What does history teach?

WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH?

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WHAT DOES HISTORY
TEACH?

BY

JOHN STUART BLACKIE

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

1886

*#* The following Lectures were prepared for the Philo-
sophical Institution of Edinburgh, and were delivered, with
the exception of a few passages, before audiences consisting of
Members of that Institution on the evenings of 8th and nth
December in the present year.

Edinburgh, December, i88j.

THE STATE.

"Clcnrep reXaaOkv fiiXricrTov tcov £wcov avOpuiTros ovt<o
kgu -^(apicrBlv votu.ov /cat SUrjs \api(TTQV ttoli'Tuv- —

Aristotle. /

History, whether founded on reliable
record, or on monuments, or on the scien-
tific analysis of the great fossil tradition
called language, knows nothing of the
earliest beginnings. The seed of human
society, like the seed of the vegetable
growth, lies under ground in darkness, and
its earliest processes are invisible to the
outward eye. Speculations about the de-
scent of the primeval man from a monkey,
of the primeval monkey from an ascidian,
md of the primeval ascidian from a proto-
lastic bubble, though they may act as a
; Dtent stimulus to the biological research

2 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ?

of the hour, certainly never can form the
starting-point of a profitable philosophy of
history.

As revealed in history, man is an animal,
not onlv generically different from, but
characteristically antagonistic to the brute.
That which makes him a man is precisely
that which no brute possesses, or can by
any process of training be made to pos-
sess. The man can no more be developed
out of the brute than the purple heather
out of the granite rock which it clothes.
The relation of the one to the other is a
relation of mere outward attachment or
dependency — like the relation which ex-
ists between the painter's easel and the
picture which is painted on it. The easel
is essential to the picture, but it did not
make the picture, nor give even the small-
est hint towards the making of it. So the
monkey, as a basis, may be essential to the
man without being in any way partici-
pant of the divine indwelling Xoyo; which
makes a man a man. The two are related
only as all things are related, inasmuch as

THE STATE. 3

they are all shot forth from the great
fountain-head of all vital forces, whom we
justly call God.

The distinctive character of man as re-
vealed in history is threefold. Man is an
inventive animal, and he does not invent
from a compulsion of nature, as bees make
cells or as swallows build nests. These
are all prescribed operations which the
animal must perform; but the inventive
faculty in man is free, in such a manner
that the course of its action cannot be
foreseen or calculated. It revels in va-
riety, and, above all things, shuns that uni-
formity which is the servile provinces of
brute activity. A man may live in a hole
like a fox, but his proper humanity is
shown by building a house and inventing
a style of architecture. A man can sing
like a bird, but — what the bird cannot do
— he can make a harp or an organ. He
can scrape with his nails like a terrier, but,
as a man manifesting his proper manhood,
he prefers to make a shovel of wood and a
hatchet of stone or iron. The other ani-

4 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ?

mals, however cunning, and often wonder-
fully adaptable in their instincts, are mere
machines. Man makes machines. In this
respect he is justly entitled to look upon
himself as the God to the lower animals,
just as the sheriff in the counties by dele-
gated right represents the supreme author-
ity of the Crown. But, above all things,
man is a progressive animal, — not merely
progressive as the grass grows from root
to blade and from blade to blossom to per-
fect its individual type of vegetable life,
but advancing from stage to stage and
mounting from platform to platform for
the perfectionation of the race ; nor even
progressive as plants and fruits are im-
proved by culture and favorable surround-
ings, and what is called forcing, or as
the breed of sheep and cattle is improved
by selection. No doubt progress of this
kind is made by man as well as by plants
and brutes; but his most distinctive hu-
man progress is made, not by imposition
from without, but by projection from with-
in. These projections from within are

THE STATE. 5

what in philosophical language is called
the idea ; they proceed from the essential
nature of mind, whose imperial function it
is to dictate forms, as it is the servile func-
tion of the senses to receive impressions.
These intelligent forms, coming directly
from the divine source of all excellence,
and projected from within with sovereign
authority to shape for themselves an out-
ward embodiment, constitute what in art,
in literature, in religion, and in social or-
ganisms, is called the ideal ; and man may
accordingly be defined as an animal that
lives by the conception of ideals, and whose
destiny it is to spend his strength, and, if
need be, to lay down his life, for the real-
ization of such ideals. The steps of this
realization, often slow and painful, and al-
ways difficult, are what we mean by human
progress ; and it is the dominant character-
istic of man, of which amongst the lower
animals there is not a vestige, neither in-
deed "could be ; for so long as they have no
ideas, neither reason nor the outward ex-
pression of reason in language — two things

6 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ?

so closely bound together that the wise
Greeks expressed them both by one word,
Xoyog — so long must it be ridiculous to
think of them shaping their career ac-
cording to an inborn type of progressive
excellence. To do so is exclusively hu-
man. Hence our poems, our high art, our
churches, our legislations, our apostleships,
our philosophies, our social arrangements
and devices, our speculations and schemes
of all kinds, which, though they are some-
times foolish, and always more or less in-
adequate, deliver the strongest possible
proof that man is an animal who will rather
die and embrace martyrdom than be con-
tent to live as the brutes do, neither
spurred with the hope of progress nor
borne aloft on the wings of the ideal.

Of the very earliest state of human • so-
ciety, as we have already said, history
teaches nothing ; but, as man is a progres-
sive animal, and the plan of Providence
with regard to him seems plain to let him
shift for himself and learn to do right by
blundering, as children learn to walk by

THE STATE. 7

tumbling, we may safely say that the easier,
more obvious, and more rude forms of
living together must have preceded the
more difficult, the more complex, and the
more polished. And in perfect consis-
tency with this presumption, we find three
social platforms rising one above the other
in human value, duly accredited either by
monuments, by popular tradition, or by the
evidence of comparative philology. These
three are — (i) The prehistoric or stone
period, from which such a rich store of
monuments has been set up in the Copen-
hagen Museum, and the existence of which
is indicated in Gen. iv. 22 as antecedent
to Tubal Cain, the instructor of every arti-
ficer in brass and iron. (2) The shepherd
or pastoral stage, represented by Abel
(Gen. iv. 2), in which men subsisted from
the easy dominance which they asserted
over wild animals, and from fruits of the
earth requiring no culture. (3) The agri-
cultural stage, when cereal crops were sys-
tematically and scientifically cultivated,
which, of course, implied the limitation of

8 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH?

particular districts of ground to particular
proprietors, and those agrarian laws which
caused the Greek Demeter to be honored
with the title of fccr^o^opoc, or lawgiver, —
a step of marked and decided advance, in-
somuch that we may justly attribute to it
the redemption of society from the vagus
concubiius of the earliest times, and the
firm establishment of the family, with all its
sanctities and all its binding power, as the
prime social monad. To the priestess of
this goddess accordingly, amongst the
Greeks, was assigned the function of ush-
ering in the newly-married pair to the pe-
culiar duties of their new social relation.1

The fact that the family is the great
social monad, as it is undoubtedly one of
the oldest and most accredited facts in
human tradition, so it presents to us per-
haps the most important of all the lessons
that history teaches — a lesson as neces-
sary to be inculcated at the present hour
as at the earliest stages of social advance ;
and Aristotle certainly was never more in

1 Plutarch conjugalia praecepta init.

THE STATE. 9

the right than when he emphasized this
truth strongly in traversing Plato's fancy
of making the state the universal family,
to the utter absorption of all subordinated
family monads. Here, as in one or two
other matters, the great idealist would be
wiser than God ; and so his philosophy, so
far as that point was concerned, became
only a more sublime attitude of folly. The
importance of the family, as the divinely
instituted social monad, depends manifestly
on the happy combination and harmonious
blending of authority and love which grow
out of its constitution — two elements with
the full development and true balance of
which the well-being and happiness of all
societies is intimately bound up. The fine
moral training which the family relation
alone can inspire we find not only at our
own door, in the fidelity and self-sacrificing
devotion of our noble Highlanders, who
derived their inspiration from the clan sys-
tem, of which the family love and respect
is the binding element,1 as contrasted with

1 The word dan is the familiar, well-known Celtic word
for children.

IO WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH?

the slavish system of vassalage, the badge
of feudalism; but in the habits and insti-
tutions of the three great ancient peoples
to whom modern Europe owes its higher
civilization, Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans,
specially the last,1 the great masters of the
difficult art of government, who, to use
Mommsen's phrase, carried out the unity
of the family through the virtue of pater-
nal authority " with an inexorable consis-
tency," the beneficial effect of which could
not fail to display itself in social life far
beyond the sphere from which it originally
emanated ; for obedience to authority is
the fundamental postulate of all possible
societies. With the family, if not abso-
lutely, certainly with the best and normal
state of it, most closely connected is mo-
nogamy; for, though instances of bigamy
and polygamy, from Lamech downwards I
(Gen. iv. 19) to King David and Solomon '
in the Old Testament history, crop up
here and there in the oldest times, and

1 " Nulli alii sunt homines qui talem in liberos habeant
potestatem qualem nos habemus." Itistilut. i. 9, 2. j

THE STATE. 1 1

even in the post-Babylonian period, with-
out any formal mark of disapprobation,
yet it is quite certain that the Greeks and
Romans were guided by a sound social
instinct when they held the practice of
bigamy to be inconsistent with the proper
constitution of a family. What troubles
are apt to arise from a multiplication of
contending wives and ambitious mothers
the latter story of King David tells in
more unhappy episodes than one ; and
generally it may be laid down as one of
the great lessons of history that polygamy,
in every shape, is one of those acts of
Oriental self-indulgence which may be
sweet in the mouth but has a very strong
^tendency to be bitter in the belly, and
therefore ought by all means to be avoided.
By the instinct of aggregation, which
belongs to an essentially social animal,
families will club together into townships
or villages, and townships will be central-
ized into states. Humanity without town-
ships would degenerate into tigerhood, or
whatever type of animal existence might

12 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH?

express an essentially self-contained, soli-
tary, and selfish creature ; townships with-
out that sort of headship which the word
State implies, would make society cry halt
at a stage of loosely-connected aggregates
which would render common action for
any high human purpose extremely diffi-
cult, and, in the general case, as human
beings are, impossible. Hence the cen-
tralization of the Attic townships at Athens.
in the legendary traditions of the A the-,
nians attributed to Theseus ; * hence alscp
the lax confederation of the earliest Latiny
states under the headship of Albalonga.<;
and, after the humiliation of that old strong <-
hold, the more closely cemented union olx
those states under the hegemony of Rome.^l
Whatever may be the evils connected with'*

1 Thucyd. ii. 15. The Athenians went further, and I
attributed to the son of y£geus the creation of their de- 5
mocracy (Pausan. Att. iii.); but this, of course, was \
only the popular instinct, everywhere active, which loves ^
to heap all graces upon the head of a favorite hero.

2 See the words of the Latin league, Dionys. Hal. vi.
95, contrasting strongly with the original collection of au- }
tonomous villages described by Strabo, v. 229, nark
Ka>/.ias avTovofxeladai.

THE STATE. 1 3

the growth of large towns, especially when,
as in modern times, they have been al-
lowed to swell to enormous magnitude
without regulation or control, it is one of
the undoubted lessons of universal history
that the social stimulus necessary for the
creation of vigorous thought, no less than
the centralized force indispensable to great
achievement, is found only in the large
towns. The Christians were called Chris-
tians first at Antioch ; and, had there been
no Rome to unify a little Latium, there
would have been no great Roman Empire
to amalgamate the rude barbarians of the
North with the smooth civilization of the
South by the force of a common law and
a common lansfua^e.1

The form of government natural to such
infant states as the expansion of the origi-
nal social monad, the family, is a loose

1 The influence of the great city in centralizing the vil-
lages and making a state possible was in Greece philolog-
ically stereotyped by the fact that for city and state the
language had only one word, iro\is. The city was the state
in the same sense that the head is the body, for without
the head no living body could be.

