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+Project Gutenberg's Short Studies on Great Subjects, by James Anthony Froude
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Short Studies on Great Subjects
+
+Author: James Anthony Froude
+
+Release Date: March 6, 2007 [EBook #20755]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SHORT STUDIES ON GREAT SUBJECTS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Lybarger and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
+Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)
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+
+
+
+                              SHORT STUDIES
+                                   ON
+                             GREAT SUBJECTS.
+
+
+
+
+
+                                 LONDON
+                     PRINTED BY SPOTTISWOODE AND CO.
+                            NEW-STREET SQUARE
+
+
+
+
+
+                              SHORT STUDIES
+                                   ON
+                             GREAT SUBJECTS.
+
+                                   BY
+
+                         JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE, M.A.
+
+                  LATE FELLOW OF EXETER COLLEGE, OXFORD.
+
+
+                            _SECOND EDITION._
+
+
+
+                                 LONDON:
+                         LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
+                                  1867.
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+                                                           PAGE
+
+THE SCIENCE OF HISTORY                                        1
+
+TIMES OF ERASMUS AND LUTHER:
+    Lecture I                                                26
+    Lecture II                                               50
+    Lecture III                                              75
+
+THE INFLUENCE OF THE REFORMATION ON THE SCOTTISH CHARACTER  102
+
+THE PHILOSOPHY OF CATHOLICISM                               124
+
+A PLEA FOR THE FREE DISCUSSION OF THEOLOGICAL DIFFICULTIES  133
+
+CRITICISM AND THE GOSPEL HISTORY                            159
+
+THE BOOK OF JOB                                             185
+
+SPINOZA                                                     223
+
+THE DISSOLUTION OF THE MONASTERIES                          265
+
+ENGLAND'S FORGOTTEN WORTHIES                                294
+
+HOMER                                                       334
+
+THE LIVES OF THE SAINTS                                     363
+
+REPRESENTATIVE MEN                                          384
+
+REYNARD THE FOX                                             401
+
+THE CAT'S PILGRIMAGE:
+    Part I                                                  419
+    Part II                                                 422
+    Part III                                                427
+    Part IV                                                 430
+
+FABLES:
+     I. The Lions and the Oxen                              433
+    II. The Farmer and the Fox                              434
+
+PARABLE OF THE BREAD-FRUIT TREE                             436
+
+COMPENSATION                                                439
+
+
+
+
+THE SCIENCE OF HISTORY:
+
+A LECTURE DELIVERED AT THE ROYAL INSTITUTION
+
+FEBRUARY 5, 1864.
+
+
+Ladies and Gentlemen,--I have undertaken to speak to you this evening on
+what is called the Science of History. I fear it is a dry subject; and
+there seems, indeed, something incongruous in the very connection of
+such words as Science and History. It is as if we were to talk of the
+colour of sound, or the longitude of the rule-of-three. Where it is so
+difficult to make out the truth on the commonest disputed fact in
+matters passing under our very eyes, how can we talk of a science in
+things long past, which come to us only through books? It often seems to
+me as if History was like a child's box of letters, with which we can
+spell any word we please. We have only to pick out such letters as we
+want, arrange them as we like, and say nothing about those which do not
+suit our purpose.
+
+I will try to make the thing intelligible, and I will try not to weary
+you; but I am doubtful of my success either way. First, however, I wish
+to say a word or two about the eminent person whose name is connected
+with this way of looking at History, and whose premature death struck us
+all with such a sudden sorrow. Many of you, perhaps, recollect Mr.
+Buckle as he stood not so long ago in this place. He spoke more than an
+hour without a note--never repeating himself, never wasting words;
+laying out his matter as easily and as pleasantly as if he had been
+talking to us at his own fireside. We might think what we pleased of Mr.
+Buckle's views, but it was plain enough that he was a man of uncommon
+power; and he had qualities also--qualities to which he, perhaps,
+himself attached little value, as rare as they were admirable.
+
+Most of us, when we have hit on something which we are pleased to think
+important and original, feel as if we should burst with it. We come out
+into the book-market with our wares in hand, and ask for thanks and
+recognition. Mr. Buckle, at an early age, conceived the thought which
+made him famous, but he took the measure of his abilities. He knew that
+whenever he pleased he could command personal distinction, but he cared
+more for his subject than for himself. He was contented to work with
+patient reticence, unknown and unheard of, for twenty years; and then,
+at middle life, he produced a work which was translated at once into
+French and German, and, of all places in the world, fluttered the
+dovecotes of the Imperial Academy of St. Petersburg.
+
+Goethe says somewhere, that as soon as a man has done anything
+remarkable, there seems to be a general conspiracy to prevent him from
+doing it again. He is feasted, fêted, caressed; his time is stolen from
+him by breakfasts, dinners, societies, idle businesses of a thousand
+kinds. Mr. Buckle had his share of all this; but there are also more
+dangerous enemies that wait upon success like his. He had scarcely won
+for himself the place which he deserved, than his health was found
+shattered by his labours. He had but time to show us how large a man he
+was--time just to sketch the outlines of his philosophy, and he passed
+away as suddenly as he appeared. He went abroad to recover strength for
+his work, but his work was done with and over. He died of a fever at
+Damascus, vexed only that he was compelled to leave it uncompleted.
+Almost his last conscious words were, 'My book, my book! I shall never
+finish my book!' He went away as he had lived, nobly careless of
+himself, and thinking only of the thing which he had undertaken to do.
+
+But his labour had not been thrown away. Disagree with him as we might,
+the effect which he had already produced was unmistakable, and it is not
+likely to pass away. What he said was not essentially new. Some such
+interpretation of human things is as early as the beginning of thought.
+But Mr. Buckle, on the one hand, had the art which belongs to men of
+genius; he could present his opinions with peculiar distinctness; and,
+on the other hand, there is much in the mode of speculation at present
+current among us for which those opinions have an unusual fascination.
+They do not please us, but they excite and irritate us. We are angry
+with them; and we betray, in being so, an uneasy misgiving that there
+may be more truth in those opinions than we like to allow.
+
+Mr. Buckle's general theory was something of this kind: When human
+creatures began first to look about them in the world they lived in,
+there seemed to be no order in anything. Days and nights were not the
+same length. The air was sometimes hot and sometimes cold. Some of the
+stars rose and set like the sun; some were almost motionless in the sky;
+some described circles round a central star above the north horizon. The
+planets went on principles of their own; and in the elements there
+seemed nothing but caprice. Sun and moon would at times go out in
+eclipse. Sometimes the earth itself would shake under men's feet; and
+they could only suppose that earth and air and sky and water were
+inhabited and managed by creatures as wayward as themselves.
+
+Time went on, and the disorder began to arrange itself. Certain
+influences seemed beneficent to men, others malignant and destructive,
+and the world was supposed to be animated by good spirits and evil
+spirits, who were continually fighting against each other, in outward
+nature and in human creatures themselves. Finally, as men observed more
+and imagined less, these interpretations gave way also. Phenomena the
+most opposite in effect were seen to be the result of the same natural
+law. The fire did not burn the house down if the owners of it were
+careful, but remained on the hearth and boiled the pot; nor did it seem
+more inclined to burn a bad man's house down than a good man's, provided
+the badness did not take the form of negligence. The phenomena of nature
+were found for the most part to proceed in an orderly, regular way, and
+their variations to be such as could be counted upon. From observing the
+order of things, the step was easy to cause and effect. An eclipse,
+instead of being a sign of the anger of Heaven, was found to be the
+necessary and innocent result of the relative position of sun, moon, and
+earth. The comets became bodies in space, unrelated to the beings who
+had imagined that all creation was watching them and their doings. By
+degrees, caprice, volition, all symptoms of arbitrary action,
+disappeared out of the universe; and almost every phenomenon in earth
+or heaven was found attributable to some law, either understood or
+perceived to exist. Thus nature was reclaimed from the imagination. The
+first fantastic conception of things gave way before the moral; the
+moral in turn gave way before the natural; and at last there was left
+but one small tract of jungle where the theory of law had failed to
+penetrate--the doings and characters of human creatures themselves.
+
+There, and only there, amidst the conflicts of reason and emotion,
+conscience and desire, spiritual forces were still conceived to exist.
+Cause and effect were not traceable when there was a free volition to
+disturb the connection. In all other things, from a given set of
+conditions, the consequences necessarily followed. With man, the word
+law changed its meaning; and instead of a fixed order, which he could
+not choose but follow, it became a moral precept, which he might disobey
+if he dared.
+
+This it was which Mr. Buckle disbelieved. The economy which prevailed
+throughout nature, he thought it very unlikely should admit of this
+exception. He considered that human beings acted necessarily from the
+impulse of outward circumstances upon their mental and bodily condition
+at any given moment. Every man, he said, acted from a motive; and his
+conduct was determined by the motive which affected him most powerfully.
+Every man naturally desires what he supposes to be good for him; but to
+do well, he must know well. He will eat poison, so long as he does not
+know that it is poison. Let him see that it will kill him, and he will
+not touch it. The question was not of moral right and wrong. Once let
+him be thoroughly made to feel that the thing is destructive, and he
+will leave it alone by the law of his nature. His virtues are the result
+of knowledge; his faults, the necessary consequence of the want of it. A
+boy desires to draw. He knows nothing about it: he draws men like trees
+or houses, with their centre of gravity anywhere. He makes mistakes,
+because he knows no better. We do not blame him. Till he is better
+taught he cannot help it. But his instruction begins. He arrives at
+straight lines; then at solids; then at curves. He learns perspective,
+and light and shade. He observes more accurately the forms which he
+wishes to represent. He perceives effects, and he perceives the means by
+which they are produced. He has learned what to do; and, in part, he
+has learned how to do it. His after-progress will depend on the amount
+of force which his nature possesses; but all this is as natural as the
+growth of an acorn. You do not preach to the acorn that it is its duty
+to become a large tree; you do not preach to the art-pupil that it is
+his duty to become a Holbein. You plant your acorn in favourable soil,
+where it can have light and air, and be sheltered from the wind; you
+remove the superfluous branches, you train the strength into the leading
+shoots. The acorn will then become as fine a tree as it has vital force
+to become. The difference between men and other things is only in the
+largeness and variety of man's capacities; and in this special capacity,
+that he alone has the power of observing the circumstances favourable to
+his own growth, and can apply them for himself. Yet, again, with this
+condition,--that he is not, as is commonly supposed, free to choose
+whether he will make use of these appliances or not. When he knows what
+is good for him, he will choose it; and he will judge what is good for
+him by the circumstances which have made him what he is.
+
+And what he would do, Mr. Buckle supposed that he always had done. His
+history had been a natural growth as much as the growth of the acorn.
+His improvement had followed the progress of his knowledge; and, by a
+comparison of his outward circumstances with the condition of his mind,
+his whole proceedings on this planet, his creeds and constitutions, his
+good deeds and his bad, his arts and his sciences, his empires and his
+revolutions, would be found all to arrange themselves into clear
+relations of cause and effect.
+
+If, when Mr. Buckle pressed his conclusions, we objected the difficulty
+of finding what the truth about past times really was, he would admit it
+candidly as far as concerned individuals; but there was not the same
+difficulty, he said, with masses of men. We might disagree about the
+characters of Julius or Tiberius Cæsar, but we could know well enough
+the Romans of the Empire. We had their literature to tell us how they
+thought; we had their laws to tell us how they governed; we had the
+broad face of the world, the huge mountainous outline of their general
+doings upon it, to tell us how they acted. He believed it was all
+reducible to laws, and could be made as intelligible as the growth of
+the chalk cliffs or the coal measures.
+
+And thus consistently Mr. Buckle cared little for individuals. He did
+not believe (as some one has said) that the history of mankind is the
+history of its great men. Great men with him were but larger atoms,
+obeying the same impulses with the rest, only perhaps a trifle more
+erratic. With them or without them, the course of things would have been
+much the same.
+
+As an illustration of the truth of his view, he would point to the new
+science of Political Economy. Here already was a large area of human
+activity in which natural laws were found to act unerringly. Men had
+gone on for centuries trying to regulate trade on moral principles. They
+would fix wages according to some imaginary rule of fairness; they would
+fix prices by what they considered things ought to cost; they encouraged
+one trade or discouraged another, for moral reasons. They might as well
+have tried to work a steam-engine on moral reasons. The great statesmen
+whose names were connected with these enterprises might have as well
+legislated that water should run up-hill. There were natural laws, fixed
+in the conditions of things: and to contend against them was the old
+battle of the Titans against the gods.
+
+As it was with political economy, so it was with all other forms of
+human activity; and as the true laws of political economy explained the
+troubles which people fell into in old times, because they were ignorant
+of them, so the true laws of human nature, as soon as we knew them,
+would explain their mistakes in more serious matters, and enable us to
+manage better for the future. Geographical position, climate, air, soil,
+and the like, had their several influences. The northern nations are
+hardy and industrious, because they must till the earth if they would
+eat the fruits of it, and because the temperature is too low to make an
+idle life enjoyable. In the south, the soil is more productive, while
+less food is wanted and fewer clothes; and in the exquisite air,
+exertion is not needed to make the sense of existence delightful.
+Therefore, in the south we find men lazy and indolent.
+
+True, there are difficulties in these views; the home of the languid
+Italian was the home also of the sternest race of whom the story of
+mankind retains a record. And again, when we are told that the Spaniards
+are superstitious, because Spain is a country of earthquakes, we
+remember Japan, the spot in all the world where earthquakes are most
+frequent, and where at the same time there is the most serene disbelief
+in any supernatural agency whatsoever.
+
+Moreover, if men grow into what they are by natural laws, they cannot
+help being what they are; and if they cannot help being what they are, a
+good deal will have to be altered in our general view of human
+obligations and responsibilities.
+
+That, however, in these theories there is a great deal of truth is quite
+certain; were there but a hope that those who maintain them would be
+contented with that admission. A man born in a Mahometan country grows
+up a Mahometan; in a Catholic country, a Catholic; in a Protestant
+country, a Protestant. His opinions are like his language; he learns to
+think as he learns to speak; and it is absurd to suppose him responsible
+for being what nature makes him. We take pains to educate children.
+There is a good education and a bad education; there are rules well
+ascertained by which characters are influenced, and, clearly enough, it
+is no mere matter for a boy's free will whether he turns out well or
+ill. We try to train him into good habits; we keep him out of the way of
+temptations; we see that he is well taught; we mix kindness and
+strictness; we surround him with every good influence we can command.
+These are what are termed the advantages of a good education: and if we
+fail to provide those under our care with it, and if they go wrong, the
+responsibility we feel is as much ours as theirs. This is at once an
+admission of the power over us of outward circumstances.
+
+In the same way, we allow for the strength of temptations, and the like.
+
+In general, it is perfectly obvious that men do necessarily absorb, out
+of the influences in which they grow up, something which gives a
+complexion to their whole after-character.
+
+When historians have to relate great social or speculative changes, the
+overthrow of a monarchy or the establishment of a creed, they do but
+half their duty if they merely relate the events. In an account, for
+instance, of the rise of Mahometanism, it is not enough to describe the
+character of the Prophet, the ends which he set before him, the means
+which he made use of, and the effect which he produced; the historian
+must show what there was in the condition of the Eastern races which
+enabled Mahomet to act upon them so powerfully; their existing beliefs,
+their existing moral and political condition.
+
+In our estimate of the past, and in our calculations of the future--in
+the judgments which we pass upon one another, we measure responsibility,
+not by the thing done, but by the opportunities which people have had of
+knowing better or worse. In the efforts which we make to keep our
+children from bad associations or friends we admit that external
+circumstances have a powerful effect in making men what they are.
+
+But are circumstances everything? That is the whole question. A science
+of history, if it is more than a misleading name, implies that the
+relation between cause and effect holds in human things as completely as
+in all others, that the origin of human actions is not to be looked for
+in mysterious properties of the mind, but in influences which are
+palpable and ponderable.
+
+When natural causes are liable to be set aside and neutralised by what
+is called volition, the word Science is out of place. If it is free to a
+man to choose what he will do or not do, there is no adequate science of
+him. If there is a science of him, there is no free choice, and the
+praise or blame with which we regard one another are impertinent and out
+of place.
+
+I am trespassing upon these ethical grounds because, unless I do, the
+subject cannot be made intelligible. Mankind are but an aggregate of
+individuals--History is but the record of individual action; and what is
+true of the part, is true of the whole.
+
+We feel keenly about such things, and when the logic becomes perplexing,
+we are apt to grow rhetorical about them. But rhetoric is only
+misleading. Whatever the truth may be, it is best that we should know
+it; and for truth of any kind we should keep our heads and hearts as
+cool as we can.
+
+I will say at once, that if we had the whole case before us--if we were
+taken, like Leibnitz's Tarquin, into the council chamber of nature, and
+were shown what we really were, where we came from, and where we were
+going, however unpleasant it might be for some of us to find ourselves,
+like Tarquin, made into villains, from the subtle necessities of 'the
+best of all possible worlds;' nevertheless, some such theory as Mr.
+Buckle's might possibly turn out to be true. Likely enough, there is
+some great 'equation of the universe' where the value of the unknown
+quantities can be determined. But we must treat things in relation to
+our own powers and position; and the question is, whether the sweep of
+those vast curves can be measured by the intellect of creatures of a day
+like ourselves.
+
+The 'Faust' of Goethe, tired of the barren round of earthly knowledge,
+calls magic to his aid. He desires, first, to see the spirit of the
+Macrocosmos, but his heart fails him before he ventures that tremendous
+experiment, and he summons before him, instead, the spirit of his own
+race. There he feels himself at home. The stream of life and the storm
+of action, the everlasting ocean of existence, the web and the woof, and
+the roaring loom of time--he gazes upon them all, and in passionate
+exultation claims fellowship with the awful thing before him. But the
+majestic vision fades, and a voice comes to him--'Thou art fellow with
+the spirits which thy mind can grasp--not with me.'
+
+Had Mr. Buckle tried to follow his principles into detail, it might have
+fared no better with him than with 'Faust.'
+
+What are the conditions of a science? and when may any subject be said
+to enter the scientific stage? I suppose when the facts of it begin to
+resolve themselves into groups; when phenomena are no longer isolated
+experiences, but appear in connection and order; when, after certain
+antecedents, certain consequences are uniformly seen to follow; when
+facts enough have been collected to furnish a basis for conjectural
+explanation, and when conjectures have so far ceased to be utterly
+vague, that it is possible in some degree to foresee the future by the
+help of them.
+
+Till a subject has advanced as far as this, to speak of a science of it
+is an abuse of language. It is not enough to say that there must be a
+science of human things, because there is a science of all other things.
+This is like saying the planets must be inhabited, because the only
+planet of which we have any experience is inhabited. It may or may not
+be true, but it is not a practical question; it does not affect the
+practical treatment of the matter in hand.
+
+Let us look at the history of Astronomy.
+
+So long as sun, moon, and planets were supposed to be gods or angels; so
+long as the sword of Orion was not a metaphor, but a fact, and the
+groups of stars which inlaid the floor of heaven were the glittering
+trophies of the loves and wars of the Pantheon, so long there was no
+science of Astronomy. There was fancy, imagination, poetry, perhaps
+reverence, but no science. As soon, however, as it was observed that the
+stars retained their relative places--that the times of their rising and
+setting varied with the seasons--that sun, moon, and planets moved among
+them in a plane, and the belt of the Zodiac was marked out and divided,
+then a new order of things began. Traces of the earlier stage remained
+in the names of the signs and constellations, just as the Scandinavian
+mythology survives now in the names of the days of the week: but for all
+that, the understanding was now at work on the thing; Science had begun,
+and the first triumph of it was the power of foretelling the future.
+Eclipses were perceived to recur in cycles of nineteen years, and
+philosophers were able to say when an eclipse was to be looked for. The
+periods of the planets were determined. Theories were invented to
+account for their eccentricities; and, false as those theories might be,
+the position of the planets could be calculated with moderate certainty
+by them. The very first result of the science, in its most imperfect
+stage, was a power of foresight; and this was possible before any one
+true astronomical law had been discovered.
+
+We should not therefore question the possibility of a science of
+history, because the explanations of its phenomena were rudimentary or
+imperfect: that they might be, and might long continue to be, and yet
+enough might be done to show that there was such a thing, and that it
+was not entirely without use. But how was it that in those rude days,
+with small knowledge of mathematics, and with no better instruments than
+flat walls and dial plates, those first astronomers made progress so
+considerable? Because, I suppose, the phenomena which they were
+observing recurred, for the most part, within moderate intervals; so
+that they could collect large experience within the compass of their
+natural lives: because days and months and years were measurable
+periods, and within them the more simple phenomena perpetually repeated
+themselves.
+
+But how would it have been if, instead of turning on its axis once in
+twenty-four hours, the earth had taken a year about it; if the year had
+been nearly four hundred years; if man's life had been no longer than it
+is, and for the initial steps of astronomy there had been nothing to
+depend upon except observations recorded in history? How many ages would
+have passed, had this been our condition, before it would have occurred
+to any one, that, in what they saw night after night, there was any kind
+of order at all?
+
+We can see to some extent how it would have been, by the present state
+of those parts of the science which in fact depend on remote recorded
+observations. The movements of the comets are still extremely uncertain.
+The times of their return can be calculated only with the greatest
+vagueness.
+
+And yet such a hypothesis as I have suggested would but inadequately
+express the position in which we are in fact placed towards history.
+There the phenomena never repeat themselves. There we are dependent
+wholly on the record of things said to have happened once, but which
+never happen or can happen a second time. There no experiment is
+possible; we can watch for no recurring fact to test the worth of our
+conjectures. It has been suggested, fancifully, that if we consider the
+universe to be infinite, time is the same as eternity, and the past is
+perpetually present. Light takes nine years to come to us from Sirius;
+those rays which we may see to-night when we leave this place, left
+Sirius nine years ago; and could the inhabitants of Sirius see the earth
+at this moment, they would see the English army in the trenches before
+Sebastopol; Florence Nightingale watching at Scutari over the wounded at
+Inkermann; and the peace of England undisturbed by 'Essays and Reviews.'
+
+As the stars recede into distance, so time recedes with them, and there
+may be, and probably are, stars from which Noah might be seen stepping
+into the ark, Eve listening to the temptation of the serpent, or that
+older race, eating the oysters and leaving the shell-heaps behind them,
+when the Baltic was an open sea.
+
+Could we but compare notes, something might be done; but of this there
+is no present hope, and without it there will be no science of history.
+Eclipses, recorded in ancient books, can be verified by calculation, and
+lost dates can be recovered by them, and we can foresee by the laws
+which they follow when there will be eclipses again. Will a time ever
+be when the lost secret of the foundation of Rome can be recovered by
+historic laws? If not, where is our science? It may be said that this is
+a particular fact, that we can deal satisfactorily with general
+phenomena affecting eras and cycles. Well, then, let us take some
+general phenomenon. Mahometanism, for instance, or Buddhism. Those are
+large enough. Can you imagine a science which would have[A] _foretold_
+such movements as those? The state of things out of which they rose is
+obscure; but suppose it not obscure, can you conceive that, with any
+amount of historical insight into the old Oriental beliefs, you could
+have seen that they were about to transform themselves into those
+particular forms and no other?
+
+It is not enough to say, that, after the fact, you can understand
+partially how Mahometanism came to be. All historians worth the name
+have told us something about that. But when we talk of science, we mean
+something with more ambitious pretences, we mean something which can
+foresee as well as explain; and, thus looked at, to state the problem is
+to show its absurdity. As little could the wisest man have foreseen this
+mighty revolution, as thirty years ago such a thing as Mormonism could
+have been anticipated in America; as little as it could have been
+foreseen that table-turning and spirit-rapping would have been an
+outcome of the scientific culture of England in the nineteenth century.
+
+The greatest of Roman thinkers, gazing mournfully at the seething mass
+of moral putrefaction round him, detected and deigned to notice among
+its elements a certain detestable superstition, so he called it, rising
+up amidst the offscouring of the Jews, which was named Christianity.
+Could Tacitus have looked forward nine centuries to the Rome of Gregory
+VII., could he have beheld the representative of the majesty of the
+Cæsars holding the stirrup of the Pontiff of that vile and execrated
+sect, the spectacle would scarcely have appeared to him the fulfilment
+of a rational expectation, or an intelligible result of the causes in
+operation round him. Tacitus, indeed, was born before the science of
+history; but would M. Comte have seen any more clearly?
+
+Nor is the case much better if we are less hard upon our philosophy; if
+we content ourselves with the past, and require only a scientific
+explanation of that.
+
+First, for the facts themselves. They come to us through the minds of
+those who recorded them, neither machines nor angels, but fallible
+creatures, with human passions and prejudices. Tacitus and Thucydides
+were perhaps the ablest men who ever gave themselves to writing history;
+the ablest, and also the most incapable of conscious falsehood. Yet even
+now, after all these centuries, the truth of what they relate is called
+in question. Good reasons can be given to show that neither of them can
+be confidently trusted. If we doubt with these, whom are we to believe?
+
+Or again, let the facts be granted. To revert to my simile of the box of
+letters, you have but to select such facts as suit you, you have but to
+leave alone those which do not suit you, and let your theory of history
+be what it will, you can find no difficulty in providing facts to prove
+it.
+
+You may have your Hegel's philosophy of history, or you may have your
+Schlegel's philosophy of history; you may prove from history that the
+world is governed in detail by a special Providence; you may prove that
+there is no sign of any moral agent in the universe, except man; you may
+believe, if you like it, in the old theory of the wisdom of antiquity;
+you may speak, as was the fashion in the fifteenth century, of 'our
+fathers, who had more wit and wisdom than we;' or you may talk of 'our
+barbarian ancestors,' and describe their wars as the scuffling of kites
+and crows.
+
+You may maintain that the evolution of humanity has been an unbroken
+progress towards perfection; you may maintain that there has been no
+progress at all, and that man remains the same poor creature that he
+ever was; or, lastly, you may say with the author of the 'Contrat
+Social,' that men were purest and best in primeval simplicity--
+
+    When wild in woods the noble savage ran.
+
+In all, or any of these views, history will stand your friend. History,
+in its passive irony, will make no objection. Like Jarno, in Goethe's
+novel, it will not condescend to argue with you, and will provide you
+with abundant illustrations of anything which you may wish to believe.
+
+'What is history,' said Napoleon, 'but a fiction agreed upon?' 'My
+friend,' said Faust to the student, who was growing enthusiastic about
+the spirit of past ages; 'my friend, the times which are gone are a book
+with seven seals; and what you call the spirit of past ages is but the
+spirit of this or that worthy gentleman in whose mind those ages are
+reflected.'
+
+One lesson, and only one, history may be said to repeat with
+distinctness; that the world is built somehow on moral foundations;
+that, in the long run, it is well with the good; in the long run, it is
+ill with the wicked. But this is no science; it is no more than the old
+doctrine taught long ago by the Hebrew prophets. The theories of M.
+Comte and his disciples advance us, after all, not a step beyond the
+trodden and familiar ground. If men are not entirely animals, they are
+at least half animals, and are subject in this aspect of them to the
+conditions of animals. So far as those parts of man's doings are
+concerned, which neither have, nor need have, anything moral about them,
+so far the laws of him are calculable. There are laws for his digestion,
+and laws of the means by which his digestive organs are supplied with
+matter. But pass beyond them, and where are we? In a world where it
+would be as easy to calculate men's actions by laws like those of
+positive philosophy as to measure the orbit of Neptune with a foot-rule,
+or weigh Sirius in a grocer's scale.
+
+And it is not difficult to see why this should be. The first principle
+on which the theory of a science of history can be plausibly argued, is
+that all actions whatsoever arise from self-interest. It may be
+enlightened self-interest; it may be unenlightened; but it is assumed as
+an axiom, that every man, in whatever he does, is aiming at something
+which he considers will promote his happiness. His conduct is not
+determined by his will; it is determined by the object of his desire.
+Adam Smith, in laying the foundations of political economy, expressly
+eliminates every other motive. He does not say that men never act on
+other motives; still less, that they never ought to act on other
+motives. He asserts merely that, as far as the arts of production are
+concerned, and of buying and selling, the action of self-interest may be
+counted upon as uniform. What Adam Smith says of political economy, Mr.
+Buckle would extend over the whole circle of human activity.
+
+Now, that which especially distinguishes a high order of man from a low
+order of man--that which constitutes human goodness, human greatness,
+human nobleness--is surely not the degree of enlightenment with which
+men pursue their own advantage; but it is self-forgetfulness--it is
+self-sacrifice--it is the disregard of personal pleasure, personal
+indulgence, personal advantages remote or present, because some other
+line of conduct is more right.
+
+We are sometimes told that this is but another way of expressing the
+same thing; that when a man prefers doing what is right, it is only
+because to do right gives him a higher satisfaction. It appears to me,
+on the contrary, to be a difference in the very heart and nature of
+things. The martyr goes to the stake, the patriot to the scaffold, not
+with a view to any future reward to themselves, but because it is a
+glory to fling away their lives for truth and freedom. And so through
+all phases of existence, to the smallest details of common life, the
+beautiful character is the unselfish character. Those whom we most love
+and admire are those to whom the thought of self seems never to occur;
+who do simply and with no ulterior aim--with no thought whether it will
+be pleasant to themselves or unpleasant--that which is good, and right,
+and generous.
+
+Is this still selfishness, only more enlightened? I do not think so. The
+essence of true nobility is neglect of self. Let the thought of self
+pass in, and the beauty of a great action is gone--like the bloom from a
+soiled flower. Surely it is a paradox to speak of the self-interest of a
+martyr who dies for a cause, the triumph of which he will never enjoy;
+and the greatest of that great company in all ages would have done what
+they did, had their personal prospects closed with the grave. Nay, there
+have been those so zealous for some glorious principle, as to wish
+themselves blotted out of the book of Heaven if the cause of Heaven
+could succeed.
+
+And out of this mysterious quality, whatever it be, arise the higher
+relations of human life, the higher modes of human obligation. Kant, the
+philosopher, used to say that there were two things which overwhelmed
+him with awe as he thought of them. One was the star-sown deep of space,
+without limit and without end; the other was, right and wrong. Right,
+the sacrifice of self to good; wrong, the sacrifice of good to
+self;--not graduated objects of desire, to which we are determined by
+the degrees of our knowledge, but wide asunder as pole and pole, as
+light and darkness--one, the object of infinite love; the other, the
+object of infinite detestation and scorn. It is in this marvellous power
+in men to do wrong (it is an old story, but none the less true for
+that)--it is in this power to do wrong--wrong or right, as it lies
+somehow with ourselves to choose--that the impossibility stands of
+forming scientific calculations of what men will do before the fact, or
+scientific explanations of what they have done after the fact. If men
+were consistently selfish, you might analyse their motives; if they were
+consistently noble, they would express in their conduct the laws of the
+highest perfection. But so long as two natures are mixed together, and
+the strange creature which results from the combination is now under one
+influence and now under another, so long you will make nothing of him
+except from the old-fashioned moral--or, if you please,
+imaginative--point of view.
+
+Even the laws of political economy itself cease to guide us when they
+touch moral government. So long as labour is a chattel to be bought and
+sold, so long, like other commodities, it follows the condition of
+supply and demand. But if, for his misfortune, an employer considers
+that he stands in human relations towards his workmen; if he believes,
+rightly or wrongly, that he is responsible for them; that in return for
+their labour he is bound to see that their children are decently taught,
+and they and their families decently fed and clothed and lodged; that he
+ought to care for them in sickness and in old age; then political
+economy will no longer direct him, and the relations between himself and
+his dependents will have to be arranged on quite other principles.
+
+So long as he considers only his own material profit, so long supply and
+demand will settle every difficulty; but the introduction of a new
+factor spoils the equation.
+
+And it is precisely in this debatable ground of low motives and noble
+emotions--in the struggle, ever failing, yet ever renewed, to carry
+truth and justice into the administration of human society; in the
+establishment of states and in the overthrow of tyrannies; in the rise
+and fall of creeds; in the world of ideas; in the character and deeds of
+the great actors in the drama of life; where good and evil fight out
+their everlasting battle, now ranged in opposite camps, now and more
+often in the heart, both of them, of each living man--that the true
+human interest of history resides. The progress of industries, the
+growth of material and mechanical civilisation, are interesting, but
+they are not the most interesting. They have their reward in the
+increase of material comforts; but, unless we are mistaken about our
+nature, they do not highly concern us after all.
+
+Once more; not only is there in men this baffling duality of principle,
+but there is something else in us which still more defies scientific
+analysis.
+
+Mr. Buckle would deliver himself from the eccentricities of this and
+that individual by a doctrine of averages. Though he cannot tell whether
+A, B, or C will cut his throat, he may assure himself that one man in
+every fifty thousand, or thereabout (I forget the exact proportion),
+will cut his throat, and with this he consoles himself. No doubt it is a
+comforting discovery. Unfortunately, the average of one generation need
+not be the average of the next. We may be converted by the Japanese, for
+all that we know, and the Japanese methods of taking leave of life may
+become fashionable among us. Nay, did not Novalis suggest that the whole
+race of men would at last become so disgusted with their impotence, that
+they would extinguish themselves by a simultaneous act of suicide, and
+make room for a better order of beings? Anyhow, the fountain out of
+which the race is flowing perpetually changes--no two generations are
+alike. Whether there is a change in the organisation itself, we cannot
+tell; but this is certain, that as the planet varies with the atmosphere
+which surrounds it, so each new generation varies from the last, because
+it inhales as its atmosphere the accumulated experience and knowledge of
+the whole past of the world. These things form the spiritual air which
+we breathe as we grow; and in the infinite multiplicity of elements of
+which that air is now composed, it is for ever matter of conjecture what
+the minds will be like which expand under its influence.
+
+From the England of Fielding and Richardson to the England of Miss
+Austen--from the England of Miss Austen to the England of Railways and
+Free-trade, how vast the change; yet perhaps Sir Charles Grandison would
+not seem so strange to us now, as one of ourselves will seem to our
+great-grandchildren. The world moves faster and faster; and the
+difference will probably be considerably greater.
+
+The temper of each new generation is a continual surprise. The fates
+delight to contradict our most confident expectations. Gibbon believed
+that the era of conquerors was at an end. Had he lived out the full life
+of man, he would have seen Europe at the feet of Napoleon. But a few
+years ago we believed the world had grown too civilised for war, and the
+Crystal Palace in Hyde Park was to be the inauguration of a new era.
+Battles, bloody as Napoleon's, are now the familiar tale of every day;
+and the arts which have made greatest progress are the arts of
+destruction. What next? We may strain our eyes into the future which
+lies beyond this waning century; but never was conjecture more at fault.
+It is blank darkness, which even the imagination fails to people.
+
+What then is the use of History? and what are its lessons? If it can
+tell us little of the past, and nothing of the future, why waste our
+time over so barren a study?
+
+First, it is a voice for ever sounding across the centuries the laws of
+right and wrong. Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall,
+but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity. For every false
+word or unrighteous deed, for cruelty and oppression, for lust or
+vanity, the price has to be paid at last: not always by the chief
+offenders, but paid by some one. Justice and truth alone endure and
+live. Injustice and falsehood may be long-lived, but doomsday comes at
+last to them, in French revolutions and other terrible ways.
+
+That is one lesson of History. Another is, that we should draw no
+horoscopes; that we should expect little, for what we expect will not
+come to pass. Revolutions, reformations--those vast movements into which
+heroes and saints have flung themselves, in the belief that they were
+the dawn of the millennium--have not borne the fruit which they looked
+for. Millenniums are still far away. These great convulsions leave the
+world changed--perhaps improved,--but not improved as the actors in them
+hoped it would be. Luther would have gone to work with less heart, could
+he have foreseen the Thirty Years' War, and in the distance the theology
+of Tubingen. Washington might have hesitated to draw the sword against
+England, could he have seen the country which he made as we see it
+now.[B]
+
+The most reasonable anticipations fail us--antecedents the most apposite
+mislead us; because the conditions of human problems never repeat
+themselves. Some new feature alters everything--some element which we
+detect only in its after-operation.
+
+But this, it may be said, is but a meagre outcome. Can the long records
+of humanity, with all its joys and sorrows, its sufferings and its
+conquests, teach us no more than this? Let us approach the subject from
+another side.
+
+If you were asked to point out the special features in which
+Shakespeare's plays are so transcendently excellent, you would mention,
+perhaps, among others, this, that his stories are not put together, and
+his characters are not conceived, to illustrate any particular law or
+principle. They teach many lessons, but not any one prominent above
+another; and when we have drawn from them all the direct instruction
+which they contain, there remains still something unresolved--something
+which the artist gives, and which the philosopher cannot give.
+
+It is in this characteristic that we are accustomed to say Shakespeare's
+supreme _truth_ lies. He represents real life. His dramas teach as life
+teaches--neither less nor more. He builds his fabrics as nature does, on
+right and wrong; but he does not struggle to make nature more systematic
+than she is. In the subtle interflow of good and evil--in the unmerited
+sufferings of innocence--in the disproportion of penalties to desert--in
+the seeming blindness with which justice, in attempting to assert
+itself, overwhelms innocent and guilty in a common ruin--Shakespeare is
+true to real experience. The mystery of life he leaves as he finds it;
+and, in his most tremendous positions, he is addressing rather the
+intellectual emotions than the understanding,--knowing well that the
+understanding in such things is at fault, and the sage as ignorant as
+the child.
+
+Only the highest order of genius can represent nature thus. An inferior
+artist produces either something entirely immoral, where good and evil
+are names, and nobility of disposition is supposed to show itself in the
+absolute disregard of them--or else, if he is a better kind of man, he
+will force on nature a didactic purpose; he composes what are called
+moral tales, which may edify the conscience, but only mislead the
+intellect.
+
+The finest work of this kind produced in modern times is Lessing's play
+of 'Nathan the Wise.' The object of it is to teach religious toleration.
+The doctrine is admirable--the mode in which it is enforced is
+interesting; but it has the fatal fault, that it is not true. Nature
+does not teach religious toleration by any such direct method; and the
+result is--no one knew it better than Lessing himself--that the play is
+not poetry, but only splendid manufacture. Shakespeare is eternal;
+Lessing's 'Nathan' will pass away with the mode of thought which gave it
+birth. One is based on fact; the other, on human theory about fact. The
+theory seems at first sight to contain the most immediate instruction;
+but it is not really so.
+
+Cibber and others, as you know, wanted to alter Shakespeare. The French
+king, in 'Lear,' was to be got rid of; Cordelia was to marry Edgar, and
+Lear himself was to be rewarded for his sufferings by a golden old age.
+They could not bear that Hamlet should suffer for the sins of Claudius.
+The wicked king was to die, and the wicked mother; and Hamlet and
+Ophelia were to make a match of it, and live happily ever after. A
+common novelist would have arranged it thus; and you would have had your
+comfortable moral that wickedness was fitly punished, and virtue had its
+due reward, and all would have been well. But Shakespeare would not have
+it so. Shakespeare knew that crime was not so simple in its
+consequences, or Providence so paternal. He was contented to take the
+truth from life; and the effect upon the mind of the most correct theory
+of what life ought to be, compared to the effect of the life itself, is
+infinitesimal in comparison.
+
+Again, let us compare the popular historical treatment of remarkable
+incidents with Shakespeare's treatment of them. Look at 'Macbeth.' You
+may derive abundant instruction from it--instruction of many kinds.
+There is a moral lesson of profound interest in the steps by which a
+noble nature glides to perdition. In more modern fashion you may
+speculate, if you like, on the political conditions represented there,
+and the temptation presented in absolute monarchies to unscrupulous
+ambition; you may say, like Dr. Slop, these things could not have
+happened under a constitutional government; or, again, you may take up
+your parable against superstition--you may dilate on the frightful
+consequences of a belief in witches, and reflect on the superior
+advantages of an age of schools and newspapers. If the bare facts of the
+story had come down to us from a chronicler, and an ordinary writer of
+the nineteenth century had undertaken to relate them, his account, we
+may depend upon it, would have been put together upon one or other of
+these principles. Yet, by the side of that unfolding of the secrets of
+the prison-house of the soul, what lean and shrivelled anatomies the
+best of such descriptions would seem!
+
+Shakespeare himself, I suppose, could not have given us a theory of what
+he meant--he gave us the thing itself, on which we might make whatever
+theories we pleased.
+
+Or again, look at Homer.
+
+The 'Iliad' is from two to three thousand years older than 'Macbeth,'
+and yet it is as fresh as if it had been written yesterday. We have
+there no lessons save in the emotions which rise in us as we read. Homer
+had no philosophy; he never struggles to impress upon us his views about
+this or that; you can scarcely tell indeed whether his sympathies are
+Greek or Trojan; but he represents to us faithfully the men and women
+among whom he lived. He sang the Tale of Troy, he touched his lyre, he
+drained the golden beaker in the halls of men like those on whom he was
+conferring immortality. And thus, although no Agamemnon, king of men,
+ever led a Grecian fleet to Ilium; though no Priam sought the midnight
+tent of Achilles; though Ulysses and Diomed and Nestor were but names,
+and Helen but a dream, yet, through Homer's power of representing men
+and women, those old Greeks will still stand out from amidst the
+darkness of the ancient world with a sharpness of outline which belongs
+to no period of history except the most recent. For the mere hard
+purposes of history, the 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey' are the most effective
+books which ever were written. We see the Hall of Menelaus, we see the
+garden of Alcinous, we see Nausicaa among her maidens on the shore, we
+see the mellow monarch sitting with ivory sceptre in the Marketplace
+dealing out genial justice. Or again, when the wild mood is on, we can
+hear the crash of the spears, the rattle of the armour as the heroes
+fall, and the plunging of the horses among the slain. Could we enter the
+palace of an old Ionian lord, we know what we should see there; we know
+the words in which he would address us. We could meet Hector as a
+friend. If we could choose a companion to spend an evening with over a
+fireside, it would be the man of many counsels, the husband of Penelope.
+
+I am not going into the vexed question whether History or Poetry is the
+more true. It has been sometimes said that Poetry is the more true,
+because it can make things more like what our moral sense would prefer
+they should be. We hear of poetic justice and the like, as if nature and
+fact were not just enough.
+
+I entirely dissent from that view. So far as Poetry attempts to improve
+on truth in that way, so far it abandons truth, and is false to itself.
+Even literal facts, exactly as they were, a great poet will prefer
+whenever he can get them. Shakespeare in the historical plays is
+studious, wherever possible, to give the very words which he finds to
+have been used; and it shows how wisely he was guided in this, that
+those magnificent speeches of Wolsey are taken exactly, with no more
+change than the metre makes necessary, from Cavendish's Life.
+Marlborough read Shakespeare for English history, and read nothing else.
+The poet only is not bound, when it is inconvenient, to what may be
+called the accidents of facts. It was enough for Shakespeare to know
+that Prince Hal in his youth had lived among loose companions, and the
+tavern in Eastcheap came in to fill out his picture; although Mrs.
+Quickly and Falstaff, and Poins and Bardolph were more likely to have
+been fallen in with by Shakespeare himself at the Mermaid, than to have
+been comrades of the true Prince Henry. It was enough for Shakespeare to
+draw real men, and the situation, whatever it might be, would sit easy
+on them. In this sense only it is that Poetry is truer than History,
+that it can make a picture more complete. It may take liberties with
+time and space, and give the action distinctness by throwing it into
+more manageable compass.
+
+But it may not alter the real conditions of things, or represent life as
+other than it is. The greatness of the poet depends on his being true to
+nature, without insisting that nature shall theorise with him, without
+making her more just, more philosophical, more moral than reality; and,
+in difficult matters, leaving much to reflection which cannot be
+explained.
+
+And if this be true of Poetry--if Homer and Shakespeare are what they
+are, from the absence of everything didactic about them--may we not
+thus learn something of what History should be, and in what sense it
+should aspire to teach?
+
+If Poetry must not theorise, much less should the historian theorise,
+whose obligations to be true to fact are even greater than the poet's.
+If the drama is grandest when the action is least explicable by laws,
+because then it best resembles life, then history will be grandest also
+under the same conditions. 'Macbeth,' were it literally true, would be
+perfect history; and so far as the historian can approach to that kind
+of model, so far as he can let his story tell itself in the deeds and
+words of those who act it out, so far is he most successful. His work is
+no longer the vapour of his own brain, which a breath will scatter; it
+is the thing itself, which will have interest for all time. A thousand
+theories may be formed about it--spiritual theories, Pantheistic
+theories, cause and effect theories; but each age will have its own
+philosophy of history, and all these in turn will fail and die. Hegel
+falls out of date, Schlegel falls out of date, and Comte in good time
+will fall out of date; the thought about the thing must change as we
+change; but the thing itself can never change; and a history is durable
+or perishable as it contains more or least of the writer's own
+speculations. The splendid intellect of Gibbon for the most part kept
+him true to the right course in this; yet the philosophical chapters for
+which he has been most admired or censured may hereafter be thought the
+least interesting in his work. The time has been when they would not
+have been comprehended: the time may come when they will seem
+commonplace.
+
+It may be said, that in requiring history to be written like a drama, we
+require an impossibility.
+
+For history to be written with the complete form of a drama, doubtless
+is impossible; but there are periods, and these the periods, for the
+most part, of greatest interest to mankind, the history of which may be
+so written that the actors shall reveal their characters in their own
+words; where mind can be seen matched against mind, and the great
+passions of the epoch not simply be described as existing, but be
+exhibited at their white heat in the souls and hearts possessed by them.
+There are all the elements of drama--drama of the highest order--where
+the huge forces of the times are as the Grecian destiny, and the power
+of the man is seen either stemming the stream till it overwhelms him,
+or ruling while he seems to yield to it.
+
+It is Nature's drama--not Shakespeare's--but a drama none the less.
+
+So at least it seems to me. Wherever possible, let us not be told
+_about_ this man or that. Let us hear the man himself speak; let us see
+him act, and let us be left to form our own opinions about him. The
+historian, we are told, must not leave his readers to themselves. He
+must not only lay the facts before them--he must tell them what he
+himself thinks about those facts. In my opinion, this is precisely what
+he ought not to do. Bishop Butler says somewhere, that the best book
+which could be written would be a book consisting only of premises, from
+which the readers should draw conclusions for themselves. The highest
+poetry is the very thing which Butler requires, and the highest history
+ought to be. We should no more ask for a theory of this or that period
+of history, than we should ask for a theory of 'Macbeth' or 'Hamlet.'
+Philosophies of history, sciences of history--all these, there will
+continue to be; the fashions of them will change, as our habits of
+thought will change; each new philosopher will find his chief employment
+in showing that before him no one understood anything; but the drama of
+history is imperishable, and, the lessons of it will be like what we
+learn from Homer or Shakespeare--lessons for which we have no words.
+
+The address of history is less to the understanding than to the higher
+emotions. We learn in it to sympathise with what is great and good; we
+learn to hate what is base. In the anomalies of fortune we feel the
+mystery of our mortal existence, and in the companionship of the
+illustrious natures who have shaped the fortunes of the world, we escape
+from the littlenesses which cling to the round of common life, and our
+minds are tuned in a higher and nobler key.
+
+For the rest, and for those large questions which I touched in
+connection with Mr. Buckle, we live in times of disintegration, and none
+can tell what will be after us. What opinions--what convictions--the
+infant of to-day will find prevailing on the earth, if he and it live
+out together to the middle of another century, only a very bold man
+would undertake to conjecture! 'The time will come,' said Lichtenberg,
+in scorn at the materialising tendencies of modern thought; 'the time
+will come when the belief in God will be as the tales with which old
+women frighten children; when the world will be a machine, the ether a
+gas, and God will be a force.' Mankind, if they last long enough on the
+earth, may develope strange things out of themselves; and the growth of
+what is called the Positive Philosophy is a curious commentary on
+Lichtenberg's prophecy. But whether the end be seventy years hence, or
+seven hundred--be the close of the mortal history of humanity as far
+distant in the future as its shadowy beginnings seem now to lie behind
+us--this only we may foretell with confidence--that the riddle of man's
+nature will remain unsolved. There will be that in him yet which
+physical laws will fail to explain--that something, whatever it be, in
+himself and in the world, which science cannot fathom, and which
+suggests the unknown possibilities of his origin and his destiny. There
+will remain yet
+
+    Those obstinate questionings
+    Of sense and outward things;
+    Falling from us, vanishings--
+    Blank misgivings of a creature
+    Moving about in worlds not realised--
+    High instincts, before which our mortal nature
+    Doth tremble like a guilty thing surprised.
+
+There will remain
+
+    Those first affections--
+    Those shadowy recollections--
+    Which, be they what they may,
+    Are yet the fountain-light of all our day--
+    Are yet the master-light of all our seeing--
+    Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make
+    Our noisy years seem moments in the being
+            Of the Eternal Silence.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[A] It is objected that Geology is a science: yet that Geology cannot
+foretell the future changes of the earth's surface. Geology is not a
+century old, and its periods are measured by millions of years. Yet, if
+Geology cannot foretell future facts, it enabled Sir Roderick Murchison
+to foretell the discovery of Australian gold.
+
+[B] February 1864.
+
+
+
+
+TIMES OF ERASMUS AND LUTHER:
+
+THREE LECTURES
+
+DELIVERED AT NEWCASTLE, 1867.
+
+
+LECTURE I.
+
+Ladies and Gentlemen,--I do not know whether I have made a very wise
+selection in the subject which I have chosen for these Lectures. There
+was a time--a time which, measured by the years of our national life,
+was not so very long ago--when the serious thoughts of mankind were
+occupied exclusively by religion and politics. The small knowledge which
+they possessed of other things was tinctured by their speculative
+opinions on the relations of heaven and earth; and, down to the
+sixteenth century, art, science, scarcely even literature, existed in
+this country, except as, in some way or other, subordinate to theology.
+Philosophers--such philosophers as there were--obtained and half
+deserved the reputation of quacks and conjurors. Astronomy was confused
+with astrology. The physician's medicines were supposed to be powerless,
+unless the priests said prayers over them. The great lawyers, the
+ambassadors, the chief ministers of state, were generally bishops; even
+the fighting business was not entirely secular. Half-a-dozen Scotch
+prelates were killed at Flodden; and, late in the reign of Henry the
+Eighth, no fitter person could be found than Rowland Lee, Bishop of
+Coventry, to take command of the Welsh Marches, and harry the
+freebooters of Llangollen.
+
+Every single department of intellectual or practical life was penetrated
+with the beliefs, or was interwoven with the interests, of the clergy;
+and thus it was that, when differences of religious opinion arose, they
+split society to its foundations. The lines of cleavage penetrated
+everywhere, and there were no subjects whatever in which those who
+disagreed in theology possessed any common concern. When men
+quarrelled, they quarrelled altogether. The disturbers of settled
+beliefs were regarded as public enemies who had placed themselves beyond
+the pale of humanity, and were considered fit only to be destroyed like
+wild beasts, or trampled out like the seed of a contagion.
+
+Three centuries have passed over our heads since the time of which I am
+speaking, and the world is so changed that we can hardly recognise it as
+the same.
+
+The secrets of nature have been opened out to us on a thousand lines;
+and men of science of all creeds can pursue side by side their common
+investigations. Catholics, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Lutherans,
+Calvinists, contend with each other in honourable rivalry in arts, and
+literature, and commerce, and industry. They read the same books. They
+study at the same academies. They have seats in the same senates. They
+preside together on the judicial bench, and carry on, without jar or
+difference, the ordinary business of the country.
+
+Those who share the same pursuits are drawn in spite of themselves into
+sympathy and good-will. When they are in harmony in so large a part of
+their occupations, the points of remaining difference lose their venom.
+Those who thought they hated each other, unconsciously find themselves
+friends; and as far as it affects the world at large, the acrimony of
+controversy has almost disappeared.
+
+Imagine, if you can, a person being now put to death for a speculative
+theological opinion. You feel at once, that in the most bigoted country
+in the world such a thing has become impossible; and the impossibility
+is the measure of the alteration which we have all undergone. The
+formulas remain as they were on either side--the very same formulas
+which were once supposed to require these detestable murders. But we
+have learnt to know each other better. The cords which bind together the
+brotherhood of mankind are woven of a thousand strands. We do not any
+more fly apart or become enemies, because, here and there, in one strand
+out of so many, there are still unsound places.
+
+If I were asked for a distinct proof that Europe was improving and not
+retrograding, I should find it in this phenomenon. It has not been
+brought about by controversy. Men are fighting still over the same
+questions which they began to fight about at the Reformation. Protestant
+divines have not driven Catholics out of the field, nor Catholics,
+Protestants. Each polemic writes for his own partisans, and makes no
+impression on his adversary.
+
+Controversy has kept alive a certain quantity of bitterness; and that, I
+suspect, is all that it would accomplish if it continued till the day of
+judgment. I sometimes, in impatient moments, wish the laity in Europe
+would treat their controversial divines as two gentlemen once treated
+their seconds, when they found themselves forced into a duel without
+knowing what they were quarrelling about.
+
+As the principals were being led up to their places, one of them
+whispered to the other, 'If you will shoot your second, I will shoot
+mine.'
+
+The reconciliation of parties, if I may use such a word, is no
+tinkered-up truce, or convenient Interim. It is the healthy, silent,
+spontaneous growth of a nobler order of conviction, which has conquered
+our prejudices even before we knew that they were assailed. This better
+spirit especially is represented in institutions like this, which
+acknowledge no differences of creed--which are constructed on the
+broadest principles of toleration--and which, therefore, as a rule, are
+wisely protected from the intrusion of discordant subjects.
+
+They exist, as I understand, to draw men together, not to divide
+them--to enable us to share together in those topics of universal
+interest and instruction which all can take pleasure in, and which give
+offence to none.
+
+If you ask me, then, why I am myself departing from a practice which I
+admit to be so excellent, I fear that I shall give you rather a lame
+answer. I might say that I know more about the history of the sixteenth
+century than I know about anything else. I have spent the best years of
+my life in reading and writing about it; and if I have anything to tell
+you worth your hearing, it is probably on that subject.
+
+Or, again, I might say--which is indeed most true--that to the
+Reformation we can trace, indirectly, the best of those very influences
+which I have been describing. The Reformation broke the theological
+shackles in which men's minds were fettered. It set them thinking, and
+so gave birth to science. The Reformers also, without knowing what they
+were about, taught the lesson of religious toleration. They attempted to
+supersede one set of dogmas by another. They succeeded with half the
+world--they failed with the other half. In a little while it became
+apparent that good men--without ceasing to be good--could think
+differently about theology, and that goodness, therefore, depended on
+something else than the holding orthodox opinions.
+
+It is not, however, for either of these reasons that I am going to talk
+to you about Martin Luther; nor is toleration of differences of opinion,
+however excellent it be, the point on which I shall dwell in these
+Lectures.
+
+Were the Reformation a question merely of opinion, I for one should not
+have meddled with it, either here or anywhere. I hold that, on the
+obscure mysteries of faith, every one should be allowed to believe
+according to his conscience, and that arguments on such matters are
+either impertinent or useless.
+
+But the Reformation, gentlemen, beyond the region of opinions, was a
+historical fact--an objective something which may be studied like any of
+the facts of nature. The Reformers were men of note and distinction, who
+played a great part for good or evil on the stage of the world. If we
+except the Apostles, no body of human beings ever printed so deep a mark
+into the organisation of society; and if there be any value or meaning
+in history at all, the lives, the actions, the characters of such men as
+these can be matters of indifference to none of us.
+
+We have not to do with a story which is buried in obscure antiquity. The
+facts admit of being learnt. The truth, whatever it was, concerns us all
+equally. If the divisions created by that great convulsion are ever to
+be obliterated, it will be when we have learnt, each of us, to see the
+thing as it really was, and not rather some mythical or imaginative
+version of the thing--such as from our own point of view we like to
+think it was. Fiction in such matters may be convenient for our
+immediate theories, but it is certain to avenge itself in the end. We
+may make our own opinions, but facts were made for us; and if we evade
+or deny them, it will be the worse for us.
+
+Unfortunately, the mythical version at present very largely
+preponderates. Open a Protestant history of the Reformation, and you
+will find a picture of the world given over to a lying tyranny--the
+Christian population of Europe enslaved by a corrupt and degraded
+priesthood, and the Reformers, with the Bible in their hands, coming to
+the rescue like angels of light. All is black on one side--all is fair
+and beautiful on the other.
+
+Turn to a Catholic history of the same events and the same men, and we
+have before us the Church of the Saints fulfilling quietly its blessed
+mission in the saving of human souls. Satan a second time enters into
+Paradise, and a second time with fatal success tempts miserable man to
+his ruin. He disbelieves his appointed teachers, he aspires after
+forbidden knowledge, and at once anarchy breaks loose. The seamless robe
+of the Saviour is rent in pieces, and the earth becomes the habitation
+of fiends.
+
+Each side tells the story as it prefers to have it; facts, characters,
+circumstances, are melted in the theological crucible, and cast in
+moulds diametrically opposite. Nothing remains the same except the names
+and dates. Each side chooses its own witnesses. Everything is credible
+which makes for what it calls the truth. Everything is made false which
+will not fit into its place. 'Blasphemous fables' is the usual
+expression in Protestant controversial books for the accounts given by
+Catholics. 'Protestant tradition,' says an eminent modern Catholic, 'is
+based on lying--bold, wholesale, unscrupulous lying.'
+
+Now, depend upon it, there is some human account of the matter different
+from both these if we could only get at it, and it will be an excellent
+thing for the world when that human account can be made out. I am not so
+presumptuous as to suppose that I can give it to you; still less can you
+expect me to try to do so within the compass of two or three lectures.
+If I cannot do everything, however, I believe I can do a little; at any
+rate I can give you a sketch, such as you may place moderate confidence
+in, of the state of the Church as it was before the Reformation began. I
+will not expose myself more than I can help to the censure of the divine
+who was so hard on Protestant tradition. Most of what I shall have to
+say to you this evening will be taken from the admissions of Catholics
+themselves, or from official records earlier than the outbreak of the
+controversy, when there was no temptation to pervert the truth.
+
+Here, obviously, is the first point on which we require accurate
+information. If all was going on well, the Reformers really and truly
+told innumerable lies, and deserve all the reprobation which we can give
+them. If all was not going on well--if, so far from being well, the
+Church was so corrupt that Europe could bear with it no longer--then
+clearly a Reformation was necessary of some kind; and we have taken one
+step towards a fair estimate of the persons concerned in it.
+
+A fair estimate--that, and only that, is what we want. I need hardly
+observe to you, that opinion in England has been undergoing lately a
+very considerable alteration about these persons.
+
+Two generations ago, the leading Reformers were looked upon as little
+less than saints; now a party has risen up who intend, as they frankly
+tell us, to un-Protestantise the Church of England, who detest
+Protestantism as a kind of infidelity, who desire simply to reverse
+everything which the Reformers did.
+
+One of these gentlemen, a clergyman, writing lately of Luther, called
+him a heretic, a heretic fit only to be ranked with--whom, do you
+think?--Joe Smith, the Mormon Prophet. Joe Smith and Luther--that is the
+combination with which we are now presented.
+
+The book in which this remarkable statement appeared was presented by
+two bishops to the Upper House of Convocation. It was received with
+gracious acknowledgments by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and was placed
+solemnly in the library of reference, for that learned body to consult.
+
+So, too, a professor at Oxford, the other day, spoke of Luther as a
+Philistine--a Philistine meaning an oppressor of the chosen people; the
+enemy of men of culture, of intelligence, such as the professor himself.
+
+One notices these things, not as of much importance in themselves, but
+as showing which way the stream is running; and, curiously enough, in
+quite another direction we may see the same phenomenon. Our liberal
+philosophers, men of high literary power and reputation, looking into
+the history of Luther, and Calvin, and John Knox, and the rest, find
+them falling far short of the philosophic ideal--wanting sadly in many
+qualities which the liberal mind cannot dispense with. They are
+discovered to be intolerant, dogmatic, narrow-minded, inclined to
+persecute Catholics as Catholics had persecuted them; to be, in fact,
+little if at all better than the popes and cardinals whom they were
+fighting against.
+
+Lord Macaulay can hardly find epithets strong enough to express his
+contempt for Archbishop Cranmer. Mr. Buckle places Cranmer by the side
+of Bonner, and hesitates which of the two characters is the more
+detestable.
+
+An unfavourable estimate of the Reformers, whether just or unjust, is
+unquestionably gaining ground among our advanced thinkers. A greater man
+than either Macaulay or Buckle--the German poet, Goethe--says of Luther,
+that he threw back the intellectual progress of mankind for centuries,
+by calling in the passions of the multitude to decide on subjects which
+ought to have been left to the learned. Goethe, in saying this, was
+alluding especially to Erasmus. Goethe thought that Erasmus, and men
+like Erasmus, had struck upon the right track; and if they could have
+retained the direction of the mind of Europe, there would have been more
+truth, and less falsehood, among us at this present time. The party
+hatreds, the theological rivalries, the persecutions, the civil wars,
+the religious animosities which have so long distracted us, would have
+been all avoided, and the mind of mankind would have expanded gradually
+and equably with the growth of knowledge.
+
+Such an opinion, coming from so great a man, is not to be lightly passed
+over. It will be my endeavour to show you what kind of man Erasmus was,
+what he was aiming at, what he was doing, and how Luther spoilt his
+work--if spoiling is the word which we are to use for it.
+
+One caution, however, I must in fairness give you before we proceed
+further. It lies upon the face of the story, that the Reformers
+imperfectly understood toleration; but you must keep before you the
+spirit and temper of the men with whom they had to deal. For themselves,
+when the movement began, they aimed at nothing but liberty to think and
+speak their own way. They never dreamt of interfering with others,
+although they were quite aware that others, when they could, were likely
+to interfere with them. Lord Macaulay might have remembered that Cranmer
+was working all his life with the prospect of being burnt alive as his
+reward--and, as we all know, he actually was burnt alive.
+
+When the Protestant teaching began first to spread in the
+Netherlands--before one single Catholic had been illtreated there,
+before a symptom of a mutinous disposition had shown itself among the
+people, an edict was issued by the authorities for the suppression of
+the new opinions.
+
+The terms of this edict I will briefly describe to you.
+
+The inhabitants of the United Provinces were informed that they were to
+hold and believe the doctrines of the Holy Roman Catholic Church. 'Men
+and women,' says the edict, 'who disobey this command shall be punished
+as disturbers of public order. Women who have fallen into heresy shall
+be buried alive. Men, if they recant, shall lose their heads. If they
+continue obstinate, they shall be burnt at the stake.
+
+'If man or woman be suspected of heresy, no one shall shelter or protect
+him or her; and no stranger shall be admitted to lodge in any inn or
+dwelling-house unless he bring with him a testimonial of orthodoxy from
+the priest of his parish.
+
+'The Inquisition shall enquire into the private opinions of every
+person, of whatever degree; and all officers of all kinds shall assist
+the Inquisition at their peril. Those who know where heretics are
+concealed, shall denounce them, or they shall suffer as heretics
+themselves. Heretics (observe the malignity of this paragraph)--heretics
+who will give up other heretics to justice, shall themselves be pardoned
+if they will promise to conform for the future.'
+
+Under this edict, in the Netherlands alone, more than fifty thousand
+human beings, first and last, were deliberately murdered. And,
+gentlemen, I must say that proceedings of this kind explain and go far
+to excuse the subsequent intolerance of Protestants.
+
+Intolerance, Mr. Gibbon tells us, is a greater crime in a Protestant
+than a Catholic. Criminal intolerance, as I understand it, is the
+intolerance of such an edict as that which I have read to you--the
+unprovoked intolerance of difference of opinion. I conceive that the
+most enlightened philosopher might have grown hard and narrow-minded if
+he had suffered under the administration of the Duke of Alva.
+
+Dismissing these considerations, I will now go on with my subject.
+
+Never in all their history, in ancient times or modern, never that we
+know of, have mankind thrown out of themselves anything so grand, so
+useful, so beautiful, as the Catholic Church once was. In these times of
+ours, well-regulated selfishness is the recognised rule of action--every
+one of us is expected to look out first for himself, and take care of
+his own interests. At the time I speak of, the Church ruled the State
+with the authority of a conscience; and self-interest, as a motive of
+action, was only named to be abhorred. The bishops and clergy were
+regarded freely and simply as the immediate ministers of the Almighty;
+and they seem to me to have really deserved that high estimate of their
+character. It was not for the doctrines which they taught, only or
+chiefly, that they were held in honour. Brave men do not fall down
+before their fellow-mortals for the words which they speak, or for the
+rites which they perform. Wisdom, justice, self-denial, nobleness,
+purity, highmindedness,--these are the qualities before which the
+free-born races of Europe have been contented to bow; and in no order of
+men were such qualities to be found as they were found six hundred years
+ago in the clergy of the Catholic Church. They called themselves the
+successors of the Apostles. They claimed in their Master's name
+universal spiritual authority, but they made good their pretensions by
+the holiness of their own lives. They were allowed to rule because they
+deserved to rule, and in the fulness of reverence kings and nobles bent
+before a power which was nearer to God than their own. Over prince and
+subject, chieftain and serf, a body of unarmed defenceless men reigned
+supreme by the magic of sanctity. They tamed the fiery northern warriors
+who had broken in pieces the Roman Empire. They taught them--they
+brought them really and truly to believe--that they had immortal souls,
+and that they would one day stand at the awful judgment bar and give
+account for their lives there. With the brave, the honest, and the
+good--with those who had not oppressed the poor nor removed their
+neighbour's landmark--with those who had been just in all their
+dealings--with those who had fought against evil, and had tried
+valiantly to do their Master's will,--at that great day, it would be
+well. For cowards, for profligates, for those who lived for luxury and
+pleasure and self-indulgence, there was the blackness of eternal death.
+
+An awful conviction of this tremendous kind the clergy had effectually
+instilled into the mind of Europe. It was not a PERHAPS; it was a
+certainty. It was not a form of words repeated once a week at church; it
+was an assurance entertained on all days and in all places, without any
+particle of doubt. And the effect of such a belief on life and
+conscience was simply immeasurable.
+
+I do not pretend that the clergy were perfect. They were very far from
+perfect at the best of times, and the European nations were never
+completely submissive to them. It would not have been well if they had
+been. The business of human creatures in this planet is not summed up in
+the most excellent of priestly catechisms. The world and its concerns
+continued to interest men, though priests insisted on their nothingness.
+They could not prevent kings from quarrelling with each other. They
+could not hinder disputed successions, and civil feuds, and wars, and
+political conspiracies. What they did do was to shelter the weak from
+the strong. In the eyes of the clergy, the serf and his lord stood on
+the common level of sinful humanity. Into their ranks high birth was no
+passport. They were themselves for the most part children of the people;
+and the son of the artisan or peasant rose to the mitre and the triple
+crown, just as nowadays the rail-splitter and the tailor become
+Presidents of the Republic of the West.
+
+The Church was essentially democratic, while at the same time it had the
+monopoly of learning; and all the secular power fell to it which
+learning, combined with sanctity and assisted by superstition, can
+bestow.
+
+The privileges of the clergy were extraordinary. They were not amenable
+to the common laws of the land. While they governed the laity, the laity
+had no power over them. From the throne downwards, every secular office
+was dependent on the Church. No king was a lawful sovereign till the
+Church placed the crown upon his head: and what the Church bestowed, the
+Church claimed the right to take away. The disposition of property was
+in their hands. No will could be proved except before the bishop or his
+officer; and no will was held valid if the testator died out of
+communion. There were magistrates and courts of law for the offences of
+the laity. If a priest committed a crime, he was a sacred person. The
+civil power could not touch him; he was reserved for his ordinary.
+Bishops' commissaries sate in town and city, taking cognizance of the
+moral conduct of every man and woman. Offences against life and property
+were tried here in England, as now, by the common law; but the Church
+Courts dealt with sins--sins of word or act. If a man was a profligate
+or a drunkard; if he lied or swore; if he did not come to communion, or
+held unlawful opinions; if he was idle or unthrifty; if he was unkind
+to his wife or his servants; if a child was disobedient to his father,
+or a father cruel to his child; if a tradesman sold adulterated wares,
+or used false measures or dishonest weights,--the eye of the parish
+priest was everywhere, and the Church Court stood always open to examine
+and to punish.
+
+Imagine what a tremendous power this must have been! Yet it existed
+generally in Catholic Europe down to the eve of the Reformation. It
+could never have established itself at all unless at one time it had
+worked beneficially--as the abuse of it was one of the most fatal causes
+of the Church's fall.
+
+I know nothing in English history much more striking than the answer
+given by Archbishop Warham to the complaints of the English House of
+Commons after the fall of Cardinal Wolsey. The House of Commons
+complained that the clergy made laws in Convocation which the laity were
+excommunicated if they disobeyed. Yet the laws made by the clergy, the
+Commons said, were often at variance with the laws of the realm.
+
+What did Warham reply? He said he was sorry for the alleged discrepancy;
+but, inasmuch as the laws made by the clergy were always in conformity
+with the will of God, the laws of the realm had only to be altered and
+then the difficulty would vanish.
+
+What must have been the position of the clergy in the fulness of their
+power, when they could speak thus on the eve of their prostration? You
+have only to look from a distance at any old-fashioned cathedral city,
+and you will see in a moment the mediæval relations between Church and
+State. The cathedral _is_ the city. The first object you catch sight of
+as you approach is the spire tapering into the sky, or the huge towers
+holding possession of the centre of the landscape--majestically
+beautiful--imposing by mere size amidst the large forms of Nature
+herself. As you go nearer, the vastness of the building impresses you
+more and more. The puny dwelling-place of the citizens creep at its
+feet, the pinnacles are glittering in the tints of the sunset, when down
+below among the streets and lanes the twilight is darkening. And even
+now, when the towns are thrice their ancient size, and the houses have
+stretched upwards from two stories to five; when the great chimneys are
+vomiting their smoke among the clouds, and the temples of modern
+industry--the workshops and the factories--spread their long fronts
+before the eye, the cathedral is still the governing form in the
+picture--the one object which possesses the imagination and refuses to
+be eclipsed.
+
+As that cathedral was to the old town, so was the Church of the middle
+ages to the secular institutions of the world. Its very neighbourhood
+was sacred; and its shadow, like the shadow of the Apostles, was a
+sanctuary. When I look at the new Houses of Parliament in London, I see
+in them a type of the change which has passed over us. The House of
+Commons of the Plantagenets sate in the Chapter House of Westminster
+Abbey. The Parliament of the Reform Bill, five-and-thirty years ago,
+debated in St. Stephen's Chapel, the Abbey's small dependency. Now, by
+the side of the enormous pile which has risen out of that chapel's
+ashes, the proud Minster itself is dwarfed into insignificance.
+
+Let us turn to another vast feature of the middle ages--I mean the
+monasteries.
+
+Some person of especial and exceptional holiness has lived or died at a
+particular spot. He has been distinguished by his wisdom, by his piety,
+by his active benevolence; and in an age when conjurors and witches were
+supposed to be helped by the devil to do evil, he, on his part, has been
+thought to have possessed in larger measure than common men the favour
+and the grace of heaven. Blessed influences hang about the spot which he
+has hallowed by his presence. His relics--his household possessions, his
+books, his clothes, his bones, retain the shadowy sanctity which they
+received in having once belonged to him. We all set a value, not wholly
+unreal, on anything which has been the property of a remarkable man. At
+worst, it is but an exaggeration of natural reverence.
+
+Well, as nowadays we build monuments to great men, so in the middle ages
+they built shrines or chapels on the spots which saints had made holy,
+and communities of pious people gathered together there--beginning with
+the personal friends the saint had left behind him--to try to live as he
+had lived, to do good as he had done good, and to die as he had died.
+Thus arose religious fraternities--companies of men who desired to
+devote themselves to goodness--to give up pleasure, and amusement, and
+self-indulgence, and to spend their lives in prayer and works of
+charity.
+
+These houses became centres of pious beneficence. The monks, as the
+brotherhoods were called, were organised in different orders, with some
+variety of rule, but the broad principle was the same in all. They were
+to live for others, not for themselves. They took vows of poverty, that
+they might not be entangled in the pursuit of money. They took vows of
+chastity, that the care of a family might not distract them from the
+work which they had undertaken. Their efforts of charity were not
+limited to this world. Their days were spent in hard bodily labour, in
+study, or in visiting the sick. At night they were on the stone-floors
+of their chapels, holding up their withered hands to heaven, interceding
+for the poor souls who were suffering in purgatory.
+
+The world, as it always will, paid honour to exceptional excellence. The
+system spread to the furthest limits of Christendom. The religious
+houses became places of refuge, where men of noble birth, kings and
+queens and emperors, warriors and statesmen, retired to lay down their
+splendid cares, and end their days in peace. Those with whom the world
+had dealt hardly, or those whom it had surfeited with its unsatisfying
+pleasures, those who were disappointed with earth, and those who were
+filled with passionate aspirations after heaven, alike found a haven of
+rest in the quiet cloister. And, gradually, lands came to them, and
+wealth, and social dignity--all gratefully extended to men who deserved
+so well of their fellows; while no landlords were more popular than
+they, for the sanctity of the monks sheltered their dependents as well
+as themselves.
+
+Travel now through Ireland, and you will see in the wildest parts of it
+innumerable remains of religious houses, which had grown up among a
+people who acknowledged no rule among themselves except the sword, and
+where every chief made war upon his neighbour as the humour seized him.
+The monks among the O's and the Mac's were as defenceless as sheep among
+the wolves; but the wolves spared them for their character. In such a
+country as Ireland then was, the monasteries could not have survived for
+a generation but for the enchanted atmosphere which surrounded them.
+
+Of authority, the religious orders were practically independent. They
+were amenable only to the Pope and to their own superiors. Here in
+England, the king could not send a commissioner to inspect a monastery,
+nor even send a policeman to arrest a criminal who had taken shelter
+within its walls. Archbishops and bishops, powerful as they were, found
+their authority cease when they entered the gates of a Benedictine or
+Dominican abbey.
+
+So utterly have times changed, that with your utmost exertions you will
+hardly be able to picture to yourselves the Catholic Church in the days
+of its greatness. Our school-books tell us how the Emperor of Germany
+held the stirrup for Pope Gregory the Seventh to mount his mule; how our
+own English Henry Plantagenet walked barefoot through the streets of
+Canterbury, and knelt in the Chapter House for the monks to flog him.
+The first of these incidents, I was brought up to believe, proved the
+Pope to be the Man of Sin. Anyhow, they are both facts, and not
+romances; and you may form some notion from them how high in the world's
+eyes the Church must have stood.
+
+And be sure it did not achieve that proud position without deserving it.
+The Teutonic and Latin princes were not credulous fools; and when they
+submitted, it was to something stronger than themselves--stronger in
+limb and muscle, or stronger in intellect and character.
+
+So the Church was in its vigour: so the Church was _not_ at the opening
+of the sixteenth century. Power--wealth--security--men are more than
+mortal if they can resist the temptations to which too much of these
+expose them. Nor were they the only enemies which undermined the
+energies of the Catholic clergy. Churches exist in this world to remind
+us of the eternal laws which we are bound to obey. So far as they do
+this, they fulfil their end, and are honoured in fulfilling it. It would
+have been better for all of us--it would be better for us now, could
+Churches keep this their peculiar function steadily and singly before
+them. Unfortunately, they have preferred in later times the speculative
+side of things to the practical. They take up into their teaching
+opinions and theories which are merely ephemeral; which would naturally
+die out with the progress of knowledge; but, having received a spurious
+sanctity, prolong their days unseasonably, and become first unmeaning,
+and then occasions of superstition.
+
+It matters little whether I say a paternoster in English or Latin, so
+that what is present to my mind is the thought which the words express,
+and not the words themselves. In these and all languages it is the most
+beautiful of prayers. But you know that people came to look on a Latin
+paternoster as the most powerful of spells--potent in heaven, if said
+straightforward; if repeated backward, a charm which no spirit in hell
+could resist.
+
+So it is, in my opinion, with all forms--forms of words, or forms of
+ceremony and ritualism. While the meaning is alive in them, they are not
+only harmless, but pregnant and life-giving. When we come to think that
+they possess in themselves material and magical virtues, then the
+purpose which they answer is to hide God from us and make us practically
+into Atheists.
+
+This is what I believe to have gradually fallen upon the Catholic Church
+in the generations which preceded Luther. The body remained; the mind
+was gone away: the original thought which its symbolism represented was
+no longer credible to intelligent persons.
+
+The acute were conscious unbelievers. In Italy, when men went to mass
+they spoke of it as going to a comedy. You may have heard the story of
+Luther in his younger days saying mass at an altar in Rome, and hearing
+his fellow-priests muttering at the consecration of the Eucharist,
+'Bread thou art, and bread thou wilt remain.'
+
+Part of the clergy were profane scoundrels like these; the rest repeated
+the words of the service, conceiving that they were working a charm.
+Religion was passing through the transformation which all religions have
+a tendency to undergo. They cease to be aids and incentives to holy
+life; they become contrivances rather to enable men to sin, and escape
+the penalties of sin. Obedience to the law is dispensed with if men will
+diligently profess certain opinions, or punctually perform certain
+external duties. However scandalous the moral life, the participation of
+a particular rite, or the profession of a particular belief, at the
+moment of death, is held to clear the score.
+
+The powers which had been given to the clergy required for their
+exercise the highest wisdom and the highest probity. They had fallen at
+last into the hands of men who possessed considerably less of these
+qualities than the laity whom they undertook to govern. They had
+degraded their conceptions of God; and, as a necessary consequence, they
+had degraded their conceptions of man and man's duty. The aspirations
+after sanctity had disappeared, and instead of them there remained the
+practical reality of the five senses. The high prelates, the cardinals,
+the great abbots, were occupied chiefly in maintaining their splendour
+and luxury. The friars and the secular clergy, following their superiors
+with shorter steps, indulged themselves in grosser pleasures; while
+their spiritual powers, their supposed authority in this world and the
+next, were turned to account to obtain from the laity the means for
+their self-indulgence.
+
+The Church forbade the eating of meat on fast days, but the Church was
+ready with dispensations for those who could afford to pay for them. The
+Church forbade marriage to the fourth degree of consanguinity, but
+loving cousins, if they were rich and open-handed, could obtain the
+Church's consent to their union. There were toll-gates for the priests
+at every halting-place on the road of life--fees at weddings, fees at
+funerals, fees whenever an excuse could be found to fasten them. Even
+when a man was dead he was not safe from plunder, for a mortuary or
+death present was exacted of his family.
+
+And then those Bishop's Courts, of which I spoke just now: they were
+founded for the discipline of morality--they were made the instruments
+of the most detestable extortion. If an impatient layman spoke a
+disrespectful word of the clergy, he was cited before the bishop's
+commissary and fined. If he refused to pay, he was excommunicated, and
+excommunication was a poisonous disease. When a poor wretch was under
+the ban of the Church no tradesman might sell him clothes or food--no
+friend might relieve him--no human voice might address him, under pain
+of the same sentence; and if he died unreconciled, he died like a dog,
+without the sacraments, and was refused Christian burial.
+
+The records of some of these courts survive: a glance at their pages
+will show the principles on which they were worked. When a layman
+offended, the single object was to make him pay for it. The magistrates
+could not protect him. If he resisted, and his friends supported him, so
+much the better, for they were now all in the scrape together. The next
+step would be to indict them in a body for heresy; and then, of course,
+there was nothing for it but to give way, and compound for absolution by
+money.
+
+It was money--ever money. Even in case of real delinquency, it was
+still money. Money, not charity, covered the multitude of sins.
+
+I have told you that the clergy were exempt from secular jurisdiction.
+They claimed to be amenable only to spiritual judges, and they extended
+the broad fringe of their order till the word clerk was construed to
+mean any one who could write his name or read a sentence from a book. A
+robber or a murderer at the assizes had but to show that he possessed
+either of these qualifications, and he was allowed what was called
+benefit of clergy. His case was transferred to the Bishops' Court, to an
+easy judge, who allowed him at once to compound.
+
+Such were the clergy in matters of this world. As religious instructors,
+they appear in colours if possible less attractive.
+
+Practical religion throughout Europe at the beginning of the sixteenth
+century was a very simple affair. I am not going to speak of the
+mysterious doctrines of the Catholic Church. The creed which it
+professed in its schools and theological treatises was the same which it
+professes now, and which it had professed at the time when it was most
+powerful for good. I do not myself consider that the formulas in which
+men express their belief are of much consequence. The question is rather
+of the thing expressed; and so long as we find a living consciousness
+that above the world and above human life there is a righteous God, who
+will judge men according to their works, whether they say their prayers
+in Latin or English, whether they call themselves Protestants or call
+themselves Catholics, appears to me of quite secondary importance. But
+at the time I speak of, that consciousness no longer existed. The
+formulas and ceremonies were all in all; and of God it is hard to say
+what conceptions men had formed, when they believed that a dead man's
+relations could buy him out of purgatory--buy him out of purgatory,--for
+this was the literal truth--by hiring priests to sing masses for his
+soul.
+
+Religion, in the minds of ordinary people, meant that the keys of the
+other world were held by the clergy. If a man confessed regularly to his
+priest, received the sacrament, and was absolved, then all was well with
+him. His duties consisted in going to confession and to mass. If he
+committed sins, he was prescribed penances, which could be commuted for
+money. If he was sick or ill at ease in his mind, he was recommended a
+pilgrimage--a pilgrimage to a shrine or a holy well, or to some
+wonder-working image--where, for due consideration, his case would be
+attended to. It was no use to go to a saint empty-handed. The rule of
+the Church was, nothing for nothing. At a chapel in Saxony there was an
+image of a Virgin and Child. If the worshipper came to it with a good
+handsome offering, the child bowed and was gracious: if the present was
+unsatisfactory, it turned away its head, and withheld its favours till
+the purse-strings were untied again.
+
+There was a great rood or crucifix of the same kind at Boxley, in Kent,
+where the pilgrims went in thousands. This figure used to bow, too, when
+it was pleased; and a good sum of money was sure to secure its
+good-will.
+
+When the Reformation came, and the police looked into the matter, the
+images were found to be worked with wires and pulleys. The German lady
+was kept as a curiosity in the cabinet of the Elector of Saxony. Our
+Boxley rood was brought up and exhibited in Cheapside, and was
+afterwards torn in pieces by the people.
+
+Nor here again was death the limit of extortion: death was rather the
+gate of the sphere which the clergy made, peculiarly their own. When a
+man died, his friends were naturally anxious for the fate of his soul.
+If he died in communion, he was not in the worst place of all. He had
+not been a saint, and therefore he was not in the best. Therefore he was
+in purgatory--Purgatory Pickpurse, as our English Latimer called it--and
+a priest, if properly paid, could get him out.
+
+To be a mass priest, as it was called, was a regular profession, in
+which, with little trouble, a man could earn a comfortable living. He
+had only to be ordained and to learn by heart a certain form of words,
+and that was all the equipment necessary for him. The masses were paid
+for at so much a dozen, and for every mass that was said, so many years
+were struck off from the penal period. Two priests were sometimes to be
+seen muttering away at the opposite ends of the same altar, like a
+couple of musical boxes playing different parts of the same tune at the
+same time. It made no difference. The upper powers had what they wanted.
+If they got the masses, and the priests got the money, all parties
+concerned were satisfied.
+
+I am speaking of the form which these things assumed in an age of
+degradation and ignorance. The truest and wisest words ever spoken by
+man might be abused in the same way.
+
+The Sermon on the Mount or the Apostles' Creed, if recited mechanically,
+and relied on to work a mechanical effort, would be no less perniciously
+idolatrous.
+
+You can see something of the same kind in a milder form in Spain at the
+present day. The Spaniards, all of them, high and low, are expected to
+buy annually a Pope's Bula or Bull--a small pardon, or indulgence, or
+plenary remission of sins. The exact meaning of these things is a little
+obscure; the high authorities themselves do not universally agree about
+them, except so far as to say that they are of prodigious value of some
+sort. The orthodox explanation, I believe, is something of this kind.
+With every sin there is the moral guilt and the temporal penalty. The
+pardon cannot touch the guilt; but when the guilt is remitted, there is
+still the penalty. I may ruin my health by a dissolute life; I may
+repent of my dissoluteness and be forgiven; but the bad health will
+remain. For bad health, substitute penance in this world and purgatory
+in the next; and in this sphere the indulgence takes effect.
+
+Such as they are, at any rate, everybody in Spain has these bulls; you
+buy them in the shops for a shilling apiece.
+
+This is one form of the thing. Again, at the door of a Spanish church
+you will see hanging on the wall an intimation that whoever will pray so
+many hours before a particular image shall receive full forgiveness of
+his sins. Having got that, one might suppose he would be satisfied; but
+no--if he prays so many more hours, he can get off a hundred years of
+purgatory, or a thousand, or ten thousand. In one place I remember
+observing that for a very little trouble a man could escape a hundred
+and fifty thousand years of purgatory.
+
+What a prospect for the ill-starred Protestant, who will be lucky if he
+is admitted into purgatory at all!
+
+Again, if you enter a sacristy, you will see a small board like the
+notices addressed to parishioners in our vestries. On particular days it
+is taken out and hung up in the church, and little would a stranger,
+ignorant of the language, guess the tremendous meaning of that
+commonplace appearance. On these boards is written 'Hoy se sacan
+animas,'--'This day, souls are taken out of purgatory.' It is an
+intimation to every one with a friend in distress that now is his time.
+You put a shilling in a plate, you give your friend's name, and the
+thing is done. One wonders why, if purgatory can be sacked so easily,
+any poor wretch is left to suffer there.
+
+Such practices nowadays are comparatively innocent, the money asked and
+given is trifling, and probably no one concerned in the business
+believes much about it. They serve to show, however, on a small scale,
+what once went on on an immense scale; and even such as they are, pious
+Catholics do not much approve of them. They do not venture to say much
+on the subject directly, but they allow themselves a certain
+good-humoured ridicule. A Spanish novelist of some reputation tells a
+story of a man coming to a priest on one of these occasions, putting a
+shilling in the plate, and giving in the name of his friend.
+
+'Is my friend's soul out?' he asked. The priest said it was. 'Quite
+sure?' the man asked. 'Quite sure,' the priest answered. 'Very well,'
+said the man, 'if he is out of purgatory they will not put him in again:
+it is a bad shilling.'
+
+Sadder than all else, even as the most beautiful things are worst in
+their degradation, was the condition of the monasteries. I am here on
+delicate ground. The accounts of those institutions, as they existed in
+England and Germany at the time of their suppression, is so shocking
+that even impartial writers have hesitated to believe the reports which
+have come down to us. The laity, we are told, determined to appropriate
+the abbey lands, and maligned the monks to justify the spoliation. Were
+the charge true, the religious orders would still be without excuse, for
+the whole education of the country was in the hands of the clergy; and
+they had allowed a whole generation to grow up, which, on this
+hypothesis, was utterly depraved.
+
+But no such theory can explain away the accumulated testimony which
+comes to us--exactly alike--from so many sides and witnesses. We are not
+dependent upon evidence which Catholics can decline to receive. In the
+reign of our Henry the Seventh the notorious corruption of some of the
+great abbeys in England brought them under the notice of the Catholic
+Archbishop of Canterbury, Cardinal Morton. The archbishop, unable to
+meddle with them by his own authority, obtained the necessary powers
+from the Pope. He instituted a partial visitation in the neighbourhood
+of London; and the most malignant Protestant never drew such a picture
+of profligate brutality as Cardinal Morton left behind him in his
+Register, in a description of the great Abbey of St. Albans. I cannot,
+in a public lecture, give you the faintest idea of what it contains. The
+monks were bound to celibacy--that is to say, they were not allowed to
+marry. They were full-fed, idle, and sensual; of sin they thought only
+as something extremely pleasant, of which they could cleanse one another
+with a few mumbled words as easily as they could wash their faces in a
+basin. And there I must leave the matter. Anybody who is curious for
+particulars may see the original account in Morton's Register, in the
+Archbishop's library at Lambeth.
+
+A quarter of a century after this there appeared in Germany a book, now
+called by Catholics an infamous libel, the 'Epistolæ Obscurorum
+Virorum.' 'The obscure men,' supposed to be the writers of these
+epistles, are monks or students of theology. The letters themselves are
+written in dog-Latin--a burlesque of the language in which
+ecclesiastical people then addressed each other. They are sketches,
+satirical, but not malignant, of the moral and intellectual character of
+these reverend personages.
+
+On the moral, and by far the most important, side of the matter I am
+still obliged to be silent; but I can give you a few specimens of the
+furniture of the theological minds, and of the subjects with which they
+were occupied.
+
+A student writes to his ghostly father in an agony of distress because
+he has touched his hat to a Jew. He mistook him for a doctor of
+divinity; and on the whole, he fears he has committed mortal sin. Can
+the father absolve him? Can the bishop absolve him? Can the Pope absolve
+him? His case seems utterly desperate.
+
+Another letter describes a great intellectual riddle, which was argued
+for four days at the School of Logic at Louvaine. A certain Master of
+Arts had taken out his degree at Louvaine, Leyden, Paris, Oxford,
+Cambridge, Padua, and four other universities. He was thus a member of
+ten universities. But how _could_ a man be a member of ten universities?
+A university was a body, and one body might have many members; but how
+one member could have many bodies, passed comprehension. In such a
+monstrous anomaly, the member would be the body, and the universities
+the member, and this would be a scandal to such grave and learned
+corporations. The holy doctor St. Thomas himself could not make himself
+into the body of ten universities.
+
+The more the learned men argued, the deeper they floundered, and at
+length gave up the problem in despair.
+
+Again: a certain professor argues that Julius Cæsar could not have
+written the book which passes under the name of 'Cæsar's Commentaries,'
+because that book is written in Latin, and Latin is a difficult
+language; and a man whose life is spent in marching and fighting has
+notoriously no time to learn Latin.
+
+Here is another fellow--a monk this one--describing to a friend the
+wonderful things which he has seen in Rome.
+
+'You may have heard,' he says, 'how the Pope did possess a monstrous
+beast called an Elephant. The Pope did entertain for this beast a very
+great affection, and now behold it is dead. When it fell sick, the Pope
+called his doctors about him in great sorrow, and said to them, "If it
+be possible, heal my elephant." Then they gave the elephant a purge,
+which cost five hundred crowns, but it did not avail, and so the beast
+departed; and the Pope grieves much for his elephant, for it was indeed
+a miraculous beast, with a long, long, prodigious long nose; and when it
+saw the Pope it kneeled down before him and said, with a terrible voice,
+"Bar, bar, bar!"'
+
+I will not tire you with any more of this nonsense, especially as I
+cannot give you the really characteristic parts of the book.
+
+I want you to observe, however, what Sir Thomas More says of it, and
+nobody will question that Sir Thomas More was a good Catholic and a
+competent witness. 'These epistles,' he says, 'are the delight of
+everyone. The wise enjoy the wit; the blockheads of monks take them
+seriously, and believe that they have been written to do them honour.
+When we laugh, they think we are laughing at the style, which they admit
+to be comical. But they think the style is made up for by the beauty of
+the sentiment. The scabbard, they say, is rough, but the blade within it
+is divine. The deliberate idiots would not have found out the jest for
+themselves in a hundred years.'
+
+Well might Erasmus exclaim, 'What fungus could be more stupid? yet
+these are the Atlases who are to uphold the tottering Church!'
+
+'The monks had a pleasant time of it,' says Luther. 'Every brother had
+two cans of beer and a quart of wine for his supper, with gingerbread,
+to make him take to his liquor kindly. Thus the poor things came to look
+like fiery angels.'
+
+And more gravely, 'In the cloister rule the seven deadly
+sins--covetousness, lasciviousness, uncleanness, hate, envy, idleness,
+and the loathing of the service of God.'
+
+Consider such men as these owning a third, a half, sometimes two-thirds
+of the land in every country in Europe, and, in addition to their other
+sins, neglecting all the duties attaching to this property--the woods
+cut down and sold, the houses falling to ruin--unthrift, neglect, waste
+everywhere and in everything--the shrewd making the most of their time,
+which they had sense to see might be a short one--the rest dreaming on
+in sleepy sensuality, dividing their hours between the chapel, the
+pothouse, and the brothel.
+
+I do not think that, in its main features, the truth of this sketch can
+be impugned; and if it be just even in outline, then a reformation of
+some kind or other was overwhelmingly necessary. Corruption beyond a
+certain point becomes unendurable to the coarsest nostril. The
+constitution of human things cannot away with it.
+
+Something was to be done; but what, or how? There were three possible
+courses.
+
+Either the ancient discipline of the Church might be restored by the
+heads of the Church themselves.
+
+Or, secondly, a higher tone of feeling might gradually be introduced
+among clergy and laity alike, by education and literary culture. The
+discovery of the printing press had made possible a diffusion of
+knowledge which had been unattainable in earlier ages. The
+ecclesiastical constitution, like a sick human body, might recover its
+tone if a better diet were prepared for it.
+
+Or, lastly, the common sense of the laity might take the matter at once
+into their own hands, and make free use of the pruning knife and the
+sweeping brush. There might be much partial injustice, much violence,
+much wrongheadedness; but the people would, at any rate, go direct to
+the point, and the question was whether any other remedy would serve.
+
+The first of these alternatives may at once be dismissed. The heads of
+the Church were the last persons in the world to discover that anything
+was wrong. People of that sort always are. For them the thing as it
+existed answered excellently well. They had boundless wealth, and all
+but boundless power. What could they ask for more? No monk drowsing over
+his wine-pot was less disturbed by anxiety than nine out of ten of the
+high dignitaries who were living on the eve of the Judgment Day, and
+believed that their seat was established for them for ever.
+
+The character of the great ecclesiastics of that day you may infer from
+a single example. The Archbishop of Mayence was one of the most
+enlightened Churchmen in Germany. He was a patron of the Renaissance, a
+friend of Erasmus, a liberal, an intelligent, and, as times went, and
+considering his trade, an honourable, high-minded man.
+
+When the Emperor Maximilian died, and the imperial throne was vacant,
+the Archbishop of Mayence was one of seven electors who had to choose a
+new emperor.
+
+There were two competitors--Francis the First and Maximilian's grandson,
+afterwards the well-known Charles the Fifth.
+
+Well, of the seven electors six were bribed. John Frederick of Saxony,
+Luther's friend and protector, was the only one of the party who came
+out of the business with clean hands.
+
+But the Archbishop of Mayence took bribes six times alternately from
+both the candidates. He took money as coolly as the most rascally
+ten-pound householder in Yarmouth or Totnes, and finally drove a hard
+bargain for his actual vote.
+
+The grape does not grow upon the blackthorn; nor does healthy reform
+come from high dignitaries like the Archbishop of Mayence.
+
+The other aspect of the problem I shall consider in the following
+Lectures.
+
+
+LECTURE II.
+
+In the year 1467--the year in which Charles the Bold became Duke of
+Burgundy--four years before the great battle of Barnet, which
+established our own fourth Edward on the English throne--about the time
+when William Caxton was setting up his printing press at
+Westminster--there was born at Rotterdam, on the 28th of October,
+Desiderius Erasmus. His parents, who were middle-class people, were
+well-to-do in the world. For some reason or other they were prevented
+from marrying by the interference of relations. The father died soon
+after in a cloister; the mother was left with her illegitimate infant,
+whom she called first, after his father, Gerard; but afterwards, from
+his beauty and grace, she changed his name--the words Desiderius
+Erasmus, one with a Latin, the other with a Greek, derivation, meaning
+the lovely or delightful one.
+
+Not long after, the mother herself died also. The little Erasmus was the
+heir of a moderate fortune; and his guardians, desiring to appropriate
+it to themselves, endeavoured to force him into a convent at Brabant.
+
+The thought of living and dying in a house of religion was dreadfully
+unattractive; but an orphan boy's resistance was easily overcome. He was
+bullied into yielding, and, when about twenty, took the vows.
+
+The life of a monk, which was uninviting on the surface, was not more
+lovely when seen from within.
+
+'A monk's holy obedience,' Erasmus wrote afterwards, 'consists in--what?
+In leading an honest, chaste, and sober life? Not the least. In
+acquiring learning, in study, and industry? Still less. A monk may be a
+glutton, a drunkard, a whoremonger, an ignorant, stupid, malignant,
+envious brute, but he has broken no vow, he is within his holy
+obedience. He has only to be the slave of a superior as good for nothing
+as himself, and he is an excellent brother.'
+
+The misfortune of his position did not check Erasmus's intellectual
+growth. He was a brilliant, witty, sarcastic, mischievous youth. He did
+not trouble himself to pine and mope; but, like a young thorough-bred in
+a drove of asses, he used his heels pretty freely.
+
+While he played practical jokes upon the unreverend fathers, he
+distinguished himself equally by his appetite for knowledge. It was the
+dawn of the Renaissance--the revival of learning. The discovery of
+printing was reopening to modern Europe the great literature of Greece
+and Rome, and the writings of the Christian fathers. For studies of this
+kind, Erasmus, notwithstanding the disadvantages of cowl and frock,
+displayed extraordinary aptitude. He taught himself Greek when Greek was
+the language which, in the opinion of the monks, only the devils spoke
+in the wrong place. His Latin was as polished as Cicero's; and at length
+the Archbishop of Cambray heard of him, and sent him to the University
+of Paris.
+
+At Paris he found a world where life could be sufficiently pleasant, but
+where his religious habit was every moment in his way. He was a priest,
+and so far could not help himself. That ink-spot not all the waters of
+the German Ocean could wash away. But he did not care for the low
+debaucheries, where the frock and cowl were at home. His place was in
+the society of cultivated men, who were glad to know him and to
+patronise him; so he shook off his order, let his hair grow, and flung
+away his livery.
+
+The Archbishop's patronage was probably now withdrawn. Life in Paris was
+expensive, and Erasmus had for several years to struggle with poverty.
+We see him, however, for the most part--in his early letters--carrying a
+bold front to fortune; desponding one moment, and larking the next with
+a Paris grisette; making friends, enjoying good company, enjoying
+especially good wine when he could get it; and, above all, satiating his
+literary hunger at the library of the University.
+
+In this condition, when about eight-and-twenty, he made acquaintance
+with two young English noblemen who were travelling on the Continent,
+Lord Mountjoy and one of the Greys.
+
+Mountjoy, intensely attracted by his brilliance, took him for his tutor,
+carried him over to England, and introduced him at the court of Henry
+the Seventh. At once his fortune was made. He charmed every one, and in
+turn he was himself delighted with the country and the people. English
+character, English hospitality, English manners--everything English
+except the beer--equally pleased him. In the young London men--the
+lawyers, the noblemen, even in some of the clergy--he found his own
+passion for learning. Sir Thomas More, who was a few years younger than
+himself, became his dearest friend; and Warham, afterwards Archbishop of
+Canterbury--Fisher, afterwards Bishop of Rochester--Colet, the famous
+Dean of St. Paul's--the great Wolsey himself--recognised and welcomed
+the rising star of European literature.
+
+Money flowed in upon him. Warham gave him a benefice in Kent, which was
+afterwards changed to a pension. Prince Henry, when he became King,
+offered him--kings in those days were not bad friends to
+literature--Henry offered him, if he would remain in England, a house
+large enough to be called a palace, and a pension which, converted into
+our money, would be a thousand pounds a year.
+
+Erasmus, however, was a restless creature, and did not like to be caged
+or tethered. He declined the King's terms, but Mountjoy settled a
+pension on him instead. He had now a handsome income, and he understood
+the art of enjoying it. He moved about as he pleased--now to Cambridge,
+now to Oxford, and, as the humour took him, back again to Paris; now
+staying with Sir Thomas More at Chelsea, now going a pilgrimage with
+Dean Colet to Becket's tomb at Canterbury--but always studying, always
+gathering knowledge, and throwing it out again, steeped in his own
+mother wit, in shining Essays or Dialogues, which were the delight and
+the despair of his contemporaries.
+
+Everywhere, in his love of pleasure, in his habits of thought, in his
+sarcastic scepticism, you see the healthy, clever, well-disposed,
+tolerant, epicurean, intellectual man of the world.
+
+He went, as I said, with Dean Colet to Becket's tomb. At a shrine about
+Canterbury he was shown an old shoe which tradition called the Saint's.
+At the tomb itself, the great sight was a handkerchief which a monk took
+from among the relics, and offered it to the crowd to kiss. The
+worshippers touched it in pious adoration, with clasped hands and
+upturned eyes. If the thing was genuine, as Erasmus observed, it had but
+served for the archbishop to wipe his nose with--and Dean Colet, a
+puritan before his time, looked on with eyes flashing scorn, and
+scarcely able to keep his hands off the exhibitors. But Erasmus smiled
+kindly, reflecting that mankind were fools, and in some form or other
+would remain fools. He took notice only of the pile of gold and jewels,
+and concluded that so much wealth might prove dangerous to its
+possessors.
+
+The peculiarities of the English people interested and amused him. 'You
+are going to England,' he wrote afterwards to a friend; 'you will not
+fail to be pleased. You will find the great people there most agreeable
+and gracious; only be careful not to presume upon their intimacy. They
+will condescend to your level, but do not you therefore suppose that you
+stand upon theirs. The noble lords are gods in their own eyes.'
+
+'For the other classes, be courteous, give your right hand, do not take
+the wall, do not push yourself. Smile on whom you please, but trust no
+one that you do not know; above all, speak no evil of England to them.
+They are proud of their country above all nations in the world, as they
+have good reason to be.'
+
+These directions might have been written yesterday. The manners of the
+ladies have somewhat changed. 'English ladies,' says Erasmus, 'are
+divinely pretty, and _too_ good-natured. They have an excellent custom
+among them, that wherever you go the girls kiss you. They kiss you when
+you come, they kiss you when you go, they kiss you at intervening
+opportunities, and their lips are soft, warm, and delicious.' Pretty
+well that, for a priest!
+
+The custom, perhaps, was not quite so universal as Erasmus would have us
+believe. His own coaxing ways may have had something to do with it. At
+any rate, he found England a highly agreeable place of residence.
+
+Meanwhile, his reputation as a writer spread over the world. Latin--the
+language in which he wrote--was in universal use. It was the vernacular
+of the best society in Europe, and no living man was so perfect a master
+of it. His satire flashed about among all existing institutions,
+scathing especially his old enemies the monks; while the great secular
+clergy, who hated the religious orders, were delighted to see them
+scourged, and themselves to have the reputation of being patrons of
+toleration and reform.
+
+Erasmus, as he felt his ground more sure under him, obtained from Julius
+the Second a distinct release from his monastic vows; and, shortly
+after, when the brilliant Leo succeeded to the tiara, and gathered about
+him the magnificent cluster of artists who have made his era so
+illustrious, the new Pope invited Erasmus to visit him at Rome, and
+become another star in the constellation which surrounded the Papal
+throne.
+
+Erasmus was at this time forty years old--the age when ambition becomes
+powerful in men, and takes the place of love of pleasure. He was
+received at Rome with princely distinction, and he could have asked for
+nothing--bishoprics, red hats, or red stockings--which would not have
+been freely given to him if he would have consented to remain.
+
+But he was too considerable a man to be tempted by finery; and the
+Pope's livery, gorgeous though it might be, was but a livery after all.
+Nothing which Leo the Tenth could do for Erasmus could add lustre to his
+coronet. More money he might have had, but of money he had already
+abundance, and outward dignity would have been dearly bought by gilded
+chains. He resisted temptation; he preferred the northern air, where he
+could breathe at liberty, and he returned to England, half inclined to
+make his home there.
+
+But his own sovereign laid claim to his services; the future emperor
+recalled him to the Low Countries, settled a handsome salary upon him,
+and established him at the University of Louvaine.
+
+He was now in the zenith of his greatness. He had an income as large as
+many an English nobleman. We find him corresponding with popes,
+cardinals, kings, and statesmen; and as he grew older, his mind became
+more fixed upon serious subjects. The ignorance and brutality of the
+monks, the corruption of the spiritual courts, the absolute irreligion
+in which the Church was steeped, gave him serious alarm. He had no
+enthusiasms, no doctrinal fanaticisms, no sectarian beliefs or
+superstitions. The breadth of his culture, his clear understanding, and
+the worldly moderation of his temper, seemed to qualify him above living
+men to conduct a temperate reform. He saw that the system around him was
+pregnant with danger, and he resolved to devote what remained to him of
+life to the introduction of a higher tone in the minds of the clergy.
+
+The revival of learning had by this time alarmed the religious orders.
+Literature and education, beyond the code of the theological text-books,
+appeared simply devilish to them. When Erasmus returned to Louvaine, the
+battle was raging over the north of Europe.
+
+The Dominicans at once recognised in Erasmus their most dangerous enemy.
+At first they tried to compel him to re-enter the order, but, strong in
+the Pope's dispensation, he was so far able to defy them. They could
+bark at his heels, but dared not come to closer quarters: and with his
+temper slightly ruffled, but otherwise contented to despise them, he
+took up boldly the task which he had set himself.
+
+'We kiss the old shoes of the saints,' he said, 'but we never read their
+works.' He undertook the enormous labour of editing and translating
+selections from the writings of the Fathers. The New Testament was as
+little known as the lost books of Tacitus--all that the people knew of
+the Gospels and the Epistles were the passages on which theologians had
+built up the Catholic formulas. Erasmus published the text, and with it,
+and to make it intelligible, a series of paraphrases, which rent away
+the veil of traditional and dogmatic interpretation, and brought the
+teaching of Christ and the Apostles into their natural relation with
+reason and conscience.
+
+In all this, although the monks might curse, he had countenance and
+encouragement from the great ecclesiastics in all parts of Europe--and
+it is highly curious to see the extreme freedom with which they allowed
+him to propose to them his plans for a Reformation--we seem to be
+listening to the wisest of modern broad Churchmen.
+
+To one of his correspondents, an archbishop, he writes:--
+
+'Let us have done with theological refinements. There is an excuse for
+the Fathers, because the heretics forced them to define particular
+points; but every definition is a misfortune, and for us to persevere in
+the same way is sheer folly. Is no man to be admitted to grace who does
+not know how the Father differs from the Son, and both from the Spirit?
+or how the nativity of the Son differs from the procession of the
+Spirit? Unless I forgive my brother his sins against me, God will not
+forgive me my sins. Unless I have a pure heart--unless I put away envy,
+hate, pride, avarice, lust, I shall not see God. But a man is not damned
+because he cannot tell whether the Spirit has one principle or two. Has
+he the fruits of the Spirit? That is the question. Is he patient, kind,
+good, gentle, modest, temperate, chaste? Enquire if you will, but do not
+define. True religion is peace, and we cannot have peace unless we leave
+the conscience unshackled on obscure points on which certainty is
+impossible. We hear now of questions being referred to the next
+OEcumenical Council--better a great deal refer them to doomsday. Time
+was, when a man's faith was looked for in his life, not in the Articles
+which he professed. Necessity first brought Articles upon us, and ever
+since, we have refined and refined till Christianity has become a thing
+of words and creeds. Articles increase--sincerity vanishes
+away--contention grows hot, and charity grows cold. Then comes in the
+civil power, with stake and gallows, and men are forced to profess what
+they do not believe, to pretend to love what in fact they hate, and to
+say that they understand what in fact has no meaning for them.'
+
+Again, to the Archbishop of Mayence:--
+
+'Reduce the dogmas necessary to be believed, to the smallest possible
+number; you can do it without danger to the realities of Christianity.
+On other points, either discourage enquiry, or leave everyone free to
+believe what he pleases--then we shall have no more quarrels, and
+religion will again take hold of life. When you have done this, you can
+correct the abuses of which the world with good reason complains. The
+unjust judge heard the widow's prayer. You should not shut your ears to
+the cries of those for whom Christ died. He did not die for the great
+only, but for the poor and for the lowly. There need be no tumult. Do
+you only set human affections aside, and let kings and princes lend
+themselves heartily to the public good. But observe that the monks and
+friars be allowed no voice; with these gentlemen the world has borne too
+long. They care only for their own vanity, their own stomachs, their own
+power; and they believe that if the people are enlightened, their
+kingdom cannot stand.'
+
+Once more to the Pope himself:--
+
+'Let each man amend first his own wicked life. When he has done that,
+and will amend his neighbour, let him put on Christian charity, which is
+severe enough when severity is needed. If your holiness give power to
+men who neither believe in Christ nor care for you, but think only of
+their own appetites, I fear there will be danger. We can trust your
+holiness, but there are bad men who will use your virtues as a cloke for
+their own malice.'
+
+That the spiritual rulers of Europe should have allowed a man like
+Erasmus to use language such as this to them is a fact of supreme
+importance. It explains the feeling of Goethe, that the world would have
+gone on better had there been no Luther, and that the revival of
+theological fanaticism did more harm than good.
+
+But the question of questions is, what all this latitudinarian
+philosophising, this cultivated epicurean gracefulness would have come
+to if left to itself; or rather, what was the effect which it was
+inevitably producing? If you wish to remove an old building without
+bringing it in ruins about your ears, you must begin at the top, remove
+the stones gradually downwards, and touch the foundation last. But
+latitudinarianism loosens the elementary principles of theology. It
+destroys the premises on which the dogmatic system rests. It would beg
+the question to say that this would in itself have been undesirable; but
+the practical effect of it, as the world then stood, would have only
+been to make the educated into infidels, and to leave the multitude to a
+convenient but debasing superstition.
+
+The monks said that Erasmus laid the egg, and Luther hatched a
+cockatrice. Erasmus resented deeply such an account of his work; but it
+was true after all. The sceptical philosophy is the most powerful of
+solvents, but it has no principle of organic life in it; and what of
+truth there was in Erasmus's teaching had to assume a far other form
+before it was available for the reinvigoration of religion. He himself,
+in his clearer moments, felt his own incapacity, and despaired of making
+an impression on the mass of ignorance with which he saw himself
+surrounded.
+
+'The stupid monks,' he writes, 'say mass as a cobbler makes a shoe; they
+come to the altar reeking from their filthy pleasures. Confession with
+the monks is a cloke to steal the people's money, to rob girls of their
+virtue, and commit other crimes too horrible to name! Yet these people
+are the tyrants of Europe. The Pope himself is afraid of them.'
+
+'Beware!' he says to an impetuous friend, 'beware how you offend the
+monks. You have to do with an enemy that cannot be slain; an order never
+dies, and they will not rest till they have destroyed you.'
+
+The heads of the Church might listen politely, but Erasmus had no
+confidence in them. 'Never,' he says, 'was there a time when divines
+were greater fools, or popes and prelates more worldly.' Germany was
+about to receive a signal illustration of the improvement which it was
+to look for from liberalism and intellectual culture.
+
+We are now on the edge of the great conflagration. Here we must leave
+Erasmus for the present. I must carry you briefly over the history of
+the other great person who was preparing to play his part on the stage.
+You have seen something of what Erasmus was; you must turn next to the
+companion picture of Martin Luther. You will observe in how many points
+their early experiences touch, as if to show more vividly the contrast
+between the two men.
+
+Sixteen years after the birth of Erasmus, therefore in the year 1483,
+Martin Luther came into the world in a peasant's cottage, at Eisleben,
+in Saxony. By peasant, you need not understand a common boor. Hans
+Luther, the father, was a thrifty, well-to-do man for his station in
+life--adroit with his hands, and able to do many useful things, from
+farm work to digging in the mines. The family life was strict and
+stern--rather too stern, as Martin thought in later life.
+
+'Be temperate with your children,' he said, long after, to a friend;
+'punish them if they lie or steal, but be just in what you do. It is a
+lighter sin to take pears and apples than to take money. I shudder when
+I think of what I went through myself. My mother beat me about some nuts
+once till the blood came. I had a terrible time of it, but she meant
+well.'
+
+At school, too, he fell into rough hands, and the recollection of his
+sufferings made him tender ever after with young boys and girls.
+
+'Never be hard with children,' he used to say. 'Many a fine character
+has been ruined by the stupid brutality of pedagogues. The parts of
+speech are a boy's pillory. I was myself flogged fifteen times in one
+forenoon over the conjugation of a verb. Punish if you will, but be
+kind too, and let the sugar-plum go with the rod.' This is not the
+language of a demagogue or a fanatic; it is the wise thought of a
+tender, human-hearted man.
+
+At seventeen, he left school for the University at Erfurt. It was then
+no shame for a poor scholar to maintain himself by alms. Young Martin
+had a rich noble voice and a fine ear, and by singing ballads in the
+streets he found ready friends and help. He was still uncertain with
+what calling he should take up, when it happened that a young friend was
+killed at his side by lightning.
+
+Erasmus was a philosopher. A powder magazine was once blown up by
+lightning in a town where Erasmus was staying, and a house of infamous
+character was destroyed. The inhabitants saw in what had happened the
+Divine anger against sin. Erasmus told them that if there was any anger
+in the matter, it was anger merely with the folly which had stored
+powder in an exposed situation.
+
+Luther possessed no such premature intelligence. He was distinguished
+from other boys only by the greater power of his feelings and the
+vividness of his imagination. He saw in his friend's death the immediate
+hand of the great Lord of the universe. His conscience was terrified. A
+life-long penitence seemed necessary to atone for the faults of his
+boyhood. He too, like Erasmus, became a monk, not forced into it--for
+his father knew better what the holy men were like, and had no wish to
+have son of his among them--but because the monk of Martin's imagination
+spent his nights and days upon the stones in prayer; and Martin, in the
+heat of his repentance, longed to be kneeling at his side.
+
+In this mood he entered the Augustine monastery at Erfurt. He was full
+of an overwhelming sense of his own wretchedness and sinfulness. Like
+St. Paul, he was crying to be delivered from the body of death which he
+carried about him. He practised all possible austerities. He, if no one
+else, mortified his flesh with fasting. He passed nights in the chancel
+before the altar, or on his knees on the floor of his cell. He weakened
+his body till his mind wandered, and he saw ghosts and devils. Above
+all, he saw the flaming image of his own supposed guilt. God required
+that he should keep the law in all points. He had not so kept the
+law--could not so keep the law--and therefore he believed that he was
+damned. One morning, he was found senseless and seemingly dead; a
+brother played to him on a flute, and soothed his senses back to
+consciousness.
+
+It was long since any such phenomenon had appeared among the rosy friars
+of Erfurt. They could not tell what to make of him. Staupitz, the prior,
+listened to his accusations of himself in confession. 'My good fellow,'
+he said, 'don't be so uneasy; you have committed no sins of the least
+consequence; you have not killed anybody, or committed adultery, or
+things of that sort. If you sin to some purpose, it is right that you
+should think about it, but don't make mountains out of trifles.'
+
+Very curious: to the commonplace man the uncommonplace is for ever
+unintelligible. What was the good of all that excitement--that agony of
+self-reproach for little things? None at all, if the object is only to
+be an ordinary good sort of man--if a decent fulfilment of the round of
+common duties is the be-all and the end-all of human life on earth.
+
+The plague came by-and-by into the town. The commonplace clergy ran
+away--went to their country-houses, went to the hills, went
+anywhere--and they wondered in the same way why Luther would not go with
+them. They admired him and liked him. They told him his life was too
+precious to be thrown away. He answered, quite simply, that his place
+was with the sick and dying; a monk's life was no great matter. The sun
+he did not doubt would continue to shine, whatever became of him. 'I am
+no St. Paul,' he said; 'I am afraid of death; but there are things worse
+than death, and if I die, I die.'
+
+Even a Staupitz could not but feel that he had an extraordinary youth in
+his charge. To divert his mind from feeding upon itself, he devised a
+mission for him abroad, and brother Martin was despatched on business of
+the convent to Rome.
+
+Luther too, like Erasmus, was to see Rome; but how different the figures
+of the two men there! Erasmus goes with servants and horses, the
+polished, successful man of the world. Martin Luther trudges penniless
+and barefoot across the Alps, helped to a meal and a night's rest at the
+monasteries along the road, or begging, if the convents fail him, at the
+farm-houses.
+
+He was still young, and too much occupied with his own sins to know much
+of the world outside him. Erasmus had no dreams. He knew the hard truth
+on most things. But Rome, to Luther's eager hopes, was the city of the
+saints, and the court and palace of the Pope fragrant with the odours of
+Paradise. 'Blessed Rome,' he cried, as he entered the gate--'Blessed
+Rome, sanctified with the blood of martyrs!'
+
+Alas! the Rome of reality was very far from blessed. He remained long
+enough to complete his disenchantment. The cardinals, with their gilded
+chariots and their parasols of peacocks' plumes, were poor
+representatives of the apostles. The gorgeous churches and more gorgeous
+rituals, the pagan splendour of the paintings, the heathen gods still
+almost worshipped in the adoration of the art which had formed them, to
+Luther, whose heart was heavy with thoughts of man's depravity, were
+utterly horrible. The name of religion was there: the thinnest veil was
+scarcely spread over the utter disbelief with which God and Christ were
+at heart regarded. Culture enough there was. It was the Rome of Raphael
+and Michael Angelo, of Perugino, and Benvenuto; but to the poor German
+monk, who had come there to find help for his suffering soul, what was
+culture?
+
+He fled at the first moment that he could. 'Adieu! Rome,' he said; 'let
+all who would lead a holy life depart from Rome. Everything is permitted
+in Rome except to be an honest man.' He had no thought of leaving the
+Roman Church. To a poor monk like him, to talk of leaving the Church was
+like talking of leaping off the planet. But perplexed and troubled he
+returned to Saxony; and his friend Staupitz, seeing clearly that a
+monastery was no place for him, recommended him to the Elector as
+Professor of Philosophy at Wittenberg.
+
+The senate of Wittenberg gave him the pulpit of the town church, and
+there at once he had room to show what was in him. 'This monk,' said
+some one who heard him, 'is a marvellous fellow. He has strange eyes,
+and will give the doctors trouble by-and-by.'
+
+He had read deeply, especially he had read that rare and almost unknown
+book, the 'New Testament.' He was not cultivated like Erasmus. Erasmus
+spoke the most polished Latin. Luther spoke and wrote his own vernacular
+German. The latitudinarian philosophy, the analytical acuteness, the
+sceptical toleration of Erasmus were alike strange and distasteful to
+him. In all things he longed only to know the truth--to shake off and
+hurl from him lies and humbug.
+
+Superstitious he was. He believed in witches and devils and fairies--a
+thousand things without basis in fact, which Erasmus passed by in
+contemptuous indifference. But for things which were really true--true
+as nothing else in this world, or any world, is true--the justice of
+God, the infinite excellence of good, the infinite hatefulness of
+evil--these things he believed and felt with a power of passionate
+conviction to which the broader, feebler mind of the other was for ever
+a stranger.
+
+We come now to the memorable year 1517, when Luther was thirty-five
+years old. A new cathedral was in progress at Rome. Michael Angelo had
+furnished Leo the Tenth with the design of St. Peter's; and the question
+of questions was to find money to complete the grandest structure which
+had ever been erected by man.
+
+Pope Leo was the most polished and cultivated of mankind. The work to be
+done was to be the most splendid which art could produce. The means to
+which the Pope had recourse will serve to show us how much all that
+would have done for us.
+
+You remember what I told you about indulgences. The notable device of
+his Holiness was to send distinguished persons about Europe with sacks
+of indulgences. Indulgences and dispensations! Dispensations to eat meat
+on fast-days--dispensations to marry one's near relation--dispensations
+for anything and everything which the faithful might wish to purchase
+who desired forbidden pleasures. The dispensations were simply
+scandalous. The indulgences--well, if a pious Catholic is asked nowadays
+what they were, he will say that they were the remission of the penances
+which the Church inflicts upon earth; but it is also certain that they
+would have sold cheap if the people had thought that this was all that
+they were to get by them. As the thing was represented by the spiritual
+hawkers who disposed of these wares, they were letters of credit on
+heaven. When the great book was opened, the people believed that these
+papers would be found entire on the right side of the account.
+Debtor--so many murders, so many robberies, lies, slanders, or
+debaucheries. Creditor--the merits of the saints placed to the account
+of the delinquent by the Pope's letters, in consideration of value
+received.
+
+This is the way in which the pardon system was practically worked. This
+is the way in which it is worked still, where the same superstitions
+remain.
+
+If one had asked Pope Leo whether he really believed in these pardons of
+his, he would have said officially that the Church had always held that
+the Pope had power to grant them.
+
+Had he told the truth, he would have added privately that if the people
+chose to be fools, it was not for him to disappoint them.
+
+The collection went on. The money of the faithful came in plentifully;
+and the pedlars going their rounds appeared at last in Saxony.
+
+The Pope had bought the support of the Archbishop of Mayence, Erasmus's
+friend, by promising him half the spoil which was gathered in his
+province. The agent was the Dominican monk Tetzel, whose name has
+acquired a forlorn notoriety in European history.
+
+His stores were opened in town after town. He entered in state. The
+streets everywhere were hung with flags. Bells were pealed; nuns and
+monks walked in procession before and after him, while he himself sate
+in a chariot, with the Papal Bull on a velvet cushion in front of him.
+The sale-rooms were the churches. The altars were decorated, the candles
+lighted, the arms of St. Peter blazoned conspicuously on the roof.
+Tetzel from the pulpit explained the efficacy of his medicines; and if
+any profane person doubted their power, he was threatened with
+excommunication.
+
+Acolytes walked through the crowds, clinking their plates and crying,
+'Buy! buy!' The business went as merry as a marriage bell till the
+Dominican came near to Wittenberg.
+
+Half a century before, such a spectacle would have excited no particular
+attention. The few who saw through the imposition would have kept their
+thoughts to themselves; the many would have paid their money, and in a
+month all would have been forgotten.
+
+But the fight between the men of letters and the monks, the writings of
+Erasmus and Reuchlin, the satires of Ulric von Hutten, had created a
+silent revolution in the minds of the younger laity.
+
+A generation had grown to manhood of whom the Church authorities knew
+nothing; and the whole air of Germany, unsuspected by pope or prelate,
+was charged with electricity.
+
+Had Luther stood alone, he, too, would probably have remained silent.
+What was he, a poor, friendless, solitary monk, that he should set
+himself against the majesty of the triple crown?
+
+However hateful the walls of a dungeon, a man of sense confined alone
+there does not dash his hands against the stones.
+
+But Luther knew that his thoughts were the thoughts of thousands. Many
+wrong things, as we all know, have to be endured in this world.
+Authority is never very angelic; and moderate injustice, a moderate
+quantity of lies, is more tolerable than anarchy.
+
+But it is with human things as it is with the great icebergs which drift
+southward out of the frozen seas. They swim two-thirds under water, and
+one-third above; and so long as the equilibrium is sustained, you would
+think that they were as stable as the rocks. But the sea-water is warmer
+than the air. Hundreds of fathoms down, the tepid current washes the
+base of the berg. Silently in those far deeps the centre of gravity is
+changed; and then, in a moment, with one vast roll, the enormous mass
+heaves over, and the crystal peaks which had been glancing so proudly in
+the sunlight, are buried in the ocean for ever.
+
+Such a process as this had been going on in Germany, and Luther knew it,
+and knew that the time was come for him to speak. Fear had not kept him
+back. The danger to himself would be none the less because he would have
+the people at his side. The fiercer the thunderstorm, the greater peril
+to the central figure who stands out above the rest exposed to it. But
+he saw that there was hope at last of a change; and for himself--as he
+said in the plague--if he died, he died.
+
+Erasmus admitted frankly for himself that he did not like danger.
+
+'As to me,' he wrote to Archbishop Warham, 'I have no inclination to
+risk my life for truth. We have not all strength for martyrdom; and if
+trouble come, I shall imitate St. Peter. Popes and emperors must settle
+the creeds. If they settle them well, so much the better; if ill, I
+shall keep on the safe side.'
+
+That is to say, truth was not the first necessity to Erasmus. He would
+prefer truth, if he could have it. If not, he could get on moderately
+well upon falsehood. Luther could not. No matter what the danger to
+himself, if he could smite a lie upon the head and kill it, he was
+better pleased than by a thousand lives. We hear much of Luther's
+doctrine about faith. Stripped of theological verbiage, that doctrine
+means this.
+
+Reason says that, on the whole, truth and justice are desirable things.
+They make men happier in themselves, and make society more prosperous.
+But there reason ends, and men will not die for principles of utility.
+Faith says that between truth and lies, there is an infinite difference:
+one is of God, the other of Satan; one is eternally to be loved, the
+other eternally to be abhorred. It cannot say why, in language
+intelligible to reason. It is the voice of the nobler nature in man
+speaking out of his heart.
+
+While Tetzel, with his bull and his gilt car, was coming to Wittenberg,
+Luther, loyal still to authority while there was a hope that authority
+would be on the side of right, wrote to the Archbishop of Mayence to
+remonstrate.
+
+The archbishop, as we know, was to have a share of Tetzel's spoils; and
+what were the complaints of a poor insignificant monk to a supreme
+archbishop who was in debt and wanted money?
+
+The Archbishop of Mayence flung the letter into his waste-paper basket;
+and Luther made his solemn appeal from earthly dignitaries to the
+conscience of the German people. He set up his protest on the church
+door at Wittenberg; and, in ninety-five propositions he challenged the
+Catholic Church to defend Tetzel and his works.
+
+The Pope's indulgences, he said, cannot take away sins. God alone remits
+sins; and He pardons those who are penitent, without help from man's
+absolutions.
+
+The Church may remit penalties which the Church inflicts. But the
+Church's power is in this world only, and does not reach to purgatory.
+
+If God has thought fit to place a man in purgatory, who shall say that
+it is good for him to be taken out of purgatory? who shall say that he
+himself desires it?
+
+True repentance does not shrink from chastisement. True repentance
+rather loves chastisement.
+
+The bishops are asleep. It is better to give to the poor than to buy
+indulgences; and he who sees his neighbour in want, and instead of
+helping his neighbour buys a pardon for himself, is doing what is
+displeasing to God. Who is this man who dares to say that for so many
+crowns the soul of a sinner can be made whole?
+
+These, and like these, were Luther's propositions. Little guessed the
+Catholic prelates the dimensions of the act which had been done. The
+Pope, when he saw the theses, smiled in good-natured contempt. 'A
+drunken German wrote them,' he said; 'when he has slept off his wine, he
+will be of another mind.'
+
+Tetzel bayed defiance; the Dominican friars took up the quarrel; and
+Hochstrat of Cologne, Reuchlin's enemy, clamoured for fire and faggot.
+
+Voice answered voice. The religious houses all Germany over were like
+kennels of hounds howling to each other across the spiritual waste. If
+souls could not be sung out of purgatory, their occupation was gone.
+
+Luther wrote to Pope Leo to defend himself; Leo cited him to answer for
+his audacity at Rome; while to the young laymen, to the noble spirits
+all Europe over, Wittenberg became a beacon of light shining in the
+universal darkness.
+
+It was a trying time to Luther. Had he been a smaller man, he would have
+been swept away by his sudden popularity--he would have placed himself
+at the head of some great democratic movement, and in a few years his
+name would have disappeared in the noise and smoke of anarchy.
+
+But this was not his nature. His fellow-townsmen were heartily on his
+side. He remained quietly at his post in the Augustine Church at
+Wittenberg. If the powers of the world came down upon him and killed
+him, he was ready to be killed. Of himself at all times he thought
+infinitely little; and he believed that his death would be as
+serviceable to truth as his life.
+
+Killed undoubtedly he would have been if the clergy could have had their
+way. It happened, however, that Saxony just then was governed by a
+prince of no common order. Were all princes like the Elector Frederick,
+we should have no need of democracy in this world--we should never have
+heard of democracy. The clergy could not touch Luther against the will
+of the Wittenberg senate, unless the Elector would help them; and, to
+the astonishment of everybody, the Elector was disinclined to consent.
+The Pope himself wrote to exhort him to his duties. The Elector still
+hesitated. His professed creed was the creed in which the Church had
+educated him; but he had a clear secular understanding outside his
+formulas. When he read the propositions, they did not seem to him the
+pernicious things which the monks said they were. 'There is much in the
+Bible about Christ,' he said, 'but not much about Rome.' He sent for
+Erasmus, and asked him what he thought about the matter.
+
+The Elector knew to whom he was speaking. He wished for a direct answer,
+and looked Erasmus full and broad in the face. Erasmus pinched his thin
+lips together. 'Luther,' he said at length, 'has committed two sins: he
+has touched the Pope's crown and the monks' bellies.'
+
+He generously and strongly urged Frederick not to yield for the present
+to Pope Leo's importunacy; and the Pope was obliged to try less hasty
+and more formal methods.
+
+He had wished Luther to be sent to him to Rome, where his process would
+have had a rapid end. As this could not be, the case was transferred to
+Augsburg, and a cardinal legate was sent from Italy to look into it.
+
+There was no danger of violence at Augsburg. The townspeople there and
+everywhere were on the side of freedom; and Luther went cheerfully to
+defend himself. He walked from Wittenberg. You can fancy him still in
+his monk's brown frock, with all his wardrobe on his back--an apostle of
+the old sort. The citizens, high and low, attended him to the gates, and
+followed him along the road, crying 'Luther for ever!' 'Nay,' he
+answered, 'Christ for ever!'
+
+The cardinal legate, being reduced to the necessity of politeness,
+received him civilly. He told him, however, simply and briefly, that the
+Pope insisted on his recantation, and would accept nothing else. Luther
+requested the cardinal to point out to him where he was wrong. The
+cardinal waived discussion. 'He was come to command,' he said, 'not to
+argue.' And Luther had to tell him that it could not be.
+
+Remonstrances, threats, entreaties, even bribes were tried. Hopes of
+high distinction and reward were held out to him if he would only be
+reasonable. To the amazement of the proud Italian, a poor peasant's
+son--a miserable friar of a provincial German town--was prepared to defy
+the power and resist the prayers of the Sovereign of Christendom.
+'What!' said the cardinal at last to him, 'do you think the Pope cares
+for the opinion of a German boor? The Pope's little finger is stronger
+than all Germany. Do you expect your princes to take up arms to defend
+_you_--_you_, a wretched worm like you? I tell you, No! and where will
+you be then--where will you be then?'
+
+Luther answered, 'Then, as now, in the hands of Almighty God.'
+
+The Court dissolved. The cardinal carried back his report to his master.
+The Pope, so defied, brought out his thunders; he excommunicated Luther;
+he wrote again to the elector, entreating him not to soil his name and
+lineage by becoming a protector of heretics; and he required him,
+without further ceremony, to render up the criminal to justice.
+
+The elector's power was limited. As yet, the quarrel was simply between
+Luther and the Pope. The elector was by no means sure that his bold
+subject was right--he was only not satisfied that he was wrong--and it
+was a serious question with him how far he ought to go. The monk might
+next be placed under the ban of the empire; and if he persisted in
+protecting him afterwards, Saxony might have all the power of Germany
+upon it. He did not venture any more to refuse absolutely. He temporised
+and delayed; while Luther himself, probably at the elector's
+instigation, made overtures for peace to the Pope. Saving his duty to
+Christ, he promised to be for the future an obedient son of the Church,
+and to say no more about indulgences if Tetzel ceased to defend them.
+
+'My being such a small creature,' Luther said afterwards, 'was a
+misfortune for the Pope. He despised me too much! What, he thought,
+could a slave like me do to him--to him, who was the greatest man in all
+the world. Had he accepted my proposal, he would have extinguished me.'
+
+But the infallible Pope conducted himself like a proud, irascible,
+exceedingly fallible mortal. To make terms with the town preacher of
+Wittenberg was too preposterous.
+
+Just then the imperial throne fell vacant; and the pretty scandal I told
+you of, followed at the choice of his successor. Frederick of Saxony
+might have been elected if he had liked--and it would have been better
+for the world perhaps if Frederick had been more ambitious of high
+dignities--but the Saxon Prince did not care to trouble himself with the
+imperial sceptre. The election fell on Maximilian's grandson
+Charles--grandson also of Ferdinand the Catholic--Sovereign of Spain;
+Sovereign of Burgundy and the Low Countries; Sovereign of Naples and
+Sicily; Sovereign, beyond the Atlantic, of the New Empire of the Indies.
+
+No fitter man could have been found to do the business of the Pope. With
+the empire of Germany added to his inherited dominions, who could resist
+him?
+
+To the new emperor, unless the elector yielded, Luther's case had now to
+be referred.
+
+The elector, if he had wished, could not interfere. Germany was
+attentive, but motionless. The students, the artisans, the tradesmen,
+were at heart with the Reformer; and their enthusiasm could not be
+wholly repressed. The press grew fertile with pamphlets; and it was
+noticed that all the printers and compositors went for Luther. The
+Catholics could not get their books into type without sending them to
+France or the Low Countries.
+
+Yet none of the princes except the elector had as yet shown him favour.
+The bishops were hostile to a man. The nobles had given no sign; and
+their place would be naturally on the side of authority. They had no
+love for bishops--there was hope in that; and they looked with no favour
+on the huge estates of the religious orders. But no one could expect
+that they would peril their lands and lives for an insignificant monk.
+
+There was an interval of two years before the emperor was at leisure to
+take up the question. The time was spent in angry altercation, boding no
+good for the future.
+
+The Pope issued a second bull condemning Luther and his works. Luther
+replied by burning the bull in the great square at Wittenberg.
+
+At length, in April 1521, the Diet of the Empire assembled at Worms, and
+Luther was called to defend himself in the presence of Charles the
+Fifth.
+
+That it should have come to this at all, in days of such high-handed
+authority, was sufficiently remarkable. It indicated something growing
+in the minds of men, that the so-called Church was not to carry things
+any longer in the old style. Popes and bishops might order, but the
+laity intended for the future to have opinions of their own how far such
+orders should be obeyed.
+
+The Pope expected anyhow that the Diet, by fair means or foul, would
+now rid him of his adversary. The elector, who knew the ecclesiastical
+ways of handling such matters, made it a condition of his subject
+appearing, that he should have a safe conduct, under the emperor's hand;
+that Luther, if judgment went against him, should be free for the time
+to return to the place from which he had come; and that he, the elector,
+should determine afterwards what should be done with him.
+
+When the interests of the Church were concerned, safe conducts, it was
+too well known, were poor security. Pope Clement the Seventh, a little
+after, when reproached for breaking a promise, replied with a smile,
+'The Pope has power to bind and to loose.' Good, in the eyes of
+ecclesiastical authorities, meant what was good for the Church; evil,
+whatever was bad for the Church; and the highest moral obligation became
+sin when it stood in St. Peter's way.
+
+There had been an outburst of free thought in Bohemia a century and a
+half before. John Huss, Luther's forerunner, came with a safe conduct to
+the Council of Constance; but the bishops ruled that safe conducts could
+not protect heretics. They burnt John Huss for all their promises, and
+they hoped now that so good a Catholic as Charles would follow so
+excellent a precedent. Pope Leo wrote himself to beg that Luther's safe
+conduct should not be observed. The bishops and archbishops, when
+Charles consulted them, took the same view as the Pope.
+
+'There is something in the office of a bishop,' Luther said, a year or
+two later, 'which is dreadfully demoralising. Even good men change their
+natures at their consecration; Satan enters into them as he entered into
+Judas, as soon as they have taken the sop.'
+
+It was most seriously likely that, if Luther trusted himself at the Diet
+on the faith of his safe conduct, he would never return alive. Rumours
+of intended treachery were so strong, that if he refused to go, the
+elector meant to stand by him at any cost. Should he appear, or not
+appear? It was for himself to decide. If he stayed away, judgment would
+go against him by default. Charles would call out the forces of the
+empire, and Saxony would be invaded.
+
+Civil war would follow, with insurrection all over Germany, with no
+certain prospect except bloodshed and misery.
+
+Luther was not a man to expose his country to peril that his own person
+might escape. He had provoked the storm; and if blood was to be shed,
+his blood ought at least to be the first. He went. On his way, a friend
+came to warn him again that foul play was intended, that he was
+condemned already, that his books had been burnt by the hangman, and
+that he was a dead man if he proceeded.
+
+Luther trembled--he owned it--but he answered, 'Go to Worms! I will go
+if there are as many devils in Worms as there are tiles upon the roofs
+of the houses.'
+
+The roofs, when he came into the city, were crowded, not with devils,
+but with the inhabitants, all collecting there to see him as he passed.
+A nobleman gave him shelter for the night; the next day he was led to
+the Town Hall.
+
+No more notable spectacle had been witnessed in this planet for many a
+century--not, perhaps, since a greater than Luther stood before the
+Roman Procurator.
+
+There on the raised dais sate the sovereign of half the world. There on
+either side of him stood the archbishops, the ministers of state, the
+princes of the empire, gathered together to hear and judge the son of a
+poor miner, who had made the world ring with his name.
+
+The body of the hall was thronged with knights and nobles--stern hard
+men in dull gleaming armour. Luther, in his brown frock, was led forward
+between their ranks. The looks which greeted him were not all
+unfriendly. The first Article of a German credo was belief in _courage_.
+Germany had had its feuds in times past with Popes of Rome, and they
+were not without pride that a poor countryman of theirs should have
+taken by the beard the great Italian priest. They had settled among
+themselves that, come what would, there should be fair play; and they
+looked on half admiring, and half in scorn.
+
+As Luther passed up the hall, a steel baron touched him on the shoulder
+with his gauntlet.
+
+'Pluck up thy spirit, little monk;' he said, 'some of us here have seen
+warm work in our time, but, by my troth, nor I nor any knight in this
+company ever needed a stout heart more than thou needest it now. If thou
+hast faith in these doctrines of thine, little monk, go on, in the name
+of God.'
+
+'Yes, in the name of God,' said Luther, throwing back his head, 'In the
+name of God, forward!'
+
+As at Augsburg, one only question was raised. Luther had broken the
+laws of the Church. He had taught doctrines which the Pope had declared
+to be false. Would he or would he not retract?
+
+As at Augsburg, he replied briefly that he would retract when his
+doctrines were not declared to be false merely, but were proved to be
+false. Then, but not till then. That was his answer, and his last word.
+
+There, as you understand, the heart of the matter indeed rested. In
+those words lay the whole meaning of the Reformation. Were men to go on
+for ever saying that this and that was true, because the Pope affirmed
+it? Or were Popes' decrees thenceforward to be tried like the words of
+other men--by the ordinary laws of evidence?
+
+It required no great intellect to understand that a Pope's pardon, which
+you could buy for five shillings, could not really get a soul out of
+purgatory. It required a quality much rarer than intellect to look such
+a doctrine in the face--sanctioned as it was by the credulity of ages,
+and backed by the pomp and pageantry of earthly power--and say to it
+openly, 'You are a lie.' Cleverness and culture could have given a
+thousand reasons--they did then and they do now--why an indulgence
+should be believed in; when honesty and common sense could give but one
+reason for thinking otherwise. Cleverness and imposture get on
+excellently well together--imposture and veracity, never.
+
+Luther looked at those wares of Tetzel's, and said, 'Your pardons are no
+pardons at all--no letters of credit on heaven, but flash notes of the
+Bank of Humbug, and you know it.' They did know it. The conscience of
+every man in Europe answered back, that what Luther said was true.
+
+Bravery, honesty, veracity, these were the qualities which were
+needed--which were needed then, and are needed always, as the root of
+all real greatness in man.
+
+The first missionaries of Christianity, when they came among the heathen
+nations, and found them worshipping idols, did not care much to reason
+that an image which man had made could not be God. The priests might
+have been a match for them in reasoning. They walked up to the idol in
+the presence of its votaries. They threw stones at it, spat upon it,
+insulted it. 'See,' they said, 'I do this to your God. If he is God, let
+him avenge himself.'
+
+It was a simple argument; always effective; easy, and yet most
+difficult. It required merely a readiness to be killed upon the spot by
+the superstition which is outraged.
+
+And so, and only so, can truth make its way for us in any such matters.
+The form changes--the thing remains. Superstition, folly, and cunning
+will go on to the end of time, spinning their poison webs around the
+consciences of mankind. Courage and veracity--these qualities, and only
+these, avail to defeat them.
+
+From the moment that Luther left the emperor's presence a free man, the
+spell of Absolutism was broken, and the victory of the Reformation
+secured. The ban of the Pope had fallen; the secular arm had been called
+to interfere; the machinery of authority strained as far as it would
+bear. The emperor himself was an unconscious convert to the higher
+creed. The Pope had urged him to break his word. The Pope had told him
+that honour was nothing, and morality was nothing, where the interests
+of orthodoxy were compromised. The emperor had refused to be tempted
+into perjury; and, in refusing, had admitted that there was a spiritual
+power upon the earth, above the Pope, and above him.
+
+The party of the Church felt it so. A plot was formed to assassinate
+Luther on his return to Saxony. The insulted majesty of Rome could be
+vindicated at least by the dagger.
+
+But this, too, failed. The elector heard what was intended. A party of
+horse, disguised as banditti, waylaid the Reformer upon the road, and
+carried him off to the castle of Wartburg, where he remained out of
+harm's way till the general rising of Germany placed him beyond the
+reach of danger.
+
+At Wartburg for the present evening we leave him.
+
+The Emperor Charles and Luther never met again. The monks of Yuste, who
+watched on the deathbed of Charles, reported that at the last hour he
+repented that he had kept his word, and reproached himself for having
+allowed the arch-heretic to escape from his hands.
+
+It is possible that, when the candle of life was burning low, and spirit
+and flesh were failing together, and the air of the sick room was thick
+and close with the presence of the angel of death, the nobler nature of
+the emperor might have yielded to the influences which were around him.
+His confessor might have thrust into his lips the words which he so
+wished to hear.
+
+But Charles the Fifth, though a Catholic always, was a Catholic of the
+old grand type, to whom creed and dogmas were but the robe of a regal
+humanity. Another story is told of Charles--an authentic story this
+one--which makes me think that the monks of Yuste mistook or maligned
+him. Six and twenty years after this scene at Worms, when the then
+dawning heresy had become broad day; when Luther had gone to his
+rest--and there had gathered about his name the hate which mean men feel
+for an enemy who has proved too strong for them--a passing vicissitude
+in the struggle brought the emperor at the head of his army to
+Wittenberg.
+
+The vengeance which the monks could not inflict upon him in life, they
+proposed to wreak upon his bones.
+
+The emperor desired to be conducted to Luther's tomb; and as he stood
+gazing at it, full of many thoughts, some one suggested that the body
+should be taken up and burnt at the stake in the Market Place.
+
+There was nothing unusual in the proposal; it was the common practice of
+the Catholic Church with the remains of heretics who were held unworthy
+to be left in repose in hallowed ground. There was scarcely, perhaps,
+another Catholic prince who would have hesitated to comply. But Charles
+was one of nature's gentlemen; he answered, 'I war not with the dead.'
+
+
+LECTURE III.
+
+We have now entered upon the movement which broke the power of the
+Papacy--which swept Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, England,
+Scotland, into the stream of revolution, and gave a new direction to the
+spiritual history of mankind.
+
+You would not thank me if I were to take you out into that troubled
+ocean. I confine myself, and I wish you to confine your attention, to
+the two kinds of men who appear as leaders in times of change--of whom
+Erasmus and Luther are respectively the types.
+
+On one side there are the large-minded latitudinarian philosophers--men
+who have no confidence in the people--who have no passionate
+convictions; moderate men, tolerant men, who trust to education, to
+general progress in knowledge and civilisation, to forbearance, to
+endurance, to time--men who believe that all wholesome reforms proceed
+downwards from the educated to the multitudes; who regard with contempt,
+qualified by terror, appeals to the popular conscience or to popular
+intelligence.
+
+Opposite to these are the men of faith--and by faith I do not mean
+belief in dogmas, but belief in goodness, belief in justice, in
+righteousness, above all, belief in truth. Men of faith consider
+conscience of more importance than knowledge--or rather as a first
+condition--without which all the knowledge in the world is no use to a
+man--if he wishes to be indeed a man in any high and noble sense of the
+word. They are not contented with looking for what may be useful or
+pleasant to themselves; they look by quite other methods for what is
+honourable--for what is good--for what is just. They believe that if
+they can find out that, then at all hazards, and in spite of all present
+consequences to themselves, that is to be preferred. If, individually
+and to themselves, no visible good ever came from it, in this world or
+in any other, still they would say, 'Let us do that and nothing else.
+Life will be of no value to us if we are to use it only for our own
+gratification.'
+
+The soldier before a battle knows that if he shirks and pretends to be
+ill, he may escape danger and make sure of his life. There are very few
+men, indeed, if it comes to that, who would not sooner die ten times
+over than so dishonour themselves. Men of high moral nature carry out
+the same principle into the details of their daily life; they do not
+care to live unless they may live nobly. Like my uncle Toby, they have
+but one fear--the fear of doing a wrong thing.
+
+I call this faith, because there is no proof, such as will satisfy the
+scientific enquirer, that there is any such thing as moral truth--any
+such thing as absolute right and wrong at all. As the Scripture says,
+'Verily, thou art a God that hidest thyself.' The forces of nature pay
+no respect to what we call good and evil. Prosperity does not uniformly
+follow virtue; nor are defeat and failure necessary consequences of
+vice.
+
+Certain virtues--temperance, industry, and things within reasonable
+limits--command their reward. Sensuality, idleness, and waste, commonly
+lead to ruin.
+
+But prosperity is consistent with intense worldliness, intense
+selfishness, intense hardness of heart; while the grander features of
+human character--self-sacrifice, disregard of pleasure, patriotism, love
+of knowledge, devotion to any great and good cause--these have no
+tendency to bring men what is called fortune. They do not even
+necessarily promote their happiness; for do what they will in this way,
+the horizon of what they desire to do perpetually flies before them.
+High hopes and enthusiasms are generally disappointed in results; and
+the wrongs, the cruelties, the wretchednesses of all kinds which for
+ever prevail among mankind--the shortcomings in himself of which he
+becomes more conscious as he becomes really better--these things, you
+may be sure, will prevent a noble-minded man from ever being
+particularly happy.
+
+If you see a man happy, as the world goes--contented with himself and
+contented with what is round him--such a man may be, and probably is,
+decent and respectable; but the highest is not in him, and the highest
+will not come out of him.
+
+Judging merely by outward phenomena--judging merely by what we call
+reason--you cannot prove that there is any moral government in the world
+at all, except what men, for their own convenience, introduce into it.
+Right and wrong resolve themselves into principles of utility and social
+convenience. Enlightened selfishness prescribes a decent rule of conduct
+for common purposes; and virtue, by a large school of philosophy, is
+completely resolved into that.
+
+True, when nations go on long on the selfish hypothesis, they are apt to
+find at last that they have been mistaken. They find it in bankruptcy of
+honour and character--in social wreck and dissolution. All lies in
+serious matters end at last, as Carlyle says, in broken heads. That is
+the final issue which they are sure to come to in the long run. The
+Maker of the world does not permit a society to continue which forgets
+or denies the nobler principles of action.
+
+But the end is often long in coming; and these nobler principles are
+meanwhile _not_ provided for us by the inductive philosophy.
+
+Patriotism, for instance, of which we used to think something--a
+readiness to devote our energies while we live, to devote our lives, if
+nothing else will serve, to what we call our country--what are we to say
+of that?
+
+I once asked a distinguished philosopher what he thought of patriotism.
+He said he thought it was a compound of vanity and superstition; a bad
+kind of prejudice, which would die out with the growth of reason. My
+friend believed in the progress of humanity--he could not narrow his
+sympathies to so small a thing as his own country. I could but say to
+myself, 'Thank God, then, we are not yet a nation of philosophers.'
+
+A man who takes up with philosophy like that, may write fine books, and
+review articles and such like, but at the bottom of him he is a poor
+caitiff, and there is no more to be said about him.
+
+So when the air is heavy with imposture, and men live only to make
+money, and the service of God is become a thing of words and ceremonies,
+and the kingdom of heaven is bought and sold, and all that is high and
+pure in man is smothered by corruption--fire of the same kind bursts out
+in higher natures with a fierceness which cannot be controlled; and,
+confident in truth and right, they call fearlessly on the seven
+thousand in Israel who have not bowed the knee to Baal to rise and stand
+by them.
+
+They do not ask whether those whom they address have wide knowledge of
+history, or science, or philosophy; they ask rather that they shall be
+honest, that they shall be brave, that they shall be true to the common
+light which God has given to all His children. They know well that
+conscience is no exceptional privilege of the great or the cultivated,
+that to be generous and unselfish is no prerogative of rank or
+intellect.
+
+Erasmus considered that, for the vulgar, a lie might be as good as
+truth, and often better. A lie, ascertained to be a lie, to Luther was
+deadly poison--poison to him, and poison to all who meddled with it. In
+his own genuine greatness, he was too humble to draw insolent
+distinctions in his own favour; or to believe that any one class on
+earth is of more importance than another in the eyes of the Great Maker
+of them all.
+
+Well, then, you know what I mean by faith, and what I mean by intellect.
+It was not that Luther was without intellect. He was less subtle, less
+learned, than Erasmus; but in mother wit, in elasticity, in force, and
+imaginative power, he was as able a man as ever lived. Luther created
+the German language as an instrument of literature. His translation of
+the Bible is as rich and grand as our own, and his table talk as full of
+matter as Shakespeare's plays.
+
+Again; you will mistake me if you think I represent Erasmus as a man
+without conscience, or belief in God and goodness. But in Luther that
+belief was a certainty; in Erasmus it was only a high probability--and
+the difference between the two is not merely great, it is infinite. In
+Luther, it was the root; in Erasmus, it was the flower. In Luther, it
+was the first principle of life; in Erasmus, it was an inference which
+might be taken away, and yet leave the world a very tolerable and
+habitable place after all.
+
+You see the contrast in their early lives. You see Erasmus--light,
+bright, sarcastic, fond of pleasure, fond of society, fond of wine and
+kisses, and intellectual talk and polished company. You see Luther
+throwing himself into the cloister, that he might subdue his will to the
+will of God; prostrate in prayer, in nights of agony, and distracting
+his easy-going confessor with the exaggerated scruples of his
+conscience.
+
+You see it in the effects of their teaching. You see Erasmus addressing
+himself with persuasive eloquence to kings, and popes, and prelates; and
+for answer, you see Pope Leo sending Tetzel over Germany with his
+carriage-load of indulgences. You see Erasmus's dearest friend, our own
+gifted admirable Sir Thomas More, taking his seat beside the bishops and
+sending poor Protestant artisans to the stake.
+
+You see Luther, on the other side, standing out before the world, one
+lone man, with all authority against him--taking lies by the throat, and
+Europe thrilling at his words, and saying after him, 'The reign of
+Imposture shall end.'
+
+Let us follow the course of Erasmus after the tempest had broken.
+
+He knew Luther to be right. Luther had but said what Erasmus had been
+all his life convinced of, and Luther looked to see him come forward and
+take his place at his side. Had Erasmus done so, the course of things
+would have been far happier and better. His prodigious reputation would
+have given the Reformers the influence with the educated which they had
+won for themselves with the multitude, and the Pope would have been left
+without a friend to the north of the Alps. But there would have been
+some danger--danger to the leaders, if certainty of triumph to the
+cause--and Erasmus had no gift for martyrdom.
+
+His first impulse was generous. He encouraged the elector, as we have
+seen, to protect Luther from the Pope. 'I looked on Luther,' he wrote to
+Duke George of Saxe, 'as a necessary evil in the corruption of the
+Church; a medicine, bitter and drastic, from which sounder health would
+follow.'
+
+And again, more boldly: 'Luther has taken up the cause of honesty and
+good sense against abominations which are no longer tolerable. His
+enemies are men under whose worthlessness the Christian world has
+groaned too long.'
+
+So to the heads of the Church he wrote, pressing them to be moderate and
+careful:--
+
+'I neither approve Luther nor condemn him,' he said to the Archbishop of
+Mayence; 'if he is innocent, he ought not to be oppressed by the
+factions of the wicked; if he is in error, he should be answered, not
+destroyed. The theologians'--observe how true they remain to the
+universal type in all times and in all countries--'the theologians do
+not try to answer him. They do but raise an insane and senseless
+clamour, and shriek and curse. Heresy, heretic, heresiarch, schismatic,
+Antichrist--these are the words which are in the mouths of all of them;
+and, of course, they condemn without reading. I warned them what they
+were doing. I told them to scream less, and to think more. Luther's life
+they admit to be innocent and blameless. Such a tragedy I never saw. The
+most humane men are thirsting for his blood, and they would rather kill
+him than mend him. The Dominicans are the worst, and are more knaves
+than fools. In old times, even a heretic was quietly listened to. If he
+recanted, he was absolved; if he persisted, he was at worst
+excommunicated. Now they will have nothing but blood. Not to agree with
+them is heresy. To know Greek is heresy. To speak good Latin is heresy.
+Whatever they do not understand is heresy. Learning, they pretend, has
+given birth to Luther, though Luther has but little of it. Luther thinks
+more of the Gospel than of scholastic divinity, and that is his crime.
+This is plain at least, that the best men everywhere are those who are
+least offended with him.'
+
+Even to Pope Leo, in the midst of his fury, Erasmus wrote bravely;
+separating himself from Luther, yet deprecating violence. 'Nothing,' he
+said, 'would so recommend the new teaching as the howling of fools:'
+while to a member of Charles's council he insisted that 'severity had
+been often tried in such cases and had always failed; unless Luther was
+encountered calmly and reasonably, a tremendous convulsion was
+inevitable.'
+
+Wisely said all this, but it presumed that those whom he was addressing
+were reasonable men; and high officials, touched in their pride, are a
+class of persons of whom Solomon may have been thinking when he said,
+'Let a bear robbed of her whelps meet a man rather than a fool in his
+folly.'
+
+So to Luther, so to the people, Erasmus preached moderation. It was like
+preaching to the winds in a hurricane. The typhoon itself is not wilder
+than human creatures when once their passions are stirred. You cannot
+check them; but, if you are brave, you can guide them wisely. And this,
+Erasmus had not the heart to do.
+
+He said at the beginning, 'I will not countenance revolt against
+authority. A bad government is better than none.' But he said at the
+same time, 'You bishops, cease to be corrupt: you popes and cardinals,
+reform your wicked courts: you monks, leave your scandalous lives, and
+obey the rules of your order, so you may recover the respect of mankind,
+and be obeyed and loved as before.'
+
+When he found that the case was desperate; that his exhortations were
+but words addressed to the winds; that corruption had tainted the blood;
+that there was no hope except in revolution--as, indeed, in his heart he
+knew from the first that there was none--then his place ought to have
+been with Luther.
+
+But Erasmus, as the tempest rose, could but stand still in feeble
+uncertainty. The responsibilities of his reputation weighed him down.
+
+The Lutherans said, 'You believe as we do.' The Catholics said, 'You are
+a Lutheran at heart; if you are not, prove it by attacking Luther.'
+
+He grew impatient. He told lies. He said he had not read Luther's books,
+and had no time to read them. What was he, he said, that he should
+meddle in such a quarrel. He was the vine and the fig tree of the Book
+of Judges. The trees said to them, Rule over us. The vine and the fig
+tree answered, they would not leave their sweetness for such a thankless
+office. 'I am a poor actor,' he said; 'I prefer to be a spectator of the
+play.'
+
+But he was sore at heart, and bitter with disappointment. All had been
+going on so smoothly--literature was reviving, art and science were
+spreading, the mind of the world was being reformed in the best sense by
+the classics of Greece and Rome, and now an apple of discord had been
+flung out into Europe.
+
+The monks who had fought against enlightenment could point to the
+confusion as a fulfilment of their prophecies; and he, and all that he
+had done, was brought to disrepute.
+
+To protect himself from the Dominicans, he was forced to pretend to an
+orthodoxy which he did not possess. Were all true which Luther had
+written, he pretended that it ought not to have been said, or should
+have been addressed in a learned language to the refined and educated.
+
+He doubted whether it was not better on the whole to teach the people
+lies for their good, when truth was beyond their comprehension. Yet he
+could not for all that wish the Church to be successful.
+
+'I fear for that miserable Luther,' he said; 'the popes and princes are
+furious with him. His own destruction would be no great matter, but if
+the monks triumph there will be no bearing them. They will never rest
+till they have rooted learning out of the land. The Pope expects _me_ to
+write against Luther. The orthodox, it appears, can call him names--call
+him blockhead, fool, heretic, toadstool, schismatic, and Antichrist--but
+they must come to me to answer his arguments.'
+
+'Oh! that this had never been,' he wrote to our own Archbishop Warham.
+'Now there is no hope for any good. It is all over with quiet learning,
+thought, piety, and progress; violence is on one side and folly on the
+other; and they accuse me of having caused it all. If I joined Luther I
+could only perish with him, and I do not mean to run my neck into a
+halter. Popes and emperors must decide matters. I will accept what is
+good, and do as I can with the rest. Peace on any terms is better than
+the justest war.'
+
+Erasmus never stooped to real baseness. He was too clever, too
+genuine--he had too great a contempt for worldly greatness. They offered
+him a bishopric if he would attack Luther. He only laughed at them. What
+was a bishopric to him? He preferred a quiet life among his books at
+Louvaine.
+
+But there was no more quiet for Erasmus at Louvaine or anywhere. Here is
+a scene between him and the Prior of the Dominicans in the presence of
+the Rector of the University.
+
+The Dominican had preached at Erasmus in the University pulpit. Erasmus
+complained to the rector, and the rector invited the Dominican to defend
+himself. Erasmus tells the story.
+
+'I sate on one side and the monk on the other, the rector between us to
+prevent our scratching.
+
+'The monk asked what the matter was, and said he had done no harm.
+
+'I said he had told lies of me, and that was harm.
+
+'It was after dinner. The holy man was flushed. He turned purple.
+
+'"Why do you abuse monks in your books?" he said.
+
+'"I spoke of your order," I answered. "I did not mention you. You
+denounced me by name as a friend of Luther."
+
+'He raged like a madman. "You are the cause of all this trouble," he
+said; "you are a chameleon, you can twist everything."
+
+'"You see what a fellow he is," said I, turning to the rector. "If it
+comes to calling names, why I can do that too; but let us be
+reasonable."
+
+'He still roared and cursed; he vowed he would never rest till he had
+destroyed Luther.
+
+'I said he might curse Luther till he burst himself if he pleased. I
+complained of his cursing me.
+
+'He answered, that if I did not agree with Luther, I ought to say so,
+and write against him.
+
+'"Why should I?" urged I. "The quarrel is none of mine. Why should I
+irritate Luther against me, when he has horns and knows how to use
+them?"
+
+'"Well, then," said he, "if you will not write, at least you can say
+that we Dominicans have had the best of the argument."
+
+'"How can I do that?" replied I. "You have burnt his books, but I never
+heard that you had answered them."
+
+'He almost spat upon me. I understand that there is to be a form of
+prayer for the conversion of Erasmus and Luther.'
+
+But Erasmus was not to escape so easily. Adrian the Sixth, who succeeded
+Leo, was his old schoolfellow, and implored his assistance in terms
+which made refusal impossible. Adrian wanted Erasmus to come to him to
+Rome. He was too wary to walk into the wolf's den. But Adrian required
+him to write, and reluctantly he felt that he must comply.
+
+What was he to say?
+
+'If his Holiness will set about reform in good earnest,' he wrote to the
+Pope's secretary, 'and if he will not be too hard on Luther, I may,
+perhaps, do good; but what Luther writes of the tyranny, the corruption,
+the covetousness of the Roman court, would, my friend, that it was not
+true.'
+
+To Adrian himself, Erasmus addressed a letter really remarkable.
+
+'I cannot go to your Holiness,' he said, 'King Calculus will not let me.
+I have dreadful health, which this tornado has not improved. I, who was
+the favourite of everybody, am now cursed by everybody--at Louvaine by
+the monks; in Germany by the Lutherans. I have fallen into trouble in my
+old age, like a mouse into a pot of pitch. You say, Come to Rome; you
+might as well say to the crab, Fly. The crab says, Give me wings; I say,
+Give me back my health and my youth. If I write calmly against Luther I
+shall be called lukewarm; if I write as he does, I shall stir a hornet's
+nest. People think he can be put down by force. The more force you try,
+the stronger he will grow. Such disorders cannot be cured in that way.
+The Wickliffites in England were put down, but the fire smouldered.
+
+'If you mean to use violence you have no need of me; but mark this--if
+monks and theologians think only of themselves, no good will come of it.
+Look rather into the causes of all this confusion, and apply your
+remedies there. Send for the best and wisest men from all parts of
+Christendom and take their advice.'
+
+Tell a crab to fly. Tell a pope to be reasonable. You must relieve him
+of his infallibility if you want him to act like a sensible man. Adrian
+could undertake no reforms, and still besought Erasmus to take arms for
+him.
+
+Erasmus determined to gratify Adrian with least danger to himself and
+least injury to Luther.
+
+'I remember Uzzah, and am afraid,' he said, in his quizzing way; 'it is
+not everyone who is allowed to uphold the ark. Many a wise man has
+attacked Luther, and what has been effected? The Pope curses, the
+emperor threatens; there are prisons, confiscations, faggots; and all is
+vain. What can a poor pigmy like me do?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+'The world has been besotted with ceremonies. Miserable monks have ruled
+all, entangling men's consciences for their own benefit. Dogma has been
+heaped on dogma. The bishops have been tyrants, the Pope's commissaries
+have been rascals. Luther has been an instrument of God's displeasure,
+like Pharaoh or Nebuchadnezzar, or the Cæsars, and I shall not attack
+him on such grounds as these.'
+
+Erasmus was too acute to defend against Luther the weak point of a bad
+cause. He would not declare for him--but he would not go over to his
+enemies. Yet, unless he quarrelled with Adrian, he could not be
+absolutely silent; so he chose a subject to write upon on which all
+schools of theology, Catholic or Protestant--all philosophers, all
+thinkers of whatever kind, have been divided from the beginning of time:
+fate and free will, predestination and the liberty of man--a problem
+which has no solution--which may be argued even from eternity to
+eternity.
+
+The reason of the selection was obvious. Erasmus wished to please the
+Pope and not exasperate Luther. Of course he pleased neither, and
+offended both.
+
+Luther, who did not comprehend his motive, was needlessly angry. Adrian
+and the monks were openly contemptuous. Sick of them and their quarrels,
+he grew weary of the world, and began to wish to be well out of it.
+
+It is characteristic of Erasmus that, like many highly-gifted men, but
+unlike all theologians, he expressed a hope for sudden death, and
+declared it to be one of the greatest blessings which a human creature
+can receive.
+
+Do not suppose that he broke down or showed the white feather to
+fortune's buffets. Through all storms he stuck bravely to his own proper
+work; editing classics, editing the Fathers, writing paraphrases--still
+doing for Europe what no other man could have done.
+
+The Dominicans hunted him away from Louvaine. There was no living for
+him in Germany for the Protestants. He suffered dreadfully from the
+stone, too, and in all ways had a cruel time of it. Yet he continued,
+for all that, to make life endurable.
+
+He moved about in Switzerland and on the Upper Rhine. The lakes, the
+mountains, the waterfalls, the villas on the hill slopes, delighted
+Erasmus when few people else cared for such things. He was particular
+about his wine. The vintage of Burgundy was as new blood in his veins,
+and quickened his pen into brightness and life.
+
+The German wines he liked worse--for this point among others, which is
+curious to observe in those days. The great capitalist winegrowers,
+anti-Reformers all of them, were people without conscience and humanity,
+and adulterated their liquors. Of course they did. They believed in
+nothing but money, and this was the way to make money.
+
+'The water they mix with the wine,' Erasmus says, 'is the least part of
+the mischief. They put in lime, and alum, and resin, and sulphur, and
+salt--and then they say it is good enough for heretics.'
+
+Observe the practical issue of religious corruption. Show me a people
+where trade is dishonest, and I will show you a people where religion is
+a sham.
+
+'We hang men that steal money,' Erasmus exclaimed, writing doubtless
+with the remembrance of a stomach-ache. 'These wretches steal our money
+and our lives too, and get off scot free.'
+
+He settled at last at Basle, which the storm had not yet reached, and
+tried to bury himself among his books. The shrieks of the conflict,
+however, still troubled his ears. He heard his own name still cursed,
+and he could not bear it or sit quiet under it.
+
+His correspondence was still enormous. The high powers still appealed to
+him for advice and help: of open meddling he would have no more; he did
+not care, he said, to make a post of himself for every dog of a
+theologian to defile. Advice, however, he continued to give in the old
+style.
+
+'Put down the preachers on both sides. Fill the pulpits with men who
+will kick controversy into the kennel, and preach piety and good
+manners. Teach nothing in the schools but what bears upon life and duty.
+Punish those who break the peace, and punish no one else; and when the
+new opinions have taken root, allow liberty of conscience.'
+
+Perfection of wisdom; but a wisdom which, unfortunately, was three
+centuries at least out of date, which even now we have not grown big
+enough to profit by. The Catholic princes and bishops were at work with
+fire and faggot. The Protestants were pulling down monasteries, and
+turning the monks and nuns out into the world. The Catholics declared
+that Erasmus was as much to blame as Luther. The Protestants held him
+responsible for the persecutions, and insisted, not without reason, that
+if Erasmus had been true to his conscience, the whole Catholic world
+must have accepted the Reformation.
+
+He suffered bitterly under these attacks upon him. He loved quiet--and
+his ears were deafened with clamour. He liked popularity--and he was the
+best abused person in Europe. Others who suffered in the same way he
+could advise to leave the black-coated jackdaws to their noise--but he
+could not follow his own counsel. When the curs were at his heels, he
+could not restrain himself from lashing out at them; and, from his
+retreat at Basle, his sarcasms flashed out like jagged points of
+lightning.
+
+Describing an emeute, and the burning of an image of a saint, 'They
+insulted the poor image so,' he said, 'it is a marvel there was no
+miracle. The saint worked so many in the good old times.'
+
+When Luther married an escaped nun, the Catholics exclaimed that
+Antichrist would be born from such an incestuous intercourse. 'Nay,'
+Erasmus said, 'if monk and nun produce Antichrist, there must have been
+legions of Antichrists these many years.'
+
+More than once he was tempted to go over openly to Luther--not from a
+noble motive, but, as he confessed, 'to make those furies feel the
+difference between him and them.'
+
+He was past sixty, with broken health and failing strength. He thought
+of going back to England, but England had by this time caught fire, and
+Basle had caught fire. There was no peace on earth.
+
+'The horse has his heels,' he said, when advised to be quiet, 'the dog
+his teeth, the hedgehog his spines, the bee his sting. I myself have my
+tongue and my pen, and why should I not use them?'
+
+Yet to use them to any purpose now, he must take a side, and, sorely
+tempted as he was, he could not.
+
+With the negative part of the Protestant creed he sympathised heartily;
+but he did not understand Luther's doctrine of faith, because he had
+none of his own, and he disliked it as a new dogma.
+
+He regarded Luther's movement as an outburst of commonplace revolution,
+caused by the folly and wickedness of the authorities, but with no
+organising vitality in itself; and his chief distress, as we gather from
+his later letters, was at his own treatment. He had done his best for
+both sides. He had failed, and was abused by everybody.
+
+Thus passed away the last years of one of the most gifted men that
+Europe has ever seen. I have quoted many of his letters. I will add one
+more passage, written near the end of his life, very touching and
+pathetic:--
+
+'Hercules,' he said, 'could not fight two monsters at once; while I,
+poor wretch, have lions, cerberuses, cancers, scorpions every day at my
+sword's point; not to mention smaller vermin--rats, mosquitoes, bugs,
+and fleas. My troops of friends are turned to enemies. At dinner-tables
+or social gatherings, in churches and king's courts, in public carriage
+or public flyboat, scandal pursues me, and calumny defiles my name.
+Every goose now hisses at Erasmus; and it is worse than being stoned,
+once for all, like Stephen, or shot with arrows like Sebastian.
+
+'They attack me now even for my Latin style, and spatter me with
+epigrams. Fame I would have parted with; but to be the sport of
+blackguards--to be pelted with potsherds and dirt and ordure--is not
+this worse than death?
+
+'There is no rest for me in my age, unless I join Luther; and I cannot,
+for I cannot accept his doctrines. Sometimes I am stung with a desire to
+avenge my wrongs; but I say to myself, "Will you, to gratify your
+spleen, raise your hand against your mother the Church, who begot you at
+the font and fed you with the word of God?" I cannot do it. Yet I
+understand now how Arius, and Tertullian, and Wickliff were driven into
+schism. The theologians say I am their enemy. Why? Because I bade monks
+remember their vows; because I told parsons to leave their wranglings
+and read the Bible; because I told popes and cardinals to look at the
+Apostles, and make themselves more like to them. If this is to be their
+enemy, then indeed I have injured them.'
+
+This was almost the last. The stone, advancing years, and incessant toil
+had worn him to a shred. The clouds grew blacker. News came from England
+that his dear friends More and Fisher had died upon the scaffold. He had
+long ceased to care for life; and death, almost as sudden as he had
+longed for, gave him peace at last.
+
+So ended Desiderius Erasmus, the world's idol for so many years; and
+dying heaped with undeserved but too intelligible anathemas, seeing all
+that he had laboured for swept away by the whirlwind.
+
+Do not let me lead you to undervalue him. Without Erasmus, Luther would
+have been impossible; and Erasmus really succeeded--so much of him as
+deserved to succeed--in Luther's victory.
+
+He was brilliantly gifted. His industry never tired. His intellect was
+true to itself; and no worldly motives ever tempted him into
+insincerity. He was even far braver than he professed to be. Had he been
+brought to the trial, he would have borne it better than many a man who
+boasted louder of his courage.
+
+And yet, in his special scheme for remodelling the mind of Europe, he
+failed hopelessly--almost absurdly. He believed, himself, that his work
+was spoilt by the Reformation; but, in fact, under no conditions could
+any more have come of it.
+
+Literature and cultivation will feed life when life exists already; and
+toleration and latitudinarianism are well enough when mind and
+conscience are awake and energetic of themselves.
+
+When there is no spiritual life at all; when men live only for
+themselves and for sensual pleasure; when religion is superstition, and
+conscience a name, and God an idol half feared and half despised--then,
+for the restoration of the higher nature in man, qualities are needed
+different in kind from any which Erasmus possessed.
+
+And now to go back to Luther. I cannot tell you all that Luther did; it
+would be to tell you all the story of the German Reformation. I want you
+rather to consider the kind of man that Luther was, and to see in his
+character how he came to achieve what he did.
+
+You remember that the Elector of Saxony, after the Diet of Worms, sent
+him to the Castle of Wartburg, to prevent him from being murdered or
+kidnapped. He remained there many months; and during that time the old
+ecclesiastical institutions of Germany were burning like a North
+American forest. The monasteries were broken up; the estates were
+appropriated by the nobles; the monks were sent wandering into the
+world. The bishops looked helplessly on while their ancient spiritual
+dominion was torn to pieces and trodden under foot. The Elector of
+Saxony, the Landgrave of Hesse, and several more of the princes,
+declared for the Reformation. The Protestants had a majority in the
+Diet, and controlled the force of the empire. Charles the Fifth, busy
+with his French wars, and in want of money, dared not press questions to
+a crisis which he had not power to cope with; and he was obliged for a
+time to recognise what he could not prevent. You would have thought
+Luther would have been well pleased to see the seed which he had sown
+bear fruit so rapidly; yet it was exactly while all this was going on
+that he experienced those temptations of the devil of which he has left
+so wonderful an account.
+
+We shall have our own opinions on the nature of these apparitions. But
+Luther, it is quite certain, believed that Satan himself attacked him in
+person. Satan, he tells us, came often to him, and said, 'See what you
+have done. Behold this ancient Church--this mother of saints--polluted
+and defiled by brutal violence. And it is you--you, a poor ignorant
+monk, that have set the people on to their unholy work. Are you so much
+wiser than the saints who approved the things which you have denounced?
+Popes, bishops, clergy, kings, emperors--are none of these--are not all
+these together--wiser than Martin Luther the monk?'
+
+The devil, he says, caused him great agony by these suggestions. He fell
+into deep fits of doubt and humiliation and despondency. And wherever
+these thoughts came from, we can only say that they were very natural
+thoughts--natural and right. He called them temptations; yet these were
+temptations which would not have occurred to any but a high-minded man.
+
+He had, however, done only what duty had forced him to do. His business
+was to trust to God, who had begun the work and knew what He meant to
+make of it. His doubts and misgivings, therefore, he ascribed to Satan,
+and his enormous imaginative vigour gave body to the voice which was
+speaking in him.
+
+He tells many humorous stories--not always producible--of the means with
+which he encountered his offensive visitor.
+
+'The devil,' he says, 'is very proud, and what he least likes is to be
+laughed at.' One night he was disturbed by something rattling in his
+room; the modern unbeliever will suppose it was a mouse. He got up, lit
+a candle, searched the apartment through, and could find nothing--the
+Evil One was indisputably there.
+
+'Oh!' he said, 'it is you, is it?' He returned to bed, and went to
+sleep.
+
+Think as you please about the cause of the noise, but remember that
+Luther had not the least doubt that he was alone in the room with the
+actual devil, who, if he could not overcome his soul, could at least
+twist his neck in a moment--and then think what courage there must have
+been in a man who could deliberately sleep in such a presence!
+
+During his retirement he translated the Bible. The confusion at last
+became so desperate that he could no longer be spared; and, believing
+that he was certain to be destroyed, he left Wartburg and returned to
+Wittenberg. Death was always before him as supremely imminent. He used
+to say that it would be a great disgrace to the Pope if he died in his
+bed. He was wanted once at Leipsic. His friends said if he went there
+Duke George would kill him.
+
+'Duke George!' he said; 'I would go to Leipsic if it rained Duke Georges
+for nine days!'
+
+No such cataclysm of Duke Georges happily took place. The single one
+there was would have gladly been mischievous if he could; but Luther
+outlived him--lived for twenty-four years after this, in continued toil,
+re-shaping the German Church, and giving form to its new doctrine.
+
+Sacerdotalism, properly so called, was utterly abolished. The
+corruptions of the Church had all grown out of one root--the notion that
+the Christian priesthood possesses mystical power, conferred through
+episcopal ordination.
+
+Religion, as Luther conceived it, did not consist in certain things done
+to and for a man by a so-called priest. It was the devotion of each
+individual soul to the service of God. Masses were nothing, and
+absolution was nothing; and a clergyman differed only from a layman in
+being set apart for the especial duties of teaching and preaching.
+
+I am not concerned to defend Luther's view in this matter. It is a
+matter of fact only, that in getting rid of episcopal ordination, he
+dried up the fountain from which the mechanical and idolatrous
+conceptions of religion had sprung; and, in consequence, the religious
+life of Germany has expanded with the progress of knowledge, while
+priesthoods everywhere cling to the formulas of the past, in which they
+live, and move, and have their being.
+
+Enough of this.
+
+The peculiar doctrine which has passed into Europe under Luther's name
+is known as Justification by Faith. Bandied about as a watchword of
+party, it has by this time hardened into a formula, and has become
+barren as the soil of a trodden footpath. As originally proclaimed by
+Luther, it contained the deepest of moral truths. It expressed what was,
+and is, and must be, in one language or another, to the end of time, the
+conviction of every generous-minded man.
+
+The service of God, as Luther learnt it from the monks, was a thing of
+desert and reward. So many good works done, so much to the right page in
+the great book; where the stock proved insufficient, there was the
+reserve fund of the merits of the saints, which the Church dispensed for
+money to those who needed.
+
+'Merit!' Luther thought. 'What merit can there be in such a poor caitiff
+as man? The better a man is--the more clearly he sees how little he is
+good for, the greater mockery it seems to attribute to him the notion of
+having deserved reward.'
+
+'Miserable creatures that we are!' he said; 'we earn our bread in sin.
+Till we are seven years old, we do nothing but eat and drink and sleep
+and play; from seven to twenty-one we study four hours a day, the rest
+of it we run about and amuse ourselves; then we work till fifty, and
+then we grow again to be children. We sleep half our lives; we give God
+a tenth of our time: and yet we think that with our good works we can
+merit heaven. What have I been doing to-day? I have talked for two
+hours; I have been at meals three hours; I have been idle four hours!
+Ah, enter not into judgment with thy servant, O Lord!'
+
+A perpetual struggle. For ever to be falling, yet to rise again and
+stumble forward with eyes turned to heaven--this was the best which
+would ever come of man. It was accepted in its imperfection by the
+infinite grace of God, who pities mortal weakness, and accepts the
+intention for the deed--who, when there is a sincere desire to serve
+Him, overlooks the shortcomings of infirmity.
+
+Do you say such teaching leads to disregard of duty? All doctrines, when
+petrified into formulas, lead to that. But, as Luther said, 'where real
+faith is, a good life follows, as light follows the sun; faint and
+clouded, yet ever struggling to break through the mist which envelopes
+it, and welcoming the roughest discipline which tends to clear and raise
+it.
+
+'The barley,' he says, in a homely but effective image--'the barley
+which we brew, the flax of which we weave our garments, must be bruised
+and torn ere they come to the use for which they are grown. So must
+Christians suffer. The natural creature must be combed and threshed. The
+old Adam must die, for the higher life to begin. If man is to rise to
+nobleness, he must first be slain.'
+
+In modern language, the poet Goethe tells us the same truth. 'The
+natural man,' he says, 'is like the ore out of the iron mine. It is
+smelted in the furnace; it is forged into bars upon the anvil. A new
+nature is at last forced upon it, and it is made steel.'
+
+It was this doctrine--it was this truth rather (the word doctrine
+reminds one of quack medicines)--which, quickening in Luther's mind,
+gave Europe its new life. It was the flame which, beginning with a small
+spark, kindled the hearth-fires in every German household.
+
+Luther's own life was a model of quiet simplicity. He remained poor. He
+might have had money if he had wished; but he chose rather, amidst his
+enormous labour, to work at a turning-lathe for his livelihood.
+
+He was sociable, cheerful, fond of innocent amusements, and delighted to
+encourage them. His table-talk, collected by his friends, makes one of
+the most brilliant books in the world. He had no monkish theories about
+the necessity of abstinence; but he was temperate from habit and
+principle. A salt herring and a hunch of bread was his ordinary meal;
+and he was once four days without food of any sort, having emptied his
+larder among the poor.
+
+All kinds of people thrust themselves on Luther for help. Flights of
+nuns from the dissolved convents came to him to provide for them--naked,
+shivering creatures, with scarce a rag to cover them. Eight florins were
+wanted once to provide clothes for some of them. 'Eight florins!' he
+said; 'and where am I to get eight florins?' Great people had made him
+presents of plate: it all went to market to be turned into clothes and
+food for the wretched.
+
+Melancthon says that, unless provoked, he was usually very gentle and
+tolerant. He recognised, and was almost alone in recognising, the
+necessity of granting liberty of conscience. No one hated Popery more
+than he did, yet he said:--
+
+'The Papists must bear with us, and we with them. If they will not
+follow us, we have no right to force them. Wherever they can, they will
+hang, burn, behead, and strangle us. I shall be persecuted as long as I
+live, and most likely killed. But it must come to this at last--every
+man must be allowed to believe according to his conscience, and answer
+for his belief to his Maker.'
+
+Erasmus said of Luther that there were two natures in him: sometimes he
+wrote like an apostle--sometimes like a raving ribald.
+
+Doubtless, Luther could be impolite on occasions. When he was angry,
+invectives rushed from him like boulder rocks down a mountain torrent
+in flood. We need not admire all that; in quiet times it is hard to
+understand it.
+
+Here, for instance, is a specimen. Our Henry the Eighth, who began life
+as a highly orthodox sovereign, broke a lance with Luther for the
+Papacy.
+
+Luther did not credit Henry with a composition which was probably his
+own after all. He thought the king was put forward by some of the
+English bishops--'Thomists' he calls them, as men who looked for the
+beginning and end of wisdom to the writings of Thomas Aquinas.
+
+'Courage,' he exclaimed to them, 'swine that you are! burn me then, if
+you can and dare. Here I am; do your worst upon me. Scatter my ashes to
+all the winds--spread them through all seas. My spirit shall pursue you
+still. Living, I am the foe of the Papacy; and dead, I will be its foe
+twice over. Hogs of Thomists! Luther shall be the bear in your way--the
+lion in your path. Go where you will, Luther shall cross you. Luther
+shall leave you neither peace nor rest till he has crushed in your brows
+of brass and dashed out your iron brains.'
+
+Strong expressions; but the times were not gentle. The prelates whom he
+supposed himself to be addressing were the men who filled our Smithfield
+with the reek of burning human flesh.
+
+Men of Luther's stature are like the violent forces of Nature
+herself--terrible when roused, and in repose, majestic and beautiful. Of
+vanity he had not a trace. 'Do not call yourselves Lutherans,' he said;
+'call yourselves Christians. Who and what is Luther? Has Luther been
+crucified for the world?'
+
+I mentioned his love of music. His songs and hymns were the expression
+of the very inmost heart of the German people. 'Music' he called 'the
+grandest and sweetest gift of God to man.' 'Satan hates music,' he said;
+'he knows how it drives the evil spirit out of us.'
+
+He was extremely interested in all natural things. Before the science of
+botany was dreamt of, Luther had divined the principle of vegetable
+life. 'The principle of marriage runs through all creation,' he said;
+'and flowers as well as animals are male and female.'
+
+A garden called out bursts of eloquence from him; beautiful sometimes as
+a finished piece of poetry.
+
+One April day as he was watching the swelling buds, he exclaimed:--
+
+'Praise be to God the Creator, who out of a dead world makes all alive
+again. See those shoots how they burgeon and swell. Image of the
+resurrection of the dead! Winter is death--summer is the resurrection.
+Between them lie spring and autumn, as the period of uncertainty and
+change. The proverb says--
+
+    Trust not a day
+    Ere birth of May.
+
+Let us pray our Father in heaven to give us this day our daily bread.'
+
+'We are in the dawn of a new era,' he said another time; 'we are
+beginning to think something of the natural world which was ruined in
+Adam's fall. We are learning to see all round us the greatness and glory
+of the Creator. We can see the Almighty hand--the infinite goodness--in
+the humblest flower. We praise Him--we thank Him--we glorify Him--we
+recognise in creation the power of His word. He spoke and it was there.
+The stone of the peach is hard; but the soft kernel swells and bursts it
+when the time comes. An egg--what a thing is that! If an egg had never
+been seen in Europe, and a traveller had brought one from Calcutta, how
+would all the world have wondered!'
+
+And again:--
+
+'If a man could make a single rose, we should give him an empire; yet
+roses, and flowers no less beautiful, are scattered in profusion over
+the world, and no one regards them.'
+
+There are infinite other things which I should like to tell you about
+Luther, but time wears on. I must confine what more I have to say to a
+single matter--for which more than any other he has been blamed--I mean
+his marriage.
+
+He himself, a monk and a priest, had taken a vow of celibacy. The person
+whom he married had been a nun, and as such had taken a vow of celibacy
+also.
+
+The marriage was unquestionably no affair of passion. Luther had come to
+middle age when it was brought about, when temptations of that kind lose
+their power; and among the many accusations which have been brought
+against his early life, no one has ventured to charge him with
+incontinence. His taking a wife was a grave act deliberately performed;
+and it was either meant as a public insult to established ecclesiastical
+usage, or else he considered that the circumstances of the time required
+it of him.
+
+Let us see what those circumstances were. The enforcement of celibacy on
+the clergy was, in Luther's opinion, both iniquitous in itself, and
+productive of enormous immorality. The impurity of the religious orders
+had been the jest of satirists for a hundred years. It had been the
+distress and perplexity of pious and serious persons. Luther himself was
+impressed with profound pity for the poor men, who were cut off from the
+natural companionship which nature had provided for them--who were thus
+exposed to temptations which they ought not to have been called upon to
+resist.
+
+The dissolution of the religious houses had enormously complicated the
+problem. Germany was covered with friendless and homeless men and women
+adrift upon the world. They came to Luther to tell them what to do; and
+advice was of little service without example.
+
+The world had grown accustomed to immorality in such persons. They might
+have lived together in concubinage, and no one would have thought much
+about it. Their marriage was regarded with a superstitious terror as a
+kind of incest.
+
+Luther, on the other hand, regarded marriage as the natural and healthy
+state in which clergy as well as laity were intended to live. Immorality
+was hateful to him as a degradation of a sacrament--impious, loathsome,
+and dishonoured. Marriage was the condition in which humanity was at
+once purest, best, and happiest.
+
+For himself, he had become inured to a single life. He had borne the
+injustice of his lot, when the burden had been really heavy. But time
+and custom had lightened the load; and had there been nothing at issue
+but his own personal happiness, he would not have given further occasion
+to the malice of his enemies.
+
+But tens of thousands of poor creatures were looking to him to guide
+them--guide them by precept, or guide them by example. He had satisfied
+himself that the vow of celibacy had been unlawfully imposed both on him
+and them--that, as he would put it, it had been a snare devised by the
+devil. He saw that all eyes were fixed on him--that it was no use to
+tell others that they might marry, unless he himself led the way, and
+married first. And it was characteristic of him that, having resolved to
+do the thing, he did it in the way most likely to show the world his
+full thought upon the matter.
+
+That this was his motive, there is no kind of doubt whatever.
+
+'We may be able to live unmarried,' he said; 'but in these days we must
+protest in deed as well as word, against the doctrine of celibacy. It is
+an invention of Satan. Before I took my wife, I had made up my mind that
+I must marry some one: and had I been overtaken by illness, I should
+have betrothed myself to some pious maiden.'
+
+He asked nobody's advice. Had he let his intention be suspected, the
+moderate respectable people--the people who thought like Erasmus--those
+who wished well to what was good, but wished also to stand well with the
+world's opinion--such persons as these would have overwhelmed him with
+remonstrances. 'When you marry,' he said to a friend in a similar
+situation, 'be quiet about it, or mountains will rise between you and
+your wishes. If I had not been swift and secret, I should have had the
+whole world in my way.'
+
+Catherine Bora, the lady whom he chose for his wife, was a nun of good
+family, left homeless and shelterless by the breaking-up of her convent.
+She was an ordinary, unimaginative body--plain in person and plain in
+mind, in no sense whatever a heroine of romance--but a decent, sensible,
+commonplace Haus Frau.
+
+The age of romance was over with both of them; yet, for all that, never
+marriage brought a plainer blessing with it. They began with respect,
+and ended with steady affection.
+
+The happiest life on earth, Luther used to say, is with a pious, good
+wife; in peace and quiet, contented with a little, and giving God
+thanks.
+
+He spoke from his own experience. His Katie, as he called her, was not
+clever, and he had numerous stories to tell of the beginning of their
+adventures together.
+
+'The first year of married life is an odd business,' he says. 'At meals,
+where you used to be alone, you are yourself and somebody else. When you
+wake in the morning, there are a pair of tails close to you on the
+pillow. My Katie used to sit with me when I was at work. She thought she
+ought not to be silent. She did not know what to say, so she would ask
+me.
+
+'"Herr Doctor, is not the master of the ceremonies in Prussia the
+brother of the Margrave?"'
+
+She was an odd woman.
+
+'Doctor,' she said to him one day, 'how is it that under Popery we
+prayed so often and so earnestly, and now our prayers are cold and
+seldom?'
+
+Katie might have spoken for herself. Luther, to the last, spent hours of
+every day in prayer. He advised her to read the Bible a little more. She
+said she had read enough of it, and knew half of it by heart. 'Ah!' he
+said, 'here begins weariness of the word of God. One day new lights will
+rise up, and the Scriptures will be despised and be flung away into the
+corner.'
+
+His relations with his children were singularly beautiful. The
+recollection of his own boyhood made him especially gentle with them,
+and their fancies and imaginations delighted him.
+
+Children, to him, were images of unfallen nature. 'Children,' he said,
+'imagine heaven a place where rivers run with cream, and trees are hung
+with cakes and plums. Do not blame them. They are but showing their
+simple, natural, unquestioning, all-believing faith.'
+
+One day, after dinner, when the fruit was on the table, the children
+were watching it with longing eyes. 'That is the way,' he said, 'in
+which we grown Christians ought to look for the Judgment Day.'
+
+His daughter Magdalen died when she was fourteen. He speaks of his loss
+with the unaffected simplicity of natural grief, yet with the faith of a
+man who had not the slightest doubt into whose hands his treasure was
+passing. Perfect nature and perfect piety. Neither one emotion nor the
+other disguised or suppressed.
+
+You will have gathered something, I hope, from these faint sketches, of
+what Luther was; you will be able to see how far he deserves to be
+called by our modern new lights, a Philistine or a heretic. We will now
+return to the subject with which we began, and resume, in a general
+conclusion, the argument of these Lectures.
+
+In part, but not wholly, it can be done in Luther's words.
+
+One regrets that Luther did not know Erasmus better, or knowing him,
+should not have treated him with more forbearance.
+
+Erasmus spoke of him for the most part with kindness. He interceded for
+him, defended him, and only with the utmost reluctance was driven into
+controversy with him.
+
+Luther, on the other hand, saw in Erasmus a man who was false to his
+convictions; who played with truth; who, in his cold, sarcastic
+scepticism, believed in nothing--scarcely even in God. He was unaware of
+his own obligations to him, for Erasmus was not a person who would
+trumpet out his own good deeds.
+
+Thus Luther says:--
+
+'All you who honour Christ, I pray you hate Erasmus. He is a scoffer and
+a mocker. He speaks in riddles; and jests at Popery and Gospel, and
+Christ and God, with his uncertain speeches. He might have served the
+Gospel if he would, but, like Judas, he has betrayed the Son of Man with
+a kiss. He is not with us, and he is not with our foes; and I say with
+Joshua, Choose whom ye will serve. He thinks we should trim to the
+times, and hang our cloaks to the wind. He is himself his own first
+object; and as he lived, he died.
+
+'I take Erasmus to be the worst enemy that Christ has had for a thousand
+years. Intellect does not understand religion, and when it comes to the
+things of God, it laughs at them. He scoffs like Lucian, and by-and-by
+he will say, Behold, how are these among the saints whose life we
+counted for folly.
+
+'I bid you, therefore, take heed of Erasmus. He treats theology as a
+fool's jest, and the Gospel as a fable good for the ignorant to
+believe.'
+
+Of Erasmus personally, much of this was unjust and untrue. Erasmus knew
+many things which it would have been well for Luther to have known; and,
+as a man, he was better than his principles.
+
+But if for the name of Erasmus we substitute the theory of human things
+which Erasmus represented, between that creed and Luther there is, and
+must be, an eternal antagonism.
+
+If to be true in heart and just in act are the first qualities necessary
+for the elevation of humanity--if without these all else is worthless,
+intellectual culture cannot give what intellectual culture does not
+require or imply. You cultivate the plant which has already life; you
+will waste your labour in cultivating a stone. The moral life is the
+counterpart of the natural, alike mysterious in its origin, and alike
+visible only in its effects.
+
+Intellectual gifts are like gifts of strength, or wealth, or rank, or
+worldly power--splendid instruments if nobly used--but requiring
+qualities to use them nobler and better than themselves.
+
+The rich man may spend his wealth on vulgar luxury. The clever man may
+live for intellectual enjoyment--refined enjoyment it may be--but
+enjoyment still, and still centering in self.
+
+If the spirit of Erasmus had prevailed, it would have been with modern
+Europe as with the Roman Empire in its decay. The educated would have
+been mere sceptics; the multitude would have been sunk in superstition.
+In both alike all would have perished which deserves the name of
+manliness.
+
+And this leads me to the last observation that I have to make to you. In
+the sciences, the philosopher leads; the rest of us take on trust what
+he tells us. The spiritual progress of mankind has followed the opposite
+course. Each forward step has been made first among the people, and the
+last converts have been among the learned.
+
+The explanation is not far to look for. In the sciences there is no
+temptation of self-interest to mislead. In matters which affect life and
+conduct, the interests and prejudices of the cultivated classes are
+enlisted on the side of the existing order of things, and their better
+trained faculties and larger acquirements serve only to find them
+arguments for believing what they wish to believe.
+
+Simpler men have less to lose; they come more in contact with the
+realities of life, and they learn wisdom in the experience of suffering.
+
+Thus it was that when the learned and the wise turned away from
+Christianity, the fishermen of the Galilean lake listened, and a new
+life began for mankind. A miner's son converted Germany to the
+Reformation. The London artisans and the peasants of Buckinghamshire
+went to the stake for doctrines which were accepted afterwards as a
+second revelation.
+
+So it has been; so it will be to the end. When a great teacher comes
+again upon the earth, he will find his first disciples where Christ
+found them and Luther found them. Had Luther written for the learned,
+the words which changed the face of Europe would have slumbered in
+impotence on the bookshelves.
+
+In appealing to the German nation, you will agree, I think, with me,
+that he did well and not ill; you will not sacrifice his great name to
+the disdain of a shallow philosophy, or to the grimacing of a dead
+superstition, whose ghost is struggling out of its grave.
+
+
+
+
+THE INFLUENCE OF THE REFORMATION ON THE SCOTTISH CHARACTER:
+
+A LECTURE DELIVERED AT EDINBURGH, NOVEMBER 1865.
+
+
+I have undertaken to speak this evening on the effects of the
+Reformation in Scotland, and I consider myself a very bold person to
+have come here on any such undertaking. In the first place, the subject
+is one with which it is presumptuous for a stranger to meddle. Great
+national movements can only be understood properly by the people whose
+disposition they represent. We say ourselves about our own history that
+only Englishmen can properly comprehend it. The late Chevalier Bunsen
+once said to me of our own Reformation in England, that, for his part,
+he could not conceive how we had managed to come by such a thing. We
+seemed to him to be an obdurate, impenetrable, stupid people, hide-bound
+by tradition and precedent, and too self-satisfied to be either willing
+or able to take in new ideas upon any theoretic subject whatever,
+especially German ideas. That is to say, he could not get inside the
+English mind. He did not know that some people go furthest and go
+fastest when they look one way and row the other. It is the same with
+every considerable nation. They work out their own political and
+spiritual lives, through tempers, humours, and passions peculiar to
+themselves; and the same disposition which produces the result is
+required to interpret it afterwards. This is one reason why I should
+feel diffident about what I have undertaken. Another is, that I do not
+conceal from myself that the subject is an exceedingly delicate one. The
+blazing passions of those stormy sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are
+no longer, happily, at their old temperature. The story of those times
+can now be told or listened to with something like impartiality. Yet, if
+people no longer hate each other for such matters, the traditions of the
+struggle survive in strong opinions and sentiments, which it is easy to
+wound without intending it.
+
+My own conviction with respect to all great social and religious
+convulsions is the extremely commonplace one that much is to be said on
+both sides. I believe that nowhere and at no time any such struggle can
+take place on a large scale unless each party is contending for
+something which has a great deal of truth in it. Where the right is
+plain, honest, wise, and noble-minded men are all on one side; and only
+rogues and fools are on the other. Where the wise and good are divided,
+the truth is generally found to be divided also. But this is precisely
+what cannot be admitted as long as the conflict continues. Men begin to
+fight about things when reason and argument fail to convince them. They
+make up in passion what is wanting in logic. Each side believes that all
+the right is theirs--that their enemies have all the bad qualities which
+their language contains names for; and even now, on the subject on which
+I have to talk to-night, one has but to take up any magazine, review,
+newspaper, or party organ of any kind which touches on it, to see that
+opinion is still Whig or Tory, Cavalier or Roundhead, Protestant or
+Catholic, as the case may be. The unfortunate person who is neither
+wholly one nor wholly the other is in the position of Hamlet's 'baser
+nature,' 'between the incensed points of mighty opposites.' He is the
+Laodicean, neither cold nor hot, whom decent people consider bad
+company. He pleases no one, and hurts the sensitiveness of all.
+
+Here, then, are good reasons why I should have either not come here at
+all, or else should have chosen some other matter to talk about. In
+excuse for persisting, I can but say that the subject is one about which
+I have been led by circumstances to read and think considerably; and
+though, undoubtedly, each of us knows more about himself and his own
+affairs than anyone else can possibly know, yet a stranger's eye will
+sometimes see things which escape those more immediately interested; and
+I allow myself to hope that I may have something to say not altogether
+undeserving your attention. I shall touch as little as possible on
+questions of opinion; and if I tread by accident on any sensitive
+point, I must trust to your kindness to excuse my awkwardness.
+
+Well, then, if we look back on Scotland as it stood in the first quarter
+of the sixteenth century, we see a country in which the old feudal
+organisation continued, so far as it generally affected the people, more
+vigorous than in any other part of civilised Europe. Elsewhere, the
+growth of trade and of large towns had created a middle class, with an
+organisation of their own, independent of the lords. In Scotland, the
+towns were still scanty and poor; such as they were, they were for the
+most part under the control of the great nobleman who happened to live
+nearest to them; and a people, as in any sense independent of lords,
+knights, abbots, or prelates, under whose rule they were born, had as
+yet no existence. The tillers of the soil (and the soil was very
+miserably tilled) lived under the shadow of the castle or the monastery.
+They followed their lord's fortunes, fought his battles, believed in his
+politics, and supported him loyally in his sins or his good deeds, as
+the case might be. There was much moral beauty in the life of those
+times. The loyal attachment of man to man--of liege servant to liege
+lord--of all forms under which human beings can live and work together,
+has most of grace and humanity about it. It cannot go on without mutual
+confidence and affection--mutual benefits given and received. The length
+of time which the system lasted proves that in the main there must have
+been a fine fidelity in the people--truth, justice, generosity in their
+leaders. History brings down many bad stories to us out of those times;
+just as in these islands nowadays you may find bad instances of the
+abuses of rights of property. You may find stories--too many also--of
+husbands ill-using their wives, and so on. Yet we do not therefore lay
+the blame on marriage, or suppose that the institution of property on
+the whole does more harm than good. I do not doubt that down in that
+feudal system somewhere lie the roots of some of the finest qualities in
+the European peoples.
+
+So much for the temporal side of the matter; and the spiritual was not
+very unlike it. As no one lived independently, in our modern sense of
+the word, so no one thought independently. The minds of men were looked
+after by a Church which, for a long time also, did, I suppose, very
+largely fulfil the purpose for which it was intended. It kept alive and
+active the belief that the world was created and governed by a just
+Being, who hated sins and crimes, and steadily punished such things. It
+taught men that they had immortal souls, and that this little bit of
+life was an entirely insignificant portion of their real existence. It
+taught these truths, indeed, along with a great deal which we now
+consider to have been a mistake--a great many theories of earthly things
+which have since passed away, and special opinions clothed in outward
+forms and ritual observances which we here, most of us at least, do not
+think essential for our soul's safety. But mistakes like these are
+hurtful only when persisted in in the face of fuller truth, after truth
+has been discovered. Only a very foolish man would now uphold the
+Ptolemaic astronomy. But the Ptolemaic astronomy, when first invented,
+was based on real if incomplete observations, and formed a groundwork
+without which further progress in that science would have been probably
+impossible. The theories and ceremonials of the Catholic Church suited
+well with an age in which little was known and much was imagined: when
+superstition was active and science was not yet born. When I am told
+here or anywhere that the Middle Ages were times of mere spiritual
+darkness and priestly oppression, with the other usual formulas, I say,
+as I said before, if the Catholic Church, for those many centuries that
+it reigned supreme over all men's consciences, was no better than the
+thing which we see in the generation which immediately preceded the
+Reformation, it could not have existed at all. You might as well argue
+that the old fading tree could never have been green and young.
+Institutions do not live on lies. They either live by the truth and
+usefulness which there is in them, or they do not live at all.
+
+So things went on for several hundred years. There were scandals enough,
+and crimes enough, and feuds, and murders, and civil wars. Systems,
+however good, cannot prevent evil. They can but compress it within
+moderate and tolerable limits. I should conclude, however, that,
+measuring by the average happiness of the masses of the people, the
+mediæval institutions were very well suited for the inhabitants of these
+countries as they then were. Adam Smith and Bentham themselves could
+hardly have mended them if they had tried.
+
+But times change, and good things as well as bad grow old and have to
+die. The heart of the matter which the Catholic Church had taught was
+the fear of God; but the language of it and the formulas of it were made
+up of human ideas and notions about things which the mere increase of
+human knowledge gradually made incredible. To trace the reason of this
+would lead us a long way. It is intelligible enough, but it would take
+us into subjects better avoided here. It is enough to say that, while
+the essence of religion remains the same, the mode in which it is
+expressed changes and has changed--changes as living languages change
+and become dead, as institutions change, as forms of government change,
+as opinions on all things in heaven and earth change, as half the
+theories held at this time among ourselves will probably change--that
+is, the outward and mortal parts of them. Thus the Catholic formulas,
+instead of living symbols, become dead and powerless cabalistic signs.
+The religion lost its hold on the conscience and the intellect, and the
+effect, singularly enough, appeared in the shepherds before it made
+itself felt among the flocks. From the see of St. Peter to the far
+monasteries in the Hebrides or the Isle of Arran, the laity were shocked
+and scandalised at the outrageous doings of high cardinals, prelates,
+priests, and monks. It was clear enough that these great personages
+themselves did not believe what they taught; so why should the people
+believe it? And serious men, to whom the fear of God was a living
+reality, began to look into the matter for themselves. The first steps
+everywhere were taken with extreme reluctance; and had the popes and
+cardinals been wise, they would have taken the lead in the enquiry,
+cleared their teaching of its lumber, and taken out a new lease of life
+both for it and for themselves. An infallible pope and an infallible
+council might have done something in this way, if good sense had been
+among the attributes of their omniscience. What they did do was
+something very different. It was as if, when the new astronomy began to
+be taught, the professors of that science in all the universities of
+Europe had met together and decided that Ptolemy's cycles and epicycles
+were eternal verities; that the theory of the rotation of the earth was
+and must be a damnable heresy; and had invited the civil authorities to
+help them in putting down by force all doctrines but their own. This, or
+something very like it, was the position taken up in theology by the
+Council of Trent. The bishops assembled there did not reason. They
+decided by vote that certain things were true, and were to be believed;
+and the only arguments which they condescended to use were fire and
+faggot, and so on. How it fared with them, and with this experiment of
+theirs, we all know tolerably well.
+
+The effect was very different in different countries. Here, in Scotland,
+the failure was most marked and complete, but the way in which it came
+about was in many ways peculiar. In Germany, Luther was supported by
+princes and nobles. In England, the Reformation rapidly mixed itself up
+with politics and questions of rival jurisdiction. Both in England and
+Germany, the revolution, wherever it established itself, was accepted
+early by the Crown or the Government, and by them legally recognised.
+Here, it was far otherwise: the Protestantism of Scotland was the
+creation of the commons, as in turn the commons may be said to have been
+created by Protestantism. There were many young high-spirited men,
+belonging to the noblest families in the country, who were among the
+earliest to rally round the Reforming preachers; but authority, both in
+Church and State, set the other way. The congregations who gathered in
+the fields around Wishart and John Knox were, for the most part,
+farmers, labourers, artisans, tradesmen, or the smaller gentry; and
+thus, for the first time in Scotland, there was created an organisation
+of men detached from the lords and from the Church--brave, noble,
+resolute, daring people, bound together by a sacred cause, unrecognised
+by the leaders whom they had followed hitherto with undoubting
+allegiance. That spirit which grew in time to be the ruling power of
+Scotland--that which formed eventually its laws and its creed, and
+determined its after fortunes as a nation--had its first germ in these
+half-outlawed wandering congregations. In this it was that the
+Reformation in Scotland differed from the Reformation in any other part
+of Europe. Elsewhere it found a middle class existing--created already
+by trade or by other causes. It raised and elevated them, but it did not
+materially affect their political condition. In Scotland, the commons,
+as an organised body, were simply created by religion. Before the
+Reformation they had no political existence; and therefore it has been
+that the print of their origin has gone so deeply into their social
+constitution. On them, and them only, the burden of the work of the
+Reformation was eventually thrown; and when they triumphed at last, it
+was inevitable that both they and it should react one upon the other.
+
+How this came about I must endeavour to describe, although I can give
+but a brief sketch of an exceedingly complicated matter. Everybody knows
+the part played by the aristocracy of Scotland in the outward
+revolution, when the Reformation first became the law of the land. It
+would seem at first sight as if it had been the work of the whole
+nation--as if it had been a thing on which high and low were heartily
+united. Yet on the first glance below the surface you see that the
+greater part of the noble lords concerned in that business cared nothing
+about the Reformation at all; or, if they cared, they rather disliked it
+than otherwise. How, then, did they come to act as they did? or, how
+came they to permit a change of such magnitude when they had so little
+sympathy with it? I must make a slight circuit to look for the
+explanation.
+
+The one essentially noble feature in the great families of Scotland was
+their patriotism. They loved Scotland and Scotland's freedom with a
+passion proportioned to the difficulty with which they had defended
+their liberties; and yet the wisest of them had long seen that, sooner
+or later, union with England was inevitable; and the question was, how
+that union was to be brought about--how they were to make sure that,
+when it came, they should take their place at England's side as equals,
+and not as a dependency. It had been arranged that the little Mary
+Stuart should marry our English Edward VI., and the difficulty was to be
+settled so. They would have been contented, they said, if Scotland had
+had the 'lad' and England the 'lass.' As it stood, they broke their
+bargain, and married the little queen away into France, to prevent the
+Protector Somerset from getting hold of her. Then, however, appeared an
+opposite danger; the queen would become a Frenchwoman; her French mother
+governed Scotland with French troops and French ministers; the country
+would become a French province, and lose its freedom equally. Thus an
+English party began again; and as England was then in the middle of her
+great anti-Church revolution, so the Scottish nobles began to be
+anti-Church. It was not for doctrines: neither they nor their brothers
+in England cared much about doctrines; but in both countries the Church
+was rich--much richer than there seemed any occasion for it to be. Harry
+the Eighth had been sharing among the laity the spoils of the English
+monasteries; the Scotch Lords saw in a similar process the probability
+of a welcome addition to their own scanty incomes. Mary of Guise and the
+French stood by the Church, and the Church stood by them; and so it came
+about that the great families--even those who, like the Hamiltons, were
+most closely connected with France--were tempted over by the bait to the
+other side. They did not want reformed doctrines, but they wanted the
+Church lands; and so they came to patronise, or endure, the Reformers,
+because the Church hated them, and because they weakened the Church; and
+thus for a time, and especially as long as Mary Stuart was Queen of
+France, all classes in Scotland, high and low, seemed to fraternise in
+favour of the revolution.
+
+And it seemed as if the union of the realms could be effected at last,
+at the same juncture, and in connexion with the same movement. Next in
+succession to the Scotch crown, after Mary Stuart, was the house of
+Hamilton. Elizabeth, who had just come to the English throne, was
+supposed to be in want of a husband. The heir of the Hamiltons was of
+her own age, and in years past had been thought of for her by her
+father. What could be more fit than to make a match between those two?
+Send a Scot south to be King of England, find or make some pretext to
+shake off Mary Stuart, who had forsaken her native country, and so join
+the crowns, the 'lass' and the 'lad' being now in the right relative
+position. Scotland would thus annex her old oppressor, and give her a
+new dynasty.
+
+I seem to be straying from the point; but these political schemes had so
+much to do with the actions of the leading men at that time, that the
+story of the Reformation cannot be understood without them. It was thus,
+and with these incongruous objects, that the combination was formed
+which overturned the old Church of Scotland in 1559-60, confiscated its
+possessions, destroyed its religious houses, and changed its creed. The
+French were driven away from Leith by Elizabeth's troops; the Reformers
+took possession of the churches; and the Parliament of 1560 met with a
+clear stage to determine for themselves the future fate of the country.
+Now, I think it certain that, if the Scotch nobility, having once
+accepted the Reformation, had continued loyal to it--especially if
+Elizabeth had met their wishes in the important point of the
+marriage--the form of the Scotch Kirk would have been something
+extremely different from what it in fact became. The people were
+perfectly well inclined to follow their natural leaders if the matters
+on which their hearts were set had received tolerable consideration from
+them, and the democratic form of the ecclesiastical constitution would
+have been inevitably modified. One of the conditions of the proposed
+compact with England was the introduction of the English Liturgy and the
+English Church constitution. This too, at the outset, and with fair
+dealing, would not have been found impossible. But it soon became clear
+that the religious interests of Scotland were the very last thing which
+would receive consideration from any of the high political personages
+concerned. John Knox had dreamt of a constitution like that which he had
+seen working under Calvin at Geneva--a constitution in which the clergy
+as ministers of God should rule all things--rule politically at the
+council board, and rule in private at the fireside. It was soon made
+plain to Knox that Scotland was not Geneva. 'Eh, mon,' said the younger
+Maitland to him, 'then we may all bear the barrow now to build the House
+of the Lord.' Not exactly. The churches were left to the ministers; the
+worldly good things and worldly power remained with the laity; and as to
+religion, circumstances would decide what they would do about that.
+Again, I am not speaking of all the great men of those times. Glencairn,
+Ruthven, young Argyll--above all, the Earl of Moray--really did in some
+degree interest themselves in the Kirk. But what most of them felt was
+perhaps rather broadly expressed by Maitland when he called religion 'a
+bogle of the nursery.' That was the expression which a Scotch statesman
+of those days actually ventured to use. Had Elizabeth been conformable,
+no doubt they would in some sense or other have remained on the side of
+the Reformation. But here, too, there was a serious hitch. Elizabeth
+would not marry Arran. Elizabeth would be no party to any of their
+intrigues. She detested Knox. She detested Protestantism entirely, in
+all shapes in which Knox approved of it. She affronted the nobles on one
+side, she affronted the people on another; and all idea of uniting the
+two crowns after the fashion proposed by the Scotch Parliament she
+utterly and entirely repudiated. She was right enough, perhaps, so far
+as this was concerned; but she left the ruling families extremely
+perplexed as to the course which they would follow. They had allowed the
+country to be revolutionised in the teeth of their own sovereign, and
+what to do next they did not very well know.
+
+It was at this crisis that circumstances came in to their help. Francis
+the Second died. Mary Stuart was left a childless widow. Her connexion
+with the Crown of France was at an end, and all danger on that side to
+the liberties of Scotland at an end also. The Arran scheme having
+failed, she would be a second card as good as the first to play for the
+English Crown--as good as he, or better, for she would have the English
+Catholics on her side. So, careless how it would affect religion, and
+making no condition at all about that, the same men who a year before
+were ready to whistle Mary Stuart down the wind, now invited her back to
+Scotland; the same men who had been the loudest friends of Elizabeth now
+encouraged Mary Stuart to persist in the pretension to the Crown of
+England, which had led to all the past trouble. While in France, she had
+assumed the title of Queen of England. She had promised to abandon it,
+but, finding her own people ready to support her in withdrawing her
+promise, she stood out, insisting that at all events the English
+Parliament should declare her next in the succession; and it was well
+known that, as soon as the succession was made sure in her favour, some
+rascal would be found to put a knife or a bullet into Elizabeth. The
+object of the Scotch nobles was political, national, patriotic. For
+religion it was no great matter either way; and as they had before acted
+with the Protestants, so now they were ready to turn about, and openly
+or tacitly act with the Catholics. Mary Stuart's friends in England and
+on the Continent were Catholics, and therefore it would not do to offend
+them. First, she was allowed to have mass at Holyrood; then there was a
+move for a broader toleration. That one mass, Knox said, was more
+terrible to him than ten thousand armed men landed in the country--and
+he had perfectly good reason for saying so. He thoroughly understood
+that it was the first step towards a counter-revolution which in time
+would cover all Scotland and England, and carry them back to Popery. Yet
+he preached to deaf ears. Even Murray was so bewitched with the notion
+of the English succession, that for a year and a half he ceased to speak
+to Knox; and as it was with Murray, so it was far more with all the
+rest--their zeal for religion was gone no one knew where. Of course
+Elizabeth would not give way. She might as well, she said, herself
+prepare her shroud; and then conspiracies came, and under-ground
+intrigues with the Romanist English noblemen. France and Spain were to
+invade England, Scotland was to open its ports to their fleets, and its
+soil to their armies, giving them a safe base from which to act, and a
+dry road over the Marches to London. And if Scotland had remained
+unchanged from what it had been--had the direction of its fortunes
+remained with the prince and with the nobles, sooner or later it would
+have come to this. But suddenly it appeared that there was a new power
+in this country which no one suspected till it was felt.
+
+The commons of Scotland had hitherto been the creatures of the nobles.
+They had neither will nor opinion of their own. They thought and acted
+in the spirit of their immediate allegiance. No one seems to have dreamt
+that there would be any difficulty in dealing with them if once the
+great families agreed upon a common course. Yet it appeared, when the
+pressure came, that religion, which was the play-thing of the nobles,
+was to the people a clear matter of life and death. They might love
+their country: they might be proud of anything which would add lustre to
+its crown; but if it was to bring back the Pope and Popery--if it
+threatened to bring them back--if it looked that way--they would have
+nothing to do with it; nor would they allow it to be done. Allegiance
+was well enough; but there was a higher allegiance suddenly discovered
+which superseded all earthly considerations. I know nothing finer in
+Scottish history than the way in which the commons of the Lowlands took
+their places by the side of Knox in the great convulsions which
+followed. If all others forsook him, they at least would never forsake
+him while tongue remained to speak and hand remained to strike. Broken
+they might have been, trampled out as the Huguenots at last were
+trampled out in France, had Mary Stuart been less than the most
+imprudent or the most unlucky of sovereigns. But Providence, or the
+folly of those with whom they had to deal, fought for them. I need not
+follow the wild story of the crimes and catastrophes in which Mary
+Stuart's short reign in Scotland closed. Neither is her own share, be it
+great or small, or none at all, in those crimes of any moment to us
+here. It is enough that, both before that strange business and after it,
+when at Holyrood or across the Border, in Sheffield or Tutbury, her ever
+favourite dream was still the English throne. Her road towards it was
+through a Catholic revolution and the murder of Elizabeth. It is enough
+that, both before and after, the aristocracy of Scotland, even those
+among them who had seemed most zealous for the Reformation, were eager
+to support her. John Knox alone, and the commons, whom Knox had raised
+into a political power, remained true.
+
+Much, indeed, is to be said for the Scotch nobles. In the first shock of
+the business at Kirk-o'-Field, they forgot their politics in a sense of
+national disgrace. They sent the queen to Loch Leven. They intended to
+bring her to trial, and, if she was proved guilty, to expose and perhaps
+punish her. All parties for a time agreed in this--even the Hamiltons
+themselves; and had they been left alone they would have done it. But
+they had a perverse neighbour in England, to whom crowned heads were
+sacred. Elizabeth, it might have been thought, would have had no
+particular objection; but Elizabeth had aims of her own which baffled
+calculation. Elizabeth, the representative of revolution, yet detested
+revolutionists. The Reformers in Scotland, the Huguenots in France, the
+insurgents in the United Provinces, were the only friends she had in
+Europe. For her own safety she was obliged to encourage them; yet she
+hated them all, and would at any moment have abandoned them all, if, in
+any other way, she could have secured herself. She might have conquered
+her personal objection to Knox--she could not conquer her aversion to a
+Church which rose out of revolt against authority, which was democratic
+in constitution and republican in politics. When driven into alliance
+with the Scotch Protestants, she angrily and passionately disclaimed any
+community of creed with them; and for subjects to sit in judgment on
+their prince was a precedent which she would not tolerate. Thus she
+flung her mantle over Mary Stuart. She told the Scotch Council here in
+Edinburgh that, if they hurt a hair of her head, she would harry their
+country, and hang them all on the trees round the town, if she could
+find any trees there for that purpose. She tempted the queen to England
+with her fair promises after the battle of Langside, and then, to her
+astonishment, imprisoned her. Yet she still shielded her reputation,
+still fostered her party in Scotland, still incessantly threatened and
+incessantly endeavoured to restore her. She kept her safe, because, in
+her lucid intervals, her ministers showed her the madness of acting
+otherwise. Yet for three years she kept her own people in a fever of
+apprehension. She made a settled Government in Scotland impossible;
+till, distracted and perplexed, the Scottish statesmen went back to
+their first schemes. They assured themselves that in one way or other
+the Queen of Scots would sooner or later come again among them. They,
+and others besides them, believed that Elizabeth was cutting her own
+throat, and that the best that they could do was to recover their own
+queen's favour, and make the most of her and her titles; and so they
+lent themselves again to the English Catholic conspiracies.
+
+The Earl of Moray--the one supremely noble man then living in the
+country--was put out of the way by an assassin. French and Spanish money
+poured in, and French and Spanish armies were to be again invited over
+to Scotland. This is the form in which the drama unfolds itself in the
+correspondence of the time. Maitland, the soul and spirit of it all,
+said, in scorn, that 'he would make the Queen of England sit upon her
+tail and whine like a whipped dog.' The only powerful noblemen who
+remained on the Protestant side were Lennox, Morton, and Mar. Lord
+Lennox was a poor creature, and was soon dispatched; Mar was old and
+weak; and Morton was an unprincipled scoundrel, who used the Reformation
+only as a stalking-horse to cover the spoils which he had clutched in
+the confusion, and was ready to desert the cause at any moment if the
+balance of advantage shifted. Even the ministers of the Kirk were fooled
+and flattered over. Maitland told Mary Stuart that he had gained them
+all except one.
+
+John Knox alone defied both his threats and his persuasions. Good reason
+has Scotland to be proud of Knox. He only, in this wild crisis, saved
+the Kirk which he had founded, and saved with it Scottish and English
+freedom. But for Knox, and what he was able still to do, it is almost
+certain that the Duke of Alva's army would have been landed on the
+eastern coast. The conditions were drawn out and agreed upon for the
+reception, the support, and the stay of the Spanish troops. Two-thirds
+of the English peerage had bound themselves to rise against Elizabeth,
+and Alva waited only till Scotland itself was quiet. Only that quiet
+would not be. Instead of quiet came three dreadful years of civil war.
+Scotland was split into factions, to which the mother and son gave
+names. The queen's lords, as they were called, with unlimited money from
+France and Flanders, held Edinburgh and Glasgow; all the border line was
+theirs, and all the north and west. Elizabeth's Council, wiser than
+their mistress, barely squeezed out of her reluctant parsimony enough to
+keep Mar and Morton from making terms with the rest; but there her
+assistance ended. She would still say nothing, promise nothing, bind
+herself to nothing, and, so far as she was concerned, the war would have
+been soon enough brought to a close. But away at St. Andrews, John Knox,
+broken in body, and scarcely able to stagger up the pulpit stairs, still
+thundered in the parish church; and his voice, it was said, was like ten
+thousand trumpets braying in the ear of Scottish Protestantism. All the
+Lowlands answered to his call. Our English Cromwell found in the man of
+religion a match for the man of honour. Before Cromwell, all over the
+Lothians, and across from St. Andrews to Stirling and Glasgow--through
+farm, and town, and village--the words of Knox had struck the inmost
+chords of the Scottish commons' hearts. Passing over knight and noble,
+he had touched the farmer, the peasant, the petty tradesman, and the
+artisan, and turned the men of clay into men of steel. The village
+preacher, when he left his pulpit, doffed cap and cassock, and donned
+morion and steel-coat. The Lothian yeoman's household became for the
+nonce a band of troopers, who would cross swords with the night riders
+of Buccleuch. It was a terrible time, a time rather of anarchy than of
+defined war, for it was without form or shape. Yet the horror of it was
+everywhere. Houses and villages were burned, and women and children
+tossed on pike-point into the flames. Strings of poor men were dangled
+day after day from the walls of Edinburgh Castle. A word any way from
+Elizabeth would have ended it, but that word Elizabeth would never
+speak; and, maddened with suffering, the people half believed that she
+was feeding the fire for her own bad purposes, when it was only that she
+would not make up her mind to allow a crowned princess to be dethroned.
+No earthly influence could have held men true in such a trial. The noble
+lords--the Earl of Morton and such-like--would have made their own
+conditions, and gone with the rest; but the vital force of the Scotch
+nation, showing itself where it was least looked for, would not have it
+so.
+
+A very remarkable account of the state of the Scotch commons at this
+time is to be found in a letter of an English emissary, who had been
+sent by Lord Burleigh to see how things were going there. It was not
+merely a new creed that they had got; it was a new vital power. 'You
+would be astonished to see how men are changed here,' this writer said.
+'There is little of that submission to those above them which there used
+to be. The poor think and act for themselves. They are growing strong,
+confident, independent. The farms are better cultivated; the farmers are
+growing rich. The merchants at Leith are thriving, and, notwithstanding
+the pirates, they are increasing their ships and opening a brisk trade
+with France.'
+
+All this while civil war was raging, and the flag of Queen Mary was
+still floating over Edinburgh Castle. It surprised the English; still
+more it surprised the politicians. It was the one thing which
+disconcerted, baffled, and finally ruined the schemes and the dreams of
+Maitland. When he had gained the aristocracy, he thought that he had
+gained everybody, and, as it turned out, he had all his work still to
+do. The Spaniards did not come. The prudent Alva would not risk invasion
+till Scotland at least was assured. As time passed on, the English
+conspiracies were discovered and broken up. The Duke of Norfolk lost his
+head; the Queen of Scots was found to have been mixed up with the plots
+to murder Elizabeth; and Elizabeth at last took courage and recognised
+James. Supplies of money ceased to come from abroad, and gradually the
+tide turned. The Protestant cause once more grew towards the ascendant.
+The great families one by one came round again; and, as the backward
+movement began, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew gave it a fresh and
+tremendous impulse. Even the avowed Catholics--the Hamiltons, the
+Gordons, the Scotts, the Kers, the Maxwells--quailed before the wail of
+rage and sorrow which at that great horror rose over their country. The
+Queen's party dwindled away to a handful of desperate politicians, who
+still clung to Edinburgh Castle. But Elizabeth's 'peace-makers,' as the
+big English cannon were called, came round, at the Regent's request,
+from Berwick; David's tower, as Knox had long ago foretold, 'ran down
+over the cliff like a sandy brae;' and the cause of Mary Stuart in
+Scotland was extinguished for ever. Poor Grange, who deserved a better
+end, was hanged at the Market Cross. Secretary Maitland, the cause of
+all the mischief--the cleverest man, as far as intellect went, in all
+Britain--died (so later rumour said) by his own hand. A nobler version
+of his end is probably a truer one: He had been long ill--so ill that
+when the Castle cannon were fired, he had been carried into the cellars
+as unable to bear the sound. The breaking down of his hopes finished
+him. 'The secretary,' wrote some one from the spot to Cecil, 'is dead of
+grief, being unable to endure the great hatred which all this people
+bears towards him.' It would be well if some competent man would write a
+life of Maitland, or at least edit his papers. They contain by far the
+clearest account of the inward movements of the time; and he himself is
+one of the most tragically interesting characters in the cycle of the
+Reformation history.
+
+With the fall of the Castle, then, but not till then, it became clear to
+all men that the Reformation would hold its ground. It was the final
+trampling out of the fire which for five years had threatened both
+England and Scotland with flames and ruin. For five years--as late
+certainly as the massacre of St. Bartholomew--those who understood best
+the true state of things, felt the keenest misgivings how the event
+would turn. That things ended as they did was due to the spirit of the
+Scotch commons. There was a moment when, if they had given way, all
+would have gone, perhaps even to Elizabeth's throne. They had passed for
+nothing; they had proved to be everything; had proved--the ultimate test
+in human things--to be the power which could hit the hardest blows, and
+they took rank accordingly. The creed began now in good earnest to make
+its way into hall and castle; but it kept the form which it assumed in
+the first hours of its danger and trial, and never after lost it. Had
+the aristocracy dealt sincerely with things in the earlier stages of the
+business, again I say the democratic element in the Kirk might have been
+softened or modified. But the Protestants had been trifled with by their
+own natural leaders. Used and abused by Elizabeth, despised by the
+worldly intelligence and power of the times--they triumphed after all,
+and, as a natural consequence, they set their own mark and stamp upon
+the fruits of the victory.
+
+The question now is, what has the Kirk so established done for Scotland?
+Has it justified its own existence? Briefly, we might say, it has
+continued its first function as the guardian of Scottish freedom. But
+that is a vague phrase, and there are special accusations against the
+Kirk and its doctrines which imply that it has cared for other things
+than freedom. Narrow, fanatical, dictatorial, intrusive, superstitious,
+a spiritual despotism, the old priesthood over again with a new
+face--these and other such epithets and expressions we have heard often
+enough applied to it at more than one stage of its history. Well, I
+suppose that neither the Kirk nor anything else of man's making is
+altogether perfect. But let us look at the work which lay before it when
+it had got over its first perils. Scotch patriotism succeeded at last in
+the object it had so passionately set its heart upon. It sent a king at
+last of the Scotch blood to England, and a new dynasty; and it never
+knew peace or quiet after. The Kirk had stood between James Stuart and
+his kingcraft. He hated it as heartily as did his mother; and, when he
+got to England, he found people there who told him it would be easy to
+destroy it, and he found the strength of a fresh empire to back him in
+trying to do it. To have forced prelacy upon Scotland would have been to
+destroy the life out of Scotland. Thrust upon them by force, it would
+have been no more endurable than Popery. They would as soon, perhaps
+sooner, have had what the Irish call the 'rale thing' back again. The
+political freedom of the country was now wrapped up in the Kirk; and the
+Stuarts were perfectly well aware of that, and for that very reason
+began their crusade against it.
+
+And now, suppose the Kirk had been the broad, liberal, philosophical,
+intellectual thing which some people think it ought to have been, how
+would it have fared in that crusade; how altogether would it have
+encountered those surplices of Archbishop Laud or those dragoons of
+Claverhouse? It is hard to lose one's life for a 'perhaps,' and
+philosophical belief at the bottom means a 'perhaps' and nothing more.
+For more than half the seventeenth century, the battle had to be fought
+out in Scotland, which in reality was the battle between liberty and
+despotism; and where, except in an intense, burning conviction that they
+were maintaining God's cause against the devil, could the poor Scotch
+people have found the strength for the unequal struggle which was forced
+upon them? Toleration is a good thing in its place; but you cannot
+tolerate what will not tolerate you, and is trying to cut your throat.
+Enlightenment you cannot have enough of, but it must be true
+enlightenment, which sees a thing in all its bearings. In these matters
+the vital questions are not always those which appear on the surface;
+and in the passion and resolution of brave and noble men there is often
+an inarticulate intelligence deeper than what can be expressed in words.
+Action sometimes will hit the mark, when the spoken word either misses
+it or is but half the truth. On such subjects, and with common men,
+latitude of mind means weakness of mind. There is but a certain quantity
+of spiritual force in any man. Spread it over a broad surface, the
+stream is shallow and languid; narrow the channel, and it becomes a
+driving force. Each may be well at its own time. The mill-race which
+drives the water-wheel is dispersed in rivulets over the meadow at its
+foot. The Covenanters fought the fight and won the victory, and then,
+and not till then, came the David Humes with their essays on miracles,
+and the Adam Smiths with their political economies, and steam-engines,
+and railroads, and philosophical institutions, and all the other blessed
+or unblessed fruits of liberty.
+
+But we may go further. Institutions exist for men, not men for
+institutions; and the ultimate test of any system of politics, or body
+of opinions, or form of belief, is the effect produced on the conduct
+and condition of the people who live and die under them. Now, I am not
+here to speak of Scotland of the present day. That, happily, is no
+business of mine. We have to do here with Scotland before the march of
+intellect; with Scotland of the last two centuries; with the three or
+four hundred thousand families, who for half-a-score of generations
+believed simply and firmly in the principles of the Reformation, and
+walked in the ways of it.
+
+Looked at broadly, one would say they had been an eminently pious
+people. It is part of the complaint of modern philosophers about them,
+that religion, or superstition, or whatever they please to call it, had
+too much to do with their daily lives. So far as one can look into that
+commonplace round of things which historians never tell us about, there
+have rarely been seen in this world a set of people who have thought
+more about right and wrong, and the judgment about them of the upper
+powers. Long-headed, thrifty industry,--a sound hatred of waste,
+imprudence, idleness, extravagance,--the feet planted firmly upon the
+earth,--a conscientious sense that the worldly virtues are,
+nevertheless, very necessary virtues, that without these, honesty for
+one thing is not possible, and that without honesty no other excellence,
+religious or moral, is worth anything at all--this is the stuff of which
+Scotch life was made, and very good stuff it is. It has been called
+gloomy, austere, harsh, and such other epithets. A gifted modern writer
+has favoured us lately with long strings of extracts from the sermons of
+Scotch divines of the last century, taking hard views of human
+shortcomings and their probable consequences, and passing hard censures
+upon the world and its amusements. Well, no doubt amusement is a very
+good thing; but I should rather infer from the vehemence and frequency
+of these denunciations that the people had not been in the habit of
+denying themselves too immoderately; and, after all, it is no very hard
+charge against those teachers that they thought more of duty than of
+pleasure. Sermons always exaggerate the theoretic side of things; and
+the most austere preacher, when he is out of the pulpit, and you meet
+him at the dinner-table, becomes singularly like other people. We may
+take courage, I think, we may believe safely that in those
+minister-ridden days, men were not altogether so miserable; we may hope
+that no large body of human beings have for any length of time been too
+dangerously afraid of enjoyment. Among other good qualities, the Scots
+have been distinguished for humour--not for venomous wit, but for
+kindly, genial humour, which half loves what it laughs at--and this
+alone shows clearly enough that those to whom it belongs have not looked
+too exclusively on the gloomy side of the world. I should rather say
+that the Scots had been an unusually happy people. Intelligent industry,
+the honest doing of daily work, with a sense that it must be done well,
+under penalties; the necessaries of life moderately provided for; and a
+sensible content with the situation of life in which men are born--this
+through the week, and at the end of it the 'Cottar's Saturday
+Night'--the homely family, gathered reverently and peacefully together,
+and irradiated with a sacred presence.--Happiness! such happiness as we
+human creatures are likely to know upon this world, will be found there,
+if anywhere.
+
+The author of the 'History of Civilisation' makes a naïve remark in
+connexion with this subject. Speaking of the other country, which he
+censures equally with Scotland for its slavery to superstition, he says
+of the Spaniards that they are a well-natured, truthful, industrious,
+temperate, pious people, innocent in their habits, affectionate in their
+families, full of humour, vivacity, and shrewdness, yet that all this
+'has availed them nothing'--'has availed them nothing,' that is his
+expression--because they are loyal, because they are credulous, because
+they are contented, because they have not apprehended the first
+commandment of the new covenant: 'Thou shalt get on and make money, and
+better thy condition in life;' because, therefore, they have added
+nothing to the scientific knowledge, the wealth, and the progress of
+mankind. Without these, it seems, the old-fashioned virtues avail
+nothing. They avail a great deal to human happiness. Applied science,
+and steam, and railroads, and machinery, enable an ever-increasing
+number of people to live upon the earth; but the happiness of those
+people remains, so far as I know, dependent very much on the old
+conditions. I should be glad to believe that the new views of things
+will produce effects upon the character in the long run half so
+beautiful.
+
+There is much more to say on this subject, were there time to say it,
+but I will not trespass too far upon your patience; and I would gladly
+have ended here, had not the mention of Spain suggested one other topic,
+which I should not leave unnoticed. The Spain of Cervantes and Don
+Quixote was the Spain of the Inquisition. The Scotland of Knox and
+Melville was the Scotland of the witch trials and witch burnings. The
+belief in witches was common to all the world. The prosecution and
+punishment of the poor creatures was more conspicuous in Scotland when
+the Kirk was most powerful; in England and New England, when Puritan
+principles were also dominant there. It is easy to understand the
+reasons. Evil of all kinds was supposed to be the work of a personal
+devil; and in the general horror of evil, this particular form of it,
+in which the devil was thought especially active, excited the most
+passionate detestation. Thus, even the best men lent themselves
+unconsciously to the most detestable cruelty. Knox himself is not free
+from reproach. A poor woman was burned at St. Andrews when he was living
+there, and when a word from him would have saved her. It remains a
+lesson to all time, that goodness, though the indispensable adjunct to
+knowledge, is no substitute for it; that when conscience undertakes to
+dictate beyond its province, the result is only the more monstrous.
+
+It is well that we should look this matter in the face; and as
+particular stories leave more impression than general statements, I will
+mention one, perfectly well authenticated, which I take from the
+official report of the proceedings:--Towards the end of 1593 there was
+trouble in the family of the Earl of Orkney. His brother laid a plot to
+murder him, and was said to have sought the help of a 'notorious witch'
+called Alison Balfour. When Alison Balfour's life was looked into, no
+evidence could be found connecting her either with the particular
+offence or with witchcraft in general; but it was enough in these
+matters to be accused. She swore she was innocent; but her guilt was
+only held to be aggravated by perjury. She was tortured again and again.
+Her legs were put in the caschilaws--an iron frame which was gradually
+heated till it burned into the flesh--but no confession could be wrung
+from her. The caschilaws failed utterly, and something else had to be
+tried. She had a husband, a son, and a daughter, a child seven years
+old. As her own sufferings did not work upon her, she might be touched,
+perhaps, by the sufferings of those who were dear to her. They were
+brought into court, and placed at her side; and the husband first was
+placed in the 'lang irons'--some accursed instrument; I know not what.
+Still the devil did not yield. She bore this; and her son was next
+operated on. The boy's legs were set in 'the boot,'--the iron boot you
+may have heard of. The wedges were driven in, which, when forced home,
+crushed the very bone and marrow. Fifty-seven mallet strokes were
+delivered upon the wedges. Yet this, too, failed. There was no
+confession yet. So, last of all, the little daughter was taken. There
+was a machine called the piniwinkies--a kind of thumbscrew, which
+brought blood from under the finger nails, with a pain successfully
+terrible. These things were applied to the poor child's hands, and the
+mother's constancy broke down, and she said she would admit anything
+they wished. She confessed her witchcraft--so tried, she would have
+confessed to the seven deadly sins--and then she was burned, recalling
+her confession, and with her last breath protesting her innocence.
+
+It is due to the intelligence of the time to admit that after this her
+guilt was doubted, and such vicarious means of extorting confession do
+not seem to have been tried again. Yet the men who inflicted these
+tortures would have borne them all themselves sooner than have done any
+act which they consciously knew to be wrong. They did not know that the
+instincts of humanity were more sacred than the logic of theology, and
+in fighting against the devil they were themselves doing the devil's
+work. We should not attempt to apologise for these things, still less to
+forget them. No martyrs ever suffered to instil into mankind a more
+wholesome lesson--more wholesome, or one more hard to learn. The more
+conscientious men are, the more difficult it is for them to understand
+that in their most cherished convictions, when they pass beyond the
+limits where the wise and good of all sorts agree, they may be the
+victims of mere delusion. Yet, after all, and happily, such cases were
+but few, and affected but lightly the general condition of the people.
+
+The student running over the records of other times finds certain
+salient things standing out in frightful prominence. He concludes that
+the substance of those times was made up of the matters most dwelt on by
+the annalist. He forgets that the things most noticed are not those of
+every-day experience, but the abnormal, the extraordinary, the
+monstrous. The exceptions are noted down, the common and usual is passed
+over in silence. The philosophic historian, studying hereafter this
+present age, in which we are ourselves living, may say that it was a
+time of unexampled prosperity, luxury, and wealth; but catching at
+certain horrible murders which have lately disgraced our civilisation,
+may call us a nation of assassins. It is to invert the pyramid and stand
+it on its point. The same system of belief which produced the tragedy
+which I have described, in its proper province as the guide of ordinary
+life, has been the immediate cause of all that is best and greatest in
+Scottish character.
+
+
+
+
+THE PHILOSOPHY OF CATHOLICISM.[C]
+
+
+Not long ago I heard a living thinker of some eminence say that he
+considered Christianity to have been a misfortune. Intellectually, he
+said, it was absurd; and practically, it was an offence, over which he
+stumbled. It would have been far better for mankind, he thought, if they
+could have kept clear of superstition, and followed on upon the track of
+the Grecian philosophy. So little do men care to understand the
+conditions which have made them what they are, and which has created for
+them that very wisdom in which they themselves are so contented. But it
+is strange, indeed, that a person who could deliberately adopt such a
+conclusion should trouble himself any more to look for truth. If a mere
+absurdity could make its way out of a little fishing village in Galilee,
+and spread through the whole civilised world; if men are so pitiably
+silly, that in an age of great mental activity their strongest thinkers
+should have sunk under an abortion of fear and folly, should have
+allowed it to absorb into itself whatever of heroism, of devotion,
+self-sacrifice, and moral nobleness there was among them; surely there
+were nothing better for a wise man than to make the best of his time,
+and to crowd what enjoyment he can find into it, sheltering himself in a
+very disdainful Pyrrhonism from all care for mankind or for their
+opinions. For what better test of truth have we than the ablest men's
+acceptance of it? and if the ablest men eighteen centuries ago
+deliberately accepted what is now too absurd to reason upon, what right
+have we to hope that with the same natures, the same passions, the same
+understandings, no better proof against deception, we, like they, are
+not entangled in what, at the close of another era, shall seem again
+ridiculous? The scoff of Cicero at the divinity of Liber and Ceres
+(bread and wine) may be translated literally by the modern Protestant;
+and the sarcasms which Clement and Tertullian flung at the Pagan creed,
+the modern sceptic returns upon their own. Of what use is it to destroy
+an idol, when another, or the same in another form, takes immediate
+possession of the vacant pedestal?
+
+I shall not argue with the extravagant hypothesis of my friend. In the
+opinion even of Goethe, who was not troubled with credulity, the human
+race can never attain to anything higher than Christianity--if we mean
+by Christianity the religion which was revealed to the world in the
+teaching and the life of its Founder. But even the more limited
+reprobation by our own Reformers of the creed of mediæval Europe is not
+more just or philosophical.
+
+Ptolemy was not perfect, but Newton had been a fool if he had scoffed at
+Ptolemy. Newton could not have been without Ptolemy, nor Ptolemy without
+the Chaldees; and as it is with the minor sciences, so far more is it
+with the science of sciences--the science of life, which has grown
+through all the ages from the beginning of time. We speak of the errors
+of the past. We, with this glorious present which is opening on us, we
+shall never enter on it, we shall never understand it, till we have
+learnt to see in that past, not error, but instalment of truth,
+hard-fought-for truth, wrung out with painful and heroic effort. The
+promised land is smiling before us, but we may not pass over into the
+possession of it while the bones of our fathers who laboured through the
+wilderness lie bleaching on the sands, or a prey to the unclean birds.
+We must gather their relics and bury them, and sum up their labours, and
+inscribe the record of their actions on their tombs as an honourable
+epitaph. If Catholicism really is passing away, if it has done its work,
+and if what is left of it is now holding us back from better things, it
+is not for our bitterness but for our affectionate acknowledgment, nor
+for our heaping contempt on what it is, but for our reverend and patient
+examination of what it has been, that it will be content to bid us
+farewell, and give us God speed on our further journey.
+
+In the Natural History of Religions, certain broad phenomena perpetually
+repeat themselves; they rise in the highest thought extant at the time
+of their origin; the conclusions of philosophy settle into a creed; art
+ornaments it, devotion consecrates it, time elaborates it. It grows
+through a long series of generations into the heart and habits of the
+people; and so long as no disturbing cause interferes, or so long as the
+idea at the centre of it survives, a healthy, vigorous, natural life
+shoots beautifully up out of the intellectual root. But at last the idea
+becomes obsolete; the numbing influence of habit petrifies the spirit in
+the outside ceremonial, while new questions arise among the thinkers,
+and ideas enter into new and unexplained relations. The old formula will
+not serve; but new formulæ are tardy in appearing; and habit and
+superstition cling to the past, and policy vindicates it, and statecraft
+upholds it forcibly as serviceable to order, till, from the combined
+action of folly, and worldliness, and ignorance, the once beautiful
+symbolism becomes at last no better than 'a whited sepulchre full of
+dead men's bones and all uncleanness.' So it is now. So it was in the
+era of the Cæsars, out of which Christianity arose; and Christianity, in
+the form which it assumed at the close of the Arian controversy, was the
+deliberate solution which the most powerful intellects of that day could
+offer of the questions which had grown with the growth of mankind, and
+on which Paganism had suffered shipwreck.
+
+Paganism, as a creed, was entirely physical. When Paganism rose, men had
+not begun to reflect upon themselves, or the infirmities of their own
+nature. The bad man was a bad man--the coward, a coward--the liar, a
+liar--individually hateful and despicable: but in hating and despising
+such unfortunates, the old Greeks were satisfied to have felt all that
+it was necessary to feel about them; and how such a phenomenon as a bad
+man came to exist in this world, they scarcely cared to enquire. There
+is no evil spirit in the mythology as an antagonist of the gods. There
+is the Erinnys as the avenger of monstrous villanies; there is a
+Tartarus where the darkest criminals suffer eternal tortures. But
+Tantalus and Ixion are suffering for enormous crimes, to which the small
+wickedness of common men offers no analogy. Moreover, these and other
+such stories are only curiously ornamented myths, representing physical
+phenomena. But with Socrates a change came over philosophy; a
+sign--perhaps a cause--of the decline of the existing religion. The
+study of man superseded the study of nature: a purer Theism came in with
+the higher ideal of perfection, and sin and depravity at once assumed an
+importance, the intensity of which made every other question
+insignificant. How man could know the good and yet choose the evil; how
+God could be all pure and almighty, and yet evil have broken into his
+creation--these were the questions which thenceforth were the perplexity
+of philosophic speculation.
+
+Whatever difficulty there might be in discovering how evil came to be,
+the leaders of all the sects agreed at last upon the seat of it. Whether
+_matter_ was eternal, as Aristotle thought, or created, as Plato
+thought, both Plato and Aristotle were equally satisfied that the secret
+of all the shortcomings in this world lay in the imperfection,
+reluctancy, or inherent grossness of this impracticable substance. God
+would have everything perfect, but the nature of the element in which He
+worked in some way defeated his purpose. Death, disease, decay, clung
+necessarily to everything which was created out of it; and pain, and
+want, and hunger, and suffering. Worse than all, the spirit in its
+material body was opposed and borne down, its aspirations crushed, its
+purity tainted by the passions and appetites of its companion--the
+fleshly lusts which waged perpetual war against the soul.
+
+Matter was the cause of evil, and thenceforth the question was how to
+conquer matter, or, at least, how to set free the spirit from its
+control.
