 11

the triumph of evil, the oppression of the poor, the
sufferings of the good ; the fearless way in which these
enigmas are faced, the reverent and trustful answer
given to them : —

"Fret not thyself because of the ungodly,
neither be thou envious against the evil-doers."
..." Put thy trust in the Lord and be doing
good." ..." Commit thy way unto the Lord,
and put thy trust in Him, and He shall bring it
to pass. He shall make thy righteousness as
clear as the light, and thy just dealing as the
noonday. Hold thee still in the Lord and abide
patiently on Him ; but grieve not thyself at
him whose way doth prosper, against the man
that doeth after evil counsels."

Think of that high faith in the unseen Goodness,
of that high desire after His love and His unseen
reward, which animate the Psalms : —

" The Lord is my Light and my Salvation ;
whom then shall I fear ? The Lord is the
strength of my salvation ; of whom then shall I
be afraid?" . . . " My heart hath talked of
Thee. Seek ye my face : Thy face, Lord, will I
seek." ..." 0 my soul, thou hast said unto the

THE PSALMS 365

Lord, Thou art my God, my goods are nothing
unto Thee." ..." The Lord Himself is the por-
tion of mine inheritance and of my cup."

Where, except in the Psalms, did ancient religion
think of placing the blessedness of man, whether in
this life or beyond it, not in the outward good things
which we know on earth, not in knowledge, not in
power, but in the exercise of the affections ?

To take one point more. There is one feature
about the Psalms which it requires an effort to disen-
gage, because it is so universal in them, and has
become so familiar to us, and which yet is in that age
of the world peculiar to them — the assumption that
pervades every one of them, the vivid sense which
shows itself in every conceivable form, of the relation,
the direct, close, immediate relation of the soul of man
to God. To us Christians this has become the first
axiom of religious truth, the first element of our reli-
gious feeling : to the ancient thought of the world,
God, because of His unapproachable greatness, was, to
each single man, whatever he might be to the com-
munity, a distant God. Who would think of pouring
out his heart to the Indra of the Vedas ; who would
dream of being athirst for the Father Zeus of Homer,,

366 EARL Y SA CRED FOE TR Y 1 1

or longing after the Jupiter, though styled the Best
and Greatest, of later times ? It never occurred to
those worshippers, that besides the sacrifices and
praises, besides the prayer for protection, for deliver-
ance, for benefits, to powers supreme but far off, and
still further removed from the sympathies and the
troubles of mankind, — besides these outward ways of
religion, the soul could have secret yet real access,
everywhere, every moment, to Infinite compassion,
Infinite loving -kindness, Infinite and all -sufficing
goodness, to whom, as into the heart of the tenderest
of friends, it could pour out its distresses, before whom,
as before the feet of a faithful Comforter and Guide,
it could lay down the burden of its care, and commit
its way. But this, I need not remind you, is the idea
of religion which appears on the face of every single
Psalm. It is the idea of the unfailing tenderness of God,
His understanding of every honest prayer, the certainty
that in the vastness and the catastrophes of the world
the soul in its own singleness has a refuge, is linked
at the throne of the worlds to its own reward and
strength, is held by the hand, is guided by the eye, of
One who cares for the weakest as much as He is greater
than the greatest of His creatures.

THE PSALMS 367

And there is no mood of mixed and varied feeling,
no form of deep and yearning affection, no tone of
absorbing emotion, in which this sense of what God is
to the soul does not express itself. It allies itself to
the most poignant grief, to the bitterest self-reproach
and shame; even a despair, which, like in the 88th
Psalm, will allow itself to mention no word of hope,
betrays the hope which yet lurks under it in its
passionate appeal to God, in its unquenchable con-
fidence in prayer : " 0 Lord God of my salvation, I
have cried day and night before Thee : 0 let my
prayer enter into Thy presence, incline Thine ear unto
my calling." Sometimes it puts into words its belief
— " 0 Thou that hearest the prayer, unto Thee shall
all flesh come , " sometimes it delights in the briefest
and most emphatic word that implies it — " 0 God,
Thou art my God, early will I seek Thee ; " "I said
unto the Lord, Thou art my God, hear the voice of my
prayer, 0 Lord." There is a fearless freedom, a kind
of buoyancy and elasticity in the way in which human
feeling and affection expand and unfold themselves in
the Psalms, and press upwards in eager and manifold
desire. They are winged with joy and inexpressible
delight : or the soul brings before itself with unre-