14 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH?

but not unkindly mixture of monarchy,
democracy, and aristocracy — the aristoc-
racy being always the preponderating ele-
ment. In the single family, of course, we
have only the monarchical element in the
father, and the democratic element in the
children ; but, as families expand into
townships, it could not be but that the
heads of the families composing it, partly
from their age and experience, partly from
the force of individual character, should
form a sort of natural aristocracy, while
the less notable and less prominent mem-
bers would form the ^og, or great body
of the constantly increasing multitude bf
the associated families. Below these throe
dominant elements of the body social, the^e
would always be found a loose company of
dependents and onhangers — the class
called Oyjteg in Homer (Od. iv. 644), ancli
in the Solonian constitution — who had no\
civic rights any more than the serfs and/
vassals of our medieval feudalism. The]
weakness of the monarchical and the
strength of the aristocratic elements in th<

THE STATE. 1 5

early societies arose from the original
equality of the heads of families, and from
the jealousy with which they would natu-
rally look on any functions of superiority
exercised by any of their order naturally
no better than themselves. The king, ac-
cordingly, like Agamemnon in Homer,
would claim the homage which the title
implies only for purposes of common ac-
tion ; and even in such cases would always
be kept in check by a povhyj, or council of
the aristocracy, of whose will properly he
was only the executive hand ; while the
great mass of the people, occupied with
the labors that belong to an agricultural
and pastoral population, and unaccustomed
to the large views which statesmanship and
generalship require, would come together
only on rare occasions of peculiar urgency.
The element in that loose triad of social
forces that was first formulated into a more
distinct type, and endowed with more im-
perative efficiency, was the kingship. The
power of the king was increased, which of
course implies that the power of the peo-

l6 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH?

pie, and specially of the aristocracy, was
diminished. And here let it be observed
generally that the progress of civilization
in its natural and healthy career is the prog-
ress of limitation and the curtailment in
various ways of that freedom which origi-
nally belonged to every member of the com-
munity. The tanned savage of the baclo
woods is the freest man in existence ; next
to him, the nomad or the wandering gipsy,
such as may still be seen in their glory at
St. James' fair in Kelso, whose house is at
once his dwelling-place, his manufactory
or place of business, and his travelling
car; least free is the civilized citizen
hemmed in on all sides by police-ofhxeirs,
soldiers, sentinels, door-keepers, and game-
keepers, and the whole fraternity o[ dig-
nified but unpopular officials of various
kinds whose business it is to the c;ener&il
public to say No ! This accretion of
strength to the king proceeded first from]
his mere personal influence and the gen-l
eral deference paid to him durino- the corA-
tinuance of a prolonged and easily-exeir-

THE STATE. I J

cised sovereignty ; all classes, even the ar-
istocracy, whose ambition is thus kept in
check and their perilous enmities softened,
feel the benefit of a wise head and a firm
hand ; but the party specially benefited by
the kingship is the demos ; for this body,
from its position peculiarly liable to be
trampled on by an insolent aristocracy,
naturally looks up to the king as the
father of the whole family, who, on his
part, feels his position strengthened and
his respect increased by performing with
tact and firmness the delicate functions of
a mediator. But the great social force
which operates in giving prominence and
predominance to the monarchy is War ;
and, though war is unquestionably an evil,
it is an evil only as death is, and a form
of dying accompanied not seldom with an
exhibition of more manhood than the ex-
perience of many a peaceful deathbed can
show. In fact, as stout old Balmerino
said on the scaffold in 1 746, " The man
who is not ready to die is not fit to live ; "
that is, we hold our life under the condi-

1 8 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH?

tion that we may at any time be called on
to sacrifice it, whether for the preservation
of our own self-respect, or for the integrity
of the community of which we are a mem-
ber. All great nations, in fact, have been
cradled in war, the Hebrews no less than
the Greeks and Romans ; and it is only
an amiable sentimentalism, pardonable in
women, but inexcusable in men, that, in
contemplation of the hard blows, red
wounds, and gashed bodies with which
war is accompanied, will allow itself to for-
get the hardihood, endurance, courage,
self-sacrifice, and devotion to public duty,
of which, under Providence, it has always
been the great training school.1 There is
no profession that I know more favorable
to the growth of noble sentiment and
manly action than that of the soldier ; and
to its beneficial action in the formation of
States every page of history bears naming

1 6 (TTpaTiooTinhs (5'ios 7roAAa t^ei yuepTj tt)s apeTvjs. — AristOt.

Pol. ii. 9. St. Paul also frequently in the Epistles, and
Clemens Romanus (Oxon. 1633, p. 48) refer to the mili-
tary profession as a great school of manly virtue.

THE STATE. 1 9

testimony. War, in fact, is the principal
agent in producing that unification so ab-
solutely necessary to social existence, but
which is lost so soon as the headship of the
common father of the expanded clan ceases
to be recognized. Thus it was under the
compulsion of war from their Lombardian
neighbors on the west and Sclavonians
on the east that the petty democratic com-
munities, which after the disruption of the
Roman Empire occupied the Venetian isles,
found themselves, in the year 697, obliged
to elect a king for life, wisely masking his
absolute authority under the name of Doge
or Duke. And in a similar fashion the situ-
ation of the Piedmontese, constantly forced
to defend themselves against Gallican and
Teutonic ambition, begot in. them a stout-
ness of self-assertion and a general man-
hood of character which up to the present
hour has placed them in favorable con-
trast to the inhabitants of the southern half
of the peninsula ; and the manhood dis-
played by the Counts of Savoy in assert-
ing their independence against great odds

20 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH?

was no doubt the cause why, in the Peace
of Utrecht in 1 7 1 3, their lords were allowed
to assume and maintain the title of kings
— a circumstance which gave rise to the
saying of Frederick the Great of Prussia,
that the lords of Savoy were kings by virtue
of their locality.1 This is certainly true,
not only of Sardinia, but of all States that
ever rose above the loose aggregation of
the original townships. It was the neces-
sity of adjusting matters with troublesome
neighbors that caused a perpetual succes-
sion of petty wars ; and these could no! oe
conducted without a prolongation of the
power of the successful general, which acted
practically as a kingship. The successful
general in such times did not require to
usurp a title which the people were forward
to force upon him ; and only a few, we may
imagine, like Gideon (Judges viii. 22), had
virtue enough to remain contented with
the distinction belonging to a private sta-
tion when the grace of the crown and the
authority of the sceptre were formally

1 Spalding's Italy, ii. p. 284.

THE STATE. 21

pressed upon them by a grateful people.
So in Greece we find an early kingship
signalized by the names of ^Egeus, The-
seus, and Codrus ; so in Rome a succes-
sion of seven kings, more or less distinctly
outlined, the last of whom, Tarquin the
Proud, stands forward as the head of the
great Latin league, and entering in this
capacity into a formal treaty with Car-
thage, the great commercial state of the
Mediterranean. Closely connected with
war, or, more properly, as the natural de-
velopment of it in its more advanced
stages, we must mention Conquest; that
is, the violent imposition of the results
of a foreign civilization on the native so-
cial foundations of any country. Here,
no doubt, there may often be on the con-
quering side something very different from
a manly self-assertion — viz. self-aggran-
dizement at the expense of an innocent
neighbor, greed of territory, lust of power,
and the vanity of mere military glory,
which our brilliant neighbors the French
were so fond to have in their mouth. The

22 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH?

virtue of war as a training school of civic
manhood does by no means exclude the
operation of many forces far from admira-
ble in their motive ; and it is the presence
of these unholy influences, no doubt pi-
ously brooded over, that has generated in
the breasts of our mild friends the Qua-
kers that anti-bellicose gospel which they
preach with such lovable persistency. But
whatever the motives of famous conquerors
have been, the results of their achieve-
ments in the great history of society have
been most important. The imposition of
a foreign type on the peoples of Western
Asia by the brilliant conquests of Alexan-
der the Great, gave to the whole of that
valuable part of the world, along with the
rich coast of Northern Africa, a common
medium of culture of the utmost impor-
tance to the future civilization of the race.
The imposition of the Norman yoke goo
years ago on this island gave to the con-
tentious Saxon kingdoms, by a single vig-
orous stroke from without, that social con-
sistency which the bloody strife of five

THE STATE. 23

centuries of petty kings and kinglets
among themselves had failed to produce ;
while in India the imposition of the most
highly advanced mercantile and Christian
civilization of the West on crude masses
of an altogether diverse type of Asiatic
society presents to the thoughtful student
of history a problem of assimilation of
an altogether unique character, the final
solution of which, under the action of
many complex forces, no most sagacious
human intellect at the present moment can
divine. On the other hand, it cannot be
denied that the blessings which conquest
brings with it, when vigorously managed
and wisely used, are lightly turned into
a bane whenever the power which has
the force to conquer has not the wisdom
to administer; of which unblissful lack of
administrative capacity and assimilating
genius the conquests of the Turks in Eu-
rope, and of the English in Ireland, pre-
sent a most instructive example.

The monarchies created in the above
fashion, by the combination of the old pa-

24 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH?

triarchal habits with military necessities,
however firmly rooted they may appear at
the start, carry with them a certain germ
of dissatisfaction, which, under the influ-
ence of popular irritability, seriously en-
dangers their permanence, and may at any
time break up their consistency. The
causes of such dissatisfaction are chiefly
the following: — (i) The original motive
for creating a king, the pressure of foreign
war, as war cannot last for ever, in time of
peace will cease to operate, and the instinct
of individual liberty, which belongs to all
men, unless when violently stamped out,
will revive, and cause the subjection of all
men to the will of one to be looked on with
disfavor. (2) This feeling will be specially
strong with the aptcrrof, or natural aris-
tocracy, whose individual importance must
diminish as the power of the king in-
creases. (3) A great danger will arise
from the fixation of the order of succession
to the throne. The natural tendency will
be to follow the example of succession in
private families, and recognize the right of

THE STATE. 25

the son to walk into the public heritage of
his father ; but the additional influence
thus given to the king will have a ten-
dency to sharpen the jealousy of the no-
bles. And, again, the son may be a weak-
ling or a fool, and utterly unfit to play the
part of a supreme ruler with that mixture
of intelligence, firmness, and tact which the
royal function for its fair and full action re-
quires. (4) And if, in order to avoid these
evils, the elective principle is maintained,
either absolutely or within certain limits,
the tendency to faction inherent in all ar-
istocracies, stimulated by the potent spur
of a competition for power, will be in-
creased ; and this factious yeast will work
so potently in the blood of the nobles that
they will either reduce the power of the
king to a mere name, and change the gov-
ernment into an exclusive oligarchy, as in
Venice, or they will even go the length of
calling in foreign arbiters to heal their dis-
sensions, which, as in the case of Poland,
will naturally end in subjection to some
foreign power; or, lastly, they will dis-

26 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH?

pense with the kingship altogether, and re-
turn to their original mixture of aristocracy
and democracy with more firmly-defined
functions and more reliable guarantees.
(5) This result may be precipitated by
some outbreak of that insolence which is
so naturally fostered by the possession of
absolute power; the sacred ness of personal
property and the reverence of ancestral
possession will not be respected by some
Ahab of the day ; some young Tarquin or
Hipparchus may cast his lustful eye on the
fair daughter of an humble citizen ; and
then will be unsheathed the sword of a
Brutus, and then uprise the song of a
Harmodius and Aristogeiton, which will
sound a long knell to monarchy, during
the manhood of a free, an independent, a
self-reliant, and a self-governing people.

The system of self-government thus in-
troduced, as the natural fruit of the ele-
ments out of which it arose, would be a
mixture of aristocracy and democracy, with
a decided predominance of the former ele-
ment at starting, but with a gradually in-

THE STATE. 27

creasing momentum on the side of the
inferior factor in proportion as the mass
of the people excluded from aristocratic
privileges by a necessary law of social
orowth advanced in numbers and in social
importance. Greece and Rome, or rather
Athens and Rome, present to us here two
types from which important lessons may
be learned. In both the discarding of the
kings was the work of the aristocracy ; but
while the germ of the democratic element
was equally strong in both, in Athens,
partly from the genius of the people, partly
from peculiar circumstances, this germ
blossomed into an earlier, a more marked,
and a more characteristic manhood ; where-
as in Rome, in the most brilliant period
of its political action, the form of govern-
ment might rather be defined as a strong
aristocracy limited by a strong democracy
than a pure democracy, to which category
Athens undoubtedly belongs. In both
States the aristocratic element did not
submit to the necessary curtailment of its
power without a struggle ; but in Athens

28 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH?

the names of Solon (600 b. a), Clisthenes,
Aristides, and Pericles distinctly marked
the early formation of a democracy almost
totally purged from any remnant of aristo-
cratic influence, at an epoch in its devel-
opment corresponding to which we find
Rome pursuing her system of world-wide
conquest under a system of compromise
between the patrician and the plebeian
element, similar in some sort to what we
see before our eyes at the present moment
in our own country. To Athens, there-
fore, we look, in the first place, for an
answer to the question, What does history
teach in regard to the virtue of a purely
democratic government ? And here we
may safely say that, under favorable cir-
cumstances, there is no form of govern-
ment which, while it lasts, has such a vir-
tue to give scope to a vigorous growth and
luxuriant fruitage of various manhood as
a pure democracy. Instead of choking
and strangling, or at least depressing, the
free self-assertion of the individual, by
which alone he feels the full dignity of

THE STATE. 29

manhood, such a democracy gives a free
career to talent and civic efficiency in the
greatest number of capable individuals ;
but it does not follow that, though in this
regard it has not been surpassed by any
other form of government, it is therefore
absolutely the best of all forms of govern-
ment. All that we are warranted to say
is, as Cornewall Lewis does,1 that without
a strong admixture of the democratic spirit
humanity in its social form cannot achieve
its highest results ; of which truth, indeed,
we have the most striking proof before our
eyes in our own happy island, where, even
before the time which Mr. Green happily
designates as Puritan England, powerful
kings had received a lesson that as they
had been elected so they might be dis-
missed from office by the voice of London
burghers. Neither, on the other hand,
does it follow from the shortness of the
bright reign of Athenian democracy — not
more than 200 years from Clisthenes to
the Macedonians — that all democracies

1 On Method in Political Science.

30 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH?

are short-lived, and must pay, like dissi-
pated young gentlemen, with premature
decay for the feverish abuse of their vital
force. Possible no doubt it is that, if the
power of what we may call a sort of Athe-
nian Second Chamber, the Areiopagus,
instead of being weakened as it was by
Aristides and Pericles, had been built up
according to the idea of ^Eschylus and
the intelligent aristocrats of his day, such
a body, armed, like our House of Lords,
with an effective negative on all outbursts
of popular rashness, might have prevented
the ambition of the Athenians from launch-
ing on that famous Syracusan expedition
which exhausted their force and maimed
their action for the future. But the lesson
taught by the short-lived glory of Athens,
and its subjugation under the rough foot
of the astute Macedonian, is not that de-
mocracies, under the influence of faction,
and, it may be, not free from venality, will
sell their liberties to a strong neighbor —
for aristocratic Poland did this in a much
more blushless way than democratic Greece

THE STATE. 3 1

— but that any loose aggregate of inde-
pendent States, given more to quarrel
amongst themselves than to unite against
a common enemy, whether democratic, or
aristocratic, or monarchical in their form
of government, cannot in the long run
maintain their ground against the firm
policy and the well-massed force of a strong
monarchy. Athens was blotted out from
the map of free peoples at Chaeronea, not
because the Athenian people had too much
freedom, but because the Greek States had
too little unity. They were used by Philip
exactly in the same way that Napoleon
used the German States at the commence-
ment of the present century. Divide et
infera is the politician's most familiar
maxim, which, when wisely and persist-
ently applied, whether by an ancient Mace-
donia or a modern Russia, will always give
a strong monarchy a decided advantage
over every other form of government. Sur-
round me with a belt of petty principali-
ties, says the despot, however highly civ-
ilized and however wrell governed, and I

32 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH?

shall know to make them play my game
and work themselves into confusion, till
the hour comes when I may appear as a
god to allay by my intervention the troubles
which I have fostered by my intrigues.