+
+The Greek language and the Greek literature spread behind the march of
+Alexander; but as his generals could only make their conquests permanent
+by largely accepting the Eastern manners, so philosophy could only make
+good its ground by becoming itself Orientalised. The one pure and holy
+God whom Plato had painfully reasoned out for himself had existed from
+immemorial time in the traditions of the Jews; while the Persians, who
+had before taught the Jews at Babylon the existence of an independent
+evil being, now had him to offer to the Greeks as their account of the
+difficulties which had perplexed Socrates. Seven centuries of struggle,
+and many hundred thousand folios, were the results of the remarkable
+fusion which followed. Out of these elements, united in various
+proportions, rose successively the Alexandrian philosophy, the
+Hellenists, the Therapeutæ, those strange Essene communists, with the
+innumerable sects of Gnostic or Christian heretics. Finally, the battle
+was limited to the two great rivals, under one or other of which the
+best of the remainder had ranged themselves--Manicheism and Catholic
+Christianity: Manicheism in which the Persian--Catholicism in which the
+Jewish--element most preponderated. It did not end till the close of the
+fifth century, and it ended then rather by arbitration than by a decided
+victory which either side could claim. The Church has yet to acknowledge
+how large a portion of its enemy's doctrines it incorporated through the
+mediation of Augustine before the field was surrendered to it. Let us
+trace something of the real bearings of this section of the world's
+Oriental history, which to so many moderns seems no better than an idle
+fighting over words and straws.
+
+Facts witnessing so clearly that the especial strength of evil lay, as
+the philosophers had seen, in _matter_, it was so far a conclusion which
+both Jew and Persian were ready to accept; the naked Aristotelic view of
+it being most acceptable to the Persian, the Platonic to the Hellenistic
+Jew. But the purer theology of the Jew forced him to look for a solution
+of the question which Plato had left doubtful, and to explain how evil
+had crept into matter. He could not allow that what God had created
+could be of its own nature imperfect. God made it very good; some other
+cause had broken in to spoil it. Accordingly, as before he had reduced
+the independent Arimanes, whose existence he had learnt at Babylon, into
+a subordinate spirit; so now, not questioning the facts of disease, of
+death, of pain, or of the infirmity of the flesh which the natural
+strength of the spirit was unable to resist, he accounted for them under
+the supposition that the first man had deliberately sinned, and by his
+sin had brought a curse upon the whole material earth, and upon all
+which was fashioned out of it. The earth was created pure and lovely--a
+garden of delight, loading itself of its own free accord with fruit and
+flower, and everything most exquisite and beautiful. No bird or beast of
+prey broke the eternal peace which reigned over its hospitable surface.
+In calm and quiet intercourse, the leopard lay down by the kid, the lion
+browsed beside the ox, and the corporeal frame of man, knowing neither
+decay nor death, nor unruly appetite, nor any change or infirmity, was
+pure as the immortal substance of the unfallen angels.
+
+But with the fatal apple all this fair scene passed away, and creation
+as it seemed was hopelessly and irretrievably ruined. Adam sinned--no
+matter how, he sinned; the sin was the one terrible fact: moral evil was
+brought into the world by the only creature who was capable of
+committing it. Sin entered in, and death by sin; death and disease,
+storm and pestilence, earthquake and famine. The imprisoned passions of
+the wild animals were let loose, and earth and air became full of
+carnage: worst of all, man's animal nature came out in gigantic
+strength--the carnal lusts, unruly appetites, jealousies, hatreds,
+rapines, and murders; and then the law, and with it, of course, breaches
+of the law, and sin on sin. The seed of Adam was infected in the animal
+change which had passed over Adam's person, and every child, therefore,
+thenceforth naturally engendered in his posterity, was infected with the
+curse which he had incurred. Every material organisation thenceforward
+contained in itself the elements of its own destruction, and the
+philosophic conclusions of Aristotle were accepted and explained by
+theology. Already, in the popular histories, those who were infected by
+disease were said to be bound by Satan; madness was a 'possession' by
+the Evil Spirit; and the whole creation, from Adam till Christ, groaned
+and travailed under Satan's power. The nobler nature in man still made
+itself felt; but it was a slave when it ought to command. It might will
+to obey the higher law, but the law in the members was over-strong for
+it and bore it down. This was the body of death which philosophy
+detected but could not explain, and from which Catholicism now came
+forward with its magnificent promise of deliverance.
+
+The carnal doctrine of the sacraments, which Protestants are compelled
+to acknowledge to have been taught as fully in the early Church as it is
+now taught by the Roman Catholics, has long been the stumbling-block to
+modern thought. It was the very essence of the original creed. Unless
+the body could be purified, the soul could not be saved; because from
+the beginning, soul and flesh were one man and inseparable. Without his
+flesh, man was not, or would cease to be. But the natural organisation
+of the flesh was infected with evil, and unless organisation could begin
+again from a new original, no pure material substance could exist at
+all. He, therefore, by whom God had first made the world, entered into
+the womb of the Virgin in the form (if I may with reverence say so) of a
+new organic cell; and around it, through the virtue of his creative
+energy, a material body grew again of the substance of his mother, pure
+of taint and clean as the first body of the first man was clean when it
+passed out under his hand in the beginning of all things. In Him thus
+wonderfully born was the virtue which was to restore the lost power of
+mankind. He came to redeem man; and, therefore, He took a human body,
+and He kept it pure through a human life, till the time came when it
+could be applied to its marvellous purpose. He died, and then appeared
+what was the nature of a material human body when freed from the
+limitations of sin. The grave could not hold it, neither was it possible
+that it should see corruption. It was real, for the disciples were
+allowed to feel and handle it. He ate and drank with them to assure
+their senses. But space had no power over it, nor any of the material
+obstacles which limit an ordinary power. He willed, and his body obeyed.
+He was here, He was there. He was visible, He was invisible. He was in
+the midst of his disciples and they saw Him, and then he was gone
+whither who could tell? At last He passed away to heaven; but while in
+heaven, He was still on earth. His body became the body of his Church on
+earth, not in metaphor, but in fact!--his very material body, in which
+and by which the faithful would be saved. His flesh and blood were
+thenceforth to be their food. They were to eat it as they would eat
+ordinary meat. They were to take it into their system, a pure material
+substance, to leaven the old natural substance and assimilate it to
+itself. As they fed upon it it would grow into them, and it would become
+their own real body. Flesh grown in the old way was the body of death,
+but the flesh of Christ was the life of the world, over which death had
+no power. Circumcision availed nothing, nor uncircumcision--but a _new
+creature_--and this new creature, which the child first put on in
+baptism, was born again into Christ of water and the Spirit. In the
+Eucharist he was fed and sustained, and went on from strength to
+strength; and ever as the nature of his body changed, being able to
+render a more complete obedience, he would at last pass away to God
+through the gate of the grave, and stand holy and perfect in the
+presence of Christ. Christ had indeed been ever present with him; but
+because while life lasted some particles of the old Adam would
+necessarily cling to every man, the Christian's mortal eye on earth
+could not see Him. Hedged in by 'his muddy vesture of decay,' his eyes,
+like the eyes of the disciples of Emmaus, are holden, and only in faith
+he feels Him. But death, which till Christ had died had been the last
+victory of evil, in virtue of his submission to it, became its own
+destroyer, for it had power only over the tainted particles of the old
+substance, and there was nothing needed but that these should be washed
+away, and the elect would stand out at once pure and holy, clothed in
+immortal bodies, like refined gold, the redeemed of God.
+
+The being who accomplished a work so vast--a work compared to which the
+first creation appears but a trifling difficulty--what could He be but
+God? God Himself! Who but God could have wrested his prize from a power
+which half the thinking world believed to be his coequal and coeternal
+adversary? He was God. He was man also, for He was the second Adam--the
+second starting-point of human growth. He was virgin born, that no
+original impurity might infect the substance which He assumed; and being
+Himself sinless, He showed, in the nature of his person, after his
+resurrection, what the material body would have been in all of us except
+for sin, and what it will be when, after feeding on it in its purity,
+the bodies of each of us are transfigured after its likeness. Here was
+the secret of the spirit which set St. Simeon on his pillar and sent St.
+Anthony to the tombs--of the night watches, the weary fasts, the
+penitential scourgings, the life-long austerities which have been
+alternately the glory and the reproach of the mediæval saints. They
+desired to overcome their animal bodies, and anticipate in life the work
+of death in uniting themselves more completely to Christ by the
+destruction of the flesh, which lay as a veil between themselves and
+Him.
+
+Such I believe to have been the central idea of the beautiful creed
+which, for 1,500 years, tuned the heart and formed the mind of the
+noblest of mankind. From this centre it radiated out and spread, as time
+went on, into the full circle of human activity, flinging its own
+philosophy and its own peculiar grace over the common details of the
+common life of all of us. Like the seven lamps before the Throne of God,
+the seven mighty angels, and the seven stars, the seven sacraments shed
+over mankind a never-ceasing stream of blessed influences. The priests,
+a holy order set apart and endowed with mysterious power, represented
+Christ and administered his gifts. Christ, in his twelfth year, was
+presented in the Temple, and first entered on his Father's business; and
+the baptised child, when it has grown to an age to become conscious of
+its vow and of its privilege, again renews it in full knowledge of what
+it undertakes, and receives again sacramentally a fresh gift of grace to
+assist it forward on its way. In maturity it seeks a companion to share
+its pains and pleasures; and, again, Christ is present to consecrate the
+union. Marriage, which, outside the Church, only serves to perpetuate
+the curse and bring fresh inheritors of misery into the world, He made
+holy by his presence at Cana, and chose it as the symbol to represent
+his own mystic union with his Church. Even saints cannot live without at
+times some spot adhering to them. The atmosphere in which we breathe and
+move is soiled, and Christ has anticipated our wants. Christ did penance
+forty days in the wilderness, not to subdue his own flesh--for that
+which was already perfect did not need subduing--but to give to penance
+a cleansing virtue to serve for our daily or our hourly ablution. Christ
+consecrates our birth; Christ throws over us our baptismal robe of pure
+unsullied innocence. He strengthens us as we go forward. He raises us
+when we fall. He feeds us with the substance of his own most precious
+body. In the person of his minister he does all this for us, in virtue
+of that which in his own person He actually performed when a man living
+on this earth. Last of all, when time is drawing to its close with
+us--when life is past, when the work is done, and the dark gate is near,
+beyond which the garden of an eternal home is waiting to receive us, his
+tender care has not forsaken us. He has taken away the sting of death,
+but its appearance is still terrible; and He will not leave us without
+special help at our last need. He tried the agony of the moment; and He
+sweetens the cup for us before we drink it. We are dismissed to the
+grave with our bodies anointed with oil, which He made holy in his last
+anointing before his passion, and then all is over. We lie down and seem
+to decay--to decay--but not all. Our natural body decays, being the last
+remains of the infected matter which we have inherited from Adam; but
+the spiritual body, the glorified substance which has made our life, and
+is our real body as we are in Christ, that can never decay, but passes
+off into the kingdom which is prepared for it; that other world where
+there is no sin, and God is all and in all!
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[C] From the _Leader_, 1851.
+
+
+
+
+A PLEA FOR THE FREE DISCUSSION OF THEOLOGICAL DIFFICULTIES.[D]
+
+
+In the ordinary branches of human knowledge or enquiry, the judicious
+questioning of received opinions has been regarded as the sign of
+scientific vitality, the principle of scientific advancement, the very
+source and root of healthy progress and growth. If medicine had been
+regulated three hundred years ago by Act of Parliament; if there had
+been Thirty-nine Articles of Physic, and every licensed practitioner had
+been compelled, under pains and penalties, to compound his drugs by the
+prescriptions of Henry the Eighth's physician, Doctor Butts, it is easy
+to conjecture in what state of health the people of this country would
+at present be found. Constitutions have changed with habits of life, and
+the treatment of disorders has changed to meet the new conditions. New
+diseases have shown themselves of which Doctor Butts had no cognizance;
+new continents have given us plants with medicinal virtues previously
+unknown; new sciences, and even the mere increase of recorded
+experience, have added a thousand remedies to those known to the age of
+the Tudors. If the College of Physicians had been organised into a board
+of orthodoxy, and every novelty of treatment had been regarded as a
+crime against society, which a law had been established to punish, the
+hundreds who die annually from preventible causes would have been
+thousands and tens of thousands.
+
+Astronomy is the most perfect of the sciences. The accuracy of the
+present theory of the planetary movements is tested daily and hourly by
+the most delicate experiments, and the Legislature, if it so pleased,
+might enact the first principles of these movements into a statute,
+without danger of committing the law of England to falsehood. Yet, if
+the Legislature were to venture on any such paternal procedure in a few
+years gravitation itself would be called in question, and the whole
+science would wither under the fatal shadow. There are many phenomena
+still unexplained to give plausibility to scepticism; there are others
+more easily formularised for working purposes in the language of
+Hipparchus; and there would be reactionists who would invite us to
+return to the safe convictions of our forefathers. What the world has
+seen the world may see again; and were it once granted that astronomy
+were something to be ruled by authority, new popes would imprison new
+Galileos; the knowledge already acquired would be strangled in the cords
+which were intended to keep it safe from harm, and, deprived of the free
+air on which its life depends, it would dwindle and die.
+
+A few years ago, an Inspector of Schools--a Mr. Jellinger
+Symonds--opening, perhaps for the first time, an elementary book on
+astronomy, came on something which he conceived to be a difficulty in
+the theory of lunar motion. His objection was on the face of it
+plausible. The true motions of the heavenly bodies are universally the
+opposite of the apparent motions. Mr. Symonds conceived that the moon
+could not revolve on its axis, because the same side of it was
+continually turned towards the earth; and because if it were connected
+with the earth by a rigid bar--which, as he thought, would deprive it of
+power of rotation--the relative aspects of the two bodies would remain
+unchanged. He sent his views to the 'Times.' He appealed to the common
+sense of the world, and common sense seemed to be on his side. The men
+of science were of course right; but a phenomenon, not entirely obvious,
+had been hitherto explained in language which the general reader could
+not readily comprehend. A few words of elucidation cleared up the
+confusion. We do not recollect whether Mr. Symonds was satisfied or not;
+but most of us who had before received what the men of science told us
+with an unintelligent and languid assent, were set thinking for
+ourselves, and, as a result of the discussion, exchanged a confused idea
+for a clear one.
+
+It was an excellent illustration of the true claims of authority and of
+the value of open enquiry. The ignorant man has not as good a right to
+his own opinion as the instructed man. The instructed man, however
+right he may be, must not deliver his conclusions as axioms, and merely
+insist that they are true. The one asks a question, the other answers
+it, and all of us are the better for the business.
+
+Now, let us suppose the same thing to have happened when the only reply
+to a difficulty was an appeal to the Astronomer-Royal, where the
+rotation of the moon was an article of salvation decreed by the law of
+the land, and where all persons admitted to hold office under the State
+were required to subscribe to it. The Astronomer-Royal--as it was, if we
+remember right, he was a little cross at Mr. Symond's presumption--would
+have brought an action against him in the Court of Arches; Mr. Symonds
+would have been deprived of his inspectorship--for, of course, he would
+have been obstinate in his heresy; the world outside would have had an
+antecedent presumption that truth lay with the man who was making
+sacrifices for it, and that there was little to be said in the way of
+argument for what could not stand without the help of the law. Everybody
+could understand the difficulty; not everybody would have taken the
+trouble to attend to the answer. Mr. Symonds would have been a Colenso,
+and a good many of us would have been convinced in our secret hearts
+that the moon as little turned on its axis as the drawing-room table.
+
+As it is in idea essential to a reverence for truth to believe in its
+capacity for self-defence, so practically, in every subject except one,
+errors are allowed free room to express themselves, and the liberty of
+opinion which is the life of knowledge, as surely becomes the death of
+falsehood. A method--the soundness of which is so evident that to argue
+in favour of it is almost absurd--might be expected to have been
+applied, as a matter of course, to the one subject where mistake is
+supposed to be fatal,--where to come to wrong conclusions is held to be
+a crime for which the Maker of the universe has neither pardon nor pity.
+Yet many reasons, not difficult to understand, have long continued to
+exclude theology from the region where free discussion is supposed to be
+applicable. That so many persons have a personal interest in the
+maintenance of particular views, would of itself be fatal to fair
+argument. Though they know themselves to be right, yet right is not
+enough for them unless there is might to support it, and those who talk
+most of faith show least that they possess it. But there are deeper and
+more subtle objections. The theologian requires absolute certainty, and
+there are no absolute certainties in science. The conclusions of science
+are never more than in a high degree probable; they are no more than the
+best explanations of phenomena which are attainable in the existing
+state of knowledge. The most elementary laws are called laws only in
+courtesy. They are generalisations which are not considered likely to
+require modification, but which no one pretends to be in the nature of
+the cause exhaustively and ultimately true. As phenomena become more
+complicated, and the data for the interpretation of them more
+inadequate, the explanations offered are put forward hypothetically, and
+are graduated by the nature of the evidence. Such modest hesitation is
+altogether unsuited to the theologian, whose certainty increases with
+the mystery and obscurity of his matter; his convictions admit of no
+qualification; his truth is sure as the axioms of geometry; he knows
+what he believes, for he has the evidence in his heart; if he enquire,
+it is with a foregone conclusion, and serious doubt with him is sin. It
+is in vain to point out to him the thousand forms of opinions for each
+of which the same internal witness is affirmed. The Mayo peasant
+crawling with bare knees over the splintered rocks on Croagh Patrick,
+the nun prostrate before the image of St. Mary, the Methodist in the
+spasmodic ecstasy of a revival, alike are conscious of emotions in
+themselves which correspond to their creed: the more passionate, or--as
+some would say--the more unreasoning the piety, the louder and more
+clear is the voice within. But these varieties are no embarrassment to
+the theologian. He finds no fault with the method which is identical in
+them all. Whatever the party to which he himself belongs, he is equally
+satisfied that he alone has the truth; the rest are under illusions of
+Satan.
+
+Again, we hear--or we used to hear when the High Church party were more
+formidable than they are at present--much about 'the right of private
+judgment.' 'Why,' the eloquent Protestant would say, 'should I pin my
+faith upon the Church? the Church is but a congregation of fallible men,
+no better able to judge than I am; I have a right to my own opinion.' It
+sounds like a paradox to say that free discussion is interfered with by
+a cause which, above all others, would have been expected to further it;
+but this in fact has been the effect, because it tends to remove the
+grounds of theological belief beyond the province of argument. No one
+talks of 'a right of private judgment' in anything but religion; no one
+but a fool insists on his 'right to his own opinion' with his lawyer or
+his doctor. Able men who have given their time to special subjects, are
+authorities upon those subjects to be listened to with deference, and
+the ultimate authority at any given time is the collective general sense
+of the wisest men living in the department to which they belong. The
+utmost 'right of private judgment' which anybody claims in such cases,
+is the choice of the physician to whom he will trust his body, or of the
+counsel to whom he will commit the conduct of his cause. The expression,
+as it is commonly used, implies a belief that, in matters of religion,
+the criteria of truth are different in kind from what prevail elsewhere,
+and the efforts which have been made to bring such a notion into harmony
+with common sense and common subjects have not been the least
+successful. The High Church party used to say, as a point against the
+Evangelicals, that either 'the right of private judgment' meant nothing,
+or it meant that a man had a right to be in the wrong. 'No,' said a
+writer in the 'Edinburgh Review,' 'it means only that if a man chooses
+to be in the wrong, no one else has a right to interfere with him. A man
+has no right to get drunk in his own house, but the policeman may not
+force a way into his house and prevent him.' The illustration fails of
+its purpose.
+
+In the first place, the Evangelicals never contemplated a wrong use of
+the thing; they meant merely that they had a right to their own opinions
+as against the Church. They did not indeed put forward their claim quite
+so nakedly; they made it general, as sounding less invidious; but nobody
+ever heard an Evangelical admit a High Churchman's right to be a High
+Churchman, or a Catholic's right to be a Catholic.
+
+But secondly, society has a most absolute right to prevent all manner of
+evil--drunkenness, and the rest of it, if it can--only in doing so,
+society must not use means which would create a greater evil than it
+would remedy. As a man can by no possibility be doing anything but most
+foul wrong to himself in getting drunk, society does him no wrong, but
+rather does him the greatest benefit, if it can possibly keep him sober;
+and in the same way, since a false belief in serious matters is among
+the greatest of misfortunes, so to drive it out of man, by the whip, if
+it cannot be managed by persuasion, is an act of brotherly love and
+affection, provided the belief really and truly is false, and you have a
+better to give him in the place of it. The question is not what to do,
+but merely 'how to do it;' although Mr. Mill in his love of 'liberty,'
+thinks otherwise. Mr. Mill demands for every man a right to say out his
+convictions in plain language, whatever they may be; and so far as he
+means that there should be no Act of Parliament to prevent him, he is
+perfectly just in what he says. But when Mr. Mill goes from Parliament
+to public opinion--when he lays down as a general principle that the
+free play of thought is unwholesomely interfered with by society, he
+would take away the sole protection which we possess from the inroads of
+any kind of folly. His dread of tyranny is so great, that he thinks a
+man better off with a false opinion of his own than with a right opinion
+inflicted upon him from without; while, for our own part, we should be
+grateful for tyranny or for anything else which would perform so useful
+an office for us.
+
+Public opinion may be unjust at particular times and on particular
+subjects; we believe it to be both unjust and unwise on the matter of
+which we are at present speaking: but, on the whole, it is like the
+ventilation of a house, which keeps the air pure. Much in this world has
+to be taken for granted, and we cannot be for ever arguing over our
+first principles. If a man persists in talking of what he does not
+understand, he is put down; if he sports loose views on morals at a
+decent dinner party, the better sort of people fight shy of him, and he
+is not invited again; if he profess himself a Buddhist or a Mahometan,
+it is assumed that he has not adopted those beliefs on serious
+conviction, but rather in wilful levity and eccentricity which does not
+deserve to be tolerated. Men have no right to make themselves bores and
+nuisances; and the common sense of mankind inflicts wholesome
+inconveniences on those who carry their 'right of private judgment' to
+any such extremities. It is a check, the same in kind as that which
+operates so wholesomely in the sciences. Mere folly is extinguished in
+contempt; objections reasonably urged obtain a hearing and are
+reasonably met. New truths, after encountering sufficient opposition to
+test their value, make their way into general reception.
+
+A further cause which has operated to prevent theology from obtaining
+the benefit of free discussion is the interpretation popularly placed
+upon the constitution of the Church Establishment. For fifteen centuries
+of its existence, the Christian Church was supposed to be under the
+immediate guidance of the Holy Spirit, which miraculously controlled its
+decisions, and precluded the possibility of error. This theory broke
+down at the Reformation, but it left behind it a confused sense that
+theological truth was in some way different from other truth; and,
+partly on grounds of public policy, partly because it was supposed to
+have succeeded to the obligations and the rights of the Papacy, the
+State took upon itself to fix by statute the doctrines which should be
+taught to the people. The distractions created by divided opinions were
+then dangerous. Individuals did not hesitate to ascribe to themselves
+the infallibility which they denied to the Church. Everybody was
+intolerant upon principle, and was ready to cut the throat of an
+opponent whom his arguments had failed to convince. The State, while it
+made no pretensions to Divine guidance, was compelled to interfere in
+self-protection; and to keep the peace of the realm, and to prevent the
+nation from tearing itself in pieces, a body of formulas was enacted,
+for the time broad and comprehensive, within which opinion might be
+allowed convenient latitude, while forbidden to pass beyond the border.
+
+It might have been thought that in abandoning for itself, and formally
+denying to the Church its pretensions to immunity from error, the State
+could not have intended to bind the conscience. When this or that law is
+passed, the subject is required to obey it, but he is not required to
+approve of the law as just. The Prayer-Book and the Thirty-nine
+Articles, so far as they are made obligatory by Act of Parliament, are
+as much laws as any other statute. They are a rule to conduct; it is not
+easy to see why they should be more; it is not easy to see why they
+should have been supposed to deprive clergymen of a right to their
+opinions, or to forbid discussion of their contents. The judge is not
+forbidden to ameliorate the law which he administers. If in discharge of
+his duty he has to pronounce a sentence which he declares at the same
+time that he thinks unjust, no indignant public accuses him of
+dishonesty, or requires him to resign his office. The soldier is asked
+no questions as to the legitimacy of the war on which he is sent to
+fight; nor need he throw up his commission if he think the quarrel a bad
+one. Doubtless, if a law was utterly iniquitous--if a war was
+unmistakably wicked--honourable men might feel uncertain what to do, and
+would seek some other profession rather than continue instruments of
+evil. But within limits, and in questions of detail, where the service
+is generally good and honourable, we leave opinion its free play, and
+exaggerated scrupulousness would be folly or something worse. Somehow or
+other, however, this wholesome freedom is not allowed to the clergyman.
+The idea of absolute inward belief has been substituted for that of
+obedience; and the man who, in taking orders, signs the Articles and
+accepts the Prayer Book, does not merely undertake to use the services
+in the one, and abstain from contradicting to his congregation the
+doctrines contained in the other; but he is held to promise what no
+honest man, without presumption, can undertake to promise--that he will
+continue to think to the end of his life as he thinks when he makes his
+engagement.
+
+It is said that if his opinions change, he may resign, and retire into
+lay communion. We are not prepared to say that either the Convocation of
+1562, or the Parliament which afterwards endorsed its proceedings, knew
+exactly what they meant, or did not mean; but it is quite clear that
+they did not contemplate the alternative of a clergyman's retirement. If
+they had, they would have provided means by which he could have
+abandoned his orders, and not have remained committed for life to a
+profession from which he could not escape. If the popular theory of
+subscription be true, and the Articles are articles of belief, a
+reasonable human being, when little more than a boy, pledges himself to
+a long series of intricate and highly-difficult propositions of abstruse
+divinity. He undertakes never to waver or doubt--never to allow his mind
+to be shaken, whatever the weight of argument or evidence brought to
+bear upon him. That is to say, he promises to do what no man living has
+a right to promise to do. He is doing, on the authority of Parliament,
+precisely what the Church of Rome required him to do on the authority of
+a Council.
+
+If a clergyman--in trouble amidst the abstruse subjects with which he
+has to deal, or unable to reconcile some new-discovered truth of science
+with the established formulas--puts forward his perplexities; if he
+ventures a doubt of the omniscience of the statesmen and divines of the
+sixteenth century, which they themselves disowned, there is an instant
+cry to have him stifled, silenced, or trampled down; and if no longer
+punished in life and limb, to have him deprived of the means on which
+life and limb can be supported, while with ingenious tyranny he is
+forbidden to maintain himself by any other occupation.
+
+So far have we gone in this direction, that when the 'Essays and
+Reviews' appeared, it was gravely said--and said by men who had no
+professional antipathy to them--that the writers had broken their faith.
+Laymen were free to say what they pleased on such subjects; clergymen
+were the hired exponents of the established opinions, and were committed
+to them in thought and word. It was one more anomaly where there were
+enough already. To say that the clergy, who are set apart to study a
+particular subject, are to be the only persons unpermitted to have an
+independent opinion upon it, is like saying that lawyers must take no
+part in the amendment of the statute-book; that engineers must be silent
+upon mechanism; and if an improvement is wanted in the art of medicine,
+physicians may have nothing to say to it.
+
+These causes would, perhaps, have been insufficient to repress free
+enquiry, if there had been on the part of the really able men among us a
+determination to break the ice; in other words, if theology had
+preserved the same commanding interest for the more powerful minds with
+which it affected them three hundred years ago. But on the one hand, a
+sense, half serious, half languid, of the hopelessness of the subject
+has produced an indisposition to meddle with it; on the other, there has
+been a creditable reluctance to disturb by discussion the minds of the
+uneducated or half-educated, to whom the established religion is simply
+an expression of the obedience which they owe to Almighty God, on the
+details of which they think little, and are therefore unconscious of its
+difficulties, while in general it is the source of all that is best and
+noblest in their lives and actions.
+
+This last motive no doubt deserves respect, but the force which it once
+possessed it possesses no longer. The uncertainty which once affected
+only the more instructed extends now to all classes of society. A
+superficial crust of agreement, wearing thinner day by day, is
+undermined everywhere by a vague misgiving; and there is an unrest
+which will be satisfied only when the sources of it are probed to the
+core. The Church authorities repeat a series of phrases which they are
+pleased to call answers to objections; they treat the most serious
+grounds of perplexity as if they were puerile and trifling; while it is
+notorious that for a century past extremely able men have either not
+known what to say about them, or have not said what they thought. On the
+Continent the peculiar English view has scarcely a single educated
+defender. Even in England the laity keep their judgment in suspense, or
+remain warily silent.
+
+'Of what religion are you, Mr. Rogers?' said a lady once.
+
+'What religion, madam? I am of the religion of all sensible men.'
+
+'And what is that?' she asked.
+
+'All sensible men, madam, keep that to themselves.'
+
+If Mr. Rogers had gone on to explain himself, he would have said,
+perhaps, that where the opinions of those best able to judge are
+divided, the questions at issue are doubtful. Reasonable men who are
+unable to give them special attention withhold their judgment, while
+those who are able, form their conclusions with diffidence and modesty.
+But theologians will not tolerate diffidence; they demand absolute
+assent, and will take nothing short of it; and they affect, therefore,
+to drown in foolish ridicule whatever troubles or displeases them. The
+Bishop of Oxford talks in the old style of punishment. The Archbishop of
+Canterbury refers us to Usher as our guide in Hebrew chronology. The
+objections of the present generation of 'infidels,' he says, are the
+same which have been refuted again and again, and are such as a child
+might answer. The young man just entering upon the possession of his
+intellect, with a sense of responsibility for his belief, and more
+anxious for truth than for success in life, finds, when he looks into
+the matter, that the archbishop has altogether misrepresented it; that
+in fact, like other official persons, he had been using merely a
+stereotyped form of words, to which he attached no definite meaning. The
+words are repeated year after year, but the enemies refuse to be
+exorcised. They come and come again, from Spinoza and Lessing to Strauss
+and Renan. The theologians have resolved no single difficulty; they
+convince no one who is not convinced already; and a Colenso coming
+fresh to the subject with no more than a year's study, throws the Church
+of England into convulsions.
+
+If there were any real danger that Christianity would cease to be
+believed, it would be no more than a fulfilment of prophecy. The state
+in which the Son of Man would find the world at his coming he did not
+say would be a state of faith. But if that dark time is ever literally
+to come upon the earth, there are no present signs of it. The creed of
+eighteen centuries is not about to fade away like an exhalation, nor are
+the new lights of science so exhilarating that serious persons can look
+with comfort to exchanging one for the other. Christianity has abler
+advocates than its professed defenders, in those many quiet and humble
+men and women who in the light of it and the strength of it live holy,
+beautiful, and self-denying lives. The God that answers by fire is the
+God whom mankind will acknowledge; and so long as the fruits of the
+Spirit continue to be visible in charity, in self-sacrifice, in those
+graces which raise human creatures above themselves, and invest them
+with that beauty of holiness which only religion confers, thoughtful
+persons will remain convinced that with them in some form or other is
+the secret of truth. The body will not thrive on poison, or the soul on
+falsehood; and as the vital processes of health are too subtle for
+science to follow; as we choose our food, not by the most careful
+chemical analysis, but by the experience of its effects upon the system;
+so when a particular belief is fruitful in nobleness of character, we
+need trouble ourselves very little with scientific demonstrations that
+it is false. The most deadly poison may be chemically undistinguishable
+from substances which are perfectly innocent. Prussic acid, we are told,
+is formed of the same elements, combined in the same proportions, as
+gum-arabic.
+
+What that belief is for which the fruits speak thus so positively, it is
+less easy to define. Religion from the beginning of time has expanded
+and changed with the growth of knowledge. The religion of the prophets
+was not the religion which was adapted to the hardness of heart of the
+Israelites of the Exodus. The Gospel set aside the Law; the creed of the
+early Church was not the creed of the Middle Ages, any more than the
+creed of Luther and Cranmer was the creed of St. Bernard and Aquinas.
+Old things pass away, new things come in their place; and they in their
+turn grow old, and give place to others; yet in each of the many forms
+which Christianity has assumed in the world, holy men have lived and
+died, and have had the witness of the Spirit that they were not far from
+the truth. It may be that the faith which saves is the something held in
+common by all sincere Christians, and by those as well who should come
+from the east and the west, and sit down in the kingdom of God, when the
+children of the covenant would be cast out. It may be that the true
+teaching of our Lord is overlaid with doctrines; and theology, when
+insisting on the reception of its huge catena of formulas, may be
+binding a yoke upon our necks which neither we nor our fathers were able
+to bear.
+
+But it is not the object of this paper to put forward either this or any
+other particular opinion. The writer is conscious only that he is
+passing fast towards the dark gate which soon will close behind him. He
+believes that some kind of sincere and firm conviction on these things
+is of infinite moment to him, and, entirely diffident of his own power
+to find his way towards such a conviction, he is both ready and anxious
+to disclaim 'all right of private judgment' in the matter. He wishes
+only to learn from those who are able to teach him. The learned prelates
+talk of the presumptuousness of human reason; they tell us that doubts
+arise from the consciousness of sin and the pride of the unregenerate
+heart. The present writer, while he believes generally that reason,
+however inadequate, is the best faculty to which we have to trust, yet
+is most painfully conscious of the weakness of his own reason; and once
+let the real judgment of the best and wisest men be declared--let those
+who are most capable of forming a sound opinion, after reviewing the
+whole relations of science, history, and what is now received as
+revelation, tell us fairly how much of the doctrines popularly taught
+they conceive to be adequately established, how much to be uncertain,
+and how much, if anything, to be mistaken; there is scarcely, perhaps, a
+single serious enquirer who would not submit with delight to a court
+which is the highest on earth.
+
+Mr. Mansell tells us that in the things of God reason is beyond its
+depth, that the wise and the unwise are on the same level of incapacity,
+and that we must accept what we find established, or we must believe
+nothing. We presume that Mr. Mansell's dilemma itself is a conclusion
+of reason. Do what we will, reason is and must be our ultimate
+authority; and were the collective sense of mankind to declare Mr.
+Mansell right, we should submit to that opinion as readily as to
+another. But the collective sense of mankind is less acquiescent. He has
+been compared to a man sitting on the end of a plank and deliberately
+sawing off his seat. It seems never to have occurred to him that, if he
+is right, he has no business to be a Protestant. What Mr. Mansell says
+to Professor Jowett, Bishop Gardiner in effect replied to Frith and
+Ridley. Frith and Ridley said that transubstantiation was unreasonable;
+Gardiner answered that there was the letter of Scripture for it, and
+that the human intellect was no measure of the power of God. Yet the
+Reformers somehow believed, and Mr. Mansell by his place in the Church
+of England seems to agree with them, that the human intellect was not so
+wholly incompetent. It might be a weak guide, but it was better than
+none; and they declared on grounds of mere reason, that Christ being in
+heaven and not on earth, 'it was contrary to the truth for a natural
+body to be in two places at once.' The common sense of the country was
+of the same opinion, and the illusion was at an end.
+
+There have been 'Aids to Faith' produced lately, and 'Replies to the
+Seven Essayists,' 'Answers to Colenso,' and much else of the kind. We
+regret to say that they have done little for us. The very life of our
+souls is at issue in the questions which have been raised, and we are
+fed with the professional commonplaces of the members of a close guild,
+men holding high office in the Church, or expecting to hold high office
+there; in either case with a strong temporal interest in the defence of
+the institution which they represent. We desire to know what those of
+the clergy think whose love of truth is unconnected with their prospects
+in life; we desire to know what the educated laymen, the lawyers, the
+historians, the men of science, the statesmen think; and these are for
+the most part silent, or confess themselves modestly uncertain. The
+professional theologians alone are loud and confident; but they speak in
+the old angry tone which rarely accompanies deep and wise convictions.
+They do not meet the real difficulties; they mistake them, misrepresent
+them, claim victories over adversaries with whom they have never even
+crossed swords, and leap to conclusions with a precipitancy at which we
+can only smile. It has been the unhappy manner of their class from
+immemorial time; they call it zeal for the Lord, as if it were beyond
+all doubt that they were on God's side--as if serious enquiry after
+truth was something which they were entitled to resent. They treat
+intellectual difficulties as if they deserved rather to be condemned and
+punished than considered and weighed, and rather stop their ears and run
+with one accord upon anyone who disagrees with them than listen
+patiently to what he has to say.
+
+We do not propose to enter in detail upon the particular points which
+demand re-discussion. It is enough that the more exact habit of thought
+which science has engendered, and the closer knowledge of the value and
+nature of evidence, has notoriously made it necessary that the grounds
+should be reconsidered on which we are to believe that one country and
+one people was governed for sixteen centuries on principles different
+from those which we now find to prevail universally. One of many
+questions, however, shall be briefly glanced at, on which the real issue
+seems habitually to be evaded.
+
+Much has been lately said and written on the authenticity of the
+Pentateuch and the other historical books of the Old Testament. The
+Bishop of Natal has thrown out in a crude form the critical results of
+the enquiries of the Germans, coupled with certain arithmetical
+calculations, for which he has a special aptitude. He supposes himself
+to have proved that the first five books of the Bible are a compilation
+of uncertain date, full of inconsistencies and impossibilities. The
+apologists have replied that the objections are not absolutely
+conclusive, that the events described in the Book of Exodus might
+possibly, under certain combinations of circumstances, have actually
+taken place; and they then pass to the assumption that because a story
+is not necessarily false, therefore it is necessarily true. We have no
+intention of vindicating Dr. Colenso. His theological training makes his
+arguments very like those of his opponents, and he and Dr. M'Call may
+settle their differences between themselves. The question is at once
+wider and simpler than any which has been raised in that controversy.
+Were it proved beyond possibility of error that the Pentateuch was
+written by Moses, that those and all the books of the Old and New
+Testaments were really the work of the writers whose names they bear;
+were the Mosaic cosmogony in harmony with physical discoveries; and were
+the supposed inconsistencies and contradictions shown to have no
+existence except in Dr. Colenso's imagination--we should not have
+advanced a single step towards making good the claim put forward for the
+Bible, that it is absolutely and unexceptionably true in all its parts.
+The 'genuineness and authenticity' argument is irrelevant and needless.
+The clearest demonstration of the human authorship of the Pentateuch
+proves nothing about its immunity from errors. If there are no mistakes
+in it, it was not the workmanship of man; and if it was inspired by the
+Holy Spirit, there is no occasion to show that the hand of Moses was the
+instrument made use of. To the most excellent of contemporary histories,
+to histories written by eye-witnesses of the facts which they describe,
+we accord but a limited confidence. The highest intellectual competence,
+the most admitted truthfulness, immunity from prejudice, and the absence
+of temptation to misstate the truth; these things may secure great
+credibility, but they are no guarantee for minute and circumstantial
+exactness. Two historians, though with equal gifts and equal
+opportunities, never describe events in exactly the same way. Two
+witnesses in a court of law, while they agree in the main, invariably
+differ in some particulars. It appears as if men could not relate facts
+precisely as they saw or as they heard them. The different parts of a
+story strike different imaginations unequally; and the mind, as the
+circumstances pass through it, alters their proportions unconsciously,
+or shifts the perspective. The credit which we give to the most
+authentic work of a man has no resemblance to that universal acceptance
+which is demanded for the Bible. It is not a difference of degree: it is
+a difference in kind; and we desire to know on what ground this
+infallibility, which we do not question, but which is not proved,
+demands our belief. Very likely, the Bible is thus infallible. Unless it
+is, there can be no moral obligation to accept the facts which it
+records; and though there may be intellectual error in denying them,
+there can be no moral sin. Facts may be better or worse authenticated;
+but all the proofs in the world of the genuineness and authenticity of
+the human handiwork cannot establish a claim upon the conscience. It
+might be foolish to question Thucydides' account of Pericles, but no
+one would call it sinful. Men part with all sobriety of judgment when
+they come on ground of this kind. When Sir Henry Rawlinson read the name
+of Sennacherib on the Assyrian marbles, and found allusions there to the
+Israelites in Palestine, we were told that a triumphant answer had been
+found to the cavils of sceptics, and a convincing proof of the inspired
+truth of the Divine Oracles. Bad arguments in a good cause are a sure
+way to bring distrust upon it. The Divine Oracles may be true, and may
+be inspired; but the discoveries at Nineveh certainly do not prove them
+so. No one supposes that the Books of Kings or the prophecies of Isaiah
+and Ezekiel were the work of men who had no knowledge of Assyria or the
+Assyrian Princes. It is possible that in the excavations at Carthage
+some Punic inscription may be found confirming Livy's account of the
+battle of Cannæ; but we shall not be obliged to believe therefore in the
+inspiration of Livy, or rather (for the argument comes to that) in the
+inspiration of the whole Latin literature.
+
+We are not questioning the fact that the Bible is infallible; we desire
+only to be told on what evidence that great and awful fact concerning it
+properly rests. It would seem, indeed, as if instinct had been wiser
+than argument--as if it had been felt that nothing short of this literal
+and close inspiration could preserve the facts on which Christianity
+depends. The history of the early world is a history everywhere of
+marvels. The legendary literature of every nation upon earth tells the
+same stories of prodigies and wonders, of the appearances of the gods
+upon earth, and of their intercourse with men. The lives of the saints
+of the Catholic Church, from the time of the Apostles till the present
+day, are a complete tissue of miracles resembling and rivalling those of
+the Gospels. Some of these stories are romantic and imaginative; some
+clear, literal, and prosaic; some rest on mere tradition; some on the
+sworn testimony of eye-witnesses; some are obvious fables; some are as
+well authenticated as facts of such a kind can be authenticated at all.
+The Protestant Christian rejects every one of them--rejects them without
+enquiry--involves those for which there is good authority and those for
+which there is none or little in one absolute, contemptuous, and
+sweeping denial. The Protestant Christian feels it more likely, in the
+words of Hume, that men should deceive or be deceived, than that the
+laws of nature should be violated. At this moment we are beset with
+reports of conversations with spirits, of tables miraculously lifted, of
+hands projected out of the world of shadows into this mortal life. An
+unusually able, accomplished person, accustomed to deal with
+common-sense facts, a celebrated political economist, and notorious for
+business-like habits, assured this writer that a certain mesmerist, who
+was my informant's intimate friend, had raised a dead girl to life. We
+should believe the people who tell us these things in any ordinary
+matter: they would be admitted in a court of justice as good witnesses
+in a criminal case, and a jury would hang a man on their word. The
+person just now alluded to is incapable of telling a wilful lie; yet our
+experience of the regularity of nature on one side is so uniform, and
+our experience of the capacities of human folly on the other is so
+large, that when people tell us these wonderful stories, most of us are
+contented to smile; and we do not care so much as to turn out of our way
+to examine them.
+
+The Bible is equally a record of miracles; but as from other histories
+we reject miracles without hesitation, so of those in the Bible we
+insist on the universal acceptance: the former are all false, the latter
+are all true. It is evident that, in forming conclusions so sweeping as
+these, we cannot even suppose that we are being guided by what is called
+historical evidence. Were it admitted that, as a whole, the miracles of
+the Bible are better authenticated than the miracles of the saints, we
+should be far removed still from any large inference, that in the one
+set there is no room for falsehood, in the other no room for truth. The
+writer or writers of the Books of Kings are not known. The books
+themselves are in fact confessedly taken from older writings which are
+lost; and the accounts of the great prophets of Israel are a
+counterpart, curiously like, of those of the mediæval saints. In many
+instances the authors of the lives of these saints were their companions
+and friends. Why do we feel so sure that what we are told of Elijah or
+Elisha took place exactly as we read it? Why do we reject the account of
+St. Columba or St. Martin as a tissue of idle fable? Why should not God
+give a power to the saint which He had given to the prophet? We can
+produce no reason from the nature of things, for we know not what the
+nature of things is; and if down to the death of the Apostles the
+ministers of religion were allowed to prove their commission by working
+miracles, what right have we, on grounds either of history or
+philosophy, to draw a clear line at the death of St. John--to say that
+before that time all such stories were true, and after it all were
+false?
+
+There is no point on which Protestant controversialists evade the real
+question more habitually than on that of miracles. They accuse those who
+withhold that unreserved and absolute belief which they require for all
+which they accept themselves, of denying that miracles are possible.
+They assume this to be the position taken up by the objector, and
+proceed easily to argue that man is no judge of the power of God. Of
+course he is not. No sane man ever raised his narrow understanding into
+a measure of the possibilities of the universe; nor does any person with
+any pretensions to religion disbelieve in miracles of some kind. To pray
+is to expect a miracle. When we pray for the recovery of a sick friend,
+for the gift of any blessing, or the removal of any calamity, we expect
+that God will do something by an act of his personal will which
+otherwise would not have been done--that he will suspend the ordinary
+relations of natural cause and effect; and this is the very idea of a
+miracle. The thing we pray for may be given us, and no miracle may have
+taken place. It may be given to us by natural causes, and would have
+occurred whether we had prayed or not. But prayer itself in its very
+essence implies a belief in the possible intervention of a power which
+is above nature. The question about miracles is simply one of
+evidence--whether in any given case the proof is so strong that no room
+is left for mistake, exaggeration, or illusion, while more evidence is
+required to establish a fact antecedently improbable than is sufficient
+for a common occurrence.
+
+It has been said recently by 'A Layman,' in a letter to Mr. Maurice,
+that the resurrection of our Lord is as well authenticated as the death
+of Julius Cæsar. It is far better authenticated, unless we are mistaken
+in supposing the Bible inspired; or if we admit as evidence that inward
+assurance of the Christian, which would make him rather die than
+disbelieve a truth so dear to him. But if the layman meant that there
+was as much proof of it, in the sense in which proof is understood in a
+court of justice, he could scarcely have considered what he was saying.
+Julius Cæsar was killed in a public place, in the presence of friend
+and foe, in a remarkable but still perfectly natural manner. The
+circumstances were minutely known to all the world, and were never
+denied or doubted by any one. Our Lord, on the other hand, seems
+purposely to have withheld such public proof of his resurrection as
+would have left no room for unbelief. He showed himself, 'not to all the
+people'--not to his enemies, whom his appearance would have
+overwhelmed--but 'to witnesses chosen before;' to the circle of his own
+friends. There is no evidence which a jury could admit that he was ever
+actually dead. So unusual was it for persons crucified to die so soon,
+that Pilate, we are told, 'marvelled.' The subsequent appearances were
+strange, and scarcely intelligible. Those who saw Him did not recognise
+Him till He was made known to them in the breaking of bread. He was
+visible and invisible. He was mistaken by those who were most intimate
+with Him for another person; nor do the accounts agree which are given
+by the different Evangelists. Of investigation in the modern sense
+(except in the one instance of St. Thomas, and St. Thomas was rather
+rebuked than praised) there was none, and could be none. The evidence
+offered was different in kind, and the blessing was not to those who
+satisfied themselves of the truth of the fact by a searching enquiry,
+but who gave their assent with the unhesitating confidence of love.
+
+St. Paul's account of his own conversion is an instance of the kind of
+testimony which then worked the strongest conviction. St. Paul, a fiery
+fanatic on a mission of persecution with the midday Syrian sun streaming
+down upon his head, was struck to the ground, and saw in a vision our
+Lord in the air. If such a thing were to occur at the present day, and
+if a modern physician were consulted about it, he would say, without
+hesitation, that it was an effect of an overheated brain and that there
+was nothing in it extraordinary or unusual. If the impression left by
+the appearance had been too strong for such an explanation to be
+satisfactory, the person to whom it occurred, especially if he was a man
+of St Paul's intellectual stature, would have at once examined into the
+facts otherwise known, connected with the subject of what he had seen.
+St. Paul had evidently before disbelieved our Lord's resurrection--had
+disbelieved it fiercely and passionately; we should have expected that
+he would at once have sought for those who could best have told him the
+details of the truth. St. Paul, however, did nothing of the kind. He
+went for a year into Arabia, and when at last he returned to Jerusalem,
+he rather held aloof from those who had been our Lord's companions, and
+who had witnessed his ascension. He saw Peter, he saw James; 'of the
+rest of the apostles saw he none.' To him evidently the proof of the
+resurrection was the vision which he had himself seen. It was to that
+which he always referred when called on for a defence of his faith.
+
+Of evidence for the resurrection, in the common sense of the word, there
+may be enough to show that something extraordinary occurred; but not
+enough, unless we assume the fact to be true on far other grounds, to
+produce any absolute and unhesitating conviction; and inasmuch as the
+resurrection is the keystone of Christianity, the belief in it must be
+something far different from that suspended judgment in which history
+alone would leave us.
+
+Human testimony, we repeat, under the most favourable circumstances
+imaginable, knows nothing of 'absolute certainty;' and if historical
+facts are bound up with the creed, and if they are to be received with
+the same completeness as the laws of conscience, they rest, and must
+rest, either on the divine truth of Scripture, or on the divine witness
+in ourselves. On human evidence the miracles of St. Teresa and St.
+Francis of Assisi are as well established as those of the New Testament.
+
+M. Ernest Renan has recently produced an account of the Gospel story
+which, written as it is by a man of piety, intellect, and imagination,
+is spreading rapidly through the educated world. Carrying out the
+principles with which Protestants have swept modern history clear of
+miracles to their natural conclusions, he dismisses all that is
+miraculous from the life of our Lord, and endeavours to reproduce the
+original Galilean youth who lived and taught, and died in Palestine
+eighteen hundred years ago. We have no intention of reviewing M. Renan.
+He will be read soon enough by many who would better consider their
+peace of mind by leaving him alone. For ourselves, we are unable to see
+by what right, if he rejects the miraculous part of the narrative, he
+retains the rest; the imagination and the credulity which invent
+extraordinary incidents, invent ordinary incidents also; and if the
+divine element in the life is legendary, the human may be legendary
+also. But there is one lucid passage in the introduction which we
+commend to the perusal of controversial theologians:--
+
+'No miracle such as those of which early histories are full has taken
+place under conditions which science can accept. Experience shows,
+without exception, that miracles occur only in times and in countries in
+which miracles are believed in, and in the presence of persons who are
+disposed to believe them. No miracle has ever been performed before an
+assemblage of spectators capable of testing its reality. Neither
+uneducated people, nor even men of the world, have the requisite
+capacity; great precautions are needed, and a long habit of scientific
+research. Have we not seen men of the world in our own time become the
+dupes of the most childish and absurd illusions? And if it be certain
+that no contemporary miracles will bear investigation, is it not
+possible that the miracles of the past, were we able to examine into
+them in detail, would be found equally to contain an element of error?
+It is not in the name of this or that philosophy, it is in the name of
+an experience which never varies, that we banish miracles from history.
+We do not say a miracle is impossible--we say only that no miracle has
+ever yet been proved. Let a worker of miracles come forward to-morrow
+with pretensions serious enough to deserve examination. Let us suppose
+him to announce that he is able to raise a dead man to life. What would
+be done? A committee would be appointed, composed of physiologists,
+physicians, chemists, and persons accustomed to exact investigation; a
+body would then be selected which the committee would assure itself was
+really dead; and a place would be chosen where the experiment was to
+take place. Every precaution would be taken to leave no opening for
+uncertainty; and if, under those conditions, the restoration to life was
+effected, a probability would be arrived at which would be almost equal
+to certainty. An experiment, however, should always admit of being
+repeated. What a man has done once he should be able to do again; and in
+miracles there can be no question of ease or difficulty. The performer
+would be requested to repeat the operation under other circumstances
+upon other bodies; and if he succeeded on every occasion, two points
+would be established: first, that there may be in this world such things
+as supernatural operations; and, secondly, that the power to perform
+them is delegated to, or belongs to, particular persons. But who does
+not perceive that no miracle was ever performed under such conditions as
+these?'
+
+We have quoted this passage because it expresses with extreme precision
+and clearness the common-sense principle which we apply to all
+supernatural stories of our own time, which Protestant theologians
+employ against the whole cycle of Catholic miracles, and which M. Renan
+is only carrying to its logical conclusions in applying to the history
+of our Lord, if the Gospels are tried by the mere tests of historical
+criticism. The Gospels themselves tell us why M. Renan's conditions were
+never satisfied. Miracles were not displayed in the presence of sceptics
+to establish scientific truths. When the adulterous generation sought
+after a sign, the sign was not given; nay, it is even said that in the
+presence of unbelief, our Lord was not able to work miracles. But
+science has less respect for that undoubting and submissive willingness
+to believe; and it is quite certain that if we attempt to establish the
+truth of the New Testament on the principles of Paley--if with Professor
+Jowett 'we interpret the Bible as any other book,' the element of
+miracle which has evaporated from the entire surface of human history
+will not maintain itself in the sacred ground of the Gospels, and the
+facts of Christianity will melt in our hands like a snowball.
+
+Nothing less than a miraculous history can sustain the credibility of
+miracles, and nothing could be more likely, if revelation be a reality
+and not a dream, than that the history containing it should be saved in
+its composition from the intermixture of human infirmity. This is the
+position in which instinct long ago taught Protestants to entrench
+themselves, and where alone they can hope to hold their ground: once
+established in these lines, they were safe and unassailable, unless it
+could be demonstrated that any fact or facts related in the Bible were
+certainly untrue.
+
+Nor would it be necessary to say any more upon the subject. Those who
+believed Christianity would admit the assumption; those who disbelieved
+Christianity would repudiate it. The argument would be narrowed to that
+plain and single issue, and the elaborate treatises upon external
+evidence would cease to bring discredit upon the cause by their
+feebleness. Unfortunately--and this is the true secret of our present
+distractions--it seems certain that in some way or other this belief in
+inspiration itself requires to be revised. We are compelled to examine
+more precisely what we mean by the word. The account of the creation of
+man and the world which is given in Genesis, and which is made by St.
+Paul the basis of his theology, has not yet been reconciled with facts
+which science knows to be true. Death was in the world before Adam's
+sin, and unless Adam's age be thrust back to a distance which no
+ingenuity can torture the letter of Scripture into recognising, men and
+women lived and died upon the earth whole millenniums before the Eve of
+Sacred History listened to the temptation of the snake. Neither has any
+such deluge as that from which, according to the received
+interpretation, the ark saved Noah, swept over the globe within the
+human period. We are told that it was not God's purpose to anticipate
+the natural course of discovery: as the story of the creation was
+written in human language, so the details of it may have been adapted to
+the existing state of human knowledge. The Bible, it is said, was not
+intended to teach men science, but to teach them what was necessary for
+the moral training of their souls. It may be that this is true.
+Spiritual grace affects the moral character of men, but leaves their
+intellect unimproved. The most religious men are as liable as atheists
+to ignorance of ordinary facts, and inspiration may be only infallible
+when it touches on truths necessary to salvation. But if it be so, there
+are many things in the Bible which must become as uncertain as its
+geology or its astronomy. There is the long secular history of the
+Jewish people. Let it be once established that there is room for error
+anywhere, and we have no security for the accuracy of this history. The
+inspiration of the Bible is the foundation of our whole belief; and it
+is a grave matter if we are uncertain to what extent it reaches, or how
+much and what it guarantees to us as true. We cannot live on
+probabilities. The faith in which we can live bravely and die in peace
+must be a certainty, so far as it professes to be a faith at all, or it
+is nothing. It may be that all intellectual efforts to arrive at it are
+in vain; that it is given to those to whom it is given, and withheld
+from those from whom it is withheld. It may be that the existing belief
+is undergoing a silent modification, like those to which the
+dispensations of religion have been successively subjected; or, again,
+it may be that to the creed as it is already established there is
+nothing to be added, and nothing any more to be taken from it. At this
+moment, however, the most vigorous minds appear least to see their way
+to a conclusion; and notwithstanding all the school and church building,
+the extended episcopate, and the religious newspapers, a general doubt
+is coming up like a thunderstorm against the wind, and blackening the
+sky. Those who cling most tenaciously to the faith in which they were
+educated, yet confess themselves perplexed. They know what they believe;
+but why they believe it, or why they should require others to believe,
+they cannot tell or cannot agree. Between the authority of the Church
+and the authority of the Bible, the testimony of history and the
+testimony of the Spirit, the ascertained facts of science and the
+contradictory facts which seem to be revealed, the minds of men are
+tossed to and fro, harassed by the changed attitude in which scientific
+investigation has placed us all towards accounts of supernatural
+occurrences. We thrust the subject aside; we take refuge in practical
+work; we believe, perhaps, that the situation is desperate, and hopeless
+of improvement; we refuse to let the question be disturbed. But we
+cannot escape from our shadow, and the spirit of uncertainty will haunt
+the world like an uneasy ghost, till we take it by the throat like men.
+
+We return then to the point from which we set out. The time is past for
+repression. Despotism has done its work; but the day of despotism is
+gone, and the only remedy is a full and fair investigation. Things will
+never right themselves if they are let alone. It is idle to say peace
+when there is no peace; and the concealed imposthume is more dangerous
+than an open wound. The law in this country has postponed our trial, but
+cannot save us from it; and the questions which have agitated the
+Continent are agitating us at last. The student who twenty years ago was
+contented with the Greek and Latin fathers and the Anglican divines, now
+reads Ewald and Renan. The Church authorities still refuse to look their
+difficulties in the face: they prescribe for mental troubles the
+established doses of Paley and Pearson; they refuse dangerous questions
+as sinful, and tread the round of commonplace in placid comfort. But it
+will not avail. Their pupils grow to manhood, and fight the battle for
+themselves, unaided by those who ought to have stood by them in their
+trial, and could not or would not; and the bitterness of those
+conflicts, and the end of most of them in heart-broken uncertainty or
+careless indifference, is too notorious to all who care to know about
+such things.
+
+We cannot afford year after year to be distracted with the tentative
+scepticism of essayists and reviewers. In a healthy condition of public
+opinion such a book as Bishop Colenso's would have passed unnoticed, or
+rather would never have been written, for the difficulties with which it
+deals would have been long ago met and disposed of. When questions rose
+in the early and middle ages of the Church, they were decided by
+councils of the wisest: those best able to judge met together, and
+compared their thoughts, and conclusions were arrived at which
+individuals could accept and act upon. At the beginning of the English
+Reformation, when Protestant doctrine was struggling for reception, and
+the old belief was merging in the new, the country was deliberately held
+in formal suspense. Protestants and Catholics were set to preach on
+alternate Sundays in the same pulpit; subjects were discussed freely in
+the ears of the people; and at last, when all had been said on both
+sides, Convocation and Parliament embodied the result in formulas.
+Councils will no longer answer the purpose; the clergy have no longer a
+superiority of intellect or cultivation; and a conference of prelates
+from all parts of Christendom, or even from all departments of the
+English Church, would not present an edifying spectacle. Parliament may
+no longer meddle with opinions unless it be to untie the chains which it
+forged three centuries ago. But better than councils, better than
+sermons, better than Parliament, is that free discussion through a free
+press which is the best instrument for the discovery of truth, and the
+most effectual means for preserving it.
+
+We shall be told, perhaps, that we are beating the air--that the press
+is free, and that all men may and do write what they please. It is not
+so. Discussion is not free so long as the clergy who take any side but
+one are liable to be prosecuted and deprived of their means of living;
+it is not free so long as the expression of doubt is considered as a sin
+by public opinion and as a crime by the law. So far are we from free
+discussion, that the world is not yet agreed that a free discussion is
+desirable; and till it be so agreed, the substantial intellect of the
+country will not throw itself into the question. The battle will
+continue to be fought by outsiders, who suffice to disturb a repose
+which they cannot restore; and that collective voice of the national
+understanding, which alone can give back to us a peaceful and assured
+conviction, will not be heard.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[D] _Fraser's Magazine_, 1863.
+
+
+
+
+CRITICISM AND THE GOSPEL HISTORY.[E]
+
+
+The spirit of criticism is not the spirit of religion. The spirit of
+criticism is a questioning spirit; the spirit of religion is a spirit of
+faith, of humility and submission. Other qualities may go to the
+formation of a religious character in the highest and grandest sense of
+the word; but the virtues which religious teachers most generally
+approve, which make up the ideal of a Catholic saint, which the Catholic
+and all other churches endeavour most to cultivate in their children,
+are those of passive and loyal obedience, a devotion without reserve or
+qualification; or to use the technical word, 'a spirit of
+teachableness.' A religious education is most successful when it has
+formed a mind to which difficulties are welcome as an opportunity for
+the triumph of faith--which regards doubts as temptations to be resisted
+like the suggestions of sensuality, and which alike in action or opinion
+follows the path prescribed to it with affectionate and unhesitating
+confidence.
+
+To men or women of the tender and sensitive piety which is produced by
+such a training, an enquiry into the grounds of its faith appears
+shocking and profane. To demand an explanation of ambiguities or
+mysteries of which they have been accustomed to think only upon their
+knees, is as it were to challenge the Almighty to explain his ways to
+his creatures, and to refuse obedience unless human presumption has been
+first gratified.
+
+Undoubtedly, not in religion only, but in any branch of human knowledge,
+teachableness is the condition of growth. We augur ill for the future of
+the youth who sets his own judgment against that of his instructors, and
+refuses to believe what cannot be at once made plain to him. Yet again,
+the wise instructor will not lightly discourage questions which are
+prompted by an intelligent desire of knowledge. That an unenquiring
+submission produces characters of great and varied beauty; that it has
+inspired the most splendid acts of endurance which have given a lustre
+to humanity, no one will venture to deny. A genial faith is one of that
+group of qualities which commend themselves most to the young, the
+generous, and the enthusiastic--to those whose native and original
+nobleness has suffered least from contact with the world--which belong
+rather to the imagination than the reason, and stand related to truth
+through the emotions rather than through the sober calculations of
+probability. It is akin to loyalty, to enthusiasm, to hero-worship, to
+that deep affection to a person or a cause which can see no fault in
+what it loves.
+
+'Belief,' says Mr. Sewell, 'is a virtue; doubt is a sin.' Iago is
+nothing if not critical; and the sceptical spirit--_der Geist der stets
+verneint_--which is satisfied with nothing, which sees in everything
+good the seed of evil, and the weak spot in every great cause or nature,
+has been made the special characteristic--we all feel with justice--of
+the devil.
+
+And yet this devotedness or devotion, this reverence for authority, is
+but one element of excellence. To reverence is good; but on the one
+condition that the object of it be a thing which deserves reverence; and
+the necessary complement, the security that we are not bestowing our
+best affections where they should not be given, must be looked for in
+some quality which, if less attractive, is no less essential for our
+true welfare. To prove all things--to try the spirits whether they be of
+God--is a duty laid upon us by the highest authority; and what is called
+progress in human things--religious as well as material--has been due
+uniformly to a dissatisfaction with them as they are. Every advance in
+science, every improvement in the command of the mechanical forces of
+nature, every step in political or social freedom, has risen in the
+first instance from an act of scepticism, from an uncertainty whether
+the formulas, or the opinions, or the government, or the received
+practical theories were absolutely perfect; or whether beyond the circle
+of received truths there might not lie something broader, deeper, truer,
+and thus better deserving the acceptance of mankind.
+
+Submissiveness, humility, obedience, produce if uncorrected, in politics
+a nation of slaves, whose baseness becomes an incentive to tyranny; in
+religion, they produce the consecration of falsehood, poperies,
+immaculate conceptions, winking images, and the confessional. The spirit
+of enquiry if left to itself becomes in like manner a disease of
+uncertainty, and terminates in universal scepticism. It seems as if in a
+healthy order of things, to the willingness to believe there should be
+chained as its inseparable companion a jealousy of deception; and there
+is no lesson more important for serious persons to impress upon
+themselves than that each of these temperaments must learn to tolerate
+the other; faith accepting from reason the sanction of its service, and
+reason receiving in return the warm pulsations of life. The two
+principles exist together in the highest natures; and the man who in the
+best sense of the word is devout, is also the most cautious to whom or
+to what he pays his devotion. Among the multitude, the units of which
+are each inadequate and incomplete, the elements are disproportionately
+mixed; some men are humble and diffident, some are sceptical and
+enquiring; yet both are filling a place in the great intellectual
+economy; both contribute to make up the sum and proportion of qualities
+which are required to hold the balance even; and neither party is
+entitled to say to the other, 'Stand by; I am holier than thou.'
+
+And as it is with individuals, so is it also with whole periods and
+cycles. For centuries together the believing spirit held undisputed
+sovereignty; and these were what are called 'ages of faith;' ages, that
+is, in which the highest business of the intellect was to pray rather
+than to investigate; when for every unusual phenomenon a supernatural
+cause was instinctively assumed; when wonders were credible in
+proportion to their magnitude; and theologians, with easy command of
+belief, added miracle to miracle and piled dogma upon dogma. Then the
+tide changed; a fresh era opened, which in the eyes of those who
+considered the old system the only right one, was the letting loose of
+the impersonated spirit of evil; when profane eyes were looking their
+idols in the face; when men were saying to the miraculous images, 'You
+are but stone and wood,' and to the piece of bread, 'You are but dust as
+I am dust;' and then the huge mediæval fabric crumbled down in ruin.
+
+All forms of thought, all objects of devotion, are made thus liable to
+perpetual revision, if only that belief shall not petrify into habit,
+but remain the reasonable conviction of a reasonable soul. The change of
+times and the change of conditions change also the appearance of things
+which in themselves are the same which they always were. Facts supposed
+once to be as fixed as the stars melt into fiction. A closer
+acquaintance with the phenomena of experience has revealed to us the
+action of forces before undreamt of working throughout nature with
+unerring uniformity; and to the mediæval stories of magic, witchcraft,
+or the miracles of saints, we are thus placed in a new relation. The
+direct evidence on which such stories were received may remain
+unimpaired, but it no longer produces the same conviction. Even in
+ordinary human things where the evidence is lost--as in some of our own
+State trials, and where we know only that it was such as brought
+conviction to judges, juries, and parliaments--historians do not
+hesitate to call their verdicts into question, thinking it more likely
+that whole masses of men should have been led away by passion or fraud
+or cowardice than that this or that particular crime should have been
+committed. That we often go beyond our office and exaggerate the value
+of our new criteria of truth may be possible enough; but it is no less
+certain that this is the tendency of modern thought. Our own age, like
+every age which has gone before it, judges the value of testimony, not
+by itself merely, but by the degree to which it corresponds with our own
+sense of the laws of probability; and we consider events probable or
+improbable by the habit of mind which is the result of our general
+knowledge and culture. To the Catholic of the middle ages a miracle was
+more likely than not; and when he was told that a miracle had been
+worked, he believed it as he would have believed had he been told that a
+shower of rain had fallen, or that the night frost had killed the buds
+upon his fruit trees. If his cattle died, he found the cause in the
+malice of Satan or the evil eye of a witch; and if two or more witnesses
+could have been found to swear that they had heard an old woman curse
+him, she would have been burnt for a sorceress. The man of science, on
+the other hand, knows nothing of witches and sorcerers; when he can find
+a natural cause he refuses to entertain the possibility of the
+intervention of a cause beyond nature; and thus that very element of
+marvel which to the more superstitious temperament was an evidence of
+truth, becomes to the better informed a cause of suspicion.
+
+So it has been that throughout history, as between individuals among
+ourselves, we trace two habits of thought, one of which has given us
+churches, creeds, and the knowledge of God; the other has given us
+freedom and science, has pruned the luxuriance of imaginative reverence,
+and reminds piety of what it is too ready to forget--that God is truth.
+Yet, essential as they are to one another, each keeps too absolutely to
+the circle of its own convictions, and, but half able to recognise the
+merit of principles which are alien to its own, regards the other as its
+natural enemy.
+
+To the warm and enthusiastic pietist the enquirer appears as a hater of
+God, an inveterate blasphemer of holy things, soiling with rude and
+insolent hands what ought only to be humbly adored. The saint when he
+has the power calls the sword to his aid, and in his zeal for what he
+calls the honour of God, makes war upon such people with steel and fire.
+The innovator, on the other hand, knowing that he is not that evil
+creature which his rival represents him as being, knowing that he too
+desires only truth--first suffers, suffers in rough times at stake and
+scaffold, suffers in our own later days in good name, in reputation, in
+worldly fortune; and as the whirligig of time brings round his turn of
+triumph, takes, in French revolutions and such other fits of madness,
+his own period of wild revenge. The service of truth is made to appear
+as one thing, the service of God as another; and in that fatal
+separation religion dishonours itself with unavailing enmity to what
+nevertheless it is compelled at last to accept in humiliation; and
+science, welcoming the character which its adversary flings upon it,
+turns away with answering hostility from doctrines without which its own
+highest achievements are but pyramids of ashes.
+
+Is this antagonism a law of humanity? As mankind move upwards through
+the ascending circles of progress, is it for ever to be with them as
+with the globe which they inhabit--of which one hemisphere is
+perpetually dark? Have the lessons of the Reformation been thrown away?
+Is knowledge always to advance under the ban of religion? Is faith
+never to cease to dread investigation? Is science chiefly to value each
+new discovery as a victory gained over its rival? Is the spiritual world
+to revolve eternally upon an axis of which the two poles are materialism
+and superstition, to be buried in their alternate occultations in
+periods of utter darkness, or lifted into an icy light where there is
+neither life nor warmth?
+
+How it may be in the remote future it is idle to guess; for the present
+the signs are not hopeful. We are arrived visibly at one of those
+recurring times when the accounts are called in for audit; when the
+title-deeds are to be looked through, and established opinions again
+tested. It is a process which has been repeated more than once in the
+world's history; the last occasion and greatest being the Reformation of
+the sixteenth century; and the experience of that matter might have
+satisfied the most timid that truth has nothing to fear; and that
+religion emerges out of such trials stronger and brighter than before.
+Yet Churchmen have not profited by the experience; the pulpits and the
+religious press ring again with the old shrieks of sacrilege; the
+machinery of the law courts is set creaking on its rusty hinges, and
+denunciation and anathema in the old style take the place of reasoning.
+It will not answer; and the worst danger to what is really true is the
+want of wisdom in its defenders. The language which we sometimes hear
+about these things seems to imply that while Christianity is
+indisputably true, it cannot stand nevertheless without bolt and
+shackle, as if the Author of our faith had left the evidence so weak
+that an honest investigation would fail to find it.
+
+Inevitably, the altered relation in which modern culture places the
+minds of all of us towards the supernatural, will compel a
+reconsideration of the grounds on which the acceptance of miracles is
+required. If the English learned clergy had faith as a grain of mustard
+seed, they would be the first to take possession of the field; they
+would look the difficulty in the face fearlessly and frankly, and we
+should not be tossing as we are now in an ocean of uncertainty, ignorant
+whether, if things seem obscure to us, the fault is with our intellects
+or our hearts.
+
+It might have been that Providence, anticipating the effect produced on
+dead testimony by time and change, had raised religion into a higher
+sphere, and had appointed on earth a living and visible authority which
+could not err--guided by the Holy Spirit into truth, and divinely
+sustained in the possession of it. Such a body the Roman Catholic Church
+conceives itself to be; but in breaking away from its communion,
+Protestant Christians have declared their conviction that neither the
+Church of Rome, nor they themselves, nor any other body of men on earth,
+are exempt from a liability to error. It is no longer competent for the
+Anglican communion to say that a doctrine or a fact is true because it
+forms a part of their teaching, because it has come down to them from
+antiquity, and because to deny it is sin. Transubstantiation came down
+to the fathers of the Reformation from antiquity; it was received and
+insisted upon by the Catholic Church of Christendom; yet nevertheless it
+was flung out from among us as a lie and an offence. The theory of the
+Divine authority of the Church was abandoned in the act of Protestantism
+three centuries ago; it was the central principle of that great revolt
+that the establishment of particular opinions was no guarantee for their
+truth; and it becomes thus our duty as well as our right to examine
+periodically our intellectual defences, to abandon positions which the
+alteration of time makes untenable, and to admit and invite into the
+service of the sanctuary the fullest light of advancing knowledge. Of
+all positions the most fatally suicidal for Protestants to occupy is the
+assumption, which it is competent for Roman Catholics to hold, but not
+for them, that beliefs once sanctioned by the Church are sacred, and
+that to impugn them is not error but crime.
+
+With a hope, then, that this reproach may be taken away from us; that,
+in this most wealthily-endowed Church of England, where so many of the
+most gifted and most accomplished men among us are maintained in
+well-paid leisure to attend to such things, we may not be left any
+longer to grope our way in the dark, the present writer puts forward
+some few perplexities of which it would be well if English divinity
+contained a clearer solution than is found there. The laity, occupied in
+other matters, regard the clergy as the trustees of their spiritual
+interests; but inasmuch as the clergy tell them that the safety of their
+souls depends on the correctness of their opinions, they dare not close
+their eyes to the questions which are being asked in louder and even
+louder tones; and they have a right to demand that they shall not be
+left to their own unaided efforts to answer such questions. We go to our
+appointed teachers as to our physicians; we say to them, 'We feel pain
+here, and here, and here: we do not see our way, and we require you to
+help us.'
+
+Most of these perplexities are not new: they were felt with the first
+beginnings of critical investigation; but the fact that they have been
+so many years before the world without being satisfactorily encountered
+makes the situation only the more serious. It is the more strange that
+as time passes on, and divine after divine is raised to honour and
+office for his theological services, we should find only when we turn to
+their writings that loud promises end in no performance; that the chief
+object which they set before themselves is to avoid difficult ground;
+and that the points on which we most cry out for satisfaction are passed
+over in silence, or are disposed of with ineffectual commonplaces.
+
+With a temperament constitutionally religious, and with an instinctive
+sense of the futility of theological controversies, the English people
+have long kept the enemy at bay by passive repugnance. To the
+well-conditioned English layman the religion in which he has been
+educated is part of the law of the land; the truth of it is assumed in
+the first principles of his personal and social existence; and attacks
+on the credibility of his sacred books he has regarded with the same
+impatience and disdain with which he treats speculations on the rights
+of property or the common maxims of right and wrong. Thus, while the
+inspiration of the Bible has been a subject of discussion for a century
+in Germany, Holland, and France; while even in the desolate villages in
+the heart of Spain the priests find it necessary to placard the church
+walls with cautions against rationalism, England hitherto has escaped
+the trial; and it is only within a very few years that the note of
+speculation has compelled our deaf ears to listen. That it has come at
+last is less a matter of surprise than that it should have been so long
+delayed; and though slow to move, it is likely that so serious a people
+will not now rest till they have settled the matter for themselves in
+some practical way. We are assured that if the truth be, as we are told,
+of vital moment--vital to all alike, wise and foolish, educated and
+uneducated--the road to it cannot lie through any very profound
+enquiries. We refuse to believe that every labourer or mechanic must
+balance arduous historical probabilities and come to a just conclusion,
+under pain of damnation. We are satisfied that these poor people are not
+placed in so cruel a dilemma. Either these abstruse historical questions
+are open questions, and we are not obliged under those penalties to hold
+a definite opinion upon them, or else there must be some general
+principle accessible and easily intelligible, by which the details can
+be summarily disposed of.
+
+We shall not be much mistaken, perhaps, if we say that the view of most
+educated English laymen at present is something of this kind. They are
+aware that many questions may be asked, difficult or impossible to
+answer satisfactorily, about the creation of the world, the flood, and
+generally on the historical portion of the Old Testament; but they
+suppose that if the authority of the Gospel history can be well
+ascertained, the rest may and must be taken for granted. If it be true
+that of the miraculous birth, life, death, and resurrection of our Lord,
+we have the evidence of two evangelists who were eye-witnesses of the
+facts which they relate, and of two others who wrote under the direction
+of, or upon the authority of, eye-witnesses, we can afford to dispense
+with merely curious enquiries. The subordinate parts of a divine economy
+which culminated in so stupendous a mystery may well be as marvellous as
+itself; and it may be assumed, we think, with no great want of charity,
+that those who doubt the truth of the Old Testament extend their
+incredulity to the New; that the point of their disbelief, towards which
+they are trenching their way through the weak places in the Pentateuch,
+is the Gospel narrative itself.[F] Whatever difficulty there may be in
+proving the ancient Hebrew books to be the work of the writers whose
+names they bear, no one would have cared to challenge their genuineness
+who was thoroughly convinced of the resurrection of our Lord. And the
+real object of these speculations lies open before us in the now
+notorious work of M. Renan, which is shooting through Europe with a
+rapidity which recalls the era of Luther.
+
+To the question of the authenticity of the Gospels, therefore, the
+common sense of Englishmen has instinctively turned. If, as English
+commentators confidently tell us, the Gospel of St. Matthew, such as we
+now possess it, is undoubtedly the work of the publican who followed our
+Lord from the receipt of custom, and remained with Him to be a witness
+of His ascension; if St. John's Gospel was written by the beloved
+disciple who lay on Jesus' breast at supper; if the other two were
+indeed the composition of the companions of St. Peter and St. Paul; if
+in these four Gospels we have independent accounts of our Lord's life
+and passion, mutually confirming each other, and if it can be proved
+that they existed and were received as authentic in the first century of
+the Christian Church, a stronger man than M. Renan will fail to shake
+the hold of Christianity in England.
+
+We put the question hypothetically, not as meaning to suggest the fact
+as uncertain, but being--as the matter is of infinite moment--being, as
+it were, the hinge on which our faith depends, we are forced beyond our
+office to trespass on ground which we leave usually to professional
+theologians, and to tell them plainly that there are difficulties which
+it is their business to clear up, but to which, with worse than
+imprudence, they close their own eyes, and deliberately endeavour to
+keep them from ours. Some of these it is the object of this paper to
+point out, with an earnest hope that Dean Alford, or Dr. Ellicott, or
+some other competent clergyman, may earn our gratitude by telling us
+what to think about them. Setting aside their duty to us, they will find
+frank dealing in the long run their wisest policy. The conservative
+theologians of England have carried silence to the point of
+indiscretion.
+
+Looking, then, to the three first Gospels, usually called the
+Synoptical, we are encountered immediately with a remarkable common
+element which runs through them all--a resemblance too peculiar to be
+the result of accident, and impossible to reconcile with the theory that
+the writers were independent of each other. It is not that general
+similarity which we should expect in different accounts of the same
+scenes and events, but amidst many differences, a broad vein of
+circumstantial identity extending both to substance and expression.
+
+And the identity is of several kinds.
+
+I. Although the three evangelists relate each of them some things
+peculiar to themselves, and although between them there are some
+striking divergencies--as, for instance, between the account of our
+Lord's miraculous birth in St. Matthew and St. Luke, and in the absence
+in St. Mark of any mention of the miraculous birth at all--nevertheless,
+the body of the story is essentially the same. Out of those words and
+actions--so many, that if all were related the world itself could not
+contain the books that should be written--the three evangelists select
+for the most part the same; the same parables, the same miracles, and,
+more or less complete, the same addresses. When the material from which
+to select was so abundant--how abundant we have but to turn to the
+fourth evangelist to see--it is at least singular that three writers
+should have made so nearly the same choice.
+
+II. But this is not all. Not only are the things related the same, but
+the language in which they are expressed is the same. Sometimes the
+resemblance is such as would have arisen had the evangelists been
+translating from a common document in another language. Sometimes, and
+most frequently, there is an absolute verbal identity; sentences,
+paragraphs, long passages, are word for word the very same; a few
+expressions have been slightly varied, a particle transposed, a tense or
+a case altered, but the differences being no greater than would arise if
+a number of persons were to write from memory some common passages which
+they knew almost by heart. That there should have been this identity in
+the account of the _words_ used by our Lord seems at first sight no more
+than we should expect. But it extends to the narrative as well; and with
+respect to the parables and discourses, there is this extraordinary
+feature, that whereas our Lord is supposed to have spoken in the
+ordinary language of Palestine, the resemblance between the evangelists
+is in the Greek translation of them; and how unlikely it is that a
+number of persons in translating from one language into another should
+hit by accident on the same expressions, the simplest experiment will
+show.
+
+Now, waiving for a moment the inspiration of the Gospels; interpreting
+the Bible, to use Mr. Jowett's canon, as any other book, what are we to
+conclude from phenomena of this kind? What in fact do we conclude when
+we encounter them elsewhere? In the lives of the saints, in the monkish
+histories, there are many parallel cases. A mediæval chronicler, when he
+found a story well told by his predecessor, seldom cared to recompose
+it; he transcribed the words as they stood into his own narrative,
+contented perhaps with making a few trifling changes to add a finish or
+a polish. Sometimes two chroniclers borrow from a third. There is the
+same identity in particular expressions, the same general resemblance,
+the same divergence, as each improves his original from his independent
+knowledge by addition or omission; but the process is so transparent,
+that when the original is lost, the existence of it can be inferred with
+certainty.
+
+Or to take a more modern parallel--we must entreat our readers to pardon
+any seeming irreverence which may appear in the comparison--if in the
+letters of the correspondents of three different newspapers written from
+America or Germany, we were to read the same incidents told in the same
+language, surrounded it might be with much that was unlike, but
+nevertheless in themselves identical, and related in words which, down
+to unusual and remarkable terms of expression, were exactly the same,
+what should we infer?
+
+Suppose, for instance, the description of a battle; if we were to find
+but a single paragraph in which two out of three correspondents agreed
+verbally, we should regard it as a very strange coincidence. If all
+three agreed verbally, we should feel certain it was more than accident.
+If throughout their letters there was a recurring series of such
+passages, no doubt would be left in the mind of any one that either the
+three correspondents had seen each other's letters, or that each had had
+before him some common narrative which he had incorporated in his own
+account. It might be doubtful which of these two explanations was the
+true one; but that one or other of them was true, unless we suppose a
+miracle, is as certain as any conclusion in human things can be certain
+at all. The sworn testimony of eye-witnesses who had seen the letters so
+composed would add nothing to the weight of a proof which without their
+evidence would be overwhelming; and were the writers themselves, with
+their closest friends and companions, to swear that there had been no
+intercommunication, and no story pre-existing of which they had made
+use, and that each had written _bonâ fide_ from his own original
+observation, an English jury would sooner believe the whole party
+perjured than persuade themselves that so extraordinary a coincidence
+would have occurred.
+
+Nor would it be difficult to ascertain from internal evidence which of
+the two possible interpretations was the real one. If the writers were
+men of evident good faith; if their stories were in parts widely
+different; if they made no allusion to each other, nor ever referred to
+one another as authorities; finally, if neither of them, in giving a
+different account of any matter from that given by his companions,
+professed either to be supplying an omission or correcting a mistake,
+then we should have little doubt that they had themselves not
+communicated with each other, but were supplementing, each of them from
+other sources of information, a central narrative which all alike had
+before them.
+
+How far may we apply the parallel to the Synoptical Gospels? In one
+sense the inspiration lifts them above comparison, and disposes
+summarily of critical perplexities; there is no difficulty which may not
+be explained by a miracle; and in that aspect the points of disagreement
+between these accounts are more surprising than the similarities. It is
+on the disagreements in fact that the labours of commentators have
+chiefly been expended. Yet it is a question whether, on the whole,
+inspiration does not leave unaffected the ordinary human phenomena; and
+it is hard to suppose that where the rules of judgment in ordinary
+writings are so distinct, God would have thus purposely cast a
+stumbling-block in our way, and contrived a snare into which our reason
+should mislead us. That is hard to credit; yet that and nothing else we
+must believe if we refuse to apply to the Gospel the same canons of
+criticism which with other writings would be a guide so decisive. It may
+be assumed that the facts connected with them admit a natural
+explanation; and we arrive, therefore, at the same conclusion as before:
+that either two of the evangelists borrowed from the third, or else that
+there was some other Gospel besides those which are now extant; existing
+perhaps both in Hebrew and Greek--existing certainly in Greek--the
+fragments of which are scattered up and down through St. Mark, St.
+Matthew, and St. Luke, in masses sufficiently large to be distinctly
+recognisable.
+
+That at an early period in the Christian Church many such Gospels
+existed, we know certainly from the words of St. Luke. St. Paul alludes
+to words used by our Lord which are not mentioned by the evangelists,
+which he assumed nevertheless to be well known to his hearers. He
+speaks, too, of an appearance of our Lord after His resurrection to five
+hundred brethren; on which the four Gospels are also silent. It is
+indisputable, therefore, that besides and antecedent to them there were
+other accounts of our Lord's life in use in the Christian Church. And
+indeed, what more natural, what more necessary, than that from the day
+on which the apostles entered upon their public mission, some narrative
+should have been drawn up of the facts which they were about to make
+known? Then as little as now could the imagination of men be trusted to
+relate accurately a story composed of stupendous miracles without
+mistake or exaggeration; and their very first step would have been to
+compose an account of what had passed, to which they could speak with
+certainty, and which they could invest with authoritative sanction. Is
+it not possible then that the identical passages in the Synoptical
+Gospels are the remains of something of this kind, which the
+evangelists, in their later, fuller, and more complete histories,
+enlarged and expanded? The conjecture has been often made, and English
+commentators have for the most part dismissed it slightingly; not
+apparently being aware that in rejecting one hypothesis they were bound
+to suggest another; or at least to admit that there was something which
+required explanation, though this particular suggestion did not seem
+satisfactory. Yet if it were so, the external testimony for the truth of
+the Gospel history would be stronger than before. It would amount to the
+collective view of the first congregation of Christians, who had all
+immediate and personal knowledge of our Lord's miracles and death and
+resurrection.
+
+But perhaps the external history of the four Gospels may throw some
+light upon the question, if indeed we can speak of light where all is a
+cloud of uncertainty. It would seem as if the sources of Christianity,
+like the roots of all other living things, were purposely buried in
+mystery. There exist no ancient writings whatever of such vast moment to
+mankind of which so little can be authentically known.
+
+The four Gospels, in the form and under the names which they at present
+bear, become visible only with distinctness towards the end of the
+second century of the Christian era. Then it was that they assumed the
+authoritative position which they have ever since maintained, and were
+selected by the Church out of the many other then existing narratives
+as the supreme and exclusive authorities for our Lord's life. Irenæus is
+the first of the Fathers in whom they are found attributed by name to
+St. Matthew, St. Mark, St. Luke, and St. John. That there were four true
+evangelists, and that there could be neither more nor less than four,
+Irenæus had persuaded himself because there were four winds or spirits,
+and four divisions of the earth, for which the Church being universal
+required four columns; because the cherubim had four faces, to each of
+which an evangelist corresponded; because four covenants had been given
+to mankind--one before the Deluge in Adam, one after the Deluge in Noah,
+the third in Moses, the fourth and greatest in the New Testament; while
+again the name of Adam was composed of four letters. It is not to be
+supposed that the intellects of those great men who converted the world
+to Christianity were satisfied with arguments so imaginative as these;
+they must have had other closer and more accurate grounds for their
+decision; but the mere employment of such figures as evidence in any
+sense, shows the enormous difference between their modes of reasoning
+and ours, and illustrates the difficulty of deciding at our present
+distance from them how far their conclusions were satisfactory.
+
+Of the Gospels separately the history is immediately lost in legend.
+
+The first notice of a Gospel of St. Matthew is in the well-known words
+of Papias, a writer who in early life might have seen St. John. The
+works of Papias are lost--a misfortune the more to be regretted because
+Eusebius speaks of him as a man of very limited understanding, [Greek:
+panu smikros ton noun]. Understanding and folly are words of
+undetermined meaning; and when language like that of Irenæus could seem
+profound it is quite possible that Papias might have possessed
+commonplace faculties which would have been supremely useful to us. A
+surviving fragment of him says that St. Matthew put together the
+discourses of our Lord in Hebrew, and that every one interpreted them as
+he could. Pantænus, said by Eusebius to have been another contemporary
+of the apostles, was reported to have gone to India, to have found there
+a congregation of Christians which had been established by St.
+Bartholomew, and to have seen in use among them this Hebrew Gospel.
+Origen repeats the story, which in his time had become the universal
+Catholic tradition, that St. Matthew's was the first Gospel, that it was
+written in Hebrew, and that it was intended for the use of the Jewish
+converts. Jerome adds that it was unknown when or by whom it was
+rendered into a Greek version. That was all which the Church had to say;
+and what had become of that Hebrew original no one could tell.
+
+That there existed _a_ Hebrew Gospel in very early times is well
+authenticated; there was a Gospel called the Gospel of the Ebionites or
+Nazarenes, of which Origen possessed a copy, and which St. Jerome
+thought it worth while to translate; this too is lost, and Jerome's
+translation of it also; but the negative evidence seems conclusive that
+it was not the lost Gospel of St. Matthew. Had it been so it could not
+have failed to be recognised, although from such accounts of it as have
+been preserved, it possessed some affinity with St. Matthew's Gospel. In
+one instance, indeed, it gave the right reading of a text which has
+perplexed orthodox commentators, and has induced others to suspect that
+that Gospel in its present form could not have existed before the
+destruction of Jerusalem. The Zachariah the son of Barachiah said by St.
+Matthew to have been slain between the temple and the altar, is unknown
+to Old Testament history, while during the siege of Jerusalem a
+Zachariah the son of Barachiah actually was killed exactly in the manner
+described. But in the Ebionite Gospel the same words are found with this
+slight but important difference, that the Zachariah in question is there
+called the son of Jehoiadah, and is at once identified with the person
+whose murder is related in the Second Book of Chronicles. The later
+translator of St. Matthew had probably confused the names.
+
+Of St. Mark's Gospel the history is even more profoundly obscure.
+Papias, again the highest discoverable link of the Church tradition,
+says that St. Mark accompanied St. Peter to Rome as his interpreter; and
+that while there he wrote down what St. Peter told him, or what he could
+remember St. Peter to have said. Clement of Alexandria enlarges the
+story. According to Clement, when St. Peter was preaching at Rome, the
+Christian congregation there requested St. Mark to write a Gospel for
+them; St. Mark complied without acquainting St. Peter, and St. Peter
+when informed of it was uncertain whether to give or withhold his
+sanction till his mind was set at rest by a vision.
+
+Irenæus, on the other hand, says that St. Mark's Gospel was not written
+till after the death of St. Peter and St. Paul. St. Chrysostom says that
+after it was written St. Mark went to Egypt and published it at
+Alexandria; Epiphanius again, that the Egyptian expedition was
+undertaken at the express direction of St. Peter himself.
+
+Thus the Church tradition is inconsistent with itself, and in all
+probability is nothing but a structure of air; it is bound up with the
+presence of St. Peter at Rome; and the only ground for supposing that
+St. Peter was ever at Rome at all is the passage at the close of St.
+Peter's First Epistle, where it pleased the Fathers to assume that the
+'Babylon' there spoken of must have been the city of the Cæsars. This
+passage alone, with the wild stories (now known to have originated in
+the misreading of an inscription) of St. Peter's conflict with Simon
+Magus in the presence of the emperor, form together the light and airy
+arches on which the huge pretences of the Church of Rome have reared
+themselves. If the Babylon of the Epistle was Babylon on the
+Euphrates--and there is not the slightest historical reason to suppose
+it to have been anything else--the story of the origin of St. Mark's
+Gospel perishes with the legend to which it was inseparably attached by
+Church tradition.
+
+Of St. John's Gospel we do not propose to speak in this place; it forms
+a subject by itself; and of that it is enough to say that the defects of
+external evidence which undoubtedly exist seem overborne by the
+overwhelming proofs of authenticity contained in the Gospel itself.
+
+The faint traditionary traces which inform us that St. Matthew and St.
+Mark were supposed to have written Gospels fail us with St. Luke. The
+apostolic and the immediately post-apostolic Fathers never mention Luke
+as having written a history of our Lord at all. There was indeed a
+Gospel in use among the Marcionites which resembled that of St. Luke, as
+the Gospel of the Ebionites resembled that of St. Matthew. In both the
+one and the other there was no mention of our Lord's miraculous birth;
+and later writers accused Marcion of having mutilated St. Luke. But
+apparently their only reason for thinking so was that the two Gospels
+were like each other; and for all that can be historically proved, the
+Gospel of the Marcionites may have been the older of the two. What is
+wanting externally, however, is supposed to be more than made up by the
+language of St. Luke himself. The Gospel was evidently composed in its
+present form by the same person who wrote the Acts of the Apostles. In
+the latter part of the Acts of the Apostles the writer speaks in the
+first person as the companion of St. Paul; and the date of this Gospel
+seems to be thus conclusively fixed at an early period in the apostolic
+age. There is at least a high probability that this reasoning is sound;
+yet it has seemed strange that a convert so eminent as 'the most
+excellent' Theophilus, to whom St. Luke addressed himself, should be
+found impossible to identify. 'Most excellent' was a title given only to
+persons of high rank; and it is singular that St. Paul himself should
+never have mentioned so considerable a name. And again, there is
+something peculiar in the language of the introduction to the Gospel
+itself. Though St. Luke professes to be writing on the authority of
+eye-witnesses, he does not say he had spoken with eye-witnesses; so far
+from it, that the word translated in the English version 'delivered' is
+literally 'handed down;' it is the verb which corresponds to the
+technical expression for 'tradition;' and the words translated 'having
+had perfect understanding of all things from the first,' might be
+rendered more properly, 'having traced or followed up all things from
+the beginning.' And again, as it is humanly speaking certain that in St.
+Luke's Gospel there are passages, however they are to be explained,
+which were embodied in it from some other source, so, though extremely
+probable, it is not absolutely certain that those passages in the Acts
+in which the writer speaks in the first person are by the same hand as
+the body of the narrative. If St. Luke had anywhere directly introduced
+himself--if he had said plainly that he, the writer who was addressing
+Theophilus, had personally joined St. Paul, and in that part of his
+story was relating what he had seen and heard, there would be no room
+for uncertainty. But, so far as we know, there is no other instance in
+literature of a change of person introduced abruptly without
+explanation. The whole book is less a connected history than a series of
+episodes and fragments of the proceedings of the apostles; and it is to
+be noticed that the account of St. Paul's conversion, as given in its
+place in the first part of the narrative, differs in one material point
+from the second account given later in the part which was unquestionably
+the work of one of St. Paul's companions. There is a possibility--it
+amounts to no more, and the suggestion is thrown out for the
+consideration of those who are better able than this writer to judge of
+it--that in the Gospel and the Acts we have the work of a careful editor
+of the second century. Towards the close of that century a prominent
+actor in the great movement which gave their present authority to the
+four Gospels was Theophilus, Bishop of Antioch; he it was who brought
+them together, incorporated into a single work--_in unum opus_; and it
+may be, after all, that in him we have the long-sought person to whom
+St. Luke was writing; that the Gospel which we now possess was compiled
+at his desire out of other imperfect Gospels in use in the different
+Churches; and that it formed a part of his scheme to supersede them by
+an account more exhaustive, complete, and satisfactory.
+
+To this hypothesis indeed there is an answer which if valid at all is
+absolutely fatal. We are told that although the names of the writers of
+the Gospels may not be mentioned until a comparatively late period, yet
+that the Gospels themselves can be shown to have existed, because they
+are habitually quoted in the authentic writings of the earliest of the
+Fathers. If this be so, the slightness of the historical thread is of
+little moment, and we may rest safely on the solid ground of so
+conclusive a fact. But is it so? That the early Fathers quoted some
+accounts of our Lord's life is abundantly clear; but did they quote
+these? We proceed to examine this question--again tentatively only--we
+do but put forward certain considerations on which we ask for fuller
+information.
+
+If any one of the primitive Christian writers was likely to have been
+acquainted with the authentic writings of the evangelists, that one was
+indisputably Justin Martyr. Born in Palestine in the year 89, Justin
+Martyr lived to the age of seventy-six; he travelled over the Roman
+world as a missionary; and intellectually he was more than on a level
+with most educated Oriental Christians. He was the first distinctly
+controversial writer which the Church produced; and the great facts of
+the Gospel history were obviously as well known to him as they are to
+ourselves. There are no traces in his writings of an acquaintance with
+anything peculiar either to St. John or St. Mark; but there are extracts
+in abundance often identical with and generally nearly resembling
+passages in St. Matthew and St. Luke. Thus at first sight it would be
+difficult to doubt that with these two Gospels at least he was
+intimately familiar. And yet in all his citations there is this
+peculiarity, that Justin Martyr never speaks of either of the
+evangelists by name; he quotes or seems to quote invariably from
+something which he calls [Greek: apomnêmoneumata tôn Apostolôn], or
+'Memoirs of the Apostles.' It is no usual habit of his to describe his
+authorities vaguely: when he quotes the Apocalypse he names St. John;
+when he refers to a prophet he specifies Isaiah, Jeremiah, or Daniel.
+Why, unless there was some particular reason for it, should he use so
+singular an expression whenever he alludes to the sacred history of the
+New Testament? why, if he knew the names of the evangelists, did he
+never mention them even by accident? Nor is this the only singularity in
+Justin Martyr's quotations. There are those slight differences between
+them and the text of the Gospels which appear between the Gospels
+themselves. When we compare an extract in Justin with the parallel
+passage in St. Matthew, we find often that it differs from St. Matthew
+just as St. Matthew differs from St. Luke, or both from St. Mark--great
+verbal similarity--many paragraphs agreeing word for word--and then
+other paragraphs where there is an alteration of expression, tense,
+order, or arrangement.
+
+Again, just as in the midst of the general resemblance between the
+Synoptical Gospels, each evangelist has something of his own which is
+not to be found in the others, so in these 'Memoirs of the Apostles'
+there are facts unknown to either of the evangelists. In the account
+extracted by Justin from 'the Memoirs,' of the baptism in the Jordan,
+the words heard from heaven are not as St. Matthew gives them--'Thou art
+my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased'--but the words of the psalm,
+'Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten Thee;' a reading which,
+singularly enough, was to be found in the Gospel of the Ebionites.
+
+Another curious addition to the same scene is in the words [Greek: kai
+pur anêphthê en Iordanê], 'and a fire was kindled in Jordan.'
+
+Again, Justin Martyr speaks of our Lord having promised 'to clothe us
+with garments made ready for us if we keep his commandments'--[Greek:
+kai aiônion basileian pronoêsai]--whatever those words may precisely
+mean.
+
+These and other peculiarities in Justin may be explained if we suppose
+him to have been quoting from memory. The evangelical text might not as
+yet have acquired its verbal sanctity; and as a native of Palestine he
+might well have been acquainted with other traditions which lay outside
+the written word. The silence as to names, however, remains unexplained;
+and as the facts actually stand there is the same kind of proof, and no
+more, that Justin Martyr was acquainted with St. Matthew and St. Luke as
+there is that one of these evangelists made extracts from the other, or
+both from St. Mark. So long as one set of commentators decline to
+recognise the truth of this relation between the Gospels, there will be
+others who with as much justice will dispute the relation of Justin to
+them. He too might have used another Gospel, which, though like them,
+was not identical with them.
+
+After Justin Martyr's death, about the year 170, appeared Tatian's
+'Diatessaron,' a work which, as its title implies, was a harmony of four
+Gospels, and most likely of _the_ four; yet again not exactly as we have
+them. Tatian's harmony, like so many others of the early evangelical
+histories, was silent on the miraculous birth, and commenced only with
+the public ministration. The text was in other places different, so much
+so that Theodoret accuses Tatian of having mutilated the Gospels; but of
+this Theodoret had probably no better means of judging than we have. The
+'Diatessaron' has been long lost, and the name is the only clue to its
+composition.
+
+Of far more importance than either Justin or Tatian are such writings as
+remain of the immediate successors of the apostles--Barnabas, Clement of
+Rome, Polycarp, and Ignatius: it is asserted confidently that in these
+there are quotations from the Gospels so exact that they cannot be
+mistaken.
+
+We will examine them one by one.
+
+In an epistle of Barnabas there is one passage--it is the only one of
+the kind to be found in him--agreeing word for word with the Synoptical
+Gospels, 'I came not to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.'
+It is one of the many passages in which the Greek of the three
+evangelists is exactly the same; it was to be found also in Justin's
+'Memoirs;' and there can be no doubt that Barnabas either knew those
+Gospels or else the common source--if common source there was--from
+which the evangelists borrowed. More than this such a quotation does not
+enable us to say; and till some satisfactory explanation has been
+offered of the agreement between the evangelists, the argument can
+advance no further. On the other hand, Barnabas like St. Paul had other
+sources from which he drew his knowledge of our Lord's words. He too
+ascribes words to Him which are not recorded by the evangelists, [Greek:
+houtô phêsin Iêsous; hoi thelontes me idein kai hapsasthai mou tês
+basileias opheilousi thlibentes kai pathontes labein me]. The thought is
+everywhere in the Gospels, the words nowhere, nor anything like them.
+
+Both Ignatius and Polycarp appear to quote the Gospels, yet with them
+also there is the same uncertainty; while Ignatius quotes as genuine an
+expression which, so far as we know, was peculiar to a translation of
+the Gospel of the Ebionites--'Handle me and see, for I am not a spirit
+without body,' [Greek: hoti ouk eimi daimonion asômaton].
+
+Clement's quotations are still more free, for Clement nowhere quotes the
+text of the evangelists exactly as it at present stands; often he
+approaches it extremely close; at times the agreement is rather in
+meaning than words, as if he were translating from another language. But
+again Clement more noticeably than either of the other apostolic Fathers
+cites expressions of our Lord of which the evangelists knew nothing.
+
+For instance--
+
+'The Lord saith, "If ye be with me gathered into my bosom, and do not
+after my commandments, I will cast you off, and I will say unto you,
+Depart from me, I know you not, ye workers of iniquity."'
+
+And again:--
+
+'The Lord said, "Ye shall be as sheep in the midst of wolves." Peter
+answered and said unto Him, "Will the wolves then tear the sheep?" Jesus
+said unto Peter, "The sheep need not fear the wolves after they (the
+sheep) be dead: and fear not ye those who kill you and can do nothing to
+you; but fear Him who after you be dead hath power over soul and body to
+cast them into hell-fire."'
+
+In these words we seem to have the lost link in a passage which appears
+in a different connection in St. Matthew and St. Luke. It may be said,
+as with Justin Martyr, that Clement was quoting from memory in the sense
+rather than in the letter; although even so it is difficult to suppose
+that he could have invented an interlocution of St. Peter. Yet no
+hypothesis will explain the most strange words which follow:--
+
+'The Lord being asked when His kingdom should come, said, "When two
+shall be one, and that which is without as that which is within, and the
+male with the female neither male nor female."'
+
+It is needless to say how remote are such expressions as these from any
+which have come down to us through the evangelists; but they were no
+inventions of Clement. The passage reappears later in Clement of
+Alexandria, who found it in something which he called the Gospel of the
+Egyptians.
+
+It will be urged that because Clement quoted other authorities beside
+the evangelists, it does not follow that he did not know and quote from
+them. If the citation of a passage which appears in almost the same
+words in another book is not to be accepted as a proof of an
+acquaintance with that book, we make it impossible, it may be said, to
+prove from quotations at all the fact of any book's existence. But this
+is not the case. If a Father, in relating an event which is told
+variously in the Synoptical Gospels, had followed one of them minutely
+in its verbal peculiarities, it would go far to prove that he was
+acquainted with that one; if the same thing was observed in all his
+quotations, the proof would amount to demonstration. If he agreed
+minutely in one place with one Gospel, minutely in a second with
+another, minutely in a third with another, there would be reason to
+believe that he was acquainted with them all; but when he merely relates
+what they also relate in language which approaches theirs and yet
+differs from it, as they also resemble yet differ from one another, we
+do not escape from the circle of uncertainty, and we conclude either
+that the early Fathers made quotations with a looseness irreconcileable
+with the idea that the language of the Gospels possessed any verbal
+sacredness to them, or that there were in their times other narratives
+of our Lord's life standing in the same relation to the three Gospels as
+St. Matthew stands to St. Mark and St. Luke.
+
+Thus the problem returns upon us; and it might almost seem as if the
+explanation was laid purposely beyond our reach. We are driven back upon
+internal criticism; and we have to ask again what account is to be given
+of that element common to the Synoptical Gospels, common also to those
+other Gospels of which we find traces so distinct--those verbal
+resemblances, too close to be the effect of accident--those differences
+which forbid the supposition that the evangelists copied one another. So
+many are those common passages, that if all which is peculiar to each
+evangelist by himself were dropped, if those words and those actions
+only were retained which either all three or two at least share
+together, the figure of our Lord from His baptism to His ascension would
+remain with scarcely impaired majesty.
+
+One hypothesis, and so far as we can see one only, would make the
+mystery intelligible, that immediately on the close of our Lord's life
+some original sketch of it was drawn up by the congregation, which
+gradually grew and gathered round it whatever His mother, His relations,
+or His disciples afterwards individually might contribute. This primary
+history would thus not be the work of any one mind or man; it would be
+the joint work of the Church, and thus might well be called 'Memoirs of
+the Apostles;' and would naturally be quoted without the name of either
+one of them being specially attached to it. As Christianity spread over
+the world, and separate Churches were founded by particular apostles,
+copies would be multiplied, and copies of those copies; and, unchecked
+by the presence (before the invention of printing impossible) of any
+authoritative text, changes would creep in--passages would be left out
+which did not suit the peculiar views of this or that sect; others would
+be added as this or that apostle recollected something which our Lord
+had said that bore on questions raised in the development of the creed.
+Two great divisions would form themselves between the Jewish and the
+Gentile Churches; there would be a Hebrew Gospel and a Greek Gospel, and
+the Hebrew would be translated into Greek, as Papias says St. Matthew's
+Gospel was. Eventually the confusion would become intolerable; and among
+the conflicting stories the Church would have been called on to make its
+formal choice.
+
+This fact at least is certain from St. Luke's words, that at the time
+when he was writing many different narratives did actually exist. The
+hypothesis of a common origin for them has as yet found little favour
+with English theologians; yet rather perhaps because it would be
+inconvenient for certain peculiar forms of English thought than because
+it has not probability on its side. That the Synoptical Gospels should
+have been a natural growth rather than the special and independent work
+of three separate writers, would be unfavourable to a divinity which has
+built itself up upon particular texts, and has been more concerned with
+doctrinal polemics than with the broader basements of historic truth.
+Yet the text theory suffers equally from the mode in which the first
+Fathers treated the Gospels, if it were these Gospels indeed which they
+used. They at least could have attributed no importance to words and
+phrases; while again, as we said before, a narrative dating from the
+cradle of Christianity, with the testimony in its favour of such broad
+and deep reception, would, however wanting in some details, be an
+evidence of the truth of the main facts of the Gospel history very much
+stronger than that of three books composed we know not when, and the
+origin of which it is impossible to trace, which it is impossible to
+regard as independent, and the writers of which in any other view of
+them must be assumed to have borrowed from each other.
+
+But the object of this article is not to press either this or any other
+theory; it is but to ask from those who are able to give it an answer to
+the most serious of questions. The truth of the Gospel history is now
+more widely doubted in Europe than at any time since the conversion of
+Constantine. Every thinking person who has been brought up a Christian
+and desires to remain a Christian, yet who knows anything of what is
+passing in the world, is looking to be told on what evidence the New
+Testament claims to be received. The state of opinion proves of itself
+that the arguments hitherto offered produce no conviction. Every other
+miraculous history is discredited as legend, however exalted the
+authority on which it seems to be rested. We crave to have good reason
+shown us for maintaining still the one great exception. Hard worked in
+other professions, and snatching with difficulty sufficient leisure to
+learn how complicated is the problem, the laity can but turn to those
+for assistance who are set apart and maintained as their theological
+trustees. We can but hope and pray that some one may be found to give us
+an edition of the Gospels in which the difficulties will neither be
+slurred over with convenient neglect or noticed with affected
+indifference. It may or may not be a road to a bishopric; it may or may
+not win the favour of the religious world; but it will earn at least the
+respectful gratitude of those who cannot trifle with holy things, and
+who believe that true religion is the service of truth.
+
+The last words were scarcely written when an advertisement appeared, the
+importance of which can scarcely be over-estimated. A commentary is
+announced on the Old and New Testaments, to be composed with a view to
+what are called the 'misrepresentations' of modern criticism. It is to
+be brought out under the direction of the heads of the Church, and is
+the nearest approach to an official act in these great matters which
+they have ventured for two hundred years. It is not for us to anticipate
+the result. The word 'misrepresentations' is unfortunate; we should have
+augured better for the work if instead of it had been written 'the
+sincere perplexities of honest minds.' But the execution may be better
+than the promise. If these perplexities are encountered honourably and
+successfully, the Church may recover its supremacy over the intellect of
+the country; if otherwise, the archbishop who has taken the command will
+have steered the vessel direct upon the rocks.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[E] _Fraser's Magazine_, 1864.
+
+[F] I do not speak of individuals; I speak of _tendency_.
+
+
+
+
+THE BOOK OF JOB.[G]
+
+
+It will be matter some day of curious enquiry to ascertain why,
+notwithstanding the high reverence with which the English people regard
+the Bible, they have done so little in comparison with their continental
+contemporaries towards arriving at a proper understanding of it. The
+books named below[H] form but a section of a long list which has
+appeared during the last few years in Germany on the Book of Job alone;
+and this book has not received any larger share of attention than the
+others, either of the Old or the New Testament. Whatever be the nature
+or the origin of these books (and on this point there is much difference
+of opinion among the Germans as among ourselves) they are all agreed,
+orthodox and unorthodox, that at least we should endeavour to understand
+them; and that no efforts can be too great, either of research or
+criticism, to discover their history, or elucidate their meaning.
+
+We shall assent, doubtless, eagerly, perhaps noisily and indignantly, to
+so obvious a truism; but our own efforts in the same direction will not
+bear us out. Able men in England employ themselves in matters of a more
+practical character; and while we refuse to avail ourselves of what has
+been done elsewhere, no book, or books, which we produce on the
+interpretation of Scripture acquire more than a partial or an ephemeral
+reputation. The most important contribution to our knowledge on this
+subject which has been made in these recent years is the translation of
+the 'Library of the Fathers,' by which it is about as rational to
+suppose that the analytical criticism of modern times can be superseded,
+as that the place of Herman and Dindorf could be supplied by an edition
+of the old scholiasts.
+
+It is, indeed, reasonable that as long as we are persuaded that our
+English theory of the Bible, as a whole, is the right one, we should
+shrink from contact with investigations which, however ingenious in
+themselves, are based on what we know to be a false foundation. But
+there are some learned Germans whose orthodoxy would pass examination at
+Exeter Hall; and there are many subjects, such, for instance, as the
+present, on which all their able men are agreed in conclusions that
+cannot rationally give offence to any one. With the Book of Job,
+analytical criticism has only served to clear up the uncertainties which
+have hitherto always hung about it. It is now considered to be, beyond
+all doubt, a genuine Hebrew original, completed by its writer almost in
+the form in which it now remains to us. The questions on the
+authenticity of the Prologue and Epilogue, which once were thought
+important, have given way before a more sound conception of the dramatic
+unity of the entire poem; and the volumes before us contain merely an
+enquiry into its meaning, bringing, at the same time, all the resources
+of modern scholarship and historical and mythological research to bear
+upon the obscurity of separate passages. It is the most difficult of all
+the Hebrew compositions--many words occurring in it, and many thoughts,
+not to be found elsewhere in the Bible. How difficult our translators
+found it may be seen by the number of words which they were obliged to
+insert in italics, and the doubtful renderings which they have suggested
+in the margin. One instance of this, in passing, we will notice in this
+place--it will be familiar to every one as the passage quoted at the
+opening of the English burial service, and adduced as one of the
+doctrinal proofs of the resurrection of the body:--'I know that my
+Redeemer liveth, and that He shall stand at the latter _day_ upon the
+earth; and _though_, after my skin _worms_ destroy this _body_, yet in
+my flesh I shall see God.' So this passage stands in the ordinary
+version. But the words in italics have nothing answering to them in the
+original--they were all added by the translators[I] to fill out their
+interpretation; and for _in my flesh_, they tell us themselves in the
+margin that we may read (and, in fact, we ought to read, and must read)
+'_out of_,' or _'without' my flesh_. It is but to write out the verses,
+omitting the conjectural additions, and making that one small but vital
+correction, to see how frail a support is there for so large a
+conclusion: 'I know that my Redeemer liveth, and shall stand at the
+latter       upon the earth; and after my skin       destroy
+this       ; yet without my flesh I shall see God.' If there is any
+doctrine of a resurrection here, it is a resurrection precisely _not_ of
+the body, but of the spirit. And now let us only add, that the word
+translated Redeemer is the technical expression for the 'avenger of
+blood;' and that the second paragraph ought to be rendered--'and one to
+come after me (my next of kin, to whom the avenging my injuries belongs)
+shall stand upon my dust,' and we shall see how much was to be done
+towards the mere exegesis of the text. This is an extreme instance, and
+no one will question the general beauty and majesty of our translation;
+but there are many mythical and physical allusions scattered over the
+poem, which, in the sixteenth century, there were positively no means of
+understanding; and perhaps, too, there were mental tendencies in the
+translators themselves which prevented them from adequately apprehending
+even the drift and spirit of the composition. The form of the story was
+too stringent to allow such tendencies any latitude; but they appear,
+from time to time, sufficiently to produce serious confusion. With these
+recent assistances, therefore, we propose to say something of the nature
+of this extraordinary book--a book of which it is to say little to call
+it unequalled of its kind, and which will one day, perhaps, when it is
+allowed to stand on its own merits, be seen towering up alone, far away
+above all the poetry of the world. How it found its way into the canon,
+smiting as it does through and through the most deeply-seated Jewish
+prejudices, is the chief difficulty about it now; to be explained only
+by a traditional acceptance among the sacred books, dating back from the
+old times of the national greatness, when the minds of the people were
+hewn in a larger type than was to be found among the Pharisees of the
+great synagogue. But its authorship, its date, and its history, are
+alike a mystery to us; it existed at the time when the canon was
+composed; and this is all that we know beyond what we can gather out of
+the language and contents of the poem itself.
+
+Before going further, however, we must make room for a few remarks of a
+very general kind. Let it have been written when it would, it marks a
+period in which the religious convictions of thinking men were passing
+through a vast crisis; and we shall not understand it without having
+before us clearly something of the conditions which periods of such a
+kind always and necessarily exhibit.
+
+The history of religious speculation appears in extreme outline to have
+been of the following character. We may conceive mankind to have been
+originally launched into the universe with no knowledge either of
+themselves or of the scene in which they were placed; with no actual
+knowledge, but distinguished from the rest of the creation by a faculty
+of gaining knowledge; and first unconsciously, and afterwards
+consciously and laboriously, to have commenced that long series of
+experience and observation which has accumulated in thousands of years
+to what we now see around us. Limited on all sides by conditions which
+they must have felt to be none of their own imposing, and finding
+everywhere forces working, over which they had no control, the fear
+which they would naturally entertain of these invisible and mighty
+agents assumed, under the direction of an idea which we may perhaps call
+inborn and inherent in human nature, a more generous character of
+reverence and awe. The laws of the outer world, as they discovered them,
+they regarded as the decrees, or as the immediate energies of personal
+beings; and as knowledge grew up among them, they looked upon it, not as
+knowledge of nature, but of God, or the gods. All early paganism
+appears, on careful examination, to have arisen out of a consecration of
+the first rudiments of physical or speculative science. The twelve
+labours of Hercules are the labours of the sun, of which Hercules is an
+old name, through the twelve signs. Chronos, or _time_, being measured
+by the apparent motion of the heavens, is figured as their child; Time,
+the universal parent, devours its own offspring, yet is again itself, in
+the high faith of a human soul conscious of its power and its
+endurance, supposed to be baffled and dethroned by Zeus, or _life_; and
+so on through all the elaborate theogonies of Greece and Egypt. They are
+no more than real insight into real phenomena, allegorised as time went
+on, elaborated by fancy, or idealised by imagination, but never losing
+their original character.
+
+Thus paganism, in its very nature, was expansive, self-developing, and,
+as Mr. Hume observed, tolerant; a new god was welcomed to the Pantheon
+as a new scientific discovery is welcomed by the Royal Society; and the
+various nations found no difficulty in interchanging their divinities--a
+new god either representing a new power not hitherto discovered, or one
+with which they were already familiar under a new name. With such a
+power of adaptation and enlargement, if there had been nothing more in
+it than this, such a system might have gone on accommodating itself to
+the change of times, and keeping pace with the growth of human
+character. Already in its later forms, as the unity of nature was more
+clearly observed, and the identity of nature throughout the known world,
+the separate powers were subordinating themselves to a single supreme
+king; and, as the poets had originally personified the elemental forces,
+the thinkers were reversing the earlier process, and discovering the law
+under the person. Happily or unhappily, however, what they could do for
+themselves they could not do for the multitude. Phoebus and Aphrodite
+had been made too human to be allegorised. Humanised, and yet, we may
+say, only half-humanised, retaining their purely physical nature, and
+without any proper moral attribute at all, these gods and goddesses
+remained to the many examples of sensuality made beautiful; and, as soon
+as right and wrong came to have a meaning, it was impossible to worship
+any more these idealised despisers of it. The human caprices and
+passions which served at first to deepen the illusion, justly revenged
+themselves; paganism became a lie, and perished.
+
+In the meantime, the Jews (and perhaps some other nations, but the Jews
+chiefly and principally) had been moving forward along a road wholly
+different. Breaking early away from the gods of nature, they advanced
+along the line of their moral consciousness; and leaving the nations to
+study physics, philosophy, and art, they confined themselves to man and
+to human life. Their theology grew up round the knowledge of good and
+evil, and God, with them, was the supreme Lord of the world, who stood
+towards man in the relation of a ruler and a judge. Holding such a
+faith, to them the toleration of paganism was an impossibility; the laws
+of nature might be many, but the law of conduct was one; there was one
+law and one king; and the conditions under which he governed the world,
+as embodied in the Decalogue or other similar code, were looked upon as
+iron and inflexible certainties, unalterable revelations of the will of
+an unalterable Being. So far there was little in common between this
+process and the other; but it was identical with it in this one
+important feature, that moral knowledge, like physical, admitted of
+degrees; and the successive steps of it were only purchasable by
+experience. The dispensation of the law, in the language of modern
+theology, was not the dispensation of grace, and the nature of good and
+evil disclosed itself slowly as men were able to comprehend it. Thus, no
+system of law or articles of belief were or could be complete and
+exhaustive for all time. Experience accumulates; new facts are observed,
+new forces display themselves, and all such formulæ must necessarily be
+from period to period broken up and moulded afresh. And yet the steps
+already gained are a treasure so sacred, so liable are they at all times
+to be attacked by those lower and baser elements in our nature which it
+is their business to hold in check, that the better part of mankind have
+at all times practically regarded their creed as a sacred total to which
+nothing may be added, and from which nothing may be taken away; the
+suggestion of a new idea is resented as an encroachment, punished as an
+insidious piece of treason, and resisted by the combined forces of all
+common practical understandings, which know too well the value of what
+they have, to risk the venture upon untried change. Periods of religious
+transition, therefore, when the advance has been a real one, always have
+been violent, and probably will always continue to be so. They to whom
+the precious gift of fresh light has been given are called upon to
+exhibit their credentials as teachers in suffering for it. They, and
+those who oppose them, have alike a sacred cause; and the fearful
+spectacle arises of earnest, vehement men contending against each other
+as for their own souls, in fiery struggle. Persecutions come, and
+martyrdoms, and religions wars; and, at last, the old faith, like the
+phoenix, expires upon its altar, and the new rises out of the ashes.
+
+Such, in briefest outline, has been the history of religions, natural
+and moral; the first, indeed, being in no proper sense a religion at
+all, as we understand religion; and only assuming the character of it in
+the minds of great men whose moral sense had raised them beyond their
+time and country, and who, feeling the necessity of a real creed, with
+an effort and with indifferent success, endeavoured to express, under
+the systems which they found, emotions which had no proper place in
+them.
+
+Of the transition periods which we have described as taking place under
+the religion which we call moral, the first known to us is marked at its
+opening by the appearance of the Book of Job, the first fierce collision
+of the new fact with the formula which will not stretch to cover it.
+
+The earliest phenomenon likely to be observed connected with the moral
+government of the world is the general one, that on the whole, as things
+are constituted, good men prosper and are happy, bad men fail and are
+miserable. The cause of such a condition is no mystery, and lies very
+near the surface. As soon as men combine in society, they are forced to
+obey certain laws under which alone society is possible, and these laws,
+even in their rudest form, approach the laws of conscience. To a certain
+extent, every one is obliged to sacrifice his private inclinations; and
+those who refuse to do so are punished, or are crushed. If society were
+perfect, the imperfect tendency would carry itself out till the two sets
+of laws were identical; but perfection so far has been only in Utopia,
+and, as far as we can judge by experience hitherto, they have
+approximated most nearly in the simplest and most rudimentary forms of
+life. Under the systems which we call patriarchal, the modern
+distinction between sins and crimes had no existence. All gross sins
+were offences against society, as it then was constituted, and, wherever
+it was possible, were punished as being so; chicanery and those subtle
+advantages which the acute and unscrupulous can take over the simple,
+without open breach of enacted statutes, became only possible under the
+complications of more artificial polities; and the oppression or injury
+of man by man was open, violent, obvious, and therefore easily
+understood. Doubtless, therefore, in such a state of things it would,
+on the whole, be true to experience that, judging merely by outward
+prosperity or the reverse, good and bad men would be rewarded and
+punished as such in this actual world; so far, that is, as the
+administration of such rewards and punishments was left in the power of
+mankind. But theology could not content itself with general tendencies.
+Theological propositions then, as much as now, were held to be absolute,
+universal, admitting of no exceptions, and explaining every phenomenon.
+Superficial generalisations were construed into immutable decrees; the
+God of this world was just and righteous, and temporal prosperity or
+wretchedness were dealt out by Him immediately by His own will to His
+subjects according to their behaviour. Thus the same disposition towards
+completeness which was the ruin of paganism, here, too, was found
+generating the same evils; the half truth rounding itself out with
+falsehoods. Not only the consequences of ill actions which followed
+through themselves, but the accidents, as we call them, of
+nature--earthquakes, storms, and pestilences--were the ministers of
+God's justice, and struck sinners only with discriminating accuracy.
+That the sun should shine alike on the evil and the good was a creed too
+high for the early divines, or that the victims of a fallen tower were
+no greater offenders than their neighbours. The conceptions of such men
+could not pass beyond the outward temporal consequence; and if God's
+hand was not there it was nowhere. We might have expected that such a
+theory of things could not long resist the accumulated contradictions of
+experience; but the same experience shows also what a marvellous power
+is in us of thrusting aside phenomena which interfere with our cherished
+convictions; and when such convictions are consecrated into a creed
+which it is a sacred duty to believe, experience is but like water
+dropping upon a rock, which wears it away, indeed, at last, but only in
+thousands of years. This theory was and is the central idea of the
+Jewish polity, the obstinate toughness of which has been the perplexity
+of Gentiles and Christians from the first dawn of its existence; it
+lingers among ourselves in our Liturgy and in the popular belief; and in
+spite of the emphatic censure of Him after whose name we call ourselves,
+is still the instant interpreter for us of any unusual calamity, a
+potato blight, a famine, or an epidemic: such vitality is there in a
+moral faith, though now, at any rate, contradicted by the experience of
+all mankind, and at issue even with Christianity itself.
+
+At what period in the world's history misgivings about it began to show
+themselves it is now impossible to say; it was at the close, probably,
+of the patriarchal period, when men who really _thought_ must have found
+the ground palpably shaking under them. Indications of such misgivings
+are to be found in the Psalms, those especially passing under the name
+of Asaph; and all through Ecclesiastes there breathes a spirit of
+deepest and saddest scepticism. But Asaph thrusts his doubts aside, and
+forces himself back into his old position; and the scepticism of
+Ecclesiastes is confessedly that of a man who had gone wandering after
+enjoyment; searching after pleasures--pleasures of sense and pleasures
+of intellect--and who, at last, bears reluctant testimony that, by such
+methods, no pleasures can be found which will endure; that he had
+squandered the power which might have been used for better things, and
+had only strength remaining to tell his own sad tale as a warning to
+mankind. There is nothing in Ecclesiastes like the misgivings of a noble
+nature. The writer's own personal happiness had been all for which he
+had cared; he had failed, as all men gifted as he was gifted are sure to
+fail, and the lights of heaven were extinguished by the disappointment
+with which his own spirit had been clouded.
+
+Utterly different from these, both in character and in the lesson which
+it teaches, is the Book of Job. Of unknown date, as we said, and unknown
+authorship, the language impregnated with strange idioms and strange
+allusions, un-Jewish in form, and in fiercest hostility with Judaism, it
+hovers like a meteor over the old Hebrew literature, in it, but not of
+it, compelling the acknowledgment of itself by its own internal majesty,
+yet exerting no influence over the minds of the people, never alluded
+to, and scarcely ever quoted, till at last the light which it had
+heralded rose up full over the world in Christianity.
+
+The conjectures which have been formed upon the date of this book are so
+various, that they show of themselves on how slight a foundation the
+best of them must rest. The language is no guide, for although
+unquestionably of Hebrew origin, the poem bears no analogy to any of the
+other books in the Bible; while of its external history nothing is
+known at all, except that it was received into the canon at the time of
+the great synagogue. Ewald decides, with some confidence, that it
+belongs to the great prophetic period, and that the writer was a
+contemporary of Jeremiah. Ewald is a high authority in these matters,
+and this opinion is the one which we believe is now commonly received
+among biblical scholars. In the absence of proof, however (and the
+reasons which he brings forward are really no more than conjectures),
+these opposite considerations may be of moment. It is only natural that
+at first thought we should ascribe the grandest poem in a literature to
+the time at which the poetry of the nation to which it belongs was
+generally at its best; but, on reflection, the time when the poetry of
+prophecy is the richest, is not likely to be favourable to compositions
+of another kind. The prophets wrote in an era of decrepitude,
+dissolution, sin, and shame, when the glory of Israel was falling round
+them into ruin, and their mission, glowing as they were with the ancient
+spirit, was to rebuke, to warn, to threaten, and to promise. Finding
+themselves too late to save, and only, like Cassandra, despised and
+disregarded, their voices rise up singing the swan song of a dying
+people, now falling away in the wild wailing of despondency over the
+shameful and desperate present, now swelling in triumphant hope that God
+will not leave them for ever, and in His own time will take His chosen
+to Himself again. But such a period is an ill occasion for searching
+into the broad problems of human destiny; the present is all-important
+and all-absorbing; and such a book as that of Job could have arisen only
+out of an isolation of mind, and life, and interest, which we cannot
+conceive of as possible under such conditions.
+
+The more it is studied, the more the conclusion forces itself upon us
+that, let the writer have lived when he would, in his struggle with the
+central falsehood of his own people's creed, he must have divorced
+himself from them outwardly as well as inwardly; that he travelled away
+into the world, and lived long, perhaps all his matured life, in exile.
+Everything about the book speaks of a person who had broken free from
+the narrow littleness of 'the peculiar people.' The language, as we
+said, is full of strange words. The hero of the poem is of strange land
+and parentage--a Gentile certainly, not a Jew. The life, the manners,
+the customs are of all varieties and places--Egypt, with its river and
+its pyramids, is there; the description of mining points to Phoenicia;
+the settled life in cities, the nomad Arabs, the wandering caravans, the
+heat of the tropics, and the ice of the north, all are foreign to
+Canaan, speaking of foreign things and foreign people. No mention, or
+hint of mention, is there throughout the poem of Jewish traditions or
+Jewish certainties. We look to find the three friends vindicate
+themselves, as they so well might have done, by appeals to the fertile
+annals of Israel, to the Flood, to the cities of the plain, to the
+plagues of Egypt, or the thunders of Sinai. But of all this there is not
+a word; they are passed by as if they had no existence; and instead of
+them, when witnesses are required for the power of God, we have strange
+un-Hebrew stories of the eastern astronomic mythology, the old wars of
+the giants, the imprisoned Orion, the wounded dragon, 'the sweet
+influences of the seven stars,' and the glittering fragments of the
+sea-snake Rahab[J] trailing across the northern sky. Again, God is not
+the God of Israel, but the father of mankind; we hear nothing of a
+chosen people, nothing of a special revelation, nothing of peculiar
+privileges; and in the court of heaven there is a Satan, not the prince
+of this world and the enemy of God, but the angel of judgment, the
+accusing spirit whose mission was to walk to and fro over the earth, and
+carry up to heaven an account of the sins of mankind. We cannot believe
+that thoughts of this kind arose out of Jerusalem in the days of Josiah.
+In this book, if anywhere, we have the record of some [Greek: anêr
+polutropos] who, like the old hero of Ithaca,
+
+    [Greek:
+    pollôn anthrôpôn iden astea kai noon egnô,
+    polla d' hog' en pontô pathen algea hon kata thumon,
+    arnumenos psuchên.... ]
+
+but the scenes, the names, and the incidents, are all contrived as if to
+baffle curiosity--as if, in the very form of the poem, to teach us that
+it is no story of a single thing which happened once, but that it
+belongs to humanity itself, and is the drama of the trial of man, with
+Almighty God and the angels as the spectators of it.
+
+No reader can have failed to have been struck with the simplicity of
+the opening. Still, calm, and most majestic, it tells us everything
+which is necessary to be known in the fewest possible words. The history
+of Job was probably a tradition in the East; his name, like that of
+Priam in Greece, the symbol of fallen greatness, and his misfortunes the
+problem of philosophers. In keeping with the current belief, he is
+described as a model of excellence, the most perfect and upright man
+upon the earth, 'and the same was the greatest man in all the east.' So
+far, greatness and goodness had gone hand in hand together, as the
+popular theory required. The details of his character are brought out in
+the progress of the poem. He was 'the father of the oppressed, and of
+those who had none to help them.' When he sat as a judge in the
+market-places, 'righteousness clothed him' there, and 'his justice was a
+robe and a diadem.' He 'broke the jaws of the wicked, and plucked the
+spoil out of his teeth;' and, humble in the midst of his power, he 'did
+not despise the cause of his manservant, or his maidservant, when they
+contended with him,' knowing (and amidst those old people where the
+multitude of mankind were regarded as the born slaves of the powerful,
+to be carved into eunuchs or polluted into concubines at their master's
+pleasure, it was no easy matter to know it)--knowing that 'He who had
+made him had made them,' and _one_ 'had fashioned them both in the
+womb.' Above all, he was the friend of the poor; 'the blessing of him
+that was ready to perish came upon him,' and he 'made the widow's heart
+to sing for joy.'
+
+Setting these characteristics of his daily life by the side of his
+unaffected piety, as it is described in the first chapter, we have a
+picture of the best man who could then be conceived; not a hard ascetic,
+living in haughty or cowardly isolation, but a warm figure of flesh and
+blood, a man full of all human loveliness, and to whom, that no room
+might be left for any possible Calvinistic falsehood, God Himself bears
+the emphatic testimony, that 'there was none like him upon the earth, a
+perfect and upright man, who feared God and eschewed evil.' If such a
+person as this, therefore, could be made miserable, necessarily the
+current belief of the Jews was false to the root; and tradition
+furnished the fact that he had been visited by every worst calamity. How
+was it then to be accounted for? Out of a thousand possible
+explanations, the poet introduces a single one. He admits us behind the
+veil which covers the ways of Providence, and we hear the accusing angel
+charging Job with an interested piety, and of being obedient because it
+was his policy. 'Job does not serve God for nought,' he says; 'strip him
+of his splendour, and see if he will care for God then. Humble him into
+poverty and wretchedness, so only we shall know what is in his heart.'
+The cause thus introduced is itself a rebuke to the belief which, with
+its 'rewards and punishments,' immediately fostered selfishness; and the
+poem opens with a double action, on one side to try the question whether
+it is possible for man to love God disinterestedly--the issue of which
+trial is not foreseen or even foretold, and we watch the progress of it
+with an anxious and fearful interest; on the other side, to bring out,
+in contrast to the truth which we already know, the cruel falsehood of
+the popular faith--to show how, instead of leading men to mercy and
+affection, it hardens their heart, narrows their sympathies, and
+enhances the trials of the sufferer, by refinements which even Satan had
+not anticipated. The combination of evils, as blow falls on blow,
+suddenly, swiftly, and terribly, has all the appearance of a purposed
+visitation (as indeed it was); if ever outward incidents might with
+justice be interpreted as the immediate action of Providence, those
+which fell on Job might be so interpreted. The world turns disdainfully
+from the fallen in the world's way; but far worse than this, his chosen
+friends, wise, good, pious men, as wisdom and piety were then, without
+one glimpse of the true cause of his sufferings, see in them a judgment
+upon his secret sins. He becomes to them an illustration, and even (such
+are the paralogisms of men of this description) a proof of their theory
+that 'the prosperity of the wicked is but for a while;' and instead of
+the comfort and help which they might have brought him, and which in the
+end they were made to bring him, he is to them no more than a text for
+the enunciation of solemn falsehood. And even worse again, the sufferer
+himself had been educated in the same creed; he, too, had been taught to
+see the hand of God in the outward dispensation; and feeling from the
+bottom of his heart, that he, in his own case, was a sure contradiction
+of what he had learnt to believe, he himself finds his very faith in God
+shaken from its foundation. The worst evils which Satan had devised
+were distanced far by those which had been created by human folly.
+
+The creed in which Job had believed was tried and found wanting, and, as
+it ever will be when the facts of experience come in contact with the
+inadequate formula, the true is found so mingled with the false, that
+they can hardly be disentangled, and are in danger of being swept away
+together.
+
+A studied respect is shown, however, to orthodoxy, even while it is
+arraigned for judgment. It may be doubtful whether the writer purposely
+intended it. He probably cared only to tell the real truth; to say for
+the old theory the best which could be said, and to produce as its
+defenders the best and wisest men whom in his experience he had known to
+believe and defend it. At any rate, he represents the three friends, not
+as a weaker person would have represented them, as foolish, obstinate
+bigots, but as wise, humane, and almost great men, who, at the outset,
+at least, are animated only by the kindest feelings, and speak what they
+have to say with the most earnest conviction that it is true. Job is
+vehement, desperate, reckless. His language is the wild, natural
+outpouring of suffering. The friends, true to the eternal nature of man,
+are grave, solemn, and indignant, preaching their half truth, and
+mistaken only in supposing that it is the whole; speaking, as all such
+persons would speak and still do speak, in defending what they consider
+sacred truth against the assaults of folly and scepticism. How beautiful
+is their first introduction:--
+
+'Now when Job's three friends heard of all this evil which was come upon
+him, they came every one from his own place; Eliphaz the Temanite, and
+Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite: for they had made an
+appointment together to come to mourn with him and to comfort him. And
+when they lifted up their eyes afar off, and knew him not, they lifted
+up their voice and wept, and they rent every one his mantle, and
+sprinkled dust upon their heads towards heaven. So they sat down with
+him upon the ground seven days and seven nights, and none spake a word
+unto him, for they saw that his grief was very great.'
+
+What a picture is there! What majestic tenderness! His wife had scoffed
+at his faith, bidding him 'leave God and die.' 'His acquaintance had
+turned from him.' He 'had called his servant, and he had given him no
+answer.' Even the children, in their unconscious cruelty, had gathered
+round and mocked him as he lay among the ashes. But 'his friends
+sprinkle dust towards heaven, and sit silently by him, and weep for him
+seven days and seven nights upon the ground.' That is, they were
+true-hearted, truly loving, devout, religious men; and yet they, with
+their religion, were to become the instruments of the most poignant
+sufferings, the sharpest temptations, which he had to endure. So it was,
+and is, and will be--of such materials is this human life of ours
+composed.
+
+And now, remembering the double action of the drama--the actual trial of
+Job, the result of which is uncertain; and the delusion of these men,
+which is, at the outset, certain--let us go rapidly through the
+dialogue. Satan's share in the temptation had already been overcome.
+Lying sick in the loathsome disease which had been sent upon him, his
+wife, in Satan's own words, had tempted Job to say, 'Farewell to
+God,'--think no more of God or goodness, since this was all which came
+of it; and Job had told her that she spoke as one of the foolish women.
+He 'had received good at the hand of the Lord, and should he not receive
+evil?' But now, when real love and real affection appear, his heart
+melts in him; he loses his forced self-composure, and bursts into a
+passionate regret that he had ever been born. In the agony of his
+sufferings, hope of better things had died away. He does not complain of
+injustice; as yet, and before his friends have stung and wounded him, he
+makes no questioning of Providence,--but why was life given to him at
+all, if only for this? Sick in mind, and sick in body, but one wish
+remains to him, that death will come quickly and end all. It is a cry
+from the very depths of a single and simple heart. But for such
+simplicity and singleness his friends could not give him credit;
+possessed beforehand with their idea, they see in his misery only a
+fatal witness against him; such calamities could not have befallen a
+man, the justice of God would not have permitted it, unless they had
+been deserved. Job had sinned and he had suffered, and this wild passion
+was but impenitence and rebellion.
+
+Being as certain that they were right in this opinion as they were that
+God Himself existed, that they should speak what they felt was only
+natural and necessary; and their language at the outset is, all which
+would be dictated by the tenderest sympathy. Eliphaz opens, the oldest
+and most important of the three, in a soft, subdued, suggestive strain,
+contriving in every way to spare the feelings of the sufferer, to the
+extreme to which his love will allow him. All is general, impersonal,
+indirect,--the rule of the world, the order of Providence. He does not
+accuse Job, but he describes his calamities, and leaves him to gather
+for himself the occasion which had produced them; and then passes off,
+as if further to soften the blow, to the mysterious vision in which the
+infirmity of mortal nature had been revealed to him, the universal
+weakness which involved both the certainty that Job had shared in it,
+and the excuse for him, if he would confess and humble himself: the
+blessed virtue of repentance follows, and the promise that all shall be
+well.
+
+This is the note on which each of the friends strikes successively, in
+the first of the three divisions into which the dialogue divides itself,
+but each with increasing peremptoriness and confidence, as Job, so far
+from accepting their interpretation of what had befallen him, hurls it
+from him in anger and disdain. Let us observe (and the Calvinists should
+consider this), he will hear as little of the charges against mankind as
+of charges against himself. He will not listen to the 'corruption of
+humanity,' because in the consciousness of his own innocency, he knows
+that it is not corrupt: he knows that he is himself just and good, and
+we know it, the Divine sentence upon him having been already passed. He
+will not acknowledge his sin, for he knows not of what to repent. If he
+could have reflected calmly, he might have foreseen what they would say.
+He knew all that as well as they: it was the old story which he had
+learnt, and could repeat, if necessary, as well as anyone: and if it had
+been no more than a philosophical discussion, touching himself no more
+nearly than it touched his friends, he might have allowed for the
+tenacity of opinion in such matters, and listened to it and replied to
+it with equanimity. But, as the proverb says, 'It is ill talking between
+a full man and a fasting:' and in Job such equanimity would have been
+but Stoicism, or the affectation of it, and unreal as the others'
+theories. Possessed with the certainty that he had not deserved what had
+befallen him, harassed with doubt, and worn out with pain and
+unkindness, he had assumed (and how natural that he should assume it)
+that those who loved him should not have been hasty to believe evil of
+him; he had spoken to them as he really felt, and he thought that he
+might have looked to them for something warmer and more sympathising
+than such dreary eloquence. So when the revelation comes upon him of
+what was passing in them, he attributes it (and now he is unjust to
+them) to a falsehood of heart, and not to a blindness of understanding.
+Their sermons, so kindly intended, roll past him as a dismal mockery.
+They had been shocked (and how true again is this to nature) at his
+passionate cry for death. 'Do ye reprove words?' he says, 'and the
+speeches of one that is desperate, which are as wind?' It was but poor
+friendship and narrow wisdom. He had looked to them for pity, for
+comfort, and love. He had longed for it as the parched caravans in the
+desert for the water-streams, and 'his brethren had dealt deceitfully
+with him.' The brooks, in the cool winter, roll in a full turbid
+torrent; 'what time it waxes warm they vanish, when it is hot they are
+consumed out of their place; the caravans of Tema looked for them, the
+companies of Sheba waited for them; they were confounded because they
+had hoped; they came thither, and there was nothing.' If for once these
+poor men could have trusted their hearts, if for once they could have
+believed that there might be 'more things in heaven and earth' than were
+dreamt of in their philosophy--but this is the one thing which they
+could not do, which the theologian proper never has done or will do. And
+thus whatever of calmness or endurance Job alone, on his ash-heap, might
+have conquered for himself, is all scattered away; and as the strong
+gusts of passion sweep to and fro across his heart, he pours himself out
+in wild fitful music, so beautiful because so true, not answering them
+or their speeches, but now flinging them from him in scorn, now
+appealing to their mercy, or turning indignantly to God; now praying for
+death; now in perplexity doubting whether, in some mystic way which he
+cannot understand, he may not, perhaps, after all, really have sinned,
+and praying to be shown his fault; and then staggering further into the
+darkness, and breaking out into upbraidings of the Power which has
+become so dreadful an enigma to him. 'Thou enquirest after my iniquity,
+thou searchest after my sin, and thou knowest that I am not wicked. Why
+didst thou bring me forth out of the womb? Oh, that I had given up the
+ghost, and no eye had seen me. Cease, let me alone. It is but a little
+while that I have to live. Let me alone, that I may take comfort a
+little before I go, whence I shall not return to the land of darkness
+and the shadow of death.' In what other poem in the world is there
+pathos deep as this? With experience so stern as his, it was not for Job
+to be calm, and self-possessed, and delicate in his words. He speaks not
+what he knows, but what he feels; and without fear the writer allows him
+to throw out his passion all genuine as it rises, not overmuch caring
+how nice ears might be offended, but contented to be true to the real
+emotion of a genuine human heart. So the poem runs on to the end of the
+first answer to Zophar.
+
+But now, with admirable fitness, as the contest goes forward, the
+relative position of the speakers begins to change. Hitherto, Job only
+had been passionate; and his friends temperate and collected. Now,
+becoming shocked at his obstinacy, and disappointed in the result of
+their homilies, they stray still further from the truth in an endeavour
+to strengthen their position, and, as a natural consequence, visibly
+grow angry. To them, Job's vehement and desperate speeches are damning
+evidence of the truth of their suspicion. Impiety is added to his first
+sin, and they begin to see in him a rebel against God. At first they had
+been contented to speak generally, and much which they had urged was
+partially true; now they step forward to a direct application, and
+formally and personally accuse himself. Here their ground is positively
+false; and with delicate art it is they who are now growing violent, and
+wounded self-love begins to show behind their zeal for God; while in
+contrast to them, as there is less and less truth in what they say, Job
+grows more and more collected. For a time it had seemed doubtful how he
+would endure his trial. The light of his faith was burning feebly and
+unsteadily; a little more, and it seemed as if it might have utterly
+gone out. But at last the storm was lulling; as the charges are brought
+personally home to him, the confidence in his own real innocence rises
+against them. He had before known that he was innocent; now he feels the
+strength which lies in innocence, as if God were beginning to reveal
+Himself within him, to prepare the way for the after outward
+manifestation of Himself.
+
+The friends, as before, repeat one another with but little difference;
+the sameness being of course intentional, as showing that they were not
+speaking for themselves, but as representatives of a prevailing opinion.
+Eliphaz, again, gives the note which the others follow. Hear this
+Calvinist of the old world: 'Thy own mouth condemneth thee, and thine
+own lips testify against thee. What is man that he should be clean, and
+he that is born of a woman that he should be righteous? Behold, he
+putteth no trust in his saints; yea, the heavens are not clean in his
+sight; how much more abominable and filthy is man, which drinketh
+iniquity like water.' Strange, that after all these thousands of years
+we should still persist in this degrading confession, as a thing which
+it is impious to deny and impious to attempt to render otherwise, when
+Scripture itself, in language so emphatic, declares that it is a lie.
+Job _is_ innocent, perfect, righteous. God Himself bears witness to it.
+It is Job who is found at last to have spoken truth, and the friends to
+have sinned in denying it. And he holds fast by his innocency, and with
+a generous confidence thrusts away the misgivings which had begun to
+cling to him. Among his complainings he had exclaimed, that God was
+remembering upon him the sins of his youth--not denying them; knowing
+well that he, like others, had gone astray before he had learnt to
+control himself, but feeling that at least in an earthly father it is
+unjust to visit the faults of childhood on the matured man; feeling that
+he had long, long shaken them off from him, and they did not even impair
+the probity of his after-life. But now these doubts, too, pass away in
+the brave certainty that God is not less just than man. As the
+denouncings grow louder and darker, he appeals from his narrow judges to
+the Supreme Tribunal--calls on God to hear him and to try his cause--and
+then, in the strength of this appeal the mist rises from before his
+eyes. His sickness is mortal: he has no hope in life, and death is near;
+but the intense feeling that justice must and will be done, holds to him
+closer and closer. God may appear on earth for him; or if that be too
+bold a hope, and death finds him as he is--what is death then? God will
+clear his memory in the place where he lived; his injuries will be
+righted over his grave; while for himself, like a sudden gleam of
+sunlight between clouds, a clear, bright hope beams up, that he too,
+then, in another life, if not in this, when his skin is wasted off his
+bones, and the worms have done their work on the prison of his spirit,
+he too, at last, may then see God; may see Him, and have his pleadings
+heard.
+
+With such a hope, or even the shadow of one, he turns back to the world
+again to look at it. Facts against which he had before closed his eyes
+he allows and confronts, and he sees that his own little experience is
+but the reflection of a law. You tell me, he seems to say, that the good
+are rewarded, and that the wicked are punished; that God is just, and
+that this is always so. Perhaps it is, or will be, but not in the way
+which you imagine. You have known me, you have known what my life has
+been; you see what I am, and it is no difficulty to you. You prefer
+believing that I, whom you call your friend, am a deceiver or a
+pretender, to admitting the possibility of the falsehood of your
+hypothesis. You will not listen to my assurance, and you are angry with
+me because I will not lie against my own soul, and acknowledge sins
+which I have not committed. You appeal to the course of the world in
+proof of your faith, and challenge me to answer you. Well, then, I
+accept your challenge. The world is not what you say. You have told me
+what you have seen of it: I will tell you what I have seen.
+
+'Even while I remember I am afraid, and trembling taketh hold upon my
+flesh. Wherefore do the wicked become old, yea, and are mighty in power?
+Their seed is established in their sight with them, and their offspring
+before their eyes. Their houses are safe from fear, neither is the rod
+of God upon them. Their bull gendereth and faileth not; their cow
+calveth, and casteth not her calf. They send forth their little ones
+like a flock, and their children dance. They take the timbrel and harp,
+and rejoice at the sound of the organ. They spend their days in wealth,
+and in a moment go down into the grave. Therefore they say unto God,
+Depart from us, for we desire not the knowledge of Thy ways. What is the
+Almighty that we should serve Him? and what profit should we have if we
+pray to Him?'
+
+Will you quote the weary proverb? Will you say that 'God layeth up His
+iniquity for His children?' (Our translators have wholly lost the sense
+of this passage, and endeavour to make Job acknowledge what he is
+steadfastly denying.) Well, and what then? What will he care? 'Will his
+own eye see his own fall? Will he drink the wrath of the Almighty? What
+are the fortunes of his house to him if the number of his own months is
+fulfilled?' One man is good and another wicked, one is happy and another
+is miserable. In the great indifference of nature they share alike in
+the common lot. 'They lie down alike in the dust, and the worms cover
+them.'
+
+Ewald, and many other critics, suppose that Job was hurried away by his
+feelings to say all this; and that in his calmer moments he must have
+felt that it was untrue. It is a point on which we must decline
+accepting even Ewald's high authority. Even then, in those old times, it
+was beginning to be terribly true. Even then the current theory was
+obliged to bend to large exceptions; and what Job saw as exceptions we
+see round us everywhere. It was true then, it is infinitely more true
+now, that what is called virtue in the common sense of the word, still
+more that nobleness, godliness, or heroism of character in any form
+whatsoever, have nothing to do with this or that man's prosperity, or
+even happiness. The thoroughly vicious man is no doubt wretched enough;
+but the worldly, prudent, self-restraining man, with his five senses,
+which he understands how to gratify with tempered indulgence, with a
+conscience satisfied with the hack routine of what is called
+respectability,--such a man feels no wretchedness; no inward uneasiness
+disturbs him, no desires which he cannot gratify; and this though he be
+the basest and most contemptible slave of his own selfishness.
+Providence will not interfere to punish him. Let him obey the laws under
+which prosperity is obtainable, and he will obtain it, let him never
+fear. He will obtain it, be he base or noble. Nature is indifferent; the
+famine and the earthquake, and the blight or the accident, will not
+discriminate to strike him. He may insure himself against casualties in
+these days of ours, with the money perhaps which a better man would have
+given away, and he will have his reward. He need not doubt it.
+
+And, again, it is not true, as optimists would persuade us, that such
+prosperity brings no real pleasure. A man with no high aspirations, who
+thrives, and makes money, and envelops himself in comforts, is as happy
+as such a nature can be. If unbroken satisfaction be the most blessed
+state for a man (and this certainly is the practical notion of
+happiness), he is the happiest of men. Nor are those idle phrases any
+truer, that the good man's goodness is a never-ceasing sunshine; that
+virtue is its own reward, &c. &c. If men truly virtuous care to be
+rewarded for it, their virtue is but a poor investment of their moral
+capital. Was Job so happy then on that ash-heap of his, the mark of the
+world's scorn, and the butt for the spiritual archery of the theologian,
+alone in his forlorn nakedness, like some old dreary stump which the
+lightning has scathed, rotting away in the wind and the rain? If
+happiness be indeed what we men are sent into this world to seek for,
+those hitherto thought the noblest among us were the pitifullest and
+wretchedest. Surely it was no error in Job. It was that real insight
+which once was given to all the world in Christianity, however we have
+forgotten it now. Job was learning to see that it was not in the
+possession of enjoyment, no, nor of happiness itself, that the
+difference lies between the good and the bad. True, it might be that God
+sometimes, even generally, gives such happiness--gives it in what
+Aristotle calls an [Greek: epigignomenon telos], but it is no part of
+the terms on which He admits us to His service, still less is it the end
+which we may propose to ourselves on entering His service. Happiness He
+gives to whom He will, or leaves to the angel of nature to distribute
+among those who fulfil the laws upon which _it_ depends. But to serve
+God and to love Him is higher and better than happiness, though it be
+with wounded feet, and bleeding brows, and hearts loaded with sorrow.
+
+Into this high faith Job is rising, treading his temptations under his
+feet, and finding in them a ladder on which his spirit rises. Thus he is
+passing further and even further from his friends, soaring where their
+imaginations cannot follow him. To them he is a blasphemer whom they
+gaze at with awe and terror. They had charged him with sinning on the
+strength of their hypothesis, and he has answered with a deliberate
+denial of it. Losing now all mastery over themselves, they pour out a
+torrent of mere extravagant invective and baseless falsehood, which in
+the calmer outset they would have blushed to think of. They _know_ no
+evil of Job, but they do not hesitate to convert conjecture into
+certainty, and specify in detail the particular crimes which he must
+have committed. He _ought_ to have committed them, and so he had; the
+old argument then as now.--'Is not thy wickedness great?' says Eliphaz.
+'Thou hast taken a pledge from thy brother for nought, and stripped the
+naked of their clothing; thou hast not given water to the weary, and
+thou hast withholden bread from the hungry;' and so on through a series
+of mere distracted lies. But the time was past when words like these
+could make Job angry. Bildad follows them up with an attempt to frighten
+him by a picture of the power of that God whom he was blaspheming; but
+Job cuts short his harangue, and ends it for him in a spirit of
+loftiness which Bildad could not have approached; and then proudly and
+calmly rebukes them all, no longer in scorn and irony, but in high,
+tranquil self-possession. 'God forbid that I should justify you,' he
+says; 'till I die I will not remove my integrity from me. My
+righteousness I hold fast, and will not let it go. My heart shall not
+reproach me so long as I live.'
+
+So far all has been clear, each party, with increasing confidence,
+having insisted on their own position, and denounced their adversaries.
+A difficulty now arises which, at first sight, appears insurmountable.
+As the chapters are at present printed, the entire of the twenty-seventh
+is assigned to Job, and the paragraph from the eleventh to the
+twenty-third verses is in direct contradiction to all which he has
+maintained before--is, in fact, a concession of having been wrong from
+the beginning. Ewald, who, as we said above, himself refuses to allow
+the truth of Job's last and highest position, supposes that he is here
+receding from it, and confessing what an over-precipitate passion had
+betrayed him into denying. For many reasons, principally because we are
+satisfied that Job said then no more than the real fact, we cannot think
+Ewald right; and the concessions are too large and too inconsistent to
+be reconciled even with his own general theory of the poem. Another
+solution of the difficulty is very simple, although it is to be admitted
+that it rather cuts the knot than unties it. Eliphaz and Bildad have
+each spoken a third time; the symmetry of the general form requires that
+now Zophar should speak; and the suggestion, we believe, was first made
+by Dr. Kennicott, that he did speak, and that the verses in question
+belong to him. Any one who is accustomed to MSS. will understand easily
+how such a mistake, if it be one, might have arisen. Even in
+Shakespeare, the speeches in the early editions are in many instances
+wrongly divided, and assigned to the wrong persons. It might have
+arisen from inadvertence; it might have arisen from the foolishness of
+some Jewish transcriber, who resolved, at all costs, to drag the book
+into harmony with Judaism, and make Job unsay his heresy. This view has
+the merit of fully clearing up the obscurity. Another, however, has been
+suggested by Eichorn, who originally followed Kennicott, but discovered,
+as he supposed, a less violent hypothesis, which was equally
+satisfactory. Eichorn imagines the verses to be a summary by Job of his
+adversaries' opinions, as if he said--'Listen now; you know what the
+facts are as well as I, and yet you maintain this;' and then passed on
+with his indirect reply to it. It is possible that Eichorn may be
+right--at any rate, either he is right, or else Dr. Kennicott is.
+Certainly, Ewald is not. Taken as an account of Job's own conviction,
+the passage contradicts the burden of the whole poem. Passing it by,
+therefore, and going to what immediately follows, we arrive at what, in
+a human sense, is the final climax--Job's victory and triumph. He had
+appealed to God, and God had not appeared; he had doubted and fought
+against his doubts, and at last had crushed them down. He, too, had been
+taught to look for God in outward judgments; and when his own experience
+had shown him his mistake, he knew not where to turn. He had been
+leaning on a bruised reed, and it had run into his hand and pierced him.
+But as soon as in the speeches of his friend he saw it all laid down in
+its weakness and its false conclusions--when he saw the defenders of it
+wandering further and further from what he knew to be true, growing
+every moment, as if from a consciousness of the unsoundness of their
+standing ground, more violent, obstinate, and unreasonable, the scales
+fell more and more from his eyes--he had seen the fact that the wicked
+might prosper, and in learning to depend upon his innocency he had felt
+that the good man's support was there, if it was anywhere; and at last,
+with all his heart, was reconciled to the truth. The mystery of the
+outer world becomes deeper to him, but he does not any more try to
+understand it. The wisdom which can compass that mystery, he knows, is
+not in man, though man search for it deeper and harder than the miner
+searches for the hidden treasures of the earth; the wisdom which alone
+is attainable is resignation to God.
+
+'Where,' he cries, 'shall wisdom be found, and where is the place of
+understanding? Man knoweth not the price thereof, neither is it found
+in the land of the living. The depth said it is not with me; and the sea
+said it is not in me. It is hid from the eyes of all living, and kept
+close from the fowls of the air.[K] God understandeth the way thereof,
+and He knoweth the place thereof [He, not man, understands the mysteries
+of the world which He has made]. And unto man He said, Behold! the fear
+of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil, that is
+understanding.'
+
+Here, therefore, it might seem as if all was over. There is no clearer
+or purer faith possible for man; and Job had achieved it. His evil had
+turned to good; and sorrow had severed for him the last links which
+bound him to lower things. He had felt that he could do without
+happiness, that it was no longer essential, and that he could live on,
+and still love God, and cling to Him. But he is not described as of
+preternatural, or at all Titanic nature, but as very man, full of all
+human tenderness and susceptibility. His old life was still beautiful to
+him. He does not hate it because he can renounce it; and now that the
+struggle is over, the battle fought and won, and his heart has flowed
+over in that magnificent song of victory, the note once more changes: he
+turns back to earth to linger over those old departed days, with which
+the present is so hard a contrast; and his parable dies away in a strain
+of plaintive, but resigned melancholy. Once more he throws himself on
+God, no longer in passionate expostulation, but in pleading humility.[L]
+And then comes (perhaps, as Ewald says, it _could not_ have come
+before) the answer out of the whirlwind. Job had called on God, and
+prayed that he might appear, that he might plead his cause with him; and
+now he comes, and what will Job do? He comes not as the healing spirit
+in the heart of man; but, as Job had at first demanded, the outward God,
+the Almighty Creator of the universe, and clad in the terrors and the
+glory of it. Job, in his first precipitancy, had desired to reason with
+him on his government. The poet, in gleaming lines, describes for an
+answer the universe as it then was known, the majesty and awfulness of
+it; and then asks whether it is this which he requires to have explained
+to him, or which he believes himself capable of conducting. The
+revelation acts on Job as the sign of the Macrocosmos on the modern
+Faust; but when he sinks, crushed, it is not as the rebellious upstart,
+struck down in his pride--for he had himself, partially at least,
+subdued his own presumption--but as a humble penitent, struggling to
+overcome his weakness. He abhors himself for his murmurs, and 'repents
+in dust and ashes.' It will have occurred to every one that the secret
+which has been revealed to the reader is not, after all, revealed to Job
+or to his friends, and for this plain reason: the burden of the drama
+is, not that we do, but that we do not, and cannot, know the mystery of
+the government of the world--that it is not for man to seek it, or for
+God to reveal it. We, the readers, are, in this one instance, admitted
+behind the scenes--for once, in this single case--because it was
+necessary to meet the received theory by a positive fact which
+contradicted it. But the explanation of one case need not be the
+explanation of another; our business is to do what we know to be right,
+and ask no questions. The veil which in the Ægyptian legend lay before
+the face of Isis is not to be raised; and we are not to seek to
+penetrate secrets which are not ours.
+
+While, however, God does not condescend to justify his ways to man, he
+gives judgment on the past controversy. The self-constituted pleaders
+for him, the acceptors of his person, were all wrong; and Job--the
+passionate, vehement, scornful, misbelieving Job--he had spoken the
+truth; he at least had spoken facts, and they had been defending a
+transient theory as an everlasting truth.
+
+'And it was so, that after the Lord had spoken these words to Job, the
+Lord said to Eliphaz the Temanite, My wrath is kindled against thee and
+against thy two friends; for ye have not spoken of me the thing that is
+right, as my servant Job hath. Therefore take unto you now seven
+bullocks and seven rams, and go to my servant Job; and offer for
+yourselves a burnt-offering. And my servant Job shall pray for you, and
+him will I accept. Lest I deal with you after your folly, for that ye
+have not spoken of me the thing which is right, like my servant Job.'
+
+One act of justice remains. Knowing as we do the cause of Job's
+misfortunes, and that as soon as his trial was over it was no longer
+operative, our sense of fitness could not be satisfied unless he were
+indemnified outwardly for his outward sufferings. Satan is defeated, and
+Job's integrity proved; and there is no reason why the general law
+should be interfered with, which, however large the exceptions, tends to
+connect goodness and prosperity; or why obvious calamities, obviously
+undeserved, should remain any more unremoved. Perhaps, too, a deeper
+lesson still lies below his restoration--something perhaps of this kind.
+Prosperity, enjoyment, happiness, comfort, peace, whatever be the name
+by which we designate that state in which life is to our own selves
+pleasant and delightful, as long as they are sought or prized as things
+essential, so far have a tendency to disennoble our nature, and are a
+sign that we are still in servitude to selfishness. Only when they lie
+outside us, as ornaments merely to be worn or laid aside as God
+pleases--only then may such things be possessed with impunity. Job's
+heart in early times had clung to them more than he knew, but now he was
+purged clean, and they were restored because he had ceased to need them.
+
+Such in outline is this wonderful poem. With the material of which it is
+woven we have not here been concerned, although it is so rich and
+pregnant that we might with little difficulty construct out of it a
+complete picture of the world as then it was: its life, knowledge, arts,
+habits, superstitions, hopes, and fears. The subject is the problem of
+all mankind, and the composition embraces no less wide a range. But what
+we are here most interested upon is the epoch which it marks in the
+progress of mankind, as the first recorded struggle of a new experience
+with an established orthodox belief. True, for hundreds of years,
+perhaps for a thousand, the superstition against which it was directed
+continued. When Christ came it was still in its vitality. Nay, as we
+saw, it is alive, or in a sort of mock life, among us at this very day.
+But even those who retained their imperfect belief had received into
+their canon a book which treated it with contumely and scorn, so
+irresistible was the majesty of truth.
+
+In days like these, when we hear so much of progress, it is worth while
+to ask ourselves what advances we have made further in the same
+direction? and once more, at the risk of some repetition, let us look at
+the position in which this book leaves us. It had been assumed that man,
+if he lived a just and upright life, had a right to expect to be happy.
+Happiness, 'his being's end and aim,' was his legitimate and covenanted
+reward. If God therefore was just, such a man would be happy; and
+inasmuch as God was just, the man who was not happy had not deserved to
+be. There is no flaw in this argument; and if it is unsound, the fallacy
+can only lie in the supposed right to happiness. It is idle to talk of
+inward consolations. Job felt them, but they were not everything. They
+did not relieve the anguish of his wounds; they did not make the loss of
+his children, or his friends' unkindness, any the less painful to him.
+
+The poet, indeed, restores him in the book; but in life it need not have
+been so. He might have died upon his ash-heap, as thousands of good men
+have died, and will die again, in misery. Happiness, therefore, is _not_
+what we are to look for. Our place is to be true to the best which we
+know, to seek that and do that; and if by 'virtue its own reward' be
+meant that the good man cares only to continue good, desiring nothing
+more, then it is a true and noble saying. But if virtue be valued
+because it is politic, because in pursuit of it will be found most
+enjoyment and fewest sufferings, then it is not noble any more, and it
+is turning the truth of God into a lie. Let us do right, and whether
+happiness come or unhappiness it is no very mighty matter. If it come,
+life will be sweet; if it do not come, life will be bitter--bitter, not
+sweet, and yet to be borne. On such a theory alone is the government of
+this world intelligibly just. The well-being of our souls depends only
+on what we _are_; and nobleness of character is nothing else but steady
+love of good and steady scorn of evil. The government of the world is a
+problem while the desire of selfish enjoyment survives; and when
+justice is not done according to such standard (which will not be till
+the day after doomsday, and not then), self-loving men will still ask,
+why? and find no answer. Only to those who have the heart to say, 'We
+can do without that; it is not what we ask or desire,' is there no
+secret. Man will have what he deserves, and will find what is really
+best for him, exactly as he honestly seeks for it. Happiness may fly
+away, pleasure pall or cease to be obtainable, wealth decay, friends
+fail or prove unkind, and fame turn to infamy; but the power to serve
+God never fails, and the love of Him is never rejected.
+
+Most of us, at one time or other of our lives, have known something of
+love--of that only pure love in which no _self_ is left remaining. We
+have loved as children, we have loved as lovers; some of us have learnt
+to love a cause, a faith, a country; and what love would that be which
+existed only with a prudent view to after-interests. Surely there is a
+love which exults in the power of self-abandonment, and can glory in the
+privilege of suffering for what is good. _Que mon nom soit flétri,
+pourvu que la France soit libre_, said Danton; and those wild patriots
+who had trampled into scorn the faith in an immortal life in which they
+would be rewarded for what they were suffering, went to their graves as
+beds, for the dream of a people's liberty. Justice is done; the balance
+is not deranged. It only seems deranged, as long as we have not learnt
+to serve without looking to be paid for it.
+
+Such is the theory of life which is to be found in the Book of Job; a
+faith which has flashed up in all times and all lands, wherever
+high-minded men were to be found, and which passed in Christianity into
+the acknowledged creed of half the world. The cross was the new symbol,
+the Divine sufferer the great example; and mankind answered to the call,
+because the appeal was not to what was poor and selfish in them, but to
+whatever of best and bravest was in their nature. The law of reward and
+punishment was superseded by the law of love. Thou shalt love God and
+thou shalt love man; and that was not love--men knew it once--which was
+bought by the prospect of reward. Times are changed with us now. Thou
+shalt love God and thou shalt love man, in the hands of a Paley, are
+found to mean no more than, Thou shalt love thyself after an enlightened
+manner. And the same base tone has saturated not only our common
+feelings, but our Christian theologies and our Antichristian
+philosophies. A prudent regard to our future interests; an abstinence
+from present unlawful pleasures, because they will entail the loss of
+greater pleasure by-and-by, or perhaps be paid for with pain,--this is
+called virtue now; and the belief that such beings as men can be
+influenced by any more elevated feelings, is smiled at as the dream of
+enthusiasts whose hearts have outrun their understandings. Indeed, he
+were but a poor lover whose devotion to his mistress lay resting on the
+feeling that a marriage with her would conduce to his own comforts. That
+were a poor patriot who served his country for the hire which his
+country would give to him. And we should think but poorly of a son who
+thus addressed his earthly father: 'Father, on whom my fortunes depend,
+teach me to do what pleases thee, that I, pleasing thee in all things,
+may obtain those good things which thou hast promised to give to thy
+obedient children.' If any of us who have lived in so meagre a faith
+venture, by-and-by, to put in our claims, Satan will be likely to say of
+us (with better reason than he did of Job), 'Did they serve God for
+nought, then? Take their reward from them, and they will curse Him to
+His face.' If Christianity had never borne itself more loftily than
+this, do we suppose that those fierce Norsemen who had learnt, in the
+fiery war-songs of the Edda, of what stuff the hearts of heroes are
+composed, would have fashioned their sword-hilts into crosses, and
+themselves into a crusading chivalry? Let us not dishonour our great
+fathers with the dream of it. The Christians, like the Stoics and the
+Epicureans, would have lived their little day among the ignoble sects of
+an effete civilisation, and would have passed off and been heard of no
+more. It was in another spirit that those first preachers of
+righteousness went out upon their warfare with evil. They preached, not
+enlightened prudence, but purity, justice, goodness; holding out no
+promises in this world except of suffering as their great Master had
+suffered, and rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer for His
+sake. And that crown of glory which they did believe to await them in a
+life beyond the grave, was no enjoyment of what they had surrendered in
+life, was not enjoyment at all in any sense which human thought or
+language can attach to the words; as little like it as the crown of love
+is like it, which the true lover looks for when at last he obtains his
+mistress. It was to be with Christ--to lose themselves in Him.
+
+How these high feelings ebbed away, and Christianity became what we know
+it, we are partially beginning to see. The living spirit organised for
+itself a body of perishable flesh: not only the real gains of real
+experience, but mere conjectural hypotheses, current at the day for the
+solution of unexplained phenomena, became formulæ and articles of faith.
+Again, as before, the living and the dead were bound together, and the
+seeds of decay were already planted on the birth of a constructed
+polity.
+
+But there was another cause allied to this, and yet different from it,
+which, though a law of human nature itself, seems nowadays altogether
+forgotten. In the rapid and steady advance of our knowledge of material
+things, we are apt to believe that all our knowledge follows the same
+law; that it is merely generalised experience; that experience
+accumulates daily, and, therefore, that 'progress of the species,' _in
+all senses_, is an obvious and necessary fact. There is something which
+is true in this view, mixed with a great deal which is false. Material
+knowledge, the physical and mechanical sciences, make their way from
+step to step, from experiment to experiment, and each advance is secured
+and made good, and cannot again be lost. One generation takes up the
+general sum of experience where the last laid it down, adds to it what
+it has the opportunity of adding, and leaves it with interest to the
+next. The successive positions, as they are gained, require nothing for
+the apprehension of them but an understanding ordinarily cultivated.
+Prejudices have to be encountered, but prejudices of opinion merely, not
+prejudices of conscience or prejudices of self-love, like those which
+beset our progress in the science of morality. But in morals we enter
+upon conditions wholly different--conditions in which age differs from
+age, man differs from man, and even from himself, at different moments.
+We all have experienced times when, as we say, we should not know
+ourselves; some, when we fall below our average level; some, when we are
+lifted above, and put on, as it were, a higher nature. At such intervals
+as these last (unfortunately, with most of us, of rare occurrence), many
+things become clear to us which before were hard sayings; propositions
+become alive which, usually, are but dry words; our hearts seem purer,
+our motives loftier; our purposes, what we are proud to acknowledge to
+ourselves.
+
+And, as man is unequal to himself, so is man to his neighbour, and
+period to period. The entire method of action, the theories of human
+life which in one era prevail universally, to the next are unpractical
+and insane, as those of this next would have seemed mere baseness to the
+first, if the first could have anticipated them. One epoch, we may
+suppose, holds some 'greatest nobleness principle,' the other some
+'greatest happiness principle;' and then their very systems of axioms
+will contradict one another; their general conceptions and their
+detailed interpretations, their rules, judgments, opinions, practices
+will be in perpetual and endless collision. Our minds take shape from
+our hearts, and the facts of moral experience do not teach their own
+meaning, but submit to many readings according to the power of the eye
+which we bring with us.
+
+The want of a clear perception of so important a feature about us leads
+to many singular contradictions. A believer in popular Protestantism,
+who is also a believer in progress, ought, if he were consistent, to
+regard mankind as growing every day towards a more and more advantageous
+position with respect to the trials of life; and yet if he were asked
+whether it was easier for him to 'save his soul' in the nineteenth
+century than it would have been in the first or second, or whether the
+said soul was necessarily better worth saving, he would be perplexed for
+an answer. There is hardly one of us who, in childhood, has not felt
+like the Jews to whom Christ spoke, that if he had 'lived in the days of
+the Fathers,' if he had had their advantages, he would have found duty a
+much easier matter; and some of us in mature life have felt that in old
+Athens, or old republican Rome, in the first ages of Christianity, in
+the Crusades or at the Reformation, there was a contagious atmosphere of
+heroism, in which we should have been less troubled with the little
+feelings which cling about us now. At any rate, it is at these rare
+epochs only that real additions are made to our moral knowledge. At such
+times, new truths are, indeed, sent down among us, and, for periods
+longer or shorter, may be seen to exercise an elevating influence on
+mankind. Perhaps what is gained on these occasions is never entirely
+lost. The historical monuments of their effects are at least
+indestructible; and when the spirit which gave them birth reappears,
+their dormant energy awakens again.
+
+But it seems from our present experience of what, in some at least of
+its modern forms, Christianity has been capable of becoming, that there
+is no doctrine in itself so pure, but what the meaner nature which is in
+us can disarm and distort it, and adapt it to its own littleness. The
+once living spirit dries up into formulæ, and formulæ, whether of
+mass-sacrifice or vicarious righteousness, or 'reward and punishment,'
+are contrived ever so as to escape making over-high demands upon the
+conscience. Some aim at dispensing with obedience altogether, and those
+which insist on obedience rest the obligations of it on the poorest of
+motives. So things go on till there is no life left at all; till, from
+all higher aspirations, we are lowered down to the love of self after an
+enlightened manner; and then nothing remains but to fight the battle
+over again. The once beneficial truth has become, as in Job's case, a
+cruel and mischievous deception, and the whole question of life and its
+obligations must again be opened.
+
+It is now some three centuries since the last of such reopenings. If we
+ask ourselves how much during this time has been actually added to the
+sum of our knowledge in these matters; what, in all the thousands upon
+thousands of sermons, and theologies, and philosophies with which Europe
+has been deluged, has been gained for mankind beyond what we have found
+in this Book of Job, how far all this has advanced us in the 'progress
+of humanity,' it were hard, or rather it is easy, to answer. How far we
+have fallen below, let Paley and the rest bear witness. But what moral
+question can be asked which admits now of a grander solution than was
+offered two, perhaps three, thousand years ago? The world has not been
+standing still; experience of man and life has increased; questions have
+multiplied on questions, while the answers of the established teachers
+to them have been growing every day more and more incredible. What other
+answers have there been? Of all the countless books which have appeared,
+there has been only one of enduring importance, in which an attempt is
+made to carry on the solution of the great problem. Job is given over
+into Satan's hand to be tempted; and though he shakes, he does not fall.
+Taking the temptation of Job for his model, Goethe has similarly
+exposed his Faust to trial, and with him the tempter succeeds. His hero
+falls from sin to sin, from crime to crime; he becomes a seducer, a
+murderer, a betrayer, following recklessly his evil angel wherever he
+chooses to lead him; and yet, with all this, he never wholly forfeits
+our sympathy. In spite of his weakness, his heart is still true to his
+higher nature; sick and restless, even in the delirium of enjoyment he
+always longs for something better, and he never can be brought to say of
+evil that it is good. And therefore, after all, the devil is balked of
+his prey; in virtue of this one fact, that the evil in which he steeped
+himself remained to the last hateful to him, Faust is saved by the
+angels.... It will be eagerly answered for the established belief, that
+such cases are its especial province. All men are sinners, and _it_
+possesses the blessed remedy for sin. But, among the countless numbers
+of those characters so strangely mixed among us, in which the dark and
+the bright fibres cross like a meshwork; characters at one moment
+capable of acts of heroic greatness, at another hurried by temptation
+into actions which even common men may deplore, how many are there who
+have never availed themselves of the conditions of reconciliation as
+orthodoxy proffers them, and of such men what is to be said? It was said
+once of a sinner that to her 'much was forgiven, for she loved much.'
+But this is language which theology has as little appropriated as the
+Jews could appropriate the language of Job. It cannot recognise the
+power of the human heart. It has no balance in which to weigh the good
+against the evil; and when a great Burns or a Mirabeau comes before it,
+it can but tremblingly count up the offences committed, and then,
+looking to the end, and finding its own terms not to have been complied
+with, it faintly mutters its anathema. Sin only it can apprehend and
+judge; and for the poor acts of struggling heroism, 'Forasmuch as they
+were not done,' &c., &c., it doubts not but they have the nature of
+sin.[M]
+
+Something of the difficulty has been met by Goethe, but it cannot be
+said that he has resolved it; or at least that he has furnished others
+with a solution which may guide their judgment. In the writer of the
+Book of Job there is an awful moral earnestness before which we bend as
+in the presence of a superior being. The orthodoxy against which he
+contended is not set aside or denied; he sees what truth is in it; only
+he sees more than it, and over it, and through it. But in Goethe, who
+needed it more, inasmuch as his problem was more delicate and difficult,
+the moral earnestness is not awful, is not even high. We cannot feel
+that in dealing with sin he entertains any great horror of it; he looks
+on it as a mistake, as undesirable, but scarcely as more. Goethe's great
+powers are of another kind; and this particular question, though in
+appearance the primary subject of the poem, is really only secondary. In
+substance, Faust is more like Ecclesiastes than it is like Job, and
+describes rather the restlessness of a largely-gifted nature which,
+missing the guidance of the heart, plays experiments with life, trying
+knowledge, pleasure, dissipation, one after another, and hating them
+all; and then hating life itself as a weary, stale, flat, unprofitable
+mockery. The temper exhibited here will probably be perennial in the
+world. But the remedy for it will scarcely be more clear under other
+circumstances than it is at present, and lies in the disposition of the
+emotions, and not in any propositions which can be addressed to the
+understanding.
+
+For that other question--how rightly to estimate a human being; what
+constitutes a real vitiation of character, and how to distinguish,
+without either denying the good or making light of the evil; how to be
+just to the popular theories, and yet not to blind ourselves to their
+shallowness and injustice--that is a problem for us, for the solution of
+which we are at present left to our ordinary instinct, without any
+recognised guidance whatsoever.
+
+Nor is this the only problem which is in the same situation. There can
+scarcely be a more startling contrast between fact and theory than the
+conditions under which, practically, positions of power and influence
+are distributed among us--between the theory of human worth which the
+necessities of life oblige us to act upon, and the theory which we
+believe that we believe. As we look around among our leading men, our
+statesmen, our legislators, the judges on our bench, the commanders of
+our armies, the men to whom this English nation commits the conduct of
+its best interests, profane and sacred, what do we see to be the
+principles which guide our selection? How entirely do they lie beside
+and beyond the negative tests! and how little respect do we pay to the
+breach of this or that commandment in comparison with ability! So wholly
+impossible is it to apply the received opinions on such matters to
+practice--to treat men known to be guilty of what theology calls deadly
+sins, as really guilty of them, that it would almost seem we had fallen
+into a moral anarchy; that ability _alone_ is what we regard, without
+any reference at all, except in glaring and outrageous cases, to moral
+disqualifications. It is invidious to mention names of living men; it is
+worse than invidious to drag out of their graves men who have gone down
+into them with honour, to make a point for an argument. But we know, all
+of us, that among the best servants of our country there have been, and
+there are, many whose lives will not stand scrutiny by the negative
+tests, and who do not appear very greatly to repent, or to have
+repented, of their sins according to recognised methods.
+
+Once more: among our daily or weekly confessions, which we are supposed
+to repeat as if we were all of us at all times in precisely the same
+moral condition, we are made to say that we have done those things which
+we ought not to have done, and to have left undone those things which we
+ought to have done. An earthly father to whom his children were day
+after day to make this acknowledgment would be apt to enquire whether
+they were trying to do better--whether, at any rate, they were
+endeavouring to learn; and if he were told that although they had made
+some faint attempts to understand the negative part of their duty, yet
+that of the positive part, of those things which they ought to do, they
+had no notions at all, and had no idea that they were under obligation
+to form any, he would come to rather strange conclusions about them.
+But, really and truly, what practical notions of duty have we beyond
+that of abstaining from committing sins? Not to commit sin, we suppose,
+covers but a small part of what is expected of us. Through the entire
+tissue of our employments there runs a good and a bad. Bishop Butler
+tells us, for instance, that even of our time there is a portion which
+is ours, and a portion which is our neighbour's; and if we spend more of
+it on personal interests than our own share, we are stealing. This
+sounds strange doctrine; we prefer making vague acknowledgments, and
+shrink from pursuing them into detail. We say vaguely, that in all we
+do we should consecrate ourselves to God, and our own lips condemn us;
+for which among us cares to learn the way to do it? The _devoir_ of a
+knight was understood in the courts of chivalry; the lives of heroic
+men, Pagan and Christian, were once held up before the world as patterns
+of detailed imitation; and now, when such ideals are wanted more than
+ever, Protestantism stands with a drawn sword on the threshold of the
+enquiry, and tells us that it is impious. The law, we are told, has been
+fulfilled for us in condescension to our inherent worthlessness, and our
+business is to appropriate another's righteousness, and not, like
+Titans, to be scaling heaven by profane efforts of our own. Protestants,
+we know very well, will cry out in tones loud enough at such a
+representation of their doctrines. But we know also that unless men may
+feel a cheerful conviction that they can do right if they try,--that
+they can purify themselves, can live noble and worthy lives,--unless
+this is set before them as _the_ thing which they are to do, and _can_
+succeed in doing, they will not waste their energies on what they know
+beforehand will end in failure; and if they may not live for God, they
+will live for themselves.
+
+And all this while the whole complex frame of society is a meshwork of
+duty woven of living fibre, and the condition of its remaining sound is,
+that every thread of it, of its own free energy, shall do what it ought.
+The penalties of duties neglected are to the full as terrible as those
+of sins committed; more terrible, perhaps, because more palpable and
+sure. A lord of the land, or an employer of labour, supposes that he has
+no duty except to keep what he calls the commandments in his own person,
+to go to church, and to do what he will with his own,--and Irish famines
+follow, and trade strikes, and chartisms, and Paris revolutions. We look
+for a remedy in impossible legislative enactments, and there is but one
+remedy which will avail--that the thing which we call public opinion
+learn something of the meaning of human obligation, and demand some
+approximation to it. As things are, we have no idea of what a human
+being ought to be. After the first rudimental conditions we pass at once
+into meaningless generalities; and with no knowledge to guide our
+judgment, we allow it to be guided by meaner principles; we respect
+money, we respect rank, we respect ability--character is as if it had no
+existence.
+
+In the midst of this loud talk of progress, therefore, in which so many
+of us at present are agreed to believe, which is, indeed, the common
+meeting point of all the thousand sects into which we are split, it is
+with saddened feelings that we see so little of it in so large a matter.
+Progress there is in knowledge; and science has enabled the number of
+human beings capable of existing upon this earth to be indefinitely
+multiplied. But this is but a small triumph if the ratio of the good and
+bad, the wise and the foolish, the full and the hungry, remains
+unaffected. And we cheat ourselves with words when we conclude out of
+our material splendour an advance of the race.
+
+In two things there is progress--progress in knowledge of the outward
+world, and progress in material wealth. This last, for the present,
+creates, perhaps, more evils than it relieves; but suppose this
+difficulty solved--suppose the wealth distributed, and every peasant
+living like a peer--what then? If this is all, one noble soul outweighs
+the whole of it. Let us follow knowledge to the outer circle of the
+universe--the eye will not be satisfied with seeing, nor the ear with
+hearing. Let us build our streets of gold, and they will hide as many
+aching hearts as hovels of straw. The well-being of mankind is not
+advanced a single step. Knowledge is power, and wealth is power; and
+harnessed, as in Plato's fable, to the chariot of the soul, and guided
+by wisdom, they may bear it through the circle of the stars; but left to
+their own guidance, or reined by a fool's hand, the wild horses may
+bring the poor fool to Phaeton's end, and set a world on fire.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[G] _Westminster Review_, 1853.
+
+[H] 1. _Die poetischen Bücher des Alten Bundes._ Erklärt von Heinrich
+Ewald. Göttingen: bei Vanderhoeck und Ruprecht. 1836.
+
+    2. _Kurz gefasstes exegetisches Handbuch zum Alten Testament._ Zweite
+Lieferung. _Hiob._ Von Ludwig Hirzel. Zweite Auflage, durchgesehen von
+Dr. Justus Olshausen. Leipzig. 1852.
+
+    3. _Quæstionum in Jobeidos locos vexatos Specimen._ Von D. Hermannus
+Hupfeld. Halis Saxonum. 1853.
+
+[I] Or rather by St. Jerome, whom our translators have followed.
+
+[J] See Ewald on Job ix. 13, and xxvi. 14.
+
+[K] An allusion, perhaps, to the old bird auguries. The birds, as the
+inhabitants of the air, were supposed to be the messengers between
+heaven and earth.
+
+[L] The speech of Elihu, which lies between Job's last words and God's
+appearance, is now decisively pronounced by Hebrew scholars not to be
+genuine. The most superficial reader will have been perplexed by the
+introduction of a speaker to whom no allusion is made, either in the
+prologue or the epilogue; by a long dissertation, which adds nothing to
+the progress of the argument, proceeding evidently on the false
+hypothesis of the three friends, and betraying not the faintest
+conception of the real cause of Job's sufferings. And the suspicions
+which such an anomaly would naturally suggest, are now made certainties
+by a fuller knowledge of the language, and the detection of a different
+hand. The interpolator has unconsciously confessed the feeling which
+allowed him to take so great a liberty. He, too, possessed with the old
+Jew theory, was unable to accept in its fulness so great a contradiction
+to it: and, missing the spirit of the poem, he believed that God's
+honour could still be vindicated in the old way. 'His wrath was kindled'
+against the friends, because they could not answer Job; and against Job,
+because he would not be answered; and conceiving himself 'full of
+matter,' and 'ready to burst like new bottles,' he could not contain
+himself, and delivered into the text a sermon on the _Theodice_, such,
+we suppose, as formed the current doctrine of the time in which he
+lived.
+
+[M] See the Thirteenth Article.
+
+
+
+
+SPINOZA.[N]
+
+_Benedicti de Spinoza Tractatus de Deo et Homine ejusque Felicitate
+Lineamenta. Atque Annotationes ad Tractatum Theologico-Politicum._
+Edidit et illustravit EDWARDUS BOEHMER. Halæ ad Salam. J. F. Lippert.
+1852.
+
+
+This little volume is one evidence among many of the interest which
+continues to be felt by the German students in Spinoza. The actual merit
+of the book itself is little or nothing; but it shows the industry with
+which they are gleaning among the libraries of Holland for any traces of
+him which they can recover; and the smallest fragments of his writings
+are acquiring that factitious importance which attaches to the most
+insignificant relics of acknowledged greatness. Such industry cannot be
+otherwise than laudable, but we do not think it at present altogether
+wisely directed. Nothing is likely to be brought to light which will
+further illustrate Spinoza's philosophy. He himself spent the better
+part of his life in clearing his language of ambiguities; and such
+earlier sketches of his system as are supposed still to be extant in
+MS., and a specimen of which M. Boehmer believes himself to have
+discovered, contribute only obscurity to what is in no need of
+additional difficulty. Of Spinoza's private history, on the contrary,
+rich as it must have been, and abundant traces of it as must be extant
+somewhere in his own and his friends' correspondence, we know only
+enough to feel how vast a chasm remains to be filled. It is not often
+that any man in this world lives a life so well worth writing as Spinoza
+lived; not for striking incidents or large events connected with it, but
+because (and no sympathy with his peculiar opinions disposes us to
+exaggerate his merit) he was one of the very best men whom these modern
+times have seen. Excommunicated, disinherited, and thrown upon the world
+when a mere boy to seek his livelihood, he resisted the inducements
+which on all sides were urged upon him to come forward in the world. He
+refused pensions, legacies, money in many forms; he maintained himself
+with grinding glasses for optical instruments, an art which he had been
+taught in early life, and in which he excelled the best workmen in
+Holland; and when he died, which was at the early age of forty-four, the
+affection with which he was regarded showed itself singularly in the
+endorsement of a tradesman's bill which was sent in to his executors, in
+which he was described as M. Spinoza of 'blessed memory.'
+
+The account which remains of him we owe, not to an admiring disciple,
+but to a clergyman to whom his theories were detestable; and his
+biographer allows that the most malignant scrutiny had failed to detect
+a blemish in his character--that, except so far as his opinions were
+blameable, he had lived to outward appearance free from fault. We
+desire, in what we are going to say of him, to avoid offensive collision
+with popular prejudices; still less shall we place ourselves in
+antagonism with the earnest convictions of serious persons: our business
+is to relate what Spinoza was, and leave others to form their own
+conclusions. But one lesson there does seem to lie in such a life of
+such a man,--a lesson which he taught equally by example and in
+word,--that wherever there is genuine and thorough love for good and
+goodness, no speculative superstructure of opinion can be so extravagant
+as to forfeit those graces which are promised, not to clearness of
+intellect, but to purity of heart. In Spinoza's own beautiful
+language,--'Justitia et caritas unicum et certissimum veræ fidei
+Catholicæ signum est, et veri Spiritûs Sancti fructus: et ubicumque hæc
+reperiuntur, ibi Christus re verâ est, et ubicumque hæc desunt deest
+Christus: solo namque Christi Spiritu duci possumus in amorem justitiæ
+et caritatis.' We may deny his conclusions; we may consider his system
+of thought preposterous and even pernicious; but we cannot refuse him
+the respect which is the right of all sincere and honourable men.
+Wherever and on whatever questions good men are found ranged on opposite
+sides, one of three alternatives is always true:--either the points of
+disagreement are purely speculative and of no moral importance--or
+there is a misunderstanding of language, and the same thing is meant
+under a difference of words--or else the real truth is something
+different from what is held by any of the disputants, and each is
+representing some important element which the others ignore or forget.
+In either case, a certain calmness and good temper is necessary, if we
+would understand what we disagree with, or would oppose it with success;
+Spinoza's influence over European thought is too great to be denied or
+set aside; and if his doctrines be false in part, or false altogether,
+we cannot do their work more surely than by calumny or
+misrepresentation--a most obvious truism, which no one now living will
+deny in words, and which a century or two hence perhaps will begin to
+produce some effect upon the popular judgment.
+
+Bearing it in mind, then, ourselves, as far as we are able, we propose
+to examine the Pantheistic philosophy in the first and only logical form
+which as yet it has assumed. Whatever may have been the case with
+Spinoza's disciples, in the author of this system there was no
+unwillingness to look closely at it, or to follow it out to its
+conclusions; and whatever other merits or demerits belong to him, at
+least he has done as much as with language can be done to make himself
+thoroughly understood.
+
+And yet, both in friend and enemy alike, there has been a reluctance to
+see Spinoza as he really was. The Herder and Schleiermacher school have
+claimed him as a Christian--a position which no little disguise was
+necessary to make tenable; the orthodox Protestants and Catholics have
+called him an Atheist--which is still more extravagant; and even a man
+like Novalis, who, it might have been expected, would have had something
+reasonable to say, could find no better name for him than a _Gott
+trunkner Mann_--a God intoxicated man: an expression which has been
+quoted by everybody who has since written upon the subject, and which is
+about as inapplicable as those laboriously pregnant sayings usually are.
+With due allowance for exaggeration, such a name would describe
+tolerably the Transcendental mystics, a Toler, a Boehmen, or a
+Swedenborg; but with what justice can it be applied to the cautious,
+methodical Spinoza, who carried his thoughts about with him for twenty
+years, deliberately shaping them, and who gave them at last to the world
+in a form more severe than with such subjects had ever been so much as
+attempted before? With him, as with all great men, there was no effort
+after sublime emotions. He was a plain, practical person; his object in
+philosophy was only to find a rule by which to govern his own actions
+and his own judgment; and his treatises contain no more than the
+conclusions at which he arrived in this purely personal search, with the
+grounds on which he rested them.
+
+We cannot do better than follow his own account of himself as he has
+given it in the opening of his unfinished Tract, 'De Emendatione
+Intellectûs.' His language is very beautiful, but it is elaborate and
+full; and, as we have a long journey before us, we must be content to
+epitomise it.
+
+Looking round him on his entrance into life, and asking himself what was
+his place and business there, he turned for examples to his fellow-men,
+and found little that he could venture to imitate. He observed them all
+in their several ways governing themselves by their different notions of
+what they thought desirable; while these notions themselves were resting
+on no more secure foundation than a vague, inconsistent experience: the
+experience of one was not the experience of another, and thus men were
+all, so to say, rather playing experiments with life than living, and
+the larger portion of them miserably failing. Their mistakes arose, as
+it seemed to Spinoza, from inadequate knowledge; things which at one
+time looked desirable, disappointed expectation when obtained, and the
+wiser course concealed itself often under an uninviting exterior. He
+desired to substitute certainty for conjecture, and to endeavour to
+find, by some surer method, where the real good of man actually lay. We
+must remember that he had been brought up a Jew, and had been driven out
+of the Jews' communion; his mind was therefore in contact with the bare
+facts of life, with no creed or system lying between them and himself as
+the interpreter of experience. He was thrown on his own resources to
+find his way for himself, and the question was, how to find it. Of all
+forms of human thought, one only, he reflected, would admit of the
+certainty which he required. If certain knowledge were attainable at
+all, it must be looked for under the mathematical or demonstrative
+method; by tracing from ideas clearly conceived the consequences which
+were formally involved in them. What, then, were these ideas--these
+_veræ ideæ_, as he calls them--and how were they to be obtained? If
+they were to serve as the axioms of his system, they must be
+self-evident truths, of which no proof was required; and the
+illustration which he gives of the character of such ideas is ingenious
+and Platonic.
+
+In order to produce any mechanical instrument, Spinoza says, we require
+others with which to manufacture it; and others again to manufacture
+those; and it would seem thus as if the process must be an infinite one,
+and as if nothing could ever be made at all. Nature, however, has
+provided for the difficulty in creating of her own accord certain rude
+instruments, with the help of which we can make others better; and
+others again with the help of those. And so he thinks it must be with
+the mind; there must be somewhere similar original instruments provided
+also as the first outfit of intellectual enterprise. To discover these,
+he examines the various senses in which men are said to know anything,
+and he finds that they resolve themselves into three, or, as he
+elsewhere divides it, four.
+
+We know a thing--
+
+  1. i. _Ex mero auditu_: because we have heard it from some
+     person or persons whose veracity we have no reason to
+     question.
+
+     ii. _Ab experientiâ vagâ_: from general experience: for
+     instance, all facts or phenomena which come to us through
+     our senses as phenomena, but of the causes of which we
+     are ignorant.
+
+  2. We know a thing as we have correctly conceived the laws
+     of its phenomena, and see them following in their
+     sequence in the order of nature.
+
+  3. Finally, we know a thing, _ex scientiâ intuitivâ_, which
+     alone is absolutely clear and certain.
+
+To illustrate these divisions, suppose it be required to find a fourth
+proportional which shall stand to the third of three numbers as the
+second does to the first. The merchant's clerk knows his rule; he
+multiplies the second into the third and divides by the first. He
+neither knows nor cares to know why the result is the number which he
+seeks, but he has learnt the fact that it is so, and he remembers it.
+
+A person a little wiser has tried the experiment in a variety of simple
+cases; he has discovered the rule by induction, but still does not
+understand it.
+
+A third has mastered the laws of proportion mathematically, as he has
+found them in Euclid or other geometrical treatise.
+
+A fourth, with the plain numbers of 1, 2, and 3, sees for himself by
+simple intuitive force that 1:2=3:6.
+
+Of these several kinds of knowledge the third and fourth alone deserve
+to be called knowledge, the others being no more than opinions more or
+less justly founded. The last is the only real insight, although the
+third, being exact in its form, may be depended upon as a basis of
+certainty. Under this last, as Spinoza allows, nothing except the very
+simplest truths, _non nisi simplicissimæ veritates_, can be perceived;
+but, such as they are, they are the foundation of all after-science; and
+the true ideas, the _veræ ideæ_, which are apprehended by this faculty
+of intuition, are the primitive instruments with which nature has
+furnished us. If we ask for a test by which to distinguish them, he has
+none to give us. 'Veritas,' he says to his friends, in answer to their
+question, 'veritas index sui est et falsi. Veritas se ipsam patefacit.'
+All original truths are of such a kind that they cannot without
+absurdity even be conceived to be false; the opposites of them are
+contradictions in terms.--'Ut sciam me scire, necessario debeo prius
+scire. Hinc patet quod certitudo nihil est præter ipsam essentiam
+objectivam.... Cum itaque veritas nullo egeat signo, sed sufficiat
+habere essentiam rerum objectivam, aut quod idem est ideas, ut omne
+tollatur dubium; hinc sequitur quod vera non est methodus, signum
+veritatis quærere post acquisitionem idearum; sed quod vera methodus est
+via, ut ipsa veritas, aut essentiæ objectivæ rerum, aut ideæ (omnia illa
+idem significant) debito ordine quærantur.' (_De Emend. Intell._)
+
+Spinoza will scarcely carry with him the reasoner of the nineteenth
+century in arguments like these. When we remember the thousand
+conflicting opinions, the truth of which their several advocates have as
+little doubted as they have doubted their own existence, we require some
+better evidence than a mere feeling of certainty; and Aristotle's less
+pretending canon promises a safer road. [Greek: Ho pasi dokei], 'what all
+men think,' says Aristotle, [Greek: touto einai phamen] 'this we say
+_is_,'--'and if you will not have this to be a fair ground of
+conviction, you will scarcely find one which will serve you better.' We
+are to see, however, what these _ideæ_ are which are offered to us as
+self-evident. Of course, if they are self-evident, if they do produce
+conviction, nothing more is to be said; but it does, indeed, appear
+strange to us that Spinoza was not staggered as to the validity of his
+canon, when his friends, everyone of them, so floundered and stumbled
+among what he regarded as his simplest propositions; when he found them,
+in spite of all that he could say, requiring endless _signa veritatis_,
+and unable for a long time even to understand their meaning, far less to
+'recognise them as elementary certainties.' Modern readers may, perhaps,
+be more fortunate. We produce at length the definitions and axioms of
+the first book of the 'Ethica,' and they may judge for themselves:--
+
+DEFINITIONS.
+
+    1. By a thing which is _causa sui_, its own cause, I mean a thing
+    the essence of which involves the existence of it, or a thing which
+    cannot be conceived except as existing.
+
+    2. I call a thing finite, _suo genere_, when it can be limited by
+    another (or others) of the same nature--_e.g._ a given body is
+    called finite, because we can always conceive another body
+    enveloping it; but body is not limited by thought, nor thought by
+    body.
+
+    3. By substance I mean what exists in itself and is conceived by
+    itself; the conception of which, that is, does not involve the
+    conception of anything else as the cause of it.
+
+    4. By attribute I mean whatever the intellect perceives of substance
+    as constituting the essence of substance.
+
+    5. Mode is an affection of substance, or is that which is in
+    something else, by and through which it is conceived.
+
+    6. God is a being absolutely infinite; a substance consisting of
+    infinite attributes, each of which expresses his eternal and
+    infinite essence.
+
+
+EXPLANATION.
+
+    I say _absolutely_ infinite, not infinite _suo genere_--for of what
+    is infinite _suo genere_ only, the attributes are not infinite but
+    finite; whereas what is infinite absolutely contains in its own
+    essence everything by which substance can be expressed, and which
+    involves no impossibility.
+
+    7. That thing is 'free' which exists by the sole necessity of its
+    own nature, and is determined in its operation by itself only. That
+    is 'not free' which is called into existence by something else, and
+    is determined in its operation according to a fixed and definite
+    method.
+
+    8. Eternity is existence itself, conceived as following necessarily
+    and solely from the definition of the thing which is eternal.
+
+
+EXPLANATION.
+
+    Because existence of this kind is conceived as an eternal verity,
+    and, therefore, cannot be explained by duration, even though the
+    duration be without beginning or end.
+
+So far the definitions; then follow the
+
+
+AXIOMS.
+
+    1. All things that exist, exist either of themselves or in virtue of
+    something else.
+
+    2. What we cannot conceive of as existing in virtue of something
+    else, we must conceive through and in itself.
+
+    3. From a given cause an effect necessarily follows, and if there be
+    no given cause no effect can follow.
+
+    4. Things which have nothing in common with each other cannot be
+    understood through one another--_i.e._ the conception of one does
+    not involve the conception of the other.
+
+    5. To understand an effect implies that we understand the cause of
+    it.
+
+    6. A true idea is one which corresponds with its _ideate_.
+
+    7. The essence of anything which can be conceived as non-existent
+    does not involve existence.
+
+Such is our metaphysical outfit of simple ideas with which to start upon
+our enterprise of learning. The larger number of them, so far from being
+simple, must be absolutely without meaning to persons whose minds are
+undisciplined in metaphysical abstraction; they become only intelligible
+propositions as we look back upon them with the light of the system
+which they are supposed to contain.
+
+Although, however, we may justly quarrel with such unlooked-for
+difficulties, the important question, after all, is not of the obscurity
+of these axioms, but of their truth. Many things in all the sciences are
+obscure to an unpractised understanding, which are true enough and clear
+enough to people acquainted with the subjects, and they may be fairly
+made the foundations of a scientific system, although rudimentary
+students must be contented to accept them upon faith. Of course, also,
+it is entirely competent to Spinoza, or to any one, to define the terms
+which he intends to use just as he pleases, provided it be understood
+that any conclusions which he derives out of them apply only to the
+ideas so defined, and not to any supposed object existing which
+corresponds with them. Euclid defines his triangles and circles, and
+discovers that to figures so described, certain properties previously
+unknown may be proved to belong. But as in nature there are no such
+things as triangles and circles exactly answering the definition, his
+conclusions, as applied to actually existing objects, are either not
+true at all or only proximately so. Whether it be possible to bridge
+over the gulf between existing things and the abstract conception of
+them, as Spinoza attempts to do, we shall presently see. It is a royal
+road to certainty if it be a practicable one; but we cannot say that we
+ever met any one who could say honestly Spinoza's reasonings had
+convinced him; and power of demonstration, like all other powers, can be
+judged only by its effects. Does it prove? does it produce conviction?
+If not, it is nothing.
+
+We need not detain our readers among these abstractions. The power of
+Spinozism does not lie so remote from ordinary appreciation, or we
+should long ago have heard the last of it. Like all other systems which
+have attracted followers, it addresses itself, not to the logical
+intellect, but to the imagination, which it affects to set aside. We
+refuse to submit to the demonstrations by which it thrusts itself upon
+our reception; but regarding it as a whole, as an attempt to explain the
+nature of the world of which we are a part, we can still ask ourselves
+how far the attempt is successful. Some account of these things we know
+that there must be, and the curiosity which asks the question regards
+itself, of course, as competent in some degree to judge of the answer to
+it.
+
+Before proceeding, however, to regard this philosophy in the aspect in
+which it is really powerful, we must clear our way through the fallacy
+of the method.
+
+The system is evolved in a series of theorems in severely demonstrative
+order out of the definitions and axioms which we have translated. To
+propositions 1-6 we have nothing to object; they will not, probably,
+convey any very clear ideas, but they are so far purely abstract, and
+seem to follow (as far as we can speak of 'following' in such subjects)
+by fair reasoning. 'Substance is prior in nature to its affections.'
+'Substances with different attributes have nothing in common,' and,
+therefore, 'one cannot be the cause of the other.' 'Things really
+distinct are distinguished by difference either of attribute or mode
+(there being nothing else by which they can be distinguished), and,
+therefore, because things modally distinguished do not _quâ_ substance
+differ from one another, there cannot be more than one substance of the
+same attribute. Therefore (let us remind our readers that we are among
+what Spinoza calls _notiones simplicissimas_), since there cannot be two
+substances of the same attribute, and substances of different attributes
+cannot be the cause one of the other, it follows that no substance can
+be produced by another substance.'
+
+The existence of substance, he then concludes, is involved in the nature
+of the thing itself. Substance exists. It does and must. We ask, why?
+and we are answered, because there is nothing capable of producing it,
+and therefore it is self-caused--_i.e._ by the first definition the
+essence of it implies existence as part of the idea. It is astonishing
+that Spinoza should not have seen that he assumes the fact that
+substance does exist in order to prove that it must. If it cannot be
+produced _and_ exists, then, of course, it exists in virtue of its own
+nature. But supposing it does not exist, supposing it is all a delusion,
+the proof falls to pieces. We have to fall back on the facts of
+experience, on the obscure and unscientific certainty that the thing
+which we call the world, and the personalities which we call ourselves,
+are a real substantial something, before we find ground of any kind to
+stand upon. Conscious of the infirmity of his demonstration, Spinoza
+winds round it and round it, adding proof to proof, but never escaping
+the same vicious circle: substance exists because it exists, and the
+ultimate experience of existence, so far from being of that clear kind
+which can be accepted as an axiom, is the most confused of all our
+sensations. What is existence? and what is that something which we say
+exists? Things--essences--existences! these are but the vague names with
+which faculties, constructed only to deal with conditional phenomena,
+disguise their incapacity. The world in the Hindoo legend was supported
+upon the back of the tortoise. It was a step between the world and
+nothingness, and served to cheat the imagination with ideas of a
+fictitious resting-place.
+
+    If any one affirms (says Spinoza) that he has a clear,
+    distinct--that is to say, a true--idea of substance, but that
+    nevertheless he is uncertain whether any such substance exist, it is
+    the same as if he were to affirm that he had a true idea, but yet
+    was uncertain whether it was not false. Or if he says that
+    substance can be created, it is like saying that a false idea can
+    become a true idea--as absurd a thing as it is possible to conceive;
+    and therefore the existence of substance, as well as the essence of
+    it, must be acknowledged as an eternal verity.
+
+It is again the same story. Spinoza speaks of a clear idea of substance;
+but he has not proved that such an idea is within the compass of the
+mind. A man's own notion that he sees clearly, is no proof that he
+really sees clearly; and the distinctness of a definition in itself is
+no evidence that it corresponds adequately with the object of it. No
+doubt a man who professes to have an idea of substance as an existing
+thing, cannot doubt, as long as he has it, that substance so exists.
+This is merely to say that as long as a man is certain of this or that
+fact, he has no doubt of it. But neither his certainty nor Spinoza's
+will be of any use to a man who has no such idea, and who cannot
+recognise the lawfulness of the method by which it is arrived at.
+
+From the self-existing substance it is a short step to the existence of
+God. After a few more propositions, following one another with the same
+kind of coherence, we arrive successively at the conclusion that there
+is but one substance; that this substance being necessarily existent, it
+is also infinite; that it is therefore identical with the Being who had
+been previously defined as the 'Ens absolute perfectum.'
+
+Demonstrations of this kind were the characteristics of the period. Des
+Cartes had set the example of constructing them, and was followed by
+Cudworth, Clarke, Berkeley, and many others besides Spinoza. The
+inconclusiveness of the method may perhaps be observed most readily in
+the strangely opposite conceptions formed by all these writers of the
+nature of that Being whose existence they nevertheless agreed, by the
+same process, to gather each out of their ideas. It is important,
+however, to examine it carefully, for it is the very keystone of the
+Pantheistic system.
+
+As stated by Des Cartes, the argument stands something as follows:--God
+is an all-perfect Being,--perfection is the idea which we form of Him:
+existence is a mode of perfection, and therefore God exists. The sophism
+we are told is only apparent. Existence is part of the idea--as much
+involved in it as the equality of all lines drawn from the centre to the
+circumference of a circle is involved in the idea of a circle. A
+non-existent all-perfect Being is as inconceivable as a quadrilateral
+triangle.
+
+It is sometimes answered that in this way we may prove the existence of
+anything--Titans, Chimæras, or the Olympian Gods; we have but to define
+them as existing, and the proof is complete. But, this objection
+summarily set aside; none of these beings are by hypothesis absolutely
+perfect, and, therefore, of their existence we can conclude nothing.
+With greater justice, however, we may say, that of such terms as
+perfection and existence we know too little to speculate. Existence may
+be an imperfection for all we can tell; we know nothing about the
+matter. Such arguments are but endless _petitiones principii_--like the
+self-devouring serpent, resolving themselves into nothing. We wander
+round and round them, in the hope of finding some tangible point at
+which we can seize their meaning; but we are presented everywhere with
+the same impracticable surface, from which our grasp glides off
+ineffectual.
+
+Spinoza himself, however, obviously felt an intense conviction of the
+validity of his argument. His opinion is stated with sufficient
+distinctness in one of his letters. 'Nothing is more clear,' he writes
+to his pupil De Vries, 'than that, on the one hand, everything which
+exists is conceived by or under some attribute or other; that the more
+reality, therefore, a being or thing has, the more attributes must be
+assigned to it;' 'and conversely' (and this he calls his _argumentum
+palmarium_ in proof of the existence of God), '_the more attributes I
+assign to a thing, the more I am forced to conceive it as existing_.'
+Arrange the argument how we please, we shall never get it into a form
+clearer than this:--The more perfect a thing is, the more it must exist
+(as if existence could admit of more or less); and therefore the
+all-perfect Being must exist absolutely. There is no flaw, we are told,
+in the reasoning; and if we are not convinced, it is from the confused
+habits of our own minds.
+
+Some persons may think that all arguments are good when on the right
+side, and that it is a gratuitous impertinence to quarrel with the
+proofs of a conclusion which it is so desirable that all should receive.
+As yet, however, we are but inadequately acquainted with the idea
+attached by Spinoza to the word perfection; and if we commit ourselves
+to his logic, it may lead us out to unexpected consequences. All such
+reasonings presume, as a first condition, that we men possess faculties
+capable of dealing with absolute ideas; that we can understand the
+nature of things external to ourselves as they really _are_ in their
+absolute relation to one another, independent of our own conception. The
+question immediately before us is one which can never be determined. The
+truth which is to be proved is one which we already believe; and if, as
+we believe also, our conviction of God's existence is, like that of our
+own existence, intuitive and immediate, the grounds of it can never
+adequately be analysed; we cannot say exactly what they are, and
+therefore we cannot say what they are not. Whatever we receive
+intuitively, we receive without proof; and stated as a naked
+proposition, it must involve a _petitio principii_. We have a right,
+however, to object at once to an argument in which the conclusion is
+more obvious than the premises; and if it lead on to other consequences
+which we disapprove in themselves, we reject it without difficulty or
+hesitation. We ourselves believe that God is, because we experience the
+control of a 'power' which is stronger than we; and our instincts teach
+us so much of the nature of that power as our own relation to it
+requires us to know. God is the being to whom our obedience is due; and
+the perfections which we attribute to him are those moral perfections
+which are the proper object of our reverence. Strange to say, the
+perfections of Spinoza, which appear so clear to him, are without any
+moral character whatever; and for men to speak of the justice of God, he
+tells us, is but to see in him a reflection of themselves; as if a
+triangle were to conceive of him as _eminenter triangularis_, or a
+circle to give him the property of circularity.
+
+Having arrived at existence, we next find ourselves among ideas, which
+at least are intelligible, if the character of them is as far removed as
+before from the circle of ordinary thought. Nothing exists except
+substance, the attributes under which substance is expressed, and the
+modes or affections of those attributes. There is but one substance
+self-existent, eternal, necessary, and that is the absolutely Infinite
+all-perfect Being. Substance cannot produce substance, and therefore
+there is no such thing as creation; and everything which exists is
+either an attribute of God, or an affection of some attribute of him,
+modified in this manner or in that. Beyond him there is nothing, and
+nothing like him or equal to him; he therefore alone in himself is
+absolutely free, uninfluenced by anything, for nothing is except
+himself; and from him and from his supreme power, essence, intelligence
+(for these words mean the same thing), all things have necessarily
+flowed, and will and must flow for ever, in the same manner as from the
+nature of a triangle it follows, and has followed, and will follow from
+eternity to eternity, that the angles of it are equal to two right
+angles. It would seem as if the analogy were but an artificial play upon
+words, and that it was only metaphorically that in mathematical
+demonstration we speak of one thing as following from another. The
+properties of a curve or a triangle are what they are at all times, and
+the sequence is merely in the order in which they are successively known
+to ourselves. But according to Spinoza, this is the only true sequence;
+and what we call the universe, and all the series of incidents in earth
+or planet, are involved formally and mathematically in the definition of
+God.
+
+Each attribute is infinite _suo genere_; and it is time that we should
+know distinctly the meaning which Spinoza attaches to that important
+word. Out of the infinite number of the attributes of God, two only, he
+says, are known to us--'extension,' and 'thought,' or 'mind.' Duration,
+even though it be without beginning or end, is not an attribute; it is
+not even a real thing. Time has no relation to Being, conceived
+mathematically; it would be absurd to speak of circles or triangles as
+any older to-day than they were at the beginning of the world. These and
+everything of the same kind are conceived, as Spinoza rightly says, _sub
+quâdam specie æternitatis_. But extension, or substance extended, and
+thought, or substance perceiving, are real, absolute, and objective. We
+must not confound extension with body; for though body be a mode of
+extension, there is extension which is not body, and it is infinite
+because we cannot conceive it to be limited except by itself--or, in
+other words, to be limited at all. And as it is with extension, so it is
+with mind, which is also infinite with the infinity of its object. Thus
+there is no such thing as creation, and no beginning or end. All things
+of which our faculties are cognizant under one or other of these
+attributes are produced from God, and in him they have their being, and
+without him they would cease to be.
+
+Proceeding by steps of rigid demonstration (and most admirably indeed is
+the form of the philosophy adapted to the spirit of it), we learn that
+God is the only _causa libera_; that no other thing or being has any
+power of self-determination; all moves by fixed laws of causation,
+motive upon motive, act upon act; there is no free will, and no
+contingency; and however necessary it may be for our incapacity to
+consider future things as in a sense contingent (see _Tractat. Theol.
+Polit._ cap. iv., sec. 4), this is but one of the thousand convenient
+deceptions which we are obliged to employ with ourselves. God is the
+_causa immanens omnium_; he is not a personal being existing apart from
+the universe; but himself in his own reality, he is expressed in the
+universe, which is his living garment. Keeping to the philosophical
+language of the time, Spinoza preserves the distinction between _natura
+naturans_ and _natura naturata_. The first is being in itself, the
+attributes of substance as they are conceived simply and alone; the
+second is the infinite series of modifications which follow out of the
+properties of these attributes. And thus all which _is_, is what it is
+by an absolute necessity, and could not have been other than it is. God
+is free, because no causes external to himself have power over him; and
+as good men are most free when most a law to themselves, so it is no
+infringement on God's freedom to say that he _must_ have acted as he has
+acted, but rather he is absolutely free because absolutely a law himself
+to himself.
+
+Here ends the first book of Spinoza's Ethics--the book which contains,
+as we said, the _notiones simplicissimas_, and the primary and
+rudimental deductions from them. _His Dei naturam_, he says, in his
+lofty confidence, _ejusque proprietates explicui_. But, as if conscious
+that his method will never convince, he concludes this portion of his
+subject with an analytical appendix; not to explain or apologise, but to
+show us clearly, in practical detail, the position into which he has led
+us. The root, we are told, of all philosophical errors lies in our
+notion of final causes; we invert the order of nature, and interpret
+God's action through our own; we speak of his intentions, as if he were
+a man; we assume that we are capable of measuring them, and finally
+erect ourselves, and our own interests, into the centre and criterion of
+all things. Hence arises our notion of evil. If the universe be what
+this philosophy has described it, the perfection which it assigns to
+God is extended to everything, and evil is of course impossible; there
+is no shortcoming either in nature or in man; each person and each thing
+is exactly what it has the power to be, and nothing more. But men
+imagining that all things exist on their account, and perceiving their
+own interests, bodily and spiritual, capable of being variously
+affected, have conceived these opposite influences to result from
+opposite and contradictory powers, and call what contributes to their
+advantage good, and whatever obstructs it, evil. For our convenience we
+form generic conceptions of human excellence, as archetypes after which
+to strive; and such of us as approach nearest to such archetypes are
+supposed to be virtuous, and those who are most remote from them to be
+wicked. But such generic abstractions are but _entia imaginationis_, and
+have no real existence. In the eyes of God each thing is what it has the
+means of being. There is no rebellion against him, and no resistance of
+his will; in truth, therefore, there neither is nor can be such a thing
+as a bad action in the common sense of the word. Actions are good or
+bad, not in themselves, but as compared with the nature of the agent;
+what we censure in men, we tolerate and even admire in animals; and as
+soon as we are aware of our mistake in assigning to man a power of free
+volition, our notion of evil as a positive thing will cease to exist.
+
+    If I am asked (concludes Spinoza) why then all mankind were not
+    created by God, so as to be governed solely by reason? it was
+    because, I reply, there was to God no lack of matter to create all
+    things from the highest to the lowest grade of perfection; or, to
+    speak more properly, because the laws of God's nature were ample
+    enough to suffice for the production of all things which can be
+    conceived by an Infinite Intelligence.
+
+It is possible that readers who have followed us so far will now turn
+away from a philosophy which issues in such conclusions; resentful,
+perhaps, that it should have been ever laid before them at all, in
+language so little expressive of aversion and displeasure. We must
+claim, however, in Spinoza's name, the right which he claims for
+himself. His system must be judged as a whole; and whatever we may think
+ourselves would be the moral effect of such doctrines if they were
+generally received, in his hands and in his heart they are worked into
+maxims of the purest and loftiest morality. And at least we are bound
+to remember that some account of this great mystery of evil there must
+be; and although familiarity with commonly-received explanations may
+disguise from us the difficulties with which they too, as well as that
+of Spinoza, are embarrassed, such difficulties none the less exist. The
+fact is the grand perplexity, and for ourselves we acknowledge that of
+all theories about it Spinoza's would appear to us the least irrational,
+setting conscience, and the voice of conscience, aside. The objections,
+with the replies to them, are well drawn out in the correspondence with
+William de Blyenburg. It will be seen at once with how little justice
+the denial of evil as a positive thing can be called equivalent to
+denying it relatively to man, or to confusing the moral distinctions
+between virtue and vice.
+
+    We speak (writes Spinoza, in answer to Blyenburg, who had urged
+    something of the kind), we speak of this or that man having done a
+    wrong thing, when we compare him with a general standard of
+    humanity; but inasmuch as God neither perceives things in such
+    abstract manner, nor forms to himself such generic definitions, and
+    since there is no more reality in anything than God has assigned to
+    it, it follows, surely, that the absence of good exists only in
+    respect of man's understanding, not in respect of God's.
+
+    If this be so, then (replies Blyenburg), bad men fulfil God's will
+    as well as good.
+
+    It is true (Spinoza answers) they fulfil it, yet not as the good nor
+    as well as the good, nor are they to be compared with them. The
+    better a thing or a person be, the more there is in him of God's
+    spirit, and the more he expresses God's will; while the bad, being
+    without that divine love which arises from the knowledge of God, and
+    through which alone we are called (in respect of our understandings)
+    his servants, are but as instruments in the hand of the
+    artificer--they serve unconsciously, and are consumed in their
+    service.
+
+Spinoza, after all, is but stating in philosophical language the extreme
+doctrine of Grace; and St. Paul, if we interpret his real belief by the
+one passage so often quoted, in which he compares us to 'clay in the
+hands of the potter, who maketh one vessel to honour and another to
+dishonour,' may be accused with justice of having held the same opinion.
+If Calvinism be pressed to its logical consequences, it either becomes
+an intolerable falsehood, or it resolves itself into the philosophy of
+Spinoza. It is monstrous to call evil a positive thing, and to assert,
+in the same breath, that God has predetermined it,--to tell us that he
+has ordained what he hates, and hates what he has ordained. It is
+incredible that we should be without power to obey him except through
+his free grace, and yet be held responsible for our failures when that
+grace has been withheld. And it is idle to call a philosopher
+sacrilegious who has but systematised the faith which so many believe,
+and cleared it of its most hideous features.
+
+Spinoza flinches from nothing, and disguises no conclusions either from
+himself or from his readers. We believe for ourselves that logic has no
+business with such questions; that the answer to them lies in the
+conscience and not in the intellect. Spinoza thinks otherwise; and he is
+at least true to the guide which he has chosen. Blyenburg presses him
+with instances of monstrous crime, such as bring home to the heart the
+natural horror of it. He speaks of Nero's murder of Agrippina, and asks
+if God can be called the cause of such an act as that.
+
+    God (replies Spinoza, calmly) is the cause of all things which have
+    reality. If you can show that evil, errors, crimes express any real
+    things, I agree readily that God is the cause of them; but I
+    conceive myself to have proved that what constitutes the essence of
+    evil is not a real thing at all, and therefore that God cannot be
+    the cause of it. Nero's matricide was not a crime, in so far as it
+    was a positive outward act. Orestes also killed his mother; and we
+    do not judge Orestes as we judge Nero. The crime of the latter lay
+    in his being without pity, without obedience, without natural
+    affection--none of which things express any positive essence, but
+    the absence of it; and therefore God was not the cause of these,
+    although he was the cause of the act and the intention.
+
+    But once for all (he adds), this aspect of things will remain
+    intolerable and unintelligible as long as the common notions of free
+    will remain unremoved.
+
+And of course, and we shall all confess it, if these notions are as
+false as Spinoza supposes them--if we have no power to be anything but
+what we are, there neither is nor can be such a thing as moral evil; and
+what we call crimes will no more involve a violation of the will of God,
+they will no more impair his moral attributes if we suppose him to have
+willed them, than the same actions, whether of lust, ferocity, or
+cruelty, in the inferior animals. There will be but, as Spinoza says, an
+infinite gradation in created things, the poorest life being more than
+none, the meanest active disposition something better than inertia, and
+the smallest exercise of reason better than mere ferocity. 'The Lord has
+made all things for himself, even the wicked for the day of evil.'
+
+The moral aspect of the matter will be more clear as we proceed. We
+pause, however, to notice one difficulty of a metaphysical kind, which
+is best disposed of in passing. Whatever obscurity may lie about the
+thing which we call Time (philosophers not being able to agree what it
+is, or whether properly it _is_ anything), the words past, present,
+future, do undoubtedly convey some definite idea with them: things will
+be which are not yet, and have been which are no longer. Now, if
+everything which exists be a necessary mathematical consequence from the
+nature or definition of the One Being, we cannot see how there can be
+any time but the present, or how past and future have room for a
+meaning. God is, and therefore all properties of him _are_, just as
+every property of a circle exists in it as soon as the circle exists. We
+may if we like, for convenience, throw our theorems into the future, and
+say, _e.g._ that if two lines in a circle cut each other, the rectangle
+under the parts of the one _will_ equal that under the parts of the
+other. But we only mean in reality that these rectangles _are_ equal;
+and the _future_ relates only to our knowledge of the fact. Allowing,
+however, as much as we please, that the condition of England a hundred
+years hence lies already in embryo in existing causes, it is a paradox
+to say that such condition exists already in the sense in which the
+properties of the circle exist; and yet Spinoza insists on the
+illustration.
+
+It is singular that he should not have noticed the difficulty; not that
+either it or the answer to it (which no doubt would have been ready
+enough) are likely to interest any person except metaphysicians, a class
+of thinkers, happily, which is rapidly diminishing.
+
+We proceed to more important matters--to Spinoza's detailed theory of
+nature as exhibited in man and in man's mind. His theory for its bold
+ingenuity is by far the most remarkable which on this dark subject has
+ever been proposed. Whether we can believe it or not, is another
+question; yet undoubtedly it provides a solution for every difficulty;
+it accepts with equal welcome the extremes of materialism and of
+spiritualism: and if it be the test of the soundness of a philosophy
+that it will explain phenomena and reconcile contradictions, it is hard
+to account for the fact that a system which bears such a test so
+admirably, should nevertheless be so incredible as it is.
+
+Most people have heard of the 'Harmonie Pré-établie' of Leibnitz; it is
+borrowed without acknowledgment from Spinoza, and adapted to the
+Leibnitzian philosophy. 'Man,' says Leibnitz, 'is composed of mind and
+body; but what is mind and what is body, and what is the nature of their
+union? Substances so opposite in kind cannot affect one another; mind
+cannot act on matter, or matter upon mind; and the appearance of their
+reciprocal operation is an appearance only and a delusion.' A delusion
+so general, however, required to be accounted for; and Leibnitz
+accounted for it by supposing that God, in creating a world composed of
+material and spiritual phenomena, ordained that these several phenomena
+should proceed from the beginning in parallel lines side by side in a
+constantly corresponding harmony. The sense of seeing results, it
+appears to us, from the formation of a picture upon the retina. The
+motion of the arm or the leg appears to result from an act of will; but
+in either case we mistake coincidence for causation. Between substances
+so wholly alien there can be no intercommunion; and we only suppose that
+the object seen produces the idea, and that the desire produces the
+movement, because the phenomena of matter and the phenomena of spirit
+are so contrived as to flow always in the same order and sequence. This
+hypothesis, as coming from Leibnitz, has been, if not accepted, at least
+listened to respectfully; because while taking it out of its proper
+place, he contrived to graft it upon Christianity; and succeeded, with a
+sort of speculative legerdemain, in making it appear to be in harmony
+with revealed religion. Disguised as a philosophy of Predestination, and
+connected with the Christian doctrine of Retribution, it steps forward
+with an air of unconscious innocence, as if interfering with nothing
+which Christians generally believe. And yet, leaving as it does no
+larger scope for liberty or responsibility than when in the hands of
+Spinoza,[O] Leibnitz, in our opinion, has only succeeded in making it
+infinitely more revolting. Spinoza could not regard the bad man as an
+object of Divine anger and a subject of retributory punishment. He was
+not a Christian, and made no pretension to be considered such; and it
+did not occur to him to regard the actions of a being which, both with
+Leibnitz and himself, is (to use his own expression) an _automaton
+spirituale_, as deserving a fiery indignation and everlasting vengeance.
+
+'Deus,' according to Spinoza's definition, 'est ens constans infinitis
+attributis quorum unumquodque æternam et infinitam essentiam exprimit.'
+Under each of these attributes _infinita sequuntur_, and everything
+which an infinite intelligence can conceive, and an infinite power can
+produce,--everything which follows as a possibility out of the divine
+nature,--all things which have been, and are, and will be,--find
+expression and actual existence, not under one attribute only, but under
+each and every attribute. Language is so ill adapted to explain such a
+system, that even to state it accurately is all but impossible, and
+analogies can only remotely suggest what such expressions mean. But it
+is as if it were said that the same thought might be expressed in an
+infinite variety of languages; and not in words only, but in action, in
+painting, in sculpture, in music, in any form of any kind which can be
+employed as a means of spiritual embodiment. Of all these infinite
+attributes, two only, as we said, are known to us--extension and
+thought. Material phenomena are phenomena of extension; and to every
+modification of extension an idea corresponds under the attribute of
+thought. Out of such a compound as this is formed man, composed of body
+and mind; two parallel and correspondent modifications eternally
+answering one another. And not man only, but all other beings and things
+are similarly formed and similarly animated; the anima or mind of each
+varying according to the complicity of the organism of its material
+counterpart. Although body does not think, nor affect the mind's power
+of thinking, and mind does not control body, nor communicate to it
+either motion or rest or any influence from itself, yet body with all
+its properties is the object or ideate of mind: whatsoever body does,
+mind perceives; and the greater the energising power of the first, the
+greater the perceiving power of the second. And this is not because they
+are adapted one to the other by some inconceivable preordinating power,
+but because mind and body are _una et eadem res_, the one absolute being
+affected in one and the same manner, but expressed under several
+attributes; the modes and affections of each attribute having that being
+for their cause, as he exists under that attribute of which they are
+modes, and no other; idea being caused by idea, and body affected by
+body; the image on the retina being produced by the object reflected
+upon it, the idea or image in our minds by the idea of that object, &c.
+&c.
+
+A solution so remote from all ordinary ways of thinking on these matters
+is so difficult to grasp, that one can hardly speak of it as being
+probable, or as being improbable. Probability extends only to what we
+can imagine as possible, and Spinoza's theory seems to lie beyond the
+range within which our judgment can exercise itself. In our own opinion,
+indeed, as we have already said, the entire subject is one with which we
+have no business; and the explanation of our nature, if it is ever to be
+explained to us, is reserved till we are in some other state of
+existence. We do not disbelieve Spinoza because what he suggests is in
+itself incredible. The chances may be millions to one against his being
+right; yet the real truth, if we knew it, would be probably at least as
+strange as his conception of it. But we are firmly convinced that of
+these questions, and of all like them, practical answers only lie
+within the reach of human faculties; and that in 'researches into the
+absolute' we are on the road which ends nowhere.
+
+Among the difficulties, however, most properly akin to this philosophy
+itself, there is one most obvious, viz., that if the attributes of God
+be infinite, and each particular thing is expressed under them all, then
+mind and body express but an infinitesimal portion of the nature of each
+of ourselves; and this human nature exists (_i.e._, there exists
+corresponding modes of substance) in the whole infinity of the divine
+nature under attributes differing each from each, and all from mind and
+all from body. That this must be so follows from the definition of the
+Infinite Being, and the nature of the distinction between the two
+attributes which are known to us; and if this be so, why does not the
+mind perceive something of all these other attributes? The objection is
+well expressed by a correspondent (Letter 67):--'It follows from what
+you say,' a friend writes to Spinoza, 'that the modification which
+constitutes my mind, and that which constitutes my body, although it be
+one and the same modification, yet must be expressed in an infinity of
+ways: one way by thought, a second way by extension, a third by some
+attribute unknown to me, and so on to infinity; the attributes being
+infinite in number, and the order and connexion of modes being the same
+in them all. Why, then, does the mind perceive the modes of but one
+attribute only?'
+
+Spinoza's answer is curious: unhappily, a fragment of his letter only is
+extant, so that it is too brief to be satisfactory:--
+
+    In reply to your difficulty (he says), although each particular
+    thing be truly in the Infinite mind, conceived in Infinite modes,
+    the Infinite idea answering to all these cannot constitute one and
+    the same mind of any single being, but must constitute Infinite
+    minds. No one of all these Infinite ideas has any connexion with
+    another.
+
+He means, we suppose, that God's mind only perceives, or can perceive,
+things under their Infinite expression, and that the idea of each
+several mode, under whatever attribute, constitutes a separate mind.
+
+We do not know that we can add anything to this explanation; the
+difficulty lies in the audacious sweep of the speculation itself; we
+will, however, attempt an illustration, although we fear it will be to
+illustrate _obscurum per obscurius_. Let A B C D be four out of the
+Infinite number of the Divine attributes. A the attribute of mind; B the
+attribute of extension; C and D other attributes, the nature of which is
+not known to us. Now, A, as the attribute of mind, is that which
+perceives all which takes place under B C and D, but it is only as it
+exists in God that it forms the universal consciousness of all
+attributes at once. In its modifications it is combined separately with
+the modifications of each, constituting in combination with the modes of
+each attribute a separate being. As forming the mind of B, A perceives
+what takes place in B, but not what takes place in C or D. Combined with
+B, it forms the soul of the human body, and generally the soul of all
+modifications of extended substance; combined with C, it forms the soul
+of some other analogous being; combined with D, again of another; but
+the combinations are only in pairs, in which A is constant. A and B make
+one being, A and C another, A and D a third; but B will not combine with
+C, nor C with D; each attribute being, as it were, conscious only of
+itself. And therefore, although to those modifications of mind and
+extension which we call ourselves, there are corresponding modifications
+under C and D, and generally under each of the Infinite attributes of
+God, each of ourselves being in a sense Infinite--nevertheless, we
+neither have nor can have any knowledge of ourselves in this Infinite
+aspect; our actual consciousness being limited to the phenomena of
+sensible experience.
+
+English readers, however, are likely to care little for all this; they
+will look to the general theory, and judge of it as its aspect affects
+them. And first, perhaps, they will be tempted to throw aside as absurd
+the notion that their bodies go through the many operations which they
+experience them to do, undirected by their minds. It is a thing, they
+may say, at once preposterous and incredible. It is, however, less
+absurd than it seems; and, though we could not persuade ourselves to
+believe it, absurd in the sense of having nothing to be said for it, it
+certainly is not. It is far easier, for instance, to imagine the human
+body capable by its own virtue, and by the laws of material
+organisation, of building a house, than of _thinking_; and yet men are
+allowed to say that the body thinks, without being regarded as
+candidates for a lunatic asylum. We see the seed shoot up into stem and
+leaf and throw out flowers; we observe it fulfilling processes of
+chemistry more subtle than were ever executed in Liebig's laboratory,
+and producing structures more cunning than man can imitate. The bird
+builds her nest, the spider shapes out its delicate web, and stretches
+it in the path of his prey; directed not by calculating thought, as we
+conceive ourselves to be, but by some motive influence, our ignorance of
+the nature of which we disguise from ourselves, and call it instinct,
+but which we believe at least to be some property residing in the
+organisation. We are not to suppose that the human body, the most
+complex of all material structures, has slighter powers in it than the
+bodies of a seed, a bird, or an insect. Let us listen to Spinoza
+himself:--
+
+    There can be no doubt (he says) that this hypothesis is true; but
+    unless I can prove it from experience, men will not, I fear, be
+    induced even to reflect upon it calmly, so persuaded are they that
+    it is by the mind only that their bodies are set in motion. And yet
+    what body can or cannot do no one has yet determined; body, _i.e._,
+    by the law of its own nature, and without assistance from mind. No
+    one has so probed the human frame as to have detected all its
+    functions and exhausted the list of them; there are powers exhibited
+    by animals far exceeding human sagacity; and, again, feats are
+    performed by somnambulists on which in the waking state the same
+    persons would never venture--itself a proof that body is able to
+    accomplish what mind can only admire. Men _say_ that mind moves
+    body, but how it moves it they cannot tell, or what degree of motion
+    it can impart to it; so that, in fact, they do not know what they
+    say, and are only confessing their own ignorance in specious
+    language. They will answer me, that whether or not they understand
+    how it can be, yet that they are assured by plain experience that
+    unless mind could perceive, body would be altogether inactive; they
+    know that it depends on the mind whether the tongue speaks or is
+    silent. But do they not equally experience that if their bodies are
+    paralysed their minds cannot think?--that if their bodies are asleep
+    their minds are without power?--that their minds are not at all
+    times equally able to exert themselves even on the same subject, but
+    depend on the state of their bodies? And as for experience proving
+    that the members of the body can be controlled by the mind, I fear
+    experience proves very much the reverse. But it is absurd (they
+    rejoin) to attempt to explain from the mere laws of body such things
+    as pictures, or palaces, or works of art; the body could not build a
+    church unless mind directed it. I have shown, however, that we do
+    not yet know what body can or cannot do, or what would naturally
+    follow from the structure of it; that we experience in the feats of
+    somnambulists something which antecedently to that experience would
+    have seemed incredible. This fabric of the human body exceeds
+    infinitely any contrivance of human skill, and an infinity of
+    things, as I have already proved, ought to follow from it.
+
+We are not concerned to answer this reasoning, although if the matter
+were one the debating of which could be of any profit, it would
+undoubtedly have its weight, and would require to be patiently
+considered. Life is too serious, however, to be wasted with impunity
+over speculations in which certainty is impossible, and in which we are
+trifling with what is inscrutable.
+
+Objections of a far graver kind were anticipated by Spinoza himself,
+when he went on to gather out of his philosophy 'that the mind of man
+being part of the Infinite intelligence, when we say that such a mind
+perceives this thing or that, we are, in fact, saying that God perceives
+it, not as he is Infinite, but as he is represented by the nature of
+this or that idea; and similarly, when we say that a man does this or
+that action, we say that God does it, not _quâ_ he is Infinite, but
+_quâ_ he is expressed in that man's nature.' 'Here,' he says, 'many
+readers will no doubt hesitate, and many difficulties will occur to them
+in the way of such a supposition.'
+
+We confess that we ourselves are among these hesitating readers. As long
+as the Being whom Spinoza so freely names remains surrounded with the
+associations which in this country we bring with us out of our
+childhood, not all the logic in the world would make us listen to
+language such as this. It is not so--we know it, and that is enough. We
+are well aware of the phalanx of difficulties which lie about our
+theistic conceptions. They are quite enough, if religion depended on
+speculative consistency, and not in obedience of life, to perplex and
+terrify us. What are we? what _is_ anything? If it be not divine--what
+is it then? If created--out of what is it created? and how created--and
+why? These questions, and others far more momentous which we do not
+enter upon here, may be asked and cannot be answered; but we cannot any
+the more consent to Spinoza on the ground that he alone consistently
+provides an answer; because, as we have said again and again, we do not
+care to have them answered at all. Conscience is the single tribunal to
+which we choose to be referred, and conscience declares imperatively
+that what he says is not true. It is painful to speak of all this, and
+as far as possible we designedly avoid it. Pantheism is not Atheism, but
+the Infinite Positive and the Infinite Negative are not so remote from
+one another in their practical bearings; only let us remember that we
+are far indeed from the truth if we think that God to Spinoza was
+_nothing else_ but that world which we experience. It is but one of
+infinite expressions of him--a conception which makes us giddy in the
+effort to realise it.
+
+We have arrived at last at the outwork of the whole matter in its
+bearings upon life and human duty. It was in the search after this last,
+that Spinoza, as we said, travelled over so strange a country, and we
+now expect his conclusions. To discover the true good of man, to direct
+his actions to such ends as will secure to him real and lasting
+felicity, and, by a comparison of his powers with the objects offered to
+them, to ascertain how far they are capable of arriving at these
+objects, and by what means they can best be trained towards them--is the
+aim which Spinoza assigns to philosophy. 'Most people,' he adds, 'deride
+or vilify their nature; it is a better thing to endeavour to understand
+it; and however extravagant my proceeding may be thought, I propose to
+analyse the properties of that nature as if it were a mathematical
+figure.' Mind being, as he conceives himself to have shown, nothing else
+than the idea corresponding to this or that affection of body, we are
+not, therefore, to think of it as a faculty, but simply and merely as an
+act. There is no general power called intellect, any more than there is
+any general abstract volition, but only _hic et ille intellectus et hæc
+et illa volitio_.
+
+Again, by the word Mind is understood not merely an act or acts of will
+or intellect, but all forms also of consciousness of sensation or
+emotion. The human body being composed of many small bodies, the mind is
+similarly composed of many minds, and the unity of body and of mind
+depends on the relation which the component portions maintain towards
+each other. This is obviously the case with body; and if we can
+translate metaphysics into common experience, it is equally the case
+with mind. There are pleasures of sense and pleasures of intellect; a
+thousand tastes, tendencies, and inclinations form our mental
+composition; and since one contradicts another, and each has a tendency
+to become dominant, it is only in the harmonious equipoise of their
+several activities, in their due and just subordination, that any unity
+of action or consistency of feeling is possible. After a masterly
+analysis of all these tendencies (the most complete by far which has
+ever been made by any moral philosopher), Spinoza arrives at the
+principles under which unity and consistency can be obtained as the
+condition upon which a being so composed can look for any sort of
+happiness; and these principles, arrived at as they are by a route so
+different, are the same, and are proposed by Spinoza as being the same,
+as those of the Christian religion.
+
+It might seem impossible in a system which binds together in so
+inexorable a sequence the relations of cause and effect, to make a place
+for the action of self-control; but consideration will show that,
+however vast the difference between those who deny and those who affirm
+the liberty of the will (in the sense in which the expression is usually
+understood), it is not a difference which affects the conduct or alters
+the practical bearings of it. Conduct may be determined by laws--laws as
+absolute as those of matter; and yet the one as well as the other may be
+brought under control by a proper understanding of those laws. Now,
+experience seems plainly to say, that while all our actions arise out of
+desire--that whatever we do, we do for the sake of something which we
+wish to be or to obtain--we are differently affected towards what is
+proposed to us as an object of desire, in proportion as we understand
+the nature of such object in itself and in its consequences. The better
+we know, the better we act; and the fallacy of all common arguments
+against necessitarianism lies in the assumption that it leaves no room
+for self-direction: it merely insists, in exact conformity with
+experience, on the conditions under which self-determination is
+possible. Conduct, according to the necessitarian, depends on knowledge.
+Let a man certainly know that there is poison in the cup of wine before
+him, and he will not drink it. By the law of cause and effect, his
+desire for the wine is overcome by the fear of the pain or the death
+which will follow. So with everything which comes before him. Let the
+consequences of any action be clear, definite, and inevitable, and
+though Spinoza would not say that the knowledge of them will be
+absolutely sufficient to determine the conduct (because the clearest
+knowledge may be overborne by violent passion), yet it is the best
+which we have to trust to, and will do much if it cannot do all.
+
+On this hypothesis, after a diagnosis of the various tendencies of human
+nature, called commonly the passions and affections, he returns upon the
+nature of our ordinary knowledge to derive out of it the means for their
+subordination. All these tendencies of themselves seek their own
+objects--seek them blindly and immoderately; and the mistakes and the
+unhappinesses of life arise from the want of due understanding of these
+objects, and a just moderation of the desire for them. His analysis is
+remarkably clear, but it is too long for us to enter upon it; the
+important thing being the character of the control which is to be
+exerted. To arrive at this, he employs a distinction of great practical
+utility, and which is peculiarly his own.
+
+Following his tripartite division of knowledge, he finds all kinds of it
+arrange themselves under one of two classes, and to be either adequate
+or inadequate. By adequate knowledge he does not mean what is exhaustive
+and complete, but what, as far as it goes, is distinct and unconfused:
+by inadequate, he means what we know merely as fact either derived from
+our own sensations, or from the authority of others, while of the
+connexion of it with other facts, of the causes, effects, or meaning of
+it we know nothing. We may have an adequate idea of a circle, though we
+are unacquainted with all the properties which belong to it; we conceive
+it distinctly as a figure generated by the rotation of a line, one end
+of which is stationary. Phenomena, on the other hand, however made known
+to us--phenomena of the senses, and phenomena of experience, as long as
+they remain phenomena merely, and unseen in any higher relation--we can
+never know except as inadequately. We cannot tell what outward things
+are by coming in contact with certain features of them. We have a very
+imperfect acquaintance even with our own bodies, and the sensations
+which we experience of various kinds rather indicate to us the nature of
+these bodies themselves than of the objects which affect them. Now, it
+is obvious that the greater part of mankind act only upon knowledge of
+this latter kind. The amusements, even the active pursuits, of most of
+us remain wholly within the range of uncertainty, and, therefore, are
+full of hazard and precariousness: little or nothing issues as we
+expect. We look for pleasure and we find pain; we shun one pain and
+find a greater; and thus arises the ineffectual character which we so
+complain of in life--the disappointments, failures, mortifications which
+form the material of so much moral meditation on the vanity of the
+world. Much of all this is inevitable from the constitution of our
+nature. The mind is too infirm to be entirely occupied with higher
+knowledge. The conditions of life oblige us to act in many cases which
+cannot be understood by us except with the utmost inadequacy; and the
+resignation to the higher will which has determined all things in the
+wisest way, is imperfect in the best of us. Yet much is possible, if not
+all; and, although through a large tract of life 'there comes one event
+to all, to the wise and to the unwise,' 'yet wisdom excelleth folly as
+far as light excelleth darkness.' The phenomena of experience, after
+inductive experiment, and just and careful consideration, arrange
+themselves under laws uniform in their operation, and furnishing a guide
+to the judgment; and over all things, although the interval must remain
+unexplored for ever, because what we would search into is Infinite, may
+be seen the beginning of all things, the absolute eternal God. 'Mens
+humana,' Spinoza continues, 'quædam agit, quædam vero patitur.' In so
+far as it is influenced by inadequate ideas--'eatenus patitur'--it is
+passive and in bondage, it is the sport of fortune and caprice: in so
+far as its ideas are adequate--'eatenus agit'--it is active, it is
+itself. While we are governed by outward temptations, by the casual
+pleasures, by the fortunes or the misfortunes of life, we are but
+instruments, yielding ourselves to be acted upon as the animal is acted
+on by its appetites, or the inanimate matter by the laws which bind it;
+we are slaves--instruments, it may be, of some higher purpose in the
+order of nature, but in ourselves nothing; instruments which are
+employed for a special work, and which are consumed in effecting it. So
+far, on the contrary, as we know clearly what we do, as we understand
+what we are, and direct our conduct not by the passing emotion of the
+moment, but by a grave, clear, and constant knowledge of what is really
+good, so far we are said to act--we are ourselves the spring of our own
+activity--we pursue the genuine well-being of our entire nature, and
+_that_ we can always find, and it never disappoints us when found.
+
+All things desire life; all things seek for energy, and fuller and
+ampler being. The component parts of man, his various appetites and
+passions, are seeking larger activity while pursuing each its immoderate
+indulgence; and it is the primary law of every single being that it so
+follows what will give it increased vitality. Whatever will contribute
+to such increase is the proper good of each; and the good of man as a
+united being is measured and determined by the effect of it upon his
+collective powers. The appetites gather power from their several objects
+of desire; but the power of the part is the weakness of the whole; and
+man as a collective person gathers life, being, and self-mastery only
+from the absolute good,--the source of all real good, and truth, and
+energy,--that is, God. The love of God is the extinction of all other
+loves and all other desires. To know God, as far as man can know him, is
+power, self-government, and peace. And this is virtue, and this is
+blessedness.