368 EARLY SACRED POETRY . n

lenting keenness how it is seen and pierced through
and through, from the first instant of existence, and in
depths inaccessible to itself, by the eye of wisdom and
holiness which goes through the world ; or it looks up
to that eye, meeting it in return and guiding it ; looks
up with tender and waiting confidence — " As the eyes
of a maiden to the hand of her mistress, even so our
eyes wait upon the Lord our God, till He have mercy
upon us ; " — or, " Out of the deeps it calls to Him,"
" fleeing to Him for refuge," waiting for Him " more
than they that watch for the morning, yea, more than
they that watch for the morning ; " or it refrains itself
and keeps itself still, " like as a child that is weaned
resteth on his mother ; " or it throws itself blindly on
His mercy, in affectionate, all -surrendering trust —
" Into Thy hands I commend my spirit, for Thou hast
redeemed me, 0 Lord, Thou God of truth ; " or it
rebukes itself for its impatience—" Why art thou so
vexed, 0 my soul, and why art thou so disquieted
within me ? 0 put thy trust in God, which is the
help of my countenance, and my God ; " — or, without
the faintest hesitation of doubt in His marvellous
loving-kindness, it makes sure of His answering sym-
pathy, "for Thou shalt hear me; — keep me as the

THE PSALMS 369

apple of an eye, hide me under the shadow of Thy
wings ; " or it confides to Him its entreaty for a little
respite as the end draws near — " 0 spare me a little
that I may recover my strength, before I go hence and
be no more seen." Or, the helpless creature, it appeals
beseechingly to the Creator's mindfulness of that
which He thought it worth His while to call into
being — " Thy mercy endureth for ever : despise not
then the work of Thine own hands ; " or it exults in
the security of its retreat — " 0 how plentiful is Thy
goodness which Thou hast laid up for them that fear
Thee. . . . Thou shalt hide them privily by Thine
own presence from the provoking of all men ; Thou
shalt keep them secretly in Thy tabernacle from the
strife of tongues ; " or it gives utterance to its deep
longings, and finds their full satisfaction in the unseen
object of its love — "'Like as the hart desireth the
water-brooks, even so longeth my soul after Thee, O
God. My soul is athirst for God, even for the living
God : when shall <I come to appear before the presence
of God " — " 0 God, Thou art my God : early will I
seek Thee*; my soul thirsteth after Thee, my flesh also
longeth after Thee, in a barren and dry land where
no water is. . . . For Thy loving-kindness is better

2b

37o EARL Y SA CRED FOE TRY II

than the life itself. . . . My soul shall be satisfied
even as it were with marrow and fatness, when my
mouth praiseth Thee with joyful lips. Because Thou
hast been my helper, therefore under the shadow of
Thy wings will I rejoice."

What was there anywhere else, like this intensely
human outpouring of affection, in its most diversified
and purest forms, affection fastening itself with the
most natural freshness and simplicity on things unseen ;
so exulting, yet so reverent ; so tender, yet so strong,
and manly, and severe ; so frank and unconstrained in
its fears and griefs and anxieties ; so alive to its
weakness, yet so willing to accept the discipline of
affliction, and so confident of the love behind it ; so
keenly and painfully sensitive to the present ravages
of evil and sin and death, so joyfully hopeful, and sure
of the victory of good. There is an awful yet trans-
porting intuition which opens upon the Christian soul
in some supreme moment of silence or of trial. "We
feel" — so do they tell us, on whom that experience
has come — " we feel that while the world changes, we
are one and the same. We are led to understand the
nothingness of things around us, and we begin, by
degrees, to perceive that there are but two beings in

THE PSALMS 371

the whole universe, — our own souls and the God who
made us." " We rest in the thought of two, and two
only, supreme and luminously self-evident beings —
myself, and my Creator." We stand face to face with
the certainty of our Maker's existence. We become
conscious of being alone with the Eternal. This great
experience had been the Psalmist's. In this the
Psalmist took refuge from the perplexities of life.
" His treadings had wellnigh slipped," when he saw
" the prosperity of the wicked " — not thinking of their
" fearful end." But at once the thought comes on him;
in whose hands he was : —