So much for Athens. Let us now see
what lessons are to be learned from Rome.
And here, on the threshold, it is quite
plain that the abolition of kingship goes
in the first place to strengthen the aris-
tocracy, on whom as a body the supreme
functions exercised by the monarch natu-
rally devolve. The highly aristocratic type
of the early Roman republic, unlimited
from above by any superior power, and
with only a slight occasional check from a
plebeian citizenship in the tender bud, is
universally admitted. Plainly enough also
it stands written on the face of the early
history of the Commonwealth that the ad-
ministration of the aristocracy was marked
in no ordinary degree by all that exclusive-
ness, insolence, selfishness, and rapacity,
which are the besetting sins of an order of
men cradled in hereditary conceit, and eat-

THE STATE. 33

ing the bread not of labor, but of privilege,
" das unverbesserliche Jtmkerthum" as
Mommsen calls them. To such an extent
did they abuse the natural vantage ground
of their social position that, while the great
body of the substantial yeomanry, who
shed their blood in a constant succession
of petty wars for the safety of the State,
were stinted of their natural reward and
degraded from their rightful position, the
insolent monopolizers of all dignities and
privileges did not blush to take from the
people their natural heritage in the public
land, and, for the enlargement of their own
order, to deprive the State of its stoutest
citizens, and the army of its most effective
soldiers. The irritation produced by this
insolent and anti-social procedure of the
old Roman landlords, by the law of re-
action common to all forces, produced as
its natural consequence a revolt ; for, as it
has been truly said that the blood of the
martyrs is the seed of the Church, no less
true is it in all history that the insolence
of the aristocracy is the cradle of the de-

3

34 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH?

mocracy. That happened accordingly in
ancient Rome which Sismondi prophesied
might happen in modern Scotland : " If
the mighty thanes who rule in those trans-
Grampian regions begin to think that they
can do without the people, the people may
begin to think they can do without them."1
So at least the Roman plebs thought when,
in the year of the city 259, they marched
in a body out to the Sacred Mount on the
banks of the Anio, and refused to return
to the city till their just claims had been
conceded and their wrongs redressed.
Their wrongs . were redressed : confer-
ences, concessions, and compromises, in a
hurried and blundering sort of way, were
made ; tribunes of the plebs were appointed,
with the absolute power of stopping the
whole machinery of the State with a single
negation ; and thus was sown the seed of
a democracy destined to grow into mon-
strous proportions, and ripen into the
bloody blossom of a military despotism by
the hands of the very class of persons who
were chiefly interested in preventing it.

1 Sismondi, Etudes stir Veconomie politiqtte, Essai iv.

THE STATE. 35

The different stages of the battle be-
tween plebeians and patricians, or, as we
term it, Whig and Tory, as they evolved
themselves by a social necessity from time
to time, belong to the special history of
Rome, not to the general philosophy of
history with which we are here concerned.
The seed of democracy sown at the Sa-
cred Mount went on from one stage of ex-
pansion to another, breaking down every
barrier of hereditary privilege between the
mass of the people and the old aristocracy,
till it ended in the Lex Hortensia, passed
B. c. 288, which gave to all ordinances
passed by the Comitia Tribtita — that is,
the people assembled in local tribes and
voting independently of all aristocratic
check or co-operation — the full validity of
law. And in this progress of equalization
between class and class in a community, the
Muse of history sees only a special illustra-
tion of a general law that every aristocracy
contending for the maintenance of exclu-
sive privilege against natural right fights a
losing battle. But the necessity of the

36 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH?

adjustment of the opposing claims of a
conservative and a progressive body in the
State is a very different thing from the
fashion in which the adjustment may be
made, and from the consequences that
may grow out of the adjustment. Here
there is room for any amount of wisdom,
and unfortunately also for a large amount
of blundering. No man can say that the
Roman constitution as it stood, after the
plebeians had broken through all aristo-
cratic barriers, was a cunningly compacted
machine, or that it afforded any strong
guarantee against that degeneracy into
license towards which all unreined de-
mocracies naturally tend. But one thing
certainly was achieved. Out of the ple-
beian and patrician elements of the body
social, no longer arrayed in hostile attitude,
but fronting one another with equal rights
before the law, and adjusting their forces
in a fairly-balanced equilibrium, there was
formed a great political corporation, delib-
erative and administrative, which for inde-
pendence, dignity, patriotism, and saga-

THE STATE. 37

city, used its authority in such a masterly
style and to such world-wide issues that it
has earned from Mommsen the complimen-
tary acknowledgment of having been " the
first political corporation of all times." l
This corporation was the Roman Senate,
which ruled the policy of Rome for a
period of 200 years, from the passing of
the Hortensian Law through a long period
of African and Asiatic wars down to the
civil war of Sulla and Marius, 88 b. c. —
a body of which we may perhaps best
easily understand the composition and the
virtue if we imagine the best elements of
our House of Commons and the best ele-
ments of the House of Lords merged in
one Supreme Assembly of practical wis-
dom, to the exclusion at once of the fever-
ish factiousness and multitudinous babble
of the one assembly, and the brainless ob-
structiveness and incurable blindness of
hereditary class interests in the other.
But there was something else in the mixed

1 With which sentence Mr. Freeman agrees. Com-
parative Politics^ Lecture iii. p. 78.

38 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH?

constitution of Rome besides the tried
wisdom and the great practical weight of
the Senate. What was that ? There was,
in the first place, the evil of an elective
kingship — for the Consul was really an
annual king under a different name, as the
President of the United States is a quad-
riennial king, with greatly more power
while his kingship lasts than the Queen of
Great Britain ; and this implied an annual
fit of social fever, and the annual sowing of
a germ of faction ready to shoot into lux-
uriance under the stronsr stimulant of the
love of power. Then, as in the natural
growth of society, a new aristocracy grew
up, formed by the addition of the wealthy
plebeian families to the old family aristoc-
racy, and along with it a new and numer-
ous plebeian body, practically though not
legally excluded from the privilege of the
optimates, the old antagonism of patri-
cian and plebeian would revive, and the
question arose, What machinery had the
legislation of the previous centuries pro-
vided to prevent a collision and a rupture

THE STATE. 39

between the antagonistic tendencies of the
democratic and oligarchic elements in the
State? The answer is, None. The au-
thority of the Senate, great as it was both
morally and numerically, was antagonized
by the co-equal legislative authority of the
Comitia Tribnta — an assembly as open
to any agitator for factious or revolution-
ary purposes as a meeting of a London
mob in Hyde Park, and composed of ele-
ments of the most motley and loose de-
scription, ready at any moment to give the
solemn sanction of a national ordinance
to any act of hasty violence or calculated
party move which might flatter the vanity
or feed the craving of the masses. But
this was not all. The tribunate, originally
appointed simply for the protection of the
commonalty against the rude exercise of
patrician power, had now grown to such
formidable dimensions that the popular
tribune of the day might become the most
powerful man in the State, and only re-
quire re-election to constitute him into a
king whose decrees the consuls and the

40 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH?

senators must humiliate themselves to reg-
ister. Here was a machinery cunningly,
one might think, constructed for the pur-
pose of working out its own disruption,
even supposing both the popular and aris-
tocratic elements had been composed of
average good materials. But they were not
so. In the age of the Gracchi, 133 b. c,
the high sense of honor, the proud inher-
itance of an uncorrupted patrician body,
and the shrewd sense and sobriety of a
sound-hearted yeomanry, had equally dis-
appeared. The aristocracy were corrupted
by the wealth which flowed in from the
spoils of conquest; they had become
lovers of power rather than lovers of
Rome ; lords of the soil, not fathers of the
people ; banded together for the narrow
interests of their own order rather than for
the general well-being of the community.
The sturdy yeomanry again, of which the
mass of the original popular assemblies
had been composed, had partly dwindled
away under maladministration of the pub-
lic lands, and partly were mixed up with

THE STATE. 4 1

motley groups of citizens of no fixed res-
idence, and of a town rabble who could
be induced to vote for anything by any
man who knew to win their favor by a
large distribution of Sicilian corn or the
exciting luxury of gladiatorial shows ; in a
word, the populus had become a plebs, or,
in our language, the people a populace.
Furthermore, let it be noted that this
people or populace, tied down to meet
only in Rome, as the high seat of Govern-
ment, was called upon to deal with the
administration of countries as far apart
and as diverse in character as Madrid and
Cairo, or Bagdad and Moscow are from
London. Think of a mob of London arti-
sans, on the motion of a Henry George,
or even a rational Radical like Mr. Cham-
berlain, drummed together to pass laws
on landed property and taxation through
all that vast domain ! But so it was ; and
most unfortunately also the original fathers
of the agitation which, at the time of the
Gracchi, ranged the great rulers of the
world into two hostile factions, stabbing

42 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH?

one another in the back and cutting one
another's throats, and plotting and coun-
ter-plotting in every conceivable style of
baseness, after the fashion which is now
being exemplified before us in Ireland, —
the authors of this agitation were not the
demagogues, but the aristocracy ; as indeed
in all cases of general discontent, social
fret, and illegal violence, the parties who
are accused of stirring class against class
are not the agitators who appear on the
scene, but the maladministrators who made
their appearance necessary. Man is an an-
imal naturally inclined to obey and to take
things quietly; insurrection is too expen-
sive an affair to be indulged in by way of
recreation; and there is no truth in the
philosophy of history more certain than
that whenever the multitude of the ruled
rebel against their rulers, the original fault

— I do not say the whole blame, for as
things go on from bad to worse there
may be blame and blunders on both sides

— but the original fault and germinative
cause, of discontent and revolt unquestion-

THE STATE. 43

ably lies with the rulers. Whatever may
be said about Ireland and the Scottish
Highlands, there can be no doubt that in
the case of Rome the original cause of the
democratizing of the old constitution and
the over-riding of senatorial authority by
tribunician ordinances was the senators
themselves, who, in direct contravention
of the public law of the State, with that
greed for more land which is the beset-
ting sin of every aristocracy, had quartered
themselves, after the fashion of colonial
squatters, on the public lands, and refused
to surrender them to the State till com-
pelled by the cry of popular right against
might, raised by such patriotic and self-
sacrificing agitators as the Gracchi — pa-
triotic men who attained their object at
last by the only means in their power,
but means so drastic that, like doctor's
drugs, they drave out one devil by bring-
ing in a score, and paid for the partial
healing of an incurable disease by destroy-
ing for ever the balance of the constitution,
and inaugurating with their own martyr

44 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH?

blood one of the most woeful epochs in
human history — an epoch varied by pe-
riodical assassinations and consummated
by wholesale butcheries.

I said the Gracchi attained their object,
and that by appointing a Commission for
a distribution of the public lands, such as
the friends of the crofters in the High-
lands now propose for the repeopling of the
old depopulated homes of the clan. But
I said also that the disease under which
Rome labored was incurable. How was
this ? Simply because, whatever might
have been the merits of the special Agra-
rian Law carried by the Gracchi, the vio-
lent steam by which the State machine
was moved remained the same, the clumsy
machine itself remained, and the materials
with which it had to deal in a long and
critical course of foreign conquest became
every year larger and more unmanageable.
It was not to be expected either, on the
one hand, that a strong and influential
aristocracy should die with a single kick,
or, on the other, that a democracy, which

THE STATE. 45

had once learned the power of a popular
flood to break down aristocratic dams,
would cease to exercise that power when
a convenient occasion offered. And so
the strife of oligarchic and plebeian fac-
tions continued. The political struggle, as
always happens in such cases, became a
struggle for personal supremacy; the san-
guinary street battle between the younger
Gracchus and the Consul Opimius, though
followed by a lull for a season, was re-
newed after a few years in more startling
form and much bloodier issues, first be-
tween Marius and Sulla, and finally be-
tween Caesar and Pompey. Such a suc-
cession of embittered civil wars could end
only in exhaustion and submission; and
this is the last emphatic lesson which the
history of Rome has taught to the gov-
ernors of the people. Every constitution
of mixed aristocratic and democratic ele-
ments which fails by kindly control on
the one side, and reasonable demand on
the other, to achieve that balance of those
antagonizing forces which means good

46 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH?

government, must end in a military des-
potism. That which will not bridle itself
must be bridled ; and when constant irri-
tation, fretful jars, and cruel collisions are
the bloody fruit of unchastened liberty,
slavery and stagnation seem not too high
a price to pay for peace.