+
+Thus, by a formal process of demonstration, we are brought round to the
+old conclusions of theology; and Spinoza protests that it is no new
+doctrine which he is teaching, but that it is one which in various
+dialects has been believed from the beginning of the world. Happiness
+depends on the consistency and coherency of character, and that
+coherency can only be given by the knowledge of the One Being, to know
+whom is to know all things adequately, and to love whom is to have
+conquered every other inclination. The more entirely our minds rest on
+him--the more distinctly we regard all things in their relation to him,
+the more we cease to be under the dominion of external things; we
+surrender ourselves consciously to do his will, and as living men and
+not as passive things we become the instruments of his power. When the
+true nature and true causes of our affections become clear to us, they
+have no more power to influence us. The more we understand, the less can
+feeling sway us; we know that all things are what they are, because they
+are so constituted that they could not be otherwise, and we cease to be
+angry with our brother, because he disappoints us; we shall not fret at
+calamity, nor complain of fortune, because no such thing as fortune
+exists; and if we fail it is better than if we had succeeded, not
+perhaps for ourselves, yet for the universe. We cannot fear, when
+nothing can befall us except what God wills, and we shall not violently
+hope, when the future, whatever it be, will be the best which is
+possible. Seeing all things in their place in the everlasting order,
+Past and Future will not affect us. The temptation of present pleasure
+will not overcome the certainty of future pain, for the pain will be as
+sure as the pleasure, and we shall see all things under a rule of
+adamant. The foolish and the ignorant are led astray by the idea of
+contingency, and expect to escape the just issues of their actions; the
+wise man will know that each action brings with it its inevitable
+consequences, which even God cannot change without ceasing to be
+himself.
+
+In such a manner, through all the conditions of life, Spinoza pursues
+the advantages which will accrue to man from the knowledge of God, God
+and man being what his philosophy has described them. His practical
+teaching is singularly beautiful; although much of its beauty is perhaps
+due to associations which have arisen out of Christianity, and which in
+the system of Pantheism have no proper abiding place. Retaining, indeed,
+all that is beautiful in Christianity, he even seems to have relieved
+himself of the more fearful features of the general creed. He
+acknowledges no hell, no devil, no positive and active agency at enmity
+with God; but sees in all things infinite gradations of beings, all in
+their way obedient, and all fulfilling the part allotted to them.
+Doubtless a pleasant exchange and a grateful deliverance, if only we
+could persuade ourselves that a hundred pages of judiciously arranged
+demonstrations could really and indeed have worked it for us; if we
+could indeed believe that we could have the year without its winter, day
+without night, sunlight without shadow. Evil is unhappily too real a
+thing to be so disposed of.
+
+But if we cannot believe Spinoza's system taken in its entire
+completeness, yet we may not blind ourselves to the disinterestedness
+and calm nobility which pervades his theories of human life and
+obligation. He will not hear of a virtue which desires to be rewarded.
+Virtue is the power of God in the human soul, and that is the exhaustive
+end of all human desire. 'Beatitudo non est virtutis pretium, sed ipsa
+virtus. Nihil aliud est quam ipsa animi acquiescentia, quæ ex Dei
+intuitivâ cognitione oritur.' The same spirit of generosity exhibits
+itself in all his conclusions. The ordinary objects of desire, he says,
+are of such a kind that for one man to obtain them is for another to
+lose them; and this alone would suffice to prove that they are not what
+any man should labour after. But the fulness of God suffices for us
+all; and he who possesses this good desires only to communicate it to
+every one, and to make all mankind as happy as himself. And again:--'The
+wise man will not speak in society of his neighbour's faults, and
+sparingly of the infirmity of human nature; but he will speak largely of
+human virtue and human power, and of the means by which that nature can
+best be perfected, so to lead men to put away that fear and aversion
+with which they look on goodness, and learn with relieved hearts to love
+and desire it.' And once more:--'He who loves God will not desire that
+God should love him in return with any partial or particular affection,
+for that is to desire that God for his sake should change his
+everlasting nature and become lower than himself.'
+
+One grave element, indeed, of a religious faith would seem in such a
+system to be necessarily wanting. Where individual action is resolved
+into the modified activity of the Universal Being, all absorbing and all
+evolving, the individuality of the personal man is but an evanescent and
+unreal shadow. Such individuality as we now possess, whatever it be,
+might continue to exist in a future state as really as it exists in the
+present, and those to whom it belongs might be anxious naturally for its
+persistence. Yet it would seem that if the soul be nothing except the
+idea of a body actually existing, when that body is decomposed into its
+elements, the soul corresponding to it must accompany it into an
+answering dissolution. And this, indeed, Spinoza in one sense actually
+affirms, when he denies to the mind any power of retaining consciousness
+of what has befallen it in life, 'nisi durante corpore.' But Spinozism
+is a philosophy full of surprises; and our calculations of what _must_
+belong to it are perpetually baffled. The imagination, the memory, the
+senses, whatever belongs to inadequate perception, perish necessarily
+and eternally; and the man who has been the slave of his inclinations,
+who has no knowledge of God, and no active possession of himself, having
+in life possessed no personality, loses in death the appearance of it
+with the dissolution of the body.
+
+Nevertheless, there is in God an idea expressing the essence of the
+mind, united to the mind as the mind is united to the body, and thus
+there is in the soul something of an everlasting nature which cannot
+utterly perish. And here Spinoza, as he often does in many of his most
+solemn conclusions, deserts for a moment the thread of his
+demonstrations, and appeals to the consciousness. In spite of our
+non-recollection of what passed before our birth, in spite of all
+difficulties from the dissolution of the body, 'Nihilominus,' he says,
+'sentimus experimurque nos æternos esse. Nam mens non minus res illas
+sentit quas intelligendo concipit, quam quas in memoriâ habet. Mentis
+enim oculi quibus res videt observatque sunt ipsæ demonstrationes.'
+
+This perception, immediately revealed to the mind, falls into easy
+harmony with the rest of the system. As the mind is not a faculty, but
+an act or acts,--not a power of perception, but the perception itself,
+in its high union with the highest object (to use the metaphysical
+language which Coleridge has made popular and partially intelligible),
+the object and the subject become one. If knowledge be followed as it
+ought to be followed, and all objects of knowledge be regarded in their
+relations to the One Absolute Being, the knowledge of particular outward
+things, of nature, or life, or history, becomes, in fact, knowledge of
+God; and the more complete or adequate such knowledge, the more the mind
+is raised above what is perishable in the phenomena to the idea or law
+which lies beyond them. It learns to dwell exclusively upon the eternal,
+not upon the temporary; and being thus occupied with the everlasting
+laws, and its activity subsisting in its perfect union with them, it
+contracts in itself the character of the objects which possess it. Thus
+we are emancipated from the conditions of duration; we are liable even
+to death only _quatenus patimur_, as we are passive things and not
+active intelligences; and the more we possess such knowledge and are
+possessed by it, the more entirely the passive is superseded by the
+active--so that at last the human soul may 'become of such a nature that
+the portion of it which will perish with the body in comparison with
+that of it which shall endure, shall be insignificant and _nullius
+momenti_.' (Eth. v. 38.)
+
+Such are the principal features of a philosophy, the influence of which
+upon Europe, direct and indirect, it is not easy to over-estimate. The
+account of it is far from being an account of the whole of Spinoza's
+labours; his 'Tractatus Theologico-Politicus' was the forerunner of
+German historical criticism; the whole of which has been but the
+application of principles laid down in that remarkable work. But this is
+not a subject on which, upon the present occasion, we have cared to
+enter. We have designedly confined ourselves to the system which is most
+associated with the name of its author. It is this which has been really
+powerful, which has stolen over the minds even of thinkers who imagine
+themselves most opposed to it. It has appeared in the absolute Pantheism
+of Schelling and Hegel, in the Pantheistic Christianity of Herder and
+Schleiermacher. Passing into practical life it has formed the strong,
+shrewd judgment of Goethe, while again it has been able to unite with
+the theories of the most extreme materialism.
+
+It lies too, perhaps (and here its influence has been unmixedly good),
+at the bottom of that more reverent contemplation of nature which has
+caused the success of our modern landscape painting, which inspired
+Wordsworth's poetry, and which, if ever physical science is to become an
+instrument of intellectual education, must first be infused into the
+lessons of nature; the sense of that 'something' interfused in the
+material world--
+
+    Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
+    And the round ocean, and the living air,
+    And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;--
+    A motion and a spirit, which impels
+    All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
+    And rolls through all things.
+
+If we shrink from regarding the extended universe, with Spinoza, as an
+actual manifestation of Almighty God, we are unable to rest in the mere
+denial that it is this. We go on to ask what it _is_, and we are obliged
+to conclude thus much at least of it, that every smallest being was once
+a thought in his mind; and in the study of what he has made, we are
+really and truly studying a revelation of himself.
+
+It is not here, it is not on the physical, it is rather on the moral
+side, that the stumbling-block is lying; in that excuse for evil and for
+evil men which the necessitarian theory will furnish, disguise it in
+what fair-sounding words we will. So plain this is, that common-sense
+people, and especially English people, cannot bring themselves even to
+consider the question without impatience, and turn disdainfully and
+angrily from a theory which confuses their instincts of right and wrong.
+Although, however, error on this side is infinitely less mischievous
+than on the other, no vehement error can exist in this world with
+impunity; and it does appear that in our common view of these matters we
+have closed our eyes to certain grave facts of experience, and have
+given the fatalist a vantage ground of real truth which we ought to have
+considered and allowed. At the risk of tediousness we shall enter
+briefly into this unpromising ground. Life and the necessities of life
+are our best philosophers if we will only listen honestly to what they
+say to us; and dislike the lesson as we may, it is cowardice which
+refuses to hear it.
+
+The popular belief is, that right and wrong lie before every man, and
+that he is free to choose between them, and the responsibility of choice
+rests with himself. The fatalist's belief is that every man's actions
+are determined by causes external and internal over which he has no
+power, leaving no room for any moral choice whatever. The first is
+contradicted by facts, the second by the instinct of conscience. Even
+Spinoza allows that for practical purposes we are obliged to regard the
+future as contingent, and ourselves as able to influence it; and it is
+incredible that both our inward convictions and our outward conduct
+should be built together upon a falsehood. But if, as Butler says,
+whatever be the speculative account of the matter, we are practically
+forced to regard ourselves as free, this is but half the truth, for it
+may be equally said that practically we are forced to regard each other
+as _not_ free; and to make allowance, every moment, for influences for
+which we cannot hold each other personally responsible. If not,--if
+every person of sound mind (in the common acceptation of the term) be
+equally able at all times to act right if only he _will_,--why all the
+care which we take of children? why the pains to keep them from bad
+society? why do we so anxiously watch their disposition, to determine
+the education which will best answer to it? Why in cases of guilt do we
+vary our moral censure according to the opportunities of the offender?
+Why do we find excuses for youth, for inexperience, for violent natural
+passion, for bad education, bad example? Why, except that we feel that
+all these things do affect the culpability of the guilty person, and
+that it is folly and inhumanity to disregard them? But what we act upon
+in private life we cannot acknowledge in our ethical theories, and
+while our conduct in detail is humane and just, we have been contented
+to gather our speculative philosophy out of the broad and coarse
+generalisations of political necessity. In the swift haste of social
+life we must indeed treat men as we find them. We have no time to make
+allowances; and the graduation of punishment by the scale of guilt is a
+mere impossibility. A thief is a thief in the law's eye though he has
+been trained from his cradle in the kennels of St. Giles's; and definite
+penalties must be attached to definite acts, the conditions of political
+life not admitting of any other method of dealing with them. But it is
+absurd to argue from such rude necessity that each act therefore, by
+whomsoever committed, is of specific culpability. The act is one thing,
+the moral guilt is another. There are many cases in which, as Butler
+again allows, if we trace a sinner's history to the bottom, the guilt
+attributable to himself appears to vanish altogether.
+
+This is plain matter of fact, and as long as we continue to deny or
+ignore it, there will be found men (not bad men, but men who love the
+truth as much as ourselves) who will see only what we neglect, and will
+insist upon it, and build their systems upon it.
+
+And again, if less obvious, yet not less real, are those natural
+tendencies which each of us brings with him into the world,--which we
+did not make, and yet which almost as much determine what we are to be,
+as the properties of the seed determine the tree which shall grow from
+it. Men are self-willed, or violent, or obstinate, or weak, or generous,
+or affectionate; there is as large difference in their dispositions as
+in the features of their faces. Duties which are easy to one, another
+finds difficult or impossible. It is with morals as it is with art. Two
+children are taught to draw; one learns with ease, the other hardly or
+never. In vain the master will show him what to do. It seems so easy: it
+seems as if he had only to _will_, and the thing would be done; but it
+is not so. Between the desire and the execution lies the incapable organ
+which only wearily, and after long labour, imperfectly accomplishes what
+is required of it. And the same, _to a certain extent_, unless we will
+deny the patent facts of experience, holds true in moral actions. No
+wonder, therefore, that evaded or thrust aside as these things are in
+the popular beliefs, as soon as they are recognised in their full
+reality they should be mistaken for the whole truth, and the free-will
+theory be thrown aside as a chimera.
+
+It may be said, and it often is said, that such reasonings are merely
+sophistical--that however we entangle ourselves in logic, we are
+conscious that we are free; we know--we are as sure as we are of our
+existence--that we have power to act this way or that way, exactly as we
+choose. But this is less plain than it seems; and if granted, it proves
+less than it appears to prove. It may be true that we can act as we
+choose, but can we _choose_? Is not our choice determined for us? We
+cannot determine from the fact, because we always _have chosen_ as soon
+as we act, and we cannot replace the conditions in such a way as to
+discover whether we could have chosen anything else. The stronger motive
+may have determined our volition without our perceiving it; and if we
+desire to prove our independence of motive, by showing that we _can_
+choose something different from that which we should naturally have
+chosen, we still cannot escape from the circle, this very desire
+becoming, as Mr. Hume observes, itself a _motive_. Again, consciousness
+of the possession of any power may easily be delusive; we can properly
+judge what our powers are only by what they have actually accomplished;
+we know what we _have_ done, and we may infer from having done it that
+our power was equal to what it achieved. But it is easy for us to
+over-rate our strength if we try to measure our abilities in themselves.
+A man who can leap five yards may think that he can leap six; yet he may
+try and fail. A man who can write prose may only learn that he cannot
+write poetry from the badness of the verses which he produces. To the
+appeal to consciousness of power there is always an answer:--that we may
+believe ourselves to possess it, but that experience proves that we may
+be deceived.
+
+There is, however, another group of feelings which cannot be set aside
+in this way, which do prove that, in some sense or other, in some degree
+or other, we are the authors of our own actions. It is one of the
+clearest of all inward phenomena, that, where two or more courses
+involving moral issues are before us, whether we have a consciousness of
+_power_ to choose between them or not, we have a consciousness that we
+_ought_ to choose between them; a sense of duty--[Greek: hoti dei touto
+prattein]--as Aristotle expresses it, which we cannot shake off.
+Whatever this consciousness involves (and some measure of freedom it
+must involve or it is nonsense), the feeling exists within us, and
+refuses to yield before all the batteries of logic. It is not that of
+the two courses we know that one is in the long run the best, and the
+other more immediately tempting. We have a sense of obligation
+irrespective of consequence, the violation of which is followed again by
+a sense of self-disapprobation, of censure, of blame. In vain will
+Spinoza tell us that such feelings, incompatible as they are with the
+theory of powerlessness, are mistakes arising out of a false philosophy.
+They are primary facts of sensation most vivid in minds of most vigorous
+sensibility; and although they may be extinguished by habitual
+profligacy, or possibly, perhaps, destroyed by logic, the paralysis of
+the conscience is no more a proof that it is not a real power of
+perceiving real things, than blindness is a proof that sight is not a
+real power. The perceptions of worth and worthlessness are not
+conclusions of reasoning, but immediate sensations like those of seeing
+and hearing; and although, like the other senses, they may be mistaken
+sometimes in the accounts they render to us, the fact of the existence
+of such feelings at all proves that there is something which corresponds
+to them. If there be any such things as 'true ideas,' or clear, distinct
+perceptions at all, this of praise and blame is one of them, and
+according to Spinoza's own rule we must accept what it involves. And it
+involves that some where or other the influence of causes ceases to
+operate, and that some degree of power there is in men of
+self-determination, by the amount of which, and not by their specific
+actions, moral merit or demerit is to be measured. Speculative
+difficulties remain in abundance. It will be said in a case, _e.g._ of
+moral trial, that there may have been _power_; but was there _power
+enough_ to resist the temptation? If there was, then it was resisted. If
+there was not, there was no responsibility. We must answer again from
+practical instinct. We refuse to allow men to be considered all equally
+guilty who have committed the same faults; and we insist that their
+actions must be measured against their opportunities. But a similar
+conviction assures us that there is somewhere a point of freedom. Where
+that point is--where other influences terminate, and responsibility
+begins--will always be of intricate and often impossible solution. But
+if there be such a point at all, it is fatal to necessitarianism, and
+man is what he has been hitherto supposed to be--an exception in the
+order of nature, with a power not differing in degree but differing in
+kind from those of other creatures. Moral life, like all life, is a
+mystery; and as to anatomise the body will not reveal the secret of
+animation, so with the actions of the moral man. The spiritual life,
+which alone gives them meaning and being, glides away before the logical
+dissecting knife, and leaves it but a corpse to work upon.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[N] _Westminster Review_, 1854.
+
+[O] Since these words were written a book has appeared in Paris by an
+able disciple of Leibnitz, which, although it does not lead us to modify
+the opinion expressed in them, yet obliges us to give our reasons for
+speaking as we do. M. de Careil[P] has discovered in the library at
+Hanover, a MS. in the hand-writing of Leibnitz, containing a series of
+remarks on the book of a certain John Wachter. It does not appear who
+this John Wachter was, nor by what accident he came to have so
+distinguished a critic. If we may judge by the extracts at present
+before us, he seems to have been an absurd and extravagant person, who
+had attempted to combine the theology of the Cabbala with the very
+little which he was able to understand of the philosophy of Spinoza;
+and, as far as he is concerned, neither his writings nor the reflections
+upon them are of interest to any human being. The extravagance of
+Spinoza's followers, however, furnished Leibnitz with an opportunity of
+noticing the points on which he most disapproved of Spinoza himself; and
+these few notices M. de Careil has now for the first time published as
+_The Refutation of Spinoza_, by Leibnitz. They are exceedingly brief and
+scanty; and the writer of them would assuredly have hesitated to
+describe an imperfect criticism by so ambitious a title. The modern
+editor, however, must be allowed the privilege of a worshipper, and we
+will not quarrel with him for an exaggerated estimate of what his master
+had accomplished. We are indebted to his enthusiasm for what is at least
+a curious discovery, and we will not qualify the gratitude which he has
+earned by industry and good will. At the same time, the notes themselves
+confirm the opinion which we have always entertained, that Leibnitz did
+not understand Spinoza. Leibnitz did not understand him, and the
+followers of Leibnitz do not understand him now. If he were no more than
+what he is described in the book before us--if his metaphysics were
+'miserable,' if his philosophy was absurd, and he himself nothing more
+than a second-rate disciple of Descartes--we can assure M. de Careil
+that we should long ago have heard the last of him.
+
+There must be something else, something very different from this, to
+explain the position which he holds in Germany, or the fascination which
+his writings exerted over such minds as those of Lessing or of Göthe;
+the fact of so enduring an influence is more than a sufficient answer to
+mere depreciating criticism. This, however, is not a point which there
+is any use in pressing. Our present business is to justify the two
+assertions which we have made. First, that Leibnitz borrowed his _Theory
+of the Harmonie Pré-établie_ from Spinoza, without acknowledgment; and,
+secondly, that this theory is quite as inconsistent with religion as is
+that of Spinoza, and only differs from it in disguising its real
+character.
+
+First for the _Harmonie Pré-établie_. Spinoza's _Ethics_ appeared in
+1677; and we know that they were read by Leibnitz. In 1696, Leibnitz
+announced as a discovery of his own, a Theory of _The Communication of
+Substances_, which he illustrates in the following manner:--
+
+'Vous ne comprenez pas, dites-vous, comment je pourrois prouver ce que
+j'ai avancé touchant la communication, ou l'harmonie de deux substances
+aussi différentes que l'âme et le corps? Il est vrai que je crois en
+avoir trouvé le moyen; et voici comment je prétends vous satisfaire.
+Figurez-vous deux horloges ou montres qui s'accordent parfaitement. Or
+cela se peut faire de trois manières. La 1^{e} consiste dans une
+influence mutuelle. La 2^{e} est d'y attacher un ouvrier habile qui les
+redresse, et les mette d'accord à tous moments. La 3^{e} est de
+fabriquer ces deux pendules avec tant d'art et de justesse, qu'on se
+puisse assurer de leur accord dans la suite. Mettez maintenant l'âme et
+le corps à la place de ces deux pendules; leur accord peut arriver par
+l'une de ces trois manières. La voye d'influence est celle de la
+philosophie vulgaire; mais comme l'on ne sauroit concevoir des
+particules matérielles qui puissent passer d'une de ces substances dans
+l'autre, il faut abandonner ce sentiment. La voye de l'assistance
+continuelle du Créateur est celle du système des causes occasionnelles;
+mais je tiens que c'est faire intervenir Deus ex machinâ, dans une chose
+naturelle et ordinaire, où selon la raison il ne doit concourir, que do
+la manière qu'il concourt à toutes les autres choses naturelles. Ainsi
+il ne reste que mon hypothèse; c'est-à-dire que la voye de l'harmonie.
+Dieu a fait dès le commencement chacune de ces deux substances de telle
+nature, qu'en ne suivant que ces propres loix qu'elle a reçues avec son
+être, elle s'accorde pourtant avec l'autre tout comme s'il y avoit une
+influence mutuelle, ou comme si Dieu y mettoit toujours la main au-delà
+de son concours général. Après cela je n'ai pas besoin de rien prouver à
+moins qu'on ne veuille exiger que je prouve que Dieu est assez habile
+pour se servir de cette artifice,' &c.--LEIBNITZ, _Opera_, p. 133.
+Berlin edition, 1840.
+
+Leibnitz, as we have said, attempts to reconcile his system with
+Christianity, and therefore, of course, this theory of the relation of
+mind and body wears a very different aspect under his treatment, from
+what it wears under that of Spinoza. But Spinoza and Leibnitz both agree
+in this one peculiar conception in which they differ from all other
+philosophers before or after them--that mind and body have no direct
+communication with each other, and that the phenomena of them merely
+correspond. M. de Careil says they both borrowed it from Descartes; but
+that is impossible. Descartes held no such opinion; it was the precise
+point of disagreement at which Spinoza parted from him; and therefore,
+since in point of date Spinoza had the advantage of Leibnitz, and we
+know that Leibnitz was acquainted with his writings, we must either
+suppose that he was directly indebted to Spinoza for an obligation which
+he ought to have acknowledged, or else, which is extremely improbable,
+that having read Spinoza and forgotten him, he afterwards re-originated
+for himself one of the most singular and peculiar notions which was ever
+offered to the belief of mankind.
+
+So much for the first point, which, after all, is but of little moment.
+It is more important to ascertain whether, in the hands of Leibnitz,
+this theory can be any better reconciled with what is commonly meant by
+religion; whether, that is, the ideas of obedience and disobedience,
+merit and demerit, judgment and retribution, have any proper place under
+it. Spinoza makes no pretension to anything of the kind, and openly
+declares that these ideas are ideas merely, and human mistakes.
+Leibnitz, in opposition to him, endeavours to re-establish them in the
+following manner. He conceives that the system of the universe has been
+arranged and predetermined from the moment at which it was launched into
+being; from the moment at which God selected it, with all its details,
+as the best which could exist; but that it is carried on by the action
+of individual creatures (monads as he calls them) which, though
+necessarily obeying the laws of their existence, yet obey them with a
+'character of spontaneity,' which although 'automata,' are yet voluntary
+agents; and therefore, by the consent of their hearts to their actions,
+entitle themselves to moral praise or moral censure. The question is,
+whether by the mere assertion of the co-existence of these opposite
+qualities in the monad man, he has proved that such qualities can
+co-exist. In our opinion, it is like speaking of a circular ellipse, or
+of a quadrilateral triangle. There is a plain dilemma in these matters
+from which no philosophy can extricate itself. If men can incur guilt,
+their actions might be other than they are. If they cannot act otherwise
+than they do, they cannot incur guilt. So at least it appears to us;
+yet, in the darkness of our knowledge, we would not complain merely of a
+theory, and if our earthly life were all in all, and the grave remained
+the extreme horizon of our hopes and fears, the _Harmonie Pré-établie_
+might be tolerated as credible, and admired as ingenious and beautiful.
+It is when forcibly attached to a creed of the future, with which it has
+no natural connection, that it assumes its repulsive features. The world
+may be in the main good; while the good, from the unknown condition of
+its existence, may be impossible without some intermixture of evil; and
+although Leibnitz was at times staggered even himself by the misery and
+wickedness which he witnessed, and was driven to comfort himself with
+the reflection that this earth might be but one world in the midst of
+the universe, and perhaps the single chequered exception in an infinity
+of stainless globes, yet we would not quarrel with a hypothesis because
+it was imperfect; it might pass as a possible conjecture on a dark
+subject, when nothing better than conjecture was attainable.
+
+But as soon as we are told that the evil in these human 'automata' being
+a necessary condition of this world which God has called into being, is
+yet infinitely detestable to God; that the creatures who suffer under
+the accursed necessity of committing sin are infinitely guilty in God's
+eyes, for doing what they have no power to avoid, and may therefore be
+justly punished in everlasting fire; we recoil against the paradox.
+
+No disciple of Leibnitz will maintain, that unless he had found this
+belief in an eternity of penal retribution an article of the popular
+creed, such a doctrine would have formed a natural appendage of his
+system; and if M. de Careil desires to know why the influence of
+Spinoza, whose genius he considers so insignificant, has been so deep
+and so enduring, while Leibnitz has only secured for himself a mere
+admiration of his talents, it is because Spinoza was not afraid to be
+consistent, even at the price of the world's reprobation, and refused to
+purchase the applause of his own age at the sacrifice of sincerity.
+
+[P] _Réfutation Inédite de Spinoza._ Par Leibnitz. _Précédée d'une
+Mémoire_, par Foucher de Careil. Paris. 1854.
+
+
+
+
+THE DISSOLUTION OF THE MONASTERIES.[Q]
+
+
+To be entirely just in our estimate of other ages is not difficult--it
+is impossible. Even what is passing in our presence we see but through a
+glass darkly. The mind as well as the eye adds something of its own,
+before an image, even of the clearest object, can be painted upon it.
+
+And in historical enquiries, the most instructed thinkers have but a
+limited advantage over the most illiterate. Those who know the most,
+approach least to agreement. The most careful investigations are
+diverging roads--the further men travel upon them, the greater the
+interval by which they are divided. In the eyes of David Hume, the
+history of the Saxon Princes is 'the scuffling of kites and crows.'
+Father Newman would mortify the conceit of a degenerate England by
+pointing to the sixty saints and the hundred confessors who were trained
+in her royal palaces for the Calendar of the Blessed. How vast a chasm
+yawns between these two conceptions of the same era! Through what common
+term can the student pass from one into the other?
+
+Or, to take an instance yet more noticeable. The history of England
+scarcely interests Mr. Macaulay before the Revolution of the seventeenth
+century. To Lord John Russell, the Reformation was the first outcome
+from centuries of folly and ferocity; and Mr. Hallam's more temperate
+language softens, without concealing, a similar conclusion. These
+writers have all studied what they describe. Mr. Carlyle has studied the
+same subject with power at least equal to theirs, and to him the
+greatness of English character was waning with the dawn of English
+literature; the race of heroes was already failing. The era of action
+was yielding before the era of speech.
+
+All these views may seem to ourselves exaggerated; we may have settled
+into some moderate _via media_, or have carved out our own ground on an
+original pattern; but if we are wise, the differences in other men's
+judgments will teach us to be diffident. The more distinctly we have
+made history bear witness in favour of our particular opinions, the more
+we have multiplied the chances against the truth of our own theory.
+
+Again, supposing that we have made a truce with 'opinions,' properly so
+called; supposing we have satisfied ourselves that it is idle to quarrel
+upon points on which good men differ, and that it is better to attend
+rather to what we certainly know; supposing that, either from superior
+wisdom, or from the conceit of superior wisdom, we have resolved that we
+will look for human perfection neither exclusively in the Old World nor
+exclusively in the New--neither among Catholics nor Protestants, among
+Whigs or Tories, heathens or Christians--that we have laid aside
+accidental differences, and determined to recognise only moral
+distinctions, to love moral worth, and to hate moral evil, wherever we
+find them;--even supposing all this, we have not much improved our
+position--we cannot leap from our shadow.
+
+Eras, like individuals, differ from one another in the species of virtue
+which they encourage. In one age, we find the virtues of the warrior; in
+the next, of the saint. The ascetic and the soldier in their turn
+disappear; an industrial era succeeds, bringing with it the virtues of
+common sense, of grace, and refinement. There is the virtue of energy
+and command, there is the virtue of humility and patient suffering. All
+these are different, and all are, or may be, of equal moral value; yet,
+from the constitution of our minds, we are so framed that we cannot
+equally appreciate all; we sympathise instinctively with the person who
+most represents our own ideal--with the period when the graces which
+most harmonise with our own tempers have been especially cultivated.
+Further, if we leave out of sight these refinements, and content
+ourselves with the most popular conceptions of morality, there is this
+immeasurable difficulty--so great, yet so little considered,--that
+goodness is positive as well as negative, and consists in the active
+accomplishment of certain things which we are bound to do, as well as in
+the abstaining from things which we are bound not to do. And here the
+warp and woof vary in shade and pattern. Many a man, with the help of
+circumstances, may pick his way clear through life, never having
+violated one prohibitive commandment, and yet at last be fit only for
+the place of the unprofitable servant--he may not have committed either
+sin or crime, yet never have felt the pulsation of a single unselfish
+emotion. Another, meanwhile, shall have been hurried by an impulsive
+nature into fault after fault--shall have been reckless, improvident,
+perhaps profligate, yet be fitter after all for the kingdom of heaven
+than the Pharisee--fitter, because against the catalogue of faults there
+could perhaps be set a fairer list of acts of comparative generosity and
+self-forgetfulness--fitter, because to those who love much, much is
+forgiven. Fielding had no occasion to make Blifil, behind his decent
+coat, a traitor and a hypocrite. It would have been enough to have
+coloured him in and out alike in the steady hues of selfishness, afraid
+of offending the upper powers as he was afraid of offending
+Allworthy--not from any love for what was good, but solely because it
+would be imprudent--because the pleasure to be gained was not worth the
+risk of consequences. Such a Blifil would have answered the novelist's
+purpose--for he would have remained a worse man in the estimation of
+some of us than Tom Jones.
+
+So the truth is; but unfortunately it is only where accurate knowledge
+is stimulated by affection, that we are able to feel it. Persons who
+live beyond our own circle, and, still more, persons who have lived in
+another age, receive what is called justice, not charity; and justice is
+supposed to consist in due allotments of censure for each special act of
+misconduct, leaving merit unrecognised. There are many reasons for this
+harsh method of judging. We must decide of men by what we know, and it
+is easier to know faults than to know virtues. Faults are specific,
+easily described, easily appreciated, easily remembered. And again,
+there is, or may be, hypocrisy in virtue; but no one pretends to vice
+who is not vicious. The bad things which can be proved of a man we know
+to be genuine. He was a spendthrift, he was an adulterer, he gambled, he
+equivocated. These are blots positive, unless untrue, and when they
+stand alone, tinge the whole character.
+
+This also is to be observed in historical criticism. All men feel a
+necessity of being on some terms with their conscience, at their own
+expense or at another's. If they cannot part with their faults, they
+will at least call them by their right name when they meet with such
+faults elsewhere; and thus, when they find accounts of deeds of violence
+or sensuality, of tyranny, of injustice of man to man, of great and
+extensive suffering, or any of those other misfortunes which the
+selfishness of men has at various times occasioned, they will vituperate
+the doers of such things, and the age which has permitted them to be
+done, with the full emphasis of virtuous indignation, while all the time
+they are themselves doing things which will be described, with no less
+justice, in the same colour, by an equally virtuous posterity.
+
+Historians are fond of recording the supposed sufferings of the poor in
+the days of serfdom and villanage; yet the records of the strikes of the
+last ten years, when told by the sufferers, contain pictures no less
+fertile in tragedy. We speak of famines and plagues under the Tudors and
+Stuarts; but the Irish famine, and the Irish plague of 1847, the last
+page of such horrors which has yet been turned over, is the most
+horrible of all. We can conceive a description of England during the
+year which has just closed over us (1856), true in all its details,
+containing no one statement which can be challenged, no single
+exaggeration which can be proved; and this description, if given without
+the correcting traits, shall make ages to come marvel why the Cities of
+the Plain were destroyed, and England was allowed to survive. The frauds
+of trusted men, high in power and high in supposed religion; the
+wholesale poisonings; the robberies; the adulteration of food--nay, of
+almost everything exposed for sale--the cruel usage of women--children
+murdered for the burial fees--life and property insecure in open day in
+the open streets--splendour such as the world never saw before upon
+earth, with vice and squalor crouching under its walls--let all this be
+written down by an enemy, or let it be ascertained hereafter by the
+investigation of a posterity which desires to judge us as we generally
+have judged our forefathers, and few years will show darker in the
+English annals than the year which we have just left behind us. Yet we
+know, in the honesty of our hearts, how unjust such a picture would be.
+Our future advocate, if we are so happy as to find one, may not be able
+to disprove a single article in the indictment; and yet we know that, as
+the world goes, he will be right if he marks the year with a white
+stroke--as one in which, on the whole, the moral harvest was better than
+an average.
+
+Once more: our knowledge of any man is always inadequate--even of the
+unit which each of us calls himself; and the first condition under which
+we can know a man at all is, that he be in essentials something like
+ourselves; that our own experience be an interpreter which shall open
+the secrets of his experience; and it often happens, even among our
+contemporaries, that we are altogether baffled. The Englishman and the
+Italian may understand each other's speech, but the language of each
+other's ideas has still to be learnt. Our long failures in Ireland have
+risen from a radical incongruity of character which has divided the Celt
+from the Saxon. And again, in the same country, the Catholic will be a
+mystery to the Protestant, and the Protestant to the Catholic. Their
+intellects have been shaped in opposite moulds; they are like
+instruments which cannot be played in concert. In the same way, but in a
+far higher degree, we are divided from the generations which have
+preceded us in this planet--we try to comprehend a Pericles or a
+Cæsar--an image rises before us which we seem to recognise as belonging
+to our common humanity. There is this feature which is familiar to
+us--and this--and this. We are full of hope; the lineaments, one by one,
+pass into clearness; when suddenly the figure becomes enveloped in a
+cloud--some perplexity crosses our analysis, baffling it utterly, the
+phantom which we have evoked dies away before our eyes, scornfully
+mocking our incapacity to master it.
+
+The English antecedent to the Reformation are nearer to us than Greeks
+or Romans; and yet there is a large interval between the baron who
+fought at Barnet field, and his polished descendant in a modern
+drawing-room. The scale of appreciation and the rule of judgment--the
+habits, the hopes, the fears, the emotions--have utterly changed.
+
+In perusing modern histories, the present writer has been struck dumb
+with wonder at the facility with which men will fill in chasms in their
+information with conjecture; will guess at the motives which have
+prompted actions; will pass their censures, as if all secrets of the
+past lay out on an open scroll before them. He is obliged to say for
+himself that, wherever he has been fortunate enough to discover
+authentic explanations of English historical difficulties, it is rare
+indeed that he has found any conjecture, either of his own or of any
+other modern writer, confirmed. The true motive has almost invariably
+been of a kind which no modern experience could have suggested.
+
+Thoughts such as these form a hesitating prelude to an expression of
+opinion on a controverted question. They will serve, however, to
+indicate the limits within which the said opinion is supposed to be
+hazarded. And in fact, neither in this nor in any historical subject is
+the conclusion so clear that it can be enunciated in a definite form.
+The utmost which can be safely hazarded with history is to relate
+honestly ascertained facts, with only such indications of a judicial
+sentence upon them as may be suggested in the form in which the story is
+arranged.
+
+Whether the monastic bodies of England, at the time of their
+dissolution, were really in that condition of moral corruption which is
+laid to their charge in the Act of Parliament by which they were
+dissolved, is a point which it seems hopeless to argue. Roman Catholic,
+and indeed almost all English, writers who are not committed to an
+unfavourable opinion by the ultra-Protestantism of their doctrines, seem
+to have agreed of late years that the accusations, if not false, were
+enormously exaggerated. The dissolution, we are told, was a
+predetermined act of violence and rapacity; and when the reports and the
+letters of the visitors are quoted in justification of the Government,
+the discussion is closed with the dismissal of every unfavourable
+witness from the court, as venal, corrupt, calumnious--in fact, as a
+suborned liar. Upon these terms the argument is easily disposed of; and
+if it were not that truth is in all matters better than falsehood, it
+would be idle to reopen a question which cannot be justly dealt with. No
+evidence can affect convictions which have been arrived at without
+evidence--and why should we attempt a task which it is hopeless to
+accomplish? It seems necessary, however, to reassert the actual state of
+the surviving testimony from time to time, if it be only to sustain the
+links of the old traditions; and the present paper will contain one or
+two pictures of a peculiar kind, exhibiting the life and habits of those
+institutions, which have been lately met with chiefly among the
+unprinted Records. In anticipation of any possible charge of unfairness
+in judging from isolated instances, we disclaim simply all desire to
+judge--all wish to do anything beyond relating certain ascertained
+stories. Let it remain, to those who are perverse enough to insist upon
+it, an open question whether the monasteries were more corrupt under
+Henry the Eighth than they had been four hundred years earlier. The
+dissolution would have been equally a necessity; for no reasonable
+person would desire that bodies of men should have been maintained for
+the only business of singing masses, when the efficacy of masses was no
+longer believed. Our present desire is merely this--to satisfy ourselves
+whether the Government, in discharging a duty which could not be
+dispensed with, condescended to falsehood in seeking a vindication for
+themselves which they did not require; or whether they had cause really
+to believe the majority of the monastic bodies to be as they
+affirmed--whether, that is to say, there really were such cases either
+of flagrant immorality, neglect of discipline, or careless waste and
+prodigality, as to justify the general censure which was pronounced
+against the system by the Parliament and the Privy Council.
+
+Secure in the supposed completeness with which Queen Mary's agents
+destroyed the Records of the visitation under her father, Roman Catholic
+writers have taken refuge in a disdainful denial; and the Anglicans, who
+for the most part, while contented to enjoy the fruits of the
+Reformation, detest the means by which it was brought about, have taken
+the same view. Bishop Latimer tells us that, when the Report of the
+visitors of the abbeys was read in the Commons House, there rose from
+all sides one long cry of 'Down with them.' But Bishop Latimer, in the
+opinion of High Churchmen, is not to be believed. Do we produce letters
+of the visitors themselves, we are told that they are the slanders
+prepared to justify a preconceived purpose of spoliation. No witness, it
+seems, will be admitted unless it be the witness of a friend. Unless
+some enemy of the Reformation can be found to confess the crimes which
+made the Reformation necessary, the crimes themselves are to be regarded
+as unproved. This is a hard condition. We appeal to Wolsey. Wolsey
+commenced the suppression. Wolsey first made public the infamies which
+disgraced the Church; while, notwithstanding, he died the devoted
+servant of the Church. This evidence is surely admissible? But no:
+Wolsey, too, must be put out of court. Wolsey was a courtier and a
+time-server. Wolsey was a tyrant's minion. Wolsey was--in short, we know
+not what Wolsey was, or what he was not. Who can put confidence in a
+charlatan? Behind the bulwarks of such objections, the champion of the
+abbeys may well believe himself secure.
+
+And yet, unreasonable though these demands may be, it happens, after
+all, that we are able partially to gratify them. It is strange that, of
+all extant accusations against any one of the abbeys, the heaviest is
+from a quarter which even Lingard himself would scarcely call
+suspicious. No picture left us by Henry's visitors surpasses, even if it
+equals, a description of the condition of the Abbey of St. Albans, in
+the last quarter of the fifteenth century, drawn by Morton, Henry the
+Seventh's minister, Cardinal Archbishop, Legate of the Apostolic See, in
+a letter addressed by him to the Abbot of St. Albans himself. We must
+request our reader's special attention for the next two pages.
+
+In the year 1489, Pope Innocent the Eighth--moved with the enormous
+stories which reached his ear of the corruption of the houses of
+religion in England--granted a commission to the Archbishop of
+Canterbury to make enquiries whether these stories were true, and to
+proceed to correct and reform as might seem good to him. The regular
+clergy were exempt from episcopal visitation, except under especial
+directions from Rome. The occasion had appeared so serious as to make
+extraordinary interference necessary.
+
+On the receipt of the Papal commission, Cardinal Morton, among other
+letters, wrote the following letter:--
+
+    John, by Divine permission, Archbishop of Canterbury, Primate of all
+    England, Legate of the Apostolic See, to William, Abbot of the
+    Monastery of St. Albans, greeting.
+
+    We have received certain letters under lead, the copies whereof we
+    herewith send you, from our most holy Lord and Father in Christ,
+    Innocent, by Divine Providence Pope, the eighth of that name. We
+    therefore, John, the Archbishop, the visitor, reformer, inquisitor,
+    and judge therein mentioned, in reverence for the Apostolic See,
+    have taken upon ourselves the burden of enforcing the said
+    commission; and have determined that we will proceed by, and
+    according to, the full force, tenor, and effect of the same.
+
+    And it has come to our ears, being at once publicly notorious and
+    brought before us upon the testimony of many witnesses worthy of
+    credit, that you, the abbot afore-mentioned, have been of long time
+    noted and diffamed, and do yet continue so noted, of simony, of
+    usury, of dilapidation and waste of the goods, revenues, and
+    possessions of the said monastery, and of certain other enormous
+    crimes and excesses hereafter written. In the rule, custody, and
+    administration of the goods, spiritual and temporal, of the said
+    monastery, you are so remiss, so negligent, so prodigal, that
+    whereas the said monastery was of old times founded and endowed by
+    the pious devotion of illustrious princes, of famous memory,
+    heretofore kings of this land, the most noble progenitors of our
+    most serene Lord and King that now is, in order that true religion
+    might flourish there, that the name of the Most High, in whose
+    honour and glory it was instituted, might be duly celebrated there;
+
+    And whereas, in days heretofore, the regular observance of the said
+    rule was greatly regarded, and hospitality was diligently kept;
+
+    Nevertheless, for no little time, during which you have presided in
+    the same monastery, you and certain of your fellow-monks and
+    brethren (whose blood, it is feared, through your neglect, a severe
+    Judge will require at your hand) have relaxed the measure and form
+    of religious life; you have laid aside the pleasant yoke of
+    contemplation, and all regular observances--hospitality, alms, and
+    those other offices of piety which of old time were exercised and
+    ministered therein have decreased, and by your faults, your
+    carelessness, your neglect and deed, do daily decrease more and
+    more, and cease to be regarded--the pious vows of the founders are
+    defrauded of their just intent--the ancient rule of your order is
+    deserted; and not a few of your fellow-monks and brethren, as we
+    most deeply grieve to learn, giving themselves over to a reprobate
+    mind, laying aside the fear of God, do lead only a life of
+    lasciviousness--nay, as is horrible to relate, be not afraid to
+    defile the holy places, even the very churches of God, by infamous
+    intercourse with nuns, &c. &c.
+
+    You yourself, moreover, among other grave enormities and abominable
+    crimes whereof you are guilty, and for which you are noted and
+    diffamed, have, in the first place, admitted a certain married
+    woman, named Elena Germyn, who has separated herself without just
+    cause from her husband, and for some time past has lived in adultery
+    with another man, to be a nun or sister in the house or Priory of
+    Bray, lying, as you pretend, within your jurisdiction. You have next
+    appointed the same woman to be prioress of the said house,
+    notwithstanding that her said husband was living at the time, and is
+    still alive. And finally, Father Thomas Sudbury, one of your brother
+    monks, publicly, notoriously, and without interference or punishment
+    from you, has associated, and still associates, with this woman as
+    an adulterer with his harlot.
+
+    Moreover, divers other of your brethren and fellow-monks have
+    resorted, and do resort, continually to her and other women at the
+    same place, as to a public brothel or receiving house, and have
+    received no correction therefor.
+
+    Nor is Bray the only house into which you have introduced disorder.
+    At the nunnery of Sapwell, which you also contend to be under your
+    jurisdiction, you change the prioresses and superiors again and
+    again at your own will and caprice. Here, as well as at Bray, you
+    depose those who are good and religious; you promote to the highest
+    dignities the worthless and the vicious. The duties of the order are
+    cast aside; virtue is neglected; and by these means so much cost and
+    extravagance has been caused, that to provide means for your
+    indulgence you have introduced certain of your brethren to preside
+    in their houses under the name of guardians, when in fact they are
+    no guardians, but thieves and notorious villains; and with their
+    help you have caused and permitted the goods of the same priories to
+    be dispensed, or to speak more truly to be dissipated, in the
+    above-described corruptions and other enormous and accursed
+    offences. Those places once religious are rendered and reputed as it
+    were profane and impious; and by your own and your creatures'
+    conduct, are so impoverished as to be reduced to the verge of ruin.
+
+    In like manner, also, you have dealt with certain other cells of
+    monks, which you say are subject to you, even within the monastery
+    of the glorious proto-martyr Alban himself. You have dilapidated the
+    common property; you have made away with the jewels; the copses, the
+    woods, the underwood, almost all the oaks, and other forest trees,
+    to the value of eight thousand marks and more, you have made to be
+    cut down without distinction, and they have by you been sold and
+    alienated. The brethren of the abbey, some of whom, as is reported,
+    are given over to all the evil things of the world, neglect the
+    service of God altogether. They live with harlots and mistresses
+    publicly and continuously, within the precincts of the monastery and
+    without. Some of them, who are covetous of honour and promotion, and
+    desirous therefore of pleasing your cupidity, have stolen and made
+    away with the chalices and other jewels of the church. They have
+    even sacrilegiously extracted the precious stones from the very
+    shrine of St. Alban; and you have not punished these men, but have
+    rather knowingly supported and maintained them. If any of your
+    brethren be living justly and religiously, if any be wise and
+    virtuous, these you straightway depress and hold in hatred.... You
+    ...
+
+But we need not transcribe further this overwhelming document. It
+pursues its way through mire and filth to its most lame and impotent
+conclusion. After all this, the abbot was not deposed; he was invited
+merely to reconsider his doings, and, if possible, amend them. Such was
+Church discipline, even under an extraordinary commission from Rome.
+But the most incorrigible Anglican will scarcely question the truth of a
+picture drawn by such a hand; and it must be added that this one
+unexceptionable indictment lends at once assured credibility to the
+reports which were presented fifty years later, on the general
+visitation. There is no longer room for the presumptive objection that
+charges so revolting could not be true. We see that in their worst form
+they could be true, and the evidence of Legh and Leghton, of Rice and
+Bedyll, as it remains in their letters to Cromwell, must be shaken in
+detail, or else it must be accepted as correct. We cannot dream that
+Archbishop Morton was mistaken, or was misled by false information. St.
+Albans was no obscure priory in a remote and thinly-peopled county. The
+Abbot of St. Albans was a peer of the realm, taking precedence of
+bishops, living in the full glare of notoriety, within a few miles of
+London. The archbishop had ample means of ascertaining the truth; and,
+we may be sure, had taken care to examine his ground before he left on
+record so tremendous an accusation. This story is true--as true as it is
+piteous. We will pause a moment over it before we pass from this, once
+more to ask our passionate Church friends whether still they will
+persist that the abbeys were no worse under the Tudors than they had
+been in their origin, under the Saxons, or under the first Norman and
+Plantagenet kings. We refuse to believe it. The abbeys which towered in
+the midst of the English towns, the houses clustered at their feet like
+subjects round some majestic queen, were images indeed of the civil
+supremacy which the Church of the Middle Ages had asserted for itself;
+but they were images also of an inner spiritual sublimity, which had won
+the homage of grateful and admiring nations. The heavenly graces had
+once descended upon the monastic orders, making them ministers of mercy,
+patterns of celestial life, breathing witnesses of the power of the
+Spirit in renewing and sanctifying the heart. And then it was that art
+and wealth and genius poured out their treasures to raise fitting
+tabernacles for the dwelling of so divine a soul. Alike in the village
+and the city, amongst the unadorned walls and lowly roofs which closed
+in the humble dwellings of the laity, the majestic houses of the Father
+of mankind and of his especial servants rose up in sovereign beauty.
+And ever at the sacred gates sat Mercy, pouring out relief from a
+never-failing store to the poor and the suffering; ever within the
+sacred aisles the voices of holy men were pealing heavenwards in
+intercession for the sins of mankind; and such blessed influences were
+thought to exhale around those mysterious precincts, that even the poor
+outcasts of society--the debtor, the felon, and the outlaw--gathered
+round the walls as the sick men sought the shadow of the apostle, and
+lay there sheltered from the avenging hand, till their sins were washed
+from off their souls. The abbeys of the middle ages floated through the
+storms of war and conquest, like the ark upon the waves of the flood, in
+the midst of violence remaining inviolate, through the awful reverence
+which surrounded them. The abbeys, as Henry's visitors found them, were
+as little like what they once had been, as the living man in the pride
+of his growth is like the corpse which the earth makes haste to hide for
+ever.
+
+The official letters which reveal the condition into which the monastic
+establishments had degenerated, are chiefly in the Cotton Library, and a
+large number of them have been published by the Camden Society. Besides
+these, however, there are in the Rolls House many other documents which
+confirm and complete the statements of the writers of those letters.
+There is a part of what seems to have been a digest of the 'Black
+Book'--an epitome of iniquities, under the title of the 'Compendium
+Compertorum.' There are also reports from private persons, private
+entreaties for enquiry, depositions of monks in official examinations,
+and other similar papers, which, in many instances, are too offensive to
+be produced, and may rest in obscurity, unless contentious persons
+compel us to bring them forward. Some of these, however, throw curious
+light on the habits of the time, and on the collateral disorders which
+accompanied the more gross enormities. They show us, too, that although
+the dark tints predominate, the picture was not wholly black; that as
+just Lot was in the midst of Sodom, yet was unable by his single
+presence to save the guilty city from destruction, so in the latest era
+of monasticism there were types yet lingering of an older and fairer
+age, who, nevertheless, were not delivered, like the patriarch, but
+perished most of them with the institution to which they belonged. The
+hideous exposure is not untinted with fairer lines; and we see traits
+here and there of true devotion, mistaken but heroic.
+
+Of these documents two specimens shall be given in this place, one of
+either kind; and both, so far as we know, new to modern history. The
+first is so singular, that we print it as it is found--a genuine
+antique, fished up, in perfect preservation, out of the wreck of the old
+world.
+
+About eight miles from Ludlow, in the county of Herefordshire, once
+stood the abbey of Wigmore. There was Wigmore Castle, a stronghold of
+the Welsh Marches, now, we believe, a modern, well-conditioned mansion;
+and Wigmore Abbey, of which we do not hear that there are any remaining
+traces. Though now vanished, however, like so many of its kind, the
+house was three hundred years ago in vigorous existence; and when the
+stir commenced for an enquiry, the proceedings of the abbot of this
+place gave occasion to a memorial which stands in the Rolls collection
+as follows:--[R]
+
+    Articles to be objected against John Smart, Abbot of the Monastery
+    of Wigmore, in the county of Hereford, to be exhibited to the Right
+    Honourable Lord Thomas Cromwell, the Lord Privy Seal and Vice-gerent
+    to the King's Majesty.
+
+    1. The said abbot is to be accused of simony, as well for taking
+    money for advocation and putations of benefices, as for giving of
+    orders, or more truly, selling them, and that to such persons which
+    have been rejected elsewhere, and of little learning and light
+    consideration.
+
+    2. The said abbot hath promoted to orders many scholars when all
+    other bishops did refrain to give such orders on account of certain
+    ordinances devised by the King's Majesty and his Council for the
+    common weal of this realm. Then resorted to the said abbot scholars
+    out of all parts, whom he would promote to orders by sixty at a
+    time, and sometimes more, and otherwhiles less. And sometimes the
+    said abbot would give orders by night within his chamber, and
+    otherwise in the church early in the morning, and now and then at a
+    chapel out of the abbey. So that there be many unlearned and light
+    priests made by the said abbot, and in the diocese of Llandaff, and
+    in the places afore named--a thousand, as it is esteemed, by the
+    space of this seven years he hath made priests, and received not so
+    little money of them as a thousand pounds for their orders.
+
+    3. Item, that the said abbot now of late, when he could not be
+    suffered to give general orders, for the most part doth give orders
+    by pretence of dispensation; and by that colour he promoteth them to
+    orders by two and three, and takes much money of them, both for
+    their orders and for to purchase their dispensations after the time
+    he hath promoted them to their orders.
+
+    4. Item, the said abbot hath hurt and dismayed his tenants by
+    putting them from their leases, and by enclosing their commons from
+    them, and selling and utter wasting of the woods that were wont to
+    relieve and succour them.
+
+    5. Item, the said abbot hath sold corradyes, to the damage of the
+    said monastery.
+
+    6. Item, the said abbot hath alienate and sold the jewels and plate
+    of the monastery, to the value of five hundred marks, _to purchase
+    of the Bishop of Rome his bulls to be a bishop, and to annex the
+    said abbey to his bishopric, to that intent that he should not for
+    his misdeeds be punished, or deprived from his said abbey_.
+
+    7. Item, that the said abbot, long after that other bishops had
+    renounced the Bishop of Rome, and professed them to the King's
+    Majesty, did use, but more verily usurped, the office of a bishop by
+    virtue of his first bulls purchased from Rome, till now of late, as
+    it will appear by the date of his confirmation, if he have any.
+
+    8. Item, that he the said abbot hath lived viciously, and kept to
+    concubines divers and many women that is openly known.
+
+    9. Item, that the said abbot doth yet continue his vicious living,
+    as it is known, openly.
+
+    10. Item, that the said abbot hath spent and wasted much of the
+    goods of the said monastery upon the foresaid women.
+
+    11. Item, that the said abbot is malicious and very wrathful, not
+    regarding what he saith or doeth in his fury or anger.
+
+    12. Item, that one Richard Gyles bought of the abbot and convent of
+    Wigmore a corradye, and a chamber for him and his wife for term of
+    their lives; and when the said Richard Gyles was aged and was very
+    weak, he disposed his goods, and made executors to execute his will.
+    And when the said abbot now being ---- perceived that the said
+    Richard Gyles was rich, and had not bequested so much of his goods
+    to him as he would have had, the said abbot then came to the chamber
+    of the said Richard Gyles, and put out thence all his friends and
+    kinsfolk that kept him in his sickness; and then the said abbot set
+    his brother and other of his servants to keep the sick man; and the
+    night next coming after the said Richard Gyles's coffer was broken,
+    and thence taken all that was in the same, to the value of forty
+    marks; and long after the said abbot confessed, before the executors
+    of the said Richard Gyles, that it was his deed.
+
+    13. Item, that the said abbot, after he had taken away the goods of
+    the said Richard Gyles, used daily to reprove and check the said
+    Richard Gyles, and inquire of him where was more of his coin and
+    money; and at the last the said abbot thought he lived too long, and
+    made the sick man, after much sorry keeping, to be taken from his
+    feather-bed, and laid upon a cold mattress, and kept his friends
+    from him to his death.
+
+    15. Item, that the said abbot consented to the death and murdering
+    of one John Tichkill, that was slain at his procuring, at the said
+    monastery, by Sir Richard Cubley, canon and chaplain to the said
+    abbot; which canon is and ever hath been since that time chief of
+    the said abbot's council; and is supported to carry crossbowes, and
+    to go whither he lusteth at any time, to fishing and hunting in the
+    king's forests, parks, and chases; but little or nothing serving the
+    quire, as other brethren do, neither corrected of the abbot for any
+    trespass he doth commit.
+
+    16. Item, that the said abbot hath been perjured oft, as is to be
+    proved and is proved; and as it is supposed, did not make a true
+    inventory of the goods, chattels, and jewels of his monastery to the
+    King's Majesty and his Council.
+
+    17. Item, that the said abbot hath infringed all the king's
+    injunctions which were given him by Doctor Cave to observe and keep;
+    and when he was denounced _in pleno capitulo_ to have broken the
+    same, he would have put in prison the brother as did denounce him to
+    have broken the same injunctions, save that he was let by the
+    convent there.
+
+    18. Item, that the said abbot hath openly preached against the
+    doctrine of Christ, saying he ought not to love his enemy, but as he
+    loves the devil; and that he should love his enemy's soul, but not
+    his body.
+
+    19. Item, that the said abbot hath taken but small regard to the
+    good-living of his household.
+
+    20. Item, that the said abbot hath had and hath yet a special favour
+    to misdoers and manquellers, thieves, deceivers of their neighbours,
+    and by them [is] most ruled and counselled.
+
+    21. Item, that the said abbot hath granted leases of farms and
+    advocations first to one man, and took his fine, and also hath
+    granted the same lease to another man for more money; and then would
+    make to the last taker a lease or writing, with an antedate of the
+    first lease, which hath bred great dissension among gentlemen--as
+    Master Blunt and Master Moysey, and other takers of such leases--and
+    that often.
+
+    22. Item, the said abbot having the contrepaynes of leases in his
+    keeping, hath, for money, rased out the number of years mentioned in
+    the said leases, and writ a fresh number in the former taker's
+    lease, and in the contrepayne thereof, to the intent to defraud the
+    taker or buyer of the residue of such leases, of whom he hath
+    received the money.
+
+    23. Item, the said abbot hath not, according to the foundation of
+    his monastery, admitted freely tenants into certain alms-houses
+    belonging to the said monastery; but of them he hath taken large
+    fines, and some of them he hath put away that would not give him
+    fines: whither poor, aged, and impotent people were wont to be
+    freely admitted, and [to] receive the founder's alms that of the old
+    customs [were] limited to the same--which alms is also diminished by
+    the said abbot.
+
+    24. Item, that the said abbot did not deliver the bulls of his
+    bishopric, that he purchased from Rome, to our sovereign lord the
+    king's council till long after the time he had delivered and
+    exhibited the bulls of his monastery to them.
+
+    25. Item, that the said abbot hath detained and yet doth detain
+    servants' wages; and often when the said servants hath asked their
+    wages, the said abbot hath put them into the stocks, and beat them.
+
+    26. Item, the said abbot, in times past, hath had a great devotion
+    to ride to Llangarvan, in Wales, upon Lammas-day, to receive pardon
+    there; and on the even he would visit one Mary Hawle, an old
+    acquaintance of his, at the Welsh Poole, and on the morrow ride to
+    the foresaid Llangarvan, to be confessed and absolved, and the same
+    night return to company with the said Mary Hawle, at the Welsh Poole
+    aforesaid, and Kateryn, the said Mary Hawle her first daughter, whom
+    the said abbot long hath kept to concubine, and had children by her,
+    that he lately married at Ludlow. And [there be] others that have
+    been taken out of his chamber and put in the stocks within the said
+    abbey, and others that have complained upon him to the king's
+    council of the Marches of Wales; and the woman that dashed out his
+    teeth, that he would have had by violence, I will not name now, nor
+    other men's wives, lest it would offend your good lordship to read
+    or hear the same.
+
+    27. Item, the said abbot doth daily embezzle, sell, and convey the
+    goods and chattels, and jewels of the said monastery, having no need
+    so to do: for it is thought that he hath a thousand marks or two
+    thousand lying by him that he hath gotten by selling of orders, and
+    the jewels and plate of the monastery and corradyes; and it is to be
+    feared that he will alienate all the rest, unless your good lordship
+    speedily make redress and provision to let the same.
+
+    28. Item, the said abbot was accustomed yearly to preach at
+    Leynt-warden on the Festival of the Nativity of the Virgin Mary,
+    where and when the people were wont to offer to an image there, and
+    to the same the said abbot in his sermons would exhort them and
+    encourage them. But now the oblations be decayed, the abbot, espying
+    the image then to have a cote of silver plate and gilt, hath taken
+    away of his own authority the said image, and the plate turned to
+    his own use; and left his preaching there, saying it is no manner of
+    profit to any man, and the plate that was about the said image was
+    named to be worth forty pounds.
+
+    29. Item, the said abbot hath ever nourished enmity and discord
+    among his brethren; and hath not encouraged them to learn the laws
+    and the mystery of Christ. But he that least knew was most cherished
+    by him; and he hath been highly displeased and [hath] disdained when
+    his brothers would say that 'it is God's precept and doctrine that
+    ye ought to prefer before your ceremonies and vain constitutions.'
+    This saying was high disobedient, and should be grievously punished;
+    when that lying, obloquy, flattery, ignorance, derision, contumely,
+    discord, great swearing, drinking, hypocrisy, fraud, superstition,
+    deceit, conspiracy to wrong their neighbour, and other of that kind,
+    was had in special favour and regard. Laud and praise be to God that
+    hath sent us the true knowledge. Honour and long prosperity to our
+    sovereign lord and his noble council, that teaches to advance the
+    same. Amen.
+
+    By John Lee, your faithful bedeman, and canon of the said monastery
+    of Wigmore.
+
+    Postscript.--My good lord, there is in the said abbey a cross of
+    fine gold and precious stones, whereof one diamond was esteemed by
+    Doctor Booth, Bishop of Hereford, worth a hundred marks. In that
+    cross is enclosed a piece of wood, named to be of the cross that
+    Christ died upon, and to the same hath been offering. And when it
+    should be brought down to the church from the treasury, it was
+    brought down with lights, and like reverence as should have been
+    done to Christ himself. I fear lest the abbot upon Sunday next, when
+    he may enter the treasury, will take away the said cross and break
+    it, or turn it to his own use, with many other precious jewels that
+    be there.
+
+    All these articles afore written be true as to the substance and
+    true meaning of them, though peradventure for haste and lack of
+    counsel, some words be set amiss or out of their place. That I will
+    be ready to prove forasmuch as lies in me, when it shall like your
+    honourable lordship to direct your commission to men (or any man)
+    that will be indifferent and not corrupt to sit upon the same, at
+    the said abbey, where the witnesses and proofs be most ready and the
+    truth is best known, or at any other place where it shall be thought
+    most convenient by your high discretion and authority.
+
+The statutes of Provisors, commonly called Præmunire statutes, which,
+forbade all purchases of bulls from Rome under penalty of outlawry, have
+been usually considered in the highest degree oppressive; and more
+particularly the public censure has fallen upon the last application of
+those statutes, when, on Wolsey's fall, the whole body of the clergy
+were laid under a præmunire, and only obtained pardon on payment of a
+serious fine. Let no one regret that he has learnt to be tolerant to
+Roman Catholics as the nineteenth century knows them. But it is a
+spurious charity which, to remedy a modern injustice, hastens to its
+opposite; and when philosophic historians indulge in loose invective
+against the statesmen of the Reformation, they show themselves unfit to
+be trusted with the custody of our national annals. The Acts of
+Parliament speak plainly of the enormous abuses which had grown up under
+these bulls. Yet even the emphatic language of the statutes scarcely
+prepares us to find an abbot able to purchase with jewels stolen from
+his own convent a faculty to confer holy orders, though he had never
+been consecrated bishop, and to make a thousand pounds by selling the
+exercise of his privileges. This is the most flagrant case which has
+fallen under the eyes of the present writer. Yet it is but a choice
+specimen out of many. He was taught to believe, like other modern
+students of history, that the papal dispensations for immorality, of
+which we read in Fox and other Protestant writers, were calumnies, but
+he has been forced against his will to perceive that the supposed
+calumnies were but the plain truth; he has found among the records--for
+one thing, a list of more than twenty clergy in one diocese who had
+obtained licences to keep concubines.[S] After some experience, he
+advises all persons who are anxious to understand the English
+Reformation to place implicit confidence in the Statute Book. Every
+fresh record which is brought to light is a fresh evidence in its
+favour. In the fluctuations of the conflict there were parliaments, as
+there were princes, of opposing sentiments; and measures were passed,
+amended, repealed, or censured, as Protestants and Catholics came
+alternately into power. But whatever were the differences of opinion,
+the facts on either side which are stated in an Act of Parliament may be
+uniformly trusted. Even in the attainders for treason and heresy we
+admire the truthfulness of the details of the indictments, although we
+deplore the prejudice which at times could make a crime of virtue.
+
+We pass on to the next picture. Equal justice, or some attempt at it,
+was promised, and we shall perhaps part from the friends of the
+monasteries on better terms than they believe. At least, we shall add to
+our own history and to the Catholic martyrology a story of genuine
+interest.
+
+We have many accounts of the abbeys at the time of their actual
+dissolution. The resistance or acquiescence of superiors, the
+dismissals of the brethren, the sale of the property, the destruction of
+relics, &c., are all described. We know how the windows were taken out,
+how the glass appropriated, how the 'melter' accompanied the visitors to
+run the lead upon the roofs, and the metal of the bells into portable
+forms. We see the pensioned regulars filing out reluctantly, or exulting
+in their deliverance, discharged from their vows, furnished each with
+his 'secular apparel,' and his purse of money, to begin the world as he
+might. These scenes have long been partially known, and they were rarely
+attended with anything remarkable. At the time of the suppression, the
+discipline of several years had broken down opposition, and prepared the
+way for the catastrophe. The end came at last, but as an issue which had
+been long foreseen.
+
+We have sought in vain, however, for a glimpse into the interior of the
+houses at the first intimation of what was coming--more especially when
+the great blow was struck which severed England from obedience to Rome,
+and asserted the independence of the Anglican Church. Then, virtually,
+the fate of the monasteries was decided. As soon as the supremacy was
+vested in the Crown, enquiry into their condition could no longer be
+escaped or delayed; and then, through the length and breadth of the
+country, there must have been rare dismay. The account of the London
+Carthusians is indeed known to us, because they chose to die rather than
+yield submission where their consciences forbade them; and their
+isolated heroism has served to distinguish their memories. The pope, as
+head of the Universal Church, claimed the power of absolving subjects
+from their allegiance to their king. He deposed Henry. He called on
+foreign princes to enforce his sentence; and, on pain of
+excommunication, commanded the native English to rise in rebellion. The
+king, in self-defence, was compelled to require his subjects to disclaim
+all sympathy with these pretensions, and to recognise no higher
+authority, spiritual or secular, than himself within his own dominions.
+The regular clergy throughout the country were on the pope's side,
+secretly or openly. The Charterhouse monks, however, alone of all the
+order, had the courage to declare their convictions, and to suffer for
+them. Of the rest, we only perceive that they at last submitted; and
+since there was no uncertainty as to their real feelings, we have been
+disposed to judge them hardly as cowards. Yet we who have never been
+tried, should perhaps be cautious in our censures. It is possible to
+hold an opinion quite honestly, and yet to hesitate about dying for it.
+We consider ourselves, at the present day, persuaded honestly of many
+things; yet which of them should we refuse to relinquish if the scaffold
+were the alternative--or at least seem to relinquish, under silent
+protest?
+
+And yet, in the details of the struggle at the Charterhouse, we see the
+forms of mental trial which must have repeated themselves among all
+bodies of the clergy wherever there was seriousness of conviction. If
+the majority of the monks were vicious and sensual, there was still a
+large minority labouring to be true to their vows; and when one entire
+convent was capable of sustained resistance, there must have been many
+where there was only just too little virtue for the emergency--where the
+conflict between interest and conscience was equally genuine, though it
+ended the other way. Scenes of bitter misery there must have been--of
+passionate emotion wrestling ineffectually with the iron resolution of
+the Government: and the faults of the Catholic party weigh so heavily
+against them in the course and progress of the Reformation, that we
+cannot willingly lose the few countervailing tints which soften the
+darkness of their conditions.
+
+Nevertheless, for any authentic account of the abbeys at this crisis, we
+have hitherto been left to our imagination. A stern and busy
+administration had little leisure to preserve records of sentimental
+struggles which led to nothing. The Catholics did not care to keep alive
+the recollection of a conflict in which, even though with difficulty,
+the Church was defeated. A rare accident only could have brought down to
+us any fragment of a transaction which no one had an interest in
+remembering. That such an accident has really occurred, we may consider
+as unusually fortunate. The story in question concerns the abbey of
+Woburn, and is as follows:--
+
+At Woburn, as in many other religious houses, there were representatives
+of both the factions which divided the country; perhaps we should say of
+three--the sincere Catholics, the Indifferentists, and the Protestants.
+These last, so long as Wolsey was in power, had been frightened into
+silence, and with difficulty had been able to save themselves from
+extreme penalties. No sooner, however, had Wolsey fallen, and the
+battle commenced with the papacy, than the tables turned, the persecuted
+became persecutors--or at least threw off their disguise--and were
+strengthened with the support of the large class who cared only to keep
+on the winning side. The mysteries of the faith came to be disputed at
+the public tables; the refectories rang with polemics; the sacred
+silence of the dormitories was broken for the first time by lawless
+speculation. The orthodox might have appealed to the Government: heresy
+was still forbidden by law, and, if detected, was still punished by the
+stake. But the orthodox among the regular clergy adhered to the pope as
+well as to the faith, and abhorred the sacrilege of the Parliament as
+deeply as the new opinions of the Reformers. Instead of calling in the
+help of the law, they muttered treason in secret; and the Reformers,
+confident in the necessities of the times, sent reports to London of
+their arguments and conversations. The authorities in the abbey were
+accused of disaffection; and a commission of enquiry was sent down
+towards the end of the spring of 1536, to investigate. The depositions
+taken on this occasion are still preserved; and with the help of them,
+we can leap over three centuries of time, and hear the last echoes of
+the old monastic life in Woburn Abbey dying away in discord.
+
+Where party feeling was running so high, there were, of course,
+passionate arguments. The Act of Supremacy, the spread of Protestantism,
+the power of the Pope, the state of England--all were discussed; and the
+possibilities of the future, as each party painted it in the colours of
+his hopes. The brethren, we find, spoke their minds in plain language,
+sometimes condescending to a joke.
+
+Brother Sherborne deposes that the sub-prior, 'on Candlemas-day last
+past (February 2, 1536), asked him whether he longed not to be at Rome
+where all his bulls were?' Brother Sherborne answered that 'his bulls
+had made so many calves, that he had burned them. Whereunto the
+sub-prior said he thought there were more calves now than there were
+then.'
+
+Then there were long and furious quarrels about 'my Lord Privy Seal'
+(Cromwell)--who was to one party, the incarnation of Satan; to the
+other, the delivering angel.
+
+Nor did matters mend when from the minister they passed to the master.
+
+Dan John Croxton being in 'the shaving-house' one day with certain of
+the brethren having their tonsures looked to, and gossiping, as men do
+on such occasions, one 'Friar Lawrence did say that the king was dead.'
+Then said Croxton, 'Thanks be to God, his Grace is in good health, and I
+pray God so continue him;' and said further to the said Lawrence, 'I
+advise thee to leave thy babbling.' Croxton, it seems, had been among
+the suspected in earlier times. Lawrence said to him, 'Croxton, it
+maketh no matter what thou sayest, for thou art one of the new world;'
+whereupon hotter still the conversation proceeded. 'Thy babbling
+tongue,' Croxton said, 'will turn us all to displeasure at length.'
+'Then,' quoth Lawrence, 'neither thou nor yet any of us all shall do
+well as long as we forsake our head of the Church, the Pope.' 'By the
+mass!' quoth Croxton, 'I would thy Pope Roger were in thy belly, or thou
+in his, for thou art a false perjured knave to thy prince.' Whereunto
+the said Lawrence answered, saying, 'By the mass, thou liest! I was
+never sworn to forsake the Pope to be our head, and never will be.'
+'Then,' quoth Croxton, 'thou shalt be sworn spite of thine heart one
+day, or I will know why nay.'
+
+These and similar wranglings may be taken as specimens of the daily
+conversation at Woburn, and we can perceive how an abbot with the best
+intentions would have found it difficult to keep the peace. There are
+instances of superiors in other houses throwing down their command in
+the midst of the crisis in flat despair, protesting that their subject
+brethren were no longer governable. Abbots who were inclined to the
+Reformation could not manage the Catholics; Catholic abbots could not
+manage the Protestants; indifferent abbots could not manage either the
+one or the other. It would have been well for the Abbot of Woburn--or
+well as far as this world is concerned--if he, like one of these, had
+acknowledged his incapacity, and had fled from his charge.
+
+His name was Robert Hobbes. Of his age and family, history is silent. We
+know only that he held his place when the storm rose against the pope;
+that, like the rest of the clergy, he bent before the blast, taking the
+oath to the king, and submitting to the royal supremacy, but swearing
+under protest, as the phrase went, with the outward, and not with the
+inward man--in fact, perjuring himself. Though infirm, so far, however,
+he was too honest to be a successful counterfeit, and from the jealous
+eyes of the Neologians of the abbey he could not conceal his tendencies.
+We have significant evidence of the _espionage_ which was established
+over all suspected quarters, in the conversations and trifling details
+of conduct on the part of the abbot, which were reported to the
+Government.
+
+In the summer of 1534, orders came that the pope's name should be rased
+out wherever it was mentioned in the Mass books. A malcontent, by name
+Robert Salford, deposed that 'he was singing mass before the abbot at
+St. Thomas's altar within the monastery, at which time he rased out with
+his knife the said name out of the canon.' The abbot told him to 'take a
+pen and strike or cross him out.' The saucy monk said those were not the
+orders. They were to rase him out. 'Well, well,' the abbot said, 'it
+will come again one day.' 'Come again, will it?' was the answer; 'if it
+do, then we will put him in again; but I trust I shall never see that
+day.' The mild abbot could remonstrate, but could not any more command;
+and the proofs of his malignant inclinations were remembered against him
+for the ear of Cromwell.
+
+In the general injunctions, too, he was directed to preach against the
+pope, and to expose his usurpation; but he could not bring himself to
+obey. He shrank from the pulpit; he preached but twice after the
+visitation, and then on other subjects, while in the prayer before the
+sermon he refused, as we find, to use the prescribed form. He only said,
+'You shall pray for the spirituality, the temporality, and the souls
+that be in the pains of purgatory; and did not name the king to be
+supreme head of the Church in neither of the said sermons, nor speak
+against the pretended authority of the Bishop of Rome.'
+
+Again, when Paul the Third, shortly after his election, proposed to call
+a general council at Mantua, against which, by advice of Henry the
+Eighth, the Germans protested, we have a glimpse how eagerly anxious
+English eyes were watching for a turning tide. 'Hear you,' said the
+abbot one day, 'of the Pope's holiness and the congregation of bishops,
+abbots, and princes gathered to the council at Mantua? They be gathered
+for the reformation of the universal Church; and here now we have a book
+of the excuse of the Germans, by which we may know what heretics they
+be: for if they were Catholics and true men as they pretend to be, they
+would never have refused to come to a general council.'
+
+So matters went with the abbot for some months after he had sworn
+obedience to the king. Lulling his conscience with such opiates as the
+casuists could provide for him, he watched anxiously for a change, and
+laboured with but little reserve to hold his brethren to their old
+allegiance.
+
+In the summer of 1535, however, a change came over the scene, very
+different from the outward reaction for which he was looking, and a
+better mind woke in the abbot: he learnt that in swearing what he did
+not mean with reservations and nice distinctions, he had lied to heaven
+and lied to man; that to save his miserable life he had perilled his
+soul. When the oath of supremacy was required of the nation, Sir Thomas
+More, Bishop Fisher, and the monks of the Charterhouse--mistaken, as we
+believe, in judgment, but true to their consciences, and disdaining
+evasion or subterfuge--chose, with deliberate nobleness, rather to die
+than to perjure themselves. This is no place to enter on the great
+question of the justice or necessity of those executions; but the story
+of the so-called martyrdoms convulsed the Catholic world. The pope shook
+upon his throne; the shuttle of diplomatic intrigue stood still;
+diplomatists who had lived so long in lies that the whole life of man
+seemed but a stage pageant, a thing of show and tinsel, stood aghast at
+the revelation of English sincerity, and a shudder of great awe ran
+through Europe. The fury of party leaves little room for generous
+emotion, and no pity was felt for these men by the English Protestants.
+The Protestants knew well that if these same sufferers could have had
+their way, they would themselves have been sacrificed by hecatombs; and
+as they had never experienced mercy, so they were in turn without mercy.
+But to the English Catholics, who believed as Fisher believed, but who
+had not dared to suffer as Fisher suffered, his death and the death of
+the rest acted as a glimpse of the Judgment Day. Their safety became
+their shame and terror; and in the radiant example before them of true
+faithfulness, they saw their own falsehood and their own disgrace. So it
+was with Father Forest, who had taught his penitents in confession that
+they might perjure themselves, and who now sought a cruel death in
+voluntary expiation; so it was with Whiting, the Abbot of Glastonbury;
+so with others whose names should be more familiar to us than they are;
+and here in Woburn we are to see the feeble but genuine penitence of
+Abbot Hobbes. He was still unequal to immediate martyrdom, but he did
+what he knew might drag his death upon him if disclosed to the
+Government, and surrounded by spies he could have had no hope of
+concealment.
+
+'At the time,' deposed Robert Salford, 'that the monks of the
+Charterhouse, with other traitors, did suffer death, the abbot did call
+us into the Chapter-house, and said these words:--"Brethren, this is a
+perilous time; such a scourge was never heard since Christ's passion. Ye
+hear how good men suffer the death. Brethren, this is undoubted for our
+offences. Ye read, so long as the children of Israel kept the
+commandments of God, so long their enemies had no power over them, but
+God took vengeance of their enemies. But when they broke God's
+commandments, then they were subdued by their enemies, and so be we.
+Therefore let us be sorry for our offences. Undoubted He will take
+vengeance of our enemies; I mean those heretics that causeth so many
+good men to suffer thus. Alas, it is a piteous case that so much
+Christian blood should be shed. Therefore, good brethren, for the
+reverence of God, every one of you devoutly pray, and say this Psalm,
+'Oh God, the heathen are come into thine inheritance; thy holy temple
+have they defiled, and made Jerusalem a heap of stones. The dead bodies
+of thy servants have they given to be meat to the fowls of the air, and
+the flesh of thy saints unto the beasts of the field. Their blood have
+they shed like water on every side of Jerusalem, and there was no man to
+bury them. We are become an open scorn unto our enemies, a very scorn
+and derision unto them that are round about us. Oh, remember not our old
+sins, but have mercy upon us, and that soon, for we are come to great
+misery. Help us, oh God of our salvation, for the glory of thy name. Oh,
+be merciful unto our sins for thy name's sake. Wherefore do the heathen
+say, Where is now their God?' Ye shall say this Psalm," repeated the
+abbot, "every Friday, after the litany, prostrate, when ye lie upon the
+high altar, and undoubtedly God will cease this extreme scourge." And
+so,' continues Salford, significantly, 'the convent did say this
+aforesaid Psalm until there were certain that did murmur at the saying
+of it, and so it was left.'
+
+The abbot, it seems, either stood alone, or found but languid support;
+even his own familiar friends whom he trusted, those with whom he had
+walked in the house of God, had turned against him; the harsh air of the
+dawn of a new world choked him: what was there for him but to die? But
+his conscience still haunted him: while he lived he must fight on, and
+so, if possible, find pardon for his perjury. The blows in those years
+fell upon the Church thick and fast. In February 1536, the Bill passed
+for the dissolution of the smaller monasteries; and now we find the
+sub-prior with the whole fraternity united in hostility, and the abbot
+without one friend remaining.
+
+'He did again call us together,' says the next deposition, 'and
+lamentably mourning for the dissolving the said houses, he enjoined us
+to sing "Salvator mundi, salva nos omnes," every day after lauds; and we
+murmured at it, and were not content to sing it for such cause; and so
+we did omit it divers days, for which the abbot came unto the chapter,
+and did in manner rebuke us, and said we were bound to obey his
+commandment by our profession, and so did command us to sing it again
+with the versicle "Let God arise, and let his enemies be scattered. Let
+them also that hate him flee before him." Also he enjoined us at every
+mass that every priest did sing, to say the collect, "Oh God, who
+despisest not the sighing of a contrite heart." And he said if we did
+this with good and true devotion, God would so handle the matter, that
+it should be to the comfort of all England, and so show us mercy as he
+showed unto the children of Israel. And surely, brethren, there will
+come to us a good man that will rectify these monasteries again that be
+now supprest, because "God can of these stones raise up children to
+Abraham."'
+
+'Of the stones,' perhaps, but less easily of the stony-hearted monks,
+who, with pitiless smiles, watched the abbot's sorrow, which should soon
+bring him to his ruin.
+
+Time passed on, and as the world grew worse, so the abbot grew more
+lonely. Desolate and unsupported, he was still unable to make up his
+mind to the course which he knew to be right; but he slowly strengthened
+himself for the trial, and as Lent came on, the season brought with it a
+more special call to effort; he did not fail to recognise it. The
+conduct of the fraternity sorely disturbed him. They preached against
+all which he most loved and valued, in language purposely coarse; and
+the mild sweetness of the rebukes which he administered, showed plainly
+on which side lay, in the abbey of Woburn, the larger portion of the
+spirit of Heaven. Now, when the passions of those times have died away,
+and we can look back with more indifferent eyes, how touching is the
+following scene. There was one Sir William, curate of Woburn Chapel,
+whose tongue, it seems, was rough beyond the rest. The abbot met him one
+day, and spoke to him. 'Sir William,' he said, 'I hear tell ye be a
+great railer. I marvel that ye rail so. I pray you teach my cure the
+Scripture of God, and that may be to edification. I pray you leave such
+railing. Ye call the pope a bear and a bandog. Either he is a good man
+or an ill. _Domino suo stat aut cadit._ The office of a bishop is
+honourable. What edifying is this to rail? Let him alone.'
+
+But they would not let him alone, nor would they let the abbot alone. He
+grew 'somewhat acrased,' they said; vexed with feelings of which they
+had no experience. He fell sick, sorrow and the Lent discipline weighing
+upon him. The brethren went to see him in his room; one Brother Dan
+Woburn came among the rest, and asked him how he did; the abbot
+answered, 'I would that I had died with the good men that died for
+holding with the pope. My conscience, my conscience doth grudge me every
+day for it.' Life was fast losing its value for him. What was life to
+him or any man when bought with a sin against his soul? 'If the abbot be
+disposed to die, for that matter,' Brother Croxton observed, 'he may die
+as soon as he will.'
+
+All Lent he fasted and prayed, and his illness grew upon him; and at
+length in Passion week he thought all was over, and that he was going
+away. On Passion Sunday he called the brethren about him, and as they
+stood round his bed, with their cold, hard eyes, 'he exhorted them all
+to charity;' he implored them 'never to consent to go out of their
+monastery; and if it chanced them to be put from it, they should in no
+wise forsake their habit.' After these words, 'being in a great agony,
+he rose out of his bed, and cried out and said, "I would to God, it
+would please him to take me out of this wretched world; and I would I
+had died with the good men that have suffered death heretofore, for
+they were quickly out of their pain."'[T] Then, half wandering, he
+began to mutter to himself aloud the thoughts which had been working in
+him in his struggles; and quoting St. Bernard's words about the pope, he
+exclaimed, 'Tu quis es primatu Abel, gubernatione Noah, auctoritate
+Moses, judicatu Samuel, potestate Petrus, unctione Christus. Aliæ
+ecclesiæ habent super se pastores. Tu pastor pastorum es.'
+
+Let it be remembered that this is no sentimental fiction begotten out of
+the brain of some ingenious novelist, but the record of the true words
+and sufferings of a genuine child of Adam, labouring in a trial too hard
+for him.
+
+He prayed to die, and in good time death was to come to him; but not,
+after all, in the sick bed, with his expiation but half completed. A
+year before, he had thrown down the cross when it was offered him. He
+was to take it again--the very cross which he had refused. He recovered.
+He was brought before the council; with what result, there are no means
+of knowing. To admit the papal supremacy when officially questioned was
+high treason. Whether the abbot was constant, and received some
+conditional pardon, or whether his heart again for the moment failed
+him--whichever he did, the records are silent. This only we ascertain of
+him: that he was not put to death under the statute of supremacy. But,
+two years later, when the official list was presented to the Parliament
+of those who had suffered for their share in 'the Pilgrimage of Grace,'
+among the rest we find the name of Robert Hobbes, late Abbot of Woburn.
+To this solitary fact we can add nothing. The rebellion was put down,
+and in the punishment of the offenders there was unusual leniency; not
+more than thirty persons were executed, although forty thousand had been
+in arms. Those only were selected who had been most signally implicated.
+But they were all leaders in the movement; the men of highest rank, and
+therefore greatest guilt. They died for what they believed their duty;
+and the king and council did their duty in enforcing the laws against
+armed insurgents. He for whose cause each supposed themselves to be
+contending, has long since judged between them; and both parties perhaps
+now see all things with clearer eyes than was permitted to them on
+earth.
+
+We also can see more distinctly. We will not refuse the Abbot Hobbes a
+brief record of his trial and passion. And although twelve generations
+of Russells--all loyal to the Protestant ascendancy--have swept Woburn
+clear of Catholic associations, they, too, in these later days, will not
+regret to see revived the authentic story of its last abbot.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Q] From _Fraser's Magazine_, 1857.
+
+[R] Rolls House MS., _Miscellaneous Papers_, First Series. 356.
+
+[S] Tanner MS. 105, Bodleian Library, Oxford.
+
+[T] Meaning, as he afterwards said, More and Fisher and the Carthusians.
+
+
+
+
+ENGLAND'S FORGOTTEN WORTHIES.[U]
+
+1. _The Observations of Sir Richard Hawkins, Knt., in his Voyage in the
+South Sea in 1593._ Reprinted from the Edition of 1622, and Edited by R.
+H. Major, Esq., of the British Museum. Published by the Hakluyt Society.
+
+2. _The Discoverie of the Empire of Guiana._ By Sir Walter Ralegh, Knt.
+Edited, with copious Explanatory Notes, and a Biographical Memoir, by
+Sir Robert H. Schomburgk, Phil. D., &c.
+
+3. _Narratives of Early Voyages undertaken for the Discovery of a
+Passage to Cathaia and India by the North-west_; with Selections from
+the Records of the Worshipful Fellowship of the Merchants of London,
+trading into the East Indies, and from MSS. in the Library of the
+British Museum, now first published, by Thomas Rundall, Esq.
+
+
+The Reformation, the Antipodes, the American Continent, the Planetary
+system, and the infinite deep of the Heavens, have now become common and
+familiar facts to us. Globes and orreries are the playthings of our
+school-days; we inhale the spirit of Protestantism with our earliest
+breath of consciousness. It is all but impossible to throw back our
+imagination into the time when, as new grand discoveries, they stirred
+every mind which they touched with awe and wonder at the revelation
+which God had sent down among mankind. Vast spiritual and material
+continents lay for the first time displayed, opening fields of thought
+and fields of enterprise of which none could conjecture the limit. Old
+routine was broken up. Men were thrown back on their own strength and
+their own power, unshackled, to accomplish whatever they might dare. And
+although we do not speak of these discoveries as the cause of that
+enormous force of heart and intellect which accompanied them (for they
+were as much the effect as the cause, and one reacted on the other),
+yet at any rate they afforded scope and room for the play of powers
+which, without such scope, let them have been as transcendant as they
+would, must have passed away unproductive and blighted.
+
+An earnest faith in the supernatural, an intensely real conviction of
+the divine and devilish forces by which the universe was guided and
+misguided, was the inheritance of the Elizabethan age from Catholic
+Christianity. The fiercest and most lawless men did then really and
+truly believe in the actual personal presence of God or the devil in
+every accident, or scene, or action. They brought to the contemplation
+of the new heaven and the new earth an imagination saturated with the
+spiritual convictions of the old era, which were not lost, but only
+infinitely expanded. The planets, whose vastness they now learnt to
+recognise, were, therefore, only the more powerful for evil or for good;
+the tides were the breathing of Demogorgon; and the idolatrous American
+tribes were real worshippers of the real devil, and were assisted with
+the full power of his evil army.
+
+It is a form of thought which, however in a vague and general way we may
+continue to use its phraseology, has become, in its detailed application
+to life, utterly strange to us. We congratulate ourselves on the
+enlargement of our understanding when we read the decisions of grave law
+courts in cases of supposed witchcraft; we smile complacently over
+Raleigh's story of the island of the Amazons, and rejoice that we are
+not such as he--entangled in the cobwebs of effete and foolish
+superstition. Yet the true conclusion is less flattering to our vanity.
+That Raleigh and Bacon could believe what they believed, and could be
+what they were notwithstanding, is to us a proof that the injury which
+such mistakes can inflict is unspeakably insignificant: and arising, as
+they arose, from a never-failing sense of the real awfulness and mystery
+of the world, and of the life of human souls upon it, they witness to
+the presence in such minds of a spirit, the loss of which not the most
+perfect acquaintance with every law by which the whole creation moves
+can compensate. We wonder at the grandeur, the moral majesty of some of
+Shakespeare's characters, so far beyond what the noblest among ourselves
+can imitate, and at first thought we attribute it to the genius of the
+poet, who has outstripped nature in his creations. But we are
+misunderstanding the power and the meaning of poetry in attributing
+creativeness to it in any such sense. Shakespeare created, but only as
+the spirit of nature created around him, working in him as it worked
+abroad in those among whom he lived. The men whom he draws were such men
+as he saw and knew; the words they utter were such as he heard in the
+ordinary conversations in which he joined. At the Mermaid with Raleigh
+and with Sidney, and at a thousand unnamed English firesides, he found
+the living originals for his Prince Hals, his Orlandos, his Antonios,
+his Portias, his Isabellas. The closer personal acquaintance which we
+can form with the English of the age of Elizabeth, the more we are
+satisfied that Shakespeare's great poetry is no more than the rhythmic
+echo of the life which it depicts.
+
+It was, therefore, with no little interest that we heard of the
+formation of a society which was to employ itself, as we understood, in
+republishing in accessible form some, if not all, of the invaluable
+records compiled or composed by Richard Hakluyt. Books, like everything
+else, have their appointed death-day; the souls of them, unless they be
+found worthy of a second birth in a new body, perish with the paper in
+which they lived; and the early folio Hakluyts, not from their own want
+of merit, but from our neglect of them, were expiring of old age. The
+five-volume quarto edition, published in 1811, so little people then
+cared for the exploits of their ancestors, consisted but of 270 copies.
+It was intended for no more than for curious antiquaries, or for the
+great libraries, where it could be consulted as a book of reference; and
+among a people, the greater part of whom had never heard Hakluyt's name,
+the editors are scarcely to be blamed if it never so much as occurred to
+them that general readers would care to have the book within their
+reach.
+
+And yet those five volumes may be called the Prose Epic of the modern
+English nation. They contain the heroic tales of the exploits of the
+great men in whom the new era was inaugurated; not mythic, like the
+Iliads and the Eddas, but plain broad narratives of substantial facts,
+which rival legend in interest and grandeur. What the old epics were to
+the royally or nobly born, this modern epic is to the common people. We
+have no longer kings or princes for chief actors, to whom the heroism
+like the dominion of the world had in time past been confined. But, as
+it was in the days of the Apostles, when a few poor fishermen from an
+obscure lake in Palestine assumed, under the Divine mission, the
+spiritual authority over mankind, so, in the days of our own Elizabeth,
+the seamen from the banks of the Thames and the Avon, the Plym and the
+Dart, self-taught and self-directed, with no impulse but what was
+beating in their own royal hearts, went out across the unknown seas
+fighting, discovering, colonising, and graved out the channels, paving
+them at last with their bones, through which the commerce and enterprise
+of England has flowed out over all the world. We can conceive nothing,
+not the songs of Homer himself, which would be read among us with more
+enthusiastic interest than these plain massive tales; and a people's
+edition of them in these days, when the writings of Ainsworth and Eugène
+Sue circulate in tens of thousands, would perhaps be the most blessed
+antidote which could be bestowed upon us. The heroes themselves were the
+men of the people--the Joneses, the Smiths, the Davises, the Drakes; and
+no courtly pen, with the one exception of Raleigh, lent its polish or
+its varnish to set them off. In most cases the captain himself, or his
+clerk or servant, or some unknown gentleman volunteer, sat down and
+chronicled the voyage which he had shared; and thus inorganically arose
+a collection of writings which, with all their simplicity, are for
+nothing more striking than for the high moral beauty, warmed with
+natural feeling, which displays itself through all their pages. With us,
+the sailor is scarcely himself beyond his quarter-deck. If he is
+distinguished in his profession, he is professional merely; or if he is
+more than that, he owes it not to his work as a sailor, but to
+independent domestic culture. With them, their profession was the school
+of their nature, a high moral education which most brought out what was
+most nobly human in them; and the wonders of earth, and air, and sea,
+and sky, were a real intelligible language in which they heard Almighty
+God speaking to them.
+
+That such hopes of what might be accomplished by the Hakluyt Society
+should in some measure be disappointed, is only what might naturally be
+anticipated of all very sanguine expectation. Cheap editions are
+expensive editions to the publisher; and historical societies, from a
+necessity which appears to encumber all corporate English action,
+rarely fail to do their work expensively and infelicitously. Yet, after
+all allowances and deductions, we cannot reconcile ourselves to the
+mortification of having found but one volume in the series to be even
+tolerably edited, and that one to be edited by a gentleman to whom
+England is but an adopted country--Sir Robert Schomburgk. Raleigh's
+'Conquest of Guiana,' with Sir Robert's sketch of Raleigh's history and
+character, form in everything but its cost a very model of an excellent
+volume. For the remaining editors,[V] we are obliged to say that they
+have exerted themselves successfully to paralyse whatever interest was
+reviving in Hakluyt, and to consign their own volumes to the same
+obscurity to which time and accident were consigning the earlier
+editions. Very little which was really noteworthy escaped the industry
+of Hakluyt himself, and we looked to find reprints of the most
+remarkable of the stories which were to be found in his collection. The
+editors began unfortunately with proposing to continue the work where he
+had left it, and to produce narratives hitherto unpublished of other
+voyages of inferior interest, or not of English origin. Better thoughts
+appear to have occurred to them in the course of the work; but their
+evil destiny overtook them before their thoughts could get themselves
+executed. We opened one volume with eagerness, bearing the title of
+'Voyages to the North-west,' in hope of finding our old friends Davis
+and Frobisher. We found a vast unnecessary Editor's Preface: and instead
+of the voyages themselves, which with their picturesqueness and moral
+beauty shine among the fairest jewels in the diamond mine of Hakluyt, we
+encountered an analysis and digest of their results, which Milton was
+called in to justify in an inappropriate quotation. It is much as if
+they had undertaken to edit 'Bacon's Essays,' and had retailed what they
+conceived to be the substance of them in their own language; strangely
+failing to see that the real value of the actions or the thoughts of
+remarkable men does not lie in the material result which can be gathered
+from them, but in the heart and soul of the actors or speakers
+themselves. Consider what Homer's 'Odyssey' would be, reduced into an
+analysis.
+
+The editor of the 'Letters of Columbus' apologises for the rudeness of
+the old seaman's phraseology. Columbus, he tells us, was not so great a
+master of the pen as of the art of navigation. We are to make excuses
+for him. We are put on our guard, and warned not to be offended, before
+we are introduced to the sublime record of sufferings under which a man
+of the highest order was staggering towards the end of his earthly
+calamities; although the inarticulate fragments in which his thought
+breaks out from him, are strokes of natural art by the side of which
+literary pathos is poor and meaningless.
+
+And even in the subjects which they select they are pursued by the same
+curious fatality. Why is Drake to be best known, or to be only known, in
+his last voyage? Why pass over the success, and endeavour to immortalise
+the failure? When Drake climbed the tree in Panama, and saw both oceans,
+and vowed that he would sail a ship in the Pacific; when he crawled out
+upon the cliffs of Terra del Fuego, and leaned his head over the
+southernmost angle of the world; when he scored a furrow round the globe
+with his keel, and received the homage of the barbarians of the
+antipodes in the name of the Virgin Queen, he was another man from what
+he had become after twenty years of court life and intrigue, and Spanish
+fighting and gold-hunting. There is a tragic solemnity in his end, if we
+take it as the last act of his career; but it is his life, not his
+death, which we desire--not what he failed to do, but what he did.
+
+But every bad has a worse below it, and more offensive than all these is
+the editor of Hawkins's 'Voyage to the South Sea.' The narrative is
+striking in itself; not one of the best, but very good; and, as it is
+republished complete, we can fortunately read it through, carefully
+shutting off Captain Bethune's notes with one hand, and we shall then
+find in it the same beauty which breathes in the tone of all the
+writings of the period.
+
+It is a record of misfortune, but of misfortune which did no dishonour
+to him who sunk under it; and there is a melancholy dignity in the style
+in which Hawkins tells his story, which seems to say, that though he had
+been defeated, and had never again an opportunity of winning back his
+lost laurels, he respects himself still for the heart with which he
+endured a shame which would have broken a smaller man. It would have
+required no large exertion of editorial self-denial to have abstained
+from marring the pages with puns of which 'Punch' would be ashamed, and
+with the vulgar affectation of patronage with which the sea captain of
+the nineteenth century condescends to criticise and approve of his
+half-barbarous precursor. And what excuse can we find for such an
+offence as this which follows. The war of freedom of the Araucan Indians
+is the most gallant episode in the history of the New World. The
+Spaniards themselves were not behindhand in acknowledging the chivalry
+before which they quailed, and, after many years of ineffectual efforts,
+they gave up a conflict which they never afterwards resumed; leaving the
+Araucans alone, of all the American races with which they came in
+contact, a liberty which they were unable to tear from them. It is a
+subject for an epic poem; and whatever admiration is due to the heroism
+of a brave people whom no inequality of strength could appal and no
+defeats could crush, these poor Indians have a right to demand of us.
+The story of the war was well known in Europe; Hawkins, in coasting the
+western shores of South America, fell in with them, and the finest
+passage in his book is the relation of one of the incidents of the
+war:--
+
+    An Indian captain was taken prisoner by the Spaniards, and for that
+    he was of name, and known to have done his devoir against them, they
+    cut off his hands, thereby intending to disenable him to fight any
+    more against them. But he, returning home, desirous to revenge this
+    injury, to maintain his liberty, with the reputation of his nation,
+    and to help to banish the Spaniard, with his tongue intreated and
+    incited them to persevere in their accustomed valour and reputation,
+    abasing the enemy and advancing his nation; condemning their
+    contraries of cowardliness, and confirming it by the cruelty used
+    with him and other his companions in their mishaps; showing them his
+    arms without hands, and naming his brethren whose half feet they had
+    cut off, because they might be unable to sit on horseback; with
+    force arguing that if they feared them not, they would not have used
+    so great inhumanity--for fear produceth cruelty, the companion of
+    cowardice. Thus encouraged he them to fight for their lives, limbs,
+    and liberty, choosing rather to die an honourable death fighting,
+    than to live in servitude as fruitless members of the commonwealth.
+    Thus using the office of a sergeant-major, and having loaden his two
+    stumps with bundles of arrows, he succoured them who, in the
+    succeeding battle had their store wasted; and changing himself from
+    place to place, animated and encouraged his countrymen with such
+    comfortable persuasions, as it is reported and credibly believed,
+    that he did more good with his words and presence, without striking
+    a stroke, than a great part of the army did with fighting to the
+    utmost.
+
+It is an action which may take its place by the side of the myth of
+Mucius Scævola, or the real exploit of that brother of the poet
+Æschylus, who, when the Persians were flying from Marathon, clung to a
+ship till both his hands were hewn away, and then seized it with his
+teeth, leaving his name as a portent even in the splendid calendar of
+Athenian heroes. Captain Bethune, without call or need, making his
+notes, merely, as he tells us, from the suggestions of his own mind as
+he revised the proof-sheets, informs us, at the bottom of the page, that
+'it reminds him of the familiar lines--
+
+    For Widdrington I needs must wail,
+      As one in doleful dumps;
+    For when his legs were smitten off,
+      He fought upon his stumps.'
+
+It must not avail him, that he has but quoted from the ballad of Chevy
+Chase. It is the most deformed stanza[W] of the modern deformed version
+which was composed in the eclipse of heart and taste, on the restoration
+of the Stuarts; and if such verses could then pass for serious poetry,
+they have ceased to sound in any ear as other than a burlesque; the
+associations which they arouse are only absurd, and they could only have
+continued to ring in his memory through their ludicrous doggrel.
+
+When to these offences of the Society we add, that in the long laboured
+appendices and introductions, which fill up valuable space, which
+increase the expense of the edition, and into reading which many readers
+are, no doubt, betrayed, we have found nothing which assists the
+understanding of the stories which they are supposed to illustrate--when
+we have declared that we have found what is most uncommon passed
+without notice, and what is most trite and familiar encumbered with
+comment--we have unpacked our hearts of the bitterness which these
+volumes have aroused in us, and can now take our leave of them and go on
+with our more grateful subject.
+
+Elizabeth, whose despotism was as peremptory as that of the
+Plantagenets, and whose ideas of the English constitution were limited
+in the highest degree, was, notwithstanding, more beloved by her
+subjects than any sovereign before or since. It was because,
+substantially, she was the people's sovereign; because it was given to
+her to conduct the outgrowth of the national life through its crisis of
+change, and the weight of her great mind and her great place were thrown
+on the people's side. She was able to paralyse the dying efforts with
+which, if a Stuart had been on the throne, the representatives of an
+effete system might have made the struggle a deadly one; and the history
+of England is not the history of France, because the resolution of one
+person held the Reformation firm till it had rooted itself in the heart
+of the nation, and could not be again overthrown. The Catholic faith was
+no longer able to furnish standing ground on which the English or any
+other nation could live a manly and a godly life. Feudalism, as a social
+organisation, was not any more a system under which their energies could
+have scope to move. Thenceforward, not the Catholic Church, but any man
+to whom God had given a heart to feel and a voice to speak, was to be
+the teacher to whom men were to listen; and great actions were not to
+remain the privilege of the families of the Norman nobles, but were to
+be laid within the reach of the poorest plebeian who had the stuff in
+him to perform them. Alone, of all the sovereigns in Europe, Elizabeth
+saw the change which had passed over the world. She saw it, and saw it
+in faith, and accepted it. The England of the Catholic Hierarchy and the
+Norman Baron, was to cast its shell and to become the England of free
+thought and commerce and manufacture, which was to plough the ocean with
+its navies, and sow its colonies over the globe; and the first
+appearance of these enormous forces and the light of the earliest
+achievements of the new era shines through the forty years of the reign
+of Elizabeth with a grandeur which, when once its history is written,
+will be seen to be among the most sublime phenomena which the earth as
+yet has witnessed. The work was not of her creation; the heart of the
+whole English nation was stirred to its depths; and Elizabeth's place
+was to recognise, to love, to foster, and to guide. The Government
+originated nothing; at such a time it was neither necessary nor
+desirable that it should do so; but wherever expensive enterprises were
+on foot which promised ultimate good, and doubtful immediate profit, we
+never fail to find among the lists of contributors the Queen's Majesty,
+Burghley, Leicester, Walsingham. Never chary of her presence, for
+Elizabeth could afford to condescend, when ships were fitting for
+distant voyages in the river, the queen would go down in her barge and
+inspect. Frobisher, who was but a poor sailor adventurer, sees her wave
+her handkerchief to him from the Greenwich Palace windows, and he brings
+her home a narwhal's horn for a present. She honoured her people, and
+her people loved her; and the result was that, with no cost to the
+Government, she saw them scattering the fleets of the Spaniards,
+planting America with colonies, and exploring the most distant seas.
+Either for honour or for expectation of profit, or from that unconscious
+necessity by which a great people, like a great man, will do what is
+right, and must do it at the right time, whoever had the means to
+furnish a ship, and whoever had the talent to command one, laid their
+abilities together and went out to pioneer, and to conquer, and take
+possession, in the name of the Queen of the Sea. There was no nation so
+remote but what some one or other was found ready to undertake an
+expedition there, in the hope of opening a trade; and, let them go where
+they would, they were sure of Elizabeth's countenance. We find letters
+written by her, for the benefit of nameless adventurers, to every
+potentate of whom she had ever heard--to the Emperors of China, Japan,
+and India, the Grand Duke of Russia, the Grand Turk, the Persian
+'Sofee,' and other unheard-of Asiatic and African princes; whatever was
+to be done in England, or by Englishmen, Elizabeth assisted when she
+could, and admired when she could not. The springs of great actions are
+always difficult to analyse--impossible to analyse perfectly--possible
+to analyse only very proximately; and the force by which a man throws a
+good action out of himself is invisible and mystical, like that which
+brings out the blossom and the fruit upon the tree. The motives which
+we find men urging for their enterprises seem often insufficient to have
+prompted them to so large a daring. They did what they did from the
+great unrest in them which made them do it, and what it was may be best
+measured by the results in the present England and America.
+
+Nevertheless, there was enough in the state of the world, and in the
+position of England, to have furnished abundance of conscious motive,
+and to have stirred the drowsiest minister of routine.
+
+Among material occasions for exertion, the population began to outgrow
+the employment, and there was a necessity for plantations to serve as an
+outlet. Men who, under happier circumstances, might have led decent
+lives, and done good service, were now driven by want to desperate
+courses--'witness,' as Richard Hakluyt says, 'twenty tall fellows hanged
+last Rochester assizes for small robberies;' and there is an admirable
+paper addressed to the Privy Council by Christopher Carlile,
+Walsingham's son-in-law, pointing out the possible openings to be made
+in or through such plantations for home produce and manufacture.
+
+Far below all such prudential economics and mercantile ambitions,
+however, lay a chivalrous enthusiasm which in these dull days we can
+hardly, without an effort, realise. The life-and-death wrestle between
+the Reformation and the old religion had settled in the last quarter of
+the sixteenth century into a permanent struggle between England and
+Spain. France was disabled. All the help which Elizabeth could spare
+barely enabled the Netherlands to defend themselves. Protestantism, if
+it conquered, must conquer on another field; and by the circumstances of
+the time the championship of the Reformed faith fell to the English
+sailors. The sword of Spain was forged in the gold-mines of Peru; the
+legions of Alva were only to be disarmed by intercepting the gold ships
+on their passage; and, inspired by an enthusiasm like that which four
+centuries before had precipitated the chivalry of Europe upon the East,
+the same spirit which in its present degeneracy covers our bays and
+rivers with pleasure yachts, then fitted out armed privateers, to sweep
+the Atlantic, and plunder and destroy Spanish ships wherever they could
+meet them.
+
+Thus, from a combination of causes, the whole force and energy of the
+age was directed towards the sea. The wide excitement, and the greatness
+of the interests at stake, raised even common men above themselves; and
+people who in ordinary times would have been no more than mere seamen,
+or mere money-making merchants, appear before us with a largeness and
+greatness of heart and mind in which their duties to God and their
+country are alike clearly and broadly seen and felt to be paramount to
+every other.
+
+Ordinary English traders we find fighting Spanish war ships in behalf of
+the Protestant faith. The cruisers of the Spanish Main were full of
+generous eagerness for the conversion of the savage nations to
+Christianity. And what is even more surprising, sites for colonisation
+were examined and scrutinised by such men in a lofty statesmanlike
+spirit, and a ready insight was displayed by them into the indirect
+effects of a wisely-extended commerce on every highest human interest.
+
+Again, in the conflict with the Spaniards, there was a further feeling,
+a feeling of genuine chivalry, which was spurring on the English, and
+one which must be well understood and well remembered, if men like
+Drake, and Hawkins, and Raleigh are to be tolerably understood. One of
+the English Reviews, a short time ago, was much amused with a story of
+Drake having excommunicated a petty officer as a punishment for some
+moral offence; the reviewer not being able to see in Drake, as a man,
+anything more than a highly brave and successful buccaneer, whose
+pretences to religion might rank with the devotion of an Italian bandit
+to the Madonna. And so Hawkins, and even Raleigh, are regarded by
+superficial persons, who see only such outward circumstances of their
+history as correspond with their own impressions. The high nature of
+these men, and the high objects which they pursued, will only rise out
+and become visible to us as we can throw ourselves back into their times
+and teach our hearts to feel as they felt. We do not find in the
+language of the voyagers themselves, or of those who lent them their
+help at home, any of that weak watery talk of 'protection of
+aborigines,' which, as soon as it is translated into fact, becomes the
+most active policy for their destruction, soul and body. But the stories
+of the dealings of the Spaniards with the conquered Indians, which were
+widely known in England, seem to have affected all classes of people,
+not with pious passive horror, but with a genuine human indignation. A
+thousand anecdotes in detail we find scattered up and down the pages of
+Hakluyt, who, with a view to make them known, translated Peter Martyr's
+letters; and each commonest sailor-boy who had heard these stories from
+his childhood among the tales of his father's fireside, had longed to be
+a man, that he might go out and become the avenger of a gallant and
+suffering people. A high mission, undertaken with a generous heart,
+seldom fails to make those worthy of it to whom it is given; and it was
+a point of honour, if of nothing more, among the English sailors, to do
+no discredit by their conduct to the greatness of their cause. The high
+courtesy, the chivalry of the Spanish nobles, so conspicuous in their
+dealings with their European rivals, either failed to touch them in
+their dealings with uncultivated idolators, or the high temper of the
+aristocracy was unable to restrain or to influence the masses of the
+soldiers. It would be as ungenerous as it would be untrue, to charge
+upon their religion the grievous actions of men who called themselves
+the armed missionaries of Catholicism, when the Catholic priests and
+bishops were the loudest in the indignation with which they denounced
+them. But we are obliged to charge upon it that slow and subtle
+influence so inevitably exercised by any religion which is divorced from
+life, and converted into a thing of form, or creed, or ceremony, or
+system--which could permit the same men to be extravagant in a sincere
+devotion to the Queen of Heaven, whose entire lower nature, unsubdued
+and unaffected, was given up to thirst of gold, and plunder, and
+sensuality. If religion does not make men more humane than they would be
+without it, it makes them fatally less so; and it is to be feared that
+the spirit of the Pilgrim Fathers, which had oscillated to the other
+extreme, and had again crystallised into a formal antinomian fanaticism,
+reproduced the same fatal results as those in which the Spaniards had
+set them their unworthy precedent. But the Elizabethan navigators, full
+for the most part with large kindness, wisdom, gentleness, and beauty,
+bear names untainted, as far as we know, with a single crime against the
+savages of America; and the name of England was as famous in the Indian
+seas as that of Spain was infamous. On the banks of the Oronoko there
+was remembered for a hundred years the noble captain who had come there
+from the great queen beyond the seas; and Raleigh speaks the language of
+the heart of his country, when he urges the English statesmen to
+colonise Guiana, and exults in the glorious hope of driving the white
+marauder into the Pacific, and restoring the Incas to the throne of
+Peru.
+
+    Who will not be persuaded (he says) that now at length the great
+    Judge of the world hath heard the sighs, groans, and lamentations,
+    hath seen the tears and blood of so many millions of innocent men,
+    women, and children, afflicted, robbed, reviled, branded with hot
+    irons, roasted, dismembered, mangled, stabbed, whipped, racked,
+    scalded with hot oil, put to the strapado, ripped alive, beheaded in
+    sport, drowned, dashed against the rocks, famished, devoured by
+    mastiffs, burned, and by infinite cruelties consumed, and purposeth
+    to scourge and plague that cursed nation, and to take the yoke of
+    servitude from that distressed people, as free by nature as any
+    Christian?
+
+Poor Raleigh! if peace and comfort in this world were of much importance
+to him, it was in an ill day that he provoked the revenge of Spain. The
+strength of England was needed at the moment at its own door; the Armada
+came, and there was no means of executing such an enterprise. And
+afterwards the throne of Elizabeth was filled by a Stuart, and Guiana
+was to be no scene of glory for Raleigh; rather, as later historians are
+pleased to think, it was the grave of his reputation.
+
+But the hope burned clear in him through all the weary years of unjust
+imprisonment; and when he was a grey-headed old man, the base son of a
+bad mother used it to betray him. The success of his last enterprise was
+made the condition under which he was to be pardoned for a crime which
+he had not committed; and its success depended, as he knew, on its being
+kept secret from the Spaniards. James required of Raleigh on his
+allegiance a detail of what he proposed, giving him at the same time his
+word as a king that the secret should be safe with him. The next day it
+was sweeping out of the port of London in the swiftest of the Spanish
+ships, with private orders to the Governor of St. Thomas to provoke a
+collision when Raleigh should arrive there, which should afterwards cost
+him his heart's blood.
+
+We modern readers may run rapidly over the series of epithets under
+which Raleigh has catalogued the Indian sufferings, hoping that they
+are exaggerated, seeing that they are horrible, and closing our eyes
+against them with swiftest haste; but it was not so when every epithet
+suggested a hundred familiar facts; and some of these (not resting on
+English prejudice, but on sad Spanish evidence, which is too full of
+shame and sorrow to be suspected) shall be given in this place, however
+old a story it may be thought; because, as we said above, it is
+impossible to understand the actions of these men, unless we are
+familiar with the feelings of which their hearts were full.
+
+The massacres under Cortez and Pizarro, terrible as they were, were not
+the occasion which stirred the deepest indignation. They had the excuse
+of what might be called, for want of a better word, necessity, and of
+the desperate position of small bands of men in the midst of enemies who
+might be counted by millions. And in De Soto, when he burnt his guides
+in Florida (it was his practice, when there was danger of treachery,
+that those who were left alive might take warning); or in Vasco Nunnez,
+praying to the Virgin on the mountains of Darien, and going down from
+off them into the valleys to hunt the Indian caciques, and fling them
+alive to his bloodhounds; there was, at least, with all this fierceness
+and cruelty, a desperate courage which we cannot refuse to admire, and
+which mingles with and corrects our horror. It is the refinement of the
+Spaniard's cruelty in the settled and conquered provinces, excused by no
+danger and provoked by no resistance, the details of which witness to
+the infernal coolness with which it was perpetrated; and the great
+bearing of the Indians themselves under an oppression which they
+despaired of resisting, raises the whole history to the rank of a
+world-wide tragedy, in which the nobler but weaker nature was crushed
+under a malignant force which was stronger and yet meaner than itself.
+Gold hunting and lust were the two passions for which the Spaniards
+cared; and the fate of the Indian women was only more dreadful than that
+of the men, who were ganged and chained to a labour in the mines which
+was only to cease with their lives, in a land where but a little before
+they had lived a free contented people, more innocent of crime than
+perhaps any people upon earth. If we can conceive what our own feelings
+would be--if, in the 'development of the mammalia,' some baser but more
+powerful race than man were to appear upon this planet, and we and our
+wives and children at our own happy firesides were degraded from our
+freedom, and became to them what the lower animals are to us, we can
+perhaps realise the feelings of the enslaved nations of Hispaniola.
+
+As a harsh justification of slavery, it is sometimes urged that men who
+do not deserve to be slaves will prefer death to the endurance of it;
+and that if they prize their liberty, it is always in their power to
+assert it in the old Roman fashion. Tried even by so hard a rule, the
+Indians vindicated their right; and, before the close of the sixteenth
+century, the entire group of the Western Islands in the hands of the
+Spaniards, containing, when Columbus discovered them, many millions of
+inhabitants, were left literally desolate from suicide. Of the anecdotes
+of this terrible self-immolation, as they were then known in England,
+here are a few out of many.
+
+The first is simple, and a specimen of the ordinary method. A Yucatan
+cacique, who was forced with his old subjects to labour in the mines, at
+last 'calling those miners into an house, to the number of ninety-five,
+he thus debateth with them:'--
+
+    'My worthy companions and friends, why desire we to live any longer
+    under so cruel a servitude? Let us now go unto the perpetual seat of
+    our ancestors, for we shall there have rest from these intolerable
+    cares and grievances which we endure under the subjection of the
+    unthankful. Go ye before, I will presently follow you.' Having so
+    spoken, he held out whole handfuls of those leaves which take away
+    life, prepared for the purpose, and giving every one part thereof,
+    being kindled to suck up the fume; who obeyed his command, the king
+    and his chief kinsmen reserving the last place for themselves.
+
+We speak of the crime of suicide, but few persons will see a crime in
+this sad and stately leave-taking of a life which it was no longer
+possible to bear with unbroken hearts. We do not envy the Indian, who,
+with Spaniards before him as an evidence of the fruits which their creed
+brought forth, deliberately exchanged for it the old religion of his
+country, which could sustain him in an action of such melancholy
+grandeur. But the Indians did not always reply to their oppressors with
+escaping passively beyond their hands. Here is a story with matter in it
+for as rich a tragedy as OEdipus or Agamemnon; and in its stern and
+tremendous features, more nearly resembling them than any which were
+conceived even by Shakespeare.
+
+An officer named Orlando had taken the daughter of a Cuban cacique to be
+his mistress. She was with child by him, but, suspecting her of being
+engaged in some other intrigue, he had her fastened to two wooden spits,
+not intending to kill her, but to terrify her; and setting her before
+the fire, he ordered that she should be turned by the servants of the
+kitchen.
+
+    The maiden, stricken with fear through the cruelty thereof, and
+    strange kind of torment, presently gave up the ghost. The cacique
+    her father, understanding the matter, took thirty of his men and
+    went to the house of the captain, who was then absent, and slew his
+    wife, whom he had married after that wicked act committed, and the
+    women who were companions of the wife, and her servants every one.
+    Then shutting the door of the house, and putting fire under it, he
+    burnt himself and all his companions that assisted him, together
+    with the captain's dead family and goods.
+
+This is no fiction or poet's romance. It is a tale of wrath and revenge,
+which in sober dreadful truth enacted itself upon this earth, and
+remains among the eternal records of the doings of mankind upon it. As
+some relief to its most terrible features, we follow it with a story
+which has a touch in it of diabolical humour.
+
+The slave-owners finding their slaves escaping thus unprosperously out
+of their grasp, set themselves to find a remedy for so desperate a
+disease, and were swift to avail themselves of any weakness, mental or
+bodily, through which to retain them in life. One of these proprietors
+being informed that a number of his people intended to kill themselves
+on a certain day, at a particular spot, and knowing by experience that
+they were too likely to do it, presented himself there at the time which
+had been fixed upon, and telling the Indians when they arrived that he
+knew their intention, and that it was vain for them to attempt to keep
+anything a secret from him, he ended with saying, that he had come there
+to kill himself with them; that as he had used them ill in this world,
+he might use them worse in the next; 'with which he did dissuade them
+presently from their purpose.' With what efficacy such believers in the
+immortality of the soul were likely to recommend either their faith or
+their God; rather, how terribly all the devotion and all the
+earnestness with which the poor priests who followed in the wake of the
+conquerors laboured to recommend it were shamed and paralysed, they
+themselves too bitterly lament.
+
+It was idle to send out governor after governor with orders to stay such
+practices. They had but to arrive on the scene to become infected with
+the same fever; or if any remnant of Castilian honour, or any faintest
+echoes of the faith which they professed, still flickered in a few of
+the best and noblest, they could but look on with folded hands in
+ineffectual mourning; they could do nothing without soldiers, and the
+soldiers were the worst offenders. Hispaniola became a desert; the gold
+was in the mines, and there were no slaves left remaining to extract it.
+One means which the Spaniards dared to employ to supply the vacancy,
+brought about an incident which in its piteous pathos exceeds any story
+we have ever heard. Crimes and criminals are swept away by time, nature
+finds an antidote for their poison, and they and their ill consequences
+alike are blotted out and perish. If we do not for give the villain, at
+least we cease to hate him, as it grows more clear to us that he injures
+none so deeply as himself. But the [Greek: thêriôdês kakia], the
+enormous wickedness by which humanity itself has been outraged and
+disgraced, we cannot forgive; we cannot cease to hate that; the years
+roll away, but the tints of it remain on the pages of history, deep and
+horrible as the day on which they were entered there.
+
+    When the Spaniards understood the simple opinion of the Yucatan
+    islanders concerning the souls of their departed, which, after their
+    sins purged in the cold northern mountains should pass into the
+    south, to the intent that, leaving their own country of their own
+    accord, they might suffer themselves to be brought to Hispaniola,
+    they did persuade those poor wretches, that they came from those
+    places where they should see their parents and children, and all
+    their kindred and friends that were dead, and should enjoy all kinds
+    of delights with the embracements and fruition of all beloved
+    beings. And they, being infected and possessed with these crafty and
+    subtle imaginations, singing and rejoicing left their country, and
+    followed vain and idle hope. But when they saw that they were
+    deceived, and neither met their parents nor any that they desired,
+    but were compelled to undergo grievous sovereignty and command, and
+    to endure cruel and extreme labour, they either slew themselves, or,
+    choosing to famish, gave up their fair spirits, being persuaded by
+    no reason or violence to take food. So these miserable Yucatans came
+    to their end.
+
+It was once more as it was in the days of the Apostles. The New World
+was first offered to the holders of the old traditions. They were the
+husbandmen first chosen for the new vineyard, and blood and desolation
+were the only fruits which they reared upon it. In their hands it was
+becoming a kingdom, not of God, but of the devil, and a sentence of
+blight went out against them and against their works. How fatally it has
+worked, let modern Spain and Spanish America bear witness. We need not
+follow further the history of their dealings with the Indians. For their
+colonies, a fatality appears to have followed all attempts at Catholic
+colonisation. Like shoots from an old decaying tree which no skill and
+no care can rear, they were planted, and for a while they might seem to
+grow; but their life was never more than a lingering death, a failure,
+which to a thinking person would outweigh in the arguments against
+Catholicism whole libraries of faultless _catenas_, and a _consensus
+patrum_ unbroken through fifteen centuries for the supremacy of St.
+Peter.
+
+There is no occasion to look for superstitious causes to explain the
+phenomenon. The Catholic faith had ceased to be the faith of the large
+mass of earnest thinking capable persons; and to those who can best do
+the work, all work in this world sooner or later is committed. America
+was the natural home for Protestants; persecuted at home, they sought a
+place where they might worship God in their own way, without danger of
+stake or gibbet, and the French Huguenots, as afterwards the English
+Puritans, early found their way there. The fate of a party of Coligny's
+people, who had gone out as settlers, shall be the last of these
+stories, illustrating, as it does in the highest degree, the wrath and
+fury with which the passions on both sides were boiling. A certain John
+Ribault, with about 400 companions, had emigrated to Florida. They were
+quiet inoffensive people, and lived in peace there several years,
+cultivating the soil, building villages, and on the best possible terms
+with the natives. Spain was at the time at peace with France; we are,
+therefore, to suppose that it was in pursuance of the great crusade, in
+which they might feel secure of the secret, if not the confessed,
+sympathy of the Guises, that a powerful Spanish fleet bore down upon
+this settlement. The French made no resistance, and they were seized and
+flayed alive, and their bodies hung out upon the trees, with an
+inscription suspended over them, 'Not as Frenchmen, but as heretics.' At
+Paris all was sweetness and silence. The settlement was tranquilly
+surrendered to the same men who had made it the scene of their atrocity;
+and two years later, 500 of the very Spaniards who had been most active
+in the murder were living there in peaceable possession, in two forts
+which their relation with the natives had obliged them to build. It was
+well that there were other Frenchmen living, of whose consciences the
+Court had not the keeping, and who were able on emergencies to do what
+was right without consulting it. A certain privateer, named Dominique de
+Gourges, secretly armed and equipped a vessel at Rochelle, and, stealing
+across the Atlantic and in two days collecting a strong party of
+Indians, he came down suddenly upon the forts, and, taking them by
+storm, slew or afterwards hanged every man he found there, leaving their
+bodies on the trees on which they had hanged the Huguenots, with their
+own inscription reversed against them--'Not as Spaniards, but as
+murderers.' For which exploit, well deserving of all honest men's
+praise, Dominique de Gourges had to fly his country for his life; and,
+coming to England, was received with honourable welcome by Elizabeth.
+
+It was at such a time, and to take their part amidst such scenes as
+these, that the English navigators appeared along the shores of South
+America, as the armed soldiers of the Reformation, and as the avengers
+of humanity. As their enterprise was grand and lofty, so for the most
+part was the manner in which they bore themselves worthy of it. They
+were no nation of saints, in the modern sentimental sense of that word;
+they were prompt, stern men--more ready ever to strike an enemy than to
+parley with him; and, private adventurers as they all were, it was
+natural enough that private rapacity and private badness should be found
+among them as among other mortals. Every Englishman who had the means
+was at liberty to fit out a ship or ships, and if he could produce
+tolerable vouchers for himself, received at once a commission from the
+Court. The battles of England were fought by her children, at their own
+risk and cost, and they were at liberty to repay themselves the expense
+of their expeditions by plundering at the cost of the national enemy.
+Thus, of course, in a mixed world, there were found mixed marauding
+crews of scoundrels, who played the game which a century later was
+played with such effect by the pirates of the Tortugas. Negro hunters
+too, there were, and a bad black slave trade--in which Elizabeth
+herself, being hard driven for money, did not disdain to invest her
+capital--but on the whole, and in the war with the Spaniards, as in the
+war with the elements, the conduct and character of the English sailors,
+considering what they were and the work which they were sent to do,
+present us all through that age with such a picture of gallantry,
+disinterestedness, and high heroic energy, as has never been
+overmatched; the more remarkable, as it was the fruit of no drill or
+discipline, no tradition, no system, no organised training, but was the
+free native growth of a noble virgin soil.
+
+Before starting on an expedition, it was usual for the crew and the
+officers to meet and arrange among themselves a series of articles of
+conduct, to which they bound themselves by a formal agreement, the
+entire body itself undertaking to see to their observance. It is quite
+possible that strong religious profession, and even sincere profession,
+might be accompanied, as it was in the Spaniards, with everything most
+detestable. It is not sufficient of itself to prove that their actions
+would correspond with it, but it is one among a number of evidences; and
+coming as most of these men come before us, with hands clear of any
+blood but of fair and open enemies, their articles may pass at least as
+indications of what they were.
+
+Here we have a few instances:--
+
+Richard Hawkins's ship's company was, as he himself informs us, an
+unusually loose one. Nevertheless, we find them 'gathered together every
+morning and evening to serve God;' and a fire on board, which only
+Hawkins's presence of mind prevented from destroying ship and crew
+together, was made use of by the men as an occasion to banish swearing
+out of the ship.
+
+    With a general consent of all our company, it was ordained that
+    there should be a palmer or ferula which should be in the keeping of
+    him who was taken with an oath; and that he who had the palmer
+    should give to every one that he took swearing, a palmada with it
+    and the ferula; and whosoever at the time of evening or morning
+    prayer was found to have the palmer, should have three blows given
+    him by the captain or the master; and that he should still be bound
+    to free himself by taking another, or else to run in danger of
+    continuing the penalty, which, being executed a few days, reformed
+    the vice, so that in three days together was not one oath heard to
+    be sworn.
+
+The regulations for Luke Fox's voyage commenced thus:--
+
+    For as much as the good success and prosperity of every action doth
+    consist in the due service and glorifying of God, knowing that not
+    only our being and preservation, but the prosperity of all our
+    actions and enterprises do immediately depend on His Almighty
+    goodness and mercy; it is provided--
+
+    First, that all the company, as well officers as others, shall duly
+    repair every day twice at the call of the bell to hear public
+    prayers to be read, such as are authorised by the church, and that
+    in a godly and devout manner, as good Christians ought.
+
+    Secondly, that no man shall swear by the name of God, or use any
+    profane oath, or blaspheme His holy name.
+
+To symptoms such as these, we cannot but assign a very different value
+when they are the spontaneous growth of common minds, unstimulated by
+sense of propriety or rules of the service, or other official influence
+lay or ecclesiastic, from what attaches to the somewhat similar
+ceremonials in which, among persons whose position is conspicuous,
+important enterprises are now and then inaugurated.
+
+We have said as much as we intend to say of the treatment by the
+Spaniards of the Indian women. Sir Walter Raleigh is commonly
+represented by historians as rather defective, if he was remarkable at
+all, on the moral side of his character. Yet Raleigh can declare
+proudly, that all the time he was on the Oronoko, 'neither by force nor
+other means had any of his men intercourse with any woman there;' and
+the narrator of the incidents of Raleigh's last voyage acquaints his
+correspondent 'with some particulars touching the government of the
+fleet, which, although other men in their voyages doubtless in some
+measure observed, yet in all the great volumes which have been written
+touching voyages, there is no precedent of so godly severe and martial
+government, which not only in itself is laudable and worthy of
+imitation, but is also fit to be written and engraven on every man's
+soul that coveteth to do honour to his country.'
+
+Once more, the modern theory of Drake is, as we said above, that he was
+a gentleman-like pirate on a large scale, who is indebted for the place
+which he fills in history to the indistinct ideas of right and wrong
+prevailing in the unenlightened age in which he lived, and who
+therefore demands all the toleration of our own enlarged humanity to
+allow him to remain there. Let us see how the following incident can be
+made to coincide with this hypothesis:--
+
+A few days after clearing the Channel on his first great voyage, he fell
+in with a small Spanish ship, which he took for a prize. He committed
+the care of it to a certain Mr. Doughtie, a person much trusted by, and
+personally very dear to him, and this second vessel was to follow him as
+a tender.
+
+In dangerous expeditions into unknown seas, a second smaller ship was
+often indispensable to success; but many finely intended enterprises
+were ruined by the cowardice of the officers to whom such ships were
+entrusted; who shrank as danger thickened, and again and again took
+advantage of darkness or heavy weather to make sail for England and
+forsake their commander. Hawkins twice suffered in this way; so did Sir
+Humfrey Gilbert; and, although Drake's own kind feeling for his old
+friend has prevented him from leaving an exact account of his offence,
+we gather from the scattered hints which are let fall, that he, too, was
+meditating a similar piece of treason. However, it may or may not have
+been thus. But when at Port St. Julien, 'our General,' says one of the
+crew,--
+
+    Began to inquire diligently of the actions of Mr. Thomas Doughtie,
+    and found them not to be such as he looked for, but tending rather
+    to contention or mutiny, or some other disorder, whereby, without
+    redresse, the success of the voyage might greatly have been
+    hazarded. Whereupon the company was called together and made
+    acquainted with the particulars of the cause, which were found,
+    partly by Mr. Doughtie's own confession, and partly by the evidence
+    of the fact, to be true, which, when our General saw, although his
+    private affection to Mr. Doughtie (as he then, in the presence of us
+    all, sacredly protested) was great, yet the care which he had of the
+    state of the voyage, of the expectation of Her Majesty, and of the
+    honour of his country, did more touch him, as indeed it ought, than
+    the private respect of one man; so that the cause being throughly
+    heard, and all things done in good order as near as might be to the
+    course of our law in England, it was concluded that Mr. Doughtie
+    should receive punishment according to the quality of the offence.
+    And he, seeing no remedy but patience for himself, desired before
+    his death to receive the communion, which he did at the hands of Mr.
+    Fletcher, our minister, and our General himself accompanied him in
+    that holy action, which, being done, and the place of execution made
+    ready, he, having embraced our General, and taken leave of all the
+    company, with prayers for the Queen's Majesty and our realm, in
+    quiet sort laid his head to the block, where he ended his life. This
+    being done, our General made divers speeches to the whole company,
+    persuading us to unity, obedience, love, and regard of our voyage,
+    and for the better confirmation thereof, willed every man the next
+    Sunday following to prepare himself to receive the communion, as
+    Christian brethren and friends ought to do, which was done in very
+    reverent sort, and so with good contentment every man went about his
+    business.
+
+The simple majesty of this anecdote can gain nothing from any comment
+which we might offer upon it. The crew of a common English ship
+organising, of their own free motion, on that wild shore, a judgment
+hall more grand and awful than any most elaborate law court, is not to
+be reconciled with the pirate theory. Drake, it is true, appropriated
+and brought home a million and a half of Spanish treasure, while England
+and Spain were at peace. He took that treasure because for many years
+the officers of the Inquisition had made free at their pleasure with the
+lives and goods of English merchants and seamen. The king of Spain, when
+appealed to, had replied that he had no power over the Holy House; and
+it was necessary to make the king of Spain, or the Inquisition, or
+whoever were the parties responsible, feel that they could not play
+their pious pranks with impunity. When Drake seized the bullion at
+Panama, he sent word to the viceroy that he should now learn to respect
+the properties of English subjects; and he added, that if four English
+sailors, who were prisoners in Mexico, were molested, he would execute
+2,000 Spaniards and send the viceroy their heads. Spain and England were
+at peace, but Popery and Protestantism were at war--deep, deadly, and
+irreconcileable.
+
+Wherever we find them, they are still the same. In the courts of Japan
+or of China; fighting Spaniards in the Pacific, or prisoners among the
+Algerines; founding colonies which by-and-by were to grow into enormous
+Transatlantic republics, or exploring in crazy pinnaces the fierce
+latitudes of the Polar seas,--they are the same indomitable God-fearing
+men whose life was one great liturgy. 'The ice was strong, but God was
+stronger,' says one of Frobisher's men, after grinding a night and a day
+among the icebergs, not waiting for God to come down and split the ice
+for them, but toiling through the long hours, himself and the rest
+fending off the vessel with poles and planks, with death glaring at
+them out of the rocks. Icebergs were strong, Spaniards were strong, and
+storms, and corsairs, and rocks and reefs, which no chart had then
+noted--they were all strong; but God was stronger, and that was all
+which they cared to know.
+
+Out of the vast number of illustrations it is difficult to make wise
+selections, but the attention floats loosely over generalities, and only
+individual instances can seize it and hold it fast. We shall attempt to
+bring our readers face to face with some of these men; not, of course,
+to write their biographies, but to sketch the details of a few scenes,
+in the hope that they may tempt those under whose eyes they may fall to
+look for themselves to complete the perfect figure.
+
+Some two miles above the port of Dartmouth, once among the most
+important harbours in England, on a projecting angle of land which runs
+out into the river at the head of one of its most beautiful reaches,
+there has stood for some centuries the Manor House of Greenaway. The
+water runs deep all the way to it from the sea, and the largest vessels
+may ride with safety within a stone's throw of the windows. In the
+latter half of the sixteenth century there must have met, in the hall of
+this mansion, a party as remarkable as could have been found anywhere in
+England. Humfrey and Adrian Gilbert, with their half-brother, Walter
+Raleigh, here, when little boys, played at sailors in the reaches of
+Long Stream; in the summer evenings doubtless rowing down with the tide
+to the port, and wondering at the quaint figure-heads and carved prows
+of the ships which thronged it; or climbing on board, and listening,
+with hearts beating, to the mariners' tales of the new earth beyond the
+sunset. And here in later life, matured men, whose boyish dreams had
+become heroic action, they used again to meet in the intervals of quiet,
+and the rock is shown underneath the house where Raleigh smoked the
+first tobacco. Another remarkable man, of whom we shall presently speak
+more closely, could not fail to have made a fourth at these meetings. A
+sailor boy of Sandwich, the adjoining parish, John Davis, showed early a
+genius which could not have escaped the eye of such neighbours, and in
+the atmosphere of Greenaway he learned to be as noble as the Gilberts,
+and as tender and delicate as Raleigh. Of this party, for the present we
+confine ourselves to the host and owner, Humfrey Gilbert, knighted
+afterwards by Elizabeth. Led by the scenes of his childhood to the sea
+and to sea adventures, and afterwards, as his mind unfolded, to study
+his profession scientifically, we find him as soon as he was old enough
+to think for himself, or make others listen to him, 'amending the great
+errors of naval sea cards, whose common fault is to make the degree of
+longitude in every latitude of one common bigness;' inventing
+instruments for taking observations, studying the form of the earth, and
+convincing himself that there was a north-west passage, and studying the
+necessities of his country, and discovering the remedies for them in
+colonisation and extended markets for home manufactures. Gilbert was
+examined before the Queen's Majesty and the Privy Council, and the
+record of his examination he has himself left to us in a paper which he
+afterwards drew up, and strange enough reading it is. The most admirable
+conclusions stand side by side with the wildest conjectures.
+
+Homer and Aristotle are pressed into service to prove that the ocean
+runs round the three old continents, and that America therefore is
+necessarily an island. The Gulf Stream, which he had carefully observed,
+eked out by a theory of the _primum mobile_, is made to demonstrate a
+channel to the north, corresponding to Magellan's Straits in the south,
+Gilbert believing, in common with almost everyone of his day, that these
+straits were the only opening into the Pacific, and the land to the
+South was unbroken to the Pole. He prophesies a market in the East for
+our manufactured linen and calicoes:--
+
+    The Easterns greatly prizing the same, as appeareth in Hester, where
+    the pomp is expressed of the great King of India, Ahasuerus, who
+    matched the coloured clothes wherewith his houses and tents were
+    apparelled, with gold and silver, as part of his greatest treasure.
+
+These and other such arguments were the best analysis which Sir Humfrey
+had to offer of the spirit which he felt to be working in him. We may
+think what we please of them; but we can have but one thought of the
+great grand words with which the memorial concludes, and they alone
+would explain the love which Elizabeth bore him:--
+
+    Never, therefore, mislike with me for taking in hand any laudable
+    and honest enterprise, for if through pleasure or idleness we
+    purchase shame, the pleasure vanisheth, but the shame abideth for
+    ever.
+
+    Give me leave, therefore, without offence, always to live and die in
+    this mind: that he is not worthy to live at all that, for fear or
+    danger of death, shunneth his country's service and his own honour,
+    seeing that death is inevitable and the fame of virtue immortal,
+    wherefore in this behalf _mutare vel timere sperno_.
+
+Two voyages which he undertook at his own cost, which shattered his
+fortune, and failed, as they naturally might, since inefficient help or
+mutiny of subordinates, or other disorders, are inevitable conditions
+under which more or less great men must be content to see their great
+thoughts mutilated by the feebleness of their instruments, did not
+dishearten him, and in June 1583 a last fleet of five ships sailed from
+the port of Dartmouth, with commission from the queen to discover and
+take possession from latitude 45° to 50° North--a voyage not a little
+noteworthy, there being planted in the course of it the first English
+colony west of the Atlantic. Elizabeth had a foreboding that she would
+never see him again. She sent him a jewel as a last token of her favour,
+and she desired Raleigh to have his picture taken before he went.
+
+The history of the voyage was written by a Mr. Edward Hayes, of
+Dartmouth, one of the principal actors in it, and as a composition it is
+more remarkable for fine writing than any very commendable thought in
+the author. But Sir Humfrey's nature shines through the infirmity of his
+chronicler; and in the end, indeed, Mr. Hayes himself is subdued into a
+better mind. He had lost money by the voyage, and we will hope his
+higher nature was only under a temporary eclipse. The fleet consisted
+(it is well to observe the ships and the size of them) of the 'Delight,'
+120 tons; the barque 'Raleigh,' 200 tons (this ship deserted off the
+Land's End); the 'Golden Hinde' and the 'Swallow,' 40 tons each; and the
+'Squirrel,' which was called the frigate, 10 tons. For the uninitiated
+in such matters, we may add, that if in a vessel the size of the last, a
+member of the Yacht Club would consider that he had earned a club-room
+immortality if he had ventured a run in the depth of summer from Cowes
+to the Channel Islands.
+
+    We were in all (says Mr. Hayes) 260 men, among whom we had of every
+    faculty good choice. Besides, for solace of our own people, and
+    allurement of the savages, we were provided of music in good
+    variety, not omitting the least toys, as morris dancers, hobby
+    horses, and May-like conceits to delight the savage people.
+
+The expedition reached Newfoundland without accident. St. John's was
+taken possession of, and a colony left there; and Sir Humfrey then set
+out exploring along the American coast to the south, he himself doing
+all the work in his little 10-ton cutter, the service being too
+dangerous for the larger vessels to venture on. One of these had
+remained at St. John's. He was now accompanied only by the 'Delight' and
+the 'Golden Hinde,' and these two keeping as near the shore as they
+dared, he spent what remained of the summer examining every creek and
+bay, marking the soundings, taking the bearings of the possible
+harbours, and risking his life, as every hour he was obliged to risk it
+in such a service, in thus leading, as it were, the forlorn hope in the
+conquest of the New World. How dangerous it was we shall presently see.
+It was towards the end of August.
+
+    The evening was fair and pleasant, yet not without token of storm to
+    ensue, and most part of this Wednesday night, like the swan that
+    singeth before her death, they in the 'Delight' continued in
+    sounding of drums and trumpets and fifes, also winding the cornets
+    and hautboys, and in the end of their jollity left with the battell
+    and ringing of doleful knells.
+
+Two days after came the storm; the 'Delight' struck upon a bank, and
+went down in sight of the other vessels, which were unable to render her
+any help. Sir Humfrey's papers, among other things, were all lost in
+her; at the time considered by him an irreparable misfortune. But it was
+little matter, he was never to need them. The 'Golden Hinde' and the
+'Squirrel' were now left alone of the five ships. The provisions were
+running short, and the summer season was closing. Both crews were on
+short allowance; and with much difficulty Sir Humfrey was prevailed upon
+to be satisfied for the present with what he had done, and to lay off
+for England.
+
+    So upon Saturday, in the afternoon, the 31st of August, we changed
+    our course, and returned back for England, at which very instant,
+    even in winding about, there passed along between us and the land,
+    which we now forsook, a very lion, to our seeming, in shape, hair,
+    and colour; not swimming after the manner of a beast by moving of
+    his feet, but rather sliding upon the water with his whole body,
+    except his legs, in sight, neither yet diving under and again
+    rising as the manner is of whales, porpoises, and other fish, but
+    confidently showing himself without hiding, notwithstanding that we
+    presented ourselves in open view and gesture to amaze him. Thus he
+    passed along, turning his head to and fro, yawning and gaping wide,
+    with ougly demonstration of long teeth and glaring eyes; and to
+    bidde us farewell, coming right against the 'Hinde,' he sent forth a
+    horrible voice, roaring and bellowing as doth a lion, which
+    spectacle we all beheld so far as we were able to discern the same,
+    as men prone to wonder at every strange thing. What opinion others
+    had thereof, and chiefly the General himself, I forbear to deliver.
+    But he took it for _Bonum Omen_, rejoicing that he was to war
+    against such an enemy, if it were the devil.
+
+We have no doubt that he did think it was the devil; men in those days
+believing really that evil was more than a principle or a necessary
+accident, and that in all their labour for God and for right, they must
+make their account to have to fight with the devil in his proper person.
+But if we are to call it superstition, and if this were no devil in the
+form of a roaring lion, but a mere great seal or sea-lion, it is a more
+innocent superstition to impersonate so real a power, and it requires a
+bolder heart to rise up against it and defy it in its living terror,
+than to sublimate it away into a philosophical principle, and to forget
+to battle with it in speculating on its origin and nature. But to follow
+the brave Sir Humfrey, whose work of fighting with the devil was now
+over, and who was passing to his reward. The 2nd of September the
+General came on board the 'Golden Hinde' 'to make merry with us.' He
+greatly deplored the loss of his books and papers, but he was full of
+confidence from what he had seen, and talked with eagerness and warmth
+of the new expedition for the following spring. Apocryphal gold-mines
+still occupying the minds of Mr. Hayes and others, they were persuaded
+that Sir Humfrey was keeping to himself some such discovery which he had
+secretly made, and they tried hard to extract it from him. They could
+make nothing, however, of his odd, ironical answers, and their sorrow at
+the catastrophe which followed is sadly blended with disappointment that
+such a secret should have perished. Sir Humfrey doubtless saw America
+with other eyes than theirs, and gold-mines richer than California in
+its huge rivers and savannahs.
+
+    Leaving the issue of this good hope (about the gold), (continues Mr.
+    Hayes), to God, who only knoweth the truth thereof, I will hasten
+    to the end of this tragedy, which must be knit up in the person of
+    our General, and as it was God's ordinance upon him, even so the
+    vehement persuasion of his friends could nothing avail to divert him
+    from his wilful resolution of going in his frigate; and when he was
+    entreated by the captain, master, and others, his well-wishers in
+    the 'Hinde,' not to venture, this was his answer--'I will not
+    forsake my little company going homewards, with whom I have passed
+    so many storms and perils.'
+
+Two-thirds of the way home they met foul weather and terrible seas,
+'breaking-short and pyramid-wise.' Men who had all their lives 'occupied
+the sea' had never seen it more outrageous. 'We had also upon our
+mainyard an apparition of a little fier by night, which seamen do call
+Castor and Pollux.'
+
+    Monday the ninth of September, in the afternoon, the frigate was
+    near cast away oppressed by waves, but at that time recovered, and
+    giving forth signs of joy, the General, sitting abaft with a book in
+    his hand, cried out unto us in the 'Hinde' so often as we did
+    approach within hearing, 'We are as near to heaven by sea as by
+    land,' reiterating the same speech, well beseeming a soldier
+    resolute in Jesus Christ, as I can testify that he was. The same
+    Monday night, about twelve of the clock, or not long after, the
+    frigate being ahead of us in the 'Golden Hinde,' suddenly her lights
+    were out, whereof as it were in a moment we lost the sight; and
+    withal our watch cried, 'The General was cast away,' which was too
+    true.
+
+    Thus faithfully (concludes Mr. Hayes, in some degree rising above
+    himself) I have related this story, wherein some spark of the
+    knight's virtues, though he be extinguished, may happily appear; he
+    remaining resolute to a purpose honest and godly as was this, to
+    discover, possess, and reduce unto the service of God and Christian
+    piety, those remote and heathen countries of America. Such is the
+    infinite bounty of God, who from every evil deriveth good, that
+    fruit may grow in time of our travelling in these North-Western
+    lands (as has it not grown?), and the crosses, turmoils, and
+    afflictions, both in the preparation and execution of the voyage,
+    did correct the intemperate humours which before we noted to be in
+    this gentleman, and made unsavoury and less delightful his other
+    manifold virtues.
+
+    Thus as he was refined and made nearer unto the image of God, so it
+    pleased the Divine will to resume him unto Himself, whither both his
+    and every other high and noble mind have always aspired.
+
+Such was Sir Humfrey Gilbert; still in the prime of his years when the
+Atlantic swallowed him. Like the gleam of a landscape lit suddenly for a
+moment by the lightning, these few scenes flash down to us across the
+centuries: but what a life must that have been of which this was the
+conclusion! We have glimpses of him a few years earlier, when he won his
+spurs in Ireland--won them by deeds which to us seem terrible in their
+ruthlessness, but which won the applause of Sir Henry Sidney as too high
+for praise or even reward. Chequered like all of us with lines of light
+and darkness, he was, nevertheless, one of a race which has ceased to
+be. We look round for them, and we can hardly believe that the same
+blood is flowing in our veins. Brave we may still be, and strong perhaps
+as they, but the high moral grace which made bravery and strength so
+beautiful is departed from us for ever.
+
+Our space is sadly limited for historical portrait painting; but we must
+find room for another of that Greenaway party whose nature was as fine
+as that of Gilbert, and who intellectually was more largely gifted. The
+latter was drowned in 1583. In 1585 John Davis left Dartmouth on his
+first voyage into the Polar seas; and twice subsequently he went again,
+venturing in small ill-equipped vessels of thirty or forty tons into the
+most dangerous seas. These voyages were as remarkable for their success
+as for the daring with which they were accomplished, and Davis's epitaph
+is written on the map of the world, where his name still remains to
+commemorate his discoveries. Brave as he was, he is distinguished by a
+peculiar and exquisite sweetness of nature, which, from many little
+facts of his life, seems to have affected everyone with whom he came in
+contact in a remarkable degree. We find men, for the love of Master
+Davis, leaving their firesides to sail with him, without other hope or
+motion; we find silver bullets cast to shoot him in a mutiny; the hard
+rude natures of the mutineers being awed by something in his carriage
+which was not like that of a common man. He has written the account of
+one of his northern voyages himself; one of those, by-the-by, which the
+Hakluyt Society have mutilated; and there is an imaginative beauty in
+it, and a rich delicacy of expression, which is called out in him by the
+first sight of strange lands and things and people.
+
+To show what he was, we should have preferred, if possible, to have
+taken the story of his expedition into the South Seas, in which, under
+circumstances of singular difficulty, he was deserted by Candish, under
+whom he had sailed; and after inconceivable trials from famine, mutiny,
+and storm, ultimately saved himself and his ship, and such of the crew
+as had chosen to submit to his orders. But it is a long history, and
+will not admit of being curtailed. As an instance of the stuff of which
+it was composed, he ran back in the black night in a gale of wind
+through the Straits of Magellan, _by a chart which he had made with the
+eye in passing up_. His anchors were lost or broken; the cables were
+parted. He could not bring up the ship; there was nothing for it but to
+run, and he carried her safe through along a channel often not three
+miles broad, sixty miles from end to end, and twisting like the reaches
+of a river.
+
+For the present, however, we are forced to content ourselves with a few
+sketches out of the north-west voyages. Here is one, for instance, which
+shows how an Englishman could deal with the Indians. Davis had landed at
+Gilbert's Sound, and gone up the country exploring. On his return he
+found his crew loud in complaints of the thievish propensities of the
+natives, and urgent to have an example made of some of them. On the next
+occasion he fired a gun at them with blank cartridge; but their nature
+was still too strong for them.
+
+    Seeing iron (he says), they could in no case forbear stealing;
+    which, when I perceived, it did but minister to me occasion of
+    laughter to see their simplicity, and I willed that they should not
+    be hardly used, but that our company should be more diligent to keep
+    their things, supposing it to be very hard in so short a time to
+    make them know their evils.
+
+In his own way, however, he took an opportunity of administering a
+lesson to them of a more wholesome kind than could be given with
+gunpowder and bullets. Like the rest his countrymen, he believed the
+savage Indians in their idolatries to be worshippers of the devil. 'They
+are witches,' he says; 'they have images in great store, and use many
+kinds of enchantments.' And these enchantments they tried on one
+occasion to put in force against himself and his crew.
+
+    Being on shore on the 4th day of July, one of them made a long
+    oration, and then kindled a fire, into which with many strange words
+    and gestures he put divers things, which we supposed to be a
+    sacrifice. Myself and certain of my company standing by, they
+    desired us to go into the smoke. I desired them to go into the
+    smoke, which they would by no means do. I then took one of them and
+    thrust him into the smoke, and willed one of my company to tread out
+    the fire, and spurn it into the sea, which was done to show them
+    that we did contemn their sorceries.
+
+It is a very English story--exactly what a modern Englishman would do;
+only, perhaps, not believing that there was any real devil in the case,
+which makes a difference. However, real or not real, after seeing him
+patiently put up with such an injury, we will hope the poor Greenlander
+had less respect for the devil than formerly.
+
+Leaving Gilbert's Sound, Davis went on to the north-west, and in lat.
+63° fell in with a barrier of ice, which he coasted for thirteen days
+without finding an opening. The very sight of an iceberg was new to all
+his crew; and the ropes and shrouds, though it was midsummer, becoming
+compassed with ice,--
+
+    The people began to fall sick and faint-hearted--whereupon, very
+    orderly, with good discretion, they entreated me to regard the
+    safety of mine own life, as well as the preservation of theirs; and
+    that I should not, through overbouldness, leave their widows and
+    fatherless children to give me bitter curses.
+
+    Whereupon, seeking counsel of God, it pleased His Divine Majesty to
+    move my heart to prosecute that which I hope shall be to His glory,
+    and to the contentation of every Christian mind.
+
+He had two vessels--one of some burthen, the other a pinnace of thirty
+tons. The result of the counsel which he had sought was, that he made
+over his own large vessel to such as wished to return, and himself,
+'thinking it better to die with honour than to return with infamy,' went
+on, with such volunteers as would follow him, in a poor leaky cutter, up
+the sea now in commemoration of that adventure called Davis's Straits.
+He ascended 4° North of the furthest known point, among storms and
+icebergs, when the long days and twilight nights alone saved him from
+being destroyed, and, coasting back along the American shore, he
+discovered Hudson's Straits, supposed then to be the long-desired
+entrance into the Pacific. This exploit drew the attention of
+Walsingham, and by him Davis was presented to Burleigh, 'who was also
+pleased to show him great encouragement.' If either these statesmen or
+Elizabeth had been twenty years younger, his name would have filled a
+larger space in history than a small corner of the map of the world;
+but if he was employed at all in the last years of the century, no
+_vates sacer_ has been found to celebrate his work, and no clue is left
+to guide us. He disappears; a cloud falls over him. He is known to have
+commanded trading vessels in the Eastern seas, and to have returned five
+times from India. But the details are all lost, and accident has only
+parted the clouds for a moment to show us the mournful setting with
+which he, too, went down upon the sea.
+
+In taking out Sir Edward Michellthorne to India, in 1604, he fell in
+with a crew of Japanese, whose ship had been burnt, drifting at sea,
+without provisions, in a leaky junk. He supposed them to be pirates, but
+he did not choose to leave them to so wretched a death, and took them on
+board; and in a few hours, watching their opportunity, they murdered
+him.
+
+As the fool dieth, so dieth the wise, and there is no difference; it was
+the chance of the sea, and the ill reward of a humane action--a
+melancholy end for such a man--like the end of a warrior, not dying
+Epaminondas-like on the field of victory, but cut off in some poor brawl
+or ambuscade. But so it was with all these men. They were cut off in the
+flower of their days, and few of them laid their bones in the sepulchres
+of their fathers. They knew the service which they had chosen, and they
+did not ask the wages for which they had not laboured. Life with them
+was no summer holiday, but a holy sacrifice offered up to duty, and what
+their Master sent was welcome. Beautiful is old age--beautiful as the
+slow-dropping mellow autumn of a rich glorious summer. In the old man,
+nature has fulfilled her work; she loads him with her blessings; she
+fills him with the fruits of a well-spent life; and, surrounded by his
+children and his children's children, she rocks him softly away to a
+grave, to which he is followed with blessings. God forbid we should not
+call it beautiful. It is beautiful, but not the most beautiful. There is
+another life, hard, rough, and thorny, trodden with bleeding feet and
+aching brow; the life of which the cross is the symbol; a battle which
+no peace follows, this side the grave; which the grave gapes to finish,
+before the victory is won; and--strange that it should be so--this is
+the highest life of man. Look back along the great names of history;
+there is none whose life has been other than this. They to whom it has
+been given to do the really highest work in this earth--whoever they
+are, Jew or Gentile, Pagan or Christian, warriors, legislators,
+philosophers, priests, poets, kings, slaves--one and all, their fate has
+been the same--the same bitter cup has been given to them to drink. And
+so it was with the servants of England in the sixteenth century. Their
+life was a long battle, either with the elements or with men; and it was
+enough for them to fulfil their work, and to pass away in the hour when
+God had nothing more to bid them do. They did not complain, and why
+should we complain for them? Peaceful life was not what they desired,
+and an honourable death had no terrors for them. Theirs was the old
+Grecian spirit, and the great heart of the Theban poet lived again in
+them:--
+
+    [Greek:
+    Thanein d' hoisin ananka, ti ke tis anônumon
+    gêras en skotô kathêmenos hepsoi matan,
+    hapantôn kalôn ammoros?]
+
+'Seeing,' in Gilbert's own brave words, 'that death is inevitable, and
+the fame of virtue is immortal; wherefore in this behalf _mutare vel
+timere sperno_.'
+
+In the conclusion of these light sketches we pass into an element
+different from that in which we have been lately dwelling. The scenes in
+which Gilbert and Davis played out their high natures were of the kind
+which we call peaceful, and the enemies with which they contended were
+principally the ice and the wind, and the stormy seas and the dangers of
+unknown and savage lands. We shall close amidst the roar of cannon, and
+the wrath and rage of battle. Hume, who alludes to the engagement which
+we are going to describe, speaks of it in a tone which shows that he
+looked at it as something portentous and prodigious; as a thing to
+wonder at--but scarcely as deserving the admiration which we pay to
+actions properly within the scope of humanity--and as if the energy
+which was displayed in it was like the unnatural strength of madness. He
+does not say this, but he appears to feel it; and he scarcely would have
+felt it if he had cared more deeply to saturate himself with the temper
+of the age of which he was writing. At the time, all England and all the
+world rang with the story. It struck a deeper terror, though it was but
+the action of a single ship, into the hearts of the Spanish people; it
+dealt a more deadly blow upon their fame and moral strength than the
+destruction of the Armada itself; and in the direct results which arose
+from it, it was scarcely less disastrous to them. Hardly, as it seems to
+us, if the most glorious actions which are set like jewels in the
+history of mankind are weighed one against the other in the balance,
+hardly will those 300 Spartans who in the summer morning sate 'combing
+their long hair for death' in the passes of Thermopylæ, have earned a
+more lofty estimate for themselves than this one crew of modern
+Englishmen.
+
+In August 1591, Lord Thomas Howard, with six English line-of-battle
+ships, six victuallers, and two or three pinnaces, was lying at anchor
+under the Island of Florez. Light in ballast and short of water, with
+half his men disabled by sickness, Howard was unable to pursue the
+aggressive purpose on which he had been sent out. Several of the ships'
+crews were on shore: the ships themselves 'all pestered and rommaging,'
+with everything out of order. In this condition they were surprised by a
+Spanish fleet consisting of 53 men-of-war. Eleven out of the twelve
+English ships obeyed the signal of the admiral, to cut or weigh their
+anchors and escape as they might. The twelfth, the 'Revenge,' was unable
+for the moment to follow. Of her crew of 190, ninety were sick on shore,
+and, from the position of the ship, there was some delay and difficulty
+in getting them on board. The 'Revenge' was commanded by Sir Richard
+Grenville, of Bideford, a man well known in the Spanish seas, and the
+terror of the Spanish sailors; so fierce he was said to be, that mythic
+stories passed from lip to lip about him, and, like Earl Talbot or
+Coeur de Lion, the nurses at the Azores frightened children with the
+sound of his name. 'He was of great revenues, of his own inheritance,'
+they said, 'but of unquiet mind, and greatly affected to wars;' and from
+his uncontrollable propensities for blood-eating, he had volunteered his
+services to the queen; 'of so hard a complexion was he, that I (John
+Huighen von Linschoten, who is our authority here, and who was with the
+Spanish fleet after the action) have been told by divers credible
+persons who stood and beheld him, that he would carouse three or four
+glasses of wine, and take the glasses between his teeth and crush them
+in pieces and swallow them down.' Such Grenville was to the Spaniard. To
+the English he was a goodly and gallant gentleman, who had never turned
+his back upon an enemy, and was remarkable in that remarkable time for
+his constancy and daring. In this surprise at Florez he was in no haste
+to fly. He first saw all his sick on board and stowed away on the
+ballast; and then, with no more than 100 men left him to fight and work
+the ship, he deliberately weighed, uncertain, as it seemed at first,
+what he intended to do. The Spanish fleet were by this time on his
+weather bow, and he was persuaded (we here take his cousin Raleigh's
+beautiful narrative, and follow it in Raleigh's words) 'to cut his
+mainsail and cast about, and trust to the sailing of the ship:'--
+
+    But Sir Richard utterly refused to turn from the enemy, alledging
+    that he would rather choose to die than to dishonour himself, his
+    country, and her Majesty's ship, persuading his company that he
+    would pass through their two squadrons in spite of them, and enforce
+    those of Seville to give him way: which he performed upon diverse of
+    the foremost, who, as the mariners term it, sprang their luff, and
+    fell under the lee of the 'Revenge.' But the other course had been
+    the better; and might right well have been answered in so great an
+    impossibility of prevailing: notwithstanding, out of the greatness
+    of his mind, he could not be persuaded.
+
+The wind was light; the 'San Philip,' 'a huge high-carged ship' of 1,500
+tons, came up to windward of him, and, taking the wind out of his sails,
+ran aboard him.
+
+    After the 'Revenge' was entangled with the 'San Philip,' four others
+    boarded her, two on her larboard and two on her starboard. The fight
+    thus beginning at three o'clock in the afternoon continued very
+    terrible all that evening. But the great 'San Philip,' having
+    received the lower tier of the 'Revenge,' shifted herself with all
+    diligence from her sides, utterly misliking her first entertainment.
+    The Spanish ships were tilled with soldiers, in some 200, besides
+    the mariners, in some 500, in others 800. In ours there were none at
+    all, besides the mariners, but the servants of the commander and
+    some few voluntary gentlemen only. After many enterchanged vollies
+    of great ordnance and small shot, the Spaniards deliberated to enter
+    the 'Revenge,' and made divers attempts, hoping to force her by the
+    multitude of their armed soldiers and musketeers; but were still
+    repulsed again and again, and at all times beaten back into their
+    own ship or into the sea. In the beginning of the fight the 'George
+    Noble,' of London, having received some shot through her by the
+    Armadas, fell under the lee of the 'Revenge,' and asked Sir Richard
+    what he would command him; but being one of the victuallers, and of
+    small force, Sir Richard bade him save himself and leave him to his
+    fortune.
+
+This last was a little touch of gallantry, which we should be glad to
+remember with the honour due to the brave English sailor who commanded
+the 'George Noble;' but his name has passed away, and his action is an
+_in memoriam_, on which time has effaced the writing. All that August
+night the fight continued, the stars rolling over in their sad majesty,
+but unseen through the sulphurous clouds which hung over the scene. Ship
+after ship of the Spaniards came on upon the 'Revenge,' 'so that never
+less than two mighty galleons were at her side and aboard her,' washing
+up like waves upon a rock, and falling foiled and shattered back amidst
+the roar of the artillery. Before morning fifteen several Armadas had
+assailed her, and all in vain; some had been sunk at her side; and the
+rest, 'so ill approving of their entertainment, that at break of day
+they were far more willing to hearken to a composition, than hastily to
+make more assaults or entries.' 'But as the day increased,' says
+Raleigh, 'so our men decreased; and as the light grew more and more, by
+so much the more grew our discomfort, for none appeared in sight but
+enemies, save one small ship called the "Pilgrim," commanded by Jacob
+Whiddon, who hovered all night to see the success, but in the morning,
+bearing with the "Revenge," was hunted like a hare among many ravenous
+hounds--but escaped.'
+
+All the powder in the 'Revenge' was now spent, all her pikes were
+broken, 40 out of her 100 men killed, and a great number of the rest
+wounded. Sir Richard, though badly hurt early in the battle, never
+forsook the deck till an hour before midnight; and was then shot through
+the body while his wounds were being dressed, and again in the head. His
+surgeon was killed while attending on him; the masts were lying over the
+side, the rigging cut or broken, the upper works all shot in pieces, and
+the ship herself, unable to move, was settling slowly in the sea; the
+vast fleet of Spaniards lying round her in a ring, like dogs round a
+dying lion, and wary of approaching him in his last agony. Sir Richard,
+seeing that it was past hope, having fought for fifteen hours, and
+'having by estimation eight hundred shot of great artillery through
+him,' 'commanded the master gunner, whom he knew to be a most resolute
+man, to split and sink the ship, that thereby nothing might remain of
+glory or victory to the Spaniards; seeing in so many hours they were not
+able to take her, having had above fifteen hours' time, above ten
+thousand men, and fifty-three men-of-war to perform it withal; and
+persuaded the company, or as many as he could induce, to yield
+themselves unto God and to the mercy of none else; but as they had, like
+valiant resolute men, repulsed so many enemies, they should not now
+shorten the honour of their nation by prolonging their own lives for a
+few hours or a few days.'
+
+The gunner and a few others consented. But such [Greek: daimoniê aretê]
+was more than could be expected of ordinary seamen. They had dared do
+all which did become men, and they were not more than men. Two Spanish
+ships had gone down, above 1,500 of their crew were killed, and the
+Spanish admiral could not induce any one of the rest of his fleet to
+board the 'Revenge' again, 'doubting lest Sir Richard would have blown
+up himself and them, knowing his dangerous disposition.' Sir Richard
+lying disabled below, the captain, 'finding the Spaniards as ready to
+entertain a composition as they could be to offer it,' gained over the
+majority of the surviving company; and the remainder then drawing back
+from the master gunner, they all, without further consulting their dying
+commander, surrendered on honourable terms. If unequal to the English in
+action, the Spaniards were at least as courteous in victory. It is due
+to them to say, that the conditions were faithfully observed; and 'the
+ship being marvellous unsavourie,' Alonzo de Bacon, the Spanish admiral,
+sent his boat to bring Sir Richard on board his own vessel.
+
+Sir Richard, whose life was fast ebbing away, replied that 'he might do
+with his body what he list, for that he esteemed it not;' and as he was
+carried out of the ship he swooned, and reviving again, desired the
+company to pray for him.
+
+The admiral used him with all humanity, 'commending his valour and
+worthiness, being unto them a rare spectacle, and a resolution seldom
+approved.' The officers of the fleet, too, John Higgins tells us,
+crowded round to look at him; and a new fight had almost broken out
+between the Biscayans and the 'Portugals,' each claiming the honour of
+having boarded the 'Revenge.'
+
+    In a few hours Sir Richard, feeling his end approaching, showed not
+    any sign of faintness, but spake these words in Spanish, and said,
+    'Here die I, Richard Grenville, with a joyful and quiet mind, for
+    that I have ended my life as a true soldier ought to do that hath
+    fought for his country, queen, religion, and honour. Whereby my soul
+    most joyfully departeth out of this body, and shall always leave
+    behind it an everlasting fame of a valiant and true soldier that
+    hath done his duty as he was bound to do.' When he had finished
+    these or other such like words, he gave up the ghost with great and
+    stout courage, and no man could perceive any sign of heaviness in
+    him.
+
+Such was the fight at Florez, in that August of 1591, without its equal
+in such of the annals of mankind as the thing which we call history has
+preserved to us; scarcely equalled by the most glorious fate which the
+imagination of Barrère could invent for the 'Vengeur.' Nor did the
+matter end without a sequel awful as itself. Sea battles have been often
+followed by storms, and without a miracle; but with a miracle, as the
+Spaniards and the English alike believed, or without one, as we moderns
+would prefer believing, 'there ensued on this action a tempest so
+terrible as was never seen or heard the like before.' A fleet of
+merchantmen joined the Armada immediately after the battle, forming in
+all 140 sail; and of these 140, only 32 ever saw Spanish harbour. The
+rest foundered, or were lost on the Azores. The men-of-war had been so
+shattered by shot as to be unable to carry sail; and the 'Revenge'
+herself, disdaining to survive her commander, or as if to complete his
+own last baffled purpose, like Samson, buried herself and her 200 prize
+crew under the rocks of St. Michael's.
+
+    And it may well be thought and presumed (says John Huighen) that it
+    was no other than a just plague purposely sent upon the Spaniards;
+    and that it might be truly said, the taking of the 'Revenge' was
+    justly revenged on them; and not by the might or force of man, but
+    by the power of God. As some of them openly said in the Isle of
+    Terceira, that they believed verily God would consume them, and that
+    he took part with the Lutherans and heretics ... saying further,
+    that so soon as they had thrown the dead body of the Vice-Admiral
+    Sir Richard Grenville overboard, they verily thought that as he had
+    a devilish faith and religion, and therefore the devil loved him, so
+    he presently sunk into the bottom of the sea and down into hell,
+    where he raised up all the devils to the revenge of his death, and
+    that they brought so great a storm and torments upon the Spaniards,
+    because they only maintained the Catholic and Romish religion. Such
+    and the like blasphemies against God they ceased not openly to
+    utter.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[U] _Westminster Review_, 1853.
+
+[V] This essay was written 15 years ago.
+
+[W] Here is the old stanza. Let whoever is disposed to think us too hard
+on Captain Bethune compare them:--
+
+    'For Wetharrington my harte was wo,
+      That even he slayne sholde be;
+    For when both his leggis were hewen in to,
+      He knyled and fought on his knee.'
+
+Even Percy, who, on the whole, thinks well of the modern ballad, gives
+up this stanza as hopeless.
+
+
+
+
+HOMER.[X]
+
+
+Troy fell before the Greeks; and in its turn the war of Troy is now
+falling before the critics. That ten years' death-struggle, in which the
+immortals did not disdain to mingle--those massive warriors, with their
+grandeur and their chivalry, have, 'like an unsubstantial pageant,
+faded' before the wand of these modern enchanters; and the Iliad and the
+Odyssey, and the other early legends, are discovered to be no more than
+the transparent myths of an old cosmogony, the arabesques and frescoes
+with which the imagination of the Ionian poets set off and ornamented
+the palace of the heavens, the struggle of the earth with the seasons,
+and the labours of the sun through his twelve signs.
+
+Nay, with Homer himself it was likely at one time to have fared no
+better. His works, indeed, were indestructible, yet if they could not be
+destroyed, they might be disorganised; and with their instinctive hatred
+of facts, the critics fastened on the historical existence of the poet.
+The origin of the poems was distributed among the clouds of pre-historic
+imagination; and--instead of a single inspired Homer for their author,
+we were required to believe in some extraordinary spontaneous
+generation, or in some collective genius of an age which ignorance had
+personified.
+
+But the person of a poet has been found more difficult of elimination
+than a mere fact of history. Facts, it was once said, were stubborn
+things; but in our days we have changed all that; a fact, under the
+knife of a critic, splits in pieces, and is dissected out of belief with
+incredible readiness. The helpless thing lies under his hand like a
+foolish witness in a law court, when browbeaten by an unscrupulous
+advocate, and is turned about and twisted this way and that way, till
+in its distraction it contradicts itself, and bears witness against
+itself; and to escape from torture, at last flies utterly away, itself
+half doubting its own existence.
+
+But it requires more cunning weapons to destroy a Homer; like his own
+immortals, he may be wounded, but he cannot have the life carved out of
+him by the prosaic strokes of common men. His poems have but to be
+disintegrated to unite again, so strong are they in the individuality of
+their genius. The singleness of their structure--the unity of
+design--the distinctness of drawing in the characters--the inimitable
+peculiarities of manner in each of them, seem to place beyond serious
+question, after the worst onslaught of the Wolfian critics, that both
+Iliad and Odyssey, whether or not the work of the same mind, are at
+least each of them singly the work of one.
+
+Let them leave us Homer, however, and on the rank and file of facts they
+may do their worst; we can be indifferent to, or even thankful for, what
+slaughter they may make. In the legends of the Theogonia, in that of
+Zeus and Cronus, for instance, there is evidently a metaphysical
+allegory; in the legends of Persephone, or of the Dioscuri, a physical
+one; in that of Athene, a profoundly philosophical one; and fused as the
+entire system was in the intensely poetical conception of the early
+thinkers, it would be impossible, even if it were desirable, at this
+time of day, to disentangle the fibres of all these various elements.
+Fact and theory, the natural and the supernatural, the legendary and the
+philosophical, shade off so imperceptibly one into the other, in the
+stories of the Olympians, or of their first offspring, that we can never
+assure ourselves that we are on historic ground, or that, antecedent to
+the really historic age, there is any such ground to be found anywhere.
+The old notion, that the heroes were deified men, is no longer tenable.
+With but few exceptions, we can trace their names as the names of the
+old gods of the Hellenic or Pelasgian races; and if they appeared later
+in human forms, they descended from Olympus to assume them. Diomed was
+the OEtolian sun-god; Achilles was worshipped in Thessaly long before
+he became the hero of the tale of Troy. The tragedy of the house of
+Atreus, and the bloody bath of Agamemnon, as we are now told with
+appearance of certainty,[Y] are humanised stories of the physical
+struggle of the opposing principles of life and death, light and
+darkness, night and day, winter and summer.
+
+And let them be so; we need not be sorry to believe that there is no
+substantial basis for these tales of crime. The history of mankind is
+not so pure but that we can afford to lose a few dark pages out of the
+record. Let it be granted that of the times which Homer sung
+historically we know nothing literal at all--not any names of any kings,
+of any ministers, wars, intrigues, revolutions, crimes. They are all
+gone--dead--passed away; their vacant chronicles may be silent as the
+tombs in which their bones are buried. Of such stuff as that with which
+historians fill their pages there is no trace; it is a blank, vacant as
+the annals of the Hottentot or of the Red Indian. Yet when all is said,
+there remain still to us in Homer's verse, materials richer, perhaps,
+than exist for any period of the ancient world, richer than even for the
+brilliant days of Pericles, or of the Cæsars, to construct a history of
+another kind--a history, a picture not of the times of which he sang,
+but of the men among whom he lived. How they acted; how they thought,
+talked, and felt; what they made of this earth, and of their place in
+it; their private life and their public life; men and women; masters and
+servants; rich and poor--we have it all delineated in the marvellous
+verse of a poet who, be he what he may, was in this respect the greatest
+which the earth has ever seen. In extent, the information is little
+enough; but in the same sense as it has been said that an hour at an
+Athenian supper-party would teach us more Grecian life and character
+than all Aristophanes, Homer's pictures of life and manners are so
+living, so distinct, so palpable, that a whole prose encyclopædia of
+disconnected facts could give us nothing like them. It is the marvellous
+property of verse--one, if we rightly consider it, which would excuse
+any superstition on the origin of language--that the metrical and
+rhythmic arrangement of syllable and sound is able to catch and express
+back to us, not the stories of actions, but the actions themselves, with
+all the feelings which inspire them; to call up human action, and all
+other outward things in which human hearts take interest--to produce
+them, or to reproduce them, with a distinctness which shall produce the
+same emotions which they would themselves produce when really existing.
+The thing itself is made present before us by an exercise of creative
+power as genuine as that of Nature herself; which, perhaps, is but the
+same power manifesting itself at one time in words, at another in
+outward phenomena. Whatever be the cause, the fact is so. Poetry has
+this life-giving power, and prose has it not; and thus the poet is the
+truest historian. Whatever is properly valuable in history the poet
+gives us--not events and names, but emotion, but action, but life. He is
+the heart of his age, and his verse expresses his age; and what matter
+is it by what name he describes his places or his persons? What matter
+is it what his own name was, while we have himself, and while we have
+the originals, from which he drew? The work and the life are all for
+which we need care, are all which can really interest us; the names are
+nothing. Though Phoeacia was a dream-land, or a symbol of the Elysian
+fields, yet Homer drew his material, his island, his palaces, his
+harbour, his gardens of perennial beauty, from those fair cities which
+lay along the shores of his own Ionia; and like his blind Demodocus,
+Homer doubtless himself sung those very hymns which now delight us so,
+in the halls of many a princely Alcinous.
+
+The prose historian may give us facts and names; he may catalogue the
+successions, and tell us long stories of battles, and of factions, and
+of political intrigues; he may draw characters for us, of the sort which
+figure commonly in such features of human affairs, men of the unheroic,
+unpoetic kind--the Cleons, the Sejanuses, the Tiberiuses, a Philip the
+Second or a Louis Quatorze, in whom the noble element died out into
+selfishness and vulgarity. But great men--and all MEN properly so called
+(whatever is genuine and natural in them)--lie beyond prose, and can
+only be really represented by the poet. This is the reason why such men
+as Alexander, or as Cæsar, or as Cromwell, so perplex us in histories,
+because they and their actions are beyond the scope of the art through
+which we have looked at them. We compare the man as the historian
+represents him, with the track of his path through the world. The work
+is the work of a giant; the man, stripped of the vulgar appendages with
+which the stunted imagination of his biographer may have set him off, is
+full of meannesses and littlenesses, and is scarcely greater than one
+of ourselves. Prose, that is, has attempted something to which it is not
+equal. It describes a figure which it calls Cæsar; but it is not Cæsar,
+it is a monster. For the same reason, prose fictions, novels, and the
+like, are worthless for more than a momentary purpose. The life which
+they are able to represent is not worth representing. There is no person
+so poor in his own eyes as not to gaze with pleasure into a
+looking-glass; and the prose age may value its own image in the novel.
+But the value of all such representations is ephemeral. It is with the
+poet's art as with the sculptor's--sandstone will not carve like marble,
+its texture is too loose to retain a sharply moulded outline. The
+actions of men, if they are true, noble, and genuine, are strong enough
+to bear the form and bear the polish of verse; if loose or feeble, they
+crumble away into the softer undulations of prose.
+
+What the life was whose texture bore shaping into Homer's verse, we
+intend to spend these pages in examining. It is, of course, properly to
+be sought for in the poems themselves. But we shall here be concerned
+mainly with features which in the original are rather secondary than
+prominent, and which have to be collected out of fragments, here a line,
+and there a line, out of little hints, let fall by Homer as it were by
+accident. Things too familiar to his own hearers to require dwelling on,
+to us, whose object is to make out just those very things which were
+familiar, are of special and singular value. It is not an enquiry which
+will much profit us, if we come to it with any grand notions of the
+'progress of the species,' for in many ways it will discourage the
+belief in progress.
+
+We have fallen into ways of talking of the childhood and infancy of the
+race, as if no beards had grown on any face before the modern
+Reformation; and even people who know what old Athens was under
+Pericles, look commonly on earlier Greece as scarcely struggling out of
+its cradle. It would have fared so with all early history except for the
+Bible. The Old Testament has operated partially to keep us in our modest
+senses, and we can see something grand about the patriarchs; but this is
+owing to exceptional causes, which do not apply to other literature; and
+in spite of our admiration of Homer's poetry, we regard his age, and the
+contemporary periods in the other people of the earth, as a kind of
+childhood little better than barbarism. We look upon it, at all events,
+as too far removed in every essential of spirit or of form from our own,
+to enable us to feel for it any strong interest or sympathy. More or
+less, we have, every one of us, felt something of this kind. Homer's men
+are, at first sight, unlike any men that we have ever seen; and it is
+not without a shock of surprise that, for the first time, we fall, in
+reading him, across some little trait of humanity which in form as well
+as spirit is really identical with our own experience. Then, for the
+moment, all is changed with us--gleams of light flash out, in which the
+drapery becomes transparent, and we see the human form behind it, and
+that entire old world in the warm glow of flesh and blood. Such is the
+effect of those few child scenes of his, which throw us back into our
+old familiar childhood. With all these years between us, there is no
+difference between their children and ours, and child would meet child
+without sense of strangeness in common games and common pleasures.
+
+The little Ulysses climbing on the knees of his father's guest, coaxing
+for a taste of the red wine, and spilling it as he starts at the unusual
+taste; or that other most beautiful picture of him running at Laertes's
+side in the garden at Ithaca, the father teaching the boy the names of
+the fruit-trees, and making presents to him of this tree and of that
+tree for his very own, to help him to remember what they were called;
+the partition wall of three thousand years melts away as we look back at
+scenes like these; that broad, world-experienced man was once, then,
+such a little creature as we remember ourselves, and Laertes a calm,
+kind father of the nineteenth century. Then, as now, the children loved
+to sport upon the shore, and watch the inrolling waves;--then, as now,
+the boy-architect would pile the moist sand into mimic town or castle,
+and when the work was finished, sweep it away again in wanton humour
+with foot and hand;--then, as now, the little tired maiden would cling
+to her mother's skirt, and, trotting painfully along beside her, look up
+wistfully and plead with moist eyes to be carried in her arms. Nay, and
+among the grown ones, where time has not changed the occupation, and the
+forms of culture have little room to vary, we meet again with very
+familiar faces. There is Melantho, the not over-modest tittering
+waiting-maid--saucy to her mistress and the old housekeeper, and always
+running after the handsome young princes. Unhappy Melantho, true child
+of universal nature! grievous work we should make with most households,
+if all who resemble thee were treated to as rough a destiny. And there
+are other old friends whom it is pleasant enough to recognise at so long
+a distance. 'Certain smooth-haired, sleek-faced fellows--insolent where
+their lords would permit them; inquisitive and pert, living but to eat
+and drink, and pilfering the good things, to convey them stealthily to
+their friends outside the castle wall.' The thing that hath been, that
+shall be again. When Homer wrote, the type had settled into its long
+enduring form. 'Such are they,' he adds, in his good-natured irony, 'as
+the valet race ever love to be.'
+
+With such evidence of identity among us all, it is worth while to look
+closer at the old Greeks, to try to find in Homer something beyond fine
+poetry, or exciting adventures, or battle-scenes, or material for
+scholarship; for awhile to set all that aside, and look in him for the
+story of real living men--set to pilgrimise in the old way on the same
+old earth--men such as we are, children of one family, with the same
+work to do, to live the best life they could, and to save their
+souls--with the same trials, the same passions, the same difficulties,
+if with weaker means of meeting them.
+
+And first for their religion.
+
+Let those who like it, lend their labour to the unravelling the secrets
+of the mythologies. Theogonies and Theologies are not religion; they are
+but its historic dress and outward or formal expression, which, like a
+language, may be intelligible to those who see the inward meaning in the
+sign, but no more than confused sound to us who live in another
+atmosphere, and have no means of transferring ourselves into the
+sentiment of an earlier era. It is not in these forms of a day or of an
+age that we should look for the real belief--the real feelings of the
+heart; but in the natural expressions which burst out
+spontaneously--expressions of opinion on Providence, on the relation of
+man to God, on the eternal laws by which this world is governed. Perhaps
+we misuse the word in speaking of religion; we ought rather to speak of
+piety: piety is always simple; the emotion is too vast, too
+overpowering, whenever it is genuine, to be nice or fantastic in its
+form; and leaving philosophies and cosmogonies to shape themselves in
+myth and legend, it speaks itself out with a calm and humble clearness.
+We may trifle with our own discoveries, and hand them over to the fancy
+or the imagination for elaborate decoration. We may shroud over supposed
+mysteries under an enigmatic veil, and adapt the degrees of initiation
+to the capacities of our pupils; but before the vast facts of God and
+Providence, the difference between man and man dwarfs into nothing. They
+are no discoveries of our own with which we can meddle, but revelations
+of the Infinite, which, like the sunlight, shed themselves on all alike,
+wise and unwise, good and evil, and they claim and they permit no other
+acknowledgment from us than the simple obedience of our lives, and the
+plainest confession of our lips.
+
+Such confessions, except in David's Psalms, we shall not anywhere find
+more natural or unaffected than in Homer--most definite, yet never
+elaborate--as far as may be from any complimenting of Providence, yet
+expressing the most unquestioning conviction. We shall not often
+remember them when we set about religion as a business; but when the
+occasions of life stir the feelings in us on which religion itself
+reposes, if we were as familiar with the Iliad as with the Psalms, the
+words of the old Ionian singer would leap as naturally to our lips as
+those of the Israelite king.
+
+Zeus is not always the questionable son of Cronus, nor the gods always
+the mythologic Olympians. Generally, it is true, they appear as a larger
+order of subject beings--beings like men, and subject to a higher
+control--in a position closely resembling that of Milton's angels, and
+liable like them to passion and to error. But at times, the father of
+gods and men is the Infinite and Eternal Ruler--the living Providence of
+the world--and the lesser gods are the immortal administrators of his
+Divine will throughout the lower creation. For ever at the head of the
+universe there is an awful spiritual power; when Zeus appears with a
+distinct and positive personality, he is himself subordinate to an
+authority which elsewhere is one with himself. Wherever either he or the
+other gods are made susceptible of emotion, the Invisible is beyond and
+above them. When Zeus is the personal father of Sarpedon, and his
+private love conflicts with the law of the eternal order, though he has
+power to set aside the law, he dares not break it; but in the midst of
+his immortality, and on his own awful throne, he weeps tears of blood in
+ineffectual sorrow for his dying child. And again, there is a power
+supreme both over Zeus and over Poseidon, of which Iris reminds the
+latter, when she is sent to rebuke him for his disobedience to his
+brother. It is a law, she says, that the younger shall obey the elder,
+and the Erinnys will revenge its breach even on a god.
+
+But descending from the more difficult Pantheon among mankind, the
+Divine law of justice is conceived as clearly as we in this day can
+conceive it. The supreme power is the same immortal lover of justice and
+the same hater of iniquity; and justice means what we mean by justice,
+and iniquity what we mean by iniquity. There is no diffidence, no
+scepticism on this matter; the moral law is as sure as day and night,
+summer and winter. Thus in the sixteenth Iliad--
+
+'When in the market-place men deal unjustly, and the rulers decree
+crooked judgment, not regarding the fear of God,' God sends the storm,
+and the earthquake, and the tempest, as the executors of his vengeance.
+
+Again, Ulysses says--
+
+'God looks upon the children of men, and punishes the wrong-doer.'
+
+And Eumæus--
+
+'The gods love not violence and wrong; but the man whose ways are
+righteous, him they honour.'
+
+Even when as mere Olympians they put off their celestial nature, and mix
+in earthly strife, and are thus laid open to earthly suffering, a
+mystery still hangs about them; Diomed, even while he crosses the path
+of Ares, feels all the while 'that they are short-lived who contend with
+the Immortals.' Ajax boasts that he will save himself in spite of
+heaven, and immediately the wave dashes him upon the rocks. One light
+word escaped Ulysses in the excitement of his escape from the Cyclops,
+which nine years of suffering hardly expiated.
+
+The same spirit which teaches Christians that those who have no earthly
+friend have specially a friend above to care for and to avenge them,
+taught the Ionians a proverb which appears again and again in Homer,
+that the stranger and the poor man are the patrimony of God; and it
+taught them, also, that sometimes men entertained the Immortals
+unawares. It was a faith, too, which was more than words with them; for
+we hear of no vagrant acts or alien acts, and it was sacrilege to turn
+away from the gate whoever asked its hospitality. Times are changed. The
+world was not so crowded as it is now, and perhaps rogues were less
+abundant; but at any rate those antique Greeks did what they said. We
+say what they said, while in the same breath we say, too, that it is
+impossible to do it.
+
+In every way, the dependence of man on a special heavenly Providence was
+a matter of sure and certain conviction with them. Telemachus appeals to
+the belief in the Council at Ithaca. He questions it at Pylos, and is at
+once rebuked by Athene. Both in Iliad and Odyssey to live justly is the
+steady service which the gods require, and their favour as surely
+follows when that service is paid, as a Nemesis sooner or later follows
+surely, too, on the evil-doers.
+
+But without multiplying evidence, as we easily might, from every part of
+both Iliad and Odyssey, the sceptical and the believing forms of thought
+and feeling on this very subject are made points of dramatic contrast,
+to show off the opposition of two separate characters; and this is clear
+proof that such thoughts and feelings must have been familiar to Homer's
+hearers: if it were not so, his characters would have been without
+interest to his age--they would have been individual, and not universal;
+and no expenditure of intellect, or passion, would have made men care to
+listen to him. The two persons who throughout the Iliad stand out in
+relief in contrast to each other are, of course, Hector and Achilles;
+and faith in God (as distinct from a mere recognition of him) is as
+directly the characteristic of Hector as in Achilles it is entirely
+absent. Both characters are heroic, but the heroism in them springs from
+opposite sources. Both are heroic, because both are strong; but the
+strength of one is in himself, and the strength of the other is in his
+faith. Hector is a patriot; Achilles does not know what patriotism
+means;--Hector is full of tenderness and human affection; Achilles is
+self-enveloped. Even his love for Patroclus is not pure, for Patroclus
+is as the moon to the sun of Achilles, and Achilles sees his own glory
+reflected on his friend. They have both a forecast of their fate; but
+Hector, in his great brave way, scoffs at omens; he knows that there is
+a special providence in the fall of a sparrow, and defies augury. To do
+his duty is the only omen for which Hector cares; and if death must be,
+he can welcome it like a gallant man, if it find him fighting for his
+country. Achilles is moody, speculative, and subjective; he is too proud
+to attempt an ineffectual resistance to what he knows to be inevitable,
+but he alternately murmurs at it and scorns it. Till his passion is
+stirred by his friend's death, he seems equally to disdain the greatness
+of life and the littleness of it; the glories of a hero are not worth
+dying for; and like Solomon, and almost in Solomon's words, he complains
+that there is one event to all--
+
+    [Greek: En de iê timê ê men kakos êe kai esthlos.]
+
+To gratify his own spleen, he will accept an inglorious age in Thessaly,
+in exchange for a hero's immortality; as again in the end it is but to
+gratify his own wounded pride that he goes out to brave a fate which he
+scorns while he knows that it will subdue him. Thus, Achilles is the
+hero of the stern human, self-sufficing spirit, which does not deny or
+question destiny, but seeing nothing in it except a cold, iron law,
+meets force with force, and holds up against it an unbroken, unbending
+will. Human nature is at its best but a miserable business to him; death
+and sorrow are its inevitable lot. As a brave man, he will not fear such
+things, but he will not pretend to regard them as anything but
+detestable; and he comforts the old, weeping king of Troy, whose age he
+was himself bringing down to the grave in sorrow, with philosophic
+meditations on the vanity of all things, and a picture of Zeus mixing
+the elements of life out of the two urns of good and evil.
+
+Turn to Hector, and we turn from shadow into sunlight. Achilles is all
+self, Hector all self-forgetfulness; Achilles all pride, Hector all
+modesty. The confidence of Achilles is in himself and in his own arm;
+Hector knows (and the strongest expressions of the kind in all the Iliad
+are placed pointedly in Hector's mouth) that there is no strength except
+from above. 'God's will,' he says, 'is over all; he makes the strong man
+to fear, and gives the victory to the weak, if it shall please him.' And
+at last, when he meets Achilles, he answers his bitter words, not with a
+defiance, but calmly saying, 'I know that thou art mighty, and that my
+strength is far less than thine; but these things lie in the will of
+the gods, and I, though weaker far than thou, may yet take thy life from
+thee, if the Immortals choose to have it so.'
+
+So far, then, on the general fact of Divine Providence, the feeling of
+Homer, and therefore of his countrymen, is distinct. Both the great
+poems bearing his name speak in the same language. But beyond the
+general fact, many questions rise in the application of the creed, and
+on one of these (it is among several remarkable differences which seem
+to mark the Odyssey as of a later age) there is a very singular
+discrepancy. In the Iliad, the life of man on this side the grave is
+enough for the completion of his destiny--for his reward, if he lives
+nobly; for his punishment, if he be base or wicked. Without repinings or
+scepticisms at the apparent successes of bad men, the poet is contented
+with what he finds, accepting cheerfully the facts of life as they are;
+it never seems to occur to him as seriously possible that a bad man
+could succeed or a good one fail; and as the ways of Providence,
+therefore, require no vindicating, neither his imagination nor his
+curiosity tempts him into penetrating the future. The house of Hades is
+the long home to which men go when dismissed out of their bodies; but it
+is a dim, shadowy place, of which we see nothing, and concerning which
+no conjectures are ventured. Achilles, in his passion over Patroclus,
+cries out, that although the dead forget the dead in the halls of the
+departed, yet that he will remember his friend; and through the Iliad
+there is nothing clearer than these vague words to show with what hopes
+or fears the poet looked forward to death. So far, therefore, his faith
+may seem imperfect; yet, perhaps, not the less noble because imperfect;
+religious men in general are too well contented with the promise of a
+future life, as of a scene where the seeming shortcomings of the Divine
+administration will be carried out with larger equity. But whether
+imperfect or not, or whatever be the account of the omission, the theory
+of Hades in the Odyssey is developed into far greater distinctness; the
+future is still, indeed, shadowy, but it is no longer uncertain; there
+is the dreadful prison-house, with the judge upon his throne--and the
+darker criminals are overtaken by the vengeance which was delayed in
+life. The thin phantoms of the great ones of the past flit to and fro,
+mourning wearily for their lost mortality, and feeding on its memory.
+And more than this, as if it were beginning to be felt that something
+more was wanted after all to satisfy us with the completeness of the
+Divine rule, we have a glimpse--it is but one, but it is like a ray of
+sunshine falling in upon the darkness of the grave--'of the far-off
+Elysian fields where dwells Rhadamanthus with the golden hair, where
+life is ever sweet, and sorrow is not, nor winter, nor any rain or
+storm, and the never-dying zephyrs blow soft and cool from off the
+ocean.'
+
+However vague the filling up of such a picture, the outline is correct
+to the best which has been revealed even in Christianity, and it speaks
+nobly for the people among whom, even in germ, such ideas could root
+themselves. But think what we will of their notions of the future, the
+old Greek faith, considered as a practical and not a theological system,
+is truly admirable, clear, rational, and moral; if it does not profess
+to deal with the mysteries of evil in the heart, it is prompt and stern
+with them in their darker outward manifestations, and, as far as it
+goes, as a guide in the common daily business of life, it scarcely
+leaves anything unsaid.
+
+How far it went we shall see in the details of the life itself, the most
+important of which in the eyes of a modern will be the social
+organisation; and when he looks for organisation, he will be at once at
+a loss, for he will find the fact of government yet without defined
+form;--he will find law, but without a public sword to enforce it; and a
+'social machine' moving without friction under the easy control of
+opinion. There are no wars of classes, no politics, no opposition of
+interests, a sacred feeling of the will of the gods keeping every one in
+his proper subordination. It was a sacred duty that the younger should
+obey the elder, that the servant should obey his master, that property
+should be respected; in war, that the leader should be obeyed without
+questioning; in peace, that public questions should be brought before
+the assembly of the people, and settled quietly as the Council
+determined. In this assembly the prince presided, and beyond this
+presidency his authority at home does not seem to have extended. Of
+course there was no millennium in Ionia, and men's passions were pretty
+much what they are now. Without any organised means of repressing crime
+when it did appear, the people were exposed to, and often suffered
+under, extreme forms of violence--violence such as that of the suitors
+at Ithaca, or of Ægisthus at Argos. On the other hand, what a state of
+cultivation it implies, what peace and comfort in all classes, when
+society could hold together for a day with no more complete defence.
+And, moreover, there are disadvantages in elaborate police systems.
+Self-reliance is one of the highest virtues in which this world is
+intended to discipline us; and to depend upon ourselves even for our own
+personal safety is a large element in moral training.
+
+But not to dwell on this, and to pass to the way in which the men of
+those days employed themselves.
+
+Our first boy's feeling with the Iliad is, that Homer is pre-eminently a
+poet of war; that battles were his own passion, and tales of battles the
+delight of his listeners. His heroes appear like a great fighting
+aristocracy, such as the after Spartans were, Homer himself like another
+Tyrtæus, and the poorer occupations of life too menial for their notice
+or for his. They seem to live for glory--the one glory worth caring for
+only to be won upon the battle-field, and their exploits the one worthy
+theme of the poet's song. This is our boyish impression, and, like other
+such, it is very different from the truth. If war had been a passion
+with the Ionians, as it was with the Teutons and the Norsemen, the god
+of battles would have been supreme in the Pantheon; and Zeus would
+scarcely have called Ares the most hateful spirit in Olympus--most
+hateful, _because_ of his delight in war and carnage. Mr. Carlyle looks
+forward to a chivalry of labour. He rather wishes than expects that a
+time may come when the campaign of industry against anarchic nature may
+gather into it those feelings of gallantry and nobleness which have
+found their vent hitherto in fighting only. The modern man's work, Mr.
+Carlyle says, is no longer to splinter lances or break down walls, but
+to break soil, to build barns and factories, and to find a high
+employment for himself in what hitherto has been despised as degrading.
+How to elevate labour--how to make it beautiful--how to enlist the
+_spirit_ in it (for in no other way can it be made humanly profitable),
+that is the problem which he looks wistfully to the future to solve for
+us. He may look to the past as well as to the future; in the old Ionia
+he will find all for which he wishes. The wise Ulysses built his own
+house, and carved his own bed. Princes killed and cooked their own
+food. It was a holy work with them--their way of saying grace for it;
+for they offered the animal in his death to the gods, and they were not
+butchers, but sacrificing priests. Even a keeper of swine is called
+noble, and fights like a hero; and the young princess of Phoeacia--the
+loveliest and gracefullest of Homer's women--drove the clothes-cart and
+washed linen with her own beautiful hands. Not only was labour free--for
+so it was among the early Romans; or honourable, so it was among the
+Israelites,--but it was beautiful--beautiful in the artist's sense, as
+perhaps elsewhere it has never been. In later Greece--in what we call
+the glorious period--toil had gathered about it its modern crust of
+supposed baseness--it was left to slaves; and wise men, in their
+philosophic lecture-rooms, spoke of it as unworthy of the higher
+specimens of cultivated humanity.
+
+But Homer finds, in its most homely forms, fit illustrations for the
+most glorious achievements of his heroes; and in every page we find, in
+simile or metaphor some common scene of daily life worked out with
+elaborate beauty. What the popular poet chooses for his illustrations
+are as good a measure as we can have of the popular feeling, and the
+images which he suggests are, of course, what he knows his hearers will
+be pleased to dwell upon. There is much to be said about this, and we
+shall return to it presently; in the meantime, we must not build on
+indirect evidence. The designs on the shield of Achilles are, together,
+a complete picture of Homer's microcosm; Homer surely never thought
+inglorious or ignoble what the immortal art of Hephaistos condescended
+to imitate.
+
+The first groups of figures point a contrast which is obviously
+intentional; and the significance becomes sadly earnest when we remember
+who it was that was to bear the shield. The moral is a very modern one,
+and the picture might be called by the modern name of Peace and War.
+There are two cities, embodying in their condition the two ideas. In
+one, a happy wedding is going forward; the pomp of the hymeneal
+procession is passing along the streets; the air is full of music, and
+the women are standing at their doors to gaze. The other is in the
+terrors of a siege; the hostile armies glitter under the walls, the
+women and children press into the defence, and crowd to the
+battlements. In the first city, a quarrel rises, and wrong is made
+right, not by violence and fresh wrong, but by the majesty of law and
+order. The heads of the families are sitting gravely in the
+market-place, the cause is heard, the compensation set, the claim
+awarded. Under the walls of the other city an ambush lies, like a wild
+beast on the watch for its prey. The unsuspecting herdsmen pass on with
+their flocks to the waterside; the spoilers spring from their
+hiding-place, and all is strife, and death, and horror, and confusion.
+If there were other war-scenes on the shield, it might be doubted
+whether Homer intended so strong a contrast as he executed; but fighting
+for its own sake was evidently held in slight respect with him. The
+forms of life which were really beautiful to him follow in a series of
+exquisite Rubens-like pictures: harvest scenes and village festivals;
+the ploughing and the vintage, or the lion-hunt on the reedy margin of
+the river; and he describes them with a serene, sunny enjoyment which no
+other old world art or poetry gives us anything in the least resembling.
+Even we ourselves, in our own pastorals, are struggling with but half
+success, after what Homer entirely possessed. What a majesty he has
+thrown into his harvest scene! The yellow corn falling, the boys
+following to gather up the large arms-full as they drop behind the
+reapers; in the distance a banquet preparing under the trees; in the
+centre, in the midst of his workmen, the king sitting in mellow silence,
+sceptre in hand, looking on with gladdened heart. Again we see the
+ploughmen, unlike what are to be seen in our corn-grounds, turning their
+teams at the end of the furrow, and attendants standing ready with the
+wine-cup, to hand to them as they pass. Homer had seen these things, or
+he would not have sung of them; and princes and nobles might have shared
+such labour without shame, when kings took part in it, and gods designed
+it, and the divine Achilles bore its image among his insignia in the
+field.
+
+Analogous to this, and as part of the same feeling, is that intense
+enjoyment of natural scenery, so keen in Homer, and of which the
+Athenian poets show not a trace; as, for instance, in that night
+landscape by the sea, finished off in a few lines only, but so
+exquisitely perfect! The broad moon, gleaming through the mist as it
+parts suddenly from off the sky; the crags and headlands, and soft
+wooded slopes, shining out in the silver light, and earth and sea
+transformed into fairy land.
+
+We spoke of Homer's similes as illustrative of the Ionic feelings about
+war. War, of course, was glorious to him--but war in a glorious cause.
+Wars there were--wars in plenty, as there have been since, and as it is
+like there will be for some time to come; and a just war, of all human
+employments, is the one which most calls out whatever nobleness there is
+in man. It was the thing itself, the actual fighting and killing, as
+apart from the heroism for which it makes opportunities, for which we
+said that he showed no taste. His manner shows that he felt like a
+cultivated man, and not like a savage. His spirit stirs in him as he
+goes out with his hero to the battle; but there is no drunken delight in
+blood; we never hear of warriors as in that grim Hall of the Nibelungen,
+quenching their thirst in the red stream; never anything of that fierce
+exultation in carnage with which the war poetry of so many nations, late
+and old, is crimsoned. Everything, on the contrary, is contrived so as
+to soften the merely horrible, and fix our interest only on what is
+grand or beautiful. We are never left to dwell long together on scenes
+of death, and when the battle is at its fiercest, our minds are called
+off by the rapid introduction (either by simile or some softer turn of
+human feeling) of other associations, not contrived, as an inferior
+artist would contrive, to deepen our emotions, but to soften and relieve
+them. Two warriors meet, and exchange their high words of defiance; we
+hear the grinding of the spear-head, as it pierces shield and
+breast-plate, and the crash of the armour, as this or that hero falls.
+But at once, instead of being left at his side to see him bleed, we are
+summoned away to the soft water meadow, the lazy river, the tall poplar,
+now waving its branches against the sky, now lying its length along in
+the grass beside the water, and the woodcutter with peaceful industry
+labouring and lopping at it.
+
+In the thick of the universal mêlée, when the stones and arrows are
+raining on the combatants, and some furious hailstorm is the slightest
+illustration with which we should expect him to heighten the effect of
+the human tempest, so sure Homer is that he has painted the thing itself
+in its own intense reality, that his simile is the stillest phenomenon
+in all nature--a stillness of activity, infinitely expressive of the
+density of the shower of missiles, yet falling like oil on water on the
+ruffled picture of the battle; the snow descending in the _still_ air,
+covering first hills, then plains and fields and farmsteads; covering
+the rocks down to the very water's edge, and clogging the waves as they
+roll in. Again, in that fearful death-wrestle at the Grecian wall, when
+gates and battlements are sprinkled over with blood, and neither Greeks
+nor Trojans can force their way against the other, we have, first, as an
+image of the fight itself, two men in the field, with measuring rods,
+disputing over a land boundary; and for the equipoise of the two armies,
+the softest of all home scenes, a poor working woman weighing out her
+wool before weaving it, to earn a scanty subsistence for herself and for
+her children. Of course the similes are not all of this kind; it would
+be monotonous if they were; but they occur often enough to mark their
+meaning. In the direct narrative, too, we see the same tendency.
+Sarpedon struck through the thigh is borne off the field, the long spear
+trailing from the wound, and there is too much haste to draw it out.
+Hector flies past him and has no time to speak; all is dust, hurry, and
+confusion. Even Homer can only pause for a moment, but in three lines he
+lays the wounded hero under a tree, he brings a dear friend to his side,
+and we refresh ourselves in a beautiful scene, when the lance is taken
+out, and Sarpedon faints, and comes slowly back to life, with the cool
+air fanning him. We may look in vain through the Nibelungen Lied for
+anything like this. The Swabian poet can be tender before the battle,
+but in the battle itself his barbaric nature is too strong for him, and
+he scents nothing but blood. In the Iliad, on the contrary, the very
+battles of the gods, grand and awful as they are, relieve rather than
+increase the human horror. In the magnificent scene, where Achilles,
+weary with slaughter, pauses on the bank of the Scamander, and the angry
+river god, whose course is checked by the bodies of the slain, swells up
+to revenge them and destroy him, the natural and the supernatural are so
+strangely blended, that when Poseidon lights the forest, and god meets
+god and element meets element, the convulsion is too tremendous to
+enhance the fierceness of Achilles; it concentrates the interest on
+itself, and Achilles and Hector, flying Trojan and pursuing Greek, for
+the time melt out and are forgotten.
+
+We do not forget that there is nothing of this kind, no relief, no
+softening, in the great scene at the conclusion of the Odyssey. All is
+stern enough and terrible enough there; more terrible, if possible,
+because more distinct, than its modern counterpart in Criemhildas Hall.
+But there is an obvious reason for this, and it does not make against
+what we have been saying. It is not delight in slaughter, but it is the
+stern justice of revenge which we have here; not, as in the Iliad, hero
+meeting hero, but the long crime receiving at last its Divine
+punishment; the breaking of the one storm, which from the beginning has
+been slowly and awfully gathering.
+
+With Homer's treatment of a battle-field, and as illustrating the
+conclusion which we argue from it, we are tempted to draw parallels from
+two modern poets--one a German, who was taken away in the morning of his
+life; the other, the most gifted of modern Englishmen. Each of these two
+has attempted the same subject, and the treatment in each case embodies,
+in a similar manner, modern ways of thinking about it.
+
+The first is from the 'Albigenses' of young Lenau, who has since died
+lunatic, we have heard, as he was not unlikely to have died with such
+thoughts in him. It is the eve of one of those terrible struggles at
+Toulouse, and the poet's imagination is hanging at moon-rise over the
+scene. 'The low broad field scattered over thick with corpses, all
+silent, dead,--the last sob spent,'--the priest's thanksgiving for the
+Catholic victory having died into an echo, and only the 'vultures crying
+their Te Deum laudamus.'
+
+    Hat Gott der Herr den Körperstoff erschaffen,
+    Hat ihn hervorgebracht ein böser Geist,
+    Darüber stritten sie mit allen Waffen
+    Und werden von den Vögeln nun gespeist,
+    Die, ohne ihren Ursprung nachzufragen,
+    Die Körper da sich lassen wohl behagen.
+
+'Was it God the Lord who formed the substance of their bodies? or did
+some evil spirit bring it forth? It was for this with all their might
+they fought, and now they are devoured there by the wild birds, who sit
+gorging merrily over their carrion, _without asking from whence it
+came_.'
+
+In Homer, as we saw, the true hero is master over death--death has no
+terror for him. He meets it, if it is to be, calmly and proudly, and
+then it is over; whatever offensive may follow after it, is concealed,
+or at least passed lightly over. Here, on the contrary, everything most
+offensive is dwelt upon with an agonising intensity, and the triumph of
+death is made to extend, not over the body only, but over the soul,
+whose heroism it turns to mockery. The cause in which a man dies, is
+what can make his death beautiful; but here nature herself, in her
+stern, awful way, is reading her sentence over the cause itself as a
+wild and frantic dream. We ought to be revolted--doubly revolted, one
+would think, and yet we are not so; instead of being revolted, we are
+affected with a sense of vast, sad magnificence. Why is this? Because we
+lose sight of the scene, or lose the sense of its horror, in the tragedy
+of the spirit. It is the true modern tragedy; the note which sounds
+through Shakespeare's 'Sonnets,' through 'Hamlet,' through 'Faust;' all
+the deeper trials of the modern heart might be gathered out of those few
+lines; the sense of wasted nobleness--nobleness spending its energies
+upon what time seems to be pronouncing no better than a dream--at any
+rate, misgivings, sceptic and distracting; yet the heart the while, in
+spite of the uncertainty of the issue, remaining true at least to
+itself. If the spirit of the Albigensian warriors had really broken
+down, or if the poet had pointed his lesson so as to say, Truth is a
+lie; faith is folly; eat, drink, and die,--then his picture would have
+been revolting; but the noble spirit remains, though it is borne down
+and trifled with by destiny, and therefore it is not revolting, but
+tragic.
+
+Far different from this--as far inferior in tone to Lenau's lines, as it
+exceeds them in beauty of workmanship--is the well-known picture of the
+scene under the wall in the Siege of Corinth:--
+
+    He saw the lean dogs beneath the wall
+    Hold o'er the dead their carnival;
+    Gorging and growling o'er carcass and limb;
+    They were too busy to bark at him!
+    From a Tartar's skull they had stripp'd the flesh,
+    As ye peel the fig when its fruit is fresh;
+    And their white tusks crunch'd o'er the whiter skull,
+    As it slipp'd through their jaws when their edge grew dull,
+    As they lazily mumbled the bones of the dead,
+    When they scarce could rise from the spot where they fed;
+    So well had they broken a lingering fast
+    With those who had fallen for that night's repast.
+    And Alp knew, by the turbans that roll'd on the sand,
+    The foremost of these were the best of his band:
+
+      .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .
+
+    The scalps were in the wild dog's maw,
+    The hair was tangled round his jaw.
+    Close by the shore, on the edge of the gulf,
+    There sate a vulture flapping a wolf,
+    Who had stolen from the hills, but kept away,
+    Scared by the dogs, from the human prey;
+    But he seized on his share of a steed that lay,
+    Pick'd by the birds, on the sands of the bay.
+
+For a parallel to the horribleness of this wonderfully painted scene we
+need not go to the Nibelungen, for we shall find nothing like it there:
+we must go back to the carved slabs which adorned the banquet halls of
+the Assyrian kings, where the foul birds hover over the stricken fields,
+and trail from their talons the entrails of the slain.
+
+And for what purpose does Byron introduce these frightful images? Was it
+in contrast to the exquisite moonlight scene which tempts the renegade
+out of his tent? Was it to bring his mind into a fit condition to be
+worked upon by the vision of Francesca? It does but mar and untune the
+softening influences of nature, which might have been rendered more
+powerful, perhaps, by some slight touch to remind him of his past day's
+work, but are blotted out and paralysed by such a mass of horrors.
+
+To go back to Homer.
+
+We must omit for the present any notice of the domestic pictures, of
+which there are so many, in the palaces of Ulysses, of Nestor, or of
+Alcinous; of the games, so manly, yet, in point of refinement, so
+superior even to those of our own middle ages; of the supreme good of
+life as the Greeks conceived it, and of the arts by which they
+endeavoured to realise that good. It is useless to notice such things
+briefly, and the detail would expand into a volume. But the impression
+which we gather from them is the same which we have gathered all
+along--that if the proper aim of all human culture be to combine, in the
+highest measure in which they are compatible, the two elements of
+refinement and of manliness, then Homer's age was cultivated to a degree
+the like of which the earth has not witnessed since. There was more
+refinement under Pericles, as there is more in modern London and Paris;
+but there was, and there is, infinitely more vice. There was more
+fierceness (greater manliness there never was) in the times of
+feudalism. But take it for all in all, and in a mere human sense, apart
+from any other aspect of the world which is involved in Christianity, it
+is difficult to point to a time when life in general was happier, and
+the character of man set in a more noble form. If we have drawn the
+picture with too little shadow, let it be allowed for. The shadow was
+there, doubtless, though we see it only in a few dark spots. The
+Margites would have supplied the rest, but the Margites, unhappily for
+us, is lost. Even heroes have their littlenesses, and Comedy is truer to
+the details of littleness than Tragedy or Epic. The grand is always more
+or less ideal, and the elevation of a moment is sublimed into the spirit
+of a life. Comedy, therefore, is essential for the representing of men;
+and there were times, doubtless, when the complexion of Agamemnon's
+greatness was discoloured, like Prince Henry's, by remembering, when he
+was weary, that poor creature--small beer--_i.e._ if the Greeks had got
+any.
+
+A more serious discoloration, however, we are obliged to say that we
+find in Homer himself, in the soil or taint which even he is obliged to
+cast over the position of women. In the Iliad, where there is no sign of
+male slavery, women had already fallen under the chain, and though there
+does not seem to have been any practice of polygamy, the female
+prisoners fell, as a matter of course, into a more degraded position. It
+is painful, too, to observe that their own feelings followed the
+practice of the times, and that they composed themselves to bear without
+reluctance whatever their destiny forced upon them. When Priam ventured
+into the Grecian camp for Hector's body, and stood under the roof of
+Achilles, he endured to do what, as he says, no mortal father had ever
+yet endured--to give his hand to his son's destroyer. Briseis, whose bed
+was made desolate by the hand of the same Achilles, finds it her one
+greatest consolation, that the conqueror stoops to choose her to share
+his own. And when Hector in his last sad parting scene anticipates a
+like fate for his own Andromache, it is not with the revolted agony of
+horror with which such a possible future would be regarded by a modern
+husband; nor does Andromache, however bitterly she feels the danger,
+protest, as a modern wife would do, that there was no fear for
+her--that death by sorrow's hand, or by her own, would preserve her to
+rejoin him.
+
+Nor, again, was unfaithfulness, of however long duration, conclusively
+fatal against a wife; for we meet Helen, after a twenty years'
+elopement, again the quiet, hospitable mistress in the Spartan palace,
+entertaining her husband's guests with an easy matronly dignity, and not
+afraid even in Menelaus's presence to allude to the past--in strong
+terms of self-reproach, indeed, but with nothing like despairing
+prostration. Making the worst of this, however, yet even in this respect
+the Homeric Greeks were better than their contemporaries in Palestine;
+and on the whole there was, perhaps, no time anterior to Christianity
+when women held a higher place, or the relation between wife and husband
+was of a more free and honourable kind.
+
+For we have given but one side of the picture. When a woman can be the
+theme of a poet, her nature cannot be held in slight esteem; and there
+is no doubt that Penelope is Homer's heroine in the Odyssey. One design,
+at least, which Homer had before him was to vindicate the character of
+the virtuous matron against the stain which Clytemnestra had inflicted
+on it. Clytemnestra has every advantage, Penelope every difficulty: the
+trial of the former lasted only half as long as that of the latter.
+Agamemnon in leaving her gave herself and his house in charge to a
+divine [Greek: aoidos], a heaven-inspired prophet, who should stand
+between her and temptation, and whom she had to murder before her
+passion could have its way. Penelope had to bear up alone for twenty
+weary years, without a friend, without a counsellor, and with even a
+child whose constancy was wavering. It is obvious that Homer designed
+this contrast. The story of the Argos tragedy is told again and again.
+The shade of Agamemnon himself forebodes a fate like his own to Ulysses.
+It is Ulysses's first thought when he wakes from his sleep to find
+himself in his own land; and the scene in Hades, in the last book, seems
+only introduced that the husband of Clytemnestra may meet the shades of
+the Ithacan suitors, and learn, in their own tale of the sad issue of
+their wooing, how far otherwise it had fared with Ulysses than with
+himself. Women, therefore, according to Homer, were as capable of heroic
+virtue as men were, and the ideal of this heroism is one to which we
+have scarcely added.
+
+For the rest, there is no trace of any oriental seraglio system. The
+sexes lived together in easy unaffected intercourse. The ladies appeared
+in society naturally and gracefully, and their chief occupations were
+household matters, care of clothes and linen, and other domestic
+arrangements. When a guest came, they prepared his dressing-room,
+settled the bath, and arranged the convenience of his toilet-table. In
+their leisure hours, they were to be found, as now, in the hall or the
+saloon, and their work-table contained pretty much the same materials.
+Helen was winding worsted as she entertained Telemachus, and Andromache
+worked roses in very modern cross-stitch. A literalist like Mr. Mackay,
+who finds out that the Israelites were cannibals, from such expressions
+as 'drinking the blood of the slain,' might discover, perhaps, a similar
+unpleasant propensity in an excited wish of Hecuba, that she might eat
+the heart of Achilles; but in the absence of other evidence, it is
+unwise in either case to press a metaphor; and the food of ladies,
+wherever Homer lets us see it, is very innocent cake and wine, with such
+fruits as were in season. To judge by Nausicaa, their breeding must have
+been exquisite. Nausicaa standing still, when the uncouth figure of
+Ulysses emerged from under the wood, all sea slime and nakedness, and
+only covered with a girdle of leaves--standing still to meet him when
+the other girls ran away tittering and terrified, is the perfect
+conception of true female modesty; and in the whole scene between them,
+Homer shows the most finished understanding of the delicate and
+tremulous relations which occur occasionally in the accidents of
+intercourse between highly cultivated men and women, and which he could
+only have learnt by living in a society where men and women met and felt
+in the way which he has described.
+
+Who, then, was Homer? What was he? When did he live? History has
+absolutely nothing to answer. His poems were not written; for the art of
+writing (at any rate for a poet's purpose) was unknown to him. There is
+a vague tradition that the Iliad, and the Odyssey, and a comic poem
+called the Margites, were composed by an Ionian whose name was Homer,
+about four hundred years before Herodotus, or in the ninth century B.C.
+We know certainly that these poems were preserved by the Rhapsodists, or
+popular reciters, who repeated them at private parties or festivals,
+until writing came into use, and they were fixed in a less precarious
+form. A later story was current, that we owe the collection to
+Pisistratus; but an exclusive claim for him was probably only Athenian
+conceit. It is incredible that men of genius in Homer's own
+land--Alcæus, for instance--should have left such a work to be done by a
+foreigner. But this is really all which is known; and the creation of
+the poems lies in impenetrable mystery. Nothing remains to guide us,
+therefore, except internal evidence (strangely enough, it is the same
+with Shakespeare), and it has led to wild conclusions: yet the wildest
+is not without its use; it has commonly something to rest upon; and
+internal evidence is only really valuable when outward testimony has
+been sifted to the uttermost. The present opinion seems to be, that each
+poem is unquestionably the work of one man; but whether both poems are
+the work of the same is yet _sub judice_. The Greeks believed they were;
+and that is much. There are remarkable points of resemblance in style,
+yet not greater than the resemblances in the 'Two Noble Kinsmen' and in
+the 'Yorkshire Tragedy' to 'Macbeth' and 'Hamlet;' and there are more
+remarkable points of non-resemblance, which deepen upon us the more we
+read. On the other hand, tradition is absolute. If the style of the
+Odyssey is sometimes unlike the Iliad, so is one part of the Iliad
+sometimes unlike another. It is hard to conceive a genius equal to the
+creation of either Iliad or Odyssey to have existed without leaving at
+least a legend of his name; and the difficulty of criticising style
+accurately in an old language will be appreciated by those who have
+tried their hand in their own language with the disputed plays of
+Shakespeare. There are heavy difficulties every way; and we shall best
+conclude our own subject by noting down briefly the most striking points
+of variation of which as yet no explanation has been attempted. We have
+already noticed several: the non-appearance of male slavery in the Iliad
+which is common in the Odyssey; the notion of a future state; and
+perhaps a fuller cultivation in the female character. Andromache is as
+delicate as Nausicaa, but she is not as grand as Penelope; and in marked
+contrast to the feeling expressed by Briseis, is the passage where the
+grief of Ulysses over the song of Demodocus is compared to the grief of
+a young wife flinging herself on the yet warm body of her husband, and
+looking forward to her impending slavery with feelings of horror and
+repulsion. But these are among the slightest points in which the two
+poems are dissimilar. Not only are there slaves in the Odyssey, but
+there are [Greek: Thêtes], or serfs, an order with which we are familiar
+in later times, but which again are not in the Iliad. In the Odyssey the
+Trojans are called [Greek: epibêtores hippôn], which must mean _riders_.
+In the Iliad, horses are never ridden; they are always in harness.
+
+Wherever in the Odyssey the Trojan war is alluded to (and it is very
+often), in no one case is the allusion to anything which is mentioned in
+the Iliad. We hear of the wooden horse, the taking of Troy, the death of
+Achilles, the contention of Ulysses with Ajax for his arms. It might be
+said that the poet wished to supply afterwards indirectly what he had
+left in the Iliad untold; but again, this is impossible, for a very
+curious reason. The Iliad opens with the wrath of Achilles, which caused
+such bitter woe to the Achaians. In the Odyssey it is still the wrath of
+Achilles; but singularly _not with Agamemnon, but with Ulysses_. Ulysses
+to the author of the Odyssey was a far grander person at _Troy_ than he
+appears in the Iliad. In the latter poem he is great, but far from one
+of the greatest; in the other, he is evidently the next to Achilles; and
+it seems almost certain that whoever wrote the Odyssey was working from
+some other legend of the war. There were a thousand versions of it. The
+tale of Ilium was set to every lyre in Greece, and the relative position
+of the heroes was doubtless changed according to the sympathies or the
+patriotism of the singer. The character of Ulysses is much stronger in
+the Odyssey; and even when the same qualities are attributed to him--his
+soft-flowing tongue, his cunning, and his eloquence--they are held in
+very different estimation. The Homer of the Iliad has little liking for
+a talker. Thersites is his pattern specimen of such; and it is the
+current scoff at unready warriors to praise their father's courage, and
+then to add--
+
+    [Greek:
+                                alla ton huion
+    geinato heio cherêa machê, agorê de t' ameinô.]
+
+But the Phoeacian Lord who ventured to reflect, in the Iliad style, on
+the supposed unreadiness of Ulysses, is taught a different notion of
+human excellence. Ulysses tells him that he is a fool. 'The gods,'
+Ulysses says, 'do not give all good things to all men, and often a man
+is made unfair to look upon, but over his ill favour they fling, like a
+garland, a power of lovely speech, and the people delight to _look_ on
+him. He speaks with modest dignity, and he shines among the multitude.
+As he walks through the city, men gaze on him as on a god.'
+
+Differences like these, however, are far from decisive. The very
+slightest external evidence would weigh them all down together. Perhaps
+the following may be of more importance:--
+
+In both poems there are 'questionings of destiny,' as the modern phrase
+goes. The thing which we call human life is looked in the face--this
+little chequered island of lights and shadows, in the middle of an ocean
+of darkness; and in each we see the sort of answer which the poet finds
+for himself, and which might be summed up briefly in the last words of
+Ecclesiastes, 'Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the
+whole duty of man.' But the world bears a different aspect, and the
+answer looks different in its application. In the Iliad, in spite of the
+gloom of Achilles, and his complaint of the double urn, the sense of
+life, on the whole, is sunny and cheerful. There is no yearning for
+anything beyond--nothing vague, nothing mystical. The earth, the men,
+the gods, have all a palpable reality about them. From first to last, we
+know where we are, and what we are about. In the Odyssey we are
+breathing another atmosphere. The speculations on the moral mysteries of
+our being hang like a mist over us from the beginning to the end; and
+the cloud from time to time descends on the actors, and envelopes them
+with a preternatural halo. The poet evidently dislikes the expression of
+'suffering being the lot of mortals,' as if it had been abused already
+for ungodly purposes. In the opening of the first book, Zeus reproves
+the folly of mortal men for casting the blame upon the gods, when they
+themselves, in spite of all the gods can do to save them, persist in
+their own perverseness; and we never know as we go on, so fast we pass
+from one to the other, when we are among mere human beings, and when
+among the spiritual or the mystical. Those sea-nymphs, those cannibals,
+those enchantresses, if intended to be real, are neither mortal nor
+divine--at any rate, like nothing divine which we had seen in Olympus,
+or on the plains of Ilium; and at times there is a strangeness even in
+the hero himself. Sometimes it is Ulysses painfully toiling his way home
+across the unknown ocean; sometimes it is we that are Ulysses, and that
+unknown ocean is the life across which we are wandering, with too many
+Circes, and Sirens, and 'Isles of Error' in our path. In the same spirit
+death is no longer the end; and on every side long vistas seem to
+stretch away into the infinite, peopled with shadowy forms.
+
+But, as if this palpable initiation into the unseen were still
+insufficient or unconvincing, the common ground on which we are treading
+sometimes shakes under us, and we feel as Humboldt describes himself to
+have felt at the first shock of an earthquake. Strange pieces of
+mysterious wildness are let fall in our way, coming suddenly on us like
+spectres, and vanishing without explanation or hint of their purpose.
+What are those Phoeacian ships meant for, which required neither sail
+nor oar, but of their own selves read the hearts of those they carried,
+and bore them wherever they would go?--or the wild end of the ship which
+carried Ulysses home?--or that terrible piece of second sight in the
+Hall at Ithaca, for which the seer was brought from Pylos?--or those
+islands, one of which is for ever wasting while another is born into
+being to complete the number?--or those mystical sheep and oxen, which
+knew neither age nor death, nor ever had offspring born to them, and
+whose flesh upon the spits began to crawl and bellow?--or Helen singing
+round the horse inside the Trojan walls, when every Grecian chief's
+heart fainted in him as he thought he heard the voice of his own dear
+wife far away beyond the sea?
+
+In the far gates of the Loestrygones, 'where such a narrow rim of
+night divided day from day, that a man who needed not sleep might earn a
+double hire, and the cry of the shepherd at evening driving home his
+flock was heard by the shepherd going out in the morning to pasture,' we
+have, perhaps, some tale of a Phoenician mariner, who had wandered
+into the North Seas, and seen 'the Norway sun set into sunrise.' But
+what shall we say to that Syrian isle, 'where disease is not, nor
+hunger, nor thirst, and where, when men grow old, Apollo comes with
+Artemis, and slays them with his silver bow?' There is nothing in the
+Iliad like any of these stories.
+
+Yet, when all is said, it matters little who wrote the poems. Each is
+so magnificent, that to have written both could scarcely have increased
+the greatness of the man who had written one; and if there were two
+Homers, the earth is richer by one more divine-gifted man than we had
+known. After all, it is perhaps more easy to believe that the
+differences which we seem to see arise from Homer's own choice of the
+material which best suited two works so different, than that nature was
+so largely prodigal as to have created in one age and in one people two
+such men; for whether one or two, the authors of the Iliad and the
+Odyssey stand alone with Shakespeare far away above mankind.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[X] _Fraser's Magazine_, 1851.
+
+[Y] Mackay's _Progress of the Intellect_.
+
+
+
+
+THE LIVES OF THE SAINTS.
+
+1850.
+
+
+If the enormous undertaking of the Bollandist editors had been
+completed, it would have contained the histories of 25,000 saints. So
+many the Catholic Church acknowledged and accepted as her ideals--as men
+who had not only done her honour by the eminence of their sanctity, but
+who had received while on earth an openly divine recognition of it in
+gifts of supernatural power. And this vast number is but a selection;
+the editors chose only out of the mass before them what was most
+noteworthy and trustworthy, and what was of catholic rather than of
+national interest. It is no more than a fraction of that singular
+mythology which for so many ages delighted the Christian world, which is
+still held in external reverence among the Romanists, and of which the
+modern historians, provoked by its feeble supernaturalism, and by the
+entire absence of critical ability among its writers to distinguish
+between fact and fable, have hitherto failed to speak a reasonable word.
+Of the attempt in our own day to revive an interest in them we shall say
+little in this place. The 'Lives' have no form or beauty to give them
+attraction in themselves; and for their human interest the broad
+atmosphere of the world suited ill with these delicate plants, which had
+grown up under the shadow of the convent wall; they were exotics, not
+from another climate, but from another age; the breath of scorn fell on
+them, and having no root in the hearts and beliefs of men any more, but
+only in the sentimentalities and make-beliefs, they withered and sank.
+And yet, in their place as historical phenomena, the legends of the
+saints are as remarkable as any of the Pagan mythologies; to the full as
+remarkable, perhaps far more so, if the length and firmness of hold
+they once possessed on the convictions of mankind is to pass for
+anything in the estimate--and to ourselves they have a near and peculiar
+interest, as spiritual facts in the growth of the Catholic faith.
+
+Philosophy has rescued the old theogonies from ridicule; their
+extravagancies, even the most grotesque of them, can be now seen to have
+their root in an idea, often a deep one, representing features of
+natural history or of metaphysical speculation, and we do not laugh at
+them any more. In their origin, they were the consecration of the
+first-fruits of knowledge; the expression of a real reverential belief.
+Then time did its work on them; knowledge grew, and they could not grow;
+they became monstrous and mischievous, and were driven out by
+Christianity with scorn and indignation. But it is with human
+institutions as it is with men themselves; we are tender with the dead
+when their power to hurt us has passed away; and as Paganism can never
+more be dangerous, we have been able to command a calmer attitude
+towards it, and to detect under its most repulsive features sufficient
+latent elements of genuine thought to satisfy us that even in their
+darkest aberrations men are never wholly given over to falsehood and
+absurdity. When philosophy has done for mediæval mythology what it has
+done for Hesiod and for the Edda, we shall find there also at least as
+deep a sense of the awfulness and mystery of life, and we shall find a
+moral element which the Pagans never had. The lives of the saints are
+always simple, often childish, seldom beautiful; yet, as Goethe
+observed, if without beauty, they are always good.
+
+And as a phenomenon, let us not deceive ourselves on the magnitude of
+the Christian hagiology. The Bollandists were restricted on many sides.
+They took only what was in Latin--while every country in Europe had its
+own home growth in its own language--and thus many of the most
+characteristic of the lives are not to be found at all in their
+collection. And again, they took but one life of each saint, composed in
+all cases late, and compiled out of the mass of various shorter lives
+which had grown up in different localities out of popular tradition; so
+that many of their longer productions have an elaborate literary
+character, with an appearance of artifice, which, till we know how they
+came into existence, might blind us to the vast width and variety of
+the traditionary sources from which they are drawn. In the twelfth
+century there were sixty-six lives extant of St. Patrick alone; and that
+in a country where every parish had its own special saint and special
+legend of him. These sixty-six lives may have contained (Mr. Gibbon says
+_must_ have contained) at least as many thousand lies. Perhaps so. To
+severe criticism, even the existence of a single apostle, St. Patrick,
+appears problematical. But at least there is the historical fact, about
+which there can be no mistake, that the stories did grow up in some way
+or other, that they were repeated, sung, listened to, written, and read;
+that these lives in Ireland, and all over Europe and over the earth,
+wherever the Catholic faith was preached, stories like these, sprang out
+of the heart of the people, and grew and shadowed over the entire
+believing mind of the Catholic world. Wherever church was founded, or
+soil was consecrated for the long resting-place of those who had died in
+the faith; wherever the sweet bells of convent or of monastery were
+heard in the evening air, charming the unquiet world to rest and
+remembrance of God, there dwelt the memory of some apostle who had laid
+the first stone, there was the sepulchre of some martyr whose relics
+reposed beneath the altar, of some confessor who had suffered there for
+his Master's sake, of some holy ascetic who in silent self-chosen
+austerity had woven a ladder there of prayer and penance, on which the
+angels of God were believed to have ascended and descended. It is not a
+phenomenon of an age or of a century; it is characteristic of the
+history of Christianity. From the time when the first preachers of the
+faith passed out from their homes by that quiet Galilean lake, to go to
+and fro over the earth, and did their mighty work, and at last
+disappeared and were not any more seen, these sacred legends began to
+grow. Those who had once known the Apostles, who had drawn from their
+lips the blessed message of light and life, one and all would gather
+together what fragments they could find of their stories. Rumours blew
+in from all the winds. They had been seen here, had been seen there, in
+the farthest corners of the earth, preaching, contending, suffering,
+prevailing. Affection did not stay to scrutinise. When some member of a
+family among ourselves is absent in some far place from which sure news
+of him comes slowly and uncertainly; if he has been in the army, or on
+some dangerous expedition, or at sea, or anywhere where real or
+imaginary dangers stimulate anxiety; or when one is gone away from us
+altogether--fallen perhaps in battle--and when the story of his end can
+be collected but fitfully from strangers, who only knew his name, but
+had heard him nobly spoken of; the faintest threads are caught at;
+reports, the vagueness of which might be evident to indifference, are to
+love strong grounds of confidence, and 'trifles light as air' establish
+themselves as certainties. So, in those first Christian communities,
+travellers came through from east and west; legions on the march, or
+caravans of wandering merchants; and one had been in Rome, and seen
+Peter disputing with Simon Magus; another in India, where he had heard
+St. Thomas preaching to the Brahmins; a third brought with him, from the
+wilds of Britain, a staff which he had cut, as he said, from a thorn
+tree, the seed of which St. Joseph had sown there, and which had grown
+to its full size in a single night, making merchandise of the precious
+relic out of the credulity of the believers. So the legends grew, and
+were treasured up, and loved, and trusted; and alas! all which we have
+been able to do with them is to call them lies, and to point a shallow
+moral on the impostures and credulities of the early Catholics. An
+Atheist could not wish us to say more. If we can really believe that the
+Christian Church was made over in its very cradle to lies and to the
+father of lies, and was allowed to remain in his keeping, so to say,
+till yesterday, he will not much trouble himself with any faith which
+after such an admission we may profess to entertain. For, as this spirit
+began in the first age in which the Church began to have a history, so
+it continued so long as the Church as an integral body retained its
+vitality, and only died out in the degeneracy which preceded and which
+brought on the Reformation. For fourteen hundred years these stories
+held their place, and rang on from age to age, from century to century;
+as the new faith widened its boundaries, and numbered ever more and more
+great names of men and women who had fought and died for it, so long
+their histories, living in the hearts of those for whom they laboured,
+laid hold of them and filled them: and the devout imagination, possessed
+with what was often no more than the rumour of a name, bodied it out
+into life, and form, and reality. And doubtless, if we try them by any
+historical canon, we have to say that quite endless untruths grew in
+this way to be believed among men; and not believed only, but held
+sacred, passionately and devotedly; not filling the history books only,
+not only serving to amuse and edify the refectory, or to furnish matter
+for meditation in the cell, but claiming days for themselves of special
+remembrance, entering into liturgies and inspiring prayers, forming the
+spiritual nucleus of the hopes and fears of millions of human souls.
+
+From the hard barren standing ground of the fact idolator, what a
+strange sight must be that still mountain-peak on the wild west Irish
+shore, where, for more than ten centuries, a rude old bell and a carved
+chip of oak have witnessed, or seemed to witness, to the presence long
+ago there of the Irish apostle; and where, in the sharp crystals of the
+trap rock, a path has been worn smooth by the bare feet and bleeding
+knees of the pilgrims, who still, in the August weather, drag their
+painful way along it as they have done for a thousand years. Doubtless
+the 'Lives of the Saints' are full of lies. Are there none in the Iliad?
+or in the legends of Æneas? Were the stories sung in the liturgy of
+Eleusis all so true? so true as fact? Are the songs of the Cid or of
+Siegfried true? We say nothing of the lies in these; but why? Oh, it
+will be said, but they are fictions; they were never supposed to be
+true. But they _were_ supposed to be true, to the full as true as the
+'Legenda Aurea.' Oh, then, they are poetry; and besides, they have
+nothing to do with Christianity. Yes, that is it; they have nothing to
+do with Christianity. Religion has grown such a solemn business with us,
+and we bring such long faces to it, that we cannot admit or conceive to
+be at all naturally admissible such a light companion as the
+imagination. The distinction between secular and religious has been
+extended even to the faculties; and we cannot tolerate in others the
+fulness and freedom which we have lost or rejected for ourselves. Yet it
+has been a fatal mistake with the critics. They found themselves off the
+recognised ground of Romance and Paganism, and they failed to see the
+same principles at work, though at work with new materials. In the
+records of all human affairs, it cannot be too often insisted on that
+two kinds of truth run for ever side by side, or rather, crossing in and
+out with each other, form the warp and the woof of the coloured web
+which we call history: the one, the literal and external truths
+corresponding to the eternal and as yet undiscovered laws of fact; the
+other, the truths of feeling and of thought, which embody themselves
+either in distorted pictures of outward things, or in some entirely new
+creation--sometimes moulding and shaping real history; sometimes taking
+the form of heroic biography, of tradition, or popular legend; sometimes
+appearing as recognised fiction in the epic, the drama, or the novel. It
+is useless to tell us that this is to confuse truth and falsehood. We
+are stating a fact, not a theory; and if it makes truth and falsehood
+difficult to distinguish, that is nature's fault, not ours. Fiction is
+only false, when it is false, not to fact, else how could it be fiction?
+but when it is--to _law_. To try it by its correspondence to the real is
+pedantry. Imagination creates as nature creates, by the force which is
+in man, which refuses to be restrained; we cannot help it, and we are
+only false when we make monsters, or when we pretend that our inventions
+are facts, when we substitute truths of one kind for truths of another;
+when we substitute,--and again we must say when we _intentionally_
+substitute:--whenever persons, and whenever facts seize strongly on the
+imagination (and of course when there is anything remarkable in them
+they must and will do so), invention glides into the images which form
+in our minds; so it must be, and so it ever has been, from the first
+legends of a cosmogony to the written life of the great man who died
+last year or century, or to the latest scientific magazine. We cannot
+relate facts as they are; they must first pass through ourselves, and we
+are more or less than mortal if they gather nothing in the transit. The
+great outlines alone lie around us as imperative and constraining; the
+detail we each fill up variously, according to the turn of our
+sympathies, the extent of our knowledge, or our general theories of
+things: and therefore it may be said that the only literally true
+history possible is the history which mind has left of itself in all the
+changes through which it has passed.
+
+Suetonius is to the full as extravagant and superstitious as Surius, and
+Suetonius was most laborious and careful, and was the friend of Tacitus
+and Pliny. Suetonius gives us prodigies, where Surius has miracles, but
+that is all the difference; each follows the form of the supernatural
+which belonged to the genius of his age. Plutarch writes a life of
+Lycurgus, with details of his childhood, and of the trials and
+vicissitudes of his age; and the existence of Lycurgus is now quite as
+questionable as that of St. Patrick or of St. George of England.
+
+No rectitude of intention will save us from mistakes. Sympathies and
+antipathies are but synonyms of prejudice, and indifference is
+impossible. Love is blind, and so is every other passion. Love believes
+eagerly what it desires; it excuses or passes lightly over blemishes, it
+dwells on what is beautiful; while dislike sees a tarnish on what is
+brightest, and deepens faults into vices. Do we believe that all this is
+a disease of unenlightened times, and that in our strong sunlight only
+truth can get received?--then let us contrast the portrait, for
+instance, of Sir Robert Peel as it is drawn in the Free Trade Hall at
+Manchester,[Z] at the county meeting, and in the Oxford Common Room. It
+is not so. Faithful and literal history is possible only to an impassive
+spirit. Man will never write it, until perfect knowledge and perfect
+faith in God shall enable him to see and endure every fact in its
+reality; until perfect love shall kindle in him under its touch the one
+just emotion which is in harmony with the eternal order of all things.
+
+How far we are in these days from approximating to such a combination we
+need not here insist. Criticism in the hands of men like Niebuhr seems
+to have accomplished great intellectual triumphs; and in Germany and
+France, and among ourselves, we have our new schools of the philosophy
+of history: yet their real successes have hitherto only been
+destructive. When philosophy reconstructs, it does nothing but project
+its own idea; when it throws off tradition, it cannot work without a
+theory: and what is a theory but an imperfect generalisation caught up
+by a predisposition? What is Comte's great division of the eras but a
+theory, and facts are but as clay in his hands, which he can mould to
+illustrate it, as every clever man will find facts to be, let his theory
+be what it will? Intellect can destroy, but it cannot restore life; call
+in the creative faculties--call in Love, Idea, Imagination, and we have
+living figures, but we cannot tell whether they are figures which ever
+lived before. The high faith in which Love and Intellect can alone
+unite in their fulness, has not yet found utterance in modern
+historians.
+
+The greatest man who has as yet given himself to the recording of human
+affairs is, beyond question, Cornelius Tacitus. Alone in Tacitus a
+serene calmness of insight was compatible with intensity of feeling. He
+took no side; he may have been Imperialist, he may have been Republican,
+but he has left no sign whether he was either: he appears to have sifted
+facts with scrupulous integrity; to administer his love, his scorn, his
+hatred, according only to individual merit: and his sentiments are
+rather felt by the reader in the life-like clearness of his portraits,
+than expressed in words by himself. Yet such a power of seeing into
+things was only possible to him, because there was no party left with
+which he could determinedly side, and no wide spirit alive in Rome
+through which he could feel. The spirit of Rome, the spirit of life had
+gone away to seek other forms, and the world of Tacitus was a heap of
+decaying institutions; a stage where men and women, as they themselves
+were individually base or noble, played over their little parts. Life
+indeed was come into the world, was working in it, and silently shaping
+the old dead corpse into fresh and beautiful being. Tacitus alludes to
+it once only, in one brief scornful chapter; and the most poorly gifted
+of those forlorn biographers whose unreasoning credulity was piling up
+the legends of St. Mary and the Apostles, which now drive the
+ecclesiastical historian to despair, knew more, in his divine hope and
+faith, of the real spirit which had gone out among mankind, than the
+keenest and gravest intellect which ever set itself to contemplate them.
+
+And now having in some degree cleared the ground of difficulties, let us
+go back to the Lives of the Saints. If Bede tells us lies about St.
+Cuthbert, we will disbelieve his stories; but we will not call Bede a
+liar, even though he prefaces his life with a declaration that he has
+set down nothing but what he has ascertained on the clearest evidence.
+We are driven to no such alternative; our canons of criticism are
+different from Bede's, and so are our notions of probability. Bede would
+expect _à priori_, and would therefore consider as sufficiently attested
+by a consent of popular tradition, what the oaths of living witnesses
+would fail to make credible to a modern English jury. We will call Bede
+a liar only if he put forward his picture of St. Cuthbert as a picture
+of a life which he considered admirable and excellent, as one after
+which he was endeavouring to model his own, and which he held up as a
+pattern of imitation, when in his heart he did not consider it admirable
+at all, when he was making no effort at the austerities which he was
+lauding. The histories of the saints are written as ideals of a
+Christian life; they have no elaborate and beautiful forms; single and
+straightforward as they are,--if they are not this they are nothing. For
+fourteen centuries the religious mind of the Catholic world threw them
+out as its form of hero worship, as the heroic patterns of a form of
+human life which each Christian within his own limits was endeavouring
+to realise. The first martyrs and confessors were to those poor monks
+what the first Dorian conquerors were in the war songs of Tyrtæus, what
+Achilles and Ajax and Agamemnon and Diomed were wherever Homer was sung
+or read; or in more modern times, what the Knights of the Round Table
+were in the halls of the Norman castles. The Catholic mind was
+expressing its conception of the highest human excellence; and the
+result is that immense and elaborate hagiology. As with the battle
+heroes, too, the inspiration lies in the universal idea; the varieties
+of character (with here and there an exception) are slight and
+unimportant; the object being to create examples for universal human
+imitation. Lancelot or Tristram were equally true to the spirit of
+chivalry; and Patrick on the mountain, or Antony in the desert, are
+equal models of patient austerity. The knights fight with giants,
+enchanters, robbers, unknightly nobles, or furious wild beasts; the
+Christians fight with the world, the flesh, and the devil. The knight
+leaves the comforts of home in quest of adventures, the saint in quest
+of penance, and on the bare rocks or in desolate wildernesses subdues
+the devil in his flesh with prayers and penances; and so alien is it all
+to the whole thought and system of the modern Christian, that he either
+rejects such stories altogether as monks' impostures, or receives them
+with disdainful wonder, as one more shameful form of superstition with
+which human nature has insulted heaven and disgraced itself.