" Nevertheless I am alway by Thee ; for
Thou hast holden me by Thy right hand. Thou
shalt guide me with Thy counsel, and after that
receive me with glory ; whom have I in heaven
but Thee ? and there is none upon earth that I
desire in comparison with Thee. My flesh and
my heart faileth ; but God is the strength of my
heart, and my portion for ever." ..." I have
set God always before me; for He is on my
right hand, therefore I shall not fall. Therefore
my heart was glad and my glory rejoiced; my
flesh also shall rest in hope." ..." Thou shalt

372 EARL Y SA CRED ROE TRY 1 1

shew me the path of life ; in Thy presence is
the fulness of joy ; in Thy right hand there is
pleasure for evermore." . . . "When I wake up
after Thy likeness, I shall be satisfied with it."

I am surely not saying too much in asserting that
nothing in kind like this, nothing in any way compar-
able with it, is to be found in the noblest and highest
examples of any other ancient religious language.
We know what there was in the world besides ; where
do we look for its counterpart ? The Psalms stand
up like a pillar of fire and light in the history of the
early world. They lift us at once into an atmosphere
of religious thought, which is the highest that man has
ever reached ; they come with all the characteristic
affections and emotions of humanity, everything that
is deepest, tenderest, most pathetic, most aspiring,
along with all the plain realities of man's condition
and destiny, into the presence of the living God. I
am justified in saying that in that stage of the world's
history this is absolutely unique. I am now only
stating it as a fact, however to be accounted for.
Christians account for it from the history in which
the Psalms are embedded, and by the light and
guidance from above, implied in that history; and

THE PSALMS

373

what other account can be given I find it hard to
imagine. That such thoughts, such words, so steady
and uniform in their central idea, so infinitely varied
in their forms of expressing it, should have been pro-
duced in any of the nations which we call heathen, is
to me absolutely inconceivable. That they should
have been produced among the Hebrews, if the
Hebrews were only as other nations, is equally incon-
ceivable. But I want only to impress the fact, one
of the most certain and eventful in the history of the
world. It is idle to talk of Semitic Monotheism, even
if such tendency at that time can be proved. There
is Monotheism and Monotheism : the Monotheism even
of the Koran is not the Monotheism of the Psalms ; and
Monotheism is a poor and scanty word to express the
continued flow of affectionateness, of joy and mourning,
of hope and love, of every tone, every strain, high and
low, in the human soul, which we find in the Psalms.
Nor does it avail to say that they are more modern
than the songs of the Yeda, or the Zendavesta. Chron-
ology is a very uncertain measure of national develop-
ment and culture, and the men who sung the Vedic
hymns had a language, and therefore had had a training
of thought and experience, as advanced as the Hebrew

374 EARL Y SA CRED POE TRY 1 1

Psalmists. The Psalms are certainly no product of
civilisation and philosophy ; the differences of date
among them, which are considerable, from the days of
David, perhaps of Moses, to the " Pilgrim Songs " of
the returning exiles in the days of Zerubbabel, make
no difference in this respect. Nor is it relevant to
point out alleged imperfections in the morality of some
of the Psalms. This is not the occasion to go into the
allegation itself; but were it sustainable, it would
only make the wonder of the whole phenomenon more
surprising. Here is a nation certainly rude and fierce,
certainly behind its neighbours in the arts of life, in
the activity and enterprise of intelligence which lead
to knowledge, to subtlety or width of thought, or to
the sense and creation of beauty, and described in its
own records as beset with incorrigible tendencies to
the coarsest irreligion and degeneracy. Are we not
constantly told that the songs of a people reflect its
character ; that a religion in its idea of God reflects
its worshippers ? What sort of character is reflected
in the Psalms ? They come to us from a people like
their neighbours, merciless and bloody, yet they are
full of love and innocence and mercy. They come
from a people whose deep sins and wrong-doing are

THE PSALMS 375

recorded by their own writers ; yet the Psalms breathe
the hunger and thirst of the soul after righteousness.
They come from a race still in the rude childhood of
the world : yet they express the thoughts about God
and duty, and about the purpose and reward of human
life, which are those of the most refined, the gentlest,
the most saintly, the most exalted, whom the ages of
the world have ever seen, down to its latest.