I have enlarged on the development
and decay of the Roman republic, not
only because in point of political achieve-
ment Rome is by far the most notable of
the great States of the world, but because
in the struggle between aristocracy and
democracy which was the salient feature
of its history from the expulsion of the
kings to the battle of Actium, it pre-
sents a very close and instructive parallel
to what has been going on amongst
ourselves from the revolution settlement
of 1688 to the present hour. If for
annual kings with large power we put
hereditary kings with small power, the
parallel is complete.1 Let us now cast a

1 This parallel has been noticed by the thoughtful Ger-
mans; sec particularly Zacharia Sulla, i. 40.

THE STATE. 47

glance, for time and space allow us no
more, over some modern developments.
The modern States of Europe have good
reason, upon the whole, to think them-
selves fortunate in their having retained
the kingship, which the Greeks and Ro-
mans rejected, either as their original type,
or elevated and glorified from the duke-
doms, margravates, and electorates with
which they started. There cannot be
much doubt, I imagine, that, if the Romans
had retained their king in a hereditary or
nearly hereditary form, he might have ex-
ercised a mediatorial function between the
contending parties that would have pre-
vented those bloody strifes and those ugly
civic wounds with which the record of
their political career stands now so sorrow-
fully defaced. In the experience of their
own earliest story, Servius Tullius had
already shown them how a king in the
strife of classes might step in by a peace-
ful new model to open the ranks of a close
aristocracy with dignity and safety to a
rising democracy; and in modern times

48 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH?

the case of Leopold II. of Tuscany does
not stand alone as an example of what
good service a wise king may do in the
adjustment of contending claims and
smoothing the march of necessary social
transitions. In fact, the most democratic
people amongst the ancients, in order to
effect such an adjustment in a peaceful
way, had been obliged to make Solon a
king for the nonce ; and the Romans,
urged by a like social pressure, named
their dictator, or re-elected their consuls
and their tribunes, in order to secure for
the need of the moment that unity of
counsel, energy of conduct, and moral
authority which is the grand recommenda-
tion of the kingship. No doubt kings in
modern as in ancient times have erred ;
they have not been able always to keep
themselves sober under the intoxicating
influence of absolute power, and they
have paid dearly for their errors ; but we
were wise in this country, while behead-
ing one despot and banishing another, to
punish the offender without abolishing

THE STATE. 49

the office. True, a thorough -going and
sternly -consistent republican may ask,
with an indignant sneer, What is the use
of a king, when we have shorn him of all
honors save the grace of a crown and the
bauble of a sceptre — reduced him, in fact,
to a mere machine to register the decrees
of a democratic assembly ? But such per-
sons require to be reminded that there is
nothing more dangerous, not only in po-
litical, but in all practical matters, than
logical consistency ; that the most narrow-
minded people are always the most consis-
tent, and this for the very obvious reason
that they have only room for one idea in
their small brain chambers, whereas God's
world contains many ideas, stiff ideas too,
and given to battle, which must be brought
into some friendly balance or compromise,
or set about throat-cutting on a large scale
— a process to which consistent republi-
cans have never shown a less bloody incli-
nation than consistent monarchists. They
must be reminded also that the person of
the monarch is an incarnated, visible, and
4

50 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ?

tangible symbol of the unity of the nation,
of which parties and factions are so apt to
be forgetful ; and if our logically-consistent
republican may look on this as a matter of
association and sentiment which he will
not acknowledge, he must simply be told
that the man who does not acknowledge
the important place played by associations
and sentiments in all matters of Church
and State knows nothing of human nature,
and is altogether unfit for meddling with
the difficult and dangerous art of politics.
He may write books, and lecture to cote-
ries, and harangue electoral meetings, and
delight himself largely in the reverberation
of his own wisdom, but by all means let
him not be a prime minister. To what
ends logical consistency can lead a poli-
tician in high places Charles I. and Arch-
bishop Laud learned when it was too late ;
and the fate of these two high-perched
worthies stands as a speaking lesson to
all politicians, whether of the democratic
or the monarchical type, how easy a thing
it is for a man to be a good Christian and

THE STATE. 5 1

a consistent thinker, and yet on all political
matters a perfect fool.

Among the notable modern States three
stand before us with an exceptional pref-
erence for the democratic form of govern-
ment — Switzerland, France, and the great
trans-Atlantic Republic. These must be
regarded with curious interest and kindly
human sympathy as great social experi-
ments, by no means to be prejudged and
denounced by any sweeping conclusions
made from the unfortunate breakdown of
the two celebrated ancient republics. The
experiment in these cases, as made in alto-
gether different circumstances and under
different conditions, cannot warrant any
such denunciations. The representative
system which now universally prevails, and
which enables a most widely-scattered and
diverse-minded population to vote with a
coolness and a precision and a large survey
of which the urban system of Greece and
Rome never dreamed ; the general growth
of intelligence among all classes through
the action of cheap education and the

52 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH?

large circulation of cheap books ; the rapid
and ever more rapid travelling of conta-
gious thought from the centre to the ex-
treme limbs and flourishes of social uni,
ties; and, above all, let us hope the im,
proved tone of social feeling in all the
relations of man to man, which we owe to
the great Christian principle of living as
brother with brother, and sister with sister,
under a common heavenly fatherhood, —
these are all forces largely operating in the
present day which justify us in hoping that
many a social experiment which signally
failed with the ancients may be crowned in
the centuries which are now being inau-
gurated with encouraging success. Of the
three which we have named, Switzerland
is the country in which, from topographical
peculiarities, the interests of jealous neigh-
bors, and the traditional habits of a peas-
ant population well trained to provincial
self-government, the permanence of a dem-
ocratic federation may be prophesied with
the greatest safety, but at the same time
with the least interest to the general march

THE STATE. 53

of humanity. Ancient Rome, had it con-
tinued as compact and as little disturbed by
external forces and internal fermentations as
modern Switzerland, might have remained
during the whole course of its career as
sober-minded and as stable as in the days
of Cincinnatus, and the yeomanry which
were displaced by huge absentee landlords,
and Syrian or Sicilian slaves. The case of
France is altogether different. A repub-
lic in an over-civilized, highly-centralized,
bureaucratically-governed country, with a
religiously hollow, hasty, violent, excitable,
and explosive people, seems of all social
experiments the least hopeful : and that
is all that can wisely be said of it at pres-
ent. But the social conditions in Amer-
ica are altogether different; and the ex-
periment of a great democratic republic
for the first time in the history of the world
— for Rome in its best times, as we have
seen, was an aristocracy — will be looked
on by all lovers of their species with the
most kindly curiosity and the most hope-
ful sympathy. Here we have the stout,

54 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH?

self - reliant, sober - minded Anglo - Saxon
stock, well trained in the process of the
ages to the difficult art of self-govern-
ment ; here we have a constitution framed
with the most cautious consideration, and
with the most effective checks against
the dangers of an over-riding democracy ;
here also a people as free from any im-
minent external danger as they have un-
limited scope for internal progress. Un-
der no circumstances could the experi-
ment of self-government, on a great scale,
have been made with a more promising
start. No doubt they have a difficult
and slippery problem to perform. The
frequent recurrence of elections to the
supreme magistracy has always been, and
ever must be, the breeder of faction, the
nurse of venality, and the spur of am-
bition. Once already has this Titanic
confederacy, though only a hundred years
old, by going through a process of a long,
bitter, and bloody civil war, shown that
the unifying machinery so cunningly put
together by the conservative genius of a

THE STATE. 55

Washington, an Adams, and a Madison,
was insufficient to hold in check the re-
bellious forces at war within its womb.
No doubt also it were in vain to speak
America free from those acts of gigantic
jobbing, blushless venality, and over-riding
of the masses in various ways, which were
working the ruin of Rome in the days of
Jugurtha. The aristocracy of gold and
the tyranny of capitalists in Christian New
York has shown itself no less able to
usurp the public land and defraud the
people of their share in the soil than the
lordly aristocracy and the slave-dealing
magnates of heathen Rome. Nevertheless
we need not despair. The sins of Ameri-
can democracy may serve as a useful hint
to us not rashly to tinker our own mixed
constitution without waiting for a verdict
on issues, which, as Socrates wisely says,
lie with the gods ; nor, on the other hand,
is there any wisdom in ascribing to the
American form of government evils which,
as belonging to human nature, crop up
with more or less abundance under all

56 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH?

forms of government, and which may be
specially rife among ourselves. We also
have our Glasgow banks, our bubble com-
panies of all kinds, our heady speculations,
our hot competitions, our over-productions,
our haste to be rich, our idol worship of
mere material magnificence, — these are
evils, and the root of all evil, with the pro-
duction of which no form of government
has anything to do, and against which every
form of government will be in vain invoked
to contend.

In conclusion, we must bear in mind
that democracy or social self-government
is the most difficult of all human problems,
and must be approached, not with inflated
hopes and rosy imaginations, but with so-
briety and caution and a sound mind, and
at critical moments not without prayer and
fasting. Before entering on any scheme
for rebuilding our social edifice on a dem-
ocratic model, we should consider seriously
what a democracy really implies, and what
we may reasonably promise ourselves from
its possible success. Of the two rallying

THE STATE. 57

cries which have made it a favorite with
persons given to change, equality and
liberty, the one is no more true than that
all the mountains in the Highlands are as
high as Ben Nevis, and can only mean at
the best that all men have an equal right
to be called men and to be treated as men,
while the other is only true so far as con-
cerns the removal of all artificial barriers
to the free exercise of each man's function,
according to his capacity and opportuni-
ties. But this is a mere starting-point in
the social life of a great people. When
the bird is out of the cage, which it must
be in order to be a perfect bird, the more
serious question emerges, what use it shall
make of its newly-acquired liberty. Here
certainly to men, as to birds, there are
great dangers to be faced ; and with na-
tions the progress of society, as already
remarked, is measured to a much larger
extent by the increase of limitations than
by the extension of liberties. Then, again,
the fundamental postulate of extreme de-
mocracy that the majority have everywhere

58 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH?

a right to govern is manifestly false. No
man as a member of society has a natural
right to govern : he has a right to be gov-
erned, and well governed ; and that can
only be when the government is conducted
by the wisest and best men who compose
the society. If the numerical majority is
composed of sober-minded, sensible, and
intelligent persons who will either govern
wisely themselves or choose persons who
will do so, then democracy is justified by
its deeds ; but if it is otherwise, and if,
when an appeal is made to the multitude,
they will choose the most daring, the most
ambitious, and the most unscrupulous,
rather than the most sensible, the most
moderate, and the most conscientious, then
democracy is a bad thing, at least nothing
better than the other ocracies which it sup-
plants. It is manifest, therefore, that of
all forms of government democracy is that
which imperatively requires the greatest
amount of intelligence and moderation
among the great mass of the people, es-
pecially amongst the lower classes, who

THE STATE. 59

have always been the most numerous ;
and, as history can point to no quarter of
the world where such a happy condition of
the numerical intelligence has been real-
ized, it cannot look with any favor on
schemes of universal suffrage, even when
qualified with a stout array of effective
checks. The system, indeed, of represent-
ing every man individually, and giving
every member of a society a capitation
vote, as they have a capitation tax in Tur-
key however popular with the advocates of
extreme democracy, seems quite unreason-
able. What requires to be represented in a
reasonable representative system is not so
much individuals as qualities, capacities,
interests, and types. Every class should
be represented, rather than every man in
a class. Besides, the equality of votes
which democracy demands, on the princi-
ple that I am as good as you and perhaps
a little better, is utterly false, and tends to
nourish conceit and impertinence, to ban-
ish all reverence, and to ignore all distinc-
tions in society. Anyhow, there can be

60 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH?

no doubt that great masses of men acting
together on exciting occasions are pecul-
iarly liable to hasty resolutions and violent
opinions ; all democracies, therefore, are
unsafe which are unprovided with checks
in the form of an upper chamber composed
of more cool materials, and planted firmly
in a position that makes them indepen-
dent of the fever and faction of the hour
A strong democracy stands as much in
need of an aristocratic rein as a strong aris-
tocracy does of a democratic spur. And
let it never be forgotten — what democra-
cies are far too apt to forget — that minor-
ities have rights as well as majorities ; nay,
that one of the great ends to be achieved
by a good government is to protect the few
against the natural insolence of a majority
glorying in its numbers, and hurried on by
the spring-tide of a popular contagion. A
state of society is not at all inconceivable
in which the many shall make all the laws
and monopolize all the offices of a fussy
bureaucracy, while the few are burdened
with all the taxes. Never too frequently

THE STATE. 6 1

can we repeat, in reference to all public
acts, no less than to the conduct of indi-
viduals in private life, the great Aristotelian
maxim that all extremes are wrong;
that every force when in full action tends
to an excess which for its own salvation
must be met by a counterpoising force ;
that all good government, as all healthy
existence, is the balance of opposites and
the marriage of contraries ; and that the
more mettlesome the charger the more
need of a firm rein and a cautious rider.
He who overlooks this prime postulate of
all sane action in this complex world may
pile his democratic house tier above tier
and enjoy his green conceit for a season ;
but the day of sore trial and civic storm is
not far, when the rain shall descend, and
the floods come, and the winds blow and
beat upon that house, and it will fall, be-
cause it was founded upon a dream.

II.

THE CHURCH.

Ov iras 6 Xeywv /jlol Kvpte, Kvpi€, eto-cXcwerat eis ttjv
jSacriAeiav tujv ovpavuiv • dAA' 6 7roiujv to OeXyjjxa to9 7ra-
rpos /xov tov iv Tots ovpavots. — 'O 20THP.