+
+Leaving, however, for the present, the meaning of monastic asceticism,
+it seems necessary to insist that there really was such a thing; there
+is no doubt about it. If the particular actions told of each saint are
+not literally true, as belonging to him, abundance of men did for many
+centuries lead the sort of life which saints are said to have led. We
+have got a notion that the friars were a snug, comfortable set, after
+all; and the life in a monastery pretty much like that in a modern
+university, where the old monks' language and affectation of
+unworldliness does somehow contrive to co-exist with as large a mass of
+bodily enjoyment as man's nature can well appropriate. Very likely this
+was the state into which many of the monasteries had fallen in the
+fifteenth century. It was a symptom of a very rapid disorder which had
+set in among them, and which promptly terminated in dissolution. But
+long, long ages lay behind the fifteenth century, in which, wisely or
+foolishly, these old monks and hermits did make themselves a very hard
+life of it; and the legend only exceeded the reality in being a very
+slightly idealised portrait. We are not speaking of the miracles; that
+is a wholly different question. When men knew little of the order of
+nature, whatever came to pass without an obvious cause was at once set
+down to influences beyond nature and above it; and so long as there were
+witches and enchanters, strong with the help of the bad powers, of
+course the especial servants of God would not be left without graces to
+outmatch and overcome the devil. And there were many other reasons why
+the saints should work miracles. They had done so under the old
+dispensation, and there was no obvious reason why Christians should be
+worse off than Jews. And again, although it be true, in the modern
+phrase, which is beginning to savour a little of cant, that the highest
+natural is the highest supernatural, nevertheless natural facts permit
+us to be so easily familiar with them, that they have an air of
+commonness; and when we have a vast idea to express, there is always a
+disposition to the extraordinary. But the miracles are not the chief
+thing; nor ever were they so. Men did not become saints by working
+miracles, but they worked miracles because they had become saints; and
+the instructiveness and value of their lives lay in the means which they
+had used to make themselves what they were: and as we said, in this part
+of the business there is unquestionable basis of truth--scarcely even
+exaggeration. We have documentary evidence, which has been filtered
+through the sharp ordeal of party hatred, of the way in which some men
+(and those, not mere ignorant fanatics, but men of vast mind and vast
+influence in their days) conducted themselves, where _myth_ has no room
+to enter. We know something of the hair-shirt of Thomas à Becket; and
+there was another poor monk, whose asceticism imagination could not
+easily outrun; he who, when the earth's mighty ones were banded together
+to crush him under their armed heels, spoke but one little word, and it
+fell among them like the spear of Cadmus; the strong ones turned their
+hands against each other, and the armies melted away; and the proudest
+monarch of the earth lay at that monk's threshold three winter nights in
+the scanty clothing of penance, suing miserably for forgiveness. Or
+again, to take a fairer figure. There is a poem extant, the genuineness
+of which, we believe, has not been challenged, composed by Columbkill,
+commonly called St. Columba. He was a hermit in Arran, a rocky island in
+the Atlantic, outside Galway Bay; from which he was summoned, we do not
+know how, but in a manner which appeared to him to be a Divine call, to
+go away and be Bishop of Iona. The poem is a 'Farewell to Arran,' which
+he wrote on leaving it; and he lets us see something of a hermit's life
+there. 'Farewell,' he begins (we are obliged to quote from memory), 'a
+long farewell to thee, Arran of my heart. Paradise is with thee; the
+garden of God within the sound of thy bells. The angels love Arran. Each
+day an angel comes there to join in its services.' And then he goes on
+to describe his 'dear cell,' and the holy happy hours which he had spent
+there, 'with the wind whistling through the loose stones, and the sea
+spray hanging on his hair.' Arran is no better than a wild rock. It is
+strewed over with the ruins which may still be seen of the old
+hermitages; and at their best they could have been but such places as
+sheep would huddle under in a storm, and shiver in the cold and wet
+which would pierce through the chinks of the walls.
+
+Or, if written evidence be too untrustworthy, there are silent witnesses
+which cannot lie, that tell the same touching story. Whoever loiters
+among the ruins of a monastery will see, commonly leading out of the
+cloisters, rows of cellars half under-ground, low, damp, and
+wretched-looking; an earthen floor, bearing no trace of pavement; a roof
+from which the mortar and the damp keep up (and always must have kept
+up) a perpetual ooze; for a window a narrow slip in the wall, through
+which the cold and the wind find as free an access as the light. Such as
+they are, a well-kept dog would object to accept a night's lodging in
+them; and if they had been prison cells, thousands of philanthropic
+tongues would have trumpeted out their horrors. The stranger perhaps
+supposes that they were the very dungeons of which he has heard such
+terrible things. He asks his guide, and his guide tells him they were
+the monks' dormitories. Yes; there on that wet soil, with that dripping
+roof above them, was the self-chosen home of those poor men. Through
+winter frost, through rain and storm, through summer sunshine,
+generation after generation of them, there they lived and prayed, and at
+last lay down and died.
+
+It is all gone now--gone as if it had never been; and it was as foolish
+as, if the attempt had succeeded, it would have been mischievous, to
+revive a devotional interest in the Lives of the Saints. It would have
+produced but one more unreality in an age already too full of such. No
+one supposes we should have set to work to live as they lived; that any
+man, however earnest in his religion, would have gone looking for earth
+floors and wet dungeons, or wild islands to live in, when he could get
+anything better. Either we are wiser, or more humane, or more
+self-indulgent; at any rate we are something which divides us from
+mediæval Christianity by an impassable gulf which this age or this epoch
+will not see bridged over. Nevertheless, these modern hagiologists,
+however wrongly they went to work at it, had detected, and were
+endeavouring to fill, a very serious blank in our educational system; a
+very serious blank indeed, and one which, somehow, we must contrive to
+get filled if the education of character is ever to be more than a name
+with us. To try and teach people how to live without giving them
+examples in which our rules are illustrated, is like teaching them to
+draw by the rules of perspective, and of light and shade, without
+designs in which to study the effects; or to write verse by the laws of
+rhyme and metre, without song or poem in which rhyme and metre are
+exhibited. It is a principle which we have forgotten, and it is one
+which the old Catholics did not forget. We do not mean that they set out
+with saying to themselves, 'We must have examples, we must have
+ideals;' very likely they never thought about it at all; love for their
+holy men, and a thirst to know about them, produced the histories; and
+love unconsciously working gave them the best for which they could have
+wished. The boy at school at the monastery, the young monk disciplining
+himself as yet with difficulty under the austerities to which he had
+devoted himself, the old one halting on toward the close of his
+pilgrimage,--all of them had before their eyes, in the legend of the
+patron saint, a personal realisation of all they were trying after;
+leading them on, beckoning to them, and pointing, as they stumbled among
+their difficulties, to the marks which his own footsteps had left, as he
+had trod that hard path before them. It was as if the Church was for
+ever saying to them:--'You have doubts and fears, and trials and
+temptations, outward and inward; you have sinned, perhaps, and feel the
+burden of your sin. Here was one who, like you, _in this very spot_,
+under the same sky, treading the same soil, among the same hills and
+woods and rocks and rivers, was tried like you, tempted like you, sinned
+like you; but here he prayed, and persevered, and did penance, and
+washed out his sins; he fought the fight, he vanquished the Evil One, he
+triumphed, and now he reigns a saint with Christ in heaven. The same
+ground which yields you your food, once supplied him; he breathed, and
+lived, and felt, and died _here_; and now, from his throne in the sky,
+he is still looking lovingly down on his children, making intercession
+for you that you may have grace to follow him, that by-and-by he may
+himself offer you at God's throne as his own.' It is impossible to
+measure the influence which a personal reality of this kind must have
+exercised on the mind, thus daily and hourly impressed upon it through a
+life; there is nothing vague any more, no abstract excellences to strain
+after; all is distinct, personal, palpable. It is no dream. The saint's
+bones are under the altar; nay, perhaps, his very form and features
+undissolved. Under some late abbot the coffin may have been opened and
+the body seen without mark or taint of decay. Such things have been, and
+the emaciation of a saint will account for it without a miracle. Daily
+some incident of his story is read aloud, or spoken of, or preached
+upon. In quaint beautiful forms it lives in light in the long chapel
+windows; and in the summer matins his figure, lighted up in splendour,
+gleams down on the congregation as they pray, or streams in mysterious
+tints along the pavement, clad, as it seems, in soft celestial glory,
+and shining as he shines in heaven. Alas, alas! where is it all gone?
+
+We are going to venture a few thoughts on the wide question, what
+possibly may have been the meaning of so large a portion of the human
+race, and so many centuries of Christianity, having been surrendered and
+seemingly sacrificed to the working out this dreary asceticism. If right
+once, then it is right now; if now worthless, then it could never have
+been more than worthless; and the energies which spent themselves on it
+were like corn sown upon the rock, or substance given for that which is
+not bread. We supposed ourselves challenged recently for our facts. Here
+is an enormous fact which there is no evading. It is not to be slurred
+over with indolent generalities, with unmeaning talk of superstition, of
+the twilight of the understanding, of barbarism, and of nursery
+credulity; it is matter for the philosophy of history, if the philosophy
+has yet been born which can deal with it; one of the solid, experienced
+facts in the story of mankind which must be accepted and considered with
+that respectful deference which all facts claim of their several
+sciences, and which will certainly not disclose its meaning (supposing
+it to have a meaning) except to reverence, to sympathy, to love. We must
+remember that the men who wrote these stories, and who practised these
+austerities, were the same men who composed our liturgies, who built our
+churches and our cathedrals--and the gothic cathedral is, perhaps, on
+the whole, the most magnificent creation which the mind of man has as
+yet thrown out of itself. If there be any such thing as a philosophy of
+history, real or possible, it is in virtue of there being certain
+progressive organising laws in which the fretful lives of each of us are
+gathered into and subordinated in some larger unity, through which age
+is linked to age, as we move forward, with an horizon expanding and
+advancing. And if this is true, the magnitude of any human phenomenon is
+a criterion of its importance, and definite forms of thought working
+through long historic periods imply an effect of one of these vast
+laws--imply a distinct step in human progress. Something previously
+unrealised is being lived out, and rooted into the heart of mankind.
+
+Nature never half does her work. She goes over it, and over it, to make
+assurance sure, and makes good her ground with wearying repetition. A
+single section of a short paper is but a small space to enter on so vast
+an enterprise; nevertheless, a few very general words shall be ventured
+as a suggestion of what this monastic or saintly spirit may possibly
+have meant.
+
+First, as the spirit of Christianity is antagonistic to the world,
+whatever form the spirit of the world assumes, the ideals of
+Christianity will of course be their opposite; as one verges into one
+extreme, the other will verge into the contrary. In those rough times
+the law was the sword; animal might of arm, and the strong animal heart
+which guided it, were the excellences which the world rewarded; and
+monasticism, therefore, in its position of protest, would be the
+destruction and abnegation of the animal nature. The war hero in the
+battle or the tourney yard might be taken as the apotheosis of the
+fleshly man--the saint in the desert of the spiritual.
+
+But this interpretation is slight, imperfect, and if true at all only
+partially so. The animal and the spiritual are not contradictories; they
+are the complements in the perfect character; and in the middle ages, as
+in all ages of genuine earnestness, they interfused and penetrated each
+other. There were warrior saints and saintly warriors; and those grand
+old figures which sleep cross-legged in the cathedral aisles were
+something higher than only one more form of the beast of prey.
+Monasticism represented something more positive than a protest against
+the world. We believe it to have been the realisation of the infinite
+loveliness and beauty of personal purity.
+
+In the earlier civilisation, the Greeks, however genuine their reverence
+for the gods, do not seem to have supposed any part of their duty to the
+gods to consist in keeping their bodies untainted. Exquisite as was
+their sense of beauty, of beauty of mind as well as beauty of form, with
+all their loftiness and their nobleness, with their ready love of moral
+excellence when manifested, as fortitude, or devotion to liberty and to
+home, they had little or no idea of what we mean by morality. With a few
+rare exceptions, pollution, too detestable to be even named among
+ourselves, was of familiar and daily occurrence among their greatest
+men; was no reproach to philosopher or to statesman; and was not
+supposed to be incompatible, and was not, in fact, incompatible with any
+of those especial excellences which we so admire in the Greek character.
+
+Among the Romans (that is, the early Romans of the republic), there was
+a sufficiently austere morality. A public officer of state, whose
+business was to enquire into the private lives of the citizens, and to
+punish offences against morals, is a phenomenon which we have seen only
+once on this planet. There was never a nation before, and there has been
+none since, with sufficient virtue to endure it. But the Roman morality
+was not lovely for its own sake, nor excellent in itself. It was
+obedience to law, practised and valued, loved for what resulted from it,
+for the strength and rigid endurance which it gave, but not loved for
+itself. The Roman nature was fierce, rugged, almost brutal; and it
+submitted to restraint as stern as itself, as long as the energy of the
+old spirit endured. But as soon as that energy grew slack--when the
+religion was no longer believed, and taste, as it was called, came in,
+and there was no more danger to face, and the world was at their feet,
+all was swept away as before a whirlwind; there was no loveliness in
+virtue to make it desired, and the Rome of the Cæsars presents, in its
+later ages, a picture of enormous sensuality, of the coarsest animal
+desire, with means unlimited to gratify it. In Latin literature, as
+little as in the Greek, is there any sense of the beauty of purity.
+Moral essays on temperance we may find, and praise enough of the wise
+man whose passions and whose appetites are trained into obedience to
+reason. But this is no more than the philosophy of the old Roman life,
+which got itself expressed in words when men were tired of the reality.
+It involves no sense of sin. If sin could be indulged without weakening
+self-command, or without hurting other people, Roman philosophy would
+have nothing to say against it.
+
+The Christians stepped far out beyond philosophy. Without speculating on
+the _why_, they felt that indulgence of animal passion did, in fact,
+pollute them, and so much the more, the more it was deliberate.
+Philosophy, gliding into Manicheism, divided the forces of the universe,
+giving the spirit to God, but declaring matter to be eternally and
+incurably evil; and looking forward to the time when the spirit should
+be emancipated from the body, as the beginning of, or as the return to,
+its proper existence, a man like Plotinus took no especial care what
+became the meanwhile of its evil tenement of flesh. If the body sinned,
+sin was its element; it could not do other than sin; purity of conduct
+could not make the body clean, and no amount of bodily indulgence could
+shed a taint upon the spirit--a very comfortable doctrine, and one
+which, under various disguises, has appeared a good many times on the
+earth. But Christianity, shaking all this off, would present the body to
+God as a pure and holy sacrifice, as so much of the material world
+conquered from the appetites and lusts, and from the devil whose abode
+they were. This was the meaning of the fastings and scourgings, the
+penances and night-watchings; it was this which sent St. Anthony to the
+tombs and set Simeon on his pillar, to conquer the devil in the flesh,
+and keep themselves, if possible, undefiled by so much as one corrupt
+thought.
+
+And they may have been absurd and extravagant. When the feeling is
+stronger than the judgment, men are very apt to be extravagant. If, in
+the recoil from Manicheism, they conceived that a body of a saint thus
+purified had contracted supernatural virtue and could work miracles,
+they had not sufficiently attended to the facts, and so far are not
+unexceptionable witnesses to them. Nevertheless they did their work, and
+in virtue of it we are raised to a higher stage--we are lifted forward a
+mighty step which we can never again retrace. Personal purity is not the
+whole for which we have to care: it is but one feature in the ideal
+character of man. The monks may have thought it was all, or more nearly
+all than it is; and therefore their lives may seem to us poor, mean, and
+emasculate. Yet it is with life as it is with science; generations of
+men have given themselves exclusively to single branches, which, when
+mastered, form but a little section in a cosmic philosophy; and in life,
+so slow is progress, it may take a thousand years to make good a single
+step. Weary and tedious enough it seems when we cease to speak in large
+language, and remember the numbers of individual souls who have been at
+work at the process; but who knows whereabouts we are in the duration
+of the race? Is humanity crawling out of the cradle, or tottering into
+the grave? Is it in nursery, in schoolroom, or in opening manhood? Who
+knows? It is enough for us to be sure of our steps when we have taken
+them, and thankfully to accept what has been done for us. Henceforth it
+is impossible for us to give our unmixed admiration to any character
+which moral shadows overhang. Henceforth we require, not greatness only,
+but goodness; and not that goodness only which begins and ends in
+conduct correctly regulated, but that love of goodness, that keen pure
+feeling for it, which resides in a conscience as sensitive and
+susceptible as woman's modesty.
+
+So much for what seems to us the philosophy of this matter. If we are
+right, it is no more than a first furrow in the crust of a soil which
+hitherto the historians have been contented to leave in its barrenness.
+If they are conscientious enough not to trifle with the facts, as they
+look back on them from the luxurious self-indulgence of modern
+Christianity, they either revile the superstition or pity the ignorance
+which made such large mistakes on the nature of religion--and, loud in
+their denunciations of priestcraft and of lying wonders, they point
+their moral with pictures of the ambition of mediæval prelacy or the
+scandals of the annals of the papacy. For the inner life of all those
+millions of immortal souls who were struggling, with such good or bad
+success as was given them, to carry Christ's cross along their journey
+through life, they set it by, pass it over, dismiss it out of history,
+with some poor commonplace simper of sorrow or of scorn. It will not do.
+Mankind have not been so long on this planet altogether, that we can
+allow so large a chasm to be scooped out of their spiritual existence.
+
+We intended to leave our readers with something lighter than all this in
+the shape of literary criticism, and a few specimens of the biographical
+style: in both of these we must now, however, be necessarily brief.
+Whoever is curious to study the lives of the saints in their originals,
+should rather go anywhere than to the Bollandists, and universally never
+read a late life when he can command an early one; for the genius in
+them is in the ratio of their antiquity, and, like river-water, is most
+pure nearest to the fountain. We are lucky in possessing several
+specimens of the mode of their growth in late and early lives of the
+same saints, and the process in all is similar. Out of the unnumbered
+lives of St. Bride, three are left; out of the sixty-six of St. Patrick,
+there are eight; the first of each belonging to the sixth century, the
+latest to the thirteenth. The earliest in each instance are in verse;
+they belong to a time when there was no one to write such things, and
+were popular in form and popular in their origin. The flow is easy, the
+style graceful and natural; but the step from poetry to prose is
+substantial as well as formal; the imagination is ossified, and we
+exchange the exuberance of legendary creativeness for the dogmatic
+record of fact without reality, and fiction without grace. The
+marvellous in the poetical lives is comparatively slight; the
+after-miracles being composed frequently out of a mistake of poets'
+metaphors for literal truth. There is often real, genial, human beauty
+in the old verse. The first two stanzas, for instance, of St. Bride's
+Hymn are of high merit, as may, perhaps, be imperfectly seen in a
+translation:--
+
+    Bride the queen, she loved not the world;
+    She floated on the waves of the world
+    As the sea-bird floats upon the billow.
+
+    Such sleep she slept as the mother sleeps
+    In the far land of her captivity,
+    Mourning for her child at home.
+
+What a picture is there of the strangeness and yearning of the poor
+human soul in this earthly pilgrimage!
+
+The poetical 'Life of St. Patrick,' too, is full of fine, wild, natural
+imagery. The boy is described as a shepherd on the hills of Down, and
+there is a legend, well told, of the angel Victor coming to him, and
+leaving a gigantic footprint on a rock from which he sprang back into
+heaven. The legend, of course, rose from some remarkable natural feature
+of the spot; as it is first told, a shadowy unreality hangs over it, and
+it is doubtful whether it is more than a vision of the boy; but in the
+later prose all is crystalline; the story is drawn out, with a barren
+prolixity of detail, into a series of angelic visitations. And again,
+when Patrick is described, as the after-apostle, raising the dead Celts
+to life, the metaphor cannot be left in its natural force, and we have a
+long weary list of literal deaths and literal raisings. So in many ways
+the freshness and individuality was lost with time. The larger saints
+swallowed up the smaller and appropriated their exploits; chasms were
+supplied by an ever ready fancy; and, like the stock of good works laid
+up for general use, there was a stock of miracles ever ready when any
+defect was to be supplied. So it was that, after the first impulse, the
+progressive life of a saint rolled on like a snowball down a mountain
+side, gathering up into itself whatever lay in its path, fact or legend,
+appropriate or inappropriate--sometimes real jewels of genuine old
+tradition, sometimes the débris of the old creeds and legends of
+heathenism; and on, and on, till at length it reached the bottom, and
+was dashed in pieces on the Reformation.
+
+One more illustration shall serve as evidence of what the really
+greatest, most vigorous, minds in the twelfth century could accept as
+possible or probable, which they could relate (on what evidence we do
+not know) as really ascertained facts. We remember something of St.
+Anselm: both as a statesman and as a theologian, he was unquestionably
+among the ablest men of his time alive in Europe. Here is a story which
+Anselm tells of a certain Cornish St. Kieran. The saint, with thirty of
+his companions, was preaching within the frontiers of a lawless Pagan
+prince; and, disregarding all orders to be quiet or to leave the
+country, continued to agitate, to threaten, and to thunder even in the
+ears of the prince himself. Things took their natural course.
+Disobedience provoked punishment. A guard of soldiers was sent, and the
+saint and his little band were decapitated. The scene of the execution
+was a wood, and the heads and trunks were left lying there for the
+wolves and the wild birds.
+
+    But now a miracle, such as was once heard of before in the Church in
+    the person of the holy Denis, was again wrought by Divine Providence
+    to preserve the bodies of these saints from profanation. The trunk
+    of Kieran rose from the ground, and selecting first his own head,
+    and carrying it to a stream, and there carefully washing it, and
+    afterwards performing the same sacred office for each of his
+    companions, giving each body its own head, he dug graves for them
+    and buried them, and last of all buried himself.
+
+It is even so. So it stands written in a life claiming Anselm's
+authorship; and there is no reason why the authorship should not be his.
+Out of the heart come the issues of evil and of good, and not out of the
+intellect or the understanding. Men are not good or bad, noble or
+base--thank God for it!--as they judge well or ill of the probabilities
+of nature, but as they love God and hate the devil. And yet the story is
+instructive. We have heard grave good men--men of intellect and
+influence--with all the advantages of modern science, learning,
+experience; men who would regard Anselm with sad and serious pity; yet
+tell us stories, as having fallen within their own experience, of the
+marvels of mesmerism, to the full as ridiculous (if anything is
+ridiculous) as this of the poor decapitated Kieran.
+
+      Mutato nomine, de te
+    Fabula narratur.
+
+We see our natural faces in the glass of history, and turn away and
+straightway forget what manner of men we are. The superstition of
+science scoffs at the superstition of faith.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Z] Written in 1850.
+
+
+
+
+REPRESENTATIVE MEN.
+
+1850.
+
+
+From St. Anselm to Mr. Emerson, from the 'Acta Sanctorum' to the
+'Representative Men;' so far in seven centuries we have travelled. The
+races of the old Ideals have become extinct like the Preadamite
+Saurians; and here are our new pattern specimens on which we are to
+look, and take comfort and encouragement to ourselves.
+
+The philosopher, the mystic, the poet, the sceptic, the man of the
+world, the writer; these are the present moral categories, the _summa
+genera_ of human greatness as Mr. Emerson arranges them. From every
+point of view an exceptionable catalogue. They are all thinkers, to
+begin with, except one: and thought is but a poor business compared to
+action. Saints did not earn canonisation by the number of their folios;
+and if the necessities of the times are now driving our best men out of
+action into philosophy and verse-making, so much the worse for them and
+so much the worse for the world. The one pattern actor, 'the man of the
+world,' is Napoleon Bonaparte, not in the least a person, as we are most
+of us at present feeling, whose example the world desires to see
+followed. Mr. Emerson would have done better if he had kept to his own
+side of the Atlantic. He is paying his own countrymen but a poor
+compliment by coming exclusively to Europe for his heroes; and he would
+be doing us in Europe more real good by a great deal if he would tell us
+something of the backwoodsmen in Kentucky and Ohio. However, to let that
+pass; it is not our business here to quarrel either with him or his
+book; and the book stands at the head of our article rather because it
+presents a very noticeable deficiency of which its writer is either
+unaware or careless.
+
+These six predicables, as the logician would call them, what are they?
+Are they _ultimate genera_ refusing to be classified farther? or is
+there any other larger type of greatness under which they fall? In the
+naturalist's catalogue, poet, sceptic, and the rest will all be
+classified as men--man being an intelligible entity. Has Mr. Emerson any
+similar clear idea of great man or good man? If so, where is he? what is
+he? It is desirable that we should know. Men will not get to heaven
+because they lie under one or other of these predicables. What is that
+supreme type of character which is in itself good or great, unqualified
+with any farther _differentia_? Is there any such? and if there be,
+where is the representative of this? It may be said that the generic man
+exists nowhere in an ideal unity--that if considered at all, he must be
+abstracted from the various sorts of men, black and white, tame or
+savage. So if we would know what a great man or a good man means, we
+must look to some specific line in which he is good, and abstract our
+general idea. And that is very well, provided we know what we are about;
+provided we understand, in our abstracting, how to get the essential
+idea distinctly out before ourselves, without entangling ourselves in
+the accidents. Human excellence, after all the teaching of the last
+eighteen hundred years, ought to be something palpable by this time. It
+is the one thing which we are all taught to seek and to aim at forming
+in ourselves; and if representative men are good for anything at all, it
+can only be, not as they represent merely curious combinations of
+phenomena, but as they illustrate us in a completely realised form, what
+we are, every single one of us, equally interested in understanding. It
+is not the 'great man' as 'man of the world' that we care for, but the
+'man of the world' as a 'great man'--which is a very different thing.
+Having to live in this world, how to live greatly here is the question
+for us; not, how, being great, we can cast our greatness in a worldly
+mould. There may be endless successful 'men of the world' who are mean
+or little enough all the while; and the Emersonian attitude will confuse
+success with greatness, or turn our ethics into a chaos of absurdity. So
+it is with everything which man undertakes and works in. Life has grown
+complicated; and for one employment in old times there are a hundred
+now. But it is not _they_ which are anything, but _we_. We are the end,
+they are but the means, the material--like the clay, or the marble, or
+the bronze in which the sculptor carves his statue. The _form_ is
+everything; and what is the form? From nursery to pulpit every teacher
+rings on the one note--be good, be noble, be men. What is goodness then?
+and what is nobleness? and where are the examples? We do not say that
+there are none. God forbid! That is not what we are meaning at all. If
+the earth had ceased to bear men pleasant in God's sight, it would have
+passed away like the cities in the plain. But who are they? which are
+they? how are we to know them? They are our leaders in this life
+campaign of ours. If we could see them, we would follow them, and save
+ourselves many and many a fall, and many an enemy whom we could have
+avoided, if we had known of him. It cannot be that the thing is so
+simple, when names of highest reputation are wrangled over, and such
+poor counterfeits are mobbed with applauding followers. In art and
+science we can detect the charlatan, but in life we do not recognise him
+so readily--we do not recognise the charlatan, and we do not recognise
+the true man. Rajah Brooke is alternately a hero or a pirate; and fifty
+of the best men among us are likely to have fifty opinions on the merits
+of Elizabeth or Cromwell.
+
+But surely, men say, the thing is simple. The commandments are simple.
+It is not that people do not know, but that they will not act up to what
+they know. We hear a great deal of this in sermons, and elsewhere; and
+of course, as everybody's experience will tell him, there is a great
+deal too much reason why we should hear of it. But there are two sorts
+of duty, positive and negative; what we ought to do, and what we ought
+not to do. To the latter of these, conscience is pretty much awake; but
+by cunningly concentrating its attention on one side of the matter,
+conscience has contrived to forget altogether that any other sort exists
+at all. 'Doing wrong' is breaking a commandment which forbids us to do
+some particular thing. That is all the notion which in common language
+is attached to the idea. Do not kill, steal, lie, swear, commit
+adultery, or break the Lord's day--these are the commandments; very
+simple, doubtless, and easy to be known. But, after all, what are they?
+They are no more than the very first and rudimental conditions of
+goodness. Obedience to these is not more than a small part of what is
+required of us; it is no more than the foundation on which the
+superstructure of character is to be raised. To go through life, and
+plead at the end of it that we have not broken any of these
+commandments, is but what the unprofitable servant did, who kept his
+talent carefully unspent, and yet was sent to outer darkness for his
+uselessness. Suppose these commandments obeyed--what then? It is but a
+small portion of our time which, we will hope, is spent in resisting
+temptation to break them. What are we to do with the rest of it? Or
+suppose them (and this is a high step indeed) resolved into love of God
+and love of our neighbour. Suppose we know that it is our duty to love
+our neighbour as ourselves. What are we to do, then, for our neighbour,
+besides abstaining from doing him injury? The saints knew very well what
+_they_ were to do; but our duties, we suppose, lie in a different
+direction; and it does not appear that we have found them. 'We have
+duties so positive to our neighbour,' says Bishop Butler, 'that if we
+give more of our time and of our attention to ourselves and our own
+matters than is our just due, we are taking what is not ours, and are
+guilty of fraud.' What does Bishop Butler mean? It is easy to answer
+generally. In detail, it is not only difficult, it is impossible to
+answer at all. The modern world says--'Mind your own business, and leave
+others to take care of theirs;' and whoever among us aspires to more
+than the negative abstaining from wrong, is left to his own guidance.
+There is no help for him, no instruction, no modern ideal which shall be
+to him what the heroes were to the young Greek or Roman, or the martyrs
+to the middle age Christian. There is neither track nor footprint in the
+course which he will have to follow, while, as in the old fairy tale,
+the hillside which he is climbing is strewed with black stones mocking
+at him with their thousand voices. We have no moral criterion, no idea,
+no counsels of perfection; and surely this is the reason why education
+is so little prosperous with us; because the only education worth
+anything is the education of character, and we cannot educate a
+character unless we have some notion of what we would form. Young men,
+as we know, are more easily led than driven. It is a very old story that
+to forbid this and that (so curious and contradictory is our nature) is
+to stimulate a desire to do it. But place before a boy a figure of a
+noble man; let the circumstances in which he has earned his claim to be
+called noble be such as the boy himself sees round himself; let him see
+this man rising over his temptation, and following life victoriously and
+beautifully forward, and, depend on it, you will kindle his heart as no
+threat of punishment here or anywhere will kindle it.
+
+People complain of the sameness in the 'Lives of the Saints.' It is that
+very sameness which is the secret of their excellence. There is a
+sameness in the heroes of the 'Iliad;' there is a sameness in the
+historical heroes of Greece and Rome. A man is great as he contends best
+with the circumstances of his age, and those who fight best with the
+same circumstances, of course grow like each other. And so with our own
+age--if we really could have the lives of our best men written for us
+(and written well, by men who knew what to look for, and what it was on
+which they should insist), they would be just as like as each other too,
+and would for that reason be of such infinite usefulness. They would not
+be like the old Ideals. Times are changed; they were one thing, we have
+to be another--their enemies are not ours. There is a moral
+metempsychosis in the change of era, and probably no lineament of form
+or feature remains identical; yet surely not because less is demanded of
+us--not less, but more--more, as we are again and again told on Sundays
+from the pulpits; if the preachers would but tell us in what that 'more'
+consists. The loftiest teaching we ever hear is, that we are to work in
+the spirit of love; but we are still left to generalities, while action
+divides and divides into ever smaller details. It is as if the Church
+said to the painter or to the musician whom she was training, you must
+work in the spirit of love and in the spirit of truth; and then adding,
+that the Catholic painting or the Catholic music was what he was _not_
+to imitate, supposed that she had sent him out into the world equipped
+fully for his enterprise.
+
+And what comes of this? Emersonianism has come, modern hagiology has
+come, and Ainsworth novels and Bulwer novels, and a thousand more
+unclean spirits. We have cast out the Catholic devil, and the Puritan
+has swept the house and garnished it; but as yet we do not see any
+symptoms showing of a healthy incoming tenant, and there may be worse
+states than Catholicism. If we wanted proof of the utter spiritual
+disintegration into which we have fallen, it would be enough that we
+have no biographies. We do not mean that we have no written lives of our
+fellow-creatures; there are enough and to spare. But not any one is
+there in which the ideal tendencies of this age can be discerned in
+their true form; not one, or hardly any one, which we could place in a
+young man's hands, with such warm confidence as would let us say of
+it--'Read that; there is a man--such a man as you ought to be; read it,
+meditate on it; see what he was, and how he made himself what he was,
+and try and be yourself like him.' This, as we saw lately, is what
+Catholicism did. It had its one broad type of perfection, which in
+countless thousands of instances was perpetually reproducing itself--a
+type of character not especially belonging to any one profession; it was
+a type to which priest and layman, knight or bishop, king or peasant,
+might equally aspire: men of all sorts aspired to it, and men of all
+sorts attained to it; and as fast as she had realised them (so to say),
+the Church took them in her arms, and held them up before the world as
+fresh and fresh examples of victory over the devil. This is what that
+Church was able to do, and it is what we cannot do; and yet, till we can
+learn to do it, no education which we can offer has any chance of
+prospering. Perfection is not easy; it is of all things most difficult;
+difficult to know and difficult to practise. Rules of life will not do;
+even if our analysis of life in all its possible forms were as complete
+as it is in fact rudimentary, they would still be inefficient. The
+philosophy of the thing might be understood, but the practice would be
+as far off as ever. In life, as in art, and as in mechanics, the only
+profitable teaching is the teaching by example. Your mathematician, or
+your man of science, may discourse excellently on the steam engine, yet
+he cannot make one; he cannot make a bolt or a screw. The master workman
+in the engine-room does not teach his apprentice the theory of
+expansion, or of atmospheric pressure; he guides his hand upon the
+turncock, he practises his eye upon the index, and he leaves the science
+to follow when the practice has become mechanical. So it is with
+everything which man learns to do; and yet for the art of arts, the
+trade of trades, for _life_, we content ourselves with teaching our
+children the catechism and the commandments; we preach them sermons on
+the good of being good, and the evil of being evil; in our higher
+education we advance to the theory of habit and the freedom of the will;
+and then, when failure follows failure, _ipsa experientia reclamante_,
+we hug ourselves with a complacent self-satisfied reflection that the
+fault is not ours, that all which men could do we have done. The freedom
+of the will!--as if a blacksmith would ever teach a boy to make a
+horseshoe, by telling him he could make one if he chose.
+
+In setting out on our journey through life, we are like strangers set to
+find their way across a difficult and entangled country. It is not
+enough for us to know that others have set out as we set out, that
+others have faced the lions in the path and overcome them, and have
+arrived at last at the journey's end. Such a knowledge may give us
+heart--but the help it gives is nothing beyond teaching us that the
+difficulties are not insuperable. It is the _track_, which these others,
+these pioneers of godliness, have beaten in, that we cry to have shown
+us; not a mythic 'Pilgrim's Progress,' but a real path trodden in by
+real men. Here is a crag, and there is but one spot where it can be
+climbed; here is a morass or a river, and there is a bridge in one
+place, and a ford in another. There are robbers in this forest, and wild
+beasts in that; the tracks cross and recross, and, as in the old
+labyrinth, only one will bring us right. The age of the saints has
+passed; they are no longer any service to us; we must walk in their
+spirit, but not along their road; and in this sense we say, that we have
+no pattern great men, no biographies, no history, which are of real
+service to us. It is the remarkable characteristic of the present time,
+as far as we know--a new phenomenon since history began to be written;
+one more proof, if we wanted proof, that we are entering on another era.
+In our present efforts at educating, we are like workmen setting about
+to make a machine which they know is to be composed of plates and
+joints, and wheels and screws and springs:--they temper their springs,
+and smooth their plates, and carve out carefully their wheels and
+screws, but having no idea of the machine in its combination, they
+either fasten them together at random, and create some monster of
+disjointed undirected force, or else pile the finished materials into a
+heap together, and trust to some organic spirit in themselves which will
+shape them into unity. We do not know what we would be at--make our
+children into men, says one--but what sort of men? The Greeks were men,
+so were the Jews, so were the Romans, so were the old Saxons, the
+Normans, the Duke of Alva's Spaniards, and Cromwell's Puritans. These
+were all men, and strong men too; yet all different, and all differently
+trained. 'Into Christian men,' say others: but the saints were Christian
+men; yet the modern Englishmen have been offered the saints'
+biographies, and have with sufficient clearness expressed their opinion
+of them.
+
+Alas! in all this confusion, only those keen-eyed children of this world
+find their profit; their idea does not readily forsake them. In their
+substantial theory of life, the business of man in it is to get on, to
+thrive, to prosper, to have riches in possession. They will have their
+little ones taught, by the law of demand, what will fetch its price in
+the market; and this is clear, bold, definite, straightforward--and
+therefore it is strong, and works its way. It works and will prevail for
+a time; for a time--but not for ever, unless indeed religion be all a
+dream, and our airy notions of ourselves a vision out of which our wise
+age is the long-waited-for awakening.
+
+It would be a weary and odious business to follow out all the causes
+which have combined to bring us into our present state. Many of them lie
+deep down in the roots of humanity, and many belong to that large system
+of moral causation which works through vast masses of mankind--which,
+impressing peculiar and necessary features on the eras as they succeed,
+leaves individuals but a limited margin within which they may determine
+what they will be. One cause, however, may be mentioned, which lies near
+the surface, and which for many reasons it may be advantageous to
+consider. At first thought it may seem superficial and captious; but we
+do not think it will at the second, and still less at the third.
+
+Protestantism, and even Anglo-Protestantism, has not been without its
+great men. In their first fierce struggle for existence, these creeds
+gave birth to thousands whose names may command any rank in history. But
+alone of all forms of religion, past or present, and we will add (as we
+devoutly hope), to come (for in her present form, at least, the Church
+of England cannot long remain), Protestantism knows not what to do with
+her own offspring; she is unable to give them open and honourable
+recognition. Entangled in speculative theories of human depravity, of
+the worthlessness of the best which the best men can do, Protestantism
+is unable to say heartily of any one, 'Here is a good man to be loved
+and remembered with reverence.' There are no saints in the English
+Church. The English Church does not pretend to saints. Her children may
+live purely, holily, and beautifully, but her gratitude for them must be
+silent; she may not thank God for them--she may not hold them up before
+her congregation. They may or they may not have been really good, but
+she may not commit herself to attributing a substantial value to the
+actions of a nature so corrupt as that of man. Among Protestants, the
+Church of England is the worst, for she is not wholly Protestant. In the
+utterness of the self-abnegation of the genuine Protestant there is
+something approaching the heroic. But she, ambitious of being Catholic
+as well as Protestant, like that old Church of evil memory which would
+be neither hot nor cold, will neither wholly abandon merit, nor wholly
+claim it; but halts on between two opinions, claiming and disclaiming,
+saying and in the next breath again unsaying. The Oxford student being
+asked for the doctrine of the Anglican Church on good works, knew the
+rocks and whirlpools among which an unwary answer might involve him, and
+steering midway between Scylla and Charybdis, replied, with laudable
+caution, 'a few of them would not do a man any harm.' It is scarcely a
+caricature of the prudence of the Articles. And so at last it has come
+to this with us. The soldier can raise a column to his successful
+general; the halls of the law courts are hung round with portraits of
+the ermined sages; Newton has his statue, and Harvey and Watt, in the
+academies of the sciences; and each young aspirant after fame, entering
+for the first time upon the calling which he has chosen, sees high
+excellence highly honoured; sees the high career, and sees its noble
+ending, marked out each step of it in golden letters. But the Church's
+aisles are desolate, and desolate they must remain. There is no statue
+for the Christian. The empty niches stare out like hollow eye-sockets
+from the walls. Good men live in the Church and die in her, whose story
+written out or told would be of inestimable benefit, but she may not
+write it. She may speak of goodness, but not of the good man; as she may
+speak of sin, but may not censure the sinner. Her position is critical;
+the Dissenters would lay hold of it. She may not do it, but she will do
+what she can. She cannot tolerate an image indeed, or a picture of her
+own raising; she has no praise to utter at her children's graves, when
+their lives have witnessed to her teaching. But if others will bear the
+expense and will risk the sin, she will offer no objection. Her walls
+are naked. The wealthy ones among her congregation may adorn them as
+they please; the splendour of a dead man's memorial shall be, not as his
+virtues were, but as his purse; and his epitaph may be brilliant
+according as there are means to pay for it. They manage things better at
+the museums and the institutes.
+
+Let this pass, however, as the worst case. There are other causes at
+work besides the neglect of churches; the neglect itself being as much a
+result as a cause. There is a common dead level over the world, to which
+churches and teachers, however seemingly opposite, are alike condemned.
+As it is here in England, so it is with the American Emerson. The fault
+is not in them, but in the age of which they are no more than the
+indicators. We are passing out of old forms of activity into others new
+and on their present scale untried; and how to work nobly in them is the
+one problem for us all. Surius will not profit us, nor the 'Mort
+d'Arthur.' Our calling is neither to the hermitage nor to the round
+table. Our work lies now in those peaceful occupations which, in ages
+called heroic, were thought unworthy of noble souls. In those it was the
+slave who tilled the ground, and wove the garments. It was the ignoble
+burgher who covered the sea with his ships, and raised up factories and
+workshops; and how far such occupations influenced the character, how
+they could be made to minister to loftiness of heart, and high and
+beautiful life, was a question which could not occur while the
+atmosphere of the heroic was on all sides believed so alien to them.
+Times have changed. The old hero worship has vanished with the need of
+it; but no other has risen in its stead, and without it we wander in the
+dark. The commonplaces of morality, the negative commandments, general
+exhortations to goodness, while neither speaker nor hearer can tell what
+they mean by goodness--these are all which now remain to us; and thrown
+into a life more complicated than any which the earth has yet
+experienced, we are left to wind our way through the labyrinth of its
+details without any clue except our own instincts, our own knowledge,
+our own hopes and desires.
+
+We complain of generalities; we will not leave ourselves exposed to the
+same charge. We will mention a few of the thousand instances in which we
+cry for guidance and find none; instances on which those who undertake
+to teach us ought to have made up their minds.
+
+On the surface at least of the Prayer-book, there seems to be something
+left remaining of the Catholic penitential system. Fasting is spoken of
+and abstinence, and some form or other of self-inflicted self-denial is
+necessarily meant. This thing can by no possibility be unimportant, and
+we may well smile at the exclusive claims of a church to the cure of our
+souls, who is unable to say what she thinks about it. Let us ask her
+living interpreters then, and what shall we get for an answer? either no
+answer at all, or contradictory answers; angrily, violently,
+passionately, contradictory. Among the many voices, what is a young man
+to conclude? He will conclude naturally according to his inclination;
+and if he chooses right, it will most likely be on a wrong motive.
+
+Again, _courage_ is, on all hands, considered as an essential of high
+character. Among all fine people, old and modern, wherever we are able
+to get an insight into their training system, we find it a thing
+particularly attended to. The Greeks, the Romans, the old Persians, our
+own nation till the last two hundred years, whoever of mankind have
+turned out good for anything anywhere, knew very well, that to exhort a
+boy to be brave without training him in it, would be like exhorting a
+young colt to submit to the bridle without breaking him in. Step by
+step, as he could bear it, the boy was introduced to danger, till his
+pulse ceased to be agitated, and he became familiarised with peril as
+his natural element. It was a matter of carefully considered, thoroughly
+recognised, and organised education. But courage nowadays is not a
+paying virtue. Courage does not help to make money, and so we have
+ceased to care about it; and boys are left to educate one another by
+their own semi-brutal instincts, in this, which is perhaps the most
+important of all features in the human character. Schools, as far as the
+masters are concerned with them, are places for teaching Greek and
+Latin--that, and nothing more. At the universities, fox-hunting is,
+perhaps, the only discipline of the kind now to be found, and
+fox-hunting, by forbidding it and winking at it, the authorities have
+contrived to place on as demoralising a footing as ingenuity could
+devise.[AA]
+
+To pass from training to life. A boy has done with school and college;
+he has become a man, and has to choose his profession. It is the one
+most serious step which he has yet taken. In most cases, there is no
+recalling it. He believes that he is passing through life to eternity;
+that his chance of getting to heaven depends on what use he makes of his
+time; he prays every day that he may be delivered from temptation; it is
+his business to see that he does not throw himself into it. Now, every
+one of the many professions has a peculiar character of its own, which,
+with rare exceptions, it inflicts on those who follow it. There is the
+shopkeeper type, the manufacturer type, the lawyer type, the medical
+type, the clerical type, the soldier's, the sailor's. The nature of a
+man is
+
+            Like the dyer's hand,
+    Subdued to what it works in;
+
+and we can distinguish with ease, on the slightest intercourse, to what
+class a grown person belongs. It is to be seen in his look, in his
+words, in his tone of thought, his voice, gesture, even in his
+hand-writing; and in everything which he does. Every human employment
+has its especial moral characteristic, its peculiar temptations, its
+peculiar influences--of a subtle and not easily analysed kind, and only
+to be seen in their effects. Here, therefore--here, if anywhere, we want
+Mr. Emerson with his representatives, or the Church with her advice and
+warning. But, in fact, what attempt do we see to understand any of this,
+or even to acknowledge it; to master the moral side of the professions;
+to teach young men entering them what they are to expect, what to avoid,
+or what to seek? Where are the highest types--the pattern lawyer, and
+shopkeeper, and merchant? Are they all equally favourable to excellence
+of character? Do they offer equal opportunities? Which best suits this
+disposition, and which suits that? Alas! character is little thought of
+in the choice. It is rather, which shall I best succeed in? Where shall
+I make most money? Suppose an anxious boy to go for counsel to his
+spiritual mother; to go to her, and ask her to guide him. Shall I be a
+soldier? he says. What will she tell him? This and no more--you may,
+without sin. Shall I be a lawyer, merchant, manufacturer, tradesman,
+engineer? Still the same answer. But which is best? he demands. We do
+not know: we do not know. There is no guilt in either; you may take
+which you please, provided you go to church regularly, and are honest
+and good. If he is foolish enough to persist further, and ask, in what
+goodness and honesty consist in _his especial department_ (whichever he
+selects), he will receive the same answer; in other words, he will be
+told to give every man his due and be left to find out for himself in
+what 'his due' consists. It is like an artist telling his pupil to put
+the lights and shadows in their due places, and leaving it to the
+pupil's ingenuity to interpret such instructive directions.
+
+One more instance of an obviously practical kind. Masters, few people
+will now deny, owe certain duties to their workmen beyond payment at the
+competition price for their labour, and the workmen owe something to
+their masters beyond making their own best bargain. Courtesy, on the one
+side, and respect on the other, are at least due; and wherever human
+beings are brought in contact, a number of reciprocal obligations at
+once necessarily arise out of the conditions of their position. It is
+this question which at the present moment is convulsing an entire branch
+of English trade. It is this question which has shaken the Continent
+like an earthquake, and yet it is one which, the more it is thought
+about, the more clearly seems to refuse to admit of being dealt with by
+legislation. It is a question for the Gospel and not for the law. The
+duties are of the kind which it is the business, not of the State, but
+of the Church, to look to. Why is the Church silent? There are duties;
+let her examine them, sift them, prove them, and then point them out.
+Why not--why not? Alas! she cannot, she dare not give offence, and
+therefore must find none. It is to be feared that we have a rough trial
+to pass through, before we find our way and understand our obligations.
+Yet far off we seem to see a time when the lives, the actions of the
+really great, great good masters, great good landlords, great good
+working men, will be laid out once more before their several orders,
+laid out in the name of God, as once the saints' lives were; and the
+same sounds shall be heard in factory and in counting-house as once
+sounded through abbey, chapel, and cathedral aisle--'Look at these men;
+bless God for them, and follow them.'
+
+And let no one fear that, if such happy time were come, it would result
+in a tame and weary sameness; that the beautiful variety of individual
+form would be lost, drilled away in regimental uniformity. Even if it
+were so, it need not be any the worse for us; we are not told to
+develope our individualities, we are told to bear fruit. The poor
+vagabond, with all his individualities about him, if by luck he falls
+into the hands of the recruiting sergeant, finds himself, a year later,
+with his red coat and his twelve months' training, not a little the
+better for the loss of them. But such schooling as we have been speaking
+of will drill out only such individualities as are of the unworthy kind,
+and will throw the strength of the nature into the development of the
+healthiest features in it. Far more, as things now are, we see men
+sinking into sameness--an inorganic, unwholesome sameness, in which the
+higher nature is subdued, and the _man_ is sacrificed to the profession.
+The circumstances of his life are his world; and he sinks under them, he
+does not conquer them. If he has to choose between the two, God's
+uniform is better than the world's. The first gives him freedom; the
+second takes it from him. Only here, as in everything, we must
+understand the nature of the element in which we work; understand it;
+understand the laws of it. Throw off the lower laws; the selfish,
+debasing influences of the profession; obey the higher; follow love,
+truthfulness, manliness; follow these first, and make the profession
+serve them; and that is freedom; there is none else possible for man.
+
+    Das Gesetz soll nur uns Freiheit geben;
+
+and whatever individuality is lost in the process, we may feel assured
+that the devil has too much to do with, to make us care to be rid of it.
+
+But how to arrive at this? so easy as it is to suggest on paper, so easy
+to foretell in words. Raise the level of public opinion, we might say;
+insist on a higher standard; in the economist's language, increase the
+demand for goodness, and the supply will follow; or, at any rate, men
+will do their best. Until we require more of one another, more will not
+be provided. But this is but to restate the problem in other words. How
+are we to touch the heart; how to awaken the desire? We believe that the
+good man, the great man, whatever he be, prince or peasant, is really
+lovely; that really and truly, if we can only see him, he more than
+anything will move us; and at least, we have a right to demand that the
+artificial hindrances which prevent our lifting him above the crowd,
+shall be swept away. He in his beautiful life is a thousand times more
+God's witness than any preacher in a pulpit, and his light must not be
+concealed any more. As we said, what lies in the way of our sacred
+recognition of great men is more than anything else the Protestant
+doctrine of good works. We do not forget what it meant when the world
+first heard of it. It was a cry from the very sanctuary of the soul,
+flinging off and execrating the accursed theory of merits, the sickening
+parade of redundant saintly virtues, which the Roman Church had
+converted into stock, and dispensed for the benefit of the believers.
+This is not the place to pour out our nausea on so poor, yet so
+detestable a farce. But it seems with all human matters, that as soon as
+spiritual truths are petrified into doctrines, it is another name for
+their death. They die, corrupt, and breed a pestilence. The doctrine of
+good works was hurled away by an instinct of generous feeling, and this
+feeling itself has again become dead, and a fresh disease has followed
+upon it. Nobody (or, at least, nobody good for anything) will lay a
+claim to merit for this or that good action which he may have done.
+Exactly in proportion as a man is really good, will be the eagerness
+with which he will refuse all credit for it; he will cry out, with all
+his soul, 'Not unto us--not unto us.'
+
+And yet, practically, we all know and feel that between man and man
+there is an infinite moral difference; one is good, one is bad, another
+hovers between the two; the whole of our conduct to each other is
+necessarily governed by a recognition of this fact, just as it is in the
+analogous question of the will. Ultimately, we are nothing of ourselves;
+we know that we are but what God has given us grace to be--we did not
+make ourselves--we do not keep ourselves here--we are but what in the
+eternal order of Providence we were designed to be--exactly that and
+nothing else; and yet we treat each other as responsible; we cannot
+help it. The most rigid Calvinist cannot eliminate his instincts; his
+loves and hatreds seem rather to deepen in intensity of colouring as,
+logically, his creed should lead him to conquer them as foolish. It is
+useless, it is impossible, to bring down these celestial mysteries upon
+our earth, to try to see our way by them, or determine our feelings by
+them; men are good, men are bad, relatively to us and to our
+understandings if you will, but still really, and so they must be
+treated.
+
+There is no more mischievous falsehood than to persist in railing at
+man's nature, as if it were all vile together, as if the best and the
+worst which comes of it were in God's sight equally without worth. These
+denunciations tend too fatally to realise themselves. Tell a man that no
+good which he can do is of any value, and depend upon it he will take
+you at your word--most especially will the wealthy, comfortable,
+luxurious man, just the man who has most means to do good, and whom of
+all things it is most necessary to stimulate to it. Surely we should not
+be afraid. The instincts which God has placed in our hearts are too
+mighty for us to be able to extinguish them with doctrinal sophistry. We
+love the good man, we praise him, we admire him--we cannot help it; and
+surely it is mere cowardice to shrink from recognising it
+openly--thankfully, divinely recognising it. If true at all, there is no
+truth in heaven or earth of deeper practical importance to us; and
+Protestantism must have lapsed from its once generous spirit, if it
+persists in imposing a dogma of its own upon our hearts, the touch of
+which is fatal as the touch of a torpedo to any high or noble endeavours
+after excellence.
+
+'Drive out nature with a fork, she ever comes running back;' and while
+we leave out of consideration the reality, we are filling the chasm with
+inventions of our own. The only novels which are popular among us are
+those which picture the successful battles of modern men and women with
+modern life, which are imperfect shadows of those real battles which
+every reader has seen in some form or other, or has longed to see in his
+own small sphere. It shows where the craving lies if we had but the
+courage to meet it; why need we fall back on imagination to create what
+God has created ready for us? In every department of human life, in the
+more and the less, there is always one man who is the best, and one
+type of man which is the best, living and working his silent way to
+heaven in the very middle of us. Let us find this type then--let us see
+what it is which makes such men the best, and raise up their
+excellencies into an acknowledged and open standard, of which they
+themselves shall be the living witnesses. Is there a landlord who is
+spending his money, not on pineries and hothouses, but on schools, and
+washhouses, and drains, who is less intent on the magnificence of his
+own grand house, than in providing cottages for his people where decency
+is possible; then let us not pass him by with a torpid wonder or a
+vanishing emotion of pleasure--rather let us seize him and raise him up
+upon a pinnacle, that other landlords may gaze upon him, if, perhaps,
+their hearts may prick them; and the world shall learn from what one man
+has done what they have a right to require that others shall do.
+
+So it might be through the thousand channels of life. It should not be
+so difficult; the machinery is ready, both to find your men and to use
+them. In theory, at least, every parish has its pastor, and the state of
+every soul is or ought to be known. We know not what turn things may
+take, or what silent changes are rushing on below us. Even while the
+present organisation remains--but, alas! no--it is no use to urge a
+Church bound hand and foot in State shackles to stretch its limbs in any
+wholesome activity. If the teachers of the people really were the wisest
+and best and noblest men among us, this and a thousand other blessed
+things would follow from it; till then let us be content to work and
+pray, and lay our hand to the wheel wherever we can find a spoke to
+grasp. _Corruptio optimi est pessima_; the national Church as it ought
+to be is the soul and conscience of the body politic, but a man whose
+body has the direction of his conscience we do not commonly consider in
+the most hopeful moral condition.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[AA] Written 1850.
+
+
+
+
+REYNARD THE FOX.[AB]
+
+
+Lord Macaulay, in his Essay on Machiavelli, propounds a singular theory.
+Declining the various solutions which have been offered to explain how a
+man supposed to be so great could have lent his genius to the doctrine
+of 'the Prince,' he has advanced a hypothesis of his own, which may or
+may not be true, as an interpretation of Machiavelli's character, but
+which, as an exposition of a universal ethical theory, is as
+questionable as what it is brought forward to explain. We will not show
+Lord Macaulay the disrespect of supposing that he has attempted an
+elaborate piece of irony. It is possible that he may have been
+exercising his genius with a paradox, but the subject is not of the sort
+in which we can patiently permit such exercises. It is hard work with
+all of us to keep ourselves straight, even when we see the road with all
+plainness as it lies out before us; and clever men must be good enough
+to find something else to amuse themselves with, instead of dusting our
+eyes with sophistry.
+
+According to this conception of human nature, the basenesses and the
+excellencies of mankind are no more than accidents of circumstance, the
+results of national feeling and national capabilities; and cunning and
+treachery, and lying, and such other 'natural defences of the weak
+against the strong,' are in themselves neither good nor bad, except as
+thinking makes them so. They are the virtues of a weak people, and they
+will be as much admired, and are as justly admirable; they are to the
+full as compatible with the highest graces and most lofty features of
+the heart and intellect as any of those opposite so called heroisms
+which we are generally so unthinking as to allow to monopolise the name.
+Cunning is the only resource of the feeble; and why may we not feel for
+victorious cunning as strong a sympathy as for the bold, downright, open
+bearing of the strong? That there may be no mistake in the essayist's
+meaning, that he may drive the nail home into the English understanding,
+he takes an illustration which shall be familiar to all of us in the
+characters of Iago and Othello. To our northern thought, the free and
+noble nature of the Moor is wrecked through a single infirmity, by a
+fiend in the human form. To one of Machiavelli's Italians, Iago's
+keen-edged intellect would have appeared as admirable as Othello's
+daring appears to us, and Othello himself little better than a fool and
+a savage. It is but a change of scene, of climate, of the animal
+qualities of the frame, and evil has become good, and good has become
+evil. Now, our displeasure with Lord Macaulay is, not that he has
+advanced a novel and mischievous theory: it was elaborated long ago in
+the finely tempered dialectics of the Schools of Rhetoric at Athens; and
+so long as such a phenomenon as a cultivated rogue remains possible
+among mankind, it will reappear in all languages and under any number of
+philosophical disguises. Seldom or never, however, has it appeared with
+so little attempt at disguise. It has been left for questionable poets
+and novelists to idealise the rascal genus; philosophers have escaped
+into the ambiguities of general propositions, and we do not remember
+elsewhere to have met with a serious ethical thinker deliberately laying
+two whole organic characters, with their vices and virtues in full life
+and bloom, side by side, asking himself which is best, and answering
+gravely that it is a matter of taste.
+
+Lord Macaulay has been bolder than his predecessors; he has shrunk from
+no conclusion, and has looked directly into the very heart of the
+matter; he has struck, as we believe, the very lowest stone of our
+ethical convictions, and declared that the foundation quakes under it.
+
+For, ultimately, how do we know that right is right, and wrong is wrong?
+People in general accept it on authority; but authority itself must
+repose on some ulterior basis; and what is that? Are we to say that in
+morals there is a system of primary axioms, out of which we develope our
+conclusions, and apply them, as they are needed, to life? It does not
+appear so. The analogy of morals is rather with art than with geometry.
+The grace of heaven gives us good men, and gives us beautiful creations;
+and we, perceiving by the instincts within ourselves that celestial
+presence in the objects on which we gaze, find out for ourselves the
+laws which make them what they are, not by comparing them with any
+antecedent theory, but by careful analysis of our own impressions, by
+asking ourselves what it is which we admire in them, and by calling that
+good, and calling that beautiful.
+
+So, then, if admiration be the first fact--if the sense of it be the
+ultimate ground on which the after temple of morality, as a system,
+upraises itself--if we can be challenged here on our own ground, and
+fail to make it good, what we call the life of the soul becomes a dream
+of a feeble enthusiast, and we moralists a mark for the sceptic's finger
+to point at with scorn.
+
+Bold and ably-urged arguments against our own convictions, if they do
+not confuse us, will usually send us back over our ground to re-examine
+the strength of our positions: and if we are honest with ourselves, we
+shall very often find points of some uncertainty left unguarded, of
+which the show of the strength of our enemy will oblige us to see better
+to the defence. It was not without some shame, and much uneasiness,
+that, while we were ourselves engaged in this process, full of
+indignation with Lord Macaulay, we heard a clear voice ringing in our
+ear, 'Who art thou that judgest another?' and warning us of the presence
+in our own heart of a sympathy, which we could not 'deny,' with the
+sadly questionable hero of the German epic, 'Reynard the Fox.' With our
+vulpine friend, we were on the edge of the very same abyss, if, indeed,
+we were not rolling in the depth of it. By what sophistry could we
+justify ourselves, if not by the very same which we had just been so
+eagerly condemning? And our conscience whispered to us that we had been
+swift to detect a fault in another, because it was the very fault to
+which, in our own heart of hearts, we had a latent leaning.
+
+Was it so indeed, then? Was Reineke no better than Iago? Was the sole
+difference between them, that the _vates sacer_ who had sung the
+exploits of Reineke loved the wicked rascal, and entangled us in loving
+him? It was a question to be asked. And yet we had faith enough in the
+straight-forwardness of our own sympathies to feel sure that it must
+admit of some sort of answer. And, indeed, we rapidly found an answer
+satisfactory enough to give us time to breathe, in remembering that
+Reineke, with all his roguery, has no malice in him. It is not in his
+nature to hate; he could not do it if he tried. The characteristic of
+Iago is that deep motiveless malignity which rejoices in evil as its
+proper element--which loves evil as good men love virtue. In
+calculations on the character of the Moor, Iago despises Othello's
+unsuspicious trustingness as imbecility, while he hates him as a man
+because his nature is the perpetual opposite and perpetual reproach of
+his own. Now, Reineke would not have hurt a creature, not even
+Scharfenebbe, the crow's wife, when she came to peck his eyes out, if he
+had not been hungry; and that [Greek: gastros anankê], that craving of
+the stomach, makes a difference quite infinite. It is true that, like
+Iago, Reineke rejoices in the exercise of his intellect: the sense of
+his power and the scientific employment of his time are a real delight
+to him; but then, as we said, he does not love evil for its own sake; he
+is only somewhat indifferent to it. If the other animals venture to take
+liberties with him, he will repay them in their own coin, and get his
+quiet laugh at them at the same time; but the object generally for which
+he lives is the natural one of getting his bread for himself and his
+family; and, as the great moralist says, 'It is better to be bad for
+something than for nothing.' Badness generally is undesirable; but
+badness in its essence, which may be called heroic badness, is
+gratuitous.
+
+But this first thought served merely to give us a momentary relief from
+our alarm, and we determined we would sift the matter to the bottom, and
+no more expose ourselves to be taken at such disadvantage. We went again
+to the poem, with our eyes open, and our moral sense as keenly awake as
+a genuine wish to understand our feelings could make it. We determined
+that we would really know what we did feel and what we did not. We would
+not be lightly scared away from our friend, but neither would we any
+more allow our judgment to be talked down by that fluent tongue of his;
+he should have justice from us, he and his biographer, as far as it lay
+with us to discern justice and to render it.
+
+And really on this deliberate perusal it did seem little less than
+impossible that we could find any conceivable attribute illustrated in
+Reineke's proceedings which we could dare to enter in our catalogue of
+virtues, and not blush to read it there. What sin is there in the
+Decalogue in which he has not steeped himself to the lips? To the lips,
+shall we say? nay, over head and ears--rolling and rollicking in sin.
+Murder, and theft, and adultery; sacrilege, perjury, lying--his very
+life is made of them. On he goes to the end, heaping crime on crime, and
+lie on lie, and at last, when it seems that justice, which has been so
+long vainly halting after him, has him really in her iron grasp, there
+is a solemn appeal to heaven, a challenge, a battle ordeal, in which, by
+means we may not venture even to whisper, the villain prospers, and
+comes out glorious, victorious, amidst the applause of a gazing world.
+To crown it all, the poet tells us that under the disguise of the animal
+name and form the world of man is represented, and the true course of
+it; and the idea of the book is, that we who read it may learn therein
+to discern between good and evil, and choose the first and avoid the
+last. It seemed beyond the power of sophistry to whitewash Reineke, and
+the interest which still continued to cling to him seemed too nearly to
+resemble the unwisdom of the multitude, with whom success is the one
+virtue, and failure the only crime.
+
+It appeared, too, that although the animal disguises were too
+transparent to endure a moment's reflection, yet that they were so
+gracefully worn that such moment's reflection was not to be come at
+without an effort. Our imagination following the costume, did
+imperceptibly betray our judgment; we admired the human intellect, the
+ever ready prompt sagacity and presence of mind. We delighted in the
+satire on the foolishnesses and greedinesses of our own
+fellow-creatures; but in our regard for the hero we forgot his humanity
+wherever it was his interest that we should forget it, and while we
+admired him as a man we judged him only as a fox. We doubt whether it
+would have been possible, if he had been described as an open
+acknowledged biped in coat and trousers, to have retained our regard for
+him. Something or other in us, either real rightmindedness, or humbug,
+or hypocrisy, would have obliged us to mix more censure with our liking
+than most of us do in the case as it stands. It may be that the dress of
+the fox throws us off our guard, and lets out a secret or two which we
+commonly conceal even from ourselves. When we have to pass an opinion
+upon bad people, who at the same time are clever and attractive, we say
+rather what we think that we ought to feel than what we feel in reality;
+while with Reineke, being but an animal, we forget to make ourselves up,
+and for once our genuine tastes show themselves freely. Some degree of
+truth there undoubtedly is in this. But making all allowance for
+it--making all and over allowance for the trick which is passed upon our
+senses, there still remained a feeling unresolved. The poem was not
+solely the apotheosis of a rascal in whom we were betrayed into taking
+an interest; and it was not a satire merely on the world, and on the men
+whom the world delight to honour. There was still something which really
+deserved to be liked in Reineke, and what it was we had as yet failed to
+discover.
+
+'Two are better than one,' and we resolved in our difficulty to try what
+our friends might have to say about it. The appearance of the Wurtemburg
+animals at the Exhibition came fortunately _apropos_ to our assistance:
+a few years ago it was rare to find a person who had read the Fox Epic;
+and still more, of course, to find one whose judgment would be worth
+taking about it. But now the charming figures of Reineke himself, and
+the Lion King, and Isegrim, and Bruin, and Bellyn, and Hintze, and
+Grimbart, had set all the world asking who and what they were, and the
+story began to get itself known. The old editions, which had long slept
+unbound in reams upon the shelves, began to descend and clothe
+themselves in green and crimson. Mr. Dickens sent a summary of it round
+the households of England. Everybody began to talk of Reineke; and now,
+at any rate, we said to ourselves, we shall see whether we are alone in
+our liking--whether others share in this strange sympathy, or whether it
+be some unique and monstrous moral obliquity in ourselves.
+
+We set to work, therefore, with all earnestness, feeling our way first
+with fear and delicacy, as conscious of our own delinquency, to gather
+judgments which should be wiser than our own, and correct ourselves, if
+it proved that we required correction, with whatever severity might be
+necessary. The result of this labour of ours was not a little
+surprising. We found that women invariably, with that clear moral
+instinct of theirs, at once utterly reprobated and detested our poor
+Reynard; detested the hero and detested the bard who sang of him with so
+much sympathy; while men we found almost invariably feeling just as we
+felt ourselves, only with this difference, that we saw no trace of
+uneasiness in them about the matter. It was no little comfort to us,
+moreover, to find that the exceptions were rather among the half-men,
+the would-be extremely good, but whose goodness was of that dead and
+passive kind which spoke to but a small elevation of thought or
+activity; while just in proportion as a man was strong, and real, and
+energetic, was his ability to see good in Reineke. It was really most
+strange: one near friend of ours--a man who, as far as we knew (and we
+knew him well), had never done a wrong thing--when we ventured to hint
+something about roguery, replied, 'You see, he was such a clever rogue,
+that he had a right.' Another, whom we pressed more closely with that
+treacherous cannibal feast at Malepartus, on the body of poor Lampe,
+said off-hand and with much impatience of such questioning, 'Such
+fellows were made to be eaten.' What could we do? It had come to
+this;--as in the exuberance of our pleasure with some dear child, no
+ordinary epithet will sometimes reach to express the vehemence of our
+affection, and borrowing language out of the opposites, we call him
+little rogue or little villain, so here, reversing the terms of the
+analogy, we bestow the fulness of our regard on Reineke because of that
+transcendently successful roguery.
+
+When we asked our friends how they came to feel as they did, they had
+little to say. They were not persons who could be suspected of any
+latent disposition towards evil-doing; and yet though it appeared as if
+they were falling under the description of those unhappy ones who, if
+they did not such things themselves, yet 'had pleasure in those who did
+them,' they did not care to justify themselves. The fact was so: [Greek:
+archê to hoti]: it was a fact--what could we want more? Some few
+attempted feebly to maintain that the book was a satire. But this only
+moved the difficulty a single step; for the fact of the sympathy
+remained unimpaired, and if it was a satire we were ourselves the
+objects of it. Others urged what we said above, that the story was only
+of poor animals that, according to Descartes, not only had no souls, but
+scarcely had even life in any original and sufficient sense, and
+therefore we need not trouble ourselves. But one of two alternatives it
+seemed we were bound to choose, either of which was fatal to the
+proposed escape. Either there was a man hiding under the fox's skin; or
+else, if real foxes have such brains as Reineke was furnished withal, no
+honest doubt could be entertained that some sort of conscience was not
+forgotten in the compounding of him, and he must be held answerable
+according to his knowledge.
+
+What would Mr. Carlyle say of it, we thought, with his might and right?
+'The just thing in the long run is the strong thing.' But Reineke had a
+long run out and came in winner. Does he only 'seem to succeed?' Who
+does succeed, then, if he no more than seems? The vulpine intellect
+knows where the geese live, it is elsewhere said; but among Reineke's
+victims we do not remember one goose, in the literal sense of goose; and
+as to geese metaphorical, the whole visible world lies down complacently
+at his feet. Nor does Mr. Carlyle's expressed language on this very poem
+serve any better to help us--nay, it seems as if he feels uneasy in the
+neighbourhood of so strong a rascal, so briefly he dismisses him.
+'Worldly prudence is the only virtue which is certain of its reward.'
+Nay, but there is more in it than that: no worldly prudence would
+command the voices which have been given in to us for Reineke.
+
+Three only possibilities lay now before us: either we should, on
+searching, find something solid in the Fox's doings to justify success;
+or else the just thing was not always the strong thing; or it might be,
+that such very semblance of success was itself the most miserable
+failure; that the wicked man who was struck down and foiled, and foiled
+again, till he unlearnt his wickedness, or till he was disabled from any
+more attempting it, was blessed in his disappointment; that to triumph
+in wickedness, and to continue in it and to prosper to the end, was the
+last, worst penalty inflicted by the divine vengeance. [Greek: Hin'
+athanatos ê adikos ôn]--to go on with injustice through this world and
+through all eternity, uncleansed by any purgatorial fire, untaught by
+any untoward consequence to open his eyes and to see in its true
+accursed form the miserable demon to which he has sold himself--this, of
+all catastrophes which could befal an evil man, was the deepest, lowest,
+and most savouring of hell, which the purest of the Grecian moralists
+could reason out for himself,--under which third hypothesis many an
+uneasy misgiving would vanish away, and Mr. Carlyle's broad aphorism
+might be accepted by us with thankfulness.
+
+It appeared, therefore, at any rate, to have to come to this--that if we
+wanted a solution for our sphinx enigma, no OEdipus was likely to rise
+and find it for us; and that if we wanted help, we must take it for
+ourselves. This only we found, that if we sinned in our regard for the
+unworthy animal, we shared our sin with the largest number of our own
+sex; comforted with the sense of good fellowship, we went boldly to work
+upon our consciousness; and the imperfect analysis which we succeeded in
+accomplishing, we here lay before you, whoever you may be, who have
+felt, as we have felt, a regard which was a moral disturbance to you,
+and which you will be pleased if we enable you to justify--
+
+            Si quid novisti rectius istis,
+    Candidus imperti; si non, his uttere mecum.
+
+Following the clue which was thrust into our hand by the marked
+difference of the feelings of men upon the subject, from those of women,
+we were at once satisfied that Reineke's goodness, if he had any, must
+lay rather in the active than the passive department of life. The
+negative obedience to prohibitory precepts, under which women are bound
+as well as men, as was already too clear, we were obliged to surrender
+as hopeless. But it seemed as if, with respect to men whose business is
+to do, and to labour, and to accomplish, this negative test was a
+seriously imperfect one; and it was quite as possible that a man who
+unhappily had broken many prohibitions might yet exhibit positive
+excellences, as that he might walk through life picking his way with the
+utmost assiduity, risking nothing and doing nothing, not committing a
+single sin, but keeping his talent carefully wrapt up in a napkin, and
+get sent, in the end, to outer darkness for his pains, as an
+unprofitable servant. And this appeared the more important to us, as it
+was very little dwelt upon by religions or moral teachers: at the end of
+six thousand years, the popular notion of virtue, as far as it could get
+itself expressed, had not risen beyond the mere abstinence from certain
+specific bad actions.
+
+The king of the beasts forgives Reineke on account of the substantial
+services which at various times he has rendered. His counsel was always
+the wisest, his hand the promptest in cases of difficulty; and all that
+dexterity, and politeness, and courtesy, and exquisite culture had not
+been learnt without an effort, or without conquering many undesirable
+tendencies in himself. Men are not born with any art in its perfection,
+and Reineke had made himself valuable by his own sagacity and exertion.
+Now, on the human stage, a man who has made himself valuable is certain
+to be valued. However we may pretend to estimate men according to the
+wrong things which they have done, or abstained from doing, we in fact
+follow the example of Nobel, the king of the beasts: we give them their
+places among us according to the service-ableness and capability which
+they display. We might mention not a few eminent public servants, whom
+the world delights to honour--ministers, statesmen, lawyers, men of
+science, artists, poets, soldiers, who, if they were tried by the
+negative test, would show but a poor figure; yet their value is too real
+to be dispensed with; and we tolerate unquestionable wrong to secure the
+services of eminent ability. The world really does this, and it always
+has really done it from the beginning of the human history; and it is
+only indolence or cowardice which has left our ethical teaching halting
+so far behind the universal and necessary practice. Even questionable
+prima donnas, in virtue of their sweet voices, have their praises hymned
+in drawing-room and newspaper, and applause rolls over them, and gold
+and bouquets shower on them from lips and hands which, except for those
+said voices, would treat them to a ruder reward. In real fact, we take
+our places in this world, not according to what we are not, but
+according to what we are. His Holiness Pope Clement, when his
+audience-room rang with furious outcries for justice on Benvenuto
+Cellini, who, as far as half-a-dozen murders could form a title, was as
+fair a candidate for the gallows as ever swung from that unlucky wood,
+replied, 'All this is very well, gentlemen: these murders are bad
+things, we know that. But where am I to get another Benvenuto if you
+hang this one for me?'
+
+Or, to take an acknowledged hero, one of the old Greek sort, the theme
+of the song of the greatest of human poets, whom it is less easy to
+refuse to admire than even our friend Reineke. Take Ulysses. It cannot
+be said that he kept his hands from taking what was not his, or his
+tongue from speaking what was not true; and if Frau Ermelyn had to
+complain (as indeed there was too much reason for her complaining) of
+certain infirmities in her good husband Reineke, Penelope, too, might
+have urged a thing or two, if she had known as much about the matter as
+we know, which the modern moralist would find it hard to excuse.
+
+After all is said, the capable man is the man to be admired. The man who
+tries and fails, what is the use of him? We are in this world to do
+something--not to fail in doing it. Of your bunglers--helpless,
+inefficient persons, 'unfit alike for good or ill,' who try one thing,
+and fail because they are not strong enough, and another, because they
+have not energy enough, and a third, because they have no
+talent--inconsistent, unstable, and therefore never to excel, what shall
+we say of them? what use is there in them? what hope is there of them?
+what can we wish for them? [Greek: to mêpot' einai pant' ariston]. It
+were better for them they had never been born. To be able to do what a
+man tries to do, that is the first requisite; and given that, we may
+hope all things for him. 'Hell is paved with good intentions,'the
+proverb says; and the enormous proportion of bad successes in this life
+lie between the desire and the execution. Give us a man who is able to
+do what he settles that he desires to do, and we have the one thing
+indispensable. If he can succeed doing ill, much more he can succeed
+doing well. Show him better, and, at any rate, there is a chance that he
+will do better.
+
+We are not concerned here with Benvenuto or with Ulysses further than to
+show, through the position which we all consent to give them, that there
+is much unreality in our common moral talk, against which we must be on
+our guard. And if we fling off an old friend, and take to affecting a
+hatred of him which we do not feel, we have scarcely gained by the
+exchange, even though originally our friendship may have been misplaced.
+
+Capability no one will deny to Reineke. That is the very _differentia_
+of him. An 'animal capable' would be his sufficient definition. Here is
+another very genuinely valuable feature about him--his wonderful
+singleness of character. Lying, treacherous, cunning scoundrel as he is,
+there is a wholesome absence of humbug about him. Cheating all the
+world, he never cheats himself; and while he is a hypocrite, he is
+always a conscious hypocrite--a form of character, however paradoxical
+it may seem, a great deal more accessible to good influences than the
+other of the unconscious sort. Ask Reineke for the principles of his
+life, and if it suited his purpose to tell you, he could do so with the
+greatest exactness. There would be no discrepancy between the profession
+and the practice. He is most truly single-minded, and therefore stable
+in his ways, and therefore, as the world goes, and in the world's sense,
+successful. Whether really successful is a question we do not care here
+to enter on; but only to say this--that of all unsuccessful men in every
+sense, either divine, or human, or devilish, there is none equal to
+Bunyan's Mr. Facing-both-ways--the fellow with one eye on heaven and one
+on earth--who sincerely preaches one thing, and sincerely does another;
+and from the intensity of his unreality is unable either to see or feel
+the contradiction. Serving God with his lips, and with the half of his
+mind which is not bound up in the world, and serving the devil with his
+actions, and with the other half, he is substantially trying to cheat
+both God and the devil, and is, in fact, only cheating himself and his
+neighbours. This, of all characters upon the earth, appears to us to be
+the one of whom there is no hope at all--a character becoming, in these
+days, alarmingly abundant; and the abundance of which makes us find even
+in a Reineke an inexpressible relief.
+
+But what we most thoroughly value in him is his capacity. He can do what
+he sets to work to do. That blind instinct with which the world shouts
+and claps its hand for the successful man, is one of those latent
+impulses in us which are truer than we know; it is the universal
+confessional to which Nature leads us, and, in her intolerance of
+disguise and hypocrisy, compels us to be our own accusers. Whoever can
+succeed in a given condition of society, can succeed only in virtue of
+fulfilling the terms which society exacts of him; and if he can fulfil
+them triumphantly, of course it rewards him and praises him. He is what
+the rest of the world would be, if their powers were equal to their
+desires. He has accomplished what they all are vaguely, and with
+imperfect consistency, struggling to accomplish; and the character of
+the conqueror--the means and appliances by which he has climbed up that
+great pinnacle on which he stands victorious, the observed of all
+observers, is no more than a very exact indicator of the amount of real
+virtue in the age, out of which he stands prominent.
+
+We are forced to acknowledge that it was not a very virtuous age in
+which Reineke made himself a great man; but that was the fault of the
+age as much as the fault of him. His nature is to succeed wherever he
+is. If the age had required something else of him, then he would have
+been something else. Whatever it had said to him, 'Do, and I will make
+you my hero,' that Reineke would have done. No appetite makes a slave of
+him--no faculty refuses obedience to his will. His entire nature is
+under perfect organic control to the one supreme authority. And the one
+object for which he lives, and for which, let his lot have been cast in
+whatever century it might, he would always have lived, is to rise, to
+thrive, to prosper, and become great.
+
+The world as he found it said to him--Prey upon us; we are your oyster,
+let your wit open us. If you will only do it cleverly--if you will take
+care that we shall not close upon your fingers in the process, you may
+devour us at your pleasure, and we shall feel ourselves highly honoured.
+Can we wonder at a fox of Reineke's abilities taking such a world at its
+word?
+
+And let it not be supposed that society in this earth of ours is ever so
+viciously put together, is ever so totally without organic life, that a
+rogue, unredeemed by any merit, can prosper in it. There is no strength
+in rottenness; and when it comes to that, society dies and falls in
+pieces. Success, as it is called, even worldly success, is impossible,
+without some exercise of what is called moral virtue, without some
+portion of it, infinitesimally small, perhaps, but still some. Courage,
+for instance, steady self-confidence, self-trust, self-reliance--that
+only basis and foundation stone on which a strong character can rear
+itself--do we not see this in Reineke? While he lives, he lives for
+himself; but if he comes to dying, he can die like his betters; and his
+wit is not of that effervescent sort which will fly away at the sight of
+death and leave him panic-stricken. It is true there is a meaning to
+that word courage, which was perhaps not to be found in the dictionary
+in which Reineke studied. 'I hope I am afraid of nothing, Trim,' said my
+uncle Toby, 'except doing a wrong thing.' With Reineke there was no
+'except.' His digestive powers shrank from no action, good or bad, which
+would serve his turn. Yet it required no slight measure of courage to
+treat his fellow-creatures with the steady disrespect with which Reineke
+treats them. To walk along among them, regardless of any interest but
+his own; out of mere wantonness to hook them up like so many
+cock-chafers, and spin them for his pleasure; not like Domitian, with an
+imperial army to hold them down during the operation, but with no other
+assistance but his own little body and large wit; it was something to
+venture upon. And a world which would submit to be so treated, what
+could he do but despise?
+
+To the animals utterly below ourselves, external to our own species, we
+hold ourselves bound by no law. We say to them, _vos non vobis_, without
+any uneasy misgivings. We rob the bees of their honey, the cattle of
+their lives, the horse and the ass of their liberty. We kill the wild
+animals that they may not interfere with our pleasures; and acknowledge
+ourselves bound to them by no terms except what are dictated by our own
+convenience. And why should Reineke have acknowledged an obligation any
+more than we, to creatures so utterly below himself? He was so clever,
+as our friend said, that he had a right. That he _could_ treat them so,
+Mr. Carlyle would say, proves that he had a right.
+
+But it is a mistake to say he is without a conscience. No bold creature
+is ever totally without one. Even Iago shows some sort of conscience.
+Respecting nothing else in heaven or earth, he respects and even
+reverences his own intellect. After one of those sweet interviews with
+Roderigo, his, what we must call conscience, takes him to account for
+his company; and he pleads to it in his own justification--
+
+    For I mine own gained knowledge should _profane_
+    Were I to waste myself with such a snipe
+    But for my sport and profit.
+
+Reineke, if we take the mass of his misdeeds, preyed chiefly, like our
+own Robin Hood, on rogues who were greater rogues than himself. If Bruin
+chose to steal Rusteviel's honey, if Hintze trespassed in the priest's
+granary, they were but taken in their own evildoings. And what is
+Isegrim, the worst of Reineke's victims, but a great heavy, stupid,
+lawless brute?--fair type, we will suppose, of not a few Front-de-Boeufs
+and other so-called nobles of the poet's era, whose will to do mischief
+was happily limited by their obtuseness. We remember that French
+baron--Gilbert de Retz, we believe, was his name--who, like Isegrim, had
+studied at the universities, and passed for learned, whose after-dinner
+pastime for many years, as it proved at last, was to cut children's
+throats for the pleasure of watching them die. We may well feel
+gratitude that a Reineke was provided to be the scourge of such monsters
+as these; and we have a thorough pure, exuberant satisfaction in seeing
+the intellect in that little weak body triumph over them and trample
+them down. This, indeed, this victory of intellect over brute force, is
+one great secret of our pleasure in the poem, and goes far, in the
+Carlyle direction, to satisfy us that, at any rate, it is not given to
+mere base physical strength to win in the battle of life, even in times
+when physical strength is apparently the only recognised power.
+
+We are insensibly falling from our self-assumed judicial office into
+that of advocacy; and sliding into what may be plausibly urged, rather
+than standing fast on what we can surely affirm. Yet there are cases
+when it is fitting for the judge to become the advocate of an undefended
+prisoner; and advocacy is only plausible when a few words of truth are
+mixed with what we say, like the few drops of wine which colour and
+faintly flavour the large draught of water. Such few grains or drops,
+whatever they may be, we must leave to the kindness of Reynard's friends
+to distil for him, while we continue a little longer in the same strain.
+
+After all, it may be said, what is it in man's nature which is really
+admirable? It is idle for us to waste our labour in passing Reineke
+through the moral crucible unless we shall recognise the results when we
+obtain them; and in these moral sciences our analytical tests can only
+be obtained by a study of our own internal experience. If we desire to
+know what we admire in Reineke, we must look for what we admire in
+ourselves. And what is that? Is it what on Sundays, and on set
+occasions, and when we are mounted on our moral stilts, we are pleased
+to call goodness, probity, obedience, humility? Is it? Is it really? Is
+it not rather the face and form which Nature made--the strength which is
+ours, we know not how--our talents, our rank, our possessions? It
+appears to us that we most value in ourselves and most admire in our
+neighbour, not acquisitions, but _gifts_. A man does not praise himself
+for being good. If he praise himself he is not good. The first condition
+of goodness is forgetfulness of self; and where self has entered, under
+however plausible a form, the health is but skin-deep, and underneath
+there is corruption. And so through everything; we value, we are vain
+of, proud of, or whatever you please to call it, not what we have done
+for ourselves, but what has been done for us--what has been given to us
+by the upper powers. We look up to high-born men, to wealthy men, to
+fortunate men, to clever men. Is it not so? Whom do we choose for the
+county member, the magistrate, the officer, the minister? The good man
+we leave to the humble enjoyment of his goodness, and we look out for
+the able or the wealthy. And again of the wealthy, as if on every side
+to witness to the same universal law, the man who with no labour of his
+own has inherited a fortune, ranks higher in the world's esteem than his
+father who made it. We take rank by descent. Such of us as have the
+longest pedigree, and are therefore the farthest removed from the first
+who made the fortune and founded the family, we are the noblest. The
+nearer to the fountain, the fouler the stream; and that first ancestor,
+who has soiled his fingers by labour, is no better than a parvenu.
+
+And as it is with what we value, so it is with what we blame. It is an
+old story, that there is no one who would not in his heart prefer being
+a knave to being a fool; and when we fail in a piece of attempted
+roguery, as Coleridge has wisely observed, though reasoning unwisely
+from it, we lay the blame, not on our own moral nature, for which we are
+responsible, but on our intellectual, for which we are not responsible.
+We do not say what knaves, we say what fools, we have been; perplexing
+Coleridge, who regards it as a phenomenon of some deep moral disorder;
+whereas it is but one more evidence of the universal fact that _gifts_
+are the true and proper object of appreciation; and as we admire men for
+possessing gifts, so we blame them for their absence. The noble man is
+the gifted man; the ignoble is the ungifted; and therefore we have only
+to state a simple law in simple language to have a full solution of the
+enigma of Reineke. He has gifts enough: of that, at least, there can be
+no doubt; and if he lacks the gift to use them in the way which we call
+good, at least he uses them successfully. His victims are less gifted
+than he, and therefore less noble; and therefore he has a right to use
+them as he pleases.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And, after all, what are these victims? Among the heaviest charges
+which were urged against him was the killing and eating of that wretched
+Scharfenebbe--Sharpbeak--the crow's wife. It is well that there are two
+sides to every story. A poor weary fox, it seemed, was not to be allowed
+to enjoy a quiet sleep in the sunshine but what an unclean carrion bird
+must come down and take a peck at him. We can feel no sympathy with the
+outcries of the crow husband over the fate of the unfortunate Sharpbeak.
+Wofully, he says, he flew over the place where, a few moments before, in
+the glory of glossy plumage, a loving wife sate croaking out her passion
+for him, and found nothing--nothing but a little blood and a few torn
+feathers--all else clean gone and utterly abolished. Well, and if it was
+so, it was a blank prospect for him, but the earth was well rid of her;
+and for herself, it was a higher fate to be assimilated into the body of
+Reineke than to remain in a miserable individuality to be a layer of
+carrion crows' eggs.
+
+And then for Bellyn, and for Bruin, and for Hintze, and the rest, who
+would needs be meddling with what was no concern of theirs--what is
+there in them to challenge either regret or pity? They made love to
+their occupation.
+
+    'Tis dangerous when the baser nature falls
+    Between the pass and fell incensed points
+    Of mighty opposites:
+    They lie not near our conscience.
+
+Ah! if they were all. But there is one misdeed, one which outweighs all
+others whatsoever--a crime which it is useless to palliate, let our
+other friend say what he pleased; and Reineke himself felt it so. It
+sate heavy, _for him_, on his soul, and alone of all the actions of his
+life we are certain that he wished it undone--the death and eating of
+that poor foolish Lampe, the hare. It was a paltry revenge in Reineke.
+Lampe had told tales of him; he had complained that Reineke, under
+pretence of teaching him his Catechism, had seized him and tried to
+murder him; and though he provoked his fate by thrusting himself, after
+such a warning, into the jaws of Malepartus, Reineke betrays an
+uneasiness about it in confession; and, unlike himself, feels it
+necessary to make some sort of an excuse.
+
+Grimbart, the badger, Reineke's father confessor, had been obliged to
+speak severely of the seriousness of the offence. 'You see,' Reineke
+answers:--
+
+    To help oneself out through the world is a queer sort of business:
+        one can not
+    Keep, you know, quite altogether as pure as one can in the cloister.
+    When we are handling honey we now and then lick at our fingers.
+    Lampe sorely provoked me; he frisked about this way and that way,
+    Up and down, under my eyes, and he looked so fat and so jolly,
+    Really I could not resist it. I entirely forgot how I loved him.
+    And then he was so stupid.
+
+But even this acknowledgment does not satisfy Reineke. His mind is
+evidently softened, and it was on that occasion that he poured out his
+pathetic lamentation over the sad condition of the world--so fluent, so
+musical, so touching, that Grimbart listened with wide eyes, unable,
+till it had run to the length of a sermon, to collect himself. It is
+true that at last his office as ghostly father obliged him to put in a
+slight demurrer:--
+
+    Uncle, the badger replied, why these are the sins of your neighbours;
+    Yours, I should think, were sufficient, and rather more now
+        to the purpose.
+
+But he sighs to think what a bishop Reineke would have made.
+
+And now, for the present, farewell to Reineke Fuchs, and to the song in
+which his glory is enshrined--the Welt Bibel, Bible of this world, as
+Goethe called it, the most exquisite moral satire, as we will call it,
+which has ever been composed. It is not addressed to a passing mode of
+folly or of profligacy, but it touches the perennial nature of mankind,
+laying bare our own sympathies, and tastes, and weaknesses, with as keen
+and true an edge as when the living world of the old Swabian poet winced
+under its earliest utterance.
+
+Humorous in the high pure sense, every laugh which it gives may have its
+echo in a sigh, or may glide into it as excitement subsides into
+thought; and yet, for those who do not care to find matter there either
+for thought or sadness, may remain innocently as a laugh.
+
+Too strong for railing, too kindly and loving for the bitterness of
+irony, the poem is, as the world itself, a book where each man will find
+what his nature enables him to see, which gives us back each our own
+image, and teaches us each the lesson which each of us desires to
+learn.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[AB] _Fraser's Magazine_, 1852.
+
+
+
+
+THE CAT'S PILGRIMAGE.
+
+1850.
+
+
+PART I.
+
+'It is all very fine,' said the Cat, yawning, and stretching herself
+against the fender, 'but it is rather a bore; I don't see the use of
+it.' She raised herself, and arranging her tail into a ring, and seating
+herself in the middle of it, with her fore paws in a straight line from
+her shoulders, at right angles to the hearth-rug, she looked pensively
+at the fire. 'It is very odd,' she went on, 'there is my poor Tom; he is
+gone. I saw him stretched out in the yard. I spoke to him, and he took
+no notice of me. He won't, I suppose, ever any more, for they put him
+under the earth. Nice fellow he was. It is wonderful how little one
+cares about it. So many jolly evenings we spent together; and now I seem
+to get on quite as well without him. I wonder what has become of him;
+and my last children, too, what has become of them? What are we here
+for? I would ask the men, only they are so conceited and stupid they
+can't understand what we say. I hear them droning away, teaching their
+little ones every day; telling them to be good, and to do what they are
+bid, and all that. Nobody ever tells me to do anything; if they do I
+don't do it, and I am very good. I wonder whether I should be any better
+if I minded more. I'll ask the Dog.'
+
+'Dog,' said she, to a little fat spaniel coiled up on a mat like a
+lady's muff with a head and tail stuck on to it, 'Dog, what do you make
+of it all?'
+
+The Dog faintly opened his languid eyes, looked sleepily at the Cat for
+a moment, and dropped them again.
+
+'Dog,' she said, 'I want to talk to you; don't go to sleep. Can't you
+answer a civil question?'
+
+'Don't bother me,' said the Dog, 'I am tired. I stood on my hind legs
+ten minutes this morning before I could get my breakfast, and it hasn't
+agreed with me.'
+
+'Who told you to do it?' said the Cat.
+
+'Why, the lady I have to take care of me,' replied the Dog.
+
+'Do you feel any better for it, Dog, after you have been standing on
+your legs?' asked she.
+
+'Hav'n't I told you, you stupid Cat, that it hasn't agreed with me; let
+me go to sleep and don't plague me.'
+
+'But I mean,' persisted the Cat, 'do you feel improved, as the men call
+it? They tell their children that if they do what they are told they
+will improve, and grow good and great. Do you feel good and great?'
+
+'What do I know?' said the Dog. 'I eat my breakfast and am happy. Let me
+alone.'
+
+'Do you never think, oh Dog without a soul! Do you never wonder what
+dogs are, and what this world is?'
+
+The Dog stretched himself, and rolled his eyes lazily round the room. 'I
+conceive,' he said, 'that the world is for dogs, and men and women are
+put into it to take care of dogs; women to take care of little dogs like
+me, and men for the big dogs like those in the yard--and cats,' he
+continued, 'are to know their place, and not to be troublesome.'
+
+'They beat you sometimes,' said the Cat. 'Why do they do that? They
+never beat me.'
+
+'If they forget their places, and beat me,' snarled the Dog, 'I bite
+them, and they don't do it again. I should like to bite you, too, you
+nasty Cat; you have woke me up.'
+
+'There may be truth in what you say,' said the Cat, calmly; 'but I think
+your view is limited. If you listened like me you would hear the men say
+it was all made for them, and you and I were made to amuse them.'
+
+'They don't dare to say so,' said the Dog.
+
+'They do, indeed,' said the Cat. 'I hear many things which you lose by
+sleeping so much. They think I am asleep, and so they are not afraid to
+talk before me; but my ears are open when my eyes are shut.'
+
+'You surprise me,' said the Dog. 'I never listen to them, except when I
+take notice of them, and then they never talk of anything except of me.'
+
+'I could tell you a thing or two about yourself which you don't know,'
+said the Cat. 'You have never heard, I dare say, that once upon a time
+your fathers lived in a temple, and that people prayed to them.'
+
+'Prayed! what is that?'
+
+'Why, they went on their knees to you to ask you to give them good
+things, just as you stand on your toes to them now to ask for your
+breakfast. You don't know either that you have got one of those bright
+things we see up in the air at night called after you.'
+
+'Well, it is just what I said,' answered the Dog. 'I told you it was all
+made for us. They never did anything of that sort for you?'
+
+'Didn't they? Why, there was a whole city where the people did nothing
+else, and as soon as we got stiff and couldn't move about any more,
+instead of being put under the ground like poor Tom, we used to be
+stuffed full of all sorts of nice things, and kept better than we were
+when we were alive.'
+
+'You are a very wise Cat,' answered her companion; 'but what good is it
+knowing all this?'
+
+'Why, don't you see,' said she, 'they don't do it any more. We are going
+down in the world, we are, and that is why living on in this way is such
+an unsatisfactory sort of thing. I don't mean to complain for myself,
+and you needn't, Dog; we have a quiet life of it; but a quiet life is
+not the thing, and if there is nothing to be done except sleep and eat,
+and eat and sleep, why, as I said before, I don't see the use of it.
+There is something more in it than that; there was once, and there will
+be again, and I sha'n't be happy till I find it out. It is a shame, Dog,
+I say. The men have been here only a few thousand years, and we--why, we
+have been here hundreds of thousands; if we are older, we ought to be
+wiser. I'll go and ask the creatures in the wood.'
+
+'You'll learn more from the men,' said the Dog.
+
+'They are stupid, and they don't know what I say to them; besides, they
+are so conceited they care for nothing except themselves. No, I shall
+try what I can do in the woods. I'd as soon go after poor Tom as stay
+living any longer like this.'
+
+'And where is poor Tom?' yawned the Dog.
+
+'That is just one of the things I want to know,' answered she. 'Poor Tom
+is lying under the yard, or the skin of him, but whether that is the
+whole I don't feel so sure. They didn't think so in the city I told you
+about. It is a beautiful day, Dog; you won't take a trot out with me?'
+she added, wistfully.
+
+'Who? I' said the Dog. 'Not quite.'
+
+'You may get so wise,' said she.
+
+'Wisdom is good,' said the Dog; 'but so is the hearth-rug, thank you!'
+
+'But you may be free,' said she.
+
+'I shall have to hunt for my own dinner,' said he.
+
+'But, Dog, they may pray to you again,' said she.
+
+'But I sha'n't have a softer mat to sleep upon, Cat, and as I am rather
+delicate, that is a consideration.'
+
+
+PART II.
+
+So the Dog wouldn't go, and the Cat set off by herself to learn how to
+be happy, and to be all that a Cat could be. It was a fine sunny
+morning. She determined to try the meadow first, and, after an hour or
+two, if she had not succeeded, then to go off to the wood. A Blackbird
+was piping away on a thornbush as if his heart was running over with
+happiness. The Cat had breakfasted, and so was able to listen without
+any mixture of feeling. She didn't sneak. She walked boldly up under the
+bush, and the bird, seeing she had no bad purpose, sate still and sung
+on.
+
+'Good morning, Blackbird; you seem to be enjoying yourself this fine
+day.'
+
+'Good morning, Cat.'
+
+'Blackbird, it is an odd question, perhaps. What ought one to do to be
+as happy as you?'
+
+'Do your duty, Cat.'
+
+'But what is my duty, Blackbird?'
+
+'Take care of your little ones, Cat.'
+
+'I hav'n't any,' said she.
+
+'Then sing to your mate,' said the bird.
+
+'Tom is dead,' said she.
+
+'Poor Cat!' said the bird. 'Then sing over his grave. If your song is
+sad, you will find your heart grow lighter for it.'
+
+'Mercy!' thought the Cat. 'I could do a little singing with a living
+lover, but I never heard of singing for a dead one. But you see, bird,
+it isn't Cats' nature. When I am cross, I mew. When I am pleased, I
+purr; but I must be pleased first. I can't purr myself into happiness.'
+
+'I am afraid there is something the matter with your heart, my Cat. It
+wants warming; good-bye.'
+
+The Blackbird flew away. The Cat looked sadly after him. 'He thinks I am
+like him; and he doesn't know that a Cat is a Cat,' said she. 'As it
+happens now, I feel a great deal for a Cat. If I hadn't got a heart I
+shouldn't be unhappy. I won't be angry. I'll try that great fat fellow.'
+
+The Ox lay placidly chewing, with content beaming out of his eyes and
+playing on his mouth.
+
+'Ox,' she said, 'what is the way to be happy?'
+
+'Do your duty,' said the Ox.
+
+'Bother,' said the Cat, 'duty again! What is it, Ox?'
+
+'Get your dinner,' said the Ox.
+
+'But it is got for me, Ox; and I have nothing to do but to eat it.'
+
+'Well, eat it, then, like me.'
+
+'So I do; but I am not happy for all that.'
+
+'Then you are a very wicked, ungrateful Cat.'
+
+The Ox munched away. A Bee buzzed into a buttercup under the Cat's nose.
+
+'I beg your pardon,' said the Cat, 'it isn't curiosity--what are you
+doing?'
+
+'Doing my duty; don't stop me, Cat.'
+
+'But, Bee, what is your duty?'
+
+'Making honey,' said the Bee.
+
+'I wish I could make honey,' sighed the Cat.
+
+'Do you mean to say you can't?' said the Bee. 'How stupid you must be.
+What do you do, then?'
+
+'I do nothing, Bee. I can't get anything to do.'
+
+'You won't get anything to do, you mean, you lazy Cat! You are a
+good-for-nothing drone. Do you know what we do to our drones? We kill
+them; and that is all they are fit for. Good morning to you.'
+
+'Well, I am sure,' said the Cat, 'they are treating me civilly; I had
+better have stopped at home at this rate. Stroke my whiskers! heartless!
+wicked! good-for-nothing! stupid! and only fit to be killed! This is a
+pleasant beginning, anyhow. I must look for some wiser creatures than
+these are. What shall I do? I know. I know where I will go.'
+
+It was in the middle of the wood. The bush was very dark, but she found
+him by his wonderful eye. Presently, as she got used to the light, she
+distinguished a sloping roll of feathers, a rounded breast, surmounted
+by a round head, set close to the body, without an inch of a neck
+intervening. 'How wise he looks!' she said; 'What a brain! what a
+forehead! His head is not long, but what an expanse! and what a depth of
+earnestness!' The Owl sloped his head a little on one side; the Cat
+slanted hers upon the other. The Owl set it straight again, the Cat did
+the same. They stood looking in this way for some minutes; at last, in a
+whispering voice, the Owl said, 'What are you who presume to look into
+my repose? Pass on upon your way, and carry elsewhere those prying
+eyes.'
+
+'Oh, wonderful Owl,' said the Cat, 'you are wise, and I want to be wise;
+and I am come to you to teach me.'
+
+A film floated backwards and forwards over the Owl's eyes; it was his
+way of showing that he was pleased.
+
+'I have heard in our schoolroom,' went on the Cat, 'that you sate on the
+shoulder of Pallas, and she told you all about it.'
+
+'And what would you know, oh, my daughter?' said the Owl.
+
+'Everything,' said the Cat, 'everything. First of all, how to be happy.'
+
+'Mice content you not, my child, even as they content not me,' said the
+Owl. 'It is good.'
+
+'Mice, indeed!' said the Cat; 'no, Parlour Cats don't eat mice. I have
+better than mice, and no trouble to get it; but I want something more.'
+
+'The body's meat is provided. You would now fill your soul.'
+
+'I want to improve,' said the Cat. 'I want something to do. I want to
+find out what the creatures call my duty.'
+
+'You would learn how to employ those happy hours of your leisure--rather
+how to make them happy by a worthy use. Meditate, oh Cat! meditate!
+meditate!'
+
+'That is the very thing,' said she. 'Meditate! that is what I like above
+all things. Only I want to know how: I want something to meditate about.
+Tell me, Owl, and I will bless you every hour of the day as I sit by the
+parlour fire.'
+
+'I will tell you,' answered the Owl, 'what I have been thinking of ever
+since the moon changed. You shall take it home with you and think about
+it too; and the next full moon you shall come again to me; we will
+compare our conclusions.'
+
+'Delightful! delightful!' said the Cat. 'What is it? I will try this
+minute.'
+
+'From the beginning,' replied the Owl, 'our race have been considering
+which first existed, the Owl or the egg. The Owl comes from the egg, but
+likewise the egg from the Owl.'
+
+'Mercy!' said the Cat.
+
+'From sunrise to sunset I ponder on it, oh Cat! When I reflect on the
+beauty of the complete Owl, I think that must have been first, as the
+cause is greater than the effect. When I remember my own childhood, I
+incline the other way.'
+
+'Well, but how are we to find out?' said the Cat.
+
+'Find out!' said the Owl. 'We can never find out. The beauty of the
+question is, that its solution is impossible. What would become of all
+our delightful reasonings, oh, unwise Cat! if we were so unhappy as to
+know?'
+
+'But what in the world is the good of thinking about it, if you can't,
+oh Owl?'
+
+'My child, that is a foolish question. It is good, in order that the
+thoughts on these things may stimulate wonder. It is in wonder that the
+Owl is great.'
+
+'Then you don't know anything at all,' said the Cat. 'What did you sit
+on Pallas's shoulder for? You must have gone to sleep.'
+
+'Your tone is over flippant, Cat, for philosophy. The highest of all
+knowledge is to know that we know nothing.'
+
+The Cat made two great arches with her back and her tail.
+
+'Bless the mother that laid you,' said she. 'You were dropped by mistake
+in a goose nest. You won't do. I don't know much, but I am not such a
+creature as you, anyhow. A great white thing!'
+
+She straitened her body, stuck her tail up on end, and marched off with
+much dignity. But, though she respected herself rather more than before,
+she was not on the way to the end of her difficulties. She tried all the
+creatures she met without advancing a step. They had all the old story,
+'Do your duty.' But each had its own, and no one could tell her what
+hers was. Only one point they all agreed upon--the duty of getting their
+dinner when they were hungry. The day wore on, and she began to think
+she would like hers. Her meals came so regularly at home that she
+scarcely knew what hunger was; but now the sensation came over her very
+palpably, and she experienced quite new emotions as the hares and
+rabbits skipped about her, or as she spied a bird upon a tree. For a
+moment she thought she would go back and eat the Owl--he was the most
+useless creature she had seen; but on second thought she didn't fancy he
+would be nice: besides that, his claws were sharp and his beak too.
+Presently, however, as she sauntered down the path, she came on a little
+open patch of green, in the middle of which a fine fat Rabbit was
+sitting. There was no escape. The path ended there, and the bushes were
+so thick on each side that he couldn't get away except through her paws.
+
+'Really,' said the Cat, 'I don't wish to be troublesome; I wouldn't do
+it if I could help it; but I am very hungry, I am afraid I must eat you.
+It is very unpleasant, I assure you, to me as well as to you.'
+
+The poor Rabbit begged for mercy.
+
+'Well,' said she, 'I think it is hard; I do really--and, if the law
+could be altered, I should be the first to welcome it. But what can a
+Cat do? You eat the grass; I eat you. But, Rabbit, I wish you would do
+me a favour.'
+
+'Anything to save my life,' said the Rabbit.
+
+'It is not exactly that,' said the Cat; 'but I haven't been used to
+killing my own dinner, and it is disagreeable. Couldn't you die? I shall
+hurt you dreadfully if I kill you.'
+
+'Oh!' said the Rabbit, 'you are a kind Cat; I see it in your eyes, and
+your whiskers don't curl like those of the cats in the woods. I am sure
+you will spare me.'
+
+'But, Rabbit, it is a question of principle. I have to do my duty; and
+the only duty I have, as far as I can make out, is to get my dinner.'
+
+'If you kill me, Cat, to do your duty, I sha'n't be able to do mine.'
+
+It was a doubtful point, and the Cat was new to casuistry. 'What is your
+duty?' said she.
+
+'I have seven little ones at home--seven little ones, and they will all
+die without me. Pray let me go.'
+
+'What! do you take care of your children?' said the Cat. 'How
+interesting! I should like to see that; take me.'
+
+'Oh! you would eat them, you would,' said the Rabbit. 'No! better eat me
+than them. No, no.'
+
+'Well, well,' said the Cat, 'I don't know; I suppose I couldn't answer
+for myself. I don't think I am right, for duty is pleasant, and it is
+very unpleasant to be so hungry; but I suppose you must go. You seem a
+good Rabbit. Are you happy, Rabbit?'
+
+'Happy! oh, dear beautiful Cat! if you spare me to my poor babies!'
+
+'Pooh, pooh!' said the Cat, peevishly; 'I don't want fine speeches; I
+meant whether you thought it worth while to be alive! Of course you do!
+It don't matter. Go, and keep out of my way; for, if I don't get my
+dinner, you may not get off another time. Get along, Rabbit.'
+
+
+PART III.
+
+It was a great day in the Fox's cave. The eldest cub had the night
+before brought home his first goose, and they were just sitting down to
+it as the Cat came by.
+
+'Ah, my young lady! what, you in the woods? Bad feeding at home, eh?
+Come out to hunt for yourself?'
+
+The goose smelt excellent; the Cat couldn't help a wistful look. She was
+only come, she said, to pay her respects to her wild friends.
+
+'Just in time,' said the Fox. 'Sit down and take a bit of dinner; I see
+you want it. Make room, you cubs; place a seat for the lady.'
+
+'Why, thank you,' said the Cat, 'yes; I acknowledge it is not unwelcome.
+Pray, don't disturb yourselves, young Foxes. I am hungry. I met a Rabbit
+on my way here. I was going to eat him, but he talked so prettily I let
+him go.'
+
+The cubs looked up from their plates, and burst out laughing.
+
+'For shame, young rascals,' said their father. 'Where are your manners?
+Mind your dinner, and don't be rude.'
+
+'Fox,' she said, when it was over, and the cubs were gone to play, 'you
+are very clever. The other creatures are all stupid.' The Fox bowed.
+'Your family were always clever,' she continued. 'I have heard about
+them in the books they use in our schoolroom. It is many years since
+your ancestor stole the crow's dinner.'
+
+'Don't say stole, Cat; it is not pretty. Obtained by superior ability.'
+
+'I beg your pardon,' said the Cat; 'it is all living with those men.
+That is not the point. Well, but I want to know whether you are any
+wiser or any better than Foxes were then?'
+
+'Really,' said the Fox, 'I am what Nature made me. I don't know. I am
+proud of my ancestors, and do my best to keep up the credit of the
+family.'
+
+'Well, but Fox, I mean do you improve? do I? do any of you? The men are
+always talking about doing their duty, and that, they say, is the way to
+improve, and to be happy. And as I was not happy I thought that had,
+perhaps, something to do with it, so I came out to talk to the
+creatures. They also had the old chant--duty, duty, duty; but none of
+them could tell me what mine was, or whether I had any.'
+
+The Fox smiled. 'Another leaf out of your schoolroom,' said he. 'Can't
+they tell you there?'
+
+'Indeed,' she said, 'they are very absurd. They say a great deal about
+themselves, but they only speak disrespectfully of us. If such creatures
+as they can do their duty, and improve, and be happy, why can't we?'
+
+'They say they do, do they?' said the Fox. 'What do they say of me?'
+
+The Cat hesitated.
+
+'Don't be afraid of hurting my feelings, Cat. Out with it.'
+
+'They do all justice to your abilities, Fox,' said she; 'but your
+morality, they say, is not high. They say you are a rogue.'
+
+'Morality!' said the Fox. 'Very moral and good they are. And you really
+believe all that? What do they mean by calling me a rogue?'
+
+'They mean you take whatever you can get, without caring whether it is
+just or not.'
+
+'My dear Cat, it is very well for a man, if he can't bear his own face,
+to paint a pretty one on a panel and call it a looking-glass; but you
+don't mean that it takes _you_ in.'
+
+'Teach me,' said the Cat. 'I fear I am weak.'
+
+'Who get justice from the men unless they can force it? Ask the sheep
+that are cut into mutton. Ask the horses that draw their ploughs. I
+don't mean it is wrong of the men to do as they do; but they needn't lie
+about it.'
+
+'You surprise me,' said the Cat.
+
+'My good Cat, there is but one law in the world. The weakest goes to the
+wall. The men are sharper-witted than the creatures, and so they get the
+better of them and use them. They may call it just if they like; but
+when a tiger eats a man I guess he has just as much justice on his side
+as the man when he eats a sheep.'
+
+'And that is the whole of it,' said the Cat. 'Well, it is very sad. What
+do you do with yourself?'
+
+'My duty, to be sure,' said the Fox; 'use my wits and enjoy myself. My
+dear friend, you and I are on the lucky side. We eat and are not eaten.'
+
+'Except by the hounds now and then,' said the Cat.
+
+'Yes; by brutes that forget their nature, and sell their freedom to the
+men,' said the Fox, bitterly. 'In the meantime my wits have kept my skin
+whole hitherto, and I bless Nature for making me a Fox and not a goose.'
+
+'And are you happy, Fox?'
+
+'Happy! yes, of course. So would you be if you would do like me, and use
+your wits. My good Cat, I should be as miserable as you if I found my
+geese every day at the cave's mouth. I have to hunt for them, lie for
+them, sneak for them, fight for them; cheat those old fat farmers, and
+bring out what there is inside me; and then I am happy--of course I am.
+And then, Cat, think of my feelings as a father last night, when my dear
+boy came home with the very young gosling which was marked for the
+Michaelmas dinner! Old Reineke himself wasn't more than a match for that
+young Fox at his years. You know our epic?'
+
+'A little of it, Fox. They don't read it in our schoolroom. They say it
+is not moral; but I have heard pieces of it. I hope it is not all quite
+true.'
+
+'Pack of stuff! it is the only true book that ever was written. If it is
+not, it ought to be. Why, that book is the law of the world--_la
+carrière aux talents_--and writing it was the honestest thing ever done
+by a man. That fellow knew a thing or two, and wasn't ashamed of himself
+when he did know. They are all like him, too, if they would only say so.
+There never was one of them yet who wasn't more ashamed of being called
+ugly than of being called a rogue, and of being called stupid than of
+being called naughty.'
+
+'It has a roughish end, this life of yours, if you keep clear of the
+hounds, Fox,' said the Cat.
+
+'What! a rope in the yard! Well, it must end some day; and when the
+farmer catches me I shall be getting old, and my brains will be taking
+leave of me; so the sooner I go the better, that I may disgrace myself
+the less. Better be jolly while it lasts, than sit mewing out your life
+and grumbling at it as a bore.'
+
+'Well,' said the Cat, 'I am very much obliged to you. I suppose I may
+even get home again. I shall not find a wiser friend than you, and
+perhaps I shall not find another good-natured enough to give me so good
+a dinner. But it is very sad.'
+
+'Think of what I have said,' answered the Fox. 'I'll call at your house
+some night; you will take me a walk round the yard, and then I'll show
+you.'
+
+'Not quite,' thought the Cat, as she trotted off; 'one good turn
+deserves another, that is true; and you have given me a dinner. But they
+have given me many at home, and I mean to take a few more of them; so I
+think you mustn't go round our yard.'
+
+
+PART IV.
+
+The next morning, when the Dog came down to breakfast, he found his old
+friend sitting in her usual place on the hearth-rug.
+
+'Oh! so you have come back,' said he. 'How d'ye do? You don't look as if
+you had had a very pleasant journey.'
+
+'I have learnt something,' said the Cat. 'Knowledge is never pleasant.'
+
+'Then it is better to be without it,' said the Dog.
+
+'Especially, better to be without knowing how to stand on one's hind
+legs, Dog,' said the Cat; 'still you see, you are proud of it; but I
+have learnt a great deal, Dog. They won't worship you any more, and it
+is better for you; you wouldn't be any happier. What did you do
+yesterday?'
+
+'Indeed,' said the Dog, 'I hardly remember. I slept after you went away.
+In the afternoon I took a drive in the carriage. Then I had my dinner.
+My maid washed me and put me to bed. There is the difference between you
+and me; you have to wash yourself and put yourself to bed.'
+
+'And you really don't find it a bore, living like this? Wouldn't you
+like something to do? Wouldn't you like some children to play with? The
+Fox seemed to find it very pleasant.'
+
+'Children, indeed!' said the Dog, 'when I have got men and women.
+Children are well enough for foxes and wild creatures; refined dogs know
+better; and, for doing--can't I stand on my toes? can't I dance? at
+least, couldn't I before I was so fat?'
+
+'Ah! I see everybody likes what he was bred to,' sighed the Cat. 'I was
+bred to do nothing, and I must like that. Train the cat as the cat
+should go, and the cat will be happy and ask no questions. Never seek
+for impossibilities, Dog. That is the secret.'
+
+'And you have spent a day in the woods to learn that,' said he. 'I could
+have taught you that. Why, Cat, one day when you were sitting scratching
+your nose before the fire, I thought you looked so pretty that I should
+have liked to marry you; but I knew I couldn't, so I didn't make myself
+miserable.'
+
+The Cat looked at him with her odd green eyes. 'I never wished to marry
+you, Dog; I shouldn't have presumed. But it was wise of you not to fret
+about it. But, listen to me, Dog--listen. I met many creatures in the
+wood, all sorts of creatures, beasts and birds. They were all happy;
+they didn't find it a bore. They went about their work, and did it, and
+enjoyed it, and yet none of them had the same story to tell. Some did
+one thing, some another; and, except the Fox, each had got a sort of
+notion of doing its duty. The Fox was a rogue; he said he was; but yet
+he was not unhappy. His conscience never troubled him. Your work is
+standing on your toes, and you are happy. I have none, and that is why I
+am unhappy. When I came to think about it, I found every creature out in
+the wood had to get its own living. I tried to get mine, but I didn't
+like it, because I wasn't used to it; and as for knowing, the Fox, who
+didn't care to know anything except how to cheat greater fools than
+himself, was the cleverest fellow I came across. Oh! the Owl, Dog--you
+should have heard the Owl. But I came to this, that it was no use trying
+to know, and the only way to be jolly was to go about one's own business
+like a decent Cat. Cats' business seems to be killing rabbits and
+such-like; and it is not the pleasantest possible; so the sooner one is
+bred to it the better. As for me, that have been bred to do nothing,
+why, as I said before, I must try to like that; but I consider myself an
+unfortunate Cat.'
+
+'So don't I consider myself an unfortunate Dog,' said her companion.
+
+'Very likely you do not,' said the Cat.
+
+By this time their breakfast was come in. The Cat ate hers, the Dog did
+penance for his; and if one might judge by the purring on the
+hearth-rug, the Cat, if not the happiest of the two, at least was not
+exceedingly miserable.
+
+
+
+
+FABLES.
+
+I.--THE LIONS AND THE OXEN.
+
+
+Once upon a time a number of cattle came out of the desert to settle in
+the broad meadows by a river. They were poor and wretched, and they
+found it a pleasant exchange; except for a number of lions, who lived in
+the mountains near, and who claimed a right, in consideration of
+permitting the cattle to remain, to eat as many as they wanted among
+them. The cattle submitted, partly because they were too weak to help
+it, partly because the lions said it was the will of Jupiter; and the
+cattle believed them. And so they went on for many ages, till at last,
+from better feeding, the cattle grew larger and stronger, and multiplied
+into great numbers; and at the same time, from other causes, the lions
+had much diminished: they were fewer, smaller, and meaner-looking than
+they had been; and except in their own opinion of themselves, and in
+their appetites, which were more enormous than ever, there was nothing
+of the old lion left in them.
+
+One day a large ox was quietly grazing, when one of these lions came up,
+and desired the ox to lie down, for he wanted to eat him. The ox raised
+his head, and gravely protested; the lion growled; the ox was mild, yet
+firm. The lion insisted upon his legal right, and they agreed to refer
+the matter to Minos.
+
+When they came into court, the lion accused the ox of having broken the
+laws of the beasts. The lion was king, and the others were bound to
+obey. Prescriptive usage was clearly on the lion's side. Minos called on
+the ox for his defence.
+
+The Ox said that, without consent of his own being asked, he had been
+born into the meadow. He did not consider himself much of a beast, but,
+such as he was, he was very happy, and gave Jupiter thanks. Now, if the
+lion could show that the existence of lions was of more importance than
+that of oxen in the eyes of Jupiter, he had nothing more to say; he was
+ready to sacrifice himself. But this lion had already eaten a thousand
+oxen. Lions' appetites were so insatiable that he was forced to ask
+whether they were really worth what was done for them,--whether the life
+of one lion was so noble that the lives of thousands of oxen were not
+equal to it? He was ready to own that lions had always eaten oxen, but
+lions when they first came to the meadow were a different sort of
+creature, and they themselves, too (and the ox looked complacently at
+himself), had improved since that time. Judging by appearances, though
+they might be fallacious, he himself was quite as good a beast as the
+lion. If the lions would lead lives more noble than oxen could live,
+once more he would not complain. As it was, he submitted that the cost
+was too great.
+
+Then the Lion put on a grand face and tried to roar; but when he opened
+his mouth he disclosed a jaw so drearily furnished that Minos laughed,
+and told the ox it was his own fault if he let himself be eaten by such
+a beast as that. If he persisted in declining, he did not think the lion
+would force him.
+
+
+II.--THE FARMER AND THE FOX.
+
+A farmer, whose poultry-yard had suffered severely from the foxes,
+succeeded at last in catching one in a trap. 'Ah, you rascal!' said he,
+as he saw him struggling, 'I'll teach you to steal my fat geese!--you
+shall hang on the tree yonder, and your brothers shall see what comes of
+thieving!' The farmer was twisting a halter to do what he threatened,
+when the fox, whose tongue had helped him in hard pinches before,
+thought there could be no harm in trying whether it might not do him one
+more good turn.
+
+'You will hang me,' he said, 'to frighten my brother foxes. On the word
+of a fox they won't care a rabbit-skin for it; they'll come and look at
+me; but you may depend upon it, they will dine at your expense before
+they go home again!'
+
+'Then I shall hang you for yourself, as a rogue and a rascal,' said the
+farmer.
+
+'I am only what Nature, or whatever you call the thing, chose to make
+me,' the Fox answered. 'I didn't make myself.'
+
+'You stole my geese,' said the man.
+
+'Why did Nature make me like geese, then?' said the Fox. 'Live and let
+live; give me my share, and I won't touch yours; but you keep them all
+to yourself.'
+
+'I don't understand your fine talk,' answered the Farmer; 'but I know
+that you are a thief, and that you deserve to be hanged.'
+
+His head is too thick to let me catch him so, thought the Fox; I wonder
+if his heart is any softer! 'You are taking away the life of a
+fellow-creature,' he said; 'that's a responsibility--it is a curious
+thing that life, and who knows what comes after it? You say I am a
+rogue--I say I am not; but at any rate I ought not to be hanged--for if
+I am not, I don't deserve it; and if I am, you should give me time to
+repent!' I have him now, thought the Fox; let him get out if he can.
+
+'Why, what would you have me do with you?' said the man.
+
+'My notion is that you should let me go, and give me a lamb, or goose or
+two, every month, and then I could live without stealing; but perhaps
+you know better than me, and I am a rogue; my education may have been
+neglected; you should shut me up, and take care of me, and teach me. Who
+knows but in the end I may turn into a dog?'
+
+'Very pretty,' said the Farmer; 'we have dogs enough, and more, too,
+than we can take care of, without you. No, no, Master Fox, I have caught
+you, and you shall swing, whatever is the logic of it. There will be one
+rogue less in the world, anyhow.'
+
+'It is mere hate and unchristian vengeance,' said the Fox.
+
+'No, friend,' the Farmer answered, 'I don't hate you, and I don't want
+to revenge myself on you; but you and I can't get on together, and I
+think I am of more importance than you. If nettles and thistles grow in
+my cabbage-garden, I don't try to persuade them to grow into cabbages. I
+just dig them up. I don't hate them; but I feel somehow that they
+mustn't hinder me with my cabbages, and that I must put them away; and
+so, my poor friend, I am sorry for you, but I am afraid you must
+swing.'
+
+
+
+
+PARABLE OF THE BREAD-FRUIT TREE.
+
+
+It was after one of those heavy convulsions which have divided era from
+era, and left mankind to start again from the beginning, that a number
+of brave men gathered together to raise anew from the ground a fresh
+green home for themselves. The rest of the surviving race were
+sheltering themselves amidst the old ruins, or in the caves on the
+mountains, feeding on husks and shells; but these men with clear heads
+and brave hearts ploughed and harrowed the earth, and planted seeds, and
+watered them, and watched them; and the seeds grew and shot up with the
+spring, but one was larger and fairer than the rest, and the other
+plants seemed to know it, for they crawled along till they reached the
+large one; and they gathered round it, and clung to it, and grew into
+it; and soon they became one great stem, with branching roots feeding it
+as from many fountains. Then the men got great heart in them when they
+saw that, and they laboured more bravely, digging about it in the hot
+sun, till at last it became great and mighty, and its roots went down
+into the heart of the earth, and its branches stretched over all the
+plain.
+
+Then many others of mankind, when they saw the tree was beautiful, came
+down and gathered under it, and those who had raised it received them
+with open arms, and they all sat under its shade together, and gathered
+its fruits, and made their homes there, rejoicing in its loveliness. And
+ages passed away, and all that generation passed away, and still the
+tree grew stronger and fairer, and their children's children watched it
+age after age, as it lived on and flowered and seeded. And they said in
+their hearts, the tree is immortal--it will never die. They took no care
+of the seed; the scent of the flowers and the taste of the sweet fruit
+was all they thought of: and the winds of heaven, and the wild birds,
+and the beasts of the field caught the stray fruits and seed-dust, and
+bore the seed away, and scattered it in far-off soils.
+
+And by-and-by, at a great great age, the tree at last began to cease to
+grow, and then to faint and droop: its leaves were not so thick, its
+flowers were not so fragrant; and from time to time the night winds,
+which before had passed away, and had been never heard, came moaning and
+sighing among the branches. And the men for a while doubted and
+denied--they thought it was the accident of the seasons; and then a
+branch fell, and they said it was a storm, and such a storm as came but
+once in a thousand years. At last there could be no doubt that the
+leaves were thin and sere and scanty--that the sun shone through
+them--that the fruit was tasteless. But the generation was gone away
+which had known the tree in its beauty, and so men said it was always
+so--its fruits were never better--its foliage never was thicker.
+
+So things went on, and from time to time strangers would come among
+them, and would say, Why are you sitting here under the old tree? there
+are young trees grown of the seed of this tree, far away, more beautiful
+than it ever was; see, we have brought you leaves and flowers to show
+you. But the men would not listen. They were angry, and some they drove
+away, and some they killed, and poured their blood round the roots of
+the tree, saying, They have spoken evil of our tree; let them feed it
+now with their blood. At last some of their own wiser ones brought out
+specimens of the old fruits, which had been laid up to be preserved, and
+compared them with the present bearing, and they saw that the tree was
+not as it had been; and such of them as were good men reproached
+themselves, and said it was their own fault. They had not watered it;
+they had forgotten to manure it. So, like their first fathers, they
+laboured with might and main, and for a while it seemed as if they might
+succeed, and for a few years branches, which were almost dead when the
+spring came round, put out some young green shoots again. But it was
+only for a few years; there was not enough of living energy in the tree.
+Half the labour which was wasted on it would have raised another nobler
+one far away. So the men grew soon weary, and looked for a shorter way:
+and some gathered up the leaves and shoots which the strangers had
+brought, and grafted them on, if perhaps they might grow; but they could
+not grow on a dying stock, and they, too, soon drooped and became as the
+rest. And others said, Come, let us tie the preserved fruits on again;
+perhaps they will join again to the stem, and give it back its life. But
+there were not enough, for only a few had been preserved; so they took
+painted paper and wax and clay, and cut sham leaves and fruits of the
+old pattern, which for a time looked bright and gay, and the world, who
+did not know what had been done, said--See, the tree is immortal: it is
+green again. Then some believed, but many saw that it was a sham, and
+liking better to bear the sky and sun, without any shade at all, than to
+live in a lie, and call painted paper leaves and flowers, they passed
+out in search of other homes. But the larger number stayed behind; they
+had lived so long in falsehood that they had forgotten there was any
+such thing as truth at all; the tree had done very well for them--it
+would do very well for their children. And if their children, as they
+grew up, did now and then happen to open their eyes and see how it
+really was, they learned from their fathers to hold their tongues about
+it. If the little ones and the weak ones believed, it answered all
+purposes, and change was inconvenient. They might smile to themselves at
+the folly which they countenanced, but they were discreet, and they
+would not expose it. This is the state of the tree, and of the men who
+are under it at this present time:--they say it still does very well.
+Perhaps it does--but, stem and boughs and paper leaves, it is dry for
+the burning, and if the lightning touches it, those who sit beneath will
+suffer.
+
+
+
+
+COMPENSATION.
+
+
+One day an Antelope was lying with her fawn at the foot of the flowering
+Mimosa. The weather was intensely sultry, and a Dove, who had sought
+shelter from the heat among the leaves, was cooing above her head.
+
+'Happy bird!' said the Antelope. 'Happy bird! to whom the air is given
+for an inheritance, and whose flight is swifter than the wind. At your
+will you alight upon the ground, at your will you sweep into the sky,
+and fly races with the driving clouds; while I, poor I, am bound a
+prisoner to this miserable earth, and wear out my pitiable life crawling
+to and fro upon its surface.'
+
+Then the Dove answered, 'It is sweet to sail along the sky, to fly from
+land to land, and coo among the valleys; but, Antelope, when I have sate
+above amidst the branches and watched your little one close its tiny
+lips upon your breast, and feed its life on yours, I have felt that I
+could strip off my wings, lay down my plumage, and remain all my life
+upon the ground only once to know such blessed enjoyment.'
+
+The breeze sighed among the boughs of the Mimosa, and a voice came
+trembling out of the rustling leaves: 'If the Antelope mourns her
+destiny, what should the Mimosa do? The Antelope is the swiftest among
+the animals. It rises in the morning; the ground flies under its
+feet--in the evening it is a hundred miles away. The Mimosa is feeding
+its old age on the same soil which quickened its seed cell into
+activity. The seasons roll by me and leave me in the old place. The
+winds sway among my branches, as if they longed to bear me away with
+them, but they pass on and leave me behind. The wild birds come and go.
+The flocks move by me in the evening on their way to the pleasant
+waters. I can never move. My cradle must be my grave.'
+
+Then from below, at the root of the tree, came a voice which neither
+bird, nor Antelope, nor tree had ever heard, as a Rock Crystal from its
+prison in the limestone followed on the words of the Mimosa.
+
+'Are ye all unhappy?' it said. 'If ye are, then what am I? Ye all have
+life. You! O Mimosa, you! whose fair flowers year by year come again to
+you, ever young, and fresh, and beautiful--you who can drink the rain
+with your leaves, who can wanton with the summer breeze, and open your
+breast to give a home to the wild birds, look at me and be ashamed. I
+only am truly wretched.'
+
+'Alas!' said the Mimosa, 'we have life, which you have not, it is true.
+We have also what you have not, its shadow--death. My beautiful
+children, which year by year I bring out into being, expand in their
+loveliness only to die. Where they are gone I too shall soon follow,
+while you will flash in the light of the last sun which rises upon the
+earth.'
+
+
+LONDON
+
+PRINTED BY SPOTTISWOODE AND CO.
+
+NEW-STREET SQUARE
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Notes:
+
+Page 67: popositions: typo for propositions. Corrected.
+
+Page 118: seventeeth: typo for seventeenth. Corrected.
+
+Page 198: assults: typo for assaults. Corrected.
+
+Page 279: reely: typo for freely. Corrected.
+
+Page 300: appal: alternate spelling for appall.
+
+Page 301: doggrel: alternate spelling for doggerel.
+
+Page 316: throughly: alternate spelling for thoroughly.
+
+Page 322: ougly: alternate spelling for ugly.
+
+Page 329: rommaging: alternate spelling for rummaging.
+
+Page 330: carged: In 'a huge high-carged' [May mean high-charged as with
+many weapons, or cargo, as heavy freight?]
+
+Page 330: enterchanged: alternate spelling for interchanged.
+
+Page 408: befal: alternate spelling for befall.
+
+Page 440: wanton: probably means to frolic or move freely in this
+context.
+
+Page various: sate: alternate, archaic spelling for sat.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Short Studies on Great Subjects, by 
+James Anthony Froude
+
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+
+Project Gutenberg's Short Studies on Great Subjects, by James Anthony Froude
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Short Studies on Great Subjects
+
+Author: James Anthony Froude
+
+Release Date: March 6, 2007 [EBook #20755]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SHORT STUDIES ON GREAT SUBJECTS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Lybarger and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
+Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+<h1>SHORT STUDIES</h1>
+<h1>ON</h1>
+<h1>GREAT SUBJECTS.</h1>
+
+
+
+
+
+<p class="center">LONDON<br />
+PRINTED BY SPOTTISWOODE AND CO.<br />
+NEW-STREET SQUARE</p>
+
+
+<hr />
+
+
+<h1>SHORT STUDIES</h1>
+<h1>ON</h1>
+<h1>GREAT SUBJECTS.</h1>
+
+<h4>BY</h4>
+
+<h3>JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE, M.A.</h3>
+
+<h5>LATE FELLOW OF EXETER COLLEGE, OXFORD.</h5>
+
+
+<p class="center"><i>SECOND EDITION.</i></p>
+
+
+
+<p class="center">LONDON:<br />
+LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.<br />
+1867.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="CONTENTS" id="CONTENTS"></a>CONTENTS.</h2>
+
+
+
+<ul class="TOC">
+
+  <li>&nbsp;                     <span class="ralign">PAGE</span></li>
+
+  <li><a href="#THE_SCIENCE_OF_HISTORY">The Science of History</a>        <span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_1">1</a></span></li>
+
+  <li><a href="#TIMES_OF_ERASMUS_AND_LUTHER">Times of Erasmus and Luther:</a>
+    <ul class="lsoff">
+      <li>    <a href="#lect_1">Lecture I</a>                                                <span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_26">26</a></span></li>
+      <li>    <a href="#lect_2">Lecture II</a>                                               <span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_50">50</a></span></li>
+      <li>    <a href="#lect_3">Lecture III</a>                                              <span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_75">75</a></span></li>
+    </ul>
+  </li>
+
+  <li><a href="#THE_INFLUENCE_OF_THE_REFORMATION_ON_THE_SCOTTISH_CHARACTER">The Influence of the Reformation on the Scottish Character</a>       <span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_102">102</a></span></li>
+
+  <li><a href="#THE_PHILOSOPHY_OF_CATHOLICISMC">The Philosophy of Catholicism</a>                 <span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_124">124</a></span></li>
+
+  <li><a href="#A_PLEA_FOR_THE_FREE_DISCUSSION_OF_THEOLOGICAL_DIFFICULTIESD">A Plea for the Free Discussion of Theological Difficulties</a>      <span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_133">133</a></span></li>
+
+  <li><a href="#CRITICISM_AND_THE_GOSPEL_HISTORYE">Criticism and the Gospel History</a>                  <span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_159">159</a></span></li>
+
+  <li><a href="#THE_BOOK_OF_JOBG">The Book of Job</a>                       <span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_185">185</a></span></li>
+
+  <li><a href="#SPINOZAN">Spinoza</a>                                 <span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_223">223</a></span></li>
+
+  <li><a href="#THE_DISSOLUTION_OF_THE_MONASTERIESQ">The Dissolution of the Monasteries</a>                 <span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_265">265</a></span></li>
+
+  <li><a href="#ENGLANDS_FORGOTTEN_WORTHIESU">England's Forgotten Worthies</a>               <span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_294">294</a></span></li>
+
+  <li><a href="#HOMERX">Homer</a>                                 <span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_334">334</a></span></li>
+
+  <li><a href="#THE_LIVES_OF_THE_SAINTS">The Lives of the Saints</a>                 <span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_363">363</a></span></li>
+
+  <li><a href="#REPRESENTATIVE_MEN">Representative Men</a>                       <span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_384">384</a></span></li>
+
+  <li><a href="#REYNARD_THE_FOXAB">Reynard the Fox</a>                                 <span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_401">401</a></span></li>
+
+  <li><a href="#THE_CATS_PILGRIMAGE">The Cat's Pilgrimage:</a>
+    <ul class="lsoff">
+      <li>     <a href="#cat_1">Part I</a>                                          <span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_419">419</a></span></li>
+      <li>     <a href="#cat_2">Part II</a>                                         <span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_422">422</a></span></li>
+      <li>     <a href="#cat_3">Part III</a>                                        <span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_427">427</a></span></li>
+      <li>     <a href="#cat_4">Part IV</a>                                         <span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_430">430</a></span></li>
+    </ul>
+  </li>
+
+  <li><a href="#FABLES">Fables:</a>
+    <ul class="lsoff">
+      <li>     <a href="#fable_1">I. The Lions and the Oxen</a>                       <span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_433">433</a></span></li>
+      <li>    <a href="#fable_2">II. The Farmer and the Fox</a>                       <span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_434">434</a></span></li>
+    </ul>
+  </li>
+
+  <li><a href="#PARABLE_OF_THE_BREAD-FRUIT_TREE">Parable of the Bread-Fruit Tree</a>                  <span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_436">436</a></span></li>
+
+  <li><a href="#COMPENSATION">Compensation</a>                                     <span class="ralign"><a href="#Page_439">439</a></span></li>
+</ul>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="THE_SCIENCE_OF_HISTORY" id="THE_SCIENCE_OF_HISTORY"></a>THE SCIENCE OF HISTORY:</h2>
+
+<h4>A LECTURE DELIVERED AT THE ROYAL INSTITUTION</h4>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">February</span> 5, 1864.</p>
+
+
+<p>Ladies and Gentlemen,&mdash;I have undertaken to speak to you this evening on
+what is called the Science of History. I fear it is a dry subject; and
+there seems, indeed, something incongruous in the very connection of
+such words as Science and History. It is as if we were to talk of the
+colour of sound, or the longitude of the rule-of-three. Where it is so
+difficult to make out the truth on the commonest disputed fact in
+matters passing under our very eyes, how can we talk of a science in
+things long past, which come to us only through books? It often seems to
+me as if History was like a child's box of letters, with which we can
+spell any word we please. We have only to pick out such letters as we
+want, arrange them as we like, and say nothing about those which do not
+suit our purpose.</p>
+
+<p>I will try to make the thing intelligible, and I will try not to weary
+you; but I am doubtful of my success either way. First, however, I wish
+to say a word or two about the eminent person whose name is connected
+with this way of looking at History, and whose premature death struck us
+all with such a sudden sorrow. Many of you, perhaps, recollect Mr.
+Buckle as he stood not so long ago in this place. He spoke more than an
+hour without a note&mdash;never repeating himself, never wasting words;
+laying out his matter as easily and as pleasantly as if he had been
+talking to us at his own fireside. We might think what we pleased of Mr.
+Buckle's views, but it was plain enough that he was a man of uncommon
+power; and he had qualities also&mdash;qualities to which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</a></span> he, perhaps,
+himself attached little value, as rare as they were admirable.</p>
+
+<p>Most of us, when we have hit on something which we are pleased to think
+important and original, feel as if we should burst with it. We come out
+into the book-market with our wares in hand, and ask for thanks and
+recognition. Mr. Buckle, at an early age, conceived the thought which
+made him famous, but he took the measure of his abilities. He knew that
+whenever he pleased he could command personal distinction, but he cared
+more for his subject than for himself. He was contented to work with
+patient reticence, unknown and unheard of, for twenty years; and then,
+at middle life, he produced a work which was translated at once into
+French and German, and, of all places in the world, fluttered the
+dovecotes of the Imperial Academy of St. Petersburg.</p>
+
+<p>Goethe says somewhere, that as soon as a man has done anything
+remarkable, there seems to be a general conspiracy to prevent him from
+doing it again. He is feasted, f&ecirc;ted, caressed; his time is stolen from
+him by breakfasts, dinners, societies, idle businesses of a thousand
+kinds. Mr. Buckle had his share of all this; but there are also more
+dangerous enemies that wait upon success like his. He had scarcely won
+for himself the place which he deserved, than his health was found
+shattered by his labours. He had but time to show us how large a man he
+was&mdash;time just to sketch the outlines of his philosophy, and he passed
+away as suddenly as he appeared. He went abroad to recover strength for
+his work, but his work was done with and over. He died of a fever at
+Damascus, vexed only that he was compelled to leave it uncompleted.
+Almost his last conscious words were, 'My book, my book! I shall never
+finish my book!' He went away as he had lived, nobly careless of
+himself, and thinking only of the thing which he had undertaken to do.</p>
+
+<p>But his labour had not been thrown away. Disagree with him as we might,
+the effect which he had already produced was unmistakable, and it is not
+likely to pass away. What he said was not essentially new. Some such
+interpretation of human things is as early as the beginning of thought.
+But Mr. Buckle, on the one hand, had the art which belongs to men of
+genius; he could present his opinions with peculiar distinctness; and,
+on the other hand, there is much in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span> the mode of speculation at present
+current among us for which those opinions have an unusual fascination.
+They do not please us, but they excite and irritate us. We are angry
+with them; and we betray, in being so, an uneasy misgiving that there
+may be more truth in those opinions than we like to allow.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Buckle's general theory was something of this kind: When human
+creatures began first to look about them in the world they lived in,
+there seemed to be no order in anything. Days and nights were not the
+same length. The air was sometimes hot and sometimes cold. Some of the
+stars rose and set like the sun; some were almost motionless in the sky;
+some described circles round a central star above the north horizon. The
+planets went on principles of their own; and in the elements there
+seemed nothing but caprice. Sun and moon would at times go out in
+eclipse. Sometimes the earth itself would shake under men's feet; and
+they could only suppose that earth and air and sky and water were
+inhabited and managed by creatures as wayward as themselves.</p>
+
+<p>Time went on, and the disorder began to arrange itself. Certain
+influences seemed beneficent to men, others malignant and destructive,
+and the world was supposed to be animated by good spirits and evil
+spirits, who were continually fighting against each other, in outward
+nature and in human creatures themselves. Finally, as men observed more
+and imagined less, these interpretations gave way also. Phenomena the
+most opposite in effect were seen to be the result of the same natural
+law. The fire did not burn the house down if the owners of it were
+careful, but remained on the hearth and boiled the pot; nor did it seem
+more inclined to burn a bad man's house down than a good man's, provided
+the badness did not take the form of negligence. The phenomena of nature
+were found for the most part to proceed in an orderly, regular way, and
+their variations to be such as could be counted upon. From observing the
+order of things, the step was easy to cause and effect. An eclipse,
+instead of being a sign of the anger of Heaven, was found to be the
+necessary and innocent result of the relative position of sun, moon, and
+earth. The comets became bodies in space, unrelated to the beings who
+had imagined that all creation was watching them and their doings. By
+degrees, caprice, volition, all symptoms of arbitrary action,
+disappeared out of the universe; and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span> almost every phenomenon in earth
+or heaven was found attributable to some law, either understood or
+perceived to exist. Thus nature was reclaimed from the imagination. The
+first fantastic conception of things gave way before the moral; the
+moral in turn gave way before the natural; and at last there was left
+but one small tract of jungle where the theory of law had failed to
+penetrate&mdash;the doings and characters of human creatures themselves.</p>
+
+<p>There, and only there, amidst the conflicts of reason and emotion,
+conscience and desire, spiritual forces were still conceived to exist.
+Cause and effect were not traceable when there was a free volition to
+disturb the connection. In all other things, from a given set of
+conditions, the consequences necessarily followed. With man, the word
+law changed its meaning; and instead of a fixed order, which he could
+not choose but follow, it became a moral precept, which he might disobey
+if he dared.</p>
+
+<p>This it was which Mr. Buckle disbelieved. The economy which prevailed
+throughout nature, he thought it very unlikely should admit of this
+exception. He considered that human beings acted necessarily from the
+impulse of outward circumstances upon their mental and bodily condition
+at any given moment. Every man, he said, acted from a motive; and his
+conduct was determined by the motive which affected him most powerfully.
+Every man naturally desires what he supposes to be good for him; but to
+do well, he must know well. He will eat poison, so long as he does not
+know that it is poison. Let him see that it will kill him, and he will
+not touch it. The question was not of moral right and wrong. Once let
+him be thoroughly made to feel that the thing is destructive, and he
+will leave it alone by the law of his nature. His virtues are the result
+of knowledge; his faults, the necessary consequence of the want of it. A
+boy desires to draw. He knows nothing about it: he draws men like trees
+or houses, with their centre of gravity anywhere. He makes mistakes,
+because he knows no better. We do not blame him. Till he is better
+taught he cannot help it. But his instruction begins. He arrives at
+straight lines; then at solids; then at curves. He learns perspective,
+and light and shade. He observes more accurately the forms which he
+wishes to represent. He perceives effects, and he perceives the means by
+which they are produced. He<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span> has learned what to do; and, in part, he
+has learned how to do it. His after-progress will depend on the amount
+of force which his nature possesses; but all this is as natural as the
+growth of an acorn. You do not preach to the acorn that it is its duty
+to become a large tree; you do not preach to the art-pupil that it is
+his duty to become a Holbein. You plant your acorn in favourable soil,
+where it can have light and air, and be sheltered from the wind; you
+remove the superfluous branches, you train the strength into the leading
+shoots. The acorn will then become as fine a tree as it has vital force
+to become. The difference between men and other things is only in the
+largeness and variety of man's capacities; and in this special capacity,
+that he alone has the power of observing the circumstances favourable to
+his own growth, and can apply them for himself. Yet, again, with this
+condition,&mdash;that he is not, as is commonly supposed, free to choose
+whether he will make use of these appliances or not. When he knows what
+is good for him, he will choose it; and he will judge what is good for
+him by the circumstances which have made him what he is.</p>
+
+<p>And what he would do, Mr. Buckle supposed that he always had done. His
+history had been a natural growth as much as the growth of the acorn.
+His improvement had followed the progress of his knowledge; and, by a
+comparison of his outward circumstances with the condition of his mind,
+his whole proceedings on this planet, his creeds and constitutions, his
+good deeds and his bad, his arts and his sciences, his empires and his
+revolutions, would be found all to arrange themselves into clear
+relations of cause and effect.</p>
+
+<p>If, when Mr. Buckle pressed his conclusions, we objected the difficulty
+of finding what the truth about past times really was, he would admit it
+candidly as far as concerned individuals; but there was not the same
+difficulty, he said, with masses of men. We might disagree about the
+characters of Julius or Tiberius C&aelig;sar, but we could know well enough
+the Romans of the Empire. We had their literature to tell us how they
+thought; we had their laws to tell us how they governed; we had the
+broad face of the world, the huge mountainous outline of their general
+doings upon it, to tell us how they acted. He believed it was all
+reducible to laws, and could be made as intelligible as the growth of
+the chalk cliffs or the coal measures.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>And thus consistently Mr. Buckle cared little for individuals. He did
+not believe (as some one has said) that the history of mankind is the
+history of its great men. Great men with him were but larger atoms,
+obeying the same impulses with the rest, only perhaps a trifle more
+erratic. With them or without them, the course of things would have been
+much the same.</p>
+
+<p>As an illustration of the truth of his view, he would point to the new
+science of Political Economy. Here already was a large area of human
+activity in which natural laws were found to act unerringly. Men had
+gone on for centuries trying to regulate trade on moral principles. They
+would fix wages according to some imaginary rule of fairness; they would
+fix prices by what they considered things ought to cost; they encouraged
+one trade or discouraged another, for moral reasons. They might as well
+have tried to work a steam-engine on moral reasons. The great statesmen
+whose names were connected with these enterprises might have as well
+legislated that water should run up-hill. There were natural laws, fixed
+in the conditions of things: and to contend against them was the old
+battle of the Titans against the gods.</p>
+
+<p>As it was with political economy, so it was with all other forms of
+human activity; and as the true laws of political economy explained the
+troubles which people fell into in old times, because they were ignorant
+of them, so the true laws of human nature, as soon as we knew them,
+would explain their mistakes in more serious matters, and enable us to
+manage better for the future. Geographical position, climate, air, soil,
+and the like, had their several influences. The northern nations are
+hardy and industrious, because they must till the earth if they would
+eat the fruits of it, and because the temperature is too low to make an
+idle life enjoyable. In the south, the soil is more productive, while
+less food is wanted and fewer clothes; and in the exquisite air,
+exertion is not needed to make the sense of existence delightful.
+Therefore, in the south we find men lazy and indolent.</p>
+
+<p>True, there are difficulties in these views; the home of the languid
+Italian was the home also of the sternest race of whom the story of
+mankind retains a record. And again, when we are told that the Spaniards
+are superstitious,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span> because Spain is a country of earthquakes, we
+remember Japan, the spot in all the world where earthquakes are most
+frequent, and where at the same time there is the most serene disbelief
+in any supernatural agency whatsoever.</p>
+
+<p>Moreover, if men grow into what they are by natural laws, they cannot
+help being what they are; and if they cannot help being what they are, a
+good deal will have to be altered in our general view of human
+obligations and responsibilities.</p>
+
+<p>That, however, in these theories there is a great deal of truth is quite
+certain; were there but a hope that those who maintain them would be
+contented with that admission. A man born in a Mahometan country grows
+up a Mahometan; in a Catholic country, a Catholic; in a Protestant
+country, a Protestant. His opinions are like his language; he learns to
+think as he learns to speak; and it is absurd to suppose him responsible
+for being what nature makes him. We take pains to educate children.
+There is a good education and a bad education; there are rules well
+ascertained by which characters are influenced, and, clearly enough, it
+is no mere matter for a boy's free will whether he turns out well or
+ill. We try to train him into good habits; we keep him out of the way of
+temptations; we see that he is well taught; we mix kindness and
+strictness; we surround him with every good influence we can command.
+These are what are termed the advantages of a good education: and if we
+fail to provide those under our care with it, and if they go wrong, the
+responsibility we feel is as much ours as theirs. This is at once an
+admission of the power over us of outward circumstances.</p>
+
+<p>In the same way, we allow for the strength of temptations, and the like.</p>
+
+<p>In general, it is perfectly obvious that men do necessarily absorb, out
+of the influences in which they grow up, something which gives a
+complexion to their whole after-character.</p>
+
+<p>When historians have to relate great social or speculative changes, the
+overthrow of a monarchy or the establishment of a creed, they do but
+half their duty if they merely relate the events. In an account, for
+instance, of the rise of Mahometanism, it is not enough to describe the
+character of the Prophet, the ends which he set before him, the means<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span>
+which he made use of, and the effect which he produced; the historian
+must show what there was in the condition of the Eastern races which
+enabled Mahomet to act upon them so powerfully; their existing beliefs,
+their existing moral and political condition.</p>
+
+<p>In our estimate of the past, and in our calculations of the future&mdash;in
+the judgments which we pass upon one another, we measure responsibility,
+not by the thing done, but by the opportunities which people have had of
+knowing better or worse. In the efforts which we make to keep our
+children from bad associations or friends we admit that external
+circumstances have a powerful effect in making men what they are.</p>
+
+<p>But are circumstances everything? That is the whole question. A science
+of history, if it is more than a misleading name, implies that the
+relation between cause and effect holds in human things as completely as
+in all others, that the origin of human actions is not to be looked for
+in mysterious properties of the mind, but in influences which are
+palpable and ponderable.</p>
+
+<p>When natural causes are liable to be set aside and neutralised by what
+is called volition, the word Science is out of place. If it is free to a
+man to choose what he will do or not do, there is no adequate science of
+him. If there is a science of him, there is no free choice, and the
+praise or blame with which we regard one another are impertinent and out
+of place.</p>
+
+<p>I am trespassing upon these ethical grounds because, unless I do, the
+subject cannot be made intelligible. Mankind are but an aggregate of
+individuals&mdash;History is but the record of individual action; and what is
+true of the part, is true of the whole.</p>
+
+<p>We feel keenly about such things, and when the logic becomes perplexing,
+we are apt to grow rhetorical about them. But rhetoric is only
+misleading. Whatever the truth may be, it is best that we should know
+it; and for truth of any kind we should keep our heads and hearts as
+cool as we can.</p>
+
+<p>I will say at once, that if we had the whole case before us&mdash;if we were
+taken, like Leibnitz's Tarquin, into the council chamber of nature, and
+were shown what we really were, where we came from, and where we were
+going, however<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span> unpleasant it might be for some of us to find ourselves,
+like Tarquin, made into villains, from the subtle necessities of 'the
+best of all possible worlds;' nevertheless, some such theory as Mr.
+Buckle's might possibly turn out to be true. Likely enough, there is
+some great 'equation of the universe' where the value of the unknown
+quantities can be determined. But we must treat things in relation to
+our own powers and position; and the question is, whether the sweep of
+those vast curves can be measured by the intellect of creatures of a day
+like ourselves.</p>
+
+<p>The 'Faust' of Goethe, tired of the barren round of earthly knowledge,
+calls magic to his aid. He desires, first, to see the spirit of the
+Macrocosmos, but his heart fails him before he ventures that tremendous
+experiment, and he summons before him, instead, the spirit of his own
+race. There he feels himself at home. The stream of life and the storm
+of action, the everlasting ocean of existence, the web and the woof, and
+the roaring loom of time&mdash;he gazes upon them all, and in passionate
+exultation claims fellowship with the awful thing before him. But the
+majestic vision fades, and a voice comes to him&mdash;'Thou art fellow with
+the spirits which thy mind can grasp&mdash;not with me.'</p>
+
+<p>Had Mr. Buckle tried to follow his principles into detail, it might have
+fared no better with him than with 'Faust.'</p>
+
+<p>What are the conditions of a science? and when may any subject be said
+to enter the scientific stage? I suppose when the facts of it begin to
+resolve themselves into groups; when phenomena are no longer isolated
+experiences, but appear in connection and order; when, after certain
+antecedents, certain consequences are uniformly seen to follow; when
+facts enough have been collected to furnish a basis for conjectural
+explanation, and when conjectures have so far ceased to be utterly
+vague, that it is possible in some degree to foresee the future by the
+help of them.</p>
+
+<p>Till a subject has advanced as far as this, to speak of a science of it
+is an abuse of language. It is not enough to say that there must be a
+science of human things, because there is a science of all other things.
+This is like saying the planets must be inhabited, because the only
+planet of which we have any experience is inhabited. It may or may not
+be true, but it is not a practical question; it does not affect the
+practical treatment of the matter in hand.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Let us look at the history of Astronomy.</p>
+
+<p>So long as sun, moon, and planets were supposed to be gods or angels; so
+long as the sword of Orion was not a metaphor, but a fact, and the
+groups of stars which inlaid the floor of heaven were the glittering
+trophies of the loves and wars of the Pantheon, so long there was no
+science of Astronomy. There was fancy, imagination, poetry, perhaps
+reverence, but no science. As soon, however, as it was observed that the
+stars retained their relative places&mdash;that the times of their rising and
+setting varied with the seasons&mdash;that sun, moon, and planets moved among
+them in a plane, and the belt of the Zodiac was marked out and divided,
+then a new order of things began. Traces of the earlier stage remained
+in the names of the signs and constellations, just as the Scandinavian
+mythology survives now in the names of the days of the week: but for all
+that, the understanding was now at work on the thing; Science had begun,
+and the first triumph of it was the power of foretelling the future.
+Eclipses were perceived to recur in cycles of nineteen years, and
+philosophers were able to say when an eclipse was to be looked for. The
+periods of the planets were determined. Theories were invented to
+account for their eccentricities; and, false as those theories might be,
+the position of the planets could be calculated with moderate certainty
+by them. The very first result of the science, in its most imperfect
+stage, was a power of foresight; and this was possible before any one
+true astronomical law had been discovered.</p>
+
+<p>We should not therefore question the possibility of a science of
+history, because the explanations of its phenomena were rudimentary or
+imperfect: that they might be, and might long continue to be, and yet
+enough might be done to show that there was such a thing, and that it
+was not entirely without use. But how was it that in those rude days,
+with small knowledge of mathematics, and with no better instruments than
+flat walls and dial plates, those first astronomers made progress so
+considerable? Because, I suppose, the phenomena which they were
+observing recurred, for the most part, within moderate intervals; so
+that they could collect large experience within the compass of their
+natural lives: because days and months and years were measurable
+periods, and within them the more simple phenomena perpetually repeated
+themselves.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>But how would it have been if, instead of turning on its axis once in
+twenty-four hours, the earth had taken a year about it; if the year had
+been nearly four hundred years; if man's life had been no longer than it
+is, and for the initial steps of astronomy there had been nothing to
+depend upon except observations recorded in history? How many ages would
+have passed, had this been our condition, before it would have occurred
+to any one, that, in what they saw night after night, there was any kind
+of order at all?</p>
+
+<p>We can see to some extent how it would have been, by the present state
+of those parts of the science which in fact depend on remote recorded
+observations. The movements of the comets are still extremely uncertain.
+The times of their return can be calculated only with the greatest
+vagueness.</p>
+
+<p>And yet such a hypothesis as I have suggested would but inadequately
+express the position in which we are in fact placed towards history.
+There the phenomena never repeat themselves. There we are dependent
+wholly on the record of things said to have happened once, but which
+never happen or can happen a second time. There no experiment is
+possible; we can watch for no recurring fact to test the worth of our
+conjectures. It has been suggested, fancifully, that if we consider the
+universe to be infinite, time is the same as eternity, and the past is
+perpetually present. Light takes nine years to come to us from Sirius;
+those rays which we may see to-night when we leave this place, left
+Sirius nine years ago; and could the inhabitants of Sirius see the earth
+at this moment, they would see the English army in the trenches before
+Sebastopol; Florence Nightingale watching at Scutari over the wounded at
+Inkermann; and the peace of England undisturbed by 'Essays and Reviews.'</p>
+
+<p>As the stars recede into distance, so time recedes with them, and there
+may be, and probably are, stars from which Noah might be seen stepping
+into the ark, Eve listening to the temptation of the serpent, or that
+older race, eating the oysters and leaving the shell-heaps behind them,
+when the Baltic was an open sea.</p>
+
+<p>Could we but compare notes, something might be done; but of this there
+is no present hope, and without it there will be no science of history.
+Eclipses, recorded in ancient books, can be verified by calculation, and
+lost dates can be recovered by them, and we can foresee by the laws
+which they follow<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span> when there will be eclipses again. Will a time ever
+be when the lost secret of the foundation of Rome can be recovered by
+historic laws? If not, where is our science? It may be said that this is
+a particular fact, that we can deal satisfactorily with general
+phenomena affecting eras and cycles. Well, then, let us take some
+general phenomenon. Mahometanism, for instance, or Buddhism. Those are
+large enough. Can you imagine a science which would have<a name="FNanchor_A_1" id="FNanchor_A_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_A_1" class="fnanchor">[A]</a> <i>foretold</i>
+such movements as those? The state of things out of which they rose is
+obscure; but suppose it not obscure, can you conceive that, with any
+amount of historical insight into the old Oriental beliefs, you could
+have seen that they were about to transform themselves into those
+particular forms and no other?</p>
+
+<p>It is not enough to say, that, after the fact, you can understand
+partially how Mahometanism came to be. All historians worth the name
+have told us something about that. But when we talk of science, we mean
+something with more ambitious pretences, we mean something which can
+foresee as well as explain; and, thus looked at, to state the problem is
+to show its absurdity. As little could the wisest man have foreseen this
+mighty revolution, as thirty years ago such a thing as Mormonism could
+have been anticipated in America; as little as it could have been
+foreseen that table-turning and spirit-rapping would have been an
+outcome of the scientific culture of England in the nineteenth century.</p>
+
+<p>The greatest of Roman thinkers, gazing mournfully at the seething mass
+of moral putrefaction round him, detected and deigned to notice among
+its elements a certain detestable superstition, so he called it, rising
+up amidst the offscouring of the Jews, which was named Christianity.
+Could Tacitus have looked forward nine centuries to the Rome of Gregory
+VII., could he have beheld the representative of the majesty of the
+C&aelig;sars holding the stirrup of the Pontiff of that vile and execrated
+sect, the spectacle would scarcely have appeared to him the fulfilment
+of a rational expectation, or an intelligible result of the causes in
+operation round him.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span> Tacitus, indeed, was born before the science of
+history; but would M. Comte have seen any more clearly?</p>
+
+<p>Nor is the case much better if we are less hard upon our philosophy; if
+we content ourselves with the past, and require only a scientific
+explanation of that.</p>
+
+<p>First, for the facts themselves. They come to us through the minds of
+those who recorded them, neither machines nor angels, but fallible
+creatures, with human passions and prejudices. Tacitus and Thucydides
+were perhaps the ablest men who ever gave themselves to writing history;
+the ablest, and also the most incapable of conscious falsehood. Yet even
+now, after all these centuries, the truth of what they relate is called
+in question. Good reasons can be given to show that neither of them can
+be confidently trusted. If we doubt with these, whom are we to believe?</p>
+
+<p>Or again, let the facts be granted. To revert to my simile of the box of
+letters, you have but to select such facts as suit you, you have but to
+leave alone those which do not suit you, and let your theory of history
+be what it will, you can find no difficulty in providing facts to prove
+it.</p>
+
+<p>You may have your Hegel's philosophy of history, or you may have your
+Schlegel's philosophy of history; you may prove from history that the
+world is governed in detail by a special Providence; you may prove that
+there is no sign of any moral agent in the universe, except man; you may
+believe, if you like it, in the old theory of the wisdom of antiquity;
+you may speak, as was the fashion in the fifteenth century, of 'our
+fathers, who had more wit and wisdom than we;' or you may talk of 'our
+barbarian ancestors,' and describe their wars as the scuffling of kites
+and crows.</p>
+
+<p>You may maintain that the evolution of humanity has been an unbroken
+progress towards perfection; you may maintain that there has been no
+progress at all, and that man remains the same poor creature that he
+ever was; or, lastly, you may say with the author of the 'Contrat
+Social,' that men were purest and best in primeval simplicity&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<div class="i0">When wild in woods the noble savage ran.</div><br />
+</div></div>
+
+<p>In all, or any of these views, history will stand your friend. History,
+in its passive irony, will make no objection. Like Jarno, in Goethe's
+novel, it will not condescend to argue with you, and will provide you
+with abundant illustrations of anything which you may wish to believe.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>'What is history,' said Napoleon, 'but a fiction agreed upon?' 'My
+friend,' said Faust to the student, who was growing enthusiastic about
+the spirit of past ages; 'my friend, the times which are gone are a book
+with seven seals; and what you call the spirit of past ages is but the
+spirit of this or that worthy gentleman in whose mind those ages are
+reflected.'</p>
+
+<p>One lesson, and only one, history may be said to repeat with
+distinctness; that the world is built somehow on moral foundations;
+that, in the long run, it is well with the good; in the long run, it is
+ill with the wicked. But this is no science; it is no more than the old
+doctrine taught long ago by the Hebrew prophets. The theories of M.
+Comte and his disciples advance us, after all, not a step beyond the
+trodden and familiar ground. If men are not entirely animals, they are
+at least half animals, and are subject in this aspect of them to the
+conditions of animals. So far as those parts of man's doings are
+concerned, which neither have, nor need have, anything moral about them,
+so far the laws of him are calculable. There are laws for his digestion,
+and laws of the means by which his digestive organs are supplied with
+matter. But pass beyond them, and where are we? In a world where it
+would be as easy to calculate men's actions by laws like those of
+positive philosophy as to measure the orbit of Neptune with a foot-rule,
+or weigh Sirius in a grocer's scale.</p>
+
+<p>And it is not difficult to see why this should be. The first principle
+on which the theory of a science of history can be plausibly argued, is
+that all actions whatsoever arise from self-interest. It may be
+enlightened self-interest; it may be unenlightened; but it is assumed as
+an axiom, that every man, in whatever he does, is aiming at something
+which he considers will promote his happiness. His conduct is not
+determined by his will; it is determined by the object of his desire.
+Adam Smith, in laying the foundations of political economy, expressly
+eliminates every other motive. He does not say that men never act on
+other motives; still less, that they never ought to act on other
+motives. He asserts merely that, as far as the arts of production are
+concerned, and of buying and selling, the action of self-interest may be
+counted upon as uniform. What Adam Smith says of political economy, Mr.
+Buckle would extend over the whole circle of human activity.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Now, that which especially distinguishes a high order of man from a low
+order of man&mdash;that which constitutes human goodness, human greatness,
+human nobleness&mdash;is surely not the degree of enlightenment with which
+men pursue their own advantage; but it is self-forgetfulness&mdash;it is
+self-sacrifice&mdash;it is the disregard of personal pleasure, personal
+indulgence, personal advantages remote or present, because some other
+line of conduct is more right.</p>
+
+<p>We are sometimes told that this is but another way of expressing the
+same thing; that when a man prefers doing what is right, it is only
+because to do right gives him a higher satisfaction. It appears to me,
+on the contrary, to be a difference in the very heart and nature of
+things. The martyr goes to the stake, the patriot to the scaffold, not
+with a view to any future reward to themselves, but because it is a
+glory to fling away their lives for truth and freedom. And so through
+all phases of existence, to the smallest details of common life, the
+beautiful character is the unselfish character. Those whom we most love
+and admire are those to whom the thought of self seems never to occur;
+who do simply and with no ulterior aim&mdash;with no thought whether it will
+be pleasant to themselves or unpleasant&mdash;that which is good, and right,
+and generous.</p>
+
+<p>Is this still selfishness, only more enlightened? I do not think so. The
+essence of true nobility is neglect of self. Let the thought of self
+pass in, and the beauty of a great action is gone&mdash;like the bloom from a
+soiled flower. Surely it is a paradox to speak of the self-interest of a
+martyr who dies for a cause, the triumph of which he will never enjoy;
+and the greatest of that great company in all ages would have done what
+they did, had their personal prospects closed with the grave. Nay, there
+have been those so zealous for some glorious principle, as to wish
+themselves blotted out of the book of Heaven if the cause of Heaven
+could succeed.</p>
+
+<p>And out of this mysterious quality, whatever it be, arise the higher
+relations of human life, the higher modes of human obligation. Kant, the
+philosopher, used to say that there were two things which overwhelmed
+him with awe as he thought of them. One was the star-sown deep of space,
+without limit and without end; the other was, right and wrong. Right,
+the sacrifice of self to good; wrong, the sacrifice of good to
+self;&mdash;not graduated objects of desire, to which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span> we are determined by
+the degrees of our knowledge, but wide asunder as pole and pole, as
+light and darkness&mdash;one, the object of infinite love; the other, the
+object of infinite detestation and scorn. It is in this marvellous power
+in men to do wrong (it is an old story, but none the less true for
+that)&mdash;it is in this power to do wrong&mdash;wrong or right, as it lies
+somehow with ourselves to choose&mdash;that the impossibility stands of
+forming scientific calculations of what men will do before the fact, or
+scientific explanations of what they have done after the fact. If men
+were consistently selfish, you might analyse their motives; if they were
+consistently noble, they would express in their conduct the laws of the
+highest perfection. But so long as two natures are mixed together, and
+the strange creature which results from the combination is now under one
+influence and now under another, so long you will make nothing of him
+except from the old-fashioned moral&mdash;or, if you please,
+imaginative&mdash;point of view.</p>
+
+<p>Even the laws of political economy itself cease to guide us when they
+touch moral government. So long as labour is a chattel to be bought and
+sold, so long, like other commodities, it follows the condition of
+supply and demand. But if, for his misfortune, an employer considers
+that he stands in human relations towards his workmen; if he believes,
+rightly or wrongly, that he is responsible for them; that in return for
+their labour he is bound to see that their children are decently taught,
+and they and their families decently fed and clothed and lodged; that he
+ought to care for them in sickness and in old age; then political
+economy will no longer direct him, and the relations between himself and
+his dependents will have to be arranged on quite other principles.</p>
+
+<p>So long as he considers only his own material profit, so long supply and
+demand will settle every difficulty; but the introduction of a new
+factor spoils the equation.</p>
+
+<p>And it is precisely in this debatable ground of low motives and noble
+emotions&mdash;in the struggle, ever failing, yet ever renewed, to carry
+truth and justice into the administration of human society; in the
+establishment of states and in the overthrow of tyrannies; in the rise
+and fall of creeds; in the world of ideas; in the character and deeds of
+the great actors in the drama of life; where good and evil fight out
+their<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span> everlasting battle, now ranged in opposite camps, now and more
+often in the heart, both of them, of each living man&mdash;that the true
+human interest of history resides. The progress of industries, the
+growth of material and mechanical civilisation, are interesting, but
+they are not the most interesting. They have their reward in the
+increase of material comforts; but, unless we are mistaken about our
+nature, they do not highly concern us after all.</p>
+
+<p>Once more; not only is there in men this baffling duality of principle,
+but there is something else in us which still more defies scientific
+analysis.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Buckle would deliver himself from the eccentricities of this and
+that individual by a doctrine of averages. Though he cannot tell whether
+A, B, or C will cut his throat, he may assure himself that one man in
+every fifty thousand, or thereabout (I forget the exact proportion),
+will cut his throat, and with this he consoles himself. No doubt it is a
+comforting discovery. Unfortunately, the average of one generation need
+not be the average of the next. We may be converted by the Japanese, for
+all that we know, and the Japanese methods of taking leave of life may
+become fashionable among us. Nay, did not Novalis suggest that the whole
+race of men would at last become so disgusted with their impotence, that
+they would extinguish themselves by a simultaneous act of suicide, and
+make room for a better order of beings? Anyhow, the fountain out of
+which the race is flowing perpetually changes&mdash;no two generations are
+alike. Whether there is a change in the organisation itself, we cannot
+tell; but this is certain, that as the planet varies with the atmosphere
+which surrounds it, so each new generation varies from the last, because
+it inhales as its atmosphere the accumulated experience and knowledge of
+the whole past of the world. These things form the spiritual air which
+we breathe as we grow; and in the infinite multiplicity of elements of
+which that air is now composed, it is for ever matter of conjecture what
+the minds will be like which expand under its influence.</p>
+
+<p>From the England of Fielding and Richardson to the England of Miss
+Austen&mdash;from the England of Miss Austen to the England of Railways and
+Free-trade, how vast the change; yet perhaps Sir Charles Grandison would
+not seem so strange to us now, as one of ourselves will seem to our<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span>
+great-grandchildren. The world moves faster and faster; and the
+difference will probably be considerably greater.</p>
+
+<p>The temper of each new generation is a continual surprise. The fates
+delight to contradict our most confident expectations. Gibbon believed
+that the era of conquerors was at an end. Had he lived out the full life
+of man, he would have seen Europe at the feet of Napoleon. But a few
+years ago we believed the world had grown too civilised for war, and the
+Crystal Palace in Hyde Park was to be the inauguration of a new era.
+Battles, bloody as Napoleon's, are now the familiar tale of every day;
+and the arts which have made greatest progress are the arts of
+destruction. What next? We may strain our eyes into the future which
+lies beyond this waning century; but never was conjecture more at fault.
+It is blank darkness, which even the imagination fails to people.</p>
+
+<p>What then is the use of History? and what are its lessons? If it can
+tell us little of the past, and nothing of the future, why waste our
+time over so barren a study?</p>
+
+<p>First, it is a voice for ever sounding across the centuries the laws of
+right and wrong. Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall,
+but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity. For every false
+word or unrighteous deed, for cruelty and oppression, for lust or
+vanity, the price has to be paid at last: not always by the chief
+offenders, but paid by some one. Justice and truth alone endure and
+live. Injustice and falsehood may be long-lived, but doomsday comes at
+last to them, in French revolutions and other terrible ways.</p>
+
+<p>That is one lesson of History. Another is, that we should draw no
+horoscopes; that we should expect little, for what we expect will not
+come to pass. Revolutions, reformations&mdash;those vast movements into which
+heroes and saints have flung themselves, in the belief that they were
+the dawn of the millennium&mdash;have not borne the fruit which they looked
+for. Millenniums are still far away. These great convulsions leave the
+world changed&mdash;perhaps improved,&mdash;but not improved as the actors in them
+hoped it would be. Luther would have gone to work with less heart, could
+he have foreseen the Thirty Years' War, and in the distance the theology
+of Tubingen. Washington might have hesitated to draw the sword against
+England, could he have seen the country which he made as we see it
+now.<a name="FNanchor_B_2" id="FNanchor_B_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_B_2" class="fnanchor">[B]</a> <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The most reasonable anticipations fail us&mdash;antecedents the most apposite
+mislead us; because the conditions of human problems never repeat
+themselves. Some new feature alters everything&mdash;some element which we
+detect only in its after-operation.</p>
+
+<p>But this, it may be said, is but a meagre outcome. Can the long records
+of humanity, with all its joys and sorrows, its sufferings and its
+conquests, teach us no more than this? Let us approach the subject from
+another side.</p>
+
+<p>If you were asked to point out the special features in which
+Shakespeare's plays are so transcendently excellent, you would mention,
+perhaps, among others, this, that his stories are not put together, and
+his characters are not conceived, to illustrate any particular law or
+principle. They teach many lessons, but not any one prominent above
+another; and when we have drawn from them all the direct instruction
+which they contain, there remains still something unresolved&mdash;something
+which the artist gives, and which the philosopher cannot give.</p>
+
+<p>It is in this characteristic that we are accustomed to say Shakespeare's
+supreme <i>truth</i> lies. He represents real life. His dramas teach as life
+teaches&mdash;neither less nor more. He builds his fabrics as nature does, on
+right and wrong; but he does not struggle to make nature more systematic
+than she is. In the subtle interflow of good and evil&mdash;in the unmerited
+sufferings of innocence&mdash;in the disproportion of penalties to desert&mdash;in
+the seeming blindness with which justice, in attempting to assert
+itself, overwhelms innocent and guilty in a common ruin&mdash;Shakespeare is
+true to real experience. The mystery of life he leaves as he finds it;
+and, in his most tremendous positions, he is addressing rather the
+intellectual emotions than the understanding,&mdash;knowing well that the
+understanding in such things is at fault, and the sage as ignorant as
+the child.</p>
+
+<p>Only the highest order of genius can represent nature thus. An inferior
+artist produces either something entirely immoral, where good and evil
+are names, and nobility of disposition is supposed to show itself in the
+absolute disregard of them&mdash;or else, if he is a better kind of man, he
+will force on nature a didactic purpose; he composes what are called
+moral tales, which may edify the conscience, but only mislead the
+intellect.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The finest work of this kind produced in modern times is Lessing's play
+of 'Nathan the Wise.' The object of it is to teach religious toleration.
+The doctrine is admirable&mdash;the mode in which it is enforced is
+interesting; but it has the fatal fault, that it is not true. Nature
+does not teach religious toleration by any such direct method; and the
+result is&mdash;no one knew it better than Lessing himself&mdash;that the play is
+not poetry, but only splendid manufacture. Shakespeare is eternal;
+Lessing's 'Nathan' will pass away with the mode of thought which gave it
+birth. One is based on fact; the other, on human theory about fact. The
+theory seems at first sight to contain the most immediate instruction;
+but it is not really so.</p>
+
+<p>Cibber and others, as you know, wanted to alter Shakespeare. The French
+king, in 'Lear,' was to be got rid of; Cordelia was to marry Edgar, and
+Lear himself was to be rewarded for his sufferings by a golden old age.
+They could not bear that Hamlet should suffer for the sins of Claudius.
+The wicked king was to die, and the wicked mother; and Hamlet and
+Ophelia were to make a match of it, and live happily ever after. A
+common novelist would have arranged it thus; and you would have had your
+comfortable moral that wickedness was fitly punished, and virtue had its
+due reward, and all would have been well. But Shakespeare would not have
+it so. Shakespeare knew that crime was not so simple in its
+consequences, or Providence so paternal. He was contented to take the
+truth from life; and the effect upon the mind of the most correct theory
+of what life ought to be, compared to the effect of the life itself, is
+infinitesimal in comparison.</p>
+
+<p>Again, let us compare the popular historical treatment of remarkable
+incidents with Shakespeare's treatment of them. Look at 'Macbeth.' You
+may derive abundant instruction from it&mdash;instruction of many kinds.
+There is a moral lesson of profound interest in the steps by which a
+noble nature glides to perdition. In more modern fashion you may
+speculate, if you like, on the political conditions represented there,
+and the temptation presented in absolute monarchies to unscrupulous
+ambition; you may say, like Dr. Slop, these things could not have
+happened under a constitutional government; or, again, you may take up
+your parable against superstition&mdash;you may dilate on the frightful
+consequences<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span> of a belief in witches, and reflect on the superior
+advantages of an age of schools and newspapers. If the bare facts of the
+story had come down to us from a chronicler, and an ordinary writer of
+the nineteenth century had undertaken to relate them, his account, we
+may depend upon it, would have been put together upon one or other of
+these principles. Yet, by the side of that unfolding of the secrets of
+the prison-house of the soul, what lean and shrivelled anatomies the
+best of such descriptions would seem!</p>
+
+<p>Shakespeare himself, I suppose, could not have given us a theory of what
+he meant&mdash;he gave us the thing itself, on which we might make whatever
+theories we pleased.</p>
+
+<p>Or again, look at Homer.</p>
+
+<p>The 'Iliad' is from two to three thousand years older than 'Macbeth,'
+and yet it is as fresh as if it had been written yesterday. We have
+there no lessons save in the emotions which rise in us as we read. Homer
+had no philosophy; he never struggles to impress upon us his views about
+this or that; you can scarcely tell indeed whether his sympathies are
+Greek or Trojan; but he represents to us faithfully the men and women
+among whom he lived. He sang the Tale of Troy, he touched his lyre, he
+drained the golden beaker in the halls of men like those on whom he was
+conferring immortality. And thus, although no Agamemnon, king of men,
+ever led a Grecian fleet to Ilium; though no Priam sought the midnight
+tent of Achilles; though Ulysses and Diomed and Nestor were but names,
+and Helen but a dream, yet, through Homer's power of representing men
+and women, those old Greeks will still stand out from amidst the
+darkness of the ancient world with a sharpness of outline which belongs
+to no period of history except the most recent. For the mere hard
+purposes of history, the 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey' are the most effective
+books which ever were written. We see the Hall of Menelaus, we see the
+garden of Alcinous, we see Nausicaa among her maidens on the shore, we
+see the mellow monarch sitting with ivory sceptre in the Marketplace
+dealing out genial justice. Or again, when the wild mood is on, we can
+hear the crash of the spears, the rattle of the armour as the heroes
+fall, and the plunging of the horses among the slain. Could we enter the
+palace of an old Ionian lord, we know what we should see there; we know
+the words in which he would address us. We<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span> could meet Hector as a
+friend. If we could choose a companion to spend an evening with over a
+fireside, it would be the man of many counsels, the husband of Penelope.</p>
+
+<p>I am not going into the vexed question whether History or Poetry is the
+more true. It has been sometimes said that Poetry is the more true,
+because it can make things more like what our moral sense would prefer
+they should be. We hear of poetic justice and the like, as if nature and
+fact were not just enough.</p>
+
+<p>I entirely dissent from that view. So far as Poetry attempts to improve
+on truth in that way, so far it abandons truth, and is false to itself.
+Even literal facts, exactly as they were, a great poet will prefer
+whenever he can get them. Shakespeare in the historical plays is
+studious, wherever possible, to give the very words which he finds to
+have been used; and it shows how wisely he was guided in this, that
+those magnificent speeches of Wolsey are taken exactly, with no more
+change than the metre makes necessary, from Cavendish's Life.
+Marlborough read Shakespeare for English history, and read nothing else.
+The poet only is not bound, when it is inconvenient, to what may be
+called the accidents of facts. It was enough for Shakespeare to know
+that Prince Hal in his youth had lived among loose companions, and the
+tavern in Eastcheap came in to fill out his picture; although Mrs.
+Quickly and Falstaff, and Poins and Bardolph were more likely to have
+been fallen in with by Shakespeare himself at the Mermaid, than to have
+been comrades of the true Prince Henry. It was enough for Shakespeare to
+draw real men, and the situation, whatever it might be, would sit easy
+on them. In this sense only it is that Poetry is truer than History,
+that it can make a picture more complete. It may take liberties with
+time and space, and give the action distinctness by throwing it into
+more manageable compass.</p>
+
+<p>But it may not alter the real conditions of things, or represent life as
+other than it is. The greatness of the poet depends on his being true to
+nature, without insisting that nature shall theorise with him, without
+making her more just, more philosophical, more moral than reality; and,
+in difficult matters, leaving much to reflection which cannot be
+explained.</p>
+
+<p>And if this be true of Poetry&mdash;if Homer and Shakespeare are what they
+are, from the absence of everything didactic<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span> about them&mdash;may we not
+thus learn something of what History should be, and in what sense it
+should aspire to teach?</p>
+
+<p>If Poetry must not theorise, much less should the historian theorise,
+whose obligations to be true to fact are even greater than the poet's.
+If the drama is grandest when the action is least explicable by laws,
+because then it best resembles life, then history will be grandest also
+under the same conditions. 'Macbeth,' were it literally true, would be
+perfect history; and so far as the historian can approach to that kind
+of model, so far as he can let his story tell itself in the deeds and
+words of those who act it out, so far is he most successful. His work is
+no longer the vapour of his own brain, which a breath will scatter; it
+is the thing itself, which will have interest for all time. A thousand
+theories may be formed about it&mdash;spiritual theories, Pantheistic
+theories, cause and effect theories; but each age will have its own
+philosophy of history, and all these in turn will fail and die. Hegel
+falls out of date, Schlegel falls out of date, and Comte in good time
+will fall out of date; the thought about the thing must change as we
+change; but the thing itself can never change; and a history is durable
+or perishable as it contains more or least of the writer's own
+speculations. The splendid intellect of Gibbon for the most part kept
+him true to the right course in this; yet the philosophical chapters for
+which he has been most admired or censured may hereafter be thought the
+least interesting in his work. The time has been when they would not
+have been comprehended: the time may come when they will seem
+commonplace.</p>
+
+<p>It may be said, that in requiring history to be written like a drama, we
+require an impossibility.</p>
+
+<p>For history to be written with the complete form of a drama, doubtless
+is impossible; but there are periods, and these the periods, for the
+most part, of greatest interest to mankind, the history of which may be
+so written that the actors shall reveal their characters in their own
+words; where mind can be seen matched against mind, and the great
+passions of the epoch not simply be described as existing, but be
+exhibited at their white heat in the souls and hearts possessed by them.
+There are all the elements of drama&mdash;drama of the highest order&mdash;where
+the huge forces of the times are as the Grecian destiny, and the power
+of the man is seen either<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span> stemming the stream till it overwhelms him,
+or ruling while he seems to yield to it.</p>
+
+<p>It is Nature's drama&mdash;not Shakespeare's&mdash;but a drama none the less.</p>
+
+<p>So at least it seems to me. Wherever possible, let us not be told
+<i>about</i> this man or that. Let us hear the man himself speak; let us see
+him act, and let us be left to form our own opinions about him. The
+historian, we are told, must not leave his readers to themselves. He
+must not only lay the facts before them&mdash;he must tell them what he
+himself thinks about those facts. In my opinion, this is precisely what
+he ought not to do. Bishop Butler says somewhere, that the best book
+which could be written would be a book consisting only of premises, from
+which the readers should draw conclusions for themselves. The highest
+poetry is the very thing which Butler requires, and the highest history
+ought to be. We should no more ask for a theory of this or that period
+of history, than we should ask for a theory of 'Macbeth' or 'Hamlet.'
+Philosophies of history, sciences of history&mdash;all these, there will
+continue to be; the fashions of them will change, as our habits of
+thought will change; each new philosopher will find his chief employment
+in showing that before him no one understood anything; but the drama of
+history is imperishable, and, the lessons of it will be like what we
+learn from Homer or Shakespeare&mdash;lessons for which we have no words.</p>
+
+<p>The address of history is less to the understanding than to the higher
+emotions. We learn in it to sympathise with what is great and good; we
+learn to hate what is base. In the anomalies of fortune we feel the
+mystery of our mortal existence, and in the companionship of the
+illustrious natures who have shaped the fortunes of the world, we escape
+from the littlenesses which cling to the round of common life, and our
+minds are tuned in a higher and nobler key.</p>
+
+<p>For the rest, and for those large questions which I touched in
+connection with Mr. Buckle, we live in times of disintegration, and none
+can tell what will be after us. What opinions&mdash;what convictions&mdash;the
+infant of to-day will find prevailing on the earth, if he and it live
+out together to the middle of another century, only a very bold man
+would undertake to conjecture! 'The time will come,' said Lichtenberg,
+in scorn at the materialising tendencies of modern<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span> thought; 'the time
+will come when the belief in God will be as the tales with which old
+women frighten children; when the world will be a machine, the ether a
+gas, and God will be a force.' Mankind, if they last long enough on the
+earth, may develope strange things out of themselves; and the growth of
+what is called the Positive Philosophy is a curious commentary on
+Lichtenberg's prophecy. But whether the end be seventy years hence, or
+seven hundred&mdash;be the close of the mortal history of humanity as far
+distant in the future as its shadowy beginnings seem now to lie behind
+us&mdash;this only we may foretell with confidence&mdash;that the riddle of man's
+nature will remain unsolved. There will be that in him yet which
+physical laws will fail to explain&mdash;that something, whatever it be, in
+himself and in the world, which science cannot fathom, and which
+suggests the unknown possibilities of his origin and his destiny. There
+will remain yet</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div class="i0">Those obstinate questionings</div><br />
+<div class="i0">Of sense and outward things;</div><br />
+<div class="i0">Falling from us, vanishings&mdash;</div><br />
+<div class="i0">Blank misgivings of a creature</div><br />
+<div class="i0">Moving about in worlds not realised&mdash;</div><br />
+<div class="i0">High instincts, before which our mortal nature</div><br />
+<div class="i0">Doth tremble like a guilty thing surprised.</div><br />
+</div></div>
+
+<p>There will remain</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div class="i0">Those first affections&mdash;</div><br />
+<div class="i0">Those shadowy recollections&mdash;</div><br />
+<div class="i0">Which, be they what they may,</div><br />
+<div class="i0">Are yet the fountain-light of all our day&mdash;</div><br />
+<div class="i0">Are yet the master-light of all our seeing&mdash;</div><br />
+<div class="i0">Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make</div><br />
+<div class="i0">Our noisy years seem moments in the being</div><br />
+<div class="i4">Of the Eternal Silence.</div><br />
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_A_1" id="Footnote_A_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_A_1"><span class="label">[A]</span></a> It is objected that Geology is a science: yet that Geology
+cannot foretell the future changes of the earth's surface. Geology is
+not a century old, and its periods are measured by millions of years.
+Yet, if Geology cannot foretell future facts, it enabled Sir Roderick
+Murchison to foretell the discovery of Australian gold.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_B_2" id="Footnote_B_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_B_2"><span class="label">[B]</span></a> February 1864.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="TIMES_OF_ERASMUS_AND_LUTHER" id="TIMES_OF_ERASMUS_AND_LUTHER"></a>TIMES OF ERASMUS AND LUTHER:</h2>
+
+<h4>THREE LECTURES</h4>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Delivered at Newcastle</span>, 1867.</p>
+
+
+<h3><a name="lect_1" id="lect_1"></a>LECTURE I.</h3>
+
+<p>Ladies and Gentlemen,&mdash;I do not know whether I have made a very wise
+selection in the subject which I have chosen for these Lectures. There
+was a time&mdash;a time which, measured by the years of our national life,
+was not so very long ago&mdash;when the serious thoughts of mankind were
+occupied exclusively by religion and politics. The small knowledge which
+they possessed of other things was tinctured by their speculative
+opinions on the relations of heaven and earth; and, down to the
+sixteenth century, art, science, scarcely even literature, existed in
+this country, except as, in some way or other, subordinate to theology.
+Philosophers&mdash;such philosophers as there were&mdash;obtained and half
+deserved the reputation of quacks and conjurors. Astronomy was confused
+with astrology. The physician's medicines were supposed to be powerless,
+unless the priests said prayers over them. The great lawyers, the
+ambassadors, the chief ministers of state, were generally bishops; even
+the fighting business was not entirely secular. Half-a-dozen Scotch
+prelates were killed at Flodden; and, late in the reign of Henry the
+Eighth, no fitter person could be found than Rowland Lee, Bishop of
+Coventry, to take command of the Welsh Marches, and harry the
+freebooters of Llangollen.</p>
+
+<p>Every single department of intellectual or practical life was penetrated
+with the beliefs, or was interwoven with the interests, of the clergy;
+and thus it was that, when differences of religious opinion arose, they
+split society to its foundations. The lines of cleavage penetrated
+everywhere, and there were no subjects whatever in which those who
+disagreed in theology possessed any common concern. When men
+quarrelled,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span> they quarrelled altogether. The disturbers of settled
+beliefs were regarded as public enemies who had placed themselves beyond
+the pale of humanity, and were considered fit only to be destroyed like
+wild beasts, or trampled out like the seed of a contagion.</p>
+
+<p>Three centuries have passed over our heads since the time of which I am
+speaking, and the world is so changed that we can hardly recognise it as
+the same.</p>
+
+<p>The secrets of nature have been opened out to us on a thousand lines;
+and men of science of all creeds can pursue side by side their common
+investigations. Catholics, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Lutherans,
+Calvinists, contend with each other in honourable rivalry in arts, and
+literature, and commerce, and industry. They read the same books. They
+study at the same academies. They have seats in the same senates. They
+preside together on the judicial bench, and carry on, without jar or
+difference, the ordinary business of the country.</p>
+
+<p>Those who share the same pursuits are drawn in spite of themselves into
+sympathy and good-will. When they are in harmony in so large a part of
+their occupations, the points of remaining difference lose their venom.
+Those who thought they hated each other, unconsciously find themselves
+friends; and as far as it affects the world at large, the acrimony of
+controversy has almost disappeared.</p>
+
+<p>Imagine, if you can, a person being now put to death for a speculative
+theological opinion. You feel at once, that in the most bigoted country
+in the world such a thing has become impossible; and the impossibility
+is the measure of the alteration which we have all undergone. The
+formulas remain as they were on either side&mdash;the very same formulas
+which were once supposed to require these detestable murders. But we
+have learnt to know each other better. The cords which bind together the
+brotherhood of mankind are woven of a thousand strands. We do not any
+more fly apart or become enemies, because, here and there, in one strand
+out of so many, there are still unsound places.</p>
+
+<p>If I were asked for a distinct proof that Europe was improving and not
+retrograding, I should find it in this phenomenon. It has not been
+brought about by controversy. Men are fighting still over the same
+questions which they began to fight about at the Reformation. Protestant
+divines<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span> have not driven Catholics out of the field, nor Catholics,
+Protestants. Each polemic writes for his own partisans, and makes no
+impression on his adversary.</p>
+
+<p>Controversy has kept alive a certain quantity of bitterness; and that, I
+suspect, is all that it would accomplish if it continued till the day of
+judgment. I sometimes, in impatient moments, wish the laity in Europe
+would treat their controversial divines as two gentlemen once treated
+their seconds, when they found themselves forced into a duel without
+knowing what they were quarrelling about.</p>
+
+<p>As the principals were being led up to their places, one of them
+whispered to the other, 'If you will shoot your second, I will shoot
+mine.'</p>
+
+<p>The reconciliation of parties, if I may use such a word, is no
+tinkered-up truce, or convenient Interim. It is the healthy, silent,
+spontaneous growth of a nobler order of conviction, which has conquered
+our prejudices even before we knew that they were assailed. This better
+spirit especially is represented in institutions like this, which
+acknowledge no differences of creed&mdash;which are constructed on the
+broadest principles of toleration&mdash;and which, therefore, as a rule, are
+wisely protected from the intrusion of discordant subjects.</p>
+
+<p>They exist, as I understand, to draw men together, not to divide
+them&mdash;to enable us to share together in those topics of universal
+interest and instruction which all can take pleasure in, and which give
+offence to none.</p>
+
+<p>If you ask me, then, why I am myself departing from a practice which I
+admit to be so excellent, I fear that I shall give you rather a lame
+answer. I might say that I know more about the history of the sixteenth
+century than I know about anything else. I have spent the best years of
+my life in reading and writing about it; and if I have anything to tell
+you worth your hearing, it is probably on that subject.</p>
+
+<p>Or, again, I might say&mdash;which is indeed most true&mdash;that to the
+Reformation we can trace, indirectly, the best of those very influences
+which I have been describing. The Reformation broke the theological
+shackles in which men's minds were fettered. It set them thinking, and
+so gave birth to science. The Reformers also, without knowing what they
+were about, taught the lesson of religious toleration. They attempted to
+supersede one set of dogmas by another. They succeeded with half the
+world&mdash;they failed with the other<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span> half. In a little while it became
+apparent that good men&mdash;without ceasing to be good&mdash;could think
+differently about theology, and that goodness, therefore, depended on
+something else than the holding orthodox opinions.</p>
+
+<p>It is not, however, for either of these reasons that I am going to talk
+to you about Martin Luther; nor is toleration of differences of opinion,
+however excellent it be, the point on which I shall dwell in these
+Lectures.</p>
+
+<p>Were the Reformation a question merely of opinion, I for one should not
+have meddled with it, either here or anywhere. I hold that, on the
+obscure mysteries of faith, every one should be allowed to believe
+according to his conscience, and that arguments on such matters are
+either impertinent or useless.</p>
+
+<p>But the Reformation, gentlemen, beyond the region of opinions, was a
+historical fact&mdash;an objective something which may be studied like any of
+the facts of nature. The Reformers were men of note and distinction, who
+played a great part for good or evil on the stage of the world. If we
+except the Apostles, no body of human beings ever printed so deep a mark
+into the organisation of society; and if there be any value or meaning
+in history at all, the lives, the actions, the characters of such men as
+these can be matters of indifference to none of us.</p>
+
+<p>We have not to do with a story which is buried in obscure antiquity. The
+facts admit of being learnt. The truth, whatever it was, concerns us all
+equally. If the divisions created by that great convulsion are ever to
+be obliterated, it will be when we have learnt, each of us, to see the
+thing as it really was, and not rather some mythical or imaginative
+version of the thing&mdash;such as from our own point of view we like to
+think it was. Fiction in such matters may be convenient for our
+immediate theories, but it is certain to avenge itself in the end. We
+may make our own opinions, but facts were made for us; and if we evade
+or deny them, it will be the worse for us.</p>
+
+<p>Unfortunately, the mythical version at present very largely
+preponderates. Open a Protestant history of the Reformation, and you
+will find a picture of the world given over to a lying tyranny&mdash;the
+Christian population of Europe enslaved by a corrupt and degraded
+priesthood, and the Reformers, with the Bible in their hands, coming to
+the rescue<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span> like angels of light. All is black on one side&mdash;all is fair
+and beautiful on the other.</p>
+
+<p>Turn to a Catholic history of the same events and the same men, and we
+have before us the Church of the Saints fulfilling quietly its blessed
+mission in the saving of human souls. Satan a second time enters into
+Paradise, and a second time with fatal success tempts miserable man to
+his ruin. He disbelieves his appointed teachers, he aspires after
+forbidden knowledge, and at once anarchy breaks loose. The seamless robe
+of the Saviour is rent in pieces, and the earth becomes the habitation
+of fiends.</p>
+
+<p>Each side tells the story as it prefers to have it; facts, characters,
+circumstances, are melted in the theological crucible, and cast in
+moulds diametrically opposite. Nothing remains the same except the names
+and dates. Each side chooses its own witnesses. Everything is credible
+which makes for what it calls the truth. Everything is made false which
+will not fit into its place. 'Blasphemous fables' is the usual
+expression in Protestant controversial books for the accounts given by
+Catholics. 'Protestant tradition,' says an eminent modern Catholic, 'is
+based on lying&mdash;bold, wholesale, unscrupulous lying.'</p>
+
+<p>Now, depend upon it, there is some human account of the matter different
+from both these if we could only get at it, and it will be an excellent
+thing for the world when that human account can be made out. I am not so
+presumptuous as to suppose that I can give it to you; still less can you
+expect me to try to do so within the compass of two or three lectures.
+If I cannot do everything, however, I believe I can do a little; at any
+rate I can give you a sketch, such as you may place moderate confidence
+in, of the state of the Church as it was before the Reformation began. I
+will not expose myself more than I can help to the censure of the divine
+who was so hard on Protestant tradition. Most of what I shall have to
+say to you this evening will be taken from the admissions of Catholics
+themselves, or from official records earlier than the outbreak of the
+controversy, when there was no temptation to pervert the truth.</p>
+
+<p>Here, obviously, is the first point on which we require accurate
+information. If all was going on well, the Reformers really and truly
+told innumerable lies, and deserve all the reprobation which we can give
+them. If all was not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span> going on well&mdash;if, so far from being well, the
+Church was so corrupt that Europe could bear with it no longer&mdash;then
+clearly a Reformation was necessary of some kind; and we have taken one
+step towards a fair estimate of the persons concerned in it.</p>
+
+<p>A fair estimate&mdash;that, and only that, is what we want. I need hardly
+observe to you, that opinion in England has been undergoing lately a
+very considerable alteration about these persons.</p>
+
+<p>Two generations ago, the leading Reformers were looked upon as little
+less than saints; now a party has risen up who intend, as they frankly
+tell us, to un-Protestantise the Church of England, who detest
+Protestantism as a kind of infidelity, who desire simply to reverse
+everything which the Reformers did.</p>
+
+<p>One of these gentlemen, a clergyman, writing lately of Luther, called
+him a heretic, a heretic fit only to be ranked with&mdash;whom, do you
+think?&mdash;Joe Smith, the Mormon Prophet. Joe Smith and Luther&mdash;that is the
+combination with which we are now presented.</p>
+
+<p>The book in which this remarkable statement appeared was presented by
+two bishops to the Upper House of Convocation. It was received with
+gracious acknowledgments by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and was placed
+solemnly in the library of reference, for that learned body to consult.</p>
+
+<p>So, too, a professor at Oxford, the other day, spoke of Luther as a
+Philistine&mdash;a Philistine meaning an oppressor of the chosen people; the
+enemy of men of culture, of intelligence, such as the professor himself.</p>
+
+<p>One notices these things, not as of much importance in themselves, but
+as showing which way the stream is running; and, curiously enough, in
+quite another direction we may see the same phenomenon. Our liberal
+philosophers, men of high literary power and reputation, looking into
+the history of Luther, and Calvin, and John Knox, and the rest, find
+them falling far short of the philosophic ideal&mdash;wanting sadly in many
+qualities which the liberal mind cannot dispense with. They are
+discovered to be intolerant, dogmatic, narrow-minded, inclined to
+persecute Catholics as Catholics had persecuted them; to be, in fact,
+little if at all better than the popes and cardinals whom they were
+fighting against.</p>
+
+<p>Lord Macaulay can hardly find epithets strong enough to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span> express his
+contempt for Archbishop Cranmer. Mr. Buckle places Cranmer by the side
+of Bonner, and hesitates which of the two characters is the more
+detestable.</p>
+
+<p>An unfavourable estimate of the Reformers, whether just or unjust, is
+unquestionably gaining ground among our advanced thinkers. A greater man
+than either Macaulay or Buckle&mdash;the German poet, Goethe&mdash;says of Luther,
+that he threw back the intellectual progress of mankind for centuries,
+by calling in the passions of the multitude to decide on subjects which
+ought to have been left to the learned. Goethe, in saying this, was
+alluding especially to Erasmus. Goethe thought that Erasmus, and men
+like Erasmus, had struck upon the right track; and if they could have
+retained the direction of the mind of Europe, there would have been more
+truth, and less falsehood, among us at this present time. The party
+hatreds, the theological rivalries, the persecutions, the civil wars,
+the religious animosities which have so long distracted us, would have
+been all avoided, and the mind of mankind would have expanded gradually
+and equably with the growth of knowledge.</p>
+
+<p>Such an opinion, coming from so great a man, is not to be lightly passed
+over. It will be my endeavour to show you what kind of man Erasmus was,
+what he was aiming at, what he was doing, and how Luther spoilt his
+work&mdash;if spoiling is the word which we are to use for it.</p>
+
+<p>One caution, however, I must in fairness give you before we proceed
+further. It lies upon the face of the story, that the Reformers
+imperfectly understood toleration; but you must keep before you the
+spirit and temper of the men with whom they had to deal. For themselves,
+when the movement began, they aimed at nothing but liberty to think and
+speak their own way. They never dreamt of interfering with others,
+although they were quite aware that others, when they could, were likely
+to interfere with them. Lord Macaulay might have remembered that Cranmer
+was working all his life with the prospect of being burnt alive as his
+reward&mdash;and, as we all know, he actually was burnt alive.</p>
+
+<p>When the Protestant teaching began first to spread in the
+Netherlands&mdash;before one single Catholic had been illtreated there,
+before a symptom of a mutinous disposition had shown itself among the
+people, an edict was issued by the authorities for the suppression of
+the new opinions.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The terms of this edict I will briefly describe to you.</p>
+
+<p>The inhabitants of the United Provinces were informed that they were to
+hold and believe the doctrines of the Holy Roman Catholic Church. 'Men
+and women,' says the edict, 'who disobey this command shall be punished
+as disturbers of public order. Women who have fallen into heresy shall
+be buried alive. Men, if they recant, shall lose their heads. If they
+continue obstinate, they shall be burnt at the stake.</p>
+
+<p>'If man or woman be suspected of heresy, no one shall shelter or protect
+him or her; and no stranger shall be admitted to lodge in any inn or
+dwelling-house unless he bring with him a testimonial of orthodoxy from
+the priest of his parish.</p>
+
+<p>'The Inquisition shall enquire into the private opinions of every
+person, of whatever degree; and all officers of all kinds shall assist
+the Inquisition at their peril. Those who know where heretics are
+concealed, shall denounce them, or they shall suffer as heretics
+themselves. Heretics (observe the malignity of this paragraph)&mdash;heretics
+who will give up other heretics to justice, shall themselves be pardoned
+if they will promise to conform for the future.'</p>
+
+<p>Under this edict, in the Netherlands alone, more than fifty thousand
+human beings, first and last, were deliberately murdered. And,
+gentlemen, I must say that proceedings of this kind explain and go far
+to excuse the subsequent intolerance of Protestants.</p>
+
+<p>Intolerance, Mr. Gibbon tells us, is a greater crime in a Protestant
+than a Catholic. Criminal intolerance, as I understand it, is the
+intolerance of such an edict as that which I have read to you&mdash;the
+unprovoked intolerance of difference of opinion. I conceive that the
+most enlightened philosopher might have grown hard and narrow-minded if
+he had suffered under the administration of the Duke of Alva.</p>
+
+<p>Dismissing these considerations, I will now go on with my subject.</p>
+
+<p>Never in all their history, in ancient times or modern, never that we
+know of, have mankind thrown out of themselves anything so grand, so
+useful, so beautiful, as the Catholic Church once was. In these times of
+ours, well-regulated selfishness is the recognised rule of action&mdash;every
+one of us is expected to look out first for himself, and take care of
+his own interests. At the time I speak of, the Church<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span> ruled the State
+with the authority of a conscience; and self-interest, as a motive of
+action, was only named to be abhorred. The bishops and clergy were
+regarded freely and simply as the immediate ministers of the Almighty;
+and they seem to me to have really deserved that high estimate of their
+character. It was not for the doctrines which they taught, only or
+chiefly, that they were held in honour. Brave men do not fall down
+before their fellow-mortals for the words which they speak, or for the
+rites which they perform. Wisdom, justice, self-denial, nobleness,
+purity, highmindedness,&mdash;these are the qualities before which the
+free-born races of Europe have been contented to bow; and in no order of
+men were such qualities to be found as they were found six hundred years
+ago in the clergy of the Catholic Church. They called themselves the
+successors of the Apostles. They claimed in their Master's name
+universal spiritual authority, but they made good their pretensions by
+the holiness of their own lives. They were allowed to rule because they
+deserved to rule, and in the fulness of reverence kings and nobles bent
+before a power which was nearer to God than their own. Over prince and
+subject, chieftain and serf, a body of unarmed defenceless men reigned
+supreme by the magic of sanctity. They tamed the fiery northern warriors
+who had broken in pieces the Roman Empire. They taught them&mdash;they
+brought them really and truly to believe&mdash;that they had immortal souls,
+and that they would one day stand at the awful judgment bar and give
+account for their lives there. With the brave, the honest, and the
+good&mdash;with those who had not oppressed the poor nor removed their
+neighbour's landmark&mdash;with those who had been just in all their
+dealings&mdash;with those who had fought against evil, and had tried
+valiantly to do their Master's will,&mdash;at that great day, it would be
+well. For cowards, for profligates, for those who lived for luxury and
+pleasure and self-indulgence, there was the blackness of eternal death.</p>
+
+<p>An awful conviction of this tremendous kind the clergy had effectually
+instilled into the mind of Europe. It was not a <span class="smcap1">PERHAPS</span>; it was a
+certainty. It was not a form of words repeated once a week at church; it
+was an assurance entertained on all days and in all places, without any
+particle of doubt. And the effect of such a belief on life and
+conscience was simply immeasurable.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>I do not pretend that the clergy were perfect. They were very far from
+perfect at the best of times, and the European nations were never
+completely submissive to them. It would not have been well if they had
+been. The business of human creatures in this planet is not summed up in
+the most excellent of priestly catechisms. The world and its concerns
+continued to interest men, though priests insisted on their nothingness.
+They could not prevent kings from quarrelling with each other. They
+could not hinder disputed successions, and civil feuds, and wars, and
+political conspiracies. What they did do was to shelter the weak from
+the strong. In the eyes of the clergy, the serf and his lord stood on
+the common level of sinful humanity. Into their ranks high birth was no
+passport. They were themselves for the most part children of the people;
+and the son of the artisan or peasant rose to the mitre and the triple
+crown, just as nowadays the rail-splitter and the tailor become
+Presidents of the Republic of the West.</p>
+
+<p>The Church was essentially democratic, while at the same time it had the
+monopoly of learning; and all the secular power fell to it which
+learning, combined with sanctity and assisted by superstition, can
+bestow.</p>
+
+<p>The privileges of the clergy were extraordinary. They were not amenable
+to the common laws of the land. While they governed the laity, the laity
+had no power over them. From the throne downwards, every secular office
+was dependent on the Church. No king was a lawful sovereign till the
+Church placed the crown upon his head: and what the Church bestowed, the
+Church claimed the right to take away. The disposition of property was
+in their hands. No will could be proved except before the bishop or his
+officer; and no will was held valid if the testator died out of
+communion. There were magistrates and courts of law for the offences of
+the laity. If a priest committed a crime, he was a sacred person. The
+civil power could not touch him; he was reserved for his ordinary.
+Bishops' commissaries sate in town and city, taking cognizance of the
+moral conduct of every man and woman. Offences against life and property
+were tried here in England, as now, by the common law; but the Church
+Courts dealt with sins&mdash;sins of word or act. If a man was a profligate
+or a drunkard; if he lied or swore; if he did not come to communion, or
+held unlawful opinions;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span> if he was idle or unthrifty; if he was unkind
+to his wife or his servants; if a child was disobedient to his father,
+or a father cruel to his child; if a tradesman sold adulterated wares,
+or used false measures or dishonest weights,&mdash;the eye of the parish
+priest was everywhere, and the Church Court stood always open to examine
+and to punish.</p>
+
+<p>Imagine what a tremendous power this must have been! Yet it existed
+generally in Catholic Europe down to the eve of the Reformation. It
+could never have established itself at all unless at one time it had
+worked beneficially&mdash;as the abuse of it was one of the most fatal causes
+of the Church's fall.</p>
+
+<p>I know nothing in English history much more striking than the answer
+given by Archbishop Warham to the complaints of the English House of
+Commons after the fall of Cardinal Wolsey. The House of Commons
+complained that the clergy made laws in Convocation which the laity were
+excommunicated if they disobeyed. Yet the laws made by the clergy, the
+Commons said, were often at variance with the laws of the realm.</p>
+
+<p>What did Warham reply? He said he was sorry for the alleged discrepancy;
+but, inasmuch as the laws made by the clergy were always in conformity
+with the will of God, the laws of the realm had only to be altered and
+then the difficulty would vanish.</p>
+
+<p>What must have been the position of the clergy in the fulness of their
+power, when they could speak thus on the eve of their prostration? You
+have only to look from a distance at any old-fashioned cathedral city,
+and you will see in a moment the medi&aelig;val relations between Church and
+State. The cathedral <i>is</i> the city. The first object you catch sight of
+as you approach is the spire tapering into the sky, or the huge towers
+holding possession of the centre of the landscape&mdash;majestically
+beautiful&mdash;imposing by mere size amidst the large forms of Nature
+herself. As you go nearer, the vastness of the building impresses you
+more and more. The puny dwelling-place of the citizens creep at its
+feet, the pinnacles are glittering in the tints of the sunset, when down
+below among the streets and lanes the twilight is darkening. And even
+now, when the towns are thrice their ancient size, and the houses have
+stretched upwards from two stories to five; when the great chimneys are
+vomiting their smoke among the clouds, and the temples of modern
+industry&mdash;the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span> workshops and the factories&mdash;spread their long fronts
+before the eye, the cathedral is still the governing form in the
+picture&mdash;the one object which possesses the imagination and refuses to
+be eclipsed.</p>
+
+<p>As that cathedral was to the old town, so was the Church of the middle
+ages to the secular institutions of the world. Its very neighbourhood
+was sacred; and its shadow, like the shadow of the Apostles, was a
+sanctuary. When I look at the new Houses of Parliament in London, I see
+in them a type of the change which has passed over us. The House of
+Commons of the Plantagenets sate in the Chapter House of Westminster
+Abbey. The Parliament of the Reform Bill, five-and-thirty years ago,
+debated in St. Stephen's Chapel, the Abbey's small dependency. Now, by
+the side of the enormous pile which has risen out of that chapel's
+ashes, the proud Minster itself is dwarfed into insignificance.</p>
+
+<p>Let us turn to another vast feature of the middle ages&mdash;I mean the
+monasteries.</p>
+
+<p>Some person of especial and exceptional holiness has lived or died at a
+particular spot. He has been distinguished by his wisdom, by his piety,
+by his active benevolence; and in an age when conjurors and witches were
+supposed to be helped by the devil to do evil, he, on his part, has been
+thought to have possessed in larger measure than common men the favour
+and the grace of heaven. Blessed influences hang about the spot which he
+has hallowed by his presence. His relics&mdash;his household possessions, his
+books, his clothes, his bones, retain the shadowy sanctity which they
+received in having once belonged to him. We all set a value, not wholly
+unreal, on anything which has been the property of a remarkable man. At
+worst, it is but an exaggeration of natural reverence.</p>
+
+<p>Well, as nowadays we build monuments to great men, so in the middle ages
+they built shrines or chapels on the spots which saints had made holy,
+and communities of pious people gathered together there&mdash;beginning with
+the personal friends the saint had left behind him&mdash;to try to live as he
+had lived, to do good as he had done good, and to die as he had died.
+Thus arose religious fraternities&mdash;companies of men who desired to
+devote themselves to goodness&mdash;to give up pleasure, and amusement, and
+self-indulgence, and to spend their lives in prayer and works of
+charity.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>These houses became centres of pious beneficence. The monks, as the
+brotherhoods were called, were organised in different orders, with some
+variety of rule, but the broad principle was the same in all. They were
+to live for others, not for themselves. They took vows of poverty, that
+they might not be entangled in the pursuit of money. They took vows of
+chastity, that the care of a family might not distract them from the
+work which they had undertaken. Their efforts of charity were not
+limited to this world. Their days were spent in hard bodily labour, in
+study, or in visiting the sick. At night they were on the stone-floors
+of their chapels, holding up their withered hands to heaven, interceding
+for the poor souls who were suffering in purgatory.</p>
+
+<p>The world, as it always will, paid honour to exceptional excellence. The
+system spread to the furthest limits of Christendom. The religious
+houses became places of refuge, where men of noble birth, kings and
+queens and emperors, warriors and statesmen, retired to lay down their
+splendid cares, and end their days in peace. Those with whom the world
+had dealt hardly, or those whom it had surfeited with its unsatisfying
+pleasures, those who were disappointed with earth, and those who were
+filled with passionate aspirations after heaven, alike found a haven of
+rest in the quiet cloister. And, gradually, lands came to them, and
+wealth, and social dignity&mdash;all gratefully extended to men who deserved
+so well of their fellows; while no landlords were more popular than
+they, for the sanctity of the monks sheltered their dependents as well
+as themselves.</p>
+
+<p>Travel now through Ireland, and you will see in the wildest parts of it
+innumerable remains of religious houses, which had grown up among a
+people who acknowledged no rule among themselves except the sword, and
+where every chief made war upon his neighbour as the humour seized him.
+The monks among the O's and the Mac's were as defenceless as sheep among
+the wolves; but the wolves spared them for their character. In such a
+country as Ireland then was, the monasteries could not have survived for
+a generation but for the enchanted atmosphere which surrounded them.</p>
+
+<p>Of authority, the religious orders were practically independent. They
+were amenable only to the Pope and to their own superiors. Here in
+England, the king could not send a commissioner to inspect a monastery,
+nor even send a policeman<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span> to arrest a criminal who had taken shelter
+within its walls. Archbishops and bishops, powerful as they were, found
+their authority cease when they entered the gates of a Benedictine or
+Dominican abbey.</p>
+
+<p>So utterly have times changed, that with your utmost exertions you will
+hardly be able to picture to yourselves the Catholic Church in the days
+of its greatness. Our school-books tell us how the Emperor of Germany
+held the stirrup for Pope Gregory the Seventh to mount his mule; how our
+own English Henry Plantagenet walked barefoot through the streets of
+Canterbury, and knelt in the Chapter House for the monks to flog him.
+The first of these incidents, I was brought up to believe, proved the
+Pope to be the Man of Sin. Anyhow, they are both facts, and not
+romances; and you may form some notion from them how high in the world's
+eyes the Church must have stood.</p>
+
+<p>And be sure it did not achieve that proud position without deserving it.
+The Teutonic and Latin princes were not credulous fools; and when they
+submitted, it was to something stronger than themselves&mdash;stronger in
+limb and muscle, or stronger in intellect and character.</p>
+
+<p>So the Church was in its vigour: so the Church was <i>not</i> at the opening
+of the sixteenth century. Power&mdash;wealth&mdash;security&mdash;men are more than
+mortal if they can resist the temptations to which too much of these
+expose them. Nor were they the only enemies which undermined the
+energies of the Catholic clergy. Churches exist in this world to remind
+us of the eternal laws which we are bound to obey. So far as they do
+this, they fulfil their end, and are honoured in fulfilling it. It would
+have been better for all of us&mdash;it would be better for us now, could
+Churches keep this their peculiar function steadily and singly before
+them. Unfortunately, they have preferred in later times the speculative
+side of things to the practical. They take up into their teaching
+opinions and theories which are merely ephemeral; which would naturally
+die out with the progress of knowledge; but, having received a spurious
+sanctity, prolong their days unseasonably, and become first unmeaning,
+and then occasions of superstition.</p>
+
+<p>It matters little whether I say a paternoster in English or Latin, so
+that what is present to my mind is the thought which the words express,
+and not the words themselves. In<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span> these and all languages it is the most
+beautiful of prayers. But you know that people came to look on a Latin
+paternoster as the most powerful of spells&mdash;potent in heaven, if said
+straightforward; if repeated backward, a charm which no spirit in hell
+could resist.</p>
+
+<p>So it is, in my opinion, with all forms&mdash;forms of words, or forms of
+ceremony and ritualism. While the meaning is alive in them, they are not
+only harmless, but pregnant and life-giving. When we come to think that
+they possess in themselves material and magical virtues, then the
+purpose which they answer is to hide God from us and make us practically
+into Atheists.</p>
+
+<p>This is what I believe to have gradually fallen upon the Catholic Church
+in the generations which preceded Luther. The body remained; the mind
+was gone away: the original thought which its symbolism represented was
+no longer credible to intelligent persons.</p>
+
+<p>The acute were conscious unbelievers. In Italy, when men went to mass
+they spoke of it as going to a comedy. You may have heard the story of
+Luther in his younger days saying mass at an altar in Rome, and hearing
+his fellow-priests muttering at the consecration of the Eucharist,
+'Bread thou art, and bread thou wilt remain.'</p>
+
+<p>Part of the clergy were profane scoundrels like these; the rest repeated
+the words of the service, conceiving that they were working a charm.
+Religion was passing through the transformation which all religions have
+a tendency to undergo. They cease to be aids and incentives to holy
+life; they become contrivances rather to enable men to sin, and escape
+the penalties of sin. Obedience to the law is dispensed with if men will
+diligently profess certain opinions, or punctually perform certain
+external duties. However scandalous the moral life, the participation of
+a particular rite, or the profession of a particular belief, at the
+moment of death, is held to clear the score.</p>
+
+<p>The powers which had been given to the clergy required for their
+exercise the highest wisdom and the highest probity. They had fallen at
+last into the hands of men who possessed considerably less of these
+qualities than the laity whom they undertook to govern. They had
+degraded their conceptions of God; and, as a necessary consequence, they
+had degraded their conceptions of man and man's duty. The aspirations<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span>
+after sanctity had disappeared, and instead of them there remained the
+practical reality of the five senses. The high prelates, the cardinals,
+the great abbots, were occupied chiefly in maintaining their splendour
+and luxury. The friars and the secular clergy, following their superiors
+with shorter steps, indulged themselves in grosser pleasures; while
+their spiritual powers, their supposed authority in this world and the
+next, were turned to account to obtain from the laity the means for
+their self-indulgence.</p>
+
+<p>The Church forbade the eating of meat on fast days, but the Church was
+ready with dispensations for those who could afford to pay for them. The
+Church forbade marriage to the fourth degree of consanguinity, but
+loving cousins, if they were rich and open-handed, could obtain the
+Church's consent to their union. There were toll-gates for the priests
+at every halting-place on the road of life&mdash;fees at weddings, fees at
+funerals, fees whenever an excuse could be found to fasten them. Even
+when a man was dead he was not safe from plunder, for a mortuary or
+death present was exacted of his family.</p>
+
+<p>And then those Bishop's Courts, of which I spoke just now: they were
+founded for the discipline of morality&mdash;they were made the instruments
+of the most detestable extortion. If an impatient layman spoke a
+disrespectful word of the clergy, he was cited before the bishop's
+commissary and fined. If he refused to pay, he was excommunicated, and
+excommunication was a poisonous disease. When a poor wretch was under
+the ban of the Church no tradesman might sell him clothes or food&mdash;no
+friend might relieve him&mdash;no human voice might address him, under pain
+of the same sentence; and if he died unreconciled, he died like a dog,
+without the sacraments, and was refused Christian burial.</p>
+
+<p>The records of some of these courts survive: a glance at their pages
+will show the principles on which they were worked. When a layman
+offended, the single object was to make him pay for it. The magistrates
+could not protect him. If he resisted, and his friends supported him, so
+much the better, for they were now all in the scrape together. The next
+step would be to indict them in a body for heresy; and then, of course,
+there was nothing for it but to give way, and compound for absolution by
+money.</p>
+
+<p>It was money&mdash;ever money. Even in case of real delinquency,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span> it was
+still money. Money, not charity, covered the multitude of sins.</p>
+
+<p>I have told you that the clergy were exempt from secular jurisdiction.
+They claimed to be amenable only to spiritual judges, and they extended
+the broad fringe of their order till the word clerk was construed to
+mean any one who could write his name or read a sentence from a book. A
+robber or a murderer at the assizes had but to show that he possessed
+either of these qualifications, and he was allowed what was called
+benefit of clergy. His case was transferred to the Bishops' Court, to an
+easy judge, who allowed him at once to compound.</p>
+
+<p>Such were the clergy in matters of this world. As religious instructors,
+they appear in colours if possible less attractive.</p>
+
+<p>Practical religion throughout Europe at the beginning of the sixteenth
+century was a very simple affair. I am not going to speak of the
+mysterious doctrines of the Catholic Church. The creed which it
+professed in its schools and theological treatises was the same which it
+professes now, and which it had professed at the time when it was most
+powerful for good. I do not myself consider that the formulas in which
+men express their belief are of much consequence. The question is rather
+of the thing expressed; and so long as we find a living consciousness
+that above the world and above human life there is a righteous God, who
+will judge men according to their works, whether they say their prayers
+in Latin or English, whether they call themselves Protestants or call
+themselves Catholics, appears to me of quite secondary importance. But
+at the time I speak of, that consciousness no longer existed. The
+formulas and ceremonies were all in all; and of God it is hard to say
+what conceptions men had formed, when they believed that a dead man's
+relations could buy him out of purgatory&mdash;buy him out of purgatory,&mdash;for
+this was the literal truth&mdash;by hiring priests to sing masses for his
+soul.</p>
+
+<p>Religion, in the minds of ordinary people, meant that the keys of the
+other world were held by the clergy. If a man confessed regularly to his
+priest, received the sacrament, and was absolved, then all was well with
+him. His duties consisted in going to confession and to mass. If he
+committed sins, he was prescribed penances, which could be commuted for
+money. If he was sick or ill at ease in his mind, he was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span> recommended a
+pilgrimage&mdash;a pilgrimage to a shrine or a holy well, or to some
+wonder-working image&mdash;where, for due consideration, his case would be
+attended to. It was no use to go to a saint empty-handed. The rule of
+the Church was, nothing for nothing. At a chapel in Saxony there was an
+image of a Virgin and Child. If the worshipper came to it with a good
+handsome offering, the child bowed and was gracious: if the present was
+unsatisfactory, it turned away its head, and withheld its favours till
+the purse-strings were untied again.</p>
+
+<p>There was a great rood or crucifix of the same kind at Boxley, in Kent,
+where the pilgrims went in thousands. This figure used to bow, too, when
+it was pleased; and a good sum of money was sure to secure its
+good-will.</p>
+
+<p>When the Reformation came, and the police looked into the matter, the
+images were found to be worked with wires and pulleys. The German lady
+was kept as a curiosity in the cabinet of the Elector of Saxony. Our
+Boxley rood was brought up and exhibited in Cheapside, and was
+afterwards torn in pieces by the people.</p>
+
+<p>Nor here again was death the limit of extortion: death was rather the
+gate of the sphere which the clergy made, peculiarly their own. When a
+man died, his friends were naturally anxious for the fate of his soul.
+If he died in communion, he was not in the worst place of all. He had
+not been a saint, and therefore he was not in the best. Therefore he was
+in purgatory&mdash;Purgatory Pickpurse, as our English Latimer called it&mdash;and
+a priest, if properly paid, could get him out.</p>
+
+<p>To be a mass priest, as it was called, was a regular profession, in
+which, with little trouble, a man could earn a comfortable living. He
+had only to be ordained and to learn by heart a certain form of words,
+and that was all the equipment necessary for him. The masses were paid
+for at so much a dozen, and for every mass that was said, so many years
+were struck off from the penal period. Two priests were sometimes to be
+seen muttering away at the opposite ends of the same altar, like a
+couple of musical boxes playing different parts of the same tune at the
+same time. It made no difference. The upper powers had what they wanted.
+If they got the masses, and the priests got the money, all parties
+concerned were satisfied.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>I am speaking of the form which these things assumed in an age of
+degradation and ignorance. The truest and wisest words ever spoken by
+man might be abused in the same way.</p>
+
+<p>The Sermon on the Mount or the Apostles' Creed, if recited mechanically,
+and relied on to work a mechanical effort, would be no less perniciously
+idolatrous.</p>
+
+<p>You can see something of the same kind in a milder form in Spain at the
+present day. The Spaniards, all of them, high and low, are expected to
+buy annually a Pope's Bula or Bull&mdash;a small pardon, or indulgence, or
+plenary remission of sins. The exact meaning of these things is a little
+obscure; the high authorities themselves do not universally agree about
+them, except so far as to say that they are of prodigious value of some
+sort. The orthodox explanation, I believe, is something of this kind.
+With every sin there is the moral guilt and the temporal penalty. The
+pardon cannot touch the guilt; but when the guilt is remitted, there is
+still the penalty. I may ruin my health by a dissolute life; I may
+repent of my dissoluteness and be forgiven; but the bad health will
+remain. For bad health, substitute penance in this world and purgatory
+in the next; and in this sphere the indulgence takes effect.</p>
+
+<p>Such as they are, at any rate, everybody in Spain has these bulls; you
+buy them in the shops for a shilling apiece.</p>
+
+<p>This is one form of the thing. Again, at the door of a Spanish church
+you will see hanging on the wall an intimation that whoever will pray so
+many hours before a particular image shall receive full forgiveness of
+his sins. Having got that, one might suppose he would be satisfied; but
+no&mdash;if he prays so many more hours, he can get off a hundred years of
+purgatory, or a thousand, or ten thousand. In one place I remember
+observing that for a very little trouble a man could escape a hundred
+and fifty thousand years of purgatory.</p>
+
+<p>What a prospect for the ill-starred Protestant, who will be lucky if he
+is admitted into purgatory at all!</p>
+
+<p>Again, if you enter a sacristy, you will see a small board like the
+notices addressed to parishioners in our vestries. On particular days it
+is taken out and hung up in the church, and little would a stranger,
+ignorant of the language, guess the tremendous meaning of that
+commonplace appearance. On these boards is written 'Hoy se sacan
+animas,'&mdash;'This day, souls are taken out of purgatory.' It is an
+intimation<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span> to every one with a friend in distress that now is his time.
+You put a shilling in a plate, you give your friend's name, and the
+thing is done. One wonders why, if purgatory can be sacked so easily,
+any poor wretch is left to suffer there.</p>
+
+<p>Such practices nowadays are comparatively innocent, the money asked and
+given is trifling, and probably no one concerned in the business
+believes much about it. They serve to show, however, on a small scale,
+what once went on on an immense scale; and even such as they are, pious
+Catholics do not much approve of them. They do not venture to say much
+on the subject directly, but they allow themselves a certain
+good-humoured ridicule. A Spanish novelist of some reputation tells a
+story of a man coming to a priest on one of these occasions, putting a
+shilling in the plate, and giving in the name of his friend.</p>
+
+<p>'Is my friend's soul out?' he asked. The priest said it was. 'Quite
+sure?' the man asked. 'Quite sure,' the priest answered. 'Very well,'
+said the man, 'if he is out of purgatory they will not put him in again:
+it is a bad shilling.'</p>
+
+<p>Sadder than all else, even as the most beautiful things are worst in
+their degradation, was the condition of the monasteries. I am here on
+delicate ground. The accounts of those institutions, as they existed in
+England and Germany at the time of their suppression, is so shocking
+that even impartial writers have hesitated to believe the reports which
+have come down to us. The laity, we are told, determined to appropriate
+the abbey lands, and maligned the monks to justify the spoliation. Were
+the charge true, the religious orders would still be without excuse, for
+the whole education of the country was in the hands of the clergy; and
+they had allowed a whole generation to grow up, which, on this
+hypothesis, was utterly depraved.</p>
+
+<p>But no such theory can explain away the accumulated testimony which
+comes to us&mdash;exactly alike&mdash;from so many sides and witnesses. We are not
+dependent upon evidence which Catholics can decline to receive. In the
+reign of our Henry the Seventh the notorious corruption of some of the
+great abbeys in England brought them under the notice of the Catholic
+Archbishop of Canterbury, Cardinal Morton. The archbishop, unable to
+meddle with them by his own authority, obtained the necessary powers
+from the Pope. He<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span> instituted a partial visitation in the neighbourhood
+of London; and the most malignant Protestant never drew such a picture
+of profligate brutality as Cardinal Morton left behind him in his
+Register, in a description of the great Abbey of St. Albans. I cannot,
+in a public lecture, give you the faintest idea of what it contains. The
+monks were bound to celibacy&mdash;that is to say, they were not allowed to
+marry. They were full-fed, idle, and sensual; of sin they thought only
+as something extremely pleasant, of which they could cleanse one another
+with a few mumbled words as easily as they could wash their faces in a
+basin. And there I must leave the matter. Anybody who is curious for
+particulars may see the original account in Morton's Register, in the
+Archbishop's library at Lambeth.</p>
+
+<p>A quarter of a century after this there appeared in Germany a book, now
+called by Catholics an infamous libel, the 'Epistol&aelig; Obscurorum
+Virorum.' 'The obscure men,' supposed to be the writers of these
+epistles, are monks or students of theology. The letters themselves are
+written in dog-Latin&mdash;a burlesque of the language in which
+ecclesiastical people then addressed each other. They are sketches,
+satirical, but not malignant, of the moral and intellectual character of
+these reverend personages.</p>
+
+<p>On the moral, and by far the most important, side of the matter I am
+still obliged to be silent; but I can give you a few specimens of the
+furniture of the theological minds, and of the subjects with which they
+were occupied.</p>
+
+<p>A student writes to his ghostly father in an agony of distress because
+he has touched his hat to a Jew. He mistook him for a doctor of
+divinity; and on the whole, he fears he has committed mortal sin. Can
+the father absolve him? Can the bishop absolve him? Can the Pope absolve
+him? His case seems utterly desperate.</p>
+
+<p>Another letter describes a great intellectual riddle, which was argued
+for four days at the School of Logic at Louvaine. A certain Master of
+Arts had taken out his degree at Louvaine, Leyden, Paris, Oxford,
+Cambridge, Padua, and four other universities. He was thus a member of
+ten universities. But how <i>could</i> a man be a member of ten universities?
+A university was a body, and one body might have many members; but how
+one member could have many bodies, passed comprehension. In such a
+monstrous anomaly, the member<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span> would be the body, and the universities
+the member, and this would be a scandal to such grave and learned
+corporations. The holy doctor St. Thomas himself could not make himself
+into the body of ten universities.</p>
+
+<p>The more the learned men argued, the deeper they floundered, and at
+length gave up the problem in despair.</p>
+
+<p>Again: a certain professor argues that Julius C&aelig;sar could not have
+written the book which passes under the name of 'C&aelig;sar's Commentaries,'
+because that book is written in Latin, and Latin is a difficult
+language; and a man whose life is spent in marching and fighting has
+notoriously no time to learn Latin.</p>
+
+<p>Here is another fellow&mdash;a monk this one&mdash;describing to a friend the
+wonderful things which he has seen in Rome.</p>
+
+<p>'You may have heard,' he says, 'how the Pope did possess a monstrous
+beast called an Elephant. The Pope did entertain for this beast a very
+great affection, and now behold it is dead. When it fell sick, the Pope
+called his doctors about him in great sorrow, and said to them, "If it
+be possible, heal my elephant." Then they gave the elephant a purge,
+which cost five hundred crowns, but it did not avail, and so the beast
+departed; and the Pope grieves much for his elephant, for it was indeed
+a miraculous beast, with a long, long, prodigious long nose; and when it
+saw the Pope it kneeled down before him and said, with a terrible voice,
+"Bar, bar, bar!"'</p>
+
+<p>I will not tire you with any more of this nonsense, especially as I
+cannot give you the really characteristic parts of the book.</p>
+
+<p>I want you to observe, however, what Sir Thomas More says of it, and
+nobody will question that Sir Thomas More was a good Catholic and a
+competent witness. 'These epistles,' he says, 'are the delight of
+everyone. The wise enjoy the wit; the blockheads of monks take them
+seriously, and believe that they have been written to do them honour.
+When we laugh, they think we are laughing at the style, which they admit
+to be comical. But they think the style is made up for by the beauty of
+the sentiment. The scabbard, they say, is rough, but the blade within it
+is divine. The deliberate idiots would not have found out the jest for
+themselves in a hundred years.'</p>
+
+<p>Well might Erasmus exclaim, 'What fungus could be more<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span> stupid? yet
+these are the Atlases who are to uphold the tottering Church!'</p>
+
+<p>'The monks had a pleasant time of it,' says Luther. 'Every brother had
+two cans of beer and a quart of wine for his supper, with gingerbread,
+to make him take to his liquor kindly. Thus the poor things came to look
+like fiery angels.'</p>
+
+<p>And more gravely, 'In the cloister rule the seven deadly
+sins&mdash;covetousness, lasciviousness, uncleanness, hate, envy, idleness,
+and the loathing of the service of God.'</p>
+
+<p>Consider such men as these owning a third, a half, sometimes two-thirds
+of the land in every country in Europe, and, in addition to their other
+sins, neglecting all the duties attaching to this property&mdash;the woods
+cut down and sold, the houses falling to ruin&mdash;unthrift, neglect, waste
+everywhere and in everything&mdash;the shrewd making the most of their time,
+which they had sense to see might be a short one&mdash;the rest dreaming on
+in sleepy sensuality, dividing their hours between the chapel, the
+pothouse, and the brothel.</p>
+
+<p>I do not think that, in its main features, the truth of this sketch can
+be impugned; and if it be just even in outline, then a reformation of
+some kind or other was overwhelmingly necessary. Corruption beyond a
+certain point becomes unendurable to the coarsest nostril. The
+constitution of human things cannot away with it.</p>
+
+<p>Something was to be done; but what, or how? There were three possible
+courses.</p>
+
+<p>Either the ancient discipline of the Church might be restored by the
+heads of the Church themselves.</p>
+
+<p>Or, secondly, a higher tone of feeling might gradually be introduced
+among clergy and laity alike, by education and literary culture. The
+discovery of the printing press had made possible a diffusion of
+knowledge which had been unattainable in earlier ages. The
+ecclesiastical constitution, like a sick human body, might recover its
+tone if a better diet were prepared for it.</p>
+
+<p>Or, lastly, the common sense of the laity might take the matter at once
+into their own hands, and make free use of the pruning knife and the
+sweeping brush. There might be much partial injustice, much violence,
+much wrongheadedness; but the people would, at any rate, go direct to
+the point, and the question was whether any other remedy would serve.</p>
+
+<p>The first of these alternatives may at once be dismissed.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span> The heads of
+the Church were the last persons in the world to discover that anything
+was wrong. People of that sort always are. For them the thing as it
+existed answered excellently well. They had boundless wealth, and all
+but boundless power. What could they ask for more? No monk drowsing over
+his wine-pot was less disturbed by anxiety than nine out of ten of the
+high dignitaries who were living on the eve of the Judgment Day, and
+believed that their seat was established for them for ever.</p>
+
+<p>The character of the great ecclesiastics of that day you may infer from
+a single example. The Archbishop of Mayence was one of the most
+enlightened Churchmen in Germany. He was a patron of the Renaissance, a
+friend of Erasmus, a liberal, an intelligent, and, as times went, and
+considering his trade, an honourable, high-minded man.</p>
+
+<p>When the Emperor Maximilian died, and the imperial throne was vacant,
+the Archbishop of Mayence was one of seven electors who had to choose a
+new emperor.</p>
+
+<p>There were two competitors&mdash;Francis the First and Maximilian's grandson,
+afterwards the well-known Charles the Fifth.</p>
+
+<p>Well, of the seven electors six were bribed. John Frederick of Saxony,
+Luther's friend and protector, was the only one of the party who came
+out of the business with clean hands.</p>
+
+<p>But the Archbishop of Mayence took bribes six times alternately from
+both the candidates. He took money as coolly as the most rascally
+ten-pound householder in Yarmouth or Totnes, and finally drove a hard
+bargain for his actual vote.</p>
+
+<p>The grape does not grow upon the blackthorn; nor does healthy reform
+come from high dignitaries like the Archbishop of Mayence.</p>
+
+<p>The other aspect of the problem I shall consider in the following
+Lectures.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h3><a name="lect_2" id="lect_2"></a>LECTURE II.</h3>
+
+<p>In the year 1467&mdash;the year in which Charles the Bold became Duke
+of Burgundy&mdash;four years before the great battle of Barnet, which
+established our own fourth Edward on the English throne&mdash;about the
+time when William Caxton was setting up his printing press at
+Westminster&mdash;there was born at Rotterdam, on the 28th of October,
+Desiderius Erasmus. His parents, who were middle-class people, were
+well-to-do in the world. For some reason or other they were prevented
+from marrying by the interference of relations. The father died soon
+after in a cloister; the mother was left with her illegitimate infant,
+whom she called first, after his father, Gerard; but afterwards, from
+his beauty and grace, she changed his name&mdash;the words Desiderius
+Erasmus, one with a Latin, the other with a Greek, derivation, meaning
+the lovely or delightful one.</p>
+
+<p>Not long after, the mother herself died also. The little Erasmus was the
+heir of a moderate fortune; and his guardians, desiring to appropriate
+it to themselves, endeavoured to force him into a convent at Brabant.</p>
+
+<p>The thought of living and dying in a house of religion was dreadfully
+unattractive; but an orphan boy's resistance was easily overcome. He was
+bullied into yielding, and, when about twenty, took the vows.</p>
+
+<p>The life of a monk, which was uninviting on the surface, was not more
+lovely when seen from within.</p>
+
+<p>'A monk's holy obedience,' Erasmus wrote afterwards, 'consists in&mdash;what?
+In leading an honest, chaste, and sober life? Not the least. In
+acquiring learning, in study, and industry? Still less. A monk may be a
+glutton, a drunkard, a whoremonger, an ignorant, stupid, malignant,
+envious brute, but he has broken no vow, he is within his holy
+obedience. He has only to be the slave of a superior as good for nothing
+as himself, and he is an excellent brother.'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The misfortune of his position did not check Erasmus's intellectual
+growth. He was a brilliant, witty, sarcastic, mischievous youth. He did
+not trouble himself to pine and mope; but, like a young thorough-bred in
+a drove of asses, he used his heels pretty freely.</p>
+
+<p>While he played practical jokes upon the unreverend fathers, he
+distinguished himself equally by his appetite for knowledge. It was the
+dawn of the Renaissance&mdash;the revival of learning. The discovery of
+printing was reopening to modern Europe the great literature of Greece
+and Rome, and the writings of the Christian fathers. For studies of this
+kind, Erasmus, notwithstanding the disadvantages of cowl and frock,
+displayed extraordinary aptitude. He taught himself Greek when Greek was
+the language which, in the opinion of the monks, only the devils spoke
+in the wrong place. His Latin was as polished as Cicero's; and at length
+the Archbishop of Cambray heard of him, and sent him to the University
+of Paris.</p>
+
+<p>At Paris he found a world where life could be sufficiently pleasant, but
+where his religious habit was every moment in his way. He was a priest,
+and so far could not help himself. That ink-spot not all the waters of
+the German Ocean could wash away. But he did not care for the low
+debaucheries, where the frock and cowl were at home. His place was in
+the society of cultivated men, who were glad to know him and to
+patronise him; so he shook off his order, let his hair grow, and flung
+away his livery.</p>
+
+<p>The Archbishop's patronage was probably now withdrawn. Life in Paris was
+expensive, and Erasmus had for several years to struggle with poverty.
+We see him, however, for the most part&mdash;in his early letters&mdash;carrying a
+bold front to fortune; desponding one moment, and larking the next with
+a Paris grisette; making friends, enjoying good company, enjoying
+especially good wine when he could get it; and, above all, satiating his
+literary hunger at the library of the University.</p>
+
+<p>In this condition, when about eight-and-twenty, he made acquaintance
+with two young English noblemen who were travelling on the Continent,
+Lord Mountjoy and one of the Greys.</p>
+
+<p>Mountjoy, intensely attracted by his brilliance, took him for his tutor,
+carried him over to England, and introduced<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span> him at the court of Henry
+the Seventh. At once his fortune was made. He charmed every one, and in
+turn he was himself delighted with the country and the people. English
+character, English hospitality, English manners&mdash;everything English
+except the beer&mdash;equally pleased him. In the young London men&mdash;the
+lawyers, the noblemen, even in some of the clergy&mdash;he found his own
+passion for learning. Sir Thomas More, who was a few years younger than
+himself, became his dearest friend; and Warham, afterwards Archbishop of
+Canterbury&mdash;Fisher, afterwards Bishop of Rochester&mdash;Colet, the famous
+Dean of St. Paul's&mdash;the great Wolsey himself&mdash;recognised and welcomed
+the rising star of European literature.</p>
+
+<p>Money flowed in upon him. Warham gave him a benefice in Kent, which was
+afterwards changed to a pension. Prince Henry, when he became King,
+offered him&mdash;kings in those days were not bad friends to
+literature&mdash;Henry offered him, if he would remain in England, a house
+large enough to be called a palace, and a pension which, converted into
+our money, would be a thousand pounds a year.</p>
+
+<p>Erasmus, however, was a restless creature, and did not like to be caged
+or tethered. He declined the King's terms, but Mountjoy settled a
+pension on him instead. He had now a handsome income, and he understood
+the art of enjoying it. He moved about as he pleased&mdash;now to Cambridge,
+now to Oxford, and, as the humour took him, back again to Paris; now
+staying with Sir Thomas More at Chelsea, now going a pilgrimage with
+Dean Colet to Becket's tomb at Canterbury&mdash;but always studying, always
+gathering knowledge, and throwing it out again, steeped in his own
+mother wit, in shining Essays or Dialogues, which were the delight and
+the despair of his contemporaries.</p>
+
+<p>Everywhere, in his love of pleasure, in his habits of thought, in his
+sarcastic scepticism, you see the healthy, clever, well-disposed,
+tolerant, epicurean, intellectual man of the world.</p>
+
+<p>He went, as I said, with Dean Colet to Becket's tomb. At a shrine about
+Canterbury he was shown an old shoe which tradition called the Saint's.
+At the tomb itself, the great sight was a handkerchief which a monk took
+from among the relics, and offered it to the crowd to kiss. The
+worshippers touched it in pious adoration, with clasped hands<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span> and
+upturned eyes. If the thing was genuine, as Erasmus observed, it had but
+served for the archbishop to wipe his nose with&mdash;and Dean Colet, a
+puritan before his time, looked on with eyes flashing scorn, and
+scarcely able to keep his hands off the exhibitors. But Erasmus smiled
+kindly, reflecting that mankind were fools, and in some form or other
+would remain fools. He took notice only of the pile of gold and jewels,
+and concluded that so much wealth might prove dangerous to its
+possessors.</p>
+
+<p>The peculiarities of the English people interested and amused him. 'You
+are going to England,' he wrote afterwards to a friend; 'you will not
+fail to be pleased. You will find the great people there most agreeable
+and gracious; only be careful not to presume upon their intimacy. They
+will condescend to your level, but do not you therefore suppose that you
+stand upon theirs. The noble lords are gods in their own eyes.'</p>
+
+<p>'For the other classes, be courteous, give your right hand, do not take
+the wall, do not push yourself. Smile on whom you please, but trust no
+one that you do not know; above all, speak no evil of England to them.
+They are proud of their country above all nations in the world, as they
+have good reason to be.'</p>
+
+<p>These directions might have been written yesterday. The manners of the
+ladies have somewhat changed. 'English ladies,' says Erasmus, 'are
+divinely pretty, and <i>too</i> good-natured. They have an excellent custom
+among them, that wherever you go the girls kiss you. They kiss you when
+you come, they kiss you when you go, they kiss you at intervening
+opportunities, and their lips are soft, warm, and delicious.' Pretty
+well that, for a priest!</p>
+
+<p>The custom, perhaps, was not quite so universal as Erasmus would have us
+believe. His own coaxing ways may have had something to do with it. At
+any rate, he found England a highly agreeable place of residence.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, his reputation as a writer spread over the world. Latin&mdash;the
+language in which he wrote&mdash;was in universal use. It was the vernacular
+of the best society in Europe, and no living man was so perfect a master
+of it. His satire flashed about among all existing institutions,
+scathing especially his old enemies the monks; while the great secular
+clergy, who hated the religious orders, were<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span> delighted to see them
+scourged, and themselves to have the reputation of being patrons of
+toleration and reform.</p>
+
+<p>Erasmus, as he felt his ground more sure under him, obtained from Julius
+the Second a distinct release from his monastic vows; and, shortly
+after, when the brilliant Leo succeeded to the tiara, and gathered about
+him the magnificent cluster of artists who have made his era so
+illustrious, the new Pope invited Erasmus to visit him at Rome, and
+become another star in the constellation which surrounded the Papal
+throne.</p>
+
+<p>Erasmus was at this time forty years old&mdash;the age when ambition becomes
+powerful in men, and takes the place of love of pleasure. He was
+received at Rome with princely distinction, and he could have asked for
+nothing&mdash;bishoprics, red hats, or red stockings&mdash;which would not have
+been freely given to him if he would have consented to remain.</p>
+
+<p>But he was too considerable a man to be tempted by finery; and the
+Pope's livery, gorgeous though it might be, was but a livery after all.