The question is asked in these days, Is God know-
able ? The answer depends on a further question.
Whether God can be known by man depends on
whether we have the faculties for knowing. We have
faculties which enable us to know the phenomena of
sense and of the outward world. We have faculties
different from them, which enable us to know the
truths of mathematics. Have we anything else ?
By whatever name we call them, we have powers
very unlike, both in their subjects and in their
mode of working, to the knowledge of sense or the
processes of mathematical science. There is a won-
derful art, connected on the one hand with the senses,
on the other hand with mathematical truth, yet in
itself having that which belongs to neither, and which
we call music. There is another, closely connected

376 EARL Y SA CRED POETR Y n

also with the senses, but, except in the most general
way, beyond the domain of mathematical precision,
which we call painting. There is yet a third — the
art, or the power, or the gift, of calling into existence
out of the imagination and the feelings and the lan-
guage of men, by means of choice words and their
measured rhythm, new creations of beauty and grandeur,
which keep their hold on the minds and history of
men for ages — the wondrous art of poetry. In music,
in painting, in poetry, we say that we "know. There
are powers in human nature and in the human mind
of dealing with these subjects, powers of the greatest
activity and energy, most subtle and most delicate, yet
most real, undoubting of themselves and undoubted in
their effects, of which no one makes any question ;
certain, within limits, of what they know and do, but
which yet in their tests of certainty are absolutely
different from mathematical or physical knowledge,
and absolutely impatient of the verifications which
are indispensable in sensible and mathematical proof.
And a man might be the greatest physicist and the
greatest mathematician, while all their marvellous
regions were to him absolutely a ■ blank ; though his
mind was one to which, say music, its meaning and its

THE PSALMS 377

laws, were absolutely incomprehensible, the most im-
possible of puzzles. He might not know a false note
in music from a true one ; he might be utterly unable
to see the difference between what is noble and base
in it, or to distinguish the greatest work of Handel or
Beethoven from any other collection of sounds. And
yet the musician knows ; he knows the glory and the
truth, and the ordered perfection of which he speaks ;
he knows that this perfection is governed by the
exactest laws ; he knows that, like all perfection, it
depends on infinitesimal differences, which yet are most
real ones : his faculty of knowing and his knowledge,
however he has got to them, and although other men
or other races have them not, and he knows not the
channel of communication between his own knowledge
and their minds, are their own warrant and witness.
The musical unbeliever might question the possibility
of knowing anything about what to him would be so
vague and misty, full of arbitrary definitions and unin-
telligible rules, and, if he was obstinate, might vainly
seek to be convinced. Yet the world of music is a
most real world; man has faculties for reaching it
and judging of it ; and the evidences of its reality are
in the domain of fact and history.

378 EARL Y SA CRED ROE TRY 1 1

Is there in human nature such a faculty, separate
from the faculties by which we judge of the things of
sense and the abstractions of the pure intellect, but
yet a true and trustworthy faculty for knowing God
— for knowing God, in some such way as we know the
spirits and souls, half disclosed, half concealed under
the mask and garment of the flesh, among whom we
have been brought up, among whom we live ? Can
we know Him in such a true sense as we know those
whom we love and those whom we dislike ; those
whom we venerate and trust, and those whom we fear
and shrink from ? The course of the world, its his-
tory, its literature, our everyday life, presuppose such
knowledge of men and character ; they confirm its
existence and general trustworthiness, by the infinitely
varied and continuous evidence of results. The ques-
tion whether there is such a faculty in the human soul
for knowing its Maker and God — knowing Him, though
behind the veil, — knowing Him, though flesh and
blood can never see Him, — knowing Him, though the
questioning intellect loses itself in the thought of Him,
— this question finds here its answer. In the Psalms is
the evidence of that faculty, and that with it man has
not worked in vain. The Book of Psalms is like the

THE PSALMS 379

fact of the production, by the existence and exercise
of a faculty in man's nature, of vast results, such as a
great literature, a great school of painting, a great body
of music. If it is not a proof and example of this
power of knowing, I cannot imagine what a proof can
be. The proof that the living God can be known by
man is that He can be loved and longed for with all
the freedom and naturalness and hope of human affec-
tion. The answer whether God has given to man the
faculty to know Him might be sought in vain in the
Vedas or the Zendavesta. It is found in the Book of
Psalms.

THE END

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