Man is characteristically a religious ani-
mal ; in fact, as Socrates teaches, the only
religious animal ; 1 for, though a dog has
no doubt reverential emotions, it cannot
be said with any propriety that he has re-
ligious ideas or ecclesiastical institutions,
for a very good reason, because he has
no ideas at all : observation he has very
keen, and memory also wonderfully reten-
tive ; instincts also, like all primal vital
forces, divine and miraculous ; but ideas

1 vivos yh.p &AA00 £aiov tyvxh ifpZira, fxkv 6ewv rcovrh, fi^yiara
Kai KaWiara avvra^avTiav jjadrjTai on e*cri • ri 8e (pvKov aAAo 1)
&vdp<i)Troi deovs Qepairevovo~i. — Xen. Mem. i. 4.

THE CHURCH. 63

certainly none, for ideas mean knowledge ;
and brutes that have no language properly
so called that is a system of significant
vocal signs expressive of ideas, but only
cries, gesticulations, and visible or audible
signs expressive of sensations and feelings,
can by no law of natural analogy be
credited with the possession of a faculty
of which they give no manifestation.
Language is the outward body and form
of which thought and reason and knowl-
edge and ideas are the inward soul and
force ; and hence the wise Greeks, unlike
our modern scientists, who delight in con-
founding man with the monkey, expressed
language and reason with one word %6yog,
while what we dignify with the name of
language in birds and other animals wras
simply (povYi, or significant voice. If, there-
fore, there is anything most human that
history has to teach, it must be about reli-
gion. All the great nations whose names
mark the march of human fates have been
religious nations. A people without reli-
gion does not exist, or, if it does exist, it

64 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH?

exists only as an abnormal and deficient
specimen of the genus to which it belongs,
which is of no more account in the just
estimate of the type than a fox without
a tail, or a lawyer without a tongue ; and
as for individual atheists, who have been
talked about in ancient times, and specially
in these latter days, they are either phi-
losophers like Spinoza, the most pious of
men, falsely baptized with an odious title
from the stupidity, prejudice, or malice of
the community, or, if they really are athe-
ists, they are monsters which a man may
stare at as at an ass with three heads or
with no head at all in a show.

The form in which religion generally
presents itself in early history is what we
commonly call Polytheism, though it is
quite possible — a matter about which I am
not careful curiously to dogmatize — that
there may have been in some places an
original Dualism, like the ancient Persian,
or even a Monotheism, out of which the
Polytheism was developed. For there
cannot be the slightest doubt that, what-

THE CHURCH. 65

over may have been the starting-point,
there lay in the popular theology a ten-
dency to multiply and to reproduce itself
in kindred but not always easily recogniz-
able forms, like the children of a family
or the cousinship of a clan. But, taking
Polytheism as the type under which his-
tory presents the objects of religious faith
in the earliest times, we have to remark
that under this common name, as in the
case of Christianity, the greatest contrasts,
both in speculative idea and in social effi-
ciency, stare us everywhere in the face. In
the eye of the Christian or the monotheis-
tic devotee the worships of Aphrodite and
of Pallas Athene are equally idolatrous;
but, allowing that these anthropomorphic
forms of divine forces and functions of the
universe are equally destitute of a founda-
tion in fact or reason, the reverence paid
to them by a devout people might be as
different as passion is from thought, and
sense from spirit. As the ideal of wisdom
in counsel and in action, the Athenian
. Pallas no doubt exercised as beneficent a
5

66 WH - HISTORY TEACH?

sway over her Hellenic worshippers as
the ideal e: Christian womanhood, in the
pers the Virgin Mary, does at the

present day over millions of Christian
worshippers. It is only when the cosmic
function im Dated in the polytheistic

am interior order, leaps from
proper position of subordination and
usurps the controlling and regulating
action belonging to the superior function,
that polytheistic idolatry becomes im-
moral ; though, of course, the very facil-
ity of this usurpation, and the stamp of a
pseudo divinity that may thereby be given
to beast '.v vice, is a sufficient reason for
; denunciations of the heathen idola-
tries so frequent in the Old Testament,
which ultimately ripened into the spiritual
apostleship and monotheistic aggression of
St Paul. One other striking feature of all
polvtheistic religions may not be omitted.
Thev are naturally complete — more cath-
olic, more sympathetic with universal na-
ture and universal life than monotheistic
religions ; if they make a philosophical

THE CHURCH. 67

mistake in worshipping many gods, they
do not make a moral mistake in excluding
any of his attributes. With the polythe-
istic worshipper everything is sacred : the
sun and the sea and the sky, dark earth
and awful night, excite in him an emotion
of reverence. If the Greek polytheist was
devout at all, he was devout everywhere ;
whereas, under monotheistic influences,
there is a danger that devout feelings may
respond exclusively to the stern decrees of
an absolute lawgiver and the awful threat-
enings of a violated law. Polytheistic
piety, whatever its defects, was always
ready to add a grace to every innocent
enjoyment ; monotheistic religiousness, as
we see its severe features in some mod-
ern churches, contents itself with adding
a solemn sanction to the moral law — a se-
verity which here and there has not been
able to keep itself free from the unlovely
phase of regarding the innocent en;
ments and the graceful pleasantries of life
as a sin.

So much for the soul of the business ;

68 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH?

the body is what we call the Church.
And here the very word is significant. In
one sense, as a separate ethical corpora-
tion, the ancients had no Church. Why?
Because Church and State were one ; or,
if they were two, they were too like the
famous Siamese twins that used to be car-
ried about the country as a show, two so
closely connected that they could no more
be torn from one another and live than the
limpet can be separated from the rock to
which it clings.^ With the peoples of the
ancient world the State was the Church
and the Church was the State ; the priest
was a magistrate and the magistrate was
a priest. This identity of two things, or
loose intercommunion and fusion of two
things in modern association so instinc-
tively kept apart, arose from the common
germ out of which both Church and State
grew — viz., as we saw in the previous lec-
ture, the Family. Every father of a fam-
ily, in the normal and healthy state of soci-
ety, is his own priest as well as his own
king. In religion and morals, as well as in

THE CHURCH. 69

all domestic ordinances, he is absolute
and supreme; and the functions which
necessarily belonged to him as supreme
administrator in his own family would, un-
der the influence of family feelings, nat-
urally be conceded to him when the family
grew to a clan, and the clan to a king-
dom. And this is the state of things
which we meet with in the Book of Gen-
esis, long before the promulgation of the
Mosaic law, where we read (xiv. 18) that
Melchizedek, king of Salem, went out to
bless Abraham, and he was priest of the
Most High God; the distinction between
priest and layman, to which our ears are
so familiar, being in this, as in a thousand
other well-known instances, altogether ig-
nored. Not only in Homer, where we find
Agamemnon, the king of men, perform-
ing sacrificial functions without even the
presence of a priest,1 but in the sober his-
torical age we find the King of Sparta per-
forming all the public sacrifices — being
in fact, in virtue of his office, high priest of

1 Iliad% iii. 271 ; and compare Virgil, jEneid, ill- 80.

JO WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ?

Jove.1 So closely indeed was the State re-
ligion identified with the person of the su-
preme magistrate that, when the kingship
was abolished in Greece, and three princi-
pal archons and seven secondary ones
shared his functions, one still retained the
title of (3aotXevg, king, and had the supervis-
ion, or, as we would say, supreme episco-
pacy and overseership of all matters per-
taining to religion.2 The same thing took
place in Rome, where the name of king
was even more odious than in Greece ; but
nevertheless a rex sacrificuhis, or king-sac-
rijicer, with his regina or queen, took rank
in all the public pontifical dinners above
the pontifex maximus himself. The col-
lege of pontiffs in Rome, which had the su-
preme direction of all religious matters, was
not a board of priests, but of laymen — or
at least of laymen who, without any quali-
fication but some inaugurating ceremony,
might be assumed into the pontifical col-
lege ; whence the title of pontifex maximus,

1 Xen. Rep. Lac. i. 15 ; Herod, vi. 56.

2 Pollux, viii. 90.

THE CHURCH. 7 1

which the emperors assumed, was no more
of the nature of a usurpation than the title
of imperator, which belonged to them as
supreme commanders of the army. Who,
then, were the priests, and what need of
them at all, if the laity might legally per-
form all their functions ? The answer is
simple. Both in Greece and Rome there
were priests and priestly families, as the
EumolpidcB in Eleusis, specially dedicated
to the service of certain local gods ; but
there was no order, class, or body of per-
sons having the exclusive right to of-
ficiate in sacred matters over the whole
community. No doubt the social position
of priests in democratic Greece and mo-
narchical Egypt was extremely different,
but in one respect they were identical:
in Athens Church and State were one as
much as in Memphis. In Egypt there
was a remarkably strong body or clan of
priests enjoying the highest dignities and
immunities ; but there is no proof that
they were a caste, in the strict sense of the
word ; and their virtues were so far from

72 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH?

being incommunicable that, when the Pha-
raoh did not happen to be a born priest,
but of the military class, he was obliged
to be made a priest before he could be a
king; and when once king he became
ipso facto the high priest of the nation,
and took precedence of all priests in all
great public acts of religious ceremonial.
It must not be supposed, however, that,
though he was supreme in all sacred mat-
ters and the actual head of the Church,
to use our language, he could set himself,
like our Henry VIII., to carve creeds for
the people, and imprison or burn devout
persons for refusing to acknowledge his
arbitrary decrees. The exercise of sacred
functions in the hands of the masterful
Tudor and his Machiavelian minister was
a usurpation tolerated by a loyal people
as their readiest and most effective way of
getting rid of the masterdom of the Roman
Pope, which in those days pressed like
an incubus on the European conscience;
it was invoking one devil to turn out an-
other, and was successful, as such opera-

THE CHURCH. J3

tions are wont to be, in a blundering sort
of way. But the worshipful " Sons of the
Sun" — for so they were betitled — on
the banks of the sweet-watered Nile, had
no monstrous pretension of this kind, and
could not even have dreamt of it. They
did not sit on the throne to reform relig-
ion, but to maintain it. Neither in Egypt
nor in Greece in those days was any such
thing known as the rights of the individual
conscience ; but both kings and people re-
ceived religious laws and consuetudes as
we do Magna Charta ; reasonable people,
in the Ions: course of the centuries before
Christ, would no more dream of disturbing
the ancestral belief about the gods than
they would think of influencing the set-
tled courses of the stars. It was their very
deep-rooted permanency, in the midst of
the startling mutabilities to which human
affairs are liable, that made the fundamen-
tal truths of religion so valuable to their
souls ; and as to the particular forms under
which these fundamental truths might have
been symbolized by venerable tradition, the

74 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ?

people were not given to form themselves
into hostile camps on the ground of any
local difference, as we do in Scotland about
ecclesiastical conceits and crotchets ; and
every devout Egyptian allowed his neigh-
bor without offence to pay sacred hon-
ors to a crocodile or a cat, convinced that
these honors were equally legitimate and
equally beneficial whenever the sacred
symbolism peculiar to the worship was
wisely understood. Collisions, therefore,
between Church and State, or between
priesthood and kingship, such as signalized
the medieval struggles of the Popes and
Emperors, and the convulsions of our in-
fant Protestant freedom in England, could
not take place amongst the ancient poly-
theists. A wise Socrates was equally
willing with the most superstitious dev-
otee, when pious gratitude called, to sac-
rifice a cock to yEsculapius ; and the vofio)
noleidq, by the custom of the State, was
the direction which he gave to all who
inquired of him by what rites they ought
to worship the gods.1 Only amongst the

1 Xen. Mem. i. 3.

THE CHURCH. 75

Hebrews, as a people in whose religious
habitude polytheistic and monotheistic
tendencies had never come to any deci-
sive settlement of their inherent antago-
nism, do I find a record of a very serious
collision between Church and State, after
the fashion of our German Henries and
Transalpine Hildebrands in the days of
Papal aggression. Scotsmen familiar with
their Bibles will easily see that I allude
to the case of Uzziah, as recorded in 2
Chron. xxvi. 16-20: — "But when he
was strong, his heart was lifted up to his
destruction: for he transgressed against
the Lord his God, and went into the tem-
ple of the Lord to burn incense upon the
altar of incense. And Azariah the priest
went in after him, and with him four-
score priests of the Lord, that were val-
iant men : And they withstood Uzziah the
king, and said unto him, It appertaineth
not unto thee, Uzziah, to burn incense
unto the Lord, but to the priests the sons
of Aaron, that are consecrated to burn
incense : go out of the sanctuary ; for thou

76 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ?

hast trespassed ; neither shall it be for
thine honor from the Lord God. Then
Uzziah was wroth, and had a censer in his
hand to burn incense : and while he was
wroth with the priests, the leprosy even
rose up in his forehead before the priests
in the house of the Lord, from beside the
incense altar. And Azariah the chief
priest, and all the priests, looked upon
him, and, behold, he was leprous in his
forehead, and they thrust him out from
thence ; yea, himself hasted also to go out,
because the Lord had smitten him."