+Nothing which Leo the Tenth could do for Erasmus could add lustre to his
+coronet. More money he might have had, but of money he had already
+abundance, and outward dignity would have been dearly bought by gilded
+chains. He resisted temptation; he preferred the northern air, where he
+could breathe at liberty, and he returned to England, half inclined to
+make his home there.</p>
+
+<p>But his own sovereign laid claim to his services; the future emperor
+recalled him to the Low Countries, settled a handsome salary upon him,
+and established him at the University of Louvaine.</p>
+
+<p>He was now in the zenith of his greatness. He had an income as large as
+many an English nobleman. We find him corresponding with popes,
+cardinals, kings, and statesmen; and as he grew older, his mind became
+more fixed upon serious subjects. The ignorance and brutality of the
+monks, the corruption of the spiritual courts, the absolute irreligion
+in which the Church was steeped, gave him serious alarm. He had no
+enthusiasms, no doctrinal fanaticisms, no sectarian beliefs or
+superstitions. The breadth of his culture, his clear understanding, and
+the worldly moderation of his temper, seemed to qualify him above living
+men to conduct a temperate reform. He saw that the system around him was
+pregnant<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span> with danger, and he resolved to devote what remained to him of
+life to the introduction of a higher tone in the minds of the clergy.</p>
+
+<p>The revival of learning had by this time alarmed the religious orders.
+Literature and education, beyond the code of the theological text-books,
+appeared simply devilish to them. When Erasmus returned to Louvaine, the
+battle was raging over the north of Europe.</p>
+
+<p>The Dominicans at once recognised in Erasmus their most dangerous enemy.
+At first they tried to compel him to re-enter the order, but, strong in
+the Pope's dispensation, he was so far able to defy them. They could
+bark at his heels, but dared not come to closer quarters: and with his
+temper slightly ruffled, but otherwise contented to despise them, he
+took up boldly the task which he had set himself.</p>
+
+<p>'We kiss the old shoes of the saints,' he said, 'but we never read their
+works.' He undertook the enormous labour of editing and translating
+selections from the writings of the Fathers. The New Testament was as
+little known as the lost books of Tacitus&mdash;all that the people knew of
+the Gospels and the Epistles were the passages on which theologians had
+built up the Catholic formulas. Erasmus published the text, and with it,
+and to make it intelligible, a series of paraphrases, which rent away
+the veil of traditional and dogmatic interpretation, and brought the
+teaching of Christ and the Apostles into their natural relation with
+reason and conscience.</p>
+
+<p>In all this, although the monks might curse, he had countenance and
+encouragement from the great ecclesiastics in all parts of Europe&mdash;and
+it is highly curious to see the extreme freedom with which they allowed
+him to propose to them his plans for a Reformation&mdash;we seem to be
+listening to the wisest of modern broad Churchmen.</p>
+
+<p>To one of his correspondents, an archbishop, he writes:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>'Let us have done with theological refinements. There is an excuse for
+the Fathers, because the heretics forced them to define particular
+points; but every definition is a misfortune, and for us to persevere in
+the same way is sheer folly. Is no man to be admitted to grace who does
+not know how the Father differs from the Son, and both from the Spirit?
+or how the nativity of the Son differs from the procession of the
+Spirit? Unless I forgive my brother his sins against me,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span> God will not
+forgive me my sins. Unless I have a pure heart&mdash;unless I put away envy,
+hate, pride, avarice, lust, I shall not see God. But a man is not damned
+because he cannot tell whether the Spirit has one principle or two. Has
+he the fruits of the Spirit? That is the question. Is he patient, kind,
+good, gentle, modest, temperate, chaste? Enquire if you will, but do not
+define. True religion is peace, and we cannot have peace unless we leave
+the conscience unshackled on obscure points on which certainty is
+impossible. We hear now of questions being referred to the next
+&OElig;cumenical Council&mdash;better a great deal refer them to doomsday. Time
+was, when a man's faith was looked for in his life, not in the Articles
+which he professed. Necessity first brought Articles upon us, and ever
+since, we have refined and refined till Christianity has become a thing
+of words and creeds. Articles increase&mdash;sincerity vanishes
+away&mdash;contention grows hot, and charity grows cold. Then comes in the
+civil power, with stake and gallows, and men are forced to profess what
+they do not believe, to pretend to love what in fact they hate, and to
+say that they understand what in fact has no meaning for them.'</p>
+
+<p>Again, to the Archbishop of Mayence:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>'Reduce the dogmas necessary to be believed, to the smallest possible
+number; you can do it without danger to the realities of Christianity.
+On other points, either discourage enquiry, or leave everyone free to
+believe what he pleases&mdash;then we shall have no more quarrels, and
+religion will again take hold of life. When you have done this, you can
+correct the abuses of which the world with good reason complains. The
+unjust judge heard the widow's prayer. You should not shut your ears to
+the cries of those for whom Christ died. He did not die for the great
+only, but for the poor and for the lowly. There need be no tumult. Do
+you only set human affections aside, and let kings and princes lend
+themselves heartily to the public good. But observe that the monks and
+friars be allowed no voice; with these gentlemen the world has borne too
+long. They care only for their own vanity, their own stomachs, their own
+power; and they believe that if the people are enlightened, their
+kingdom cannot stand.'</p>
+
+<p>Once more to the Pope himself:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>'Let each man amend first his own wicked life. When he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span> has done that,
+and will amend his neighbour, let him put on Christian charity, which is
+severe enough when severity is needed. If your holiness give power to
+men who neither believe in Christ nor care for you, but think only of
+their own appetites, I fear there will be danger. We can trust your
+holiness, but there are bad men who will use your virtues as a cloke for
+their own malice.'</p>
+
+<p>That the spiritual rulers of Europe should have allowed a man like
+Erasmus to use language such as this to them is a fact of supreme
+importance. It explains the feeling of Goethe, that the world would have
+gone on better had there been no Luther, and that the revival of
+theological fanaticism did more harm than good.</p>
+
+<p>But the question of questions is, what all this latitudinarian
+philosophising, this cultivated epicurean gracefulness would have come
+to if left to itself; or rather, what was the effect which it was
+inevitably producing? If you wish to remove an old building without
+bringing it in ruins about your ears, you must begin at the top, remove
+the stones gradually downwards, and touch the foundation last. But
+latitudinarianism loosens the elementary principles of theology. It
+destroys the premises on which the dogmatic system rests. It would beg
+the question to say that this would in itself have been undesirable; but
+the practical effect of it, as the world then stood, would have only
+been to make the educated into infidels, and to leave the multitude to a
+convenient but debasing superstition.</p>
+
+<p>The monks said that Erasmus laid the egg, and Luther hatched a
+cockatrice. Erasmus resented deeply such an account of his work; but it
+was true after all. The sceptical philosophy is the most powerful of
+solvents, but it has no principle of organic life in it; and what of
+truth there was in Erasmus's teaching had to assume a far other form
+before it was available for the reinvigoration of religion. He himself,
+in his clearer moments, felt his own incapacity, and despaired of making
+an impression on the mass of ignorance with which he saw himself
+surrounded.</p>
+
+<p>'The stupid monks,' he writes, 'say mass as a cobbler makes a shoe; they
+come to the altar reeking from their filthy pleasures. Confession with
+the monks is a cloke to steal the people's money, to rob girls of their
+virtue, and commit other crimes too horrible to name! Yet these<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span> people
+are the tyrants of Europe. The Pope himself is afraid of them.'</p>
+
+<p>'Beware!' he says to an impetuous friend, 'beware how you offend the
+monks. You have to do with an enemy that cannot be slain; an order never
+dies, and they will not rest till they have destroyed you.'</p>
+
+<p>The heads of the Church might listen politely, but Erasmus had no
+confidence in them. 'Never,' he says, 'was there a time when divines
+were greater fools, or popes and prelates more worldly.' Germany was
+about to receive a signal illustration of the improvement which it was
+to look for from liberalism and intellectual culture.</p>
+
+<p>We are now on the edge of the great conflagration. Here we must leave
+Erasmus for the present. I must carry you briefly over the history of
+the other great person who was preparing to play his part on the stage.
+You have seen something of what Erasmus was; you must turn next to the
+companion picture of Martin Luther. You will observe in how many points
+their early experiences touch, as if to show more vividly the contrast
+between the two men.</p>
+
+<p>Sixteen years after the birth of Erasmus, therefore in the year 1483,
+Martin Luther came into the world in a peasant's cottage, at Eisleben,
+in Saxony. By peasant, you need not understand a common boor. Hans
+Luther, the father, was a thrifty, well-to-do man for his station in
+life&mdash;adroit with his hands, and able to do many useful things, from
+farm work to digging in the mines. The family life was strict and
+stern&mdash;rather too stern, as Martin thought in later life.</p>
+
+<p>'Be temperate with your children,' he said, long after, to a friend;
+'punish them if they lie or steal, but be just in what you do. It is a
+lighter sin to take pears and apples than to take money. I shudder when
+I think of what I went through myself. My mother beat me about some nuts
+once till the blood came. I had a terrible time of it, but she meant
+well.'</p>
+
+<p>At school, too, he fell into rough hands, and the recollection of his
+sufferings made him tender ever after with young boys and girls.</p>
+
+<p>'Never be hard with children,' he used to say. 'Many a fine character
+has been ruined by the stupid brutality of pedagogues. The parts of
+speech are a boy's pillory. I was myself flogged fifteen times in one
+forenoon over the conjugation of a verb. Punish if you will, but be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span>
+kind too, and let the sugar-plum go with the rod.' This is not the
+language of a demagogue or a fanatic; it is the wise thought of a
+tender, human-hearted man.</p>
+
+<p>At seventeen, he left school for the University at Erfurt. It was then
+no shame for a poor scholar to maintain himself by alms. Young Martin
+had a rich noble voice and a fine ear, and by singing ballads in the
+streets he found ready friends and help. He was still uncertain with
+what calling he should take up, when it happened that a young friend was
+killed at his side by lightning.</p>
+
+<p>Erasmus was a philosopher. A powder magazine was once blown up by
+lightning in a town where Erasmus was staying, and a house of infamous
+character was destroyed. The inhabitants saw in what had happened the
+Divine anger against sin. Erasmus told them that if there was any anger
+in the matter, it was anger merely with the folly which had stored
+powder in an exposed situation.</p>
+
+<p>Luther possessed no such premature intelligence. He was distinguished
+from other boys only by the greater power of his feelings and the
+vividness of his imagination. He saw in his friend's death the immediate
+hand of the great Lord of the universe. His conscience was terrified. A
+life-long penitence seemed necessary to atone for the faults of his
+boyhood. He too, like Erasmus, became a monk, not forced into it&mdash;for
+his father knew better what the holy men were like, and had no wish to
+have son of his among them&mdash;but because the monk of Martin's imagination
+spent his nights and days upon the stones in prayer; and Martin, in the
+heat of his repentance, longed to be kneeling at his side.</p>
+
+<p>In this mood he entered the Augustine monastery at Erfurt. He was full
+of an overwhelming sense of his own wretchedness and sinfulness. Like
+St. Paul, he was crying to be delivered from the body of death which he
+carried about him. He practised all possible austerities. He, if no one
+else, mortified his flesh with fasting. He passed nights in the chancel
+before the altar, or on his knees on the floor of his cell. He weakened
+his body till his mind wandered, and he saw ghosts and devils. Above
+all, he saw the flaming image of his own supposed guilt. God required
+that he should keep the law in all points. He had not so kept the
+law&mdash;could not so keep the law&mdash;and therefore he believed that he was
+damned. One morning, he was found senseless and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span> seemingly dead; a
+brother played to him on a flute, and soothed his senses back to
+consciousness.</p>
+
+<p>It was long since any such phenomenon had appeared among the rosy friars
+of Erfurt. They could not tell what to make of him. Staupitz, the prior,
+listened to his accusations of himself in confession. 'My good fellow,'
+he said, 'don't be so uneasy; you have committed no sins of the least
+consequence; you have not killed anybody, or committed adultery, or
+things of that sort. If you sin to some purpose, it is right that you
+should think about it, but don't make mountains out of trifles.'</p>
+
+<p>Very curious: to the commonplace man the uncommonplace is for ever
+unintelligible. What was the good of all that excitement&mdash;that agony of
+self-reproach for little things? None at all, if the object is only to
+be an ordinary good sort of man&mdash;if a decent fulfilment of the round of
+common duties is the be-all and the end-all of human life on earth.</p>
+
+<p>The plague came by-and-by into the town. The commonplace clergy ran
+away&mdash;went to their country-houses, went to the hills, went
+anywhere&mdash;and they wondered in the same way why Luther would not go with
+them. They admired him and liked him. They told him his life was too
+precious to be thrown away. He answered, quite simply, that his place
+was with the sick and dying; a monk's life was no great matter. The sun
+he did not doubt would continue to shine, whatever became of him. 'I am
+no St. Paul,' he said; 'I am afraid of death; but there are things worse
+than death, and if I die, I die.'</p>
+
+<p>Even a Staupitz could not but feel that he had an extraordinary youth in
+his charge. To divert his mind from feeding upon itself, he devised a
+mission for him abroad, and brother Martin was despatched on business of
+the convent to Rome.</p>
+
+<p>Luther too, like Erasmus, was to see Rome; but how different the figures
+of the two men there! Erasmus goes with servants and horses, the
+polished, successful man of the world. Martin Luther trudges penniless
+and barefoot across the Alps, helped to a meal and a night's rest at the
+monasteries along the road, or begging, if the convents fail him, at the
+farm-houses.</p>
+
+<p>He was still young, and too much occupied with his own sins to know much
+of the world outside him. Erasmus had no dreams. He knew the hard truth
+on most things. But<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span> Rome, to Luther's eager hopes, was the city of the
+saints, and the court and palace of the Pope fragrant with the odours of
+Paradise. 'Blessed Rome,' he cried, as he entered the gate&mdash;'Blessed
+Rome, sanctified with the blood of martyrs!'</p>
+
+<p>Alas! the Rome of reality was very far from blessed. He remained long
+enough to complete his disenchantment. The cardinals, with their gilded
+chariots and their parasols of peacocks' plumes, were poor
+representatives of the apostles. The gorgeous churches and more gorgeous
+rituals, the pagan splendour of the paintings, the heathen gods still
+almost worshipped in the adoration of the art which had formed them, to
+Luther, whose heart was heavy with thoughts of man's depravity, were
+utterly horrible. The name of religion was there: the thinnest veil was
+scarcely spread over the utter disbelief with which God and Christ were
+at heart regarded. Culture enough there was. It was the Rome of Raphael
+and Michael Angelo, of Perugino, and Benvenuto; but to the poor German
+monk, who had come there to find help for his suffering soul, what was
+culture?</p>
+
+<p>He fled at the first moment that he could. 'Adieu! Rome,' he said; 'let
+all who would lead a holy life depart from Rome. Everything is permitted
+in Rome except to be an honest man.' He had no thought of leaving the
+Roman Church. To a poor monk like him, to talk of leaving the Church was
+like talking of leaping off the planet. But perplexed and troubled he
+returned to Saxony; and his friend Staupitz, seeing clearly that a
+monastery was no place for him, recommended him to the Elector as
+Professor of Philosophy at Wittenberg.</p>
+
+<p>The senate of Wittenberg gave him the pulpit of the town church, and
+there at once he had room to show what was in him. 'This monk,' said
+some one who heard him, 'is a marvellous fellow. He has strange eyes,
+and will give the doctors trouble by-and-by.'</p>
+
+<p>He had read deeply, especially he had read that rare and almost unknown
+book, the 'New Testament.' He was not cultivated like Erasmus. Erasmus
+spoke the most polished Latin. Luther spoke and wrote his own vernacular
+German. The latitudinarian philosophy, the analytical acuteness, the
+sceptical toleration of Erasmus were alike strange and distasteful to
+him. In all things he longed only to know the truth&mdash;to shake off and
+hurl from him lies and humbug.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Superstitious he was. He believed in witches and devils and fairies&mdash;a
+thousand things without basis in fact, which Erasmus passed by in
+contemptuous indifference. But for things which were really true&mdash;true
+as nothing else in this world, or any world, is true&mdash;the justice of
+God, the infinite excellence of good, the infinite hatefulness of
+evil&mdash;these things he believed and felt with a power of passionate
+conviction to which the broader, feebler mind of the other was for ever
+a stranger.</p>
+
+<p>We come now to the memorable year 1517, when Luther was thirty-five
+years old. A new cathedral was in progress at Rome. Michael Angelo had
+furnished Leo the Tenth with the design of St. Peter's; and the question
+of questions was to find money to complete the grandest structure which
+had ever been erected by man.</p>
+
+<p>Pope Leo was the most polished and cultivated of mankind. The work to be
+done was to be the most splendid which art could produce. The means to
+which the Pope had recourse will serve to show us how much all that
+would have done for us.</p>
+
+<p>You remember what I told you about indulgences. The notable device of
+his Holiness was to send distinguished persons about Europe with sacks
+of indulgences. Indulgences and dispensations! Dispensations to eat meat
+on fast-days&mdash;dispensations to marry one's near relation&mdash;dispensations
+for anything and everything which the faithful might wish to purchase
+who desired forbidden pleasures. The dispensations were simply
+scandalous. The indulgences&mdash;well, if a pious Catholic is asked nowadays
+what they were, he will say that they were the remission of the penances
+which the Church inflicts upon earth; but it is also certain that they
+would have sold cheap if the people had thought that this was all that
+they were to get by them. As the thing was represented by the spiritual
+hawkers who disposed of these wares, they were letters of credit on
+heaven. When the great book was opened, the people believed that these
+papers would be found entire on the right side of the account.
+Debtor&mdash;so many murders, so many robberies, lies, slanders, or
+debaucheries. Creditor&mdash;the merits of the saints placed to the account
+of the delinquent by the Pope's letters, in consideration of value
+received.</p>
+
+<p>This is the way in which the pardon system was practically<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span> worked. This
+is the way in which it is worked still, where the same superstitions
+remain.</p>
+
+<p>If one had asked Pope Leo whether he really believed in these pardons of
+his, he would have said officially that the Church had always held that
+the Pope had power to grant them.</p>
+
+<p>Had he told the truth, he would have added privately that if the people
+chose to be fools, it was not for him to disappoint them.</p>
+
+<p>The collection went on. The money of the faithful came in plentifully;
+and the pedlars going their rounds appeared at last in Saxony.</p>
+
+<p>The Pope had bought the support of the Archbishop of Mayence, Erasmus's
+friend, by promising him half the spoil which was gathered in his
+province. The agent was the Dominican monk Tetzel, whose name has
+acquired a forlorn notoriety in European history.</p>
+
+<p>His stores were opened in town after town. He entered in state. The
+streets everywhere were hung with flags. Bells were pealed; nuns and
+monks walked in procession before and after him, while he himself sate
+in a chariot, with the Papal Bull on a velvet cushion in front of him.
+The sale-rooms were the churches. The altars were decorated, the candles
+lighted, the arms of St. Peter blazoned conspicuously on the roof.
+Tetzel from the pulpit explained the efficacy of his medicines; and if
+any profane person doubted their power, he was threatened with
+excommunication.</p>
+
+<p>Acolytes walked through the crowds, clinking their plates and crying,
+'Buy! buy!' The business went as merry as a marriage bell till the
+Dominican came near to Wittenberg.</p>
+
+<p>Half a century before, such a spectacle would have excited no particular
+attention. The few who saw through the imposition would have kept their
+thoughts to themselves; the many would have paid their money, and in a
+month all would have been forgotten.</p>
+
+<p>But the fight between the men of letters and the monks, the writings of
+Erasmus and Reuchlin, the satires of Ulric von Hutten, had created a
+silent revolution in the minds of the younger laity.</p>
+
+<p>A generation had grown to manhood of whom the Church authorities knew
+nothing; and the whole air of Germany, unsuspected by pope or prelate,
+was charged with electricity.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Had Luther stood alone, he, too, would probably have remained silent.
+What was he, a poor, friendless, solitary monk, that he should set
+himself against the majesty of the triple crown?</p>
+
+<p>However hateful the walls of a dungeon, a man of sense confined alone
+there does not dash his hands against the stones.</p>
+
+<p>But Luther knew that his thoughts were the thoughts of thousands. Many
+wrong things, as we all know, have to be endured in this world.
+Authority is never very angelic; and moderate injustice, a moderate
+quantity of lies, is more tolerable than anarchy.</p>
+
+<p>But it is with human things as it is with the great icebergs which drift
+southward out of the frozen seas. They swim two-thirds under water, and
+one-third above; and so long as the equilibrium is sustained, you would
+think that they were as stable as the rocks. But the sea-water is warmer
+than the air. Hundreds of fathoms down, the tepid current washes the
+base of the berg. Silently in those far deeps the centre of gravity is
+changed; and then, in a moment, with one vast roll, the enormous mass
+heaves over, and the crystal peaks which had been glancing so proudly in
+the sunlight, are buried in the ocean for ever.</p>
+
+<p>Such a process as this had been going on in Germany, and Luther knew it,
+and knew that the time was come for him to speak. Fear had not kept him
+back. The danger to himself would be none the less because he would have
+the people at his side. The fiercer the thunderstorm, the greater peril
+to the central figure who stands out above the rest exposed to it. But
+he saw that there was hope at last of a change; and for himself&mdash;as he
+said in the plague&mdash;if he died, he died.</p>
+
+<p>Erasmus admitted frankly for himself that he did not like danger.</p>
+
+<p>'As to me,' he wrote to Archbishop Warham, 'I have no inclination to
+risk my life for truth. We have not all strength for martyrdom; and if
+trouble come, I shall imitate St. Peter. Popes and emperors must settle
+the creeds. If they settle them well, so much the better; if ill, I
+shall keep on the safe side.'</p>
+
+<p>That is to say, truth was not the first necessity to Erasmus. He would
+prefer truth, if he could have it. If not, he could get on moderately
+well upon falsehood. Luther could<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span> not. No matter what the danger to
+himself, if he could smite a lie upon the head and kill it, he was
+better pleased than by a thousand lives. We hear much of Luther's
+doctrine about faith. Stripped of theological verbiage, that doctrine
+means this.</p>
+
+<p>Reason says that, on the whole, truth and justice are desirable things.
+They make men happier in themselves, and make society more prosperous.
+But there reason ends, and men will not die for principles of utility.
+Faith says that between truth and lies, there is an infinite difference:
+one is of God, the other of Satan; one is eternally to be loved, the
+other eternally to be abhorred. It cannot say why, in language
+intelligible to reason. It is the voice of the nobler nature in man
+speaking out of his heart.</p>
+
+<p>While Tetzel, with his bull and his gilt car, was coming to Wittenberg,
+Luther, loyal still to authority while there was a hope that authority
+would be on the side of right, wrote to the Archbishop of Mayence to
+remonstrate.</p>
+
+<p>The archbishop, as we know, was to have a share of Tetzel's spoils; and
+what were the complaints of a poor insignificant monk to a supreme
+archbishop who was in debt and wanted money?</p>
+
+<p>The Archbishop of Mayence flung the letter into his waste-paper basket;
+and Luther made his solemn appeal from earthly dignitaries to the
+conscience of the German people. He set up his protest on the church
+door at Wittenberg; and, in ninety-five propositions he challenged the
+Catholic Church to defend Tetzel and his works.</p>
+
+<p>The Pope's indulgences, he said, cannot take away sins. God alone remits
+sins; and He pardons those who are penitent, without help from man's
+absolutions.</p>
+
+<p>The Church may remit penalties which the Church inflicts. But the
+Church's power is in this world only, and does not reach to purgatory.</p>
+
+<p>If God has thought fit to place a man in purgatory, who shall say that
+it is good for him to be taken out of purgatory? who shall say that he
+himself desires it?</p>
+
+<p>True repentance does not shrink from chastisement. True repentance
+rather loves chastisement.</p>
+
+<p>The bishops are asleep. It is better to give to the poor than to buy
+indulgences; and he who sees his neighbour in want, and instead of
+helping his neighbour buys a pardon for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span> himself, is doing what is
+displeasing to God. Who is this man who dares to say that for so many
+crowns the soul of a sinner can be made whole?</p>
+
+<p>These, and like these, were Luther's propositions. Little guessed the
+Catholic prelates the dimensions of the act which had been done. The
+Pope, when he saw the theses, smiled in good-natured contempt. 'A
+drunken German wrote them,' he said; 'when he has slept off his wine, he
+will be of another mind.'</p>
+
+<p>Tetzel bayed defiance; the Dominican friars took up the quarrel; and
+Hochstrat of Cologne, Reuchlin's enemy, clamoured for fire and faggot.</p>
+
+<p>Voice answered voice. The religious houses all Germany over were like
+kennels of hounds howling to each other across the spiritual waste. If
+souls could not be sung out of purgatory, their occupation was gone.</p>
+
+<p>Luther wrote to Pope Leo to defend himself; Leo cited him to answer for
+his audacity at Rome; while to the young laymen, to the noble spirits
+all Europe over, Wittenberg became a beacon of light shining in the
+universal darkness.</p>
+
+<p>It was a trying time to Luther. Had he been a smaller man, he would have
+been swept away by his sudden popularity&mdash;he would have placed himself
+at the head of some great democratic movement, and in a few years his
+name would have disappeared in the noise and smoke of anarchy.</p>
+
+<p>But this was not his nature. His fellow-townsmen were heartily on his
+side. He remained quietly at his post in the Augustine Church at
+Wittenberg. If the powers of the world came down upon him and killed
+him, he was ready to be killed. Of himself at all times he thought
+infinitely little; and he believed that his death would be as
+serviceable to truth as his life.</p>
+
+<p>Killed undoubtedly he would have been if the clergy could have had their
+way. It happened, however, that Saxony just then was governed by a
+prince of no common order. Were all princes like the Elector Frederick,
+we should have no need of democracy in this world&mdash;we should never have
+heard of democracy. The clergy could not touch Luther against the will
+of the Wittenberg senate, unless the Elector would help them; and, to
+the astonishment of everybody, the Elector was disinclined to consent.
+The Pope himself wrote to exhort him to his duties. The Elector still
+hesitated.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span> His professed creed was the creed in which the Church had
+educated him; but he had a clear secular understanding outside his
+formulas. When he read the <ins class="cor" title="Original: popositions.">propositions</ins>, they did not seem to him the
+pernicious things which the monks said they were. 'There is much in the
+Bible about Christ,' he said, 'but not much about Rome.' He sent for
+Erasmus, and asked him what he thought about the matter.</p>
+
+<p>The Elector knew to whom he was speaking. He wished for a direct answer,
+and looked Erasmus full and broad in the face. Erasmus pinched his thin
+lips together. 'Luther,' he said at length, 'has committed two sins: he
+has touched the Pope's crown and the monks' bellies.'</p>
+
+<p>He generously and strongly urged Frederick not to yield for the present
+to Pope Leo's importunacy; and the Pope was obliged to try less hasty
+and more formal methods.</p>
+
+<p>He had wished Luther to be sent to him to Rome, where his process would
+have had a rapid end. As this could not be, the case was transferred to
+Augsburg, and a cardinal legate was sent from Italy to look into it.</p>
+
+<p>There was no danger of violence at Augsburg. The townspeople there and
+everywhere were on the side of freedom; and Luther went cheerfully to
+defend himself. He walked from Wittenberg. You can fancy him still in
+his monk's brown frock, with all his wardrobe on his back&mdash;an apostle of
+the old sort. The citizens, high and low, attended him to the gates, and
+followed him along the road, crying 'Luther for ever!' 'Nay,' he
+answered, 'Christ for ever!'</p>
+
+<p>The cardinal legate, being reduced to the necessity of politeness,
+received him civilly. He told him, however, simply and briefly, that the
+Pope insisted on his recantation, and would accept nothing else. Luther
+requested the cardinal to point out to him where he was wrong. The
+cardinal waived discussion. 'He was come to command,' he said, 'not to
+argue.' And Luther had to tell him that it could not be.</p>
+
+<p>Remonstrances, threats, entreaties, even bribes were tried. Hopes of
+high distinction and reward were held out to him if he would only be
+reasonable. To the amazement of the proud Italian, a poor peasant's
+son&mdash;a miserable friar of a provincial German town&mdash;was prepared to defy
+the power and resist the prayers of the Sovereign of Christendom.
+'What!' said the cardinal at last to him, 'do you think the Pope<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span> cares
+for the opinion of a German boor? The Pope's little finger is stronger
+than all Germany. Do you expect your princes to take up arms to defend
+<i>you</i>&mdash;<i>you</i>, a wretched worm like you? I tell you, No! and where will
+you be then&mdash;where will you be then?'</p>
+
+<p>Luther answered, 'Then, as now, in the hands of Almighty God.'</p>
+
+<p>The Court dissolved. The cardinal carried back his report to his master.
+The Pope, so defied, brought out his thunders; he excommunicated Luther;
+he wrote again to the elector, entreating him not to soil his name and
+lineage by becoming a protector of heretics; and he required him,
+without further ceremony, to render up the criminal to justice.</p>
+
+<p>The elector's power was limited. As yet, the quarrel was simply between
+Luther and the Pope. The elector was by no means sure that his bold
+subject was right&mdash;he was only not satisfied that he was wrong&mdash;and it
+was a serious question with him how far he ought to go. The monk might
+next be placed under the ban of the empire; and if he persisted in
+protecting him afterwards, Saxony might have all the power of Germany
+upon it. He did not venture any more to refuse absolutely. He temporised
+and delayed; while Luther himself, probably at the elector's
+instigation, made overtures for peace to the Pope. Saving his duty to
+Christ, he promised to be for the future an obedient son of the Church,
+and to say no more about indulgences if Tetzel ceased to defend them.</p>
+
+<p>'My being such a small creature,' Luther said afterwards, 'was a
+misfortune for the Pope. He despised me too much! What, he thought,
+could a slave like me do to him&mdash;to him, who was the greatest man in all
+the world. Had he accepted my proposal, he would have extinguished me.'</p>
+
+<p>But the infallible Pope conducted himself like a proud, irascible,
+exceedingly fallible mortal. To make terms with the town preacher of
+Wittenberg was too preposterous.</p>
+
+<p>Just then the imperial throne fell vacant; and the pretty scandal I told
+you of, followed at the choice of his successor. Frederick of Saxony
+might have been elected if he had liked&mdash;and it would have been better
+for the world perhaps if Frederick had been more ambitious of high
+dignities&mdash;but the Saxon Prince did not care to trouble himself with the
+imperial sceptre. The election fell on Maximilian's grandson<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span>
+Charles&mdash;grandson also of Ferdinand the Catholic&mdash;Sovereign of Spain;
+Sovereign of Burgundy and the Low Countries; Sovereign of Naples and
+Sicily; Sovereign, beyond the Atlantic, of the New Empire of the Indies.</p>
+
+<p>No fitter man could have been found to do the business of the Pope. With
+the empire of Germany added to his inherited dominions, who could resist
+him?</p>
+
+<p>To the new emperor, unless the elector yielded, Luther's case had now to
+be referred.</p>
+
+<p>The elector, if he had wished, could not interfere. Germany was
+attentive, but motionless. The students, the artisans, the tradesmen,
+were at heart with the Reformer; and their enthusiasm could not be
+wholly repressed. The press grew fertile with pamphlets; and it was
+noticed that all the printers and compositors went for Luther. The
+Catholics could not get their books into type without sending them to
+France or the Low Countries.</p>
+
+<p>Yet none of the princes except the elector had as yet shown him favour.
+The bishops were hostile to a man. The nobles had given no sign; and
+their place would be naturally on the side of authority. They had no
+love for bishops&mdash;there was hope in that; and they looked with no favour
+on the huge estates of the religious orders. But no one could expect
+that they would peril their lands and lives for an insignificant monk.</p>
+
+<p>There was an interval of two years before the emperor was at leisure to
+take up the question. The time was spent in angry altercation, boding no
+good for the future.</p>
+
+<p>The Pope issued a second bull condemning Luther and his works. Luther
+replied by burning the bull in the great square at Wittenberg.</p>
+
+<p>At length, in April 1521, the Diet of the Empire assembled at Worms, and
+Luther was called to defend himself in the presence of Charles the
+Fifth.</p>
+
+<p>That it should have come to this at all, in days of such high-handed
+authority, was sufficiently remarkable. It indicated something growing
+in the minds of men, that the so-called Church was not to carry things
+any longer in the old style. Popes and bishops might order, but the
+laity intended for the future to have opinions of their own how far such
+orders should be obeyed.</p>
+
+<p>The Pope expected anyhow that the Diet, by fair means or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span> foul, would
+now rid him of his adversary. The elector, who knew the ecclesiastical
+ways of handling such matters, made it a condition of his subject
+appearing, that he should have a safe conduct, under the emperor's hand;
+that Luther, if judgment went against him, should be free for the time
+to return to the place from which he had come; and that he, the elector,
+should determine afterwards what should be done with him.</p>
+
+<p>When the interests of the Church were concerned, safe conducts, it was
+too well known, were poor security. Pope Clement the Seventh, a little
+after, when reproached for breaking a promise, replied with a smile,
+'The Pope has power to bind and to loose.' Good, in the eyes of
+ecclesiastical authorities, meant what was good for the Church; evil,
+whatever was bad for the Church; and the highest moral obligation became
+sin when it stood in St. Peter's way.</p>
+
+<p>There had been an outburst of free thought in Bohemia a century and a
+half before. John Huss, Luther's forerunner, came with a safe conduct to
+the Council of Constance; but the bishops ruled that safe conducts could
+not protect heretics. They burnt John Huss for all their promises, and
+they hoped now that so good a Catholic as Charles would follow so
+excellent a precedent. Pope Leo wrote himself to beg that Luther's safe
+conduct should not be observed. The bishops and archbishops, when
+Charles consulted them, took the same view as the Pope.</p>
+
+<p>'There is something in the office of a bishop,' Luther said, a year or
+two later, 'which is dreadfully demoralising. Even good men change their
+natures at their consecration; Satan enters into them as he entered into
+Judas, as soon as they have taken the sop.'</p>
+
+<p>It was most seriously likely that, if Luther trusted himself at the Diet
+on the faith of his safe conduct, he would never return alive. Rumours
+of intended treachery were so strong, that if he refused to go, the
+elector meant to stand by him at any cost. Should he appear, or not
+appear? It was for himself to decide. If he stayed away, judgment would
+go against him by default. Charles would call out the forces of the
+empire, and Saxony would be invaded.</p>
+
+<p>Civil war would follow, with insurrection all over Germany, with no
+certain prospect except bloodshed and misery.</p>
+
+<p>Luther was not a man to expose his country to peril that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span> his own person
+might escape. He had provoked the storm; and if blood was to be shed,
+his blood ought at least to be the first. He went. On his way, a friend
+came to warn him again that foul play was intended, that he was
+condemned already, that his books had been burnt by the hangman, and
+that he was a dead man if he proceeded.</p>
+
+<p>Luther trembled&mdash;he owned it&mdash;but he answered, 'Go to Worms! I will go
+if there are as many devils in Worms as there are tiles upon the roofs
+of the houses.'</p>
+
+<p>The roofs, when he came into the city, were crowded, not with devils,
+but with the inhabitants, all collecting there to see him as he passed.
+A nobleman gave him shelter for the night; the next day he was led to
+the Town Hall.</p>
+
+<p>No more notable spectacle had been witnessed in this planet for many a
+century&mdash;not, perhaps, since a greater than Luther stood before the
+Roman Procurator.</p>
+
+<p>There on the raised dais sate the sovereign of half the world. There on
+either side of him stood the archbishops, the ministers of state, the
+princes of the empire, gathered together to hear and judge the son of a
+poor miner, who had made the world ring with his name.</p>
+
+<p>The body of the hall was thronged with knights and nobles&mdash;stern hard
+men in dull gleaming armour. Luther, in his brown frock, was led forward
+between their ranks. The looks which greeted him were not all
+unfriendly. The first Article of a German credo was belief in <i>courage</i>.
+Germany had had its feuds in times past with Popes of Rome, and they
+were not without pride that a poor countryman of theirs should have
+taken by the beard the great Italian priest. They had settled among
+themselves that, come what would, there should be fair play; and they
+looked on half admiring, and half in scorn.</p>
+
+<p>As Luther passed up the hall, a steel baron touched him on the shoulder
+with his gauntlet.</p>
+
+<p>'Pluck up thy spirit, little monk;' he said, 'some of us here have seen
+warm work in our time, but, by my troth, nor I nor any knight in this
+company ever needed a stout heart more than thou needest it now. If thou
+hast faith in these doctrines of thine, little monk, go on, in the name
+of God.'</p>
+
+<p>'Yes, in the name of God,' said Luther, throwing back his head, 'In the
+name of God, forward!'</p>
+
+<p>As at Augsburg, one only question was raised. Luther<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span> had broken the
+laws of the Church. He had taught doctrines which the Pope had declared
+to be false. Would he or would he not retract?</p>
+
+<p>As at Augsburg, he replied briefly that he would retract when his
+doctrines were not declared to be false merely, but were proved to be
+false. Then, but not till then. That was his answer, and his last word.</p>
+
+<p>There, as you understand, the heart of the matter indeed rested. In
+those words lay the whole meaning of the Reformation. Were men to go on
+for ever saying that this and that was true, because the Pope affirmed
+it? Or were Popes' decrees thenceforward to be tried like the words of
+other men&mdash;by the ordinary laws of evidence?</p>
+
+<p>It required no great intellect to understand that a Pope's pardon, which
+you could buy for five shillings, could not really get a soul out of
+purgatory. It required a quality much rarer than intellect to look such
+a doctrine in the face&mdash;sanctioned as it was by the credulity of ages,
+and backed by the pomp and pageantry of earthly power&mdash;and say to it
+openly, 'You are a lie.' Cleverness and culture could have given a
+thousand reasons&mdash;they did then and they do now&mdash;why an indulgence
+should be believed in; when honesty and common sense could give but one
+reason for thinking otherwise. Cleverness and imposture get on
+excellently well together&mdash;imposture and veracity, never.</p>
+
+<p>Luther looked at those wares of Tetzel's, and said, 'Your pardons are no
+pardons at all&mdash;no letters of credit on heaven, but flash notes of the
+Bank of Humbug, and you know it.' They did know it. The conscience of
+every man in Europe answered back, that what Luther said was true.</p>
+
+<p>Bravery, honesty, veracity, these were the qualities which were
+needed&mdash;which were needed then, and are needed always, as the root of
+all real greatness in man.</p>
+
+<p>The first missionaries of Christianity, when they came among the heathen
+nations, and found them worshipping idols, did not care much to reason
+that an image which man had made could not be God. The priests might
+have been a match for them in reasoning. They walked up to the idol in
+the presence of its votaries. They threw stones at it, spat upon it,
+insulted it. 'See,' they said, 'I do this to your God. If he is God, let
+him avenge himself.'</p>
+
+<p>It was a simple argument; always effective; easy, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span> yet most
+difficult. It required merely a readiness to be killed upon the spot by
+the superstition which is outraged.</p>
+
+<p>And so, and only so, can truth make its way for us in any such matters.
+The form changes&mdash;the thing remains. Superstition, folly, and cunning
+will go on to the end of time, spinning their poison webs around the
+consciences of mankind. Courage and veracity&mdash;these qualities, and only
+these, avail to defeat them.</p>
+
+<p>From the moment that Luther left the emperor's presence a free man, the
+spell of Absolutism was broken, and the victory of the Reformation
+secured. The ban of the Pope had fallen; the secular arm had been called
+to interfere; the machinery of authority strained as far as it would
+bear. The emperor himself was an unconscious convert to the higher
+creed. The Pope had urged him to break his word. The Pope had told him
+that honour was nothing, and morality was nothing, where the interests
+of orthodoxy were compromised. The emperor had refused to be tempted
+into perjury; and, in refusing, had admitted that there was a spiritual
+power upon the earth, above the Pope, and above him.</p>
+
+<p>The party of the Church felt it so. A plot was formed to assassinate
+Luther on his return to Saxony. The insulted majesty of Rome could be
+vindicated at least by the dagger.</p>
+
+<p>But this, too, failed. The elector heard what was intended. A party of
+horse, disguised as banditti, waylaid the Reformer upon the road, and
+carried him off to the castle of Wartburg, where he remained out of
+harm's way till the general rising of Germany placed him beyond the
+reach of danger.</p>
+
+<p>At Wartburg for the present evening we leave him.</p>
+
+<p>The Emperor Charles and Luther never met again. The monks of Yuste, who
+watched on the deathbed of Charles, reported that at the last hour he
+repented that he had kept his word, and reproached himself for having
+allowed the arch-heretic to escape from his hands.</p>
+
+<p>It is possible that, when the candle of life was burning low, and spirit
+and flesh were failing together, and the air of the sick room was thick
+and close with the presence of the angel of death, the nobler nature of
+the emperor might have yielded to the influences which were around him.
+His confessor might have thrust into his lips the words which he so
+wished to hear.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>But Charles the Fifth, though a Catholic always, was a Catholic of the
+old grand type, to whom creed and dogmas were but the robe of a regal
+humanity. Another story is told of Charles&mdash;an authentic story this
+one&mdash;which makes me think that the monks of Yuste mistook or maligned
+him. Six and twenty years after this scene at Worms, when the then
+dawning heresy had become broad day; when Luther had gone to his
+rest&mdash;and there had gathered about his name the hate which mean men feel
+for an enemy who has proved too strong for them&mdash;a passing vicissitude
+in the struggle brought the emperor at the head of his army to
+Wittenberg.</p>
+
+<p>The vengeance which the monks could not inflict upon him in life, they
+proposed to wreak upon his bones.</p>
+
+<p>The emperor desired to be conducted to Luther's tomb; and as he stood
+gazing at it, full of many thoughts, some one suggested that the body
+should be taken up and burnt at the stake in the Market Place.</p>
+
+<p>There was nothing unusual in the proposal; it was the common practice of
+the Catholic Church with the remains of heretics who were held unworthy
+to be left in repose in hallowed ground. There was scarcely, perhaps,
+another Catholic prince who would have hesitated to comply. But Charles
+was one of nature's gentlemen; he answered, 'I war not with the dead.'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h3><a name="lect_3" id="lect_3"></a>LECTURE III.</h3>
+
+<p>We have now entered upon the movement which broke the power of the
+Papacy&mdash;which swept Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, England,
+Scotland, into the stream of revolution, and gave a new direction to the
+spiritual history of mankind.</p>
+
+<p>You would not thank me if I were to take you out into that troubled
+ocean. I confine myself, and I wish you to confine your attention, to
+the two kinds of men who appear as leaders in times of change&mdash;of whom
+Erasmus and Luther are respectively the types.</p>
+
+<p>On one side there are the large-minded latitudinarian philosophers&mdash;men
+who have no confidence in the people&mdash;who have no passionate
+convictions; moderate men, tolerant men, who trust to education, to
+general progress in knowledge and civilisation, to forbearance, to
+endurance, to time&mdash;men who believe that all wholesome reforms proceed
+downwards from the educated to the multitudes; who regard with contempt,
+qualified by terror, appeals to the popular conscience or to popular
+intelligence.</p>
+
+<p>Opposite to these are the men of faith&mdash;and by faith I do not mean
+belief in dogmas, but belief in goodness, belief in justice, in
+righteousness, above all, belief in truth. Men of faith consider
+conscience of more importance than knowledge&mdash;or rather as a first
+condition&mdash;without which all the knowledge in the world is no use to a
+man&mdash;if he wishes to be indeed a man in any high and noble sense of the
+word. They are not contented with looking for what may be useful or
+pleasant to themselves; they look by quite other methods for what is
+honourable&mdash;for what is good&mdash;for what is just. They believe that if
+they can find out that, then at all hazards, and in spite of all present
+consequences to themselves, that is to be preferred. If, individually
+and to themselves, no visible good ever came from it, in this world or
+in any other,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span> still they would say, 'Let us do that and nothing else.
+Life will be of no value to us if we are to use it only for our own
+gratification.'</p>
+
+<p>The soldier before a battle knows that if he shirks and pretends to be
+ill, he may escape danger and make sure of his life. There are very few
+men, indeed, if it comes to that, who would not sooner die ten times
+over than so dishonour themselves. Men of high moral nature carry out
+the same principle into the details of their daily life; they do not
+care to live unless they may live nobly. Like my uncle Toby, they have
+but one fear&mdash;the fear of doing a wrong thing.</p>
+
+<p>I call this faith, because there is no proof, such as will satisfy the
+scientific enquirer, that there is any such thing as moral truth&mdash;any
+such thing as absolute right and wrong at all. As the Scripture says,
+'Verily, thou art a God that hidest thyself.' The forces of nature pay
+no respect to what we call good and evil. Prosperity does not uniformly
+follow virtue; nor are defeat and failure necessary consequences of
+vice.</p>
+
+<p>Certain virtues&mdash;temperance, industry, and things within reasonable
+limits&mdash;command their reward. Sensuality, idleness, and waste, commonly
+lead to ruin.</p>
+
+<p>But prosperity is consistent with intense worldliness, intense
+selfishness, intense hardness of heart; while the grander features of
+human character&mdash;self-sacrifice, disregard of pleasure, patriotism, love
+of knowledge, devotion to any great and good cause&mdash;these have no
+tendency to bring men what is called fortune. They do not even
+necessarily promote their happiness; for do what they will in this way,
+the horizon of what they desire to do perpetually flies before them.
+High hopes and enthusiasms are generally disappointed in results; and
+the wrongs, the cruelties, the wretchednesses of all kinds which for
+ever prevail among mankind&mdash;the shortcomings in himself of which he
+becomes more conscious as he becomes really better&mdash;these things, you
+may be sure, will prevent a noble-minded man from ever being
+particularly happy.</p>
+
+<p>If you see a man happy, as the world goes&mdash;contented with himself and
+contented with what is round him&mdash;such a man may be, and probably is,
+decent and respectable; but the highest is not in him, and the highest
+will not come out of him.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Judging merely by outward phenomena&mdash;judging merely by what we call
+reason&mdash;you cannot prove that there is any moral government in the world
+at all, except what men, for their own convenience, introduce into it.
+Right and wrong resolve themselves into principles of utility and social
+convenience. Enlightened selfishness prescribes a decent rule of conduct
+for common purposes; and virtue, by a large school of philosophy, is
+completely resolved into that.</p>
+
+<p>True, when nations go on long on the selfish hypothesis, they are apt to
+find at last that they have been mistaken. They find it in bankruptcy of
+honour and character&mdash;in social wreck and dissolution. All lies in
+serious matters end at last, as Carlyle says, in broken heads. That is
+the final issue which they are sure to come to in the long run. The
+Maker of the world does not permit a society to continue which forgets
+or denies the nobler principles of action.</p>
+
+<p>But the end is often long in coming; and these nobler principles are
+meanwhile <i>not</i> provided for us by the inductive philosophy.</p>
+
+<p>Patriotism, for instance, of which we used to think something&mdash;a
+readiness to devote our energies while we live, to devote our lives, if
+nothing else will serve, to what we call our country&mdash;what are we to say
+of that?</p>
+
+<p>I once asked a distinguished philosopher what he thought of patriotism.
+He said he thought it was a compound of vanity and superstition; a bad
+kind of prejudice, which would die out with the growth of reason. My
+friend believed in the progress of humanity&mdash;he could not narrow his
+sympathies to so small a thing as his own country. I could but say to
+myself, 'Thank God, then, we are not yet a nation of philosophers.'</p>
+
+<p>A man who takes up with philosophy like that, may write fine books, and
+review articles and such like, but at the bottom of him he is a poor
+caitiff, and there is no more to be said about him.</p>
+
+<p>So when the air is heavy with imposture, and men live only to make
+money, and the service of God is become a thing of words and ceremonies,
+and the kingdom of heaven is bought and sold, and all that is high and
+pure in man is smothered by corruption&mdash;fire of the same kind bursts out
+in higher natures with a fierceness which cannot be controlled; and,
+confident in truth and right, they call fearlessly on the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span> seven
+thousand in Israel who have not bowed the knee to Baal to rise and stand
+by them.</p>
+
+<p>They do not ask whether those whom they address have wide knowledge of
+history, or science, or philosophy; they ask rather that they shall be
+honest, that they shall be brave, that they shall be true to the common
+light which God has given to all His children. They know well that
+conscience is no exceptional privilege of the great or the cultivated,
+that to be generous and unselfish is no prerogative of rank or
+intellect.</p>
+
+<p>Erasmus considered that, for the vulgar, a lie might be as good as
+truth, and often better. A lie, ascertained to be a lie, to Luther was
+deadly poison&mdash;poison to him, and poison to all who meddled with it. In
+his own genuine greatness, he was too humble to draw insolent
+distinctions in his own favour; or to believe that any one class on
+earth is of more importance than another in the eyes of the Great Maker
+of them all.</p>
+
+<p>Well, then, you know what I mean by faith, and what I mean by intellect.
+It was not that Luther was without intellect. He was less subtle, less
+learned, than Erasmus; but in mother wit, in elasticity, in force, and
+imaginative power, he was as able a man as ever lived. Luther created
+the German language as an instrument of literature. His translation of
+the Bible is as rich and grand as our own, and his table talk as full of
+matter as Shakespeare's plays.</p>
+
+<p>Again; you will mistake me if you think I represent Erasmus as a man
+without conscience, or belief in God and goodness. But in Luther that
+belief was a certainty; in Erasmus it was only a high probability&mdash;and
+the difference between the two is not merely great, it is infinite. In
+Luther, it was the root; in Erasmus, it was the flower. In Luther, it
+was the first principle of life; in Erasmus, it was an inference which
+might be taken away, and yet leave the world a very tolerable and
+habitable place after all.</p>
+
+<p>You see the contrast in their early lives. You see Erasmus&mdash;light,
+bright, sarcastic, fond of pleasure, fond of society, fond of wine and
+kisses, and intellectual talk and polished company. You see Luther
+throwing himself into the cloister, that he might subdue his will to the
+will of God; prostrate in prayer, in nights of agony, and distracting
+his easy-going confessor with the exaggerated scruples of his
+conscience.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>You see it in the effects of their teaching. You see Erasmus addressing
+himself with persuasive eloquence to kings, and popes, and prelates; and
+for answer, you see Pope Leo sending Tetzel over Germany with his
+carriage-load of indulgences. You see Erasmus's dearest friend, our own
+gifted admirable Sir Thomas More, taking his seat beside the bishops and
+sending poor Protestant artisans to the stake.</p>
+
+<p>You see Luther, on the other side, standing out before the world, one
+lone man, with all authority against him&mdash;taking lies by the throat, and
+Europe thrilling at his words, and saying after him, 'The reign of
+Imposture shall end.'</p>
+
+<p>Let us follow the course of Erasmus after the tempest had broken.</p>
+
+<p>He knew Luther to be right. Luther had but said what Erasmus had been
+all his life convinced of, and Luther looked to see him come forward and
+take his place at his side. Had Erasmus done so, the course of things
+would have been far happier and better. His prodigious reputation would
+have given the Reformers the influence with the educated which they had
+won for themselves with the multitude, and the Pope would have been left
+without a friend to the north of the Alps. But there would have been
+some danger&mdash;danger to the leaders, if certainty of triumph to the
+cause&mdash;and Erasmus had no gift for martyrdom.</p>
+
+<p>His first impulse was generous. He encouraged the elector, as we have
+seen, to protect Luther from the Pope. 'I looked on Luther,' he wrote to
+Duke George of Saxe, 'as a necessary evil in the corruption of the
+Church; a medicine, bitter and drastic, from which sounder health would
+follow.'</p>
+
+<p>And again, more boldly: 'Luther has taken up the cause of honesty and
+good sense against abominations which are no longer tolerable. His
+enemies are men under whose worthlessness the Christian world has
+groaned too long.'</p>
+
+<p>So to the heads of the Church he wrote, pressing them to be moderate and
+careful:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>'I neither approve Luther nor condemn him,' he said to the Archbishop of
+Mayence; 'if he is innocent, he ought not to be oppressed by the
+factions of the wicked; if he is in error, he should be answered, not
+destroyed. The theologians'&mdash;observe how true they remain to the
+universal type in all times and in all countries&mdash;'the theologians do
+not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span> try to answer him. They do but raise an insane and senseless
+clamour, and shriek and curse. Heresy, heretic, heresiarch, schismatic,
+Antichrist&mdash;these are the words which are in the mouths of all of them;
+and, of course, they condemn without reading. I warned them what they
+were doing. I told them to scream less, and to think more. Luther's life
+they admit to be innocent and blameless. Such a tragedy I never saw. The
+most humane men are thirsting for his blood, and they would rather kill
+him than mend him. The Dominicans are the worst, and are more knaves
+than fools. In old times, even a heretic was quietly listened to. If he
+recanted, he was absolved; if he persisted, he was at worst
+excommunicated. Now they will have nothing but blood. Not to agree with
+them is heresy. To know Greek is heresy. To speak good Latin is heresy.
+Whatever they do not understand is heresy. Learning, they pretend, has
+given birth to Luther, though Luther has but little of it. Luther thinks
+more of the Gospel than of scholastic divinity, and that is his crime.
+This is plain at least, that the best men everywhere are those who are
+least offended with him.'</p>
+
+<p>Even to Pope Leo, in the midst of his fury, Erasmus wrote bravely;
+separating himself from Luther, yet deprecating violence. 'Nothing,' he
+said, 'would so recommend the new teaching as the howling of fools:'
+while to a member of Charles's council he insisted that 'severity had
+been often tried in such cases and had always failed; unless Luther was
+encountered calmly and reasonably, a tremendous convulsion was
+inevitable.'</p>
+
+<p>Wisely said all this, but it presumed that those whom he was addressing
+were reasonable men; and high officials, touched in their pride, are a
+class of persons of whom Solomon may have been thinking when he said,
+'Let a bear robbed of her whelps meet a man rather than a fool in his
+folly.'</p>
+
+<p>So to Luther, so to the people, Erasmus preached moderation. It was like
+preaching to the winds in a hurricane. The typhoon itself is not wilder
+than human creatures when once their passions are stirred. You cannot
+check them; but, if you are brave, you can guide them wisely. And this,
+Erasmus had not the heart to do.</p>
+
+<p>He said at the beginning, 'I will not countenance revolt against
+authority. A bad government is better than none.'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span> But he said at the
+same time, 'You bishops, cease to be corrupt: you popes and cardinals,
+reform your wicked courts: you monks, leave your scandalous lives, and
+obey the rules of your order, so you may recover the respect of mankind,
+and be obeyed and loved as before.'</p>
+
+<p>When he found that the case was desperate; that his exhortations were
+but words addressed to the winds; that corruption had tainted the blood;
+that there was no hope except in revolution&mdash;as, indeed, in his heart he
+knew from the first that there was none&mdash;then his place ought to have
+been with Luther.</p>
+
+<p>But Erasmus, as the tempest rose, could but stand still in feeble
+uncertainty. The responsibilities of his reputation weighed him down.</p>
+
+<p>The Lutherans said, 'You believe as we do.' The Catholics said, 'You are
+a Lutheran at heart; if you are not, prove it by attacking Luther.'</p>
+
+<p>He grew impatient. He told lies. He said he had not read Luther's books,
+and had no time to read them. What was he, he said, that he should
+meddle in such a quarrel. He was the vine and the fig tree of the Book
+of Judges. The trees said to them, Rule over us. The vine and the fig
+tree answered, they would not leave their sweetness for such a thankless
+office. 'I am a poor actor,' he said; 'I prefer to be a spectator of the
+play.'</p>
+
+<p>But he was sore at heart, and bitter with disappointment. All had been
+going on so smoothly&mdash;literature was reviving, art and science were
+spreading, the mind of the world was being reformed in the best sense by
+the classics of Greece and Rome, and now an apple of discord had been
+flung out into Europe.</p>
+
+<p>The monks who had fought against enlightenment could point to the
+confusion as a fulfilment of their prophecies; and he, and all that he
+had done, was brought to disrepute.</p>
+
+<p>To protect himself from the Dominicans, he was forced to pretend to an
+orthodoxy which he did not possess. Were all true which Luther had
+written, he pretended that it ought not to have been said, or should
+have been addressed in a learned language to the refined and educated.</p>
+
+<p>He doubted whether it was not better on the whole to teach the people
+lies for their good, when truth was beyond<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span> their comprehension. Yet he
+could not for all that wish the Church to be successful.</p>
+
+<p>'I fear for that miserable Luther,' he said; 'the popes and princes are
+furious with him. His own destruction would be no great matter, but if
+the monks triumph there will be no bearing them. They will never rest
+till they have rooted learning out of the land. The Pope expects <i>me</i> to
+write against Luther. The orthodox, it appears, can call him names&mdash;call
+him blockhead, fool, heretic, toadstool, schismatic, and Antichrist&mdash;but
+they must come to me to answer his arguments.'</p>
+
+<p>'Oh! that this had never been,' he wrote to our own Archbishop Warham.
+'Now there is no hope for any good. It is all over with quiet learning,
+thought, piety, and progress; violence is on one side and folly on the
+other; and they accuse me of having caused it all. If I joined Luther I
+could only perish with him, and I do not mean to run my neck into a
+halter. Popes and emperors must decide matters. I will accept what is
+good, and do as I can with the rest. Peace on any terms is better than
+the justest war.'</p>
+
+<p>Erasmus never stooped to real baseness. He was too clever, too
+genuine&mdash;he had too great a contempt for worldly greatness. They offered
+him a bishopric if he would attack Luther. He only laughed at them. What
+was a bishopric to him? He preferred a quiet life among his books at
+Louvaine.</p>
+
+<p>But there was no more quiet for Erasmus at Louvaine or anywhere. Here is
+a scene between him and the Prior of the Dominicans in the presence of
+the Rector of the University.</p>
+
+<p>The Dominican had preached at Erasmus in the University pulpit. Erasmus
+complained to the rector, and the rector invited the Dominican to defend
+himself. Erasmus tells the story.</p>
+
+<p>'I sate on one side and the monk on the other, the rector between us to
+prevent our scratching.</p>
+
+<p>'The monk asked what the matter was, and said he had done no harm.</p>
+
+<p>'I said he had told lies of me, and that was harm.</p>
+
+<p>'It was after dinner. The holy man was flushed. He turned purple.</p>
+
+<p>'"Why do you abuse monks in your books?" he said.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>'"I spoke of your order," I answered. "I did not mention you. You
+denounced me by name as a friend of Luther."</p>
+
+<p>'He raged like a madman. "You are the cause of all this trouble," he
+said; "you are a chameleon, you can twist everything."</p>
+
+<p>'"You see what a fellow he is," said I, turning to the rector. "If it
+comes to calling names, why I can do that too; but let us be
+reasonable."</p>
+
+<p>'He still roared and cursed; he vowed he would never rest till he had
+destroyed Luther.</p>
+
+<p>'I said he might curse Luther till he burst himself if he pleased. I
+complained of his cursing me.</p>
+
+<p>'He answered, that if I did not agree with Luther, I ought to say so,
+and write against him.</p>
+
+<p>'"Why should I?" urged I. "The quarrel is none of mine. Why should I
+irritate Luther against me, when he has horns and knows how to use
+them?"</p>
+
+<p>'"Well, then," said he, "if you will not write, at least you can say
+that we Dominicans have had the best of the argument."</p>
+
+<p>'"How can I do that?" replied I. "You have burnt his books, but I never
+heard that you had answered them."</p>
+
+<p>'He almost spat upon me. I understand that there is to be a form of
+prayer for the conversion of Erasmus and Luther.'</p>
+
+<p>But Erasmus was not to escape so easily. Adrian the Sixth, who succeeded
+Leo, was his old schoolfellow, and implored his assistance in terms
+which made refusal impossible. Adrian wanted Erasmus to come to him to
+Rome. He was too wary to walk into the wolf's den. But Adrian required
+him to write, and reluctantly he felt that he must comply.</p>
+
+<p>What was he to say?</p>
+
+<p>'If his Holiness will set about reform in good earnest,' he wrote to the
+Pope's secretary, 'and if he will not be too hard on Luther, I may,
+perhaps, do good; but what Luther writes of the tyranny, the corruption,
+the covetousness of the Roman court, would, my friend, that it was not
+true.'</p>
+
+<p>To Adrian himself, Erasmus addressed a letter really remarkable.</p>
+
+<p>'I cannot go to your Holiness,' he said, 'King Calculus will not let me.
+I have dreadful health, which this tornado has<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span> not improved. I, who was
+the favourite of everybody, am now cursed by everybody&mdash;at Louvaine by
+the monks; in Germany by the Lutherans. I have fallen into trouble in my
+old age, like a mouse into a pot of pitch. You say, Come to Rome; you
+might as well say to the crab, Fly. The crab says, Give me wings; I say,
+Give me back my health and my youth. If I write calmly against Luther I
+shall be called lukewarm; if I write as he does, I shall stir a hornet's
+nest. People think he can be put down by force. The more force you try,
+the stronger he will grow. Such disorders cannot be cured in that way.
+The Wickliffites in England were put down, but the fire smouldered.</p>
+
+<p>'If you mean to use violence you have no need of me; but mark this&mdash;if
+monks and theologians think only of themselves, no good will come of it.
+Look rather into the causes of all this confusion, and apply your
+remedies there. Send for the best and wisest men from all parts of
+Christendom and take their advice.'</p>
+
+<p>Tell a crab to fly. Tell a pope to be reasonable. You must relieve him
+of his infallibility if you want him to act like a sensible man. Adrian
+could undertake no reforms, and still besought Erasmus to take arms for
+him.</p>
+
+<p>Erasmus determined to gratify Adrian with least danger to himself and
+least injury to Luther.</p>
+
+<p>'I remember Uzzah, and am afraid,' he said, in his quizzing way; 'it is
+not everyone who is allowed to uphold the ark. Many a wise man has
+attacked Luther, and what has been effected? The Pope curses, the
+emperor threatens; there are prisons, confiscations, faggots; and all is
+vain. What can a poor pigmy like me do?</p>
+
+<hr class="minor" />
+
+<p>'The world has been besotted with ceremonies. Miserable monks have ruled
+all, entangling men's consciences for their own benefit. Dogma has been
+heaped on dogma. The bishops have been tyrants, the Pope's commissaries
+have been rascals. Luther has been an instrument of God's displeasure,
+like Pharaoh or Nebuchadnezzar, or the C&aelig;sars, and I shall not attack
+him on such grounds as these.'</p>
+
+<p>Erasmus was too acute to defend against Luther the weak point of a bad
+cause. He would not declare for him&mdash;but he would not go over to his
+enemies. Yet, unless he quarrelled with Adrian, he could not be
+absolutely silent; so he chose a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span> subject to write upon on which all
+schools of theology, Catholic or Protestant&mdash;all philosophers, all
+thinkers of whatever kind, have been divided from the beginning of time:
+fate and free will, predestination and the liberty of man&mdash;a problem
+which has no solution&mdash;which may be argued even from eternity to
+eternity.</p>
+
+<p>The reason of the selection was obvious. Erasmus wished to please the
+Pope and not exasperate Luther. Of course he pleased neither, and
+offended both.</p>
+
+<p>Luther, who did not comprehend his motive, was needlessly angry. Adrian
+and the monks were openly contemptuous. Sick of them and their quarrels,
+he grew weary of the world, and began to wish to be well out of it.</p>
+
+<p>It is characteristic of Erasmus that, like many highly-gifted men, but
+unlike all theologians, he expressed a hope for sudden death, and
+declared it to be one of the greatest blessings which a human creature
+can receive.</p>
+
+<p>Do not suppose that he broke down or showed the white feather to
+fortune's buffets. Through all storms he stuck bravely to his own proper
+work; editing classics, editing the Fathers, writing paraphrases&mdash;still
+doing for Europe what no other man could have done.</p>
+
+<p>The Dominicans hunted him away from Louvaine. There was no living for
+him in Germany for the Protestants. He suffered dreadfully from the
+stone, too, and in all ways had a cruel time of it. Yet he continued,
+for all that, to make life endurable.</p>
+
+<p>He moved about in Switzerland and on the Upper Rhine. The lakes, the
+mountains, the waterfalls, the villas on the hill slopes, delighted
+Erasmus when few people else cared for such things. He was particular
+about his wine. The vintage of Burgundy was as new blood in his veins,
+and quickened his pen into brightness and life.</p>
+
+<p>The German wines he liked worse&mdash;for this point among others, which is
+curious to observe in those days. The great capitalist winegrowers,
+anti-Reformers all of them, were people without conscience and humanity,
+and adulterated their liquors. Of course they did. They believed in
+nothing but money, and this was the way to make money.</p>
+
+<p>'The water they mix with the wine,' Erasmus says, 'is the least part of
+the mischief. They put in lime, and alum, and resin, and sulphur, and
+salt&mdash;and then they say it is good enough for heretics.'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Observe the practical issue of religious corruption. Show me a people
+where trade is dishonest, and I will show you a people where religion is
+a sham.</p>
+
+<p>'We hang men that steal money,' Erasmus exclaimed, writing doubtless
+with the remembrance of a stomach-ache. 'These wretches steal our money
+and our lives too, and get off scot free.'</p>
+
+<p>He settled at last at Basle, which the storm had not yet reached, and
+tried to bury himself among his books. The shrieks of the conflict,
+however, still troubled his ears. He heard his own name still cursed,
+and he could not bear it or sit quiet under it.</p>
+
+<p>His correspondence was still enormous. The high powers still appealed to
+him for advice and help: of open meddling he would have no more; he did
+not care, he said, to make a post of himself for every dog of a
+theologian to defile. Advice, however, he continued to give in the old
+style.</p>
+
+<p>'Put down the preachers on both sides. Fill the pulpits with men who
+will kick controversy into the kennel, and preach piety and good
+manners. Teach nothing in the schools but what bears upon life and duty.
+Punish those who break the peace, and punish no one else; and when the
+new opinions have taken root, allow liberty of conscience.'</p>
+
+<p>Perfection of wisdom; but a wisdom which, unfortunately, was three
+centuries at least out of date, which even now we have not grown big
+enough to profit by. The Catholic princes and bishops were at work with
+fire and faggot. The Protestants were pulling down monasteries, and
+turning the monks and nuns out into the world. The Catholics declared
+that Erasmus was as much to blame as Luther. The Protestants held him
+responsible for the persecutions, and insisted, not without reason, that
+if Erasmus had been true to his conscience, the whole Catholic world
+must have accepted the Reformation.</p>
+
+<p>He suffered bitterly under these attacks upon him. He loved quiet&mdash;and
+his ears were deafened with clamour. He liked popularity&mdash;and he was the
+best abused person in Europe. Others who suffered in the same way he
+could advise to leave the black-coated jackdaws to their noise&mdash;but he
+could not follow his own counsel. When the curs were at his heels, he
+could not restrain himself from lashing out at them; and, from his
+retreat at Basle, his sarcasms flashed out like jagged points of
+lightning.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Describing an emeute, and the burning of an image of a saint, 'They
+insulted the poor image so,' he said, 'it is a marvel there was no
+miracle. The saint worked so many in the good old times.'</p>
+
+<p>When Luther married an escaped nun, the Catholics exclaimed that
+Antichrist would be born from such an incestuous intercourse. 'Nay,'
+Erasmus said, 'if monk and nun produce Antichrist, there must have been
+legions of Antichrists these many years.'</p>
+
+<p>More than once he was tempted to go over openly to Luther&mdash;not from a
+noble motive, but, as he confessed, 'to make those furies feel the
+difference between him and them.'</p>
+
+<p>He was past sixty, with broken health and failing strength. He thought
+of going back to England, but England had by this time caught fire, and
+Basle had caught fire. There was no peace on earth.</p>
+
+<p>'The horse has his heels,' he said, when advised to be quiet, 'the dog
+his teeth, the hedgehog his spines, the bee his sting. I myself have my
+tongue and my pen, and why should I not use them?'</p>
+
+<p>Yet to use them to any purpose now, he must take a side, and, sorely
+tempted as he was, he could not.</p>
+
+<p>With the negative part of the Protestant creed he sympathised heartily;
+but he did not understand Luther's doctrine of faith, because he had
+none of his own, and he disliked it as a new dogma.</p>
+
+<p>He regarded Luther's movement as an outburst of commonplace revolution,
+caused by the folly and wickedness of the authorities, but with no
+organising vitality in itself; and his chief distress, as we gather from
+his later letters, was at his own treatment. He had done his best for
+both sides. He had failed, and was abused by everybody.</p>
+
+<p>Thus passed away the last years of one of the most gifted men that
+Europe has ever seen. I have quoted many of his letters. I will add one
+more passage, written near the end of his life, very touching and
+pathetic:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>'Hercules,' he said, 'could not fight two monsters at once; while I,
+poor wretch, have lions, cerberuses, cancers, scorpions every day at my
+sword's point; not to mention smaller vermin&mdash;rats, mosquitoes, bugs,
+and fleas. My troops of friends are turned to enemies. At dinner-tables
+or social gatherings, in churches and king's courts, in public carriage<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span>
+or public flyboat, scandal pursues me, and calumny defiles my name.
+Every goose now hisses at Erasmus; and it is worse than being stoned,
+once for all, like Stephen, or shot with arrows like Sebastian.</p>
+
+<p>'They attack me now even for my Latin style, and spatter me with
+epigrams. Fame I would have parted with; but to be the sport of
+blackguards&mdash;to be pelted with potsherds and dirt and ordure&mdash;is not
+this worse than death?</p>
+
+<p>'There is no rest for me in my age, unless I join Luther; and I cannot,
+for I cannot accept his doctrines. Sometimes I am stung with a desire to
+avenge my wrongs; but I say to myself, "Will you, to gratify your
+spleen, raise your hand against your mother the Church, who begot you at
+the font and fed you with the word of God?" I cannot do it. Yet I
+understand now how Arius, and Tertullian, and Wickliff were driven into
+schism. The theologians say I am their enemy. Why? Because I bade monks
+remember their vows; because I told parsons to leave their wranglings
+and read the Bible; because I told popes and cardinals to look at the
+Apostles, and make themselves more like to them. If this is to be their
+enemy, then indeed I have injured them.'</p>
+
+<p>This was almost the last. The stone, advancing years, and incessant toil
+had worn him to a shred. The clouds grew blacker. News came from England
+that his dear friends More and Fisher had died upon the scaffold. He had
+long ceased to care for life; and death, almost as sudden as he had
+longed for, gave him peace at last.</p>
+
+<p>So ended Desiderius Erasmus, the world's idol for so many years; and
+dying heaped with undeserved but too intelligible anathemas, seeing all
+that he had laboured for swept away by the whirlwind.</p>
+
+<p>Do not let me lead you to undervalue him. Without Erasmus, Luther would
+have been impossible; and Erasmus really succeeded&mdash;so much of him as
+deserved to succeed&mdash;in Luther's victory.</p>
+
+<p>He was brilliantly gifted. His industry never tired. His intellect was
+true to itself; and no worldly motives ever tempted him into
+insincerity. He was even far braver than he professed to be. Had he been
+brought to the trial, he would have borne it better than many a man who
+boasted louder of his courage.</p>
+
+<p>And yet, in his special scheme for remodelling the mind of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span> Europe, he
+failed hopelessly&mdash;almost absurdly. He believed, himself, that his work
+was spoilt by the Reformation; but, in fact, under no conditions could
+any more have come of it.</p>
+
+<p>Literature and cultivation will feed life when life exists already; and
+toleration and latitudinarianism are well enough when mind and
+conscience are awake and energetic of themselves.</p>
+
+<p>When there is no spiritual life at all; when men live only for
+themselves and for sensual pleasure; when religion is superstition, and
+conscience a name, and God an idol half feared and half despised&mdash;then,
+for the restoration of the higher nature in man, qualities are needed
+different in kind from any which Erasmus possessed.</p>
+
+<p>And now to go back to Luther. I cannot tell you all that Luther did; it
+would be to tell you all the story of the German Reformation. I want you
+rather to consider the kind of man that Luther was, and to see in his
+character how he came to achieve what he did.</p>
+
+<p>You remember that the Elector of Saxony, after the Diet of Worms, sent
+him to the Castle of Wartburg, to prevent him from being murdered or
+kidnapped. He remained there many months; and during that time the old
+ecclesiastical institutions of Germany were burning like a North
+American forest. The monasteries were broken up; the estates were
+appropriated by the nobles; the monks were sent wandering into the
+world. The bishops looked helplessly on while their ancient spiritual
+dominion was torn to pieces and trodden under foot. The Elector of
+Saxony, the Landgrave of Hesse, and several more of the princes,
+declared for the Reformation. The Protestants had a majority in the
+Diet, and controlled the force of the empire. Charles the Fifth, busy
+with his French wars, and in want of money, dared not press questions to
+a crisis which he had not power to cope with; and he was obliged for a
+time to recognise what he could not prevent. You would have thought
+Luther would have been well pleased to see the seed which he had sown
+bear fruit so rapidly; yet it was exactly while all this was going on
+that he experienced those temptations of the devil of which he has left
+so wonderful an account.</p>
+
+<p>We shall have our own opinions on the nature of these apparitions. But
+Luther, it is quite certain, believed that Satan himself attacked him in
+person. Satan, he tells us,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span> came often to him, and said, 'See what you
+have done. Behold this ancient Church&mdash;this mother of saints&mdash;polluted
+and defiled by brutal violence. And it is you&mdash;you, a poor ignorant
+monk, that have set the people on to their unholy work. Are you so much
+wiser than the saints who approved the things which you have denounced?
+Popes, bishops, clergy, kings, emperors&mdash;are none of these&mdash;are not all
+these together&mdash;wiser than Martin Luther the monk?'</p>
+
+<p>The devil, he says, caused him great agony by these suggestions. He fell
+into deep fits of doubt and humiliation and despondency. And wherever
+these thoughts came from, we can only say that they were very natural
+thoughts&mdash;natural and right. He called them temptations; yet these were
+temptations which would not have occurred to any but a high-minded man.</p>
+
+<p>He had, however, done only what duty had forced him to do. His business
+was to trust to God, who had begun the work and knew what He meant to
+make of it. His doubts and misgivings, therefore, he ascribed to Satan,
+and his enormous imaginative vigour gave body to the voice which was
+speaking in him.</p>
+
+<p>He tells many humorous stories&mdash;not always producible&mdash;of the means with
+which he encountered his offensive visitor.</p>
+
+<p>'The devil,' he says, 'is very proud, and what he least likes is to be
+laughed at.' One night he was disturbed by something rattling in his
+room; the modern unbeliever will suppose it was a mouse. He got up, lit
+a candle, searched the apartment through, and could find nothing&mdash;the
+Evil One was indisputably there.</p>
+
+<p>'Oh!' he said, 'it is you, is it?' He returned to bed, and went to
+sleep.</p>
+
+<p>Think as you please about the cause of the noise, but remember that
+Luther had not the least doubt that he was alone in the room with the
+actual devil, who, if he could not overcome his soul, could at least
+twist his neck in a moment&mdash;and then think what courage there must have
+been in a man who could deliberately sleep in such a presence!</p>
+
+<p>During his retirement he translated the Bible. The confusion at last
+became so desperate that he could no longer be spared; and, believing
+that he was certain to be destroyed, he left Wartburg and returned to
+Wittenberg. Death was always before him as supremely imminent. He used
+to say<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span> that it would be a great disgrace to the Pope if he died in his
+bed. He was wanted once at Leipsic. His friends said if he went there
+Duke George would kill him.</p>
+
+<p>'Duke George!' he said; 'I would go to Leipsic if it rained Duke Georges
+for nine days!'</p>
+
+<p>No such cataclysm of Duke Georges happily took place. The single one
+there was would have gladly been mischievous if he could; but Luther
+outlived him&mdash;lived for twenty-four years after this, in continued toil,
+re-shaping the German Church, and giving form to its new doctrine.</p>
+
+<p>Sacerdotalism, properly so called, was utterly abolished. The
+corruptions of the Church had all grown out of one root&mdash;the notion that
+the Christian priesthood possesses mystical power, conferred through
+episcopal ordination.</p>
+
+<p>Religion, as Luther conceived it, did not consist in certain things done
+to and for a man by a so-called priest. It was the devotion of each
+individual soul to the service of God. Masses were nothing, and
+absolution was nothing; and a clergyman differed only from a layman in
+being set apart for the especial duties of teaching and preaching.</p>
+
+<p>I am not concerned to defend Luther's view in this matter. It is a
+matter of fact only, that in getting rid of episcopal ordination, he
+dried up the fountain from which the mechanical and idolatrous
+conceptions of religion had sprung; and, in consequence, the religious
+life of Germany has expanded with the progress of knowledge, while
+priesthoods everywhere cling to the formulas of the past, in which they
+live, and move, and have their being.</p>
+
+<p>Enough of this.</p>
+
+<p>The peculiar doctrine which has passed into Europe under Luther's name
+is known as Justification by Faith. Bandied about as a watchword of
+party, it has by this time hardened into a formula, and has become
+barren as the soil of a trodden footpath. As originally proclaimed by
+Luther, it contained the deepest of moral truths. It expressed what was,
+and is, and must be, in one language or another, to the end of time, the
+conviction of every generous-minded man.</p>
+
+<p>The service of God, as Luther learnt it from the monks, was a thing of
+desert and reward. So many good works done, so much to the right page in
+the great book; where the stock proved insufficient, there was the
+reserve fund of the merits of the saints, which the Church dispensed for
+money to those who needed.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>'Merit!' Luther thought. 'What merit can there be in such a poor caitiff
+as man? The better a man is&mdash;the more clearly he sees how little he is
+good for, the greater mockery it seems to attribute to him the notion of
+having deserved reward.'</p>
+
+<p>'Miserable creatures that we are!' he said; 'we earn our bread in sin.
+Till we are seven years old, we do nothing but eat and drink and sleep
+and play; from seven to twenty-one we study four hours a day, the rest
+of it we run about and amuse ourselves; then we work till fifty, and
+then we grow again to be children. We sleep half our lives; we give God
+a tenth of our time: and yet we think that with our good works we can
+merit heaven. What have I been doing to-day? I have talked for two
+hours; I have been at meals three hours; I have been idle four hours!
+Ah, enter not into judgment with thy servant, O Lord!'</p>
+
+<p>A perpetual struggle. For ever to be falling, yet to rise again and
+stumble forward with eyes turned to heaven&mdash;this was the best which
+would ever come of man. It was accepted in its imperfection by the
+infinite grace of God, who pities mortal weakness, and accepts the
+intention for the deed&mdash;who, when there is a sincere desire to serve
+Him, overlooks the shortcomings of infirmity.</p>
+
+<p>Do you say such teaching leads to disregard of duty? All doctrines, when
+petrified into formulas, lead to that. But, as Luther said, 'where real
+faith is, a good life follows, as light follows the sun; faint and
+clouded, yet ever struggling to break through the mist which envelopes
+it, and welcoming the roughest discipline which tends to clear and raise
+it.</p>
+
+<p>'The barley,' he says, in a homely but effective image&mdash;'the barley
+which we brew, the flax of which we weave our garments, must be bruised
+and torn ere they come to the use for which they are grown. So must
+Christians suffer. The natural creature must be combed and threshed. The
+old Adam must die, for the higher life to begin. If man is to rise to
+nobleness, he must first be slain.'</p>
+
+<p>In modern language, the poet Goethe tells us the same truth. 'The
+natural man,' he says, 'is like the ore out of the iron mine. It is
+smelted in the furnace; it is forged into bars upon the anvil. A new
+nature is at last forced upon it, and it is made steel.'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It was this doctrine&mdash;it was this truth rather (the word doctrine
+reminds one of quack medicines)&mdash;which, quickening in Luther's mind,
+gave Europe its new life. It was the flame which, beginning with a small
+spark, kindled the hearth-fires in every German household.</p>
+
+<p>Luther's own life was a model of quiet simplicity. He remained poor. He
+might have had money if he had wished; but he chose rather, amidst his
+enormous labour, to work at a turning-lathe for his livelihood.</p>
+
+<p>He was sociable, cheerful, fond of innocent amusements, and delighted to
+encourage them. His table-talk, collected by his friends, makes one of
+the most brilliant books in the world. He had no monkish theories about
+the necessity of abstinence; but he was temperate from habit and
+principle. A salt herring and a hunch of bread was his ordinary meal;
+and he was once four days without food of any sort, having emptied his
+larder among the poor.</p>
+
+<p>All kinds of people thrust themselves on Luther for help. Flights of
+nuns from the dissolved convents came to him to provide for them&mdash;naked,
+shivering creatures, with scarce a rag to cover them. Eight florins were
+wanted once to provide clothes for some of them. 'Eight florins!' he
+said; 'and where am I to get eight florins?' Great people had made him
+presents of plate: it all went to market to be turned into clothes and
+food for the wretched.</p>
+
+<p>Melancthon says that, unless provoked, he was usually very gentle and
+tolerant. He recognised, and was almost alone in recognising, the
+necessity of granting liberty of conscience. No one hated Popery more
+than he did, yet he said:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>'The Papists must bear with us, and we with them. If they will not
+follow us, we have no right to force them. Wherever they can, they will
+hang, burn, behead, and strangle us. I shall be persecuted as long as I
+live, and most likely killed. But it must come to this at last&mdash;every
+man must be allowed to believe according to his conscience, and answer
+for his belief to his Maker.'</p>
+
+<p>Erasmus said of Luther that there were two natures in him: sometimes he
+wrote like an apostle&mdash;sometimes like a raving ribald.</p>
+
+<p>Doubtless, Luther could be impolite on occasions. When he was angry,
+invectives rushed from him like boulder rocks<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span> down a mountain torrent
+in flood. We need not admire all that; in quiet times it is hard to
+understand it.</p>
+
+<p>Here, for instance, is a specimen. Our Henry the Eighth, who began life
+as a highly orthodox sovereign, broke a lance with Luther for the
+Papacy.</p>
+
+<p>Luther did not credit Henry with a composition which was probably his
+own after all. He thought the king was put forward by some of the
+English bishops&mdash;'Thomists' he calls them, as men who looked for the
+beginning and end of wisdom to the writings of Thomas Aquinas.</p>
+
+<p>'Courage,' he exclaimed to them, 'swine that you are! burn me then, if
+you can and dare. Here I am; do your worst upon me. Scatter my ashes to
+all the winds&mdash;spread them through all seas. My spirit shall pursue you
+still. Living, I am the foe of the Papacy; and dead, I will be its foe
+twice over. Hogs of Thomists! Luther shall be the bear in your way&mdash;the
+lion in your path. Go where you will, Luther shall cross you. Luther
+shall leave you neither peace nor rest till he has crushed in your brows
+of brass and dashed out your iron brains.'</p>
+
+<p>Strong expressions; but the times were not gentle. The prelates whom he
+supposed himself to be addressing were the men who filled our Smithfield
+with the reek of burning human flesh.</p>
+
+<p>Men of Luther's stature are like the violent forces of Nature
+herself&mdash;terrible when roused, and in repose, majestic and beautiful. Of
+vanity he had not a trace. 'Do not call yourselves Lutherans,' he said;
+'call yourselves Christians. Who and what is Luther? Has Luther been
+crucified for the world?'</p>
+
+<p>I mentioned his love of music. His songs and hymns were the expression
+of the very inmost heart of the German people. 'Music' he called 'the
+grandest and sweetest gift of God to man.' 'Satan hates music,' he said;
+'he knows how it drives the evil spirit out of us.'</p>
+
+<p>He was extremely interested in all natural things. Before the science of
+botany was dreamt of, Luther had divined the principle of vegetable
+life. 'The principle of marriage runs through all creation,' he said;
+'and flowers as well as animals are male and female.'</p>
+
+<p>A garden called out bursts of eloquence from him; beautiful sometimes as
+a finished piece of poetry.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>One April day as he was watching the swelling buds, he exclaimed:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>'Praise be to God the Creator, who out of a dead world makes all alive
+again. See those shoots how they burgeon and swell. Image of the
+resurrection of the dead! Winter is death&mdash;summer is the resurrection.
+Between them lie spring and autumn, as the period of uncertainty and
+change. The proverb says&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div class="i0">Trust not a day</div><br />
+<div class="i0">Ere birth of May.</div><br />
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Let us pray our Father in heaven to give us this day our daily bread.'</p>
+
+<p>'We are in the dawn of a new era,' he said another time; 'we are
+beginning to think something of the natural world which was ruined in
+Adam's fall. We are learning to see all round us the greatness and glory
+of the Creator. We can see the Almighty hand&mdash;the infinite goodness&mdash;in
+the humblest flower. We praise Him&mdash;we thank Him&mdash;we glorify Him&mdash;we
+recognise in creation the power of His word. He spoke and it was there.
+The stone of the peach is hard; but the soft kernel swells and bursts it
+when the time comes. An egg&mdash;what a thing is that! If an egg had never
+been seen in Europe, and a traveller had brought one from Calcutta, how
+would all the world have wondered!'</p>
+
+<p>And again:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>'If a man could make a single rose, we should give him an empire; yet
+roses, and flowers no less beautiful, are scattered in profusion over
+the world, and no one regards them.'</p>
+
+<p>There are infinite other things which I should like to tell you about
+Luther, but time wears on. I must confine what more I have to say to a
+single matter&mdash;for which more than any other he has been blamed&mdash;I mean
+his marriage.</p>
+
+<p>He himself, a monk and a priest, had taken a vow of celibacy. The person
+whom he married had been a nun, and as such had taken a vow of celibacy
+also.</p>
+
+<p>The marriage was unquestionably no affair of passion. Luther had come to
+middle age when it was brought about, when temptations of that kind lose
+their power; and among the many accusations which have been brought
+against his early life, no one has ventured to charge him with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span>
+incontinence. His taking a wife was a grave act deliberately performed;
+and it was either meant as a public insult to established ecclesiastical
+usage, or else he considered that the circumstances of the time required
+it of him.</p>
+
+<p>Let us see what those circumstances were. The enforcement of celibacy on
+the clergy was, in Luther's opinion, both iniquitous in itself, and
+productive of enormous immorality. The impurity of the religious orders
+had been the jest of satirists for a hundred years. It had been the
+distress and perplexity of pious and serious persons. Luther himself was
+impressed with profound pity for the poor men, who were cut off from the
+natural companionship which nature had provided for them&mdash;who were thus
+exposed to temptations which they ought not to have been called upon to
+resist.</p>
+
+<p>The dissolution of the religious houses had enormously complicated the
+problem. Germany was covered with friendless and homeless men and women
+adrift upon the world. They came to Luther to tell them what to do; and
+advice was of little service without example.</p>
+
+<p>The world had grown accustomed to immorality in such persons. They might
+have lived together in concubinage, and no one would have thought much
+about it. Their marriage was regarded with a superstitious terror as a
+kind of incest.</p>
+
+<p>Luther, on the other hand, regarded marriage as the natural and healthy
+state in which clergy as well as laity were intended to live. Immorality
+was hateful to him as a degradation of a sacrament&mdash;impious, loathsome,
+and dishonoured. Marriage was the condition in which humanity was at
+once purest, best, and happiest.</p>
+
+<p>For himself, he had become inured to a single life. He had borne the
+injustice of his lot, when the burden had been really heavy. But time
+and custom had lightened the load; and had there been nothing at issue
+but his own personal happiness, he would not have given further occasion
+to the malice of his enemies.</p>
+
+<p>But tens of thousands of poor creatures were looking to him to guide
+them&mdash;guide them by precept, or guide them by example. He had satisfied
+himself that the vow of celibacy had been unlawfully imposed both on him
+and them&mdash;that, as he would put it, it had been a snare devised by the
+devil. He saw that all eyes were fixed on him&mdash;that it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span> was no use to
+tell others that they might marry, unless he himself led the way, and
+married first. And it was characteristic of him that, having resolved to
+do the thing, he did it in the way most likely to show the world his
+full thought upon the matter.</p>
+
+<p>That this was his motive, there is no kind of doubt whatever.</p>
+
+<p>'We may be able to live unmarried,' he said; 'but in these days we must
+protest in deed as well as word, against the doctrine of celibacy. It is
+an invention of Satan. Before I took my wife, I had made up my mind that
+I must marry some one: and had I been overtaken by illness, I should
+have betrothed myself to some pious maiden.'</p>
+
+<p>He asked nobody's advice. Had he let his intention be suspected, the
+moderate respectable people&mdash;the people who thought like Erasmus&mdash;those
+who wished well to what was good, but wished also to stand well with the
+world's opinion&mdash;such persons as these would have overwhelmed him with
+remonstrances. 'When you marry,' he said to a friend in a similar
+situation, 'be quiet about it, or mountains will rise between you and
+your wishes. If I had not been swift and secret, I should have had the
+whole world in my way.'</p>
+
+<p>Catherine Bora, the lady whom he chose for his wife, was a nun of good
+family, left homeless and shelterless by the breaking-up of her convent.
+She was an ordinary, unimaginative body&mdash;plain in person and plain in
+mind, in no sense whatever a heroine of romance&mdash;but a decent, sensible,
+commonplace Haus Frau.</p>
+
+<p>The age of romance was over with both of them; yet, for all that, never
+marriage brought a plainer blessing with it. They began with respect,
+and ended with steady affection.</p>
+
+<p>The happiest life on earth, Luther used to say, is with a pious, good
+wife; in peace and quiet, contented with a little, and giving God
+thanks.</p>
+
+<p>He spoke from his own experience. His Katie, as he called her, was not
+clever, and he had numerous stories to tell of the beginning of their
+adventures together.</p>
+
+<p>'The first year of married life is an odd business,' he says. 'At meals,
+where you used to be alone, you are yourself and somebody else. When you
+wake in the morning, there are a pair of tails close to you on the
+pillow. My Katie used to sit with me when I was at work. She thought she
+ought not to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span> be silent. She did not know what to say, so she would ask
+me.</p>
+
+<p>'"Herr Doctor, is not the master of the ceremonies in Prussia the
+brother of the Margrave?"'</p>
+
+<p>She was an odd woman.</p>
+
+<p>'Doctor,' she said to him one day, 'how is it that under Popery we
+prayed so often and so earnestly, and now our prayers are cold and
+seldom?'</p>
+
+<p>Katie might have spoken for herself. Luther, to the last, spent hours of
+every day in prayer. He advised her to read the Bible a little more. She
+said she had read enough of it, and knew half of it by heart. 'Ah!' he
+said, 'here begins weariness of the word of God. One day new lights will
+rise up, and the Scriptures will be despised and be flung away into the
+corner.'</p>
+
+<p>His relations with his children were singularly beautiful. The
+recollection of his own boyhood made him especially gentle with them,
+and their fancies and imaginations delighted him.</p>
+
+<p>Children, to him, were images of unfallen nature. 'Children,' he said,
+'imagine heaven a place where rivers run with cream, and trees are hung
+with cakes and plums. Do not blame them. They are but showing their
+simple, natural, unquestioning, all-believing faith.'</p>
+
+<p>One day, after dinner, when the fruit was on the table, the children
+were watching it with longing eyes. 'That is the way,' he said, 'in
+which we grown Christians ought to look for the Judgment Day.'</p>
+
+<p>His daughter Magdalen died when she was fourteen. He speaks of his loss
+with the unaffected simplicity of natural grief, yet with the faith of a
+man who had not the slightest doubt into whose hands his treasure was
+passing. Perfect nature and perfect piety. Neither one emotion nor the
+other disguised or suppressed.</p>
+
+<p>You will have gathered something, I hope, from these faint sketches, of
+what Luther was; you will be able to see how far he deserves to be
+called by our modern new lights, a Philistine or a heretic. We will now
+return to the subject with which we began, and resume, in a general
+conclusion, the argument of these Lectures.</p>
+
+<p>In part, but not wholly, it can be done in Luther's words.</p>
+
+<p>One regrets that Luther did not know Erasmus better, or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span> knowing him,
+should not have treated him with more forbearance.</p>
+
+<p>Erasmus spoke of him for the most part with kindness. He interceded for
+him, defended him, and only with the utmost reluctance was driven into
+controversy with him.</p>
+
+<p>Luther, on the other hand, saw in Erasmus a man who was false to his
+convictions; who played with truth; who, in his cold, sarcastic
+scepticism, believed in nothing&mdash;scarcely even in God. He was unaware of
+his own obligations to him, for Erasmus was not a person who would
+trumpet out his own good deeds.</p>
+
+<p>Thus Luther says:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>'All you who honour Christ, I pray you hate Erasmus. He is a scoffer and
+a mocker. He speaks in riddles; and jests at Popery and Gospel, and
+Christ and God, with his uncertain speeches. He might have served the
+Gospel if he would, but, like Judas, he has betrayed the Son of Man with
+a kiss. He is not with us, and he is not with our foes; and I say with
+Joshua, Choose whom ye will serve. He thinks we should trim to the
+times, and hang our cloaks to the wind. He is himself his own first
+object; and as he lived, he died.</p>
+
+<p>'I take Erasmus to be the worst enemy that Christ has had for a thousand
+years. Intellect does not understand religion, and when it comes to the
+things of God, it laughs at them. He scoffs like Lucian, and by-and-by
+he will say, Behold, how are these among the saints whose life we
+counted for folly.</p>
+
+<p>'I bid you, therefore, take heed of Erasmus. He treats theology as a
+fool's jest, and the Gospel as a fable good for the ignorant to
+believe.'</p>
+
+<p>Of Erasmus personally, much of this was unjust and untrue. Erasmus knew
+many things which it would have been well for Luther to have known; and,
+as a man, he was better than his principles.</p>
+
+<p>But if for the name of Erasmus we substitute the theory of human things
+which Erasmus represented, between that creed and Luther there is, and
+must be, an eternal antagonism.</p>
+
+<p>If to be true in heart and just in act are the first qualities necessary
+for the elevation of humanity&mdash;if without these all else is worthless,
+intellectual culture cannot give what intellectual<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span> culture does not
+require or imply. You cultivate the plant which has already life; you
+will waste your labour in cultivating a stone. The moral life is the
+counterpart of the natural, alike mysterious in its origin, and alike
+visible only in its effects.</p>
+
+<p>Intellectual gifts are like gifts of strength, or wealth, or rank, or
+worldly power&mdash;splendid instruments if nobly used&mdash;but requiring
+qualities to use them nobler and better than themselves.</p>
+
+<p>The rich man may spend his wealth on vulgar luxury. The clever man may
+live for intellectual enjoyment&mdash;refined enjoyment it may be&mdash;but
+enjoyment still, and still centering in self.</p>
+
+<p>If the spirit of Erasmus had prevailed, it would have been with modern
+Europe as with the Roman Empire in its decay. The educated would have
+been mere sceptics; the multitude would have been sunk in superstition.
+In both alike all would have perished which deserves the name of
+manliness.</p>
+
+<p>And this leads me to the last observation that I have to make to you. In
+the sciences, the philosopher leads; the rest of us take on trust what
+he tells us. The spiritual progress of mankind has followed the opposite
+course. Each forward step has been made first among the people, and the
+last converts have been among the learned.</p>
+
+<p>The explanation is not far to look for. In the sciences there is no
+temptation of self-interest to mislead. In matters which affect life and
+conduct, the interests and prejudices of the cultivated classes are
+enlisted on the side of the existing order of things, and their better
+trained faculties and larger acquirements serve only to find them
+arguments for believing what they wish to believe.</p>
+
+<p>Simpler men have less to lose; they come more in contact with the
+realities of life, and they learn wisdom in the experience of suffering.</p>
+
+<p>Thus it was that when the learned and the wise turned away from
+Christianity, the fishermen of the Galilean lake listened, and a new
+life began for mankind. A miner's son converted Germany to the
+Reformation. The London artisans and the peasants of Buckinghamshire
+went to the stake for doctrines which were accepted afterwards as a
+second revelation.</p>
+
+<p>So it has been; so it will be to the end. When a great<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span> teacher comes
+again upon the earth, he will find his first disciples where Christ
+found them and Luther found them. Had Luther written for the learned,
+the words which changed the face of Europe would have slumbered in
+impotence on the bookshelves.</p>
+
+<p>In appealing to the German nation, you will agree, I think, with me,
+that he did well and not ill; you will not sacrifice his great name to
+the disdain of a shallow philosophy, or to the grimacing of a dead
+superstition, whose ghost is struggling out of its grave.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="THE_INFLUENCE_OF_THE_REFORMATION_ON_THE_SCOTTISH_CHARACTER" id="THE_INFLUENCE_OF_THE_REFORMATION_ON_THE_SCOTTISH_CHARACTER"></a>THE INFLUENCE OF THE REFORMATION ON THE SCOTTISH CHARACTER:</h2>
+
+<h4>A LECTURE DELIVERED AT EDINBURGH, NOVEMBER 1865.</h4>
+
+
+<p>I have undertaken to speak this evening on the effects of the
+Reformation in Scotland, and I consider myself a very bold person to
+have come here on any such undertaking. In the first place, the subject
+is one with which it is presumptuous for a stranger to meddle. Great
+national movements can only be understood properly by the people whose
+disposition they represent. We say ourselves about our own history that
+only Englishmen can properly comprehend it. The late Chevalier Bunsen
+once said to me of our own Reformation in England, that, for his part,
+he could not conceive how we had managed to come by such a thing. We
+seemed to him to be an obdurate, impenetrable, stupid people, hide-bound
+by tradition and precedent, and too self-satisfied to be either willing
+or able to take in new ideas upon any theoretic subject whatever,
+especially German ideas. That is to say, he could not get inside the
+English mind. He did not know that some people go furthest and go
+fastest when they look one way and row the other. It is the same with
+every considerable nation. They work out their own political and
+spiritual lives, through tempers, humours, and passions peculiar to
+themselves; and the same disposition which produces the result is
+required to interpret it afterwards. This is one reason why I should
+feel diffident about what I have undertaken. Another is, that I do not
+conceal from myself that the subject is an exceedingly delicate one. The
+blazing passions of those stormy sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are
+no longer, happily, at their old temperature. The story<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span> of those times
+can now be told or listened to with something like impartiality. Yet, if
+people no longer hate each other for such matters, the traditions of the
+struggle survive in strong opinions and sentiments, which it is easy to
+wound without intending it.</p>
+
+<p>My own conviction with respect to all great social and religious
+convulsions is the extremely commonplace one that much is to be said on
+both sides. I believe that nowhere and at no time any such struggle can
+take place on a large scale unless each party is contending for
+something which has a great deal of truth in it. Where the right is
+plain, honest, wise, and noble-minded men are all on one side; and only
+rogues and fools are on the other. Where the wise and good are divided,
+the truth is generally found to be divided also. But this is precisely
+what cannot be admitted as long as the conflict continues. Men begin to
+fight about things when reason and argument fail to convince them. They
+make up in passion what is wanting in logic. Each side believes that all
+the right is theirs&mdash;that their enemies have all the bad qualities which
+their language contains names for; and even now, on the subject on which
+I have to talk to-night, one has but to take up any magazine, review,
+newspaper, or party organ of any kind which touches on it, to see that
+opinion is still Whig or Tory, Cavalier or Roundhead, Protestant or
+Catholic, as the case may be. The unfortunate person who is neither
+wholly one nor wholly the other is in the position of Hamlet's 'baser
+nature,' 'between the incensed points of mighty opposites.' He is the
+Laodicean, neither cold nor hot, whom decent people consider bad
+company. He pleases no one, and hurts the sensitiveness of all.</p>
+
+<p>Here, then, are good reasons why I should have either not come here at
+all, or else should have chosen some other matter to talk about. In
+excuse for persisting, I can but say that the subject is one about which
+I have been led by circumstances to read and think considerably; and
+though, undoubtedly, each of us knows more about himself and his own
+affairs than anyone else can possibly know, yet a stranger's eye will
+sometimes see things which escape those more immediately interested; and
+I allow myself to hope that I may have something to say not altogether
+undeserving your attention. I shall touch as little as possible on
+questions of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span> opinion; and if I tread by accident on any sensitive
+point, I must trust to your kindness to excuse my awkwardness.</p>
+
+<p>Well, then, if we look back on Scotland as it stood in the first quarter
+of the sixteenth century, we see a country in which the old feudal
+organisation continued, so far as it generally affected the people, more
+vigorous than in any other part of civilised Europe. Elsewhere, the
+growth of trade and of large towns had created a middle class, with an
+organisation of their own, independent of the lords. In Scotland, the
+towns were still scanty and poor; such as they were, they were for the
+most part under the control of the great nobleman who happened to live
+nearest to them; and a people, as in any sense independent of lords,
+knights, abbots, or prelates, under whose rule they were born, had as
+yet no existence. The tillers of the soil (and the soil was very
+miserably tilled) lived under the shadow of the castle or the monastery.
+They followed their lord's fortunes, fought his battles, believed in his
+politics, and supported him loyally in his sins or his good deeds, as
+the case might be. There was much moral beauty in the life of those
+times. The loyal attachment of man to man&mdash;of liege servant to liege
+lord&mdash;of all forms under which human beings can live and work together,
+has most of grace and humanity about it. It cannot go on without mutual
+confidence and affection&mdash;mutual benefits given and received. The length
+of time which the system lasted proves that in the main there must have
+been a fine fidelity in the people&mdash;truth, justice, generosity in their
+leaders. History brings down many bad stories to us out of those times;
+just as in these islands nowadays you may find bad instances of the
+abuses of rights of property. You may find stories&mdash;too many also&mdash;of
+husbands ill-using their wives, and so on. Yet we do not therefore lay
+the blame on marriage, or suppose that the institution of property on
+the whole does more harm than good. I do not doubt that down in that
+feudal system somewhere lie the roots of some of the finest qualities in
+the European peoples.</p>
+
+<p>So much for the temporal side of the matter; and the spiritual was not
+very unlike it. As no one lived independently, in our modern sense of
+the word, so no one thought independently. The minds of men were looked
+after by a Church which, for a long time also, did, I suppose, very<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span>
+largely fulfil the purpose for which it was intended. It kept alive and
+active the belief that the world was created and governed by a just
+Being, who hated sins and crimes, and steadily punished such things. It
+taught men that they had immortal souls, and that this little bit of
+life was an entirely insignificant portion of their real existence. It
+taught these truths, indeed, along with a great deal which we now
+consider to have been a mistake&mdash;a great many theories of earthly things
+which have since passed away, and special opinions clothed in outward
+forms and ritual observances which we here, most of us at least, do not
+think essential for our soul's safety. But mistakes like these are
+hurtful only when persisted in in the face of fuller truth, after truth
+has been discovered. Only a very foolish man would now uphold the
+Ptolemaic astronomy. But the Ptolemaic astronomy, when first invented,
+was based on real if incomplete observations, and formed a groundwork
+without which further progress in that science would have been probably
+impossible. The theories and ceremonials of the Catholic Church suited
+well with an age in which little was known and much was imagined: when
+superstition was active and science was not yet born. When I am told
+here or anywhere that the Middle Ages were times of mere spiritual
+darkness and priestly oppression, with the other usual formulas, I say,
+as I said before, if the Catholic Church, for those many centuries that
+it reigned supreme over all men's consciences, was no better than the
+thing which we see in the generation which immediately preceded the
+Reformation, it could not have existed at all. You might as well argue
+that the old fading tree could never have been green and young.
+Institutions do not live on lies. They either live by the truth and
+usefulness which there is in them, or they do not live at all.</p>
+
+<p>So things went on for several hundred years. There were scandals enough,
+and crimes enough, and feuds, and murders, and civil wars. Systems,
+however good, cannot prevent evil. They can but compress it within
+moderate and tolerable limits. I should conclude, however, that,
+measuring by the average happiness of the masses of the people, the
+medi&aelig;val institutions were very well suited for the inhabitants of these
+countries as they then were. Adam Smith and Bentham themselves could
+hardly have mended them if they had tried.</p>
+
+<p>But times change, and good things as well as bad grow<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span> old and have to
+die. The heart of the matter which the Catholic Church had taught was
+the fear of God; but the language of it and the formulas of it were made
+up of human ideas and notions about things which the mere increase of
+human knowledge gradually made incredible. To trace the reason of this
+would lead us a long way. It is intelligible enough, but it would take
+us into subjects better avoided here. It is enough to say that, while
+the essence of religion remains the same, the mode in which it is
+expressed changes and has changed&mdash;changes as living languages change
+and become dead, as institutions change, as forms of government change,
+as opinions on all things in heaven and earth change, as half the
+theories held at this time among ourselves will probably change&mdash;that
+is, the outward and mortal parts of them. Thus the Catholic formulas,
+instead of living symbols, become dead and powerless cabalistic signs.
+The religion lost its hold on the conscience and the intellect, and the
+effect, singularly enough, appeared in the shepherds before it made
+itself felt among the flocks. From the see of St. Peter to the far
+monasteries in the Hebrides or the Isle of Arran, the laity were shocked
+and scandalised at the outrageous doings of high cardinals, prelates,
+priests, and monks. It was clear enough that these great personages
+themselves did not believe what they taught; so why should the people
+believe it? And serious men, to whom the fear of God was a living
+reality, began to look into the matter for themselves. The first steps
+everywhere were taken with extreme reluctance; and had the popes and
+cardinals been wise, they would have taken the lead in the enquiry,
+cleared their teaching of its lumber, and taken out a new lease of life
+both for it and for themselves. An infallible pope and an infallible
+council might have done something in this way, if good sense had been
+among the attributes of their omniscience. What they did do was
+something very different. It was as if, when the new astronomy began to
+be taught, the professors of that science in all the universities of
+Europe had met together and decided that Ptolemy's cycles and epicycles
+were eternal verities; that the theory of the rotation of the earth was
+and must be a damnable heresy; and had invited the civil authorities to
+help them in putting down by force all doctrines but their own. This, or
+something very like it, was the position taken up in theology by<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span> the
+Council of Trent. The bishops assembled there did not reason. They
+decided by vote that certain things were true, and were to be believed;
+and the only arguments which they condescended to use were fire and
+faggot, and so on. How it fared with them, and with this experiment of
+theirs, we all know tolerably well.</p>
+
+<p>The effect was very different in different countries. Here, in Scotland,
+the failure was most marked and complete, but the way in which it came
+about was in many ways peculiar. In Germany, Luther was supported by
+princes and nobles. In England, the Reformation rapidly mixed itself up
+with politics and questions of rival jurisdiction. Both in England and
+Germany, the revolution, wherever it established itself, was accepted
+early by the Crown or the Government, and by them legally recognised.
+Here, it was far otherwise: the Protestantism of Scotland was the
+creation of the commons, as in turn the commons may be said to have been
+created by Protestantism. There were many young high-spirited men,
+belonging to the noblest families in the country, who were among the
+earliest to rally round the Reforming preachers; but authority, both in
+Church and State, set the other way. The congregations who gathered in
+the fields around Wishart and John Knox were, for the most part,
+farmers, labourers, artisans, tradesmen, or the smaller gentry; and
+thus, for the first time in Scotland, there was created an organisation
+of men detached from the lords and from the Church&mdash;brave, noble,
+resolute, daring people, bound together by a sacred cause, unrecognised
+by the leaders whom they had followed hitherto with undoubting
+allegiance. That spirit which grew in time to be the ruling power of
+Scotland&mdash;that which formed eventually its laws and its creed, and
+determined its after fortunes as a nation&mdash;had its first germ in these
+half-outlawed wandering congregations. In this it was that the
+Reformation in Scotland differed from the Reformation in any other part
+of Europe. Elsewhere it found a middle class existing&mdash;created already
+by trade or by other causes. It raised and elevated them, but it did not
+materially affect their political condition. In Scotland, the commons,
+as an organised body, were simply created by religion. Before the
+Reformation they had no political existence; and therefore it has been
+that the print of their origin has gone so deeply into their social
+constitution. On them, and them only, the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span> burden of the work of the
+Reformation was eventually thrown; and when they triumphed at last, it
+was inevitable that both they and it should react one upon the other.</p>
+
+<p>How this came about I must endeavour to describe, although I can give
+but a brief sketch of an exceedingly complicated matter. Everybody knows
+the part played by the aristocracy of Scotland in the outward
+revolution, when the Reformation first became the law of the land. It
+would seem at first sight as if it had been the work of the whole
+nation&mdash;as if it had been a thing on which high and low were heartily
+united. Yet on the first glance below the surface you see that the
+greater part of the noble lords concerned in that business cared nothing
+about the Reformation at all; or, if they cared, they rather disliked it
+than otherwise. How, then, did they come to act as they did? or, how
+came they to permit a change of such magnitude when they had so little
+sympathy with it? I must make a slight circuit to look for the
+explanation.</p>
+
+<p>The one essentially noble feature in the great families of Scotland was
+their patriotism. They loved Scotland and Scotland's freedom with a
+passion proportioned to the difficulty with which they had defended
+their liberties; and yet the wisest of them had long seen that, sooner
+or later, union with England was inevitable; and the question was, how
+that union was to be brought about&mdash;how they were to make sure that,
+when it came, they should take their place at England's side as equals,
+and not as a dependency. It had been arranged that the little Mary
+Stuart should marry our English Edward VI., and the difficulty was to be
+settled so. They would have been contented, they said, if Scotland had
+had the 'lad' and England the 'lass.' As it stood, they broke their
+bargain, and married the little queen away into France, to prevent the
+Protector Somerset from getting hold of her. Then, however, appeared an
+opposite danger; the queen would become a Frenchwoman; her French mother
+governed Scotland with French troops and French ministers; the country
+would become a French province, and lose its freedom equally. Thus an
+English party began again; and as England was then in the middle of her
+great anti-Church revolution, so the Scottish nobles began to be
+anti-Church. It was not for doctrines: neither they nor their brothers
+in England cared much about doctrines; but in both countries<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span> the Church
+was rich&mdash;much richer than there seemed any occasion for it to be. Harry
+the Eighth had been sharing among the laity the spoils of the English
+monasteries; the Scotch Lords saw in a similar process the probability
+of a welcome addition to their own scanty incomes. Mary of Guise and the
+French stood by the Church, and the Church stood by them; and so it came
+about that the great families&mdash;even those who, like the Hamiltons, were
+most closely connected with France&mdash;were tempted over by the bait to the
+other side. They did not want reformed doctrines, but they wanted the
+Church lands; and so they came to patronise, or endure, the Reformers,
+because the Church hated them, and because they weakened the Church; and
+thus for a time, and especially as long as Mary Stuart was Queen of
+France, all classes in Scotland, high and low, seemed to fraternise in
+favour of the revolution.</p>
+
+<p>And it seemed as if the union of the realms could be effected at last,
+at the same juncture, and in connexion with the same movement. Next in
+succession to the Scotch crown, after Mary Stuart, was the house of
+Hamilton. Elizabeth, who had just come to the English throne, was
+supposed to be in want of a husband. The heir of the Hamiltons was of
+her own age, and in years past had been thought of for her by her
+father. What could be more fit than to make a match between those two?
+Send a Scot south to be King of England, find or make some pretext to
+shake off Mary Stuart, who had forsaken her native country, and so join
+the crowns, the 'lass' and the 'lad' being now in the right relative
+position. Scotland would thus annex her old oppressor, and give her a
+new dynasty.</p>
+
+<p>I seem to be straying from the point; but these political schemes had so
+much to do with the actions of the leading men at that time, that the
+story of the Reformation cannot be understood without them. It was thus,
+and with these incongruous objects, that the combination was formed
+which overturned the old Church of Scotland in 1559-60, confiscated its
+possessions, destroyed its religious houses, and changed its creed. The
+French were driven away from Leith by Elizabeth's troops; the Reformers
+took possession of the churches; and the Parliament of 1560 met with a
+clear stage to determine for themselves the future fate of the country.
+Now, I think it certain that, if the Scotch nobility,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span> having once
+accepted the Reformation, had continued loyal to it&mdash;especially if
+Elizabeth had met their wishes in the important point of the
+marriage&mdash;the form of the Scotch Kirk would have been something
+extremely different from what it in fact became. The people were
+perfectly well inclined to follow their natural leaders if the matters
+on which their hearts were set had received tolerable consideration from
+them, and the democratic form of the ecclesiastical constitution would
+have been inevitably modified. One of the conditions of the proposed
+compact with England was the introduction of the English Liturgy and the
+English Church constitution. This too, at the outset, and with fair
+dealing, would not have been found impossible. But it soon became clear
+that the religious interests of Scotland were the very last thing which
+would receive consideration from any of the high political personages
+concerned. John Knox had dreamt of a constitution like that which he had
+seen working under Calvin at Geneva&mdash;a constitution in which the clergy
+as ministers of God should rule all things&mdash;rule politically at the
+council board, and rule in private at the fireside. It was soon made
+plain to Knox that Scotland was not Geneva. 'Eh, mon,' said the younger
+Maitland to him, 'then we may all bear the barrow now to build the House
+of the Lord.' Not exactly. The churches were left to the ministers; the
+worldly good things and worldly power remained with the laity; and as to
+religion, circumstances would decide what they would do about that.
+Again, I am not speaking of all the great men of those times. Glencairn,
+Ruthven, young Argyll&mdash;above all, the Earl of Moray&mdash;really did in some
+degree interest themselves in the Kirk. But what most of them felt was
+perhaps rather broadly expressed by Maitland when he called religion 'a
+bogle of the nursery.' That was the expression which a Scotch statesman
+of those days actually ventured to use. Had Elizabeth been conformable,
+no doubt they would in some sense or other have remained on the side of
+the Reformation. But here, too, there was a serious hitch. Elizabeth
+would not marry Arran. Elizabeth would be no party to any of their
+intrigues. She detested Knox. She detested Protestantism entirely, in
+all shapes in which Knox approved of it. She affronted the nobles on one
+side, she affronted the people on another; and all idea of uniting the
+two crowns after the fashion proposed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span> by the Scotch Parliament she
+utterly and entirely repudiated. She was right enough, perhaps, so far
+as this was concerned; but she left the ruling families extremely
+perplexed as to the course which they would follow. They had allowed the
+country to be revolutionised in the teeth of their own sovereign, and
+what to do next they did not very well know.</p>
+
+<p>It was at this crisis that circumstances came in to their help. Francis
+the Second died. Mary Stuart was left a childless widow. Her connexion
+with the Crown of France was at an end, and all danger on that side to
+the liberties of Scotland at an end also. The Arran scheme having
+failed, she would be a second card as good as the first to play for the
+English Crown&mdash;as good as he, or better, for she would have the English
+Catholics on her side. So, careless how it would affect religion, and
+making no condition at all about that, the same men who a year before
+were ready to whistle Mary Stuart down the wind, now invited her back to
+Scotland; the same men who had been the loudest friends of Elizabeth now
+encouraged Mary Stuart to persist in the pretension to the Crown of
+England, which had led to all the past trouble. While in France, she had
+assumed the title of Queen of England. She had promised to abandon it,
+but, finding her own people ready to support her in withdrawing her
+promise, she stood out, insisting that at all events the English
+Parliament should declare her next in the succession; and it was well
+known that, as soon as the succession was made sure in her favour, some
+rascal would be found to put a knife or a bullet into Elizabeth. The
+object of the Scotch nobles was political, national, patriotic. For
+religion it was no great matter either way; and as they had before acted
+with the Protestants, so now they were ready to turn about, and openly
+or tacitly act with the Catholics. Mary Stuart's friends in England and
+on the Continent were Catholics, and therefore it would not do to offend
+them. First, she was allowed to have mass at Holyrood; then there was a
+move for a broader toleration. That one mass, Knox said, was more
+terrible to him than ten thousand armed men landed in the country&mdash;and
+he had perfectly good reason for saying so. He thoroughly understood
+that it was the first step towards a counter-revolution which in time
+would cover all Scotland and England, and carry them back to Popery. Yet
+he preached to deaf ears. Even Murray was so bewitched<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span> with the notion
+of the English succession, that for a year and a half he ceased to speak
+to Knox; and as it was with Murray, so it was far more with all the
+rest&mdash;their zeal for religion was gone no one knew where. Of course
+Elizabeth would not give way. She might as well, she said, herself
+prepare her shroud; and then conspiracies came, and under-ground
+intrigues with the Romanist English noblemen. France and Spain were to
+invade England, Scotland was to open its ports to their fleets, and its
+soil to their armies, giving them a safe base from which to act, and a
+dry road over the Marches to London. And if Scotland had remained
+unchanged from what it had been&mdash;had the direction of its fortunes
+remained with the prince and with the nobles, sooner or later it would
+have come to this. But suddenly it appeared that there was a new power
+in this country which no one suspected till it was felt.</p>
+
+<p>The commons of Scotland had hitherto been the creatures of the nobles.
+They had neither will nor opinion of their own. They thought and acted
+in the spirit of their immediate allegiance. No one seems to have dreamt
+that there would be any difficulty in dealing with them if once the
+great families agreed upon a common course. Yet it appeared, when the
+pressure came, that religion, which was the play-thing of the nobles,
+was to the people a clear matter of life and death. They might love
+their country: they might be proud of anything which would add lustre to
+its crown; but if it was to bring back the Pope and Popery&mdash;if it
+threatened to bring them back&mdash;if it looked that way&mdash;they would have
+nothing to do with it; nor would they allow it to be done. Allegiance
+was well enough; but there was a higher allegiance suddenly discovered
+which superseded all earthly considerations. I know nothing finer in
+Scottish history than the way in which the commons of the Lowlands took
+their places by the side of Knox in the great convulsions which
+followed. If all others forsook him, they at least would never forsake
+him while tongue remained to speak and hand remained to strike. Broken
+they might have been, trampled out as the Huguenots at last were
+trampled out in France, had Mary Stuart been less than the most
+imprudent or the most unlucky of sovereigns. But Providence, or the
+folly of those with whom they had to deal, fought for them. I need not
+follow the wild story of the crimes and catastrophes in which Mary<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span>
+Stuart's short reign in Scotland closed. Neither is her own share, be it
+great or small, or none at all, in those crimes of any moment to us
+here. It is enough that, both before that strange business and after it,
+when at Holyrood or across the Border, in Sheffield or Tutbury, her ever
+favourite dream was still the English throne. Her road towards it was
+through a Catholic revolution and the murder of Elizabeth. It is enough
+that, both before and after, the aristocracy of Scotland, even those
+among them who had seemed most zealous for the Reformation, were eager
+to support her. John Knox alone, and the commons, whom Knox had raised
+into a political power, remained true.</p>
+
+<p>Much, indeed, is to be said for the Scotch nobles. In the first shock of
+the business at Kirk-o'-Field, they forgot their politics in a sense of
+national disgrace. They sent the queen to Loch Leven. They intended to
+bring her to trial, and, if she was proved guilty, to expose and perhaps
+punish her. All parties for a time agreed in this&mdash;even the Hamiltons
+themselves; and had they been left alone they would have done it. But
+they had a perverse neighbour in England, to whom crowned heads were
+sacred. Elizabeth, it might have been thought, would have had no
+particular objection; but Elizabeth had aims of her own which baffled
+calculation. Elizabeth, the representative of revolution, yet detested
+revolutionists. The Reformers in Scotland, the Huguenots in France, the
+insurgents in the United Provinces, were the only friends she had in
+Europe. For her own safety she was obliged to encourage them; yet she
+hated them all, and would at any moment have abandoned them all, if, in
+any other way, she could have secured herself. She might have conquered
+her personal objection to Knox&mdash;she could not conquer her aversion to a
+Church which rose out of revolt against authority, which was democratic
+in constitution and republican in politics. When driven into alliance
+with the Scotch Protestants, she angrily and passionately disclaimed any
+community of creed with them; and for subjects to sit in judgment on
+their prince was a precedent which she would not tolerate. Thus she
+flung her mantle over Mary Stuart. She told the Scotch Council here in
+Edinburgh that, if they hurt a hair of her head, she would harry their
+country, and hang them all on the trees round the town, if she could
+find any trees there for that purpose. She tempted the queen to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span> England
+with her fair promises after the battle of Langside, and then, to her
+astonishment, imprisoned her. Yet she still shielded her reputation,
+still fostered her party in Scotland, still incessantly threatened and
+incessantly endeavoured to restore her. She kept her safe, because, in
+her lucid intervals, her ministers showed her the madness of acting
+otherwise. Yet for three years she kept her own people in a fever of
+apprehension. She made a settled Government in Scotland impossible;
+till, distracted and perplexed, the Scottish statesmen went back to
+their first schemes. They assured themselves that in one way or other
+the Queen of Scots would sooner or later come again among them. They,
+and others besides them, believed that Elizabeth was cutting her own
+throat, and that the best that they could do was to recover their own
+queen's favour, and make the most of her and her titles; and so they
+lent themselves again to the English Catholic conspiracies.</p>
+
+<p>The Earl of Moray&mdash;the one supremely noble man then living in the
+country&mdash;was put out of the way by an assassin. French and Spanish money
+poured in, and French and Spanish armies were to be again invited over
+to Scotland. This is the form in which the drama unfolds itself in the
+correspondence of the time. Maitland, the soul and spirit of it all,
+said, in scorn, that 'he would make the Queen of England sit upon her
+tail and whine like a whipped dog.' The only powerful noblemen who
+remained on the Protestant side were Lennox, Morton, and Mar. Lord
+Lennox was a poor creature, and was soon dispatched; Mar was old and
+weak; and Morton was an unprincipled scoundrel, who used the Reformation
+only as a stalking-horse to cover the spoils which he had clutched in
+the confusion, and was ready to desert the cause at any moment if the
+balance of advantage shifted. Even the ministers of the Kirk were fooled
+and flattered over. Maitland told Mary Stuart that he had gained them
+all except one.</p>
+
+<p>John Knox alone defied both his threats and his persuasions. Good reason
+has Scotland to be proud of Knox. He only, in this wild crisis, saved
+the Kirk which he had founded, and saved with it Scottish and English
+freedom. But for Knox, and what he was able still to do, it is almost
+certain that the Duke of Alva's army would have been landed on the
+eastern coast. The conditions were drawn out and agreed upon for the
+reception, the support, and the stay of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span> Spanish troops. Two-thirds
+of the English peerage had bound themselves to rise against Elizabeth,
+and Alva waited only till Scotland itself was quiet. Only that quiet
+would not be. Instead of quiet came three dreadful years of civil war.
+Scotland was split into factions, to which the mother and son gave
+names. The queen's lords, as they were called, with unlimited money from
+France and Flanders, held Edinburgh and Glasgow; all the border line was
+theirs, and all the north and west. Elizabeth's Council, wiser than
+their mistress, barely squeezed out of her reluctant parsimony enough to
+keep Mar and Morton from making terms with the rest; but there her
+assistance ended. She would still say nothing, promise nothing, bind
+herself to nothing, and, so far as she was concerned, the war would have
+been soon enough brought to a close. But away at St. Andrews, John Knox,
+broken in body, and scarcely able to stagger up the pulpit stairs, still
+thundered in the parish church; and his voice, it was said, was like ten
+thousand trumpets braying in the ear of Scottish Protestantism. All the
+Lowlands answered to his call. Our English Cromwell found in the man of
+religion a match for the man of honour. Before Cromwell, all over the
+Lothians, and across from St. Andrews to Stirling and Glasgow&mdash;through
+farm, and town, and village&mdash;the words of Knox had struck the inmost
+chords of the Scottish commons' hearts. Passing over knight and noble,
+he had touched the farmer, the peasant, the petty tradesman, and the
+artisan, and turned the men of clay into men of steel. The village
+preacher, when he left his pulpit, doffed cap and cassock, and donned
+morion and steel-coat. The Lothian yeoman's household became for the
+nonce a band of troopers, who would cross swords with the night riders
+of Buccleuch. It was a terrible time, a time rather of anarchy than of
+defined war, for it was without form or shape. Yet the horror of it was
+everywhere. Houses and villages were burned, and women and children
+tossed on pike-point into the flames. Strings of poor men were dangled
+day after day from the walls of Edinburgh Castle. A word any way from
+Elizabeth would have ended it, but that word Elizabeth would never
+speak; and, maddened with suffering, the people half believed that she
+was feeding the fire for her own bad purposes, when it was only that she
+would not make up her mind to allow a crowned princess to be dethroned.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span>
+No earthly influence could have held men true in such a trial. The noble
+lords&mdash;the Earl of Morton and such-like&mdash;would have made their own
+conditions, and gone with the rest; but the vital force of the Scotch
+nation, showing itself where it was least looked for, would not have it
+so.</p>
+
+<p>A very remarkable account of the state of the Scotch commons at this
+time is to be found in a letter of an English emissary, who had been
+sent by Lord Burleigh to see how things were going there. It was not
+merely a new creed that they had got; it was a new vital power. 'You
+would be astonished to see how men are changed here,' this writer said.
+'There is little of that submission to those above them which there used
+to be. The poor think and act for themselves. They are growing strong,
+confident, independent. The farms are better cultivated; the farmers are
+growing rich. The merchants at Leith are thriving, and, notwithstanding
+the pirates, they are increasing their ships and opening a brisk trade
+with France.'</p>
+
+<p>All this while civil war was raging, and the flag of Queen Mary was
+still floating over Edinburgh Castle. It surprised the English; still
+more it surprised the politicians. It was the one thing which
+disconcerted, baffled, and finally ruined the schemes and the dreams of
+Maitland. When he had gained the aristocracy, he thought that he had
+gained everybody, and, as it turned out, he had all his work still to
+do. The Spaniards did not come. The prudent Alva would not risk invasion
+till Scotland at least was assured. As time passed on, the English
+conspiracies were discovered and broken up. The Duke of Norfolk lost his
+head; the Queen of Scots was found to have been mixed up with the plots
+to murder Elizabeth; and Elizabeth at last took courage and recognised
+James. Supplies of money ceased to come from abroad, and gradually the
+tide turned. The Protestant cause once more grew towards the ascendant.
+The great families one by one came round again; and, as the backward
+movement began, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew gave it a fresh and
+tremendous impulse. Even the avowed Catholics&mdash;the Hamiltons, the
+Gordons, the Scotts, the Kers, the Maxwells&mdash;quailed before the wail of
+rage and sorrow which at that great horror rose over their country. The
+Queen's party dwindled away to a handful of desperate politicians, who
+still clung to Edinburgh Castle. But Elizabeth's 'peace-makers,'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span> as the
+big English cannon were called, came round, at the Regent's request,
+from Berwick; David's tower, as Knox had long ago foretold, 'ran down
+over the cliff like a sandy brae;' and the cause of Mary Stuart in
+Scotland was extinguished for ever. Poor Grange, who deserved a better
+end, was hanged at the Market Cross. Secretary Maitland, the cause of
+all the mischief&mdash;the cleverest man, as far as intellect went, in all
+Britain&mdash;died (so later rumour said) by his own hand. A nobler version
+of his end is probably a truer one: He had been long ill&mdash;so ill that
+when the Castle cannon were fired, he had been carried into the cellars
+as unable to bear the sound. The breaking down of his hopes finished
+him. 'The secretary,' wrote some one from the spot to Cecil, 'is dead of
+grief, being unable to endure the great hatred which all this people
+bears towards him.' It would be well if some competent man would write a
+life of Maitland, or at least edit his papers. They contain by far the
+clearest account of the inward movements of the time; and he himself is
+one of the most tragically interesting characters in the cycle of the
+Reformation history.</p>
+
+<p>With the fall of the Castle, then, but not till then, it became clear to
+all men that the Reformation would hold its ground. It was the final
+trampling out of the fire which for five years had threatened both
+England and Scotland with flames and ruin. For five years&mdash;as late
+certainly as the massacre of St. Bartholomew&mdash;those who understood best
+the true state of things, felt the keenest misgivings how the event
+would turn. That things ended as they did was due to the spirit of the
+Scotch commons. There was a moment when, if they had given way, all
+would have gone, perhaps even to Elizabeth's throne. They had passed for
+nothing; they had proved to be everything; had proved&mdash;the ultimate test
+in human things&mdash;to be the power which could hit the hardest blows, and
+they took rank accordingly. The creed began now in good earnest to make
+its way into hall and castle; but it kept the form which it assumed in
+the first hours of its danger and trial, and never after lost it. Had
+the aristocracy dealt sincerely with things in the earlier stages of the
+business, again I say the democratic element in the Kirk might have been
+softened or modified. But the Protestants had been trifled with by their
+own natural leaders. Used and abused by Elizabeth, despised by the
+worldly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span> intelligence and power of the times&mdash;they triumphed after all,
+and, as a natural consequence, they set their own mark and stamp upon
+the fruits of the victory.</p>
+
+<p>The question now is, what has the Kirk so established done for Scotland?
+Has it justified its own existence? Briefly, we might say, it has
+continued its first function as the guardian of Scottish freedom. But
+that is a vague phrase, and there are special accusations against the
+Kirk and its doctrines which imply that it has cared for other things
+than freedom. Narrow, fanatical, dictatorial, intrusive, superstitious,
+a spiritual despotism, the old priesthood over again with a new
+face&mdash;these and other such epithets and expressions we have heard often
+enough applied to it at more than one stage of its history. Well, I
+suppose that neither the Kirk nor anything else of man's making is
+altogether perfect. But let us look at the work which lay before it when
+it had got over its first perils. Scotch patriotism succeeded at last in
+the object it had so passionately set its heart upon. It sent a king at
+last of the Scotch blood to England, and a new dynasty; and it never
+knew peace or quiet after. The Kirk had stood between James Stuart and
+his kingcraft. He hated it as heartily as did his mother; and, when he
+got to England, he found people there who told him it would be easy to
+destroy it, and he found the strength of a fresh empire to back him in
+trying to do it. To have forced prelacy upon Scotland would have been to
+destroy the life out of Scotland. Thrust upon them by force, it would
+have been no more endurable than Popery. They would as soon, perhaps
+sooner, have had what the Irish call the 'rale thing' back again. The
+political freedom of the country was now wrapped up in the Kirk; and the
+Stuarts were perfectly well aware of that, and for that very reason
+began their crusade against it.</p>
+
+<p>And now, suppose the Kirk had been the broad, liberal, philosophical,
+intellectual thing which some people think it ought to have been, how
+would it have fared in that crusade; how altogether would it have
+encountered those surplices of Archbishop Laud or those dragoons of
+Claverhouse? It is hard to lose one's life for a 'perhaps,' and
+philosophical belief at the bottom means a 'perhaps' and nothing more.
+For more than half the <ins class="cor" title="Original typo: seventeeth">seventeenth</ins> century, the battle had to be fought
+out in Scotland, which in reality was the battle<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span> between liberty and
+despotism; and where, except in an intense, burning conviction that they
+were maintaining God's cause against the devil, could the poor Scotch
+people have found the strength for the unequal struggle which was forced
+upon them? Toleration is a good thing in its place; but you cannot
+tolerate what will not tolerate you, and is trying to cut your throat.
+Enlightenment you cannot have enough of, but it must be true
+enlightenment, which sees a thing in all its bearings. In these matters
+the vital questions are not always those which appear on the surface;
+and in the passion and resolution of brave and noble men there is often
+an inarticulate intelligence deeper than what can be expressed in words.
+Action sometimes will hit the mark, when the spoken word either misses
+it or is but half the truth. On such subjects, and with common men,
+latitude of mind means weakness of mind. There is but a certain quantity
+of spiritual force in any man. Spread it over a broad surface, the
+stream is shallow and languid; narrow the channel, and it becomes a
+driving force. Each may be well at its own time. The mill-race which
+drives the water-wheel is dispersed in rivulets over the meadow at its
+foot. The Covenanters fought the fight and won the victory, and then,
+and not till then, came the David Humes with their essays on miracles,
+and the Adam Smiths with their political economies, and steam-engines,
+and railroads, and philosophical institutions, and all the other blessed
+or unblessed fruits of liberty.</p>
+
+<p>But we may go further. Institutions exist for men, not men for
+institutions; and the ultimate test of any system of politics, or body
+of opinions, or form of belief, is the effect produced on the conduct
+and condition of the people who live and die under them. Now, I am not
+here to speak of Scotland of the present day. That, happily, is no
+business of mine. We have to do here with Scotland before the march of
+intellect; with Scotland of the last two centuries; with the three or
+four hundred thousand families, who for half-a-score of generations
+believed simply and firmly in the principles of the Reformation, and
+walked in the ways of it.</p>
+
+<p>Looked at broadly, one would say they had been an eminently pious
+people. It is part of the complaint of modern philosophers about them,
+that religion, or superstition, or whatever they please to call it, had
+too much to do with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span> their daily lives. So far as one can look into that
+commonplace round of things which historians never tell us about, there
+have rarely been seen in this world a set of people who have thought
+more about right and wrong, and the judgment about them of the upper
+powers. Long-headed, thrifty industry,&mdash;a sound hatred of waste,
+imprudence, idleness, extravagance,&mdash;the feet planted firmly upon the
+earth,&mdash;a conscientious sense that the worldly virtues are,
+nevertheless, very necessary virtues, that without these, honesty for
+one thing is not possible, and that without honesty no other excellence,
+religious or moral, is worth anything at all&mdash;this is the stuff of which
+Scotch life was made, and very good stuff it is. It has been called
+gloomy, austere, harsh, and such other epithets. A gifted modern writer
+has favoured us lately with long strings of extracts from the sermons of
+Scotch divines of the last century, taking hard views of human
+shortcomings and their probable consequences, and passing hard censures
+upon the world and its amusements. Well, no doubt amusement is a very
+good thing; but I should rather infer from the vehemence and frequency
+of these denunciations that the people had not been in the habit of
+denying themselves too immoderately; and, after all, it is no very hard
+charge against those teachers that they thought more of duty than of
+pleasure. Sermons always exaggerate the theoretic side of things; and
+the most austere preacher, when he is out of the pulpit, and you meet
+him at the dinner-table, becomes singularly like other people. We may
+take courage, I think, we may believe safely that in those
+minister-ridden days, men were not altogether so miserable; we may hope
+that no large body of human beings have for any length of time been too
+dangerously afraid of enjoyment. Among other good qualities, the Scots
+have been distinguished for humour&mdash;not for venomous wit, but for
+kindly, genial humour, which half loves what it laughs at&mdash;and this
+alone shows clearly enough that those to whom it belongs have not looked
+too exclusively on the gloomy side of the world. I should rather say
+that the Scots had been an unusually happy people. Intelligent industry,
+the honest doing of daily work, with a sense that it must be done well,
+under penalties; the necessaries of life moderately provided for; and a
+sensible content with the situation of life in which men are born&mdash;this
+through the week, and at the end<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span> of it the 'Cottar's Saturday
+Night'&mdash;the homely family, gathered reverently and peacefully together,
+and irradiated with a sacred presence.&mdash;Happiness! such happiness as we
+human creatures are likely to know upon this world, will be found there,
+if anywhere.</p>
+
+<p>The author of the 'History of Civilisation' makes a na&iuml;ve remark in
+connexion with this subject. Speaking of the other country, which he
+censures equally with Scotland for its slavery to superstition, he says
+of the Spaniards that they are a well-natured, truthful, industrious,
+temperate, pious people, innocent in their habits, affectionate in their
+families, full of humour, vivacity, and shrewdness, yet that all this
+'has availed them nothing'&mdash;'has availed them nothing,' that is his
+expression&mdash;because they are loyal, because they are credulous, because
+they are contented, because they have not apprehended the first
+commandment of the new covenant: 'Thou shalt get on and make money, and
+better thy condition in life;' because, therefore, they have added
+nothing to the scientific knowledge, the wealth, and the progress of
+mankind. Without these, it seems, the old-fashioned virtues avail
+nothing. They avail a great deal to human happiness. Applied science,
+and steam, and railroads, and machinery, enable an ever-increasing
+number of people to live upon the earth; but the happiness of those
+people remains, so far as I know, dependent very much on the old
+conditions. I should be glad to believe that the new views of things
+will produce effects upon the character in the long run half so
+beautiful.</p>
+
+<p>There is much more to say on this subject, were there time to say it,
+but I will not trespass too far upon your patience; and I would gladly
+have ended here, had not the mention of Spain suggested one other topic,
+which I should not leave unnoticed. The Spain of Cervantes and Don
+Quixote was the Spain of the Inquisition. The Scotland of Knox and
+Melville was the Scotland of the witch trials and witch burnings. The
+belief in witches was common to all the world. The prosecution and
+punishment of the poor creatures was more conspicuous in Scotland when
+the Kirk was most powerful; in England and New England, when Puritan
+principles were also dominant there. It is easy to understand the
+reasons. Evil of all kinds was supposed to be the work of a personal
+devil; and in the general horror of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span> evil, this particular form of it,
+in which the devil was thought especially active, excited the most
+passionate detestation. Thus, even the best men lent themselves
+unconsciously to the most detestable cruelty. Knox himself is not free
+from reproach. A poor woman was burned at St. Andrews when he was living
+there, and when a word from him would have saved her. It remains a
+lesson to all time, that goodness, though the indispensable adjunct to
+knowledge, is no substitute for it; that when conscience undertakes to
+dictate beyond its province, the result is only the more monstrous.</p>
+
+<p>It is well that we should look this matter in the face; and as
+particular stories leave more impression than general statements, I will
+mention one, perfectly well authenticated, which I take from the
+official report of the proceedings:&mdash;Towards the end of 1593 there was
+trouble in the family of the Earl of Orkney. His brother laid a plot to
+murder him, and was said to have sought the help of a 'notorious witch'
+called Alison Balfour. When Alison Balfour's life was looked into, no
+evidence could be found connecting her either with the particular
+offence or with witchcraft in general; but it was enough in these
+matters to be accused. She swore she was innocent; but her guilt was
+only held to be aggravated by perjury. She was tortured again and again.
+Her legs were put in the caschilaws&mdash;an iron frame which was gradually
+heated till it burned into the flesh&mdash;but no confession could be wrung
+from her. The caschilaws failed utterly, and something else had to be
+tried. She had a husband, a son, and a daughter, a child seven years
+old. As her own sufferings did not work upon her, she might be touched,
+perhaps, by the sufferings of those who were dear to her. They were
+brought into court, and placed at her side; and the husband first was
+placed in the 'lang irons'&mdash;some accursed instrument; I know not what.
+Still the devil did not yield. She bore this; and her son was next
+operated on. The boy's legs were set in 'the boot,'&mdash;the iron boot you
+may have heard of. The wedges were driven in, which, when forced home,
+crushed the very bone and marrow. Fifty-seven mallet strokes were
+delivered upon the wedges. Yet this, too, failed. There was no
+confession yet. So, last of all, the little daughter was taken. There
+was a machine called the piniwinkies&mdash;a kind of thumbscrew, which
+brought blood from under the finger nails, with a pain successfully<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span>
+terrible. These things were applied to the poor child's hands, and the
+mother's constancy broke down, and she said she would admit anything
+they wished. She confessed her witchcraft&mdash;so tried, she would have
+confessed to the seven deadly sins&mdash;and then she was burned, recalling
+her confession, and with her last breath protesting her innocence.</p>
+
+<p>It is due to the intelligence of the time to admit that after this her
+guilt was doubted, and such vicarious means of extorting confession do
+not seem to have been tried again. Yet the men who inflicted these
+tortures would have borne them all themselves sooner than have done any
+act which they consciously knew to be wrong. They did not know that the
+instincts of humanity were more sacred than the logic of theology, and
+in fighting against the devil they were themselves doing the devil's
+work. We should not attempt to apologise for these things, still less to
+forget them. No martyrs ever suffered to instil into mankind a more
+wholesome lesson&mdash;more wholesome, or one more hard to learn. The more
+conscientious men are, the more difficult it is for them to understand
+that in their most cherished convictions, when they pass beyond the
+limits where the wise and good of all sorts agree, they may be the
+victims of mere delusion. Yet, after all, and happily, such cases were
+but few, and affected but lightly the general condition of the people.</p>
+
+<p>The student running over the records of other times finds certain
+salient things standing out in frightful prominence. He concludes that
+the substance of those times was made up of the matters most dwelt on by
+the annalist. He forgets that the things most noticed are not those of
+every-day experience, but the abnormal, the extraordinary, the
+monstrous. The exceptions are noted down, the common and usual is passed
+over in silence. The philosophic historian, studying hereafter this
+present age, in which we are ourselves living, may say that it was a
+time of unexampled prosperity, luxury, and wealth; but catching at
+certain horrible murders which have lately disgraced our civilisation,
+may call us a nation of assassins. It is to invert the pyramid and stand
+it on its point. The same system of belief which produced the tragedy
+which I have described, in its proper province as the guide of ordinary
+life, has been the immediate cause of all that is best and greatest in
+Scottish character.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="THE_PHILOSOPHY_OF_CATHOLICISMC" id="THE_PHILOSOPHY_OF_CATHOLICISMC"></a>THE PHILOSOPHY OF CATHOLICISM.<a name="FNanchor_C_3" id="FNanchor_C_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_C_3" class="fnanchor">[C]</a></h2>
+
+
+<p>Not long ago I heard a living thinker of some eminence say that he
+considered Christianity to have been a misfortune. Intellectually, he
+said, it was absurd; and practically, it was an offence, over which he
+stumbled. It would have been far better for mankind, he thought, if they
+could have kept clear of superstition, and followed on upon the track of
+the Grecian philosophy. So little do men care to understand the
+conditions which have made them what they are, and which has created for
+them that very wisdom in which they themselves are so contented. But it
+is strange, indeed, that a person who could deliberately adopt such a
+conclusion should trouble himself any more to look for truth. If a mere
+absurdity could make its way out of a little fishing village in Galilee,
+and spread through the whole civilised world; if men are so pitiably
+silly, that in an age of great mental activity their strongest thinkers
+should have sunk under an abortion of fear and folly, should have
+allowed it to absorb into itself whatever of heroism, of devotion,
+self-sacrifice, and moral nobleness there was among them; surely there
+were nothing better for a wise man than to make the best of his time,
+and to crowd what enjoyment he can find into it, sheltering himself in a
+very disdainful Pyrrhonism from all care for mankind or for their
+opinions. For what better test of truth have we than the ablest men's
+acceptance of it? and if the ablest men eighteen centuries ago
+deliberately accepted what is now too absurd to reason upon, what right
+have we to hope that with the same natures, the same passions, the same
+understandings, no better proof against deception, we, like they, are
+not entangled in what, at the close of another era, shall seem again
+ridiculous? The scoff of Cicero at the divinity of Liber and Ceres
+(bread and wine) may be translated<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span> literally by the modern Protestant;
+and the sarcasms which Clement and Tertullian flung at the Pagan creed,
+the modern sceptic returns upon their own. Of what use is it to destroy
+an idol, when another, or the same in another form, takes immediate
+possession of the vacant pedestal?</p>
+
+<p>I shall not argue with the extravagant hypothesis of my friend. In the
+opinion even of Goethe, who was not troubled with credulity, the human
+race can never attain to anything higher than Christianity&mdash;if we mean
+by Christianity the religion which was revealed to the world in the
+teaching and the life of its Founder. But even the more limited
+reprobation by our own Reformers of the creed of medi&aelig;val Europe is not
+more just or philosophical.</p>
+
+<p>Ptolemy was not perfect, but Newton had been a fool if he had scoffed at
+Ptolemy. Newton could not have been without Ptolemy, nor Ptolemy without
+the Chaldees; and as it is with the minor sciences, so far more is it
+with the science of sciences&mdash;the science of life, which has grown
+through all the ages from the beginning of time. We speak of the errors
+of the past. We, with this glorious present which is opening on us, we
+shall never enter on it, we shall never understand it, till we have
+learnt to see in that past, not error, but instalment of truth,
+hard-fought-for truth, wrung out with painful and heroic effort. The
+promised land is smiling before us, but we may not pass over into the
+possession of it while the bones of our fathers who laboured through the
+wilderness lie bleaching on the sands, or a prey to the unclean birds.
+We must gather their relics and bury them, and sum up their labours, and
+inscribe the record of their actions on their tombs as an honourable
+epitaph. If Catholicism really is passing away, if it has done its work,
+and if what is left of it is now holding us back from better things, it
+is not for our bitterness but for our affectionate acknowledgment, nor
+for our heaping contempt on what it is, but for our reverend and patient
+examination of what it has been, that it will be content to bid us
+farewell, and give us God speed on our further journey.</p>
+
+<p>In the Natural History of Religions, certain broad phenomena perpetually
+repeat themselves; they rise in the highest thought extant at the time
+of their origin; the conclusions of philosophy settle into a creed; art
+ornaments it, devotion consecrates it, time elaborates it. It grows
+through a long<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span> series of generations into the heart and habits of the
+people; and so long as no disturbing cause interferes, or so long as the
+idea at the centre of it survives, a healthy, vigorous, natural life
+shoots beautifully up out of the intellectual root. But at last the idea
+becomes obsolete; the numbing influence of habit petrifies the spirit in
+the outside ceremonial, while new questions arise among the thinkers,
+and ideas enter into new and unexplained relations. The old formula will
+not serve; but new formul&aelig; are tardy in appearing; and habit and
+superstition cling to the past, and policy vindicates it, and statecraft
+upholds it forcibly as serviceable to order, till, from the combined
+action of folly, and worldliness, and ignorance, the once beautiful
+symbolism becomes at last no better than 'a whited sepulchre full of
+dead men's bones and all uncleanness.' So it is now. So it was in the
+era of the C&aelig;sars, out of which Christianity arose; and Christianity, in
+the form which it assumed at the close of the Arian controversy, was the
+deliberate solution which the most powerful intellects of that day could
+offer of the questions which had grown with the growth of mankind, and
+on which Paganism had suffered shipwreck.</p>
+
+<p>Paganism, as a creed, was entirely physical. When Paganism rose, men had
+not begun to reflect upon themselves, or the infirmities of their own
+nature. The bad man was a bad man&mdash;the coward, a coward&mdash;the liar, a
+liar&mdash;individually hateful and despicable: but in hating and despising
+such unfortunates, the old Greeks were satisfied to have felt all that
+it was necessary to feel about them; and how such a phenomenon as a bad
+man came to exist in this world, they scarcely cared to enquire. There
+is no evil spirit in the mythology as an antagonist of the gods. There
+is the Erinnys as the avenger of monstrous villanies; there is a
+Tartarus where the darkest criminals suffer eternal tortures. But
+Tantalus and Ixion are suffering for enormous crimes, to which the small
+wickedness of common men offers no analogy. Moreover, these and other
+such stories are only curiously ornamented myths, representing physical
+phenomena. But with Socrates a change came over philosophy; a
+sign&mdash;perhaps a cause&mdash;of the decline of the existing religion. The
+study of man superseded the study of nature: a purer Theism came in with
+the higher ideal of perfection, and sin and depravity at once assumed an
+importance, the intensity<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span> of which made every other question
+insignificant. How man could know the good and yet choose the evil; how
+God could be all pure and almighty, and yet evil have broken into his
+creation&mdash;these were the questions which thenceforth were the perplexity
+of philosophic speculation.</p>
+
+<p>Whatever difficulty there might be in discovering how evil came to be,
+the leaders of all the sects agreed at last upon the seat of it. Whether
+<i>matter</i> was eternal, as Aristotle thought, or created, as Plato
+thought, both Plato and Aristotle were equally satisfied that the secret
+of all the shortcomings in this world lay in the imperfection,
+reluctancy, or inherent grossness of this impracticable substance. God
+would have everything perfect, but the nature of the element in which He
+worked in some way defeated his purpose. Death, disease, decay, clung
+necessarily to everything which was created out of it; and pain, and
+want, and hunger, and suffering. Worse than all, the spirit in its
+material body was opposed and borne down, its aspirations crushed, its
+purity tainted by the passions and appetites of its companion&mdash;the
+fleshly lusts which waged perpetual war against the soul.</p>
+
+<p>Matter was the cause of evil, and thenceforth the question was how to
+conquer matter, or, at least, how to set free the spirit from its
+control.</p>
+
+<p>The Greek language and the Greek literature spread behind the march of
+Alexander; but as his generals could only make their conquests permanent
+by largely accepting the Eastern manners, so philosophy could only make
+good its ground by becoming itself Orientalised. The one pure and holy
+God whom Plato had painfully reasoned out for himself had existed from
+immemorial time in the traditions of the Jews; while the Persians, who
+had before taught the Jews at Babylon the existence of an independent
+evil being, now had him to offer to the Greeks as their account of the
+difficulties which had perplexed Socrates. Seven centuries of struggle,
+and many hundred thousand folios, were the results of the remarkable
+fusion which followed. Out of these elements, united in various
+proportions, rose successively the Alexandrian philosophy, the
+Hellenists, the Therapeut&aelig;, those strange Essene communists, with the
+innumerable sects of Gnostic or Christian heretics. Finally, the battle
+was limited to the two great rivals, under one or other of which the
+best<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span> of the remainder had ranged themselves&mdash;Manicheism and Catholic
+Christianity: Manicheism in which the Persian&mdash;Catholicism in which the
+Jewish&mdash;element most preponderated. It did not end till the close of the
+fifth century, and it ended then rather by arbitration than by a decided
+victory which either side could claim. The Church has yet to acknowledge
+how large a portion of its enemy's doctrines it incorporated through the
+mediation of Augustine before the field was surrendered to it. Let us
+trace something of the real bearings of this section of the world's
+Oriental history, which to so many moderns seems no better than an idle
+fighting over words and straws.</p>
+
+<p>Facts witnessing so clearly that the especial strength of evil lay, as
+the philosophers had seen, in <i>matter</i>, it was so far a conclusion which
+both Jew and Persian were ready to accept; the naked Aristotelic view of
+it being most acceptable to the Persian, the Platonic to the Hellenistic
+Jew. But the purer theology of the Jew forced him to look for a solution
+of the question which Plato had left doubtful, and to explain how evil
+had crept into matter. He could not allow that what God had created
+could be of its own nature imperfect. God made it very good; some other
+cause had broken in to spoil it. Accordingly, as before he had reduced
+the independent Arimanes, whose existence he had learnt at Babylon, into
+a subordinate spirit; so now, not questioning the facts of disease, of
+death, of pain, or of the infirmity of the flesh which the natural
+strength of the spirit was unable to resist, he accounted for them under
+the supposition that the first man had deliberately sinned, and by his
+sin had brought a curse upon the whole material earth, and upon all
+which was fashioned out of it. The earth was created pure and lovely&mdash;a
+garden of delight, loading itself of its own free accord with fruit and
+flower, and everything most exquisite and beautiful. No bird or beast of
+prey broke the eternal peace which reigned over its hospitable surface.
+In calm and quiet intercourse, the leopard lay down by the kid, the lion
+browsed beside the ox, and the corporeal frame of man, knowing neither
+decay nor death, nor unruly appetite, nor any change or infirmity, was
+pure as the immortal substance of the unfallen angels.</p>
+
+<p>But with the fatal apple all this fair scene passed away, and creation
+as it seemed was hopelessly and irretrievably<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span> ruined. Adam sinned&mdash;no
+matter how, he sinned; the sin was the one terrible fact: moral evil was
+brought into the world by the only creature who was capable of
+committing it. Sin entered in, and death by sin; death and disease,
+storm and pestilence, earthquake and famine. The imprisoned passions of
+the wild animals were let loose, and earth and air became full of
+carnage: worst of all, man's animal nature came out in gigantic
+strength&mdash;the carnal lusts, unruly appetites, jealousies, hatreds,
+rapines, and murders; and then the law, and with it, of course, breaches
+of the law, and sin on sin. The seed of Adam was infected in the animal
+change which had passed over Adam's person, and every child, therefore,
+thenceforth naturally engendered in his posterity, was infected with the
+curse which he had incurred. Every material organisation thenceforward
+contained in itself the elements of its own destruction, and the
+philosophic conclusions of Aristotle were accepted and explained by
+theology. Already, in the popular histories, those who were infected by
+disease were said to be bound by Satan; madness was a 'possession' by
+the Evil Spirit; and the whole creation, from Adam till Christ, groaned
+and travailed under Satan's power. The nobler nature in man still made
+itself felt; but it was a slave when it ought to command. It might will
+to obey the higher law, but the law in the members was over-strong for
+it and bore it down. This was the body of death which philosophy
+detected but could not explain, and from which Catholicism now came
+forward with its magnificent promise of deliverance.</p>
+
+<p>The carnal doctrine of the sacraments, which Protestants are compelled
+to acknowledge to have been taught as fully in the early Church as it is
+now taught by the Roman Catholics, has long been the stumbling-block to
+modern thought. It was the very essence of the original creed. Unless
+the body could be purified, the soul could not be saved; because from
+the beginning, soul and flesh were one man and inseparable. Without his
+flesh, man was not, or would cease to be. But the natural organisation
+of the flesh was infected with evil, and unless organisation could begin
+again from a new original, no pure material substance could exist at
+all. He, therefore, by whom God had first made the world, entered into
+the womb of the Virgin in the form (if I may with reverence say so) of a
+new organic cell; and around it,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span> through the virtue of his creative
+energy, a material body grew again of the substance of his mother, pure
+of taint and clean as the first body of the first man was clean when it
+passed out under his hand in the beginning of all things. In Him thus
+wonderfully born was the virtue which was to restore the lost power of
+mankind. He came to redeem man; and, therefore, He took a human body,
+and He kept it pure through a human life, till the time came when it
+could be applied to its marvellous purpose. He died, and then appeared
+what was the nature of a material human body when freed from the
+limitations of sin. The grave could not hold it, neither was it possible
+that it should see corruption. It was real, for the disciples were
+allowed to feel and handle it. He ate and drank with them to assure
+their senses. But space had no power over it, nor any of the material
+obstacles which limit an ordinary power. He willed, and his body obeyed.
+He was here, He was there. He was visible, He was invisible. He was in
+the midst of his disciples and they saw Him, and then he was gone
+whither who could tell? At last He passed away to heaven; but while in
+heaven, He was still on earth. His body became the body of his Church on
+earth, not in metaphor, but in fact!&mdash;his very material body, in which
+and by which the faithful would be saved. His flesh and blood were
+thenceforth to be their food. They were to eat it as they would eat
+ordinary meat. They were to take it into their system, a pure material
+substance, to leaven the old natural substance and assimilate it to
+itself. As they fed upon it it would grow into them, and it would become
+their own real body. Flesh grown in the old way was the body of death,
+but the flesh of Christ was the life of the world, over which death had
+no power. Circumcision availed nothing, nor uncircumcision&mdash;but a <i>new
+creature</i>&mdash;and this new creature, which the child first put on in
+baptism, was born again into Christ of water and the Spirit. In the
+Eucharist he was fed and sustained, and went on from strength to
+strength; and ever as the nature of his body changed, being able to
+render a more complete obedience, he would at last pass away to God
+through the gate of the grave, and stand holy and perfect in the
+presence of Christ. Christ had indeed been ever present with him; but
+because while life lasted some particles of the old Adam would
+necessarily cling to every man, the Christian's mortal eye on earth
+could not see Him. Hedged in by 'his muddy vesture of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span> decay,' his eyes,
+like the eyes of the disciples of Emmaus, are holden, and only in faith
+he feels Him. But death, which till Christ had died had been the last
+victory of evil, in virtue of his submission to it, became its own
+destroyer, for it had power only over the tainted particles of the old
+substance, and there was nothing needed but that these should be washed
+away, and the elect would stand out at once pure and holy, clothed in
+immortal bodies, like refined gold, the redeemed of God.</p>
+
+<p>The being who accomplished a work so vast&mdash;a work compared to which the
+first creation appears but a trifling difficulty&mdash;what could He be but
+God? God Himself! Who but God could have wrested his prize from a power
+which half the thinking world believed to be his coequal and coeternal
+adversary? He was God. He was man also, for He was the second Adam&mdash;the
+second starting-point of human growth. He was virgin born, that no
+original impurity might infect the substance which He assumed; and being
+Himself sinless, He showed, in the nature of his person, after his
+resurrection, what the material body would have been in all of us except
+for sin, and what it will be when, after feeding on it in its purity,
+the bodies of each of us are transfigured after its likeness. Here was
+the secret of the spirit which set St. Simeon on his pillar and sent St.
+Anthony to the tombs&mdash;of the night watches, the weary fasts, the
+penitential scourgings, the life-long austerities which have been
+alternately the glory and the reproach of the medi&aelig;val saints. They
+desired to overcome their animal bodies, and anticipate in life the work
+of death in uniting themselves more completely to Christ by the
+destruction of the flesh, which lay as a veil between themselves and
+Him.</p>
+
+<p>Such I believe to have been the central idea of the beautiful creed
+which, for 1,500 years, tuned the heart and formed the mind of the
+noblest of mankind. From this centre it radiated out and spread, as time
+went on, into the full circle of human activity, flinging its own
+philosophy and its own peculiar grace over the common details of the
+common life of all of us. Like the seven lamps before the Throne of God,
+the seven mighty angels, and the seven stars, the seven sacraments shed
+over mankind a never-ceasing stream of blessed influences. The priests,
+a holy order set apart and endowed with mysterious power, represented
+Christ and administered<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span> his gifts. Christ, in his twelfth year, was
+presented in the Temple, and first entered on his Father's business; and
+the baptised child, when it has grown to an age to become conscious of
+its vow and of its privilege, again renews it in full knowledge of what
+it undertakes, and receives again sacramentally a fresh gift of grace to
+assist it forward on its way. In maturity it seeks a companion to share
+its pains and pleasures; and, again, Christ is present to consecrate the
+union. Marriage, which, outside the Church, only serves to perpetuate
+the curse and bring fresh inheritors of misery into the world, He made
+holy by his presence at Cana, and chose it as the symbol to represent
+his own mystic union with his Church. Even saints cannot live without at
+times some spot adhering to them. The atmosphere in which we breathe and
+move is soiled, and Christ has anticipated our wants. Christ did penance
+forty days in the wilderness, not to subdue his own flesh&mdash;for that
+which was already perfect did not need subduing&mdash;but to give to penance
+a cleansing virtue to serve for our daily or our hourly ablution. Christ
+consecrates our birth; Christ throws over us our baptismal robe of pure
+unsullied innocence. He strengthens us as we go forward. He raises us
+when we fall. He feeds us with the substance of his own most precious
+body. In the person of his minister he does all this for us, in virtue
+of that which in his own person He actually performed when a man living
+on this earth. Last of all, when time is drawing to its close with
+us&mdash;when life is past, when the work is done, and the dark gate is near,
+beyond which the garden of an eternal home is waiting to receive us, his
+tender care has not forsaken us. He has taken away the sting of death,
+but its appearance is still terrible; and He will not leave us without
+special help at our last need. He tried the agony of the moment; and He
+sweetens the cup for us before we drink it. We are dismissed to the
+grave with our bodies anointed with oil, which He made holy in his last
+anointing before his passion, and then all is over. We lie down and seem
+to decay&mdash;to decay&mdash;but not all. Our natural body decays, being the last
+remains of the infected matter which we have inherited from Adam; but
+the spiritual body, the glorified substance which has made our life, and
+is our real body as we are in Christ, that can never decay, but passes
+off into the kingdom which is prepared for it; that other world where
+there is no sin, and God is all and in all!<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_C_3" id="Footnote_C_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_C_3"><span class="label">[C]</span></a> From the <i>Leader</i>, 1851.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="A_PLEA_FOR_THE_FREE_DISCUSSION_OF_THEOLOGICAL_DIFFICULTIESD" id="A_PLEA_FOR_THE_FREE_DISCUSSION_OF_THEOLOGICAL_DIFFICULTIESD"></a>A PLEA FOR THE FREE DISCUSSION OF THEOLOGICAL DIFFICULTIES.<a name="FNanchor_D_4" id="FNanchor_D_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_D_4" class="fnanchor">[D]</a></h2>
+
+
+<p>In the ordinary branches of human knowledge or enquiry, the judicious
+questioning of received opinions has been regarded as the sign of
+scientific vitality, the principle of scientific advancement, the very
+source and root of healthy progress and growth. If medicine had been
+regulated three hundred years ago by Act of Parliament; if there had
+been Thirty-nine Articles of Physic, and every licensed practitioner had
+been compelled, under pains and penalties, to compound his drugs by the
+prescriptions of Henry the Eighth's physician, Doctor Butts, it is easy
+to conjecture in what state of health the people of this country would
+at present be found. Constitutions have changed with habits of life, and
+the treatment of disorders has changed to meet the new conditions. New
+diseases have shown themselves of which Doctor Butts had no cognizance;
+new continents have given us plants with medicinal virtues previously
+unknown; new sciences, and even the mere increase of recorded
+experience, have added a thousand remedies to those known to the age of
+the Tudors. If the College of Physicians had been organised into a board
+of orthodoxy, and every novelty of treatment had been regarded as a
+crime against society, which a law had been established to punish, the
+hundreds who die annually from preventible causes would have been
+thousands and tens of thousands.</p>
+
+<p>Astronomy is the most perfect of the sciences. The accuracy of the
+present theory of the planetary movements is tested daily and hourly by
+the most delicate experiments, and the Legislature, if it so pleased,
+might enact the first principles of these movements into a statute,
+without danger<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span> of committing the law of England to falsehood. Yet, if
+the Legislature were to venture on any such paternal procedure in a few
+years gravitation itself would be called in question, and the whole
+science would wither under the fatal shadow. There are many phenomena
+still unexplained to give plausibility to scepticism; there are others
+more easily formularised for working purposes in the language of
+Hipparchus; and there would be reactionists who would invite us to
+return to the safe convictions of our forefathers. What the world has
+seen the world may see again; and were it once granted that astronomy
+were something to be ruled by authority, new popes would imprison new
+Galileos; the knowledge already acquired would be strangled in the cords
+which were intended to keep it safe from harm, and, deprived of the free
+air on which its life depends, it would dwindle and die.</p>
+
+<p>A few years ago, an Inspector of Schools&mdash;a Mr. Jellinger
+Symonds&mdash;opening, perhaps for the first time, an elementary book on
+astronomy, came on something which he conceived to be a difficulty in
+the theory of lunar motion. His objection was on the face of it
+plausible. The true motions of the heavenly bodies are universally the
+opposite of the apparent motions. Mr. Symonds conceived that the moon
+could not revolve on its axis, because the same side of it was
+continually turned towards the earth; and because if it were connected
+with the earth by a rigid bar&mdash;which, as he thought, would deprive it of
+power of rotation&mdash;the relative aspects of the two bodies would remain
+unchanged. He sent his views to the 'Times.' He appealed to the common
+sense of the world, and common sense seemed to be on his side. The men
+of science were of course right; but a phenomenon, not entirely obvious,
+had been hitherto explained in language which the general reader could
+not readily comprehend. A few words of elucidation cleared up the
+confusion. We do not recollect whether Mr. Symonds was satisfied or not;
+but most of us who had before received what the men of science told us
+with an unintelligent and languid assent, were set thinking for
+ourselves, and, as a result of the discussion, exchanged a confused idea
+for a clear one.</p>
+
+<p>It was an excellent illustration of the true claims of authority and of
+the value of open enquiry. The ignorant man has not as good a right to
+his own opinion as the instructed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span> man. The instructed man, however
+right he may be, must not deliver his conclusions as axioms, and merely
+insist that they are true. The one asks a question, the other answers
+it, and all of us are the better for the business.</p>
+
+<p>Now, let us suppose the same thing to have happened when the only reply
+to a difficulty was an appeal to the Astronomer-Royal, where the
+rotation of the moon was an article of salvation decreed by the law of
+the land, and where all persons admitted to hold office under the State
+were required to subscribe to it. The Astronomer-Royal&mdash;as it was, if we
+remember right, he was a little cross at Mr. Symond's presumption&mdash;would
+have brought an action against him in the Court of Arches; Mr. Symonds
+would have been deprived of his inspectorship&mdash;for, of course, he would
+have been obstinate in his heresy; the world outside would have had an
+antecedent presumption that truth lay with the man who was making
+sacrifices for it, and that there was little to be said in the way of
+argument for what could not stand without the help of the law. Everybody
+could understand the difficulty; not everybody would have taken the
+trouble to attend to the answer. Mr. Symonds would have been a Colenso,
+and a good many of us would have been convinced in our secret hearts
+that the moon as little turned on its axis as the drawing-room table.</p>
+
+<p>As it is in idea essential to a reverence for truth to believe in its
+capacity for self-defence, so practically, in every subject except one,
+errors are allowed free room to express themselves, and the liberty of
+opinion which is the life of knowledge, as surely becomes the death of
+falsehood. A method&mdash;the soundness of which is so evident that to argue
+in favour of it is almost absurd&mdash;might be expected to have been
+applied, as a matter of course, to the one subject where mistake is
+supposed to be fatal,&mdash;where to come to wrong conclusions is held to be
+a crime for which the Maker of the universe has neither pardon nor pity.
+Yet many reasons, not difficult to understand, have long continued to
+exclude theology from the region where free discussion is supposed to be
+applicable. That so many persons have a personal interest in the
+maintenance of particular views, would of itself be fatal to fair
+argument. Though they know themselves to be right, yet right is not
+enough for them unless there is might to support it, and those who talk
+most of faith show least that they possess it.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span> But there are deeper and
+more subtle objections. The theologian requires absolute certainty, and
+there are no absolute certainties in science. The conclusions of science
+are never more than in a high degree probable; they are no more than the
+best explanations of phenomena which are attainable in the existing
+state of knowledge. The most elementary laws are called laws only in
+courtesy. They are generalisations which are not considered likely to
+require modification, but which no one pretends to be in the nature of
+the cause exhaustively and ultimately true. As phenomena become more
+complicated, and the data for the interpretation of them more
+inadequate, the explanations offered are put forward hypothetically, and
+are graduated by the nature of the evidence. Such modest hesitation is
+altogether unsuited to the theologian, whose certainty increases with
+the mystery and obscurity of his matter; his convictions admit of no
+qualification; his truth is sure as the axioms of geometry; he knows
+what he believes, for he has the evidence in his heart; if he enquire,
+it is with a foregone conclusion, and serious doubt with him is sin. It
+is in vain to point out to him the thousand forms of opinions for each
+of which the same internal witness is affirmed. The Mayo peasant
+crawling with bare knees over the splintered rocks on Croagh Patrick,
+the nun prostrate before the image of St. Mary, the Methodist in the
+spasmodic ecstasy of a revival, alike are conscious of emotions in
+themselves which correspond to their creed: the more passionate, or&mdash;as
+some would say&mdash;the more unreasoning the piety, the louder and more
+clear is the voice within. But these varieties are no embarrassment to
+the theologian. He finds no fault with the method which is identical in
+them all. Whatever the party to which he himself belongs, he is equally
+satisfied that he alone has the truth; the rest are under illusions of
+Satan.</p>
+
+<p>Again, we hear&mdash;or we used to hear when the High Church party were more
+formidable than they are at present&mdash;much about 'the right of private
+judgment.' 'Why,' the eloquent Protestant would say, 'should I pin my
+faith upon the Church? the Church is but a congregation of fallible men,
+no better able to judge than I am; I have a right to my own opinion.' It
+sounds like a paradox to say that free discussion is interfered with by
+a cause which, above all others, would have been expected to further it;
+but this in fact has been<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span> the effect, because it tends to remove the
+grounds of theological belief beyond the province of argument. No one
+talks of 'a right of private judgment' in anything but religion; no one
+but a fool insists on his 'right to his own opinion' with his lawyer or
+his doctor. Able men who have given their time to special subjects, are
+authorities upon those subjects to be listened to with deference, and
+the ultimate authority at any given time is the collective general sense
+of the wisest men living in the department to which they belong. The
+utmost 'right of private judgment' which anybody claims in such cases,
+is the choice of the physician to whom he will trust his body, or of the
+counsel to whom he will commit the conduct of his cause. The expression,
+as it is commonly used, implies a belief that, in matters of religion,
+the criteria of truth are different in kind from what prevail elsewhere,
+and the efforts which have been made to bring such a notion into harmony
+with common sense and common subjects have not been the least
+successful. The High Church party used to say, as a point against the
+Evangelicals, that either 'the right of private judgment' meant nothing,
+or it meant that a man had a right to be in the wrong. 'No,' said a
+writer in the 'Edinburgh Review,' 'it means only that if a man chooses
+to be in the wrong, no one else has a right to interfere with him. A man
+has no right to get drunk in his own house, but the policeman may not
+force a way into his house and prevent him.' The illustration fails of
+its purpose.</p>
+
+<p>In the first place, the Evangelicals never contemplated a wrong use of
+the thing; they meant merely that they had a right to their own opinions
+as against the Church. They did not indeed put forward their claim quite
+so nakedly; they made it general, as sounding less invidious; but nobody
+ever heard an Evangelical admit a High Churchman's right to be a High
+Churchman, or a Catholic's right to be a Catholic.</p>
+
+<p>But secondly, society has a most absolute right to prevent all manner of
+evil&mdash;drunkenness, and the rest of it, if it can&mdash;only in doing so,
+society must not use means which would create a greater evil than it
+would remedy. As a man can by no possibility be doing anything but most
+foul wrong to himself in getting drunk, society does him no wrong, but
+rather does him the greatest benefit, if it can possibly keep him sober;
+and in the same way, since a false belief in serious matters is among
+the greatest of misfortunes,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span> so to drive it out of man, by the whip, if
+it cannot be managed by persuasion, is an act of brotherly love and
+affection, provided the belief really and truly is false, and you have a
+better to give him in the place of it. The question is not what to do,
+but merely 'how to do it;' although Mr. Mill in his love of 'liberty,'
+thinks otherwise. Mr. Mill demands for every man a right to say out his
+convictions in plain language, whatever they may be; and so far as he
+means that there should be no Act of Parliament to prevent him, he is
+perfectly just in what he says. But when Mr. Mill goes from Parliament
+to public opinion&mdash;when he lays down as a general principle that the
+free play of thought is unwholesomely interfered with by society, he
+would take away the sole protection which we possess from the inroads of
+any kind of folly. His dread of tyranny is so great, that he thinks a
+man better off with a false opinion of his own than with a right opinion
+inflicted upon him from without; while, for our own part, we should be
+grateful for tyranny or for anything else which would perform so useful
+an office for us.</p>
+
+<p>Public opinion may be unjust at particular times and on particular
+subjects; we believe it to be both unjust and unwise on the matter of
+which we are at present speaking: but, on the whole, it is like the
+ventilation of a house, which keeps the air pure. Much in this world has
+to be taken for granted, and we cannot be for ever arguing over our
+first principles. If a man persists in talking of what he does not
+understand, he is put down; if he sports loose views on morals at a
+decent dinner party, the better sort of people fight shy of him, and he
+is not invited again; if he profess himself a Buddhist or a Mahometan,
+it is assumed that he has not adopted those beliefs on serious
+conviction, but rather in wilful levity and eccentricity which does not
+deserve to be tolerated. Men have no right to make themselves bores and
+nuisances; and the common sense of mankind inflicts wholesome
+inconveniences on those who carry their 'right of private judgment' to
+any such extremities. It is a check, the same in kind as that which
+operates so wholesomely in the sciences. Mere folly is extinguished in
+contempt; objections reasonably urged obtain a hearing and are
+reasonably met. New truths, after encountering sufficient opposition to
+test their value, make their way into general reception.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>A further cause which has operated to prevent theology from obtaining
+the benefit of free discussion is the interpretation popularly placed
+upon the constitution of the Church Establishment. For fifteen centuries
+of its existence, the Christian Church was supposed to be under the
+immediate guidance of the Holy Spirit, which miraculously controlled its
+decisions, and precluded the possibility of error. This theory broke
+down at the Reformation, but it left behind it a confused sense that
+theological truth was in some way different from other truth; and,
+partly on grounds of public policy, partly because it was supposed to
+have succeeded to the obligations and the rights of the Papacy, the
+State took upon itself to fix by statute the doctrines which should be
+taught to the people. The distractions created by divided opinions were
+then dangerous. Individuals did not hesitate to ascribe to themselves
+the infallibility which they denied to the Church. Everybody was
+intolerant upon principle, and was ready to cut the throat of an
+opponent whom his arguments had failed to convince. The State, while it
+made no pretensions to Divine guidance, was compelled to interfere in
+self-protection; and to keep the peace of the realm, and to prevent the
+nation from tearing itself in pieces, a body of formulas was enacted,
+for the time broad and comprehensive, within which opinion might be
+allowed convenient latitude, while forbidden to pass beyond the border.</p>
+
+<p>It might have been thought that in abandoning for itself, and formally
+denying to the Church its pretensions to immunity from error, the State
+could not have intended to bind the conscience. When this or that law is
+passed, the subject is required to obey it, but he is not required to
+approve of the law as just. The Prayer-Book and the Thirty-nine
+Articles, so far as they are made obligatory by Act of Parliament, are
+as much laws as any other statute. They are a rule to conduct; it is not
+easy to see why they should be more; it is not easy to see why they
+should have been supposed to deprive clergymen of a right to their
+opinions, or to forbid discussion of their contents. The judge is not
+forbidden to ameliorate the law which he administers. If in discharge of
+his duty he has to pronounce a sentence which he declares at the same
+time that he thinks unjust, no indignant public accuses him of
+dishonesty, or requires him to resign his office. The soldier is asked
+no questions as to the legitimacy of the war<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span> on which he is sent to
+fight; nor need he throw up his commission if he think the quarrel a bad
+one. Doubtless, if a law was utterly iniquitous&mdash;if a war was
+unmistakably wicked&mdash;honourable men might feel uncertain what to do, and
+would seek some other profession rather than continue instruments of
+evil. But within limits, and in questions of detail, where the service
+is generally good and honourable, we leave opinion its free play, and
+exaggerated scrupulousness would be folly or something worse. Somehow or
+other, however, this wholesome freedom is not allowed to the clergyman.
+The idea of absolute inward belief has been substituted for that of
+obedience; and the man who, in taking orders, signs the Articles and
+accepts the Prayer Book, does not merely undertake to use the services
+in the one, and abstain from contradicting to his congregation the
+doctrines contained in the other; but he is held to promise what no
+honest man, without presumption, can undertake to promise&mdash;that he will
+continue to think to the end of his life as he thinks when he makes his
+engagement.</p>
+
+<p>It is said that if his opinions change, he may resign, and retire into
+lay communion. We are not prepared to say that either the Convocation of
+1562, or the Parliament which afterwards endorsed its proceedings, knew
+exactly what they meant, or did not mean; but it is quite clear that
+they did not contemplate the alternative of a clergyman's retirement. If
+they had, they would have provided means by which he could have
+abandoned his orders, and not have remained committed for life to a
+profession from which he could not escape. If the popular theory of
+subscription be true, and the Articles are articles of belief, a
+reasonable human being, when little more than a boy, pledges himself to
+a long series of intricate and highly-difficult propositions of abstruse
+divinity. He undertakes never to waver or doubt&mdash;never to allow his mind
+to be shaken, whatever the weight of argument or evidence brought to
+bear upon him. That is to say, he promises to do what no man living has
+a right to promise to do. He is doing, on the authority of Parliament,
+precisely what the Church of Rome required him to do on the authority of
+a Council.</p>
+
+<p>If a clergyman&mdash;in trouble amidst the abstruse subjects with which he
+has to deal, or unable to reconcile some new-discovered truth of science
+with the established formulas&mdash;puts forward his perplexities; if he
+ventures a doubt of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span> omniscience of the statesmen and divines of the
+sixteenth century, which they themselves disowned, there is an instant
+cry to have him stifled, silenced, or trampled down; and if no longer
+punished in life and limb, to have him deprived of the means on which
+life and limb can be supported, while with ingenious tyranny he is
+forbidden to maintain himself by any other occupation.</p>
+
+<p>So far have we gone in this direction, that when the 'Essays and
+Reviews' appeared, it was gravely said&mdash;and said by men who had no
+professional antipathy to them&mdash;that the writers had broken their faith.
+Laymen were free to say what they pleased on such subjects; clergymen
+were the hired exponents of the established opinions, and were committed
+to them in thought and word. It was one more anomaly where there were
+enough already. To say that the clergy, who are set apart to study a
+particular subject, are to be the only persons unpermitted to have an
+independent opinion upon it, is like saying that lawyers must take no
+part in the amendment of the statute-book; that engineers must be silent
+upon mechanism; and if an improvement is wanted in the art of medicine,
+physicians may have nothing to say to it.</p>
+
+<p>These causes would, perhaps, have been insufficient to repress free
+enquiry, if there had been on the part of the really able men among us a
+determination to break the ice; in other words, if theology had
+preserved the same commanding interest for the more powerful minds with
+which it affected them three hundred years ago. But on the one hand, a
+sense, half serious, half languid, of the hopelessness of the subject
+has produced an indisposition to meddle with it; on the other, there has
+been a creditable reluctance to disturb by discussion the minds of the
+uneducated or half-educated, to whom the established religion is simply
+an expression of the obedience which they owe to Almighty God, on the
+details of which they think little, and are therefore unconscious of its
+difficulties, while in general it is the source of all that is best and
+noblest in their lives and actions.</p>
+
+<p>This last motive no doubt deserves respect, but the force which it once
+possessed it possesses no longer. The uncertainty which once affected
+only the more instructed extends now to all classes of society. A
+superficial crust of agreement, wearing thinner day by day, is
+undermined everywhere<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span> by a vague misgiving; and there is an unrest
+which will be satisfied only when the sources of it are probed to the
+core. The Church authorities repeat a series of phrases which they are
+pleased to call answers to objections; they treat the most serious
+grounds of perplexity as if they were puerile and trifling; while it is
+notorious that for a century past extremely able men have either not
+known what to say about them, or have not said what they thought. On the
+Continent the peculiar English view has scarcely a single educated
+defender. Even in England the laity keep their judgment in suspense, or
+remain warily silent.</p>
+
+<p>'Of what religion are you, Mr. Rogers?' said a lady once.</p>
+
+<p>'What religion, madam? I am of the religion of all sensible men.'</p>
+
+<p>'And what is that?' she asked.</p>
+
+<p>'All sensible men, madam, keep that to themselves.'</p>
+
+<p>If Mr. Rogers had gone on to explain himself, he would have said,
+perhaps, that where the opinions of those best able to judge are
+divided, the questions at issue are doubtful. Reasonable men who are
+unable to give them special attention withhold their judgment, while
+those who are able, form their conclusions with diffidence and modesty.
+But theologians will not tolerate diffidence; they demand absolute
+assent, and will take nothing short of it; and they affect, therefore,
+to drown in foolish ridicule whatever troubles or displeases them. The
+Bishop of Oxford talks in the old style of punishment. The Archbishop of
+Canterbury refers us to Usher as our guide in Hebrew chronology. The
+objections of the present generation of 'infidels,' he says, are the
+same which have been refuted again and again, and are such as a child
+might answer. The young man just entering upon the possession of his
+intellect, with a sense of responsibility for his belief, and more
+anxious for truth than for success in life, finds, when he looks into
+the matter, that the archbishop has altogether misrepresented it; that
+in fact, like other official persons, he had been using merely a
+stereotyped form of words, to which he attached no definite meaning. The
+words are repeated year after year, but the enemies refuse to be
+exorcised. They come and come again, from Spinoza and Lessing to Strauss
+and Renan. The theologians have resolved no single difficulty; they
+convince no one who is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span> not convinced already; and a Colenso coming
+fresh to the subject with no more than a year's study, throws the Church
+of England into convulsions.</p>
+
+<p>If there were any real danger that Christianity would cease to be
+believed, it would be no more than a fulfilment of prophecy. The state
+in which the Son of Man would find the world at his coming he did not
+say would be a state of faith. But if that dark time is ever literally
+to come upon the earth, there are no present signs of it. The creed of
+eighteen centuries is not about to fade away like an exhalation, nor are
+the new lights of science so exhilarating that serious persons can look
+with comfort to exchanging one for the other. Christianity has abler
+advocates than its professed defenders, in those many quiet and humble
+men and women who in the light of it and the strength of it live holy,
+beautiful, and self-denying lives. The God that answers by fire is the
+God whom mankind will acknowledge; and so long as the fruits of the
+Spirit continue to be visible in charity, in self-sacrifice, in those
+graces which raise human creatures above themselves, and invest them
+with that beauty of holiness which only religion confers, thoughtful
+persons will remain convinced that with them in some form or other is
+the secret of truth. The body will not thrive on poison, or the soul on
+falsehood; and as the vital processes of health are too subtle for
+science to follow; as we choose our food, not by the most careful
+chemical analysis, but by the experience of its effects upon the system;
+so when a particular belief is fruitful in nobleness of character, we
+need trouble ourselves very little with scientific demonstrations that
+it is false. The most deadly poison may be chemically undistinguishable
+from substances which are perfectly innocent. Prussic acid, we are told,
+is formed of the same elements, combined in the same proportions, as
+gum-arabic.</p>
+
+<p>What that belief is for which the fruits speak thus so positively, it is
+less easy to define. Religion from the beginning of time has expanded
+and changed with the growth of knowledge. The religion of the prophets
+was not the religion which was adapted to the hardness of heart of the
+Israelites of the Exodus. The Gospel set aside the Law; the creed of the
+early Church was not the creed of the Middle Ages, any more than the
+creed of Luther and Cranmer was the creed of St. Bernard and Aquinas.
+Old things pass away, new things<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span> come in their place; and they in their
+turn grow old, and give place to others; yet in each of the many forms
+which Christianity has assumed in the world, holy men have lived and
+died, and have had the witness of the Spirit that they were not far from
+the truth. It may be that the faith which saves is the something held in
+common by all sincere Christians, and by those as well who should come
+from the east and the west, and sit down in the kingdom of God, when the
+children of the covenant would be cast out. It may be that the true
+teaching of our Lord is overlaid with doctrines; and theology, when
+insisting on the reception of its huge catena of formulas, may be
+binding a yoke upon our necks which neither we nor our fathers were able
+to bear.</p>
+
+<p>But it is not the object of this paper to put forward either this or any
+other particular opinion. The writer is conscious only that he is
+passing fast towards the dark gate which soon will close behind him. He
+believes that some kind of sincere and firm conviction on these things
+is of infinite moment to him, and, entirely diffident of his own power
+to find his way towards such a conviction, he is both ready and anxious
+to disclaim 'all right of private judgment' in the matter. He wishes
+only to learn from those who are able to teach him. The learned prelates
+talk of the presumptuousness of human reason; they tell us that doubts
+arise from the consciousness of sin and the pride of the unregenerate
+heart. The present writer, while he believes generally that reason,
+however inadequate, is the best faculty to which we have to trust, yet
+is most painfully conscious of the weakness of his own reason; and once
+let the real judgment of the best and wisest men be declared&mdash;let those
+who are most capable of forming a sound opinion, after reviewing the
+whole relations of science, history, and what is now received as
+revelation, tell us fairly how much of the doctrines popularly taught
+they conceive to be adequately established, how much to be uncertain,
+and how much, if anything, to be mistaken; there is scarcely, perhaps, a
+single serious enquirer who would not submit with delight to a court
+which is the highest on earth.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Mansell tells us that in the things of God reason is beyond its
+depth, that the wise and the unwise are on the same level of incapacity,
+and that we must accept what we find established, or we must believe
+nothing. We presume<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span> that Mr. Mansell's dilemma itself is a conclusion
+of reason. Do what we will, reason is and must be our ultimate
+authority; and were the collective sense of mankind to declare Mr.
+Mansell right, we should submit to that opinion as readily as to
+another. But the collective sense of mankind is less acquiescent. He has
+been compared to a man sitting on the end of a plank and deliberately
+sawing off his seat. It seems never to have occurred to him that, if he
+is right, he has no business to be a Protestant. What Mr. Mansell says
+to Professor Jowett, Bishop Gardiner in effect replied to Frith and
+Ridley. Frith and Ridley said that transubstantiation was unreasonable;
+Gardiner answered that there was the letter of Scripture for it, and
+that the human intellect was no measure of the power of God. Yet the
+Reformers somehow believed, and Mr. Mansell by his place in the Church
+of England seems to agree with them, that the human intellect was not so
+wholly incompetent. It might be a weak guide, but it was better than
+none; and they declared on grounds of mere reason, that Christ being in
+heaven and not on earth, 'it was contrary to the truth for a natural
+body to be in two places at once.' The common sense of the country was
+of the same opinion, and the illusion was at an end.</p>
+
+<p>There have been 'Aids to Faith' produced lately, and 'Replies to the
+Seven Essayists,' 'Answers to Colenso,' and much else of the kind. We
+regret to say that they have done little for us. The very life of our
+souls is at issue in the questions which have been raised, and we are
+fed with the professional commonplaces of the members of a close guild,
+men holding high office in the Church, or expecting to hold high office
+there; in either case with a strong temporal interest in the defence of
+the institution which they represent. We desire to know what those of
+the clergy think whose love of truth is unconnected with their prospects
+in life; we desire to know what the educated laymen, the lawyers, the
+historians, the men of science, the statesmen think; and these are for
+the most part silent, or confess themselves modestly uncertain. The
+professional theologians alone are loud and confident; but they speak in
+the old angry tone which rarely accompanies deep and wise convictions.
+They do not meet the real difficulties; they mistake them, misrepresent
+them, claim victories over adversaries with whom they have never even
+crossed swords, and leap to conclusions with a precipitancy<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span> at which we
+can only smile. It has been the unhappy manner of their class from
+immemorial time; they call it zeal for the Lord, as if it were beyond
+all doubt that they were on God's side&mdash;as if serious enquiry after
+truth was something which they were entitled to resent. They treat
+intellectual difficulties as if they deserved rather to be condemned and
+punished than considered and weighed, and rather stop their ears and run
+with one accord upon anyone who disagrees with them than listen
+patiently to what he has to say.</p>
+
+<p>We do not propose to enter in detail upon the particular points which
+demand re-discussion. It is enough that the more exact habit of thought
+which science has engendered, and the closer knowledge of the value and
+nature of evidence, has notoriously made it necessary that the grounds
+should be reconsidered on which we are to believe that one country and
+one people was governed for sixteen centuries on principles different
+from those which we now find to prevail universally. One of many
+questions, however, shall be briefly glanced at, on which the real issue
+seems habitually to be evaded.</p>
+
+<p>Much has been lately said and written on the authenticity of the
+Pentateuch and the other historical books of the Old Testament. The
+Bishop of Natal has thrown out in a crude form the critical results of
+the enquiries of the Germans, coupled with certain arithmetical
+calculations, for which he has a special aptitude. He supposes himself
+to have proved that the first five books of the Bible are a compilation
+of uncertain date, full of inconsistencies and impossibilities. The
+apologists have replied that the objections are not absolutely
+conclusive, that the events described in the Book of Exodus might
+possibly, under certain combinations of circumstances, have actually
+taken place; and they then pass to the assumption that because a story
+is not necessarily false, therefore it is necessarily true. We have no
+intention of vindicating Dr. Colenso. His theological training makes his
+arguments very like those of his opponents, and he and Dr. M'Call may
+settle their differences between themselves. The question is at once
+wider and simpler than any which has been raised in that controversy.
+Were it proved beyond possibility of error that the Pentateuch was
+written by Moses, that those and all the books of the Old and New<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span>
+Testaments were really the work of the writers whose names they bear;
+were the Mosaic cosmogony in harmony with physical discoveries; and were
+the supposed inconsistencies and contradictions shown to have no
+existence except in Dr. Colenso's imagination&mdash;we should not have
+advanced a single step towards making good the claim put forward for the
+Bible, that it is absolutely and unexceptionably true in all its parts.
+The 'genuineness and authenticity' argument is irrelevant and needless.
+The clearest demonstration of the human authorship of the Pentateuch
+proves nothing about its immunity from errors. If there are no mistakes
+in it, it was not the workmanship of man; and if it was inspired by the
+Holy Spirit, there is no occasion to show that the hand of Moses was the
+instrument made use of. To the most excellent of contemporary histories,
+to histories written by eye-witnesses of the facts which they describe,
+we accord but a limited confidence. The highest intellectual competence,
+the most admitted truthfulness, immunity from prejudice, and the absence
+of temptation to misstate the truth; these things may secure great
+credibility, but they are no guarantee for minute and circumstantial
+exactness. Two historians, though with equal gifts and equal
+opportunities, never describe events in exactly the same way. Two
+witnesses in a court of law, while they agree in the main, invariably
+differ in some particulars. It appears as if men could not relate facts
+precisely as they saw or as they heard them. The different parts of a
+story strike different imaginations unequally; and the mind, as the
+circumstances pass through it, alters their proportions unconsciously,
+or shifts the perspective. The credit which we give to the most
+authentic work of a man has no resemblance to that universal acceptance
+which is demanded for the Bible. It is not a difference of degree: it is
+a difference in kind; and we desire to know on what ground this
+infallibility, which we do not question, but which is not proved,
+demands our belief. Very likely, the Bible is thus infallible. Unless it
+is, there can be no moral obligation to accept the facts which it
+records; and though there may be intellectual error in denying them,
+there can be no moral sin. Facts may be better or worse authenticated;
+but all the proofs in the world of the genuineness and authenticity of
+the human handiwork cannot establish a claim upon the conscience. It
+might be foolish to question<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span> Thucydides' account of Pericles, but no
+one would call it sinful. Men part with all sobriety of judgment when
+they come on ground of this kind. When Sir Henry Rawlinson read the name
+of Sennacherib on the Assyrian marbles, and found allusions there to the
+Israelites in Palestine, we were told that a triumphant answer had been
+found to the cavils of sceptics, and a convincing proof of the inspired
+truth of the Divine Oracles. Bad arguments in a good cause are a sure
+way to bring distrust upon it. The Divine Oracles may be true, and may
+be inspired; but the discoveries at Nineveh certainly do not prove them
+so. No one supposes that the Books of Kings or the prophecies of Isaiah
+and Ezekiel were the work of men who had no knowledge of Assyria or the
+Assyrian Princes. It is possible that in the excavations at Carthage
+some Punic inscription may be found confirming Livy's account of the
+battle of Cann&aelig;; but we shall not be obliged to believe therefore in the
+inspiration of Livy, or rather (for the argument comes to that) in the
+inspiration of the whole Latin literature.</p>
+
+<p>We are not questioning the fact that the Bible is infallible; we desire
+only to be told on what evidence that great and awful fact concerning it
+properly rests. It would seem, indeed, as if instinct had been wiser
+than argument&mdash;as if it had been felt that nothing short of this literal
+and close inspiration could preserve the facts on which Christianity
+depends. The history of the early world is a history everywhere of
+marvels. The legendary literature of every nation upon earth tells the
+same stories of prodigies and wonders, of the appearances of the gods
+upon earth, and of their intercourse with men. The lives of the saints
+of the Catholic Church, from the time of the Apostles till the present
+day, are a complete tissue of miracles resembling and rivalling those of
+the Gospels. Some of these stories are romantic and imaginative; some
+clear, literal, and prosaic; some rest on mere tradition; some on the
+sworn testimony of eye-witnesses; some are obvious fables; some are as
+well authenticated as facts of such a kind can be authenticated at all.
+The Protestant Christian rejects every one of them&mdash;rejects them without
+enquiry&mdash;involves those for which there is good authority and those for
+which there is none or little in one absolute, contemptuous, and
+sweeping denial. The Protestant Christian feels it more likely, in the
+words of Hume, that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span> men should deceive or be deceived, than that the
+laws of nature should be violated. At this moment we are beset with
+reports of conversations with spirits, of tables miraculously lifted, of
+hands projected out of the world of shadows into this mortal life. An
+unusually able, accomplished person, accustomed to deal with
+common-sense facts, a celebrated political economist, and notorious for
+business-like habits, assured this writer that a certain mesmerist, who
+was my informant's intimate friend, had raised a dead girl to life. We
+should believe the people who tell us these things in any ordinary
+matter: they would be admitted in a court of justice as good witnesses
+in a criminal case, and a jury would hang a man on their word. The
+person just now alluded to is incapable of telling a wilful lie; yet our
+experience of the regularity of nature on one side is so uniform, and
+our experience of the capacities of human folly on the other is so
+large, that when people tell us these wonderful stories, most of us are
+contented to smile; and we do not care so much as to turn out of our way
+to examine them.</p>
+
+<p>The Bible is equally a record of miracles; but as from other histories
+we reject miracles without hesitation, so of those in the Bible we
+insist on the universal acceptance: the former are all false, the latter
+are all true. It is evident that, in forming conclusions so sweeping as
+these, we cannot even suppose that we are being guided by what is called
+historical evidence. Were it admitted that, as a whole, the miracles of
+the Bible are better authenticated than the miracles of the saints, we
+should be far removed still from any large inference, that in the one
+set there is no room for falsehood, in the other no room for truth. The
+writer or writers of the Books of Kings are not known. The books
+themselves are in fact confessedly taken from older writings which are
+lost; and the accounts of the great prophets of Israel are a
+counterpart, curiously like, of those of the medi&aelig;val saints. In many
+instances the authors of the lives of these saints were their companions
+and friends. Why do we feel so sure that what we are told of Elijah or
+Elisha took place exactly as we read it? Why do we reject the account of
+St. Columba or St. Martin as a tissue of idle fable? Why should not God
+give a power to the saint which He had given to the prophet? We can
+produce no reason from the nature of things, for we know not what the
+nature of things is; and if down to the death<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span> of the Apostles the
+ministers of religion were allowed to prove their commission by working
+miracles, what right have we, on grounds either of history or
+philosophy, to draw a clear line at the death of St. John&mdash;to say that
+before that time all such stories were true, and after it all were
+false?</p>
+
+<p>There is no point on which Protestant controversialists evade the real
+question more habitually than on that of miracles. They accuse those who
+withhold that unreserved and absolute belief which they require for all
+which they accept themselves, of denying that miracles are possible.
+They assume this to be the position taken up by the objector, and
+proceed easily to argue that man is no judge of the power of God. Of
+course he is not. No sane man ever raised his narrow understanding into
+a measure of the possibilities of the universe; nor does any person with
+any pretensions to religion disbelieve in miracles of some kind. To pray
+is to expect a miracle. When we pray for the recovery of a sick friend,
+for the gift of any blessing, or the removal of any calamity, we expect
+that God will do something by an act of his personal will which
+otherwise would not have been done&mdash;that he will suspend the ordinary
+relations of natural cause and effect; and this is the very idea of a
+miracle. The thing we pray for may be given us, and no miracle may have
+taken place. It may be given to us by natural causes, and would have
+occurred whether we had prayed or not. But prayer itself in its very
+essence implies a belief in the possible intervention of a power which
+is above nature. The question about miracles is simply one of
+evidence&mdash;whether in any given case the proof is so strong that no room
+is left for mistake, exaggeration, or illusion, while more evidence is
+required to establish a fact antecedently improbable than is sufficient
+for a common occurrence.</p>
+
+<p>It has been said recently by 'A Layman,' in a letter to Mr. Maurice,
+that the resurrection of our Lord is as well authenticated as the death
+of Julius C&aelig;sar. It is far better authenticated, unless we are mistaken
+in supposing the Bible inspired; or if we admit as evidence that inward
+assurance of the Christian, which would make him rather die than
+disbelieve a truth so dear to him. But if the layman meant that there
+was as much proof of it, in the sense in which proof is understood in a
+court of justice, he could scarcely have considered what he was saying.
+Julius C&aelig;sar was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span> killed in a public place, in the presence of friend
+and foe, in a remarkable but still perfectly natural manner. The
+circumstances were minutely known to all the world, and were never
+denied or doubted by any one. Our Lord, on the other hand, seems
+purposely to have withheld such public proof of his resurrection as
+would have left no room for unbelief. He showed himself, 'not to all the
+people'&mdash;not to his enemies, whom his appearance would have
+overwhelmed&mdash;but 'to witnesses chosen before;' to the circle of his own
+friends. There is no evidence which a jury could admit that he was ever
+actually dead. So unusual was it for persons crucified to die so soon,
+that Pilate, we are told, 'marvelled.' The subsequent appearances were
+strange, and scarcely intelligible. Those who saw Him did not recognise
+Him till He was made known to them in the breaking of bread. He was
+visible and invisible. He was mistaken by those who were most intimate
+with Him for another person; nor do the accounts agree which are given
+by the different Evangelists. Of investigation in the modern sense
+(except in the one instance of St. Thomas, and St. Thomas was rather
+rebuked than praised) there was none, and could be none. The evidence
+offered was different in kind, and the blessing was not to those who
+satisfied themselves of the truth of the fact by a searching enquiry,
+but who gave their assent with the unhesitating confidence of love.</p>
+
+<p>St. Paul's account of his own conversion is an instance of the kind of
+testimony which then worked the strongest conviction. St. Paul, a fiery
+fanatic on a mission of persecution with the midday Syrian sun streaming
+down upon his head, was struck to the ground, and saw in a vision our
+Lord in the air. If such a thing were to occur at the present day, and
+if a modern physician were consulted about it, he would say, without
+hesitation, that it was an effect of an overheated brain and that there
+was nothing in it extraordinary or unusual. If the impression left by
+the appearance had been too strong for such an explanation to be
+satisfactory, the person to whom it occurred, especially if he was a man
+of St Paul's intellectual stature, would have at once examined into the
+facts otherwise known, connected with the subject of what he had seen.
+St. Paul had evidently before disbelieved our Lord's resurrection&mdash;had
+disbelieved it fiercely and passionately; we should have expected that
+he would at once have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span> sought for those who could best have told him the
+details of the truth. St. Paul, however, did nothing of the kind. He
+went for a year into Arabia, and when at last he returned to Jerusalem,
+he rather held aloof from those who had been our Lord's companions, and
+who had witnessed his ascension. He saw Peter, he saw James; 'of the
+rest of the apostles saw he none.' To him evidently the proof of the
+resurrection was the vision which he had himself seen. It was to that
+which he always referred when called on for a defence of his faith.</p>
+
+<p>Of evidence for the resurrection, in the common sense of the word, there
+may be enough to show that something extraordinary occurred; but not
+enough, unless we assume the fact to be true on far other grounds, to
+produce any absolute and unhesitating conviction; and inasmuch as the
+resurrection is the keystone of Christianity, the belief in it must be
+something far different from that suspended judgment in which history
+alone would leave us.</p>
+
+<p>Human testimony, we repeat, under the most favourable circumstances
+imaginable, knows nothing of 'absolute certainty;' and if historical
+facts are bound up with the creed, and if they are to be received with
+the same completeness as the laws of conscience, they rest, and must
+rest, either on the divine truth of Scripture, or on the divine witness
+in ourselves. On human evidence the miracles of St. Teresa and St.
+Francis of Assisi are as well established as those of the New Testament.</p>
+
+<p>M. Ernest Renan has recently produced an account of the Gospel story
+which, written as it is by a man of piety, intellect, and imagination,
+is spreading rapidly through the educated world. Carrying out the
+principles with which Protestants have swept modern history clear of
+miracles to their natural conclusions, he dismisses all that is
+miraculous from the life of our Lord, and endeavours to reproduce the
+original Galilean youth who lived and taught, and died in Palestine
+eighteen hundred years ago. We have no intention of reviewing M. Renan.
+He will be read soon enough by many who would better consider their
+peace of mind by leaving him alone. For ourselves, we are unable to see
+by what right, if he rejects the miraculous part of the narrative, he
+retains the rest; the imagination and the credulity which invent
+extraordinary incidents, invent ordinary incidents also; and if the
+divine element in the life is legendary, the human<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span> may be legendary
+also. But there is one lucid passage in the introduction which we
+commend to the perusal of controversial theologians:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>'No miracle such as those of which early histories are full has taken
+place under conditions which science can accept. Experience shows,
+without exception, that miracles occur only in times and in countries in
+which miracles are believed in, and in the presence of persons who are
+disposed to believe them. No miracle has ever been performed before an
+assemblage of spectators capable of testing its reality. Neither
+uneducated people, nor even men of the world, have the requisite
+capacity; great precautions are needed, and a long habit of scientific
+research. Have we not seen men of the world in our own time become the
+dupes of the most childish and absurd illusions? And if it be certain
+that no contemporary miracles will bear investigation, is it not
+possible that the miracles of the past, were we able to examine into
+them in detail, would be found equally to contain an element of error?
+It is not in the name of this or that philosophy, it is in the name of
+an experience which never varies, that we banish miracles from history.
+We do not say a miracle is impossible&mdash;we say only that no miracle has
+ever yet been proved. Let a worker of miracles come forward to-morrow
+with pretensions serious enough to deserve examination. Let us suppose
+him to announce that he is able to raise a dead man to life. What would
+be done? A committee would be appointed, composed of physiologists,
+physicians, chemists, and persons accustomed to exact investigation; a
+body would then be selected which the committee would assure itself was
+really dead; and a place would be chosen where the experiment was to
+take place. Every precaution would be taken to leave no opening for
+uncertainty; and if, under those conditions, the restoration to life was
+effected, a probability would be arrived at which would be almost equal
+to certainty. An experiment, however, should always admit of being
+repeated. What a man has done once he should be able to do again; and in
+miracles there can be no question of ease or difficulty. The performer
+would be requested to repeat the operation under other circumstances
+upon other bodies; and if he succeeded on every occasion, two points
+would be established: first, that there may be in this world such things
+as supernatural operations; and, secondly, that the power to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span> perform
+them is delegated to, or belongs to, particular persons. But who does
+not perceive that no miracle was ever performed under such conditions as
+these?'</p>
+
+<p>We have quoted this passage because it expresses with extreme precision
+and clearness the common-sense principle which we apply to all
+supernatural stories of our own time, which Protestant theologians
+employ against the whole cycle of Catholic miracles, and which M. Renan
+is only carrying to its logical conclusions in applying to the history
+of our Lord, if the Gospels are tried by the mere tests of historical
+criticism. The Gospels themselves tell us why M. Renan's conditions were
+never satisfied. Miracles were not displayed in the presence of sceptics
+to establish scientific truths. When the adulterous generation sought
+after a sign, the sign was not given; nay, it is even said that in the
+presence of unbelief, our Lord was not able to work miracles. But
+science has less respect for that undoubting and submissive willingness
+to believe; and it is quite certain that if we attempt to establish the
+truth of the New Testament on the principles of Paley&mdash;if with Professor
+Jowett 'we interpret the Bible as any other book,' the element of
+miracle which has evaporated from the entire surface of human history
+will not maintain itself in the sacred ground of the Gospels, and the
+facts of Christianity will melt in our hands like a snowball.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing less than a miraculous history can sustain the credibility of
+miracles, and nothing could be more likely, if revelation be a reality
+and not a dream, than that the history containing it should be saved in
+its composition from the intermixture of human infirmity. This is the
+position in which instinct long ago taught Protestants to entrench
+themselves, and where alone they can hope to hold their ground: once
+established in these lines, they were safe and unassailable, unless it
+could be demonstrated that any fact or facts related in the Bible were
+certainly untrue.</p>
+
+<p>Nor would it be necessary to say any more upon the subject. Those who
+believed Christianity would admit the assumption; those who disbelieved
+Christianity would repudiate it. The argument would be narrowed to that
+plain and single issue, and the elaborate treatises upon external
+evidence would cease to bring discredit upon the cause by their
+feebleness. Unfortunately&mdash;and this is the true secret of our present
+distractions&mdash;it seems certain that in some way or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span> other this belief in
+inspiration itself requires to be revised. We are compelled to examine
+more precisely what we mean by the word. The account of the creation of
+man and the world which is given in Genesis, and which is made by St.
+Paul the basis of his theology, has not yet been reconciled with facts
+which science knows to be true. Death was in the world before Adam's
+sin, and unless Adam's age be thrust back to a distance which no
+ingenuity can torture the letter of Scripture into recognising, men and
+women lived and died upon the earth whole millenniums before the Eve of
+Sacred History listened to the temptation of the snake. Neither has any
+such deluge as that from which, according to the received
+interpretation, the ark saved Noah, swept over the globe within the
+human period. We are told that it was not God's purpose to anticipate
+the natural course of discovery: as the story of the creation was
+written in human language, so the details of it may have been adapted to
+the existing state of human knowledge. The Bible, it is said, was not
+intended to teach men science, but to teach them what was necessary for
+the moral training of their souls. It may be that this is true.
+Spiritual grace affects the moral character of men, but leaves their
+intellect unimproved. The most religious men are as liable as atheists
+to ignorance of ordinary facts, and inspiration may be only infallible
+when it touches on truths necessary to salvation. But if it be so, there
+are many things in the Bible which must become as uncertain as its
+geology or its astronomy. There is the long secular history of the
+Jewish people. Let it be once established that there is room for error
+anywhere, and we have no security for the accuracy of this history. The
+inspiration of the Bible is the foundation of our whole belief; and it
+is a grave matter if we are uncertain to what extent it reaches, or how
+much and what it guarantees to us as true. We cannot live on
+probabilities. The faith in which we can live bravely and die in peace
+must be a certainty, so far as it professes to be a faith at all, or it
+is nothing. It may be that all intellectual efforts to arrive at it are
+in vain; that it is given to those to whom it is given, and withheld
+from those from whom it is withheld. It may be that the existing belief
+is undergoing a silent modification, like those to which the
+dispensations of religion have been successively subjected; or, again,
+it may be that to the creed as it is already established<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span> there is
+nothing to be added, and nothing any more to be taken from it. At this
+moment, however, the most vigorous minds appear least to see their way
+to a conclusion; and notwithstanding all the school and church building,
+the extended episcopate, and the religious newspapers, a general doubt
+is coming up like a thunderstorm against the wind, and blackening the
+sky. Those who cling most tenaciously to the faith in which they were
+educated, yet confess themselves perplexed. They know what they believe;
+but why they believe it, or why they should require others to believe,
+they cannot tell or cannot agree. Between the authority of the Church
+and the authority of the Bible, the testimony of history and the
+testimony of the Spirit, the ascertained facts of science and the
+contradictory facts which seem to be revealed, the minds of men are
+tossed to and fro, harassed by the changed attitude in which scientific
+investigation has placed us all towards accounts of supernatural
+occurrences. We thrust the subject aside; we take refuge in practical
+work; we believe, perhaps, that the situation is desperate, and hopeless
+of improvement; we refuse to let the question be disturbed. But we
+cannot escape from our shadow, and the spirit of uncertainty will haunt
+the world like an uneasy ghost, till we take it by the throat like men.</p>
+
+<p>We return then to the point from which we set out. The time is past for
+repression. Despotism has done its work; but the day of despotism is
+gone, and the only remedy is a full and fair investigation. Things will
+never right themselves if they are let alone. It is idle to say peace
+when there is no peace; and the concealed imposthume is more dangerous
+than an open wound. The law in this country has postponed our trial, but
+cannot save us from it; and the questions which have agitated the
+Continent are agitating us at last. The student who twenty years ago was
+contented with the Greek and Latin fathers and the Anglican divines, now
+reads Ewald and Renan. The Church authorities still refuse to look their
+difficulties in the face: they prescribe for mental troubles the
+established doses of Paley and Pearson; they refuse dangerous questions
+as sinful, and tread the round of commonplace in placid comfort. But it
+will not avail. Their pupils grow to manhood, and fight the battle for
+themselves, unaided by those who ought to have stood by them in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span> their
+trial, and could not or would not; and the bitterness of those
+conflicts, and the end of most of them in heart-broken uncertainty or
+careless indifference, is too notorious to all who care to know about
+such things.</p>
+
+<p>We cannot afford year after year to be distracted with the tentative
+scepticism of essayists and reviewers. In a healthy condition of public
+opinion such a book as Bishop Colenso's would have passed unnoticed, or
+rather would never have been written, for the difficulties with which it
+deals would have been long ago met and disposed of. When questions rose
+in the early and middle ages of the Church, they were decided by
+councils of the wisest: those best able to judge met together, and
+compared their thoughts, and conclusions were arrived at which
+individuals could accept and act upon. At the beginning of the English
+Reformation, when Protestant doctrine was struggling for reception, and
+the old belief was merging in the new, the country was deliberately held
+in formal suspense. Protestants and Catholics were set to preach on
+alternate Sundays in the same pulpit; subjects were discussed freely in
+the ears of the people; and at last, when all had been said on both
+sides, Convocation and Parliament embodied the result in formulas.
+Councils will no longer answer the purpose; the clergy have no longer a
+superiority of intellect or cultivation; and a conference of prelates
+from all parts of Christendom, or even from all departments of the
+English Church, would not present an edifying spectacle. Parliament may
+no longer meddle with opinions unless it be to untie the chains which it
+forged three centuries ago. But better than councils, better than
+sermons, better than Parliament, is that free discussion through a free
+press which is the best instrument for the discovery of truth, and the
+most effectual means for preserving it.</p>
+
+<p>We shall be told, perhaps, that we are beating the air&mdash;that the press
+is free, and that all men may and do write what they please. It is not
+so. Discussion is not free so long as the clergy who take any side but
+one are liable to be prosecuted and deprived of their means of living;
+it is not free so long as the expression of doubt is considered as a sin
+by public opinion and as a crime by the law. So far are we from free
+discussion, that the world is not yet agreed that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span> a free discussion is
+desirable; and till it be so agreed, the substantial intellect of the
+country will not throw itself into the question. The battle will
+continue to be fought by outsiders, who suffice to disturb a repose
+which they cannot restore; and that collective voice of the national
+understanding, which alone can give back to us a peaceful and assured
+conviction, will not be heard.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_D_4" id="Footnote_D_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_D_4"><span class="label">[D]</span></a> <i>Fraser's Magazine</i>, 1863.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="CRITICISM_AND_THE_GOSPEL_HISTORYE" id="CRITICISM_AND_THE_GOSPEL_HISTORYE"></a>CRITICISM AND THE GOSPEL HISTORY.<a name="FNanchor_E_5" id="FNanchor_E_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_E_5" class="fnanchor">[E]</a></h2>
+
+
+<p>The spirit of criticism is not the spirit of religion. The spirit of
+criticism is a questioning spirit; the spirit of religion is a spirit of
+faith, of humility and submission. Other qualities may go to the
+formation of a religious character in the highest and grandest sense of
+the word; but the virtues which religious teachers most generally
+approve, which make up the ideal of a Catholic saint, which the Catholic
+and all other churches endeavour most to cultivate in their children,
+are those of passive and loyal obedience, a devotion without reserve or
+qualification; or to use the technical word, 'a spirit of
+teachableness.' A religious education is most successful when it has
+formed a mind to which difficulties are welcome as an opportunity for
+the triumph of faith&mdash;which regards doubts as temptations to be resisted
+like the suggestions of sensuality, and which alike in action or opinion
+follows the path prescribed to it with affectionate and unhesitating
+confidence.</p>
+
+<p>To men or women of the tender and sensitive piety which is produced by
+such a training, an enquiry into the grounds of its faith appears
+shocking and profane. To demand an explanation of ambiguities or
+mysteries of which they have been accustomed to think only upon their
+knees, is as it were to challenge the Almighty to explain his ways to
+his creatures, and to refuse obedience unless human presumption has been
+first gratified.</p>
+
+<p>Undoubtedly, not in religion only, but in any branch of human knowledge,
+teachableness is the condition of growth. We augur ill for the future of
+the youth who sets his own judgment against that of his instructors, and
+refuses to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span> believe what cannot be at once made plain to him. Yet again,
+the wise instructor will not lightly discourage questions which are
+prompted by an intelligent desire of knowledge. That an unenquiring
+submission produces characters of great and varied beauty; that it has
+inspired the most splendid acts of endurance which have given a lustre
+to humanity, no one will venture to deny. A genial faith is one of that
+group of qualities which commend themselves most to the young, the
+generous, and the enthusiastic&mdash;to those whose native and original
+nobleness has suffered least from contact with the world&mdash;which belong
+rather to the imagination than the reason, and stand related to truth
+through the emotions rather than through the sober calculations of
+probability. It is akin to loyalty, to enthusiasm, to hero-worship, to
+that deep affection to a person or a cause which can see no fault in
+what it loves.</p>
+
+<p>'Belief,' says Mr. Sewell, 'is a virtue; doubt is a sin.' Iago is
+nothing if not critical; and the sceptical spirit&mdash;<i>der Geist der stets
+verneint</i>&mdash;which is satisfied with nothing, which sees in everything
+good the seed of evil, and the weak spot in every great cause or nature,
+has been made the special characteristic&mdash;we all feel with justice&mdash;of
+the devil.</p>
+
+<p>And yet this devotedness or devotion, this reverence for authority, is
+but one element of excellence. To reverence is good; but on the one
+condition that the object of it be a thing which deserves reverence; and
+the necessary complement, the security that we are not bestowing our
+best affections where they should not be given, must be looked for in
+some quality which, if less attractive, is no less essential for our
+true welfare. To prove all things&mdash;to try the spirits whether they be of
+God&mdash;is a duty laid upon us by the highest authority; and what is called
+progress in human things&mdash;religious as well as material&mdash;has been due
+uniformly to a dissatisfaction with them as they are. Every advance in
+science, every improvement in the command of the mechanical forces of
+nature, every step in political or social freedom, has risen in the
+first instance from an act of scepticism, from an uncertainty whether
+the formulas, or the opinions, or the government, or the received
+practical theories were absolutely perfect; or whether beyond the circle
+of received truths there might not lie something broader, deeper, truer,
+and thus better deserving the acceptance of mankind.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Submissiveness, humility, obedience, produce if uncorrected, in politics
+a nation of slaves, whose baseness becomes an incentive to tyranny; in
+religion, they produce the consecration of falsehood, poperies,
+immaculate conceptions, winking images, and the confessional. The spirit
+of enquiry if left to itself becomes in like manner a disease of
+uncertainty, and terminates in universal scepticism. It seems as if in a
+healthy order of things, to the willingness to believe there should be
+chained as its inseparable companion a jealousy of deception; and there
+is no lesson more important for serious persons to impress upon
+themselves than that each of these temperaments must learn to tolerate
+the other; faith accepting from reason the sanction of its service, and
+reason receiving in return the warm pulsations of life. The two
+principles exist together in the highest natures; and the man who in the
+best sense of the word is devout, is also the most cautious to whom or
+to what he pays his devotion. Among the multitude, the units of which
+are each inadequate and incomplete, the elements are disproportionately
+mixed; some men are humble and diffident, some are sceptical and
+enquiring; yet both are filling a place in the great intellectual
+economy; both contribute to make up the sum and proportion of qualities
+which are required to hold the balance even; and neither party is
+entitled to say to the other, 'Stand by; I am holier than thou.'</p>
+
+<p>And as it is with individuals, so is it also with whole periods and
+cycles. For centuries together the believing spirit held undisputed
+sovereignty; and these were what are called 'ages of faith;' ages, that
+is, in which the highest business of the intellect was to pray rather
+than to investigate; when for every unusual phenomenon a supernatural
+cause was instinctively assumed; when wonders were credible in
+proportion to their magnitude; and theologians, with easy command of
+belief, added miracle to miracle and piled dogma upon dogma. Then the
+tide changed; a fresh era opened, which in the eyes of those who
+considered the old system the only right one, was the letting loose of
+the impersonated spirit of evil; when profane eyes were looking their
+idols in the face; when men were saying to the miraculous images, 'You
+are but stone and wood,' and to the piece of bread, 'You are but dust as
+I am dust;' and then the huge medi&aelig;val fabric crumbled down in ruin.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>All forms of thought, all objects of devotion, are made thus liable to
+perpetual revision, if only that belief shall not petrify into habit,
+but remain the reasonable conviction of a reasonable soul. The change of
+times and the change of conditions change also the appearance of things
+which in themselves are the same which they always were. Facts supposed
+once to be as fixed as the stars melt into fiction. A closer
+acquaintance with the phenomena of experience has revealed to us the
+action of forces before undreamt of working throughout nature with
+unerring uniformity; and to the medi&aelig;val stories of magic, witchcraft,
+or the miracles of saints, we are thus placed in a new relation. The
+direct evidence on which such stories were received may remain
+unimpaired, but it no longer produces the same conviction. Even in
+ordinary human things where the evidence is lost&mdash;as in some of our own
+State trials, and where we know only that it was such as brought
+conviction to judges, juries, and parliaments&mdash;historians do not
+hesitate to call their verdicts into question, thinking it more likely
+that whole masses of men should have been led away by passion or fraud
+or cowardice than that this or that particular crime should have been
+committed. That we often go beyond our office and exaggerate the value
+of our new criteria of truth may be possible enough; but it is no less
+certain that this is the tendency of modern thought. Our own age, like
+every age which has gone before it, judges the value of testimony, not
+by itself merely, but by the degree to which it corresponds with our own
+sense of the laws of probability; and we consider events probable or
+improbable by the habit of mind which is the result of our general
+knowledge and culture. To the Catholic of the middle ages a miracle was
+more likely than not; and when he was told that a miracle had been
+worked, he believed it as he would have believed had he been told that a
+shower of rain had fallen, or that the night frost had killed the buds
+upon his fruit trees. If his cattle died, he found the cause in the
+malice of Satan or the evil eye of a witch; and if two or more witnesses
+could have been found to swear that they had heard an old woman curse
+him, she would have been burnt for a sorceress. The man of science, on
+the other hand, knows nothing of witches and sorcerers; when he can find
+a natural cause he refuses to entertain the possibility of the
+intervention of a cause beyond<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span> nature; and thus that very element of
+marvel which to the more superstitious temperament was an evidence of
+truth, becomes to the better informed a cause of suspicion.</p>
+
+<p>So it has been that throughout history, as between individuals among
+ourselves, we trace two habits of thought, one of which has given us
+churches, creeds, and the knowledge of God; the other has given us
+freedom and science, has pruned the luxuriance of imaginative reverence,
+and reminds piety of what it is too ready to forget&mdash;that God is truth.
+Yet, essential as they are to one another, each keeps too absolutely to
+the circle of its own convictions, and, but half able to recognise the
+merit of principles which are alien to its own, regards the other as its
+natural enemy.</p>
+
+<p>To the warm and enthusiastic pietist the enquirer appears as a hater of
+God, an inveterate blasphemer of holy things, soiling with rude and
+insolent hands what ought only to be humbly adored. The saint when he
+has the power calls the sword to his aid, and in his zeal for what he
+calls the honour of God, makes war upon such people with steel and fire.
+The innovator, on the other hand, knowing that he is not that evil
+creature which his rival represents him as being, knowing that he too
+desires only truth&mdash;first suffers, suffers in rough times at stake and
+scaffold, suffers in our own later days in good name, in reputation, in
+worldly fortune; and as the whirligig of time brings round his turn of
+triumph, takes, in French revolutions and such other fits of madness,
+his own period of wild revenge. The service of truth is made to appear
+as one thing, the service of God as another; and in that fatal
+separation religion dishonours itself with unavailing enmity to what
+nevertheless it is compelled at last to accept in humiliation; and
+science, welcoming the character which its adversary flings upon it,
+turns away with answering hostility from doctrines without which its own
+highest achievements are but pyramids of ashes.</p>
+
+<p>Is this antagonism a law of humanity? As mankind move upwards through
+the ascending circles of progress, is it for ever to be with them as
+with the globe which they inhabit&mdash;of which one hemisphere is
+perpetually dark? Have the lessons of the Reformation been thrown away?
+Is knowledge always to advance under the ban of religion? Is faith<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span>
+never to cease to dread investigation? Is science chiefly to value each
+new discovery as a victory gained over its rival? Is the spiritual world
+to revolve eternally upon an axis of which the two poles are materialism
+and superstition, to be buried in their alternate occultations in
+periods of utter darkness, or lifted into an icy light where there is
+neither life nor warmth?</p>
+
+<p>How it may be in the remote future it is idle to guess; for the present
+the signs are not hopeful. We are arrived visibly at one of those
+recurring times when the accounts are called in for audit; when the
+title-deeds are to be looked through, and established opinions again
+tested. It is a process which has been repeated more than once in the
+world's history; the last occasion and greatest being the Reformation of
+the sixteenth century; and the experience of that matter might have
+satisfied the most timid that truth has nothing to fear; and that
+religion emerges out of such trials stronger and brighter than before.
+Yet Churchmen have not profited by the experience; the pulpits and the
+religious press ring again with the old shrieks of sacrilege; the
+machinery of the law courts is set creaking on its rusty hinges, and
+denunciation and anathema in the old style take the place of reasoning.
+It will not answer; and the worst danger to what is really true is the
+want of wisdom in its defenders. The language which we sometimes hear
+about these things seems to imply that while Christianity is
+indisputably true, it cannot stand nevertheless without bolt and
+shackle, as if the Author of our faith had left the evidence so weak
+that an honest investigation would fail to find it.</p>
+
+<p>Inevitably, the altered relation in which modern culture places the
+minds of all of us towards the supernatural, will compel a
+reconsideration of the grounds on which the acceptance of miracles is
+required. If the English learned clergy had faith as a grain of mustard
+seed, they would be the first to take possession of the field; they
+would look the difficulty in the face fearlessly and frankly, and we
+should not be tossing as we are now in an ocean of uncertainty, ignorant
+whether, if things seem obscure to us, the fault is with our intellects
+or our hearts.</p>
+
+<p>It might have been that Providence, anticipating the effect produced on
+dead testimony by time and change, had raised religion into a higher
+sphere, and had appointed on<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span> earth a living and visible authority which
+could not err&mdash;guided by the Holy Spirit into truth, and divinely
+sustained in the possession of it. Such a body the Roman Catholic Church
+conceives itself to be; but in breaking away from its communion,
+Protestant Christians have declared their conviction that neither the
+Church of Rome, nor they themselves, nor any other body of men on earth,
+are exempt from a liability to error. It is no longer competent for the
+Anglican communion to say that a doctrine or a fact is true because it
+forms a part of their teaching, because it has come down to them from
+antiquity, and because to deny it is sin. Transubstantiation came down
+to the fathers of the Reformation from antiquity; it was received and
+insisted upon by the Catholic Church of Christendom; yet nevertheless it
+was flung out from among us as a lie and an offence. The theory of the
+Divine authority of the Church was abandoned in the act of Protestantism
+three centuries ago; it was the central principle of that great revolt
+that the establishment of particular opinions was no guarantee for their
+truth; and it becomes thus our duty as well as our right to examine
+periodically our intellectual defences, to abandon positions which the
+alteration of time makes untenable, and to admit and invite into the
+service of the sanctuary the fullest light of advancing knowledge. Of
+all positions the most fatally suicidal for Protestants to occupy is the
+assumption, which it is competent for Roman Catholics to hold, but not
+for them, that beliefs once sanctioned by the Church are sacred, and
+that to impugn them is not error but crime.</p>
+
+<p>With a hope, then, that this reproach may be taken away from us; that,
+in this most wealthily-endowed Church of England, where so many of the
+most gifted and most accomplished men among us are maintained in
+well-paid leisure to attend to such things, we may not be left any
+longer to grope our way in the dark, the present writer puts forward
+some few perplexities of which it would be well if English divinity
+contained a clearer solution than is found there. The laity, occupied in
+other matters, regard the clergy as the trustees of their spiritual
+interests; but inasmuch as the clergy tell them that the safety of their
+souls depends on the correctness of their opinions, they dare not close
+their eyes to the questions which are being asked in louder and even
+louder tones; and they have a right to demand that they<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span> shall not be
+left to their own unaided efforts to answer such questions. We go to our
+appointed teachers as to our physicians; we say to them, 'We feel pain
+here, and here, and here: we do not see our way, and we require you to
+help us.'</p>
+
+<p>Most of these perplexities are not new: they were felt with the first
+beginnings of critical investigation; but the fact that they have been
+so many years before the world without being satisfactorily encountered
+makes the situation only the more serious. It is the more strange that
+as time passes on, and divine after divine is raised to honour and
+office for his theological services, we should find only when we turn to
+their writings that loud promises end in no performance; that the chief
+object which they set before themselves is to avoid difficult ground;
+and that the points on which we most cry out for satisfaction are passed
+over in silence, or are disposed of with ineffectual commonplaces.</p>
+
+<p>With a temperament constitutionally religious, and with an instinctive
+sense of the futility of theological controversies, the English people
+have long kept the enemy at bay by passive repugnance. To the
+well-conditioned English layman the religion in which he has been
+educated is part of the law of the land; the truth of it is assumed in
+the first principles of his personal and social existence; and attacks
+on the credibility of his sacred books he has regarded with the same
+impatience and disdain with which he treats speculations on the rights
+of property or the common maxims of right and wrong. Thus, while the
+inspiration of the Bible has been a subject of discussion for a century
+in Germany, Holland, and France; while even in the desolate villages in
+the heart of Spain the priests find it necessary to placard the church
+walls with cautions against rationalism, England hitherto has escaped
+the trial; and it is only within a very few years that the note of
+speculation has compelled our deaf ears to listen. That it has come at
+last is less a matter of surprise than that it should have been so long
+delayed; and though slow to move, it is likely that so serious a people
+will not now rest till they have settled the matter for themselves in
+some practical way. We are assured that if the truth be, as we are told,
+of vital moment&mdash;vital to all alike, wise and foolish, educated and
+uneducated&mdash;the road to it cannot lie through any very profound
+enquiries. We refuse<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span> to believe that every labourer or mechanic must
+balance arduous historical probabilities and come to a just conclusion,
+under pain of damnation. We are satisfied that these poor people are not
+placed in so cruel a dilemma. Either these abstruse historical questions
+are open questions, and we are not obliged under those penalties to hold
+a definite opinion upon them, or else there must be some general
+principle accessible and easily intelligible, by which the details can
+be summarily disposed of.</p>
+
+<p>We shall not be much mistaken, perhaps, if we say that the view of most
+educated English laymen at present is something of this kind. They are
+aware that many questions may be asked, difficult or impossible to
+answer satisfactorily, about the creation of the world, the flood, and
+generally on the historical portion of the Old Testament; but they
+suppose that if the authority of the Gospel history can be well
+ascertained, the rest may and must be taken for granted. If it be true
+that of the miraculous birth, life, death, and resurrection of our Lord,
+we have the evidence of two evangelists who were eye-witnesses of the
+facts which they relate, and of two others who wrote under the direction
+of, or upon the authority of, eye-witnesses, we can afford to dispense
+with merely curious enquiries. The subordinate parts of a divine economy
+which culminated in so stupendous a mystery may well be as marvellous as
+itself; and it may be assumed, we think, with no great want of charity,
+that those who doubt the truth of the Old Testament extend their
+incredulity to the New; that the point of their disbelief, towards which
+they are trenching their way through the weak places in the Pentateuch,
+is the Gospel narrative itself.<a name="FNanchor_F_6" id="FNanchor_F_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_F_6" class="fnanchor">[F]</a> Whatever difficulty there may be in
+proving the ancient Hebrew books to be the work of the writers whose
+names they bear, no one would have cared to challenge their genuineness
+who was thoroughly convinced of the resurrection of our Lord. And the
+real object of these speculations lies open before us in the now
+notorious work of M. Renan, which is shooting through Europe with a
+rapidity which recalls the era of Luther.</p>
+
+<p>To the question of the authenticity of the Gospels, therefore, the
+common sense of Englishmen has instinctively<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span> turned. If, as English
+commentators confidently tell us, the Gospel of St. Matthew, such as we
+now possess it, is undoubtedly the work of the publican who followed our
+Lord from the receipt of custom, and remained with Him to be a witness
+of His ascension; if St. John's Gospel was written by the beloved
+disciple who lay on Jesus' breast at supper; if the other two were
+indeed the composition of the companions of St. Peter and St. Paul; if
+in these four Gospels we have independent accounts of our Lord's life
+and passion, mutually confirming each other, and if it can be proved
+that they existed and were received as authentic in the first century of
+the Christian Church, a stronger man than M. Renan will fail to shake
+the hold of Christianity in England.</p>
+
+<p>We put the question hypothetically, not as meaning to suggest the fact
+as uncertain, but being&mdash;as the matter is of infinite moment&mdash;being, as
+it were, the hinge on which our faith depends, we are forced beyond our
+office to trespass on ground which we leave usually to professional
+theologians, and to tell them plainly that there are difficulties which
+it is their business to clear up, but to which, with worse than
+imprudence, they close their own eyes, and deliberately endeavour to
+keep them from ours. Some of these it is the object of this paper to
+point out, with an earnest hope that Dean Alford, or Dr. Ellicott, or
+some other competent clergyman, may earn our gratitude by telling us
+what to think about them. Setting aside their duty to us, they will find
+frank dealing in the long run their wisest policy. The conservative
+theologians of England have carried silence to the point of
+indiscretion.</p>
+
+<p>Looking, then, to the three first Gospels, usually called the
+Synoptical, we are encountered immediately with a remarkable common
+element which runs through them all&mdash;a resemblance too peculiar to be
+the result of accident, and impossible to reconcile with the theory that
+the writers were independent of each other. It is not that general
+similarity which we should expect in different accounts of the same
+scenes and events, but amidst many differences, a broad vein of
+circumstantial identity extending both to substance and expression.</p>
+
+<p>And the identity is of several kinds.</p>
+
+<p>I. Although the three evangelists relate each of them some things
+peculiar to themselves, and although between them<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span> there are some
+striking divergencies&mdash;as, for instance, between the account of our
+Lord's miraculous birth in St. Matthew and St. Luke, and in the absence
+in St. Mark of any mention of the miraculous birth at all&mdash;nevertheless,
+the body of the story is essentially the same. Out of those words and
+actions&mdash;so many, that if all were related the world itself could not
+contain the books that should be written&mdash;the three evangelists select
+for the most part the same; the same parables, the same miracles, and,
+more or less complete, the same addresses. When the material from which
+to select was so abundant&mdash;how abundant we have but to turn to the
+fourth evangelist to see&mdash;it is at least singular that three writers
+should have made so nearly the same choice.</p>
+
+<p>II. But this is not all. Not only are the things related the same, but
+the language in which they are expressed is the same. Sometimes the
+resemblance is such as would have arisen had the evangelists been
+translating from a common document in another language. Sometimes, and
+most frequently, there is an absolute verbal identity; sentences,
+paragraphs, long passages, are word for word the very same; a few
+expressions have been slightly varied, a particle transposed, a tense or
+a case altered, but the differences being no greater than would arise if
+a number of persons were to write from memory some common passages which
+they knew almost by heart. That there should have been this identity in
+the account of the <i>words</i> used by our Lord seems at first sight no more
+than we should expect. But it extends to the narrative as well; and with
+respect to the parables and discourses, there is this extraordinary
+feature, that whereas our Lord is supposed to have spoken in the
+ordinary language of Palestine, the resemblance between the evangelists
+is in the Greek translation of them; and how unlikely it is that a
+number of persons in translating from one language into another should
+hit by accident on the same expressions, the simplest experiment will
+show.</p>
+
+<p>Now, waiving for a moment the inspiration of the Gospels; interpreting
+the Bible, to use Mr. Jowett's canon, as any other book, what are we to
+conclude from phenomena of this kind? What in fact do we conclude when
+we encounter them elsewhere? In the lives of the saints, in the monkish
+histories, there are many parallel cases. A medi&aelig;val chronicler, when he
+found a story well told by his predecessor,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span> seldom cared to recompose
+it; he transcribed the words as they stood into his own narrative,
+contented perhaps with making a few trifling changes to add a finish or
+a polish. Sometimes two chroniclers borrow from a third. There is the
+same identity in particular expressions, the same general resemblance,
+the same divergence, as each improves his original from his independent
+knowledge by addition or omission; but the process is so transparent,
+that when the original is lost, the existence of it can be inferred with
+certainty.</p>
+
+<p>Or to take a more modern parallel&mdash;we must entreat our readers to pardon
+any seeming irreverence which may appear in the comparison&mdash;if in the
+letters of the correspondents of three different newspapers written from
+America or Germany, we were to read the same incidents told in the same
+language, surrounded it might be with much that was unlike, but
+nevertheless in themselves identical, and related in words which, down
+to unusual and remarkable terms of expression, were exactly the same,
+what should we infer?</p>
+
+<p>Suppose, for instance, the description of a battle; if we were to find
+but a single paragraph in which two out of three correspondents agreed
+verbally, we should regard it as a very strange coincidence. If all
+three agreed verbally, we should feel certain it was more than accident.
+If throughout their letters there was a recurring series of such
+passages, no doubt would be left in the mind of any one that either the
+three correspondents had seen each other's letters, or that each had had
+before him some common narrative which he had incorporated in his own
+account. It might be doubtful which of these two explanations was the
+true one; but that one or other of them was true, unless we suppose a
+miracle, is as certain as any conclusion in human things can be certain
+at all. The sworn testimony of eye-witnesses who had seen the letters so
+composed would add nothing to the weight of a proof which without their
+evidence would be overwhelming; and were the writers themselves, with
+their closest friends and companions, to swear that there had been no
+intercommunication, and no story pre-existing of which they had made
+use, and that each had written <i>bon&acirc; fide</i> from his own original
+observation, an English jury would sooner believe the whole party
+perjured than persuade themselves that so extraordinary a coincidence
+would have occurred.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Nor would it be difficult to ascertain from internal evidence which of
+the two possible interpretations was the real one. If the writers were
+men of evident good faith; if their stories were in parts widely
+different; if they made no allusion to each other, nor ever referred to
+one another as authorities; finally, if neither of them, in giving a
+different account of any matter from that given by his companions,
+professed either to be supplying an omission or correcting a mistake,
+then we should have little doubt that they had themselves not
+communicated with each other, but were supplementing, each of them from
+other sources of information, a central narrative which all alike had
+before them.</p>
+
+<p>How far may we apply the parallel to the Synoptical Gospels? In one
+sense the inspiration lifts them above comparison, and disposes
+summarily of critical perplexities; there is no difficulty which may not
+be explained by a miracle; and in that aspect the points of disagreement
+between these accounts are more surprising than the similarities. It is
+on the disagreements in fact that the labours of commentators have
+chiefly been expended. Yet it is a question whether, on the whole,
+inspiration does not leave unaffected the ordinary human phenomena; and
+it is hard to suppose that where the rules of judgment in ordinary
+writings are so distinct, God would have thus purposely cast a
+stumbling-block in our way, and contrived a snare into which our reason
+should mislead us. That is hard to credit; yet that and nothing else we
+must believe if we refuse to apply to the Gospel the same canons of
+criticism which with other writings would be a guide so decisive. It may
+be assumed that the facts connected with them admit a natural
+explanation; and we arrive, therefore, at the same conclusion as before:
+that either two of the evangelists borrowed from the third, or else that
+there was some other Gospel besides those which are now extant; existing
+perhaps both in Hebrew and Greek&mdash;existing certainly in Greek&mdash;the
+fragments of which are scattered up and down through St. Mark, St.
+Matthew, and St. Luke, in masses sufficiently large to be distinctly
+recognisable.</p>
+
+<p>That at an early period in the Christian Church many such Gospels
+existed, we know certainly from the words of St. Luke. St. Paul alludes
+to words used by our Lord which are not mentioned by the evangelists,
+which he assumed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span> nevertheless to be well known to his hearers. He
+speaks, too, of an appearance of our Lord after His resurrection to five
+hundred brethren; on which the four Gospels are also silent. It is
+indisputable, therefore, that besides and antecedent to them there were
+other accounts of our Lord's life in use in the Christian Church. And
+indeed, what more natural, what more necessary, than that from the day
+on which the apostles entered upon their public mission, some narrative
+should have been drawn up of the facts which they were about to make
+known? Then as little as now could the imagination of men be trusted to
+relate accurately a story composed of stupendous miracles without
+mistake or exaggeration; and their very first step would have been to
+compose an account of what had passed, to which they could speak with
+certainty, and which they could invest with authoritative sanction. Is
+it not possible then that the identical passages in the Synoptical
+Gospels are the remains of something of this kind, which the
+evangelists, in their later, fuller, and more complete histories,
+enlarged and expanded? The conjecture has been often made, and English
+commentators have for the most part dismissed it slightingly; not
+apparently being aware that in rejecting one hypothesis they were bound
+to suggest another; or at least to admit that there was something which
+required explanation, though this particular suggestion did not seem
+satisfactory. Yet if it were so, the external testimony for the truth of
+the Gospel history would be stronger than before. It would amount to the
+collective view of the first congregation of Christians, who had all
+immediate and personal knowledge of our Lord's miracles and death and
+resurrection.</p>
+
+<p>But perhaps the external history of the four Gospels may throw some
+light upon the question, if indeed we can speak of light where all is a
+cloud of uncertainty. It would seem as if the sources of Christianity,
+like the roots of all other living things, were purposely buried in
+mystery. There exist no ancient writings whatever of such vast moment to
+mankind of which so little can be authentically known.</p>
+
+<p>The four Gospels, in the form and under the names which they at present
+bear, become visible only with distinctness towards the end of the
+second century of the Christian era. Then it was that they assumed the
+authoritative position which they have ever since maintained, and were
+selected by<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span> the Church out of the many other then existing narratives
+as the supreme and exclusive authorities for our Lord's life. Iren&aelig;us is
+the first of the Fathers in whom they are found attributed by name to
+St. Matthew, St. Mark, St. Luke, and St. John. That there were four true
+evangelists, and that there could be neither more nor less than four,
+Iren&aelig;us had persuaded himself because there were four winds or spirits,
+and four divisions of the earth, for which the Church being universal
+required four columns; because the cherubim had four faces, to each of
+which an evangelist corresponded; because four covenants had been given
+to mankind&mdash;one before the Deluge in Adam, one after the Deluge in Noah,
+the third in Moses, the fourth and greatest in the New Testament; while
+again the name of Adam was composed of four letters. It is not to be
+supposed that the intellects of those great men who converted the world
+to Christianity were satisfied with arguments so imaginative as these;
+they must have had other closer and more accurate grounds for their
+decision; but the mere employment of such figures as evidence in any
+sense, shows the enormous difference between their modes of reasoning
+and ours, and illustrates the difficulty of deciding at our present
+distance from them how far their conclusions were satisfactory.</p>
+
+<p>Of the Gospels separately the history is immediately lost in legend.</p>
+
+<p>The first notice of a Gospel of St. Matthew is in the well-known words
+of Papias, a writer who in early life might have seen St. John. The
+works of Papias are lost&mdash;a misfortune the more to be regretted because
+Eusebius speaks of him as a man of very limited understanding,
+<ins class="cor" title="panu smikros ton noun">&#960;&#945;&#957;&#965; &#963;&#956;&#953;&#954;&#961;&#959;&#962; &#964;&#959;&#957; &#957;&#959;&#965;&#957;</ins>.
+Understanding and folly are words of
+undetermined meaning; and when language like that of Iren&aelig;us could seem
+profound it is quite possible that Papias might have possessed
+commonplace faculties which would have been supremely useful to us. A
+surviving fragment of him says that St. Matthew put together the
+discourses of our Lord in Hebrew, and that every one interpreted them as
+he could. Pant&aelig;nus, said by Eusebius to have been another contemporary
+of the apostles, was reported to have gone to India, to have found there
+a congregation of Christians which had been established by St.
+Bartholomew, and to have seen in use among them this Hebrew Gospel.
+Origen repeats the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span> story, which in his time had become the universal
+Catholic tradition, that St. Matthew's was the first Gospel, that it was
+written in Hebrew, and that it was intended for the use of the Jewish
+converts. Jerome adds that it was unknown when or by whom it was
+rendered into a Greek version. That was all which the Church had to say;
+and what had become of that Hebrew original no one could tell.</p>
+
+<p>That there existed <i>a</i> Hebrew Gospel in very early times is well
+authenticated; there was a Gospel called the Gospel of the Ebionites or
+Nazarenes, of which Origen possessed a copy, and which St. Jerome
+thought it worth while to translate; this too is lost, and Jerome's
+translation of it also; but the negative evidence seems conclusive that
+it was not the lost Gospel of St. Matthew. Had it been so it could not
+have failed to be recognised, although from such accounts of it as have
+been preserved, it possessed some affinity with St. Matthew's Gospel. In
+one instance, indeed, it gave the right reading of a text which has
+perplexed orthodox commentators, and has induced others to suspect that
+that Gospel in its present form could not have existed before the
+destruction of Jerusalem. The Zachariah the son of Barachiah said by St.
+Matthew to have been slain between the temple and the altar, is unknown
+to Old Testament history, while during the siege of Jerusalem a
+Zachariah the son of Barachiah actually was killed exactly in the manner
+described. But in the Ebionite Gospel the same words are found with this
+slight but important difference, that the Zachariah in question is there
+called the son of Jehoiadah, and is at once identified with the person
+whose murder is related in the Second Book of Chronicles. The later
+translator of St. Matthew had probably confused the names.</p>
+
+<p>Of St. Mark's Gospel the history is even more profoundly obscure.
+Papias, again the highest discoverable link of the Church tradition,
+says that St. Mark accompanied St. Peter to Rome as his interpreter; and
+that while there he wrote down what St. Peter told him, or what he could
+remember St. Peter to have said. Clement of Alexandria enlarges the
+story. According to Clement, when St. Peter was preaching at Rome, the
+Christian congregation there requested St. Mark to write a Gospel for
+them; St. Mark complied without acquainting St. Peter, and St. Peter
+when<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span> informed of it was uncertain whether to give or withhold his
+sanction till his mind was set at rest by a vision.</p>
+
+<p>Iren&aelig;us, on the other hand, says that St. Mark's Gospel was not written
+till after the death of St. Peter and St. Paul. St. Chrysostom says that
+after it was written St. Mark went to Egypt and published it at
+Alexandria; Epiphanius again, that the Egyptian expedition was
+undertaken at the express direction of St. Peter himself.</p>
+
+<p>Thus the Church tradition is inconsistent with itself, and in all
+probability is nothing but a structure of air; it is bound up with the
+presence of St. Peter at Rome; and the only ground for supposing that
+St. Peter was ever at Rome at all is the passage at the close of St.
+Peter's First Epistle, where it pleased the Fathers to assume that the
+'Babylon' there spoken of must have been the city of the C&aelig;sars. This
+passage alone, with the wild stories (now known to have originated in
+the misreading of an inscription) of St. Peter's conflict with Simon
+Magus in the presence of the emperor, form together the light and airy
+arches on which the huge pretences of the Church of Rome have reared
+themselves. If the Babylon of the Epistle was Babylon on the
+Euphrates&mdash;and there is not the slightest historical reason to suppose
+it to have been anything else&mdash;the story of the origin of St. Mark's
+Gospel perishes with the legend to which it was inseparably attached by
+Church tradition.</p>
+
+<p>Of St. John's Gospel we do not propose to speak in this place; it forms
+a subject by itself; and of that it is enough to say that the defects of
+external evidence which undoubtedly exist seem overborne by the
+overwhelming proofs of authenticity contained in the Gospel itself.</p>
+
+<p>The faint traditionary traces which inform us that St. Matthew and St.