So much for Polytheism. That it
should have served the spiritual needs of
the human heart so long — five thousand
years at least, from the first Pharaoh that
looked down from his Memphian pyramid
on the mystic form of the Sphinx, to the
last Roman Emperor that sacrificed white
bulls from Clitumnus at the altar of the
Capitoline Jove — is proof sufficient that,
with all its faults, it was made of very ser-
viceable stuff; but creeds and kingdoms,
like individuals, must die. At the com-

THE CHURCH. 77

mencement of the eighth century of the
Roman Republic heathenism was doomed
in all Romanized Europe, in all Northern
Africa, and in Western Asia, and that for
four reasons. The polytheistic religions of
the Old World, created as they were in
the infancy of society, no doubt under
the guidance of a healthy instinct of de-
pendence on the ruling power of the uni-
verse, but in the main inspired by the
emotions and formulated by the imagina-
tion, without the regulating control of rea-
son, could not hope to hold their ground
permanently in the face of that rich growth
of individual speculation which, from the
sixth century before Christ, spread with
such ample ramification from Asiatic and
European Greece over the greater part of
the civilized world. If it was a necessity
of human beings at all times to have a re-
ligion, it was a no less urgent problem, as
the range of vision enlarged with the pro-
cess of the ages, to harmonize their the-
ology with their thinking. And if, on the
intellectual side, the polytheistic religions

78 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ?

of that cultivated age were threatened
with a collapse, the sensuous element,
always strongly represented in emotional
faiths, was in constant danger of bei

£>v

in

g

dragged down into a disturbing and de-
grading sensuality. Then, again, when the
Roman Republic, in the age of Augustus
Caesar, had completed the range of its
world - wide conquests, two social forces,
unknown in the best ages of Greece and
Rome, viz., wealth and luxury, added their
perilous momentum to the corrupting ele-
ments which were already at work in the
bosom of the polytheistic system. And in
what a hot -bed of fermenting putridity
these evil leavens had resulted at this
period, the pages of Suetonius and many
chapters in St. Paul are witnesses equally
credible and equally tragic. Add to all this
the fact that the motley intermixture of
ideas and the inorganic confusion and
forced assimilation of creeds, which accom-
panied the universal march of Roman
polity, brought about a vague desire for
some sort of religious unity which might

THE CHURCH. 79

run parallel with the political unity under
which men lived ; and this desire could be
gratified only by placing in the foreground
the great truth of the unity of the Supreme
Being, which to vindicate in pre-Christian
ages had been the special mission of the
Hebrew race, and which the Greeks them-
selves had not indistinctly indicated by
placing the moral government of the world
and the issues of peace and war in the
hands of an omnipotent, all-wise, all-benefi-
cient, and absolute Jove. These and the
like considerations will lead the thought-
ful student of history easily to understand
how the appearance of such an extraordi-
nary moral force as Christianity was im-
peratively called for at the period when
our Saviour, with His divine mission to a
fallen race, began His preaching on the
shores of a lonely Galilean lake ; and the
most superficial glance at the contents of
His preaching, as contrasted with the
heathenism which it replaced, will show
how wonderful was the new start which
it gave to the moral life of the world, and

80 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ?

how effective the spur which it applied to
the march of the ages — a spur so potent
that we may, without the slightest exag-
geration, say that to Christianity we owe
almost exclusively whatever mild agencies
tempered the harshness and sweetened the
sourness of crude government in the Mid-
dle Ages ; and no less, whatever hopeful
elements are at the present moment work-
ing among ourselves to save the British
people, at a critical stage of their social
development, from the decadence and the
degradation that overtook the Romans af-
ter their great military mission had been
fulfilled. Let us look articulately at the
main constituents of that new leaven where-
with Christianity was equipped to regen-
erate the world. These I find to be —

(i.) By asserting in the strongest way
the unity of God, it at once cut the root of
the tendency in human nature to create
arbitrary objects of worship according to
the lust or fancy of the worshipper, and
accustomed the popular intelligence to a
harmonized view of the various forces at

THE CHURCH. 8 1

work in the constitution of a world so
various and so complex as to a superficial
view readily to appear contradictory and
irreconcilable.

(2.) By preaching the unity of God, not
as an abstract metaphysical idea, but as
what it really is, a divine fatherhood,
Christianity at one stroke bound all men
together as brethren and members of a
common family ; and in this way, while in
the relation of nation to nation it substi-
tuted apostleships of love for wars of sub-
jugation, in the relation of class to class it
established a sort of spiritual democracy,
in which the implied equality of all men as
men gradually led to the abolition of the
abnormal institution of slavery, on which
all ancient society rested.

(3.) Christianity, by starting religion as
an independent moral association alto-
gether separate from the State, at once
purified the sphere of the Church from
corrupting elements, and confined the
State within those bounds which the

nature of a civic administration furnishes.
6

82 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH?

Religion in this way was purified and
elevated, because in its nicely segregated
sphere no secular considerations of any
kind could interfere to tone down its
ideal, direct its current, or lame its effi-
ciency ; while the State, on the other hand,
was saved from the folly of intermeddling
with matters which it did not understand,
and professing principles which it did not
believe.

(4.) Christianity, by planting itself em-
phatically at the very first start, as one
may see in the Sermon on the Mount, in
direct antagonism to ritualism, ceremonial-
ism, and every variety of externalism, and
placing the essence of all true religion in
regeneration, or, as St. Paul has it, a new
creature — i. e. the legitimate practical dom-
inance of the spiritual and ethical above
the sensual and carnal part of our nature
— broke down the middle wall of partition
which had so often divided piety from
morality; so that now a man of culture
might consistently give his right hand to
religion and his left hand to philosophy,

THE CHURCH. 83

an attitude which, so long as Homer was
all that the Greeks had for a bible, no
devout Hellenist could assume.

(5.) By placing a firm belief in a future
life as a guiding prospect in the foreground,
the religion of Christ gave the highest pos-
sible value to human life, and the strong-
est possible spur to perseverance in a vir-
tuous career.

(6.) By appealing directly to the indi-
vidual conscience, and making religion a
matter of personal concern and of moral
conviction, it raised the value of each
individual as a responsible moral agent,
and placed the dignity of every man as
a social monad on the firmest possible
pedestal.

(7.) By making love its chief motive
power, it supplied both the steam and the
oil of the social machine with a continuity
of moral force never dreamt of in any of
the ancient societies — a force which no
mere socialistic schemes for organizing
labor, no boards of health, no political
economy, no mathematical abstractions, no

84 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH?

curiosities of physical science, no demo-
cratic suffrages, and no school inspector-
ships, though multiplied a thousand times,
apart from this divine agency, can ever
hope to achieve.

Thus equipped with a moral armature
such as the world had never yet seen, it
might have been expected that the triumph
of Christianity over the ruins of heathen-
ism would have been as complete and as
pure from all admixture of evil as it ap-
pears in the great evangelical manifesto
commonly called the Sermon on the Mount.
But it was not to be so ; nor, indeed, cre-
ated as human nature is, could possibly be.
The miraculous virtue of the seed could
not change the nature of the soil, and the
sweet new wine put into old bottles could
not fail to catch a taint from the acid in-
crustations of the original liquor. Cor-
ruptia optimi pessima is the great lesson
which history everywhere teaches, and no-
where with a more tragic impressiveness
than in the history of the Christian Church.
What a rank crop of old wives' fables,

THE CHURCH. 85

endless genealogies, ceremonial observ-
ances, worship of the letter, voluntary
humilities, and disputations of science,
falsely so called, started into fretful array
before the spiritual swordsmanship of St.
Paul, no reader of the grandest correspond-
ence in the world need be told ; but it was
not so much from Jewish drivel, Attic
subtlety, or Corinthian sensualism, that the
corrupting forces were to proceed which
in the post-Apostolic age insinuated them-
selves like a poison into the pure blood of
the Church. It is from within that, in
moral matters, our great danger flows : if
the kingdom of heaven is there, the king-
dom of hell is there no less distinctly.
The doctrine of Aristotle, and the teaching
of history that all extremes are wrong,
is ever and ever repeated to passion-
spurred mortals, and ever and ever for-
gotten. In the green ardor of our worship
we make an idol of our virtue ; the strong
lines of the particular excellence which we
admire are stretched into a caricature ; our
sublime, severed from all root of sound-

86 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH?

ness, reels over into the ridiculous; we
revel and riot and get into an intoxicated
excitement with the fruit of our own fancy ;
and work ourselves from one stage of in-
flammation to another, till, as our great
dramatist says,

" Goodness, grown to a pleurisy,
Dies of its own too much."

The excess into which Christianity at
its first start most naturally fell was ultra-
spiritualism, asceticism, or by whatever
name we may choose to characterize that
high-flying system in morals which, not
content with the regulation and subordina-
tion, aims at the violent subjugation and,
as much as may be, the total suppression
of the physical element in man. How
near this abuse lay is evident, not only
from the general tendency of every man
to make an idol of his distinctive virtue,
and of every sect to delight in the exag-
geration of its most characteristic feature,
but there are not a few passages of the
New Testament which plainly show that
the masculine Christianity of St. Paul had

THE CHURCH. 87

not more occasion to protest against those
Greek libertines who turned the grace of
God into licentiousness, than against those
offshoots of the Jewish Essenes who pro-
fessed a self-imposed arbitrary religiosity
(Col. ii. 18, 23), even forbidding to marry
and commanding to abstain from meats
(1 Tim. iv. 3).1 There is, indeed, some-
thing very seductive in these attempts to
acquire a superhuman virtue, whether they
be made by a poet casting off the vul-
gar bonds that bind him to his fellows,
like Percy Bysshe Shelley, that he may
feed upon sun-dews and get drunk on tran-
scendental imaginations, or by a religious
person, that he may devote himself to
spiritual exercises, free from the disturbing
influence of earthly passions. Such a re-
nunciation of the flesh gratifies his pride,
and has, in fact, the aspect of a heroic
virtue in a special line ; while, at the same

1 From the SiSaxri tS>v hirovTSxwv, or Early Teaching
of the Apostles, lately discovered, ch. viii., we learn
that it was the custom of the early Christians to observe
two days of fasting in the week — Wednesday and Fri-
day.—Edit. Oxford Parker, 1885.

88 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH?

time, it is with some persons more con-
venient, inasmuch as when the resolution
is once formed and a decided start made,
it is always easier to abstain than to be
moderate. Nevertheless, all such ambitious
schemes to ignore the body and to cut
short the natural rights of our physical
nature must fail. It never can be the
virtue of a man to wish to be more than
man ; and every religion which sets a stamp
of special approval on superhuman, and
therefore unhuman, virtue, erects a wall of
separation between the gospel which it
preaches and the world which it should
convert. In fact, it rather gives up the
world in despair, and institutes an artificial
school for the practice of certain select
virtues, which only a few will practise, and
which, when practised, can only make
those few unfit for the social position
which Providence meant them to occupy.

The second excess into which Chris-
tianity, under the action of frail human
nature, easily ran was intolerance. This
intolerance, as in the previous case, is

THE CHURCH. 89

only a virtue run to seed ; for, as all
asceticism is merely a misapplication or
an exaggeration of the virtue of self-denial
and self-control, so all intolerance, or defect
of kindly regard to the contrary in opinion
or conduct, is merely a crude or an im-
politic extension of the imperative ought
which lies at the root of all moral truth,
and specially of all monotheistic religions.
There is, indeed, a certain intolerance in
truth which will not allow it to hold
parley with error; and every new religion
with a lofty inspiration, conscious of a
divine mission, is necessarily aggressive :
it delights to pluck the beard of ancestral
authority, and marches right into the pres-
ence of hoary absurdity and consecrated
stupidity. No doubt there is a boundary
here which the divine wisdom of the Son
of God pointed at emphatically enough
when he was asked to bring down fire
from heaven on those who taught or did
otherwise ; but the evil spirit of self-im-
portance which prompted this request was
too deeply engrained in human nature to

90 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH?

be eradicated by a single warning of the
great teacher. This spirit of arrogant in-
dividualism asserted itself at an early pe-
riod in the disorderly Corinthian Church
very much in the same way as it does
amongst ourselves, specially in Scotland,
at the present moment — viz., by the
multiplication of sects, the exaggeration
of petty distinctions, and the fomenting
of petty rivalries, — " Now this I say,
that every one of you saith, I am of
Paul ; and I of Apollos ; and I of Cephas ;
and I of Christ "(i Cor. i. 12), — a spirit
which the apostle most strongly denounces
as proceeding manifestly from the over-
rated importance of some secondary spe-
cialty, or some accessory- condition, of the
body of believers, who thus clubbed them-
selves into a denomination, and resulting
in an unkindly divergence from the com-
mon highway of evangelic life, and an in-
tolerant desire to override one Christian
brother with the private shibboleth of an-
other, and to stamp him with the seal of
their own conceit. The field in which this

THE CHURCH. 9 1

intolerant spirit displayed itself was of
course different, according to the influences
at work at the time ; but there is one field
which, if church history is to teach us any-
thing, we are bound to emphasize strongly,
that is the field of dogma ; for, if there be
any influence that has worked more power-
fully to discredit Christianity than even the
immoral lives and selfish maxims of pro-
fessing Christians, it is the fixation and
glorification and idol-worship of the dogma.
No doubt Christianity is far from being
that system, or rather no system, of vague
and cloudy sentiment to which some per-
sons would reduce it: it has bones, and
a firm framework ; it stands upon facts,
and is not without doctrines, but it does
not make a parade of doctrines; and the
faith which it enjoins, as is manifest from
the definition and historical examples in
Hebrews xi., is not an intellectual faith in
the doctrines of a metaphysical theology,
but a living faith in the moral government
of the world and a heroic conduct in life,
as the necessary expression of such faith.

92 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH?