+Mark were supposed to have written Gospels fail us with St. Luke. The
+apostolic and the immediately post-apostolic Fathers never mention Luke
+as having written a history of our Lord at all. There was indeed a
+Gospel in use among the Marcionites which resembled that of St. Luke, as
+the Gospel of the Ebionites resembled that of St. Matthew. In both the
+one and the other there was no mention of our Lord's miraculous birth;
+and later writers accused Marcion of having mutilated St. Luke. But
+apparently their only reason for thinking so was that the two Gospels
+were like each other; and for all that can be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span> historically proved, the
+Gospel of the Marcionites may have been the older of the two. What is
+wanting externally, however, is supposed to be more than made up by the
+language of St. Luke himself. The Gospel was evidently composed in its
+present form by the same person who wrote the Acts of the Apostles. In
+the latter part of the Acts of the Apostles the writer speaks in the
+first person as the companion of St. Paul; and the date of this Gospel
+seems to be thus conclusively fixed at an early period in the apostolic
+age. There is at least a high probability that this reasoning is sound;
+yet it has seemed strange that a convert so eminent as 'the most
+excellent' Theophilus, to whom St. Luke addressed himself, should be
+found impossible to identify. 'Most excellent' was a title given only to
+persons of high rank; and it is singular that St. Paul himself should
+never have mentioned so considerable a name. And again, there is
+something peculiar in the language of the introduction to the Gospel
+itself. Though St. Luke professes to be writing on the authority of
+eye-witnesses, he does not say he had spoken with eye-witnesses; so far
+from it, that the word translated in the English version 'delivered' is
+literally 'handed down;' it is the verb which corresponds to the
+technical expression for 'tradition;' and the words translated 'having
+had perfect understanding of all things from the first,' might be
+rendered more properly, 'having traced or followed up all things from
+the beginning.' And again, as it is humanly speaking certain that in St.
+Luke's Gospel there are passages, however they are to be explained,
+which were embodied in it from some other source, so, though extremely
+probable, it is not absolutely certain that those passages in the Acts
+in which the writer speaks in the first person are by the same hand as
+the body of the narrative. If St. Luke had anywhere directly introduced
+himself&mdash;if he had said plainly that he, the writer who was addressing
+Theophilus, had personally joined St. Paul, and in that part of his
+story was relating what he had seen and heard, there would be no room
+for uncertainty. But, so far as we know, there is no other instance in
+literature of a change of person introduced abruptly without
+explanation. The whole book is less a connected history than a series of
+episodes and fragments of the proceedings of the apostles; and it is to
+be noticed that the account of St. Paul's conversion, as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span> given in its
+place in the first part of the narrative, differs in one material point
+from the second account given later in the part which was unquestionably
+the work of one of St. Paul's companions. There is a possibility&mdash;it
+amounts to no more, and the suggestion is thrown out for the
+consideration of those who are better able than this writer to judge of
+it&mdash;that in the Gospel and the Acts we have the work of a careful editor
+of the second century. Towards the close of that century a prominent
+actor in the great movement which gave their present authority to the
+four Gospels was Theophilus, Bishop of Antioch; he it was who brought
+them together, incorporated into a single work&mdash;<i>in unum opus</i>; and it
+may be, after all, that in him we have the long-sought person to whom
+St. Luke was writing; that the Gospel which we now possess was compiled
+at his desire out of other imperfect Gospels in use in the different
+Churches; and that it formed a part of his scheme to supersede them by
+an account more exhaustive, complete, and satisfactory.</p>
+
+<p>To this hypothesis indeed there is an answer which if valid at all is
+absolutely fatal. We are told that although the names of the writers of
+the Gospels may not be mentioned until a comparatively late period, yet
+that the Gospels themselves can be shown to have existed, because they
+are habitually quoted in the authentic writings of the earliest of the
+Fathers. If this be so, the slightness of the historical thread is of
+little moment, and we may rest safely on the solid ground of so
+conclusive a fact. But is it so? That the early Fathers quoted some
+accounts of our Lord's life is abundantly clear; but did they quote
+these? We proceed to examine this question&mdash;again tentatively only&mdash;we
+do but put forward certain considerations on which we ask for fuller
+information.</p>
+
+<p>If any one of the primitive Christian writers was likely to have been
+acquainted with the authentic writings of the evangelists, that one was
+indisputably Justin Martyr. Born in Palestine in the year 89, Justin
+Martyr lived to the age of seventy-six; he travelled over the Roman
+world as a missionary; and intellectually he was more than on a level
+with most educated Oriental Christians. He was the first distinctly
+controversial writer which the Church produced; and the great facts of
+the Gospel history were obviously as well known to him as they are to
+ourselves. There are no<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span> traces in his writings of an acquaintance with
+anything peculiar either to St. John or St. Mark; but there are extracts
+in abundance often identical with and generally nearly resembling
+passages in St. Matthew and St. Luke. Thus at first sight it would be
+difficult to doubt that with these two Gospels at least he was
+intimately familiar. And yet in all his citations there is this
+peculiarity, that Justin Martyr never speaks of either of the
+evangelists by name; he quotes or seems to quote invariably from
+something which he calls <ins class="cor" title="[Greek: apomn&ecirc;moneumata t&ocirc;n Apostol&ocirc;n]">
+&#945;&#960;&#959;&#956;&#957;&#951;&#956;&#959;&#957;&#949;&#965;&#956;&#945;&#964;&#945; &#964;&#969;&#957; &#913;&#960;&#959;&#963;&#964;&#959;&#955;&#969;&#957;</ins>, or
+'Memoirs of the Apostles.' It is no usual habit of his to describe his
+authorities vaguely: when he quotes the Apocalypse he names St. John;
+when he refers to a prophet he specifies Isaiah, Jeremiah, or Daniel.
+Why, unless there was some particular reason for it, should he use so
+singular an expression whenever he alludes to the sacred history of the
+New Testament? why, if he knew the names of the evangelists, did he
+never mention them even by accident? Nor is this the only singularity in
+Justin Martyr's quotations. There are those slight differences between
+them and the text of the Gospels which appear between the Gospels
+themselves. When we compare an extract in Justin with the parallel
+passage in St. Matthew, we find often that it differs from St. Matthew
+just as St. Matthew differs from St. Luke, or both from St. Mark&mdash;great
+verbal similarity&mdash;many paragraphs agreeing word for word&mdash;and then
+other paragraphs where there is an alteration of expression, tense,
+order, or arrangement.</p>
+
+<p>Again, just as in the midst of the general resemblance between the
+Synoptical Gospels, each evangelist has something of his own which is
+not to be found in the others, so in these 'Memoirs of the Apostles'
+there are facts unknown to either of the evangelists. In the account
+extracted by Justin from 'the Memoirs,' of the baptism in the Jordan,
+the words heard from heaven are not as St. Matthew gives them&mdash;'Thou art
+my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased'&mdash;but the words of the psalm,
+'Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten Thee;' a reading which,
+singularly enough, was to be found in the Gospel of the Ebionites.</p>
+
+<p>Another curious addition to the same scene is in the words <ins class="cor" title="[Greek: kai
+pur an&ecirc;phth&ecirc; en Iordan&ecirc;]">&#954;&#945;&#953; &#960;&#965;&#961; &#945;&#957;&#951;&#966;&#952;&#951; &#949;&#957; &#921;&#959;&#961;&#948;&#945;&#957;&#951;</ins>, 'and a fire was kindled in Jordan.'</p>
+
+<p>Again, Justin Martyr speaks of our Lord having promised 'to clothe us
+with garments made ready for us if we keep<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span> his commandments'&mdash; <ins class="cor" title="[Greek:
+kai ai&ocirc;nion basileian prono&ecirc;sai]">&#954;&#945;&#953; &#945;&#953;&#969;&#957;&#953;&#959;&#957; &#946;&#945;&#963;&#953;&#955;&#949;&#953;&#945;&#957; &#960;&#961;&#959;&#957;&#959;&#951;&#963;&#945;&#953;</ins>&mdash;whatever those words may precisely
+mean.</p>
+
+<p>These and other peculiarities in Justin may be explained if we suppose
+him to have been quoting from memory. The evangelical text might not as
+yet have acquired its verbal sanctity; and as a native of Palestine he
+might well have been acquainted with other traditions which lay outside
+the written word. The silence as to names, however, remains unexplained;
+and as the facts actually stand there is the same kind of proof, and no
+more, that Justin Martyr was acquainted with St. Matthew and St. Luke as
+there is that one of these evangelists made extracts from the other, or
+both from St. Mark. So long as one set of commentators decline to
+recognise the truth of this relation between the Gospels, there will be
+others who with as much justice will dispute the relation of Justin to
+them. He too might have used another Gospel, which, though like them,
+was not identical with them.</p>
+
+<p>After Justin Martyr's death, about the year 170, appeared Tatian's
+'Diatessaron,' a work which, as its title implies, was a harmony of four
+Gospels, and most likely of <i>the</i> four; yet again not exactly as we have
+them. Tatian's harmony, like so many others of the early evangelical
+histories, was silent on the miraculous birth, and commenced only with
+the public ministration. The text was in other places different, so much
+so that Theodoret accuses Tatian of having mutilated the Gospels; but of
+this Theodoret had probably no better means of judging than we have. The
+'Diatessaron' has been long lost, and the name is the only clue to its
+composition.</p>
+
+<p>Of far more importance than either Justin or Tatian are such writings as
+remain of the immediate successors of the apostles&mdash;Barnabas, Clement of
+Rome, Polycarp, and Ignatius: it is asserted confidently that in these
+there are quotations from the Gospels so exact that they cannot be
+mistaken.</p>
+
+<p>We will examine them one by one.</p>
+
+<p>In an epistle of Barnabas there is one passage&mdash;it is the only one of
+the kind to be found in him&mdash;agreeing word for word with the Synoptical
+Gospels, 'I came not to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.'
+It is one of the many passages in which the Greek of the three
+evangelists<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span> is exactly the same; it was to be found also in Justin's
+'Memoirs;' and there can be no doubt that Barnabas either knew those
+Gospels or else the common source&mdash;if common source there was&mdash;from
+which the evangelists borrowed. More than this such a quotation does not
+enable us to say; and till some satisfactory explanation has been
+offered of the agreement between the evangelists, the argument can
+advance no further. On the other hand, Barnabas like St. Paul had other
+sources from which he drew his knowledge of our Lord's words. He too
+ascribes words to Him which are not recorded by the evangelists, <ins class="cor" title="[Greek:
+hout&ocirc; ph&ecirc;sin I&ecirc;sous;">&#959;&#8017;&#964;&#969; &#966;&#951;&#963;&#953;&#957; &#921;&#951;&#963;&#959;&#965;&#962;&#183;</ins> <ins class="cor" title="hoi thelontes me">&#959;&#7985; &#952;&#949;&#955;&#959;&#957;&#964;&#949;&#962; &#956;&#949; </ins> <ins class="cor" title="idein kai hapsasthai">&#953;&#948;&#949;&#953;&#957; &#954;&#945;&#953; &#7937;&#968;&#945;&#963;&#952;&#945;&#953; </ins> <ins class="cor" title="mou t&ecirc;s
+basileias">&#956;&#959;&#965; &#964;&#951;&#962; &#946;&#945;&#963;&#953;&#955;&#949;&#953;&#945;&#962; </ins> <ins class="cor" title="opheilousi thlibentes kai">&#959;&#966;&#949;&#953;&#955;&#959;&#965;&#963;&#953; &#952;&#955;&#953;&#946;&#949;&#957;&#964;&#949;&#962; &#954;&#945;&#953; </ins> <ins class="cor" title="pathontes labein me]">&#960;&#945;&#952;&#959;&#957;&#964;&#949;&#962; &#955;&#945;&#946;&#949;&#953;&#957; &#956;&#949;</ins>. The thought is
+everywhere in the Gospels, the words nowhere, nor anything like them.</p>
+
+<p>Both Ignatius and Polycarp appear to quote the Gospels, yet with them
+also there is the same uncertainty; while Ignatius quotes as genuine an
+expression which, so far as we know, was peculiar to a translation of
+the Gospel of the Ebionites&mdash;'Handle me and see, for I am not a spirit
+without body,' <ins class="cor" title="[Greek: hoti ouk eimi daimonion as&ocirc;maton]">&#8001;&#964;&#953; &#959;&#965;&#954; &#949;&#953;&#956;&#953; &#948;&#945;&#953;&#956;&#959;&#957;&#953;&#959;&#957; &#945;&#963;&#969;&#956;&#945;&#964;&#959;&#957;</ins>.</p>
+
+<p>Clement's quotations are still more free, for Clement nowhere quotes the
+text of the evangelists exactly as it at present stands; often he
+approaches it extremely close; at times the agreement is rather in
+meaning than words, as if he were translating from another language. But
+again Clement more noticeably than either of the other apostolic Fathers
+cites expressions of our Lord of which the evangelists knew nothing.</p>
+
+<p>For instance&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>'The Lord saith, "If ye be with me gathered into my bosom, and do not
+after my commandments, I will cast you off, and I will say unto you,
+Depart from me, I know you not, ye workers of iniquity."'</p>
+
+<p>And again:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>'The Lord said, "Ye shall be as sheep in the midst of wolves." Peter
+answered and said unto Him, "Will the wolves then tear the sheep?" Jesus
+said unto Peter, "The sheep need not fear the wolves after they (the
+sheep) be dead: and fear not ye those who kill you and can do nothing to
+you; but fear Him who after you be dead hath power over soul and body to
+cast them into hell-fire."'</p>
+
+<p>In these words we seem to have the lost link in a passage<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span> which appears
+in a different connection in St. Matthew and St. Luke. It may be said,
+as with Justin Martyr, that Clement was quoting from memory in the sense
+rather than in the letter; although even so it is difficult to suppose
+that he could have invented an interlocution of St. Peter. Yet no
+hypothesis will explain the most strange words which follow:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>'The Lord being asked when His kingdom should come, said, "When two
+shall be one, and that which is without as that which is within, and the
+male with the female neither male nor female."'</p>
+
+<p>It is needless to say how remote are such expressions as these from any
+which have come down to us through the evangelists; but they were no
+inventions of Clement. The passage reappears later in Clement of
+Alexandria, who found it in something which he called the Gospel of the
+Egyptians.</p>
+
+<p>It will be urged that because Clement quoted other authorities beside
+the evangelists, it does not follow that he did not know and quote from
+them. If the citation of a passage which appears in almost the same
+words in another book is not to be accepted as a proof of an
+acquaintance with that book, we make it impossible, it may be said, to
+prove from quotations at all the fact of any book's existence. But this
+is not the case. If a Father, in relating an event which is told
+variously in the Synoptical Gospels, had followed one of them minutely
+in its verbal peculiarities, it would go far to prove that he was
+acquainted with that one; if the same thing was observed in all his
+quotations, the proof would amount to demonstration. If he agreed
+minutely in one place with one Gospel, minutely in a second with
+another, minutely in a third with another, there would be reason to
+believe that he was acquainted with them all; but when he merely relates
+what they also relate in language which approaches theirs and yet
+differs from it, as they also resemble yet differ from one another, we
+do not escape from the circle of uncertainty, and we conclude either
+that the early Fathers made quotations with a looseness irreconcileable
+with the idea that the language of the Gospels possessed any verbal
+sacredness to them, or that there were in their times other narratives
+of our Lord's life standing in the same relation to the three Gospels as
+St. Matthew stands to St. Mark and St. Luke.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Thus the problem returns upon us; and it might almost seem as if the
+explanation was laid purposely beyond our reach. We are driven back upon
+internal criticism; and we have to ask again what account is to be given
+of that element common to the Synoptical Gospels, common also to those
+other Gospels of which we find traces so distinct&mdash;those verbal
+resemblances, too close to be the effect of accident&mdash;those differences
+which forbid the supposition that the evangelists copied one another. So
+many are those common passages, that if all which is peculiar to each
+evangelist by himself were dropped, if those words and those actions
+only were retained which either all three or two at least share
+together, the figure of our Lord from His baptism to His ascension would
+remain with scarcely impaired majesty.</p>
+
+<p>One hypothesis, and so far as we can see one only, would make the
+mystery intelligible, that immediately on the close of our Lord's life
+some original sketch of it was drawn up by the congregation, which
+gradually grew and gathered round it whatever His mother, His relations,
+or His disciples afterwards individually might contribute. This primary
+history would thus not be the work of any one mind or man; it would be
+the joint work of the Church, and thus might well be called 'Memoirs of
+the Apostles;' and would naturally be quoted without the name of either
+one of them being specially attached to it. As Christianity spread over
+the world, and separate Churches were founded by particular apostles,
+copies would be multiplied, and copies of those copies; and, unchecked
+by the presence (before the invention of printing impossible) of any
+authoritative text, changes would creep in&mdash;passages would be left out
+which did not suit the peculiar views of this or that sect; others would
+be added as this or that apostle recollected something which our Lord
+had said that bore on questions raised in the development of the creed.
+Two great divisions would form themselves between the Jewish and the
+Gentile Churches; there would be a Hebrew Gospel and a Greek Gospel, and
+the Hebrew would be translated into Greek, as Papias says St. Matthew's
+Gospel was. Eventually the confusion would become intolerable; and among
+the conflicting stories the Church would have been called on to make its
+formal choice.</p>
+
+<p>This fact at least is certain from St. Luke's words, that at<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span> the time
+when he was writing many different narratives did actually exist. The
+hypothesis of a common origin for them has as yet found little favour
+with English theologians; yet rather perhaps because it would be
+inconvenient for certain peculiar forms of English thought than because
+it has not probability on its side. That the Synoptical Gospels should
+have been a natural growth rather than the special and independent work
+of three separate writers, would be unfavourable to a divinity which has
+built itself up upon particular texts, and has been more concerned with
+doctrinal polemics than with the broader basements of historic truth.
+Yet the text theory suffers equally from the mode in which the first
+Fathers treated the Gospels, if it were these Gospels indeed which they
+used. They at least could have attributed no importance to words and
+phrases; while again, as we said before, a narrative dating from the
+cradle of Christianity, with the testimony in its favour of such broad
+and deep reception, would, however wanting in some details, be an
+evidence of the truth of the main facts of the Gospel history very much
+stronger than that of three books composed we know not when, and the
+origin of which it is impossible to trace, which it is impossible to
+regard as independent, and the writers of which in any other view of
+them must be assumed to have borrowed from each other.</p>
+
+<p>But the object of this article is not to press either this or any other
+theory; it is but to ask from those who are able to give it an answer to
+the most serious of questions. The truth of the Gospel history is now
+more widely doubted in Europe than at any time since the conversion of
+Constantine. Every thinking person who has been brought up a Christian
+and desires to remain a Christian, yet who knows anything of what is
+passing in the world, is looking to be told on what evidence the New
+Testament claims to be received. The state of opinion proves of itself
+that the arguments hitherto offered produce no conviction. Every other
+miraculous history is discredited as legend, however exalted the
+authority on which it seems to be rested. We crave to have good reason
+shown us for maintaining still the one great exception. Hard worked in
+other professions, and snatching with difficulty sufficient leisure to
+learn how complicated is the problem, the laity can but turn to those
+for assistance who are set apart and maintained as their theological<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span>
+trustees. We can but hope and pray that some one may be found to give us
+an edition of the Gospels in which the difficulties will neither be
+slurred over with convenient neglect or noticed with affected
+indifference. It may or may not be a road to a bishopric; it may or may
+not win the favour of the religious world; but it will earn at least the
+respectful gratitude of those who cannot trifle with holy things, and
+who believe that true religion is the service of truth.</p>
+
+<p>The last words were scarcely written when an advertisement appeared, the
+importance of which can scarcely be over-estimated. A commentary is
+announced on the Old and New Testaments, to be composed with a view to
+what are called the 'misrepresentations' of modern criticism. It is to
+be brought out under the direction of the heads of the Church, and is
+the nearest approach to an official act in these great matters which
+they have ventured for two hundred years. It is not for us to anticipate
+the result. The word 'misrepresentations' is unfortunate; we should have
+augured better for the work if instead of it had been written 'the
+sincere perplexities of honest minds.' But the execution may be better
+than the promise. If these perplexities are encountered honourably and
+successfully, the Church may recover its supremacy over the intellect of
+the country; if otherwise, the archbishop who has taken the command will
+have steered the vessel direct upon the rocks.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_E_5" id="Footnote_E_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_E_5"><span class="label">[E]</span></a> <i>Fraser's Magazine</i>, 1864.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_F_6" id="Footnote_F_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_F_6"><span class="label">[F]</span></a> I do not speak of individuals; I speak of <i>tendency</i>.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="THE_BOOK_OF_JOBG" id="THE_BOOK_OF_JOBG"></a>THE BOOK OF JOB.<a name="FNanchor_G_7" id="FNanchor_G_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_G_7" class="fnanchor">[G]</a></h2>
+
+
+<p>It will be matter some day of curious enquiry to ascertain why,
+notwithstanding the high reverence with which the English people regard
+the Bible, they have done so little in comparison with their continental
+contemporaries towards arriving at a proper understanding of it. The
+books named below<a name="FNanchor_H_8" id="FNanchor_H_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_H_8" class="fnanchor">[H]</a> form but a section of a long list which has
+appeared during the last few years in Germany on the Book of Job alone;
+and this book has not received any larger share of attention than the
+others, either of the Old or the New Testament. Whatever be the nature
+or the origin of these books (and on this point there is much difference
+of opinion among the Germans as among ourselves) they are all agreed,
+orthodox and unorthodox, that at least we should endeavour to understand
+them; and that no efforts can be too great, either of research or
+criticism, to discover their history, or elucidate their meaning.</p>
+
+<p>We shall assent, doubtless, eagerly, perhaps noisily and indignantly, to
+so obvious a truism; but our own efforts in the same direction will not
+bear us out. Able men in England employ themselves in matters of a more
+practical character; and while we refuse to avail ourselves of what has
+been done elsewhere, no book, or books, which we produce on the
+interpretation of Scripture acquire more than a partial or an ephemeral
+reputation. The most important contribution<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span> to our knowledge on this
+subject which has been made in these recent years is the translation of
+the 'Library of the Fathers,' by which it is about as rational to
+suppose that the analytical criticism of modern times can be superseded,
+as that the place of Herman and Dindorf could be supplied by an edition
+of the old scholiasts.</p>
+
+<p>It is, indeed, reasonable that as long as we are persuaded that our
+English theory of the Bible, as a whole, is the right one, we should
+shrink from contact with investigations which, however ingenious in
+themselves, are based on what we know to be a false foundation. But
+there are some learned Germans whose orthodoxy would pass examination at
+Exeter Hall; and there are many subjects, such, for instance, as the
+present, on which all their able men are agreed in conclusions that
+cannot rationally give offence to any one. With the Book of Job,
+analytical criticism has only served to clear up the uncertainties which
+have hitherto always hung about it. It is now considered to be, beyond
+all doubt, a genuine Hebrew original, completed by its writer almost in
+the form in which it now remains to us. The questions on the
+authenticity of the Prologue and Epilogue, which once were thought
+important, have given way before a more sound conception of the dramatic
+unity of the entire poem; and the volumes before us contain merely an
+enquiry into its meaning, bringing, at the same time, all the resources
+of modern scholarship and historical and mythological research to bear
+upon the obscurity of separate passages. It is the most difficult of all
+the Hebrew compositions&mdash;many words occurring in it, and many thoughts,
+not to be found elsewhere in the Bible. How difficult our translators
+found it may be seen by the number of words which they were obliged to
+insert in italics, and the doubtful renderings which they have suggested
+in the margin. One instance of this, in passing, we will notice in this
+place&mdash;it will be familiar to every one as the passage quoted at the
+opening of the English burial service, and adduced as one of the
+doctrinal proofs of the resurrection of the body:&mdash;'I know that my
+Redeemer liveth, and that He shall stand at the latter <i>day</i> upon the
+earth; and <i>though</i>, after my skin <i>worms</i> destroy this <i>body</i>, yet in
+my flesh I shall see God.' So this passage stands in the ordinary
+version. But the words in italics have nothing answering to them in the
+original&mdash;they were all added by<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span> the translators<a name="FNanchor_I_9" id="FNanchor_I_9"></a><a href="#Footnote_I_9" class="fnanchor">[I]</a> to fill out their
+interpretation; and for <i>in my flesh</i>, they tell us themselves in the
+margin that we may read (and, in fact, we ought to read, and must read)
+'<i>out of</i>,' or <i>'without' my flesh</i>. It is but to write out the verses,
+omitting the conjectural additions, and making that one small but vital
+correction, to see how frail a support is there for so large a
+conclusion: 'I know that my Redeemer liveth, and shall stand at the
+latter&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;upon the earth; and after my skin&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;destroy
+this&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;; yet without my flesh I shall see God.' If there is any
+doctrine of a resurrection here, it is a resurrection precisely <i>not</i> of
+the body, but of the spirit. And now let us only add, that the word
+translated Redeemer is the technical expression for the 'avenger of
+blood;' and that the second paragraph ought to be rendered&mdash;'and one to
+come after me (my next of kin, to whom the avenging my injuries belongs)
+shall stand upon my dust,' and we shall see how much was to be done
+towards the mere exegesis of the text. This is an extreme instance, and
+no one will question the general beauty and majesty of our translation;
+but there are many mythical and physical allusions scattered over the
+poem, which, in the sixteenth century, there were positively no means of
+understanding; and perhaps, too, there were mental tendencies in the
+translators themselves which prevented them from adequately apprehending
+even the drift and spirit of the composition. The form of the story was
+too stringent to allow such tendencies any latitude; but they appear,
+from time to time, sufficiently to produce serious confusion. With these
+recent assistances, therefore, we propose to say something of the nature
+of this extraordinary book&mdash;a book of which it is to say little to call
+it unequalled of its kind, and which will one day, perhaps, when it is
+allowed to stand on its own merits, be seen towering up alone, far away
+above all the poetry of the world. How it found its way into the canon,
+smiting as it does through and through the most deeply-seated Jewish
+prejudices, is the chief difficulty about it now; to be explained only
+by a traditional acceptance among the sacred books, dating back from the
+old times of the national greatness, when the minds of the people were
+hewn in a larger type than was to be found among the Pharisees of the
+great<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span> synagogue. But its authorship, its date, and its history, are
+alike a mystery to us; it existed at the time when the canon was
+composed; and this is all that we know beyond what we can gather out of
+the language and contents of the poem itself.</p>
+
+<p>Before going further, however, we must make room for a few remarks of a
+very general kind. Let it have been written when it would, it marks a
+period in which the religious convictions of thinking men were passing
+through a vast crisis; and we shall not understand it without having
+before us clearly something of the conditions which periods of such a
+kind always and necessarily exhibit.</p>
+
+<p>The history of religious speculation appears in extreme outline to have
+been of the following character. We may conceive mankind to have been
+originally launched into the universe with no knowledge either of
+themselves or of the scene in which they were placed; with no actual
+knowledge, but distinguished from the rest of the creation by a faculty
+of gaining knowledge; and first unconsciously, and afterwards
+consciously and laboriously, to have commenced that long series of
+experience and observation which has accumulated in thousands of years
+to what we now see around us. Limited on all sides by conditions which
+they must have felt to be none of their own imposing, and finding
+everywhere forces working, over which they had no control, the fear
+which they would naturally entertain of these invisible and mighty
+agents assumed, under the direction of an idea which we may perhaps call
+inborn and inherent in human nature, a more generous character of
+reverence and awe. The laws of the outer world, as they discovered them,
+they regarded as the decrees, or as the immediate energies of personal
+beings; and as knowledge grew up among them, they looked upon it, not as
+knowledge of nature, but of God, or the gods. All early paganism
+appears, on careful examination, to have arisen out of a consecration of
+the first rudiments of physical or speculative science. The twelve
+labours of Hercules are the labours of the sun, of which Hercules is an
+old name, through the twelve signs. Chronos, or <i>time</i>, being measured
+by the apparent motion of the heavens, is figured as their child; Time,
+the universal parent, devours its own offspring, yet is again itself, in
+the high faith of a human soul conscious of its power and its
+endurance,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span> supposed to be baffled and dethroned by Zeus, or <i>life</i>; and
+so on through all the elaborate theogonies of Greece and Egypt. They are
+no more than real insight into real phenomena, allegorised as time went
+on, elaborated by fancy, or idealised by imagination, but never losing
+their original character.</p>
+
+<p>Thus paganism, in its very nature, was expansive, self-developing, and,
+as Mr. Hume observed, tolerant; a new god was welcomed to the Pantheon
+as a new scientific discovery is welcomed by the Royal Society; and the
+various nations found no difficulty in interchanging their divinities&mdash;a
+new god either representing a new power not hitherto discovered, or one
+with which they were already familiar under a new name. With such a
+power of adaptation and enlargement, if there had been nothing more in
+it than this, such a system might have gone on accommodating itself to
+the change of times, and keeping pace with the growth of human
+character. Already in its later forms, as the unity of nature was more
+clearly observed, and the identity of nature throughout the known world,
+the separate powers were subordinating themselves to a single supreme
+king; and, as the poets had originally personified the elemental forces,
+the thinkers were reversing the earlier process, and discovering the law
+under the person. Happily or unhappily, however, what they could do for
+themselves they could not do for the multitude. Ph&oelig;bus and Aphrodite
+had been made too human to be allegorised. Humanised, and yet, we may
+say, only half-humanised, retaining their purely physical nature, and
+without any proper moral attribute at all, these gods and goddesses
+remained to the many examples of sensuality made beautiful; and, as soon
+as right and wrong came to have a meaning, it was impossible to worship
+any more these idealised despisers of it. The human caprices and
+passions which served at first to deepen the illusion, justly revenged
+themselves; paganism became a lie, and perished.</p>
+
+<p>In the meantime, the Jews (and perhaps some other nations, but the Jews
+chiefly and principally) had been moving forward along a road wholly
+different. Breaking early away from the gods of nature, they advanced
+along the line of their moral consciousness; and leaving the nations to
+study physics, philosophy, and art, they confined themselves<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span> to man and
+to human life. Their theology grew up round the knowledge of good and
+evil, and God, with them, was the supreme Lord of the world, who stood
+towards man in the relation of a ruler and a judge. Holding such a
+faith, to them the toleration of paganism was an impossibility; the laws
+of nature might be many, but the law of conduct was one; there was one
+law and one king; and the conditions under which he governed the world,
+as embodied in the Decalogue or other similar code, were looked upon as
+iron and inflexible certainties, unalterable revelations of the will of
+an unalterable Being. So far there was little in common between this
+process and the other; but it was identical with it in this one
+important feature, that moral knowledge, like physical, admitted of
+degrees; and the successive steps of it were only purchasable by
+experience. The dispensation of the law, in the language of modern
+theology, was not the dispensation of grace, and the nature of good and
+evil disclosed itself slowly as men were able to comprehend it. Thus, no
+system of law or articles of belief were or could be complete and
+exhaustive for all time. Experience accumulates; new facts are observed,
+new forces display themselves, and all such formul&aelig; must necessarily be
+from period to period broken up and moulded afresh. And yet the steps
+already gained are a treasure so sacred, so liable are they at all times
+to be attacked by those lower and baser elements in our nature which it
+is their business to hold in check, that the better part of mankind have
+at all times practically regarded their creed as a sacred total to which
+nothing may be added, and from which nothing may be taken away; the
+suggestion of a new idea is resented as an encroachment, punished as an
+insidious piece of treason, and resisted by the combined forces of all
+common practical understandings, which know too well the value of what
+they have, to risk the venture upon untried change. Periods of religious
+transition, therefore, when the advance has been a real one, always have
+been violent, and probably will always continue to be so. They to whom
+the precious gift of fresh light has been given are called upon to
+exhibit their credentials as teachers in suffering for it. They, and
+those who oppose them, have alike a sacred cause; and the fearful
+spectacle arises of earnest, vehement men contending against each other
+as for their own souls, in fiery struggle. Persecutions come, and
+martyrdoms,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span> and religions wars; and, at last, the old faith, like the
+ph&oelig;nix, expires upon its altar, and the new rises out of the ashes.</p>
+
+<p>Such, in briefest outline, has been the history of religions, natural
+and moral; the first, indeed, being in no proper sense a religion at
+all, as we understand religion; and only assuming the character of it in
+the minds of great men whose moral sense had raised them beyond their
+time and country, and who, feeling the necessity of a real creed, with
+an effort and with indifferent success, endeavoured to express, under
+the systems which they found, emotions which had no proper place in
+them.</p>
+
+<p>Of the transition periods which we have described as taking place under
+the religion which we call moral, the first known to us is marked at its
+opening by the appearance of the Book of Job, the first fierce collision
+of the new fact with the formula which will not stretch to cover it.</p>
+
+<p>The earliest phenomenon likely to be observed connected with the moral
+government of the world is the general one, that on the whole, as things
+are constituted, good men prosper and are happy, bad men fail and are
+miserable. The cause of such a condition is no mystery, and lies very
+near the surface. As soon as men combine in society, they are forced to
+obey certain laws under which alone society is possible, and these laws,
+even in their rudest form, approach the laws of conscience. To a certain
+extent, every one is obliged to sacrifice his private inclinations; and
+those who refuse to do so are punished, or are crushed. If society were
+perfect, the imperfect tendency would carry itself out till the two sets
+of laws were identical; but perfection so far has been only in Utopia,
+and, as far as we can judge by experience hitherto, they have
+approximated most nearly in the simplest and most rudimentary forms of
+life. Under the systems which we call patriarchal, the modern
+distinction between sins and crimes had no existence. All gross sins
+were offences against society, as it then was constituted, and, wherever
+it was possible, were punished as being so; chicanery and those subtle
+advantages which the acute and unscrupulous can take over the simple,
+without open breach of enacted statutes, became only possible under the
+complications of more artificial polities; and the oppression or injury
+of man by man was open, violent, obvious, and therefore easily
+understood.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span> Doubtless, therefore, in such a state of things it would,
+on the whole, be true to experience that, judging merely by outward
+prosperity or the reverse, good and bad men would be rewarded and
+punished as such in this actual world; so far, that is, as the
+administration of such rewards and punishments was left in the power of
+mankind. But theology could not content itself with general tendencies.
+Theological propositions then, as much as now, were held to be absolute,
+universal, admitting of no exceptions, and explaining every phenomenon.
+Superficial generalisations were construed into immutable decrees; the
+God of this world was just and righteous, and temporal prosperity or
+wretchedness were dealt out by Him immediately by His own will to His
+subjects according to their behaviour. Thus the same disposition towards
+completeness which was the ruin of paganism, here, too, was found
+generating the same evils; the half truth rounding itself out with
+falsehoods. Not only the consequences of ill actions which followed
+through themselves, but the accidents, as we call them, of
+nature&mdash;earthquakes, storms, and pestilences&mdash;were the ministers of
+God's justice, and struck sinners only with discriminating accuracy.
+That the sun should shine alike on the evil and the good was a creed too
+high for the early divines, or that the victims of a fallen tower were
+no greater offenders than their neighbours. The conceptions of such men
+could not pass beyond the outward temporal consequence; and if God's
+hand was not there it was nowhere. We might have expected that such a
+theory of things could not long resist the accumulated contradictions of
+experience; but the same experience shows also what a marvellous power
+is in us of thrusting aside phenomena which interfere with our cherished
+convictions; and when such convictions are consecrated into a creed
+which it is a sacred duty to believe, experience is but like water
+dropping upon a rock, which wears it away, indeed, at last, but only in
+thousands of years. This theory was and is the central idea of the
+Jewish polity, the obstinate toughness of which has been the perplexity
+of Gentiles and Christians from the first dawn of its existence; it
+lingers among ourselves in our Liturgy and in the popular belief; and in
+spite of the emphatic censure of Him after whose name we call ourselves,
+is still the instant interpreter for us of any unusual calamity, a
+potato blight, a famine, or an<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span> epidemic: such vitality is there in a
+moral faith, though now, at any rate, contradicted by the experience of
+all mankind, and at issue even with Christianity itself.</p>
+
+<p>At what period in the world's history misgivings about it began to show
+themselves it is now impossible to say; it was at the close, probably,
+of the patriarchal period, when men who really <i>thought</i> must have found
+the ground palpably shaking under them. Indications of such misgivings
+are to be found in the Psalms, those especially passing under the name
+of Asaph; and all through Ecclesiastes there breathes a spirit of
+deepest and saddest scepticism. But Asaph thrusts his doubts aside, and
+forces himself back into his old position; and the scepticism of
+Ecclesiastes is confessedly that of a man who had gone wandering after
+enjoyment; searching after pleasures&mdash;pleasures of sense and pleasures
+of intellect&mdash;and who, at last, bears reluctant testimony that, by such
+methods, no pleasures can be found which will endure; that he had
+squandered the power which might have been used for better things, and
+had only strength remaining to tell his own sad tale as a warning to
+mankind. There is nothing in Ecclesiastes like the misgivings of a noble
+nature. The writer's own personal happiness had been all for which he
+had cared; he had failed, as all men gifted as he was gifted are sure to
+fail, and the lights of heaven were extinguished by the disappointment
+with which his own spirit had been clouded.</p>
+
+<p>Utterly different from these, both in character and in the lesson which
+it teaches, is the Book of Job. Of unknown date, as we said, and unknown
+authorship, the language impregnated with strange idioms and strange
+allusions, un-Jewish in form, and in fiercest hostility with Judaism, it
+hovers like a meteor over the old Hebrew literature, in it, but not of
+it, compelling the acknowledgment of itself by its own internal majesty,
+yet exerting no influence over the minds of the people, never alluded
+to, and scarcely ever quoted, till at last the light which it had
+heralded rose up full over the world in Christianity.</p>
+
+<p>The conjectures which have been formed upon the date of this book are so
+various, that they show of themselves on how slight a foundation the
+best of them must rest. The language is no guide, for although
+unquestionably of Hebrew origin, the poem bears no analogy to any of the
+other books<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span> in the Bible; while of its external history nothing is
+known at all, except that it was received into the canon at the time of
+the great synagogue. Ewald decides, with some confidence, that it
+belongs to the great prophetic period, and that the writer was a
+contemporary of Jeremiah. Ewald is a high authority in these matters,
+and this opinion is the one which we believe is now commonly received
+among biblical scholars. In the absence of proof, however (and the
+reasons which he brings forward are really no more than conjectures),
+these opposite considerations may be of moment. It is only natural that
+at first thought we should ascribe the grandest poem in a literature to
+the time at which the poetry of the nation to which it belongs was
+generally at its best; but, on reflection, the time when the poetry of
+prophecy is the richest, is not likely to be favourable to compositions
+of another kind. The prophets wrote in an era of decrepitude,
+dissolution, sin, and shame, when the glory of Israel was falling round
+them into ruin, and their mission, glowing as they were with the ancient
+spirit, was to rebuke, to warn, to threaten, and to promise. Finding
+themselves too late to save, and only, like Cassandra, despised and
+disregarded, their voices rise up singing the swan song of a dying
+people, now falling away in the wild wailing of despondency over the
+shameful and desperate present, now swelling in triumphant hope that God
+will not leave them for ever, and in His own time will take His chosen
+to Himself again. But such a period is an ill occasion for searching
+into the broad problems of human destiny; the present is all-important
+and all-absorbing; and such a book as that of Job could have arisen only
+out of an isolation of mind, and life, and interest, which we cannot
+conceive of as possible under such conditions.</p>
+
+<p>The more it is studied, the more the conclusion forces itself upon us
+that, let the writer have lived when he would, in his struggle with the
+central falsehood of his own people's creed, he must have divorced
+himself from them outwardly as well as inwardly; that he travelled away
+into the world, and lived long, perhaps all his matured life, in exile.
+Everything about the book speaks of a person who had broken free from
+the narrow littleness of 'the peculiar people.' The language, as we
+said, is full of strange words. The hero of the poem is of strange land
+and parentage&mdash;a Gentile certainly,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span> not a Jew. The life, the manners,
+the customs are of all varieties and places&mdash;Egypt, with its river and
+its pyramids, is there; the description of mining points to Ph&oelig;nicia;
+the settled life in cities, the nomad Arabs, the wandering caravans, the
+heat of the tropics, and the ice of the north, all are foreign to
+Canaan, speaking of foreign things and foreign people. No mention, or
+hint of mention, is there throughout the poem of Jewish traditions or
+Jewish certainties. We look to find the three friends vindicate
+themselves, as they so well might have done, by appeals to the fertile
+annals of Israel, to the Flood, to the cities of the plain, to the
+plagues of Egypt, or the thunders of Sinai. But of all this there is not
+a word; they are passed by as if they had no existence; and instead of
+them, when witnesses are required for the power of God, we have strange
+un-Hebrew stories of the eastern astronomic mythology, the old wars of
+the giants, the imprisoned Orion, the wounded dragon, 'the sweet
+influences of the seven stars,' and the glittering fragments of the
+sea-snake Rahab<a name="FNanchor_J_10" id="FNanchor_J_10"></a><a href="#Footnote_J_10" class="fnanchor">[J]</a> trailing across the northern sky. Again, God is not
+the God of Israel, but the father of mankind; we hear nothing of a
+chosen people, nothing of a special revelation, nothing of peculiar
+privileges; and in the court of heaven there is a Satan, not the prince
+of this world and the enemy of God, but the angel of judgment, the
+accusing spirit whose mission was to walk to and fro over the earth, and
+carry up to heaven an account of the sins of mankind. We cannot believe
+that thoughts of this kind arose out of Jerusalem in the days of Josiah.
+In this book, if anywhere, we have the record of some <ins class="cor" title="[Greek: an&ecirc;r
+polutropos]">&#945;&#957;&#951;&#961; &#960;&#959;&#955;&#965;&#964;&#961;&#959;&#960;&#959;&#962;</ins> who, like the old hero of Ithaca,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div class="i0"><ins class="cor" title="poll&ocirc;n anthr&ocirc;p&ocirc;n iden astea kai noon egn&ocirc;">&#960;&#959;&#955;&#955;&#969;&#957; &#945;&#957;&#952;&#961;&#969;&#960;&#969;&#957; &#953;&#948;&#949;&#957; &#945;&#963;&#964;&#949;&#945; &#954;&#945;&#953; &#957;&#959;&#959;&#957; &#949;&#947;&#957;&#969;</ins>,</div><br />
+<div class="i0"><ins class="cor" title="polla d' hog' en pont&ocirc; pathen algea hon kata thumon">&#960;&#959;&#955;&#955;&#945; &#948;' &#8001;&#947;' &#949;&#957; &#960;&#959;&#957;&#964;&#969; &#960;&#945;&#952;&#949;&#957; &#945;&#955;&#947;&#949;&#945; &#8001;&#957; &#954;&#945;&#964;&#945; &#952;&#965;&#956;&#959;&#957;</ins>,</div><br />
+<div class="i0"><ins class="cor" title="arnumenos psuch&ecirc;n.... ]">&#945;&#961;&#957;&#965;&#956;&#949;&#957;&#959;&#962; &#968;&#965;&#967;&#951;&#957; . . . . </ins></div><br />
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="no_in">but the scenes, the names, and the incidents, are all contrived as if to
+baffle curiosity&mdash;as if, in the very form of the poem, to teach us that
+it is no story of a single thing which happened once, but that it
+belongs to humanity itself, and is the drama of the trial of man, with
+Almighty God and the angels as the spectators of it.</p>
+
+<p>No reader can have failed to have been struck with the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span> simplicity of
+the opening. Still, calm, and most majestic, it tells us everything
+which is necessary to be known in the fewest possible words. The history
+of Job was probably a tradition in the East; his name, like that of
+Priam in Greece, the symbol of fallen greatness, and his misfortunes the
+problem of philosophers. In keeping with the current belief, he is
+described as a model of excellence, the most perfect and upright man
+upon the earth, 'and the same was the greatest man in all the east.' So
+far, greatness and goodness had gone hand in hand together, as the
+popular theory required. The details of his character are brought out in
+the progress of the poem. He was 'the father of the oppressed, and of
+those who had none to help them.' When he sat as a judge in the
+market-places, 'righteousness clothed him' there, and 'his justice was a
+robe and a diadem.' He 'broke the jaws of the wicked, and plucked the
+spoil out of his teeth;' and, humble in the midst of his power, he 'did
+not despise the cause of his manservant, or his maidservant, when they
+contended with him,' knowing (and amidst those old people where the
+multitude of mankind were regarded as the born slaves of the powerful,
+to be carved into eunuchs or polluted into concubines at their master's
+pleasure, it was no easy matter to know it)&mdash;knowing that 'He who had
+made him had made them,' and <i>one</i> 'had fashioned them both in the
+womb.' Above all, he was the friend of the poor; 'the blessing of him
+that was ready to perish came upon him,' and he 'made the widow's heart
+to sing for joy.'</p>
+
+<p>Setting these characteristics of his daily life by the side of his
+unaffected piety, as it is described in the first chapter, we have a
+picture of the best man who could then be conceived; not a hard ascetic,
+living in haughty or cowardly isolation, but a warm figure of flesh and
+blood, a man full of all human loveliness, and to whom, that no room
+might be left for any possible Calvinistic falsehood, God Himself bears
+the emphatic testimony, that 'there was none like him upon the earth, a
+perfect and upright man, who feared God and eschewed evil.' If such a
+person as this, therefore, could be made miserable, necessarily the
+current belief of the Jews was false to the root; and tradition
+furnished the fact that he had been visited by every worst calamity. How
+was it then to be accounted for? Out of a thousand possible
+explanations,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span> the poet introduces a single one. He admits us behind the
+veil which covers the ways of Providence, and we hear the accusing angel
+charging Job with an interested piety, and of being obedient because it
+was his policy. 'Job does not serve God for nought,' he says; 'strip him
+of his splendour, and see if he will care for God then. Humble him into
+poverty and wretchedness, so only we shall know what is in his heart.'
+The cause thus introduced is itself a rebuke to the belief which, with
+its 'rewards and punishments,' immediately fostered selfishness; and the
+poem opens with a double action, on one side to try the question whether
+it is possible for man to love God disinterestedly&mdash;the issue of which
+trial is not foreseen or even foretold, and we watch the progress of it
+with an anxious and fearful interest; on the other side, to bring out,
+in contrast to the truth which we already know, the cruel falsehood of
+the popular faith&mdash;to show how, instead of leading men to mercy and
+affection, it hardens their heart, narrows their sympathies, and
+enhances the trials of the sufferer, by refinements which even Satan had
+not anticipated. The combination of evils, as blow falls on blow,
+suddenly, swiftly, and terribly, has all the appearance of a purposed
+visitation (as indeed it was); if ever outward incidents might with
+justice be interpreted as the immediate action of Providence, those
+which fell on Job might be so interpreted. The world turns disdainfully
+from the fallen in the world's way; but far worse than this, his chosen
+friends, wise, good, pious men, as wisdom and piety were then, without
+one glimpse of the true cause of his sufferings, see in them a judgment
+upon his secret sins. He becomes to them an illustration, and even (such
+are the paralogisms of men of this description) a proof of their theory
+that 'the prosperity of the wicked is but for a while;' and instead of
+the comfort and help which they might have brought him, and which in the
+end they were made to bring him, he is to them no more than a text for
+the enunciation of solemn falsehood. And even worse again, the sufferer
+himself had been educated in the same creed; he, too, had been taught to
+see the hand of God in the outward dispensation; and feeling from the
+bottom of his heart, that he, in his own case, was a sure contradiction
+of what he had learnt to believe, he himself finds his very faith in God
+shaken from its foundation. The worst evils which Satan had devised
+were<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span> distanced far by those which had been created by human folly.</p>
+
+<p>The creed in which Job had believed was tried and found wanting, and, as
+it ever will be when the facts of experience come in contact with the
+inadequate formula, the true is found so mingled with the false, that
+they can hardly be disentangled, and are in danger of being swept away
+together.</p>
+
+<p>A studied respect is shown, however, to orthodoxy, even while it is
+arraigned for judgment. It may be doubtful whether the writer purposely
+intended it. He probably cared only to tell the real truth; to say for
+the old theory the best which could be said, and to produce as its
+defenders the best and wisest men whom in his experience he had known to
+believe and defend it. At any rate, he represents the three friends, not
+as a weaker person would have represented them, as foolish, obstinate
+bigots, but as wise, humane, and almost great men, who, at the outset,
+at least, are animated only by the kindest feelings, and speak what they
+have to say with the most earnest conviction that it is true. Job is
+vehement, desperate, reckless. His language is the wild, natural
+outpouring of suffering. The friends, true to the eternal nature of man,
+are grave, solemn, and indignant, preaching their half truth, and
+mistaken only in supposing that it is the whole; speaking, as all such
+persons would speak and still do speak, in defending what they consider
+sacred truth against the <ins class="cor" title="Original: assults">assaults</ins> of folly and scepticism. How beautiful
+is their first introduction:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>'Now when Job's three friends heard of all this evil which was come upon
+him, they came every one from his own place; Eliphaz the Temanite, and
+Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite: for they had made an
+appointment together to come to mourn with him and to comfort him. And
+when they lifted up their eyes afar off, and knew him not, they lifted
+up their voice and wept, and they rent every one his mantle, and
+sprinkled dust upon their heads towards heaven. So they sat down with
+him upon the ground seven days and seven nights, and none spake a word
+unto him, for they saw that his grief was very great.'</p>
+
+<p>What a picture is there! What majestic tenderness! His wife had scoffed
+at his faith, bidding him 'leave God and die.' 'His acquaintance had
+turned from him.' He 'had called his servant, and he had given him no
+answer.' Even the children,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span> in their unconscious cruelty, had gathered
+round and mocked him as he lay among the ashes. But 'his friends
+sprinkle dust towards heaven, and sit silently by him, and weep for him
+seven days and seven nights upon the ground.' That is, they were
+true-hearted, truly loving, devout, religious men; and yet they, with
+their religion, were to become the instruments of the most poignant
+sufferings, the sharpest temptations, which he had to endure. So it was,
+and is, and will be&mdash;of such materials is this human life of ours
+composed.</p>
+
+<p>And now, remembering the double action of the drama&mdash;the actual trial of
+Job, the result of which is uncertain; and the delusion of these men,
+which is, at the outset, certain&mdash;let us go rapidly through the
+dialogue. Satan's share in the temptation had already been overcome.
+Lying sick in the loathsome disease which had been sent upon him, his
+wife, in Satan's own words, had tempted Job to say, 'Farewell to
+God,'&mdash;think no more of God or goodness, since this was all which came
+of it; and Job had told her that she spoke as one of the foolish women.
+He 'had received good at the hand of the Lord, and should he not receive
+evil?' But now, when real love and real affection appear, his heart
+melts in him; he loses his forced self-composure, and bursts into a
+passionate regret that he had ever been born. In the agony of his
+sufferings, hope of better things had died away. He does not complain of
+injustice; as yet, and before his friends have stung and wounded him, he
+makes no questioning of Providence,&mdash;but why was life given to him at
+all, if only for this? Sick in mind, and sick in body, but one wish
+remains to him, that death will come quickly and end all. It is a cry
+from the very depths of a single and simple heart. But for such
+simplicity and singleness his friends could not give him credit;
+possessed beforehand with their idea, they see in his misery only a
+fatal witness against him; such calamities could not have befallen a
+man, the justice of God would not have permitted it, unless they had
+been deserved. Job had sinned and he had suffered, and this wild passion
+was but impenitence and rebellion.</p>
+
+<p>Being as certain that they were right in this opinion as they were that
+God Himself existed, that they should speak what they felt was only
+natural and necessary; and their language at the outset is, all which
+would be dictated by the tenderest sympathy. Eliphaz opens, the oldest
+and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span> most important of the three, in a soft, subdued, suggestive strain,
+contriving in every way to spare the feelings of the sufferer, to the
+extreme to which his love will allow him. All is general, impersonal,
+indirect,&mdash;the rule of the world, the order of Providence. He does not
+accuse Job, but he describes his calamities, and leaves him to gather
+for himself the occasion which had produced them; and then passes off,
+as if further to soften the blow, to the mysterious vision in which the
+infirmity of mortal nature had been revealed to him, the universal
+weakness which involved both the certainty that Job had shared in it,
+and the excuse for him, if he would confess and humble himself: the
+blessed virtue of repentance follows, and the promise that all shall be
+well.</p>
+
+<p>This is the note on which each of the friends strikes successively, in
+the first of the three divisions into which the dialogue divides itself,
+but each with increasing peremptoriness and confidence, as Job, so far
+from accepting their interpretation of what had befallen him, hurls it
+from him in anger and disdain. Let us observe (and the Calvinists should
+consider this), he will hear as little of the charges against mankind as
+of charges against himself. He will not listen to the 'corruption of
+humanity,' because in the consciousness of his own innocency, he knows
+that it is not corrupt: he knows that he is himself just and good, and
+we know it, the Divine sentence upon him having been already passed. He
+will not acknowledge his sin, for he knows not of what to repent. If he
+could have reflected calmly, he might have foreseen what they would say.
+He knew all that as well as they: it was the old story which he had
+learnt, and could repeat, if necessary, as well as anyone: and if it had
+been no more than a philosophical discussion, touching himself no more
+nearly than it touched his friends, he might have allowed for the
+tenacity of opinion in such matters, and listened to it and replied to
+it with equanimity. But, as the proverb says, 'It is ill talking between
+a full man and a fasting:' and in Job such equanimity would have been
+but Stoicism, or the affectation of it, and unreal as the others'
+theories. Possessed with the certainty that he had not deserved what had
+befallen him, harassed with doubt, and worn out with pain and
+unkindness, he had assumed (and how natural that he should assume it)
+that those who loved him should not have been hasty to believe evil of
+him; he had spoken to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span> them as he really felt, and he thought that he
+might have looked to them for something warmer and more sympathising
+than such dreary eloquence. So when the revelation comes upon him of
+what was passing in them, he attributes it (and now he is unjust to
+them) to a falsehood of heart, and not to a blindness of understanding.
+Their sermons, so kindly intended, roll past him as a dismal mockery.
+They had been shocked (and how true again is this to nature) at his
+passionate cry for death. 'Do ye reprove words?' he says, 'and the
+speeches of one that is desperate, which are as wind?' It was but poor
+friendship and narrow wisdom. He had looked to them for pity, for
+comfort, and love. He had longed for it as the parched caravans in the
+desert for the water-streams, and 'his brethren had dealt deceitfully
+with him.' The brooks, in the cool winter, roll in a full turbid
+torrent; 'what time it waxes warm they vanish, when it is hot they are
+consumed out of their place; the caravans of Tema looked for them, the
+companies of Sheba waited for them; they were confounded because they
+had hoped; they came thither, and there was nothing.' If for once these
+poor men could have trusted their hearts, if for once they could have
+believed that there might be 'more things in heaven and earth' than were
+dreamt of in their philosophy&mdash;but this is the one thing which they
+could not do, which the theologian proper never has done or will do. And
+thus whatever of calmness or endurance Job alone, on his ash-heap, might
+have conquered for himself, is all scattered away; and as the strong
+gusts of passion sweep to and fro across his heart, he pours himself out
+in wild fitful music, so beautiful because so true, not answering them
+or their speeches, but now flinging them from him in scorn, now
+appealing to their mercy, or turning indignantly to God; now praying for
+death; now in perplexity doubting whether, in some mystic way which he
+cannot understand, he may not, perhaps, after all, really have sinned,
+and praying to be shown his fault; and then staggering further into the
+darkness, and breaking out into upbraidings of the Power which has
+become so dreadful an enigma to him. 'Thou enquirest after my iniquity,
+thou searchest after my sin, and thou knowest that I am not wicked. Why
+didst thou bring me forth out of the womb? Oh, that I had given up the
+ghost, and no eye had seen me. Cease, let me alone. It is but a little<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span>
+while that I have to live. Let me alone, that I may take comfort a
+little before I go, whence I shall not return to the land of darkness
+and the shadow of death.' In what other poem in the world is there
+pathos deep as this? With experience so stern as his, it was not for Job
+to be calm, and self-possessed, and delicate in his words. He speaks not
+what he knows, but what he feels; and without fear the writer allows him
+to throw out his passion all genuine as it rises, not overmuch caring
+how nice ears might be offended, but contented to be true to the real
+emotion of a genuine human heart. So the poem runs on to the end of the
+first answer to Zophar.</p>
+
+<p>But now, with admirable fitness, as the contest goes forward, the
+relative position of the speakers begins to change. Hitherto, Job only
+had been passionate; and his friends temperate and collected. Now,
+becoming shocked at his obstinacy, and disappointed in the result of
+their homilies, they stray still further from the truth in an endeavour
+to strengthen their position, and, as a natural consequence, visibly
+grow angry. To them, Job's vehement and desperate speeches are damning
+evidence of the truth of their suspicion. Impiety is added to his first
+sin, and they begin to see in him a rebel against God. At first they had
+been contented to speak generally, and much which they had urged was
+partially true; now they step forward to a direct application, and
+formally and personally accuse himself. Here their ground is positively
+false; and with delicate art it is they who are now growing violent, and
+wounded self-love begins to show behind their zeal for God; while in
+contrast to them, as there is less and less truth in what they say, Job
+grows more and more collected. For a time it had seemed doubtful how he
+would endure his trial. The light of his faith was burning feebly and
+unsteadily; a little more, and it seemed as if it might have utterly
+gone out. But at last the storm was lulling; as the charges are brought
+personally home to him, the confidence in his own real innocence rises
+against them. He had before known that he was innocent; now he feels the
+strength which lies in innocence, as if God were beginning to reveal
+Himself within him, to prepare the way for the after outward
+manifestation of Himself.</p>
+
+<p>The friends, as before, repeat one another with but little<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span> difference;
+the sameness being of course intentional, as showing that they were not
+speaking for themselves, but as representatives of a prevailing opinion.
+Eliphaz, again, gives the note which the others follow. Hear this
+Calvinist of the old world: 'Thy own mouth condemneth thee, and thine
+own lips testify against thee. What is man that he should be clean, and
+he that is born of a woman that he should be righteous? Behold, he
+putteth no trust in his saints; yea, the heavens are not clean in his
+sight; how much more abominable and filthy is man, which drinketh
+iniquity like water.' Strange, that after all these thousands of years
+we should still persist in this degrading confession, as a thing which
+it is impious to deny and impious to attempt to render otherwise, when
+Scripture itself, in language so emphatic, declares that it is a lie.
+Job <i>is</i> innocent, perfect, righteous. God Himself bears witness to it.
+It is Job who is found at last to have spoken truth, and the friends to
+have sinned in denying it. And he holds fast by his innocency, and with
+a generous confidence thrusts away the misgivings which had begun to
+cling to him. Among his complainings he had exclaimed, that God was
+remembering upon him the sins of his youth&mdash;not denying them; knowing
+well that he, like others, had gone astray before he had learnt to
+control himself, but feeling that at least in an earthly father it is
+unjust to visit the faults of childhood on the matured man; feeling that
+he had long, long shaken them off from him, and they did not even impair
+the probity of his after-life. But now these doubts, too, pass away in
+the brave certainty that God is not less just than man. As the
+denouncings grow louder and darker, he appeals from his narrow judges to
+the Supreme Tribunal&mdash;calls on God to hear him and to try his cause&mdash;and
+then, in the strength of this appeal the mist rises from before his
+eyes. His sickness is mortal: he has no hope in life, and death is near;
+but the intense feeling that justice must and will be done, holds to him
+closer and closer. God may appear on earth for him; or if that be too
+bold a hope, and death finds him as he is&mdash;what is death then? God will
+clear his memory in the place where he lived; his injuries will be
+righted over his grave; while for himself, like a sudden gleam of
+sunlight between clouds, a clear, bright hope beams up, that he too,
+then, in another life, if not in this, when his skin is wasted<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span> off his
+bones, and the worms have done their work on the prison of his spirit,
+he too, at last, may then see God; may see Him, and have his pleadings
+heard.</p>
+
+<p>With such a hope, or even the shadow of one, he turns back to the world
+again to look at it. Facts against which he had before closed his eyes
+he allows and confronts, and he sees that his own little experience is
+but the reflection of a law. You tell me, he seems to say, that the good
+are rewarded, and that the wicked are punished; that God is just, and
+that this is always so. Perhaps it is, or will be, but not in the way
+which you imagine. You have known me, you have known what my life has
+been; you see what I am, and it is no difficulty to you. You prefer
+believing that I, whom you call your friend, am a deceiver or a
+pretender, to admitting the possibility of the falsehood of your
+hypothesis. You will not listen to my assurance, and you are angry with
+me because I will not lie against my own soul, and acknowledge sins
+which I have not committed. You appeal to the course of the world in
+proof of your faith, and challenge me to answer you. Well, then, I
+accept your challenge. The world is not what you say. You have told me
+what you have seen of it: I will tell you what I have seen.</p>
+
+<p>'Even while I remember I am afraid, and trembling taketh hold upon my
+flesh. Wherefore do the wicked become old, yea, and are mighty in power?
+Their seed is established in their sight with them, and their offspring
+before their eyes. Their houses are safe from fear, neither is the rod
+of God upon them. Their bull gendereth and faileth not; their cow
+calveth, and casteth not her calf. They send forth their little ones
+like a flock, and their children dance. They take the timbrel and harp,
+and rejoice at the sound of the organ. They spend their days in wealth,
+and in a moment go down into the grave. Therefore they say unto God,
+Depart from us, for we desire not the knowledge of Thy ways. What is the
+Almighty that we should serve Him? and what profit should we have if we
+pray to Him?'</p>
+
+<p>Will you quote the weary proverb? Will you say that 'God layeth up His
+iniquity for His children?' (Our translators have wholly lost the sense
+of this passage, and endeavour to make Job acknowledge what he is
+steadfastly denying.) Well, and what then? What will he care? 'Will his
+own eye see his own fall? Will he drink the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span> wrath of the Almighty? What
+are the fortunes of his house to him if the number of his own months is
+fulfilled?' One man is good and another wicked, one is happy and another
+is miserable. In the great indifference of nature they share alike in
+the common lot. 'They lie down alike in the dust, and the worms cover
+them.'</p>
+
+<p>Ewald, and many other critics, suppose that Job was hurried away by his
+feelings to say all this; and that in his calmer moments he must have
+felt that it was untrue. It is a point on which we must decline
+accepting even Ewald's high authority. Even then, in those old times, it
+was beginning to be terribly true. Even then the current theory was
+obliged to bend to large exceptions; and what Job saw as exceptions we
+see round us everywhere. It was true then, it is infinitely more true
+now, that what is called virtue in the common sense of the word, still
+more that nobleness, godliness, or heroism of character in any form
+whatsoever, have nothing to do with this or that man's prosperity, or
+even happiness. The thoroughly vicious man is no doubt wretched enough;
+but the worldly, prudent, self-restraining man, with his five senses,
+which he understands how to gratify with tempered indulgence, with a
+conscience satisfied with the hack routine of what is called
+respectability,&mdash;such a man feels no wretchedness; no inward uneasiness
+disturbs him, no desires which he cannot gratify; and this though he be
+the basest and most contemptible slave of his own selfishness.
+Providence will not interfere to punish him. Let him obey the laws under
+which prosperity is obtainable, and he will obtain it, let him never
+fear. He will obtain it, be he base or noble. Nature is indifferent; the
+famine and the earthquake, and the blight or the accident, will not
+discriminate to strike him. He may insure himself against casualties in
+these days of ours, with the money perhaps which a better man would have
+given away, and he will have his reward. He need not doubt it.</p>
+
+<p>And, again, it is not true, as optimists would persuade us, that such
+prosperity brings no real pleasure. A man with no high aspirations, who
+thrives, and makes money, and envelops himself in comforts, is as happy
+as such a nature can be. If unbroken satisfaction be the most blessed
+state for a man (and this certainly is the practical notion of
+happiness), he is the happiest of men. Nor are those idle phrases any<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span>
+truer, that the good man's goodness is a never-ceasing sunshine; that
+virtue is its own reward, &amp;c. &amp;c. If men truly virtuous care to be
+rewarded for it, their virtue is but a poor investment of their moral
+capital. Was Job so happy then on that ash-heap of his, the mark of the
+world's scorn, and the butt for the spiritual archery of the theologian,
+alone in his forlorn nakedness, like some old dreary stump which the
+lightning has scathed, rotting away in the wind and the rain? If
+happiness be indeed what we men are sent into this world to seek for,
+those hitherto thought the noblest among us were the pitifullest and
+wretchedest. Surely it was no error in Job. It was that real insight
+which once was given to all the world in Christianity, however we have
+forgotten it now. Job was learning to see that it was not in the
+possession of enjoyment, no, nor of happiness itself, that the
+difference lies between the good and the bad. True, it might be that God
+sometimes, even generally, gives such happiness&mdash;gives it in what
+Aristotle calls an <ins class="cor" title="[Greek: epigignomenon telos]">&#949;&#960;&#953;&#947;&#953;&#947;&#957;&#959;&#956;&#949;&#957;&#959;&#957; &#964;&#949;&#955;&#959;&#962;</ins>, but it is no part of
+the terms on which He admits us to His service, still less is it the end
+which we may propose to ourselves on entering His service. Happiness He
+gives to whom He will, or leaves to the angel of nature to distribute
+among those who fulfil the laws upon which <i>it</i> depends. But to serve
+God and to love Him is higher and better than happiness, though it be
+with wounded feet, and bleeding brows, and hearts loaded with sorrow.</p>
+
+<p>Into this high faith Job is rising, treading his temptations under his
+feet, and finding in them a ladder on which his spirit rises. Thus he is
+passing further and even further from his friends, soaring where their
+imaginations cannot follow him. To them he is a blasphemer whom they
+gaze at with awe and terror. They had charged him with sinning on the
+strength of their hypothesis, and he has answered with a deliberate
+denial of it. Losing now all mastery over themselves, they pour out a
+torrent of mere extravagant invective and baseless falsehood, which in
+the calmer outset they would have blushed to think of. They <i>know</i> no
+evil of Job, but they do not hesitate to convert conjecture into
+certainty, and specify in detail the particular crimes which he must
+have committed. He <i>ought</i> to have committed them, and so he had; the
+old argument then as now.&mdash;'Is not thy wickedness great?' says Eliphaz.
+'Thou hast taken a pledge<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span> from thy brother for nought, and stripped the
+naked of their clothing; thou hast not given water to the weary, and
+thou hast withholden bread from the hungry;' and so on through a series
+of mere distracted lies. But the time was past when words like these
+could make Job angry. Bildad follows them up with an attempt to frighten
+him by a picture of the power of that God whom he was blaspheming; but
+Job cuts short his harangue, and ends it for him in a spirit of
+loftiness which Bildad could not have approached; and then proudly and
+calmly rebukes them all, no longer in scorn and irony, but in high,
+tranquil self-possession. 'God forbid that I should justify you,' he
+says; 'till I die I will not remove my integrity from me. My
+righteousness I hold fast, and will not let it go. My heart shall not
+reproach me so long as I live.'</p>
+
+<p>So far all has been clear, each party, with increasing confidence,
+having insisted on their own position, and denounced their adversaries.
+A difficulty now arises which, at first sight, appears insurmountable.
+As the chapters are at present printed, the entire of the twenty-seventh
+is assigned to Job, and the paragraph from the eleventh to the
+twenty-third verses is in direct contradiction to all which he has
+maintained before&mdash;is, in fact, a concession of having been wrong from
+the beginning. Ewald, who, as we said above, himself refuses to allow
+the truth of Job's last and highest position, supposes that he is here
+receding from it, and confessing what an over-precipitate passion had
+betrayed him into denying. For many reasons, principally because we are
+satisfied that Job said then no more than the real fact, we cannot think
+Ewald right; and the concessions are too large and too inconsistent to
+be reconciled even with his own general theory of the poem. Another
+solution of the difficulty is very simple, although it is to be admitted
+that it rather cuts the knot than unties it. Eliphaz and Bildad have
+each spoken a third time; the symmetry of the general form requires that
+now Zophar should speak; and the suggestion, we believe, was first made
+by Dr. Kennicott, that he did speak, and that the verses in question
+belong to him. Any one who is accustomed to MSS. will understand easily
+how such a mistake, if it be one, might have arisen. Even in
+Shakespeare, the speeches in the early editions are in many instances
+wrongly divided, and assigned to the wrong persons. It might have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span>
+arisen from inadvertence; it might have arisen from the foolishness of
+some Jewish transcriber, who resolved, at all costs, to drag the book
+into harmony with Judaism, and make Job unsay his heresy. This view has
+the merit of fully clearing up the obscurity. Another, however, has been
+suggested by Eichorn, who originally followed Kennicott, but discovered,
+as he supposed, a less violent hypothesis, which was equally
+satisfactory. Eichorn imagines the verses to be a summary by Job of his
+adversaries' opinions, as if he said&mdash;'Listen now; you know what the
+facts are as well as I, and yet you maintain this;' and then passed on
+with his indirect reply to it. It is possible that Eichorn may be
+right&mdash;at any rate, either he is right, or else Dr. Kennicott is.
+Certainly, Ewald is not. Taken as an account of Job's own conviction,
+the passage contradicts the burden of the whole poem. Passing it by,
+therefore, and going to what immediately follows, we arrive at what, in
+a human sense, is the final climax&mdash;Job's victory and triumph. He had
+appealed to God, and God had not appeared; he had doubted and fought
+against his doubts, and at last had crushed them down. He, too, had been
+taught to look for God in outward judgments; and when his own experience
+had shown him his mistake, he knew not where to turn. He had been
+leaning on a bruised reed, and it had run into his hand and pierced him.
+But as soon as in the speeches of his friend he saw it all laid down in
+its weakness and its false conclusions&mdash;when he saw the defenders of it
+wandering further and further from what he knew to be true, growing
+every moment, as if from a consciousness of the unsoundness of their
+standing ground, more violent, obstinate, and unreasonable, the scales
+fell more and more from his eyes&mdash;he had seen the fact that the wicked
+might prosper, and in learning to depend upon his innocency he had felt
+that the good man's support was there, if it was anywhere; and at last,
+with all his heart, was reconciled to the truth. The mystery of the
+outer world becomes deeper to him, but he does not any more try to
+understand it. The wisdom which can compass that mystery, he knows, is
+not in man, though man search for it deeper and harder than the miner
+searches for the hidden treasures of the earth; the wisdom which alone
+is attainable is resignation to God.</p>
+
+<p>'Where,' he cries, 'shall wisdom be found, and where is the place of
+understanding? Man knoweth not the price<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span> thereof, neither is it found
+in the land of the living. The depth said it is not with me; and the sea
+said it is not in me. It is hid from the eyes of all living, and kept
+close from the fowls of the air.<a name="FNanchor_K_11" id="FNanchor_K_11"></a><a href="#Footnote_K_11" class="fnanchor">[K]</a> God understandeth the way thereof,
+and He knoweth the place thereof [He, not man, understands the mysteries
+of the world which He has made]. And unto man He said, Behold! the fear
+of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil, that is
+understanding.'</p>
+
+<p>Here, therefore, it might seem as if all was over. There is no clearer
+or purer faith possible for man; and Job had achieved it. His evil had
+turned to good; and sorrow had severed for him the last links which
+bound him to lower things. He had felt that he could do without
+happiness, that it was no longer essential, and that he could live on,
+and still love God, and cling to Him. But he is not described as of
+preternatural, or at all Titanic nature, but as very man, full of all
+human tenderness and susceptibility. His old life was still beautiful to
+him. He does not hate it because he can renounce it; and now that the
+struggle is over, the battle fought and won, and his heart has flowed
+over in that magnificent song of victory, the note once more changes: he
+turns back to earth to linger over those old departed days, with which
+the present is so hard a contrast; and his parable dies away in a strain
+of plaintive, but resigned melancholy. Once more he throws himself on
+God, no longer in passionate expostulation, but in pleading humility.<a name="FNanchor_L_12" id="FNanchor_L_12"></a><a href="#Footnote_L_12" class="fnanchor">[L]</a>
+And<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span> then comes (perhaps, as Ewald says, it <i>could not</i> have come
+before) the answer out of the whirlwind. Job had called on God, and
+prayed that he might appear, that he might plead his cause with him; and
+now he comes, and what will Job do? He comes not as the healing spirit
+in the heart of man; but, as Job had at first demanded, the outward God,
+the Almighty Creator of the universe, and clad in the terrors and the
+glory of it. Job, in his first precipitancy, had desired to reason with
+him on his government. The poet, in gleaming lines, describes for an
+answer the universe as it then was known, the majesty and awfulness of
+it; and then asks whether it is this which he requires to have explained
+to him, or which he believes himself capable of conducting. The
+revelation acts on Job as the sign of the Macrocosmos on the modern
+Faust; but when he sinks, crushed, it is not as the rebellious upstart,
+struck down in his pride&mdash;for he had himself, partially at least,
+subdued his own presumption&mdash;but as a humble penitent, struggling to
+overcome his weakness. He abhors himself for his murmurs, and 'repents
+in dust and ashes.' It will have occurred to every one that the secret
+which has been revealed to the reader is not, after all, revealed to Job
+or to his friends, and for this plain reason: the burden of the drama
+is, not that we do, but that we do not, and cannot, know the mystery of
+the government of the world&mdash;that it is not for man to seek it, or for
+God to reveal it. We, the readers, are, in this one instance, admitted
+behind the scenes&mdash;for once, in this single case&mdash;because it was
+necessary to meet the received theory by a positive fact which
+contradicted it. But the explanation of one case need not be the
+explanation of another; our business is to do what we know to be right,
+and ask no questions. The veil which in the &AElig;gyptian legend lay before
+the face of Isis is not to be raised; and we are not to seek to
+penetrate secrets which are not ours.</p>
+
+<p>While, however, God does not condescend to justify his ways to man, he
+gives judgment on the past controversy. The self-constituted pleaders
+for him, the acceptors of his person, were all wrong; and Job&mdash;the
+passionate, vehement, scornful, misbelieving Job&mdash;he had spoken the
+truth; he at least had spoken facts, and they had been defending a
+transient theory as an everlasting truth.</p>
+
+<p>'And it was so, that after the Lord had spoken these<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span> words to Job, the
+Lord said to Eliphaz the Temanite, My wrath is kindled against thee and
+against thy two friends; for ye have not spoken of me the thing that is
+right, as my servant Job hath. Therefore take unto you now seven
+bullocks and seven rams, and go to my servant Job; and offer for
+yourselves a burnt-offering. And my servant Job shall pray for you, and
+him will I accept. Lest I deal with you after your folly, for that ye
+have not spoken of me the thing which is right, like my servant Job.'</p>
+
+<p>One act of justice remains. Knowing as we do the cause of Job's
+misfortunes, and that as soon as his trial was over it was no longer
+operative, our sense of fitness could not be satisfied unless he were
+indemnified outwardly for his outward sufferings. Satan is defeated, and
+Job's integrity proved; and there is no reason why the general law
+should be interfered with, which, however large the exceptions, tends to
+connect goodness and prosperity; or why obvious calamities, obviously
+undeserved, should remain any more unremoved. Perhaps, too, a deeper
+lesson still lies below his restoration&mdash;something perhaps of this kind.
+Prosperity, enjoyment, happiness, comfort, peace, whatever be the name
+by which we designate that state in which life is to our own selves
+pleasant and delightful, as long as they are sought or prized as things
+essential, so far have a tendency to disennoble our nature, and are a
+sign that we are still in servitude to selfishness. Only when they lie
+outside us, as ornaments merely to be worn or laid aside as God
+pleases&mdash;only then may such things be possessed with impunity. Job's
+heart in early times had clung to them more than he knew, but now he was
+purged clean, and they were restored because he had ceased to need them.</p>
+
+<p>Such in outline is this wonderful poem. With the material of which it is
+woven we have not here been concerned, although it is so rich and
+pregnant that we might with little difficulty construct out of it a
+complete picture of the world as then it was: its life, knowledge, arts,
+habits, superstitions, hopes, and fears. The subject is the problem of
+all mankind, and the composition embraces no less wide a range. But what
+we are here most interested upon is the epoch which it marks in the
+progress of mankind, as the first recorded struggle of a new experience
+with an established orthodox belief. True, for hundreds of years,
+perhaps for a thousand,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span> the superstition against which it was directed
+continued. When Christ came it was still in its vitality. Nay, as we
+saw, it is alive, or in a sort of mock life, among us at this very day.
+But even those who retained their imperfect belief had received into
+their canon a book which treated it with contumely and scorn, so
+irresistible was the majesty of truth.</p>
+
+<p>In days like these, when we hear so much of progress, it is worth while
+to ask ourselves what advances we have made further in the same
+direction? and once more, at the risk of some repetition, let us look at
+the position in which this book leaves us. It had been assumed that man,
+if he lived a just and upright life, had a right to expect to be happy.
+Happiness, 'his being's end and aim,' was his legitimate and covenanted
+reward. If God therefore was just, such a man would be happy; and
+inasmuch as God was just, the man who was not happy had not deserved to
+be. There is no flaw in this argument; and if it is unsound, the fallacy
+can only lie in the supposed right to happiness. It is idle to talk of
+inward consolations. Job felt them, but they were not everything. They
+did not relieve the anguish of his wounds; they did not make the loss of
+his children, or his friends' unkindness, any the less painful to him.</p>
+
+<p>The poet, indeed, restores him in the book; but in life it need not have
+been so. He might have died upon his ash-heap, as thousands of good men
+have died, and will die again, in misery. Happiness, therefore, is <i>not</i>
+what we are to look for. Our place is to be true to the best which we
+know, to seek that and do that; and if by 'virtue its own reward' be
+meant that the good man cares only to continue good, desiring nothing
+more, then it is a true and noble saying. But if virtue be valued
+because it is politic, because in pursuit of it will be found most
+enjoyment and fewest sufferings, then it is not noble any more, and it
+is turning the truth of God into a lie. Let us do right, and whether
+happiness come or unhappiness it is no very mighty matter. If it come,
+life will be sweet; if it do not come, life will be bitter&mdash;bitter, not
+sweet, and yet to be borne. On such a theory alone is the government of
+this world intelligibly just. The well-being of our souls depends only
+on what we <i>are</i>; and nobleness of character is nothing else but steady
+love of good and steady scorn of evil. The government of the world is a
+problem while the desire of selfish enjoyment<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span> survives; and when
+justice is not done according to such standard (which will not be till
+the day after doomsday, and not then), self-loving men will still ask,
+why? and find no answer. Only to those who have the heart to say, 'We
+can do without that; it is not what we ask or desire,' is there no
+secret. Man will have what he deserves, and will find what is really
+best for him, exactly as he honestly seeks for it. Happiness may fly
+away, pleasure pall or cease to be obtainable, wealth decay, friends
+fail or prove unkind, and fame turn to infamy; but the power to serve
+God never fails, and the love of Him is never rejected.</p>
+
+<p>Most of us, at one time or other of our lives, have known something of
+love&mdash;of that only pure love in which no <i>self</i> is left remaining. We
+have loved as children, we have loved as lovers; some of us have learnt
+to love a cause, a faith, a country; and what love would that be which
+existed only with a prudent view to after-interests. Surely there is a
+love which exults in the power of self-abandonment, and can glory in the
+privilege of suffering for what is good. <i>Que mon nom soit fl&eacute;tri,
+pourvu que la France soit libre</i>, said Danton; and those wild patriots
+who had trampled into scorn the faith in an immortal life in which they
+would be rewarded for what they were suffering, went to their graves as
+beds, for the dream of a people's liberty. Justice is done; the balance
+is not deranged. It only seems deranged, as long as we have not learnt
+to serve without looking to be paid for it.</p>
+
+<p>Such is the theory of life which is to be found in the Book of Job; a
+faith which has flashed up in all times and all lands, wherever
+high-minded men were to be found, and which passed in Christianity into
+the acknowledged creed of half the world. The cross was the new symbol,
+the Divine sufferer the great example; and mankind answered to the call,
+because the appeal was not to what was poor and selfish in them, but to
+whatever of best and bravest was in their nature. The law of reward and
+punishment was superseded by the law of love. Thou shalt love God and
+thou shalt love man; and that was not love&mdash;men knew it once&mdash;which was
+bought by the prospect of reward. Times are changed with us now. Thou
+shalt love God and thou shalt love man, in the hands of a Paley, are
+found to mean no more than, Thou shalt love thyself after an enlightened
+manner. And the same base tone has saturated not only our common
+feelings,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span> but our Christian theologies and our Antichristian
+philosophies. A prudent regard to our future interests; an abstinence
+from present unlawful pleasures, because they will entail the loss of
+greater pleasure by-and-by, or perhaps be paid for with pain,&mdash;this is
+called virtue now; and the belief that such beings as men can be
+influenced by any more elevated feelings, is smiled at as the dream of
+enthusiasts whose hearts have outrun their understandings. Indeed, he
+were but a poor lover whose devotion to his mistress lay resting on the
+feeling that a marriage with her would conduce to his own comforts. That
+were a poor patriot who served his country for the hire which his
+country would give to him. And we should think but poorly of a son who
+thus addressed his earthly father: 'Father, on whom my fortunes depend,
+teach me to do what pleases thee, that I, pleasing thee in all things,
+may obtain those good things which thou hast promised to give to thy
+obedient children.' If any of us who have lived in so meagre a faith
+venture, by-and-by, to put in our claims, Satan will be likely to say of
+us (with better reason than he did of Job), 'Did they serve God for
+nought, then? Take their reward from them, and they will curse Him to
+His face.' If Christianity had never borne itself more loftily than
+this, do we suppose that those fierce Norsemen who had learnt, in the
+fiery war-songs of the Edda, of what stuff the hearts of heroes are
+composed, would have fashioned their sword-hilts into crosses, and
+themselves into a crusading chivalry? Let us not dishonour our great
+fathers with the dream of it. The Christians, like the Stoics and the
+Epicureans, would have lived their little day among the ignoble sects of
+an effete civilisation, and would have passed off and been heard of no
+more. It was in another spirit that those first preachers of
+righteousness went out upon their warfare with evil. They preached, not
+enlightened prudence, but purity, justice, goodness; holding out no
+promises in this world except of suffering as their great Master had
+suffered, and rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer for His
+sake. And that crown of glory which they did believe to await them in a
+life beyond the grave, was no enjoyment of what they had surrendered in
+life, was not enjoyment at all in any sense which human thought or
+language can attach to the words; as little like it as the crown of love
+is like it, which the true<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span> lover looks for when at last he obtains his
+mistress. It was to be with Christ&mdash;to lose themselves in Him.</p>
+
+<p>How these high feelings ebbed away, and Christianity became what we know
+it, we are partially beginning to see. The living spirit organised for
+itself a body of perishable flesh: not only the real gains of real
+experience, but mere conjectural hypotheses, current at the day for the
+solution of unexplained phenomena, became formul&aelig; and articles of faith.
+Again, as before, the living and the dead were bound together, and the
+seeds of decay were already planted on the birth of a constructed
+polity.</p>
+
+<p>But there was another cause allied to this, and yet different from it,
+which, though a law of human nature itself, seems nowadays altogether
+forgotten. In the rapid and steady advance of our knowledge of material
+things, we are apt to believe that all our knowledge follows the same
+law; that it is merely generalised experience; that experience
+accumulates daily, and, therefore, that 'progress of the species,' <i>in
+all senses</i>, is an obvious and necessary fact. There is something which
+is true in this view, mixed with a great deal which is false. Material
+knowledge, the physical and mechanical sciences, make their way from
+step to step, from experiment to experiment, and each advance is secured
+and made good, and cannot again be lost. One generation takes up the
+general sum of experience where the last laid it down, adds to it what
+it has the opportunity of adding, and leaves it with interest to the
+next. The successive positions, as they are gained, require nothing for
+the apprehension of them but an understanding ordinarily cultivated.
+Prejudices have to be encountered, but prejudices of opinion merely, not
+prejudices of conscience or prejudices of self-love, like those which
+beset our progress in the science of morality. But in morals we enter
+upon conditions wholly different&mdash;conditions in which age differs from
+age, man differs from man, and even from himself, at different moments.
+We all have experienced times when, as we say, we should not know
+ourselves; some, when we fall below our average level; some, when we are
+lifted above, and put on, as it were, a higher nature. At such intervals
+as these last (unfortunately, with most of us, of rare occurrence), many
+things become clear to us which before were hard sayings; propositions
+become alive which, usually, are but dry words; our hearts<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span> seem purer,
+our motives loftier; our purposes, what we are proud to acknowledge to
+ourselves.</p>
+
+<p>And, as man is unequal to himself, so is man to his neighbour, and
+period to period. The entire method of action, the theories of human
+life which in one era prevail universally, to the next are unpractical
+and insane, as those of this next would have seemed mere baseness to the
+first, if the first could have anticipated them. One epoch, we may
+suppose, holds some 'greatest nobleness principle,' the other some
+'greatest happiness principle;' and then their very systems of axioms
+will contradict one another; their general conceptions and their
+detailed interpretations, their rules, judgments, opinions, practices
+will be in perpetual and endless collision. Our minds take shape from
+our hearts, and the facts of moral experience do not teach their own
+meaning, but submit to many readings according to the power of the eye
+which we bring with us.</p>
+
+<p>The want of a clear perception of so important a feature about us leads
+to many singular contradictions. A believer in popular Protestantism,
+who is also a believer in progress, ought, if he were consistent, to
+regard mankind as growing every day towards a more and more advantageous
+position with respect to the trials of life; and yet if he were asked
+whether it was easier for him to 'save his soul' in the nineteenth
+century than it would have been in the first or second, or whether the
+said soul was necessarily better worth saving, he would be perplexed for
+an answer. There is hardly one of us who, in childhood, has not felt
+like the Jews to whom Christ spoke, that if he had 'lived in the days of
+the Fathers,' if he had had their advantages, he would have found duty a
+much easier matter; and some of us in mature life have felt that in old
+Athens, or old republican Rome, in the first ages of Christianity, in
+the Crusades or at the Reformation, there was a contagious atmosphere of
+heroism, in which we should have been less troubled with the little
+feelings which cling about us now. At any rate, it is at these rare
+epochs only that real additions are made to our moral knowledge. At such
+times, new truths are, indeed, sent down among us, and, for periods
+longer or shorter, may be seen to exercise an elevating influence on
+mankind. Perhaps what is gained on these occasions is never entirely
+lost. The historical monuments of their effects are at least
+indestructible; and when<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span> the spirit which gave them birth reappears,
+their dormant energy awakens again.</p>
+
+<p>But it seems from our present experience of what, in some at least of
+its modern forms, Christianity has been capable of becoming, that there
+is no doctrine in itself so pure, but what the meaner nature which is in
+us can disarm and distort it, and adapt it to its own littleness. The
+once living spirit dries up into formul&aelig;, and formul&aelig;, whether of
+mass-sacrifice or vicarious righteousness, or 'reward and punishment,'
+are contrived ever so as to escape making over-high demands upon the
+conscience. Some aim at dispensing with obedience altogether, and those
+which insist on obedience rest the obligations of it on the poorest of
+motives. So things go on till there is no life left at all; till, from
+all higher aspirations, we are lowered down to the love of self after an
+enlightened manner; and then nothing remains but to fight the battle
+over again. The once beneficial truth has become, as in Job's case, a
+cruel and mischievous deception, and the whole question of life and its
+obligations must again be opened.</p>
+
+<p>It is now some three centuries since the last of such reopenings. If we
+ask ourselves how much during this time has been actually added to the
+sum of our knowledge in these matters; what, in all the thousands upon
+thousands of sermons, and theologies, and philosophies with which Europe
+has been deluged, has been gained for mankind beyond what we have found
+in this Book of Job, how far all this has advanced us in the 'progress
+of humanity,' it were hard, or rather it is easy, to answer. How far we
+have fallen below, let Paley and the rest bear witness. But what moral
+question can be asked which admits now of a grander solution than was
+offered two, perhaps three, thousand years ago? The world has not been
+standing still; experience of man and life has increased; questions have
+multiplied on questions, while the answers of the established teachers
+to them have been growing every day more and more incredible. What other
+answers have there been? Of all the countless books which have appeared,
+there has been only one of enduring importance, in which an attempt is
+made to carry on the solution of the great problem. Job is given over
+into Satan's hand to be tempted; and though he shakes, he does not fall.
+Taking the temptation of Job for his model, Goethe has<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span> similarly
+exposed his Faust to trial, and with him the tempter succeeds. His hero
+falls from sin to sin, from crime to crime; he becomes a seducer, a
+murderer, a betrayer, following recklessly his evil angel wherever he
+chooses to lead him; and yet, with all this, he never wholly forfeits
+our sympathy. In spite of his weakness, his heart is still true to his
+higher nature; sick and restless, even in the delirium of enjoyment he
+always longs for something better, and he never can be brought to say of
+evil that it is good. And therefore, after all, the devil is balked of
+his prey; in virtue of this one fact, that the evil in which he steeped
+himself remained to the last hateful to him, Faust is saved by the
+angels.... It will be eagerly answered for the established belief, that
+such cases are its especial province. All men are sinners, and <i>it</i>
+possesses the blessed remedy for sin. But, among the countless numbers
+of those characters so strangely mixed among us, in which the dark and
+the bright fibres cross like a meshwork; characters at one moment
+capable of acts of heroic greatness, at another hurried by temptation
+into actions which even common men may deplore, how many are there who
+have never availed themselves of the conditions of reconciliation as
+orthodoxy proffers them, and of such men what is to be said? It was said
+once of a sinner that to her 'much was forgiven, for she loved much.'
+But this is language which theology has as little appropriated as the
+Jews could appropriate the language of Job. It cannot recognise the
+power of the human heart. It has no balance in which to weigh the good
+against the evil; and when a great Burns or a Mirabeau comes before it,
+it can but tremblingly count up the offences committed, and then,
+looking to the end, and finding its own terms not to have been complied
+with, it faintly mutters its anathema. Sin only it can apprehend and
+judge; and for the poor acts of struggling heroism, 'Forasmuch as they
+were not done,' &amp;c., &amp;c., it doubts not but they have the nature of
+sin.<a name="FNanchor_M_13" id="FNanchor_M_13"></a><a href="#Footnote_M_13" class="fnanchor">[M]</a></p>
+
+<p>Something of the difficulty has been met by Goethe, but it cannot be
+said that he has resolved it; or at least that he has furnished others
+with a solution which may guide their judgment. In the writer of the
+Book of Job there is an awful moral earnestness before which we bend as
+in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span> presence of a superior being. The orthodoxy against which he
+contended is not set aside or denied; he sees what truth is in it; only
+he sees more than it, and over it, and through it. But in Goethe, who
+needed it more, inasmuch as his problem was more delicate and difficult,
+the moral earnestness is not awful, is not even high. We cannot feel
+that in dealing with sin he entertains any great horror of it; he looks
+on it as a mistake, as undesirable, but scarcely as more. Goethe's great
+powers are of another kind; and this particular question, though in
+appearance the primary subject of the poem, is really only secondary. In
+substance, Faust is more like Ecclesiastes than it is like Job, and
+describes rather the restlessness of a largely-gifted nature which,
+missing the guidance of the heart, plays experiments with life, trying
+knowledge, pleasure, dissipation, one after another, and hating them
+all; and then hating life itself as a weary, stale, flat, unprofitable
+mockery. The temper exhibited here will probably be perennial in the
+world. But the remedy for it will scarcely be more clear under other
+circumstances than it is at present, and lies in the disposition of the
+emotions, and not in any propositions which can be addressed to the
+understanding.</p>
+
+<p>For that other question&mdash;how rightly to estimate a human being; what
+constitutes a real vitiation of character, and how to distinguish,
+without either denying the good or making light of the evil; how to be
+just to the popular theories, and yet not to blind ourselves to their
+shallowness and injustice&mdash;that is a problem for us, for the solution of
+which we are at present left to our ordinary instinct, without any
+recognised guidance whatsoever.</p>
+
+<p>Nor is this the only problem which is in the same situation. There can
+scarcely be a more startling contrast between fact and theory than the
+conditions under which, practically, positions of power and influence
+are distributed among us&mdash;between the theory of human worth which the
+necessities of life oblige us to act upon, and the theory which we
+believe that we believe. As we look around among our leading men, our
+statesmen, our legislators, the judges on our bench, the commanders of
+our armies, the men to whom this English nation commits the conduct of
+its best interests, profane and sacred, what do we see to be the
+principles which guide our selection? How entirely do they lie<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span> beside
+and beyond the negative tests! and how little respect do we pay to the
+breach of this or that commandment in comparison with ability! So wholly
+impossible is it to apply the received opinions on such matters to
+practice&mdash;to treat men known to be guilty of what theology calls deadly
+sins, as really guilty of them, that it would almost seem we had fallen
+into a moral anarchy; that ability <i>alone</i> is what we regard, without
+any reference at all, except in glaring and outrageous cases, to moral
+disqualifications. It is invidious to mention names of living men; it is
+worse than invidious to drag out of their graves men who have gone down
+into them with honour, to make a point for an argument. But we know, all
+of us, that among the best servants of our country there have been, and
+there are, many whose lives will not stand scrutiny by the negative
+tests, and who do not appear very greatly to repent, or to have
+repented, of their sins according to recognised methods.</p>
+
+<p>Once more: among our daily or weekly confessions, which we are supposed
+to repeat as if we were all of us at all times in precisely the same
+moral condition, we are made to say that we have done those things which
+we ought not to have done, and to have left undone those things which we
+ought to have done. An earthly father to whom his children were day
+after day to make this acknowledgment would be apt to enquire whether
+they were trying to do better&mdash;whether, at any rate, they were
+endeavouring to learn; and if he were told that although they had made
+some faint attempts to understand the negative part of their duty, yet
+that of the positive part, of those things which they ought to do, they
+had no notions at all, and had no idea that they were under obligation
+to form any, he would come to rather strange conclusions about them.
+But, really and truly, what practical notions of duty have we beyond
+that of abstaining from committing sins? Not to commit sin, we suppose,
+covers but a small part of what is expected of us. Through the entire
+tissue of our employments there runs a good and a bad. Bishop Butler
+tells us, for instance, that even of our time there is a portion which
+is ours, and a portion which is our neighbour's; and if we spend more of
+it on personal interests than our own share, we are stealing. This
+sounds strange doctrine; we prefer making vague acknowledgments, and
+shrink from pursuing them into detail.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span> We say vaguely, that in all we
+do we should consecrate ourselves to God, and our own lips condemn us;
+for which among us cares to learn the way to do it? The <i>devoir</i> of a
+knight was understood in the courts of chivalry; the lives of heroic
+men, Pagan and Christian, were once held up before the world as patterns
+of detailed imitation; and now, when such ideals are wanted more than
+ever, Protestantism stands with a drawn sword on the threshold of the
+enquiry, and tells us that it is impious. The law, we are told, has been
+fulfilled for us in condescension to our inherent worthlessness, and our
+business is to appropriate another's righteousness, and not, like
+Titans, to be scaling heaven by profane efforts of our own. Protestants,
+we know very well, will cry out in tones loud enough at such a
+representation of their doctrines. But we know also that unless men may
+feel a cheerful conviction that they can do right if they try,&mdash;that
+they can purify themselves, can live noble and worthy lives,&mdash;unless
+this is set before them as <i>the</i> thing which they are to do, and <i>can</i>
+succeed in doing, they will not waste their energies on what they know
+beforehand will end in failure; and if they may not live for God, they
+will live for themselves.</p>
+
+<p>And all this while the whole complex frame of society is a meshwork of
+duty woven of living fibre, and the condition of its remaining sound is,
+that every thread of it, of its own free energy, shall do what it ought.
+The penalties of duties neglected are to the full as terrible as those
+of sins committed; more terrible, perhaps, because more palpable and
+sure. A lord of the land, or an employer of labour, supposes that he has
+no duty except to keep what he calls the commandments in his own person,
+to go to church, and to do what he will with his own,&mdash;and Irish famines
+follow, and trade strikes, and chartisms, and Paris revolutions. We look
+for a remedy in impossible legislative enactments, and there is but one
+remedy which will avail&mdash;that the thing which we call public opinion
+learn something of the meaning of human obligation, and demand some
+approximation to it. As things are, we have no idea of what a human
+being ought to be. After the first rudimental conditions we pass at once
+into meaningless generalities; and with no knowledge to guide our
+judgment, we allow it to be guided by meaner principles; we respect
+money, we respect rank, we respect ability&mdash;character is as if it had no
+existence.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In the midst of this loud talk of progress, therefore, in which so many
+of us at present are agreed to believe, which is, indeed, the common
+meeting point of all the thousand sects into which we are split, it is
+with saddened feelings that we see so little of it in so large a matter.
+Progress there is in knowledge; and science has enabled the number of
+human beings capable of existing upon this earth to be indefinitely
+multiplied. But this is but a small triumph if the ratio of the good and
+bad, the wise and the foolish, the full and the hungry, remains
+unaffected. And we cheat ourselves with words when we conclude out of
+our material splendour an advance of the race.</p>
+
+<p>In two things there is progress&mdash;progress in knowledge of the outward
+world, and progress in material wealth. This last, for the present,
+creates, perhaps, more evils than it relieves; but suppose this
+difficulty solved&mdash;suppose the wealth distributed, and every peasant
+living like a peer&mdash;what then? If this is all, one noble soul outweighs
+the whole of it. Let us follow knowledge to the outer circle of the
+universe&mdash;the eye will not be satisfied with seeing, nor the ear with
+hearing. Let us build our streets of gold, and they will hide as many
+aching hearts as hovels of straw. The well-being of mankind is not
+advanced a single step. Knowledge is power, and wealth is power; and
+harnessed, as in Plato's fable, to the chariot of the soul, and guided
+by wisdom, they may bear it through the circle of the stars; but left to
+their own guidance, or reined by a fool's hand, the wild horses may
+bring the poor fool to Phaeton's end, and set a world on fire.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_G_7" id="Footnote_G_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_G_7"><span class="label">[G]</span></a> <i>Westminster Review</i>, 1853.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_H_8" id="Footnote_H_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_H_8"><span class="label">[H]</span></a> 1. <i>Die poetischen B&uuml;cher des Alten Bundes.</i> Erkl&auml;rt von
+Heinrich Ewald. G&ouml;ttingen: bei Vanderhoeck und Ruprecht. 1836.
+</p><p>
+2. <i>Kurz gefasstes exegetisches Handbuch zum Alten Testament.</i> Zweite
+Lieferung. <i>Hiob.</i> Von Ludwig Hirzel. Zweite Auflage, durchgesehen von
+Dr. Justus Olshausen. Leipzig. 1852.
+</p><p>
+3. <i>Qu&aelig;stionum in Jobeidos locos vexatos Specimen.</i> Von D. Hermannus
+Hupfeld. Halis Saxonum. 1853.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_I_9" id="Footnote_I_9"></a><a href="#FNanchor_I_9"><span class="label">[I]</span></a> Or rather by St. Jerome, whom our translators have
+followed.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_J_10" id="Footnote_J_10"></a><a href="#FNanchor_J_10"><span class="label">[J]</span></a> See Ewald on Job ix. 13, and xxvi. 14.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_K_11" id="Footnote_K_11"></a><a href="#FNanchor_K_11"><span class="label">[K]</span></a> An allusion, perhaps, to the old bird auguries. The birds,
+as the inhabitants of the air, were supposed to be the messengers
+between heaven and earth.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_L_12" id="Footnote_L_12"></a><a href="#FNanchor_L_12"><span class="label">[L]</span></a> The speech of Elihu, which lies between Job's last words
+and God's appearance, is now decisively pronounced by Hebrew scholars
+not to be genuine. The most superficial reader will have been perplexed
+by the introduction of a speaker to whom no allusion is made, either in
+the prologue or the epilogue; by a long dissertation, which adds nothing
+to the progress of the argument, proceeding evidently on the false
+hypothesis of the three friends, and betraying not the faintest
+conception of the real cause of Job's sufferings. And the suspicions
+which such an anomaly would naturally suggest, are now made certainties
+by a fuller knowledge of the language, and the detection of a different
+hand. The interpolator has unconsciously confessed the feeling which
+allowed him to take so great a liberty. He, too, possessed with the old
+Jew theory, was unable to accept in its fulness so great a contradiction
+to it: and, missing the spirit of the poem, he believed that God's
+honour could still be vindicated in the old way. 'His wrath was kindled'
+against the friends, because they could not answer Job; and against Job,
+because he would not be answered; and conceiving himself 'full of
+matter,' and 'ready to burst like new bottles,' he could not contain
+himself, and delivered into the text a sermon on the <i>Theodice</i>, such,
+we suppose, as formed the current doctrine of the time in which he
+lived.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_M_13" id="Footnote_M_13"></a><a href="#FNanchor_M_13"><span class="label">[M]</span></a> See the Thirteenth Article.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="SPINOZAN" id="SPINOZAN"></a>SPINOZA.<a name="FNanchor_N_14" id="FNanchor_N_14"></a><a href="#Footnote_N_14" class="fnanchor">[N]</a></h2>
+
+<p style="margin-left: 1em; text-indent: -1em;"><i>Benedicti de Spinoza Tractatus de Deo et Homine ejusque Felicitate
+Lineamenta. Atque Annotationes ad Tractatum Theologico-Politicum.</i>
+Edidit et illustravit <span class="smcap">Edwardus Boehmer</span>. Hal&aelig; ad Salam. J. F. Lippert.
+1852.</p>
+
+
+<p class="no_in">This little volume is one evidence among many of the interest which
+continues to be felt by the German students in Spinoza. The actual merit
+of the book itself is little or nothing; but it shows the industry with
+which they are gleaning among the libraries of Holland for any traces of
+him which they can recover; and the smallest fragments of his writings
+are acquiring that factitious importance which attaches to the most
+insignificant relics of acknowledged greatness. Such industry cannot be
+otherwise than laudable, but we do not think it at present altogether
+wisely directed. Nothing is likely to be brought to light which will
+further illustrate Spinoza's philosophy. He himself spent the better
+part of his life in clearing his language of ambiguities; and such
+earlier sketches of his system as are supposed still to be extant in
+MS., and a specimen of which M. Boehmer believes himself to have
+discovered, contribute only obscurity to what is in no need of
+additional difficulty. Of Spinoza's private history, on the contrary,
+rich as it must have been, and abundant traces of it as must be extant
+somewhere in his own and his friends' correspondence, we know only
+enough to feel how vast a chasm remains to be filled. It is not often
+that any man in this world lives a life so well worth writing as Spinoza
+lived; not for striking incidents or large events connected with it, but
+because (and no sympathy with his peculiar opinions disposes us to
+exaggerate his merit) he was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span> one of the very best men whom these modern
+times have seen. Excommunicated, disinherited, and thrown upon the world
+when a mere boy to seek his livelihood, he resisted the inducements
+which on all sides were urged upon him to come forward in the world. He
+refused pensions, legacies, money in many forms; he maintained himself
+with grinding glasses for optical instruments, an art which he had been
+taught in early life, and in which he excelled the best workmen in
+Holland; and when he died, which was at the early age of forty-four, the
+affection with which he was regarded showed itself singularly in the
+endorsement of a tradesman's bill which was sent in to his executors, in
+which he was described as M. Spinoza of 'blessed memory.'</p>
+
+<p>The account which remains of him we owe, not to an admiring disciple,
+but to a clergyman to whom his theories were detestable; and his
+biographer allows that the most malignant scrutiny had failed to detect
+a blemish in his character&mdash;that, except so far as his opinions were
+blameable, he had lived to outward appearance free from fault. We
+desire, in what we are going to say of him, to avoid offensive collision
+with popular prejudices; still less shall we place ourselves in
+antagonism with the earnest convictions of serious persons: our business
+is to relate what Spinoza was, and leave others to form their own
+conclusions. But one lesson there does seem to lie in such a life of
+such a man,&mdash;a lesson which he taught equally by example and in
+word,&mdash;that wherever there is genuine and thorough love for good and
+goodness, no speculative superstructure of opinion can be so extravagant
+as to forfeit those graces which are promised, not to clearness of
+intellect, but to purity of heart. In Spinoza's own beautiful
+language,&mdash;'Justitia et caritas unicum et certissimum ver&aelig; fidei
+Catholic&aelig; signum est, et veri Spirit&ucirc;s Sancti fructus: et ubicumque h&aelig;c
+reperiuntur, ibi Christus re ver&acirc; est, et ubicumque h&aelig;c desunt deest
+Christus: solo namque Christi Spiritu duci possumus in amorem justiti&aelig;
+et caritatis.' We may deny his conclusions; we may consider his system
+of thought preposterous and even pernicious; but we cannot refuse him
+the respect which is the right of all sincere and honourable men.
+Wherever and on whatever questions good men are found ranged on opposite
+sides, one of three alternatives is always true:&mdash;either the points of
+disagreement are purely speculative and of no<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span> moral importance&mdash;or
+there is a misunderstanding of language, and the same thing is meant
+under a difference of words&mdash;or else the real truth is something
+different from what is held by any of the disputants, and each is
+representing some important element which the others ignore or forget.
+In either case, a certain calmness and good temper is necessary, if we
+would understand what we disagree with, or would oppose it with success;
+Spinoza's influence over European thought is too great to be denied or
+set aside; and if his doctrines be false in part, or false altogether,
+we cannot do their work more surely than by calumny or
+misrepresentation&mdash;a most obvious truism, which no one now living will
+deny in words, and which a century or two hence perhaps will begin to
+produce some effect upon the popular judgment.</p>
+
+<p>Bearing it in mind, then, ourselves, as far as we are able, we propose
+to examine the Pantheistic philosophy in the first and only logical form
+which as yet it has assumed. Whatever may have been the case with
+Spinoza's disciples, in the author of this system there was no
+unwillingness to look closely at it, or to follow it out to its
+conclusions; and whatever other merits or demerits belong to him, at
+least he has done as much as with language can be done to make himself
+thoroughly understood.</p>
+
+<p>And yet, both in friend and enemy alike, there has been a reluctance to
+see Spinoza as he really was. The Herder and Schleiermacher school have
+claimed him as a Christian&mdash;a position which no little disguise was
+necessary to make tenable; the orthodox Protestants and Catholics have
+called him an Atheist&mdash;which is still more extravagant; and even a man
+like Novalis, who, it might have been expected, would have had something
+reasonable to say, could find no better name for him than a <i>Gott
+trunkner Mann</i>&mdash;a God intoxicated man: an expression which has been
+quoted by everybody who has since written upon the subject, and which is
+about as inapplicable as those laboriously pregnant sayings usually are.
+With due allowance for exaggeration, such a name would describe
+tolerably the Transcendental mystics, a Toler, a Boehmen, or a
+Swedenborg; but with what justice can it be applied to the cautious,
+methodical Spinoza, who carried his thoughts about with him for twenty
+years, deliberately shaping them, and who gave them at last to the world
+in a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span> form more severe than with such subjects had ever been so much as
+attempted before? With him, as with all great men, there was no effort
+after sublime emotions. He was a plain, practical person; his object in
+philosophy was only to find a rule by which to govern his own actions
+and his own judgment; and his treatises contain no more than the
+conclusions at which he arrived in this purely personal search, with the
+grounds on which he rested them.</p>
+
+<p>We cannot do better than follow his own account of himself as he has
+given it in the opening of his unfinished Tract, 'De Emendatione
+Intellect&ucirc;s.' His language is very beautiful, but it is elaborate and
+full; and, as we have a long journey before us, we must be content to
+epitomise it.</p>
+
+<p>Looking round him on his entrance into life, and asking himself what was
+his place and business there, he turned for examples to his fellow-men,
+and found little that he could venture to imitate. He observed them all
+in their several ways governing themselves by their different notions of
+what they thought desirable; while these notions themselves were resting
+on no more secure foundation than a vague, inconsistent experience: the
+experience of one was not the experience of another, and thus men were
+all, so to say, rather playing experiments with life than living, and
+the larger portion of them miserably failing. Their mistakes arose, as
+it seemed to Spinoza, from inadequate knowledge; things which at one
+time looked desirable, disappointed expectation when obtained, and the
+wiser course concealed itself often under an uninviting exterior. He
+desired to substitute certainty for conjecture, and to endeavour to
+find, by some surer method, where the real good of man actually lay. We
+must remember that he had been brought up a Jew, and had been driven out
+of the Jews' communion; his mind was therefore in contact with the bare
+facts of life, with no creed or system lying between them and himself as
+the interpreter of experience. He was thrown on his own resources to
+find his way for himself, and the question was, how to find it. Of all
+forms of human thought, one only, he reflected, would admit of the
+certainty which he required. If certain knowledge were attainable at
+all, it must be looked for under the mathematical or demonstrative
+method; by tracing from ideas clearly conceived the consequences which
+were formally involved in them. What, then, were these ideas&mdash;these
+<i>ver&aelig; ide&aelig;</i>,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span> as he calls them&mdash;and how were they to be obtained? If
+they were to serve as the axioms of his system, they must be
+self-evident truths, of which no proof was required; and the
+illustration which he gives of the character of such ideas is ingenious
+and Platonic.</p>
+
+<p>In order to produce any mechanical instrument, Spinoza says, we require
+others with which to manufacture it; and others again to manufacture
+those; and it would seem thus as if the process must be an infinite one,
+and as if nothing could ever be made at all. Nature, however, has
+provided for the difficulty in creating of her own accord certain rude
+instruments, with the help of which we can make others better; and
+others again with the help of those. And so he thinks it must be with
+the mind; there must be somewhere similar original instruments provided
+also as the first outfit of intellectual enterprise. To discover these,
+he examines the various senses in which men are said to know anything,
+and he finds that they resolve themselves into three, or, as he
+elsewhere divides it, four.</p>
+
+<p>We know a thing&mdash;</p>
+
+
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="We know a thing">
+<tr><td align='left' rowspan="2">1.</td><td align='left'>i.</td><td align='left'><i>Ex mero auditu</i>: because we have heard it from some person or persons whose veracity we have no reason to question.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>ii.</td><td align='left'><i>Ab experienti&acirc; vag&acirc;</i>: from general experience: for instance, all facts or phenomena which come to us through our senses as phenomena, but of the causes of which we are ignorant.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align='left'>2.</td><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>We know a thing as we have correctly conceived the
+laws of its phenomena, and see them following in their sequence
+in the order of nature.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align='left'>3.</td><td align='left'>&nbsp;</td><td align='left'>Finally, we know a thing, <i>ex scienti&acirc; intuitiv&acirc;</i>, which
+alone is absolutely clear and certain.</td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+<p>To illustrate these divisions, suppose it be required to find a fourth
+proportional which shall stand to the third of three numbers as the
+second does to the first. The merchant's clerk knows his rule; he
+multiplies the second into the third and divides by the first. He
+neither knows nor cares to know why the result is the number which he
+seeks, but he has learnt the fact that it is so, and he remembers it.</p>
+
+<p>A person a little wiser has tried the experiment in a variety of simple
+cases; he has discovered the rule by induction, but still does not
+understand it.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>A third has mastered the laws of proportion mathematically, as he has
+found them in Euclid or other geometrical treatise.</p>
+
+<p>A fourth, with the plain numbers of 1, 2, and 3, sees for himself by
+simple intuitive force that 1:2=3:6.</p>
+
+<p>Of these several kinds of knowledge the third and fourth alone deserve
+to be called knowledge, the others being no more than opinions more or
+less justly founded. The last is the only real insight, although the
+third, being exact in its form, may be depended upon as a basis of
+certainty. Under this last, as Spinoza allows, nothing except the very
+simplest truths, <i>non nisi simplicissim&aelig; veritates</i>, can be perceived;
+but, such as they are, they are the foundation of all after-science; and
+the true ideas, the <i>ver&aelig; ide&aelig;</i>, which are apprehended by this faculty
+of intuition, are the primitive instruments with which nature has
+furnished us. If we ask for a test by which to distinguish them, he has
+none to give us. 'Veritas,' he says to his friends, in answer to their
+question, 'veritas index sui est et falsi. Veritas se ipsam patefacit.'
+All original truths are of such a kind that they cannot without
+absurdity even be conceived to be false; the opposites of them are
+contradictions in terms.&mdash;'Ut sciam me scire, necessario debeo prius
+scire. Hinc patet quod certitudo nihil est pr&aelig;ter ipsam essentiam
+objectivam.... Cum itaque veritas nullo egeat signo, sed sufficiat
+habere essentiam rerum objectivam, aut quod idem est ideas, ut omne
+tollatur dubium; hinc sequitur quod vera non est methodus, signum
+veritatis qu&aelig;rere post acquisitionem idearum; sed quod vera methodus est
+via, ut ipsa veritas, aut essenti&aelig; objectiv&aelig; rerum, aut ide&aelig; (omnia illa
+idem significant) debito ordine qu&aelig;rantur.' (<i>De Emend. Intell.</i>)</p>
+
+<p>Spinoza will scarcely carry with him the reasoner of the nineteenth
+century in arguments like these. When we remember the thousand
+conflicting opinions, the truth of which their several advocates have as
+little doubted as they have doubted their own existence, we require some
+better evidence than a mere feeling of certainty; and Aristotle's less
+pretending canon promises a safer road. <ins class="cor" title="[Greek: Ho pasi dokei]">&#8009; &#960;&#945;&#963;&#953; &#948;&#959;&#954;&#949;&#953;</ins>, 'what all
+men think,' says Aristotle, <ins class="cor" title="[Greek: touto einai phamen]">&#964;&#959;&#965;&#964;&#959; &#949;&#953;&#957;&#945;&#953; &#966;&#945;&#956;&#949;&#957;</ins> 'this we say
+<i>is</i>,'&mdash;'and if you will not have this to be a fair ground of
+conviction, you will scarcely find one which will serve you better.' We
+are to see, however, what these <i>ide&aelig;</i> are which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span> are offered to us as
+self-evident. Of course, if they are self-evident, if they do produce
+conviction, nothing more is to be said; but it does, indeed, appear
+strange to us that Spinoza was not staggered as to the validity of his
+canon, when his friends, everyone of them, so floundered and stumbled
+among what he regarded as his simplest propositions; when he found them,
+in spite of all that he could say, requiring endless <i>signa veritatis</i>,
+and unable for a long time even to understand their meaning, far less to
+'recognise them as elementary certainties.' Modern readers may, perhaps,
+be more fortunate. We produce at length the definitions and axioms of
+the first book of the 'Ethica,' and they may judge for themselves:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>DEFINITIONS.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>1. By a thing which is <i>causa sui</i>, its own cause, I mean a thing
+the essence of which involves the existence of it, or a thing which
+cannot be conceived except as existing.</p>
+
+<p>2. I call a thing finite, <i>suo genere</i>, when it can be limited by
+another (or others) of the same nature&mdash;<i>e.g.</i> a given body is
+called finite, because we can always conceive another body
+enveloping it; but body is not limited by thought, nor thought by
+body.</p>
+
+<p>3. By substance I mean what exists in itself and is conceived by
+itself; the conception of which, that is, does not involve the
+conception of anything else as the cause of it.</p>
+
+<p>4. By attribute I mean whatever the intellect perceives of substance
+as constituting the essence of substance.</p>
+
+<p>5. Mode is an affection of substance, or is that which is in
+something else, by and through which it is conceived.</p>
+
+<p>6. God is a being absolutely infinite; a substance consisting of
+infinite attributes, each of which expresses his eternal and
+infinite essence. </p></div>
+
+
+<p>EXPLANATION.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>I say <i>absolutely</i> infinite, not infinite <i>suo genere</i>&mdash;for of what
+is infinite <i>suo genere</i> only, the attributes are not infinite but
+finite; whereas what is infinite absolutely contains in its own
+essence everything by which substance can be expressed, and which
+involves no impossibility.</p>
+
+<p>7. That thing is 'free' which exists by the sole necessity of its
+own nature, and is determined in its operation by itself only. That
+is 'not free' which is called into existence by something else, and
+is determined in its operation according to a fixed and definite
+method.</p>
+
+<p>8. Eternity is existence itself, conceived as following necessarily
+and solely from the definition of the thing which is eternal. </p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<p>EXPLANATION.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Because existence of this kind is conceived as an eternal verity,
+and, therefore, cannot be explained by duration, even though the
+duration be without beginning or end. </p></div>
+
+<p>So far the definitions; then follow the</p>
+
+
+<p>AXIOMS.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>1. All things that exist, exist either of themselves or in virtue of
+something else.</p>
+
+<p>2. What we cannot conceive of as existing in virtue of something
+else, we must conceive through and in itself.</p>
+
+<p>3. From a given cause an effect necessarily follows, and if there be
+no given cause no effect can follow.</p>
+
+<p>4. Things which have nothing in common with each other cannot be
+understood through one another&mdash;<i>i.e.</i> the conception of one does
+not involve the conception of the other.</p>
+
+<p>5. To understand an effect implies that we understand the cause of
+it.</p>
+
+<p>6. A true idea is one which corresponds with its <i>ideate</i>.</p>
+
+<p>7. The essence of anything which can be conceived as non-existent
+does not involve existence. </p></div>
+
+<p>Such is our metaphysical outfit of simple ideas with which to start upon
+our enterprise of learning. The larger number of them, so far from being
+simple, must be absolutely without meaning to persons whose minds are
+undisciplined in metaphysical abstraction; they become only intelligible
+propositions as we look back upon them with the light of the system
+which they are supposed to contain.</p>
+
+<p>Although, however, we may justly quarrel with such unlooked-for
+difficulties, the important question, after all, is not of the obscurity
+of these axioms, but of their truth. Many things in all the sciences are
+obscure to an unpractised understanding, which are true enough and clear
+enough to people acquainted with the subjects, and they may be fairly
+made the foundations of a scientific system, although rudimentary
+students must be contented to accept them upon faith. Of course, also,
+it is entirely competent to Spinoza, or to any one, to define the terms
+which he intends to use just as he pleases, provided it be understood
+that any conclusions which he derives out of them apply only to the
+ideas so defined, and not to any supposed object existing which
+corresponds with them. Euclid defines his triangles and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span> circles, and
+discovers that to figures so described, certain properties previously
+unknown may be proved to belong. But as in nature there are no such
+things as triangles and circles exactly answering the definition, his
+conclusions, as applied to actually existing objects, are either not
+true at all or only proximately so. Whether it be possible to bridge
+over the gulf between existing things and the abstract conception of
+them, as Spinoza attempts to do, we shall presently see. It is a royal
+road to certainty if it be a practicable one; but we cannot say that we
+ever met any one who could say honestly Spinoza's reasonings had
+convinced him; and power of demonstration, like all other powers, can be
+judged only by its effects. Does it prove? does it produce conviction?
+If not, it is nothing.</p>
+
+<p>We need not detain our readers among these abstractions. The power of
+Spinozism does not lie so remote from ordinary appreciation, or we
+should long ago have heard the last of it. Like all other systems which
+have attracted followers, it addresses itself, not to the logical
+intellect, but to the imagination, which it affects to set aside. We
+refuse to submit to the demonstrations by which it thrusts itself upon
+our reception; but regarding it as a whole, as an attempt to explain the
+nature of the world of which we are a part, we can still ask ourselves
+how far the attempt is successful. Some account of these things we know
+that there must be, and the curiosity which asks the question regards
+itself, of course, as competent in some degree to judge of the answer to
+it.</p>
+
+<p>Before proceeding, however, to regard this philosophy in the aspect in
+which it is really powerful, we must clear our way through the fallacy
+of the method.</p>
+
+<p>The system is evolved in a series of theorems in severely demonstrative
+order out of the definitions and axioms which we have translated. To
+propositions 1-6 we have nothing to object; they will not, probably,
+convey any very clear ideas, but they are so far purely abstract, and
+seem to follow (as far as we can speak of 'following' in such subjects)
+by fair reasoning. 'Substance is prior in nature to its affections.'
+'Substances with different attributes have nothing in common,' and,
+therefore, 'one cannot be the cause of the other.' 'Things really
+distinct are distinguished by difference either of attribute or mode
+(there being nothing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span> else by which they can be distinguished), and,
+therefore, because things modally distinguished do not <i>qu&acirc;</i> substance
+differ from one another, there cannot be more than one substance of the
+same attribute. Therefore (let us remind our readers that we are among
+what Spinoza calls <i>notiones simplicissimas</i>), since there cannot be two
+substances of the same attribute, and substances of different attributes
+cannot be the cause one of the other, it follows that no substance can
+be produced by another substance.'</p>
+
+<p>The existence of substance, he then concludes, is involved in the nature
+of the thing itself. Substance exists. It does and must. We ask, why?
+and we are answered, because there is nothing capable of producing it,
+and therefore it is self-caused&mdash;<i>i.e.</i> by the first definition the
+essence of it implies existence as part of the idea. It is astonishing
+that Spinoza should not have seen that he assumes the fact that
+substance does exist in order to prove that it must. If it cannot be
+produced <i>and</i> exists, then, of course, it exists in virtue of its own
+nature. But supposing it does not exist, supposing it is all a delusion,
+the proof falls to pieces. We have to fall back on the facts of
+experience, on the obscure and unscientific certainty that the thing
+which we call the world, and the personalities which we call ourselves,
+are a real substantial something, before we find ground of any kind to
+stand upon. Conscious of the infirmity of his demonstration, Spinoza
+winds round it and round it, adding proof to proof, but never escaping
+the same vicious circle: substance exists because it exists, and the
+ultimate experience of existence, so far from being of that clear kind
+which can be accepted as an axiom, is the most confused of all our
+sensations. What is existence? and what is that something which we say
+exists? Things&mdash;essences&mdash;existences! these are but the vague names with
+which faculties, constructed only to deal with conditional phenomena,
+disguise their incapacity. The world in the Hindoo legend was supported
+upon the back of the tortoise. It was a step between the world and
+nothingness, and served to cheat the imagination with ideas of a
+fictitious resting-place.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>If any one affirms (says Spinoza) that he has a clear,
+distinct&mdash;that is to say, a true&mdash;idea of substance, but that
+nevertheless he is uncertain whether any such substance exist, it is
+the same as if he were to affirm that he had a true idea, but yet
+was uncertain whether<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span> it was not false. Or if he says that
+substance can be created, it is like saying that a false idea can
+become a true idea&mdash;as absurd a thing as it is possible to conceive;
+and therefore the existence of substance, as well as the essence of
+it, must be acknowledged as an eternal verity. </p></div>
+
+<p>It is again the same story. Spinoza speaks of a clear idea of substance;
+but he has not proved that such an idea is within the compass of the
+mind. A man's own notion that he sees clearly, is no proof that he
+really sees clearly; and the distinctness of a definition in itself is
+no evidence that it corresponds adequately with the object of it. No
+doubt a man who professes to have an idea of substance as an existing
+thing, cannot doubt, as long as he has it, that substance so exists.
+This is merely to say that as long as a man is certain of this or that
+fact, he has no doubt of it. But neither his certainty nor Spinoza's
+will be of any use to a man who has no such idea, and who cannot
+recognise the lawfulness of the method by which it is arrived at.</p>
+
+<p>From the self-existing substance it is a short step to the existence of
+God. After a few more propositions, following one another with the same
+kind of coherence, we arrive successively at the conclusion that there
+is but one substance; that this substance being necessarily existent, it
+is also infinite; that it is therefore identical with the Being who had
+been previously defined as the 'Ens absolute perfectum.'</p>
+
+<p>Demonstrations of this kind were the characteristics of the period. Des
+Cartes had set the example of constructing them, and was followed by
+Cudworth, Clarke, Berkeley, and many others besides Spinoza. The
+inconclusiveness of the method may perhaps be observed most readily in
+the strangely opposite conceptions formed by all these writers of the
+nature of that Being whose existence they nevertheless agreed, by the
+same process, to gather each out of their ideas. It is important,
+however, to examine it carefully, for it is the very keystone of the
+Pantheistic system.</p>
+
+<p>As stated by Des Cartes, the argument stands something as follows:&mdash;God
+is an all-perfect Being,&mdash;perfection is the idea which we form of Him:
+existence is a mode of perfection, and therefore God exists. The sophism
+we are told is only apparent. Existence is part of the idea&mdash;as much
+involved in it as the equality of all lines drawn from the centre to the
+circumference of a circle is involved in the idea of a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span> circle. A
+non-existent all-perfect Being is as inconceivable as a quadrilateral
+triangle.</p>
+
+<p>It is sometimes answered that in this way we may prove the existence of
+anything&mdash;Titans, Chim&aelig;ras, or the Olympian Gods; we have but to define
+them as existing, and the proof is complete. But, this objection
+summarily set aside; none of these beings are by hypothesis absolutely
+perfect, and, therefore, of their existence we can conclude nothing.
+With greater justice, however, we may say, that of such terms as
+perfection and existence we know too little to speculate. Existence may
+be an imperfection for all we can tell; we know nothing about the
+matter. Such arguments are but endless <i>petitiones principii</i>&mdash;like the
+self-devouring serpent, resolving themselves into nothing. We wander
+round and round them, in the hope of finding some tangible point at
+which we can seize their meaning; but we are presented everywhere with
+the same impracticable surface, from which our grasp glides off
+ineffectual.</p>
+
+<p>Spinoza himself, however, obviously felt an intense conviction of the
+validity of his argument. His opinion is stated with sufficient
+distinctness in one of his letters. 'Nothing is more clear,' he writes
+to his pupil De Vries, 'than that, on the one hand, everything which
+exists is conceived by or under some attribute or other; that the more
+reality, therefore, a being or thing has, the more attributes must be
+assigned to it;' 'and conversely' (and this he calls his <i>argumentum
+palmarium</i> in proof of the existence of God), '<i>the more attributes I
+assign to a thing, the more I am forced to conceive it as existing</i>.'
+Arrange the argument how we please, we shall never get it into a form
+clearer than this:&mdash;The more perfect a thing is, the more it must exist
+(as if existence could admit of more or less); and therefore the
+all-perfect Being must exist absolutely. There is no flaw, we are told,
+in the reasoning; and if we are not convinced, it is from the confused
+habits of our own minds.</p>
+
+<p>Some persons may think that all arguments are good when on the right
+side, and that it is a gratuitous impertinence to quarrel with the
+proofs of a conclusion which it is so desirable that all should receive.
+As yet, however, we are but inadequately acquainted with the idea
+attached by Spinoza to the word perfection; and if we commit ourselves
+to his logic, it may lead us out to unexpected consequences.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span> All such
+reasonings presume, as a first condition, that we men possess faculties
+capable of dealing with absolute ideas; that we can understand the
+nature of things external to ourselves as they really <i>are</i> in their
+absolute relation to one another, independent of our own conception. The
+question immediately before us is one which can never be determined. The
+truth which is to be proved is one which we already believe; and if, as
+we believe also, our conviction of God's existence is, like that of our
+own existence, intuitive and immediate, the grounds of it can never
+adequately be analysed; we cannot say exactly what they are, and
+therefore we cannot say what they are not. Whatever we receive
+intuitively, we receive without proof; and stated as a naked
+proposition, it must involve a <i>petitio principii</i>. We have a right,
+however, to object at once to an argument in which the conclusion is
+more obvious than the premises; and if it lead on to other consequences
+which we disapprove in themselves, we reject it without difficulty or
+hesitation. We ourselves believe that God is, because we experience the
+control of a 'power' which is stronger than we; and our instincts teach
+us so much of the nature of that power as our own relation to it
+requires us to know. God is the being to whom our obedience is due; and
+the perfections which we attribute to him are those moral perfections
+which are the proper object of our reverence. Strange to say, the
+perfections of Spinoza, which appear so clear to him, are without any
+moral character whatever; and for men to speak of the justice of God, he
+tells us, is but to see in him a reflection of themselves; as if a
+triangle were to conceive of him as <i>eminenter triangularis</i>, or a
+circle to give him the property of circularity.</p>
+
+<p>Having arrived at existence, we next find ourselves among ideas, which
+at least are intelligible, if the character of them is as far removed as
+before from the circle of ordinary thought. Nothing exists except
+substance, the attributes under which substance is expressed, and the
+modes or affections of those attributes. There is but one substance
+self-existent, eternal, necessary, and that is the absolutely Infinite
+all-perfect Being. Substance cannot produce substance, and therefore
+there is no such thing as creation; and everything which exists is
+either an attribute of God, or an affection of some attribute of him,
+modified in this manner or in that.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span> Beyond him there is nothing, and
+nothing like him or equal to him; he therefore alone in himself is
+absolutely free, uninfluenced by anything, for nothing is except
+himself; and from him and from his supreme power, essence, intelligence
+(for these words mean the same thing), all things have necessarily
+flowed, and will and must flow for ever, in the same manner as from the
+nature of a triangle it follows, and has followed, and will follow from
+eternity to eternity, that the angles of it are equal to two right
+angles. It would seem as if the analogy were but an artificial play upon
+words, and that it was only metaphorically that in mathematical
+demonstration we speak of one thing as following from another. The
+properties of a curve or a triangle are what they are at all times, and
+the sequence is merely in the order in which they are successively known
+to ourselves. But according to Spinoza, this is the only true sequence;
+and what we call the universe, and all the series of incidents in earth
+or planet, are involved formally and mathematically in the definition of
+God.</p>
+
+<p>Each attribute is infinite <i>suo genere</i>; and it is time that we should
+know distinctly the meaning which Spinoza attaches to that important
+word. Out of the infinite number of the attributes of God, two only, he
+says, are known to us&mdash;'extension,' and 'thought,' or 'mind.' Duration,
+even though it be without beginning or end, is not an attribute; it is
+not even a real thing. Time has no relation to Being, conceived
+mathematically; it would be absurd to speak of circles or triangles as
+any older to-day than they were at the beginning of the world. These and
+everything of the same kind are conceived, as Spinoza rightly says, <i>sub
+qu&acirc;dam specie &aelig;ternitatis</i>. But extension, or substance extended, and
+thought, or substance perceiving, are real, absolute, and objective. We
+must not confound extension with body; for though body be a mode of
+extension, there is extension which is not body, and it is infinite
+because we cannot conceive it to be limited except by itself&mdash;or, in
+other words, to be limited at all. And as it is with extension, so it is
+with mind, which is also infinite with the infinity of its object. Thus
+there is no such thing as creation, and no beginning or end. All things
+of which our faculties are cognizant under one or other of these
+attributes are produced from God, and in him they have their being, and
+without him they would cease to be.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Proceeding by steps of rigid demonstration (and most admirably indeed is
+the form of the philosophy adapted to the spirit of it), we learn that
+God is the only <i>causa libera</i>; that no other thing or being has any
+power of self-determination; all moves by fixed laws of causation,
+motive upon motive, act upon act; there is no free will, and no
+contingency; and however necessary it may be for our incapacity to
+consider future things as in a sense contingent (see <i>Tractat. Theol.
+Polit.</i> cap. iv., sec. 4), this is but one of the thousand convenient
+deceptions which we are obliged to employ with ourselves. God is the
+<i>causa immanens omnium</i>; he is not a personal being existing apart from
+the universe; but himself in his own reality, he is expressed in the
+universe, which is his living garment. Keeping to the philosophical
+language of the time, Spinoza preserves the distinction between <i>natura
+naturans</i> and <i>natura naturata</i>. The first is being in itself, the
+attributes of substance as they are conceived simply and alone; the
+second is the infinite series of modifications which follow out of the
+properties of these attributes. And thus all which <i>is</i>, is what it is
+by an absolute necessity, and could not have been other than it is. God
+is free, because no causes external to himself have power over him; and
+as good men are most free when most a law to themselves, so it is no
+infringement on God's freedom to say that he <i>must</i> have acted as he has
+acted, but rather he is absolutely free because absolutely a law himself
+to himself.</p>
+
+<p>Here ends the first book of Spinoza's Ethics&mdash;the book which contains,
+as we said, the <i>notiones simplicissimas</i>, and the primary and
+rudimental deductions from them. <i>His Dei naturam</i>, he says, in his
+lofty confidence, <i>ejusque proprietates explicui</i>. But, as if conscious
+that his method will never convince, he concludes this portion of his
+subject with an analytical appendix; not to explain or apologise, but to
+show us clearly, in practical detail, the position into which he has led
+us. The root, we are told, of all philosophical errors lies in our
+notion of final causes; we invert the order of nature, and interpret
+God's action through our own; we speak of his intentions, as if he were
+a man; we assume that we are capable of measuring them, and finally
+erect ourselves, and our own interests, into the centre and criterion of
+all things. Hence arises our notion of evil. If the universe be what
+this philosophy has described it, the perfection which it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span> assigns to
+God is extended to everything, and evil is of course impossible; there
+is no shortcoming either in nature or in man; each person and each thing
+is exactly what it has the power to be, and nothing more. But men
+imagining that all things exist on their account, and perceiving their
+own interests, bodily and spiritual, capable of being variously
+affected, have conceived these opposite influences to result from
+opposite and contradictory powers, and call what contributes to their
+advantage good, and whatever obstructs it, evil. For our convenience we
+form generic conceptions of human excellence, as archetypes after which
+to strive; and such of us as approach nearest to such archetypes are
+supposed to be virtuous, and those who are most remote from them to be
+wicked. But such generic abstractions are but <i>entia imaginationis</i>, and
+have no real existence. In the eyes of God each thing is what it has the
+means of being. There is no rebellion against him, and no resistance of
+his will; in truth, therefore, there neither is nor can be such a thing
+as a bad action in the common sense of the word. Actions are good or
+bad, not in themselves, but as compared with the nature of the agent;
+what we censure in men, we tolerate and even admire in animals; and as
+soon as we are aware of our mistake in assigning to man a power of free
+volition, our notion of evil as a positive thing will cease to exist.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>If I am asked (concludes Spinoza) why then all mankind were not
+created by God, so as to be governed solely by reason? it was
+because, I reply, there was to God no lack of matter to create all
+things from the highest to the lowest grade of perfection; or, to
+speak more properly, because the laws of God's nature were ample
+enough to suffice for the production of all things which can be
+conceived by an Infinite Intelligence. </p></div>
+
+<p>It is possible that readers who have followed us so far will now turn
+away from a philosophy which issues in such conclusions; resentful,
+perhaps, that it should have been ever laid before them at all, in
+language so little expressive of aversion and displeasure. We must
+claim, however, in Spinoza's name, the right which he claims for
+himself. His system must be judged as a whole; and whatever we may think
+ourselves would be the moral effect of such doctrines if they were
+generally received, in his hands and in his heart they are worked into
+maxims of the purest and loftiest morality.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span> And at least we are bound
+to remember that some account of this great mystery of evil there must
+be; and although familiarity with commonly-received explanations may
+disguise from us the difficulties with which they too, as well as that
+of Spinoza, are embarrassed, such difficulties none the less exist. The
+fact is the grand perplexity, and for ourselves we acknowledge that of
+all theories about it Spinoza's would appear to us the least irrational,
+setting conscience, and the voice of conscience, aside. The objections,
+with the replies to them, are well drawn out in the correspondence with
+William de Blyenburg. It will be seen at once with how little justice
+the denial of evil as a positive thing can be called equivalent to
+denying it relatively to man, or to confusing the moral distinctions
+between virtue and vice.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>We speak (writes Spinoza, in answer to Blyenburg, who had urged
+something of the kind), we speak of this or that man having done a
+wrong thing, when we compare him with a general standard of
+humanity; but inasmuch as God neither perceives things in such
+abstract manner, nor forms to himself such generic definitions, and
+since there is no more reality in anything than God has assigned to
+it, it follows, surely, that the absence of good exists only in
+respect of man's understanding, not in respect of God's.</p>
+
+<p>If this be so, then (replies Blyenburg), bad men fulfil God's will
+as well as good.</p>
+
+<p>It is true (Spinoza answers) they fulfil it, yet not as the good nor
+as well as the good, nor are they to be compared with them. The
+better a thing or a person be, the more there is in him of God's
+spirit, and the more he expresses God's will; while the bad, being
+without that divine love which arises from the knowledge of God, and
+through which alone we are called (in respect of our understandings)
+his servants, are but as instruments in the hand of the
+artificer&mdash;they serve unconsciously, and are consumed in their
+service. </p></div>
+
+<p>Spinoza, after all, is but stating in philosophical language the extreme
+doctrine of Grace; and St. Paul, if we interpret his real belief by the
+one passage so often quoted, in which he compares us to 'clay in the
+hands of the potter, who maketh one vessel to honour and another to
+dishonour,' may be accused with justice of having held the same opinion.
+If Calvinism be pressed to its logical consequences, it either becomes
+an intolerable falsehood, or it resolves itself into the philosophy of
+Spinoza. It is monstrous to call evil a positive thing, and to assert,
+in the same<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span> breath, that God has predetermined it,&mdash;to tell us that he
+has ordained what he hates, and hates what he has ordained. It is
+incredible that we should be without power to obey him except through
+his free grace, and yet be held responsible for our failures when that
+grace has been withheld. And it is idle to call a philosopher
+sacrilegious who has but systematised the faith which so many believe,
+and cleared it of its most hideous features.</p>
+
+<p>Spinoza flinches from nothing, and disguises no conclusions either from
+himself or from his readers. We believe for ourselves that logic has no
+business with such questions; that the answer to them lies in the
+conscience and not in the intellect. Spinoza thinks otherwise; and he is
+at least true to the guide which he has chosen. Blyenburg presses him
+with instances of monstrous crime, such as bring home to the heart the
+natural horror of it. He speaks of Nero's murder of Agrippina, and asks
+if God can be called the cause of such an act as that.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>God (replies Spinoza, calmly) is the cause of all things which have
+reality. If you can show that evil, errors, crimes express any real
+things, I agree readily that God is the cause of them; but I
+conceive myself to have proved that what constitutes the essence of
+evil is not a real thing at all, and therefore that God cannot be
+the cause of it. Nero's matricide was not a crime, in so far as it
+was a positive outward act. Orestes also killed his mother; and we
+do not judge Orestes as we judge Nero. The crime of the latter lay
+in his being without pity, without obedience, without natural
+affection&mdash;none of which things express any positive essence, but
+the absence of it; and therefore God was not the cause of these,
+although he was the cause of the act and the intention.</p>
+
+<p>But once for all (he adds), this aspect of things will remain
+intolerable and unintelligible as long as the common notions of free
+will remain unremoved. </p></div>
+
+<p>And of course, and we shall all confess it, if these notions are as
+false as Spinoza supposes them&mdash;if we have no power to be anything but
+what we are, there neither is nor can be such a thing as moral evil; and
+what we call crimes will no more involve a violation of the will of God,
+they will no more impair his moral attributes if we suppose him to have
+willed them, than the same actions, whether of lust, ferocity, or
+cruelty, in the inferior animals. There will be but, as Spinoza says, an
+infinite gradation in created things, the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span> poorest life being more than
+none, the meanest active disposition something better than inertia, and
+the smallest exercise of reason better than mere ferocity. 'The Lord has
+made all things for himself, even the wicked for the day of evil.'</p>
+
+<p>The moral aspect of the matter will be more clear as we proceed. We
+pause, however, to notice one difficulty of a metaphysical kind, which
+is best disposed of in passing. Whatever obscurity may lie about the
+thing which we call Time (philosophers not being able to agree what it
+is, or whether properly it <i>is</i> anything), the words past, present,
+future, do undoubtedly convey some definite idea with them: things will
+be which are not yet, and have been which are no longer. Now, if
+everything which exists be a necessary mathematical consequence from the
+nature or definition of the One Being, we cannot see how there can be
+any time but the present, or how past and future have room for a
+meaning. God is, and therefore all properties of him <i>are</i>, just as
+every property of a circle exists in it as soon as the circle exists. We
+may if we like, for convenience, throw our theorems into the future, and
+say, <i>e.g.</i> that if two lines in a circle cut each other, the rectangle
+under the parts of the one <i>will</i> equal that under the parts of the
+other. But we only mean in reality that these rectangles <i>are</i> equal;
+and the <i>future</i> relates only to our knowledge of the fact. Allowing,
+however, as much as we please, that the condition of England a hundred
+years hence lies already in embryo in existing causes, it is a paradox
+to say that such condition exists already in the sense in which the
+properties of the circle exist; and yet Spinoza insists on the
+illustration.</p>
+
+<p>It is singular that he should not have noticed the difficulty; not that
+either it or the answer to it (which no doubt would have been ready
+enough) are likely to interest any person except metaphysicians, a class
+of thinkers, happily, which is rapidly diminishing.</p>
+
+<p>We proceed to more important matters&mdash;to Spinoza's detailed theory of
+nature as exhibited in man and in man's mind. His theory for its bold
+ingenuity is by far the most remarkable which on this dark subject has
+ever been proposed. Whether we can believe it or not, is another
+question; yet undoubtedly it provides a solution for every difficulty;
+it accepts with equal welcome the extremes of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span> materialism and of
+spiritualism: and if it be the test of the soundness of a philosophy
+that it will explain phenomena and reconcile contradictions, it is hard
+to account for the fact that a system which bears such a test so
+admirably, should nevertheless be so incredible as it is.</p>
+
+<p>Most people have heard of the 'Harmonie Pr&eacute;-&eacute;tablie' of Leibnitz; it is
+borrowed without acknowledgment from Spinoza, and adapted to the
+Leibnitzian philosophy. 'Man,' says Leibnitz, 'is composed of mind and
+body; but what is mind and what is body, and what is the nature of their
+union? Substances so opposite in kind cannot affect one another; mind
+cannot act on matter, or matter upon mind; and the appearance of their
+reciprocal operation is an appearance only and a delusion.' A delusion
+so general, however, required to be accounted for; and Leibnitz
+accounted for it by supposing that God, in creating a world composed of
+material and spiritual phenomena, ordained that these several phenomena
+should proceed from the beginning in parallel lines side by side in a
+constantly corresponding harmony. The sense of seeing results, it
+appears to us, from the formation of a picture upon the retina. The
+motion of the arm or the leg appears to result from an act of will; but
+in either case we mistake coincidence for causation. Between substances
+so wholly alien there can be no intercommunion; and we only suppose that
+the object seen produces the idea, and that the desire produces the
+movement, because the phenomena of matter and the phenomena of spirit
+are so contrived as to flow always in the same order and sequence. This
+hypothesis, as coming from Leibnitz, has been, if not accepted, at least
+listened to respectfully; because while taking it out of its proper
+place, he contrived to graft it upon Christianity; and succeeded, with a
+sort of speculative legerdemain, in making it appear to be in harmony
+with revealed religion. Disguised as a philosophy of Predestination, and
+connected with the Christian doctrine of Retribution, it steps forward
+with an air of unconscious innocence, as if interfering with nothing
+which Christians generally believe. And yet, leaving as it does no
+larger scope for liberty or responsibility than when in the hands of
+Spinoza,<a name="FNanchor_O_15" id="FNanchor_O_15"></a><a href="#Footnote_O_15" class="fnanchor">[O]</a> Leibnitz, in our opinion,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span> has only succeeded in making it
+infinitely more revolting. Spinoza could not regard the bad man as an
+object of Divine<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span> anger and a subject of retributory punishment. He was
+not a Christian, and made no pretension to be considered<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span> such; and it
+did not occur to him to regard the actions of a being which, both with
+Leibnitz and himself, is (to use his own expression) an <i>automaton
+spirituale</i>, as deserving a fiery indignation and everlasting vengeance.</p>
+
+<p>'Deus,' according to Spinoza's definition, 'est ens constans infinitis
+attributis quorum unumquodque &aelig;ternam et infinitam essentiam exprimit.'
+Under each of these attributes <i>infinita sequuntur</i>, and everything
+which an infinite intelligence can conceive, and an infinite power can
+produce,&mdash;everything which follows as a possibility out of the divine
+nature,&mdash;all things which have been, and are, and will be,&mdash;find
+expression and actual existence, not under one attribute only, but under
+each and every attribute. Language is so ill adapted to explain such a
+system, that even to state it accurately is all but impossible, and
+analogies can only remotely suggest what such expressions mean. But it
+is as if it were said that the same thought might be expressed in an
+infinite variety of languages; and not in words only, but in action, in
+painting, in sculpture, in music, in any form of any kind which can be
+employed as a means of spiritual embodiment.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span> Of all these infinite
+attributes, two only, as we said, are known to us&mdash;extension and
+thought. Material phenomena are phenomena of extension; and to every
+modification of extension an idea corresponds under the attribute of
+thought. Out of such a compound as this is formed man, composed of body
+and mind; two parallel and correspondent modifications eternally
+answering one another. And not man only, but all other beings and things
+are similarly formed and similarly animated; the anima or mind of each
+varying according to the complicity of the organism of its material
+counterpart. Although body does not think, nor affect the mind's power
+of thinking, and mind does not control body, nor communicate to it
+either motion or rest or any influence from itself, yet body with all
+its properties is the object or ideate of mind: whatsoever body does,
+mind perceives; and the greater the energising power of the first, the
+greater the perceiving power of the second. And this is not because they
+are adapted one to the other by some inconceivable preordinating power,
+but because mind and body are <i>una et eadem res</i>, the one absolute being
+affected in one and the same manner, but expressed under several
+attributes; the modes and affections of each attribute having that being
+for their cause, as he exists under that attribute of which they are
+modes, and no other; idea being caused by idea, and body affected by
+body; the image on the retina being produced by the object reflected
+upon it, the idea or image in our minds by the idea of that object, &amp;c.
+&amp;c.</p>
+
+<p>A solution so remote from all ordinary ways of thinking on these matters
+is so difficult to grasp, that one can hardly speak of it as being
+probable, or as being improbable. Probability extends only to what we
+can imagine as possible, and Spinoza's theory seems to lie beyond the
+range within which our judgment can exercise itself. In our own opinion,
+indeed, as we have already said, the entire subject is one with which we
+have no business; and the explanation of our nature, if it is ever to be
+explained to us, is reserved till we are in some other state of
+existence. We do not disbelieve Spinoza because what he suggests is in
+itself incredible. The chances may be millions to one against his being
+right; yet the real truth, if we knew it, would be probably at least as
+strange as his conception of it. But we are firmly convinced that of
+these questions, and of all like<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span> them, practical answers only lie
+within the reach of human faculties; and that in 'researches into the
+absolute' we are on the road which ends nowhere.</p>
+
+<p>Among the difficulties, however, most properly akin to this philosophy
+itself, there is one most obvious, viz., that if the attributes of God
+be infinite, and each particular thing is expressed under them all, then
+mind and body express but an infinitesimal portion of the nature of each
+of ourselves; and this human nature exists (<i>i.e.</i>, there exists
+corresponding modes of substance) in the whole infinity of the divine
+nature under attributes differing each from each, and all from mind and
+all from body. That this must be so follows from the definition of the
+Infinite Being, and the nature of the distinction between the two
+attributes which are known to us; and if this be so, why does not the
+mind perceive something of all these other attributes? The objection is
+well expressed by a correspondent (Letter 67):&mdash;'It follows from what
+you say,' a friend writes to Spinoza, 'that the modification which
+constitutes my mind, and that which constitutes my body, although it be
+one and the same modification, yet must be expressed in an infinity of
+ways: one way by thought, a second way by extension, a third by some
+attribute unknown to me, and so on to infinity; the attributes being
+infinite in number, and the order and connexion of modes being the same
+in them all. Why, then, does the mind perceive the modes of but one
+attribute only?'</p>
+
+<p>Spinoza's answer is curious: unhappily, a fragment of his letter only is
+extant, so that it is too brief to be satisfactory:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>In reply to your difficulty (he says), although each particular
+thing be truly in the Infinite mind, conceived in Infinite modes,
+the Infinite idea answering to all these cannot constitute one and
+the same mind of any single being, but must constitute Infinite
+minds. No one of all these Infinite ideas has any connexion with
+another. </p></div>
+
+<p>He means, we suppose, that God's mind only perceives, or can perceive,
+things under their Infinite expression, and that the idea of each
+several mode, under whatever attribute, constitutes a separate mind.</p>
+
+<p>We do not know that we can add anything to this explanation; the
+difficulty lies in the audacious sweep of the speculation itself; we
+will, however, attempt an illustration,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span> although we fear it will be to
+illustrate <i>obscurum per obscurius</i>. Let A B C D be four out of the
+Infinite number of the Divine attributes. A the attribute of mind; B the
+attribute of extension; C and D other attributes, the nature of which is
+not known to us. Now, A, as the attribute of mind, is that which
+perceives all which takes place under B C and D, but it is only as it
+exists in God that it forms the universal consciousness of all
+attributes at once. In its modifications it is combined separately with
+the modifications of each, constituting in combination with the modes of
+each attribute a separate being. As forming the mind of B, A perceives
+what takes place in B, but not what takes place in C or D. Combined with
+B, it forms the soul of the human body, and generally the soul of all
+modifications of extended substance; combined with C, it forms the soul
+of some other analogous being; combined with D, again of another; but
+the combinations are only in pairs, in which A is constant. A and B make
+one being, A and C another, A and D a third; but B will not combine with
+C, nor C with D; each attribute being, as it were, conscious only of
+itself. And therefore, although to those modifications of mind and
+extension which we call ourselves, there are corresponding modifications
+under C and D, and generally under each of the Infinite attributes of
+God, each of ourselves being in a sense Infinite&mdash;nevertheless, we
+neither have nor can have any knowledge of ourselves in this Infinite
+aspect; our actual consciousness being limited to the phenomena of
+sensible experience.</p>
+
+<p>English readers, however, are likely to care little for all this; they
+will look to the general theory, and judge of it as its aspect affects
+them. And first, perhaps, they will be tempted to throw aside as absurd
+the notion that their bodies go through the many operations which they
+experience them to do, undirected by their minds. It is a thing, they
+may say, at once preposterous and incredible. It is, however, less
+absurd than it seems; and, though we could not persuade ourselves to
+believe it, absurd in the sense of having nothing to be said for it, it
+certainly is not. It is far easier, for instance, to imagine the human
+body capable by its own virtue, and by the laws of material
+organisation, of building a house, than of <i>thinking</i>; and yet men are
+allowed to say that the body thinks, without being regarded as
+candidates for a lunatic asylum. We see the seed shoot<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span> up into stem and
+leaf and throw out flowers; we observe it fulfilling processes of
+chemistry more subtle than were ever executed in Liebig's laboratory,
+and producing structures more cunning than man can imitate. The bird
+builds her nest, the spider shapes out its delicate web, and stretches
+it in the path of his prey; directed not by calculating thought, as we
+conceive ourselves to be, but by some motive influence, our ignorance of
+the nature of which we disguise from ourselves, and call it instinct,
+but which we believe at least to be some property residing in the
+organisation. We are not to suppose that the human body, the most
+complex of all material structures, has slighter powers in it than the
+bodies of a seed, a bird, or an insect. Let us listen to Spinoza
+himself:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>There can be no doubt (he says) that this hypothesis is true; but
+unless I can prove it from experience, men will not, I fear, be
+induced even to reflect upon it calmly, so persuaded are they that
+it is by the mind only that their bodies are set in motion. And yet
+what body can or cannot do no one has yet determined; body, <i>i.e.</i>,
+by the law of its own nature, and without assistance from mind. No
+one has so probed the human frame as to have detected all its
+functions and exhausted the list of them; there are powers exhibited
+by animals far exceeding human sagacity; and, again, feats are
+performed by somnambulists on which in the waking state the same
+persons would never venture&mdash;itself a proof that body is able to
+accomplish what mind can only admire. Men <i>say</i> that mind moves
+body, but how it moves it they cannot tell, or what degree of motion
+it can impart to it; so that, in fact, they do not know what they
+say, and are only confessing their own ignorance in specious
+language. They will answer me, that whether or not they understand
+how it can be, yet that they are assured by plain experience that
+unless mind could perceive, body would be altogether inactive; they
+know that it depends on the mind whether the tongue speaks or is
+silent. But do they not equally experience that if their bodies are
+paralysed their minds cannot think?&mdash;that if their bodies are asleep
+their minds are without power?&mdash;that their minds are not at all
+times equally able to exert themselves even on the same subject, but
+depend on the state of their bodies? And as for experience proving
+that the members of the body can be controlled by the mind, I fear
+experience proves very much the reverse. But it is absurd (they
+rejoin) to attempt to explain from the mere laws of body such things
+as pictures, or palaces, or works of art; the body could not build a
+church unless mind directed it. I have shown, however, that we do
+not yet know what body can or cannot do, or what would naturally
+follow from the structure of it; that we experience<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span> in the feats of
+somnambulists something which antecedently to that experience would
+have seemed incredible. This fabric of the human body exceeds
+infinitely any contrivance of human skill, and an infinity of
+things, as I have already proved, ought to follow from it. </p></div>
+
+<p>We are not concerned to answer this reasoning, although if the matter
+were one the debating of which could be of any profit, it would
+undoubtedly have its weight, and would require to be patiently
+considered. Life is too serious, however, to be wasted with impunity
+over speculations in which certainty is impossible, and in which we are
+trifling with what is inscrutable.</p>
+
+<p>Objections of a far graver kind were anticipated by Spinoza himself,
+when he went on to gather out of his philosophy 'that the mind of man
+being part of the Infinite intelligence, when we say that such a mind
+perceives this thing or that, we are, in fact, saying that God perceives
+it, not as he is Infinite, but as he is represented by the nature of
+this or that idea; and similarly, when we say that a man does this or
+that action, we say that God does it, not <i>qu&acirc;</i> he is Infinite, but
+<i>qu&acirc;</i> he is expressed in that man's nature.' 'Here,' he says, 'many
+readers will no doubt hesitate, and many difficulties will occur to them
+in the way of such a supposition.'</p>
+
+<p>We confess that we ourselves are among these hesitating readers. As long
+as the Being whom Spinoza so freely names remains surrounded with the
+associations which in this country we bring with us out of our
+childhood, not all the logic in the world would make us listen to
+language such as this. It is not so&mdash;we know it, and that is enough. We
+are well aware of the phalanx of difficulties which lie about our
+theistic conceptions. They are quite enough, if religion depended on
+speculative consistency, and not in obedience of life, to perplex and
+terrify us. What are we? what <i>is</i> anything? If it be not divine&mdash;what
+is it then? If created&mdash;out of what is it created? and how created&mdash;and
+why? These questions, and others far more momentous which we do not
+enter upon here, may be asked and cannot be answered; but we cannot any
+the more consent to Spinoza on the ground that he alone consistently
+provides an answer; because, as we have said again and again, we do not
+care to have them answered at all. Conscience is the single tribunal to
+which we choose to be referred, and conscience declares imperatively
+that what he says is not true. It is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span> painful to speak of all this, and
+as far as possible we designedly avoid it. Pantheism is not Atheism, but
+the Infinite Positive and the Infinite Negative are not so remote from
+one another in their practical bearings; only let us remember that we
+are far indeed from the truth if we think that God to Spinoza was
+<i>nothing else</i> but that world which we experience. It is but one of
+infinite expressions of him&mdash;a conception which makes us giddy in the
+effort to realise it.</p>
+
+<p>We have arrived at last at the outwork of the whole matter in its
+bearings upon life and human duty. It was in the search after this last,
+that Spinoza, as we said, travelled over so strange a country, and we
+now expect his conclusions. To discover the true good of man, to direct
+his actions to such ends as will secure to him real and lasting
+felicity, and, by a comparison of his powers with the objects offered to
+them, to ascertain how far they are capable of arriving at these
+objects, and by what means they can best be trained towards them&mdash;is the
+aim which Spinoza assigns to philosophy. 'Most people,' he adds, 'deride
+or vilify their nature; it is a better thing to endeavour to understand
+it; and however extravagant my proceeding may be thought, I propose to
+analyse the properties of that nature as if it were a mathematical
+figure.' Mind being, as he conceives himself to have shown, nothing else
+than the idea corresponding to this or that affection of body, we are
+not, therefore, to think of it as a faculty, but simply and merely as an
+act. There is no general power called intellect, any more than there is
+any general abstract volition, but only <i>hic et ille intellectus et h&aelig;c
+et illa volitio</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Again, by the word Mind is understood not merely an act or acts of will
+or intellect, but all forms also of consciousness of sensation or
+emotion. The human body being composed of many small bodies, the mind is
+similarly composed of many minds, and the unity of body and of mind
+depends on the relation which the component portions maintain towards
+each other. This is obviously the case with body; and if we can
+translate metaphysics into common experience, it is equally the case
+with mind. There are pleasures of sense and pleasures of intellect; a
+thousand tastes, tendencies, and inclinations form our mental
+composition; and since one contradicts another, and each has a tendency
+to become dominant,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span> it is only in the harmonious equipoise of their
+several activities, in their due and just subordination, that any unity
+of action or consistency of feeling is possible. After a masterly
+analysis of all these tendencies (the most complete by far which has
+ever been made by any moral philosopher), Spinoza arrives at the
+principles under which unity and consistency can be obtained as the
+condition upon which a being so composed can look for any sort of
+happiness; and these principles, arrived at as they are by a route so
+different, are the same, and are proposed by Spinoza as being the same,
+as those of the Christian religion.</p>
+
+<p>It might seem impossible in a system which binds together in so
+inexorable a sequence the relations of cause and effect, to make a place
+for the action of self-control; but consideration will show that,
+however vast the difference between those who deny and those who affirm
+the liberty of the will (in the sense in which the expression is usually
+understood), it is not a difference which affects the conduct or alters
+the practical bearings of it. Conduct may be determined by laws&mdash;laws as
+absolute as those of matter; and yet the one as well as the other may be
+brought under control by a proper understanding of those laws. Now,
+experience seems plainly to say, that while all our actions arise out of
+desire&mdash;that whatever we do, we do for the sake of something which we
+wish to be or to obtain&mdash;we are differently affected towards what is
+proposed to us as an object of desire, in proportion as we understand
+the nature of such object in itself and in its consequences. The better
+we know, the better we act; and the fallacy of all common arguments
+against necessitarianism lies in the assumption that it leaves no room
+for self-direction: it merely insists, in exact conformity with
+experience, on the conditions under which self-determination is
+possible. Conduct, according to the necessitarian, depends on knowledge.
+Let a man certainly know that there is poison in the cup of wine before
+him, and he will not drink it. By the law of cause and effect, his
+desire for the wine is overcome by the fear of the pain or the death
+which will follow. So with everything which comes before him. Let the
+consequences of any action be clear, definite, and inevitable, and
+though Spinoza would not say that the knowledge of them will be
+absolutely sufficient to determine the conduct (because the clearest
+knowledge may be overborne by violent passion),<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span> yet it is the best
+which we have to trust to, and will do much if it cannot do all.</p>
+
+<p>On this hypothesis, after a diagnosis of the various tendencies of human
+nature, called commonly the passions and affections, he returns upon the
+nature of our ordinary knowledge to derive out of it the means for their
+subordination. All these tendencies of themselves seek their own
+objects&mdash;seek them blindly and immoderately; and the mistakes and the
+unhappinesses of life arise from the want of due understanding of these
+objects, and a just moderation of the desire for them. His analysis is
+remarkably clear, but it is too long for us to enter upon it; the
+important thing being the character of the control which is to be
+exerted. To arrive at this, he employs a distinction of great practical
+utility, and which is peculiarly his own.</p>
+
+<p>Following his tripartite division of knowledge, he finds all kinds of it
+arrange themselves under one of two classes, and to be either adequate
+or inadequate. By adequate knowledge he does not mean what is exhaustive
+and complete, but what, as far as it goes, is distinct and unconfused:
+by inadequate, he means what we know merely as fact either derived from
+our own sensations, or from the authority of others, while of the
+connexion of it with other facts, of the causes, effects, or meaning of
+it we know nothing. We may have an adequate idea of a circle, though we
+are unacquainted with all the properties which belong to it; we conceive
+it distinctly as a figure generated by the rotation of a line, one end
+of which is stationary. Phenomena, on the other hand, however made known
+to us&mdash;phenomena of the senses, and phenomena of experience, as long as
+they remain phenomena merely, and unseen in any higher relation&mdash;we can
+never know except as inadequately. We cannot tell what outward things
+are by coming in contact with certain features of them. We have a very
+imperfect acquaintance even with our own bodies, and the sensations
+which we experience of various kinds rather indicate to us the nature of
+these bodies themselves than of the objects which affect them. Now, it
+is obvious that the greater part of mankind act only upon knowledge of
+this latter kind. The amusements, even the active pursuits, of most of
+us remain wholly within the range of uncertainty, and, therefore, are
+full of hazard and precariousness: little or nothing issues as we
+expect. We look for pleasure and we<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span> find pain; we shun one pain and
+find a greater; and thus arises the ineffectual character which we so
+complain of in life&mdash;the disappointments, failures, mortifications which
+form the material of so much moral meditation on the vanity of the
+world. Much of all this is inevitable from the constitution of our
+nature. The mind is too infirm to be entirely occupied with higher
+knowledge. The conditions of life oblige us to act in many cases which
+cannot be understood by us except with the utmost inadequacy; and the
+resignation to the higher will which has determined all things in the
+wisest way, is imperfect in the best of us. Yet much is possible, if not
+all; and, although through a large tract of life 'there comes one event
+to all, to the wise and to the unwise,' 'yet wisdom excelleth folly as
+far as light excelleth darkness.' The phenomena of experience, after
+inductive experiment, and just and careful consideration, arrange
+themselves under laws uniform in their operation, and furnishing a guide
+to the judgment; and over all things, although the interval must remain
+unexplored for ever, because what we would search into is Infinite, may
+be seen the beginning of all things, the absolute eternal God. 'Mens
+humana,' Spinoza continues, 'qu&aelig;dam agit, qu&aelig;dam vero patitur.' In so
+far as it is influenced by inadequate ideas&mdash;'eatenus patitur'&mdash;it is
+passive and in bondage, it is the sport of fortune and caprice: in so
+far as its ideas are adequate&mdash;'eatenus agit'&mdash;it is active, it is
+itself. While we are governed by outward temptations, by the casual
+pleasures, by the fortunes or the misfortunes of life, we are but
+instruments, yielding ourselves to be acted upon as the animal is acted
+on by its appetites, or the inanimate matter by the laws which bind it;
+we are slaves&mdash;instruments, it may be, of some higher purpose in the
+order of nature, but in ourselves nothing; instruments which are
+employed for a special work, and which are consumed in effecting it. So
+far, on the contrary, as we know clearly what we do, as we understand
+what we are, and direct our conduct not by the passing emotion of the
+moment, but by a grave, clear, and constant knowledge of what is really
+good, so far we are said to act&mdash;we are ourselves the spring of our own
+activity&mdash;we pursue the genuine well-being of our entire nature, and
+<i>that</i> we can always find, and it never disappoints us when found.</p>
+
+<p>All things desire life; all things seek for energy, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span> fuller and
+ampler being. The component parts of man, his various appetites and
+passions, are seeking larger activity while pursuing each its immoderate
+indulgence; and it is the primary law of every single being that it so
+follows what will give it increased vitality. Whatever will contribute
+to such increase is the proper good of each; and the good of man as a
+united being is measured and determined by the effect of it upon his
+collective powers. The appetites gather power from their several objects
+of desire; but the power of the part is the weakness of the whole; and
+man as a collective person gathers life, being, and self-mastery only
+from the absolute good,&mdash;the source of all real good, and truth, and
+energy,&mdash;that is, God. The love of God is the extinction of all other
+loves and all other desires. To know God, as far as man can know him, is
+power, self-government, and peace. And this is virtue, and this is
+blessedness.</p>
+
+<p>Thus, by a formal process of demonstration, we are brought round to the
+old conclusions of theology; and Spinoza protests that it is no new
+doctrine which he is teaching, but that it is one which in various
+dialects has been believed from the beginning of the world. Happiness
+depends on the consistency and coherency of character, and that
+coherency can only be given by the knowledge of the One Being, to know
+whom is to know all things adequately, and to love whom is to have
+conquered every other inclination. The more entirely our minds rest on
+him&mdash;the more distinctly we regard all things in their relation to him,
+the more we cease to be under the dominion of external things; we
+surrender ourselves consciously to do his will, and as living men and
+not as passive things we become the instruments of his power. When the
+true nature and true causes of our affections become clear to us, they
+have no more power to influence us. The more we understand, the less can
+feeling sway us; we know that all things are what they are, because they
+are so constituted that they could not be otherwise, and we cease to be
+angry with our brother, because he disappoints us; we shall not fret at
+calamity, nor complain of fortune, because no such thing as fortune
+exists; and if we fail it is better than if we had succeeded, not
+perhaps for ourselves, yet for the universe. We cannot fear, when
+nothing can befall us except what God wills, and we shall not violently
+hope, when the future, whatever it be, will be the best which is
+possible. Seeing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</a></span> all things in their place in the everlasting order,
+Past and Future will not affect us. The temptation of present pleasure
+will not overcome the certainty of future pain, for the pain will be as
+sure as the pleasure, and we shall see all things under a rule of
+adamant. The foolish and the ignorant are led astray by the idea of
+contingency, and expect to escape the just issues of their actions; the
+wise man will know that each action brings with it its inevitable
+consequences, which even God cannot change without ceasing to be
+himself.</p>
+
+<p>In such a manner, through all the conditions of life, Spinoza pursues
+the advantages which will accrue to man from the knowledge of God, God
+and man being what his philosophy has described them. His practical
+teaching is singularly beautiful; although much of its beauty is perhaps
+due to associations which have arisen out of Christianity, and which in
+the system of Pantheism have no proper abiding place. Retaining, indeed,
+all that is beautiful in Christianity, he even seems to have relieved
+himself of the more fearful features of the general creed. He
+acknowledges no hell, no devil, no positive and active agency at enmity
+with God; but sees in all things infinite gradations of beings, all in
+their way obedient, and all fulfilling the part allotted to them.
+Doubtless a pleasant exchange and a grateful deliverance, if only we
+could persuade ourselves that a hundred pages of judiciously arranged
+demonstrations could really and indeed have worked it for us; if we
+could indeed believe that we could have the year without its winter, day
+without night, sunlight without shadow. Evil is unhappily too real a
+thing to be so disposed of.</p>
+
+<p>But if we cannot believe Spinoza's system taken in its entire
+completeness, yet we may not blind ourselves to the disinterestedness
+and calm nobility which pervades his theories of human life and
+obligation. He will not hear of a virtue which desires to be rewarded.
+Virtue is the power of God in the human soul, and that is the exhaustive
+end of all human desire. 'Beatitudo non est virtutis pretium, sed ipsa
+virtus. Nihil aliud est quam ipsa animi acquiescentia, qu&aelig; ex Dei
+intuitiv&acirc; cognitione oritur.' The same spirit of generosity exhibits
+itself in all his conclusions. The ordinary objects of desire, he says,
+are of such a kind that for one man to obtain them is for another to
+lose them; and this alone would suffice to prove that they are not what
+any man should<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span> labour after. But the fulness of God suffices for us
+all; and he who possesses this good desires only to communicate it to
+every one, and to make all mankind as happy as himself. And again:&mdash;'The
+wise man will not speak in society of his neighbour's faults, and
+sparingly of the infirmity of human nature; but he will speak largely of
+human virtue and human power, and of the means by which that nature can
+best be perfected, so to lead men to put away that fear and aversion
+with which they look on goodness, and learn with relieved hearts to love
+and desire it.' And once more:&mdash;'He who loves God will not desire that
+God should love him in return with any partial or particular affection,
+for that is to desire that God for his sake should change his
+everlasting nature and become lower than himself.'</p>
+
+<p>One grave element, indeed, of a religious faith would seem in such a
+system to be necessarily wanting. Where individual action is resolved
+into the modified activity of the Universal Being, all absorbing and all
+evolving, the individuality of the personal man is but an evanescent and
+unreal shadow. Such individuality as we now possess, whatever it be,
+might continue to exist in a future state as really as it exists in the
+present, and those to whom it belongs might be anxious naturally for its
+persistence. Yet it would seem that if the soul be nothing except the
+idea of a body actually existing, when that body is decomposed into its
+elements, the soul corresponding to it must accompany it into an
+answering dissolution. And this, indeed, Spinoza in one sense actually
+affirms, when he denies to the mind any power of retaining consciousness
+of what has befallen it in life, 'nisi durante corpore.' But Spinozism
+is a philosophy full of surprises; and our calculations of what <i>must</i>
+belong to it are perpetually baffled. The imagination, the memory, the
+senses, whatever belongs to inadequate perception, perish necessarily
+and eternally; and the man who has been the slave of his inclinations,
+who has no knowledge of God, and no active possession of himself, having
+in life possessed no personality, loses in death the appearance of it
+with the dissolution of the body.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, there is in God an idea expressing the essence of the
+mind, united to the mind as the mind is united to the body, and thus
+there is in the soul something of an everlasting nature which cannot
+utterly perish. And here<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span> Spinoza, as he often does in many of his most
+solemn conclusions, deserts for a moment the thread of his
+demonstrations, and appeals to the consciousness. In spite of our
+non-recollection of what passed before our birth, in spite of all
+difficulties from the dissolution of the body, 'Nihilominus,' he says,
+'sentimus experimurque nos &aelig;ternos esse. Nam mens non minus res illas
+sentit quas intelligendo concipit, quam quas in memori&acirc; habet. Mentis
+enim oculi quibus res videt observatque sunt ips&aelig; demonstrationes.'</p>
+
+<p>This perception, immediately revealed to the mind, falls into easy
+harmony with the rest of the system. As the mind is not a faculty, but
+an act or acts,&mdash;not a power of perception, but the perception itself,
+in its high union with the highest object (to use the metaphysical
+language which Coleridge has made popular and partially intelligible),
+the object and the subject become one. If knowledge be followed as it
+ought to be followed, and all objects of knowledge be regarded in their
+relations to the One Absolute Being, the knowledge of particular outward
+things, of nature, or life, or history, becomes, in fact, knowledge of
+God; and the more complete or adequate such knowledge, the more the mind
+is raised above what is perishable in the phenomena to the idea or law
+which lies beyond them. It learns to dwell exclusively upon the eternal,
+not upon the temporary; and being thus occupied with the everlasting
+laws, and its activity subsisting in its perfect union with them, it
+contracts in itself the character of the objects which possess it. Thus
+we are emancipated from the conditions of duration; we are liable even
+to death only <i>quatenus patimur</i>, as we are passive things and not
+active intelligences; and the more we possess such knowledge and are
+possessed by it, the more entirely the passive is superseded by the
+active&mdash;so that at last the human soul may 'become of such a nature that
+the portion of it which will perish with the body in comparison with
+that of it which shall endure, shall be insignificant and <i>nullius
+momenti</i>.' (Eth. v. 38.)</p>
+
+<p>Such are the principal features of a philosophy, the influence of which
+upon Europe, direct and indirect, it is not easy to over-estimate. The
+account of it is far from being an account of the whole of Spinoza's
+labours; his 'Tractatus Theologico-Politicus' was the forerunner of
+German historical criticism; the whole of which has been but the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span>
+application of principles laid down in that remarkable work. But this is
+not a subject on which, upon the present occasion, we have cared to
+enter. We have designedly confined ourselves to the system which is most
+associated with the name of its author. It is this which has been really
+powerful, which has stolen over the minds even of thinkers who imagine
+themselves most opposed to it. It has appeared in the absolute Pantheism
+of Schelling and Hegel, in the Pantheistic Christianity of Herder and
+Schleiermacher. Passing into practical life it has formed the strong,
+shrewd judgment of Goethe, while again it has been able to unite with
+the theories of the most extreme materialism.</p>
+
+<p>It lies too, perhaps (and here its influence has been unmixedly good),
+at the bottom of that more reverent contemplation of nature which has
+caused the success of our modern landscape painting, which inspired
+Wordsworth's poetry, and which, if ever physical science is to become an
+instrument of intellectual education, must first be infused into the
+lessons of nature; the sense of that 'something' interfused in the
+material world&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div class="i0">Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,</div><br />
+<div class="i0">And the round ocean, and the living air,</div><br />
+<div class="i0">And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;&mdash;</div><br />
+<div class="i0">A motion and a spirit, which impels</div><br />
+<div class="i0">All thinking things, all objects of all thought,</div><br />
+<div class="i0">And rolls through all things.</div><br />
+</div></div>
+
+<p>If we shrink from regarding the extended universe, with Spinoza, as an
+actual manifestation of Almighty God, we are unable to rest in the mere
+denial that it is this. We go on to ask what it <i>is</i>, and we are obliged
+to conclude thus much at least of it, that every smallest being was once
+a thought in his mind; and in the study of what he has made, we are
+really and truly studying a revelation of himself.</p>
+
+<p>It is not here, it is not on the physical, it is rather on the moral
+side, that the stumbling-block is lying; in that excuse for evil and for
+evil men which the necessitarian theory will furnish, disguise it in
+what fair-sounding words we will. So plain this is, that common-sense
+people, and especially English people, cannot bring themselves even to
+consider the question without impatience, and turn disdainfully and
+angrily from a theory which confuses their instincts of right and wrong.
+Although, however, error on this side is infinitely<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span> less mischievous
+than on the other, no vehement error can exist in this world with
+impunity; and it does appear that in our common view of these matters we
+have closed our eyes to certain grave facts of experience, and have
+given the fatalist a vantage ground of real truth which we ought to have
+considered and allowed. At the risk of tediousness we shall enter
+briefly into this unpromising ground. Life and the necessities of life
+are our best philosophers if we will only listen honestly to what they
+say to us; and dislike the lesson as we may, it is cowardice which
+refuses to hear it.</p>
+
+<p>The popular belief is, that right and wrong lie before every man, and
+that he is free to choose between them, and the responsibility of choice
+rests with himself. The fatalist's belief is that every man's actions
+are determined by causes external and internal over which he has no
+power, leaving no room for any moral choice whatever. The first is
+contradicted by facts, the second by the instinct of conscience. Even
+Spinoza allows that for practical purposes we are obliged to regard the
+future as contingent, and ourselves as able to influence it; and it is
+incredible that both our inward convictions and our outward conduct
+should be built together upon a falsehood. But if, as Butler says,
+whatever be the speculative account of the matter, we are practically
+forced to regard ourselves as free, this is but half the truth, for it
+may be equally said that practically we are forced to regard each other
+as <i>not</i> free; and to make allowance, every moment, for influences for
+which we cannot hold each other personally responsible. If not,&mdash;if
+every person of sound mind (in the common acceptation of the term) be
+equally able at all times to act right if only he <i>will</i>,&mdash;why all the
+care which we take of children? why the pains to keep them from bad
+society? why do we so anxiously watch their disposition, to determine
+the education which will best answer to it? Why in cases of guilt do we
+vary our moral censure according to the opportunities of the offender?
+Why do we find excuses for youth, for inexperience, for violent natural
+passion, for bad education, bad example? Why, except that we feel that
+all these things do affect the culpability of the guilty person, and
+that it is folly and inhumanity to disregard them? But what we act upon
+in private life we cannot acknowledge in our ethical theories, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span>
+while our conduct in detail is humane and just, we have been contented
+to gather our speculative philosophy out of the broad and coarse
+generalisations of political necessity. In the swift haste of social
+life we must indeed treat men as we find them. We have no time to make
+allowances; and the graduation of punishment by the scale of guilt is a
+mere impossibility. A thief is a thief in the law's eye though he has
+been trained from his cradle in the kennels of St. Giles's; and definite
+penalties must be attached to definite acts, the conditions of political
+life not admitting of any other method of dealing with them. But it is
+absurd to argue from such rude necessity that each act therefore, by
+whomsoever committed, is of specific culpability. The act is one thing,
+the moral guilt is another. There are many cases in which, as Butler
+again allows, if we trace a sinner's history to the bottom, the guilt
+attributable to himself appears to vanish altogether.</p>
+
+<p>This is plain matter of fact, and as long as we continue to deny or
+ignore it, there will be found men (not bad men, but men who love the
+truth as much as ourselves) who will see only what we neglect, and will
+insist upon it, and build their systems upon it.</p>
+
+<p>And again, if less obvious, yet not less real, are those natural
+tendencies which each of us brings with him into the world,&mdash;which we
+did not make, and yet which almost as much determine what we are to be,
+as the properties of the seed determine the tree which shall grow from
+it. Men are self-willed, or violent, or obstinate, or weak, or generous,
+or affectionate; there is as large difference in their dispositions as
+in the features of their faces. Duties which are easy to one, another
+finds difficult or impossible. It is with morals as it is with art. Two
+children are taught to draw; one learns with ease, the other hardly or
+never. In vain the master will show him what to do. It seems so easy: it
+seems as if he had only to <i>will</i>, and the thing would be done; but it
+is not so. Between the desire and the execution lies the incapable organ
+which only wearily, and after long labour, imperfectly accomplishes what
+is required of it. And the same, <i>to a certain extent</i>, unless we will
+deny the patent facts of experience, holds true in moral actions. No
+wonder, therefore, that evaded or thrust aside as these things are in
+the popular beliefs, as soon as they are recognised in their<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span> full
+reality they should be mistaken for the whole truth, and the free-will
+theory be thrown aside as a chimera.</p>
+
+<p>It may be said, and it often is said, that such reasonings are merely
+sophistical&mdash;that however we entangle ourselves in logic, we are
+conscious that we are free; we know&mdash;we are as sure as we are of our
+existence&mdash;that we have power to act this way or that way, exactly as we
+choose. But this is less plain than it seems; and if granted, it proves
+less than it appears to prove. It may be true that we can act as we
+choose, but can we <i>choose</i>? Is not our choice determined for us? We
+cannot determine from the fact, because we always <i>have chosen</i> as soon
+as we act, and we cannot replace the conditions in such a way as to
+discover whether we could have chosen anything else. The stronger motive
+may have determined our volition without our perceiving it; and if we
+desire to prove our independence of motive, by showing that we <i>can</i>
+choose something different from that which we should naturally have
+chosen, we still cannot escape from the circle, this very desire
+becoming, as Mr. Hume observes, itself a <i>motive</i>. Again, consciousness
+of the possession of any power may easily be delusive; we can properly
+judge what our powers are only by what they have actually accomplished;
+we know what we <i>have</i> done, and we may infer from having done it that
+our power was equal to what it achieved. But it is easy for us to
+over-rate our strength if we try to measure our abilities in themselves.
+A man who can leap five yards may think that he can leap six; yet he may
+try and fail. A man who can write prose may only learn that he cannot
+write poetry from the badness of the verses which he produces. To the
+appeal to consciousness of power there is always an answer:&mdash;that we may
+believe ourselves to possess it, but that experience proves that we may
+be deceived.</p>
+
+<p>There is, however, another group of feelings which cannot be set aside
+in this way, which do prove that, in some sense or other, in some degree
+or other, we are the authors of our own actions. It is one of the
+clearest of all inward phenomena, that, where two or more courses
+involving moral issues are before us, whether we have a consciousness of
+<i>power</i> to choose between them or not, we have a consciousness that we
+<i>ought</i> to choose between them; a sense of duty&mdash;<ins class="cor" title="[Greek: hoti dei touto
+prattein]">&#8001;&#964;&#953; &#948;&#949;&#953; &#964;&#959;&#965;&#964;&#959; &#960;&#961;&#945;&#964;&#964;&#949;&#953;&#957;</ins>&mdash;as Aristotle expresses it, which we cannot shake<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span> off.
+Whatever this consciousness involves (and some measure of freedom it
+must involve or it is nonsense), the feeling exists within us, and
+refuses to yield before all the batteries of logic. It is not that of
+the two courses we know that one is in the long run the best, and the
+other more immediately tempting. We have a sense of obligation
+irrespective of consequence, the violation of which is followed again by
+a sense of self-disapprobation, of censure, of blame. In vain will
+Spinoza tell us that such feelings, incompatible as they are with the
+theory of powerlessness, are mistakes arising out of a false philosophy.
+They are primary facts of sensation most vivid in minds of most vigorous
+sensibility; and although they may be extinguished by habitual
+profligacy, or possibly, perhaps, destroyed by logic, the paralysis of
+the conscience is no more a proof that it is not a real power of
+perceiving real things, than blindness is a proof that sight is not a
+real power. The perceptions of worth and worthlessness are not
+conclusions of reasoning, but immediate sensations like those of seeing
+and hearing; and although, like the other senses, they may be mistaken
+sometimes in the accounts they render to us, the fact of the existence
+of such feelings at all proves that there is something which corresponds
+to them. If there be any such things as 'true ideas,' or clear, distinct
+perceptions at all, this of praise and blame is one of them, and
+according to Spinoza's own rule we must accept what it involves. And it
+involves that some where or other the influence of causes ceases to
+operate, and that some degree of power there is in men of
+self-determination, by the amount of which, and not by their specific
+actions, moral merit or demerit is to be measured. Speculative
+difficulties remain in abundance. It will be said in a case, <i>e.g.</i> of
+moral trial, that there may have been <i>power</i>; but was there <i>power
+enough</i> to resist the temptation? If there was, then it was resisted. If
+there was not, there was no responsibility. We must answer again from
+practical instinct. We refuse to allow men to be considered all equally
+guilty who have committed the same faults; and we insist that their
+actions must be measured against their opportunities. But a similar
+conviction assures us that there is somewhere a point of freedom. Where
+that point is&mdash;where other influences terminate, and responsibility
+begins&mdash;will always be of intricate and often impossible solution. But<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span>
+if there be such a point at all, it is fatal to necessitarianism, and
+man is what he has been hitherto supposed to be&mdash;an exception in the
+order of nature, with a power not differing in degree but differing in
+kind from those of other creatures. Moral life, like all life, is a
+mystery; and as to anatomise the body will not reveal the secret of
+animation, so with the actions of the moral man. The spiritual life,
+which alone gives them meaning and being, glides away before the logical
+dissecting knife, and leaves it but a corpse to work upon.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_N_14" id="Footnote_N_14"></a><a href="#FNanchor_N_14"><span class="label">[N]</span></a> <i>Westminster Review</i>, 1854.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_O_15" id="Footnote_O_15"></a><a href="#FNanchor_O_15"><span class="label">[O]</span></a> Since these words were written a book has appeared in Paris
+by an able disciple of Leibnitz, which, although it does not lead us to
+modify the opinion expressed in them, yet obliges us to give our reasons
+for speaking as we do. M. de Careil<a name="FNanchor_P_16" id="FNanchor_P_16"></a><a href="#Footnote_P_16" class="fnanchor">[P]</a> has discovered in the library at
+Hanover, a MS. in the hand-writing of Leibnitz, containing a series of
+remarks on the book of a certain John Wachter. It does not appear who
+this John Wachter was, nor by what accident he came to have so
+distinguished a critic. If we may judge by the extracts at present
+before us, he seems to have been an absurd and extravagant person, who
+had attempted to combine the theology of the Cabbala with the very
+little which he was able to understand of the philosophy of Spinoza;
+and, as far as he is concerned, neither his writings nor the reflections
+upon them are of interest to any human being. The extravagance of
+Spinoza's followers, however, furnished Leibnitz with an opportunity of
+noticing the points on which he most disapproved of Spinoza himself; and
+these few notices M. de Careil has now for the first time published as
+<i>The Refutation of Spinoza</i>, by Leibnitz. They are exceedingly brief and
+scanty; and the writer of them would assuredly have hesitated to
+describe an imperfect criticism by so ambitious a title. The modern
+editor, however, must be allowed the privilege of a worshipper, and we
+will not quarrel with him for an exaggerated estimate of what his master
+had accomplished. We are indebted to his enthusiasm for what is at least
+a curious discovery, and we will not qualify the gratitude which he has
+earned by industry and good will. At the same time, the notes themselves
+confirm the opinion which we have always entertained, that Leibnitz did
+not understand Spinoza. Leibnitz did not understand him, and the
+followers of Leibnitz do not understand him now. If he were no more than
+what he is described in the book before us&mdash;if his metaphysics were
+'miserable,' if his philosophy was absurd, and he himself nothing more
+than a second-rate disciple of Descartes&mdash;we can assure M. de Careil
+that we should long ago have heard the last of him.
+</p><p>
+There must be something else, something very different from this, to
+explain the position which he holds in Germany, or the fascination which
+his writings exerted over such minds as those of Lessing or of G&ouml;the;
+the fact of so enduring an influence is more than a sufficient answer to
+mere depreciating criticism. This, however, is not a point which there
+is any use in pressing. Our present business is to justify the two
+assertions which we have made. First, that Leibnitz borrowed his <i>Theory
+of the Harmonie Pr&eacute;-&eacute;tablie</i> from Spinoza, without acknowledgment; and,
+secondly, that this theory is quite as inconsistent with religion as is
+that of Spinoza, and only differs from it in disguising its real
+character.
+</p><p>
+First for the <i>Harmonie Pr&eacute;-&eacute;tablie</i>. Spinoza's <i>Ethics</i> appeared in
+1677; and we know that they were read by Leibnitz. In 1696, Leibnitz
+announced as a discovery of his own, a Theory of <i>The Communication of
+Substances</i>, which he illustrates in the following manner:&mdash;
+</p><p>
+'Vous ne comprenez pas, dites-vous, comment je pourrois prouver ce que
+j'ai avanc&eacute; touchant la communication, ou l'harmonie de deux substances
+aussi diff&eacute;rentes que l'&acirc;me et le corps? Il est vrai que je crois en
+avoir trouv&eacute; le moyen; et voici comment je pr&eacute;tends vous satisfaire.
+Figurez-vous deux horloges ou montres qui s'accordent parfaitement. Or
+cela se peut faire de trois mani&egrave;res. La 1<sup>e</sup> consiste dans une
+influence mutuelle. La 2<sup>e</sup> est d'y attacher un ouvrier habile qui les
+redresse, et les mette d'accord &agrave; tous moments. La 3<sup>e</sup> est de
+fabriquer ces deux pendules avec tant d'art et de justesse, qu'on se
+puisse assurer de leur accord dans la suite. Mettez maintenant l'&acirc;me et
+le corps &agrave; la place de ces deux pendules; leur accord peut arriver par
+l'une de ces trois mani&egrave;res. La voye d'influence est celle de la
+philosophie vulgaire; mais comme l'on ne sauroit concevoir des
+particules mat&eacute;rielles qui puissent passer d'une de ces substances dans
+l'autre, il faut abandonner ce sentiment. La voye de l'assistance
+continuelle du Cr&eacute;ateur est celle du syst&egrave;me des causes occasionnelles;
+mais je tiens que c'est faire intervenir Deus ex machin&acirc;, dans une chose
+naturelle et ordinaire, o&ugrave; selon la raison il ne doit concourir, que do
+la mani&egrave;re qu'il concourt &agrave; toutes les autres choses naturelles. Ainsi
+il ne reste que mon hypoth&egrave;se; c'est-&agrave;-dire que la voye de l'harmonie.
+Dieu a fait d&egrave;s le commencement chacune de ces deux substances de telle
+nature, qu'en ne suivant que ces propres loix qu'elle a re&ccedil;ues avec son
+&ecirc;tre, elle s'accorde pourtant avec l'autre tout comme s'il y avoit une
+influence mutuelle, ou comme si Dieu y mettoit toujours la main au-del&agrave;
+de son concours g&eacute;n&eacute;ral. Apr&egrave;s cela je n'ai pas besoin de rien prouver &agrave;
+moins qu'on ne veuille exiger que je prouve que Dieu est assez habile
+pour se servir de cette artifice,' &amp;c.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Leibnitz</span>, <i>Opera</i>, p. 133.
+Berlin edition, 1840.
+</p><p>
+Leibnitz, as we have said, attempts to reconcile his system with
+Christianity, and therefore, of course, this theory of the relation of
+mind and body wears a very different aspect under his treatment, from
+what it wears under that of Spinoza. But Spinoza and Leibnitz both agree
+in this one peculiar conception in which they differ from all other
+philosophers before or after them&mdash;that mind and body have no direct
+communication with each other, and that the phenomena of them merely
+correspond. M. de Careil says they both borrowed it from Descartes; but
+that is impossible. Descartes held no such opinion; it was the precise
+point of disagreement at which Spinoza parted from him; and therefore,
+since in point of date Spinoza had the advantage of Leibnitz, and we
+know that Leibnitz was acquainted with his writings, we must either
+suppose that he was directly indebted to Spinoza for an obligation which
+he ought to have acknowledged, or else, which is extremely improbable,
+that having read Spinoza and forgotten him, he afterwards re-originated
+for himself one of the most singular and peculiar notions which was ever
+offered to the belief of mankind.
+</p><p>
+So much for the first point, which, after all, is but of little moment.
+It is more important to ascertain whether, in the hands of Leibnitz,
+this theory can be any better reconciled with what is commonly meant by
+religion; whether, that is, the ideas of obedience and disobedience,
+merit and demerit, judgment and retribution, have any proper place under
+it. Spinoza makes no pretension to anything of the kind, and openly
+declares that these ideas are ideas merely, and human mistakes.
+Leibnitz, in opposition to him, endeavours to re-establish them in the
+following manner. He conceives that the system of the universe has been
+arranged and predetermined from the moment at which it was launched into
+being; from the moment at which God selected it, with all its details,
+as the best which could exist; but that it is carried on by the action
+of individual creatures (monads as he calls them) which, though
+necessarily obeying the laws of their existence, yet obey them with a
+'character of spontaneity,' which although 'automata,' are yet voluntary
+agents; and therefore, by the consent of their hearts to their actions,
+entitle themselves to moral praise or moral censure. The question is,
+whether by the mere assertion of the co-existence of these opposite
+qualities in the monad man, he has proved that such qualities can
+co-exist. In our opinion, it is like speaking of a circular ellipse, or
+of a quadrilateral triangle. There is a plain dilemma in these matters
+from which no philosophy can extricate itself. If men can incur guilt,
+their actions might be other than they are. If they cannot act otherwise
+than they do, they cannot incur guilt. So at least it appears to us;
+yet, in the darkness of our knowledge, we would not complain merely of a
+theory, and if our earthly life were all in all, and the grave remained
+the extreme horizon of our hopes and fears, the <i>Harmonie Pr&eacute;-&eacute;tablie</i>
+might be tolerated as credible, and admired as ingenious and beautiful.
+It is when forcibly attached to a creed of the future, with which it has
+no natural connection, that it assumes its repulsive features. The world
+may be in the main good; while the good, from the unknown condition of
+its existence, may be impossible without some intermixture of evil; and
+although Leibnitz was at times staggered even himself by the misery and
+wickedness which he witnessed, and was driven to comfort himself with
+the reflection that this earth might be but one world in the midst of
+the universe, and perhaps the single chequered exception in an infinity
+of stainless globes, yet we would not quarrel with a hypothesis because
+it was imperfect; it might pass as a possible conjecture on a dark
+subject, when nothing better than conjecture was attainable.
+</p><p>
+But as soon as we are told that the evil in these human 'automata' being
+a necessary condition of this world which God has called into being, is
+yet infinitely detestable to God; that the creatures who suffer under
+the accursed necessity of committing sin are infinitely guilty in God's
+eyes, for doing what they have no power to avoid, and may therefore be
+justly punished in everlasting fire; we recoil against the paradox.
+</p><p>
+No disciple of Leibnitz will maintain, that unless he had found this
+belief in an eternity of penal retribution an article of the popular
+creed, such a doctrine would have formed a natural appendage of his
+system; and if M. de Careil desires to know why the influence of
+Spinoza, whose genius he considers so insignificant, has been so deep
+and so enduring, while Leibnitz has only secured for himself a mere
+admiration of his talents, it is because Spinoza was not afraid to be
+consistent, even at the price of the world's reprobation, and refused to
+purchase the applause of his own age at the sacrifice of sincerity.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_P_16" id="Footnote_P_16"></a><a href="#FNanchor_P_16"><span class="label">[P]</span></a> <i>R&eacute;futation In&eacute;dite de Spinoza.</i> Par Leibnitz. <i>Pr&eacute;c&eacute;d&eacute;e
+d'une M&eacute;moire</i>, par Foucher de Careil. Paris. 1854.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="THE_DISSOLUTION_OF_THE_MONASTERIESQ" id="THE_DISSOLUTION_OF_THE_MONASTERIESQ"></a>THE DISSOLUTION OF THE MONASTERIES.<a name="FNanchor_Q_17" id="FNanchor_Q_17"></a><a href="#Footnote_Q_17" class="fnanchor">[Q]</a></h2>
+
+
+<p>To be entirely just in our estimate of other ages is not difficult&mdash;it
+is impossible. Even what is passing in our presence we see but through a
+glass darkly. The mind as well as the eye adds something of its own,
+before an image, even of the clearest object, can be painted upon it.</p>
+
+<p>And in historical enquiries, the most instructed thinkers have but a
+limited advantage over the most illiterate. Those who know the most,
+approach least to agreement. The most careful investigations are
+diverging roads&mdash;the further men travel upon them, the greater the
+interval by which they are divided. In the eyes of David Hume, the
+history of the Saxon Princes is 'the scuffling of kites and crows.'
+Father Newman would mortify the conceit of a degenerate England by
+pointing to the sixty saints and the hundred confessors who were trained
+in her royal palaces for the Calendar of the Blessed. How vast a chasm
+yawns between these two conceptions of the same era! Through what common
+term can the student pass from one into the other?</p>
+
+<p>Or, to take an instance yet more noticeable. The history of England
+scarcely interests Mr. Macaulay before the Revolution of the seventeenth
+century. To Lord John Russell, the Reformation was the first outcome
+from centuries of folly and ferocity; and Mr. Hallam's more temperate
+language softens, without concealing, a similar conclusion. These
+writers have all studied what they describe. Mr. Carlyle has studied the
+same subject with power at least equal to theirs, and to him the
+greatness of English character was waning with the dawn of English
+literature; the race of heroes was already failing. The era of action
+was yielding before the era of speech.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>All these views may seem to ourselves exaggerated; we may have settled
+into some moderate <i>via media</i>, or have carved out our own ground on an
+original pattern; but if we are wise, the differences in other men's
+judgments will teach us to be diffident. The more distinctly we have
+made history bear witness in favour of our particular opinions, the more
+we have multiplied the chances against the truth of our own theory.</p>
+
+<p>Again, supposing that we have made a truce with 'opinions,' properly so
+called; supposing we have satisfied ourselves that it is idle to quarrel
+upon points on which good men differ, and that it is better to attend
+rather to what we certainly know; supposing that, either from superior
+wisdom, or from the conceit of superior wisdom, we have resolved that we
+will look for human perfection neither exclusively in the Old World nor
+exclusively in the New&mdash;neither among Catholics nor Protestants, among
+Whigs or Tories, heathens or Christians&mdash;that we have laid aside
+accidental differences, and determined to recognise only moral
+distinctions, to love moral worth, and to hate moral evil, wherever we
+find them;&mdash;even supposing all this, we have not much improved our
+position&mdash;we cannot leap from our shadow.</p>
+
+<p>Eras, like individuals, differ from one another in the species of virtue
+which they encourage. In one age, we find the virtues of the warrior; in
+the next, of the saint. The ascetic and the soldier in their turn
+disappear; an industrial era succeeds, bringing with it the virtues of
+common sense, of grace, and refinement. There is the virtue of energy
+and command, there is the virtue of humility and patient suffering. All
+these are different, and all are, or may be, of equal moral value; yet,
+from the constitution of our minds, we are so framed that we cannot
+equally appreciate all; we sympathise instinctively with the person who
+most represents our own ideal&mdash;with the period when the graces which
+most harmonise with our own tempers have been especially cultivated.
+Further, if we leave out of sight these refinements, and content
+ourselves with the most popular conceptions of morality, there is this
+immeasurable difficulty&mdash;so great, yet so little considered,&mdash;that
+goodness is positive as well as negative, and consists in the active
+accomplishment of certain things which we are bound to do, as well as in
+the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span> abstaining from things which we are bound not to do. And here the
+warp and woof vary in shade and pattern. Many a man, with the help of
+circumstances, may pick his way clear through life, never having
+violated one prohibitive commandment, and yet at last be fit only for
+the place of the unprofitable servant&mdash;he may not have committed either
+sin or crime, yet never have felt the pulsation of a single unselfish
+emotion. Another, meanwhile, shall have been hurried by an impulsive
+nature into fault after fault&mdash;shall have been reckless, improvident,
+perhaps profligate, yet be fitter after all for the kingdom of heaven
+than the Pharisee&mdash;fitter, because against the catalogue of faults there
+could perhaps be set a fairer list of acts of comparative generosity and
+self-forgetfulness&mdash;fitter, because to those who love much, much is
+forgiven. Fielding had no occasion to make Blifil, behind his decent
+coat, a traitor and a hypocrite. It would have been enough to have
+coloured him in and out alike in the steady hues of selfishness, afraid
+of offending the upper powers as he was afraid of offending
+Allworthy&mdash;not from any love for what was good, but solely because it
+would be imprudent&mdash;because the pleasure to be gained was not worth the
+risk of consequences. Such a Blifil would have answered the novelist's
+purpose&mdash;for he would have remained a worse man in the estimation of
+some of us than Tom Jones.</p>
+
+<p>So the truth is; but unfortunately it is only where accurate knowledge
+is stimulated by affection, that we are able to feel it. Persons who
+live beyond our own circle, and, still more, persons who have lived in
+another age, receive what is called justice, not charity; and justice is
+supposed to consist in due allotments of censure for each special act of
+misconduct, leaving merit unrecognised. There are many reasons for this
+harsh method of judging. We must decide of men by what we know, and it
+is easier to know faults than to know virtues. Faults are specific,
+easily described, easily appreciated, easily remembered. And again,
+there is, or may be, hypocrisy in virtue; but no one pretends to vice
+who is not vicious. The bad things which can be proved of a man we know
+to be genuine. He was a spendthrift, he was an adulterer, he gambled, he
+equivocated. These are blots positive, unless untrue, and when they
+stand alone, tinge the whole character.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>This also is to be observed in historical criticism. All men feel a
+necessity of being on some terms with their conscience, at their own
+expense or at another's. If they cannot part with their faults, they
+will at least call them by their right name when they meet with such
+faults elsewhere; and thus, when they find accounts of deeds of violence
+or sensuality, of tyranny, of injustice of man to man, of great and
+extensive suffering, or any of those other misfortunes which the
+selfishness of men has at various times occasioned, they will vituperate
+the doers of such things, and the age which has permitted them to be
+done, with the full emphasis of virtuous indignation, while all the time
+they are themselves doing things which will be described, with no less
+justice, in the same colour, by an equally virtuous posterity.</p>
+
+<p>Historians are fond of recording the supposed sufferings of the poor in
+the days of serfdom and villanage; yet the records of the strikes of the
+last ten years, when told by the sufferers, contain pictures no less
+fertile in tragedy. We speak of famines and plagues under the Tudors and
+Stuarts; but the Irish famine, and the Irish plague of 1847, the last
+page of such horrors which has yet been turned over, is the most
+horrible of all. We can conceive a description of England during the
+year which has just closed over us (1856), true in all its details,
+containing no one statement which can be challenged, no single
+exaggeration which can be proved; and this description, if given without
+the correcting traits, shall make ages to come marvel why the Cities of
+the Plain were destroyed, and England was allowed to survive. The frauds
+of trusted men, high in power and high in supposed religion; the
+wholesale poisonings; the robberies; the adulteration of food&mdash;nay, of
+almost everything exposed for sale&mdash;the cruel usage of women&mdash;children
+murdered for the burial fees&mdash;life and property insecure in open day in
+the open streets&mdash;splendour such as the world never saw before upon
+earth, with vice and squalor crouching under its walls&mdash;let all this be
+written down by an enemy, or let it be ascertained hereafter by the
+investigation of a posterity which desires to judge us as we generally
+have judged our forefathers, and few years will show darker in the
+English annals than the year which we have just left behind us. Yet we
+know, in the honesty of our hearts, how unjust such a picture would be.
+Our future advocate, if we are so happy<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</a></span> as to find one, may not be able
+to disprove a single article in the indictment; and yet we know that, as
+the world goes, he will be right if he marks the year with a white
+stroke&mdash;as one in which, on the whole, the moral harvest was better than
+an average.</p>
+
+<p>Once more: our knowledge of any man is always inadequate&mdash;even of the
+unit which each of us calls himself; and the first condition under which
+we can know a man at all is, that he be in essentials something like
+ourselves; that our own experience be an interpreter which shall open
+the secrets of his experience; and it often happens, even among our
+contemporaries, that we are altogether baffled. The Englishman and the
+Italian may understand each other's speech, but the language of each
+other's ideas has still to be learnt. Our long failures in Ireland have
+risen from a radical incongruity of character which has divided the Celt
+from the Saxon. And again, in the same country, the Catholic will be a
+mystery to the Protestant, and the Protestant to the Catholic. Their
+intellects have been shaped in opposite moulds; they are like
+instruments which cannot be played in concert. In the same way, but in a
+far higher degree, we are divided from the generations which have
+preceded us in this planet&mdash;we try to comprehend a Pericles or a
+C&aelig;sar&mdash;an image rises before us which we seem to recognise as belonging
+to our common humanity. There is this feature which is familiar to
+us&mdash;and this&mdash;and this. We are full of hope; the lineaments, one by one,
+pass into clearness; when suddenly the figure becomes enveloped in a
+cloud&mdash;some perplexity crosses our analysis, baffling it utterly, the
+phantom which we have evoked dies away before our eyes, scornfully
+mocking our incapacity to master it.</p>
+
+<p>The English antecedent to the Reformation are nearer to us than Greeks
+or Romans; and yet there is a large interval between the baron who
+fought at Barnet field, and his polished descendant in a modern
+drawing-room. The scale of appreciation and the rule of judgment&mdash;the
+habits, the hopes, the fears, the emotions&mdash;have utterly changed.</p>
+
+<p>In perusing modern histories, the present writer has been struck dumb
+with wonder at the facility with which men will fill in chasms in their
+information with conjecture; will guess at the motives which have
+prompted actions; will pass their censures, as if all secrets of the
+past lay out on an<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</a></span> open scroll before them. He is obliged to say for
+himself that, wherever he has been fortunate enough to discover
+authentic explanations of English historical difficulties, it is rare
+indeed that he has found any conjecture, either of his own or of any
+other modern writer, confirmed. The true motive has almost invariably
+been of a kind which no modern experience could have suggested.</p>
+
+<p>Thoughts such as these form a hesitating prelude to an expression of
+opinion on a controverted question. They will serve, however, to
+indicate the limits within which the said opinion is supposed to be
+hazarded. And in fact, neither in this nor in any historical subject is
+the conclusion so clear that it can be enunciated in a definite form.
+The utmost which can be safely hazarded with history is to relate
+honestly ascertained facts, with only such indications of a judicial
+sentence upon them as may be suggested in the form in which the story is
+arranged.</p>
+
+<p>Whether the monastic bodies of England, at the time of their
+dissolution, were really in that condition of moral corruption which is
+laid to their charge in the Act of Parliament by which they were
+dissolved, is a point which it seems hopeless to argue. Roman Catholic,
+and indeed almost all English, writers who are not committed to an
+unfavourable opinion by the ultra-Protestantism of their doctrines, seem
+to have agreed of late years that the accusations, if not false, were
+enormously exaggerated. The dissolution, we are told, was a
+predetermined act of violence and rapacity; and when the reports and the
+letters of the visitors are quoted in justification of the Government,
+the discussion is closed with the dismissal of every unfavourable
+witness from the court, as venal, corrupt, calumnious&mdash;in fact, as a
+suborned liar. Upon these terms the argument is easily disposed of; and
+if it were not that truth is in all matters better than falsehood, it
+would be idle to reopen a question which cannot be justly dealt with. No
+evidence can affect convictions which have been arrived at without
+evidence&mdash;and why should we attempt a task which it is hopeless to
+accomplish? It seems necessary, however, to reassert the actual state of
+the surviving testimony from time to time, if it be only to sustain the
+links of the old traditions; and the present paper will contain one or
+two pictures of a peculiar kind, exhibiting the life and habits of those
+institutions, which have been lately<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</a></span> met with chiefly among the
+unprinted Records. In anticipation of any possible charge of unfairness
+in judging from isolated instances, we disclaim simply all desire to
+judge&mdash;all wish to do anything beyond relating certain ascertained
+stories. Let it remain, to those who are perverse enough to insist upon
+it, an open question whether the monasteries were more corrupt under
+Henry the Eighth than they had been four hundred years earlier. The
+dissolution would have been equally a necessity; for no reasonable
+person would desire that bodies of men should have been maintained for
+the only business of singing masses, when the efficacy of masses was no
+longer believed. Our present desire is merely this&mdash;to satisfy ourselves
+whether the Government, in discharging a duty which could not be
+dispensed with, condescended to falsehood in seeking a vindication for
+themselves which they did not require; or whether they had cause really
+to believe the majority of the monastic bodies to be as they
+affirmed&mdash;whether, that is to say, there really were such cases either
+of flagrant immorality, neglect of discipline, or careless waste and
+prodigality, as to justify the general censure which was pronounced
+against the system by the Parliament and the Privy Council.</p>
+
+<p>Secure in the supposed completeness with which Queen Mary's agents
+destroyed the Records of the visitation under her father, Roman Catholic
+writers have taken refuge in a disdainful denial; and the Anglicans, who
+for the most part, while contented to enjoy the fruits of the
+Reformation, detest the means by which it was brought about, have taken
+the same view. Bishop Latimer tells us that, when the Report of the
+visitors of the abbeys was read in the Commons House, there rose from
+all sides one long cry of 'Down with them.' But Bishop Latimer, in the
+opinion of High Churchmen, is not to be believed. Do we produce letters
+of the visitors themselves, we are told that they are the slanders
+prepared to justify a preconceived purpose of spoliation. No witness, it
+seems, will be admitted unless it be the witness of a friend. Unless
+some enemy of the Reformation can be found to confess the crimes which
+made the Reformation necessary, the crimes themselves are to be regarded
+as unproved. This is a hard condition. We appeal to Wolsey. Wolsey
+commenced the suppression. Wolsey first made public the infamies which
+disgraced the Church; while,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[Pg 272]</a></span> notwithstanding, he died the devoted
+servant of the Church. This evidence is surely admissible? But no:
+Wolsey, too, must be put out of court. Wolsey was a courtier and a
+time-server. Wolsey was a tyrant's minion. Wolsey was&mdash;in short, we know
+not what Wolsey was, or what he was not. Who can put confidence in a
+charlatan? Behind the bulwarks of such objections, the champion of the
+abbeys may well believe himself secure.</p>
+
+<p>And yet, unreasonable though these demands may be, it happens, after
+all, that we are able partially to gratify them. It is strange that, of
+all extant accusations against any one of the abbeys, the heaviest is
+from a quarter which even Lingard himself would scarcely call
+suspicious. No picture left us by Henry's visitors surpasses, even if it
+equals, a description of the condition of the Abbey of St. Albans, in
+the last quarter of the fifteenth century, drawn by Morton, Henry the
+Seventh's minister, Cardinal Archbishop, Legate of the Apostolic See, in
+a letter addressed by him to the Abbot of St. Albans himself. We must
+request our reader's special attention for the next two pages.</p>
+
+<p>In the year 1489, Pope Innocent the Eighth&mdash;moved with the enormous
+stories which reached his ear of the corruption of the houses of
+religion in England&mdash;granted a commission to the Archbishop of
+Canterbury to make enquiries whether these stories were true, and to
+proceed to correct and reform as might seem good to him. The regular
+clergy were exempt from episcopal visitation, except under especial
+directions from Rome. The occasion had appeared so serious as to make
+extraordinary interference necessary.</p>
+
+<p>On the receipt of the Papal commission, Cardinal Morton, among other
+letters, wrote the following letter:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>John, by Divine permission, Archbishop of Canterbury, Primate of all
+England, Legate of the Apostolic See, to William, Abbot of the
+Monastery of St. Albans, greeting.</p>
+
+<p>We have received certain letters under lead, the copies whereof we
+herewith send you, from our most holy Lord and Father in Christ,
+Innocent, by Divine Providence Pope, the eighth of that name. We
+therefore, John, the Archbishop, the visitor, reformer, inquisitor,
+and judge therein mentioned, in reverence for the Apostolic See,
+have taken upon ourselves the burden of enforcing the said
+commission; and have determined that we will proceed by, and
+according to, the full force, tenor, and effect of the same.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[Pg 273]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>And it has come to our ears, being at once publicly notorious and
+brought before us upon the testimony of many witnesses worthy of
+credit, that you, the abbot afore-mentioned, have been of long time
+noted and diffamed, and do yet continue so noted, of simony, of
+usury, of dilapidation and waste of the goods, revenues, and
+possessions of the said monastery, and of certain other enormous
+crimes and excesses hereafter written. In the rule, custody, and
+administration of the goods, spiritual and temporal, of the said
+monastery, you are so remiss, so negligent, so prodigal, that
+whereas the said monastery was of old times founded and endowed by
+the pious devotion of illustrious princes, of famous memory,
+heretofore kings of this land, the most noble progenitors of our
+most serene Lord and King that now is, in order that true religion
+might flourish there, that the name of the Most High, in whose
+honour and glory it was instituted, might be duly celebrated there;</p>
+
+<p>And whereas, in days heretofore, the regular observance of the said
+rule was greatly regarded, and hospitality was diligently kept;</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, for no little time, during which you have presided in
+the same monastery, you and certain of your fellow-monks and
+brethren (whose blood, it is feared, through your neglect, a severe
+Judge will require at your hand) have relaxed the measure and form
+of religious life; you have laid aside the pleasant yoke of
+contemplation, and all regular observances&mdash;hospitality, alms, and
+those other offices of piety which of old time were exercised and
+ministered therein have decreased, and by your faults, your
+carelessness, your neglect and deed, do daily decrease more and
+more, and cease to be regarded&mdash;the pious vows of the founders are
+defrauded of their just intent&mdash;the ancient rule of your order is
+deserted; and not a few of your fellow-monks and brethren, as we
+most deeply grieve to learn, giving themselves over to a reprobate
+mind, laying aside the fear of God, do lead only a life of
+lasciviousness&mdash;nay, as is horrible to relate, be not afraid to
+defile the holy places, even the very churches of God, by infamous
+intercourse with nuns, &amp;c. &amp;c.</p>
+
+<p>You yourself, moreover, among other grave enormities and abominable
+crimes whereof you are guilty, and for which you are noted and
+diffamed, have, in the first place, admitted a certain married
+woman, named Elena Germyn, who has separated herself without just
+cause from her husband, and for some time past has lived in adultery
+with another man, to be a nun or sister in the house or Priory of
+Bray, lying, as you pretend, within your jurisdiction. You have next
+appointed the same woman to be prioress of the said house,
+notwithstanding that her said husband was living at the time, and is
+still alive. And finally, Father Thomas Sudbury, one of your brother
+monks, publicly, notoriously, and without interference or punishment
+from you, has associated, and still associates, with this woman as
+an adulterer with his harlot.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[Pg 274]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Moreover, divers other of your brethren and fellow-monks have
+resorted, and do resort, continually to her and other women at the
+same place, as to a public brothel or receiving house, and have
+received no correction therefor.</p>
+
+<p>Nor is Bray the only house into which you have introduced disorder.
+At the nunnery of Sapwell, which you also contend to be under your
+jurisdiction, you change the prioresses and superiors again and
+again at your own will and caprice. Here, as well as at Bray, you
+depose those who are good and religious; you promote to the highest
+dignities the worthless and the vicious. The duties of the order are
+cast aside; virtue is neglected; and by these means so much cost and
+extravagance has been caused, that to provide means for your
+indulgence you have introduced certain of your brethren to preside
+in their houses under the name of guardians, when in fact they are
+no guardians, but thieves and notorious villains; and with their
+help you have caused and permitted the goods of the same priories to
+be dispensed, or to speak more truly to be dissipated, in the
+above-described corruptions and other enormous and accursed
+offences. Those places once religious are rendered and reputed as it
+were profane and impious; and by your own and your creatures'
+conduct, are so impoverished as to be reduced to the verge of ruin.</p>
+
+<p>In like manner, also, you have dealt with certain other cells of
+monks, which you say are subject to you, even within the monastery
+of the glorious proto-martyr Alban himself. You have dilapidated the
+common property; you have made away with the jewels; the copses, the
+woods, the underwood, almost all the oaks, and other forest trees,
+to the value of eight thousand marks and more, you have made to be
+cut down without distinction, and they have by you been sold and
+alienated. The brethren of the abbey, some of whom, as is reported,
+are given over to all the evil things of the world, neglect the
+service of God altogether. They live with harlots and mistresses
+publicly and continuously, within the precincts of the monastery and
+without. Some of them, who are covetous of honour and promotion, and
+desirous therefore of pleasing your cupidity, have stolen and made
+away with the chalices and other jewels of the church. They have
+even sacrilegiously extracted the precious stones from the very
+shrine of St. Alban; and you have not punished these men, but have
+rather knowingly supported and maintained them. If any of your
+brethren be living justly and religiously, if any be wise and
+virtuous, these you straightway depress and hold in hatred.... You
+... </p></div>
+
+<p>But we need not transcribe further this overwhelming document. It
+pursues its way through mire and filth to its most lame and impotent
+conclusion. After all this, the abbot was not deposed; he was invited
+merely to reconsider his doings, and, if possible, amend them. Such was
+Church<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[Pg 275]</a></span> discipline, even under an extraordinary commission from Rome.
+But the most incorrigible Anglican will scarcely question the truth of a
+picture drawn by such a hand; and it must be added that this one
+unexceptionable indictment lends at once assured credibility to the
+reports which were presented fifty years later, on the general
+visitation. There is no longer room for the presumptive objection that
+charges so revolting could not be true. We see that in their worst form
+they could be true, and the evidence of Legh and Leghton, of Rice and
+Bedyll, as it remains in their letters to Cromwell, must be shaken in
+detail, or else it must be accepted as correct. We cannot dream that
+Archbishop Morton was mistaken, or was misled by false information. St.
+Albans was no obscure priory in a remote and thinly-peopled county. The
+Abbot of St. Albans was a peer of the realm, taking precedence of
+bishops, living in the full glare of notoriety, within a few miles of
+London. The archbishop had ample means of ascertaining the truth; and,
+we may be sure, had taken care to examine his ground before he left on
+record so tremendous an accusation. This story is true&mdash;as true as it is
+piteous. We will pause a moment over it before we pass from this, once
+more to ask our passionate Church friends whether still they will
+persist that the abbeys were no worse under the Tudors than they had
+been in their origin, under the Saxons, or under the first Norman and
+Plantagenet kings. We refuse to believe it. The abbeys which towered in
+the midst of the English towns, the houses clustered at their feet like
+subjects round some majestic queen, were images indeed of the civil
+supremacy which the Church of the Middle Ages had asserted for itself;
+but they were images also of an inner spiritual sublimity, which had won
+the homage of grateful and admiring nations. The heavenly graces had
+once descended upon the monastic orders, making them ministers of mercy,
+patterns of celestial life, breathing witnesses of the power of the
+Spirit in renewing and sanctifying the heart. And then it was that art
+and wealth and genius poured out their treasures to raise fitting
+tabernacles for the dwelling of so divine a soul. Alike in the village
+and the city, amongst the unadorned walls and lowly roofs which closed
+in the humble dwellings of the laity, the majestic houses of the Father
+of mankind and of his especial servants rose up in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[Pg 276]</a></span> sovereign beauty.
+And ever at the sacred gates sat Mercy, pouring out relief from a
+never-failing store to the poor and the suffering; ever within the
+sacred aisles the voices of holy men were pealing heavenwards in
+intercession for the sins of mankind; and such blessed influences were
+thought to exhale around those mysterious precincts, that even the poor
+outcasts of society&mdash;the debtor, the felon, and the outlaw&mdash;gathered
+round the walls as the sick men sought the shadow of the apostle, and
+lay there sheltered from the avenging hand, till their sins were washed
+from off their souls. The abbeys of the middle ages floated through the
+storms of war and conquest, like the ark upon the waves of the flood, in
+the midst of violence remaining inviolate, through the awful reverence
+which surrounded them. The abbeys, as Henry's visitors found them, were
+as little like what they once had been, as the living man in the pride
+of his growth is like the corpse which the earth makes haste to hide for
+ever.</p>
+
+<p>The official letters which reveal the condition into which the monastic
+establishments had degenerated, are chiefly in the Cotton Library, and a
+large number of them have been published by the Camden Society. Besides
+these, however, there are in the Rolls House many other documents which
+confirm and complete the statements of the writers of those letters.
+There is a part of what seems to have been a digest of the 'Black
+Book'&mdash;an epitome of iniquities, under the title of the 'Compendium
+Compertorum.' There are also reports from private persons, private
+entreaties for enquiry, depositions of monks in official examinations,
+and other similar papers, which, in many instances, are too offensive to
+be produced, and may rest in obscurity, unless contentious persons
+compel us to bring them forward. Some of these, however, throw curious
+light on the habits of the time, and on the collateral disorders which
+accompanied the more gross enormities. They show us, too, that although
+the dark tints predominate, the picture was not wholly black; that as
+just Lot was in the midst of Sodom, yet was unable by his single
+presence to save the guilty city from destruction, so in the latest era
+of monasticism there were types yet lingering of an older and fairer
+age, who, nevertheless, were not delivered, like the patriarch, but
+perished most of them with the institution to which they belonged. The<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[Pg 277]</a></span>
+hideous exposure is not untinted with fairer lines; and we see traits
+here and there of true devotion, mistaken but heroic.</p>
+
+<p>Of these documents two specimens shall be given in this place, one of
+either kind; and both, so far as we know, new to modern history. The
+first is so singular, that we print it as it is found&mdash;a genuine
+antique, fished up, in perfect preservation, out of the wreck of the old
+world.</p>
+
+<p>About eight miles from Ludlow, in the county of Herefordshire, once
+stood the abbey of Wigmore. There was Wigmore Castle, a stronghold of
+the Welsh Marches, now, we believe, a modern, well-conditioned mansion;
+and Wigmore Abbey, of which we do not hear that there are any remaining
+traces. Though now vanished, however, like so many of its kind, the
+house was three hundred years ago in vigorous existence; and when the
+stir commenced for an enquiry, the proceedings of the abbot of this
+place gave occasion to a memorial which stands in the Rolls collection
+as follows:&mdash;<a name="FNanchor_R_18" id="FNanchor_R_18"></a><a href="#Footnote_R_18" class="fnanchor">[R]</a></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Articles to be objected against John Smart, Abbot of the Monastery
+of Wigmore, in the county of Hereford, to be exhibited to the Right
+Honourable Lord Thomas Cromwell, the Lord Privy Seal and Vice-gerent
+to the King's Majesty.</p>
+
+<p>1. The said abbot is to be accused of simony, as well for taking
+money for advocation and putations of benefices, as for giving of
+orders, or more truly, selling them, and that to such persons which
+have been rejected elsewhere, and of little learning and light
+consideration.</p>
+
+<p>2. The said abbot hath promoted to orders many scholars when all
+other bishops did refrain to give such orders on account of certain
+ordinances devised by the King's Majesty and his Council for the
+common weal of this realm. Then resorted to the said abbot scholars
+out of all parts, whom he would promote to orders by sixty at a
+time, and sometimes more, and otherwhiles less. And sometimes the
+said abbot would give orders by night within his chamber, and
+otherwise in the church early in the morning, and now and then at a
+chapel out of the abbey. So that there be many unlearned and light
+priests made by the said abbot, and in the diocese of Llandaff, and
+in the places afore named&mdash;a thousand, as it is esteemed, by the
+space of this seven years he hath made priests, and received not so
+little money of them as a thousand pounds for their orders.</p>
+
+<p>3. Item, that the said abbot now of late, when he could not be
+suffered<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[Pg 278]</a></span> to give general orders, for the most part doth give orders
+by pretence of dispensation; and by that colour he promoteth them to
+orders by two and three, and takes much money of them, both for
+their orders and for to purchase their dispensations after the time
+he hath promoted them to their orders.</p>
+
+<p>4. Item, the said abbot hath hurt and dismayed his tenants by
+putting them from their leases, and by enclosing their commons from
+them, and selling and utter wasting of the woods that were wont to
+relieve and succour them.</p>
+
+<p>5. Item, the said abbot hath sold corradyes, to the damage of the
+said monastery.</p>
+
+<p>6. Item, the said abbot hath alienate and sold the jewels and plate
+of the monastery, to the value of five hundred marks, <i>to purchase
+of the Bishop of Rome his bulls to be a bishop, and to annex the
+said abbey to his bishopric, to that intent that he should not for
+his misdeeds be punished, or deprived from his said abbey</i>.</p>
+
+<p>7. Item, that the said abbot, long after that other bishops had
+renounced the Bishop of Rome, and professed them to the King's
+Majesty, did use, but more verily usurped, the office of a bishop by
+virtue of his first bulls purchased from Rome, till now of late, as
+it will appear by the date of his confirmation, if he have any.</p>
+
+<p>8. Item, that he the said abbot hath lived viciously, and kept to
+concubines divers and many women that is openly known.</p>
+
+<p>9. Item, that the said abbot doth yet continue his vicious living,
+as it is known, openly.</p>
+
+<p>10. Item, that the said abbot hath spent and wasted much of the
+goods of the said monastery upon the foresaid women.</p>
+
+<p>11. Item, that the said abbot is malicious and very wrathful, not
+regarding what he saith or doeth in his fury or anger.</p>
+
+<p>12. Item, that one Richard Gyles bought of the abbot and convent of
+Wigmore a corradye, and a chamber for him and his wife for term of
+their lives; and when the said Richard Gyles was aged and was very
+weak, he disposed his goods, and made executors to execute his will.
+And when the said abbot now being &mdash;&mdash; perceived that the said Richard
+Gyles was rich, and had not bequested so much of his goods to him as
+he would have had, the said abbot then came to the chamber of the
+said Richard Gyles, and put out thence all his friends and kinsfolk
+that kept him in his sickness; and then the said abbot set his
+brother and other of his servants to keep the sick man; and the
+night next coming after the said Richard Gyles's coffer was broken,
+and thence taken all that was in the same, to the value of forty
+marks; and long after the said abbot confessed, before the executors
+of the said Richard Gyles, that it was his deed.</p>
+
+<p>13. Item, that the said abbot, after he had taken away the goods of
+the said Richard Gyles, used daily to reprove and check the said
+Richard Gyles, and inquire of him where was more of his coin and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[Pg 279]</a></span>
+money; and at the last the said abbot thought he lived too long, and
+made the sick man, after much sorry keeping, to be taken from his
+feather-bed, and laid upon a cold mattress, and kept his friends
+from him to his death.</p>
+
+<p>15. Item, that the said abbot consented to the death and murdering
+of one John Tichkill, that was slain at his procuring, at the said
+monastery, by Sir Richard Cubley, canon and chaplain to the said
+abbot; which canon is and ever hath been since that time chief of
+the said abbot's council; and is supported to carry crossbowes, and
+to go whither he lusteth at any time, to fishing and hunting in the
+king's forests, parks, and chases; but little or nothing serving the
+quire, as other brethren do, neither corrected of the abbot for any
+trespass he doth commit.</p>
+
+<p>16. Item, that the said abbot hath been perjured oft, as is to be
+proved and is proved; and as it is supposed, did not make a true
+inventory of the goods, chattels, and jewels of his monastery to the
+King's Majesty and his Council.</p>
+
+<p>17. Item, that the said abbot hath infringed all the king's
+injunctions which were given him by Doctor Cave to observe and keep;
+and when he was denounced <i>in pleno capitulo</i> to have broken the
+same, he would have put in prison the brother as did denounce him to
+have broken the same injunctions, save that he was let by the
+convent there.</p>
+
+<p>18. Item, that the said abbot hath openly preached against the
+doctrine of Christ, saying he ought not to love his enemy, but as he
+loves the devil; and that he should love his enemy's soul, but not
+his body.</p>
+
+<p>19. Item, that the said abbot hath taken but small regard to the
+good-living of his household.</p>
+
+<p>20. Item, that the said abbot hath had and hath yet a special favour
+to misdoers and manquellers, thieves, deceivers of their neighbours,
+and by them [is] most ruled and counselled.</p>
+
+<p>21. Item, that the said abbot hath granted leases of farms and
+advocations first to one man, and took his fine, and also hath
+granted the same lease to another man for more money; and then would
+make to the last taker a lease or writing, with an antedate of the
+first lease, which hath bred great dissension among gentlemen&mdash;as
+Master Blunt and Master Moysey, and other takers of such leases&mdash;and
+that often.</p>
+
+<p>22. Item, the said abbot having the contrepaynes of leases in his
+keeping, hath, for money, rased out the number of years mentioned in
+the said leases, and writ a fresh number in the former taker's
+lease, and in the contrepayne thereof, to the intent to defraud the
+taker or buyer of the residue of such leases, of whom he hath
+received the money.</p>
+
+<p>23. Item, the said abbot hath not, according to the foundation of
+his monastery, admitted <ins class="cor" title="Original: reely.">freely</ins> tenants into certain alms-houses
+belonging<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[Pg 280]</a></span> to the said monastery; but of them he hath taken large
+fines, and some of them he hath put away that would not give him
+fines: whither poor, aged, and impotent people were wont to be
+freely admitted, and [to] receive the founder's alms that of the old
+customs [were] limited to the same&mdash;which alms is also diminished by
+the said abbot.</p>
+
+<p>24. Item, that the said abbot did not deliver the bulls of his
+bishopric, that he purchased from Rome, to our sovereign lord the
+king's council till long after the time he had delivered and
+exhibited the bulls of his monastery to them.</p>
+
+<p>25. Item, that the said abbot hath detained and yet doth detain
+servants' wages; and often when the said servants hath asked their
+wages, the said abbot hath put them into the stocks, and beat them.</p>
+
+<p>26. Item, the said abbot, in times past, hath had a great devotion
+to ride to Llangarvan, in Wales, upon Lammas-day, to receive pardon
+there; and on the even he would visit one Mary Hawle, an old
+acquaintance of his, at the Welsh Poole, and on the morrow ride to
+the foresaid Llangarvan, to be confessed and absolved, and the same
+night return to company with the said Mary Hawle, at the Welsh Poole
+aforesaid, and Kateryn, the said Mary Hawle her first daughter, whom
+the said abbot long hath kept to concubine, and had children by her,
+that he lately married at Ludlow. And [there be] others that have
+been taken out of his chamber and put in the stocks within the said
+abbey, and others that have complained upon him to the king's
+council of the Marches of Wales; and the woman that dashed out his
+teeth, that he would have had by violence, I will not name now, nor
+other men's wives, lest it would offend your good lordship to read
+or hear the same.</p>
+
+<p>27. Item, the said abbot doth daily embezzle, sell, and convey the
+goods and chattels, and jewels of the said monastery, having no need
+so to do: for it is thought that he hath a thousand marks or two
+thousand lying by him that he hath gotten by selling of orders, and
+the jewels and plate of the monastery and corradyes; and it is to be
+feared that he will alienate all the rest, unless your good lordship
+speedily make redress and provision to let the same.</p>
+
+<p>28. Item, the said abbot was accustomed yearly to preach at
+Leynt-warden on the Festival of the Nativity of the Virgin Mary,
+where and when the people were wont to offer to an image there, and
+to the same the said abbot in his sermons would exhort them and
+encourage them. But now the oblations be decayed, the abbot, espying
+the image then to have a cote of silver plate and gilt, hath taken
+away of his own authority the said image, and the plate turned to
+his own use; and left his preaching there, saying it is no manner of
+profit to any man, and the plate that was about the said image was
+named to be worth forty pounds.</p>
+
+<p>29. Item, the said abbot hath ever nourished enmity and discord
+among his brethren; and hath not encouraged them to learn the laws<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</a></span>
+and the mystery of Christ. But he that least knew was most cherished
+by him; and he hath been highly displeased and [hath] disdained when
+his brothers would say that 'it is God's precept and doctrine that
+ye ought to prefer before your ceremonies and vain constitutions.'
+This saying was high disobedient, and should be grievously punished;
+when that lying, obloquy, flattery, ignorance, derision, contumely,
+discord, great swearing, drinking, hypocrisy, fraud, superstition,
+deceit, conspiracy to wrong their neighbour, and other of that kind,
+was had in special favour and regard. Laud and praise be to God that
+hath sent us the true knowledge. Honour and long prosperity to our
+sovereign lord and his noble council, that teaches to advance the
+same. Amen.</p>
+
+<p>By John Lee, your faithful bedeman, and canon of the said monastery
+of Wigmore.</p>
+
+<p>Postscript.&mdash;My good lord, there is in the said abbey a cross of
+fine gold and precious stones, whereof one diamond was esteemed by
+Doctor Booth, Bishop of Hereford, worth a hundred marks. In that
+cross is enclosed a piece of wood, named to be of the cross that
+Christ died upon, and to the same hath been offering. And when it
+should be brought down to the church from the treasury, it was
+brought down with lights, and like reverence as should have been
+done to Christ himself. I fear lest the abbot upon Sunday next, when
+he may enter the treasury, will take away the said cross and break
+it, or turn it to his own use, with many other precious jewels that
+be there.</p>
+
+<p>All these articles afore written be true as to the substance and
+true meaning of them, though peradventure for haste and lack of
+counsel, some words be set amiss or out of their place. That I will
+be ready to prove forasmuch as lies in me, when it shall like your
+honourable lordship to direct your commission to men (or any man)
+that will be indifferent and not corrupt to sit upon the same, at
+the said abbey, where the witnesses and proofs be most ready and the
+truth is best known, or at any other place where it shall be thought
+most convenient by your high discretion and authority. </p></div>
+
+<p>The statutes of Provisors, commonly called Pr&aelig;munire statutes, which,
+forbade all purchases of bulls from Rome under penalty of outlawry, have
+been usually considered in the highest degree oppressive; and more
+particularly the public censure has fallen upon the last application of
+those statutes, when, on Wolsey's fall, the whole body of the clergy
+were laid under a pr&aelig;munire, and only obtained pardon on payment of a
+serious fine. Let no one regret that he has learnt to be tolerant to
+Roman Catholics as the nineteenth century knows them. But it is a
+spurious charity which, to remedy a modern injustice, hastens to its
+opposite; and when philosophic<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[Pg 282]</a></span> historians indulge in loose invective
+against the statesmen of the Reformation, they show themselves unfit to
+be trusted with the custody of our national annals. The Acts of
+Parliament speak plainly of the enormous abuses which had grown up under
+these bulls. Yet even the emphatic language of the statutes scarcely
+prepares us to find an abbot able to purchase with jewels stolen from
+his own convent a faculty to confer holy orders, though he had never
+been consecrated bishop, and to make a thousand pounds by selling the
+exercise of his privileges. This is the most flagrant case which has
+fallen under the eyes of the present writer. Yet it is but a choice
+specimen out of many. He was taught to believe, like other modern
+students of history, that the papal dispensations for immorality, of
+which we read in Fox and other Protestant writers, were calumnies, but
+he has been forced against his will to perceive that the supposed
+calumnies were but the plain truth; he has found among the records&mdash;for
+one thing, a list of more than twenty clergy in one diocese who had
+obtained licences to keep concubines.<a name="FNanchor_S_19" id="FNanchor_S_19"></a><a href="#Footnote_S_19" class="fnanchor">[S]</a> After some experience, he
+advises all persons who are anxious to understand the English
+Reformation to place implicit confidence in the Statute Book. Every
+fresh record which is brought to light is a fresh evidence in its
+favour. In the fluctuations of the conflict there were parliaments, as
+there were princes, of opposing sentiments; and measures were passed,
+amended, repealed, or censured, as Protestants and Catholics came
+alternately into power. But whatever were the differences of opinion,
+the facts on either side which are stated in an Act of Parliament may be
+uniformly trusted. Even in the attainders for treason and heresy we
+admire the truthfulness of the details of the indictments, although we
+deplore the prejudice which at times could make a crime of virtue.</p>
+
+<p>We pass on to the next picture. Equal justice, or some attempt at it,
+was promised, and we shall perhaps part from the friends of the
+monasteries on better terms than they believe. At least, we shall add to
+our own history and to the Catholic martyrology a story of genuine
+interest.</p>
+
+<p>We have many accounts of the abbeys at the time of their actual
+dissolution. The resistance or acquiescence of superiors,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[Pg 283]</a></span> the
+dismissals of the brethren, the sale of the property, the destruction of
+relics, &amp;c., are all described. We know how the windows were taken out,
+how the glass appropriated, how the 'melter' accompanied the visitors to
+run the lead upon the roofs, and the metal of the bells into portable
+forms. We see the pensioned regulars filing out reluctantly, or exulting
+in their deliverance, discharged from their vows, furnished each with
+his 'secular apparel,' and his purse of money, to begin the world as he
+might. These scenes have long been partially known, and they were rarely
+attended with anything remarkable. At the time of the suppression, the
+discipline of several years had broken down opposition, and prepared the
+way for the catastrophe. The end came at last, but as an issue which had
+been long foreseen.</p>
+
+<p>We have sought in vain, however, for a glimpse into the interior of the
+houses at the first intimation of what was coming&mdash;more especially when
+the great blow was struck which severed England from obedience to Rome,
+and asserted the independence of the Anglican Church. Then, virtually,
+the fate of the monasteries was decided. As soon as the supremacy was
+vested in the Crown, enquiry into their condition could no longer be
+escaped or delayed; and then, through the length and breadth of the
+country, there must have been rare dismay. The account of the London
+Carthusians is indeed known to us, because they chose to die rather than
+yield submission where their consciences forbade them; and their
+isolated heroism has served to distinguish their memories. The pope, as
+head of the Universal Church, claimed the power of absolving subjects
+from their allegiance to their king. He deposed Henry. He called on
+foreign princes to enforce his sentence; and, on pain of
+excommunication, commanded the native English to rise in rebellion. The
+king, in self-defence, was compelled to require his subjects to disclaim
+all sympathy with these pretensions, and to recognise no higher
+authority, spiritual or secular, than himself within his own dominions.
+The regular clergy throughout the country were on the pope's side,
+secretly or openly. The Charterhouse monks, however, alone of all the
+order, had the courage to declare their convictions, and to suffer for
+them. Of the rest, we only perceive that they at last submitted; and
+since there was no uncertainty as to their real feelings, we have been
+disposed to judge them hardly as cowards. Yet<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[Pg 284]</a></span> we who have never been
+tried, should perhaps be cautious in our censures. It is possible to
+hold an opinion quite honestly, and yet to hesitate about dying for it.
+We consider ourselves, at the present day, persuaded honestly of many
+things; yet which of them should we refuse to relinquish if the scaffold
+were the alternative&mdash;or at least seem to relinquish, under silent
+protest?</p>
+
+<p>And yet, in the details of the struggle at the Charterhouse, we see the
+forms of mental trial which must have repeated themselves among all
+bodies of the clergy wherever there was seriousness of conviction. If
+the majority of the monks were vicious and sensual, there was still a
+large minority labouring to be true to their vows; and when one entire
+convent was capable of sustained resistance, there must have been many
+where there was only just too little virtue for the emergency&mdash;where the
+conflict between interest and conscience was equally genuine, though it
+ended the other way. Scenes of bitter misery there must have been&mdash;of
+passionate emotion wrestling ineffectually with the iron resolution of
+the Government: and the faults of the Catholic party weigh so heavily
+against them in the course and progress of the Reformation, that we
+cannot willingly lose the few countervailing tints which soften the
+darkness of their conditions.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, for any authentic account of the abbeys at this crisis, we
+have hitherto been left to our imagination. A stern and busy
+administration had little leisure to preserve records of sentimental
+struggles which led to nothing. The Catholics did not care to keep alive
+the recollection of a conflict in which, even though with difficulty,
+the Church was defeated. A rare accident only could have brought down to
+us any fragment of a transaction which no one had an interest in
+remembering. That such an accident has really occurred, we may consider
+as unusually fortunate. The story in question concerns the abbey of
+Woburn, and is as follows:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>At Woburn, as in many other religious houses, there were representatives
+of both the factions which divided the country; perhaps we should say of
+three&mdash;the sincere Catholics, the Indifferentists, and the Protestants.
+These last, so long as Wolsey was in power, had been frightened into
+silence, and with difficulty had been able to save themselves from
+extreme penalties. No sooner, however, had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[Pg 285]</a></span> Wolsey fallen, and the
+battle commenced with the papacy, than the tables turned, the persecuted
+became persecutors&mdash;or at least threw off their disguise&mdash;and were
+strengthened with the support of the large class who cared only to keep
+on the winning side. The mysteries of the faith came to be disputed at
+the public tables; the refectories rang with polemics; the sacred
+silence of the dormitories was broken for the first time by lawless
+speculation. The orthodox might have appealed to the Government: heresy
+was still forbidden by law, and, if detected, was still punished by the
+stake. But the orthodox among the regular clergy adhered to the pope as
+well as to the faith, and abhorred the sacrilege of the Parliament as
+deeply as the new opinions of the Reformers. Instead of calling in the
+help of the law, they muttered treason in secret; and the Reformers,
+confident in the necessities of the times, sent reports to London of
+their arguments and conversations. The authorities in the abbey were
+accused of disaffection; and a commission of enquiry was sent down
+towards the end of the spring of 1536, to investigate. The depositions
+taken on this occasion are still preserved; and with the help of them,
+we can leap over three centuries of time, and hear the last echoes of
+the old monastic life in Woburn Abbey dying away in discord.</p>
+
+<p>Where party feeling was running so high, there were, of course,
+passionate arguments. The Act of Supremacy, the spread of Protestantism,
+the power of the Pope, the state of England&mdash;all were discussed; and the
+possibilities of the future, as each party painted it in the colours of
+his hopes. The brethren, we find, spoke their minds in plain language,
+sometimes condescending to a joke.</p>
+
+<p>Brother Sherborne deposes that the sub-prior, 'on Candlemas-day last
+past (February 2, 1536), asked him whether he longed not to be at Rome
+where all his bulls were?' Brother Sherborne answered that 'his bulls
+had made so many calves, that he had burned them. Whereunto the
+sub-prior said he thought there were more calves now than there were
+then.'</p>
+
+<p>Then there were long and furious quarrels about 'my Lord Privy Seal'
+(Cromwell)&mdash;who was to one party, the incarnation of Satan; to the
+other, the delivering angel.</p>
+
+<p>Nor did matters mend when from the minister they passed to the master.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[Pg 286]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Dan John Croxton being in 'the shaving-house' one day with certain of
+the brethren having their tonsures looked to, and gossiping, as men do
+on such occasions, one 'Friar Lawrence did say that the king was dead.'
+Then said Croxton, 'Thanks be to God, his Grace is in good health, and I
+pray God so continue him;' and said further to the said Lawrence, 'I
+advise thee to leave thy babbling.' Croxton, it seems, had been among
+the suspected in earlier times. Lawrence said to him, 'Croxton, it
+maketh no matter what thou sayest, for thou art one of the new world;'
+whereupon hotter still the conversation proceeded. 'Thy babbling
+tongue,' Croxton said, 'will turn us all to displeasure at length.'
+'Then,' quoth Lawrence, 'neither thou nor yet any of us all shall do
+well as long as we forsake our head of the Church, the Pope.' 'By the
+mass!' quoth Croxton, 'I would thy Pope Roger were in thy belly, or thou
+in his, for thou art a false perjured knave to thy prince.' Whereunto
+the said Lawrence answered, saying, 'By the mass, thou liest! I was
+never sworn to forsake the Pope to be our head, and never will be.'
+'Then,' quoth Croxton, 'thou shalt be sworn spite of thine heart one
+day, or I will know why nay.'</p>
+
+<p>These and similar wranglings may be taken as specimens of the daily
+conversation at Woburn, and we can perceive how an abbot with the best
+intentions would have found it difficult to keep the peace. There are
+instances of superiors in other houses throwing down their command in
+the midst of the crisis in flat despair, protesting that their subject
+brethren were no longer governable. Abbots who were inclined to the
+Reformation could not manage the Catholics; Catholic abbots could not
+manage the Protestants; indifferent abbots could not manage either the
+one or the other. It would have been well for the Abbot of Woburn&mdash;or
+well as far as this world is concerned&mdash;if he, like one of these, had
+acknowledged his incapacity, and had fled from his charge.</p>
+
+<p>His name was Robert Hobbes. Of his age and family, history is silent. We
+know only that he held his place when the storm rose against the pope;
+that, like the rest of the clergy, he bent before the blast, taking the
+oath to the king, and submitting to the royal supremacy, but swearing
+under protest, as the phrase went, with the outward, and not with the
+inward man&mdash;in fact, perjuring himself. Though<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[Pg 287]</a></span> infirm, so far, however,
+he was too honest to be a successful counterfeit, and from the jealous
+eyes of the Neologians of the abbey he could not conceal his tendencies.