The mere intellectual orthodoxy on which
the Christian Church has, by the tradition
of centuries, placed such a high value, is,
in the apostolical estimate, plainly worth
nothing; for the devils also believe and
tremble, as St. James has it, or as our Lord
himself said in the striking summation to
the Sermon on the Mount, " Not they who
call me Lord, Lord, shall enter into the
kingdom, but they who do the will of my
Father who is in heaven. By their works,
not by their creed, ye shall know them."1
Nevertheless, the exaltation of the dogma
has always been a favorite tendency of the
Church, and the besetting sin of the
clergy. With the mass of the people, to
swrear to a curious creed is always more
easy than to lead a noble life ; while to
the clerical intellect it must always give a
secret satisfaction to think that the science
of theology, which is the furthest removed

1 In the Sidaxb r<Z>v aTrocrrSxcav there is absolutely no
dogma. It is all practice, and this is quite in harmony
with the use of SiBaxh by St. Paul (i Tim. i. 10), and in-
deed with the whole tone of these two admirable epistles.

THE CHURCH. 93

from the handling of the great mass of
men, has in their hands assumed a well-
defined shape, of which the articulations
are as subtle and as necessary as the steps
of solution in a difficult algebraic problem.
The late Baron Bunsen, for many years
Prussian ambassador in London, one of
the most large-minded and large-hearted
of Christian men, in the preface to his
great Bibehverk, devotes a special chapter
to Dogmatism as a vice of the clerical
mind leading to false views of Scripture ;
over and above what he calls the modern
revival of scholastic theology in Germany,
he enumerates four dominant epochs of
ecclesiastical life in which this anti-evan-
gelical tendency has prominently asserted
itself. These are— (i) the dogmatism of
the great Church councils in the reigns of
Constantine, Theodosius, and Justinian;
(a) the medieval scholasticism of the
Western Church ; (3) the Protestant
scholasticism of the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries ; (4) the dogmatism of the
Jesuits, Perron, Bossuet, and others. Had

94 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH?

this dogmatic tendency of the Church
contented itself with tabulating a curious
scheme of divine mysteries, though it
might justly have been deemed imperti-
nent, and here and there a little presump-
tuous, yet it might have been condoned
lightly as a sort of clerical recreation in
hours which might have been worse em-
ployed ; but it could not be content with
this : it passed at once into action, and in
this guise prevailed to deface the fair front
of the Church with gashes of more bloody
and barbarous inhumanity than ever
marked the altars of the Baals and Molochs
of the most savage heathen superstitions.

Another monstrous abuse born out of
the bosom of the Church, though not so
directly, is Sacerdotalism. I say not so
directly, because the genius of Christian-
ity is so distinctly negative of all priest-
hood that, had there been even an ex-
press prohibition of it, its contradiction
to the whole tone of the New Testament
could not have been more apparent. Not
more certainly are the sacrifices of the

THE CHURCH. 95

Jewish law abolished in the sacrifice of
Christ, according to the Pauline theology,
than the Levitical priesthood stands abol-
ished in the priesthood of Christ and in
the priesthood of the individual members
of his spiritual body (2 Peter v. 9).1
Whence, then, came our Christian priest-
hood ? Partly, I suspect, as the Jewish
Sabbath was interpolated into the Chris-
tian Lord's Day, from the nearness and
external similitude of the two things — the
presbyter being to the outward eye pretty
much the same as the priest was to the
Jewish worshippers ; partly from the self-
importance which is the besetting sin of all
bodies of men prominently planted in the
social platform, and which induces them to
magnify their vocation, and in doing so stilt
their professional pride up into the attitude
of a very stately and a very reputable virtue.
The proper functions of the office-bearers

1 In the SiSaxv v&v airoarSxcou, ch. xiii., the " prophets "
are said to be to Christians what thfe " high priests " were
to the Jews, — a phraseology which could not possibly
have been used had any priesthood, in the Hebrew sense,
existed in the early Church.

96 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH?

of the early Christian Church, call them
overseers, bishops, or what you will, were
so honorable and so beneficent that, es-
pecially with an unlearned and unthinking
people, the reverential respect clue to the
actors might easily pass into a supersti-
tious belief in the mystical virtue of the
operations of which they were the con-
ductors ; and this ready submission on the
part of the people, holding out a willing
hand to the natural self-importance and
potentiated self-estimate of the clerical
body, resulted in a four-square system of
sacerdotal control, sacerdotal virtue, and
sacerdotal influence, to which we shall
search for a parallel in vain through all
the annals of Asiatic and African hea-
thenism. Nay, I can readily believe that
those who can find a priesthood in the
genius of the gospel and the apostolic
institution of the Christian Church will
naturally be inclined to maintain that the
superior power of the Gregories, Bonifaces,
and Innocents of the medieval Church, as
contrasted with anything that we read or

THE CHURCH. i"

know of the Egyp "

pontiffs, is the natural and nee :ut-

come of the superior excellence of the
Christian religion; and this, no doub:
the only comfortable belief on which all
forms of Chrir:::." sacerdotalism ::.:. re-
pose.

So much for the corruptions of the
Christian religion proceeding from what,
in theological language, might be called
the indwelling sin of the Church, unstim-
ulated by any strong external seduction.
But this seduction came. After three
tunes ndshij manfully endured

in the school of a~ the more

trial of prosperity had to be gone through.
The Church, which had been declared to
be not of this \nd had stood face : :

face with the g : political power the

world ever knew in a position of sublime
moral isolation, was now adopted by the
- :e, and formed a bond of the most in-
timate connection with its hereditary per-
secutors. The starting-point of the oldest
heathen social attitude, the identity of

7

gS WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH?

Church and State, seemed to be recalled ;
and a Justinian on the shores of the Bos-
phorus seemed as really a head of the
Church as a Menes or an Amenophis on
the banks of the Nile. But under the
outward likeness a radical difference lay
concealed. As an essentially ethical so-
ciety, with its own special credentials, its
separate history, and its independent tri-
umph, the Christian Church might form
an alliance with a purely secular institu-
tion like the State, but it could not be ab-
sorbed or identified with it. That alliance
might be made beneficially in various ways
and on various terms; the civil magistrate
might be proud to be called the friend and
the brother of the Christian bishop, or he
might humble himself to be its servant,
but he never could be its master. The
alliance therefore was, as it ought to be,
all in favor of the spiritual body ; the
Church gained the civil power to execute
its decrees and to patronize its missions;
but a Christian State could never gain
the right to dictate the creed or perform

THE CHURCH. 99

the functions of the Church. The idea
that there is anything absolutely sinful, or
necessarily pernicious, in the conception of
an alliance between the Church and the
State, is one of those hyperconscientious
crotchets of modern British sectarianism
at which the Muse of history can only
smile. There can be no greater sin in an
Established Church than in an Established
University or an Established Royal Acad-
emy. Religion and Science and Art have
their separate and well-marked provinces,
in the administration of which they may
wisely seek for the co-operation, though
they will always jealously avoid the dicta-
tion, of the State. But, though there
could be no sin in the Church receiving the
right hand of fellowship from the State,
there might be danger, and that of a very
serious description. Nothing strikes a
man so much in the reading of the New
Testament as the little respect which it
pays to riches and the pomp and pride
of life, and worldly honors and dignities
of all kinds. "How can ye believe who

IOO WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH?

receive honor one from another ? " is a
sentence that cuts very deep into the con-
nection between the Church and State,
which might readily mean the alliance of a
secular institution, delighting in pomp and
parade and glittering show, with a religion
of which, like the philosophy of the porch,
the most prominent feature was unworld-
liness, humility, and spirituality. Here
unquestionably was danger: an alliance in
which, as in an ill-consorted marriage, the
lower element was as likely to drag down
the higher as the higher to lift up the
lower. And so it actually happened. The
Church was secularized. Alongside of the
hundred and one monkeries of stolid as-
ceticism and the hundred and one mum-
meries of sacerdotal ceremonialism, there
grew up in the process of the ages a con-
solidated hierarchy of such concentrated,
secular, and sacred potency that the loftiest
crowned heads of Europe ducked beneath
its shadow and quailed beneath its ban.
To understand this, we must take note of
the change by which the scattered pres-

THE CHURCH. IOI

byters of the primitive Church were grad-
ually massed into a strong aristocracy,
which in due season, after the fashion of
the State, found its key-stone in an eccle-
siastical monarch. It was the wisdom of
the founders of the Christian Church not
to lay down any fixed form of official ad-
ministration, but to leave all the external
machinery of a purely spiritual institution
free to adapt itself to the existing forms
of society as time and circumstance and
national genius might demand. The form
of government natural to the Church in
its earliest stages was democratic, with a
certain loose, ill-defined element of pres-
idential aristocracy. But in an age which
had bidden a long farewell both to the
spirit and the form of democracy in civil
administration, such a form of govern-
ment in the Church could not hope to
maintain itself. Under the influence of
the magnificent autocracy of Rome in its
decadence, the simple overseer or superin-
tendent (s7tiaxo7tog) of a remote provincial
congregation of believers gradually grew

102 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH?

into a metropolitan dignitary, and culmi-
nated in the wielder of a secular sover-
eignty sitting in council with the most in-
fluential monarchs of Europe. The epiph-
any of an absolute monarch with a triple
tiara on his head when contrasted with
the simplicity and unworldliness of the
primitive bishops wears such a strange
look that it has been judged, especially in
Protestant countries, with a more sweeping
severity than it deserved. As a mere form
of government, no man can give any good
reason why the Church should not be gov-
erned by a monarch as well as the State ;
the bishop of Rome, as supreme head of
the body of bishops all over Christendom,
and guided by them as his habitual advis-
ers, was at least as natural and as reason-
able a guide for the direction of the con-
science of Christendom in the Middle Ages
as the Council of Protestants who at Dort,
in the year 1618, condemned the greatest
theologian and jurist of the day to pine
in a Dutch prison, or the Assembly of Di-
vines in Westminster who empowered the

THE CHURCH. IO3

supreme magistrate to suppress the right
of free thought in the breasts of all persons
who were not prepared to set their seal to
the damnatory dogmas of extreme Calvin-
ism. Nay, so far from there being anything
anti-Christian or anti-social in the Pope-
dom as a form of Church government, we
may safely say that in ages of general tur-
moil, confusion, and violence, the admitted
supremacy of the visible head of a church
founded on principles of peace and concili-
ation could not act otherwise than benefi-
cially. But when the person in whom this
moral supremacy was vested became the ac-
knowledged head of a secular princedom,
the case was altered. It was an unhappy
day for the Christian Church, the most un-
happy day perhaps in its whole eventful his-
tory, when Pepin, the ambitious minister
of the last of the Merovingian kings, in
the year 751, contrived to get out of Pope
Zachary a spiritual sanction for his usurpa-
tion of his masters throne. From that mo-
ment the Church was doomed to a blazing
and brilliant, but a sure career of downfall.

104 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH?

The spiritual abetter of a secular crime had
to be rewarded for his pious subservien-
cy : he received the exarchate of Ravenna,
and became a temporal prince. From that
time forward the head of the Christian
Church, who ought to have stood before
the world as a model of all purity, truthful-
ness, peacef ulness, and ethical nobility, was
condemned to serve two masters, God and
Mammon, unworldly morality and worldly
power which was impossible. From this
time forward there was not a single court
intrigue in Europe, nor a single plot of any
knot of conspirators, into whose counsels
the supreme bishop of the gospel of peace
might not be dragged, or, what is worse,
into whose lawless and ungodly machina-
tions he might not be officially thrusting
himself, in order to preserve some acces-
sory interest or gain some paltry advantage
altogether unconnected with his spiritual
function. If there is any one element,
always of course excepting the element
of gross sensuality and absolute villainy,
which more than another is adverse to the

THE CHURCH. IO5

spirit of Evangelical Christianity, it is the
element of court intrigue, political con-
tention, and party feuds. In this region
love, which is the life of the regenerate
soul, cannot breathe ; truth is put under
ban ; lies nourish ; conscience is smoth-
ered ; and low expediency everywhere takes
the place of lofty principle. So it fared
not seldom with the Popes ; and much
worse in the last degree; for wickedness,
like everything that lives, must live by
growing, and the seed of secular ambition
which was sown in lies will grow to rob-
bery, blossom in lust, and ripen into mur-
der. This anywhere, but specially in Italy,
where from the time of the patrician Scipio,
who suppressed the elder Gracchus, the
hot contenders for absolute power, in the
eager pursuit of their object, have never
shrunk from the free use of the assassin's
dagger and the poisoner's bowl. In fact,
if the love of mere animal pleasure makes
a man a beast, it is the love of power
that translates him into a fiend; and of
this sort of human fiends Italian history

106 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH?

presents as appalling a register as can be
found anywhere in the annals of our race ;
and at the top of this register stand some
of the Popes, whose names are as prom-
inent in the story of ecclesiastical Rome
as those of Nero, Domitianus, and Helio-
gabalus are in the story of the imperial
decadence. When we cast a rapid glance
— for it deserves nothing more — on the
revolting record of the Roman Popes in
the age immediately preceding the Ref-
ormation, we hear the solemn voice of
history repeating again the maxim above
quoted — corruptio optimi pessima : when
priests are bad, they are very bad ; when
the salt of the gospel, which was meant
to preserve the moral life of society from
putrescence, has lost its savor, if not cast
out, it is worse than useless — it becomes
a poison.

Before proceeding to the modern his-
tory of the Church, we ought to emphasize
in a special paragraph the fact that one
unfortunate result of the incorporation of
the Church with the State was that the

THE CHURCH. 107

Church was now in a position to request
the State to lend its potent aid in estab-
lishing the true doctrine of the gospel and
suppressing all heresies. That the State
had a right to do so no man doubted ;
even in democratic Greece free-thinking
philosophers, such as Anaxagoras, Diog-
enes, and Socrates, were banished or suf-
fered death on charges of impiety; and
though, no doubt, political elements, as in
the case of the Arminians in Holland,
worked along with the strictly religious
feeling to set the brand of atheism on those
men, there cannot be any doubt that where
the State and the Church were so essen-
tially one, persecutions for unauthorized
religious observances were perfectly legiti-
mate, as indeed the memorable case of the
forcible suppression of the Dionysiac mys-
teries, more than two hundred years be-
fore the earliest of the Christian martyr-
doms in Rome, abundantly testifies. But
there was a double horror in the relig-
ious persecution, after the establishment of
Christianity, now inaugurated for the first

: ;:

: : :zs :::r:: : v teach :

2 ::r.dn:: 5; diirr.e:-

: 2nd

-
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places rich with historical lessons in Lon-

. ir.d not a few sad ones ; ti-
des: of all i afield I can . ice
the stones :: this memorable si ere
our nc

jmbowelled and quartered I : _ ratify the
mee of an imperic ith-

out thinking of the sad fate of the young
and be Anne Askc This .

the g :er of a knight of good family in

Lincolnshire, under some of those stimu-
lants of thought whic. ing up the

grant traditions of medieval pie:;- had
been led to concei ve serious i^ubts with
regard :: :he Scripture authority* for some
of the most univt. .nes

:: E the Roman Church. This pons scep-
ticism raining :: the ears of certain leading
prrs:"? in Church and State whc liter
the example of the Nicean doctors, con-
i it a sacred i ..:; in matters pertain-
3 to relirion to tolerate no contradic-
tion, first brought this ladv before the
Lord Chancellor, who tore her limb from
limb on the rack, be : -Id not

IIO WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH?

say that she believed what she could not
believe without denying her senses, and
then dragged her to the blood-stained
pavement of Smithfield, where she was
girt with gunpowder bags and fenced with
faggots, to be burnt to death, as if the God
of Christians were a second and enlarged
edition of the old Moloch of Palestine.
And what was her offence — beautiful,
young, pure, and truthful woman, not more
than twenty -five years of age — that she
should be treated in this worse than can-
nibalic style in the name of the gospel of
Jesus Christ? Simply that Henry VIII.,
in that style of insolent masterdom which
he showed so royally, and conceiting him-
self, like a Scotch fool who came after him,
to be a considerable theologian, assumed
the right to put the stamp of absolute king-
ship on the doctrine of the Church that a
piece of bread, over which a priestly bene-
diction had been pronounced by a priest,
was by the mystical virtue of this bene-
diction changed into flesh, while the fair
young lady persisted in seeing nothing but

THE CHURCH. Ill

bread. Let it be granted that the lady
was in the wrong and the churchly tradi-
tion right, it never could be right to tear
her flesh to shreds and to burn her bones
to ashes because she held an opinion which,
to say the least of it, looked as like the
truth as its opposite. How sad, how sor-
rowfully sad, and what a commentary on
what we are ever and anon tempted to call
poor, pitiful, prideful, and presumptuous
human nature, that Christianity had at that
time been more than fifteen hundred years
in the world, sitting in high places, and
walking with triumphal banners over the
earth, and yet neither the princes of the
earth nor the rulers of the Church should
have retained even a slight echo of that
reproof from a mild Master to a zealous
disciple, to the effect that no man who
knew the spirit of the divine religion which
He taught would ever propose to bring
fire down from heaven or up from hell to
consume the unbeliever.

Such enormities in the doctrine and
practice of the Church, as we have indi-

112 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH t

cated rather than described, could lead to
only one of two issues — Reform or Revo-
lution. The change brought about, though
contenting itself with the milder name, was
in fact the more drastic procedure. The
European reformation of Martin Luther
in 15 1 7 was a revolution in the Church,
much more radical and much more worthy
of so strong a designation than the political
revolution of 1688 in Great Britain. It is
needless to recapitulate the causes of of-
fence ; they were only too patent — inso-
lence, secularity, sensuality, venality, idle-
ness, vice, and worthlessness of every kind
in the Church ; but there were two causes
which, in addition to corruption from
within, tended to open the ears of Christen-
dom largely to the cry for Church reform.
These were the stir in the intellectual
movement from the days of the author of
the Divine Comedy downwards, enforced
by the invention of printing in the middle
of the fifteenth century, which was amply
sufficient to become a danger to even a
much less vulnerable creed than 'that which

THE CHURCH. II3

had satisfied the crude demands of medi-
eval intelligence ; and, in the second place,
the hostility which the insolence and am-
bition of Churchmen had roused in the
secular magistracy — that is, not only the
monarch and his official ministers, but
the great body of the higher nobility who
found themselves ousted from their place
in the familiar counsels of the monarch by
the advocates and ambassadors of a foreign
potentate. Thus the two best friends of
every Established Church in its normal
state were converted into enemies ; and
the natural indignation of the common
people at the licentious lives and gross
venality of the clergy was stimulated into
an explosion by the desire of the secular
dignities to curb the pride of the clergy,
and, it might likely happen also, to rob
them of part of their overgrown wealth,
nominally for the public good, really for
the aggrandizement of the Crown and the
nobility. The shameless nepotism of Pope
Sixtus IV., the flagitious lives and abhor-
rent practices of the Borgias, more fit for

114 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH?

a sensational melodrama in the lowest
Parisian theatre than for the home of a
Christian bishop; the military rage of a
Julius, who turned the Church of Christ
into a travelling camp and the bishop's
crozier into a soldier's sword ; the literary
dilettantism of the Court of Leo X., more
eager to distinguish itself by the elegant
trimming of Latin versicles than by apos-
tolic zeal and Christian purity, — all this,
so long as it disported itself on Italian
ground, the aristocracy of England and
Scotland might have continued to look on
with indifference ; but that the son of any-
body or nobody, in a county of unvalued
clodhoppers, should jostle them in the
antechamber of the monarch, and claim
precedence in the hall of audience, simply
because he was the supple instrument of
an insolent Italian priest, this was not to
be borne ; and so the Reformation came,
with the mob of the lowest classes, the
mass of the respectable middle classes, the
most influential of the nobility, and the
power of the Crown, all in full cry against

THE CHURCH. 1 1 5

the ecclesiastical fox. The revolution thus
volcanically effected, and known in history
under the name of Protestantism, meant
simply the right of every individual mem-
ber of the Christian Church to take the
principles and the practice of his Church
directly from the original records of the
Church, without the intervention of any
body of authorized interpreters ; and the
necessary product of this right when exer-
cised was first to declare certain practices
and doctrines that had grown up in the
Church through long centuries to be un-
authorized departures from the original
simplicity and purity of the gospel; and,
further, to deny that there existed in the
Christian Church, as originally constituted,
any class or caste of men enjoying the
exclusive privilege to perform sacred func-
tions, and endowed with a divine virtue
to perform sacramental miracles by their
consecrating touch, — in a word, that there
was no priesthood, properly so called, in
the Reformed Christian Church. Nor is
this doctrine, as some may think, the teach-

Il6 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH?

ing only of the Helvetic confession, what
certain persons have been fond to call ex-
treme Protestantism ; for, though the word
priest has been retained in the English
prayer-book as a minister in sacred things
of a particular grade and exercising a
particular function, the attempt made by
Archbishop Laud and the Romanizing
party in the Reformed Church of England
to retain in the bosom of the Anglican
Church the ideas which the ancient Jews
and the Romish Christians attached to the
word priest, proved a signal failure ; and
for the sacerdotal despotism which it im-
plied, as well as for the secular despotism
which the priest advised and encouraged
the unfortunate king to assert, the adviser
and the advised justly lost their heads. Of
all the teachings of Church history, from
the Waldenses in the twelfth century down
to the present hour, there is nothing more
certain than this, that between Popery and
Protestantism there is no middle term
possible. They may agree, in fact they
do agree, in many essential things, and in

THE CHURCH. 1 1 7

a few accidental ; but in the fundamental
principle of Church administration they
are diametrically opposed. The principle
of the one is sacerdotal authority, absolute
and unqualified ; the principle of the other
is individual and congregational liberty.
The one form of polity is a close oligarchy,
the other either a free democracy or an
aristocracy more or less penetrated by a
democratic spirit,

The practical outcome of this great Prot-
estant movement, in the midst of which
we live, cannot fail to a reasonable eye to
appear in the highest degree satisfactory.
Never was the life of the Christian Church
at once more intensely earnest and more
expansively distributive than at the present
moment. On the one hand, the Roman
Church, wisely taught by the experience
of the past, though obstinately cleaving to
that stout conservatism of doctrine and
ritual inherent in the very bones of all
sacerdotal religions, has been, in the
main, studious to avoid those causes of
offence from which the great rupture pro-

Il8 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH?

ceeded. On the other hand, the Protest-
ant Churches, shaken free from the dis-
tracting influence of sacerdotal assumption
and secular ambition, have found them-
selves in a condition to permeate all
classes of society with a moral virtue,
of whose regenerative action Plato and
Socrates, in their best hours, could not
have dreamed. Some people, while gladly
admitting the immense amount of social
good that is done by the various sections
of the Protestant Church, never cease to
sigh for a lost ecclesiastical unity, and to
lament the unseemly strifes that arise
among those that should be possessed by
one spirit and strive together for a com-
mon end. But the persons who speak
thus are either sentimental weaklings, be-
ing Protestants, or are Romanists and sac-
erdotalists in their heart. Variety is the
law of nature in the moral no less than in
the physical world ; and the absorption of
all sects into one results in a stagnation
which will never be found amongst moral
beings, unless when produced by weakness

THE CHURCH. II9

of vital force from within, or unnatural
suppression from above. The two domi-
nant types of church polity recognized in
this country since the Reformation —
the Episcopal and the Presbyterian — of
which the one boasts a more aristocratic
intellectual culture, and the other a more
fervid and forcible popular action, may
well be allowed to exist together on a mu-
tual understanding of giving and taking
whatever is best in each, and thus, in
apostolic language, provoking one another
to love and to good works. Competition
is for the public benefit as much in
churches as in trades. Dissent from any
dominant body, even though it may
proceed from the exaggerated importance
given to a secondary matter, will always
produce the good result that the dominant
body will thereby be stirred to greater ac-
tivity and greater watchfulness; so that,
in this view, we may lay it down as one of
the great lessons of history that the best
form of church government is a strong
establishment qualified by a strong dis-

120 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH?

sent. As to the proposals which have in
recent times been made for the formal
separation of Church and State, they bear
on their face more of a political than of a
religious significance. Impartial history-
offers no countenance to the notion that
Established Churches, when well flanked
by dissent, and in an age when the spirit-
ual ruler has ceased to make the arm of
the State the tool of intolerance, are con-
trary either to piety or to policy ; and in
the desire so loudly expressed at election
contests to lay violent hands on the valu-
able organism of church agency existing
in this country, the venerated inheritance
of many ages of patriotic struggle, the
student of history, with a charitable allow-
ance for the best motives in not a few,
feels himself constrained to suspect in all
such movements no small admixture of
sectarian jealousy, fussy religiosity, and
domineering democracy. Christianity, of
course, stands in no need of an Estab-
lished Church; religion existed for three
hundred years in the Church without any

THE CHURCH. 121

State connection, and may exist again ; but
Christianity does, above all things, abhor
the stirring up of strife betwixt Church and
Church from motives of jealousy, envy, or
greed ; and, along with the highest philos-
ophy and the most far-sighted political wis-
dom, must protest in the strongest terms
against the abolishing of a useful ethical
institution to gratify the insane lust of
levelling in a mere numerical majority.

The Church of the future, whether es-
tablished or disestablished, or, as I think
best, both together, provoking one another
to love and to good works, has a great
mission before it, if it keep sharply in
view the two lessons which the teaching of
eighteen centuries so eloquently enforces.
Our evangelists must remove from the
van of their evangelic force all that sharp
fence of metaphysical subtlety and scholas-
tic dogma, which, being ostentatiously pa-
raded in creeds and catechisms, has given
more just offence to those without than
edification to those within the Church ;
the gospel must be presented to the world

122 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH?

with all that catholic breadth, kindly hu-
manity, and popular directness which were
its boast before it was laced and screwed
into artificial shapes by the decrees of intol-
erant councils, and the subtleties of ingen-
ious schoolmen. And, again, they must
not allow the gospel to be handled, what
is too often the case, as a mere message
of hope and comfort in view of a future
world; but they must make it walk di-
rectly into the complex relations of mod-
ern society, and think that it has done noth-
ing till the ideal of sentiment and conduct
which it preached on Sunday has been
more or less practised on Monday. In
fact, there ought to be less vague preach
ing on Sunday, and more specific and di
rect application through the week of gospe
principle in various spheres of the intel
lectual and moral life of the community
If, in addition to this, our prophets of the
pulpit take care to keep abreast of the in-
tellectual movement of the age, so as not
only to stir the world in sermons, but to
guide them in the wisdom of daily life,

THE CHURCH. I 23

they have nothing to fear from all the
windy artillery that the speculations of a
soulless physical science, the imaginations
of a dreamy socialism, or the dogmatism of
a cold philosophical formalism, can bring
to bear upon them. Let them grapple
bravely with all social problems, and prove
whether Christianity, which has done so
much to purify the motives of individuals,
may not be able also to put a more effec-
tive steam into the machinery of society.
If they shall fail here, they will fail glori-
ously, having done their best. It is not
given to any people, however great, to
solve all problems. When Great Brit-
ain shall have played out her part, there
will be scope enough in the process of
the ages for another stout social worker
to place the cornice on the edifice of
which she was privileged to raise the pil-
lars.

.Virtit ■;' ■ ;