+We have significant evidence of the <i>espionage</i> which was established
+over all suspected quarters, in the conversations and trifling details
+of conduct on the part of the abbot, which were reported to the
+Government.</p>
+
+<p>In the summer of 1534, orders came that the pope's name should be rased
+out wherever it was mentioned in the Mass books. A malcontent, by name
+Robert Salford, deposed that 'he was singing mass before the abbot at
+St. Thomas's altar within the monastery, at which time he rased out with
+his knife the said name out of the canon.' The abbot told him to 'take a
+pen and strike or cross him out.' The saucy monk said those were not the
+orders. They were to rase him out. 'Well, well,' the abbot said, 'it
+will come again one day.' 'Come again, will it?' was the answer; 'if it
+do, then we will put him in again; but I trust I shall never see that
+day.' The mild abbot could remonstrate, but could not any more command;
+and the proofs of his malignant inclinations were remembered against him
+for the ear of Cromwell.</p>
+
+<p>In the general injunctions, too, he was directed to preach against the
+pope, and to expose his usurpation; but he could not bring himself to
+obey. He shrank from the pulpit; he preached but twice after the
+visitation, and then on other subjects, while in the prayer before the
+sermon he refused, as we find, to use the prescribed form. He only said,
+'You shall pray for the spirituality, the temporality, and the souls
+that be in the pains of purgatory; and did not name the king to be
+supreme head of the Church in neither of the said sermons, nor speak
+against the pretended authority of the Bishop of Rome.'</p>
+
+<p>Again, when Paul the Third, shortly after his election, proposed to call
+a general council at Mantua, against which, by advice of Henry the
+Eighth, the Germans protested, we have a glimpse how eagerly anxious
+English eyes were watching for a turning tide. 'Hear you,' said the
+abbot one day, 'of the Pope's holiness and the congregation of bishops,
+abbots, and princes gathered to the council at Mantua? They be gathered
+for the reformation of the universal Church; and here now we have a book
+of the excuse<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[Pg 288]</a></span> of the Germans, by which we may know what heretics they
+be: for if they were Catholics and true men as they pretend to be, they
+would never have refused to come to a general council.'</p>
+
+<p>So matters went with the abbot for some months after he had sworn
+obedience to the king. Lulling his conscience with such opiates as the
+casuists could provide for him, he watched anxiously for a change, and
+laboured with but little reserve to hold his brethren to their old
+allegiance.</p>
+
+<p>In the summer of 1535, however, a change came over the scene, very
+different from the outward reaction for which he was looking, and a
+better mind woke in the abbot: he learnt that in swearing what he did
+not mean with reservations and nice distinctions, he had lied to heaven
+and lied to man; that to save his miserable life he had perilled his
+soul. When the oath of supremacy was required of the nation, Sir Thomas
+More, Bishop Fisher, and the monks of the Charterhouse&mdash;mistaken, as we
+believe, in judgment, but true to their consciences, and disdaining
+evasion or subterfuge&mdash;chose, with deliberate nobleness, rather to die
+than to perjure themselves. This is no place to enter on the great
+question of the justice or necessity of those executions; but the story
+of the so-called martyrdoms convulsed the Catholic world. The pope shook
+upon his throne; the shuttle of diplomatic intrigue stood still;
+diplomatists who had lived so long in lies that the whole life of man
+seemed but a stage pageant, a thing of show and tinsel, stood aghast at
+the revelation of English sincerity, and a shudder of great awe ran
+through Europe. The fury of party leaves little room for generous
+emotion, and no pity was felt for these men by the English Protestants.
+The Protestants knew well that if these same sufferers could have had
+their way, they would themselves have been sacrificed by hecatombs; and
+as they had never experienced mercy, so they were in turn without mercy.
+But to the English Catholics, who believed as Fisher believed, but who
+had not dared to suffer as Fisher suffered, his death and the death of
+the rest acted as a glimpse of the Judgment Day. Their safety became
+their shame and terror; and in the radiant example before them of true
+faithfulness, they saw their own falsehood and their own disgrace. So it
+was with Father Forest, who had taught his penitents in confession that
+they might perjure themselves, and who now<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[Pg 289]</a></span> sought a cruel death in
+voluntary expiation; so it was with Whiting, the Abbot of Glastonbury;
+so with others whose names should be more familiar to us than they are;
+and here in Woburn we are to see the feeble but genuine penitence of
+Abbot Hobbes. He was still unequal to immediate martyrdom, but he did
+what he knew might drag his death upon him if disclosed to the
+Government, and surrounded by spies he could have had no hope of
+concealment.</p>
+
+<p>'At the time,' deposed Robert Salford, 'that the monks of the
+Charterhouse, with other traitors, did suffer death, the abbot did call
+us into the Chapter-house, and said these words:&mdash;"Brethren, this is a
+perilous time; such a scourge was never heard since Christ's passion. Ye
+hear how good men suffer the death. Brethren, this is undoubted for our
+offences. Ye read, so long as the children of Israel kept the
+commandments of God, so long their enemies had no power over them, but
+God took vengeance of their enemies. But when they broke God's
+commandments, then they were subdued by their enemies, and so be we.
+Therefore let us be sorry for our offences. Undoubted He will take
+vengeance of our enemies; I mean those heretics that causeth so many
+good men to suffer thus. Alas, it is a piteous case that so much
+Christian blood should be shed. Therefore, good brethren, for the
+reverence of God, every one of you devoutly pray, and say this Psalm,
+'Oh God, the heathen are come into thine inheritance; thy holy temple
+have they defiled, and made Jerusalem a heap of stones. The dead bodies
+of thy servants have they given to be meat to the fowls of the air, and
+the flesh of thy saints unto the beasts of the field. Their blood have
+they shed like water on every side of Jerusalem, and there was no man to
+bury them. We are become an open scorn unto our enemies, a very scorn
+and derision unto them that are round about us. Oh, remember not our old
+sins, but have mercy upon us, and that soon, for we are come to great
+misery. Help us, oh God of our salvation, for the glory of thy name. Oh,
+be merciful unto our sins for thy name's sake. Wherefore do the heathen
+say, Where is now their God?' Ye shall say this Psalm," repeated the
+abbot, "every Friday, after the litany, prostrate, when ye lie upon the
+high altar, and undoubtedly God will cease this extreme scourge." And
+so,' continues Salford, significantly, 'the convent did say this
+aforesaid Psalm until<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[Pg 290]</a></span> there were certain that did murmur at the saying
+of it, and so it was left.'</p>
+
+<p>The abbot, it seems, either stood alone, or found but languid support;
+even his own familiar friends whom he trusted, those with whom he had
+walked in the house of God, had turned against him; the harsh air of the
+dawn of a new world choked him: what was there for him but to die? But
+his conscience still haunted him: while he lived he must fight on, and
+so, if possible, find pardon for his perjury. The blows in those years
+fell upon the Church thick and fast. In February 1536, the Bill passed
+for the dissolution of the smaller monasteries; and now we find the
+sub-prior with the whole fraternity united in hostility, and the abbot
+without one friend remaining.</p>
+
+<p>'He did again call us together,' says the next deposition, 'and
+lamentably mourning for the dissolving the said houses, he enjoined us
+to sing "Salvator mundi, salva nos omnes," every day after lauds; and we
+murmured at it, and were not content to sing it for such cause; and so
+we did omit it divers days, for which the abbot came unto the chapter,
+and did in manner rebuke us, and said we were bound to obey his
+commandment by our profession, and so did command us to sing it again
+with the versicle "Let God arise, and let his enemies be scattered. Let
+them also that hate him flee before him." Also he enjoined us at every
+mass that every priest did sing, to say the collect, "Oh God, who
+despisest not the sighing of a contrite heart." And he said if we did
+this with good and true devotion, God would so handle the matter, that
+it should be to the comfort of all England, and so show us mercy as he
+showed unto the children of Israel. And surely, brethren, there will
+come to us a good man that will rectify these monasteries again that be
+now supprest, because "God can of these stones raise up children to
+Abraham."'</p>
+
+<p>'Of the stones,' perhaps, but less easily of the stony-hearted monks,
+who, with pitiless smiles, watched the abbot's sorrow, which should soon
+bring him to his ruin.</p>
+
+<p>Time passed on, and as the world grew worse, so the abbot grew more
+lonely. Desolate and unsupported, he was still unable to make up his
+mind to the course which he knew to be right; but he slowly strengthened
+himself for the trial, and as Lent came on, the season brought with it a
+more special call to effort; he did not fail to recognise it.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[Pg 291]</a></span> The
+conduct of the fraternity sorely disturbed him. They preached against
+all which he most loved and valued, in language purposely coarse; and
+the mild sweetness of the rebukes which he administered, showed plainly
+on which side lay, in the abbey of Woburn, the larger portion of the
+spirit of Heaven. Now, when the passions of those times have died away,
+and we can look back with more indifferent eyes, how touching is the
+following scene. There was one Sir William, curate of Woburn Chapel,
+whose tongue, it seems, was rough beyond the rest. The abbot met him one
+day, and spoke to him. 'Sir William,' he said, 'I hear tell ye be a
+great railer. I marvel that ye rail so. I pray you teach my cure the
+Scripture of God, and that may be to edification. I pray you leave such
+railing. Ye call the pope a bear and a bandog. Either he is a good man
+or an ill. <i>Domino suo stat aut cadit.</i> The office of a bishop is
+honourable. What edifying is this to rail? Let him alone.'</p>
+
+<p>But they would not let him alone, nor would they let the abbot alone. He
+grew 'somewhat acrased,' they said; vexed with feelings of which they
+had no experience. He fell sick, sorrow and the Lent discipline weighing
+upon him. The brethren went to see him in his room; one Brother Dan
+Woburn came among the rest, and asked him how he did; the abbot
+answered, 'I would that I had died with the good men that died for
+holding with the pope. My conscience, my conscience doth grudge me every
+day for it.' Life was fast losing its value for him. What was life to
+him or any man when bought with a sin against his soul? 'If the abbot be
+disposed to die, for that matter,' Brother Croxton observed, 'he may die
+as soon as he will.'</p>
+
+<p>All Lent he fasted and prayed, and his illness grew upon him; and at
+length in Passion week he thought all was over, and that he was going
+away. On Passion Sunday he called the brethren about him, and as they
+stood round his bed, with their cold, hard eyes, 'he exhorted them all
+to charity;' he implored them 'never to consent to go out of their
+monastery; and if it chanced them to be put from it, they should in no
+wise forsake their habit.' After these words, 'being in a great agony,
+he rose out of his bed, and cried out and said, "I would to God, it
+would please him to take me out of this wretched world; and I would I
+had died with the good men that have suffered death heretofore, for
+they<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[Pg 292]</a></span> were quickly out of their pain."'<a name="FNanchor_T_20" id="FNanchor_T_20"></a><a href="#Footnote_T_20" class="fnanchor">[T]</a> Then, half wandering, he
+began to mutter to himself aloud the thoughts which had been working in
+him in his struggles; and quoting St. Bernard's words about the pope, he
+exclaimed, 'Tu quis es primatu Abel, gubernatione Noah, auctoritate
+Moses, judicatu Samuel, potestate Petrus, unctione Christus. Ali&aelig;
+ecclesi&aelig; habent super se pastores. Tu pastor pastorum es.'</p>
+
+<p>Let it be remembered that this is no sentimental fiction begotten out of
+the brain of some ingenious novelist, but the record of the true words
+and sufferings of a genuine child of Adam, labouring in a trial too hard
+for him.</p>
+
+<p>He prayed to die, and in good time death was to come to him; but not,
+after all, in the sick bed, with his expiation but half completed. A
+year before, he had thrown down the cross when it was offered him. He
+was to take it again&mdash;the very cross which he had refused. He recovered.
+He was brought before the council; with what result, there are no means
+of knowing. To admit the papal supremacy when officially questioned was
+high treason. Whether the abbot was constant, and received some
+conditional pardon, or whether his heart again for the moment failed
+him&mdash;whichever he did, the records are silent. This only we ascertain of
+him: that he was not put to death under the statute of supremacy. But,
+two years later, when the official list was presented to the Parliament
+of those who had suffered for their share in 'the Pilgrimage of Grace,'
+among the rest we find the name of Robert Hobbes, late Abbot of Woburn.
+To this solitary fact we can add nothing. The rebellion was put down,
+and in the punishment of the offenders there was unusual leniency; not
+more than thirty persons were executed, although forty thousand had been
+in arms. Those only were selected who had been most signally implicated.
+But they were all leaders in the movement; the men of highest rank, and
+therefore greatest guilt. They died for what they believed their duty;
+and the king and council did their duty in enforcing the laws against
+armed insurgents. He for whose cause each supposed themselves to be
+contending, has long since judged between them; and both parties perhaps
+now see all things with clearer eyes than was permitted to them on
+earth.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[Pg 293]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>We also can see more distinctly. We will not refuse the Abbot Hobbes a
+brief record of his trial and passion. And although twelve generations
+of Russells&mdash;all loyal to the Protestant ascendancy&mdash;have swept Woburn
+clear of Catholic associations, they, too, in these later days, will not
+regret to see revived the authentic story of its last abbot.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[Pg 294]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_Q_17" id="Footnote_Q_17"></a><a href="#FNanchor_Q_17"><span class="label">[Q]</span></a> From <i>Fraser's Magazine</i>, 1857.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_R_18" id="Footnote_R_18"></a><a href="#FNanchor_R_18"><span class="label">[R]</span></a> Rolls House MS., <i>Miscellaneous Papers</i>, First Series.
+356.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_S_19" id="Footnote_S_19"></a><a href="#FNanchor_S_19"><span class="label">[S]</span></a> Tanner MS. 105, Bodleian Library, Oxford.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_T_20" id="Footnote_T_20"></a><a href="#FNanchor_T_20"><span class="label">[T]</span></a> Meaning, as he afterwards said, More and Fisher and the
+Carthusians.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="ENGLANDS_FORGOTTEN_WORTHIESU" id="ENGLANDS_FORGOTTEN_WORTHIESU"></a>ENGLAND'S FORGOTTEN WORTHIES.<a name="FNanchor_U_21" id="FNanchor_U_21"></a><a href="#Footnote_U_21" class="fnanchor">[U]</a></h2>
+
+<p class="in">1. <i>The Observations of Sir Richard Hawkins, Knt., in his Voyage in the
+South Sea in 1593.</i> Reprinted from the Edition of 1622, and Edited by R.
+H. Major, Esq., of the British Museum. Published by the Hakluyt Society.</p>
+
+<p>2. <i>The Discoverie of the Empire of Guiana.</i> By Sir Walter Ralegh, Knt.
+Edited, with copious Explanatory Notes, and a Biographical Memoir, by
+Sir Robert H. Schomburgk, Phil. D., &amp;c.</p>
+
+<p>3. <i>Narratives of Early Voyages undertaken for the Discovery of a
+Passage to Cathaia and India by the North-west</i>; with Selections from
+the Records of the Worshipful Fellowship of the Merchants of London,
+trading into the East Indies, and from MSS. in the Library of the
+British Museum, now first published, by Thomas Rundall, Esq.</p>
+
+
+<p class="no_in">The Reformation, the Antipodes, the American Continent, the Planetary
+system, and the infinite deep of the Heavens, have now become common and
+familiar facts to us. Globes and orreries are the playthings of our
+school-days; we inhale the spirit of Protestantism with our earliest
+breath of consciousness. It is all but impossible to throw back our
+imagination into the time when, as new grand discoveries, they stirred
+every mind which they touched with awe and wonder at the revelation
+which God had sent down among mankind. Vast spiritual and material
+continents lay for the first time displayed, opening fields of thought
+and fields of enterprise of which none could conjecture the limit. Old
+routine was broken up. Men were thrown back on their own strength and
+their own power, unshackled, to accomplish whatever they might dare. And
+although we do not speak of these discoveries as the cause of that
+enormous force of heart and intellect which accompanied them (for they
+were as much the effect as the cause, and one reacted on the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[Pg 295]</a></span> other),
+yet at any rate they afforded scope and room for the play of powers
+which, without such scope, let them have been as transcendant as they
+would, must have passed away unproductive and blighted.</p>
+
+<p>An earnest faith in the supernatural, an intensely real conviction of
+the divine and devilish forces by which the universe was guided and
+misguided, was the inheritance of the Elizabethan age from Catholic
+Christianity. The fiercest and most lawless men did then really and
+truly believe in the actual personal presence of God or the devil in
+every accident, or scene, or action. They brought to the contemplation
+of the new heaven and the new earth an imagination saturated with the
+spiritual convictions of the old era, which were not lost, but only
+infinitely expanded. The planets, whose vastness they now learnt to
+recognise, were, therefore, only the more powerful for evil or for good;
+the tides were the breathing of Demogorgon; and the idolatrous American
+tribes were real worshippers of the real devil, and were assisted with
+the full power of his evil army.</p>
+
+<p>It is a form of thought which, however in a vague and general way we may
+continue to use its phraseology, has become, in its detailed application
+to life, utterly strange to us. We congratulate ourselves on the
+enlargement of our understanding when we read the decisions of grave law
+courts in cases of supposed witchcraft; we smile complacently over
+Raleigh's story of the island of the Amazons, and rejoice that we are
+not such as he&mdash;entangled in the cobwebs of effete and foolish
+superstition. Yet the true conclusion is less flattering to our vanity.
+That Raleigh and Bacon could believe what they believed, and could be
+what they were notwithstanding, is to us a proof that the injury which
+such mistakes can inflict is unspeakably insignificant: and arising, as
+they arose, from a never-failing sense of the real awfulness and mystery
+of the world, and of the life of human souls upon it, they witness to
+the presence in such minds of a spirit, the loss of which not the most
+perfect acquaintance with every law by which the whole creation moves
+can compensate. We wonder at the grandeur, the moral majesty of some of
+Shakespeare's characters, so far beyond what the noblest among ourselves
+can imitate, and at first thought we attribute it to the genius of the
+poet, who has outstripped nature in his creations. But we are
+misunderstanding<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[Pg 296]</a></span> the power and the meaning of poetry in attributing
+creativeness to it in any such sense. Shakespeare created, but only as
+the spirit of nature created around him, working in him as it worked
+abroad in those among whom he lived. The men whom he draws were such men
+as he saw and knew; the words they utter were such as he heard in the
+ordinary conversations in which he joined. At the Mermaid with Raleigh
+and with Sidney, and at a thousand unnamed English firesides, he found
+the living originals for his Prince Hals, his Orlandos, his Antonios,
+his Portias, his Isabellas. The closer personal acquaintance which we
+can form with the English of the age of Elizabeth, the more we are
+satisfied that Shakespeare's great poetry is no more than the rhythmic
+echo of the life which it depicts.</p>
+
+<p>It was, therefore, with no little interest that we heard of the
+formation of a society which was to employ itself, as we understood, in
+republishing in accessible form some, if not all, of the invaluable
+records compiled or composed by Richard Hakluyt. Books, like everything
+else, have their appointed death-day; the souls of them, unless they be
+found worthy of a second birth in a new body, perish with the paper in
+which they lived; and the early folio Hakluyts, not from their own want
+of merit, but from our neglect of them, were expiring of old age. The
+five-volume quarto edition, published in 1811, so little people then
+cared for the exploits of their ancestors, consisted but of 270 copies.
+It was intended for no more than for curious antiquaries, or for the
+great libraries, where it could be consulted as a book of reference; and
+among a people, the greater part of whom had never heard Hakluyt's name,
+the editors are scarcely to be blamed if it never so much as occurred to
+them that general readers would care to have the book within their
+reach.</p>
+
+<p>And yet those five volumes may be called the Prose Epic of the modern
+English nation. They contain the heroic tales of the exploits of the
+great men in whom the new era was inaugurated; not mythic, like the
+Iliads and the Eddas, but plain broad narratives of substantial facts,
+which rival legend in interest and grandeur. What the old epics were to
+the royally or nobly born, this modern epic is to the common people. We
+have no longer kings or princes for chief actors, to whom the heroism
+like the dominion of the world<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[Pg 297]</a></span> had in time past been confined. But, as
+it was in the days of the Apostles, when a few poor fishermen from an
+obscure lake in Palestine assumed, under the Divine mission, the
+spiritual authority over mankind, so, in the days of our own Elizabeth,
+the seamen from the banks of the Thames and the Avon, the Plym and the
+Dart, self-taught and self-directed, with no impulse but what was
+beating in their own royal hearts, went out across the unknown seas
+fighting, discovering, colonising, and graved out the channels, paving
+them at last with their bones, through which the commerce and enterprise
+of England has flowed out over all the world. We can conceive nothing,
+not the songs of Homer himself, which would be read among us with more
+enthusiastic interest than these plain massive tales; and a people's
+edition of them in these days, when the writings of Ainsworth and Eug&egrave;ne
+Sue circulate in tens of thousands, would perhaps be the most blessed
+antidote which could be bestowed upon us. The heroes themselves were the
+men of the people&mdash;the Joneses, the Smiths, the Davises, the Drakes; and
+no courtly pen, with the one exception of Raleigh, lent its polish or
+its varnish to set them off. In most cases the captain himself, or his
+clerk or servant, or some unknown gentleman volunteer, sat down and
+chronicled the voyage which he had shared; and thus inorganically arose
+a collection of writings which, with all their simplicity, are for
+nothing more striking than for the high moral beauty, warmed with
+natural feeling, which displays itself through all their pages. With us,
+the sailor is scarcely himself beyond his quarter-deck. If he is
+distinguished in his profession, he is professional merely; or if he is
+more than that, he owes it not to his work as a sailor, but to
+independent domestic culture. With them, their profession was the school
+of their nature, a high moral education which most brought out what was
+most nobly human in them; and the wonders of earth, and air, and sea,
+and sky, were a real intelligible language in which they heard Almighty
+God speaking to them.</p>
+
+<p>That such hopes of what might be accomplished by the Hakluyt Society
+should in some measure be disappointed, is only what might naturally be
+anticipated of all very sanguine expectation. Cheap editions are
+expensive editions to the publisher; and historical societies, from a
+necessity which appears to encumber all corporate English action,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[Pg 298]</a></span>
+rarely fail to do their work expensively and infelicitously. Yet, after
+all allowances and deductions, we cannot reconcile ourselves to the
+mortification of having found but one volume in the series to be even
+tolerably edited, and that one to be edited by a gentleman to whom
+England is but an adopted country&mdash;Sir Robert Schomburgk. Raleigh's
+'Conquest of Guiana,' with Sir Robert's sketch of Raleigh's history and
+character, form in everything but its cost a very model of an excellent
+volume. For the remaining editors,<a name="FNanchor_V_22" id="FNanchor_V_22"></a><a href="#Footnote_V_22" class="fnanchor">[V]</a> we are obliged to say that they
+have exerted themselves successfully to paralyse whatever interest was
+reviving in Hakluyt, and to consign their own volumes to the same
+obscurity to which time and accident were consigning the earlier
+editions. Very little which was really noteworthy escaped the industry
+of Hakluyt himself, and we looked to find reprints of the most
+remarkable of the stories which were to be found in his collection. The
+editors began unfortunately with proposing to continue the work where he
+had left it, and to produce narratives hitherto unpublished of other
+voyages of inferior interest, or not of English origin. Better thoughts
+appear to have occurred to them in the course of the work; but their
+evil destiny overtook them before their thoughts could get themselves
+executed. We opened one volume with eagerness, bearing the title of
+'Voyages to the North-west,' in hope of finding our old friends Davis
+and Frobisher. We found a vast unnecessary Editor's Preface: and instead
+of the voyages themselves, which with their picturesqueness and moral
+beauty shine among the fairest jewels in the diamond mine of Hakluyt, we
+encountered an analysis and digest of their results, which Milton was
+called in to justify in an inappropriate quotation. It is much as if
+they had undertaken to edit 'Bacon's Essays,' and had retailed what they
+conceived to be the substance of them in their own language; strangely
+failing to see that the real value of the actions or the thoughts of
+remarkable men does not lie in the material result which can be gathered
+from them, but in the heart and soul of the actors or speakers
+themselves. Consider what Homer's 'Odyssey' would be, reduced into an
+analysis.</p>
+
+<p>The editor of the 'Letters of Columbus' apologises for the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[Pg 299]</a></span> rudeness of
+the old seaman's phraseology. Columbus, he tells us, was not so great a
+master of the pen as of the art of navigation. We are to make excuses
+for him. We are put on our guard, and warned not to be offended, before
+we are introduced to the sublime record of sufferings under which a man
+of the highest order was staggering towards the end of his earthly
+calamities; although the inarticulate fragments in which his thought
+breaks out from him, are strokes of natural art by the side of which
+literary pathos is poor and meaningless.</p>
+
+<p>And even in the subjects which they select they are pursued by the same
+curious fatality. Why is Drake to be best known, or to be only known, in
+his last voyage? Why pass over the success, and endeavour to immortalise
+the failure? When Drake climbed the tree in Panama, and saw both oceans,
+and vowed that he would sail a ship in the Pacific; when he crawled out
+upon the cliffs of Terra del Fuego, and leaned his head over the
+southernmost angle of the world; when he scored a furrow round the globe
+with his keel, and received the homage of the barbarians of the
+antipodes in the name of the Virgin Queen, he was another man from what
+he had become after twenty years of court life and intrigue, and Spanish
+fighting and gold-hunting. There is a tragic solemnity in his end, if we
+take it as the last act of his career; but it is his life, not his
+death, which we desire&mdash;not what he failed to do, but what he did.</p>
+
+<p>But every bad has a worse below it, and more offensive than all these is
+the editor of Hawkins's 'Voyage to the South Sea.' The narrative is
+striking in itself; not one of the best, but very good; and, as it is
+republished complete, we can fortunately read it through, carefully
+shutting off Captain Bethune's notes with one hand, and we shall then
+find in it the same beauty which breathes in the tone of all the
+writings of the period.</p>
+
+<p>It is a record of misfortune, but of misfortune which did no dishonour
+to him who sunk under it; and there is a melancholy dignity in the style
+in which Hawkins tells his story, which seems to say, that though he had
+been defeated, and had never again an opportunity of winning back his
+lost laurels, he respects himself still for the heart with which he
+endured a shame which would have broken a smaller man. It would have
+required no large exertion of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[Pg 300]</a></span> editorial self-denial to have abstained
+from marring the pages with puns of which 'Punch' would be ashamed, and
+with the vulgar affectation of patronage with which the sea captain of
+the nineteenth century condescends to criticise and approve of his
+half-barbarous precursor. And what excuse can we find for such an
+offence as this which follows. The war of freedom of the Araucan Indians
+is the most gallant episode in the history of the New World. The
+Spaniards themselves were not behindhand in acknowledging the chivalry
+before which they quailed, and, after many years of ineffectual efforts,
+they gave up a conflict which they never afterwards resumed; leaving the
+Araucans alone, of all the American races with which they came in
+contact, a liberty which they were unable to tear from them. It is a
+subject for an epic poem; and whatever admiration is due to the heroism
+of a brave people whom no inequality of strength could <ins class="cor" title="Alternate spelling for appall">appal</ins> and no
+defeats could crush, these poor Indians have a right to demand of us.
+The story of the war was well known in Europe; Hawkins, in coasting the
+western shores of South America, fell in with them, and the finest
+passage in his book is the relation of one of the incidents of the
+war:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>An Indian captain was taken prisoner by the Spaniards, and for that
+he was of name, and known to have done his devoir against them, they
+cut off his hands, thereby intending to disenable him to fight any
+more against them. But he, returning home, desirous to revenge this
+injury, to maintain his liberty, with the reputation of his nation,
+and to help to banish the Spaniard, with his tongue intreated and
+incited them to persevere in their accustomed valour and reputation,
+abasing the enemy and advancing his nation; condemning their
+contraries of cowardliness, and confirming it by the cruelty used
+with him and other his companions in their mishaps; showing them his
+arms without hands, and naming his brethren whose half feet they had
+cut off, because they might be unable to sit on horseback; with
+force arguing that if they feared them not, they would not have used
+so great inhumanity&mdash;for fear produceth cruelty, the companion of
+cowardice. Thus encouraged he them to fight for their lives, limbs,
+and liberty, choosing rather to die an honourable death fighting,
+than to live in servitude as fruitless members of the commonwealth.
+Thus using the office of a sergeant-major, and having loaden his two
+stumps with bundles of arrows, he succoured them who, in the
+succeeding battle had their store wasted; and changing himself from
+place to place, animated and encouraged his countrymen with such
+comfortable persuasions,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[Pg 301]</a></span> as it is reported and credibly believed,
+that he did more good with his words and presence, without striking
+a stroke, than a great part of the army did with fighting to the
+utmost. </p></div>
+
+<p>It is an action which may take its place by the side of the myth of
+Mucius Sc&aelig;vola, or the real exploit of that brother of the poet
+&AElig;schylus, who, when the Persians were flying from Marathon, clung to a
+ship till both his hands were hewn away, and then seized it with his
+teeth, leaving his name as a portent even in the splendid calendar of
+Athenian heroes. Captain Bethune, without call or need, making his
+notes, merely, as he tells us, from the suggestions of his own mind as
+he revised the proof-sheets, informs us, at the bottom of the page, that
+'it reminds him of the familiar lines&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div class="i0">For Widdrington I needs must wail,</div><br />
+<div class="i1">As one in doleful dumps;</div><br />
+<div class="i0">For when his legs were smitten off,</div><br />
+<div class="i1">He fought upon his stumps.'</div><br />
+</div></div>
+
+<p>It must not avail him, that he has but quoted from the ballad of Chevy
+Chase. It is the most deformed stanza<a name="FNanchor_W_23" id="FNanchor_W_23"></a><a href="#Footnote_W_23" class="fnanchor">[W]</a> of the modern deformed version
+which was composed in the eclipse of heart and taste, on the restoration
+of the Stuarts; and if such verses could then pass for serious poetry,
+they have ceased to sound in any ear as other than a burlesque; the
+associations which they arouse are only absurd, and they could only have
+continued to ring in his memory through their ludicrous <ins class="cor" title="Alternate spelling for doggerel">doggrel.</ins></p>
+
+<p>When to these offences of the Society we add, that in the long laboured
+appendices and introductions, which fill up valuable space, which
+increase the expense of the edition, and into reading which many readers
+are, no doubt, betrayed, we have found nothing which assists the
+understanding of the stories which they are supposed to illustrate&mdash;when
+we have declared that we have found what is most<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[Pg 302]</a></span> uncommon passed
+without notice, and what is most trite and familiar encumbered with
+comment&mdash;we have unpacked our hearts of the bitterness which these
+volumes have aroused in us, and can now take our leave of them and go on
+with our more grateful subject.</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth, whose despotism was as peremptory as that of the
+Plantagenets, and whose ideas of the English constitution were limited
+in the highest degree, was, notwithstanding, more beloved by her
+subjects than any sovereign before or since. It was because,
+substantially, she was the people's sovereign; because it was given to
+her to conduct the outgrowth of the national life through its crisis of
+change, and the weight of her great mind and her great place were thrown
+on the people's side. She was able to paralyse the dying efforts with
+which, if a Stuart had been on the throne, the representatives of an
+effete system might have made the struggle a deadly one; and the history
+of England is not the history of France, because the resolution of one
+person held the Reformation firm till it had rooted itself in the heart
+of the nation, and could not be again overthrown. The Catholic faith was
+no longer able to furnish standing ground on which the English or any
+other nation could live a manly and a godly life. Feudalism, as a social
+organisation, was not any more a system under which their energies could
+have scope to move. Thenceforward, not the Catholic Church, but any man
+to whom God had given a heart to feel and a voice to speak, was to be
+the teacher to whom men were to listen; and great actions were not to
+remain the privilege of the families of the Norman nobles, but were to
+be laid within the reach of the poorest plebeian who had the stuff in
+him to perform them. Alone, of all the sovereigns in Europe, Elizabeth
+saw the change which had passed over the world. She saw it, and saw it
+in faith, and accepted it. The England of the Catholic Hierarchy and the
+Norman Baron, was to cast its shell and to become the England of free
+thought and commerce and manufacture, which was to plough the ocean with
+its navies, and sow its colonies over the globe; and the first
+appearance of these enormous forces and the light of the earliest
+achievements of the new era shines through the forty years of the reign
+of Elizabeth with a grandeur which, when once its history is written,
+will be seen to be among the most sublime phenomena<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[Pg 303]</a></span> which the earth as
+yet has witnessed. The work was not of her creation; the heart of the
+whole English nation was stirred to its depths; and Elizabeth's place
+was to recognise, to love, to foster, and to guide. The Government
+originated nothing; at such a time it was neither necessary nor
+desirable that it should do so; but wherever expensive enterprises were
+on foot which promised ultimate good, and doubtful immediate profit, we
+never fail to find among the lists of contributors the Queen's Majesty,
+Burghley, Leicester, Walsingham. Never chary of her presence, for
+Elizabeth could afford to condescend, when ships were fitting for
+distant voyages in the river, the queen would go down in her barge and
+inspect. Frobisher, who was but a poor sailor adventurer, sees her wave
+her handkerchief to him from the Greenwich Palace windows, and he brings
+her home a narwhal's horn for a present. She honoured her people, and
+her people loved her; and the result was that, with no cost to the
+Government, she saw them scattering the fleets of the Spaniards,
+planting America with colonies, and exploring the most distant seas.
+Either for honour or for expectation of profit, or from that unconscious
+necessity by which a great people, like a great man, will do what is
+right, and must do it at the right time, whoever had the means to
+furnish a ship, and whoever had the talent to command one, laid their
+abilities together and went out to pioneer, and to conquer, and take
+possession, in the name of the Queen of the Sea. There was no nation so
+remote but what some one or other was found ready to undertake an
+expedition there, in the hope of opening a trade; and, let them go where
+they would, they were sure of Elizabeth's countenance. We find letters
+written by her, for the benefit of nameless adventurers, to every
+potentate of whom she had ever heard&mdash;to the Emperors of China, Japan,
+and India, the Grand Duke of Russia, the Grand Turk, the Persian
+'Sofee,' and other unheard-of Asiatic and African princes; whatever was
+to be done in England, or by Englishmen, Elizabeth assisted when she
+could, and admired when she could not. The springs of great actions are
+always difficult to analyse&mdash;impossible to analyse perfectly&mdash;possible
+to analyse only very proximately; and the force by which a man throws a
+good action out of himself is invisible and mystical, like that which
+brings out the blossom and the fruit upon<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[Pg 304]</a></span> the tree. The motives which
+we find men urging for their enterprises seem often insufficient to have
+prompted them to so large a daring. They did what they did from the
+great unrest in them which made them do it, and what it was may be best
+measured by the results in the present England and America.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, there was enough in the state of the world, and in the
+position of England, to have furnished abundance of conscious motive,
+and to have stirred the drowsiest minister of routine.</p>
+
+<p>Among material occasions for exertion, the population began to outgrow
+the employment, and there was a necessity for plantations to serve as an
+outlet. Men who, under happier circumstances, might have led decent
+lives, and done good service, were now driven by want to desperate
+courses&mdash;'witness,' as Richard Hakluyt says, 'twenty tall fellows hanged
+last Rochester assizes for small robberies;' and there is an admirable
+paper addressed to the Privy Council by Christopher Carlile,
+Walsingham's son-in-law, pointing out the possible openings to be made
+in or through such plantations for home produce and manufacture.</p>
+
+<p>Far below all such prudential economics and mercantile ambitions,
+however, lay a chivalrous enthusiasm which in these dull days we can
+hardly, without an effort, realise. The life-and-death wrestle between
+the Reformation and the old religion had settled in the last quarter of
+the sixteenth century into a permanent struggle between England and
+Spain. France was disabled. All the help which Elizabeth could spare
+barely enabled the Netherlands to defend themselves. Protestantism, if
+it conquered, must conquer on another field; and by the circumstances of
+the time the championship of the Reformed faith fell to the English
+sailors. The sword of Spain was forged in the gold-mines of Peru; the
+legions of Alva were only to be disarmed by intercepting the gold ships
+on their passage; and, inspired by an enthusiasm like that which four
+centuries before had precipitated the chivalry of Europe upon the East,
+the same spirit which in its present degeneracy covers our bays and
+rivers with pleasure yachts, then fitted out armed privateers, to sweep
+the Atlantic, and plunder and destroy Spanish ships wherever they could
+meet them.</p>
+
+<p>Thus, from a combination of causes, the whole force and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[Pg 305]</a></span> energy of the
+age was directed towards the sea. The wide excitement, and the greatness
+of the interests at stake, raised even common men above themselves; and
+people who in ordinary times would have been no more than mere seamen,
+or mere money-making merchants, appear before us with a largeness and
+greatness of heart and mind in which their duties to God and their
+country are alike clearly and broadly seen and felt to be paramount to
+every other.</p>
+
+<p>Ordinary English traders we find fighting Spanish war ships in behalf of
+the Protestant faith. The cruisers of the Spanish Main were full of
+generous eagerness for the conversion of the savage nations to
+Christianity. And what is even more surprising, sites for colonisation
+were examined and scrutinised by such men in a lofty statesmanlike
+spirit, and a ready insight was displayed by them into the indirect
+effects of a wisely-extended commerce on every highest human interest.</p>
+
+<p>Again, in the conflict with the Spaniards, there was a further feeling,
+a feeling of genuine chivalry, which was spurring on the English, and
+one which must be well understood and well remembered, if men like
+Drake, and Hawkins, and Raleigh are to be tolerably understood. One of
+the English Reviews, a short time ago, was much amused with a story of
+Drake having excommunicated a petty officer as a punishment for some
+moral offence; the reviewer not being able to see in Drake, as a man,
+anything more than a highly brave and successful buccaneer, whose
+pretences to religion might rank with the devotion of an Italian bandit
+to the Madonna. And so Hawkins, and even Raleigh, are regarded by
+superficial persons, who see only such outward circumstances of their
+history as correspond with their own impressions. The high nature of
+these men, and the high objects which they pursued, will only rise out
+and become visible to us as we can throw ourselves back into their times
+and teach our hearts to feel as they felt. We do not find in the
+language of the voyagers themselves, or of those who lent them their
+help at home, any of that weak watery talk of 'protection of
+aborigines,' which, as soon as it is translated into fact, becomes the
+most active policy for their destruction, soul and body. But the stories
+of the dealings of the Spaniards with the conquered Indians, which were
+widely known in England, seem to have affected all classes of people,
+not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[Pg 306]</a></span> with pious passive horror, but with a genuine human indignation. A
+thousand anecdotes in detail we find scattered up and down the pages of
+Hakluyt, who, with a view to make them known, translated Peter Martyr's
+letters; and each commonest sailor-boy who had heard these stories from
+his childhood among the tales of his father's fireside, had longed to be
+a man, that he might go out and become the avenger of a gallant and
+suffering people. A high mission, undertaken with a generous heart,
+seldom fails to make those worthy of it to whom it is given; and it was
+a point of honour, if of nothing more, among the English sailors, to do
+no discredit by their conduct to the greatness of their cause. The high
+courtesy, the chivalry of the Spanish nobles, so conspicuous in their
+dealings with their European rivals, either failed to touch them in
+their dealings with uncultivated idolators, or the high temper of the
+aristocracy was unable to restrain or to influence the masses of the
+soldiers. It would be as ungenerous as it would be untrue, to charge
+upon their religion the grievous actions of men who called themselves
+the armed missionaries of Catholicism, when the Catholic priests and
+bishops were the loudest in the indignation with which they denounced
+them. But we are obliged to charge upon it that slow and subtle
+influence so inevitably exercised by any religion which is divorced from
+life, and converted into a thing of form, or creed, or ceremony, or
+system&mdash;which could permit the same men to be extravagant in a sincere
+devotion to the Queen of Heaven, whose entire lower nature, unsubdued
+and unaffected, was given up to thirst of gold, and plunder, and
+sensuality. If religion does not make men more humane than they would be
+without it, it makes them fatally less so; and it is to be feared that
+the spirit of the Pilgrim Fathers, which had oscillated to the other
+extreme, and had again crystallised into a formal antinomian fanaticism,
+reproduced the same fatal results as those in which the Spaniards had
+set them their unworthy precedent. But the Elizabethan navigators, full
+for the most part with large kindness, wisdom, gentleness, and beauty,
+bear names untainted, as far as we know, with a single crime against the
+savages of America; and the name of England was as famous in the Indian
+seas as that of Spain was infamous. On the banks of the Oronoko there
+was remembered for a hundred years<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[Pg 307]</a></span> the noble captain who had come there
+from the great queen beyond the seas; and Raleigh speaks the language of
+the heart of his country, when he urges the English statesmen to
+colonise Guiana, and exults in the glorious hope of driving the white
+marauder into the Pacific, and restoring the Incas to the throne of
+Peru.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Who will not be persuaded (he says) that now at length the great
+Judge of the world hath heard the sighs, groans, and lamentations,
+hath seen the tears and blood of so many millions of innocent men,
+women, and children, afflicted, robbed, reviled, branded with hot
+irons, roasted, dismembered, mangled, stabbed, whipped, racked,
+scalded with hot oil, put to the strapado, ripped alive, beheaded in
+sport, drowned, dashed against the rocks, famished, devoured by
+mastiffs, burned, and by infinite cruelties consumed, and purposeth
+to scourge and plague that cursed nation, and to take the yoke of
+servitude from that distressed people, as free by nature as any
+Christian? </p></div>
+
+<p>Poor Raleigh! if peace and comfort in this world were of much importance
+to him, it was in an ill day that he provoked the revenge of Spain. The
+strength of England was needed at the moment at its own door; the Armada
+came, and there was no means of executing such an enterprise. And
+afterwards the throne of Elizabeth was filled by a Stuart, and Guiana
+was to be no scene of glory for Raleigh; rather, as later historians are
+pleased to think, it was the grave of his reputation.</p>
+
+<p>But the hope burned clear in him through all the weary years of unjust
+imprisonment; and when he was a grey-headed old man, the base son of a
+bad mother used it to betray him. The success of his last enterprise was
+made the condition under which he was to be pardoned for a crime which
+he had not committed; and its success depended, as he knew, on its being
+kept secret from the Spaniards. James required of Raleigh on his
+allegiance a detail of what he proposed, giving him at the same time his
+word as a king that the secret should be safe with him. The next day it
+was sweeping out of the port of London in the swiftest of the Spanish
+ships, with private orders to the Governor of St. Thomas to provoke a
+collision when Raleigh should arrive there, which should afterwards cost
+him his heart's blood.</p>
+
+<p>We modern readers may run rapidly over the series of epithets under
+which Raleigh has catalogued the Indian<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[Pg 308]</a></span> sufferings, hoping that they
+are exaggerated, seeing that they are horrible, and closing our eyes
+against them with swiftest haste; but it was not so when every epithet
+suggested a hundred familiar facts; and some of these (not resting on
+English prejudice, but on sad Spanish evidence, which is too full of
+shame and sorrow to be suspected) shall be given in this place, however
+old a story it may be thought; because, as we said above, it is
+impossible to understand the actions of these men, unless we are
+familiar with the feelings of which their hearts were full.</p>
+
+<p>The massacres under Cortez and Pizarro, terrible as they were, were not
+the occasion which stirred the deepest indignation. They had the excuse
+of what might be called, for want of a better word, necessity, and of
+the desperate position of small bands of men in the midst of enemies who
+might be counted by millions. And in De Soto, when he burnt his guides
+in Florida (it was his practice, when there was danger of treachery,
+that those who were left alive might take warning); or in Vasco Nunnez,
+praying to the Virgin on the mountains of Darien, and going down from
+off them into the valleys to hunt the Indian caciques, and fling them
+alive to his bloodhounds; there was, at least, with all this fierceness
+and cruelty, a desperate courage which we cannot refuse to admire, and
+which mingles with and corrects our horror. It is the refinement of the
+Spaniard's cruelty in the settled and conquered provinces, excused by no
+danger and provoked by no resistance, the details of which witness to
+the infernal coolness with which it was perpetrated; and the great
+bearing of the Indians themselves under an oppression which they
+despaired of resisting, raises the whole history to the rank of a
+world-wide tragedy, in which the nobler but weaker nature was crushed
+under a malignant force which was stronger and yet meaner than itself.
+Gold hunting and lust were the two passions for which the Spaniards
+cared; and the fate of the Indian women was only more dreadful than that
+of the men, who were ganged and chained to a labour in the mines which
+was only to cease with their lives, in a land where but a little before
+they had lived a free contented people, more innocent of crime than
+perhaps any people upon earth. If we can conceive what our own feelings
+would be&mdash;if, in the 'development of the mammalia,' some baser but more
+powerful race than man were to appear<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[Pg 309]</a></span> upon this planet, and we and our
+wives and children at our own happy firesides were degraded from our
+freedom, and became to them what the lower animals are to us, we can
+perhaps realise the feelings of the enslaved nations of Hispaniola.</p>
+
+<p>As a harsh justification of slavery, it is sometimes urged that men who
+do not deserve to be slaves will prefer death to the endurance of it;
+and that if they prize their liberty, it is always in their power to
+assert it in the old Roman fashion. Tried even by so hard a rule, the
+Indians vindicated their right; and, before the close of the sixteenth
+century, the entire group of the Western Islands in the hands of the
+Spaniards, containing, when Columbus discovered them, many millions of
+inhabitants, were left literally desolate from suicide. Of the anecdotes
+of this terrible self-immolation, as they were then known in England,
+here are a few out of many.</p>
+
+<p>The first is simple, and a specimen of the ordinary method. A Yucatan
+cacique, who was forced with his old subjects to labour in the mines, at
+last 'calling those miners into an house, to the number of ninety-five,
+he thus debateth with them:'&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'My worthy companions and friends, why desire we to live any longer
+under so cruel a servitude? Let us now go unto the perpetual seat of
+our ancestors, for we shall there have rest from these intolerable
+cares and grievances which we endure under the subjection of the
+unthankful. Go ye before, I will presently follow you.' Having so
+spoken, he held out whole handfuls of those leaves which take away
+life, prepared for the purpose, and giving every one part thereof,
+being kindled to suck up the fume; who obeyed his command, the king
+and his chief kinsmen reserving the last place for themselves. </p></div>
+
+<p>We speak of the crime of suicide, but few persons will see a crime in
+this sad and stately leave-taking of a life which it was no longer
+possible to bear with unbroken hearts. We do not envy the Indian, who,
+with Spaniards before him as an evidence of the fruits which their creed
+brought forth, deliberately exchanged for it the old religion of his
+country, which could sustain him in an action of such melancholy
+grandeur. But the Indians did not always reply to their oppressors with
+escaping passively beyond their hands. Here is a story with matter in it
+for as rich a tragedy as &OElig;dipus or Agamemnon; and in its stern and
+tremendous<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[Pg 310]</a></span> features, more nearly resembling them than any which were
+conceived even by Shakespeare.</p>
+
+<p>An officer named Orlando had taken the daughter of a Cuban cacique to be
+his mistress. She was with child by him, but, suspecting her of being
+engaged in some other intrigue, he had her fastened to two wooden spits,
+not intending to kill her, but to terrify her; and setting her before
+the fire, he ordered that she should be turned by the servants of the
+kitchen.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The maiden, stricken with fear through the cruelty thereof, and
+strange kind of torment, presently gave up the ghost. The cacique
+her father, understanding the matter, took thirty of his men and
+went to the house of the captain, who was then absent, and slew his
+wife, whom he had married after that wicked act committed, and the
+women who were companions of the wife, and her servants every one.
+Then shutting the door of the house, and putting fire under it, he
+burnt himself and all his companions that assisted him, together
+with the captain's dead family and goods. </p></div>
+
+<p>This is no fiction or poet's romance. It is a tale of wrath and revenge,
+which in sober dreadful truth enacted itself upon this earth, and
+remains among the eternal records of the doings of mankind upon it. As
+some relief to its most terrible features, we follow it with a story
+which has a touch in it of diabolical humour.</p>
+
+<p>The slave-owners finding their slaves escaping thus unprosperously out
+of their grasp, set themselves to find a remedy for so desperate a
+disease, and were swift to avail themselves of any weakness, mental or
+bodily, through which to retain them in life. One of these proprietors
+being informed that a number of his people intended to kill themselves
+on a certain day, at a particular spot, and knowing by experience that
+they were too likely to do it, presented himself there at the time which
+had been fixed upon, and telling the Indians when they arrived that he
+knew their intention, and that it was vain for them to attempt to keep
+anything a secret from him, he ended with saying, that he had come there
+to kill himself with them; that as he had used them ill in this world,
+he might use them worse in the next; 'with which he did dissuade them
+presently from their purpose.' With what efficacy such believers in the
+immortality of the soul were likely to recommend either their faith or
+their God; rather, how terribly all the devotion and all the
+earnestness<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[Pg 311]</a></span> with which the poor priests who followed in the wake of the
+conquerors laboured to recommend it were shamed and paralysed, they
+themselves too bitterly lament.</p>
+
+<p>It was idle to send out governor after governor with orders to stay such
+practices. They had but to arrive on the scene to become infected with
+the same fever; or if any remnant of Castilian honour, or any faintest
+echoes of the faith which they professed, still flickered in a few of
+the best and noblest, they could but look on with folded hands in
+ineffectual mourning; they could do nothing without soldiers, and the
+soldiers were the worst offenders. Hispaniola became a desert; the gold
+was in the mines, and there were no slaves left remaining to extract it.
+One means which the Spaniards dared to employ to supply the vacancy,
+brought about an incident which in its piteous pathos exceeds any story
+we have ever heard. Crimes and criminals are swept away by time, nature
+finds an antidote for their poison, and they and their ill consequences
+alike are blotted out and perish. If we do not for give the villain, at
+least we cease to hate him, as it grows more clear to us that he injures
+none so deeply as himself. But the <ins class="cor" title="[Greek: th&ecirc;ri&ocirc;d&ecirc;s kakia]">&#952;&#951;&#961;&#953;&#969;&#948;&#951;&#962; &#954;&#945;&#954;&#953;&#945;</ins>, the
+enormous wickedness by which humanity itself has been outraged and
+disgraced, we cannot forgive; we cannot cease to hate that; the years
+roll away, but the tints of it remain on the pages of history, deep and
+horrible as the day on which they were entered there.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>When the Spaniards understood the simple opinion of the Yucatan
+islanders concerning the souls of their departed, which, after their
+sins purged in the cold northern mountains should pass into the
+south, to the intent that, leaving their own country of their own
+accord, they might suffer themselves to be brought to Hispaniola,
+they did persuade those poor wretches, that they came from those
+places where they should see their parents and children, and all
+their kindred and friends that were dead, and should enjoy all kinds
+of delights with the embracements and fruition of all beloved
+beings. And they, being infected and possessed with these crafty and
+subtle imaginations, singing and rejoicing left their country, and
+followed vain and idle hope. But when they saw that they were
+deceived, and neither met their parents nor any that they desired,
+but were compelled to undergo grievous sovereignty and command, and
+to endure cruel and extreme labour, they either slew themselves, or,
+choosing to famish, gave up their fair spirits, being persuaded by
+no reason or violence to take food. So these miserable Yucatans came
+to their end. </p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[Pg 312]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It was once more as it was in the days of the Apostles. The New World
+was first offered to the holders of the old traditions. They were the
+husbandmen first chosen for the new vineyard, and blood and desolation
+were the only fruits which they reared upon it. In their hands it was
+becoming a kingdom, not of God, but of the devil, and a sentence of
+blight went out against them and against their works. How fatally it has
+worked, let modern Spain and Spanish America bear witness. We need not
+follow further the history of their dealings with the Indians. For their
+colonies, a fatality appears to have followed all attempts at Catholic
+colonisation. Like shoots from an old decaying tree which no skill and
+no care can rear, they were planted, and for a while they might seem to
+grow; but their life was never more than a lingering death, a failure,
+which to a thinking person would outweigh in the arguments against
+Catholicism whole libraries of faultless <i>catenas</i>, and a <i>consensus
+patrum</i> unbroken through fifteen centuries for the supremacy of St.
+Peter.</p>
+
+<p>There is no occasion to look for superstitious causes to explain the
+phenomenon. The Catholic faith had ceased to be the faith of the large
+mass of earnest thinking capable persons; and to those who can best do
+the work, all work in this world sooner or later is committed. America
+was the natural home for Protestants; persecuted at home, they sought a
+place where they might worship God in their own way, without danger of
+stake or gibbet, and the French Huguenots, as afterwards the English
+Puritans, early found their way there. The fate of a party of Coligny's
+people, who had gone out as settlers, shall be the last of these
+stories, illustrating, as it does in the highest degree, the wrath and
+fury with which the passions on both sides were boiling. A certain John
+Ribault, with about 400 companions, had emigrated to Florida. They were
+quiet inoffensive people, and lived in peace there several years,
+cultivating the soil, building villages, and on the best possible terms
+with the natives. Spain was at the time at peace with France; we are,
+therefore, to suppose that it was in pursuance of the great crusade, in
+which they might feel secure of the secret, if not the confessed,
+sympathy of the Guises, that a powerful Spanish fleet bore down upon
+this settlement. The French made no resistance, and they were seized and
+flayed alive, and their<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[Pg 313]</a></span> bodies hung out upon the trees, with an
+inscription suspended over them, 'Not as Frenchmen, but as heretics.' At
+Paris all was sweetness and silence. The settlement was tranquilly
+surrendered to the same men who had made it the scene of their atrocity;
+and two years later, 500 of the very Spaniards who had been most active
+in the murder were living there in peaceable possession, in two forts
+which their relation with the natives had obliged them to build. It was
+well that there were other Frenchmen living, of whose consciences the
+Court had not the keeping, and who were able on emergencies to do what
+was right without consulting it. A certain privateer, named Dominique de
+Gourges, secretly armed and equipped a vessel at Rochelle, and, stealing
+across the Atlantic and in two days collecting a strong party of
+Indians, he came down suddenly upon the forts, and, taking them by
+storm, slew or afterwards hanged every man he found there, leaving their
+bodies on the trees on which they had hanged the Huguenots, with their
+own inscription reversed against them&mdash;'Not as Spaniards, but as
+murderers.' For which exploit, well deserving of all honest men's
+praise, Dominique de Gourges had to fly his country for his life; and,
+coming to England, was received with honourable welcome by Elizabeth.</p>
+
+<p>It was at such a time, and to take their part amidst such scenes as
+these, that the English navigators appeared along the shores of South
+America, as the armed soldiers of the Reformation, and as the avengers
+of humanity. As their enterprise was grand and lofty, so for the most
+part was the manner in which they bore themselves worthy of it. They
+were no nation of saints, in the modern sentimental sense of that word;
+they were prompt, stern men&mdash;more ready ever to strike an enemy than to
+parley with him; and, private adventurers as they all were, it was
+natural enough that private rapacity and private badness should be found
+among them as among other mortals. Every Englishman who had the means
+was at liberty to fit out a ship or ships, and if he could produce
+tolerable vouchers for himself, received at once a commission from the
+Court. The battles of England were fought by her children, at their own
+risk and cost, and they were at liberty to repay themselves the expense
+of their expeditions by plundering at the cost of the national enemy.
+Thus, of course, in a mixed world, there were found mixed marauding
+crews of scoundrels, who played the game<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[Pg 314]</a></span> which a century later was
+played with such effect by the pirates of the Tortugas. Negro hunters
+too, there were, and a bad black slave trade&mdash;in which Elizabeth
+herself, being hard driven for money, did not disdain to invest her
+capital&mdash;but on the whole, and in the war with the Spaniards, as in the
+war with the elements, the conduct and character of the English sailors,
+considering what they were and the work which they were sent to do,
+present us all through that age with such a picture of gallantry,
+disinterestedness, and high heroic energy, as has never been
+overmatched; the more remarkable, as it was the fruit of no drill or
+discipline, no tradition, no system, no organised training, but was the
+free native growth of a noble virgin soil.</p>
+
+<p>Before starting on an expedition, it was usual for the crew and the
+officers to meet and arrange among themselves a series of articles of
+conduct, to which they bound themselves by a formal agreement, the
+entire body itself undertaking to see to their observance. It is quite
+possible that strong religious profession, and even sincere profession,
+might be accompanied, as it was in the Spaniards, with everything most
+detestable. It is not sufficient of itself to prove that their actions
+would correspond with it, but it is one among a number of evidences; and
+coming as most of these men come before us, with hands clear of any
+blood but of fair and open enemies, their articles may pass at least as
+indications of what they were.</p>
+
+<p>Here we have a few instances:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Richard Hawkins's ship's company was, as he himself informs us, an
+unusually loose one. Nevertheless, we find them 'gathered together every
+morning and evening to serve God;' and a fire on board, which only
+Hawkins's presence of mind prevented from destroying ship and crew
+together, was made use of by the men as an occasion to banish swearing
+out of the ship.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>With a general consent of all our company, it was ordained that
+there should be a palmer or ferula which should be in the keeping of
+him who was taken with an oath; and that he who had the palmer
+should give to every one that he took swearing, a palmada with it
+and the ferula; and whosoever at the time of evening or morning
+prayer was found to have the palmer, should have three blows given
+him by the captain or the master; and that he should still be bound
+to free himself by taking another, or else to run in danger of
+continuing the penalty,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[Pg 315]</a></span> which, being executed a few days, reformed
+the vice, so that in three days together was not one oath heard to
+be sworn. </p></div>
+
+<p>The regulations for Luke Fox's voyage commenced thus:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>For as much as the good success and prosperity of every action doth
+consist in the due service and glorifying of God, knowing that not
+only our being and preservation, but the prosperity of all our
+actions and enterprises do immediately depend on His Almighty
+goodness and mercy; it is provided&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>First, that all the company, as well officers as others, shall duly
+repair every day twice at the call of the bell to hear public
+prayers to be read, such as are authorised by the church, and that
+in a godly and devout manner, as good Christians ought.</p>
+
+<p>Secondly, that no man shall swear by the name of God, or use any
+profane oath, or blaspheme His holy name. </p></div>
+
+<p>To symptoms such as these, we cannot but assign a very different value
+when they are the spontaneous growth of common minds, unstimulated by
+sense of propriety or rules of the service, or other official influence
+lay or ecclesiastic, from what attaches to the somewhat similar
+ceremonials in which, among persons whose position is conspicuous,
+important enterprises are now and then inaugurated.</p>
+
+<p>We have said as much as we intend to say of the treatment by the
+Spaniards of the Indian women. Sir Walter Raleigh is commonly
+represented by historians as rather defective, if he was remarkable at
+all, on the moral side of his character. Yet Raleigh can declare
+proudly, that all the time he was on the Oronoko, 'neither by force nor
+other means had any of his men intercourse with any woman there;' and
+the narrator of the incidents of Raleigh's last voyage acquaints his
+correspondent 'with some particulars touching the government of the
+fleet, which, although other men in their voyages doubtless in some
+measure observed, yet in all the great volumes which have been written
+touching voyages, there is no precedent of so godly severe and martial
+government, which not only in itself is laudable and worthy of
+imitation, but is also fit to be written and engraven on every man's
+soul that coveteth to do honour to his country.'</p>
+
+<p>Once more, the modern theory of Drake is, as we said above, that he was
+a gentleman-like pirate on a large scale, who is indebted for the place
+which he fills in history to the indistinct ideas of right and wrong
+prevailing in the unenlightened<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[Pg 316]</a></span> age in which he lived, and who
+therefore demands all the toleration of our own enlarged humanity to
+allow him to remain there. Let us see how the following incident can be
+made to coincide with this hypothesis:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>A few days after clearing the Channel on his first great voyage, he fell
+in with a small Spanish ship, which he took for a prize. He committed
+the care of it to a certain Mr. Doughtie, a person much trusted by, and
+personally very dear to him, and this second vessel was to follow him as
+a tender.</p>
+
+<p>In dangerous expeditions into unknown seas, a second smaller ship was
+often indispensable to success; but many finely intended enterprises
+were ruined by the cowardice of the officers to whom such ships were
+entrusted; who shrank as danger thickened, and again and again took
+advantage of darkness or heavy weather to make sail for England and
+forsake their commander. Hawkins twice suffered in this way; so did Sir
+Humfrey Gilbert; and, although Drake's own kind feeling for his old
+friend has prevented him from leaving an exact account of his offence,
+we gather from the scattered hints which are let fall, that he, too, was
+meditating a similar piece of treason. However, it may or may not have
+been thus. But when at Port St. Julien, 'our General,' says one of the
+crew,&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Began to inquire diligently of the actions of Mr. Thomas Doughtie,
+and found them not to be such as he looked for, but tending rather
+to contention or mutiny, or some other disorder, whereby, without
+redresse, the success of the voyage might greatly have been
+hazarded. Whereupon the company was called together and made
+acquainted with the particulars of the cause, which were found,
+partly by Mr. Doughtie's own confession, and partly by the evidence
+of the fact, to be true, which, when our General saw, although his
+private affection to Mr. Doughtie (as he then, in the presence of us
+all, sacredly protested) was great, yet the care which he had of the
+state of the voyage, of the expectation of Her Majesty, and of the
+honour of his country, did more touch him, as indeed it ought, than
+the private respect of one man; so that the cause being <ins class="cor" title="Alternate spelling for thoroughly.">throughly</ins>
+heard, and all things done in good order as near as might be to the
+course of our law in England, it was concluded that Mr. Doughtie
+should receive punishment according to the quality of the offence.
+And he, seeing no remedy but patience for himself, desired before
+his death to receive the communion, which he did at the hands of Mr.
+Fletcher, our minister, and our General himself accompanied him in
+that holy action, which, being done, and the place of execution made
+ready, he, having embraced our General,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[Pg 317]</a></span> and taken leave of all the
+company, with prayers for the Queen's Majesty and our realm, in
+quiet sort laid his head to the block, where he ended his life. This
+being done, our General made divers speeches to the whole company,
+persuading us to unity, obedience, love, and regard of our voyage,
+and for the better confirmation thereof, willed every man the next
+Sunday following to prepare himself to receive the communion, as
+Christian brethren and friends ought to do, which was done in very
+reverent sort, and so with good contentment every man went about his
+business. </p></div>
+
+<p>The simple majesty of this anecdote can gain nothing from any comment
+which we might offer upon it. The crew of a common English ship
+organising, of their own free motion, on that wild shore, a judgment
+hall more grand and awful than any most elaborate law court, is not to
+be reconciled with the pirate theory. Drake, it is true, appropriated
+and brought home a million and a half of Spanish treasure, while England
+and Spain were at peace. He took that treasure because for many years
+the officers of the Inquisition had made free at their pleasure with the
+lives and goods of English merchants and seamen. The king of Spain, when
+appealed to, had replied that he had no power over the Holy House; and
+it was necessary to make the king of Spain, or the Inquisition, or
+whoever were the parties responsible, feel that they could not play
+their pious pranks with impunity. When Drake seized the bullion at
+Panama, he sent word to the viceroy that he should now learn to respect
+the properties of English subjects; and he added, that if four English
+sailors, who were prisoners in Mexico, were molested, he would execute
+2,000 Spaniards and send the viceroy their heads. Spain and England were
+at peace, but Popery and Protestantism were at war&mdash;deep, deadly, and
+irreconcileable.</p>
+
+<p>Wherever we find them, they are still the same. In the courts of Japan
+or of China; fighting Spaniards in the Pacific, or prisoners among the
+Algerines; founding colonies which by-and-by were to grow into enormous
+Transatlantic republics, or exploring in crazy pinnaces the fierce
+latitudes of the Polar seas,&mdash;they are the same indomitable God-fearing
+men whose life was one great liturgy. 'The ice was strong, but God was
+stronger,' says one of Frobisher's men, after grinding a night and a day
+among the icebergs, not waiting for God to come down and split the ice
+for them, but toiling through the long hours, himself and the rest
+fending<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">[Pg 318]</a></span> off the vessel with poles and planks, with death glaring at
+them out of the rocks. Icebergs were strong, Spaniards were strong, and
+storms, and corsairs, and rocks and reefs, which no chart had then
+noted&mdash;they were all strong; but God was stronger, and that was all
+which they cared to know.</p>
+
+<p>Out of the vast number of illustrations it is difficult to make wise
+selections, but the attention floats loosely over generalities, and only
+individual instances can seize it and hold it fast. We shall attempt to
+bring our readers face to face with some of these men; not, of course,
+to write their biographies, but to sketch the details of a few scenes,
+in the hope that they may tempt those under whose eyes they may fall to
+look for themselves to complete the perfect figure.</p>
+
+<p>Some two miles above the port of Dartmouth, once among the most
+important harbours in England, on a projecting angle of land which runs
+out into the river at the head of one of its most beautiful reaches,
+there has stood for some centuries the Manor House of Greenaway. The
+water runs deep all the way to it from the sea, and the largest vessels
+may ride with safety within a stone's throw of the windows. In the
+latter half of the sixteenth century there must have met, in the hall of
+this mansion, a party as remarkable as could have been found anywhere in
+England. Humfrey and Adrian Gilbert, with their half-brother, Walter
+Raleigh, here, when little boys, played at sailors in the reaches of
+Long Stream; in the summer evenings doubtless rowing down with the tide
+to the port, and wondering at the quaint figure-heads and carved prows
+of the ships which thronged it; or climbing on board, and listening,
+with hearts beating, to the mariners' tales of the new earth beyond the
+sunset. And here in later life, matured men, whose boyish dreams had
+become heroic action, they used again to meet in the intervals of quiet,
+and the rock is shown underneath the house where Raleigh smoked the
+first tobacco. Another remarkable man, of whom we shall presently speak
+more closely, could not fail to have made a fourth at these meetings. A
+sailor boy of Sandwich, the adjoining parish, John Davis, showed early a
+genius which could not have escaped the eye of such neighbours, and in
+the atmosphere of Greenaway he learned to be as noble as the Gilberts,
+and as tender and delicate as Raleigh. Of this party, for the present we
+confine ourselves to the host and owner, Humfrey Gilbert, knighted
+afterwards by Elizabeth.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[Pg 319]</a></span> Led by the scenes of his childhood to the sea
+and to sea adventures, and afterwards, as his mind unfolded, to study
+his profession scientifically, we find him as soon as he was old enough
+to think for himself, or make others listen to him, 'amending the great
+errors of naval sea cards, whose common fault is to make the degree of
+longitude in every latitude of one common bigness;' inventing
+instruments for taking observations, studying the form of the earth, and
+convincing himself that there was a north-west passage, and studying the
+necessities of his country, and discovering the remedies for them in
+colonisation and extended markets for home manufactures. Gilbert was
+examined before the Queen's Majesty and the Privy Council, and the
+record of his examination he has himself left to us in a paper which he
+afterwards drew up, and strange enough reading it is. The most admirable
+conclusions stand side by side with the wildest conjectures.</p>
+
+<p>Homer and Aristotle are pressed into service to prove that the ocean
+runs round the three old continents, and that America therefore is
+necessarily an island. The Gulf Stream, which he had carefully observed,
+eked out by a theory of the <i>primum mobile</i>, is made to demonstrate a
+channel to the north, corresponding to Magellan's Straits in the south,
+Gilbert believing, in common with almost everyone of his day, that these
+straits were the only opening into the Pacific, and the land to the
+South was unbroken to the Pole. He prophesies a market in the East for
+our manufactured linen and calicoes:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The Easterns greatly prizing the same, as appeareth in Hester, where
+the pomp is expressed of the great King of India, Ahasuerus, who
+matched the coloured clothes wherewith his houses and tents were
+apparelled, with gold and silver, as part of his greatest treasure. </p></div>
+
+<p>These and other such arguments were the best analysis which Sir Humfrey
+had to offer of the spirit which he felt to be working in him. We may
+think what we please of them; but we can have but one thought of the
+great grand words with which the memorial concludes, and they alone
+would explain the love which Elizabeth bore him:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Never, therefore, mislike with me for taking in hand any laudable
+and honest enterprise, for if through pleasure or idleness we
+purchase shame, the pleasure vanisheth, but the shame abideth for
+ever.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">[Pg 320]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Give me leave, therefore, without offence, always to live and die in
+this mind: that he is not worthy to live at all that, for fear or
+danger of death, shunneth his country's service and his own honour,
+seeing that death is inevitable and the fame of virtue immortal,
+wherefore in this behalf <i>mutare vel timere sperno</i>. </p></div>
+
+<p>Two voyages which he undertook at his own cost, which shattered his
+fortune, and failed, as they naturally might, since inefficient help or
+mutiny of subordinates, or other disorders, are inevitable conditions
+under which more or less great men must be content to see their great
+thoughts mutilated by the feebleness of their instruments, did not
+dishearten him, and in June 1583 a last fleet of five ships sailed from
+the port of Dartmouth, with commission from the queen to discover and
+take possession from latitude 45&deg; to 50&deg; North&mdash;a voyage not a little
+noteworthy, there being planted in the course of it the first English
+colony west of the Atlantic. Elizabeth had a foreboding that she would
+never see him again. She sent him a jewel as a last token of her favour,
+and she desired Raleigh to have his picture taken before he went.</p>
+
+<p>The history of the voyage was written by a Mr. Edward Hayes, of
+Dartmouth, one of the principal actors in it, and as a composition it is
+more remarkable for fine writing than any very commendable thought in
+the author. But Sir Humfrey's nature shines through the infirmity of his
+chronicler; and in the end, indeed, Mr. Hayes himself is subdued into a
+better mind. He had lost money by the voyage, and we will hope his
+higher nature was only under a temporary eclipse. The fleet consisted
+(it is well to observe the ships and the size of them) of the 'Delight,'
+120 tons; the barque 'Raleigh,' 200 tons (this ship deserted off the
+Land's End); the 'Golden Hinde' and the 'Swallow,' 40 tons each; and the
+'Squirrel,' which was called the frigate, 10 tons. For the uninitiated
+in such matters, we may add, that if in a vessel the size of the last, a
+member of the Yacht Club would consider that he had earned a club-room
+immortality if he had ventured a run in the depth of summer from Cowes
+to the Channel Islands.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>We were in all (says Mr. Hayes) 260 men, among whom we had of every
+faculty good choice. Besides, for solace of our own people, and
+allurement of the savages, we were provided of music in good
+variety,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">[Pg 321]</a></span> not omitting the least toys, as morris dancers, hobby
+horses, and May-like conceits to delight the savage people. </p></div>
+
+<p>The expedition reached Newfoundland without accident. St. John's was
+taken possession of, and a colony left there; and Sir Humfrey then set
+out exploring along the American coast to the south, he himself doing
+all the work in his little 10-ton cutter, the service being too
+dangerous for the larger vessels to venture on. One of these had
+remained at St. John's. He was now accompanied only by the 'Delight' and
+the 'Golden Hinde,' and these two keeping as near the shore as they
+dared, he spent what remained of the summer examining every creek and
+bay, marking the soundings, taking the bearings of the possible
+harbours, and risking his life, as every hour he was obliged to risk it
+in such a service, in thus leading, as it were, the forlorn hope in the
+conquest of the New World. How dangerous it was we shall presently see.
+It was towards the end of August.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The evening was fair and pleasant, yet not without token of storm to
+ensue, and most part of this Wednesday night, like the swan that
+singeth before her death, they in the 'Delight' continued in
+sounding of drums and trumpets and fifes, also winding the cornets
+and hautboys, and in the end of their jollity left with the battell
+and ringing of doleful knells. </p></div>
+
+<p>Two days after came the storm; the 'Delight' struck upon a bank, and
+went down in sight of the other vessels, which were unable to render her
+any help. Sir Humfrey's papers, among other things, were all lost in
+her; at the time considered by him an irreparable misfortune. But it was
+little matter, he was never to need them. The 'Golden Hinde' and the
+'Squirrel' were now left alone of the five ships. The provisions were
+running short, and the summer season was closing. Both crews were on
+short allowance; and with much difficulty Sir Humfrey was prevailed upon
+to be satisfied for the present with what he had done, and to lay off
+for England.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>So upon Saturday, in the afternoon, the 31st of August, we changed
+our course, and returned back for England, at which very instant,
+even in winding about, there passed along between us and the land,
+which we now forsook, a very lion, to our seeming, in shape, hair,
+and colour; not swimming after the manner of a beast by moving of
+his feet, but rather sliding upon the water with his whole body,
+except<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">[Pg 322]</a></span> his legs, in sight, neither yet diving under and again
+rising as the manner is of whales, porpoises, and other fish, but
+confidently showing himself without hiding, notwithstanding that we
+presented ourselves in open view and gesture to amaze him. Thus he
+passed along, turning his head to and fro, yawning and gaping wide,
+with <ins class="cor" title="Alternate spelling for ugly.">ougly</ins> demonstration of long teeth and glaring eyes; and to
+bidde us farewell, coming right against the 'Hinde,' he sent forth a
+horrible voice, roaring and bellowing as doth a lion, which
+spectacle we all beheld so far as we were able to discern the same,
+as men prone to wonder at every strange thing. What opinion others
+had thereof, and chiefly the General himself, I forbear to deliver.
+But he took it for <i>Bonum Omen</i>, rejoicing that he was to war
+against such an enemy, if it were the devil. </p></div>
+
+<p>We have no doubt that he did think it was the devil; men in those days
+believing really that evil was more than a principle or a necessary
+accident, and that in all their labour for God and for right, they must
+make their account to have to fight with the devil in his proper person.
+But if we are to call it superstition, and if this were no devil in the
+form of a roaring lion, but a mere great seal or sea-lion, it is a more
+innocent superstition to impersonate so real a power, and it requires a
+bolder heart to rise up against it and defy it in its living terror,
+than to sublimate it away into a philosophical principle, and to forget
+to battle with it in speculating on its origin and nature. But to follow
+the brave Sir Humfrey, whose work of fighting with the devil was now
+over, and who was passing to his reward. The 2nd of September the
+General came on board the 'Golden Hinde' 'to make merry with us.' He
+greatly deplored the loss of his books and papers, but he was full of
+confidence from what he had seen, and talked with eagerness and warmth
+of the new expedition for the following spring. Apocryphal gold-mines
+still occupying the minds of Mr. Hayes and others, they were persuaded
+that Sir Humfrey was keeping to himself some such discovery which he had
+secretly made, and they tried hard to extract it from him. They could
+make nothing, however, of his odd, ironical answers, and their sorrow at
+the catastrophe which followed is sadly blended with disappointment that
+such a secret should have perished. Sir Humfrey doubtless saw America
+with other eyes than theirs, and gold-mines richer than California in
+its huge rivers and savannahs.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Leaving the issue of this good hope (about the gold), (continues Mr.
+Hayes), to God, who only knoweth the truth thereof, I will hasten
+to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">[Pg 323]</a></span> the end of this tragedy, which must be knit up in the person of
+our General, and as it was God's ordinance upon him, even so the
+vehement persuasion of his friends could nothing avail to divert him
+from his wilful resolution of going in his frigate; and when he was
+entreated by the captain, master, and others, his well-wishers in
+the 'Hinde,' not to venture, this was his answer&mdash;'I will not
+forsake my little company going homewards, with whom I have passed
+so many storms and perils.' </p></div>
+
+<p>Two-thirds of the way home they met foul weather and terrible seas,
+'breaking-short and pyramid-wise.' Men who had all their lives 'occupied
+the sea' had never seen it more outrageous. 'We had also upon our
+mainyard an apparition of a little fier by night, which seamen do call
+Castor and Pollux.'</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Monday the ninth of September, in the afternoon, the frigate was
+near cast away oppressed by waves, but at that time recovered, and
+giving forth signs of joy, the General, sitting abaft with a book in
+his hand, cried out unto us in the 'Hinde' so often as we did
+approach within hearing, 'We are as near to heaven by sea as by
+land,' reiterating the same speech, well beseeming a soldier
+resolute in Jesus Christ, as I can testify that he was. The same
+Monday night, about twelve of the clock, or not long after, the
+frigate being ahead of us in the 'Golden Hinde,' suddenly her lights
+were out, whereof as it were in a moment we lost the sight; and
+withal our watch cried, 'The General was cast away,' which was too
+true.</p>
+
+<p>Thus faithfully (concludes Mr. Hayes, in some degree rising above
+himself) I have related this story, wherein some spark of the
+knight's virtues, though he be extinguished, may happily appear; he
+remaining resolute to a purpose honest and godly as was this, to
+discover, possess, and reduce unto the service of God and Christian
+piety, those remote and heathen countries of America. Such is the
+infinite bounty of God, who from every evil deriveth good, that
+fruit may grow in time of our travelling in these North-Western
+lands (as has it not grown?), and the crosses, turmoils, and
+afflictions, both in the preparation and execution of the voyage,
+did correct the intemperate humours which before we noted to be in
+this gentleman, and made unsavoury and less delightful his other
+manifold virtues.</p>
+
+<p>Thus as he was refined and made nearer unto the image of God, so it
+pleased the Divine will to resume him unto Himself, whither both his
+and every other high and noble mind have always aspired. </p></div>
+
+<p>Such was Sir Humfrey Gilbert; still in the prime of his years when the
+Atlantic swallowed him. Like the gleam of a landscape lit suddenly for a
+moment by the lightning, these<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">[Pg 324]</a></span> few scenes flash down to us across the
+centuries: but what a life must that have been of which this was the
+conclusion! We have glimpses of him a few years earlier, when he won his
+spurs in Ireland&mdash;won them by deeds which to us seem terrible in their
+ruthlessness, but which won the applause of Sir Henry Sidney as too high
+for praise or even reward. Chequered like all of us with lines of light
+and darkness, he was, nevertheless, one of a race which has ceased to
+be. We look round for them, and we can hardly believe that the same
+blood is flowing in our veins. Brave we may still be, and strong perhaps
+as they, but the high moral grace which made bravery and strength so
+beautiful is departed from us for ever.</p>
+
+<p>Our space is sadly limited for historical portrait painting; but we must
+find room for another of that Greenaway party whose nature was as fine
+as that of Gilbert, and who intellectually was more largely gifted. The
+latter was drowned in 1583. In 1585 John Davis left Dartmouth on his
+first voyage into the Polar seas; and twice subsequently he went again,
+venturing in small ill-equipped vessels of thirty or forty tons into the
+most dangerous seas. These voyages were as remarkable for their success
+as for the daring with which they were accomplished, and Davis's epitaph
+is written on the map of the world, where his name still remains to
+commemorate his discoveries. Brave as he was, he is distinguished by a
+peculiar and exquisite sweetness of nature, which, from many little
+facts of his life, seems to have affected everyone with whom he came in
+contact in a remarkable degree. We find men, for the love of Master
+Davis, leaving their firesides to sail with him, without other hope or
+motion; we find silver bullets cast to shoot him in a mutiny; the hard
+rude natures of the mutineers being awed by something in his carriage
+which was not like that of a common man. He has written the account of
+one of his northern voyages himself; one of those, by-the-by, which the
+Hakluyt Society have mutilated; and there is an imaginative beauty in
+it, and a rich delicacy of expression, which is called out in him by the
+first sight of strange lands and things and people.</p>
+
+<p>To show what he was, we should have preferred, if possible, to have
+taken the story of his expedition into the South Seas, in which, under
+circumstances of singular difficulty, he was deserted by Candish, under
+whom he had sailed; and after<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">[Pg 325]</a></span> inconceivable trials from famine, mutiny,
+and storm, ultimately saved himself and his ship, and such of the crew
+as had chosen to submit to his orders. But it is a long history, and
+will not admit of being curtailed. As an instance of the stuff of which
+it was composed, he ran back in the black night in a gale of wind
+through the Straits of Magellan, <i>by a chart which he had made with the
+eye in passing up</i>. His anchors were lost or broken; the cables were
+parted. He could not bring up the ship; there was nothing for it but to
+run, and he carried her safe through along a channel often not three
+miles broad, sixty miles from end to end, and twisting like the reaches
+of a river.</p>
+
+<p>For the present, however, we are forced to content ourselves with a few
+sketches out of the north-west voyages. Here is one, for instance, which
+shows how an Englishman could deal with the Indians. Davis had landed at
+Gilbert's Sound, and gone up the country exploring. On his return he
+found his crew loud in complaints of the thievish propensities of the
+natives, and urgent to have an example made of some of them. On the next
+occasion he fired a gun at them with blank cartridge; but their nature
+was still too strong for them.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Seeing iron (he says), they could in no case forbear stealing;
+which, when I perceived, it did but minister to me occasion of
+laughter to see their simplicity, and I willed that they should not
+be hardly used, but that our company should be more diligent to keep
+their things, supposing it to be very hard in so short a time to
+make them know their evils. </p></div>
+
+<p>In his own way, however, he took an opportunity of administering a
+lesson to them of a more wholesome kind than could be given with
+gunpowder and bullets. Like the rest his countrymen, he believed the
+savage Indians in their idolatries to be worshippers of the devil. 'They
+are witches,' he says; 'they have images in great store, and use many
+kinds of enchantments.' And these enchantments they tried on one
+occasion to put in force against himself and his crew.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Being on shore on the 4th day of July, one of them made a long
+oration, and then kindled a fire, into which with many strange words
+and gestures he put divers things, which we supposed to be a
+sacrifice. Myself and certain of my company standing by, they
+desired us to go into the smoke. I desired them to go into the
+smoke, which they<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326">[Pg 326]</a></span> would by no means do. I then took one of them and
+thrust him into the smoke, and willed one of my company to tread out
+the fire, and spurn it into the sea, which was done to show them
+that we did contemn their sorceries. </p></div>
+
+<p>It is a very English story&mdash;exactly what a modern Englishman would do;
+only, perhaps, not believing that there was any real devil in the case,
+which makes a difference. However, real or not real, after seeing him
+patiently put up with such an injury, we will hope the poor Greenlander
+had less respect for the devil than formerly.</p>
+
+<p>Leaving Gilbert's Sound, Davis went on to the north-west, and in lat.
+63&deg; fell in with a barrier of ice, which he coasted for thirteen days
+without finding an opening. The very sight of an iceberg was new to all
+his crew; and the ropes and shrouds, though it was midsummer, becoming
+compassed with ice,&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The people began to fall sick and faint-hearted&mdash;whereupon, very
+orderly, with good discretion, they entreated me to regard the
+safety of mine own life, as well as the preservation of theirs; and
+that I should not, through overbouldness, leave their widows and
+fatherless children to give me bitter curses.</p>
+
+<p>Whereupon, seeking counsel of God, it pleased His Divine Majesty to
+move my heart to prosecute that which I hope shall be to His glory,
+and to the contentation of every Christian mind. </p></div>
+
+<p>He had two vessels&mdash;one of some burthen, the other a pinnace of thirty
+tons. The result of the counsel which he had sought was, that he made
+over his own large vessel to such as wished to return, and himself,
+'thinking it better to die with honour than to return with infamy,' went
+on, with such volunteers as would follow him, in a poor leaky cutter, up
+the sea now in commemoration of that adventure called Davis's Straits.
+He ascended 4&deg; North of the furthest known point, among storms and
+icebergs, when the long days and twilight nights alone saved him from
+being destroyed, and, coasting back along the American shore, he
+discovered Hudson's Straits, supposed then to be the long-desired
+entrance into the Pacific. This exploit drew the attention of
+Walsingham, and by him Davis was presented to Burleigh, 'who was also
+pleased to show him great encouragement.' If either these statesmen or
+Elizabeth had been twenty years younger, his name would have filled a
+larger space in history than a small<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327">[Pg 327]</a></span> corner of the map of the world;
+but if he was employed at all in the last years of the century, no
+<i>vates sacer</i> has been found to celebrate his work, and no clue is left
+to guide us. He disappears; a cloud falls over him. He is known to have
+commanded trading vessels in the Eastern seas, and to have returned five
+times from India. But the details are all lost, and accident has only
+parted the clouds for a moment to show us the mournful setting with
+which he, too, went down upon the sea.</p>
+
+<p>In taking out Sir Edward Michellthorne to India, in 1604, he fell in
+with a crew of Japanese, whose ship had been burnt, drifting at sea,
+without provisions, in a leaky junk. He supposed them to be pirates, but
+he did not choose to leave them to so wretched a death, and took them on
+board; and in a few hours, watching their opportunity, they murdered
+him.</p>
+
+<p>As the fool dieth, so dieth the wise, and there is no difference; it was
+the chance of the sea, and the ill reward of a humane action&mdash;a
+melancholy end for such a man&mdash;like the end of a warrior, not dying
+Epaminondas-like on the field of victory, but cut off in some poor brawl
+or ambuscade. But so it was with all these men. They were cut off in the
+flower of their days, and few of them laid their bones in the sepulchres
+of their fathers. They knew the service which they had chosen, and they
+did not ask the wages for which they had not laboured. Life with them
+was no summer holiday, but a holy sacrifice offered up to duty, and what
+their Master sent was welcome. Beautiful is old age&mdash;beautiful as the
+slow-dropping mellow autumn of a rich glorious summer. In the old man,
+nature has fulfilled her work; she loads him with her blessings; she
+fills him with the fruits of a well-spent life; and, surrounded by his
+children and his children's children, she rocks him softly away to a
+grave, to which he is followed with blessings. God forbid we should not
+call it beautiful. It is beautiful, but not the most beautiful. There is
+another life, hard, rough, and thorny, trodden with bleeding feet and
+aching brow; the life of which the cross is the symbol; a battle which
+no peace follows, this side the grave; which the grave gapes to finish,
+before the victory is won; and&mdash;strange that it should be so&mdash;this is
+the highest life of man. Look back along the great names of history;
+there is none whose life has been other than this. They to whom<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328">[Pg 328]</a></span> it has
+been given to do the really highest work in this earth&mdash;whoever they
+are, Jew or Gentile, Pagan or Christian, warriors, legislators,
+philosophers, priests, poets, kings, slaves&mdash;one and all, their fate has
+been the same&mdash;the same bitter cup has been given to them to drink. And
+so it was with the servants of England in the sixteenth century. Their
+life was a long battle, either with the elements or with men; and it was
+enough for them to fulfil their work, and to pass away in the hour when
+God had nothing more to bid them do. They did not complain, and why
+should we complain for them? Peaceful life was not what they desired,
+and an honourable death had no terrors for them. Theirs was the old
+Grecian spirit, and the great heart of the Theban poet lived again in
+them:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div class="i0"><ins class="cor" title="Thanein d' hoisin ananka, ti ke tis an&ocirc;numon">&#920;&#945;&#957;&#949;&#953;&#957; &#948;' &#959;&#7985;&#963;&#953;&#957; &#945;&#957;&#945;&#947;&#954;&#945;, &#964;&#953; &#954;&#949; &#964;&#953;&#962; &#945;&#957;&#969;&#957;&#965;&#956;&#959;&#957;</ins></div><br />
+<div class="i0"><ins class="cor" title="g&ecirc;ras en skot&ocirc; kath&ecirc;menos hepsoi matan">&#947;&#951;&#961;&#945;&#962; &#949;&#957; &#963;&#954;&#959;&#964;&#969; &#954;&#945;&#952;&#951;&#956;&#949;&#957;&#959;&#962; &#7953;&#968;&#959;&#953; &#956;&#945;&#964;&#945;&#957;</ins>,</div><br />
+<div class="i0"><ins class="cor" title="hapant&ocirc;n kal&ocirc;n ammoros?">&#7937;&#960;&#945;&#957;&#964;&#969;&#957; &#954;&#945;&#955;&#969;&#957; &#945;&#956;&#956;&#959;&#961;&#959;&#962;;</ins></div><br />
+</div></div>
+
+<p>'Seeing,' in Gilbert's own brave words, 'that death is inevitable, and
+the fame of virtue is immortal; wherefore in this behalf <i>mutare vel
+timere sperno</i>.'</p>
+
+<p>In the conclusion of these light sketches we pass into an element
+different from that in which we have been lately dwelling. The scenes in
+which Gilbert and Davis played out their high natures were of the kind
+which we call peaceful, and the enemies with which they contended were
+principally the ice and the wind, and the stormy seas and the dangers of
+unknown and savage lands. We shall close amidst the roar of cannon, and
+the wrath and rage of battle. Hume, who alludes to the engagement which
+we are going to describe, speaks of it in a tone which shows that he
+looked at it as something portentous and prodigious; as a thing to
+wonder at&mdash;but scarcely as deserving the admiration which we pay to
+actions properly within the scope of humanity&mdash;and as if the energy
+which was displayed in it was like the unnatural strength of madness. He
+does not say this, but he appears to feel it; and he scarcely would have
+felt it if he had cared more deeply to saturate himself with the temper
+of the age of which he was writing. At the time, all England and all the
+world rang with the story. It struck a deeper terror, though it was but
+the action of a single ship, into the hearts of the Spanish people; it
+dealt a more deadly blow upon their fame and moral strength than the
+destruction of the Armada itself;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329">[Pg 329]</a></span> and in the direct results which arose
+from it, it was scarcely less disastrous to them. Hardly, as it seems to
+us, if the most glorious actions which are set like jewels in the
+history of mankind are weighed one against the other in the balance,
+hardly will those 300 Spartans who in the summer morning sate 'combing
+their long hair for death' in the passes of Thermopyl&aelig;, have earned a
+more lofty estimate for themselves than this one crew of modern
+Englishmen.</p>
+
+<p>In August 1591, Lord Thomas Howard, with six English line-of-battle
+ships, six victuallers, and two or three pinnaces, was lying at anchor
+under the Island of Florez. Light in ballast and short of water, with
+half his men disabled by sickness, Howard was unable to pursue the
+aggressive purpose on which he had been sent out. Several of the ships'
+crews were on shore: the ships themselves 'all pestered and <ins class="cor" title="Alternate spelling for rummaging.">rommaging</ins>,'
+with everything out of order. In this condition they were surprised by a
+Spanish fleet consisting of 53 men-of-war. Eleven out of the twelve
+English ships obeyed the signal of the admiral, to cut or weigh their
+anchors and escape as they might. The twelfth, the 'Revenge,' was unable
+for the moment to follow. Of her crew of 190, ninety were sick on shore,
+and, from the position of the ship, there was some delay and difficulty
+in getting them on board. The 'Revenge' was commanded by Sir Richard
+Grenville, of Bideford, a man well known in the Spanish seas, and the
+terror of the Spanish sailors; so fierce he was said to be, that mythic
+stories passed from lip to lip about him, and, like Earl Talbot or
+C&oelig;ur de Lion, the nurses at the Azores frightened children with the
+sound of his name. 'He was of great revenues, of his own inheritance,'
+they said, 'but of unquiet mind, and greatly affected to wars;' and from
+his uncontrollable propensities for blood-eating, he had volunteered his
+services to the queen; 'of so hard a complexion was he, that I (John
+Huighen von Linschoten, who is our authority here, and who was with the
+Spanish fleet after the action) have been told by divers credible
+persons who stood and beheld him, that he would carouse three or four
+glasses of wine, and take the glasses between his teeth and crush them
+in pieces and swallow them down.' Such Grenville was to the Spaniard. To
+the English he was a goodly and gallant gentleman, who had never turned
+his back upon an enemy, and was remarkable in that remarkable time for
+his constancy and daring. In this surprise at Florez<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330">[Pg 330]</a></span> he was in no haste
+to fly. He first saw all his sick on board and stowed away on the
+ballast; and then, with no more than 100 men left him to fight and work
+the ship, he deliberately weighed, uncertain, as it seemed at first,
+what he intended to do. The Spanish fleet were by this time on his
+weather bow, and he was persuaded (we here take his cousin Raleigh's
+beautiful narrative, and follow it in Raleigh's words) 'to cut his
+mainsail and cast about, and trust to the sailing of the ship:'&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>But Sir Richard utterly refused to turn from the enemy, alledging
+that he would rather choose to die than to dishonour himself, his
+country, and her Majesty's ship, persuading his company that he
+would pass through their two squadrons in spite of them, and enforce
+those of Seville to give him way: which he performed upon diverse of
+the foremost, who, as the mariners term it, sprang their luff, and
+fell under the lee of the 'Revenge.' But the other course had been
+the better; and might right well have been answered in so great an
+impossibility of prevailing: notwithstanding, out of the greatness
+of his mind, he could not be persuaded. </p></div>
+
+<p>The wind was light; the 'San Philip,' 'a huge high-<ins class="cor" title="See Transcriber's Notes.">carged</ins> ship' of 1,500
+tons, came up to windward of him, and, taking the wind out of his sails,
+ran aboard him.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>After the 'Revenge' was entangled with the 'San Philip,' four others
+boarded her, two on her larboard and two on her starboard. The fight
+thus beginning at three o'clock in the afternoon continued very
+terrible all that evening. But the great 'San Philip,' having
+received the lower tier of the 'Revenge,' shifted herself with all
+diligence from her sides, utterly misliking her first entertainment.
+The Spanish ships were tilled with soldiers, in some 200, besides
+the mariners, in some 500, in others 800. In ours there were none at
+all, besides the mariners, but the servants of the commander and
+some few voluntary gentlemen only. After many <ins class="cor" title="Alternate spelling for interchanged">enterchanged</ins> vollies
+of great ordnance and small shot, the Spaniards deliberated to enter
+the 'Revenge,' and made divers attempts, hoping to force her by the
+multitude of their armed soldiers and musketeers; but were still
+repulsed again and again, and at all times beaten back into their
+own ship or into the sea. In the beginning of the fight the 'George
+Noble,' of London, having received some shot through her by the
+Armadas, fell under the lee of the 'Revenge,' and asked Sir Richard
+what he would command him; but being one of the victuallers, and of
+small force, Sir Richard bade him save himself and leave him to his
+fortune. </p></div>
+
+<p>This last was a little touch of gallantry, which we should<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331">[Pg 331]</a></span> be glad to
+remember with the honour due to the brave English sailor who commanded
+the 'George Noble;' but his name has passed away, and his action is an
+<i>in memoriam</i>, on which time has effaced the writing. All that August
+night the fight continued, the stars rolling over in their sad majesty,
+but unseen through the sulphurous clouds which hung over the scene. Ship
+after ship of the Spaniards came on upon the 'Revenge,' 'so that never
+less than two mighty galleons were at her side and aboard her,' washing
+up like waves upon a rock, and falling foiled and shattered back amidst
+the roar of the artillery. Before morning fifteen several Armadas had
+assailed her, and all in vain; some had been sunk at her side; and the
+rest, 'so ill approving of their entertainment, that at break of day
+they were far more willing to hearken to a composition, than hastily to
+make more assaults or entries.' 'But as the day increased,' says
+Raleigh, 'so our men decreased; and as the light grew more and more, by
+so much the more grew our discomfort, for none appeared in sight but
+enemies, save one small ship called the "Pilgrim," commanded by Jacob
+Whiddon, who hovered all night to see the success, but in the morning,
+bearing with the "Revenge," was hunted like a hare among many ravenous
+hounds&mdash;but escaped.'</p>
+
+<p>All the powder in the 'Revenge' was now spent, all her pikes were
+broken, 40 out of her 100 men killed, and a great number of the rest
+wounded. Sir Richard, though badly hurt early in the battle, never
+forsook the deck till an hour before midnight; and was then shot through
+the body while his wounds were being dressed, and again in the head. His
+surgeon was killed while attending on him; the masts were lying over the
+side, the rigging cut or broken, the upper works all shot in pieces, and
+the ship herself, unable to move, was settling slowly in the sea; the
+vast fleet of Spaniards lying round her in a ring, like dogs round a
+dying lion, and wary of approaching him in his last agony. Sir Richard,
+seeing that it was past hope, having fought for fifteen hours, and
+'having by estimation eight hundred shot of great artillery through
+him,' 'commanded the master gunner, whom he knew to be a most resolute
+man, to split and sink the ship, that thereby nothing might remain of
+glory or victory to the Spaniards; seeing in so many hours they were not
+able to take her, having had above fifteen hours' time, above ten
+thousand men, and fifty-three men-of-war to perform it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332">[Pg 332]</a></span> withal; and
+persuaded the company, or as many as he could induce, to yield
+themselves unto God and to the mercy of none else; but as they had, like
+valiant resolute men, repulsed so many enemies, they should not now
+shorten the honour of their nation by prolonging their own lives for a
+few hours or a few days.'</p>
+
+<p>The gunner and a few others consented. But such <ins class="cor" title="[Greek: daimoni&ecirc; aret&ecirc;]">&#948;&#945;&#953;&#956;&#959;&#957;&#953;&#951; &#945;&#961;&#949;&#964;&#951;</ins>
+was more than could be expected of ordinary seamen. They had dared do
+all which did become men, and they were not more than men. Two Spanish
+ships had gone down, above 1,500 of their crew were killed, and the
+Spanish admiral could not induce any one of the rest of his fleet to
+board the 'Revenge' again, 'doubting lest Sir Richard would have blown
+up himself and them, knowing his dangerous disposition.' Sir Richard
+lying disabled below, the captain, 'finding the Spaniards as ready to
+entertain a composition as they could be to offer it,' gained over the
+majority of the surviving company; and the remainder then drawing back
+from the master gunner, they all, without further consulting their dying
+commander, surrendered on honourable terms. If unequal to the English in
+action, the Spaniards were at least as courteous in victory. It is due
+to them to say, that the conditions were faithfully observed; and 'the
+ship being marvellous unsavourie,' Alonzo de Bacon, the Spanish admiral,
+sent his boat to bring Sir Richard on board his own vessel.</p>
+
+<p>Sir Richard, whose life was fast ebbing away, replied that 'he might do
+with his body what he list, for that he esteemed it not;' and as he was
+carried out of the ship he swooned, and reviving again, desired the
+company to pray for him.</p>
+
+<p>The admiral used him with all humanity, 'commending his valour and
+worthiness, being unto them a rare spectacle, and a resolution seldom
+approved.' The officers of the fleet, too, John Higgins tells us,
+crowded round to look at him; and a new fight had almost broken out
+between the Biscayans and the 'Portugals,' each claiming the honour of
+having boarded the 'Revenge.'</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>In a few hours Sir Richard, feeling his end approaching, showed not
+any sign of faintness, but spake these words in Spanish, and said,
+'Here die I, Richard Grenville, with a joyful and quiet mind, for
+that I have ended my life as a true soldier ought to do that hath
+fought for his country, queen, religion, and honour. Whereby my soul
+most joyfully departeth out of this body, and shall always leave
+behind it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333">[Pg 333]</a></span> an everlasting fame of a valiant and true soldier that
+hath done his duty as he was bound to do.' When he had finished
+these or other such like words, he gave up the ghost with great and
+stout courage, and no man could perceive any sign of heaviness in
+him. </p></div>
+
+<p>Such was the fight at Florez, in that August of 1591, without its equal
+in such of the annals of mankind as the thing which we call history has
+preserved to us; scarcely equalled by the most glorious fate which the
+imagination of Barr&egrave;re could invent for the 'Vengeur.' Nor did the
+matter end without a sequel awful as itself. Sea battles have been often
+followed by storms, and without a miracle; but with a miracle, as the
+Spaniards and the English alike believed, or without one, as we moderns
+would prefer believing, 'there ensued on this action a tempest so
+terrible as was never seen or heard the like before.' A fleet of
+merchantmen joined the Armada immediately after the battle, forming in
+all 140 sail; and of these 140, only 32 ever saw Spanish harbour. The
+rest foundered, or were lost on the Azores. The men-of-war had been so
+shattered by shot as to be unable to carry sail; and the 'Revenge'
+herself, disdaining to survive her commander, or as if to complete his
+own last baffled purpose, like Samson, buried herself and her 200 prize
+crew under the rocks of St. Michael's.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>And it may well be thought and presumed (says John Huighen) that it
+was no other than a just plague purposely sent upon the Spaniards;
+and that it might be truly said, the taking of the 'Revenge' was
+justly revenged on them; and not by the might or force of man, but
+by the power of God. As some of them openly said in the Isle of
+Terceira, that they believed verily God would consume them, and that
+he took part with the Lutherans and heretics ... saying further,
+that so soon as they had thrown the dead body of the Vice-Admiral
+Sir Richard Grenville overboard, they verily thought that as he had
+a devilish faith and religion, and therefore the devil loved him, so
+he presently sunk into the bottom of the sea and down into hell,
+where he raised up all the devils to the revenge of his death, and
+that they brought so great a storm and torments upon the Spaniards,
+because they only maintained the Catholic and Romish religion. Such
+and the like blasphemies against God they ceased not openly to
+utter. </p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_334" id="Page_334">[Pg 334]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_U_21" id="Footnote_U_21"></a><a href="#FNanchor_U_21"><span class="label">[U]</span></a> <i>Westminster Review</i>, 1853.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_V_22" id="Footnote_V_22"></a><a href="#FNanchor_V_22"><span class="label">[V]</span></a> This essay was written 15 years ago.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_W_23" id="Footnote_W_23"></a><a href="#FNanchor_W_23"><span class="label">[W]</span></a> Here is the old stanza. Let whoever is disposed to think us
+too hard on Captain Bethune compare them:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div class="i0">'For Wetharrington my harte was wo,</div><br />
+<div class="i1">That even he slayne sholde be;</div><br />
+<div class="i0">For when both his leggis were hewen in to,</div><br />
+<div class="i1">He knyled and fought on his knee.'</div><br />
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Even Percy, who, on the whole, thinks well of the modern ballad, gives
+up this stanza as hopeless.</p>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="HOMERX" id="HOMERX"></a>HOMER.<a name="FNanchor_X_24" id="FNanchor_X_24"></a><a href="#Footnote_X_24" class="fnanchor">[X]</a></h2>
+
+
+<p>Troy fell before the Greeks; and in its turn the war of Troy is now
+falling before the critics. That ten years' death-struggle, in which the
+immortals did not disdain to mingle&mdash;those massive warriors, with their
+grandeur and their chivalry, have, 'like an unsubstantial pageant,
+faded' before the wand of these modern enchanters; and the Iliad and the
+Odyssey, and the other early legends, are discovered to be no more than
+the transparent myths of an old cosmogony, the arabesques and frescoes
+with which the imagination of the Ionian poets set off and ornamented
+the palace of the heavens, the struggle of the earth with the seasons,
+and the labours of the sun through his twelve signs.</p>
+
+<p>Nay, with Homer himself it was likely at one time to have fared no
+better. His works, indeed, were indestructible, yet if they could not be
+destroyed, they might be disorganised; and with their instinctive hatred
+of facts, the critics fastened on the historical existence of the poet.
+The origin of the poems was distributed among the clouds of pre-historic
+imagination; and&mdash;instead of a single inspired Homer for their author,
+we were required to believe in some extraordinary spontaneous
+generation, or in some collective genius of an age which ignorance had
+personified.</p>
+
+<p>But the person of a poet has been found more difficult of elimination
+than a mere fact of history. Facts, it was once said, were stubborn
+things; but in our days we have changed all that; a fact, under the
+knife of a critic, splits in pieces, and is dissected out of belief with
+incredible readiness. The helpless thing lies under his hand like a
+foolish witness in a law court, when browbeaten by an unscrupulous
+advocate, and is turned about and twisted this way and that way,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335">[Pg 335]</a></span> till
+in its distraction it contradicts itself, and bears witness against
+itself; and to escape from torture, at last flies utterly away, itself
+half doubting its own existence.</p>
+
+<p>But it requires more cunning weapons to destroy a Homer; like his own
+immortals, he may be wounded, but he cannot have the life carved out of
+him by the prosaic strokes of common men. His poems have but to be
+disintegrated to unite again, so strong are they in the individuality of
+their genius. The singleness of their structure&mdash;the unity of
+design&mdash;the distinctness of drawing in the characters&mdash;the inimitable
+peculiarities of manner in each of them, seem to place beyond serious
+question, after the worst onslaught of the Wolfian critics, that both
+Iliad and Odyssey, whether or not the work of the same mind, are at
+least each of them singly the work of one.</p>
+
+<p>Let them leave us Homer, however, and on the rank and file of facts they
+may do their worst; we can be indifferent to, or even thankful for, what
+slaughter they may make. In the legends of the Theogonia, in that of
+Zeus and Cronus, for instance, there is evidently a metaphysical
+allegory; in the legends of Persephone, or of the Dioscuri, a physical
+one; in that of Athene, a profoundly philosophical one; and fused as the
+entire system was in the intensely poetical conception of the early
+thinkers, it would be impossible, even if it were desirable, at this
+time of day, to disentangle the fibres of all these various elements.
+Fact and theory, the natural and the supernatural, the legendary and the
+philosophical, shade off so imperceptibly one into the other, in the
+stories of the Olympians, or of their first offspring, that we can never
+assure ourselves that we are on historic ground, or that, antecedent to
+the really historic age, there is any such ground to be found anywhere.
+The old notion, that the heroes were deified men, is no longer tenable.
+With but few exceptions, we can trace their names as the names of the
+old gods of the Hellenic or Pelasgian races; and if they appeared later
+in human forms, they descended from Olympus to assume them. Diomed was
+the &OElig;tolian sun-god; Achilles was worshipped in Thessaly long before
+he became the hero of the tale of Troy. The tragedy of the house of
+Atreus, and the bloody bath of Agamemnon, as we are now told with
+appearance of certainty,<a name="FNanchor_Y_25" id="FNanchor_Y_25"></a><a href="#Footnote_Y_25" class="fnanchor">[Y]</a> are humanised<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_336" id="Page_336">[Pg 336]</a></span> stories of the physical
+struggle of the opposing principles of life and death, light and
+darkness, night and day, winter and summer.</p>
+
+<p>And let them be so; we need not be sorry to believe that there is no
+substantial basis for these tales of crime. The history of mankind is
+not so pure but that we can afford to lose a few dark pages out of the
+record. Let it be granted that of the times which Homer sung
+historically we know nothing literal at all&mdash;not any names of any kings,
+of any ministers, wars, intrigues, revolutions, crimes. They are all
+gone&mdash;dead&mdash;passed away; their vacant chronicles may be silent as the
+tombs in which their bones are buried. Of such stuff as that with which
+historians fill their pages there is no trace; it is a blank, vacant as
+the annals of the Hottentot or of the Red Indian. Yet when all is said,
+there remain still to us in Homer's verse, materials richer, perhaps,
+than exist for any period of the ancient world, richer than even for the
+brilliant days of Pericles, or of the C&aelig;sars, to construct a history of
+another kind&mdash;a history, a picture not of the times of which he sang,
+but of the men among whom he lived. How they acted; how they thought,
+talked, and felt; what they made of this earth, and of their place in
+it; their private life and their public life; men and women; masters and
+servants; rich and poor&mdash;we have it all delineated in the marvellous
+verse of a poet who, be he what he may, was in this respect the greatest
+which the earth has ever seen. In extent, the information is little
+enough; but in the same sense as it has been said that an hour at an
+Athenian supper-party would teach us more Grecian life and character
+than all Aristophanes, Homer's pictures of life and manners are so
+living, so distinct, so palpable, that a whole prose encyclop&aelig;dia of
+disconnected facts could give us nothing like them. It is the marvellous
+property of verse&mdash;one, if we rightly consider it, which would excuse
+any superstition on the origin of language&mdash;that the metrical and
+rhythmic arrangement of syllable and sound is able to catch and express
+back to us, not the stories of actions, but the actions themselves, with
+all the feelings which inspire them; to call up human action, and all
+other outward things in which human hearts take interest&mdash;to produce
+them, or to reproduce them, with a distinctness which shall produce the
+same<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_337" id="Page_337">[Pg 337]</a></span> emotions which they would themselves produce when really existing.
+The thing itself is made present before us by an exercise of creative
+power as genuine as that of Nature herself; which, perhaps, is but the
+same power manifesting itself at one time in words, at another in
+outward phenomena. Whatever be the cause, the fact is so. Poetry has
+this life-giving power, and prose has it not; and thus the poet is the
+truest historian. Whatever is properly valuable in history the poet
+gives us&mdash;not events and names, but emotion, but action, but life. He is
+the heart of his age, and his verse expresses his age; and what matter
+is it by what name he describes his places or his persons? What matter
+is it what his own name was, while we have himself, and while we have
+the originals, from which he drew? The work and the life are all for
+which we need care, are all which can really interest us; the names are
+nothing. Though Ph&oelig;acia was a dream-land, or a symbol of the Elysian
+fields, yet Homer drew his material, his island, his palaces, his
+harbour, his gardens of perennial beauty, from those fair cities which
+lay along the shores of his own Ionia; and like his blind Demodocus,
+Homer doubtless himself sung those very hymns which now delight us so,
+in the halls of many a princely Alcinous.</p>
+
+<p>The prose historian may give us facts and names; he may catalogue the
+successions, and tell us long stories of battles, and of factions, and
+of political intrigues; he may draw characters for us, of the sort which
+figure commonly in such features of human affairs, men of the unheroic,
+unpoetic kind&mdash;the Cleons, the Sejanuses, the Tiberiuses, a Philip the
+Second or a Louis Quatorze, in whom the noble element died out into
+selfishness and vulgarity. But great men&mdash;and all <span class="smcap">men</span> properly so called
+(whatever is genuine and natural in them)&mdash;lie beyond prose, and can
+only be really represented by the poet. This is the reason why such men
+as Alexander, or as C&aelig;sar, or as Cromwell, so perplex us in histories,
+because they and their actions are beyond the scope of the art through
+which we have looked at them. We compare the man as the historian
+represents him, with the track of his path through the world. The work
+is the work of a giant; the man, stripped of the vulgar appendages with
+which the stunted imagination of his biographer may have set him off, is
+full of meannesses and littlenesses, and is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_338" id="Page_338">[Pg 338]</a></span> scarcely greater than one
+of ourselves. Prose, that is, has attempted something to which it is not
+equal. It describes a figure which it calls C&aelig;sar; but it is not C&aelig;sar,
+it is a monster. For the same reason, prose fictions, novels, and the
+like, are worthless for more than a momentary purpose. The life which
+they are able to represent is not worth representing. There is no person
+so poor in his own eyes as not to gaze with pleasure into a
+looking-glass; and the prose age may value its own image in the novel.
+But the value of all such representations is ephemeral. It is with the
+poet's art as with the sculptor's&mdash;sandstone will not carve like marble,
+its texture is too loose to retain a sharply moulded outline. The
+actions of men, if they are true, noble, and genuine, are strong enough
+to bear the form and bear the polish of verse; if loose or feeble, they
+crumble away into the softer undulations of prose.</p>
+
+<p>What the life was whose texture bore shaping into Homer's verse, we
+intend to spend these pages in examining. It is, of course, properly to
+be sought for in the poems themselves. But we shall here be concerned
+mainly with features which in the original are rather secondary than
+prominent, and which have to be collected out of fragments, here a line,
+and there a line, out of little hints, let fall by Homer as it were by
+accident. Things too familiar to his own hearers to require dwelling on,
+to us, whose object is to make out just those very things which were
+familiar, are of special and singular value. It is not an enquiry which
+will much profit us, if we come to it with any grand notions of the
+'progress of the species,' for in many ways it will discourage the
+belief in progress.</p>
+
+<p>We have fallen into ways of talking of the childhood and infancy of the
+race, as if no beards had grown on any face before the modern
+Reformation; and even people who know what old Athens was under
+Pericles, look commonly on earlier Greece as scarcely struggling out of
+its cradle. It would have fared so with all early history except for the
+Bible. The Old Testament has operated partially to keep us in our modest
+senses, and we can see something grand about the patriarchs; but this is
+owing to exceptional causes, which do not apply to other literature; and
+in spite of our admiration of Homer's poetry, we regard his age, and the
+contemporary periods in the other people of the earth,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_339" id="Page_339">[Pg 339]</a></span> as a kind of
+childhood little better than barbarism. We look upon it, at all events,
+as too far removed in every essential of spirit or of form from our own,
+to enable us to feel for it any strong interest or sympathy. More or
+less, we have, every one of us, felt something of this kind. Homer's men
+are, at first sight, unlike any men that we have ever seen; and it is
+not without a shock of surprise that, for the first time, we fall, in
+reading him, across some little trait of humanity which in form as well
+as spirit is really identical with our own experience. Then, for the
+moment, all is changed with us&mdash;gleams of light flash out, in which the
+drapery becomes transparent, and we see the human form behind it, and
+that entire old world in the warm glow of flesh and blood. Such is the
+effect of those few child scenes of his, which throw us back into our
+old familiar childhood. With all these years between us, there is no
+difference between their children and ours, and child would meet child
+without sense of strangeness in common games and common pleasures.</p>
+
+<p>The little Ulysses climbing on the knees of his father's guest, coaxing
+for a taste of the red wine, and spilling it as he starts at the unusual
+taste; or that other most beautiful picture of him running at Laertes's
+side in the garden at Ithaca, the father teaching the boy the names of
+the fruit-trees, and making presents to him of this tree and of that
+tree for his very own, to help him to remember what they were called;
+the partition wall of three thousand years melts away as we look back at
+scenes like these; that broad, world-experienced man was once, then,
+such a little creature as we remember ourselves, and Laertes a calm,
+kind father of the nineteenth century. Then, as now, the children loved
+to sport upon the shore, and watch the inrolling waves;&mdash;then, as now,
+the boy-architect would pile the moist sand into mimic town or castle,
+and when the work was finished, sweep it away again in wanton humour
+with foot and hand;&mdash;then, as now, the little tired maiden would cling
+to her mother's skirt, and, trotting painfully along beside her, look up
+wistfully and plead with moist eyes to be carried in her arms. Nay, and
+among the grown ones, where time has not changed the occupation, and the
+forms of culture have little room to vary, we meet again with very
+familiar faces. There is Melantho, the not over-modest<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_340" id="Page_340">[Pg 340]</a></span> tittering
+waiting-maid&mdash;saucy to her mistress and the old housekeeper, and always
+running after the handsome young princes. Unhappy Melantho, true child
+of universal nature! grievous work we should make with most households,
+if all who resemble thee were treated to as rough a destiny. And there
+are other old friends whom it is pleasant enough to recognise at so long
+a distance. 'Certain smooth-haired, sleek-faced fellows&mdash;insolent where
+their lords would permit them; inquisitive and pert, living but to eat
+and drink, and pilfering the good things, to convey them stealthily to
+their friends outside the castle wall.' The thing that hath been, that
+shall be again. When Homer wrote, the type had settled into its long
+enduring form. 'Such are they,' he adds, in his good-natured irony, 'as
+the valet race ever love to be.'</p>
+
+<p>With such evidence of identity among us all, it is worth while to look
+closer at the old Greeks, to try to find in Homer something beyond fine
+poetry, or exciting adventures, or battle-scenes, or material for
+scholarship; for awhile to set all that aside, and look in him for the
+story of real living men&mdash;set to pilgrimise in the old way on the same
+old earth&mdash;men such as we are, children of one family, with the same
+work to do, to live the best life they could, and to save their
+souls&mdash;with the same trials, the same passions, the same difficulties,
+if with weaker means of meeting them.</p>
+
+<p>And first for their religion.</p>
+
+<p>Let those who like it, lend their labour to the unravelling the secrets
+of the mythologies. Theogonies and Theologies are not religion; they are
+but its historic dress and outward or formal expression, which, like a
+language, may be intelligible to those who see the inward meaning in the
+sign, but no more than confused sound to us who live in another
+atmosphere, and have no means of transferring ourselves into the
+sentiment of an earlier era. It is not in these forms of a day or of an
+age that we should look for the real belief&mdash;the real feelings of the
+heart; but in the natural expressions which burst out
+spontaneously&mdash;expressions of opinion on Providence, on the relation of
+man to God, on the eternal laws by which this world is governed. Perhaps
+we misuse the word in speaking of religion; we ought rather to speak of
+piety: piety is always simple; the emotion is too vast, too
+overpowering, whenever it is genuine, to be nice or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_341" id="Page_341">[Pg 341]</a></span> fantastic in its
+form; and leaving philosophies and cosmogonies to shape themselves in
+myth and legend, it speaks itself out with a calm and humble clearness.
+We may trifle with our own discoveries, and hand them over to the fancy
+or the imagination for elaborate decoration. We may shroud over supposed
+mysteries under an enigmatic veil, and adapt the degrees of initiation
+to the capacities of our pupils; but before the vast facts of God and
+Providence, the difference between man and man dwarfs into nothing. They
+are no discoveries of our own with which we can meddle, but revelations
+of the Infinite, which, like the sunlight, shed themselves on all alike,
+wise and unwise, good and evil, and they claim and they permit no other
+acknowledgment from us than the simple obedience of our lives, and the
+plainest confession of our lips.</p>
+
+<p>Such confessions, except in David's Psalms, we shall not anywhere find
+more natural or unaffected than in Homer&mdash;most definite, yet never
+elaborate&mdash;as far as may be from any complimenting of Providence, yet
+expressing the most unquestioning conviction. We shall not often
+remember them when we set about religion as a business; but when the
+occasions of life stir the feelings in us on which religion itself
+reposes, if we were as familiar with the Iliad as with the Psalms, the
+words of the old Ionian singer would leap as naturally to our lips as
+those of the Israelite king.</p>
+
+<p>Zeus is not always the questionable son of Cronus, nor the gods always
+the mythologic Olympians. Generally, it is true, they appear as a larger
+order of subject beings&mdash;beings like men, and subject to a higher
+control&mdash;in a position closely resembling that of Milton's angels, and
+liable like them to passion and to error. But at times, the father of
+gods and men is the Infinite and Eternal Ruler&mdash;the living Providence of
+the world&mdash;and the lesser gods are the immortal administrators of his
+Divine will throughout the lower creation. For ever at the head of the
+universe there is an awful spiritual power; when Zeus appears with a
+distinct and positive personality, he is himself subordinate to an
+authority which elsewhere is one with himself. Wherever either he or the
+other gods are made susceptible of emotion, the Invisible is beyond and
+above them. When Zeus is the personal father of Sarpedon, and his
+private love conflicts with the law of the eternal order, though he has
+power to set aside the law,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_342" id="Page_342">[Pg 342]</a></span> he dares not break it; but in the midst of
+his immortality, and on his own awful throne, he weeps tears of blood in
+ineffectual sorrow for his dying child. And again, there is a power
+supreme both over Zeus and over Poseidon, of which Iris reminds the
+latter, when she is sent to rebuke him for his disobedience to his
+brother. It is a law, she says, that the younger shall obey the elder,
+and the Erinnys will revenge its breach even on a god.</p>
+
+<p>But descending from the more difficult Pantheon among mankind, the
+Divine law of justice is conceived as clearly as we in this day can
+conceive it. The supreme power is the same immortal lover of justice and
+the same hater of iniquity; and justice means what we mean by justice,
+and iniquity what we mean by iniquity. There is no diffidence, no
+scepticism on this matter; the moral law is as sure as day and night,
+summer and winter. Thus in the sixteenth Iliad&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>'When in the market-place men deal unjustly, and the rulers decree
+crooked judgment, not regarding the fear of God,' God sends the storm,
+and the earthquake, and the tempest, as the executors of his vengeance.</p>
+
+<p>Again, Ulysses says&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>'God looks upon the children of men, and punishes the wrong-doer.'</p>
+
+<p>And Eum&aelig;us&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>'The gods love not violence and wrong; but the man whose ways are
+righteous, him they honour.'</p>
+
+<p>Even when as mere Olympians they put off their celestial nature, and mix
+in earthly strife, and are thus laid open to earthly suffering, a
+mystery still hangs about them; Diomed, even while he crosses the path
+of Ares, feels all the while 'that they are short-lived who contend with
+the Immortals.' Ajax boasts that he will save himself in spite of
+heaven, and immediately the wave dashes him upon the rocks. One light
+word escaped Ulysses in the excitement of his escape from the Cyclops,
+which nine years of suffering hardly expiated.</p>
+
+<p>The same spirit which teaches Christians that those who have no earthly
+friend have specially a friend above to care for and to avenge them,
+taught the Ionians a proverb which appears again and again in Homer,
+that the stranger and the poor man are the patrimony of God; and it
+taught<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_343" id="Page_343">[Pg 343]</a></span> them, also, that sometimes men entertained the Immortals
+unawares. It was a faith, too, which was more than words with them; for
+we hear of no vagrant acts or alien acts, and it was sacrilege to turn
+away from the gate whoever asked its hospitality. Times are changed. The
+world was not so crowded as it is now, and perhaps rogues were less
+abundant; but at any rate those antique Greeks did what they said. We
+say what they said, while in the same breath we say, too, that it is
+impossible to do it.</p>
+
+<p>In every way, the dependence of man on a special heavenly Providence was
+a matter of sure and certain conviction with them. Telemachus appeals to
+the belief in the Council at Ithaca. He questions it at Pylos, and is at
+once rebuked by Athene. Both in Iliad and Odyssey to live justly is the
+steady service which the gods require, and their favour as surely
+follows when that service is paid, as a Nemesis sooner or later follows
+surely, too, on the evil-doers.</p>
+
+<p>But without multiplying evidence, as we easily might, from every part of
+both Iliad and Odyssey, the sceptical and the believing forms of thought
+and feeling on this very subject are made points of dramatic contrast,
+to show off the opposition of two separate characters; and this is clear
+proof that such thoughts and feelings must have been familiar to Homer's
+hearers: if it were not so, his characters would have been without
+interest to his age&mdash;they would have been individual, and not universal;
+and no expenditure of intellect, or passion, would have made men care to
+listen to him. The two persons who throughout the Iliad stand out in
+relief in contrast to each other are, of course, Hector and Achilles;
+and faith in God (as distinct from a mere recognition of him) is as
+directly the characteristic of Hector as in Achilles it is entirely
+absent. Both characters are heroic, but the heroism in them springs from
+opposite sources. Both are heroic, because both are strong; but the
+strength of one is in himself, and the strength of the other is in his
+faith. Hector is a patriot; Achilles does not know what patriotism
+means;&mdash;Hector is full of tenderness and human affection; Achilles is
+self-enveloped. Even his love for Patroclus is not pure, for Patroclus
+is as the moon to the sun of Achilles, and Achilles sees his own glory
+reflected on his friend. They have both a forecast of their fate; but
+Hector, in his great brave way, scoffs at omens; he knows<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_344" id="Page_344">[Pg 344]</a></span> that there is
+a special providence in the fall of a sparrow, and defies augury. To do
+his duty is the only omen for which Hector cares; and if death must be,
+he can welcome it like a gallant man, if it find him fighting for his
+country. Achilles is moody, speculative, and subjective; he is too proud
+to attempt an ineffectual resistance to what he knows to be inevitable,
+but he alternately murmurs at it and scorns it. Till his passion is
+stirred by his friend's death, he seems equally to disdain the greatness
+of life and the littleness of it; the glories of a hero are not worth
+dying for; and like Solomon, and almost in Solomon's words, he complains
+that there is one event to all&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div class="i0"><ins class="cor" title="[Greek: Hen de i&ecirc; tim&ecirc; &ecirc; men kakos &ecirc;e kai esthlos.]">&#7961;&#957; &#948;&#949; &#953;&#951; &#964;&#953;&#956;&#951; &#951; &#956;&#949;&#957; &#954;&#945;&#954;&#959;&#962; &#951;&#949; &#954;&#945;&#953; &#949;&#963;&#952;&#955;&#959;&#962;.</ins></div><br />
+</div></div>
+
+<p>To gratify his own spleen, he will accept an inglorious age in Thessaly,
+in exchange for a hero's immortality; as again in the end it is but to
+gratify his own wounded pride that he goes out to brave a fate which he
+scorns while he knows that it will subdue him. Thus, Achilles is the
+hero of the stern human, self-sufficing spirit, which does not deny or
+question destiny, but seeing nothing in it except a cold, iron law,
+meets force with force, and holds up against it an unbroken, unbending
+will. Human nature is at its best but a miserable business to him; death
+and sorrow are its inevitable lot. As a brave man, he will not fear such
+things, but he will not pretend to regard them as anything but
+detestable; and he comforts the old, weeping king of Troy, whose age he
+was himself bringing down to the grave in sorrow, with philosophic
+meditations on the vanity of all things, and a picture of Zeus mixing
+the elements of life out of the two urns of good and evil.</p>
+
+<p>Turn to Hector, and we turn from shadow into sunlight. Achilles is all
+self, Hector all self-forgetfulness; Achilles all pride, Hector all
+modesty. The confidence of Achilles is in himself and in his own arm;
+Hector knows (and the strongest expressions of the kind in all the Iliad
+are placed pointedly in Hector's mouth) that there is no strength except
+from above. 'God's will,' he says, 'is over all; he makes the strong man
+to fear, and gives the victory to the weak, if it shall please him.' And
+at last, when he meets Achilles, he answers his bitter words, not with a
+defiance, but calmly saying, 'I know that thou art mighty, and that my
+strength<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_345" id="Page_345">[Pg 345]</a></span> is far less than thine; but these things lie in the will of
+the gods, and I, though weaker far than thou, may yet take thy life from
+thee, if the Immortals choose to have it so.'</p>
+
+<p>So far, then, on the general fact of Divine Providence, the feeling of
+Homer, and therefore of his countrymen, is distinct. Both the great
+poems bearing his name speak in the same language. But beyond the
+general fact, many questions rise in the application of the creed, and
+on one of these (it is among several remarkable differences which seem
+to mark the Odyssey as of a later age) there is a very singular
+discrepancy. In the Iliad, the life of man on this side the grave is
+enough for the completion of his destiny&mdash;for his reward, if he lives
+nobly; for his punishment, if he be base or wicked. Without repinings or
+scepticisms at the apparent successes of bad men, the poet is contented
+with what he finds, accepting cheerfully the facts of life as they are;
+it never seems to occur to him as seriously possible that a bad man
+could succeed or a good one fail; and as the ways of Providence,
+therefore, require no vindicating, neither his imagination nor his
+curiosity tempts him into penetrating the future. The house of Hades is
+the long home to which men go when dismissed out of their bodies; but it
+is a dim, shadowy place, of which we see nothing, and concerning which
+no conjectures are ventured. Achilles, in his passion over Patroclus,
+cries out, that although the dead forget the dead in the halls of the
+departed, yet that he will remember his friend; and through the Iliad
+there is nothing clearer than these vague words to show with what hopes
+or fears the poet looked forward to death. So far, therefore, his faith
+may seem imperfect; yet, perhaps, not the less noble because imperfect;
+religious men in general are too well contented with the promise of a
+future life, as of a scene where the seeming shortcomings of the Divine
+administration will be carried out with larger equity. But whether
+imperfect or not, or whatever be the account of the omission, the theory
+of Hades in the Odyssey is developed into far greater distinctness; the
+future is still, indeed, shadowy, but it is no longer uncertain; there
+is the dreadful prison-house, with the judge upon his throne&mdash;and the
+darker criminals are overtaken by the vengeance which was delayed in
+life. The thin phantoms of the great ones of the past flit to and fro,
+mourning wearily for their lost mortality, and feeding on<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_346" id="Page_346">[Pg 346]</a></span> its memory.
+And more than this, as if it were beginning to be felt that something
+more was wanted after all to satisfy us with the completeness of the
+Divine rule, we have a glimpse&mdash;it is but one, but it is like a ray of
+sunshine falling in upon the darkness of the grave&mdash;'of the far-off
+Elysian fields where dwells Rhadamanthus with the golden hair, where
+life is ever sweet, and sorrow is not, nor winter, nor any rain or
+storm, and the never-dying zephyrs blow soft and cool from off the
+ocean.'</p>
+
+<p>However vague the filling up of such a picture, the outline is correct
+to the best which has been revealed even in Christianity, and it speaks
+nobly for the people among whom, even in germ, such ideas could root
+themselves. But think what we will of their notions of the future, the
+old Greek faith, considered as a practical and not a theological system,
+is truly admirable, clear, rational, and moral; if it does not profess
+to deal with the mysteries of evil in the heart, it is prompt and stern
+with them in their darker outward manifestations, and, as far as it
+goes, as a guide in the common daily business of life, it scarcely
+leaves anything unsaid.</p>
+
+<p>How far it went we shall see in the details of the life itself, the most
+important of which in the eyes of a modern will be the social
+organisation; and when he looks for organisation, he will be at once at
+a loss, for he will find the fact of government yet without defined
+form;&mdash;he will find law, but without a public sword to enforce it; and a
+'social machine' moving without friction under the easy control of
+opinion. There are no wars of classes, no politics, no opposition of
+interests, a sacred feeling of the will of the gods keeping every one in
+his proper subordination. It was a sacred duty that the younger should
+obey the elder, that the servant should obey his master, that property
+should be respected; in war, that the leader should be obeyed without
+questioning; in peace, that public questions should be brought before
+the assembly of the people, and settled quietly as the Council
+determined. In this assembly the prince presided, and beyond this
+presidency his authority at home does not seem to have extended. Of
+course there was no millennium in Ionia, and men's passions were pretty
+much what they are now. Without any organised means of repressing crime
+when it did appear, the people were<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_347" id="Page_347">[Pg 347]</a></span> exposed to, and often suffered
+under, extreme forms of violence&mdash;violence such as that of the suitors
+at Ithaca, or of &AElig;gisthus at Argos. On the other hand, what a state of
+cultivation it implies, what peace and comfort in all classes, when
+society could hold together for a day with no more complete defence.
+And, moreover, there are disadvantages in elaborate police systems.
+Self-reliance is one of the highest virtues in which this world is
+intended to discipline us; and to depend upon ourselves even for our own
+personal safety is a large element in moral training.</p>
+
+<p>But not to dwell on this, and to pass to the way in which the men of
+those days employed themselves.</p>
+
+<p>Our first boy's feeling with the Iliad is, that Homer is pre-eminently a
+poet of war; that battles were his own passion, and tales of battles the
+delight of his listeners. His heroes appear like a great fighting
+aristocracy, such as the after Spartans were, Homer himself like another
+Tyrt&aelig;us, and the poorer occupations of life too menial for their notice
+or for his. They seem to live for glory&mdash;the one glory worth caring for
+only to be won upon the battle-field, and their exploits the one worthy
+theme of the poet's song. This is our boyish impression, and, like other
+such, it is very different from the truth. If war had been a passion
+with the Ionians, as it was with the Teutons and the Norsemen, the god
+of battles would have been supreme in the Pantheon; and Zeus would
+scarcely have called Ares the most hateful spirit in Olympus&mdash;most
+hateful, <i>because</i> of his delight in war and carnage. Mr. Carlyle looks
+forward to a chivalry of labour. He rather wishes than expects that a
+time may come when the campaign of industry against anarchic nature may
+gather into it those feelings of gallantry and nobleness which have
+found their vent hitherto in fighting only. The modern man's work, Mr.
+Carlyle says, is no longer to splinter lances or break down walls, but
+to break soil, to build barns and factories, and to find a high
+employment for himself in what hitherto has been despised as degrading.
+How to elevate labour&mdash;how to make it beautiful&mdash;how to enlist the
+<i>spirit</i> in it (for in no other way can it be made humanly profitable),
+that is the problem which he looks wistfully to the future to solve for
+us. He may look to the past as well as to the future; in the old Ionia
+he will find all for which he wishes. The wise Ulysses built his own
+house, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_348" id="Page_348">[Pg 348]</a></span> carved his own bed. Princes killed and cooked their own
+food. It was a holy work with them&mdash;their way of saying grace for it;
+for they offered the animal in his death to the gods, and they were not
+butchers, but sacrificing priests. Even a keeper of swine is called
+noble, and fights like a hero; and the young princess of Ph&oelig;acia&mdash;the
+loveliest and gracefullest of Homer's women&mdash;drove the clothes-cart and
+washed linen with her own beautiful hands. Not only was labour free&mdash;for
+so it was among the early Romans; or honourable, so it was among the
+Israelites,&mdash;but it was beautiful&mdash;beautiful in the artist's sense, as
+perhaps elsewhere it has never been. In later Greece&mdash;in what we call
+the glorious period&mdash;toil had gathered about it its modern crust of
+supposed baseness&mdash;it was left to slaves; and wise men, in their
+philosophic lecture-rooms, spoke of it as unworthy of the higher
+specimens of cultivated humanity.</p>
+
+<p>But Homer finds, in its most homely forms, fit illustrations for the
+most glorious achievements of his heroes; and in every page we find, in
+simile or metaphor some common scene of daily life worked out with
+elaborate beauty. What the popular poet chooses for his illustrations
+are as good a measure as we can have of the popular feeling, and the
+images which he suggests are, of course, what he knows his hearers will
+be pleased to dwell upon. There is much to be said about this, and we
+shall return to it presently; in the meantime, we must not build on
+indirect evidence. The designs on the shield of Achilles are, together,
+a complete picture of Homer's microcosm; Homer surely never thought
+inglorious or ignoble what the immortal art of Hephaistos condescended
+to imitate.</p>
+
+<p>The first groups of figures point a contrast which is obviously
+intentional; and the significance becomes sadly earnest when we remember
+who it was that was to bear the shield. The moral is a very modern one,
+and the picture might be called by the modern name of Peace and War.
+There are two cities, embodying in their condition the two ideas. In
+one, a happy wedding is going forward; the pomp of the hymeneal
+procession is passing along the streets; the air is full of music, and
+the women are standing at their doors to gaze. The other is in the
+terrors of a siege; the hostile armies glitter under the walls, the
+women and children press into the defence, and crowd to the
+battlements.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_349" id="Page_349">[Pg 349]</a></span> In the first city, a quarrel rises, and wrong is made
+right, not by violence and fresh wrong, but by the majesty of law and
+order. The heads of the families are sitting gravely in the
+market-place, the cause is heard, the compensation set, the claim
+awarded. Under the walls of the other city an ambush lies, like a wild
+beast on the watch for its prey. The unsuspecting herdsmen pass on with
+their flocks to the waterside; the spoilers spring from their
+hiding-place, and all is strife, and death, and horror, and confusion.
+If there were other war-scenes on the shield, it might be doubted
+whether Homer intended so strong a contrast as he executed; but fighting
+for its own sake was evidently held in slight respect with him. The
+forms of life which were really beautiful to him follow in a series of
+exquisite Rubens-like pictures: harvest scenes and village festivals;
+the ploughing and the vintage, or the lion-hunt on the reedy margin of
+the river; and he describes them with a serene, sunny enjoyment which no
+other old world art or poetry gives us anything in the least resembling.
+Even we ourselves, in our own pastorals, are struggling with but half
+success, after what Homer entirely possessed. What a majesty he has
+thrown into his harvest scene! The yellow corn falling, the boys
+following to gather up the large arms-full as they drop behind the
+reapers; in the distance a banquet preparing under the trees; in the
+centre, in the midst of his workmen, the king sitting in mellow silence,
+sceptre in hand, looking on with gladdened heart. Again we see the
+ploughmen, unlike what are to be seen in our corn-grounds, turning their
+teams at the end of the furrow, and attendants standing ready with the
+wine-cup, to hand to them as they pass. Homer had seen these things, or
+he would not have sung of them; and princes and nobles might have shared
+such labour without shame, when kings took part in it, and gods designed
+it, and the divine Achilles bore its image among his insignia in the
+field.</p>
+
+<p>Analogous to this, and as part of the same feeling, is that intense
+enjoyment of natural scenery, so keen in Homer, and of which the
+Athenian poets show not a trace; as, for instance, in that night
+landscape by the sea, finished off in a few lines only, but so
+exquisitely perfect! The broad moon, gleaming through the mist as it
+parts suddenly from off the sky; the crags and headlands, and soft
+wooded slopes,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_350" id="Page_350">[Pg 350]</a></span> shining out in the silver light, and earth and sea
+transformed into fairy land.</p>
+
+<p>We spoke of Homer's similes as illustrative of the Ionic feelings about
+war. War, of course, was glorious to him&mdash;but war in a glorious cause.
+Wars there were&mdash;wars in plenty, as there have been since, and as it is
+like there will be for some time to come; and a just war, of all human
+employments, is the one which most calls out whatever nobleness there is
+in man. It was the thing itself, the actual fighting and killing, as
+apart from the heroism for which it makes opportunities, for which we
+said that he showed no taste. His manner shows that he felt like a
+cultivated man, and not like a savage. His spirit stirs in him as he
+goes out with his hero to the battle; but there is no drunken delight in
+blood; we never hear of warriors as in that grim Hall of the Nibelungen,
+quenching their thirst in the red stream; never anything of that fierce
+exultation in carnage with which the war poetry of so many nations, late
+and old, is crimsoned. Everything, on the contrary, is contrived so as
+to soften the merely horrible, and fix our interest only on what is
+grand or beautiful. We are never left to dwell long together on scenes
+of death, and when the battle is at its fiercest, our minds are called
+off by the rapid introduction (either by simile or some softer turn of
+human feeling) of other associations, not contrived, as an inferior
+artist would contrive, to deepen our emotions, but to soften and relieve
+them. Two warriors meet, and exchange their high words of defiance; we
+hear the grinding of the spear-head, as it pierces shield and
+breast-plate, and the crash of the armour, as this or that hero falls.
+But at once, instead of being left at his side to see him bleed, we are
+summoned away to the soft water meadow, the lazy river, the tall poplar,
+now waving its branches against the sky, now lying its length along in
+the grass beside the water, and the woodcutter with peaceful industry
+labouring and lopping at it.</p>
+
+<p>In the thick of the universal m&ecirc;l&eacute;e, when the stones and arrows are
+raining on the combatants, and some furious hailstorm is the slightest
+illustration with which we should expect him to heighten the effect of
+the human tempest, so sure Homer is that he has painted the thing itself
+in its own intense reality, that his simile is the stillest phenomenon<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_351" id="Page_351">[Pg 351]</a></span>
+in all nature&mdash;a stillness of activity, infinitely expressive of the
+density of the shower of missiles, yet falling like oil on water on the
+ruffled picture of the battle; the snow descending in the <i>still</i> air,
+covering first hills, then plains and fields and farmsteads; covering
+the rocks down to the very water's edge, and clogging the waves as they
+roll in. Again, in that fearful death-wrestle at the Grecian wall, when
+gates and battlements are sprinkled over with blood, and neither Greeks
+nor Trojans can force their way against the other, we have, first, as an
+image of the fight itself, two men in the field, with measuring rods,
+disputing over a land boundary; and for the equipoise of the two armies,
+the softest of all home scenes, a poor working woman weighing out her
+wool before weaving it, to earn a scanty subsistence for herself and for
+her children. Of course the similes are not all of this kind; it would
+be monotonous if they were; but they occur often enough to mark their
+meaning. In the direct narrative, too, we see the same tendency.
+Sarpedon struck through the thigh is borne off the field, the long spear
+trailing from the wound, and there is too much haste to draw it out.
+Hector flies past him and has no time to speak; all is dust, hurry, and
+confusion. Even Homer can only pause for a moment, but in three lines he
+lays the wounded hero under a tree, he brings a dear friend to his side,
+and we refresh ourselves in a beautiful scene, when the lance is taken
+out, and Sarpedon faints, and comes slowly back to life, with the cool
+air fanning him. We may look in vain through the Nibelungen Lied for
+anything like this. The Swabian poet can be tender before the battle,
+but in the battle itself his barbaric nature is too strong for him, and
+he scents nothing but blood. In the Iliad, on the contrary, the very
+battles of the gods, grand and awful as they are, relieve rather than
+increase the human horror. In the magnificent scene, where Achilles,
+weary with slaughter, pauses on the bank of the Scamander, and the angry
+river god, whose course is checked by the bodies of the slain, swells up
+to revenge them and destroy him, the natural and the supernatural are so
+strangely blended, that when Poseidon lights the forest, and god meets
+god and element meets element, the convulsion is too tremendous to
+enhance the fierceness of Achilles; it concentrates the interest on
+itself, and Achilles and Hector, flying<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_352" id="Page_352">[Pg 352]</a></span> Trojan and pursuing Greek, for
+the time melt out and are forgotten.</p>
+
+<p>We do not forget that there is nothing of this kind, no relief, no
+softening, in the great scene at the conclusion of the Odyssey. All is
+stern enough and terrible enough there; more terrible, if possible,
+because more distinct, than its modern counterpart in Criemhildas Hall.
+But there is an obvious reason for this, and it does not make against
+what we have been saying. It is not delight in slaughter, but it is the
+stern justice of revenge which we have here; not, as in the Iliad, hero
+meeting hero, but the long crime receiving at last its Divine
+punishment; the breaking of the one storm, which from the beginning has
+been slowly and awfully gathering.</p>
+
+<p>With Homer's treatment of a battle-field, and as illustrating the
+conclusion which we argue from it, we are tempted to draw parallels from
+two modern poets&mdash;one a German, who was taken away in the morning of his
+life; the other, the most gifted of modern Englishmen. Each of these two
+has attempted the same subject, and the treatment in each case embodies,
+in a similar manner, modern ways of thinking about it.</p>
+
+<p>The first is from the 'Albigenses' of young Lenau, who has since died
+lunatic, we have heard, as he was not unlikely to have died with such
+thoughts in him. It is the eve of one of those terrible struggles at
+Toulouse, and the poet's imagination is hanging at moon-rise over the
+scene. 'The low broad field scattered over thick with corpses, all
+silent, dead,&mdash;the last sob spent,'&mdash;the priest's thanksgiving for the
+Catholic victory having died into an echo, and only the 'vultures crying
+their Te Deum laudamus.'</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div class="i0">Hat Gott der Herr den K&ouml;rperstoff erschaffen,</div><br />
+<div class="i0">Hat ihn hervorgebracht ein b&ouml;ser Geist,</div><br />
+<div class="i0">Dar&uuml;ber stritten sie mit allen Waffen</div><br />
+<div class="i0">Und werden von den V&ouml;geln nun gespeist,</div><br />
+<div class="i0">Die, ohne ihren Ursprung nachzufragen,</div><br />
+<div class="i0">Die K&ouml;rper da sich lassen wohl behagen.</div><br />
+</div></div>
+
+<p>'Was it God the Lord who formed the substance of their bodies? or did
+some evil spirit bring it forth? It was for this with all their might
+they fought, and now they are devoured there by the wild birds, who sit
+gorging merrily over their carrion, <i>without asking from whence it
+came</i>.'</p>
+
+<p>In Homer, as we saw, the true hero is master over death&mdash;death<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_353" id="Page_353">[Pg 353]</a></span> has no
+terror for him. He meets it, if it is to be, calmly and proudly, and
+then it is over; whatever offensive may follow after it, is concealed,
+or at least passed lightly over. Here, on the contrary, everything most
+offensive is dwelt upon with an agonising intensity, and the triumph of
+death is made to extend, not over the body only, but over the soul,
+whose heroism it turns to mockery. The cause in which a man dies, is
+what can make his death beautiful; but here nature herself, in her
+stern, awful way, is reading her sentence over the cause itself as a
+wild and frantic dream. We ought to be revolted&mdash;doubly revolted, one
+would think, and yet we are not so; instead of being revolted, we are
+affected with a sense of vast, sad magnificence. Why is this? Because we
+lose sight of the scene, or lose the sense of its horror, in the tragedy
+of the spirit. It is the true modern tragedy; the note which sounds
+through Shakespeare's 'Sonnets,' through 'Hamlet,' through 'Faust;' all
+the deeper trials of the modern heart might be gathered out of those few
+lines; the sense of wasted nobleness&mdash;nobleness spending its energies
+upon what time seems to be pronouncing no better than a dream&mdash;at any
+rate, misgivings, sceptic and distracting; yet the heart the while, in
+spite of the uncertainty of the issue, remaining true at least to
+itself. If the spirit of the Albigensian warriors had really broken
+down, or if the poet had pointed his lesson so as to say, Truth is a
+lie; faith is folly; eat, drink, and die,&mdash;then his picture would have
+been revolting; but the noble spirit remains, though it is borne down
+and trifled with by destiny, and therefore it is not revolting, but
+tragic.</p>
+
+<p>Far different from this&mdash;as far inferior in tone to Lenau's lines, as it
+exceeds them in beauty of workmanship&mdash;is the well-known picture of the
+scene under the wall in the Siege of Corinth:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div class="i0">He saw the lean dogs beneath the wall</div><br />
+<div class="i0">Hold o'er the dead their carnival;</div><br />
+<div class="i0">Gorging and growling o'er carcass and limb;</div><br />
+<div class="i0">They were too busy to bark at him!</div><br />
+<div class="i0">From a Tartar's skull they had stripp'd the flesh,</div><br />
+<div class="i0">As ye peel the fig when its fruit is fresh;</div><br />
+<div class="i0">And their white tusks crunch'd o'er the whiter skull,</div><br />
+<div class="i0">As it slipp'd through their jaws when their edge grew dull,</div><br />
+<div class="i0">As they lazily mumbled the bones of the dead,</div><br />
+<div class='pagenum'><a name="Page_354" id="Page_354">[Pg 354]</a></div><div class="i0">When they scarce could rise from the spot where they fed;</div><br />
+<div class="i0">So well had they broken a lingering fast</div><br />
+<div class="i0">With those who had fallen for that night's repast.</div><br />
+<div class="i0">And Alp knew, by the turbans that roll'd on the sand,</div><br />
+<div class="i0">The foremost of these were the best of his band:</div><br />
+<br />
+<div class="i1">.&nbsp; &nbsp; .&nbsp; &nbsp; .&nbsp; &nbsp; .&nbsp; &nbsp; .&nbsp; &nbsp; .&nbsp; &nbsp; .&nbsp; &nbsp; .&nbsp; &nbsp; .</div><br />
+<br />
+<div class="i0">The scalps were in the wild dog's maw,</div><br />
+<div class="i0">The hair was tangled round his jaw.</div><br />
+<div class="i0">Close by the shore, on the edge of the gulf,</div><br />
+<div class="i0">There sate a vulture flapping a wolf,</div><br />
+<div class="i0">Who had stolen from the hills, but kept away,</div><br />
+<div class="i0">Scared by the dogs, from the human prey;</div><br />
+<div class="i0">But he seized on his share of a steed that lay,</div><br />
+<div class="i0">Pick'd by the birds, on the sands of the bay.</div><br />
+</div></div>
+
+<p>For a parallel to the horribleness of this wonderfully painted scene we
+need not go to the Nibelungen, for we shall find nothing like it there:
+we must go back to the carved slabs which adorned the banquet halls of
+the Assyrian kings, where the foul birds hover over the stricken fields,
+and trail from their talons the entrails of the slain.</p>
+
+<p>And for what purpose does Byron introduce these frightful images? Was it
+in contrast to the exquisite moonlight scene which tempts the renegade
+out of his tent? Was it to bring his mind into a fit condition to be
+worked upon by the vision of Francesca? It does but mar and untune the
+softening influences of nature, which might have been rendered more
+powerful, perhaps, by some slight touch to remind him of his past day's
+work, but are blotted out and paralysed by such a mass of horrors.</p>
+
+<p>To go back to Homer.</p>
+
+<p>We must omit for the present any notice of the domestic pictures, of
+which there are so many, in the palaces of Ulysses, of Nestor, or of
+Alcinous; of the games, so manly, yet, in point of refinement, so
+superior even to those of our own middle ages; of the supreme good of
+life as the Greeks conceived it, and of the arts by which they
+endeavoured to realise that good. It is useless to notice such things
+briefly, and the detail would expand into a volume. But the impression
+which we gather from them is the same which we have gathered all
+along&mdash;that if the proper aim of all human culture be to combine, in the
+highest measure in which they are compatible, the two elements of
+refinement and of manliness, then Homer's age was cultivated to a degree
+the like of which the earth has not witnessed since. There was more
+refinement under Pericles, as there is more in modern London<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_355" id="Page_355">[Pg 355]</a></span> and Paris;
+but there was, and there is, infinitely more vice. There was more
+fierceness (greater manliness there never was) in the times of
+feudalism. But take it for all in all, and in a mere human sense, apart
+from any other aspect of the world which is involved in Christianity, it
+is difficult to point to a time when life in general was happier, and
+the character of man set in a more noble form. If we have drawn the
+picture with too little shadow, let it be allowed for. The shadow was
+there, doubtless, though we see it only in a few dark spots. The
+Margites would have supplied the rest, but the Margites, unhappily for
+us, is lost. Even heroes have their littlenesses, and Comedy is truer to
+the details of littleness than Tragedy or Epic. The grand is always more
+or less ideal, and the elevation of a moment is sublimed into the spirit
+of a life. Comedy, therefore, is essential for the representing of men;
+and there were times, doubtless, when the complexion of Agamemnon's
+greatness was discoloured, like Prince Henry's, by remembering, when he
+was weary, that poor creature&mdash;small beer&mdash;<i>i.e.</i> if the Greeks had got
+any.</p>
+
+<p>A more serious discoloration, however, we are obliged to say that we
+find in Homer himself, in the soil or taint which even he is obliged to
+cast over the position of women. In the Iliad, where there is no sign of
+male slavery, women had already fallen under the chain, and though there
+does not seem to have been any practice of polygamy, the female
+prisoners fell, as a matter of course, into a more degraded position. It
+is painful, too, to observe that their own feelings followed the
+practice of the times, and that they composed themselves to bear without
+reluctance whatever their destiny forced upon them. When Priam ventured
+into the Grecian camp for Hector's body, and stood under the roof of
+Achilles, he endured to do what, as he says, no mortal father had ever
+yet endured&mdash;to give his hand to his son's destroyer. Briseis, whose bed
+was made desolate by the hand of the same Achilles, finds it her one
+greatest consolation, that the conqueror stoops to choose her to share
+his own. And when Hector in his last sad parting scene anticipates a
+like fate for his own Andromache, it is not with the revolted agony of
+horror with which such a possible future would be regarded by a modern
+husband; nor does Andromache, however bitterly she feels the danger,
+protest, as a modern<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_356" id="Page_356">[Pg 356]</a></span> wife would do, that there was no fear for
+her&mdash;that death by sorrow's hand, or by her own, would preserve her to
+rejoin him.</p>
+
+<p>Nor, again, was unfaithfulness, of however long duration, conclusively
+fatal against a wife; for we meet Helen, after a twenty years'
+elopement, again the quiet, hospitable mistress in the Spartan palace,
+entertaining her husband's guests with an easy matronly dignity, and not
+afraid even in Menelaus's presence to allude to the past&mdash;in strong
+terms of self-reproach, indeed, but with nothing like despairing
+prostration. Making the worst of this, however, yet even in this respect
+the Homeric Greeks were better than their contemporaries in Palestine;
+and on the whole there was, perhaps, no time anterior to Christianity
+when women held a higher place, or the relation between wife and husband
+was of a more free and honourable kind.</p>
+
+<p>For we have given but one side of the picture. When a woman can be the
+theme of a poet, her nature cannot be held in slight esteem; and there
+is no doubt that Penelope is Homer's heroine in the Odyssey. One design,
+at least, which Homer had before him was to vindicate the character of
+the virtuous matron against the stain which Clytemnestra had inflicted
+on it. Clytemnestra has every advantage, Penelope every difficulty: the
+trial of the former lasted only half as long as that of the latter.
+Agamemnon in leaving her gave herself and his house in charge to a
+divine <ins class="cor" title="[Greek: aoidos]">&#945;&#959;&#953;&#948;&#959;&#962;</ins>, a heaven-inspired prophet, who should stand
+between her and temptation, and whom she had to murder before her
+passion could have its way. Penelope had to bear up alone for twenty
+weary years, without a friend, without a counsellor, and with even a
+child whose constancy was wavering. It is obvious that Homer designed
+this contrast. The story of the Argos tragedy is told again and again.
+The shade of Agamemnon himself forebodes a fate like his own to Ulysses.
+It is Ulysses's first thought when he wakes from his sleep to find
+himself in his own land; and the scene in Hades, in the last book, seems
+only introduced that the husband of Clytemnestra may meet the shades of
+the Ithacan suitors, and learn, in their own tale of the sad issue of
+their wooing, how far otherwise it had fared with Ulysses than with
+himself. Women, therefore, according to Homer, were as capable of heroic
+virtue as men were, and the ideal of this heroism is one to which we
+have scarcely added.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_357" id="Page_357">[Pg 357]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>For the rest, there is no trace of any oriental seraglio system. The
+sexes lived together in easy unaffected intercourse. The ladies appeared
+in society naturally and gracefully, and their chief occupations were
+household matters, care of clothes and linen, and other domestic
+arrangements. When a guest came, they prepared his dressing-room,
+settled the bath, and arranged the convenience of his toilet-table. In
+their leisure hours, they were to be found, as now, in the hall or the
+saloon, and their work-table contained pretty much the same materials.
+Helen was winding worsted as she entertained Telemachus, and Andromache
+worked roses in very modern cross-stitch. A literalist like Mr. Mackay,
+who finds out that the Israelites were cannibals, from such expressions
+as 'drinking the blood of the slain,' might discover, perhaps, a similar
+unpleasant propensity in an excited wish of Hecuba, that she might eat
+the heart of Achilles; but in the absence of other evidence, it is
+unwise in either case to press a metaphor; and the food of ladies,
+wherever Homer lets us see it, is very innocent cake and wine, with such
+fruits as were in season. To judge by Nausicaa, their breeding must have
+been exquisite. Nausicaa standing still, when the uncouth figure of
+Ulysses emerged from under the wood, all sea slime and nakedness, and
+only covered with a girdle of leaves&mdash;standing still to meet him when
+the other girls ran away tittering and terrified, is the perfect
+conception of true female modesty; and in the whole scene between them,
+Homer shows the most finished understanding of the delicate and
+tremulous relations which occur occasionally in the accidents of
+intercourse between highly cultivated men and women, and which he could
+only have learnt by living in a society where men and women met and felt
+in the way which he has described.</p>
+
+<p>Who, then, was Homer? What was he? When did he live? History has
+absolutely nothing to answer. His poems were not written; for the art of
+writing (at any rate for a poet's purpose) was unknown to him. There is
+a vague tradition that the Iliad, and the Odyssey, and a comic poem
+called the Margites, were composed by an Ionian whose name was Homer,
+about four hundred years before Herodotus, or in the ninth century <span class="smcap">B.C.</span>
+We know certainly that these poems were preserved by the Rhapsodists, or
+popular reciters, who repeated them at private parties or festivals,
+until<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_358" id="Page_358">[Pg 358]</a></span> writing came into use, and they were fixed in a less precarious
+form. A later story was current, that we owe the collection to
+Pisistratus; but an exclusive claim for him was probably only Athenian
+conceit. It is incredible that men of genius in Homer's own
+land&mdash;Alc&aelig;us, for instance&mdash;should have left such a work to be done by a
+foreigner. But this is really all which is known; and the creation of
+the poems lies in impenetrable mystery. Nothing remains to guide us,
+therefore, except internal evidence (strangely enough, it is the same
+with Shakespeare), and it has led to wild conclusions: yet the wildest
+is not without its use; it has commonly something to rest upon; and
+internal evidence is only really valuable when outward testimony has
+been sifted to the uttermost. The present opinion seems to be, that each
+poem is unquestionably the work of one man; but whether both poems are
+the work of the same is yet <i>sub judice</i>. The Greeks believed they were;
+and that is much. There are remarkable points of resemblance in style,
+yet not greater than the resemblances in the 'Two Noble Kinsmen' and in
+the 'Yorkshire Tragedy' to 'Macbeth' and 'Hamlet;' and there are more
+remarkable points of non-resemblance, which deepen upon us the more we
+read. On the other hand, tradition is absolute. If the style of the
+Odyssey is sometimes unlike the Iliad, so is one part of the Iliad
+sometimes unlike another. It is hard to conceive a genius equal to the
+creation of either Iliad or Odyssey to have existed without leaving at
+least a legend of his name; and the difficulty of criticising style
+accurately in an old language will be appreciated by those who have
+tried their hand in their own language with the disputed plays of
+Shakespeare. There are heavy difficulties every way; and we shall best
+conclude our own subject by noting down briefly the most striking points
+of variation of which as yet no explanation has been attempted. We have
+already noticed several: the non-appearance of male slavery in the Iliad
+which is common in the Odyssey; the notion of a future state; and
+perhaps a fuller cultivation in the female character. Andromache is as
+delicate as Nausicaa, but she is not as grand as Penelope; and in marked
+contrast to the feeling expressed by Briseis, is the passage where the
+grief of Ulysses over the song of Demodocus is compared to the grief of
+a young wife flinging herself on the yet warm body of her husband, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_359" id="Page_359">[Pg 359]</a></span>
+looking forward to her impending slavery with feelings of horror and
+repulsion. But these are among the slightest points in which the two
+poems are dissimilar. Not only are there slaves in the Odyssey, but
+there are <ins class="cor" title="[Greek: Th&ecirc;tes]">&#952;&#951;&#964;&#949;&#962;</ins>, or serfs, an order with which we are familiar
+in later times, but which again are not in the Iliad. In the Odyssey the
+Trojans are called <ins class="cor" title="[Greek: epib&ecirc;tores hipp&ocirc;n]">&#949;&#960;&#953;&#946;&#951;&#964;&#959;&#961;&#949;&#962; &#7985;&#960;&#960;&#969;&#957;</ins>, which must mean <i>riders</i>.
+In the Iliad, horses are never ridden; they are always in harness.</p>
+
+<p>Wherever in the Odyssey the Trojan war is alluded to (and it is very
+often), in no one case is the allusion to anything which is mentioned in
+the Iliad. We hear of the wooden horse, the taking of Troy, the death of
+Achilles, the contention of Ulysses with Ajax for his arms. It might be
+said that the poet wished to supply afterwards indirectly what he had
+left in the Iliad untold; but again, this is impossible, for a very
+curious reason. The Iliad opens with the wrath of Achilles, which caused
+such bitter woe to the Achaians. In the Odyssey it is still the wrath of
+Achilles; but singularly <i>not with Agamemnon, but with Ulysses</i>. Ulysses
+to the author of the Odyssey was a far grander person at <i>Troy</i> than he
+appears in the Iliad. In the latter poem he is great, but far from one
+of the greatest; in the other, he is evidently the next to Achilles; and
+it seems almost certain that whoever wrote the Odyssey was working from
+some other legend of the war. There were a thousand versions of it. The
+tale of Ilium was set to every lyre in Greece, and the relative position
+of the heroes was doubtless changed according to the sympathies or the
+patriotism of the singer. The character of Ulysses is much stronger in
+the Odyssey; and even when the same qualities are attributed to him&mdash;his
+soft-flowing tongue, his cunning, and his eloquence&mdash;they are held in
+very different estimation. The Homer of the Iliad has little liking for
+a talker. Thersites is his pattern specimen of such; and it is the
+current scoff at unready warriors to praise their father's courage, and
+then to add&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div class="i12"><ins class="cor" title="alla ton huion">&#945;&#955;&#955;&#945; &#964;&#959;&#957; &#965;&#7985;&#959;&#957;</ins></div><br />
+<div class="i0"><ins class="cor" title="geinato heio cher&ecirc;a mach&ecirc;, agor&ecirc; de t' amein&ocirc;.">&#947;&#949;&#953;&#957;&#945;&#964;&#959; &#949;&#7985;&#959; &#967;&#949;&#961;&#951;&#945; &#956;&#945;&#967;&#951;, &#945;&#947;&#959;&#961;&#951; &#948;&#949; &#964;' &#945;&#956;&#949;&#953;&#957;&#969;</ins></div><br />
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But the Ph&oelig;acian Lord who ventured to reflect, in the Iliad style, on
+the supposed unreadiness of Ulysses, is taught a different notion of
+human excellence. Ulysses tells him that he is a fool. 'The gods,'
+Ulysses says, 'do not give all good<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_360" id="Page_360">[Pg 360]</a></span> things to all men, and often a man
+is made unfair to look upon, but over his ill favour they fling, like a
+garland, a power of lovely speech, and the people delight to <i>look</i> on
+him. He speaks with modest dignity, and he shines among the multitude.
+As he walks through the city, men gaze on him as on a god.'</p>
+
+<p>Differences like these, however, are far from decisive. The very
+slightest external evidence would weigh them all down together. Perhaps
+the following may be of more importance:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>In both poems there are 'questionings of destiny,' as the modern phrase
+goes. The thing which we call human life is looked in the face&mdash;this
+little chequered island of lights and shadows, in the middle of an ocean
+of darkness; and in each we see the sort of answer which the poet finds
+for himself, and which might be summed up briefly in the last words of
+Ecclesiastes, 'Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the
+whole duty of man.' But the world bears a different aspect, and the
+answer looks different in its application. In the Iliad, in spite of the
+gloom of Achilles, and his complaint of the double urn, the sense of
+life, on the whole, is sunny and cheerful. There is no yearning for
+anything beyond&mdash;nothing vague, nothing mystical. The earth, the men,
+the gods, have all a palpable reality about them. From first to last, we
+know where we are, and what we are about. In the Odyssey we are
+breathing another atmosphere. The speculations on the moral mysteries of
+our being hang like a mist over us from the beginning to the end; and
+the cloud from time to time descends on the actors, and envelopes them
+with a preternatural halo. The poet evidently dislikes the expression of
+'suffering being the lot of mortals,' as if it had been abused already
+for ungodly purposes. In the opening of the first book, Zeus reproves
+the folly of mortal men for casting the blame upon the gods, when they
+themselves, in spite of all the gods can do to save them, persist in
+their own perverseness; and we never know as we go on, so fast we pass
+from one to the other, when we are among mere human beings, and when
+among the spiritual or the mystical. Those sea-nymphs, those cannibals,
+those enchantresses, if intended to be real, are neither mortal nor
+divine&mdash;at any rate, like nothing divine which we had seen in Olympus,
+or on the plains of Ilium; and at times there<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_361" id="Page_361">[Pg 361]</a></span> is a strangeness even in
+the hero himself. Sometimes it is Ulysses painfully toiling his way home
+across the unknown ocean; sometimes it is we that are Ulysses, and that
+unknown ocean is the life across which we are wandering, with too many
+Circes, and Sirens, and 'Isles of Error' in our path. In the same spirit
+death is no longer the end; and on every side long vistas seem to
+stretch away into the infinite, peopled with shadowy forms.</p>
+
+<p>But, as if this palpable initiation into the unseen were still
+insufficient or unconvincing, the common ground on which we are treading
+sometimes shakes under us, and we feel as Humboldt describes himself to
+have felt at the first shock of an earthquake. Strange pieces of
+mysterious wildness are let fall in our way, coming suddenly on us like
+spectres, and vanishing without explanation or hint of their purpose.
+What are those Ph&oelig;acian ships meant for, which required neither sail
+nor oar, but of their own selves read the hearts of those they carried,
+and bore them wherever they would go?&mdash;or the wild end of the ship which
+carried Ulysses home?&mdash;or that terrible piece of second sight in the
+Hall at Ithaca, for which the seer was brought from Pylos?&mdash;or those
+islands, one of which is for ever wasting while another is born into
+being to complete the number?&mdash;or those mystical sheep and oxen, which
+knew neither age nor death, nor ever had offspring born to them, and
+whose flesh upon the spits began to crawl and bellow?&mdash;or Helen singing
+round the horse inside the Trojan walls, when every Grecian chief's
+heart fainted in him as he thought he heard the voice of his own dear
+wife far away beyond the sea?</p>
+
+<p>In the far gates of the L&oelig;strygones, 'where such a narrow rim of
+night divided day from day, that a man who needed not sleep might earn a
+double hire, and the cry of the shepherd at evening driving home his
+flock was heard by the shepherd going out in the morning to pasture,' we
+have, perhaps, some tale of a Ph&oelig;nician mariner, who had wandered
+into the North Seas, and seen 'the Norway sun set into sunrise.' But
+what shall we say to that Syrian isle, 'where disease is not, nor
+hunger, nor thirst, and where, when men grow old, Apollo comes with
+Artemis, and slays them with his silver bow?' There is nothing in the
+Iliad like any of these stories.</p>
+
+<p>Yet, when all is said, it matters little who wrote the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_362" id="Page_362">[Pg 362]</a></span> poems. Each is
+so magnificent, that to have written both could scarcely have increased
+the greatness of the man who had written one; and if there were two
+Homers, the earth is richer by one more divine-gifted man than we had
+known. After all, it is perhaps more easy to believe that the
+differences which we seem to see arise from Homer's own choice of the
+material which best suited two works so different, than that nature was
+so largely prodigal as to have created in one age and in one people two
+such men; for whether one or two, the authors of the Iliad and the
+Odyssey stand alone with Shakespeare far away above mankind.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_363" id="Page_363">[Pg 363]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_X_24" id="Footnote_X_24"></a><a href="#FNanchor_X_24"><span class="label">[X]</span></a> <i>Fraser's Magazine</i>, 1851.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_Y_25" id="Footnote_Y_25"></a><a href="#FNanchor_Y_25"><span class="label">[Y]</span></a> Mackay's <i>Progress of the Intellect</i>.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="THE_LIVES_OF_THE_SAINTS" id="THE_LIVES_OF_THE_SAINTS"></a>THE LIVES OF THE SAINTS.</h2>
+
+<p class="center">1850.</p>
+
+
+<p>If the enormous undertaking of the Bollandist editors had been
+completed, it would have contained the histories of 25,000 saints. So
+many the Catholic Church acknowledged and accepted as her ideals&mdash;as men
+who had not only done her honour by the eminence of their sanctity, but
+who had received while on earth an openly divine recognition of it in
+gifts of supernatural power. And this vast number is but a selection;
+the editors chose only out of the mass before them what was most
+noteworthy and trustworthy, and what was of catholic rather than of
+national interest. It is no more than a fraction of that singular
+mythology which for so many ages delighted the Christian world, which is
+still held in external reverence among the Romanists, and of which the
+modern historians, provoked by its feeble supernaturalism, and by the
+entire absence of critical ability among its writers to distinguish
+between fact and fable, have hitherto failed to speak a reasonable word.
+Of the attempt in our own day to revive an interest in them we shall say
+little in this place. The 'Lives' have no form or beauty to give them
+attraction in themselves; and for their human interest the broad
+atmosphere of the world suited ill with these delicate plants, which had
+grown up under the shadow of the convent wall; they were exotics, not
+from another climate, but from another age; the breath of scorn fell on
+them, and having no root in the hearts and beliefs of men any more, but
+only in the sentimentalities and make-beliefs, they withered and sank.
+And yet, in their place as historical phenomena, the legends of the
+saints are as remarkable as any of the Pagan mythologies; to the full as
+remarkable, perhaps far more so, if the length<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_364" id="Page_364">[Pg 364]</a></span> and firmness of hold
+they once possessed on the convictions of mankind is to pass for
+anything in the estimate&mdash;and to ourselves they have a near and peculiar
+interest, as spiritual facts in the growth of the Catholic faith.</p>
+
+<p>Philosophy has rescued the old theogonies from ridicule; their
+extravagancies, even the most grotesque of them, can be now seen to have
+their root in an idea, often a deep one, representing features of
+natural history or of metaphysical speculation, and we do not laugh at
+them any more. In their origin, they were the consecration of the
+first-fruits of knowledge; the expression of a real reverential belief.
+Then time did its work on them; knowledge grew, and they could not grow;
+they became monstrous and mischievous, and were driven out by
+Christianity with scorn and indignation. But it is with human
+institutions as it is with men themselves; we are tender with the dead
+when their power to hurt us has passed away; and as Paganism can never
+more be dangerous, we have been able to command a calmer attitude
+towards it, and to detect under its most repulsive features sufficient
+latent elements of genuine thought to satisfy us that even in their
+darkest aberrations men are never wholly given over to falsehood and
+absurdity. When philosophy has done for medi&aelig;val mythology what it has
+done for Hesiod and for the Edda, we shall find there also at least as
+deep a sense of the awfulness and mystery of life, and we shall find a
+moral element which the Pagans never had. The lives of the saints are
+always simple, often childish, seldom beautiful; yet, as Goethe
+observed, if without beauty, they are always good.</p>
+
+<p>And as a phenomenon, let us not deceive ourselves on the magnitude of
+the Christian hagiology. The Bollandists were restricted on many sides.
+They took only what was in Latin&mdash;while every country in Europe had its
+own home growth in its own language&mdash;and thus many of the most
+characteristic of the lives are not to be found at all in their
+collection. And again, they took but one life of each saint, composed in
+all cases late, and compiled out of the mass of various shorter lives
+which had grown up in different localities out of popular tradition; so
+that many of their longer productions have an elaborate literary
+character, with an appearance of artifice, which, till we know how they
+came into existence, might blind us to the vast width and variety of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_365" id="Page_365">[Pg 365]</a></span>
+the traditionary sources from which they are drawn. In the twelfth
+century there were sixty-six lives extant of St. Patrick alone; and that
+in a country where every parish had its own special saint and special
+legend of him. These sixty-six lives may have contained (Mr. Gibbon says
+<i>must</i> have contained) at least as many thousand lies. Perhaps so. To
+severe criticism, even the existence of a single apostle, St. Patrick,
+appears problematical. But at least there is the historical fact, about
+which there can be no mistake, that the stories did grow up in some way
+or other, that they were repeated, sung, listened to, written, and read;
+that these lives in Ireland, and all over Europe and over the earth,
+wherever the Catholic faith was preached, stories like these, sprang out
+of the heart of the people, and grew and shadowed over the entire
+believing mind of the Catholic world. Wherever church was founded, or
+soil was consecrated for the long resting-place of those who had died in
+the faith; wherever the sweet bells of convent or of monastery were
+heard in the evening air, charming the unquiet world to rest and
+remembrance of God, there dwelt the memory of some apostle who had laid
+the first stone, there was the sepulchre of some martyr whose relics
+reposed beneath the altar, of some confessor who had suffered there for
+his Master's sake, of some holy ascetic who in silent self-chosen
+austerity had woven a ladder there of prayer and penance, on which the
+angels of God were believed to have ascended and descended. It is not a
+phenomenon of an age or of a century; it is characteristic of the
+history of Christianity. From the time when the first preachers of the
+faith passed out from their homes by that quiet Galilean lake, to go to
+and fro over the earth, and did their mighty work, and at last
+disappeared and were not any more seen, these sacred legends began to
+grow. Those who had once known the Apostles, who had drawn from their
+lips the blessed message of light and life, one and all would gather
+together what fragments they could find of their stories. Rumours blew
+in from all the winds. They had been seen here, had been seen there, in
+the farthest corners of the earth, preaching, contending, suffering,
+prevailing. Affection did not stay to scrutinise. When some member of a
+family among ourselves is absent in some far place from which sure news
+of him comes slowly and uncertainly; if he has been in the army, or on
+some dangerous<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_366" id="Page_366">[Pg 366]</a></span> expedition, or at sea, or anywhere where real or
+imaginary dangers stimulate anxiety; or when one is gone away from us
+altogether&mdash;fallen perhaps in battle&mdash;and when the story of his end can
+be collected but fitfully from strangers, who only knew his name, but
+had heard him nobly spoken of; the faintest threads are caught at;
+reports, the vagueness of which might be evident to indifference, are to
+love strong grounds of confidence, and 'trifles light as air' establish
+themselves as certainties. So, in those first Christian communities,
+travellers came through from east and west; legions on the march, or
+caravans of wandering merchants; and one had been in Rome, and seen
+Peter disputing with Simon Magus; another in India, where he had heard
+St. Thomas preaching to the Brahmins; a third brought with him, from the
+wilds of Britain, a staff which he had cut, as he said, from a thorn
+tree, the seed of which St. Joseph had sown there, and which had grown
+to its full size in a single night, making merchandise of the precious
+relic out of the credulity of the believers. So the legends grew, and
+were treasured up, and loved, and trusted; and alas! all which we have
+been able to do with them is to call them lies, and to point a shallow
+moral on the impostures and credulities of the early Catholics. An
+Atheist could not wish us to say more. If we can really believe that the
+Christian Church was made over in its very cradle to lies and to the
+father of lies, and was allowed to remain in his keeping, so to say,
+till yesterday, he will not much trouble himself with any faith which
+after such an admission we may profess to entertain. For, as this spirit
+began in the first age in which the Church began to have a history, so
+it continued so long as the Church as an integral body retained its
+vitality, and only died out in the degeneracy which preceded and which
+brought on the Reformation. For fourteen hundred years these stories
+held their place, and rang on from age to age, from century to century;
+as the new faith widened its boundaries, and numbered ever more and more
+great names of men and women who had fought and died for it, so long
+their histories, living in the hearts of those for whom they laboured,
+laid hold of them and filled them: and the devout imagination, possessed
+with what was often no more than the rumour of a name, bodied it out
+into life, and form, and reality. And doubtless, if we try them by any
+historical<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_367" id="Page_367">[Pg 367]</a></span> canon, we have to say that quite endless untruths grew in
+this way to be believed among men; and not believed only, but held
+sacred, passionately and devotedly; not filling the history books only,
+not only serving to amuse and edify the refectory, or to furnish matter
+for meditation in the cell, but claiming days for themselves of special
+remembrance, entering into liturgies and inspiring prayers, forming the
+spiritual nucleus of the hopes and fears of millions of human souls.</p>
+
+<p>From the hard barren standing ground of the fact idolator, what a
+strange sight must be that still mountain-peak on the wild west Irish
+shore, where, for more than ten centuries, a rude old bell and a carved
+chip of oak have witnessed, or seemed to witness, to the presence long
+ago there of the Irish apostle; and where, in the sharp crystals of the
+trap rock, a path has been worn smooth by the bare feet and bleeding
+knees of the pilgrims, who still, in the August weather, drag their
+painful way along it as they have done for a thousand years. Doubtless
+the 'Lives of the Saints' are full of lies. Are there none in the Iliad?
+or in the legends of &AElig;neas? Were the stories sung in the liturgy of
+Eleusis all so true? so true as fact? Are the songs of the Cid or of
+Siegfried true? We say nothing of the lies in these; but why? Oh, it
+will be said, but they are fictions; they were never supposed to be
+true. But they <i>were</i> supposed to be true, to the full as true as the
+'Legenda Aurea.' Oh, then, they are poetry; and besides, they have
+nothing to do with Christianity. Yes, that is it; they have nothing to
+do with Christianity. Religion has grown such a solemn business with us,
+and we bring such long faces to it, that we cannot admit or conceive to
+be at all naturally admissible such a light companion as the
+imagination. The distinction between secular and religious has been
+extended even to the faculties; and we cannot tolerate in others the
+fulness and freedom which we have lost or rejected for ourselves. Yet it
+has been a fatal mistake with the critics. They found themselves off the
+recognised ground of Romance and Paganism, and they failed to see the
+same principles at work, though at work with new materials. In the
+records of all human affairs, it cannot be too often insisted on that
+two kinds of truth run for ever side by side, or rather, crossing in and
+out with each other, form the warp and the woof of the coloured web
+which we call history:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_368" id="Page_368">[Pg 368]</a></span> the one, the literal and external truths
+corresponding to the eternal and as yet undiscovered laws of fact; the
+other, the truths of feeling and of thought, which embody themselves
+either in distorted pictures of outward things, or in some entirely new
+creation&mdash;sometimes moulding and shaping real history; sometimes taking
+the form of heroic biography, of tradition, or popular legend; sometimes
+appearing as recognised fiction in the epic, the drama, or the novel. It
+is useless to tell us that this is to confuse truth and falsehood. We
+are stating a fact, not a theory; and if it makes truth and falsehood
+difficult to distinguish, that is nature's fault, not ours. Fiction is
+only false, when it is false, not to fact, else how could it be fiction?
+but when it is&mdash;to <i>law</i>. To try it by its correspondence to the real is
+pedantry. Imagination creates as nature creates, by the force which is
+in man, which refuses to be restrained; we cannot help it, and we are
+only false when we make monsters, or when we pretend that our inventions
+are facts, when we substitute truths of one kind for truths of another;
+when we substitute,&mdash;and again we must say when we <i>intentionally</i>
+substitute:&mdash;whenever persons, and whenever facts seize strongly on the
+imagination (and of course when there is anything remarkable in them
+they must and will do so), invention glides into the images which form
+in our minds; so it must be, and so it ever has been, from the first
+legends of a cosmogony to the written life of the great man who died
+last year or century, or to the latest scientific magazine. We cannot
+relate facts as they are; they must first pass through ourselves, and we
+are more or less than mortal if they gather nothing in the transit. The
+great outlines alone lie around us as imperative and constraining; the
+detail we each fill up variously, according to the turn of our
+sympathies, the extent of our knowledge, or our general theories of
+things: and therefore it may be said that the only literally true
+history possible is the history which mind has left of itself in all the
+changes through which it has passed.</p>
+
+<p>Suetonius is to the full as extravagant and superstitious as Surius, and
+Suetonius was most laborious and careful, and was the friend of Tacitus
+and Pliny. Suetonius gives us prodigies, where Surius has miracles, but
+that is all the difference; each follows the form of the supernatural
+which belonged to the genius of his age. Plutarch writes<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_369" id="Page_369">[Pg 369]</a></span> a life of
+Lycurgus, with details of his childhood, and of the trials and
+vicissitudes of his age; and the existence of Lycurgus is now quite as
+questionable as that of St. Patrick or of St. George of England.</p>
+
+<p>No rectitude of intention will save us from mistakes. Sympathies and
+antipathies are but synonyms of prejudice, and indifference is
+impossible. Love is blind, and so is every other passion. Love believes
+eagerly what it desires; it excuses or passes lightly over blemishes, it
+dwells on what is beautiful; while dislike sees a tarnish on what is
+brightest, and deepens faults into vices. Do we believe that all this is
+a disease of unenlightened times, and that in our strong sunlight only
+truth can get received?&mdash;then let us contrast the portrait, for
+instance, of Sir Robert Peel as it is drawn in the Free Trade Hall at
+Manchester,<a name="FNanchor_Z_26" id="FNanchor_Z_26"></a><a href="#Footnote_Z_26" class="fnanchor">[Z]</a> at the county meeting, and in the Oxford Common Room. It
+is not so. Faithful and literal history is possible only to an impassive
+spirit. Man will never write it, until perfect knowledge and perfect
+faith in God shall enable him to see and endure every fact in its
+reality; until perfect love shall kindle in him under its touch the one
+just emotion which is in harmony with the eternal order of all things.</p>
+
+<p>How far we are in these days from approximating to such a combination we
+need not here insist. Criticism in the hands of men like Niebuhr seems
+to have accomplished great intellectual triumphs; and in Germany and
+France, and among ourselves, we have our new schools of the philosophy
+of history: yet their real successes have hitherto only been
+destructive. When philosophy reconstructs, it does nothing but project
+its own idea; when it throws off tradition, it cannot work without a
+theory: and what is a theory but an imperfect generalisation caught up
+by a predisposition? What is Comte's great division of the eras but a
+theory, and facts are but as clay in his hands, which he can mould to
+illustrate it, as every clever man will find facts to be, let his theory
+be what it will? Intellect can destroy, but it cannot restore life; call
+in the creative faculties&mdash;call in Love, Idea, Imagination, and we have
+living figures, but we cannot tell whether they are figures which ever
+lived before. The high faith in which Love and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_370" id="Page_370">[Pg 370]</a></span> Intellect can alone
+unite in their fulness, has not yet found utterance in modern
+historians.</p>
+
+<p>The greatest man who has as yet given himself to the recording of human
+affairs is, beyond question, Cornelius Tacitus. Alone in Tacitus a
+serene calmness of insight was compatible with intensity of feeling. He
+took no side; he may have been Imperialist, he may have been Republican,
+but he has left no sign whether he was either: he appears to have sifted
+facts with scrupulous integrity; to administer his love, his scorn, his
+hatred, according only to individual merit: and his sentiments are
+rather felt by the reader in the life-like clearness of his portraits,
+than expressed in words by himself. Yet such a power of seeing into
+things was only possible to him, because there was no party left with
+which he could determinedly side, and no wide spirit alive in Rome
+through which he could feel. The spirit of Rome, the spirit of life had
+gone away to seek other forms, and the world of Tacitus was a heap of
+decaying institutions; a stage where men and women, as they themselves
+were individually base or noble, played over their little parts. Life
+indeed was come into the world, was working in it, and silently shaping
+the old dead corpse into fresh and beautiful being. Tacitus alludes to
+it once only, in one brief scornful chapter; and the most poorly gifted
+of those forlorn biographers whose unreasoning credulity was piling up
+the legends of St. Mary and the Apostles, which now drive the
+ecclesiastical historian to despair, knew more, in his divine hope and
+faith, of the real spirit which had gone out among mankind, than the
+keenest and gravest intellect which ever set itself to contemplate them.</p>
+
+<p>And now having in some degree cleared the ground of difficulties, let us
+go back to the Lives of the Saints. If Bede tells us lies about St.
+Cuthbert, we will disbelieve his stories; but we will not call Bede a
+liar, even though he prefaces his life with a declaration that he has
+set down nothing but what he has ascertained on the clearest evidence.
+We are driven to no such alternative; our canons of criticism are
+different from Bede's, and so are our notions of probability. Bede would
+expect <i>&agrave; priori</i>, and would therefore consider as sufficiently attested
+by a consent of popular tradition, what the oaths of living witnesses
+would fail to make credible to a modern English jury. We will call Bede
+a liar<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_371" id="Page_371">[Pg 371]</a></span> only if he put forward his picture of St. Cuthbert as a picture
+of a life which he considered admirable and excellent, as one after
+which he was endeavouring to model his own, and which he held up as a
+pattern of imitation, when in his heart he did not consider it admirable
+at all, when he was making no effort at the austerities which he was
+lauding. The histories of the saints are written as ideals of a
+Christian life; they have no elaborate and beautiful forms; single and
+straightforward as they are,&mdash;if they are not this they are nothing. For
+fourteen centuries the religious mind of the Catholic world threw them
+out as its form of hero worship, as the heroic patterns of a form of
+human life which each Christian within his own limits was endeavouring
+to realise. The first martyrs and confessors were to those poor monks
+what the first Dorian conquerors were in the war songs of Tyrt&aelig;us, what
+Achilles and Ajax and Agamemnon and Diomed were wherever Homer was sung
+or read; or in more modern times, what the Knights of the Round Table
+were in the halls of the Norman castles. The Catholic mind was
+expressing its conception of the highest human excellence; and the
+result is that immense and elaborate hagiology. As with the battle
+heroes, too, the inspiration lies in the universal idea; the varieties
+of character (with here and there an exception) are slight and
+unimportant; the object being to create examples for universal human
+imitation. Lancelot or Tristram were equally true to the spirit of
+chivalry; and Patrick on the mountain, or Antony in the desert, are
+equal models of patient austerity. The knights fight with giants,
+enchanters, robbers, unknightly nobles, or furious wild beasts; the
+Christians fight with the world, the flesh, and the devil. The knight
+leaves the comforts of home in quest of adventures, the saint in quest
+of penance, and on the bare rocks or in desolate wildernesses subdues
+the devil in his flesh with prayers and penances; and so alien is it all
+to the whole thought and system of the modern Christian, that he either
+rejects such stories altogether as monks' impostures, or receives them
+with disdainful wonder, as one more shameful form of superstition with
+which human nature has insulted heaven and disgraced itself.</p>
+
+<p>Leaving, however, for the present, the meaning of monastic asceticism,
+it seems necessary to insist that there<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_372" id="Page_372">[Pg 372]</a></span> really was such a thing; there
+is no doubt about it. If the particular actions told of each saint are
+not literally true, as belonging to him, abundance of men did for many
+centuries lead the sort of life which saints are said to have led. We
+have got a notion that the friars were a snug, comfortable set, after
+all; and the life in a monastery pretty much like that in a modern
+university, where the old monks' language and affectation of
+unworldliness does somehow contrive to co-exist with as large a mass of
+bodily enjoyment as man's nature can well appropriate. Very likely this
+was the state into which many of the monasteries had fallen in the
+fifteenth century. It was a symptom of a very rapid disorder which had
+set in among them, and which promptly terminated in dissolution. But
+long, long ages lay behind the fifteenth century, in which, wisely or
+foolishly, these old monks and hermits did make themselves a very hard
+life of it; and the legend only exceeded the reality in being a very
+slightly idealised portrait. We are not speaking of the miracles; that
+is a wholly different question. When men knew little of the order of
+nature, whatever came to pass without an obvious cause was at once set
+down to influences beyond nature and above it; and so long as there were
+witches and enchanters, strong with the help of the bad powers, of
+course the especial servants of God would not be left without graces to
+outmatch and overcome the devil. And there were many other reasons why
+the saints should work miracles. They had done so under the old
+dispensation, and there was no obvious reason why Christians should be
+worse off than Jews. And again, although it be true, in the modern
+phrase, which is beginning to savour a little of cant, that the highest
+natural is the highest supernatural, nevertheless natural facts permit
+us to be so easily familiar with them, that they have an air of
+commonness; and when we have a vast idea to express, there is always a
+disposition to the extraordinary. But the miracles are not the chief
+thing; nor ever were they so. Men did not become saints by working
+miracles, but they worked miracles because they had become saints; and
+the instructiveness and value of their lives lay in the means which they
+had used to make themselves what they were: and as we said, in this part
+of the business there is unquestionable basis of truth&mdash;scarcely even
+exaggeration. We have documentary<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_373" id="Page_373">[Pg 373]</a></span> evidence, which has been filtered
+through the sharp ordeal of party hatred, of the way in which some men
+(and those, not mere ignorant fanatics, but men of vast mind and vast
+influence in their days) conducted themselves, where <i>myth</i> has no room
+to enter. We know something of the hair-shirt of Thomas &agrave; Becket; and
+there was another poor monk, whose asceticism imagination could not
+easily outrun; he who, when the earth's mighty ones were banded together
+to crush him under their armed heels, spoke but one little word, and it
+fell among them like the spear of Cadmus; the strong ones turned their
+hands against each other, and the armies melted away; and the proudest
+monarch of the earth lay at that monk's threshold three winter nights in
+the scanty clothing of penance, suing miserably for forgiveness. Or
+again, to take a fairer figure. There is a poem extant, the genuineness
+of which, we believe, has not been challenged, composed by Columbkill,
+commonly called St. Columba. He was a hermit in Arran, a rocky island in
+the Atlantic, outside Galway Bay; from which he was summoned, we do not
+know how, but in a manner which appeared to him to be a Divine call, to
+go away and be Bishop of Iona. The poem is a 'Farewell to Arran,' which
+he wrote on leaving it; and he lets us see something of a hermit's life
+there. 'Farewell,' he begins (we are obliged to quote from memory), 'a
+long farewell to thee, Arran of my heart. Paradise is with thee; the
+garden of God within the sound of thy bells. The angels love Arran. Each
+day an angel comes there to join in its services.' And then he goes on
+to describe his 'dear cell,' and the holy happy hours which he had spent
+there, 'with the wind whistling through the loose stones, and the sea
+spray hanging on his hair.' Arran is no better than a wild rock. It is
+strewed over with the ruins which may still be seen of the old
+hermitages; and at their best they could have been but such places as
+sheep would huddle under in a storm, and shiver in the cold and wet
+which would pierce through the chinks of the walls.</p>
+
+<p>Or, if written evidence be too untrustworthy, there are silent witnesses
+which cannot lie, that tell the same touching story. Whoever loiters
+among the ruins of a monastery will see, commonly leading out of the
+cloisters, rows of cellars half under-ground, low, damp, and
+wretched-looking; an earthen floor, bearing no trace of pavement; a roof
+from<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_374" id="Page_374">[Pg 374]</a></span> which the mortar and the damp keep up (and always must have kept
+up) a perpetual ooze; for a window a narrow slip in the wall, through
+which the cold and the wind find as free an access as the light. Such as
+they are, a well-kept dog would object to accept a night's lodging in
+them; and if they had been prison cells, thousands of philanthropic
+tongues would have trumpeted out their horrors. The stranger perhaps
+supposes that they were the very dungeons of which he has heard such
+terrible things. He asks his guide, and his guide tells him they were
+the monks' dormitories. Yes; there on that wet soil, with that dripping
+roof above them, was the self-chosen home of those poor men. Through
+winter frost, through rain and storm, through summer sunshine,
+generation after generation of them, there they lived and prayed, and at
+last lay down and died.</p>
+
+<p>It is all gone now&mdash;gone as if it had never been; and it was as foolish
+as, if the attempt had succeeded, it would have been mischievous, to
+revive a devotional interest in the Lives of the Saints. It would have
+produced but one more unreality in an age already too full of such. No
+one supposes we should have set to work to live as they lived; that any
+man, however earnest in his religion, would have gone looking for earth
+floors and wet dungeons, or wild islands to live in, when he could get
+anything better. Either we are wiser, or more humane, or more
+self-indulgent; at any rate we are something which divides us from
+medi&aelig;val Christianity by an impassable gulf which this age or this epoch
+will not see bridged over. Nevertheless, these modern hagiologists,
+however wrongly they went to work at it, had detected, and were
+endeavouring to fill, a very serious blank in our educational system; a
+very serious blank indeed, and one which, somehow, we must contrive to
+get filled if the education of character is ever to be more than a name
+with us. To try and teach people how to live without giving them
+examples in which our rules are illustrated, is like teaching them to
+draw by the rules of perspective, and of light and shade, without
+designs in which to study the effects; or to write verse by the laws of
+rhyme and metre, without song or poem in which rhyme and metre are
+exhibited. It is a principle which we have forgotten, and it is one
+which the old Catholics did not forget. We do not mean that they set out
+with saying to themselves, 'We must<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_375" id="Page_375">[Pg 375]</a></span> have examples, we must have
+ideals;' very likely they never thought about it at all; love for their
+holy men, and a thirst to know about them, produced the histories; and
+love unconsciously working gave them the best for which they could have
+wished. The boy at school at the monastery, the young monk disciplining
+himself as yet with difficulty under the austerities to which he had
+devoted himself, the old one halting on toward the close of his
+pilgrimage,&mdash;all of them had before their eyes, in the legend of the
+patron saint, a personal realisation of all they were trying after;
+leading them on, beckoning to them, and pointing, as they stumbled among
+their difficulties, to the marks which his own footsteps had left, as he
+had trod that hard path before them. It was as if the Church was for
+ever saying to them:&mdash;'You have doubts and fears, and trials and
+temptations, outward and inward; you have sinned, perhaps, and feel the
+burden of your sin. Here was one who, like you, <i>in this very spot</i>,
+under the same sky, treading the same soil, among the same hills and
+woods and rocks and rivers, was tried like you, tempted like you, sinned
+like you; but here he prayed, and persevered, and did penance, and
+washed out his sins; he fought the fight, he vanquished the Evil One, he
+triumphed, and now he reigns a saint with Christ in heaven. The same
+ground which yields you your food, once supplied him; he breathed, and
+lived, and felt, and died <i>here</i>; and now, from his throne in the sky,
+he is still looking lovingly down on his children, making intercession
+for you that you may have grace to follow him, that by-and-by he may
+himself offer you at God's throne as his own.' It is impossible to
+measure the influence which a personal reality of this kind must have
+exercised on the mind, thus daily and hourly impressed upon it through a
+life; there is nothing vague any more, no abstract excellences to strain
+after; all is distinct, personal, palpable. It is no dream. The saint's
+bones are under the altar; nay, perhaps, his very form and features
+undissolved. Under some late abbot the coffin may have been opened and
+the body seen without mark or taint of decay. Such things have been, and
+the emaciation of a saint will account for it without a miracle. Daily
+some incident of his story is read aloud, or spoken of, or preached
+upon. In quaint beautiful forms it lives in light in the long chapel
+windows;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_376" id="Page_376">[Pg 376]</a></span> and in the summer matins his figure, lighted up in splendour,
+gleams down on the congregation as they pray, or streams in mysterious
+tints along the pavement, clad, as it seems, in soft celestial glory,
+and shining as he shines in heaven. Alas, alas! where is it all gone?</p>
+
+<p>We are going to venture a few thoughts on the wide question, what
+possibly may have been the meaning of so large a portion of the human
+race, and so many centuries of Christianity, having been surrendered and
+seemingly sacrificed to the working out this dreary asceticism. If right
+once, then it is right now; if now worthless, then it could never have
+been more than worthless; and the energies which spent themselves on it
+were like corn sown upon the rock, or substance given for that which is
+not bread. We supposed ourselves challenged recently for our facts. Here
+is an enormous fact which there is no evading. It is not to be slurred
+over with indolent generalities, with unmeaning talk of superstition, of
+the twilight of the understanding, of barbarism, and of nursery
+credulity; it is matter for the philosophy of history, if the philosophy
+has yet been born which can deal with it; one of the solid, experienced
+facts in the story of mankind which must be accepted and considered with
+that respectful deference which all facts claim of their several
+sciences, and which will certainly not disclose its meaning (supposing
+it to have a meaning) except to reverence, to sympathy, to love. We must
+remember that the men who wrote these stories, and who practised these
+austerities, were the same men who composed our liturgies, who built our
+churches and our cathedrals&mdash;and the gothic cathedral is, perhaps, on
+the whole, the most magnificent creation which the mind of man has as
+yet thrown out of itself. If there be any such thing as a philosophy of
+history, real or possible, it is in virtue of there being certain
+progressive organising laws in which the fretful lives of each of us are
+gathered into and subordinated in some larger unity, through which age
+is linked to age, as we move forward, with an horizon expanding and
+advancing. And if this is true, the magnitude of any human phenomenon is
+a criterion of its importance, and definite forms of thought working
+through long historic periods imply an effect of one of these vast
+laws&mdash;imply a distinct step in human progress. Something previously<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_377" id="Page_377">[Pg 377]</a></span>
+unrealised is being lived out, and rooted into the heart of mankind.</p>
+
+<p>Nature never half does her work. She goes over it, and over it, to make
+assurance sure, and makes good her ground with wearying repetition. A
+single section of a short paper is but a small space to enter on so vast
+an enterprise; nevertheless, a few very general words shall be ventured
+as a suggestion of what this monastic or saintly spirit may possibly
+have meant.</p>
+
+<p>First, as the spirit of Christianity is antagonistic to the world,
+whatever form the spirit of the world assumes, the ideals of
+Christianity will of course be their opposite; as one verges into one
+extreme, the other will verge into the contrary. In those rough times
+the law was the sword; animal might of arm, and the strong animal heart
+which guided it, were the excellences which the world rewarded; and
+monasticism, therefore, in its position of protest, would be the
+destruction and abnegation of the animal nature. The war hero in the
+battle or the tourney yard might be taken as the apotheosis of the
+fleshly man&mdash;the saint in the desert of the spiritual.</p>
+
+<p>But this interpretation is slight, imperfect, and if true at all only
+partially so. The animal and the spiritual are not contradictories; they
+are the complements in the perfect character; and in the middle ages, as
+in all ages of genuine earnestness, they interfused and penetrated each
+other. There were warrior saints and saintly warriors; and those grand
+old figures which sleep cross-legged in the cathedral aisles were
+something higher than only one more form of the beast of prey.
+Monasticism represented something more positive than a protest against
+the world. We believe it to have been the realisation of the infinite
+loveliness and beauty of personal purity.</p>
+
+<p>In the earlier civilisation, the Greeks, however genuine their reverence
+for the gods, do not seem to have supposed any part of their duty to the
+gods to consist in keeping their bodies untainted. Exquisite as was
+their sense of beauty, of beauty of mind as well as beauty of form, with
+all their loftiness and their nobleness, with their ready love of moral
+excellence when manifested, as fortitude, or devotion to liberty and to
+home, they had little or no idea of what we mean by morality. With a few
+rare exceptions,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_378" id="Page_378">[Pg 378]</a></span> pollution, too detestable to be even named among
+ourselves, was of familiar and daily occurrence among their greatest
+men; was no reproach to philosopher or to statesman; and was not
+supposed to be incompatible, and was not, in fact, incompatible with any
+of those especial excellences which we so admire in the Greek character.</p>
+
+<p>Among the Romans (that is, the early Romans of the republic), there was
+a sufficiently austere morality. A public officer of state, whose
+business was to enquire into the private lives of the citizens, and to
+punish offences against morals, is a phenomenon which we have seen only
+once on this planet. There was never a nation before, and there has been
+none since, with sufficient virtue to endure it. But the Roman morality
+was not lovely for its own sake, nor excellent in itself. It was
+obedience to law, practised and valued, loved for what resulted from it,
+for the strength and rigid endurance which it gave, but not loved for
+itself. The Roman nature was fierce, rugged, almost brutal; and it
+submitted to restraint as stern as itself, as long as the energy of the
+old spirit endured. But as soon as that energy grew slack&mdash;when the
+religion was no longer believed, and taste, as it was called, came in,
+and there was no more danger to face, and the world was at their feet,
+all was swept away as before a whirlwind; there was no loveliness in
+virtue to make it desired, and the Rome of the C&aelig;sars presents, in its
+later ages, a picture of enormous sensuality, of the coarsest animal
+desire, with means unlimited to gratify it. In Latin literature, as
+little as in the Greek, is there any sense of the beauty of purity.
+Moral essays on temperance we may find, and praise enough of the wise
+man whose passions and whose appetites are trained into obedience to
+reason. But this is no more than the philosophy of the old Roman life,
+which got itself expressed in words when men were tired of the reality.
+It involves no sense of sin. If sin could be indulged without weakening
+self-command, or without hurting other people, Roman philosophy would
+have nothing to say against it.</p>
+
+<p>The Christians stepped far out beyond philosophy. Without speculating on
+the <i>why</i>, they felt that indulgence of animal passion did, in fact,
+pollute them, and so much the more, the more it was deliberate.
+Philosophy, gliding into Manicheism, divided the forces of the universe,
+giving the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_379" id="Page_379">[Pg 379]</a></span> spirit to God, but declaring matter to be eternally and
+incurably evil; and looking forward to the time when the spirit should
+be emancipated from the body, as the beginning of, or as the return to,
+its proper existence, a man like Plotinus took no especial care what
+became the meanwhile of its evil tenement of flesh. If the body sinned,
+sin was its element; it could not do other than sin; purity of conduct
+could not make the body clean, and no amount of bodily indulgence could
+shed a taint upon the spirit&mdash;a very comfortable doctrine, and one
+which, under various disguises, has appeared a good many times on the
+earth. But Christianity, shaking all this off, would present the body to
+God as a pure and holy sacrifice, as so much of the material world
+conquered from the appetites and lusts, and from the devil whose abode
+they were. This was the meaning of the fastings and scourgings, the
+penances and night-watchings; it was this which sent St. Anthony to the
+tombs and set Simeon on his pillar, to conquer the devil in the flesh,
+and keep themselves, if possible, undefiled by so much as one corrupt
+thought.</p>
+
+<p>And they may have been absurd and extravagant. When the feeling is
+stronger than the judgment, men are very apt to be extravagant. If, in
+the recoil from Manicheism, they conceived that a body of a saint thus
+purified had contracted supernatural virtue and could work miracles,
+they had not sufficiently attended to the facts, and so far are not
+unexceptionable witnesses to them. Nevertheless they did their work, and
+in virtue of it we are raised to a higher stage&mdash;we are lifted forward a
+mighty step which we can never again retrace. Personal purity is not the
+whole for which we have to care: it is but one feature in the ideal
+character of man. The monks may have thought it was all, or more nearly
+all than it is; and therefore their lives may seem to us poor, mean, and
+emasculate. Yet it is with life as it is with science; generations of
+men have given themselves exclusively to single branches, which, when
+mastered, form but a little section in a cosmic philosophy; and in life,
+so slow is progress, it may take a thousand years to make good a single
+step. Weary and tedious enough it seems when we cease to speak in large
+language, and remember the numbers of individual souls who have been at
+work at the process; but who knows whereabouts we are in the duration<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_380" id="Page_380">[Pg 380]</a></span>
+of the race? Is humanity crawling out of the cradle, or tottering into
+the grave? Is it in nursery, in schoolroom, or in opening manhood? Who
+knows? It is enough for us to be sure of our steps when we have taken
+them, and thankfully to accept what has been done for us. Henceforth it
+is impossible for us to give our unmixed admiration to any character
+which moral shadows overhang. Henceforth we require, not greatness only,
+but goodness; and not that goodness only which begins and ends in
+conduct correctly regulated, but that love of goodness, that keen pure
+feeling for it, which resides in a conscience as sensitive and
+susceptible as woman's modesty.</p>
+
+<p>So much for what seems to us the philosophy of this matter. If we are
+right, it is no more than a first furrow in the crust of a soil which
+hitherto the historians have been contented to leave in its barrenness.
+If they are conscientious enough not to trifle with the facts, as they
+look back on them from the luxurious self-indulgence of modern
+Christianity, they either revile the superstition or pity the ignorance
+which made such large mistakes on the nature of religion&mdash;and, loud in
+their denunciations of priestcraft and of lying wonders, they point
+their moral with pictures of the ambition of medi&aelig;val prelacy or the
+scandals of the annals of the papacy. For the inner life of all those
+millions of immortal souls who were struggling, with such good or bad
+success as was given them, to carry Christ's cross along their journey
+through life, they set it by, pass it over, dismiss it out of history,
+with some poor commonplace simper of sorrow or of scorn. It will not do.
+Mankind have not been so long on this planet altogether, that we can
+allow so large a chasm to be scooped out of their spiritual existence.</p>
+
+<p>We intended to leave our readers with something lighter than all this in
+the shape of literary criticism, and a few specimens of the biographical
+style: in both of these we must now, however, be necessarily brief.
+Whoever is curious to study the lives of the saints in their originals,
+should rather go anywhere than to the Bollandists, and universally never
+read a late life when he can command an early one; for the genius in
+them is in the ratio of their antiquity, and, like river-water, is most
+pure nearest to the fountain. We are lucky in possessing several
+specimens of the mode of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_381" id="Page_381">[Pg 381]</a></span> their growth in late and early lives of the
+same saints, and the process in all is similar. Out of the unnumbered
+lives of St. Bride, three are left; out of the sixty-six of St. Patrick,
+there are eight; the first of each belonging to the sixth century, the
+latest to the thirteenth. The earliest in each instance are in verse;
+they belong to a time when there was no one to write such things, and
+were popular in form and popular in their origin. The flow is easy, the
+style graceful and natural; but the step from poetry to prose is
+substantial as well as formal; the imagination is ossified, and we
+exchange the exuberance of legendary creativeness for the dogmatic
+record of fact without reality, and fiction without grace. The
+marvellous in the poetical lives is comparatively slight; the
+after-miracles being composed frequently out of a mistake of poets'
+metaphors for literal truth. There is often real, genial, human beauty
+in the old verse. The first two stanzas, for instance, of St. Bride's
+Hymn are of high merit, as may, perhaps, be imperfectly seen in a
+translation:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div class="i0">Bride the queen, she loved not the world;</div><br />
+<div class="i0">She floated on the waves of the world</div><br />
+<div class="i0">As the sea-bird floats upon the billow.</div><br />
+<br />
+<div class="i0">Such sleep she slept as the mother sleeps</div><br />
+<div class="i0">In the far land of her captivity,</div><br />
+<div class="i0">Mourning for her child at home.</div><br />
+</div></div>
+
+<p>What a picture is there of the strangeness and yearning of the poor
+human soul in this earthly pilgrimage!</p>
+
+<p>The poetical 'Life of St. Patrick,' too, is full of fine, wild, natural
+imagery. The boy is described as a shepherd on the hills of Down, and
+there is a legend, well told, of the angel Victor coming to him, and
+leaving a gigantic footprint on a rock from which he sprang back into
+heaven. The legend, of course, rose from some remarkable natural feature
+of the spot; as it is first told, a shadowy unreality hangs over it, and
+it is doubtful whether it is more than a vision of the boy; but in the
+later prose all is crystalline; the story is drawn out, with a barren
+prolixity of detail, into a series of angelic visitations. And again,
+when Patrick is described, as the after-apostle, raising the dead Celts
+to life, the metaphor cannot be left in its natural force, and we have a
+long weary list of literal deaths and literal raisings. So in many ways
+the freshness and individuality was lost<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_382" id="Page_382">[Pg 382]</a></span> with time. The larger saints
+swallowed up the smaller and appropriated their exploits; chasms were
+supplied by an ever ready fancy; and, like the stock of good works laid
+up for general use, there was a stock of miracles ever ready when any
+defect was to be supplied. So it was that, after the first impulse, the
+progressive life of a saint rolled on like a snowball down a mountain
+side, gathering up into itself whatever lay in its path, fact or legend,
+appropriate or inappropriate&mdash;sometimes real jewels of genuine old
+tradition, sometimes the d&eacute;bris of the old creeds and legends of
+heathenism; and on, and on, till at length it reached the bottom, and
+was dashed in pieces on the Reformation.</p>
+
+<p>One more illustration shall serve as evidence of what the really
+greatest, most vigorous, minds in the twelfth century could accept as
+possible or probable, which they could relate (on what evidence we do
+not know) as really ascertained facts. We remember something of St.
+Anselm: both as a statesman and as a theologian, he was unquestionably
+among the ablest men of his time alive in Europe. Here is a story which
+Anselm tells of a certain Cornish St. Kieran. The saint, with thirty of
+his companions, was preaching within the frontiers of a lawless Pagan
+prince; and, disregarding all orders to be quiet or to leave the
+country, continued to agitate, to threaten, and to thunder even in the
+ears of the prince himself. Things took their natural course.
+Disobedience provoked punishment. A guard of soldiers was sent, and the
+saint and his little band were decapitated. The scene of the execution
+was a wood, and the heads and trunks were left lying there for the
+wolves and the wild birds.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>But now a miracle, such as was once heard of before in the Church in
+the person of the holy Denis, was again wrought by Divine Providence
+to preserve the bodies of these saints from profanation. The trunk
+of Kieran rose from the ground, and selecting first his own head,
+and carrying it to a stream, and there carefully washing it, and
+afterwards performing the same sacred office for each of his
+companions, giving each body its own head, he dug graves for them
+and buried them, and last of all buried himself. </p></div>
+
+<p>It is even so. So it stands written in a life claiming Anselm's
+authorship; and there is no reason why the authorship should not be his.
+Out of the heart come the issues of evil and of good, and not out of the
+intellect or the understanding.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_383" id="Page_383">[Pg 383]</a></span> Men are not good or bad, noble or
+base&mdash;thank God for it!&mdash;as they judge well or ill of the probabilities
+of nature, but as they love God and hate the devil. And yet the story is
+instructive. We have heard grave good men&mdash;men of intellect and
+influence&mdash;with all the advantages of modern science, learning,
+experience; men who would regard Anselm with sad and serious pity; yet
+tell us stories, as having fallen within their own experience, of the
+marvels of mesmerism, to the full as ridiculous (if anything is
+ridiculous) as this of the poor decapitated Kieran.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div class="i1">Mutato nomine, de te</div><br />
+<div class="i0">Fabula narratur.</div><br />
+</div></div>
+
+<p>We see our natural faces in the glass of history, and turn away and
+straightway forget what manner of men we are. The superstition of
+science scoffs at the superstition of faith.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_384" id="Page_384">[Pg 384]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_Z_26" id="Footnote_Z_26"></a><a href="#FNanchor_Z_26"><span class="label">[Z]</span></a> Written in 1850.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="REPRESENTATIVE_MEN" id="REPRESENTATIVE_MEN"></a>REPRESENTATIVE MEN.</h2>
+
+<p class="center">1850.</p>
+
+
+<p>From St. Anselm to Mr. Emerson, from the 'Acta Sanctorum' to the
+'Representative Men;' so far in seven centuries we have travelled. The
+races of the old Ideals have become extinct like the Preadamite
+Saurians; and here are our new pattern specimens on which we are to
+look, and take comfort and encouragement to ourselves.</p>
+
+<p>The philosopher, the mystic, the poet, the sceptic, the man of the
+world, the writer; these are the present moral categories, the <i>summa
+genera</i> of human greatness as Mr. Emerson arranges them. From every
+point of view an exceptionable catalogue. They are all thinkers, to
+begin with, except one: and thought is but a poor business compared to
+action. Saints did not earn canonisation by the number of their folios;
+and if the necessities of the times are now driving our best men out of
+action into philosophy and verse-making, so much the worse for them and
+so much the worse for the world. The one pattern actor, 'the man of the
+world,' is Napoleon Bonaparte, not in the least a person, as we are most
+of us at present feeling, whose example the world desires to see
+followed. Mr. Emerson would have done better if he had kept to his own
+side of the Atlantic. He is paying his own countrymen but a poor
+compliment by coming exclusively to Europe for his heroes; and he would
+be doing us in Europe more real good by a great deal if he would tell us
+something of the backwoodsmen in Kentucky and Ohio. However, to let that
+pass; it is not our business here to quarrel either with him or his
+book; and the book stands at the head of our article rather because it
+presents a very noticeable deficiency of which its writer is either
+unaware or careless.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_385" id="Page_385">[Pg 385]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>These six predicables, as the logician would call them, what are they?
+Are they <i>ultimate genera</i> refusing to be classified farther? or is
+there any other larger type of greatness under which they fall? In the
+naturalist's catalogue, poet, sceptic, and the rest will all be
+classified as men&mdash;man being an intelligible entity. Has Mr. Emerson any
+similar clear idea of great man or good man? If so, where is he? what is
+he? It is desirable that we should know. Men will not get to heaven
+because they lie under one or other of these predicables. What is that
+supreme type of character which is in itself good or great, unqualified
+with any farther <i>differentia</i>? Is there any such? and if there be,
+where is the representative of this? It may be said that the generic man
+exists nowhere in an ideal unity&mdash;that if considered at all, he must be
+abstracted from the various sorts of men, black and white, tame or
+savage. So if we would know what a great man or a good man means, we
+must look to some specific line in which he is good, and abstract our
+general idea. And that is very well, provided we know what we are about;
+provided we understand, in our abstracting, how to get the essential
+idea distinctly out before ourselves, without entangling ourselves in
+the accidents. Human excellence, after all the teaching of the last
+eighteen hundred years, ought to be something palpable by this time. It
+is the one thing which we are all taught to seek and to aim at forming
+in ourselves; and if representative men are good for anything at all, it
+can only be, not as they represent merely curious combinations of
+phenomena, but as they illustrate us in a completely realised form, what
+we are, every single one of us, equally interested in understanding. It
+is not the 'great man' as 'man of the world' that we care for, but the
+'man of the world' as a 'great man'&mdash;which is a very different thing.
+Having to live in this world, how to live greatly here is the question
+for us; not, how, being great, we can cast our greatness in a worldly
+mould. There may be endless successful 'men of the world' who are mean
+or little enough all the while; and the Emersonian attitude will confuse
+success with greatness, or turn our ethics into a chaos of absurdity. So
+it is with everything which man undertakes and works in. Life has grown
+complicated; and for one employment in old times there are a hundred
+now. But it is not <i>they</i> which are anything, but <i>we</i>. We are the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_386" id="Page_386">[Pg 386]</a></span> end,
+they are but the means, the material&mdash;like the clay, or the marble, or
+the bronze in which the sculptor carves his statue. The <i>form</i> is
+everything; and what is the form? From nursery to pulpit every teacher
+rings on the one note&mdash;be good, be noble, be men. What is goodness then?
+and what is nobleness? and where are the examples? We do not say that
+there are none. God forbid! That is not what we are meaning at all. If
+the earth had ceased to bear men pleasant in God's sight, it would have
+passed away like the cities in the plain. But who are they? which are
+they? how are we to know them? They are our leaders in this life
+campaign of ours. If we could see them, we would follow them, and save
+ourselves many and many a fall, and many an enemy whom we could have
+avoided, if we had known of him. It cannot be that the thing is so
+simple, when names of highest reputation are wrangled over, and such
+poor counterfeits are mobbed with applauding followers. In art and
+science we can detect the charlatan, but in life we do not recognise him
+so readily&mdash;we do not recognise the charlatan, and we do not recognise
+the true man. Rajah Brooke is alternately a hero or a pirate; and fifty
+of the best men among us are likely to have fifty opinions on the merits
+of Elizabeth or Cromwell.</p>
+
+<p>But surely, men say, the thing is simple. The commandments are simple.
+It is not that people do not know, but that they will not act up to what
+they know. We hear a great deal of this in sermons, and elsewhere; and
+of course, as everybody's experience will tell him, there is a great
+deal too much reason why we should hear of it. But there are two sorts
+of duty, positive and negative; what we ought to do, and what we ought
+not to do. To the latter of these, conscience is pretty much awake; but
+by cunningly concentrating its attention on one side of the matter,
+conscience has contrived to forget altogether that any other sort exists
+at all. 'Doing wrong' is breaking a commandment which forbids us to do
+some particular thing. That is all the notion which in common language
+is attached to the idea. Do not kill, steal, lie, swear, commit
+adultery, or break the Lord's day&mdash;these are the commandments; very
+simple, doubtless, and easy to be known. But, after all, what are they?
+They are no more than the very first and rudimental conditions of
+goodness. Obedience to these is not more<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_387" id="Page_387">[Pg 387]</a></span> than a small part of what is
+required of us; it is no more than the foundation on which the
+superstructure of character is to be raised. To go through life, and
+plead at the end of it that we have not broken any of these
+commandments, is but what the unprofitable servant did, who kept his
+talent carefully unspent, and yet was sent to outer darkness for his
+uselessness. Suppose these commandments obeyed&mdash;what then? It is but a
+small portion of our time which, we will hope, is spent in resisting
+temptation to break them. What are we to do with the rest of it? Or
+suppose them (and this is a high step indeed) resolved into love of God
+and love of our neighbour. Suppose we know that it is our duty to love
+our neighbour as ourselves. What are we to do, then, for our neighbour,
+besides abstaining from doing him injury? The saints knew very well what
+<i>they</i> were to do; but our duties, we suppose, lie in a different
+direction; and it does not appear that we have found them. 'We have
+duties so positive to our neighbour,' says Bishop Butler, 'that if we
+give more of our time and of our attention to ourselves and our own
+matters than is our just due, we are taking what is not ours, and are
+guilty of fraud.' What does Bishop Butler mean? It is easy to answer
+generally. In detail, it is not only difficult, it is impossible to
+answer at all. The modern world says&mdash;'Mind your own business, and leave
+others to take care of theirs;' and whoever among us aspires to more
+than the negative abstaining from wrong, is left to his own guidance.
+There is no help for him, no instruction, no modern ideal which shall be
+to him what the heroes were to the young Greek or Roman, or the martyrs
+to the middle age Christian. There is neither track nor footprint in the
+course which he will have to follow, while, as in the old fairy tale,
+the hillside which he is climbing is strewed with black stones mocking
+at him with their thousand voices. We have no moral criterion, no idea,
+no counsels of perfection; and surely this is the reason why education
+is so little prosperous with us; because the only education worth
+anything is the education of character, and we cannot educate a
+character unless we have some notion of what we would form. Young men,
+as we know, are more easily led than driven. It is a very old story that
+to forbid this and that (so curious and contradictory is our nature) is
+to stimulate a desire to do it. But place before a boy a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_388" id="Page_388">[Pg 388]</a></span> figure of a
+noble man; let the circumstances in which he has earned his claim to be
+called noble be such as the boy himself sees round himself; let him see
+this man rising over his temptation, and following life victoriously and
+beautifully forward, and, depend on it, you will kindle his heart as no
+threat of punishment here or anywhere will kindle it.</p>
+
+<p>People complain of the sameness in the 'Lives of the Saints.' It is that
+very sameness which is the secret of their excellence. There is a
+sameness in the heroes of the 'Iliad;' there is a sameness in the
+historical heroes of Greece and Rome. A man is great as he contends best
+with the circumstances of his age, and those who fight best with the
+same circumstances, of course grow like each other. And so with our own
+age&mdash;if we really could have the lives of our best men written for us
+(and written well, by men who knew what to look for, and what it was on
+which they should insist), they would be just as like as each other too,
+and would for that reason be of such infinite usefulness. They would not
+be like the old Ideals. Times are changed; they were one thing, we have
+to be another&mdash;their enemies are not ours. There is a moral
+metempsychosis in the change of era, and probably no lineament of form
+or feature remains identical; yet surely not because less is demanded of
+us&mdash;not less, but more&mdash;more, as we are again and again told on Sundays
+from the pulpits; if the preachers would but tell us in what that 'more'
+consists. The loftiest teaching we ever hear is, that we are to work in
+the spirit of love; but we are still left to generalities, while action
+divides and divides into ever smaller details. It is as if the Church
+said to the painter or to the musician whom she was training, you must
+work in the spirit of love and in the spirit of truth; and then adding,
+that the Catholic painting or the Catholic music was what he was <i>not</i>
+to imitate, supposed that she had sent him out into the world equipped
+fully for his enterprise.</p>
+
+<p>And what comes of this? Emersonianism has come, modern hagiology has
+come, and Ainsworth novels and Bulwer novels, and a thousand more
+unclean spirits. We have cast out the Catholic devil, and the Puritan
+has swept the house and garnished it; but as yet we do not see any
+symptoms showing of a healthy incoming tenant, and there may be worse
+states than Catholicism. If we wanted proof<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_389" id="Page_389">[Pg 389]</a></span> of the utter spiritual
+disintegration into which we have fallen, it would be enough that we
+have no biographies. We do not mean that we have no written lives of our
+fellow-creatures; there are enough and to spare. But not any one is
+there in which the ideal tendencies of this age can be discerned in
+their true form; not one, or hardly any one, which we could place in a
+young man's hands, with such warm confidence as would let us say of
+it&mdash;'Read that; there is a man&mdash;such a man as you ought to be; read it,
+meditate on it; see what he was, and how he made himself what he was,
+and try and be yourself like him.' This, as we saw lately, is what
+Catholicism did. It had its one broad type of perfection, which in
+countless thousands of instances was perpetually reproducing itself&mdash;a
+type of character not especially belonging to any one profession; it was
+a type to which priest and layman, knight or bishop, king or peasant,
+might equally aspire: men of all sorts aspired to it, and men of all
+sorts attained to it; and as fast as she had realised them (so to say),
+the Church took them in her arms, and held them up before the world as
+fresh and fresh examples of victory over the devil. This is what that
+Church was able to do, and it is what we cannot do; and yet, till we can
+learn to do it, no education which we can offer has any chance of
+prospering. Perfection is not easy; it is of all things most difficult;
+difficult to know and difficult to practise. Rules of life will not do;
+even if our analysis of life in all its possible forms were as complete
+as it is in fact rudimentary, they would still be inefficient. The
+philosophy of the thing might be understood, but the practice would be
+as far off as ever. In life, as in art, and as in mechanics, the only
+profitable teaching is the teaching by example. Your mathematician, or
+your man of science, may discourse excellently on the steam engine, yet
+he cannot make one; he cannot make a bolt or a screw. The master workman
+in the engine-room does not teach his apprentice the theory of
+expansion, or of atmospheric pressure; he guides his hand upon the
+turncock, he practises his eye upon the index, and he leaves the science
+to follow when the practice has become mechanical. So it is with
+everything which man learns to do; and yet for the art of arts, the
+trade of trades, for <i>life</i>, we content ourselves with teaching our
+children the catechism and the commandments; we preach them sermons on
+the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_390" id="Page_390">[Pg 390]</a></span> good of being good, and the evil of being evil; in our higher
+education we advance to the theory of habit and the freedom of the will;
+and then, when failure follows failure, <i>ipsa experientia reclamante</i>,
+we hug ourselves with a complacent self-satisfied reflection that the
+fault is not ours, that all which men could do we have done. The freedom
+of the will!&mdash;as if a blacksmith would ever teach a boy to make a
+horseshoe, by telling him he could make one if he chose.</p>
+
+<p>In setting out on our journey through life, we are like strangers set to
+find their way across a difficult and entangled country. It is not
+enough for us to know that others have set out as we set out, that
+others have faced the lions in the path and overcome them, and have
+arrived at last at the journey's end. Such a knowledge may give us
+heart&mdash;but the help it gives is nothing beyond teaching us that the
+difficulties are not insuperable. It is the <i>track</i>, which these others,
+these pioneers of godliness, have beaten in, that we cry to have shown
+us; not a mythic 'Pilgrim's Progress,' but a real path trodden in by
+real men. Here is a crag, and there is but one spot where it can be
+climbed; here is a morass or a river, and there is a bridge in one
+place, and a ford in another. There are robbers in this forest, and wild
+beasts in that; the tracks cross and recross, and, as in the old
+labyrinth, only one will bring us right. The age of the saints has
+passed; they are no longer any service to us; we must walk in their
+spirit, but not along their road; and in this sense we say, that we have
+no pattern great men, no biographies, no history, which are of real
+service to us. It is the remarkable characteristic of the present time,
+as far as we know&mdash;a new phenomenon since history began to be written;
+one more proof, if we wanted proof, that we are entering on another era.
+In our present efforts at educating, we are like workmen setting about
+to make a machine which they know is to be composed of plates and
+joints, and wheels and screws and springs:&mdash;they temper their springs,
+and smooth their plates, and carve out carefully their wheels and
+screws, but having no idea of the machine in its combination, they
+either fasten them together at random, and create some monster of
+disjointed undirected force, or else pile the finished materials into a
+heap together, and trust to some organic spirit in themselves which will
+shape them into unity. We do not know what we would be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_391" id="Page_391">[Pg 391]</a></span> at&mdash;make our
+children into men, says one&mdash;but what sort of men? The Greeks were men,
+so were the Jews, so were the Romans, so were the old Saxons, the
+Normans, the Duke of Alva's Spaniards, and Cromwell's Puritans. These
+were all men, and strong men too; yet all different, and all differently
+trained. 'Into Christian men,' say others: but the saints were Christian
+men; yet the modern Englishmen have been offered the saints'
+biographies, and have with sufficient clearness expressed their opinion
+of them.</p>
+
+<p>Alas! in all this confusion, only those keen-eyed children of this world
+find their profit; their idea does not readily forsake them. In their
+substantial theory of life, the business of man in it is to get on, to
+thrive, to prosper, to have riches in possession. They will have their
+little ones taught, by the law of demand, what will fetch its price in
+the market; and this is clear, bold, definite, straightforward&mdash;and
+therefore it is strong, and works its way. It works and will prevail for
+a time; for a time&mdash;but not for ever, unless indeed religion be all a
+dream, and our airy notions of ourselves a vision out of which our wise
+age is the long-waited-for awakening.</p>
+
+<p>It would be a weary and odious business to follow out all the causes
+which have combined to bring us into our present state. Many of them lie
+deep down in the roots of humanity, and many belong to that large system
+of moral causation which works through vast masses of mankind&mdash;which,
+impressing peculiar and necessary features on the eras as they succeed,
+leaves individuals but a limited margin within which they may determine
+what they will be. One cause, however, may be mentioned, which lies near
+the surface, and which for many reasons it may be advantageous to
+consider. At first thought it may seem superficial and captious; but we
+do not think it will at the second, and still less at the third.</p>
+
+<p>Protestantism, and even Anglo-Protestantism, has not been without its
+great men. In their first fierce struggle for existence, these creeds
+gave birth to thousands whose names may command any rank in history. But
+alone of all forms of religion, past or present, and we will add (as we
+devoutly hope), to come (for in her present form, at least, the Church
+of England cannot long remain), Protestantism knows not what to do with
+her own offspring; she is unable to give them open and honourable
+recognition. Entangled in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_392" id="Page_392">[Pg 392]</a></span> speculative theories of human depravity, of
+the worthlessness of the best which the best men can do, Protestantism
+is unable to say heartily of any one, 'Here is a good man to be loved
+and remembered with reverence.' There are no saints in the English
+Church. The English Church does not pretend to saints. Her children may
+live purely, holily, and beautifully, but her gratitude for them must be
+silent; she may not thank God for them&mdash;she may not hold them up before
+her congregation. They may or they may not have been really good, but
+she may not commit herself to attributing a substantial value to the
+actions of a nature so corrupt as that of man. Among Protestants, the
+Church of England is the worst, for she is not wholly Protestant. In the
+utterness of the self-abnegation of the genuine Protestant there is
+something approaching the heroic. But she, ambitious of being Catholic
+as well as Protestant, like that old Church of evil memory which would
+be neither hot nor cold, will neither wholly abandon merit, nor wholly
+claim it; but halts on between two opinions, claiming and disclaiming,
+saying and in the next breath again unsaying. The Oxford student being
+asked for the doctrine of the Anglican Church on good works, knew the
+rocks and whirlpools among which an unwary answer might involve him, and
+steering midway between Scylla and Charybdis, replied, with laudable
+caution, 'a few of them would not do a man any harm.' It is scarcely a
+caricature of the prudence of the Articles. And so at last it has come
+to this with us. The soldier can raise a column to his successful
+general; the halls of the law courts are hung round with portraits of
+the ermined sages; Newton has his statue, and Harvey and Watt, in the
+academies of the sciences; and each young aspirant after fame, entering
+for the first time upon the calling which he has chosen, sees high
+excellence highly honoured; sees the high career, and sees its noble
+ending, marked out each step of it in golden letters. But the Church's
+aisles are desolate, and desolate they must remain. There is no statue
+for the Christian. The empty niches stare out like hollow eye-sockets
+from the walls. Good men live in the Church and die in her, whose story
+written out or told would be of inestimable benefit, but she may not
+write it. She may speak of goodness, but not of the good man; as she may
+speak of sin, but may not censure the sinner. Her position<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_393" id="Page_393">[Pg 393]</a></span> is critical;
+the Dissenters would lay hold of it. She may not do it, but she will do
+what she can. She cannot tolerate an image indeed, or a picture of her
+own raising; she has no praise to utter at her children's graves, when
+their lives have witnessed to her teaching. But if others will bear the
+expense and will risk the sin, she will offer no objection. Her walls
+are naked. The wealthy ones among her congregation may adorn them as
+they please; the splendour of a dead man's memorial shall be, not as his
+virtues were, but as his purse; and his epitaph may be brilliant
+according as there are means to pay for it. They manage things better at
+the museums and the institutes.</p>
+
+<p>Let this pass, however, as the worst case. There are other causes at
+work besides the neglect of churches; the neglect itself being as much a
+result as a cause. There is a common dead level over the world, to which
+churches and teachers, however seemingly opposite, are alike condemned.
+As it is here in England, so it is with the American Emerson. The fault
+is not in them, but in the age of which they are no more than the
+indicators. We are passing out of old forms of activity into others new
+and on their present scale untried; and how to work nobly in them is the
+one problem for us all. Surius will not profit us, nor the 'Mort
+d'Arthur.' Our calling is neither to the hermitage nor to the round
+table. Our work lies now in those peaceful occupations which, in ages
+called heroic, were thought unworthy of noble souls. In those it was the
+slave who tilled the ground, and wove the garments. It was the ignoble
+burgher who covered the sea with his ships, and raised up factories and
+workshops; and how far such occupations influenced the character, how
+they could be made to minister to loftiness of heart, and high and
+beautiful life, was a question which could not occur while the
+atmosphere of the heroic was on all sides believed so alien to them.
+Times have changed. The old hero worship has vanished with the need of
+it; but no other has risen in its stead, and without it we wander in the
+dark. The commonplaces of morality, the negative commandments, general
+exhortations to goodness, while neither speaker nor hearer can tell what
+they mean by goodness&mdash;these are all which now remain to us; and thrown
+into a life more complicated than any which the earth has yet
+experienced, we are left to wind our<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_394" id="Page_394">[Pg 394]</a></span> way through the labyrinth of its
+details without any clue except our own instincts, our own knowledge,
+our own hopes and desires.</p>
+
+<p>We complain of generalities; we will not leave ourselves exposed to the
+same charge. We will mention a few of the thousand instances in which we
+cry for guidance and find none; instances on which those who undertake
+to teach us ought to have made up their minds.</p>
+
+<p>On the surface at least of the Prayer-book, there seems to be something
+left remaining of the Catholic penitential system. Fasting is spoken of
+and abstinence, and some form or other of self-inflicted self-denial is
+necessarily meant. This thing can by no possibility be unimportant, and
+we may well smile at the exclusive claims of a church to the cure of our
+souls, who is unable to say what she thinks about it. Let us ask her
+living interpreters then, and what shall we get for an answer? either no
+answer at all, or contradictory answers; angrily, violently,
+passionately, contradictory. Among the many voices, what is a young man
+to conclude? He will conclude naturally according to his inclination;
+and if he chooses right, it will most likely be on a wrong motive.</p>
+
+<p>Again, <i>courage</i> is, on all hands, considered as an essential of high
+character. Among all fine people, old and modern, wherever we are able
+to get an insight into their training system, we find it a thing
+particularly attended to. The Greeks, the Romans, the old Persians, our
+own nation till the last two hundred years, whoever of mankind have
+turned out good for anything anywhere, knew very well, that to exhort a
+boy to be brave without training him in it, would be like exhorting a
+young colt to submit to the bridle without breaking him in. Step by
+step, as he could bear it, the boy was introduced to danger, till his
+pulse ceased to be agitated, and he became familiarised with peril as
+his natural element. It was a matter of carefully considered, thoroughly
+recognised, and organised education. But courage nowadays is not a
+paying virtue. Courage does not help to make money, and so we have
+ceased to care about it; and boys are left to educate one another by
+their own semi-brutal instincts, in this, which is perhaps the most
+important of all features in the human character. Schools, as far as the
+masters are concerned with them, are places for teaching<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_395" id="Page_395">[Pg 395]</a></span> Greek and
+Latin&mdash;that, and nothing more. At the universities, fox-hunting is,
+perhaps, the only discipline of the kind now to be found, and
+fox-hunting, by forbidding it and winking at it, the authorities have
+contrived to place on as demoralising a footing as ingenuity could
+devise.<a name="FNanchor_AA_27" id="FNanchor_AA_27"></a><a href="#Footnote_AA_27" class="fnanchor">[AA]</a></p>
+
+<p>To pass from training to life. A boy has done with school and college;
+he has become a man, and has to choose his profession. It is the one
+most serious step which he has yet taken. In most cases, there is no
+recalling it. He believes that he is passing through life to eternity;
+that his chance of getting to heaven depends on what use he makes of his
+time; he prays every day that he may be delivered from temptation; it is
+his business to see that he does not throw himself into it. Now, every
+one of the many professions has a peculiar character of its own, which,
+with rare exceptions, it inflicts on those who follow it. There is the
+shopkeeper type, the manufacturer type, the lawyer type, the medical
+type, the clerical type, the soldier's, the sailor's. The nature of a
+man is</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div class="i4">Like the dyer's hand,</div><br />
+<div class="i0">Subdued to what it works in;</div><br />
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and we can distinguish with ease, on the slightest intercourse, to what
+class a grown person belongs. It is to be seen in his look, in his
+words, in his tone of thought, his voice, gesture, even in his
+hand-writing; and in everything which he does. Every human employment
+has its especial moral characteristic, its peculiar temptations, its
+peculiar influences&mdash;of a subtle and not easily analysed kind, and only
+to be seen in their effects. Here, therefore&mdash;here, if anywhere, we want
+Mr. Emerson with his representatives, or the Church with her advice and
+warning. But, in fact, what attempt do we see to understand any of this,
+or even to acknowledge it; to master the moral side of the professions;
+to teach young men entering them what they are to expect, what to avoid,
+or what to seek? Where are the highest types&mdash;the pattern lawyer, and
+shopkeeper, and merchant? Are they all equally favourable to excellence
+of character? Do they offer equal opportunities? Which best suits this
+disposition, and which suits that? Alas! character is little thought of
+in the choice. It is rather, which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_396" id="Page_396">[Pg 396]</a></span> shall I best succeed in? Where shall
+I make most money? Suppose an anxious boy to go for counsel to his
+spiritual mother; to go to her, and ask her to guide him. Shall I be a
+soldier? he says. What will she tell him? This and no more&mdash;you may,
+without sin. Shall I be a lawyer, merchant, manufacturer, tradesman,
+engineer? Still the same answer. But which is best? he demands. We do
+not know: we do not know. There is no guilt in either; you may take
+which you please, provided you go to church regularly, and are honest
+and good. If he is foolish enough to persist further, and ask, in what
+goodness and honesty consist in <i>his especial department</i> (whichever he
+selects), he will receive the same answer; in other words, he will be
+told to give every man his due and be left to find out for himself in
+what 'his due' consists. It is like an artist telling his pupil to put
+the lights and shadows in their due places, and leaving it to the
+pupil's ingenuity to interpret such instructive directions.</p>
+
+<p>One more instance of an obviously practical kind. Masters, few people
+will now deny, owe certain duties to their workmen beyond payment at the
+competition price for their labour, and the workmen owe something to
+their masters beyond making their own best bargain. Courtesy, on the one
+side, and respect on the other, are at least due; and wherever human
+beings are brought in contact, a number of reciprocal obligations at
+once necessarily arise out of the conditions of their position. It is
+this question which at the present moment is convulsing an entire branch
+of English trade. It is this question which has shaken the Continent
+like an earthquake, and yet it is one which, the more it is thought
+about, the more clearly seems to refuse to admit of being dealt with by
+legislation. It is a question for the Gospel and not for the law. The
+duties are of the kind which it is the business, not of the State, but
+of the Church, to look to. Why is the Church silent? There are duties;
+let her examine them, sift them, prove them, and then point them out.
+Why not&mdash;why not? Alas! she cannot, she dare not give offence, and
+therefore must find none. It is to be feared that we have a rough trial
+to pass through, before we find our way and understand our obligations.
+Yet far off we seem to see a time when the lives, the actions of the
+really great, great good masters, great good landlords, great good
+working men, will be laid out once more before their several<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_397" id="Page_397">[Pg 397]</a></span> orders,
+laid out in the name of God, as once the saints' lives were; and the
+same sounds shall be heard in factory and in counting-house as once
+sounded through abbey, chapel, and cathedral aisle&mdash;'Look at these men;
+bless God for them, and follow them.'</p>
+
+<p>And let no one fear that, if such happy time were come, it would result
+in a tame and weary sameness; that the beautiful variety of individual
+form would be lost, drilled away in regimental uniformity. Even if it
+were so, it need not be any the worse for us; we are not told to
+develope our individualities, we are told to bear fruit. The poor
+vagabond, with all his individualities about him, if by luck he falls
+into the hands of the recruiting sergeant, finds himself, a year later,
+with his red coat and his twelve months' training, not a little the
+better for the loss of them. But such schooling as we have been speaking
+of will drill out only such individualities as are of the unworthy kind,
+and will throw the strength of the nature into the development of the
+healthiest features in it. Far more, as things now are, we see men
+sinking into sameness&mdash;an inorganic, unwholesome sameness, in which the
+higher nature is subdued, and the <i>man</i> is sacrificed to the profession.
+The circumstances of his life are his world; and he sinks under them, he
+does not conquer them. If he has to choose between the two, God's
+uniform is better than the world's. The first gives him freedom; the
+second takes it from him. Only here, as in everything, we must
+understand the nature of the element in which we work; understand it;
+understand the laws of it. Throw off the lower laws; the selfish,
+debasing influences of the profession; obey the higher; follow love,
+truthfulness, manliness; follow these first, and make the profession
+serve them; and that is freedom; there is none else possible for man.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div class="i0">Das Gesetz soll nur uns Freiheit geben;</div><br />
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and whatever individuality is lost in the process, we may feel assured
+that the devil has too much to do with, to make us care to be rid of it.</p>
+
+<p>But how to arrive at this? so easy as it is to suggest on paper, so easy
+to foretell in words. Raise the level of public opinion, we might say;
+insist on a higher standard; in the economist's language, increase the
+demand for goodness, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_398" id="Page_398">[Pg 398]</a></span> the supply will follow; or, at any rate, men
+will do their best. Until we require more of one another, more will not
+be provided. But this is but to restate the problem in other words. How
+are we to touch the heart; how to awaken the desire? We believe that the
+good man, the great man, whatever he be, prince or peasant, is really
+lovely; that really and truly, if we can only see him, he more than
+anything will move us; and at least, we have a right to demand that the
+artificial hindrances which prevent our lifting him above the crowd,
+shall be swept away. He in his beautiful life is a thousand times more
+God's witness than any preacher in a pulpit, and his light must not be
+concealed any more. As we said, what lies in the way of our sacred
+recognition of great men is more than anything else the Protestant
+doctrine of good works. We do not forget what it meant when the world
+first heard of it. It was a cry from the very sanctuary of the soul,
+flinging off and execrating the accursed theory of merits, the sickening
+parade of redundant saintly virtues, which the Roman Church had
+converted into stock, and dispensed for the benefit of the believers.
+This is not the place to pour out our nausea on so poor, yet so
+detestable a farce. But it seems with all human matters, that as soon as
+spiritual truths are petrified into doctrines, it is another name for
+their death. They die, corrupt, and breed a pestilence. The doctrine of
+good works was hurled away by an instinct of generous feeling, and this
+feeling itself has again become dead, and a fresh disease has followed
+upon it. Nobody (or, at least, nobody good for anything) will lay a
+claim to merit for this or that good action which he may have done.
+Exactly in proportion as a man is really good, will be the eagerness
+with which he will refuse all credit for it; he will cry out, with all
+his soul, 'Not unto us&mdash;not unto us.'</p>
+
+<p>And yet, practically, we all know and feel that between man and man
+there is an infinite moral difference; one is good, one is bad, another
+hovers between the two; the whole of our conduct to each other is
+necessarily governed by a recognition of this fact, just as it is in the
+analogous question of the will. Ultimately, we are nothing of ourselves;
+we know that we are but what God has given us grace to be&mdash;we did not
+make ourselves&mdash;we do not keep ourselves here&mdash;we are but what in the
+eternal order of Providence we were designed to be&mdash;exactly that and
+nothing else; and yet we<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_399" id="Page_399">[Pg 399]</a></span> treat each other as responsible; we cannot
+help it. The most rigid Calvinist cannot eliminate his instincts; his
+loves and hatreds seem rather to deepen in intensity of colouring as,
+logically, his creed should lead him to conquer them as foolish. It is
+useless, it is impossible, to bring down these celestial mysteries upon
+our earth, to try to see our way by them, or determine our feelings by
+them; men are good, men are bad, relatively to us and to our
+understandings if you will, but still really, and so they must be
+treated.</p>
+
+<p>There is no more mischievous falsehood than to persist in railing at
+man's nature, as if it were all vile together, as if the best and the
+worst which comes of it were in God's sight equally without worth. These
+denunciations tend too fatally to realise themselves. Tell a man that no
+good which he can do is of any value, and depend upon it he will take
+you at your word&mdash;most especially will the wealthy, comfortable,
+luxurious man, just the man who has most means to do good, and whom of
+all things it is most necessary to stimulate to it. Surely we should not
+be afraid. The instincts which God has placed in our hearts are too
+mighty for us to be able to extinguish them with doctrinal sophistry. We
+love the good man, we praise him, we admire him&mdash;we cannot help it; and
+surely it is mere cowardice to shrink from recognising it
+openly&mdash;thankfully, divinely recognising it. If true at all, there is no
+truth in heaven or earth of deeper practical importance to us; and
+Protestantism must have lapsed from its once generous spirit, if it
+persists in imposing a dogma of its own upon our hearts, the touch of
+which is fatal as the touch of a torpedo to any high or noble endeavours
+after excellence.</p>
+
+<p>'Drive out nature with a fork, she ever comes running back;' and while
+we leave out of consideration the reality, we are filling the chasm with
+inventions of our own. The only novels which are popular among us are
+those which picture the successful battles of modern men and women with
+modern life, which are imperfect shadows of those real battles which
+every reader has seen in some form or other, or has longed to see in his
+own small sphere. It shows where the craving lies if we had but the
+courage to meet it; why need we fall back on imagination to create what
+God has created ready for us? In every department of human life, in the
+more and the less, there is always one man who<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_400" id="Page_400">[Pg 400]</a></span> is the best, and one
+type of man which is the best, living and working his silent way to
+heaven in the very middle of us. Let us find this type then&mdash;let us see
+what it is which makes such men the best, and raise up their
+excellencies into an acknowledged and open standard, of which they
+themselves shall be the living witnesses. Is there a landlord who is
+spending his money, not on pineries and hothouses, but on schools, and
+washhouses, and drains, who is less intent on the magnificence of his
+own grand house, than in providing cottages for his people where decency
+is possible; then let us not pass him by with a torpid wonder or a
+vanishing emotion of pleasure&mdash;rather let us seize him and raise him up
+upon a pinnacle, that other landlords may gaze upon him, if, perhaps,
+their hearts may prick them; and the world shall learn from what one man
+has done what they have a right to require that others shall do.</p>
+
+<p>So it might be through the thousand channels of life. It should not be
+so difficult; the machinery is ready, both to find your men and to use
+them. In theory, at least, every parish has its pastor, and the state of
+every soul is or ought to be known. We know not what turn things may
+take, or what silent changes are rushing on below us. Even while the
+present organisation remains&mdash;but, alas! no&mdash;it is no use to urge a
+Church bound hand and foot in State shackles to stretch its limbs in any
+wholesome activity. If the teachers of the people really were the wisest
+and best and noblest men among us, this and a thousand other blessed
+things would follow from it; till then let us be content to work and
+pray, and lay our hand to the wheel wherever we can find a spoke to
+grasp. <i>Corruptio optimi est pessima</i>; the national Church as it ought
+to be is the soul and conscience of the body politic, but a man whose
+body has the direction of his conscience we do not commonly consider in
+the most hopeful moral condition.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_401" id="Page_401">[Pg 401]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_AA_27" id="Footnote_AA_27"></a><a href="#FNanchor_AA_27"><span class="label">[AA]</span></a> Written 1850.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="REYNARD_THE_FOXAB" id="REYNARD_THE_FOXAB"></a>REYNARD THE FOX.<a name="FNanchor_AB_28" id="FNanchor_AB_28"></a><a href="#Footnote_AB_28" class="fnanchor">[AB]</a></h2>
+
+
+<p>Lord Macaulay, in his Essay on Machiavelli, propounds a singular theory.
+Declining the various solutions which have been offered to explain how a
+man supposed to be so great could have lent his genius to the doctrine
+of 'the Prince,' he has advanced a hypothesis of his own, which may or
+may not be true, as an interpretation of Machiavelli's character, but
+which, as an exposition of a universal ethical theory, is as
+questionable as what it is brought forward to explain. We will not show
+Lord Macaulay the disrespect of supposing that he has attempted an
+elaborate piece of irony. It is possible that he may have been
+exercising his genius with a paradox, but the subject is not of the sort
+in which we can patiently permit such exercises. It is hard work with
+all of us to keep ourselves straight, even when we see the road with all
+plainness as it lies out before us; and clever men must be good enough
+to find something else to amuse themselves with, instead of dusting our
+eyes with sophistry.</p>
+
+<p>According to this conception of human nature, the basenesses and the
+excellencies of mankind are no more than accidents of circumstance, the
+results of national feeling and national capabilities; and cunning and
+treachery, and lying, and such other 'natural defences of the weak
+against the strong,' are in themselves neither good nor bad, except as
+thinking makes them so. They are the virtues of a weak people, and they
+will be as much admired, and are as justly admirable; they are to the
+full as compatible with the highest graces and most lofty features of
+the heart and intellect as any of those opposite so called heroisms
+which we are generally so unthinking as to allow to monopolise the name.
+Cunning is the only resource of the feeble; and why may we<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_402" id="Page_402">[Pg 402]</a></span> not feel for
+victorious cunning as strong a sympathy as for the bold, downright, open
+bearing of the strong? That there may be no mistake in the essayist's
+meaning, that he may drive the nail home into the English understanding,
+he takes an illustration which shall be familiar to all of us in the
+characters of Iago and Othello. To our northern thought, the free and
+noble nature of the Moor is wrecked through a single infirmity, by a
+fiend in the human form. To one of Machiavelli's Italians, Iago's
+keen-edged intellect would have appeared as admirable as Othello's
+daring appears to us, and Othello himself little better than a fool and
+a savage. It is but a change of scene, of climate, of the animal
+qualities of the frame, and evil has become good, and good has become
+evil. Now, our displeasure with Lord Macaulay is, not that he has
+advanced a novel and mischievous theory: it was elaborated long ago in
+the finely tempered dialectics of the Schools of Rhetoric at Athens; and
+so long as such a phenomenon as a cultivated rogue remains possible
+among mankind, it will reappear in all languages and under any number of
+philosophical disguises. Seldom or never, however, has it appeared with
+so little attempt at disguise. It has been left for questionable poets
+and novelists to idealise the rascal genus; philosophers have escaped
+into the ambiguities of general propositions, and we do not remember
+elsewhere to have met with a serious ethical thinker deliberately laying
+two whole organic characters, with their vices and virtues in full life
+and bloom, side by side, asking himself which is best, and answering
+gravely that it is a matter of taste.</p>
+
+<p>Lord Macaulay has been bolder than his predecessors; he has shrunk from
+no conclusion, and has looked directly into the very heart of the
+matter; he has struck, as we believe, the very lowest stone of our
+ethical convictions, and declared that the foundation quakes under it.</p>
+
+<p>For, ultimately, how do we know that right is right, and wrong is wrong?
+People in general accept it on authority; but authority itself must
+repose on some ulterior basis; and what is that? Are we to say that in
+morals there is a system of primary axioms, out of which we develope our
+conclusions, and apply them, as they are needed, to life? It does not
+appear so. The analogy of morals is rather with art than with geometry.
+The grace of heaven gives us good men, and gives us beautiful creations;
+and we, perceiving<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_403" id="Page_403">[Pg 403]</a></span> by the instincts within ourselves that celestial
+presence in the objects on which we gaze, find out for ourselves the
+laws which make them what they are, not by comparing them with any
+antecedent theory, but by careful analysis of our own impressions, by
+asking ourselves what it is which we admire in them, and by calling that
+good, and calling that beautiful.</p>
+
+<p>So, then, if admiration be the first fact&mdash;if the sense of it be the
+ultimate ground on which the after temple of morality, as a system,
+upraises itself&mdash;if we can be challenged here on our own ground, and
+fail to make it good, what we call the life of the soul becomes a dream
+of a feeble enthusiast, and we moralists a mark for the sceptic's finger
+to point at with scorn.</p>
+
+<p>Bold and ably-urged arguments against our own convictions, if they do
+not confuse us, will usually send us back over our ground to re-examine
+the strength of our positions: and if we are honest with ourselves, we
+shall very often find points of some uncertainty left unguarded, of
+which the show of the strength of our enemy will oblige us to see better
+to the defence. It was not without some shame, and much uneasiness,
+that, while we were ourselves engaged in this process, full of
+indignation with Lord Macaulay, we heard a clear voice ringing in our
+ear, 'Who art thou that judgest another?' and warning us of the presence
+in our own heart of a sympathy, which we could not 'deny,' with the
+sadly questionable hero of the German epic, 'Reynard the Fox.' With our
+vulpine friend, we were on the edge of the very same abyss, if, indeed,
+we were not rolling in the depth of it. By what sophistry could we
+justify ourselves, if not by the very same which we had just been so
+eagerly condemning? And our conscience whispered to us that we had been
+swift to detect a fault in another, because it was the very fault to
+which, in our own heart of hearts, we had a latent leaning.</p>
+
+<p>Was it so indeed, then? Was Reineke no better than Iago? Was the sole
+difference between them, that the <i>vates sacer</i> who had sung the
+exploits of Reineke loved the wicked rascal, and entangled us in loving
+him? It was a question to be asked. And yet we had faith enough in the
+straight-forwardness of our own sympathies to feel sure that it must
+admit of some sort of answer. And, indeed, we rapidly found<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_404" id="Page_404">[Pg 404]</a></span> an answer
+satisfactory enough to give us time to breathe, in remembering that
+Reineke, with all his roguery, has no malice in him. It is not in his
+nature to hate; he could not do it if he tried. The characteristic of
+Iago is that deep motiveless malignity which rejoices in evil as its
+proper element&mdash;which loves evil as good men love virtue. In
+calculations on the character of the Moor, Iago despises Othello's
+unsuspicious trustingness as imbecility, while he hates him as a man
+because his nature is the perpetual opposite and perpetual reproach of
+his own. Now, Reineke would not have hurt a creature, not even
+Scharfenebbe, the crow's wife, when she came to peck his eyes out, if he
+had not been hungry; and that <ins class="cor" title="[Greek: gastros anank&ecirc;]">&#947;&#945;&#963;&#964;&#961;&#959;&#962; &#945;&#957;&#945;&#947;&#954;&#951;</ins>, that craving of
+the stomach, makes a difference quite infinite. It is true that, like
+Iago, Reineke rejoices in the exercise of his intellect: the sense of
+his power and the scientific employment of his time are a real delight
+to him; but then, as we said, he does not love evil for its own sake; he
+is only somewhat indifferent to it. If the other animals venture to take
+liberties with him, he will repay them in their own coin, and get his
+quiet laugh at them at the same time; but the object generally for which
+he lives is the natural one of getting his bread for himself and his
+family; and, as the great moralist says, 'It is better to be bad for
+something than for nothing.' Badness generally is undesirable; but
+badness in its essence, which may be called heroic badness, is
+gratuitous.</p>
+
+<p>But this first thought served merely to give us a momentary relief from
+our alarm, and we determined we would sift the matter to the bottom, and
+no more expose ourselves to be taken at such disadvantage. We went again
+to the poem, with our eyes open, and our moral sense as keenly awake as
+a genuine wish to understand our feelings could make it. We determined
+that we would really know what we did feel and what we did not. We would
+not be lightly scared away from our friend, but neither would we any
+more allow our judgment to be talked down by that fluent tongue of his;
+he should have justice from us, he and his biographer, as far as it lay
+with us to discern justice and to render it.</p>
+
+<p>And really on this deliberate perusal it did seem little less than
+impossible that we could find any conceivable attribute illustrated in
+Reineke's proceedings which we could dare to enter in our catalogue of
+virtues, and not blush to read it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_405" id="Page_405">[Pg 405]</a></span> there. What sin is there in the
+Decalogue in which he has not steeped himself to the lips? To the lips,
+shall we say? nay, over head and ears&mdash;rolling and rollicking in sin.
+Murder, and theft, and adultery; sacrilege, perjury, lying&mdash;his very
+life is made of them. On he goes to the end, heaping crime on crime, and
+lie on lie, and at last, when it seems that justice, which has been so
+long vainly halting after him, has him really in her iron grasp, there
+is a solemn appeal to heaven, a challenge, a battle ordeal, in which, by
+means we may not venture even to whisper, the villain prospers, and
+comes out glorious, victorious, amidst the applause of a gazing world.
+To crown it all, the poet tells us that under the disguise of the animal
+name and form the world of man is represented, and the true course of
+it; and the idea of the book is, that we who read it may learn therein
+to discern between good and evil, and choose the first and avoid the
+last. It seemed beyond the power of sophistry to whitewash Reineke, and
+the interest which still continued to cling to him seemed too nearly to
+resemble the unwisdom of the multitude, with whom success is the one
+virtue, and failure the only crime.</p>
+
+<p>It appeared, too, that although the animal disguises were too
+transparent to endure a moment's reflection, yet that they were so
+gracefully worn that such moment's reflection was not to be come at
+without an effort. Our imagination following the costume, did
+imperceptibly betray our judgment; we admired the human intellect, the
+ever ready prompt sagacity and presence of mind. We delighted in the
+satire on the foolishnesses and greedinesses of our own
+fellow-creatures; but in our regard for the hero we forgot his humanity
+wherever it was his interest that we should forget it, and while we
+admired him as a man we judged him only as a fox. We doubt whether it
+would have been possible, if he had been described as an open
+acknowledged biped in coat and trousers, to have retained our regard for
+him. Something or other in us, either real rightmindedness, or humbug,
+or hypocrisy, would have obliged us to mix more censure with our liking
+than most of us do in the case as it stands. It may be that the dress of
+the fox throws us off our guard, and lets out a secret or two which we
+commonly conceal even from ourselves. When we have to pass an opinion
+upon bad people, who at the same time are clever and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_406" id="Page_406">[Pg 406]</a></span> attractive, we say
+rather what we think that we ought to feel than what we feel in reality;
+while with Reineke, being but an animal, we forget to make ourselves up,
+and for once our genuine tastes show themselves freely. Some degree of
+truth there undoubtedly is in this. But making all allowance for
+it&mdash;making all and over allowance for the trick which is passed upon our
+senses, there still remained a feeling unresolved. The poem was not
+solely the apotheosis of a rascal in whom we were betrayed into taking
+an interest; and it was not a satire merely on the world, and on the men
+whom the world delight to honour. There was still something which really
+deserved to be liked in Reineke, and what it was we had as yet failed to
+discover.</p>
+
+<p>'Two are better than one,' and we resolved in our difficulty to try what
+our friends might have to say about it. The appearance of the Wurtemburg
+animals at the Exhibition came fortunately <i>apropos</i> to our assistance:
+a few years ago it was rare to find a person who had read the Fox Epic;
+and still more, of course, to find one whose judgment would be worth
+taking about it. But now the charming figures of Reineke himself, and
+the Lion King, and Isegrim, and Bruin, and Bellyn, and Hintze, and
+Grimbart, had set all the world asking who and what they were, and the
+story began to get itself known. The old editions, which had long slept
+unbound in reams upon the shelves, began to descend and clothe
+themselves in green and crimson. Mr. Dickens sent a summary of it round
+the households of England. Everybody began to talk of Reineke; and now,
+at any rate, we said to ourselves, we shall see whether we are alone in
+our liking&mdash;whether others share in this strange sympathy, or whether it
+be some unique and monstrous moral obliquity in ourselves.</p>
+
+<p>We set to work, therefore, with all earnestness, feeling our way first
+with fear and delicacy, as conscious of our own delinquency, to gather
+judgments which should be wiser than our own, and correct ourselves, if
+it proved that we required correction, with whatever severity might be
+necessary. The result of this labour of ours was not a little
+surprising. We found that women invariably, with that clear moral
+instinct of theirs, at once utterly reprobated and detested our poor
+Reynard; detested the hero and detested the bard who sang of him with so
+much sympathy; while men we found almost<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_407" id="Page_407">[Pg 407]</a></span> invariably feeling just as we
+felt ourselves, only with this difference, that we saw no trace of
+uneasiness in them about the matter. It was no little comfort to us,
+moreover, to find that the exceptions were rather among the half-men,
+the would-be extremely good, but whose goodness was of that dead and
+passive kind which spoke to but a small elevation of thought or
+activity; while just in proportion as a man was strong, and real, and
+energetic, was his ability to see good in Reineke. It was really most
+strange: one near friend of ours&mdash;a man who, as far as we knew (and we
+knew him well), had never done a wrong thing&mdash;when we ventured to hint
+something about roguery, replied, 'You see, he was such a clever rogue,
+that he had a right.' Another, whom we pressed more closely with that
+treacherous cannibal feast at Malepartus, on the body of poor Lampe,
+said off-hand and with much impatience of such questioning, 'Such
+fellows were made to be eaten.' What could we do? It had come to
+this;&mdash;as in the exuberance of our pleasure with some dear child, no
+ordinary epithet will sometimes reach to express the vehemence of our
+affection, and borrowing language out of the opposites, we call him
+little rogue or little villain, so here, reversing the terms of the
+analogy, we bestow the fulness of our regard on Reineke because of that
+transcendently successful roguery.</p>
+
+<p>When we asked our friends how they came to feel as they did, they had
+little to say. They were not persons who could be suspected of any
+latent disposition towards evil-doing; and yet though it appeared as if
+they were falling under the description of those unhappy ones who, if
+they did not such things themselves, yet 'had pleasure in those who did
+them,' they did not care to justify themselves. The fact was so: <ins class="cor" title="[Greek:
+arch&ecirc; to hoti]">&#945;&#961;&#967;&#951; &#964;&#959; &#8001;&#964;&#953;</ins>: it was a fact&mdash;what could we want more? Some few
+attempted feebly to maintain that the book was a satire. But this only
+moved the difficulty a single step; for the fact of the sympathy
+remained unimpaired, and if it was a satire we were ourselves the
+objects of it. Others urged what we said above, that the story was only
+of poor animals that, according to Descartes, not only had no souls, but
+scarcely had even life in any original and sufficient sense, and
+therefore we need not trouble ourselves. But one of two alternatives it
+seemed we were bound to choose, either of which was fatal to the
+proposed escape. Either there was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_408" id="Page_408">[Pg 408]</a></span> a man hiding under the fox's skin; or
+else, if real foxes have such brains as Reineke was furnished withal, no
+honest doubt could be entertained that some sort of conscience was not
+forgotten in the compounding of him, and he must be held answerable
+according to his knowledge.</p>
+
+<p>What would Mr. Carlyle say of it, we thought, with his might and right?
+'The just thing in the long run is the strong thing.' But Reineke had a
+long run out and came in winner. Does he only 'seem to succeed?' Who
+does succeed, then, if he no more than seems? The vulpine intellect
+knows where the geese live, it is elsewhere said; but among Reineke's
+victims we do not remember one goose, in the literal sense of goose; and
+as to geese metaphorical, the whole visible world lies down complacently
+at his feet. Nor does Mr. Carlyle's expressed language on this very poem
+serve any better to help us&mdash;nay, it seems as if he feels uneasy in the
+neighbourhood of so strong a rascal, so briefly he dismisses him.
+'Worldly prudence is the only virtue which is certain of its reward.'
+Nay, but there is more in it than that: no worldly prudence would
+command the voices which have been given in to us for Reineke.</p>
+
+<p>Three only possibilities lay now before us: either we should, on
+searching, find something solid in the Fox's doings to justify success;
+or else the just thing was not always the strong thing; or it might be,
+that such very semblance of success was itself the most miserable
+failure; that the wicked man who was struck down and foiled, and foiled
+again, till he unlearnt his wickedness, or till he was disabled from any
+more attempting it, was blessed in his disappointment; that to triumph
+in wickedness, and to continue in it and to prosper to the end, was the
+last, worst penalty inflicted by the divine vengeance. <ins class="cor" title="[Greek: Hin&apos;
+athanatos &ecirc; adikos &ocirc;n]">&#7993;&#957;&apos; &#945;&#952;&#945;&#957;&#945;&#964;&#959;&#962; &#951; &#945;&#948;&#953;&#954;&#959;&#962; &#969;&#957;</ins>&mdash;to go on with injustice through this world and
+through all eternity, uncleansed by any purgatorial fire, untaught by
+any untoward consequence to open his eyes and to see in its true
+accursed form the miserable demon to which he has sold himself&mdash;this, of
+all catastrophes which could <ins class="cor" title="Alternate spelling for befall">befal</ins> an evil man, was the deepest, lowest,
+and most savouring of hell, which the purest of the Grecian moralists
+could reason out for himself,&mdash;under which third hypothesis many an
+uneasy misgiving would vanish away, and Mr. Carlyle's broad aphorism
+might be accepted by us with thankfulness.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_409" id="Page_409">[Pg 409]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It appeared, therefore, at any rate, to have to come to this&mdash;that if we
+wanted a solution for our sphinx enigma, no &OElig;dipus was likely to rise
+and find it for us; and that if we wanted help, we must take it for
+ourselves. This only we found, that if we sinned in our regard for the
+unworthy animal, we shared our sin with the largest number of our own
+sex; comforted with the sense of good fellowship, we went boldly to work
+upon our consciousness; and the imperfect analysis which we succeeded in
+accomplishing, we here lay before you, whoever you may be, who have
+felt, as we have felt, a regard which was a moral disturbance to you,
+and which you will be pleased if we enable you to justify&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div class="i4">Si quid novisti rectius istis,</div><br />
+<div class="i0">Candidus imperti; si non, his uttere mecum.</div><br />
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Following the clue which was thrust into our hand by the marked
+difference of the feelings of men upon the subject, from those of women,
+we were at once satisfied that Reineke's goodness, if he had any, must
+lay rather in the active than the passive department of life. The
+negative obedience to prohibitory precepts, under which women are bound
+as well as men, as was already too clear, we were obliged to surrender
+as hopeless. But it seemed as if, with respect to men whose business is
+to do, and to labour, and to accomplish, this negative test was a
+seriously imperfect one; and it was quite as possible that a man who
+unhappily had broken many prohibitions might yet exhibit positive
+excellences, as that he might walk through life picking his way with the
+utmost assiduity, risking nothing and doing nothing, not committing a
+single sin, but keeping his talent carefully wrapt up in a napkin, and
+get sent, in the end, to outer darkness for his pains, as an
+unprofitable servant. And this appeared the more important to us, as it
+was very little dwelt upon by religions or moral teachers: at the end of
+six thousand years, the popular notion of virtue, as far as it could get
+itself expressed, had not risen beyond the mere abstinence from certain
+specific bad actions.</p>
+
+<p>The king of the beasts forgives Reineke on account of the substantial
+services which at various times he has rendered. His counsel was always
+the wisest, his hand the promptest in cases of difficulty; and all that
+dexterity, and politeness, and courtesy, and exquisite culture had not
+been learnt without<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_410" id="Page_410">[Pg 410]</a></span> an effort, or without conquering many undesirable
+tendencies in himself. Men are not born with any art in its perfection,
+and Reineke had made himself valuable by his own sagacity and exertion.
+Now, on the human stage, a man who has made himself valuable is certain
+to be valued. However we may pretend to estimate men according to the
+wrong things which they have done, or abstained from doing, we in fact
+follow the example of Nobel, the king of the beasts: we give them their
+places among us according to the service-ableness and capability which
+they display. We might mention not a few eminent public servants, whom
+the world delights to honour&mdash;ministers, statesmen, lawyers, men of
+science, artists, poets, soldiers, who, if they were tried by the
+negative test, would show but a poor figure; yet their value is too real
+to be dispensed with; and we tolerate unquestionable wrong to secure the
+services of eminent ability. The world really does this, and it always
+has really done it from the beginning of the human history; and it is
+only indolence or cowardice which has left our ethical teaching halting
+so far behind the universal and necessary practice. Even questionable
+prima donnas, in virtue of their sweet voices, have their praises hymned
+in drawing-room and newspaper, and applause rolls over them, and gold
+and bouquets shower on them from lips and hands which, except for those
+said voices, would treat them to a ruder reward. In real fact, we take
+our places in this world, not according to what we are not, but
+according to what we are. His Holiness Pope Clement, when his
+audience-room rang with furious outcries for justice on Benvenuto
+Cellini, who, as far as half-a-dozen murders could form a title, was as
+fair a candidate for the gallows as ever swung from that unlucky wood,
+replied, 'All this is very well, gentlemen: these murders are bad
+things, we know that. But where am I to get another Benvenuto if you
+hang this one for me?'</p>
+
+<p>Or, to take an acknowledged hero, one of the old Greek sort, the theme
+of the song of the greatest of human poets, whom it is less easy to
+refuse to admire than even our friend Reineke. Take Ulysses. It cannot
+be said that he kept his hands from taking what was not his, or his
+tongue from speaking what was not true; and if Frau Ermelyn had to
+complain (as indeed there was too much reason for her complaining) of
+certain infirmities in her good husband Reineke,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_411" id="Page_411">[Pg 411]</a></span> Penelope, too, might
+have urged a thing or two, if she had known as much about the matter as
+we know, which the modern moralist would find it hard to excuse.</p>
+
+<p>After all is said, the capable man is the man to be admired. The man who
+tries and fails, what is the use of him? We are in this world to do
+something&mdash;not to fail in doing it. Of your bunglers&mdash;helpless,
+inefficient persons, 'unfit alike for good or ill,' who try one thing,
+and fail because they are not strong enough, and another, because they
+have not energy enough, and a third, because they have no
+talent&mdash;inconsistent, unstable, and therefore never to excel, what shall
+we say of them? what use is there in them? what hope is there of them?
+what can we wish for them? <ins class="cor" title="[Greek: to m&ecirc;pot&apos; einai pant&apos; ariston]">&#964;&#959; &#956;&#951;&#960;&#959;&#964;&apos; &#949;&#953;&#957;&#945;&#953; &#960;&#945;&#957;&#964;&apos; &#945;&#961;&#953;&#963;&#964;&#959;&#957;</ins>. It were
+better for them they had never been born. To be able to do what a man
+tries to do, that is the first requisite; and given that, we may hope
+all things for him. 'Hell is paved with good intentions,' the proverb
+says; and the enormous proportion of bad successes in this life lie
+between the desire and the execution. Give us a man who is able to do
+what he settles that he desires to do, and we have the one thing
+indispensable. If he can succeed doing ill, much more he can succeed
+doing well. Show him better, and, at any rate, there is a chance that he
+will do better.</p>
+
+<p>We are not concerned here with Benvenuto or with Ulysses further than to
+show, through the position which we all consent to give them, that there
+is much unreality in our common moral talk, against which we must be on
+our guard. And if we fling off an old friend, and take to affecting a
+hatred of him which we do not feel, we have scarcely gained by the
+exchange, even though originally our friendship may have been misplaced.</p>
+
+<p>Capability no one will deny to Reineke. That is the very <i>differentia</i>
+of him. An 'animal capable' would be his sufficient definition. Here is
+another very genuinely valuable feature about him&mdash;his wonderful
+singleness of character. Lying, treacherous, cunning scoundrel as he is,
+there is a wholesome absence of humbug about him. Cheating all the
+world, he never cheats himself; and while he is a hypocrite, he is
+always a conscious hypocrite&mdash;a form of character, however paradoxical
+it may seem, a great deal more accessible to good influences than the
+other of the unconscious sort.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_412" id="Page_412">[Pg 412]</a></span> Ask Reineke for the principles of his
+life, and if it suited his purpose to tell you, he could do so with the
+greatest exactness. There would be no discrepancy between the profession
+and the practice. He is most truly single-minded, and therefore stable
+in his ways, and therefore, as the world goes, and in the world's sense,
+successful. Whether really successful is a question we do not care here
+to enter on; but only to say this&mdash;that of all unsuccessful men in every
+sense, either divine, or human, or devilish, there is none equal to
+Bunyan's Mr. Facing-both-ways&mdash;the fellow with one eye on heaven and one
+on earth&mdash;who sincerely preaches one thing, and sincerely does another;
+and from the intensity of his unreality is unable either to see or feel
+the contradiction. Serving God with his lips, and with the half of his
+mind which is not bound up in the world, and serving the devil with his
+actions, and with the other half, he is substantially trying to cheat
+both God and the devil, and is, in fact, only cheating himself and his
+neighbours. This, of all characters upon the earth, appears to us to be
+the one of whom there is no hope at all&mdash;a character becoming, in these
+days, alarmingly abundant; and the abundance of which makes us find even
+in a Reineke an inexpressible relief.</p>
+
+<p>But what we most thoroughly value in him is his capacity. He can do what
+he sets to work to do. That blind instinct with which the world shouts
+and claps its hand for the successful man, is one of those latent
+impulses in us which are truer than we know; it is the universal
+confessional to which Nature leads us, and, in her intolerance of
+disguise and hypocrisy, compels us to be our own accusers. Whoever can
+succeed in a given condition of society, can succeed only in virtue of
+fulfilling the terms which society exacts of him; and if he can fulfil
+them triumphantly, of course it rewards him and praises him. He is what
+the rest of the world would be, if their powers were equal to their
+desires. He has accomplished what they all are vaguely, and with
+imperfect consistency, struggling to accomplish; and the character of
+the conqueror&mdash;the means and appliances by which he has climbed up that
+great pinnacle on which he stands victorious, the observed of all
+observers, is no more than a very exact indicator of the amount of real
+virtue in the age, out of which he stands prominent.</p>
+
+<p>We are forced to acknowledge that it was not a very<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_413" id="Page_413">[Pg 413]</a></span> virtuous age in
+which Reineke made himself a great man; but that was the fault of the
+age as much as the fault of him. His nature is to succeed wherever he
+is. If the age had required something else of him, then he would have
+been something else. Whatever it had said to him, 'Do, and I will make
+you my hero,' that Reineke would have done. No appetite makes a slave of
+him&mdash;no faculty refuses obedience to his will. His entire nature is
+under perfect organic control to the one supreme authority. And the one
+object for which he lives, and for which, let his lot have been cast in
+whatever century it might, he would always have lived, is to rise, to
+thrive, to prosper, and become great.</p>
+
+<p>The world as he found it said to him&mdash;Prey upon us; we are your oyster,
+let your wit open us. If you will only do it cleverly&mdash;if you will take
+care that we shall not close upon your fingers in the process, you may
+devour us at your pleasure, and we shall feel ourselves highly honoured.
+Can we wonder at a fox of Reineke's abilities taking such a world at its
+word?</p>
+
+<p>And let it not be supposed that society in this earth of ours is ever so
+viciously put together, is ever so totally without organic life, that a
+rogue, unredeemed by any merit, can prosper in it. There is no strength
+in rottenness; and when it comes to that, society dies and falls in
+pieces. Success, as it is called, even worldly success, is impossible,
+without some exercise of what is called moral virtue, without some
+portion of it, infinitesimally small, perhaps, but still some. Courage,
+for instance, steady self-confidence, self-trust, self-reliance&mdash;that
+only basis and foundation stone on which a strong character can rear
+itself&mdash;do we not see this in Reineke? While he lives, he lives for
+himself; but if he comes to dying, he can die like his betters; and his
+wit is not of that effervescent sort which will fly away at the sight of
+death and leave him panic-stricken. It is true there is a meaning to
+that word courage, which was perhaps not to be found in the dictionary
+in which Reineke studied. 'I hope I am afraid of nothing, Trim,' said my
+uncle Toby, 'except doing a wrong thing.' With Reineke there was no
+'except.' His digestive powers shrank from no action, good or bad, which
+would serve his turn. Yet it required no slight measure of courage to
+treat his fellow-creatures with the steady disrespect with which Reineke
+treats them. To walk<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_414" id="Page_414">[Pg 414]</a></span> along among them, regardless of any interest but
+his own; out of mere wantonness to hook them up like so many
+cock-chafers, and spin them for his pleasure; not like Domitian, with an
+imperial army to hold them down during the operation, but with no other
+assistance but his own little body and large wit; it was something to
+venture upon. And a world which would submit to be so treated, what
+could he do but despise?</p>
+
+<p>To the animals utterly below ourselves, external to our own species, we
+hold ourselves bound by no law. We say to them, <i>vos non vobis</i>, without
+any uneasy misgivings. We rob the bees of their honey, the cattle of
+their lives, the horse and the ass of their liberty. We kill the wild
+animals that they may not interfere with our pleasures; and acknowledge
+ourselves bound to them by no terms except what are dictated by our own
+convenience. And why should Reineke have acknowledged an obligation any
+more than we, to creatures so utterly below himself? He was so clever,
+as our friend said, that he had a right. That he <i>could</i> treat them so,
+Mr. Carlyle would say, proves that he had a right.</p>
+
+<p>But it is a mistake to say he is without a conscience. No bold creature
+is ever totally without one. Even Iago shows some sort of conscience.
+Respecting nothing else in heaven or earth, he respects and even
+reverences his own intellect. After one of those sweet interviews with
+Roderigo, his, what we must call conscience, takes him to account for
+his company; and he pleads to it in his own justification&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div class="i0">For I mine own gained knowledge should <i>profane</i></div><br />
+<div class="i0">Were I to waste myself with such a snipe</div><br />
+<div class="i0">But for my sport and profit.</div><br />
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Reineke, if we take the mass of his misdeeds, preyed chiefly, like our
+own Robin Hood, on rogues who were greater rogues than himself. If Bruin
+chose to steal Rusteviel's honey, if Hintze trespassed in the priest's
+granary, they were but taken in their own evildoings. And what is
+Isegrim, the worst of Reineke's victims, but a great heavy, stupid,
+lawless brute?&mdash;fair type, we will suppose, of not a few Front-de-Boeufs
+and other so-called nobles of the poet's era, whose will to do mischief
+was happily limited by their obtuseness. We remember that French
+baron&mdash;Gilbert de Retz, we believe, was his name&mdash;who, like Isegrim, had
+studied at the universities, and passed for learned, whose after-dinner<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_415" id="Page_415">[Pg 415]</a></span>
+pastime for many years, as it proved at last, was to cut children's
+throats for the pleasure of watching them die. We may well feel
+gratitude that a Reineke was provided to be the scourge of such monsters
+as these; and we have a thorough pure, exuberant satisfaction in seeing
+the intellect in that little weak body triumph over them and trample
+them down. This, indeed, this victory of intellect over brute force, is
+one great secret of our pleasure in the poem, and goes far, in the
+Carlyle direction, to satisfy us that, at any rate, it is not given to
+mere base physical strength to win in the battle of life, even in times
+when physical strength is apparently the only recognised power.</p>
+
+<p>We are insensibly falling from our self-assumed judicial office into
+that of advocacy; and sliding into what may be plausibly urged, rather
+than standing fast on what we can surely affirm. Yet there are cases
+when it is fitting for the judge to become the advocate of an undefended
+prisoner; and advocacy is only plausible when a few words of truth are
+mixed with what we say, like the few drops of wine which colour and
+faintly flavour the large draught of water. Such few grains or drops,
+whatever they may be, we must leave to the kindness of Reynard's friends
+to distil for him, while we continue a little longer in the same strain.</p>
+
+<p>After all, it may be said, what is it in man's nature which is really
+admirable? It is idle for us to waste our labour in passing Reineke
+through the moral crucible unless we shall recognise the results when we
+obtain them; and in these moral sciences our analytical tests can only
+be obtained by a study of our own internal experience. If we desire to
+know what we admire in Reineke, we must look for what we admire in
+ourselves. And what is that? Is it what on Sundays, and on set
+occasions, and when we are mounted on our moral stilts, we are pleased
+to call goodness, probity, obedience, humility? Is it? Is it really? Is
+it not rather the face and form which Nature made&mdash;the strength which is
+ours, we know not how&mdash;our talents, our rank, our possessions? It
+appears to us that we most value in ourselves and most admire in our
+neighbour, not acquisitions, but <i>gifts</i>. A man does not praise himself
+for being good. If he praise himself he is not good. The first condition
+of goodness is forgetfulness of self; and where self has entered, under
+however plausible a form, the health is but<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_416" id="Page_416">[Pg 416]</a></span> skin-deep, and underneath
+there is corruption. And so through everything; we value, we are vain
+of, proud of, or whatever you please to call it, not what we have done
+for ourselves, but what has been done for us&mdash;what has been given to us
+by the upper powers. We look up to high-born men, to wealthy men, to
+fortunate men, to clever men. Is it not so? Whom do we choose for the
+county member, the magistrate, the officer, the minister? The good man
+we leave to the humble enjoyment of his goodness, and we look out for
+the able or the wealthy. And again of the wealthy, as if on every side
+to witness to the same universal law, the man who with no labour of his
+own has inherited a fortune, ranks higher in the world's esteem than his
+father who made it. We take rank by descent. Such of us as have the
+longest pedigree, and are therefore the farthest removed from the first
+who made the fortune and founded the family, we are the noblest. The
+nearer to the fountain, the fouler the stream; and that first ancestor,
+who has soiled his fingers by labour, is no better than a parvenu.</p>
+
+<p>And as it is with what we value, so it is with what we blame. It is an
+old story, that there is no one who would not in his heart prefer being
+a knave to being a fool; and when we fail in a piece of attempted
+roguery, as Coleridge has wisely observed, though reasoning unwisely
+from it, we lay the blame, not on our own moral nature, for which we are
+responsible, but on our intellectual, for which we are not responsible.
+We do not say what knaves, we say what fools, we have been; perplexing
+Coleridge, who regards it as a phenomenon of some deep moral disorder;
+whereas it is but one more evidence of the universal fact that <i>gifts</i>
+are the true and proper object of appreciation; and as we admire men for
+possessing gifts, so we blame them for their absence. The noble man is
+the gifted man; the ignoble is the ungifted; and therefore we have only
+to state a simple law in simple language to have a full solution of the
+enigma of Reineke. He has gifts enough: of that, at least, there can be
+no doubt; and if he lacks the gift to use them in the way which we call
+good, at least he uses them successfully. His victims are less gifted
+than he, and therefore less noble; and therefore he has a right to use
+them as he pleases.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>And, after all, what are these victims? Among the heaviest<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_417" id="Page_417">[Pg 417]</a></span> charges
+which were urged against him was the killing and eating of that wretched
+Scharfenebbe&mdash;Sharpbeak&mdash;the crow's wife. It is well that there are two
+sides to every story. A poor weary fox, it seemed, was not to be allowed
+to enjoy a quiet sleep in the sunshine but what an unclean carrion bird
+must come down and take a peck at him. We can feel no sympathy with the
+outcries of the crow husband over the fate of the unfortunate Sharpbeak.
+Wofully, he says, he flew over the place where, a few moments before, in
+the glory of glossy plumage, a loving wife sate croaking out her passion
+for him, and found nothing&mdash;nothing but a little blood and a few torn
+feathers&mdash;all else clean gone and utterly abolished. Well, and if it was
+so, it was a blank prospect for him, but the earth was well rid of her;
+and for herself, it was a higher fate to be assimilated into the body of
+Reineke than to remain in a miserable individuality to be a layer of
+carrion crows' eggs.</p>
+
+<p>And then for Bellyn, and for Bruin, and for Hintze, and the rest, who
+would needs be meddling with what was no concern of theirs&mdash;what is
+there in them to challenge either regret or pity? They made love to
+their occupation.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div class="i0">'Tis dangerous when the baser nature falls</div><br />
+<div class="i0">Between the pass and fell incensed points</div><br />
+<div class="i0">Of mighty opposites:</div><br />
+<div class="i0">They lie not near our conscience.</div><br />
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Ah! if they were all. But there is one misdeed, one which outweighs all
+others whatsoever&mdash;a crime which it is useless to palliate, let our
+other friend say what he pleased; and Reineke himself felt it so. It
+sate heavy, <i>for him</i>, on his soul, and alone of all the actions of his
+life we are certain that he wished it undone&mdash;the death and eating of
+that poor foolish Lampe, the hare. It was a paltry revenge in Reineke.
+Lampe had told tales of him; he had complained that Reineke, under
+pretence of teaching him his Catechism, had seized him and tried to
+murder him; and though he provoked his fate by thrusting himself, after
+such a warning, into the jaws of Malepartus, Reineke betrays an
+uneasiness about it in confession; and, unlike himself, feels it
+necessary to make some sort of an excuse.</p>
+
+<p>Grimbart, the badger, Reineke's father confessor, had been obliged to
+speak severely of the seriousness of the offence. 'You see,' Reineke
+answers:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_418" id="Page_418">[Pg 418]</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div class="i0">To help oneself out through the world is a queer sort of business: one can not</div><br />
+<div class="i0">Keep, you know, quite altogether as pure as one can in the cloister.</div><br />
+<div class="i0">When we are handling honey we now and then lick at our fingers.</div><br />
+<div class="i0">Lampe sorely provoked me; he frisked about this way and that way,</div><br />
+<div class="i0">Up and down, under my eyes, and he looked so fat and so jolly,</div><br />
+<div class="i0">Really I could not resist it. I entirely forgot how I loved him.</div><br />
+<div class="i0">And then he was so stupid.</div><br />
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But even this acknowledgment does not satisfy Reineke. His mind is
+evidently softened, and it was on that occasion that he poured out his
+pathetic lamentation over the sad condition of the world&mdash;so fluent, so
+musical, so touching, that Grimbart listened with wide eyes, unable,
+till it had run to the length of a sermon, to collect himself. It is
+true that at last his office as ghostly father obliged him to put in a
+slight demurrer:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div class="i0">Uncle, the badger replied, why these are the sins of your neighbours;</div><br />
+<div class="i0">Yours, I should think, were sufficient, and rather more now to the purpose.</div><br />
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But he sighs to think what a bishop Reineke would have made.</p>
+
+<p>And now, for the present, farewell to Reineke Fuchs, and to the song in
+which his glory is enshrined&mdash;the Welt Bibel, Bible of this world, as
+Goethe called it, the most exquisite moral satire, as we will call it,
+which has ever been composed. It is not addressed to a passing mode of
+folly or of profligacy, but it touches the perennial nature of mankind,
+laying bare our own sympathies, and tastes, and weaknesses, with as keen
+and true an edge as when the living world of the old Swabian poet winced
+under its earliest utterance.</p>
+
+<p>Humorous in the high pure sense, every laugh which it gives may have its
+echo in a sigh, or may glide into it as excitement subsides into
+thought; and yet, for those who do not care to find matter there either
+for thought or sadness, may remain innocently as a laugh.</p>
+
+<p>Too strong for railing, too kindly and loving for the bitterness of
+irony, the poem is, as the world itself, a book where each man will find
+what his nature enables him to see, which gives us back each our own
+image, and teaches us each the lesson which each of us desires to
+learn.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_419" id="Page_419">[Pg 419]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_AB_28" id="Footnote_AB_28"></a><a href="#FNanchor_AB_28"><span class="label">[AB]</span></a> <i>Fraser's Magazine</i>, 1852.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="THE_CATS_PILGRIMAGE" id="THE_CATS_PILGRIMAGE"></a>THE CAT'S PILGRIMAGE.</h2>
+
+<p class="center">1850.</p>
+
+
+<h3><a name="cat_1" id="cat_1"></a>PART I.</h3>
+
+<p>'It is all very fine,' said the Cat, yawning, and stretching herself
+against the fender, 'but it is rather a bore; I don't see the use of
+it.' She raised herself, and arranging her tail into a ring, and seating
+herself in the middle of it, with her fore paws in a straight line from
+her shoulders, at right angles to the hearth-rug, she looked pensively
+at the fire. 'It is very odd,' she went on, 'there is my poor Tom; he is
+gone. I saw him stretched out in the yard. I spoke to him, and he took
+no notice of me. He won't, I suppose, ever any more, for they put him
+under the earth. Nice fellow he was. It is wonderful how little one
+cares about it. So many jolly evenings we spent together; and now I seem
+to get on quite as well without him. I wonder what has become of him;
+and my last children, too, what has become of them? What are we here
+for? I would ask the men, only they are so conceited and stupid they
+can't understand what we say. I hear them droning away, teaching their
+little ones every day; telling them to be good, and to do what they are
+bid, and all that. Nobody ever tells me to do anything; if they do I
+don't do it, and I am very good. I wonder whether I should be any better
+if I minded more. I'll ask the Dog.'</p>
+
+<p>'Dog,' said she, to a little fat spaniel coiled up on a mat like a
+lady's muff with a head and tail stuck on to it, 'Dog, what do you make
+of it all?'</p>
+
+<p>The Dog faintly opened his languid eyes, looked sleepily at the Cat for
+a moment, and dropped them again.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_420" id="Page_420">[Pg 420]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>'Dog,' she said, 'I want to talk to you; don't go to sleep. Can't you
+answer a civil question?'</p>
+
+<p>'Don't bother me,' said the Dog, 'I am tired. I stood on my hind legs
+ten minutes this morning before I could get my breakfast, and it hasn't
+agreed with me.'</p>
+
+<p>'Who told you to do it?' said the Cat.</p>
+
+<p>'Why, the lady I have to take care of me,' replied the Dog.</p>
+
+<p>'Do you feel any better for it, Dog, after you have been standing on
+your legs?' asked she.</p>
+
+<p>'Hav'n't I told you, you stupid Cat, that it hasn't agreed with me; let
+me go to sleep and don't plague me.'</p>
+
+<p>'But I mean,' persisted the Cat, 'do you feel improved, as the men call
+it? They tell their children that if they do what they are told they
+will improve, and grow good and great. Do you feel good and great?'</p>
+
+<p>'What do I know?' said the Dog. 'I eat my breakfast and am happy. Let me
+alone.'</p>
+
+<p>'Do you never think, oh Dog without a soul! Do you never wonder what
+dogs are, and what this world is?'</p>
+
+<p>The Dog stretched himself, and rolled his eyes lazily round the room. 'I
+conceive,' he said, 'that the world is for dogs, and men and women are
+put into it to take care of dogs; women to take care of little dogs like
+me, and men for the big dogs like those in the yard&mdash;and cats,' he
+continued, 'are to know their place, and not to be troublesome.'</p>
+
+<p>'They beat you sometimes,' said the Cat. 'Why do they do that? They
+never beat me.'</p>
+
+<p>'If they forget their places, and beat me,' snarled the Dog, 'I bite
+them, and they don't do it again. I should like to bite you, too, you
+nasty Cat; you have woke me up.'</p>
+
+<p>'There may be truth in what you say,' said the Cat, calmly; 'but I think
+your view is limited. If you listened like me you would hear the men say
+it was all made for them, and you and I were made to amuse them.'</p>
+
+<p>'They don't dare to say so,' said the Dog.</p>
+
+<p>'They do, indeed,' said the Cat. 'I hear many things which you lose by
+sleeping so much. They think I am asleep, and so they are not afraid to
+talk before me; but my ears are open when my eyes are shut.'</p>
+
+<p>'You surprise me,' said the Dog. 'I never listen to them,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_421" id="Page_421">[Pg 421]</a></span> except when I
+take notice of them, and then they never talk of anything except of me.'</p>
+
+<p>'I could tell you a thing or two about yourself which you don't know,'
+said the Cat. 'You have never heard, I dare say, that once upon a time
+your fathers lived in a temple, and that people prayed to them.'</p>
+
+<p>'Prayed! what is that?'</p>
+
+<p>'Why, they went on their knees to you to ask you to give them good
+things, just as you stand on your toes to them now to ask for your
+breakfast. You don't know either that you have got one of those bright
+things we see up in the air at night called after you.'</p>
+
+<p>'Well, it is just what I said,' answered the Dog. 'I told you it was all
+made for us. They never did anything of that sort for you?'</p>
+
+<p>'Didn't they? Why, there was a whole city where the people did nothing
+else, and as soon as we got stiff and couldn't move about any more,
+instead of being put under the ground like poor Tom, we used to be
+stuffed full of all sorts of nice things, and kept better than we were
+when we were alive.'</p>
+
+<p>'You are a very wise Cat,' answered her companion; 'but what good is it
+knowing all this?'</p>
+
+<p>'Why, don't you see,' said she, 'they don't do it any more. We are going
+down in the world, we are, and that is why living on in this way is such
+an unsatisfactory sort of thing. I don't mean to complain for myself,
+and you needn't, Dog; we have a quiet life of it; but a quiet life is
+not the thing, and if there is nothing to be done except sleep and eat,
+and eat and sleep, why, as I said before, I don't see the use of it.
+There is something more in it than that; there was once, and there will
+be again, and I sha'n't be happy till I find it out. It is a shame, Dog,
+I say. The men have been here only a few thousand years, and we&mdash;why, we
+have been here hundreds of thousands; if we are older, we ought to be
+wiser. I'll go and ask the creatures in the wood.'</p>
+
+<p>'You'll learn more from the men,' said the Dog.</p>
+
+<p>'They are stupid, and they don't know what I say to them; besides, they
+are so conceited they care for nothing except themselves. No, I shall
+try what I can do in the woods. I'd as soon go after poor Tom as stay
+living any longer like this.'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_422" id="Page_422">[Pg 422]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>'And where is poor Tom?' yawned the Dog.</p>
+
+<p>'That is just one of the things I want to know,' answered she. 'Poor Tom
+is lying under the yard, or the skin of him, but whether that is the
+whole I don't feel so sure. They didn't think so in the city I told you
+about. It is a beautiful day, Dog; you won't take a trot out with me?'
+she added, wistfully.</p>
+
+<p>'Who? I' said the Dog. 'Not quite.'</p>
+
+<p>'You may get so wise,' said she.</p>
+
+<p>'Wisdom is good,' said the Dog; 'but so is the hearth-rug, thank you!'</p>
+
+<p>'But you may be free,' said she.</p>
+
+<p>'I shall have to hunt for my own dinner,' said he.</p>
+
+<p>'But, Dog, they may pray to you again,' said she.</p>
+
+<p>'But I sha'n't have a softer mat to sleep upon, Cat, and as I am rather
+delicate, that is a consideration.'</p>
+
+
+<h3><a name="cat_2" id="cat_2"></a>PART II.</h3>
+
+<p>So the Dog wouldn't go, and the Cat set off by herself to learn how to
+be happy, and to be all that a Cat could be. It was a fine sunny
+morning. She determined to try the meadow first, and, after an hour or
+two, if she had not succeeded, then to go off to the wood. A Blackbird
+was piping away on a thornbush as if his heart was running over with
+happiness. The Cat had breakfasted, and so was able to listen without
+any mixture of feeling. She didn't sneak. She walked boldly up under the
+bush, and the bird, seeing she had no bad purpose, sate still and sung
+on.</p>
+
+<p>'Good morning, Blackbird; you seem to be enjoying yourself this fine
+day.'</p>
+
+<p>'Good morning, Cat.'</p>
+
+<p>'Blackbird, it is an odd question, perhaps. What ought one to do to be
+as happy as you?'</p>
+
+<p>'Do your duty, Cat.'</p>
+
+<p>'But what is my duty, Blackbird?'</p>
+
+<p>'Take care of your little ones, Cat.'</p>
+
+<p>'I hav'n't any,' said she.</p>
+
+<p>'Then sing to your mate,' said the bird.</p>
+
+<p>'Tom is dead,' said she.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_423" id="Page_423">[Pg 423]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>'Poor Cat!' said the bird. 'Then sing over his grave. If your song is
+sad, you will find your heart grow lighter for it.'</p>
+
+<p>'Mercy!' thought the Cat. 'I could do a little singing with a living
+lover, but I never heard of singing for a dead one. But you see, bird,
+it isn't Cats' nature. When I am cross, I mew. When I am pleased, I
+purr; but I must be pleased first. I can't purr myself into happiness.'</p>
+
+<p>'I am afraid there is something the matter with your heart, my Cat. It
+wants warming; good-bye.'</p>
+
+<p>The Blackbird flew away. The Cat looked sadly after him. 'He thinks I am
+like him; and he doesn't know that a Cat is a Cat,' said she. 'As it
+happens now, I feel a great deal for a Cat. If I hadn't got a heart I
+shouldn't be unhappy. I won't be angry. I'll try that great fat fellow.'</p>
+
+<p>The Ox lay placidly chewing, with content beaming out of his eyes and
+playing on his mouth.</p>
+
+<p>'Ox,' she said, 'what is the way to be happy?'</p>
+
+<p>'Do your duty,' said the Ox.</p>
+
+<p>'Bother,' said the Cat, 'duty again! What is it, Ox?'</p>
+
+<p>'Get your dinner,' said the Ox.</p>
+
+<p>'But it is got for me, Ox; and I have nothing to do but to eat it.'</p>
+
+<p>'Well, eat it, then, like me.'</p>
+
+<p>'So I do; but I am not happy for all that.'</p>
+
+<p>'Then you are a very wicked, ungrateful Cat.'</p>
+
+<p>The Ox munched away. A Bee buzzed into a buttercup under the Cat's nose.</p>
+
+<p>'I beg your pardon,' said the Cat, 'it isn't curiosity&mdash;what are you
+doing?'</p>
+
+<p>'Doing my duty; don't stop me, Cat.'</p>
+
+<p>'But, Bee, what is your duty?'</p>
+
+<p>'Making honey,' said the Bee.</p>
+
+<p>'I wish I could make honey,' sighed the Cat.</p>
+
+<p>'Do you mean to say you can't?' said the Bee. 'How stupid you must be.
+What do you do, then?'</p>
+
+<p>'I do nothing, Bee. I can't get anything to do.'</p>
+
+<p>'You won't get anything to do, you mean, you lazy Cat! You are a
+good-for-nothing drone. Do you know what we do to our drones? We kill
+them; and that is all they are fit for. Good morning to you.'</p>
+
+<p>'Well, I am sure,' said the Cat, 'they are treating me<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_424" id="Page_424">[Pg 424]</a></span> civilly; I had
+better have stopped at home at this rate. Stroke my whiskers! heartless!
+wicked! good-for-nothing! stupid! and only fit to be killed! This is a
+pleasant beginning, anyhow. I must look for some wiser creatures than
+these are. What shall I do? I know. I know where I will go.'</p>
+
+<p>It was in the middle of the wood. The bush was very dark, but she found
+him by his wonderful eye. Presently, as she got used to the light, she
+distinguished a sloping roll of feathers, a rounded breast, surmounted
+by a round head, set close to the body, without an inch of a neck
+intervening. 'How wise he looks!' she said; 'What a brain! what a
+forehead! His head is not long, but what an expanse! and what a depth of
+earnestness!' The Owl sloped his head a little on one side; the Cat
+slanted hers upon the other. The Owl set it straight again, the Cat did
+the same. They stood looking in this way for some minutes; at last, in a
+whispering voice, the Owl said, 'What are you who presume to look into
+my repose? Pass on upon your way, and carry elsewhere those prying
+eyes.'</p>
+
+<p>'Oh, wonderful Owl,' said the Cat, 'you are wise, and I want to be wise;
+and I am come to you to teach me.'</p>
+
+<p>A film floated backwards and forwards over the Owl's eyes; it was his
+way of showing that he was pleased.</p>
+
+<p>'I have heard in our schoolroom,' went on the Cat, 'that you sate on the
+shoulder of Pallas, and she told you all about it.'</p>
+
+<p>'And what would you know, oh, my daughter?' said the Owl.</p>
+
+<p>'Everything,' said the Cat, 'everything. First of all, how to be happy.'</p>
+
+<p>'Mice content you not, my child, even as they content not me,' said the
+Owl. 'It is good.'</p>
+
+<p>'Mice, indeed!' said the Cat; 'no, Parlour Cats don't eat mice. I have
+better than mice, and no trouble to get it; but I want something more.'</p>
+
+<p>'The body's meat is provided. You would now fill your soul.'</p>
+
+<p>'I want to improve,' said the Cat. 'I want something to do. I want to
+find out what the creatures call my duty.'</p>
+
+<p>'You would learn how to employ those happy hours of your leisure&mdash;rather
+how to make them happy by a worthy use. Meditate, oh Cat! meditate!
+meditate!'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_425" id="Page_425">[Pg 425]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>'That is the very thing,' said she. 'Meditate! that is what I like above
+all things. Only I want to know how: I want something to meditate about.
+Tell me, Owl, and I will bless you every hour of the day as I sit by the
+parlour fire.'</p>
+
+<p>'I will tell you,' answered the Owl, 'what I have been thinking of ever
+since the moon changed. You shall take it home with you and think about
+it too; and the next full moon you shall come again to me; we will
+compare our conclusions.'</p>
+
+<p>'Delightful! delightful!' said the Cat. 'What is it? I will try this
+minute.'</p>
+
+<p>'From the beginning,' replied the Owl, 'our race have been considering
+which first existed, the Owl or the egg. The Owl comes from the egg, but
+likewise the egg from the Owl.'</p>
+
+<p>'Mercy!' said the Cat.</p>
+
+<p>'From sunrise to sunset I ponder on it, oh Cat! When I reflect on the
+beauty of the complete Owl, I think that must have been first, as the
+cause is greater than the effect. When I remember my own childhood, I
+incline the other way.'</p>
+
+<p>'Well, but how are we to find out?' said the Cat.</p>
+
+<p>'Find out!' said the Owl. 'We can never find out. The beauty of the
+question is, that its solution is impossible. What would become of all
+our delightful reasonings, oh, unwise Cat! if we were so unhappy as to
+know?'</p>
+
+<p>'But what in the world is the good of thinking about it, if you can't,
+oh Owl?'</p>
+
+<p>'My child, that is a foolish question. It is good, in order that the
+thoughts on these things may stimulate wonder. It is in wonder that the
+Owl is great.'</p>
+
+<p>'Then you don't know anything at all,' said the Cat. 'What did you sit
+on Pallas's shoulder for? You must have gone to sleep.'</p>
+
+<p>'Your tone is over flippant, Cat, for philosophy. The highest of all
+knowledge is to know that we know nothing.'</p>
+
+<p>The Cat made two great arches with her back and her tail.</p>
+
+<p>'Bless the mother that laid you,' said she. 'You were dropped by mistake
+in a goose nest. You won't do. I don't know much, but I am not such a
+creature as you, anyhow. A great white thing!'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_426" id="Page_426">[Pg 426]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>She straitened her body, stuck her tail up on end, and marched off with
+much dignity. But, though she respected herself rather more than before,
+she was not on the way to the end of her difficulties. She tried all the
+creatures she met without advancing a step. They had all the old story,
+'Do your duty.' But each had its own, and no one could tell her what
+hers was. Only one point they all agreed upon&mdash;the duty of getting their
+dinner when they were hungry. The day wore on, and she began to think
+she would like hers. Her meals came so regularly at home that she
+scarcely knew what hunger was; but now the sensation came over her very
+palpably, and she experienced quite new emotions as the hares and
+rabbits skipped about her, or as she spied a bird upon a tree. For a
+moment she thought she would go back and eat the Owl&mdash;he was the most
+useless creature she had seen; but on second thought she didn't fancy he
+would be nice: besides that, his claws were sharp and his beak too.
+Presently, however, as she sauntered down the path, she came on a little
+open patch of green, in the middle of which a fine fat Rabbit was
+sitting. There was no escape. The path ended there, and the bushes were
+so thick on each side that he couldn't get away except through her paws.</p>
+
+<p>'Really,' said the Cat, 'I don't wish to be troublesome; I wouldn't do
+it if I could help it; but I am very hungry, I am afraid I must eat you.
+It is very unpleasant, I assure you, to me as well as to you.'</p>
+
+<p>The poor Rabbit begged for mercy.</p>
+
+<p>'Well,' said she, 'I think it is hard; I do really&mdash;and, if the law
+could be altered, I should be the first to welcome it. But what can a
+Cat do? You eat the grass; I eat you. But, Rabbit, I wish you would do
+me a favour.'</p>
+
+<p>'Anything to save my life,' said the Rabbit.</p>
+
+<p>'It is not exactly that,' said the Cat; 'but I haven't been used to
+killing my own dinner, and it is disagreeable. Couldn't you die? I shall
+hurt you dreadfully if I kill you.'</p>
+
+<p>'Oh!' said the Rabbit, 'you are a kind Cat; I see it in your eyes, and
+your whiskers don't curl like those of the cats in the woods. I am sure
+you will spare me.'</p>
+
+<p>'But, Rabbit, it is a question of principle. I have to do my duty; and
+the only duty I have, as far as I can make out, is to get my dinner.'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_427" id="Page_427">[Pg 427]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>'If you kill me, Cat, to do your duty, I sha'n't be able to do mine.'</p>
+
+<p>It was a doubtful point, and the Cat was new to casuistry. 'What is your
+duty?' said she.</p>
+
+<p>'I have seven little ones at home&mdash;seven little ones, and they will all
+die without me. Pray let me go.'</p>
+
+<p>'What! do you take care of your children?' said the Cat. 'How
+interesting! I should like to see that; take me.'</p>
+
+<p>'Oh! you would eat them, you would,' said the Rabbit. 'No! better eat me
+than them. No, no.'</p>
+
+<p>'Well, well,' said the Cat, 'I don't know; I suppose I couldn't answer
+for myself. I don't think I am right, for duty is pleasant, and it is
+very unpleasant to be so hungry; but I suppose you must go. You seem a
+good Rabbit. Are you happy, Rabbit?'</p>
+
+<p>'Happy! oh, dear beautiful Cat! if you spare me to my poor babies!'</p>
+
+<p>'Pooh, pooh!' said the Cat, peevishly; 'I don't want fine speeches; I
+meant whether you thought it worth while to be alive! Of course you do!
+It don't matter. Go, and keep out of my way; for, if I don't get my
+dinner, you may not get off another time. Get along, Rabbit.'</p>
+
+
+<h3><a name="cat_3" id="cat_3"></a>PART III.</h3>
+
+<p>It was a great day in the Fox's cave. The eldest cub had the night
+before brought home his first goose, and they were just sitting down to
+it as the Cat came by.</p>
+
+<p>'Ah, my young lady! what, you in the woods? Bad feeding at home, eh?
+Come out to hunt for yourself?'</p>
+
+<p>The goose smelt excellent; the Cat couldn't help a wistful look. She was
+only come, she said, to pay her respects to her wild friends.</p>
+
+<p>'Just in time,' said the Fox. 'Sit down and take a bit of dinner; I see
+you want it. Make room, you cubs; place a seat for the lady.'</p>
+
+<p>'Why, thank you,' said the Cat, 'yes; I acknowledge it is not unwelcome.
+Pray, don't disturb yourselves, young Foxes. I am hungry. I met a Rabbit
+on my way here.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_428" id="Page_428">[Pg 428]</a></span> I was going to eat him, but he talked so prettily I let
+him go.'</p>
+
+<p>The cubs looked up from their plates, and burst out laughing.</p>
+
+<p>'For shame, young rascals,' said their father. 'Where are your manners?
+Mind your dinner, and don't be rude.'</p>
+
+<p>'Fox,' she said, when it was over, and the cubs were gone to play, 'you
+are very clever. The other creatures are all stupid.' The Fox bowed.
+'Your family were always clever,' she continued. 'I have heard about
+them in the books they use in our schoolroom. It is many years since
+your ancestor stole the crow's dinner.'</p>
+
+<p>'Don't say stole, Cat; it is not pretty. Obtained by superior ability.'</p>
+
+<p>'I beg your pardon,' said the Cat; 'it is all living with those men.
+That is not the point. Well, but I want to know whether you are any
+wiser or any better than Foxes were then?'</p>
+
+<p>'Really,' said the Fox, 'I am what Nature made me. I don't know. I am
+proud of my ancestors, and do my best to keep up the credit of the
+family.'</p>
+
+<p>'Well, but Fox, I mean do you improve? do I? do any of you? The men are
+always talking about doing their duty, and that, they say, is the way to
+improve, and to be happy. And as I was not happy I thought that had,
+perhaps, something to do with it, so I came out to talk to the
+creatures. They also had the old chant&mdash;duty, duty, duty; but none of
+them could tell me what mine was, or whether I had any.'</p>
+
+<p>The Fox smiled. 'Another leaf out of your schoolroom,' said he. 'Can't
+they tell you there?'</p>
+
+<p>'Indeed,' she said, 'they are very absurd. They say a great deal about
+themselves, but they only speak disrespectfully of us. If such creatures
+as they can do their duty, and improve, and be happy, why can't we?'</p>
+
+<p>'They say they do, do they?' said the Fox. 'What do they say of me?'</p>
+
+<p>The Cat hesitated.</p>
+
+<p>'Don't be afraid of hurting my feelings, Cat. Out with it.'</p>
+
+<p>'They do all justice to your abilities, Fox,' said she; 'but your
+morality, they say, is not high. They say you are a rogue.'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_429" id="Page_429">[Pg 429]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>'Morality!' said the Fox. 'Very moral and good they are. And you really
+believe all that? What do they mean by calling me a rogue?'</p>
+
+<p>'They mean you take whatever you can get, without caring whether it is
+just or not.'</p>
+
+<p>'My dear Cat, it is very well for a man, if he can't bear his own face,
+to paint a pretty one on a panel and call it a looking-glass; but you
+don't mean that it takes <i>you</i> in.'</p>
+
+<p>'Teach me,' said the Cat. 'I fear I am weak.'</p>
+
+<p>'Who get justice from the men unless they can force it? Ask the sheep
+that are cut into mutton. Ask the horses that draw their ploughs. I
+don't mean it is wrong of the men to do as they do; but they needn't lie
+about it.'</p>
+
+<p>'You surprise me,' said the Cat.</p>
+
+<p>'My good Cat, there is but one law in the world. The weakest goes to the
+wall. The men are sharper-witted than the creatures, and so they get the
+better of them and use them. They may call it just if they like; but
+when a tiger eats a man I guess he has just as much justice on his side
+as the man when he eats a sheep.'</p>
+
+<p>'And that is the whole of it,' said the Cat. 'Well, it is very sad. What
+do you do with yourself?'</p>
+
+<p>'My duty, to be sure,' said the Fox; 'use my wits and enjoy myself. My
+dear friend, you and I are on the lucky side. We eat and are not eaten.'</p>
+
+<p>'Except by the hounds now and then,' said the Cat.</p>
+
+<p>'Yes; by brutes that forget their nature, and sell their freedom to the
+men,' said the Fox, bitterly. 'In the meantime my wits have kept my skin
+whole hitherto, and I bless Nature for making me a Fox and not a goose.'</p>
+
+<p>'And are you happy, Fox?'</p>
+
+<p>'Happy! yes, of course. So would you be if you would do like me, and use
+your wits. My good Cat, I should be as miserable as you if I found my
+geese every day at the cave's mouth. I have to hunt for them, lie for
+them, sneak for them, fight for them; cheat those old fat farmers, and
+bring out what there is inside me; and then I am happy&mdash;of course I am.
+And then, Cat, think of my feelings as a father last night, when my dear
+boy came home with the very young gosling which was marked for the
+Michaelmas dinner! Old Reineke himself wasn't more than a match for that
+young Fox at his years. You know our epic?'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_430" id="Page_430">[Pg 430]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>'A little of it, Fox. They don't read it in our schoolroom. They say it
+is not moral; but I have heard pieces of it. I hope it is not all quite
+true.'</p>
+
+<p>'Pack of stuff! it is the only true book that ever was written. If it is
+not, it ought to be. Why, that book is the law of the world&mdash;<i>la
+carri&egrave;re aux talents</i>&mdash;and writing it was the honestest thing ever done
+by a man. That fellow knew a thing or two, and wasn't ashamed of himself
+when he did know. They are all like him, too, if they would only say so.
+There never was one of them yet who wasn't more ashamed of being called
+ugly than of being called a rogue, and of being called stupid than of
+being called naughty.'</p>
+
+<p>'It has a roughish end, this life of yours, if you keep clear of the
+hounds, Fox,' said the Cat.</p>
+
+<p>'What! a rope in the yard! Well, it must end some day; and when the
+farmer catches me I shall be getting old, and my brains will be taking
+leave of me; so the sooner I go the better, that I may disgrace myself
+the less. Better be jolly while it lasts, than sit mewing out your life
+and grumbling at it as a bore.'</p>
+
+<p>'Well,' said the Cat, 'I am very much obliged to you. I suppose I may
+even get home again. I shall not find a wiser friend than you, and
+perhaps I shall not find another good-natured enough to give me so good
+a dinner. But it is very sad.'</p>
+
+<p>'Think of what I have said,' answered the Fox. 'I'll call at your house
+some night; you will take me a walk round the yard, and then I'll show
+you.'</p>
+
+<p>'Not quite,' thought the Cat, as she trotted off; 'one good turn
+deserves another, that is true; and you have given me a dinner. But they
+have given me many at home, and I mean to take a few more of them; so I
+think you mustn't go round our yard.'</p>
+
+
+<h3><a name="cat_4" id="cat_4"></a>PART IV.</h3>
+
+<p>The next morning, when the Dog came down to breakfast, he found his old
+friend sitting in her usual place on the hearth-rug.</p>
+
+<p>'Oh! so you have come back,' said he. 'How d'ye do? You don't look as if
+you had had a very pleasant journey.'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_431" id="Page_431">[Pg 431]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>'I have learnt something,' said the Cat. 'Knowledge is never pleasant.'</p>
+
+<p>'Then it is better to be without it,' said the Dog.</p>
+
+<p>'Especially, better to be without knowing how to stand on one's hind
+legs, Dog,' said the Cat; 'still you see, you are proud of it; but I
+have learnt a great deal, Dog. They won't worship you any more, and it
+is better for you; you wouldn't be any happier. What did you do
+yesterday?'</p>
+
+<p>'Indeed,' said the Dog, 'I hardly remember. I slept after you went away.
+In the afternoon I took a drive in the carriage. Then I had my dinner.
+My maid washed me and put me to bed. There is the difference between you
+and me; you have to wash yourself and put yourself to bed.'</p>
+
+<p>'And you really don't find it a bore, living like this? Wouldn't you
+like something to do? Wouldn't you like some children to play with? The
+Fox seemed to find it very pleasant.'</p>
+
+<p>'Children, indeed!' said the Dog, 'when I have got men and women.
+Children are well enough for foxes and wild creatures; refined dogs know
+better; and, for doing&mdash;can't I stand on my toes? can't I dance? at
+least, couldn't I before I was so fat?'</p>
+
+<p>'Ah! I see everybody likes what he was bred to,' sighed the Cat. 'I was
+bred to do nothing, and I must like that. Train the cat as the cat
+should go, and the cat will be happy and ask no questions. Never seek
+for impossibilities, Dog. That is the secret.'</p>
+
+<p>'And you have spent a day in the woods to learn that,' said he. 'I could
+have taught you that. Why, Cat, one day when you were sitting scratching
+your nose before the fire, I thought you looked so pretty that I should
+have liked to marry you; but I knew I couldn't, so I didn't make myself
+miserable.'</p>
+
+<p>The Cat looked at him with her odd green eyes. 'I never wished to marry
+you, Dog; I shouldn't have presumed. But it was wise of you not to fret
+about it. But, listen to me, Dog&mdash;listen. I met many creatures in the
+wood, all sorts of creatures, beasts and birds. They were all happy;
+they didn't find it a bore. They went about their work, and did it, and
+enjoyed it, and yet none of them had the same story to tell. Some did
+one thing, some another; and, except the Fox, each had got a sort of
+notion of doing its duty.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_432" id="Page_432">[Pg 432]</a></span> The Fox was a rogue; he said he was; but yet
+he was not unhappy. His conscience never troubled him. Your work is
+standing on your toes, and you are happy. I have none, and that is why I
+am unhappy. When I came to think about it, I found every creature out in
+the wood had to get its own living. I tried to get mine, but I didn't
+like it, because I wasn't used to it; and as for knowing, the Fox, who
+didn't care to know anything except how to cheat greater fools than
+himself, was the cleverest fellow I came across. Oh! the Owl, Dog&mdash;you
+should have heard the Owl. But I came to this, that it was no use trying
+to know, and the only way to be jolly was to go about one's own business
+like a decent Cat. Cats' business seems to be killing rabbits and
+such-like; and it is not the pleasantest possible; so the sooner one is
+bred to it the better. As for me, that have been bred to do nothing,
+why, as I said before, I must try to like that; but I consider myself an
+unfortunate Cat.'</p>
+
+<p>'So don't I consider myself an unfortunate Dog,' said her companion.</p>
+
+<p>'Very likely you do not,' said the Cat.</p>
+
+<p>By this time their breakfast was come in. The Cat ate hers, the Dog did
+penance for his; and if one might judge by the purring on the
+hearth-rug, the Cat, if not the happiest of the two, at least was not
+exceedingly miserable.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_433" id="Page_433">[Pg 433]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="FABLES" id="FABLES"></a>FABLES.</h2>
+
+<h3><a name="fable_1" id="fable_1"></a>I.&mdash;<span class="smcap">The Lions and the Oxen</span>.</h3>
+
+
+<p>Once upon a time a number of cattle came out of the desert to settle in
+the broad meadows by a river. They were poor and wretched, and they
+found it a pleasant exchange; except for a number of lions, who lived in
+the mountains near, and who claimed a right, in consideration of
+permitting the cattle to remain, to eat as many as they wanted among
+them. The cattle submitted, partly because they were too weak to help
+it, partly because the lions said it was the will of Jupiter; and the
+cattle believed them. And so they went on for many ages, till at last,
+from better feeding, the cattle grew larger and stronger, and multiplied
+into great numbers; and at the same time, from other causes, the lions
+had much diminished: they were fewer, smaller, and meaner-looking than
+they had been; and except in their own opinion of themselves, and in
+their appetites, which were more enormous than ever, there was nothing
+of the old lion left in them.</p>
+
+<p>One day a large ox was quietly grazing, when one of these lions came up,
+and desired the ox to lie down, for he wanted to eat him. The ox raised
+his head, and gravely protested; the lion growled; the ox was mild, yet
+firm. The lion insisted upon his legal right, and they agreed to refer
+the matter to Minos.</p>
+
+<p>When they came into court, the lion accused the ox of having broken the
+laws of the beasts. The lion was king, and the others were bound to
+obey. Prescriptive usage was clearly on the lion's side. Minos called on
+the ox for his defence.</p>
+
+<p>The Ox said that, without consent of his own being asked, he had been
+born into the meadow. He did not consider himself much of a beast, but,
+such as he was, he was very<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_434" id="Page_434">[Pg 434]</a></span> happy, and gave Jupiter thanks. Now, if the
+lion could show that the existence of lions was of more importance than
+that of oxen in the eyes of Jupiter, he had nothing more to say; he was
+ready to sacrifice himself. But this lion had already eaten a thousand
+oxen. Lions' appetites were so insatiable that he was forced to ask
+whether they were really worth what was done for them,&mdash;whether the life
+of one lion was so noble that the lives of thousands of oxen were not
+equal to it? He was ready to own that lions had always eaten oxen, but
+lions when they first came to the meadow were a different sort of
+creature, and they themselves, too (and the ox looked complacently at
+himself), had improved since that time. Judging by appearances, though
+they might be fallacious, he himself was quite as good a beast as the
+lion. If the lions would lead lives more noble than oxen could live,
+once more he would not complain. As it was, he submitted that the cost
+was too great.</p>
+
+<p>Then the Lion put on a grand face and tried to roar; but when he opened
+his mouth he disclosed a jaw so drearily furnished that Minos laughed,
+and told the ox it was his own fault if he let himself be eaten by such
+a beast as that. If he persisted in declining, he did not think the lion
+would force him.</p>
+
+
+<h3><a name="fable_2" id="fable_2"></a>II.&mdash;<span class="smcap">The Farmer and the Fox</span>.</h3>
+
+<p>A farmer, whose poultry-yard had suffered severely from the foxes,
+succeeded at last in catching one in a trap. 'Ah, you rascal!' said he,
+as he saw him struggling, 'I'll teach you to steal my fat geese!&mdash;you
+shall hang on the tree yonder, and your brothers shall see what comes of
+thieving!' The farmer was twisting a halter to do what he threatened,
+when the fox, whose tongue had helped him in hard pinches before,
+thought there could be no harm in trying whether it might not do him one
+more good turn.</p>
+
+<p>'You will hang me,' he said, 'to frighten my brother foxes. On the word
+of a fox they won't care a rabbit-skin for it; they'll come and look at
+me; but you may depend upon it, they will dine at your expense before
+they go home again!'</p>
+
+<p>'Then I shall hang you for yourself, as a rogue and a rascal,' said the
+farmer.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_435" id="Page_435">[Pg 435]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>'I am only what Nature, or whatever you call the thing, chose to make
+me,' the Fox answered. 'I didn't make myself.'</p>
+
+<p>'You stole my geese,' said the man.</p>
+
+<p>'Why did Nature make me like geese, then?' said the Fox. 'Live and let
+live; give me my share, and I won't touch yours; but you keep them all
+to yourself.'</p>
+
+<p>'I don't understand your fine talk,' answered the Farmer; 'but I know
+that you are a thief, and that you deserve to be hanged.'</p>
+
+<p>His head is too thick to let me catch him so, thought the Fox; I wonder
+if his heart is any softer! 'You are taking away the life of a
+fellow-creature,' he said; 'that's a responsibility&mdash;it is a curious
+thing that life, and who knows what comes after it? You say I am a
+rogue&mdash;I say I am not; but at any rate I ought not to be hanged&mdash;for if
+I am not, I don't deserve it; and if I am, you should give me time to
+repent!' I have him now, thought the Fox; let him get out if he can.</p>
+
+<p>'Why, what would you have me do with you?' said the man.</p>
+
+<p>'My notion is that you should let me go, and give me a lamb, or goose or
+two, every month, and then I could live without stealing; but perhaps
+you know better than me, and I am a rogue; my education may have been
+neglected; you should shut me up, and take care of me, and teach me. Who
+knows but in the end I may turn into a dog?'</p>
+
+<p>'Very pretty,' said the Farmer; 'we have dogs enough, and more, too,
+than we can take care of, without you. No, no, Master Fox, I have caught
+you, and you shall swing, whatever is the logic of it. There will be one
+rogue less in the world, anyhow.'</p>
+
+<p>'It is mere hate and unchristian vengeance,' said the Fox.</p>
+
+<p>'No, friend,' the Farmer answered, 'I don't hate you, and I don't want
+to revenge myself on you; but you and I can't get on together, and I
+think I am of more importance than you. If nettles and thistles grow in
+my cabbage-garden, I don't try to persuade them to grow into cabbages. I
+just dig them up. I don't hate them; but I feel somehow that they
+mustn't hinder me with my cabbages, and that I must put them away; and
+so, my poor friend, I am sorry for you, but I am afraid you must
+swing.'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_436" id="Page_436">[Pg 436]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="PARABLE_OF_THE_BREAD-FRUIT_TREE" id="PARABLE_OF_THE_BREAD-FRUIT_TREE"></a>PARABLE OF THE BREAD-FRUIT TREE.</h2>
+
+
+<p>It was after one of those heavy convulsions which have divided era from
+era, and left mankind to start again from the beginning, that a number
+of brave men gathered together to raise anew from the ground a fresh
+green home for themselves. The rest of the surviving race were
+sheltering themselves amidst the old ruins, or in the caves on the
+mountains, feeding on husks and shells; but these men with clear heads
+and brave hearts ploughed and harrowed the earth, and planted seeds, and
+watered them, and watched them; and the seeds grew and shot up with the
+spring, but one was larger and fairer than the rest, and the other
+plants seemed to know it, for they crawled along till they reached the
+large one; and they gathered round it, and clung to it, and grew into
+it; and soon they became one great stem, with branching roots feeding it
+as from many fountains. Then the men got great heart in them when they
+saw that, and they laboured more bravely, digging about it in the hot
+sun, till at last it became great and mighty, and its roots went down
+into the heart of the earth, and its branches stretched over all the
+plain.</p>
+
+<p>Then many others of mankind, when they saw the tree was beautiful, came
+down and gathered under it, and those who had raised it received them
+with open arms, and they all sat under its shade together, and gathered
+its fruits, and made their homes there, rejoicing in its loveliness. And
+ages passed away, and all that generation passed away, and still the
+tree grew stronger and fairer, and their children's children watched it
+age after age, as it lived on and flowered and seeded. And they said in
+their hearts, the tree is immortal&mdash;it will never die. They took no care
+of the seed; the scent of the flowers and the taste of the sweet fruit
+was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_437" id="Page_437">[Pg 437]</a></span> all they thought of: and the winds of heaven, and the wild birds,
+and the beasts of the field caught the stray fruits and seed-dust, and
+bore the seed away, and scattered it in far-off soils.</p>
+
+<p>And by-and-by, at a great great age, the tree at last began to cease to
+grow, and then to faint and droop: its leaves were not so thick, its
+flowers were not so fragrant; and from time to time the night winds,
+which before had passed away, and had been never heard, came moaning and
+sighing among the branches. And the men for a while doubted and
+denied&mdash;they thought it was the accident of the seasons; and then a
+branch fell, and they said it was a storm, and such a storm as came but
+once in a thousand years. At last there could be no doubt that the
+leaves were thin and sere and scanty&mdash;that the sun shone through
+them&mdash;that the fruit was tasteless. But the generation was gone away
+which had known the tree in its beauty, and so men said it was always
+so&mdash;its fruits were never better&mdash;its foliage never was thicker.</p>
+
+<p>So things went on, and from time to time strangers would come among
+them, and would say, Why are you sitting here under the old tree? there
+are young trees grown of the seed of this tree, far away, more beautiful
+than it ever was; see, we have brought you leaves and flowers to show
+you. But the men would not listen. They were angry, and some they drove
+away, and some they killed, and poured their blood round the roots of
+the tree, saying, They have spoken evil of our tree; let them feed it
+now with their blood. At last some of their own wiser ones brought out
+specimens of the old fruits, which had been laid up to be preserved, and
+compared them with the present bearing, and they saw that the tree was
+not as it had been; and such of them as were good men reproached
+themselves, and said it was their own fault. They had not watered it;
+they had forgotten to manure it. So, like their first fathers, they
+laboured with might and main, and for a while it seemed as if they might
+succeed, and for a few years branches, which were almost dead when the
+spring came round, put out some young green shoots again. But it was
+only for a few years; there was not enough of living energy in the tree.
+Half the labour which was wasted on it would have raised another nobler
+one far away. So the men grew soon weary,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_438" id="Page_438">[Pg 438]</a></span> and looked for a shorter way:
+and some gathered up the leaves and shoots which the strangers had
+brought, and grafted them on, if perhaps they might grow; but they could
+not grow on a dying stock, and they, too, soon drooped and became as the
+rest. And others said, Come, let us tie the preserved fruits on again;
+perhaps they will join again to the stem, and give it back its life. But
+there were not enough, for only a few had been preserved; so they took
+painted paper and wax and clay, and cut sham leaves and fruits of the
+old pattern, which for a time looked bright and gay, and the world, who
+did not know what had been done, said&mdash;See, the tree is immortal: it is
+green again. Then some believed, but many saw that it was a sham, and
+liking better to bear the sky and sun, without any shade at all, than to
+live in a lie, and call painted paper leaves and flowers, they passed
+out in search of other homes. But the larger number stayed behind; they
+had lived so long in falsehood that they had forgotten there was any
+such thing as truth at all; the tree had done very well for them&mdash;it
+would do very well for their children. And if their children, as they
+grew up, did now and then happen to open their eyes and see how it
+really was, they learned from their fathers to hold their tongues about
+it. If the little ones and the weak ones believed, it answered all
+purposes, and change was inconvenient. They might smile to themselves at
+the folly which they countenanced, but they were discreet, and they
+would not expose it. This is the state of the tree, and of the men who
+are under it at this present time:&mdash;they say it still does very well.
+Perhaps it does&mdash;but, stem and boughs and paper leaves, it is dry for
+the burning, and if the lightning touches it, those who sit beneath will
+suffer.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_439" id="Page_439">[Pg 439]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="COMPENSATION" id="COMPENSATION"></a>COMPENSATION.</h2>
+
+
+<p>One day an Antelope was lying with her fawn at the foot of the flowering
+Mimosa. The weather was intensely sultry, and a Dove, who had sought
+shelter from the heat among the leaves, was cooing above her head.</p>
+
+<p>'Happy bird!' said the Antelope. 'Happy bird! to whom the air is given
+for an inheritance, and whose flight is swifter than the wind. At your
+will you alight upon the ground, at your will you sweep into the sky,
+and fly races with the driving clouds; while I, poor I, am bound a
+prisoner to this miserable earth, and wear out my pitiable life crawling
+to and fro upon its surface.'</p>
+
+<p>Then the Dove answered, 'It is sweet to sail along the sky, to fly from
+land to land, and coo among the valleys; but, Antelope, when I have sate
+above amidst the branches and watched your little one close its tiny
+lips upon your breast, and feed its life on yours, I have felt that I
+could strip off my wings, lay down my plumage, and remain all my life
+upon the ground only once to know such blessed enjoyment.'</p>
+
+<p>The breeze sighed among the boughs of the Mimosa, and a voice came
+trembling out of the rustling leaves: 'If the Antelope mourns her
+destiny, what should the Mimosa do? The Antelope is the swiftest among
+the animals. It rises in the morning; the ground flies under its
+feet&mdash;in the evening it is a hundred miles away. The Mimosa is feeding
+its old age on the same soil which quickened its seed cell into
+activity. The seasons roll by me and leave me in the old place. The
+winds sway among my branches, as if they longed to bear me away with
+them, but they pass on and leave me behind. The wild birds come and go.
+The flocks move by me in the evening on<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_440" id="Page_440">[Pg 440]</a></span> their way to the pleasant
+waters. I can never move. My cradle must be my grave.'</p>
+
+<p>Then from below, at the root of the tree, came a voice which neither
+bird, nor Antelope, nor tree had ever heard, as a Rock Crystal from its
+prison in the limestone followed on the words of the Mimosa.</p>
+
+<p>'Are ye all unhappy?' it said. 'If ye are, then what am I? Ye all have
+life. You! O Mimosa, you! whose fair flowers year by year come again to
+you, ever young, and fresh, and beautiful&mdash;you who can drink the rain
+with your leaves, who can <ins class="cor" title="Probably means to frolic or move freely.">wanton</ins> with the summer breeze, and open your
+breast to give a home to the wild birds, look at me and be ashamed. I
+only am truly wretched.'</p>
+
+<p>'Alas!' said the Mimosa, 'we have life, which you have not, it is true.
+We have also what you have not, its shadow&mdash;death. My beautiful
+children, which year by year I bring out into being, expand in their
+loveliness only to die. Where they are gone I too shall soon follow,
+while you will flash in the light of the last sun which rises upon the
+earth.'</p>
+
+
+<p>LONDON</p>
+
+<p>PRINTED BY SPOTTISWOODE AND CO.</p>
+
+<p>NEW-STREET SQUARE</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<div class="notes">
+<h2>Transcriber's Notes:</h2>
+
+<p>Page 67: popositions: typo for propositions. Corrected.</p>
+
+<p>Page 118: seventeeth: typo for seventeenth. Corrected.</p>
+
+<p>Page 198: assults: typo for assaults. Corrected.</p>
+
+<p>Page 279: reely: typo for freely. Corrected.</p>
+
+<p>Page 300: appal: alternate spelling for appall.</p>
+
+<p>Page 301: doggrel: alternate spelling for doggerel.</p>
+
+<p>Page 316: throughly: alternate spelling for thoroughly.</p>
+
+<p>Page 322: ougly: alternate spelling for ugly.</p>
+
+<p>Page 329: rommaging: alternate spelling for rummaging.</p>
+
+<p>Page 330: carged: In 'a huge high-carged' [May mean high-charged as with
+many weapons, or cargo, as heavy freight?]</p>
+
+<p>Page 330: enterchanged: alternate spelling for interchanged.</p>
+
+<p>Page 408: befal: alternate spelling for befall.</p>
+
+<p>Page 440: wanton: probably means to frolic or move freely in this
+context.</p>
+
+<p>Pages various: sate: alternate, archaic spelling for sat.</p>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Short Studies on Great Subjects, by 
+James Anthony Froude
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SHORT STUDIES ON GREAT SUBJECTS ***
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+</pre>
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+</body>
+</html>
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+Project Gutenberg's Short Studies on Great Subjects, by James Anthony Froude
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Short Studies on Great Subjects
+
+Author: James Anthony Froude
+
+Release Date: March 6, 2007 [EBook #20755]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SHORT STUDIES ON GREAT SUBJECTS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Lybarger and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
+Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                              SHORT STUDIES
+                                   ON
+                             GREAT SUBJECTS.
+
+
+
+
+
+                                 LONDON
+                     PRINTED BY SPOTTISWOODE AND CO.
+                            NEW-STREET SQUARE
+
+
+
+
+
+                              SHORT STUDIES
+                                   ON
+                             GREAT SUBJECTS.
+
+                                   BY
+
+                         JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE, M.A.
+
+                  LATE FELLOW OF EXETER COLLEGE, OXFORD.
+
+
+                            _SECOND EDITION._
+
+
+
+                                 LONDON:
+                         LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
+                                  1867.
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+                                                           PAGE
+
+THE SCIENCE OF HISTORY                                        1
+
+TIMES OF ERASMUS AND LUTHER:
+    Lecture I                                                26
+    Lecture II                                               50
+    Lecture III                                              75
+
+THE INFLUENCE OF THE REFORMATION ON THE SCOTTISH CHARACTER  102
+
+THE PHILOSOPHY OF CATHOLICISM                               124
+
+A PLEA FOR THE FREE DISCUSSION OF THEOLOGICAL DIFFICULTIES  133
+
+CRITICISM AND THE GOSPEL HISTORY                            159
+
+THE BOOK OF JOB                                             185
+
+SPINOZA                                                     223
+
+THE DISSOLUTION OF THE MONASTERIES                          265
+
+ENGLAND'S FORGOTTEN WORTHIES                                294
+
+HOMER                                                       334
+
+THE LIVES OF THE SAINTS                                     363
+
+REPRESENTATIVE MEN                                          384
+
+REYNARD THE FOX                                             401
+
+THE CAT'S PILGRIMAGE:
+    Part I                                                  419
+    Part II                                                 422
+    Part III                                                427
+    Part IV                                                 430
+
+FABLES:
+     I. The Lions and the Oxen                              433
+    II. The Farmer and the Fox                              434
+
+PARABLE OF THE BREAD-FRUIT TREE                             436
+
+COMPENSATION                                                439
+
+
+
+
+THE SCIENCE OF HISTORY:
+
+A LECTURE DELIVERED AT THE ROYAL INSTITUTION
+
+FEBRUARY 5, 1864.
+
+
+Ladies and Gentlemen,--I have undertaken to speak to you this evening on
+what is called the Science of History. I fear it is a dry subject; and
+there seems, indeed, something incongruous in the very connection of
+such words as Science and History. It is as if we were to talk of the
+colour of sound, or the longitude of the rule-of-three. Where it is so
+difficult to make out the truth on the commonest disputed fact in
+matters passing under our very eyes, how can we talk of a science in
+things long past, which come to us only through books? It often seems to
+me as if History was like a child's box of letters, with which we can
+spell any word we please. We have only to pick out such letters as we
+want, arrange them as we like, and say nothing about those which do not
+suit our purpose.
+
+I will try to make the thing intelligible, and I will try not to weary
+you; but I am doubtful of my success either way. First, however, I wish
+to say a word or two about the eminent person whose name is connected
+with this way of looking at History, and whose premature death struck us
+all with such a sudden sorrow. Many of you, perhaps, recollect Mr.
+Buckle as he stood not so long ago in this place. He spoke more than an
+hour without a note--never repeating himself, never wasting words;
+laying out his matter as easily and as pleasantly as if he had been
+talking to us at his own fireside. We might think what we pleased of Mr.
+Buckle's views, but it was plain enough that he was a man of uncommon
+power; and he had qualities also--qualities to which he, perhaps,
+himself attached little value, as rare as they were admirable.
+
+Most of us, when we have hit on something which we are pleased to think
+important and original, feel as if we should burst with it. We come out
+into the book-market with our wares in hand, and ask for thanks and
+recognition. Mr. Buckle, at an early age, conceived the thought which
+made him famous, but he took the measure of his abilities. He knew that
+whenever he pleased he could command personal distinction, but he cared
+more for his subject than for himself. He was contented to work with
+patient reticence, unknown and unheard of, for twenty years; and then,
+at middle life, he produced a work which was translated at once into
+French and German, and, of all places in the world, fluttered the
+dovecotes of the Imperial Academy of St. Petersburg.
+
+Goethe says somewhere, that as soon as a man has done anything
+remarkable, there seems to be a general conspiracy to prevent him from
+doing it again. He is feasted, feted, caressed; his time is stolen from
+him by breakfasts, dinners, societies, idle businesses of a thousand
+kinds. Mr. Buckle had his share of all this; but there are also more
+dangerous enemies that wait upon success like his. He had scarcely won
+for himself the place which he deserved, than his health was found
+shattered by his labours. He had but time to show us how large a man he
+was--time just to sketch the outlines of his philosophy, and he passed
+away as suddenly as he appeared. He went abroad to recover strength for
+his work, but his work was done with and over. He died of a fever at
+Damascus, vexed only that he was compelled to leave it uncompleted.
+Almost his last conscious words were, 'My book, my book! I shall never
+finish my book!' He went away as he had lived, nobly careless of
+himself, and thinking only of the thing which he had undertaken to do.
+
+But his labour had not been thrown away. Disagree with him as we might,
+the effect which he had already produced was unmistakable, and it is not
+likely to pass away. What he said was not essentially new. Some such
+interpretation of human things is as early as the beginning of thought.
+But Mr. Buckle, on the one hand, had the art which belongs to men of
+genius; he could present his opinions with peculiar distinctness; and,
+on the other hand, there is much in the mode of speculation at present
+current among us for which those opinions have an unusual fascination.
+They do not please us, but they excite and irritate us. We are angry
+with them; and we betray, in being so, an uneasy misgiving that there
+may be more truth in those opinions than we like to allow.
+
+Mr. Buckle's general theory was something of this kind: When human
+creatures began first to look about them in the world they lived in,
+there seemed to be no order in anything. Days and nights were not the
+same length. The air was sometimes hot and sometimes cold. Some of the
+stars rose and set like the sun; some were almost motionless in the sky;
+some described circles round a central star above the north horizon. The
+planets went on principles of their own; and in the elements there
+seemed nothing but caprice. Sun and moon would at times go out in
+eclipse. Sometimes the earth itself would shake under men's feet; and
+they could only suppose that earth and air and sky and water were
+inhabited and managed by creatures as wayward as themselves.
+
+Time went on, and the disorder began to arrange itself. Certain
+influences seemed beneficent to men, others malignant and destructive,
+and the world was supposed to be animated by good spirits and evil
+spirits, who were continually fighting against each other, in outward
+nature and in human creatures themselves. Finally, as men observed more
+and imagined less, these interpretations gave way also. Phenomena the
+most opposite in effect were seen to be the result of the same natural
+law. The fire did not burn the house down if the owners of it were
+careful, but remained on the hearth and boiled the pot; nor did it seem
+more inclined to burn a bad man's house down than a good man's, provided
+the badness did not take the form of negligence. The phenomena of nature
+were found for the most part to proceed in an orderly, regular way, and
+their variations to be such as could be counted upon. From observing the
+order of things, the step was easy to cause and effect. An eclipse,
+instead of being a sign of the anger of Heaven, was found to be the
+necessary and innocent result of the relative position of sun, moon, and
+earth. The comets became bodies in space, unrelated to the beings who
+had imagined that all creation was watching them and their doings. By
+degrees, caprice, volition, all symptoms of arbitrary action,
+disappeared out of the universe; and almost every phenomenon in earth
+or heaven was found attributable to some law, either understood or
+perceived to exist. Thus nature was reclaimed from the imagination. The
+first fantastic conception of things gave way before the moral; the
+moral in turn gave way before the natural; and at last there was left
+but one small tract of jungle where the theory of law had failed to
+penetrate--the doings and characters of human creatures themselves.
+
+There, and only there, amidst the conflicts of reason and emotion,
+conscience and desire, spiritual forces were still conceived to exist.
+Cause and effect were not traceable when there was a free volition to
+disturb the connection. In all other things, from a given set of
+conditions, the consequences necessarily followed. With man, the word
+law changed its meaning; and instead of a fixed order, which he could
+not choose but follow, it became a moral precept, which he might disobey
+if he dared.
+
+This it was which Mr. Buckle disbelieved. The economy which prevailed
+throughout nature, he thought it very unlikely should admit of this
+exception. He considered that human beings acted necessarily from the
+impulse of outward circumstances upon their mental and bodily condition
+at any given moment. Every man, he said, acted from a motive; and his
+conduct was determined by the motive which affected him most powerfully.
+Every man naturally desires what he supposes to be good for him; but to
+do well, he must know well. He will eat poison, so long as he does not
+know that it is poison. Let him see that it will kill him, and he will
+not touch it. The question was not of moral right and wrong. Once let
+him be thoroughly made to feel that the thing is destructive, and he
+will leave it alone by the law of his nature. His virtues are the result
+of knowledge; his faults, the necessary consequence of the want of it. A
+boy desires to draw. He knows nothing about it: he draws men like trees
+or houses, with their centre of gravity anywhere. He makes mistakes,
+because he knows no better. We do not blame him. Till he is better
+taught he cannot help it. But his instruction begins. He arrives at
+straight lines; then at solids; then at curves. He learns perspective,
+and light and shade. He observes more accurately the forms which he
+wishes to represent. He perceives effects, and he perceives the means by
+which they are produced. He has learned what to do; and, in part, he
+has learned how to do it. His after-progress will depend on the amount
+of force which his nature possesses; but all this is as natural as the
+growth of an acorn. You do not preach to the acorn that it is its duty
+to become a large tree; you do not preach to the art-pupil that it is
+his duty to become a Holbein. You plant your acorn in favourable soil,
+where it can have light and air, and be sheltered from the wind; you
+remove the superfluous branches, you train the strength into the leading
+shoots. The acorn will then become as fine a tree as it has vital force
+to become. The difference between men and other things is only in the
+largeness and variety of man's capacities; and in this special capacity,
+that he alone has the power of observing the circumstances favourable to
+his own growth, and can apply them for himself. Yet, again, with this
+condition,--that he is not, as is commonly supposed, free to choose
+whether he will make use of these appliances or not. When he knows what
+is good for him, he will choose it; and he will judge what is good for
+him by the circumstances which have made him what he is.
+
+And what he would do, Mr. Buckle supposed that he always had done. His
+history had been a natural growth as much as the growth of the acorn.
+His improvement had followed the progress of his knowledge; and, by a
+comparison of his outward circumstances with the condition of his mind,
+his whole proceedings on this planet, his creeds and constitutions, his
+good deeds and his bad, his arts and his sciences, his empires and his
+revolutions, would be found all to arrange themselves into clear
+relations of cause and effect.
+
+If, when Mr. Buckle pressed his conclusions, we objected the difficulty
+of finding what the truth about past times really was, he would admit it
+candidly as far as concerned individuals; but there was not the same
+difficulty, he said, with masses of men. We might disagree about the
+characters of Julius or Tiberius Caesar, but we could know well enough
+the Romans of the Empire. We had their literature to tell us how they
+thought; we had their laws to tell us how they governed; we had the
+broad face of the world, the huge mountainous outline of their general
+doings upon it, to tell us how they acted. He believed it was all
+reducible to laws, and could be made as intelligible as the growth of
+the chalk cliffs or the coal measures.
+
+And thus consistently Mr. Buckle cared little for individuals. He did
+not believe (as some one has said) that the history of mankind is the
+history of its great men. Great men with him were but larger atoms,
+obeying the same impulses with the rest, only perhaps a trifle more
+erratic. With them or without them, the course of things would have been
+much the same.
+
+As an illustration of the truth of his view, he would point to the new
+science of Political Economy. Here already was a large area of human
+activity in which natural laws were found to act unerringly. Men had
+gone on for centuries trying to regulate trade on moral principles. They
+would fix wages according to some imaginary rule of fairness; they would
+fix prices by what they considered things ought to cost; they encouraged
+one trade or discouraged another, for moral reasons. They might as well
+have tried to work a steam-engine on moral reasons. The great statesmen
+whose names were connected with these enterprises might have as well
+legislated that water should run up-hill. There were natural laws, fixed
+in the conditions of things: and to contend against them was the old
+battle of the Titans against the gods.
+
+As it was with political economy, so it was with all other forms of
+human activity; and as the true laws of political economy explained the
+troubles which people fell into in old times, because they were ignorant
+of them, so the true laws of human nature, as soon as we knew them,
+would explain their mistakes in more serious matters, and enable us to
+manage better for the future. Geographical position, climate, air, soil,
+and the like, had their several influences. The northern nations are
+hardy and industrious, because they must till the earth if they would
+eat the fruits of it, and because the temperature is too low to make an
+idle life enjoyable. In the south, the soil is more productive, while
+less food is wanted and fewer clothes; and in the exquisite air,
+exertion is not needed to make the sense of existence delightful.
+Therefore, in the south we find men lazy and indolent.
+
+True, there are difficulties in these views; the home of the languid
+Italian was the home also of the sternest race of whom the story of
+mankind retains a record. And again, when we are told that the Spaniards
+are superstitious, because Spain is a country of earthquakes, we
+remember Japan, the spot in all the world where earthquakes are most
+frequent, and where at the same time there is the most serene disbelief
+in any supernatural agency whatsoever.
+
+Moreover, if men grow into what they are by natural laws, they cannot
+help being what they are; and if they cannot help being what they are, a
+good deal will have to be altered in our general view of human
+obligations and responsibilities.
+
+That, however, in these theories there is a great deal of truth is quite
+certain; were there but a hope that those who maintain them would be
+contented with that admission. A man born in a Mahometan country grows
+up a Mahometan; in a Catholic country, a Catholic; in a Protestant
+country, a Protestant. His opinions are like his language; he learns to
+think as he learns to speak; and it is absurd to suppose him responsible
+for being what nature makes him. We take pains to educate children.
+There is a good education and a bad education; there are rules well
+ascertained by which characters are influenced, and, clearly enough, it
+is no mere matter for a boy's free will whether he turns out well or
+ill. We try to train him into good habits; we keep him out of the way of
+temptations; we see that he is well taught; we mix kindness and
+strictness; we surround him with every good influence we can command.
+These are what are termed the advantages of a good education: and if we
+fail to provide those under our care with it, and if they go wrong, the
+responsibility we feel is as much ours as theirs. This is at once an
+admission of the power over us of outward circumstances.
+
+In the same way, we allow for the strength of temptations, and the like.
+
+In general, it is perfectly obvious that men do necessarily absorb, out
+of the influences in which they grow up, something which gives a
+complexion to their whole after-character.
+
+When historians have to relate great social or speculative changes, the
+overthrow of a monarchy or the establishment of a creed, they do but
+half their duty if they merely relate the events. In an account, for
+instance, of the rise of Mahometanism, it is not enough to describe the
+character of the Prophet, the ends which he set before him, the means
+which he made use of, and the effect which he produced; the historian
+must show what there was in the condition of the Eastern races which
+enabled Mahomet to act upon them so powerfully; their existing beliefs,
+their existing moral and political condition.
+
+In our estimate of the past, and in our calculations of the future--in
+the judgments which we pass upon one another, we measure responsibility,
+not by the thing done, but by the opportunities which people have had of
+knowing better or worse. In the efforts which we make to keep our
+children from bad associations or friends we admit that external
+circumstances have a powerful effect in making men what they are.
+
+But are circumstances everything? That is the whole question. A science
+of history, if it is more than a misleading name, implies that the
+relation between cause and effect holds in human things as completely as
+in all others, that the origin of human actions is not to be looked for
+in mysterious properties of the mind, but in influences which are
+palpable and ponderable.
+
+When natural causes are liable to be set aside and neutralised by what
+is called volition, the word Science is out of place. If it is free to a
+man to choose what he will do or not do, there is no adequate science of
+him. If there is a science of him, there is no free choice, and the
+praise or blame with which we regard one another are impertinent and out
+of place.
+
+I am trespassing upon these ethical grounds because, unless I do, the
+subject cannot be made intelligible. Mankind are but an aggregate of
+individuals--History is but the record of individual action; and what is
+true of the part, is true of the whole.
+
+We feel keenly about such things, and when the logic becomes perplexing,
+we are apt to grow rhetorical about them. But rhetoric is only
+misleading. Whatever the truth may be, it is best that we should know
+it; and for truth of any kind we should keep our heads and hearts as
+cool as we can.
+
+I will say at once, that if we had the whole case before us--if we were
+taken, like Leibnitz's Tarquin, into the council chamber of nature, and
+were shown what we really were, where we came from, and where we were
+going, however unpleasant it might be for some of us to find ourselves,
+like Tarquin, made into villains, from the subtle necessities of 'the
+best of all possible worlds;' nevertheless, some such theory as Mr.
+Buckle's might possibly turn out to be true. Likely enough, there is
+some great 'equation of the universe' where the value of the unknown
+quantities can be determined. But we must treat things in relation to
+our own powers and position; and the question is, whether the sweep of
+those vast curves can be measured by the intellect of creatures of a day
+like ourselves.
+
+The 'Faust' of Goethe, tired of the barren round of earthly knowledge,
+calls magic to his aid. He desires, first, to see the spirit of the
+Macrocosmos, but his heart fails him before he ventures that tremendous
+experiment, and he summons before him, instead, the spirit of his own
+race. There he feels himself at home. The stream of life and the storm
+of action, the everlasting ocean of existence, the web and the woof, and
+the roaring loom of time--he gazes upon them all, and in passionate
+exultation claims fellowship with the awful thing before him. But the
+majestic vision fades, and a voice comes to him--'Thou art fellow with
+the spirits which thy mind can grasp--not with me.'
+
+Had Mr. Buckle tried to follow his principles into detail, it might have
+fared no better with him than with 'Faust.'
+
+What are the conditions of a science? and when may any subject be said
+to enter the scientific stage? I suppose when the facts of it begin to
+resolve themselves into groups; when phenomena are no longer isolated
+experiences, but appear in connection and order; when, after certain
+antecedents, certain consequences are uniformly seen to follow; when
+facts enough have been collected to furnish a basis for conjectural
+explanation, and when conjectures have so far ceased to be utterly
+vague, that it is possible in some degree to foresee the future by the
+help of them.
+
+Till a subject has advanced as far as this, to speak of a science of it
+is an abuse of language. It is not enough to say that there must be a
+science of human things, because there is a science of all other things.
+This is like saying the planets must be inhabited, because the only
+planet of which we have any experience is inhabited. It may or may not
+be true, but it is not a practical question; it does not affect the
+practical treatment of the matter in hand.
+
+Let us look at the history of Astronomy.
+
+So long as sun, moon, and planets were supposed to be gods or angels; so
+long as the sword of Orion was not a metaphor, but a fact, and the
+groups of stars which inlaid the floor of heaven were the glittering
+trophies of the loves and wars of the Pantheon, so long there was no
+science of Astronomy. There was fancy, imagination, poetry, perhaps
+reverence, but no science. As soon, however, as it was observed that the
+stars retained their relative places--that the times of their rising and
+setting varied with the seasons--that sun, moon, and planets moved among
+them in a plane, and the belt of the Zodiac was marked out and divided,
+then a new order of things began. Traces of the earlier stage remained
+in the names of the signs and constellations, just as the Scandinavian
+mythology survives now in the names of the days of the week: but for all
+that, the understanding was now at work on the thing; Science had begun,
+and the first triumph of it was the power of foretelling the future.
+Eclipses were perceived to recur in cycles of nineteen years, and
+philosophers were able to say when an eclipse was to be looked for. The
+periods of the planets were determined. Theories were invented to
+account for their eccentricities; and, false as those theories might be,
+the position of the planets could be calculated with moderate certainty
+by them. The very first result of the science, in its most imperfect
+stage, was a power of foresight; and this was possible before any one
+true astronomical law had been discovered.
+
+We should not therefore question the possibility of a science of
+history, because the explanations of its phenomena were rudimentary or
+imperfect: that they might be, and might long continue to be, and yet
+enough might be done to show that there was such a thing, and that it
+was not entirely without use. But how was it that in those rude days,
+with small knowledge of mathematics, and with no better instruments than
+flat walls and dial plates, those first astronomers made progress so
+considerable? Because, I suppose, the phenomena which they were
+observing recurred, for the most part, within moderate intervals; so
+that they could collect large experience within the compass of their
+natural lives: because days and months and years were measurable
+periods, and within them the more simple phenomena perpetually repeated
+themselves.
+
+But how would it have been if, instead of turning on its axis once in
+twenty-four hours, the earth had taken a year about it; if the year had
+been nearly four hundred years; if man's life had been no longer than it
+is, and for the initial steps of astronomy there had been nothing to
+depend upon except observations recorded in history? How many ages would
+have passed, had this been our condition, before it would have occurred
+to any one, that, in what they saw night after night, there was any kind
+of order at all?
+
+We can see to some extent how it would have been, by the present state
+of those parts of the science which in fact depend on remote recorded
+observations. The movements of the comets are still extremely uncertain.
+The times of their return can be calculated only with the greatest
+vagueness.
+
+And yet such a hypothesis as I have suggested would but inadequately
+express the position in which we are in fact placed towards history.
+There the phenomena never repeat themselves. There we are dependent
+wholly on the record of things said to have happened once, but which
+never happen or can happen a second time. There no experiment is
+possible; we can watch for no recurring fact to test the worth of our
+conjectures. It has been suggested, fancifully, that if we consider the
+universe to be infinite, time is the same as eternity, and the past is
+perpetually present. Light takes nine years to come to us from Sirius;
+those rays which we may see to-night when we leave this place, left
+Sirius nine years ago; and could the inhabitants of Sirius see the earth
+at this moment, they would see the English army in the trenches before
+Sebastopol; Florence Nightingale watching at Scutari over the wounded at
+Inkermann; and the peace of England undisturbed by 'Essays and Reviews.'
+
+As the stars recede into distance, so time recedes with them, and there
+may be, and probably are, stars from which Noah might be seen stepping
+into the ark, Eve listening to the temptation of the serpent, or that
+older race, eating the oysters and leaving the shell-heaps behind them,
+when the Baltic was an open sea.
+
+Could we but compare notes, something might be done; but of this there
+is no present hope, and without it there will be no science of history.
+Eclipses, recorded in ancient books, can be verified by calculation, and
+lost dates can be recovered by them, and we can foresee by the laws
+which they follow when there will be eclipses again. Will a time ever
+be when the lost secret of the foundation of Rome can be recovered by
+historic laws? If not, where is our science? It may be said that this is
+a particular fact, that we can deal satisfactorily with general
+phenomena affecting eras and cycles. Well, then, let us take some
+general phenomenon. Mahometanism, for instance, or Buddhism. Those are
+large enough. Can you imagine a science which would have[A] _foretold_
+such movements as those? The state of things out of which they rose is
+obscure; but suppose it not obscure, can you conceive that, with any
+amount of historical insight into the old Oriental beliefs, you could
+have seen that they were about to transform themselves into those
+particular forms and no other?
+
+It is not enough to say, that, after the fact, you can understand
+partially how Mahometanism came to be. All historians worth the name
+have told us something about that. But when we talk of science, we mean
+something with more ambitious pretences, we mean something which can
+foresee as well as explain; and, thus looked at, to state the problem is
+to show its absurdity. As little could the wisest man have foreseen this
+mighty revolution, as thirty years ago such a thing as Mormonism could
+have been anticipated in America; as little as it could have been
+foreseen that table-turning and spirit-rapping would have been an
+outcome of the scientific culture of England in the nineteenth century.
+
+The greatest of Roman thinkers, gazing mournfully at the seething mass
+of moral putrefaction round him, detected and deigned to notice among
+its elements a certain detestable superstition, so he called it, rising
+up amidst the offscouring of the Jews, which was named Christianity.
+Could Tacitus have looked forward nine centuries to the Rome of Gregory
+VII., could he have beheld the representative of the majesty of the
+Caesars holding the stirrup of the Pontiff of that vile and execrated
+sect, the spectacle would scarcely have appeared to him the fulfilment
+of a rational expectation, or an intelligible result of the causes in
+operation round him. Tacitus, indeed, was born before the science of
+history; but would M. Comte have seen any more clearly?
+
+Nor is the case much better if we are less hard upon our philosophy; if
+we content ourselves with the past, and require only a scientific
+explanation of that.
+
+First, for the facts themselves. They come to us through the minds of
+those who recorded them, neither machines nor angels, but fallible
+creatures, with human passions and prejudices. Tacitus and Thucydides
+were perhaps the ablest men who ever gave themselves to writing history;
+the ablest, and also the most incapable of conscious falsehood. Yet even
+now, after all these centuries, the truth of what they relate is called
+in question. Good reasons can be given to show that neither of them can
+be confidently trusted. If we doubt with these, whom are we to believe?
+
+Or again, let the facts be granted. To revert to my simile of the box of
+letters, you have but to select such facts as suit you, you have but to
+leave alone those which do not suit you, and let your theory of history
+be what it will, you can find no difficulty in providing facts to prove
+it.
+
+You may have your Hegel's philosophy of history, or you may have your
+Schlegel's philosophy of history; you may prove from history that the
+world is governed in detail by a special Providence; you may prove that
+there is no sign of any moral agent in the universe, except man; you may
+believe, if you like it, in the old theory of the wisdom of antiquity;
+you may speak, as was the fashion in the fifteenth century, of 'our
+fathers, who had more wit and wisdom than we;' or you may talk of 'our
+barbarian ancestors,' and describe their wars as the scuffling of kites
+and crows.
+
+You may maintain that the evolution of humanity has been an unbroken
+progress towards perfection; you may maintain that there has been no
+progress at all, and that man remains the same poor creature that he
+ever was; or, lastly, you may say with the author of the 'Contrat
+Social,' that men were purest and best in primeval simplicity--
+
+    When wild in woods the noble savage ran.
+
+In all, or any of these views, history will stand your friend. History,
+in its passive irony, will make no objection. Like Jarno, in Goethe's
+novel, it will not condescend to argue with you, and will provide you
+with abundant illustrations of anything which you may wish to believe.
+
+'What is history,' said Napoleon, 'but a fiction agreed upon?' 'My
+friend,' said Faust to the student, who was growing enthusiastic about
+the spirit of past ages; 'my friend, the times which are gone are a book
+with seven seals; and what you call the spirit of past ages is but the
+spirit of this or that worthy gentleman in whose mind those ages are
+reflected.'
+
+One lesson, and only one, history may be said to repeat with
+distinctness; that the world is built somehow on moral foundations;
+that, in the long run, it is well with the good; in the long run, it is
+ill with the wicked. But this is no science; it is no more than the old
+doctrine taught long ago by the Hebrew prophets. The theories of M.
+Comte and his disciples advance us, after all, not a step beyond the
+trodden and familiar ground. If men are not entirely animals, they are
+at least half animals, and are subject in this aspect of them to the
+conditions of animals. So far as those parts of man's doings are
+concerned, which neither have, nor need have, anything moral about them,
+so far the laws of him are calculable. There are laws for his digestion,
+and laws of the means by which his digestive organs are supplied with
+matter. But pass beyond them, and where are we? In a world where it
+would be as easy to calculate men's actions by laws like those of
+positive philosophy as to measure the orbit of Neptune with a foot-rule,
+or weigh Sirius in a grocer's scale.
+
+And it is not difficult to see why this should be. The first principle
+on which the theory of a science of history can be plausibly argued, is
+that all actions whatsoever arise from self-interest. It may be
+enlightened self-interest; it may be unenlightened; but it is assumed as
+an axiom, that every man, in whatever he does, is aiming at something
+which he considers will promote his happiness. His conduct is not
+determined by his will; it is determined by the object of his desire.
+Adam Smith, in laying the foundations of political economy, expressly
+eliminates every other motive. He does not say that men never act on
+other motives; still less, that they never ought to act on other
+motives. He asserts merely that, as far as the arts of production are
+concerned, and of buying and selling, the action of self-interest may be
+counted upon as uniform. What Adam Smith says of political economy, Mr.
+Buckle would extend over the whole circle of human activity.
+
+Now, that which especially distinguishes a high order of man from a low
+order of man--that which constitutes human goodness, human greatness,
+human nobleness--is surely not the degree of enlightenment with which
+men pursue their own advantage; but it is self-forgetfulness--it is
+self-sacrifice--it is the disregard of personal pleasure, personal
+indulgence, personal advantages remote or present, because some other
+line of conduct is more right.
+
+We are sometimes told that this is but another way of expressing the
+same thing; that when a man prefers doing what is right, it is only
+because to do right gives him a higher satisfaction. It appears to me,
+on the contrary, to be a difference in the very heart and nature of
+things. The martyr goes to the stake, the patriot to the scaffold, not
+with a view to any future reward to themselves, but because it is a
+glory to fling away their lives for truth and freedom. And so through
+all phases of existence, to the smallest details of common life, the
+beautiful character is the unselfish character. Those whom we most love
+and admire are those to whom the thought of self seems never to occur;
+who do simply and with no ulterior aim--with no thought whether it will
+be pleasant to themselves or unpleasant--that which is good, and right,
+and generous.
+
+Is this still selfishness, only more enlightened? I do not think so. The
+essence of true nobility is neglect of self. Let the thought of self
+pass in, and the beauty of a great action is gone--like the bloom from a
+soiled flower. Surely it is a paradox to speak of the self-interest of a
+martyr who dies for a cause, the triumph of which he will never enjoy;
+and the greatest of that great company in all ages would have done what
+they did, had their personal prospects closed with the grave. Nay, there
+have been those so zealous for some glorious principle, as to wish
+themselves blotted out of the book of Heaven if the cause of Heaven
+could succeed.
+
+And out of this mysterious quality, whatever it be, arise the higher
+relations of human life, the higher modes of human obligation. Kant, the
+philosopher, used to say that there were two things which overwhelmed
+him with awe as he thought of them. One was the star-sown deep of space,
+without limit and without end; the other was, right and wrong. Right,
+the sacrifice of self to good; wrong, the sacrifice of good to
+self;--not graduated objects of desire, to which we are determined by
+the degrees of our knowledge, but wide asunder as pole and pole, as
+light and darkness--one, the object of infinite love; the other, the
+object of infinite detestation and scorn. It is in this marvellous power
+in men to do wrong (it is an old story, but none the less true for
+that)--it is in this power to do wrong--wrong or right, as it lies
+somehow with ourselves to choose--that the impossibility stands of
+forming scientific calculations of what men will do before the fact, or
+scientific explanations of what they have done after the fact. If men
+were consistently selfish, you might analyse their motives; if they were
+consistently noble, they would express in their conduct the laws of the
+highest perfection. But so long as two natures are mixed together, and
+the strange creature which results from the combination is now under one
+influence and now under another, so long you will make nothing of him
+except from the old-fashioned moral--or, if you please,
+imaginative--point of view.
+
+Even the laws of political economy itself cease to guide us when they
+touch moral government. So long as labour is a chattel to be bought and
+sold, so long, like other commodities, it follows the condition of
+supply and demand. But if, for his misfortune, an employer considers
+that he stands in human relations towards his workmen; if he believes,
+rightly or wrongly, that he is responsible for them; that in return for
+their labour he is bound to see that their children are decently taught,
+and they and their families decently fed and clothed and lodged; that he
+ought to care for them in sickness and in old age; then political
+economy will no longer direct him, and the relations between himself and
+his dependents will have to be arranged on quite other principles.
+
+So long as he considers only his own material profit, so long supply and
+demand will settle every difficulty; but the introduction of a new
+factor spoils the equation.
+
+And it is precisely in this debatable ground of low motives and noble
+emotions--in the struggle, ever failing, yet ever renewed, to carry
+truth and justice into the administration of human society; in the
+establishment of states and in the overthrow of tyrannies; in the rise
+and fall of creeds; in the world of ideas; in the character and deeds of
+the great actors in the drama of life; where good and evil fight out
+their everlasting battle, now ranged in opposite camps, now and more
+often in the heart, both of them, of each living man--that the true
+human interest of history resides. The progress of industries, the
+growth of material and mechanical civilisation, are interesting, but
+they are not the most interesting. They have their reward in the
+increase of material comforts; but, unless we are mistaken about our
+nature, they do not highly concern us after all.
+
+Once more; not only is there in men this baffling duality of principle,
+but there is something else in us which still more defies scientific
+analysis.
+
+Mr. Buckle would deliver himself from the eccentricities of this and
+that individual by a doctrine of averages. Though he cannot tell whether
+A, B, or C will cut his throat, he may assure himself that one man in
+every fifty thousand, or thereabout (I forget the exact proportion),
+will cut his throat, and with this he consoles himself. No doubt it is a
+comforting discovery. Unfortunately, the average of one generation need
+not be the average of the next. We may be converted by the Japanese, for
+all that we know, and the Japanese methods of taking leave of life may
+become fashionable among us. Nay, did not Novalis suggest that the whole
+race of men would at last become so disgusted with their impotence, that
+they would extinguish themselves by a simultaneous act of suicide, and
+make room for a better order of beings? Anyhow, the fountain out of
+which the race is flowing perpetually changes--no two generations are
+alike. Whether there is a change in the organisation itself, we cannot
+tell; but this is certain, that as the planet varies with the atmosphere
+which surrounds it, so each new generation varies from the last, because
+it inhales as its atmosphere the accumulated experience and knowledge of
+the whole past of the world. These things form the spiritual air which
+we breathe as we grow; and in the infinite multiplicity of elements of
+which that air is now composed, it is for ever matter of conjecture what
+the minds will be like which expand under its influence.
+
+From the England of Fielding and Richardson to the England of Miss
+Austen--from the England of Miss Austen to the England of Railways and
+Free-trade, how vast the change; yet perhaps Sir Charles Grandison would
+not seem so strange to us now, as one of ourselves will seem to our
+great-grandchildren. The world moves faster and faster; and the
+difference will probably be considerably greater.
+
+The temper of each new generation is a continual surprise. The fates
+delight to contradict our most confident expectations. Gibbon believed
+that the era of conquerors was at an end. Had he lived out the full life
+of man, he would have seen Europe at the feet of Napoleon. But a few
+years ago we believed the world had grown too civilised for war, and the
+Crystal Palace in Hyde Park was to be the inauguration of a new era.
+Battles, bloody as Napoleon's, are now the familiar tale of every day;
+and the arts which have made greatest progress are the arts of
+destruction. What next? We may strain our eyes into the future which
+lies beyond this waning century; but never was conjecture more at fault.
+It is blank darkness, which even the imagination fails to people.
+
+What then is the use of History? and what are its lessons? If it can
+tell us little of the past, and nothing of the future, why waste our
+time over so barren a study?
+
+First, it is a voice for ever sounding across the centuries the laws of
+right and wrong. Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall,
+but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity. For every false
+word or unrighteous deed, for cruelty and oppression, for lust or
+vanity, the price has to be paid at last: not always by the chief
+offenders, but paid by some one. Justice and truth alone endure and
+live. Injustice and falsehood may be long-lived, but doomsday comes at
+last to them, in French revolutions and other terrible ways.
+
+That is one lesson of History. Another is, that we should draw no
+horoscopes; that we should expect little, for what we expect will not
+come to pass. Revolutions, reformations--those vast movements into which
+heroes and saints have flung themselves, in the belief that they were
+the dawn of the millennium--have not borne the fruit which they looked
+for. Millenniums are still far away. These great convulsions leave the
+world changed--perhaps improved,--but not improved as the actors in them
+hoped it would be. Luther would have gone to work with less heart, could
+he have foreseen the Thirty Years' War, and in the distance the theology
+of Tubingen. Washington might have hesitated to draw the sword against
+England, could he have seen the country which he made as we see it
+now.[B]
+
+The most reasonable anticipations fail us--antecedents the most apposite
+mislead us; because the conditions of human problems never repeat
+themselves. Some new feature alters everything--some element which we
+detect only in its after-operation.
+
+But this, it may be said, is but a meagre outcome. Can the long records
+of humanity, with all its joys and sorrows, its sufferings and its
+conquests, teach us no more than this? Let us approach the subject from
+another side.
+
+If you were asked to point out the special features in which
+Shakespeare's plays are so transcendently excellent, you would mention,
+perhaps, among others, this, that his stories are not put together, and
+his characters are not conceived, to illustrate any particular law or
+principle. They teach many lessons, but not any one prominent above
+another; and when we have drawn from them all the direct instruction
+which they contain, there remains still something unresolved--something
+which the artist gives, and which the philosopher cannot give.
+
+It is in this characteristic that we are accustomed to say Shakespeare's
+supreme _truth_ lies. He represents real life. His dramas teach as life
+teaches--neither less nor more. He builds his fabrics as nature does, on
+right and wrong; but he does not struggle to make nature more systematic
+than she is. In the subtle interflow of good and evil--in the unmerited
+sufferings of innocence--in the disproportion of penalties to desert--in
+the seeming blindness with which justice, in attempting to assert
+itself, overwhelms innocent and guilty in a common ruin--Shakespeare is
+true to real experience. The mystery of life he leaves as he finds it;
+and, in his most tremendous positions, he is addressing rather the
+intellectual emotions than the understanding,--knowing well that the
+understanding in such things is at fault, and the sage as ignorant as
+the child.
+
+Only the highest order of genius can represent nature thus. An inferior
+artist produces either something entirely immoral, where good and evil
+are names, and nobility of disposition is supposed to show itself in the
+absolute disregard of them--or else, if he is a better kind of man, he
+will force on nature a didactic purpose; he composes what are called
+moral tales, which may edify the conscience, but only mislead the
+intellect.
+
+The finest work of this kind produced in modern times is Lessing's play
+of 'Nathan the Wise.' The object of it is to teach religious toleration.
+The doctrine is admirable--the mode in which it is enforced is
+interesting; but it has the fatal fault, that it is not true. Nature
+does not teach religious toleration by any such direct method; and the
+result is--no one knew it better than Lessing himself--that the play is
+not poetry, but only splendid manufacture. Shakespeare is eternal;
+Lessing's 'Nathan' will pass away with the mode of thought which gave it
+birth. One is based on fact; the other, on human theory about fact. The
+theory seems at first sight to contain the most immediate instruction;
+but it is not really so.
+
+Cibber and others, as you know, wanted to alter Shakespeare. The French
+king, in 'Lear,' was to be got rid of; Cordelia was to marry Edgar, and
+Lear himself was to be rewarded for his sufferings by a golden old age.
+They could not bear that Hamlet should suffer for the sins of Claudius.
+The wicked king was to die, and the wicked mother; and Hamlet and
+Ophelia were to make a match of it, and live happily ever after. A
+common novelist would have arranged it thus; and you would have had your
+comfortable moral that wickedness was fitly punished, and virtue had its
+due reward, and all would have been well. But Shakespeare would not have
+it so. Shakespeare knew that crime was not so simple in its
+consequences, or Providence so paternal. He was contented to take the
+truth from life; and the effect upon the mind of the most correct theory
+of what life ought to be, compared to the effect of the life itself, is
+infinitesimal in comparison.
+
+Again, let us compare the popular historical treatment of remarkable
+incidents with Shakespeare's treatment of them. Look at 'Macbeth.' You
+may derive abundant instruction from it--instruction of many kinds.
+There is a moral lesson of profound interest in the steps by which a
+noble nature glides to perdition. In more modern fashion you may
+speculate, if you like, on the political conditions represented there,
+and the temptation presented in absolute monarchies to unscrupulous
+ambition; you may say, like Dr. Slop, these things could not have
+happened under a constitutional government; or, again, you may take up
+your parable against superstition--you may dilate on the frightful
+consequences of a belief in witches, and reflect on the superior
+advantages of an age of schools and newspapers. If the bare facts of the
+story had come down to us from a chronicler, and an ordinary writer of
+the nineteenth century had undertaken to relate them, his account, we
+may depend upon it, would have been put together upon one or other of
+these principles. Yet, by the side of that unfolding of the secrets of
+the prison-house of the soul, what lean and shrivelled anatomies the
+best of such descriptions would seem!
+
+Shakespeare himself, I suppose, could not have given us a theory of what
+he meant--he gave us the thing itself, on which we might make whatever
+theories we pleased.
+
+Or again, look at Homer.
+
+The 'Iliad' is from two to three thousand years older than 'Macbeth,'
+and yet it is as fresh as if it had been written yesterday. We have
+there no lessons save in the emotions which rise in us as we read. Homer
+had no philosophy; he never struggles to impress upon us his views about
+this or that; you can scarcely tell indeed whether his sympathies are
+Greek or Trojan; but he represents to us faithfully the men and women
+among whom he lived. He sang the Tale of Troy, he touched his lyre, he
+drained the golden beaker in the halls of men like those on whom he was
+conferring immortality. And thus, although no Agamemnon, king of men,
+ever led a Grecian fleet to Ilium; though no Priam sought the midnight
+tent of Achilles; though Ulysses and Diomed and Nestor were but names,
+and Helen but a dream, yet, through Homer's power of representing men
+and women, those old Greeks will still stand out from amidst the
+darkness of the ancient world with a sharpness of outline which belongs
+to no period of history except the most recent. For the mere hard
+purposes of history, the 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey' are the most effective
+books which ever were written. We see the Hall of Menelaus, we see the
+garden of Alcinous, we see Nausicaa among her maidens on the shore, we
+see the mellow monarch sitting with ivory sceptre in the Marketplace
+dealing out genial justice. Or again, when the wild mood is on, we can
+hear the crash of the spears, the rattle of the armour as the heroes
+fall, and the plunging of the horses among the slain. Could we enter the
+palace of an old Ionian lord, we know what we should see there; we know
+the words in which he would address us. We could meet Hector as a
+friend. If we could choose a companion to spend an evening with over a
+fireside, it would be the man of many counsels, the husband of Penelope.
+
+I am not going into the vexed question whether History or Poetry is the
+more true. It has been sometimes said that Poetry is the more true,
+because it can make things more like what our moral sense would prefer
+they should be. We hear of poetic justice and the like, as if nature and
+fact were not just enough.
+
+I entirely dissent from that view. So far as Poetry attempts to improve
+on truth in that way, so far it abandons truth, and is false to itself.
+Even literal facts, exactly as they were, a great poet will prefer
+whenever he can get them. Shakespeare in the historical plays is
+studious, wherever possible, to give the very words which he finds to
+have been used; and it shows how wisely he was guided in this, that
+those magnificent speeches of Wolsey are taken exactly, with no more
+change than the metre makes necessary, from Cavendish's Life.
+Marlborough read Shakespeare for English history, and read nothing else.
+The poet only is not bound, when it is inconvenient, to what may be
+called the accidents of facts. It was enough for Shakespeare to know
+that Prince Hal in his youth had lived among loose companions, and the
+tavern in Eastcheap came in to fill out his picture; although Mrs.
+Quickly and Falstaff, and Poins and Bardolph were more likely to have
+been fallen in with by Shakespeare himself at the Mermaid, than to have
+been comrades of the true Prince Henry. It was enough for Shakespeare to
+draw real men, and the situation, whatever it might be, would sit easy
+on them. In this sense only it is that Poetry is truer than History,
+that it can make a picture more complete. It may take liberties with
+time and space, and give the action distinctness by throwing it into
+more manageable compass.
+
+But it may not alter the real conditions of things, or represent life as
+other than it is. The greatness of the poet depends on his being true to
+nature, without insisting that nature shall theorise with him, without
+making her more just, more philosophical, more moral than reality; and,
+in difficult matters, leaving much to reflection which cannot be
+explained.
+
+And if this be true of Poetry--if Homer and Shakespeare are what they
+are, from the absence of everything didactic about them--may we not
+thus learn something of what History should be, and in what sense it
+should aspire to teach?
+
+If Poetry must not theorise, much less should the historian theorise,
+whose obligations to be true to fact are even greater than the poet's.
+If the drama is grandest when the action is least explicable by laws,
+because then it best resembles life, then history will be grandest also
+under the same conditions. 'Macbeth,' were it literally true, would be
+perfect history; and so far as the historian can approach to that kind
+of model, so far as he can let his story tell itself in the deeds and
+words of those who act it out, so far is he most successful. His work is
+no longer the vapour of his own brain, which a breath will scatter; it
+is the thing itself, which will have interest for all time. A thousand
+theories may be formed about it--spiritual theories, Pantheistic
+theories, cause and effect theories; but each age will have its own
+philosophy of history, and all these in turn will fail and die. Hegel
+falls out of date, Schlegel falls out of date, and Comte in good time
+will fall out of date; the thought about the thing must change as we
+change; but the thing itself can never change; and a history is durable
+or perishable as it contains more or least of the writer's own
+speculations. The splendid intellect of Gibbon for the most part kept
+him true to the right course in this; yet the philosophical chapters for
+which he has been most admired or censured may hereafter be thought the
+least interesting in his work. The time has been when they would not
+have been comprehended: the time may come when they will seem
+commonplace.
+
+It may be said, that in requiring history to be written like a drama, we
+require an impossibility.
+
+For history to be written with the complete form of a drama, doubtless
+is impossible; but there are periods, and these the periods, for the
+most part, of greatest interest to mankind, the history of which may be
+so written that the actors shall reveal their characters in their own
+words; where mind can be seen matched against mind, and the great
+passions of the epoch not simply be described as existing, but be
+exhibited at their white heat in the souls and hearts possessed by them.
+There are all the elements of drama--drama of the highest order--where
+the huge forces of the times are as the Grecian destiny, and the power
+of the man is seen either stemming the stream till it overwhelms him,
+or ruling while he seems to yield to it.
+
+It is Nature's drama--not Shakespeare's--but a drama none the less.
+
+So at least it seems to me. Wherever possible, let us not be told
+_about_ this man or that. Let us hear the man himself speak; let us see
+him act, and let us be left to form our own opinions about him. The
+historian, we are told, must not leave his readers to themselves. He
+must not only lay the facts before them--he must tell them what he
+himself thinks about those facts. In my opinion, this is precisely what
+he ought not to do. Bishop Butler says somewhere, that the best book
+which could be written would be a book consisting only of premises, from
+which the readers should draw conclusions for themselves. The highest
+poetry is the very thing which Butler requires, and the highest history
+ought to be. We should no more ask for a theory of this or that period
+of history, than we should ask for a theory of 'Macbeth' or 'Hamlet.'
+Philosophies of history, sciences of history--all these, there will
+continue to be; the fashions of them will change, as our habits of
+thought will change; each new philosopher will find his chief employment
+in showing that before him no one understood anything; but the drama of
+history is imperishable, and, the lessons of it will be like what we
+learn from Homer or Shakespeare--lessons for which we have no words.
+
+The address of history is less to the understanding than to the higher
+emotions. We learn in it to sympathise with what is great and good; we
+learn to hate what is base. In the anomalies of fortune we feel the
+mystery of our mortal existence, and in the companionship of the
+illustrious natures who have shaped the fortunes of the world, we escape
+from the littlenesses which cling to the round of common life, and our
+minds are tuned in a higher and nobler key.
+
+For the rest, and for those large questions which I touched in
+connection with Mr. Buckle, we live in times of disintegration, and none
+can tell what will be after us. What opinions--what convictions--the
+infant of to-day will find prevailing on the earth, if he and it live
+out together to the middle of another century, only a very bold man
+would undertake to conjecture! 'The time will come,' said Lichtenberg,
+in scorn at the materialising tendencies of modern thought; 'the time
+will come when the belief in God will be as the tales with which old
+women frighten children; when the world will be a machine, the ether a
+gas, and God will be a force.' Mankind, if they last long enough on the
+earth, may develope strange things out of themselves; and the growth of
+what is called the Positive Philosophy is a curious commentary on
+Lichtenberg's prophecy. But whether the end be seventy years hence, or
+seven hundred--be the close of the mortal history of humanity as far
+distant in the future as its shadowy beginnings seem now to lie behind
+us--this only we may foretell with confidence--that the riddle of man's
+nature will remain unsolved. There will be that in him yet which
+physical laws will fail to explain--that something, whatever it be, in
+himself and in the world, which science cannot fathom, and which
+suggests the unknown possibilities of his origin and his destiny. There
+will remain yet
+
+    Those obstinate questionings
+    Of sense and outward things;
+    Falling from us, vanishings--
+    Blank misgivings of a creature
+    Moving about in worlds not realised--
+    High instincts, before which our mortal nature
+    Doth tremble like a guilty thing surprised.
+
+There will remain
+
+    Those first affections--
+    Those shadowy recollections--
+    Which, be they what they may,
+    Are yet the fountain-light of all our day--
+    Are yet the master-light of all our seeing--
+    Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make
+    Our noisy years seem moments in the being
+            Of the Eternal Silence.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[A] It is objected that Geology is a science: yet that Geology cannot
+foretell the future changes of the earth's surface. Geology is not a
+century old, and its periods are measured by millions of years. Yet, if
+Geology cannot foretell future facts, it enabled Sir Roderick Murchison
+to foretell the discovery of Australian gold.
+
+[B] February 1864.
+
+
+
+
+TIMES OF ERASMUS AND LUTHER:
+
+THREE LECTURES
+
+DELIVERED AT NEWCASTLE, 1867.
+
+
+LECTURE I.
+
+Ladies and Gentlemen,--I do not know whether I have made a very wise
+selection in the subject which I have chosen for these Lectures. There
+was a time--a time which, measured by the years of our national life,
+was not so very long ago--when the serious thoughts of mankind were
+occupied exclusively by religion and politics. The small knowledge which
+they possessed of other things was tinctured by their speculative
+opinions on the relations of heaven and earth; and, down to the
+sixteenth century, art, science, scarcely even literature, existed in
+this country, except as, in some way or other, subordinate to theology.
+Philosophers--such philosophers as there were--obtained and half
+deserved the reputation of quacks and conjurors. Astronomy was confused
+with astrology. The physician's medicines were supposed to be powerless,
+unless the priests said prayers over them. The great lawyers, the
+ambassadors, the chief ministers of state, were generally bishops; even
+the fighting business was not entirely secular. Half-a-dozen Scotch
+prelates were killed at Flodden; and, late in the reign of Henry the
+Eighth, no fitter person could be found than Rowland Lee, Bishop of
+Coventry, to take command of the Welsh Marches, and harry the
+freebooters of Llangollen.
+
+Every single department of intellectual or practical life was penetrated
+with the beliefs, or was interwoven with the interests, of the clergy;
+and thus it was that, when differences of religious opinion arose, they
+split society to its foundations. The lines of cleavage penetrated
+everywhere, and there were no subjects whatever in which those who
+disagreed in theology possessed any common concern. When men
+quarrelled, they quarrelled altogether. The disturbers of settled
+beliefs were regarded as public enemies who had placed themselves beyond
+the pale of humanity, and were considered fit only to be destroyed like
+wild beasts, or trampled out like the seed of a contagion.
+
+Three centuries have passed over our heads since the time of which I am
+speaking, and the world is so changed that we can hardly recognise it as
+the same.
+
+The secrets of nature have been opened out to us on a thousand lines;
+and men of science of all creeds can pursue side by side their common
+investigations. Catholics, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Lutherans,
+Calvinists, contend with each other in honourable rivalry in arts, and
+literature, and commerce, and industry. They read the same books. They
+study at the same academies. They have seats in the same senates. They
+preside together on the judicial bench, and carry on, without jar or
+difference, the ordinary business of the country.
+
+Those who share the same pursuits are drawn in spite of themselves into
+sympathy and good-will. When they are in harmony in so large a part of
+their occupations, the points of remaining difference lose their venom.
+Those who thought they hated each other, unconsciously find themselves
+friends; and as far as it affects the world at large, the acrimony of
+controversy has almost disappeared.
+
+Imagine, if you can, a person being now put to death for a speculative
+theological opinion. You feel at once, that in the most bigoted country
+in the world such a thing has become impossible; and the impossibility
+is the measure of the alteration which we have all undergone. The
+formulas remain as they were on either side--the very same formulas
+which were once supposed to require these detestable murders. But we
+have learnt to know each other better. The cords which bind together the
+brotherhood of mankind are woven of a thousand strands. We do not any
+more fly apart or become enemies, because, here and there, in one strand
+out of so many, there are still unsound places.
+
+If I were asked for a distinct proof that Europe was improving and not
+retrograding, I should find it in this phenomenon. It has not been
+brought about by controversy. Men are fighting still over the same
+questions which they began to fight about at the Reformation. Protestant
+divines have not driven Catholics out of the field, nor Catholics,
+Protestants. Each polemic writes for his own partisans, and makes no
+impression on his adversary.
+
+Controversy has kept alive a certain quantity of bitterness; and that, I
+suspect, is all that it would accomplish if it continued till the day of
+judgment. I sometimes, in impatient moments, wish the laity in Europe
+would treat their controversial divines as two gentlemen once treated
+their seconds, when they found themselves forced into a duel without
+knowing what they were quarrelling about.
+
+As the principals were being led up to their places, one of them
+whispered to the other, 'If you will shoot your second, I will shoot
+mine.'
+
+The reconciliation of parties, if I may use such a word, is no
+tinkered-up truce, or convenient Interim. It is the healthy, silent,
+spontaneous growth of a nobler order of conviction, which has conquered
+our prejudices even before we knew that they were assailed. This better
+spirit especially is represented in institutions like this, which
+acknowledge no differences of creed--which are constructed on the
+broadest principles of toleration--and which, therefore, as a rule, are
+wisely protected from the intrusion of discordant subjects.
+
+They exist, as I understand, to draw men together, not to divide
+them--to enable us to share together in those topics of universal
+interest and instruction which all can take pleasure in, and which give
+offence to none.
+
+If you ask me, then, why I am myself departing from a practice which I
+admit to be so excellent, I fear that I shall give you rather a lame
+answer. I might say that I know more about the history of the sixteenth
+century than I know about anything else. I have spent the best years of
+my life in reading and writing about it; and if I have anything to tell
+you worth your hearing, it is probably on that subject.
+
+Or, again, I might say--which is indeed most true--that to the
+Reformation we can trace, indirectly, the best of those very influences
+which I have been describing. The Reformation broke the theological
+shackles in which men's minds were fettered. It set them thinking, and
+so gave birth to science. The Reformers also, without knowing what they
+were about, taught the lesson of religious toleration. They attempted to
+supersede one set of dogmas by another. They succeeded with half the
+world--they failed with the other half. In a little while it became
+apparent that good men--without ceasing to be good--could think
+differently about theology, and that goodness, therefore, depended on
+something else than the holding orthodox opinions.
+
+It is not, however, for either of these reasons that I am going to talk
+to you about Martin Luther; nor is toleration of differences of opinion,
+however excellent it be, the point on which I shall dwell in these
+Lectures.
+
+Were the Reformation a question merely of opinion, I for one should not
+have meddled with it, either here or anywhere. I hold that, on the
+obscure mysteries of faith, every one should be allowed to believe
+according to his conscience, and that arguments on such matters are
+either impertinent or useless.
+
+But the Reformation, gentlemen, beyond the region of opinions, was a
+historical fact--an objective something which may be studied like any of
+the facts of nature. The Reformers were men of note and distinction, who
+played a great part for good or evil on the stage of the world. If we
+except the Apostles, no body of human beings ever printed so deep a mark
+into the organisation of society; and if there be any value or meaning
+in history at all, the lives, the actions, the characters of such men as
+these can be matters of indifference to none of us.
+
+We have not to do with a story which is buried in obscure antiquity. The
+facts admit of being learnt. The truth, whatever it was, concerns us all
+equally. If the divisions created by that great convulsion are ever to
+be obliterated, it will be when we have learnt, each of us, to see the
+thing as it really was, and not rather some mythical or imaginative
+version of the thing--such as from our own point of view we like to
+think it was. Fiction in such matters may be convenient for our
+immediate theories, but it is certain to avenge itself in the end. We
+may make our own opinions, but facts were made for us; and if we evade
+or deny them, it will be the worse for us.
+
+Unfortunately, the mythical version at present very largely
+preponderates. Open a Protestant history of the Reformation, and you
+will find a picture of the world given over to a lying tyranny--the
+Christian population of Europe enslaved by a corrupt and degraded
+priesthood, and the Reformers, with the Bible in their hands, coming to
+the rescue like angels of light. All is black on one side--all is fair
+and beautiful on the other.
+
+Turn to a Catholic history of the same events and the same men, and we
+have before us the Church of the Saints fulfilling quietly its blessed
+mission in the saving of human souls. Satan a second time enters into
+Paradise, and a second time with fatal success tempts miserable man to
+his ruin. He disbelieves his appointed teachers, he aspires after
+forbidden knowledge, and at once anarchy breaks loose. The seamless robe
+of the Saviour is rent in pieces, and the earth becomes the habitation
+of fiends.
+
+Each side tells the story as it prefers to have it; facts, characters,
+circumstances, are melted in the theological crucible, and cast in
+moulds diametrically opposite. Nothing remains the same except the names
+and dates. Each side chooses its own witnesses. Everything is credible
+which makes for what it calls the truth. Everything is made false which
+will not fit into its place. 'Blasphemous fables' is the usual
+expression in Protestant controversial books for the accounts given by
+Catholics. 'Protestant tradition,' says an eminent modern Catholic, 'is
+based on lying--bold, wholesale, unscrupulous lying.'
+
+Now, depend upon it, there is some human account of the matter different
+from both these if we could only get at it, and it will be an excellent
+thing for the world when that human account can be made out. I am not so
+presumptuous as to suppose that I can give it to you; still less can you
+expect me to try to do so within the compass of two or three lectures.
+If I cannot do everything, however, I believe I can do a little; at any
+rate I can give you a sketch, such as you may place moderate confidence
+in, of the state of the Church as it was before the Reformation began. I
+will not expose myself more than I can help to the censure of the divine
+who was so hard on Protestant tradition. Most of what I shall have to
+say to you this evening will be taken from the admissions of Catholics
+themselves, or from official records earlier than the outbreak of the
+controversy, when there was no temptation to pervert the truth.
+
+Here, obviously, is the first point on which we require accurate
+information. If all was going on well, the Reformers really and truly
+told innumerable lies, and deserve all the reprobation which we can give
+them. If all was not going on well--if, so far from being well, the
+Church was so corrupt that Europe could bear with it no longer--then
+clearly a Reformation was necessary of some kind; and we have taken one
+step towards a fair estimate of the persons concerned in it.
+
+A fair estimate--that, and only that, is what we want. I need hardly
+observe to you, that opinion in England has been undergoing lately a
+very considerable alteration about these persons.
+
+Two generations ago, the leading Reformers were looked upon as little
+less than saints; now a party has risen up who intend, as they frankly
+tell us, to un-Protestantise the Church of England, who detest
+Protestantism as a kind of infidelity, who desire simply to reverse
+everything which the Reformers did.
+
+One of these gentlemen, a clergyman, writing lately of Luther, called
+him a heretic, a heretic fit only to be ranked with--whom, do you
+think?--Joe Smith, the Mormon Prophet. Joe Smith and Luther--that is the
+combination with which we are now presented.
+
+The book in which this remarkable statement appeared was presented by
+two bishops to the Upper House of Convocation. It was received with
+gracious acknowledgments by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and was placed
+solemnly in the library of reference, for that learned body to consult.
+
+So, too, a professor at Oxford, the other day, spoke of Luther as a
+Philistine--a Philistine meaning an oppressor of the chosen people; the
+enemy of men of culture, of intelligence, such as the professor himself.
+
+One notices these things, not as of much importance in themselves, but
+as showing which way the stream is running; and, curiously enough, in
+quite another direction we may see the same phenomenon. Our liberal
+philosophers, men of high literary power and reputation, looking into
+the history of Luther, and Calvin, and John Knox, and the rest, find
+them falling far short of the philosophic ideal--wanting sadly in many
+qualities which the liberal mind cannot dispense with. They are
+discovered to be intolerant, dogmatic, narrow-minded, inclined to
+persecute Catholics as Catholics had persecuted them; to be, in fact,
+little if at all better than the popes and cardinals whom they were
+fighting against.
+
+Lord Macaulay can hardly find epithets strong enough to express his
+contempt for Archbishop Cranmer. Mr. Buckle places Cranmer by the side
+of Bonner, and hesitates which of the two characters is the more
+detestable.
+
+An unfavourable estimate of the Reformers, whether just or unjust, is
+unquestionably gaining ground among our advanced thinkers. A greater man
+than either Macaulay or Buckle--the German poet, Goethe--says of Luther,
+that he threw back the intellectual progress of mankind for centuries,
+by calling in the passions of the multitude to decide on subjects which
+ought to have been left to the learned. Goethe, in saying this, was
+alluding especially to Erasmus. Goethe thought that Erasmus, and men
+like Erasmus, had struck upon the right track; and if they could have
+retained the direction of the mind of Europe, there would have been more
+truth, and less falsehood, among us at this present time. The party
+hatreds, the theological rivalries, the persecutions, the civil wars,
+the religious animosities which have so long distracted us, would have
+been all avoided, and the mind of mankind would have expanded gradually
+and equably with the growth of knowledge.
+
+Such an opinion, coming from so great a man, is not to be lightly passed
+over. It will be my endeavour to show you what kind of man Erasmus was,
+what he was aiming at, what he was doing, and how Luther spoilt his
+work--if spoiling is the word which we are to use for it.
+
+One caution, however, I must in fairness give you before we proceed
+further. It lies upon the face of the story, that the Reformers
+imperfectly understood toleration; but you must keep before you the
+spirit and temper of the men with whom they had to deal. For themselves,
+when the movement began, they aimed at nothing but liberty to think and
+speak their own way. They never dreamt of interfering with others,
+although they were quite aware that others, when they could, were likely
+to interfere with them. Lord Macaulay might have remembered that Cranmer
+was working all his life with the prospect of being burnt alive as his
+reward--and, as we all know, he actually was burnt alive.
+
+When the Protestant teaching began first to spread in the
+Netherlands--before one single Catholic had been illtreated there,
+before a symptom of a mutinous disposition had shown itself among the
+people, an edict was issued by the authorities for the suppression of
+the new opinions.
+
+The terms of this edict I will briefly describe to you.
+
+The inhabitants of the United Provinces were informed that they were to
+hold and believe the doctrines of the Holy Roman Catholic Church. 'Men
+and women,' says the edict, 'who disobey this command shall be punished
+as disturbers of public order. Women who have fallen into heresy shall
+be buried alive. Men, if they recant, shall lose their heads. If they
+continue obstinate, they shall be burnt at the stake.
+
+'If man or woman be suspected of heresy, no one shall shelter or protect
+him or her; and no stranger shall be admitted to lodge in any inn or
+dwelling-house unless he bring with him a testimonial of orthodoxy from
+the priest of his parish.
+
+'The Inquisition shall enquire into the private opinions of every
+person, of whatever degree; and all officers of all kinds shall assist
+the Inquisition at their peril. Those who know where heretics are
+concealed, shall denounce them, or they shall suffer as heretics
+themselves. Heretics (observe the malignity of this paragraph)--heretics
+who will give up other heretics to justice, shall themselves be pardoned
+if they will promise to conform for the future.'
+
+Under this edict, in the Netherlands alone, more than fifty thousand
+human beings, first and last, were deliberately murdered. And,
+gentlemen, I must say that proceedings of this kind explain and go far
+to excuse the subsequent intolerance of Protestants.
+
+Intolerance, Mr. Gibbon tells us, is a greater crime in a Protestant
+than a Catholic. Criminal intolerance, as I understand it, is the
+intolerance of such an edict as that which I have read to you--the
+unprovoked intolerance of difference of opinion. I conceive that the
+most enlightened philosopher might have grown hard and narrow-minded if
+he had suffered under the administration of the Duke of Alva.
+
+Dismissing these considerations, I will now go on with my subject.
+
+Never in all their history, in ancient times or modern, never that we
+know of, have mankind thrown out of themselves anything so grand, so
+useful, so beautiful, as the Catholic Church once was. In these times of
+ours, well-regulated selfishness is the recognised rule of action--every
+one of us is expected to look out first for himself, and take care of
+his own interests. At the time I speak of, the Church ruled the State
+with the authority of a conscience; and self-interest, as a motive of
+action, was only named to be abhorred. The bishops and clergy were
+regarded freely and simply as the immediate ministers of the Almighty;
+and they seem to me to have really deserved that high estimate of their
+character. It was not for the doctrines which they taught, only or
+chiefly, that they were held in honour. Brave men do not fall down
+before their fellow-mortals for the words which they speak, or for the
+rites which they perform. Wisdom, justice, self-denial, nobleness,
+purity, highmindedness,--these are the qualities before which the
+free-born races of Europe have been contented to bow; and in no order of
+men were such qualities to be found as they were found six hundred years
+ago in the clergy of the Catholic Church. They called themselves the
+successors of the Apostles. They claimed in their Master's name
+universal spiritual authority, but they made good their pretensions by
+the holiness of their own lives. They were allowed to rule because they
+deserved to rule, and in the fulness of reverence kings and nobles bent
+before a power which was nearer to God than their own. Over prince and
+subject, chieftain and serf, a body of unarmed defenceless men reigned
+supreme by the magic of sanctity. They tamed the fiery northern warriors
+who had broken in pieces the Roman Empire. They taught them--they
+brought them really and truly to believe--that they had immortal souls,
+and that they would one day stand at the awful judgment bar and give
+account for their lives there. With the brave, the honest, and the
+good--with those who had not oppressed the poor nor removed their
+neighbour's landmark--with those who had been just in all their
+dealings--with those who had fought against evil, and had tried
+valiantly to do their Master's will,--at that great day, it would be
+well. For cowards, for profligates, for those who lived for luxury and
+pleasure and self-indulgence, there was the blackness of eternal death.
+
+An awful conviction of this tremendous kind the clergy had effectually
+instilled into the mind of Europe. It was not a PERHAPS; it was a
+certainty. It was not a form of words repeated once a week at church; it
+was an assurance entertained on all days and in all places, without any
+particle of doubt. And the effect of such a belief on life and
+conscience was simply immeasurable.
+
+I do not pretend that the clergy were perfect. They were very far from
+perfect at the best of times, and the European nations were never
+completely submissive to them. It would not have been well if they had
+been. The business of human creatures in this planet is not summed up in
+the most excellent of priestly catechisms. The world and its concerns
+continued to interest men, though priests insisted on their nothingness.
+They could not prevent kings from quarrelling with each other. They
+could not hinder disputed successions, and civil feuds, and wars, and
+political conspiracies. What they did do was to shelter the weak from
+the strong. In the eyes of the clergy, the serf and his lord stood on
+the common level of sinful humanity. Into their ranks high birth was no
+passport. They were themselves for the most part children of the people;
+and the son of the artisan or peasant rose to the mitre and the triple
+crown, just as nowadays the rail-splitter and the tailor become
+Presidents of the Republic of the West.
+
+The Church was essentially democratic, while at the same time it had the
+monopoly of learning; and all the secular power fell to it which
+learning, combined with sanctity and assisted by superstition, can
+bestow.
+
+The privileges of the clergy were extraordinary. They were not amenable
+to the common laws of the land. While they governed the laity, the laity
+had no power over them. From the throne downwards, every secular office
+was dependent on the Church. No king was a lawful sovereign till the
+Church placed the crown upon his head: and what the Church bestowed, the
+Church claimed the right to take away. The disposition of property was
+in their hands. No will could be proved except before the bishop or his
+officer; and no will was held valid if the testator died out of
+communion. There were magistrates and courts of law for the offences of
+the laity. If a priest committed a crime, he was a sacred person. The
+civil power could not touch him; he was reserved for his ordinary.
+Bishops' commissaries sate in town and city, taking cognizance of the
+moral conduct of every man and woman. Offences against life and property
+were tried here in England, as now, by the common law; but the Church
+Courts dealt with sins--sins of word or act. If a man was a profligate
+or a drunkard; if he lied or swore; if he did not come to communion, or
+held unlawful opinions; if he was idle or unthrifty; if he was unkind
+to his wife or his servants; if a child was disobedient to his father,
+or a father cruel to his child; if a tradesman sold adulterated wares,
+or used false measures or dishonest weights,--the eye of the parish
+priest was everywhere, and the Church Court stood always open to examine
+and to punish.
+
+Imagine what a tremendous power this must have been! Yet it existed
+generally in Catholic Europe down to the eve of the Reformation. It
+could never have established itself at all unless at one time it had
+worked beneficially--as the abuse of it was one of the most fatal causes
+of the Church's fall.
+
+I know nothing in English history much more striking than the answer
+given by Archbishop Warham to the complaints of the English House of
+Commons after the fall of Cardinal Wolsey. The House of Commons
+complained that the clergy made laws in Convocation which the laity were
+excommunicated if they disobeyed. Yet the laws made by the clergy, the
+Commons said, were often at variance with the laws of the realm.
+
+What did Warham reply? He said he was sorry for the alleged discrepancy;
+but, inasmuch as the laws made by the clergy were always in conformity
+with the will of God, the laws of the realm had only to be altered and
+then the difficulty would vanish.
+
+What must have been the position of the clergy in the fulness of their
+power, when they could speak thus on the eve of their prostration? You
+have only to look from a distance at any old-fashioned cathedral city,
+and you will see in a moment the mediaeval relations between Church and
+State. The cathedral _is_ the city. The first object you catch sight of
+as you approach is the spire tapering into the sky, or the huge towers
+holding possession of the centre of the landscape--majestically
+beautiful--imposing by mere size amidst the large forms of Nature
+herself. As you go nearer, the vastness of the building impresses you
+more and more. The puny dwelling-place of the citizens creep at its
+feet, the pinnacles are glittering in the tints of the sunset, when down
+below among the streets and lanes the twilight is darkening. And even
+now, when the towns are thrice their ancient size, and the houses have
+stretched upwards from two stories to five; when the great chimneys are
+vomiting their smoke among the clouds, and the temples of modern
+industry--the workshops and the factories--spread their long fronts
+before the eye, the cathedral is still the governing form in the
+picture--the one object which possesses the imagination and refuses to
+be eclipsed.
+
+As that cathedral was to the old town, so was the Church of the middle
+ages to the secular institutions of the world. Its very neighbourhood
+was sacred; and its shadow, like the shadow of the Apostles, was a
+sanctuary. When I look at the new Houses of Parliament in London, I see
+in them a type of the change which has passed over us. The House of
+Commons of the Plantagenets sate in the Chapter House of Westminster
+Abbey. The Parliament of the Reform Bill, five-and-thirty years ago,
+debated in St. Stephen's Chapel, the Abbey's small dependency. Now, by
+the side of the enormous pile which has risen out of that chapel's
+ashes, the proud Minster itself is dwarfed into insignificance.
+
+Let us turn to another vast feature of the middle ages--I mean the
+monasteries.
+
+Some person of especial and exceptional holiness has lived or died at a
+particular spot. He has been distinguished by his wisdom, by his piety,
+by his active benevolence; and in an age when conjurors and witches were
+supposed to be helped by the devil to do evil, he, on his part, has been
+thought to have possessed in larger measure than common men the favour
+and the grace of heaven. Blessed influences hang about the spot which he
+has hallowed by his presence. His relics--his household possessions, his
+books, his clothes, his bones, retain the shadowy sanctity which they
+received in having once belonged to him. We all set a value, not wholly
+unreal, on anything which has been the property of a remarkable man. At
+worst, it is but an exaggeration of natural reverence.
+
+Well, as nowadays we build monuments to great men, so in the middle ages
+they built shrines or chapels on the spots which saints had made holy,
+and communities of pious people gathered together there--beginning with
+the personal friends the saint had left behind him--to try to live as he
+had lived, to do good as he had done good, and to die as he had died.
+Thus arose religious fraternities--companies of men who desired to
+devote themselves to goodness--to give up pleasure, and amusement, and
+self-indulgence, and to spend their lives in prayer and works of
+charity.
+
+These houses became centres of pious beneficence. The monks, as the
+brotherhoods were called, were organised in different orders, with some
+variety of rule, but the broad principle was the same in all. They were
+to live for others, not for themselves. They took vows of poverty, that
+they might not be entangled in the pursuit of money. They took vows of
+chastity, that the care of a family might not distract them from the
+work which they had undertaken. Their efforts of charity were not
+limited to this world. Their days were spent in hard bodily labour, in
+study, or in visiting the sick. At night they were on the stone-floors
+of their chapels, holding up their withered hands to heaven, interceding
+for the poor souls who were suffering in purgatory.
+
+The world, as it always will, paid honour to exceptional excellence. The
+system spread to the furthest limits of Christendom. The religious
+houses became places of refuge, where men of noble birth, kings and
+queens and emperors, warriors and statesmen, retired to lay down their
+splendid cares, and end their days in peace. Those with whom the world
+had dealt hardly, or those whom it had surfeited with its unsatisfying
+pleasures, those who were disappointed with earth, and those who were
+filled with passionate aspirations after heaven, alike found a haven of
+rest in the quiet cloister. And, gradually, lands came to them, and
+wealth, and social dignity--all gratefully extended to men who deserved
+so well of their fellows; while no landlords were more popular than
+they, for the sanctity of the monks sheltered their dependents as well
+as themselves.
+
+Travel now through Ireland, and you will see in the wildest parts of it
+innumerable remains of religious houses, which had grown up among a
+people who acknowledged no rule among themselves except the sword, and
+where every chief made war upon his neighbour as the humour seized him.
+The monks among the O's and the Mac's were as defenceless as sheep among
+the wolves; but the wolves spared them for their character. In such a
+country as Ireland then was, the monasteries could not have survived for
+a generation but for the enchanted atmosphere which surrounded them.
+
+Of authority, the religious orders were practically independent. They
+were amenable only to the Pope and to their own superiors. Here in
+England, the king could not send a commissioner to inspect a monastery,
+nor even send a policeman to arrest a criminal who had taken shelter
+within its walls. Archbishops and bishops, powerful as they were, found
+their authority cease when they entered the gates of a Benedictine or
+Dominican abbey.
+
+So utterly have times changed, that with your utmost exertions you will
+hardly be able to picture to yourselves the Catholic Church in the days
+of its greatness. Our school-books tell us how the Emperor of Germany
+held the stirrup for Pope Gregory the Seventh to mount his mule; how our
+own English Henry Plantagenet walked barefoot through the streets of
+Canterbury, and knelt in the Chapter House for the monks to flog him.
+The first of these incidents, I was brought up to believe, proved the
+Pope to be the Man of Sin. Anyhow, they are both facts, and not
+romances; and you may form some notion from them how high in the world's
+eyes the Church must have stood.
+
+And be sure it did not achieve that proud position without deserving it.
+The Teutonic and Latin princes were not credulous fools; and when they
+submitted, it was to something stronger than themselves--stronger in
+limb and muscle, or stronger in intellect and character.
+
+So the Church was in its vigour: so the Church was _not_ at the opening
+of the sixteenth century. Power--wealth--security--men are more than
+mortal if they can resist the temptations to which too much of these
+expose them. Nor were they the only enemies which undermined the
+energies of the Catholic clergy. Churches exist in this world to remind
+us of the eternal laws which we are bound to obey. So far as they do
+this, they fulfil their end, and are honoured in fulfilling it. It would
+have been better for all of us--it would be better for us now, could
+Churches keep this their peculiar function steadily and singly before
+them. Unfortunately, they have preferred in later times the speculative
+side of things to the practical. They take up into their teaching
+opinions and theories which are merely ephemeral; which would naturally
+die out with the progress of knowledge; but, having received a spurious
+sanctity, prolong their days unseasonably, and become first unmeaning,
+and then occasions of superstition.
+
+It matters little whether I say a paternoster in English or Latin, so
+that what is present to my mind is the thought which the words express,
+and not the words themselves. In these and all languages it is the most
+beautiful of prayers. But you know that people came to look on a Latin
+paternoster as the most powerful of spells--potent in heaven, if said
+straightforward; if repeated backward, a charm which no spirit in hell
+could resist.
+
+So it is, in my opinion, with all forms--forms of words, or forms of
+ceremony and ritualism. While the meaning is alive in them, they are not
+only harmless, but pregnant and life-giving. When we come to think that
+they possess in themselves material and magical virtues, then the
+purpose which they answer is to hide God from us and make us practically
+into Atheists.
+
+This is what I believe to have gradually fallen upon the Catholic Church
+in the generations which preceded Luther. The body remained; the mind
+was gone away: the original thought which its symbolism represented was
+no longer credible to intelligent persons.
+
+The acute were conscious unbelievers. In Italy, when men went to mass
+they spoke of it as going to a comedy. You may have heard the story of
+Luther in his younger days saying mass at an altar in Rome, and hearing
+his fellow-priests muttering at the consecration of the Eucharist,
+'Bread thou art, and bread thou wilt remain.'
+
+Part of the clergy were profane scoundrels like these; the rest repeated
+the words of the service, conceiving that they were working a charm.
+Religion was passing through the transformation which all religions have
+a tendency to undergo. They cease to be aids and incentives to holy
+life; they become contrivances rather to enable men to sin, and escape
+the penalties of sin. Obedience to the law is dispensed with if men will
+diligently profess certain opinions, or punctually perform certain
+external duties. However scandalous the moral life, the participation of
+a particular rite, or the profession of a particular belief, at the
+moment of death, is held to clear the score.
+
+The powers which had been given to the clergy required for their
+exercise the highest wisdom and the highest probity. They had fallen at
+last into the hands of men who possessed considerably less of these
+qualities than the laity whom they undertook to govern. They had
+degraded their conceptions of God; and, as a necessary consequence, they
+had degraded their conceptions of man and man's duty. The aspirations
+after sanctity had disappeared, and instead of them there remained the
+practical reality of the five senses. The high prelates, the cardinals,
+the great abbots, were occupied chiefly in maintaining their splendour
+and luxury. The friars and the secular clergy, following their superiors
+with shorter steps, indulged themselves in grosser pleasures; while
+their spiritual powers, their supposed authority in this world and the
+next, were turned to account to obtain from the laity the means for
+their self-indulgence.
+
+The Church forbade the eating of meat on fast days, but the Church was
+ready with dispensations for those who could afford to pay for them. The
+Church forbade marriage to the fourth degree of consanguinity, but
+loving cousins, if they were rich and open-handed, could obtain the
+Church's consent to their union. There were toll-gates for the priests
+at every halting-place on the road of life--fees at weddings, fees at
+funerals, fees whenever an excuse could be found to fasten them. Even
+when a man was dead he was not safe from plunder, for a mortuary or
+death present was exacted of his family.
+
+And then those Bishop's Courts, of which I spoke just now: they were
+founded for the discipline of morality--they were made the instruments
+of the most detestable extortion. If an impatient layman spoke a
+disrespectful word of the clergy, he was cited before the bishop's
+commissary and fined. If he refused to pay, he was excommunicated, and
+excommunication was a poisonous disease. When a poor wretch was under
+the ban of the Church no tradesman might sell him clothes or food--no
+friend might relieve him--no human voice might address him, under pain
+of the same sentence; and if he died unreconciled, he died like a dog,
+without the sacraments, and was refused Christian burial.
+
+The records of some of these courts survive: a glance at their pages
+will show the principles on which they were worked. When a layman
+offended, the single object was to make him pay for it. The magistrates
+could not protect him. If he resisted, and his friends supported him, so
+much the better, for they were now all in the scrape together. The next
+step would be to indict them in a body for heresy; and then, of course,
+there was nothing for it but to give way, and compound for absolution by
+money.
+
+It was money--ever money. Even in case of real delinquency, it was
+still money. Money, not charity, covered the multitude of sins.
+
+I have told you that the clergy were exempt from secular jurisdiction.
+They claimed to be amenable only to spiritual judges, and they extended
+the broad fringe of their order till the word clerk was construed to
+mean any one who could write his name or read a sentence from a book. A
+robber or a murderer at the assizes had but to show that he possessed
+either of these qualifications, and he was allowed what was called
+benefit of clergy. His case was transferred to the Bishops' Court, to an
+easy judge, who allowed him at once to compound.
+
+Such were the clergy in matters of this world. As religious instructors,
+they appear in colours if possible less attractive.
+
+Practical religion throughout Europe at the beginning of the sixteenth
+century was a very simple affair. I am not going to speak of the
+mysterious doctrines of the Catholic Church. The creed which it
+professed in its schools and theological treatises was the same which it
+professes now, and which it had professed at the time when it was most
+powerful for good. I do not myself consider that the formulas in which
+men express their belief are of much consequence. The question is rather
+of the thing expressed; and so long as we find a living consciousness
+that above the world and above human life there is a righteous God, who
+will judge men according to their works, whether they say their prayers
+in Latin or English, whether they call themselves Protestants or call
+themselves Catholics, appears to me of quite secondary importance. But
+at the time I speak of, that consciousness no longer existed. The
+formulas and ceremonies were all in all; and of God it is hard to say
+what conceptions men had formed, when they believed that a dead man's
+relations could buy him out of purgatory--buy him out of purgatory,--for
+this was the literal truth--by hiring priests to sing masses for his
+soul.
+
+Religion, in the minds of ordinary people, meant that the keys of the
+other world were held by the clergy. If a man confessed regularly to his
+priest, received the sacrament, and was absolved, then all was well with
+him. His duties consisted in going to confession and to mass. If he
+committed sins, he was prescribed penances, which could be commuted for
+money. If he was sick or ill at ease in his mind, he was recommended a
+pilgrimage--a pilgrimage to a shrine or a holy well, or to some
+wonder-working image--where, for due consideration, his case would be
+attended to. It was no use to go to a saint empty-handed. The rule of
+the Church was, nothing for nothing. At a chapel in Saxony there was an
+image of a Virgin and Child. If the worshipper came to it with a good
+handsome offering, the child bowed and was gracious: if the present was
+unsatisfactory, it turned away its head, and withheld its favours till
+the purse-strings were untied again.
+
+There was a great rood or crucifix of the same kind at Boxley, in Kent,
+where the pilgrims went in thousands. This figure used to bow, too, when
+it was pleased; and a good sum of money was sure to secure its
+good-will.
+
+When the Reformation came, and the police looked into the matter, the
+images were found to be worked with wires and pulleys. The German lady
+was kept as a curiosity in the cabinet of the Elector of Saxony. Our
+Boxley rood was brought up and exhibited in Cheapside, and was
+afterwards torn in pieces by the people.
+
+Nor here again was death the limit of extortion: death was rather the
+gate of the sphere which the clergy made, peculiarly their own. When a
+man died, his friends were naturally anxious for the fate of his soul.
+If he died in communion, he was not in the worst place of all. He had
+not been a saint, and therefore he was not in the best. Therefore he was
+in purgatory--Purgatory Pickpurse, as our English Latimer called it--and
+a priest, if properly paid, could get him out.
+
+To be a mass priest, as it was called, was a regular profession, in
+which, with little trouble, a man could earn a comfortable living. He
+had only to be ordained and to learn by heart a certain form of words,
+and that was all the equipment necessary for him. The masses were paid
+for at so much a dozen, and for every mass that was said, so many years
+were struck off from the penal period. Two priests were sometimes to be
+seen muttering away at the opposite ends of the same altar, like a
+couple of musical boxes playing different parts of the same tune at the
+same time. It made no difference. The upper powers had what they wanted.
+If they got the masses, and the priests got the money, all parties
+concerned were satisfied.
+
+I am speaking of the form which these things assumed in an age of
+degradation and ignorance. The truest and wisest words ever spoken by
+man might be abused in the same way.
+
+The Sermon on the Mount or the Apostles' Creed, if recited mechanically,
+and relied on to work a mechanical effort, would be no less perniciously
+idolatrous.
+
+You can see something of the same kind in a milder form in Spain at the
+present day. The Spaniards, all of them, high and low, are expected to
+buy annually a Pope's Bula or Bull--a small pardon, or indulgence, or
+plenary remission of sins. The exact meaning of these things is a little
+obscure; the high authorities themselves do not universally agree about
+them, except so far as to say that they are of prodigious value of some
+sort. The orthodox explanation, I believe, is something of this kind.
+With every sin there is the moral guilt and the temporal penalty. The
+pardon cannot touch the guilt; but when the guilt is remitted, there is
+still the penalty. I may ruin my health by a dissolute life; I may
+repent of my dissoluteness and be forgiven; but the bad health will
+remain. For bad health, substitute penance in this world and purgatory
+in the next; and in this sphere the indulgence takes effect.
+
+Such as they are, at any rate, everybody in Spain has these bulls; you
+buy them in the shops for a shilling apiece.
+
+This is one form of the thing. Again, at the door of a Spanish church
+you will see hanging on the wall an intimation that whoever will pray so
+many hours before a particular image shall receive full forgiveness of
+his sins. Having got that, one might suppose he would be satisfied; but
+no--if he prays so many more hours, he can get off a hundred years of
+purgatory, or a thousand, or ten thousand. In one place I remember
+observing that for a very little trouble a man could escape a hundred
+and fifty thousand years of purgatory.
+
+What a prospect for the ill-starred Protestant, who will be lucky if he
+is admitted into purgatory at all!
+
+Again, if you enter a sacristy, you will see a small board like the
+notices addressed to parishioners in our vestries. On particular days it
+is taken out and hung up in the church, and little would a stranger,
+ignorant of the language, guess the tremendous meaning of that
+commonplace appearance. On these boards is written 'Hoy se sacan
+animas,'--'This day, souls are taken out of purgatory.' It is an
+intimation to every one with a friend in distress that now is his time.
+You put a shilling in a plate, you give your friend's name, and the
+thing is done. One wonders why, if purgatory can be sacked so easily,
+any poor wretch is left to suffer there.
+
+Such practices nowadays are comparatively innocent, the money asked and
+given is trifling, and probably no one concerned in the business
+believes much about it. They serve to show, however, on a small scale,
+what once went on on an immense scale; and even such as they are, pious
+Catholics do not much approve of them. They do not venture to say much
+on the subject directly, but they allow themselves a certain
+good-humoured ridicule. A Spanish novelist of some reputation tells a
+story of a man coming to a priest on one of these occasions, putting a
+shilling in the plate, and giving in the name of his friend.
+
+'Is my friend's soul out?' he asked. The priest said it was. 'Quite
+sure?' the man asked. 'Quite sure,' the priest answered. 'Very well,'
+said the man, 'if he is out of purgatory they will not put him in again:
+it is a bad shilling.'
+
+Sadder than all else, even as the most beautiful things are worst in
+their degradation, was the condition of the monasteries. I am here on
+delicate ground. The accounts of those institutions, as they existed in
+England and Germany at the time of their suppression, is so shocking
+that even impartial writers have hesitated to believe the reports which
+have come down to us. The laity, we are told, determined to appropriate
+the abbey lands, and maligned the monks to justify the spoliation. Were
+the charge true, the religious orders would still be without excuse, for
+the whole education of the country was in the hands of the clergy; and
+they had allowed a whole generation to grow up, which, on this
+hypothesis, was utterly depraved.
+
+But no such theory can explain away the accumulated testimony which
+comes to us--exactly alike--from so many sides and witnesses. We are not
+dependent upon evidence which Catholics can decline to receive. In the
+reign of our Henry the Seventh the notorious corruption of some of the
+great abbeys in England brought them under the notice of the Catholic
+Archbishop of Canterbury, Cardinal Morton. The archbishop, unable to
+meddle with them by his own authority, obtained the necessary powers
+from the Pope. He instituted a partial visitation in the neighbourhood
+of London; and the most malignant Protestant never drew such a picture
+of profligate brutality as Cardinal Morton left behind him in his
+Register, in a description of the great Abbey of St. Albans. I cannot,
+in a public lecture, give you the faintest idea of what it contains. The
+monks were bound to celibacy--that is to say, they were not allowed to
+marry. They were full-fed, idle, and sensual; of sin they thought only
+as something extremely pleasant, of which they could cleanse one another
+with a few mumbled words as easily as they could wash their faces in a
+basin. And there I must leave the matter. Anybody who is curious for
+particulars may see the original account in Morton's Register, in the
+Archbishop's library at Lambeth.
+
+A quarter of a century after this there appeared in Germany a book, now
+called by Catholics an infamous libel, the 'Epistolae Obscurorum
+Virorum.' 'The obscure men,' supposed to be the writers of these
+epistles, are monks or students of theology. The letters themselves are
+written in dog-Latin--a burlesque of the language in which
+ecclesiastical people then addressed each other. They are sketches,
+satirical, but not malignant, of the moral and intellectual character of
+these reverend personages.
+
+On the moral, and by far the most important, side of the matter I am
+still obliged to be silent; but I can give you a few specimens of the
+furniture of the theological minds, and of the subjects with which they
+were occupied.
+
+A student writes to his ghostly father in an agony of distress because
+he has touched his hat to a Jew. He mistook him for a doctor of
+divinity; and on the whole, he fears he has committed mortal sin. Can
+the father absolve him? Can the bishop absolve him? Can the Pope absolve
+him? His case seems utterly desperate.
+
+Another letter describes a great intellectual riddle, which was argued
+for four days at the School of Logic at Louvaine. A certain Master of
+Arts had taken out his degree at Louvaine, Leyden, Paris, Oxford,
+Cambridge, Padua, and four other universities. He was thus a member of
+ten universities. But how _could_ a man be a member of ten universities?
+A university was a body, and one body might have many members; but how
+one member could have many bodies, passed comprehension. In such a
+monstrous anomaly, the member would be the body, and the universities
+the member, and this would be a scandal to such grave and learned
+corporations. The holy doctor St. Thomas himself could not make himself
+into the body of ten universities.
+
+The more the learned men argued, the deeper they floundered, and at
+length gave up the problem in despair.
+
+Again: a certain professor argues that Julius Caesar could not have
+written the book which passes under the name of 'Caesar's Commentaries,'
+because that book is written in Latin, and Latin is a difficult
+language; and a man whose life is spent in marching and fighting has
+notoriously no time to learn Latin.
+
+Here is another fellow--a monk this one--describing to a friend the
+wonderful things which he has seen in Rome.
+
+'You may have heard,' he says, 'how the Pope did possess a monstrous
+beast called an Elephant. The Pope did entertain for this beast a very
+great affection, and now behold it is dead. When it fell sick, the Pope
+called his doctors about him in great sorrow, and said to them, "If it
+be possible, heal my elephant." Then they gave the elephant a purge,
+which cost five hundred crowns, but it did not avail, and so the beast
+departed; and the Pope grieves much for his elephant, for it was indeed
+a miraculous beast, with a long, long, prodigious long nose; and when it
+saw the Pope it kneeled down before him and said, with a terrible voice,
+"Bar, bar, bar!"'
+
+I will not tire you with any more of this nonsense, especially as I
+cannot give you the really characteristic parts of the book.
+
+I want you to observe, however, what Sir Thomas More says of it, and
+nobody will question that Sir Thomas More was a good Catholic and a
+competent witness. 'These epistles,' he says, 'are the delight of
+everyone. The wise enjoy the wit; the blockheads of monks take them
+seriously, and believe that they have been written to do them honour.
+When we laugh, they think we are laughing at the style, which they admit
+to be comical. But they think the style is made up for by the beauty of
+the sentiment. The scabbard, they say, is rough, but the blade within it
+is divine. The deliberate idiots would not have found out the jest for
+themselves in a hundred years.'
+
+Well might Erasmus exclaim, 'What fungus could be more stupid? yet
+these are the Atlases who are to uphold the tottering Church!'
+
+'The monks had a pleasant time of it,' says Luther. 'Every brother had
+two cans of beer and a quart of wine for his supper, with gingerbread,
+to make him take to his liquor kindly. Thus the poor things came to look
+like fiery angels.'
+
+And more gravely, 'In the cloister rule the seven deadly
+sins--covetousness, lasciviousness, uncleanness, hate, envy, idleness,
+and the loathing of the service of God.'
+
+Consider such men as these owning a third, a half, sometimes two-thirds
+of the land in every country in Europe, and, in addition to their other
+sins, neglecting all the duties attaching to this property--the woods
+cut down and sold, the houses falling to ruin--unthrift, neglect, waste
+everywhere and in everything--the shrewd making the most of their time,
+which they had sense to see might be a short one--the rest dreaming on
+in sleepy sensuality, dividing their hours between the chapel, the
+pothouse, and the brothel.
+
+I do not think that, in its main features, the truth of this sketch can
+be impugned; and if it be just even in outline, then a reformation of
+some kind or other was overwhelmingly necessary. Corruption beyond a
+certain point becomes unendurable to the coarsest nostril. The
+constitution of human things cannot away with it.
+
+Something was to be done; but what, or how? There were three possible
+courses.
+
+Either the ancient discipline of the Church might be restored by the
+heads of the Church themselves.
+
+Or, secondly, a higher tone of feeling might gradually be introduced
+among clergy and laity alike, by education and literary culture. The
+discovery of the printing press had made possible a diffusion of
+knowledge which had been unattainable in earlier ages. The
+ecclesiastical constitution, like a sick human body, might recover its
+tone if a better diet were prepared for it.
+
+Or, lastly, the common sense of the laity might take the matter at once
+into their own hands, and make free use of the pruning knife and the
+sweeping brush. There might be much partial injustice, much violence,
+much wrongheadedness; but the people would, at any rate, go direct to
+the point, and the question was whether any other remedy would serve.
+
+The first of these alternatives may at once be dismissed. The heads of
+the Church were the last persons in the world to discover that anything
+was wrong. People of that sort always are. For them the thing as it
+existed answered excellently well. They had boundless wealth, and all
+but boundless power. What could they ask for more? No monk drowsing over
+his wine-pot was less disturbed by anxiety than nine out of ten of the
+high dignitaries who were living on the eve of the Judgment Day, and
+believed that their seat was established for them for ever.
+
+The character of the great ecclesiastics of that day you may infer from
+a single example. The Archbishop of Mayence was one of the most
+enlightened Churchmen in Germany. He was a patron of the Renaissance, a
+friend of Erasmus, a liberal, an intelligent, and, as times went, and
+considering his trade, an honourable, high-minded man.
+
+When the Emperor Maximilian died, and the imperial throne was vacant,
+the Archbishop of Mayence was one of seven electors who had to choose a
+new emperor.
+
+There were two competitors--Francis the First and Maximilian's grandson,
+afterwards the well-known Charles the Fifth.
+
+Well, of the seven electors six were bribed. John Frederick of Saxony,
+Luther's friend and protector, was the only one of the party who came
+out of the business with clean hands.
+
+But the Archbishop of Mayence took bribes six times alternately from
+both the candidates. He took money as coolly as the most rascally
+ten-pound householder in Yarmouth or Totnes, and finally drove a hard
+bargain for his actual vote.
+
+The grape does not grow upon the blackthorn; nor does healthy reform
+come from high dignitaries like the Archbishop of Mayence.
+
+The other aspect of the problem I shall consider in the following
+Lectures.
+
+
+LECTURE II.
+
+In the year 1467--the year in which Charles the Bold became Duke of
+Burgundy--four years before the great battle of Barnet, which
+established our own fourth Edward on the English throne--about the time
+when William Caxton was setting up his printing press at
+Westminster--there was born at Rotterdam, on the 28th of October,
+Desiderius Erasmus. His parents, who were middle-class people, were
+well-to-do in the world. For some reason or other they were prevented
+from marrying by the interference of relations. The father died soon
+after in a cloister; the mother was left with her illegitimate infant,
+whom she called first, after his father, Gerard; but afterwards, from
+his beauty and grace, she changed his name--the words Desiderius
+Erasmus, one with a Latin, the other with a Greek, derivation, meaning
+the lovely or delightful one.
+
+Not long after, the mother herself died also. The little Erasmus was the
+heir of a moderate fortune; and his guardians, desiring to appropriate
+it to themselves, endeavoured to force him into a convent at Brabant.
+
+The thought of living and dying in a house of religion was dreadfully
+unattractive; but an orphan boy's resistance was easily overcome. He was
+bullied into yielding, and, when about twenty, took the vows.
+
+The life of a monk, which was uninviting on the surface, was not more
+lovely when seen from within.
+
+'A monk's holy obedience,' Erasmus wrote afterwards, 'consists in--what?
+In leading an honest, chaste, and sober life? Not the least. In
+acquiring learning, in study, and industry? Still less. A monk may be a
+glutton, a drunkard, a whoremonger, an ignorant, stupid, malignant,
+envious brute, but he has broken no vow, he is within his holy
+obedience. He has only to be the slave of a superior as good for nothing
+as himself, and he is an excellent brother.'
+
+The misfortune of his position did not check Erasmus's intellectual
+growth. He was a brilliant, witty, sarcastic, mischievous youth. He did
+not trouble himself to pine and mope; but, like a young thorough-bred in
+a drove of asses, he used his heels pretty freely.
+
+While he played practical jokes upon the unreverend fathers, he
+distinguished himself equally by his appetite for knowledge. It was the
+dawn of the Renaissance--the revival of learning. The discovery of
+printing was reopening to modern Europe the great literature of Greece
+and Rome, and the writings of the Christian fathers. For studies of this
+kind, Erasmus, notwithstanding the disadvantages of cowl and frock,
+displayed extraordinary aptitude. He taught himself Greek when Greek was
+the language which, in the opinion of the monks, only the devils spoke
+in the wrong place. His Latin was as polished as Cicero's; and at length
+the Archbishop of Cambray heard of him, and sent him to the University
+of Paris.
+
+At Paris he found a world where life could be sufficiently pleasant, but
+where his religious habit was every moment in his way. He was a priest,
+and so far could not help himself. That ink-spot not all the waters of
+the German Ocean could wash away. But he did not care for the low
+debaucheries, where the frock and cowl were at home. His place was in
+the society of cultivated men, who were glad to know him and to
+patronise him; so he shook off his order, let his hair grow, and flung
+away his livery.
+
+The Archbishop's patronage was probably now withdrawn. Life in Paris was
+expensive, and Erasmus had for several years to struggle with poverty.
+We see him, however, for the most part--in his early letters--carrying a
+bold front to fortune; desponding one moment, and larking the next with
+a Paris grisette; making friends, enjoying good company, enjoying
+especially good wine when he could get it; and, above all, satiating his
+literary hunger at the library of the University.
+
+In this condition, when about eight-and-twenty, he made acquaintance
+with two young English noblemen who were travelling on the Continent,
+Lord Mountjoy and one of the Greys.
+
+Mountjoy, intensely attracted by his brilliance, took him for his tutor,
+carried him over to England, and introduced him at the court of Henry
+the Seventh. At once his fortune was made. He charmed every one, and in
+turn he was himself delighted with the country and the people. English
+character, English hospitality, English manners--everything English
+except the beer--equally pleased him. In the young London men--the
+lawyers, the noblemen, even in some of the clergy--he found his own
+passion for learning. Sir Thomas More, who was a few years younger than
+himself, became his dearest friend; and Warham, afterwards Archbishop of
+Canterbury--Fisher, afterwards Bishop of Rochester--Colet, the famous
+Dean of St. Paul's--the great Wolsey himself--recognised and welcomed
+the rising star of European literature.
+
+Money flowed in upon him. Warham gave him a benefice in Kent, which was
+afterwards changed to a pension. Prince Henry, when he became King,
+offered him--kings in those days were not bad friends to
+literature--Henry offered him, if he would remain in England, a house
+large enough to be called a palace, and a pension which, converted into
+our money, would be a thousand pounds a year.
+
+Erasmus, however, was a restless creature, and did not like to be caged
+or tethered. He declined the King's terms, but Mountjoy settled a
+pension on him instead. He had now a handsome income, and he understood
+the art of enjoying it. He moved about as he pleased--now to Cambridge,
+now to Oxford, and, as the humour took him, back again to Paris; now
+staying with Sir Thomas More at Chelsea, now going a pilgrimage with
+Dean Colet to Becket's tomb at Canterbury--but always studying, always
+gathering knowledge, and throwing it out again, steeped in his own
+mother wit, in shining Essays or Dialogues, which were the delight and
+the despair of his contemporaries.
+
+Everywhere, in his love of pleasure, in his habits of thought, in his
+sarcastic scepticism, you see the healthy, clever, well-disposed,
+tolerant, epicurean, intellectual man of the world.
+
+He went, as I said, with Dean Colet to Becket's tomb. At a shrine about
+Canterbury he was shown an old shoe which tradition called the Saint's.
+At the tomb itself, the great sight was a handkerchief which a monk took
+from among the relics, and offered it to the crowd to kiss. The
+worshippers touched it in pious adoration, with clasped hands and
+upturned eyes. If the thing was genuine, as Erasmus observed, it had but
+served for the archbishop to wipe his nose with--and Dean Colet, a
+puritan before his time, looked on with eyes flashing scorn, and
+scarcely able to keep his hands off the exhibitors. But Erasmus smiled
+kindly, reflecting that mankind were fools, and in some form or other
+would remain fools. He took notice only of the pile of gold and jewels,
+and concluded that so much wealth might prove dangerous to its
+possessors.
+
+The peculiarities of the English people interested and amused him. 'You
+are going to England,' he wrote afterwards to a friend; 'you will not
+fail to be pleased. You will find the great people there most agreeable
+and gracious; only be careful not to presume upon their intimacy. They
+will condescend to your level, but do not you therefore suppose that you
+stand upon theirs. The noble lords are gods in their own eyes.'
+
+'For the other classes, be courteous, give your right hand, do not take
+the wall, do not push yourself. Smile on whom you please, but trust no
+one that you do not know; above all, speak no evil of England to them.
+They are proud of their country above all nations in the world, as they
+have good reason to be.'
+
+These directions might have been written yesterday. The manners of the
+ladies have somewhat changed. 'English ladies,' says Erasmus, 'are
+divinely pretty, and _too_ good-natured. They have an excellent custom
+among them, that wherever you go the girls kiss you. They kiss you when
+you come, they kiss you when you go, they kiss you at intervening
+opportunities, and their lips are soft, warm, and delicious.' Pretty
+well that, for a priest!
+
+The custom, perhaps, was not quite so universal as Erasmus would have us
+believe. His own coaxing ways may have had something to do with it. At
+any rate, he found England a highly agreeable place of residence.
+
+Meanwhile, his reputation as a writer spread over the world. Latin--the
+language in which he wrote--was in universal use. It was the vernacular
+of the best society in Europe, and no living man was so perfect a master
+of it. His satire flashed about among all existing institutions,
+scathing especially his old enemies the monks; while the great secular
+clergy, who hated the religious orders, were delighted to see them
+scourged, and themselves to have the reputation of being patrons of
+toleration and reform.
+
+Erasmus, as he felt his ground more sure under him, obtained from Julius
+the Second a distinct release from his monastic vows; and, shortly
+after, when the brilliant Leo succeeded to the tiara, and gathered about
+him the magnificent cluster of artists who have made his era so
+illustrious, the new Pope invited Erasmus to visit him at Rome, and
+become another star in the constellation which surrounded the Papal
+throne.
+
+Erasmus was at this time forty years old--the age when ambition becomes
+powerful in men, and takes the place of love of pleasure. He was
+received at Rome with princely distinction, and he could have asked for
+nothing--bishoprics, red hats, or red stockings--which would not have
+been freely given to him if he would have consented to remain.
+
+But he was too considerable a man to be tempted by finery; and the
+Pope's livery, gorgeous though it might be, was but a livery after all.
+Nothing which Leo the Tenth could do for Erasmus could add lustre to his
+coronet. More money he might have had, but of money he had already
+abundance, and outward dignity would have been dearly bought by gilded
+chains. He resisted temptation; he preferred the northern air, where he
+could breathe at liberty, and he returned to England, half inclined to
+make his home there.
+
+But his own sovereign laid claim to his services; the future emperor
+recalled him to the Low Countries, settled a handsome salary upon him,
+and established him at the University of Louvaine.
+
+He was now in the zenith of his greatness. He had an income as large as
+many an English nobleman. We find him corresponding with popes,
+cardinals, kings, and statesmen; and as he grew older, his mind became
+more fixed upon serious subjects. The ignorance and brutality of the
+monks, the corruption of the spiritual courts, the absolute irreligion
+in which the Church was steeped, gave him serious alarm. He had no
+enthusiasms, no doctrinal fanaticisms, no sectarian beliefs or
+superstitions. The breadth of his culture, his clear understanding, and
+the worldly moderation of his temper, seemed to qualify him above living
+men to conduct a temperate reform. He saw that the system around him was
+pregnant with danger, and he resolved to devote what remained to him of
+life to the introduction of a higher tone in the minds of the clergy.
+
+The revival of learning had by this time alarmed the religious orders.
+Literature and education, beyond the code of the theological text-books,
+appeared simply devilish to them. When Erasmus returned to Louvaine, the
+battle was raging over the north of Europe.
+
+The Dominicans at once recognised in Erasmus their most dangerous enemy.
+At first they tried to compel him to re-enter the order, but, strong in
+the Pope's dispensation, he was so far able to defy them. They could
+bark at his heels, but dared not come to closer quarters: and with his
+temper slightly ruffled, but otherwise contented to despise them, he
+took up boldly the task which he had set himself.
+
+'We kiss the old shoes of the saints,' he said, 'but we never read their
+works.' He undertook the enormous labour of editing and translating
+selections from the writings of the Fathers. The New Testament was as
+little known as the lost books of Tacitus--all that the people knew of
+the Gospels and the Epistles were the passages on which theologians had
+built up the Catholic formulas. Erasmus published the text, and with it,
+and to make it intelligible, a series of paraphrases, which rent away
+the veil of traditional and dogmatic interpretation, and brought the
+teaching of Christ and the Apostles into their natural relation with
+reason and conscience.
+
+In all this, although the monks might curse, he had countenance and
+encouragement from the great ecclesiastics in all parts of Europe--and
+it is highly curious to see the extreme freedom with which they allowed
+him to propose to them his plans for a Reformation--we seem to be
+listening to the wisest of modern broad Churchmen.
+
+To one of his correspondents, an archbishop, he writes:--
+
+'Let us have done with theological refinements. There is an excuse for
+the Fathers, because the heretics forced them to define particular
+points; but every definition is a misfortune, and for us to persevere in
+the same way is sheer folly. Is no man to be admitted to grace who does
+not know how the Father differs from the Son, and both from the Spirit?
+or how the nativity of the Son differs from the procession of the
+Spirit? Unless I forgive my brother his sins against me, God will not
+forgive me my sins. Unless I have a pure heart--unless I put away envy,
+hate, pride, avarice, lust, I shall not see God. But a man is not damned
+because he cannot tell whether the Spirit has one principle or two. Has
+he the fruits of the Spirit? That is the question. Is he patient, kind,
+good, gentle, modest, temperate, chaste? Enquire if you will, but do not
+define. True religion is peace, and we cannot have peace unless we leave
+the conscience unshackled on obscure points on which certainty is
+impossible. We hear now of questions being referred to the next
+OEcumenical Council--better a great deal refer them to doomsday. Time
+was, when a man's faith was looked for in his life, not in the Articles
+which he professed. Necessity first brought Articles upon us, and ever
+since, we have refined and refined till Christianity has become a thing
+of words and creeds. Articles increase--sincerity vanishes
+away--contention grows hot, and charity grows cold. Then comes in the
+civil power, with stake and gallows, and men are forced to profess what
+they do not believe, to pretend to love what in fact they hate, and to
+say that they understand what in fact has no meaning for them.'
+
+Again, to the Archbishop of Mayence:--
+
+'Reduce the dogmas necessary to be believed, to the smallest possible
+number; you can do it without danger to the realities of Christianity.
+On other points, either discourage enquiry, or leave everyone free to
+believe what he pleases--then we shall have no more quarrels, and
+religion will again take hold of life. When you have done this, you can
+correct the abuses of which the world with good reason complains. The
+unjust judge heard the widow's prayer. You should not shut your ears to
+the cries of those for whom Christ died. He did not die for the great
+only, but for the poor and for the lowly. There need be no tumult. Do
+you only set human affections aside, and let kings and princes lend
+themselves heartily to the public good. But observe that the monks and
+friars be allowed no voice; with these gentlemen the world has borne too
+long. They care only for their own vanity, their own stomachs, their own
+power; and they believe that if the people are enlightened, their
+kingdom cannot stand.'
+
+Once more to the Pope himself:--
+
+'Let each man amend first his own wicked life. When he has done that,
+and will amend his neighbour, let him put on Christian charity, which is
+severe enough when severity is needed. If your holiness give power to
+men who neither believe in Christ nor care for you, but think only of
+their own appetites, I fear there will be danger. We can trust your
+holiness, but there are bad men who will use your virtues as a cloke for
+their own malice.'
+
+That the spiritual rulers of Europe should have allowed a man like
+Erasmus to use language such as this to them is a fact of supreme
+importance. It explains the feeling of Goethe, that the world would have
+gone on better had there been no Luther, and that the revival of
+theological fanaticism did more harm than good.
+
+But the question of questions is, what all this latitudinarian
+philosophising, this cultivated epicurean gracefulness would have come
+to if left to itself; or rather, what was the effect which it was
+inevitably producing? If you wish to remove an old building without
+bringing it in ruins about your ears, you must begin at the top, remove
+the stones gradually downwards, and touch the foundation last. But
+latitudinarianism loosens the elementary principles of theology. It
+destroys the premises on which the dogmatic system rests. It would beg
+the question to say that this would in itself have been undesirable; but
+the practical effect of it, as the world then stood, would have only
+been to make the educated into infidels, and to leave the multitude to a
+convenient but debasing superstition.
+
+The monks said that Erasmus laid the egg, and Luther hatched a
+cockatrice. Erasmus resented deeply such an account of his work; but it
+was true after all. The sceptical philosophy is the most powerful of
+solvents, but it has no principle of organic life in it; and what of
+truth there was in Erasmus's teaching had to assume a far other form
+before it was available for the reinvigoration of religion. He himself,
+in his clearer moments, felt his own incapacity, and despaired of making
+an impression on the mass of ignorance with which he saw himself
+surrounded.
+
+'The stupid monks,' he writes, 'say mass as a cobbler makes a shoe; they
+come to the altar reeking from their filthy pleasures. Confession with
+the monks is a cloke to steal the people's money, to rob girls of their
+virtue, and commit other crimes too horrible to name! Yet these people
+are the tyrants of Europe. The Pope himself is afraid of them.'
+
+'Beware!' he says to an impetuous friend, 'beware how you offend the
+monks. You have to do with an enemy that cannot be slain; an order never
+dies, and they will not rest till they have destroyed you.'
+
+The heads of the Church might listen politely, but Erasmus had no
+confidence in them. 'Never,' he says, 'was there a time when divines
+were greater fools, or popes and prelates more worldly.' Germany was
+about to receive a signal illustration of the improvement which it was
+to look for from liberalism and intellectual culture.
+
+We are now on the edge of the great conflagration. Here we must leave
+Erasmus for the present. I must carry you briefly over the history of
+the other great person who was preparing to play his part on the stage.
+You have seen something of what Erasmus was; you must turn next to the
+companion picture of Martin Luther. You will observe in how many points
+their early experiences touch, as if to show more vividly the contrast
+between the two men.
+
+Sixteen years after the birth of Erasmus, therefore in the year 1483,
+Martin Luther came into the world in a peasant's cottage, at Eisleben,
+in Saxony. By peasant, you need not understand a common boor. Hans
+Luther, the father, was a thrifty, well-to-do man for his station in
+life--adroit with his hands, and able to do many useful things, from
+farm work to digging in the mines. The family life was strict and
+stern--rather too stern, as Martin thought in later life.
+
+'Be temperate with your children,' he said, long after, to a friend;
+'punish them if they lie or steal, but be just in what you do. It is a
+lighter sin to take pears and apples than to take money. I shudder when
+I think of what I went through myself. My mother beat me about some nuts
+once till the blood came. I had a terrible time of it, but she meant
+well.'
+
+At school, too, he fell into rough hands, and the recollection of his
+sufferings made him tender ever after with young boys and girls.
+
+'Never be hard with children,' he used to say. 'Many a fine character
+has been ruined by the stupid brutality of pedagogues. The parts of
+speech are a boy's pillory. I was myself flogged fifteen times in one
+forenoon over the conjugation of a verb. Punish if you will, but be
+kind too, and let the sugar-plum go with the rod.' This is not the
+language of a demagogue or a fanatic; it is the wise thought of a
+tender, human-hearted man.
+
+At seventeen, he left school for the University at Erfurt. It was then
+no shame for a poor scholar to maintain himself by alms. Young Martin
+had a rich noble voice and a fine ear, and by singing ballads in the
+streets he found ready friends and help. He was still uncertain with
+what calling he should take up, when it happened that a young friend was
+killed at his side by lightning.
+
+Erasmus was a philosopher. A powder magazine was once blown up by
+lightning in a town where Erasmus was staying, and a house of infamous
+character was destroyed. The inhabitants saw in what had happened the
+Divine anger against sin. Erasmus told them that if there was any anger
+in the matter, it was anger merely with the folly which had stored
+powder in an exposed situation.
+
+Luther possessed no such premature intelligence. He was distinguished
+from other boys only by the greater power of his feelings and the
+vividness of his imagination. He saw in his friend's death the immediate
+hand of the great Lord of the universe. His conscience was terrified. A
+life-long penitence seemed necessary to atone for the faults of his
+boyhood. He too, like Erasmus, became a monk, not forced into it--for
+his father knew better what the holy men were like, and had no wish to
+have son of his among them--but because the monk of Martin's imagination
+spent his nights and days upon the stones in prayer; and Martin, in the
+heat of his repentance, longed to be kneeling at his side.
+
+In this mood he entered the Augustine monastery at Erfurt. He was full
+of an overwhelming sense of his own wretchedness and sinfulness. Like
+St. Paul, he was crying to be delivered from the body of death which he
+carried about him. He practised all possible austerities. He, if no one
+else, mortified his flesh with fasting. He passed nights in the chancel
+before the altar, or on his knees on the floor of his cell. He weakened
+his body till his mind wandered, and he saw ghosts and devils. Above
+all, he saw the flaming image of his own supposed guilt. God required
+that he should keep the law in all points. He had not so kept the
+law--could not so keep the law--and therefore he believed that he was
+damned. One morning, he was found senseless and seemingly dead; a
+brother played to him on a flute, and soothed his senses back to
+consciousness.
+
+It was long since any such phenomenon had appeared among the rosy friars
+of Erfurt. They could not tell what to make of him. Staupitz, the prior,
+listened to his accusations of himself in confession. 'My good fellow,'
+he said, 'don't be so uneasy; you have committed no sins of the least
+consequence; you have not killed anybody, or committed adultery, or
+things of that sort. If you sin to some purpose, it is right that you
+should think about it, but don't make mountains out of trifles.'
+
+Very curious: to the commonplace man the uncommonplace is for ever
+unintelligible. What was the good of all that excitement--that agony of
+self-reproach for little things? None at all, if the object is only to
+be an ordinary good sort of man--if a decent fulfilment of the round of
+common duties is the be-all and the end-all of human life on earth.
+
+The plague came by-and-by into the town. The commonplace clergy ran
+away--went to their country-houses, went to the hills, went
+anywhere--and they wondered in the same way why Luther would not go with
+them. They admired him and liked him. They told him his life was too
+precious to be thrown away. He answered, quite simply, that his place
+was with the sick and dying; a monk's life was no great matter. The sun
+he did not doubt would continue to shine, whatever became of him. 'I am
+no St. Paul,' he said; 'I am afraid of death; but there are things worse
+than death, and if I die, I die.'
+
+Even a Staupitz could not but feel that he had an extraordinary youth in
+his charge. To divert his mind from feeding upon itself, he devised a
+mission for him abroad, and brother Martin was despatched on business of
+the convent to Rome.
+
+Luther too, like Erasmus, was to see Rome; but how different the figures
+of the two men there! Erasmus goes with servants and horses, the
+polished, successful man of the world. Martin Luther trudges penniless
+and barefoot across the Alps, helped to a meal and a night's rest at the
+monasteries along the road, or begging, if the convents fail him, at the
+farm-houses.
+
+He was still young, and too much occupied with his own sins to know much
+of the world outside him. Erasmus had no dreams. He knew the hard truth
+on most things. But Rome, to Luther's eager hopes, was the city of the
+saints, and the court and palace of the Pope fragrant with the odours of
+Paradise. 'Blessed Rome,' he cried, as he entered the gate--'Blessed
+Rome, sanctified with the blood of martyrs!'
+
+Alas! the Rome of reality was very far from blessed. He remained long
+enough to complete his disenchantment. The cardinals, with their gilded
+chariots and their parasols of peacocks' plumes, were poor
+representatives of the apostles. The gorgeous churches and more gorgeous
+rituals, the pagan splendour of the paintings, the heathen gods still
+almost worshipped in the adoration of the art which had formed them, to
+Luther, whose heart was heavy with thoughts of man's depravity, were
+utterly horrible. The name of religion was there: the thinnest veil was
+scarcely spread over the utter disbelief with which God and Christ were
+at heart regarded. Culture enough there was. It was the Rome of Raphael
+and Michael Angelo, of Perugino, and Benvenuto; but to the poor German
+monk, who had come there to find help for his suffering soul, what was
+culture?
+
+He fled at the first moment that he could. 'Adieu! Rome,' he said; 'let
+all who would lead a holy life depart from Rome. Everything is permitted
+in Rome except to be an honest man.' He had no thought of leaving the
+Roman Church. To a poor monk like him, to talk of leaving the Church was
+like talking of leaping off the planet. But perplexed and troubled he
+returned to Saxony; and his friend Staupitz, seeing clearly that a
+monastery was no place for him, recommended him to the Elector as
+Professor of Philosophy at Wittenberg.
+
+The senate of Wittenberg gave him the pulpit of the town church, and
+there at once he had room to show what was in him. 'This monk,' said
+some one who heard him, 'is a marvellous fellow. He has strange eyes,
+and will give the doctors trouble by-and-by.'
+
+He had read deeply, especially he had read that rare and almost unknown
+book, the 'New Testament.' He was not cultivated like Erasmus. Erasmus
+spoke the most polished Latin. Luther spoke and wrote his own vernacular
+German. The latitudinarian philosophy, the analytical acuteness, the
+sceptical toleration of Erasmus were alike strange and distasteful to
+him. In all things he longed only to know the truth--to shake off and
+hurl from him lies and humbug.
+
+Superstitious he was. He believed in witches and devils and fairies--a
+thousand things without basis in fact, which Erasmus passed by in
+contemptuous indifference. But for things which were really true--true
+as nothing else in this world, or any world, is true--the justice of
+God, the infinite excellence of good, the infinite hatefulness of
+evil--these things he believed and felt with a power of passionate
+conviction to which the broader, feebler mind of the other was for ever
+a stranger.
+
+We come now to the memorable year 1517, when Luther was thirty-five
+years old. A new cathedral was in progress at Rome. Michael Angelo had
+furnished Leo the Tenth with the design of St. Peter's; and the question
+of questions was to find money to complete the grandest structure which
+had ever been erected by man.
+
+Pope Leo was the most polished and cultivated of mankind. The work to be
+done was to be the most splendid which art could produce. The means to
+which the Pope had recourse will serve to show us how much all that
+would have done for us.
+
+You remember what I told you about indulgences. The notable device of
+his Holiness was to send distinguished persons about Europe with sacks
+of indulgences. Indulgences and dispensations! Dispensations to eat meat
+on fast-days--dispensations to marry one's near relation--dispensations
+for anything and everything which the faithful might wish to purchase
+who desired forbidden pleasures. The dispensations were simply
+scandalous. The indulgences--well, if a pious Catholic is asked nowadays
+what they were, he will say that they were the remission of the penances
+which the Church inflicts upon earth; but it is also certain that they
+would have sold cheap if the people had thought that this was all that
+they were to get by them. As the thing was represented by the spiritual
+hawkers who disposed of these wares, they were letters of credit on
+heaven. When the great book was opened, the people believed that these
+papers would be found entire on the right side of the account.
+Debtor--so many murders, so many robberies, lies, slanders, or
+debaucheries. Creditor--the merits of the saints placed to the account
+of the delinquent by the Pope's letters, in consideration of value
+received.
+
+This is the way in which the pardon system was practically worked. This
+is the way in which it is worked still, where the same superstitions
+remain.
+
+If one had asked Pope Leo whether he really believed in these pardons of
+his, he would have said officially that the Church had always held that
+the Pope had power to grant them.
+
+Had he told the truth, he would have added privately that if the people
+chose to be fools, it was not for him to disappoint them.
+
+The collection went on. The money of the faithful came in plentifully;
+and the pedlars going their rounds appeared at last in Saxony.
+
+The Pope had bought the support of the Archbishop of Mayence, Erasmus's
+friend, by promising him half the spoil which was gathered in his
+province. The agent was the Dominican monk Tetzel, whose name has
+acquired a forlorn notoriety in European history.
+
+His stores were opened in town after town. He entered in state. The
+streets everywhere were hung with flags. Bells were pealed; nuns and
+monks walked in procession before and after him, while he himself sate
+in a chariot, with the Papal Bull on a velvet cushion in front of him.
+The sale-rooms were the churches. The altars were decorated, the candles
+lighted, the arms of St. Peter blazoned conspicuously on the roof.
+Tetzel from the pulpit explained the efficacy of his medicines; and if
+any profane person doubted their power, he was threatened with
+excommunication.
+
+Acolytes walked through the crowds, clinking their plates and crying,
+'Buy! buy!' The business went as merry as a marriage bell till the
+Dominican came near to Wittenberg.
+
+Half a century before, such a spectacle would have excited no particular
+attention. The few who saw through the imposition would have kept their
+thoughts to themselves; the many would have paid their money, and in a
+month all would have been forgotten.
+
+But the fight between the men of letters and the monks, the writings of
+Erasmus and Reuchlin, the satires of Ulric von Hutten, had created a
+silent revolution in the minds of the younger laity.
+
+A generation had grown to manhood of whom the Church authorities knew
+nothing; and the whole air of Germany, unsuspected by pope or prelate,
+was charged with electricity.
+
+Had Luther stood alone, he, too, would probably have remained silent.
+What was he, a poor, friendless, solitary monk, that he should set
+himself against the majesty of the triple crown?
+
+However hateful the walls of a dungeon, a man of sense confined alone
+there does not dash his hands against the stones.
+
+But Luther knew that his thoughts were the thoughts of thousands. Many
+wrong things, as we all know, have to be endured in this world.
+Authority is never very angelic; and moderate injustice, a moderate
+quantity of lies, is more tolerable than anarchy.
+
+But it is with human things as it is with the great icebergs which drift
+southward out of the frozen seas. They swim two-thirds under water, and
+one-third above; and so long as the equilibrium is sustained, you would
+think that they were as stable as the rocks. But the sea-water is warmer
+than the air. Hundreds of fathoms down, the tepid current washes the
+base of the berg. Silently in those far deeps the centre of gravity is
+changed; and then, in a moment, with one vast roll, the enormous mass
+heaves over, and the crystal peaks which had been glancing so proudly in
+the sunlight, are buried in the ocean for ever.
+
+Such a process as this had been going on in Germany, and Luther knew it,
+and knew that the time was come for him to speak. Fear had not kept him
+back. The danger to himself would be none the less because he would have
+the people at his side. The fiercer the thunderstorm, the greater peril
+to the central figure who stands out above the rest exposed to it. But
+he saw that there was hope at last of a change; and for himself--as he
+said in the plague--if he died, he died.
+
+Erasmus admitted frankly for himself that he did not like danger.
+
+'As to me,' he wrote to Archbishop Warham, 'I have no inclination to
+risk my life for truth. We have not all strength for martyrdom; and if
+trouble come, I shall imitate St. Peter. Popes and emperors must settle
+the creeds. If they settle them well, so much the better; if ill, I
+shall keep on the safe side.'
+
+That is to say, truth was not the first necessity to Erasmus. He would
+prefer truth, if he could have it. If not, he could get on moderately
+well upon falsehood. Luther could not. No matter what the danger to
+himself, if he could smite a lie upon the head and kill it, he was
+better pleased than by a thousand lives. We hear much of Luther's
+doctrine about faith. Stripped of theological verbiage, that doctrine
+means this.
+
+Reason says that, on the whole, truth and justice are desirable things.
+They make men happier in themselves, and make society more prosperous.
+But there reason ends, and men will not die for principles of utility.
+Faith says that between truth and lies, there is an infinite difference:
+one is of God, the other of Satan; one is eternally to be loved, the
+other eternally to be abhorred. It cannot say why, in language
+intelligible to reason. It is the voice of the nobler nature in man
+speaking out of his heart.
+
+While Tetzel, with his bull and his gilt car, was coming to Wittenberg,
+Luther, loyal still to authority while there was a hope that authority
+would be on the side of right, wrote to the Archbishop of Mayence to
+remonstrate.
+
+The archbishop, as we know, was to have a share of Tetzel's spoils; and
+what were the complaints of a poor insignificant monk to a supreme
+archbishop who was in debt and wanted money?
+
+The Archbishop of Mayence flung the letter into his waste-paper basket;
+and Luther made his solemn appeal from earthly dignitaries to the
+conscience of the German people. He set up his protest on the church
+door at Wittenberg; and, in ninety-five propositions he challenged the
+Catholic Church to defend Tetzel and his works.
+
+The Pope's indulgences, he said, cannot take away sins. God alone remits
+sins; and He pardons those who are penitent, without help from man's
+absolutions.
+
+The Church may remit penalties which the Church inflicts. But the
+Church's power is in this world only, and does not reach to purgatory.
+
+If God has thought fit to place a man in purgatory, who shall say that
+it is good for him to be taken out of purgatory? who shall say that he
+himself desires it?
+
+True repentance does not shrink from chastisement. True repentance
+rather loves chastisement.
+
+The bishops are asleep. It is better to give to the poor than to buy
+indulgences; and he who sees his neighbour in want, and instead of
+helping his neighbour buys a pardon for himself, is doing what is
+displeasing to God. Who is this man who dares to say that for so many
+crowns the soul of a sinner can be made whole?
+
+These, and like these, were Luther's propositions. Little guessed the
+Catholic prelates the dimensions of the act which had been done. The
+Pope, when he saw the theses, smiled in good-natured contempt. 'A
+drunken German wrote them,' he said; 'when he has slept off his wine, he
+will be of another mind.'
+
+Tetzel bayed defiance; the Dominican friars took up the quarrel; and
+Hochstrat of Cologne, Reuchlin's enemy, clamoured for fire and faggot.
+
+Voice answered voice. The religious houses all Germany over were like
+kennels of hounds howling to each other across the spiritual waste. If
+souls could not be sung out of purgatory, their occupation was gone.
+
+Luther wrote to Pope Leo to defend himself; Leo cited him to answer for
+his audacity at Rome; while to the young laymen, to the noble spirits
+all Europe over, Wittenberg became a beacon of light shining in the
+universal darkness.
+
+It was a trying time to Luther. Had he been a smaller man, he would have
+been swept away by his sudden popularity--he would have placed himself
+at the head of some great democratic movement, and in a few years his
+name would have disappeared in the noise and smoke of anarchy.
+
+But this was not his nature. His fellow-townsmen were heartily on his
+side. He remained quietly at his post in the Augustine Church at
+Wittenberg. If the powers of the world came down upon him and killed
+him, he was ready to be killed. Of himself at all times he thought
+infinitely little; and he believed that his death would be as
+serviceable to truth as his life.
+
+Killed undoubtedly he would have been if the clergy could have had their
+way. It happened, however, that Saxony just then was governed by a
+prince of no common order. Were all princes like the Elector Frederick,
+we should have no need of democracy in this world--we should never have
+heard of democracy. The clergy could not touch Luther against the will
+of the Wittenberg senate, unless the Elector would help them; and, to
+the astonishment of everybody, the Elector was disinclined to consent.
+The Pope himself wrote to exhort him to his duties. The Elector still
+hesitated. His professed creed was the creed in which the Church had
+educated him; but he had a clear secular understanding outside his
+formulas. When he read the propositions, they did not seem to him the
+pernicious things which the monks said they were. 'There is much in the
+Bible about Christ,' he said, 'but not much about Rome.' He sent for
+Erasmus, and asked him what he thought about the matter.
+
+The Elector knew to whom he was speaking. He wished for a direct answer,
+and looked Erasmus full and broad in the face. Erasmus pinched his thin
+lips together. 'Luther,' he said at length, 'has committed two sins: he
+has touched the Pope's crown and the monks' bellies.'
+
+He generously and strongly urged Frederick not to yield for the present
+to Pope Leo's importunacy; and the Pope was obliged to try less hasty
+and more formal methods.
+
+He had wished Luther to be sent to him to Rome, where his process would
+have had a rapid end. As this could not be, the case was transferred to
+Augsburg, and a cardinal legate was sent from Italy to look into it.
+
+There was no danger of violence at Augsburg. The townspeople there and
+everywhere were on the side of freedom; and Luther went cheerfully to
+defend himself. He walked from Wittenberg. You can fancy him still in
+his monk's brown frock, with all his wardrobe on his back--an apostle of
+the old sort. The citizens, high and low, attended him to the gates, and
+followed him along the road, crying 'Luther for ever!' 'Nay,' he
+answered, 'Christ for ever!'
+
+The cardinal legate, being reduced to the necessity of politeness,
+received him civilly. He told him, however, simply and briefly, that the
+Pope insisted on his recantation, and would accept nothing else. Luther
+requested the cardinal to point out to him where he was wrong. The
+cardinal waived discussion. 'He was come to command,' he said, 'not to
+argue.' And Luther had to tell him that it could not be.
+
+Remonstrances, threats, entreaties, even bribes were tried. Hopes of
+high distinction and reward were held out to him if he would only be
+reasonable. To the amazement of the proud Italian, a poor peasant's
+son--a miserable friar of a provincial German town--was prepared to defy
+the power and resist the prayers of the Sovereign of Christendom.
+'What!' said the cardinal at last to him, 'do you think the Pope cares
+for the opinion of a German boor? The Pope's little finger is stronger
+than all Germany. Do you expect your princes to take up arms to defend
+_you_--_you_, a wretched worm like you? I tell you, No! and where will
+you be then--where will you be then?'
+
+Luther answered, 'Then, as now, in the hands of Almighty God.'
+
+The Court dissolved. The cardinal carried back his report to his master.
+The Pope, so defied, brought out his thunders; he excommunicated Luther;
+he wrote again to the elector, entreating him not to soil his name and
+lineage by becoming a protector of heretics; and he required him,
+without further ceremony, to render up the criminal to justice.
+
+The elector's power was limited. As yet, the quarrel was simply between
+Luther and the Pope. The elector was by no means sure that his bold
+subject was right--he was only not satisfied that he was wrong--and it
+was a serious question with him how far he ought to go. The monk might
+next be placed under the ban of the empire; and if he persisted in
+protecting him afterwards, Saxony might have all the power of Germany
+upon it. He did not venture any more to refuse absolutely. He temporised
+and delayed; while Luther himself, probably at the elector's
+instigation, made overtures for peace to the Pope. Saving his duty to
+Christ, he promised to be for the future an obedient son of the Church,
+and to say no more about indulgences if Tetzel ceased to defend them.
+
+'My being such a small creature,' Luther said afterwards, 'was a
+misfortune for the Pope. He despised me too much! What, he thought,
+could a slave like me do to him--to him, who was the greatest man in all
+the world. Had he accepted my proposal, he would have extinguished me.'
+
+But the infallible Pope conducted himself like a proud, irascible,
+exceedingly fallible mortal. To make terms with the town preacher of
+Wittenberg was too preposterous.
+
+Just then the imperial throne fell vacant; and the pretty scandal I told
+you of, followed at the choice of his successor. Frederick of Saxony
+might have been elected if he had liked--and it would have been better
+for the world perhaps if Frederick had been more ambitious of high
+dignities--but the Saxon Prince did not care to trouble himself with the
+imperial sceptre. The election fell on Maximilian's grandson
+Charles--grandson also of Ferdinand the Catholic--Sovereign of Spain;
+Sovereign of Burgundy and the Low Countries; Sovereign of Naples and
+Sicily; Sovereign, beyond the Atlantic, of the New Empire of the Indies.
+
+No fitter man could have been found to do the business of the Pope. With
+the empire of Germany added to his inherited dominions, who could resist
+him?
+
+To the new emperor, unless the elector yielded, Luther's case had now to
+be referred.
+
+The elector, if he had wished, could not interfere. Germany was
+attentive, but motionless. The students, the artisans, the tradesmen,
+were at heart with the Reformer; and their enthusiasm could not be
+wholly repressed. The press grew fertile with pamphlets; and it was
+noticed that all the printers and compositors went for Luther. The
+Catholics could not get their books into type without sending them to
+France or the Low Countries.
+
+Yet none of the princes except the elector had as yet shown him favour.
+The bishops were hostile to a man. The nobles had given no sign; and
+their place would be naturally on the side of authority. They had no
+love for bishops--there was hope in that; and they looked with no favour
+on the huge estates of the religious orders. But no one could expect
+that they would peril their lands and lives for an insignificant monk.
+
+There was an interval of two years before the emperor was at leisure to
+take up the question. The time was spent in angry altercation, boding no
+good for the future.
+
+The Pope issued a second bull condemning Luther and his works. Luther
+replied by burning the bull in the great square at Wittenberg.
+
+At length, in April 1521, the Diet of the Empire assembled at Worms, and
+Luther was called to defend himself in the presence of Charles the
+Fifth.
+
+That it should have come to this at all, in days of such high-handed
+authority, was sufficiently remarkable. It indicated something growing
+in the minds of men, that the so-called Church was not to carry things
+any longer in the old style. Popes and bishops might order, but the
+laity intended for the future to have opinions of their own how far such
+orders should be obeyed.
+
+The Pope expected anyhow that the Diet, by fair means or foul, would
+now rid him of his adversary. The elector, who knew the ecclesiastical
+ways of handling such matters, made it a condition of his subject
+appearing, that he should have a safe conduct, under the emperor's hand;
+that Luther, if judgment went against him, should be free for the time
+to return to the place from which he had come; and that he, the elector,
+should determine afterwards what should be done with him.
+
+When the interests of the Church were concerned, safe conducts, it was
+too well known, were poor security. Pope Clement the Seventh, a little
+after, when reproached for breaking a promise, replied with a smile,
+'The Pope has power to bind and to loose.' Good, in the eyes of
+ecclesiastical authorities, meant what was good for the Church; evil,
+whatever was bad for the Church; and the highest moral obligation became
+sin when it stood in St. Peter's way.
+
+There had been an outburst of free thought in Bohemia a century and a
+half before. John Huss, Luther's forerunner, came with a safe conduct to
+the Council of Constance; but the bishops ruled that safe conducts could
+not protect heretics. They burnt John Huss for all their promises, and
+they hoped now that so good a Catholic as Charles would follow so
+excellent a precedent. Pope Leo wrote himself to beg that Luther's safe
+conduct should not be observed. The bishops and archbishops, when
+Charles consulted them, took the same view as the Pope.
+
+'There is something in the office of a bishop,' Luther said, a year or
+two later, 'which is dreadfully demoralising. Even good men change their
+natures at their consecration; Satan enters into them as he entered into
+Judas, as soon as they have taken the sop.'
+
+It was most seriously likely that, if Luther trusted himself at the Diet
+on the faith of his safe conduct, he would never return alive. Rumours
+of intended treachery were so strong, that if he refused to go, the
+elector meant to stand by him at any cost. Should he appear, or not
+appear? It was for himself to decide. If he stayed away, judgment would
+go against him by default. Charles would call out the forces of the
+empire, and Saxony would be invaded.
+
+Civil war would follow, with insurrection all over Germany, with no
+certain prospect except bloodshed and misery.
+
+Luther was not a man to expose his country to peril that his own person
+might escape. He had provoked the storm; and if blood was to be shed,
+his blood ought at least to be the first. He went. On his way, a friend
+came to warn him again that foul play was intended, that he was
+condemned already, that his books had been burnt by the hangman, and
+that he was a dead man if he proceeded.
+
+Luther trembled--he owned it--but he answered, 'Go to Worms! I will go
+if there are as many devils in Worms as there are tiles upon the roofs
+of the houses.'
+
+The roofs, when he came into the city, were crowded, not with devils,
+but with the inhabitants, all collecting there to see him as he passed.
+A nobleman gave him shelter for the night; the next day he was led to
+the Town Hall.
+
+No more notable spectacle had been witnessed in this planet for many a
+century--not, perhaps, since a greater than Luther stood before the
+Roman Procurator.
+
+There on the raised dais sate the sovereign of half the world. There on
+either side of him stood the archbishops, the ministers of state, the
+princes of the empire, gathered together to hear and judge the son of a
+poor miner, who had made the world ring with his name.
+
+The body of the hall was thronged with knights and nobles--stern hard
+men in dull gleaming armour. Luther, in his brown frock, was led forward
+between their ranks. The looks which greeted him were not all
+unfriendly. The first Article of a German credo was belief in _courage_.
+Germany had had its feuds in times past with Popes of Rome, and they
+were not without pride that a poor countryman of theirs should have
+taken by the beard the great Italian priest. They had settled among
+themselves that, come what would, there should be fair play; and they
+looked on half admiring, and half in scorn.
+
+As Luther passed up the hall, a steel baron touched him on the shoulder
+with his gauntlet.
+
+'Pluck up thy spirit, little monk;' he said, 'some of us here have seen
+warm work in our time, but, by my troth, nor I nor any knight in this
+company ever needed a stout heart more than thou needest it now. If thou
+hast faith in these doctrines of thine, little monk, go on, in the name
+of God.'
+
+'Yes, in the name of God,' said Luther, throwing back his head, 'In the
+name of God, forward!'
+
+As at Augsburg, one only question was raised. Luther had broken the
+laws of the Church. He had taught doctrines which the Pope had declared
+to be false. Would he or would he not retract?
+
+As at Augsburg, he replied briefly that he would retract when his
+doctrines were not declared to be false merely, but were proved to be
+false. Then, but not till then. That was his answer, and his last word.
+
+There, as you understand, the heart of the matter indeed rested. In
+those words lay the whole meaning of the Reformation. Were men to go on
+for ever saying that this and that was true, because the Pope affirmed
+it? Or were Popes' decrees thenceforward to be tried like the words of
+other men--by the ordinary laws of evidence?
+
+It required no great intellect to understand that a Pope's pardon, which
+you could buy for five shillings, could not really get a soul out of
+purgatory. It required a quality much rarer than intellect to look such
+a doctrine in the face--sanctioned as it was by the credulity of ages,
+and backed by the pomp and pageantry of earthly power--and say to it
+openly, 'You are a lie.' Cleverness and culture could have given a
+thousand reasons--they did then and they do now--why an indulgence
+should be believed in; when honesty and common sense could give but one
+reason for thinking otherwise. Cleverness and imposture get on
+excellently well together--imposture and veracity, never.
+
+Luther looked at those wares of Tetzel's, and said, 'Your pardons are no
+pardons at all--no letters of credit on heaven, but flash notes of the
+Bank of Humbug, and you know it.' They did know it. The conscience of
+every man in Europe answered back, that what Luther said was true.
+
+Bravery, honesty, veracity, these were the qualities which were
+needed--which were needed then, and are needed always, as the root of
+all real greatness in man.
+
+The first missionaries of Christianity, when they came among the heathen
+nations, and found them worshipping idols, did not care much to reason
+that an image which man had made could not be God. The priests might
+have been a match for them in reasoning. They walked up to the idol in
+the presence of its votaries. They threw stones at it, spat upon it,
+insulted it. 'See,' they said, 'I do this to your God. If he is God, let
+him avenge himself.'
+
+It was a simple argument; always effective; easy, and yet most
+difficult. It required merely a readiness to be killed upon the spot by
+the superstition which is outraged.
+
+And so, and only so, can truth make its way for us in any such matters.
+The form changes--the thing remains. Superstition, folly, and cunning
+will go on to the end of time, spinning their poison webs around the
+consciences of mankind. Courage and veracity--these qualities, and only
+these, avail to defeat them.
+
+From the moment that Luther left the emperor's presence a free man, the
+spell of Absolutism was broken, and the victory of the Reformation
+secured. The ban of the Pope had fallen; the secular arm had been called
+to interfere; the machinery of authority strained as far as it would
+bear. The emperor himself was an unconscious convert to the higher
+creed. The Pope had urged him to break his word. The Pope had told him
+that honour was nothing, and morality was nothing, where the interests
+of orthodoxy were compromised. The emperor had refused to be tempted
+into perjury; and, in refusing, had admitted that there was a spiritual
+power upon the earth, above the Pope, and above him.
+
+The party of the Church felt it so. A plot was formed to assassinate
+Luther on his return to Saxony. The insulted majesty of Rome could be
+vindicated at least by the dagger.
+
+But this, too, failed. The elector heard what was intended. A party of
+horse, disguised as banditti, waylaid the Reformer upon the road, and
+carried him off to the castle of Wartburg, where he remained out of
+harm's way till the general rising of Germany placed him beyond the
+reach of danger.
+
+At Wartburg for the present evening we leave him.
+
+The Emperor Charles and Luther never met again. The monks of Yuste, who
+watched on the deathbed of Charles, reported that at the last hour he
+repented that he had kept his word, and reproached himself for having
+allowed the arch-heretic to escape from his hands.
+
+It is possible that, when the candle of life was burning low, and spirit
+and flesh were failing together, and the air of the sick room was thick
+and close with the presence of the angel of death, the nobler nature of
+the emperor might have yielded to the influences which were around him.
+His confessor might have thrust into his lips the words which he so
+wished to hear.
+
+But Charles the Fifth, though a Catholic always, was a Catholic of the
+old grand type, to whom creed and dogmas were but the robe of a regal
+humanity. Another story is told of Charles--an authentic story this
+one--which makes me think that the monks of Yuste mistook or maligned
+him. Six and twenty years after this scene at Worms, when the then
+dawning heresy had become broad day; when Luther had gone to his
+rest--and there had gathered about his name the hate which mean men feel
+for an enemy who has proved too strong for them--a passing vicissitude
+in the struggle brought the emperor at the head of his army to
+Wittenberg.
+
+The vengeance which the monks could not inflict upon him in life, they
+proposed to wreak upon his bones.
+
+The emperor desired to be conducted to Luther's tomb; and as he stood
+gazing at it, full of many thoughts, some one suggested that the body
+should be taken up and burnt at the stake in the Market Place.
+
+There was nothing unusual in the proposal; it was the common practice of
+the Catholic Church with the remains of heretics who were held unworthy
+to be left in repose in hallowed ground. There was scarcely, perhaps,
+another Catholic prince who would have hesitated to comply. But Charles
+was one of nature's gentlemen; he answered, 'I war not with the dead.'
+
+
+LECTURE III.
+
+We have now entered upon the movement which broke the power of the
+Papacy--which swept Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, England,
+Scotland, into the stream of revolution, and gave a new direction to the
+spiritual history of mankind.
+
+You would not thank me if I were to take you out into that troubled
+ocean. I confine myself, and I wish you to confine your attention, to
+the two kinds of men who appear as leaders in times of change--of whom
+Erasmus and Luther are respectively the types.
+
+On one side there are the large-minded latitudinarian philosophers--men
+who have no confidence in the people--who have no passionate
+convictions; moderate men, tolerant men, who trust to education, to
+general progress in knowledge and civilisation, to forbearance, to
+endurance, to time--men who believe that all wholesome reforms proceed
+downwards from the educated to the multitudes; who regard with contempt,
+qualified by terror, appeals to the popular conscience or to popular
+intelligence.
+
+Opposite to these are the men of faith--and by faith I do not mean
+belief in dogmas, but belief in goodness, belief in justice, in
+righteousness, above all, belief in truth. Men of faith consider
+conscience of more importance than knowledge--or rather as a first
+condition--without which all the knowledge in the world is no use to a
+man--if he wishes to be indeed a man in any high and noble sense of the
+word. They are not contented with looking for what may be useful or
+pleasant to themselves; they look by quite other methods for what is
+honourable--for what is good--for what is just. They believe that if
+they can find out that, then at all hazards, and in spite of all present
+consequences to themselves, that is to be preferred. If, individually
+and to themselves, no visible good ever came from it, in this world or
+in any other, still they would say, 'Let us do that and nothing else.
+Life will be of no value to us if we are to use it only for our own
+gratification.'
+
+The soldier before a battle knows that if he shirks and pretends to be
+ill, he may escape danger and make sure of his life. There are very few
+men, indeed, if it comes to that, who would not sooner die ten times
+over than so dishonour themselves. Men of high moral nature carry out
+the same principle into the details of their daily life; they do not
+care to live unless they may live nobly. Like my uncle Toby, they have
+but one fear--the fear of doing a wrong thing.
+
+I call this faith, because there is no proof, such as will satisfy the
+scientific enquirer, that there is any such thing as moral truth--any
+such thing as absolute right and wrong at all. As the Scripture says,
+'Verily, thou art a God that hidest thyself.' The forces of nature pay
+no respect to what we call good and evil. Prosperity does not uniformly
+follow virtue; nor are defeat and failure necessary consequences of
+vice.
+
+Certain virtues--temperance, industry, and things within reasonable
+limits--command their reward. Sensuality, idleness, and waste, commonly
+lead to ruin.
+
+But prosperity is consistent with intense worldliness, intense
+selfishness, intense hardness of heart; while the grander features of
+human character--self-sacrifice, disregard of pleasure, patriotism, love
+of knowledge, devotion to any great and good cause--these have no
+tendency to bring men what is called fortune. They do not even
+necessarily promote their happiness; for do what they will in this way,
+the horizon of what they desire to do perpetually flies before them.
+High hopes and enthusiasms are generally disappointed in results; and
+the wrongs, the cruelties, the wretchednesses of all kinds which for
+ever prevail among mankind--the shortcomings in himself of which he
+becomes more conscious as he becomes really better--these things, you
+may be sure, will prevent a noble-minded man from ever being
+particularly happy.
+
+If you see a man happy, as the world goes--contented with himself and
+contented with what is round him--such a man may be, and probably is,
+decent and respectable; but the highest is not in him, and the highest
+will not come out of him.
+
+Judging merely by outward phenomena--judging merely by what we call
+reason--you cannot prove that there is any moral government in the world
+at all, except what men, for their own convenience, introduce into it.
+Right and wrong resolve themselves into principles of utility and social
+convenience. Enlightened selfishness prescribes a decent rule of conduct
+for common purposes; and virtue, by a large school of philosophy, is
+completely resolved into that.
+
+True, when nations go on long on the selfish hypothesis, they are apt to
+find at last that they have been mistaken. They find it in bankruptcy of
+honour and character--in social wreck and dissolution. All lies in
+serious matters end at last, as Carlyle says, in broken heads. That is
+the final issue which they are sure to come to in the long run. The
+Maker of the world does not permit a society to continue which forgets
+or denies the nobler principles of action.
+
+But the end is often long in coming; and these nobler principles are
+meanwhile _not_ provided for us by the inductive philosophy.
+
+Patriotism, for instance, of which we used to think something--a
+readiness to devote our energies while we live, to devote our lives, if
+nothing else will serve, to what we call our country--what are we to say
+of that?
+
+I once asked a distinguished philosopher what he thought of patriotism.
+He said he thought it was a compound of vanity and superstition; a bad
+kind of prejudice, which would die out with the growth of reason. My
+friend believed in the progress of humanity--he could not narrow his
+sympathies to so small a thing as his own country. I could but say to
+myself, 'Thank God, then, we are not yet a nation of philosophers.'
+
+A man who takes up with philosophy like that, may write fine books, and
+review articles and such like, but at the bottom of him he is a poor
+caitiff, and there is no more to be said about him.
+
+So when the air is heavy with imposture, and men live only to make
+money, and the service of God is become a thing of words and ceremonies,
+and the kingdom of heaven is bought and sold, and all that is high and
+pure in man is smothered by corruption--fire of the same kind bursts out
+in higher natures with a fierceness which cannot be controlled; and,
+confident in truth and right, they call fearlessly on the seven
+thousand in Israel who have not bowed the knee to Baal to rise and stand
+by them.
+
+They do not ask whether those whom they address have wide knowledge of
+history, or science, or philosophy; they ask rather that they shall be
+honest, that they shall be brave, that they shall be true to the common
+light which God has given to all His children. They know well that
+conscience is no exceptional privilege of the great or the cultivated,
+that to be generous and unselfish is no prerogative of rank or
+intellect.
+
+Erasmus considered that, for the vulgar, a lie might be as good as
+truth, and often better. A lie, ascertained to be a lie, to Luther was
+deadly poison--poison to him, and poison to all who meddled with it. In
+his own genuine greatness, he was too humble to draw insolent
+distinctions in his own favour; or to believe that any one class on
+earth is of more importance than another in the eyes of the Great Maker
+of them all.
+
+Well, then, you know what I mean by faith, and what I mean by intellect.
+It was not that Luther was without intellect. He was less subtle, less
+learned, than Erasmus; but in mother wit, in elasticity, in force, and
+imaginative power, he was as able a man as ever lived. Luther created
+the German language as an instrument of literature. His translation of
+the Bible is as rich and grand as our own, and his table talk as full of
+matter as Shakespeare's plays.
+
+Again; you will mistake me if you think I represent Erasmus as a man
+without conscience, or belief in God and goodness. But in Luther that
+belief was a certainty; in Erasmus it was only a high probability--and
+the difference between the two is not merely great, it is infinite. In
+Luther, it was the root; in Erasmus, it was the flower. In Luther, it
+was the first principle of life; in Erasmus, it was an inference which
+might be taken away, and yet leave the world a very tolerable and
+habitable place after all.
+
+You see the contrast in their early lives. You see Erasmus--light,
+bright, sarcastic, fond of pleasure, fond of society, fond of wine and
+kisses, and intellectual talk and polished company. You see Luther
+throwing himself into the cloister, that he might subdue his will to the
+will of God; prostrate in prayer, in nights of agony, and distracting
+his easy-going confessor with the exaggerated scruples of his
+conscience.
+
+You see it in the effects of their teaching. You see Erasmus addressing
+himself with persuasive eloquence to kings, and popes, and prelates; and
+for answer, you see Pope Leo sending Tetzel over Germany with his
+carriage-load of indulgences. You see Erasmus's dearest friend, our own
+gifted admirable Sir Thomas More, taking his seat beside the bishops and
+sending poor Protestant artisans to the stake.
+
+You see Luther, on the other side, standing out before the world, one
+lone man, with all authority against him--taking lies by the throat, and
+Europe thrilling at his words, and saying after him, 'The reign of
+Imposture shall end.'
+
+Let us follow the course of Erasmus after the tempest had broken.
+
+He knew Luther to be right. Luther had but said what Erasmus had been
+all his life convinced of, and Luther looked to see him come forward and
+take his place at his side. Had Erasmus done so, the course of things
+would have been far happier and better. His prodigious reputation would
+have given the Reformers the influence with the educated which they had
+won for themselves with the multitude, and the Pope would have been left
+without a friend to the north of the Alps. But there would have been
+some danger--danger to the leaders, if certainty of triumph to the
+cause--and Erasmus had no gift for martyrdom.
+
+His first impulse was generous. He encouraged the elector, as we have
+seen, to protect Luther from the Pope. 'I looked on Luther,' he wrote to
+Duke George of Saxe, 'as a necessary evil in the corruption of the
+Church; a medicine, bitter and drastic, from which sounder health would
+follow.'
+
+And again, more boldly: 'Luther has taken up the cause of honesty and
+good sense against abominations which are no longer tolerable. His
+enemies are men under whose worthlessness the Christian world has
+groaned too long.'
+
+So to the heads of the Church he wrote, pressing them to be moderate and
+careful:--
+
+'I neither approve Luther nor condemn him,' he said to the Archbishop of
+Mayence; 'if he is innocent, he ought not to be oppressed by the
+factions of the wicked; if he is in error, he should be answered, not
+destroyed. The theologians'--observe how true they remain to the
+universal type in all times and in all countries--'the theologians do
+not try to answer him. They do but raise an insane and senseless
+clamour, and shriek and curse. Heresy, heretic, heresiarch, schismatic,
+Antichrist--these are the words which are in the mouths of all of them;
+and, of course, they condemn without reading. I warned them what they
+were doing. I told them to scream less, and to think more. Luther's life
+they admit to be innocent and blameless. Such a tragedy I never saw. The
+most humane men are thirsting for his blood, and they would rather kill
+him than mend him. The Dominicans are the worst, and are more knaves
+than fools. In old times, even a heretic was quietly listened to. If he
+recanted, he was absolved; if he persisted, he was at worst
+excommunicated. Now they will have nothing but blood. Not to agree with
+them is heresy. To know Greek is heresy. To speak good Latin is heresy.
+Whatever they do not understand is heresy. Learning, they pretend, has
+given birth to Luther, though Luther has but little of it. Luther thinks
+more of the Gospel than of scholastic divinity, and that is his crime.
+This is plain at least, that the best men everywhere are those who are
+least offended with him.'
+
+Even to Pope Leo, in the midst of his fury, Erasmus wrote bravely;
+separating himself from Luther, yet deprecating violence. 'Nothing,' he
+said, 'would so recommend the new teaching as the howling of fools:'
+while to a member of Charles's council he insisted that 'severity had
+been often tried in such cases and had always failed; unless Luther was
+encountered calmly and reasonably, a tremendous convulsion was
+inevitable.'
+
+Wisely said all this, but it presumed that those whom he was addressing
+were reasonable men; and high officials, touched in their pride, are a
+class of persons of whom Solomon may have been thinking when he said,
+'Let a bear robbed of her whelps meet a man rather than a fool in his
+folly.'
+
+So to Luther, so to the people, Erasmus preached moderation. It was like
+preaching to the winds in a hurricane. The typhoon itself is not wilder
+than human creatures when once their passions are stirred. You cannot
+check them; but, if you are brave, you can guide them wisely. And this,
+Erasmus had not the heart to do.
+
+He said at the beginning, 'I will not countenance revolt against
+authority. A bad government is better than none.' But he said at the
+same time, 'You bishops, cease to be corrupt: you popes and cardinals,
+reform your wicked courts: you monks, leave your scandalous lives, and
+obey the rules of your order, so you may recover the respect of mankind,
+and be obeyed and loved as before.'
+
+When he found that the case was desperate; that his exhortations were
+but words addressed to the winds; that corruption had tainted the blood;
+that there was no hope except in revolution--as, indeed, in his heart he
+knew from the first that there was none--then his place ought to have
+been with Luther.
+
+But Erasmus, as the tempest rose, could but stand still in feeble
+uncertainty. The responsibilities of his reputation weighed him down.
+
+The Lutherans said, 'You believe as we do.' The Catholics said, 'You are
+a Lutheran at heart; if you are not, prove it by attacking Luther.'
+
+He grew impatient. He told lies. He said he had not read Luther's books,
+and had no time to read them. What was he, he said, that he should
+meddle in such a quarrel. He was the vine and the fig tree of the Book
+of Judges. The trees said to them, Rule over us. The vine and the fig
+tree answered, they would not leave their sweetness for such a thankless
+office. 'I am a poor actor,' he said; 'I prefer to be a spectator of the
+play.'
+
+But he was sore at heart, and bitter with disappointment. All had been
+going on so smoothly--literature was reviving, art and science were
+spreading, the mind of the world was being reformed in the best sense by
+the classics of Greece and Rome, and now an apple of discord had been
+flung out into Europe.
+
+The monks who had fought against enlightenment could point to the
+confusion as a fulfilment of their prophecies; and he, and all that he
+had done, was brought to disrepute.
+
+To protect himself from the Dominicans, he was forced to pretend to an
+orthodoxy which he did not possess. Were all true which Luther had
+written, he pretended that it ought not to have been said, or should
+have been addressed in a learned language to the refined and educated.
+
+He doubted whether it was not better on the whole to teach the people
+lies for their good, when truth was beyond their comprehension. Yet he
+could not for all that wish the Church to be successful.
+
+'I fear for that miserable Luther,' he said; 'the popes and princes are
+furious with him. His own destruction would be no great matter, but if
+the monks triumph there will be no bearing them. They will never rest
+till they have rooted learning out of the land. The Pope expects _me_ to
+write against Luther. The orthodox, it appears, can call him names--call
+him blockhead, fool, heretic, toadstool, schismatic, and Antichrist--but
+they must come to me to answer his arguments.'
+
+'Oh! that this had never been,' he wrote to our own Archbishop Warham.
+'Now there is no hope for any good. It is all over with quiet learning,
+thought, piety, and progress; violence is on one side and folly on the
+other; and they accuse me of having caused it all. If I joined Luther I
+could only perish with him, and I do not mean to run my neck into a
+halter. Popes and emperors must decide matters. I will accept what is
+good, and do as I can with the rest. Peace on any terms is better than
+the justest war.'
+
+Erasmus never stooped to real baseness. He was too clever, too
+genuine--he had too great a contempt for worldly greatness. They offered
+him a bishopric if he would attack Luther. He only laughed at them. What
+was a bishopric to him? He preferred a quiet life among his books at
+Louvaine.
+
+But there was no more quiet for Erasmus at Louvaine or anywhere. Here is
+a scene between him and the Prior of the Dominicans in the presence of
+the Rector of the University.
+
+The Dominican had preached at Erasmus in the University pulpit. Erasmus
+complained to the rector, and the rector invited the Dominican to defend
+himself. Erasmus tells the story.
+
+'I sate on one side and the monk on the other, the rector between us to
+prevent our scratching.
+
+'The monk asked what the matter was, and said he had done no harm.
+
+'I said he had told lies of me, and that was harm.
+
+'It was after dinner. The holy man was flushed. He turned purple.
+
+'"Why do you abuse monks in your books?" he said.
+
+'"I spoke of your order," I answered. "I did not mention you. You
+denounced me by name as a friend of Luther."
+
+'He raged like a madman. "You are the cause of all this trouble," he
+said; "you are a chameleon, you can twist everything."
+
+'"You see what a fellow he is," said I, turning to the rector. "If it
+comes to calling names, why I can do that too; but let us be
+reasonable."
+
+'He still roared and cursed; he vowed he would never rest till he had
+destroyed Luther.
+
+'I said he might curse Luther till he burst himself if he pleased. I
+complained of his cursing me.
+
+'He answered, that if I did not agree with Luther, I ought to say so,
+and write against him.
+
+'"Why should I?" urged I. "The quarrel is none of mine. Why should I
+irritate Luther against me, when he has horns and knows how to use
+them?"
+
+'"Well, then," said he, "if you will not write, at least you can say
+that we Dominicans have had the best of the argument."
+
+'"How can I do that?" replied I. "You have burnt his books, but I never
+heard that you had answered them."
+
+'He almost spat upon me. I understand that there is to be a form of
+prayer for the conversion of Erasmus and Luther.'
+
+But Erasmus was not to escape so easily. Adrian the Sixth, who succeeded
+Leo, was his old schoolfellow, and implored his assistance in terms
+which made refusal impossible. Adrian wanted Erasmus to come to him to
+Rome. He was too wary to walk into the wolf's den. But Adrian required
+him to write, and reluctantly he felt that he must comply.
+
+What was he to say?
+
+'If his Holiness will set about reform in good earnest,' he wrote to the
+Pope's secretary, 'and if he will not be too hard on Luther, I may,
+perhaps, do good; but what Luther writes of the tyranny, the corruption,
+the covetousness of the Roman court, would, my friend, that it was not
+true.'
+
+To Adrian himself, Erasmus addressed a letter really remarkable.
+
+'I cannot go to your Holiness,' he said, 'King Calculus will not let me.
+I have dreadful health, which this tornado has not improved. I, who was
+the favourite of everybody, am now cursed by everybody--at Louvaine by
+the monks; in Germany by the Lutherans. I have fallen into trouble in my
+old age, like a mouse into a pot of pitch. You say, Come to Rome; you
+might as well say to the crab, Fly. The crab says, Give me wings; I say,
+Give me back my health and my youth. If I write calmly against Luther I
+shall be called lukewarm; if I write as he does, I shall stir a hornet's
+nest. People think he can be put down by force. The more force you try,
+the stronger he will grow. Such disorders cannot be cured in that way.
+The Wickliffites in England were put down, but the fire smouldered.
+
+'If you mean to use violence you have no need of me; but mark this--if
+monks and theologians think only of themselves, no good will come of it.
+Look rather into the causes of all this confusion, and apply your
+remedies there. Send for the best and wisest men from all parts of
+Christendom and take their advice.'
+
+Tell a crab to fly. Tell a pope to be reasonable. You must relieve him
+of his infallibility if you want him to act like a sensible man. Adrian
+could undertake no reforms, and still besought Erasmus to take arms for
+him.
+
+Erasmus determined to gratify Adrian with least danger to himself and
+least injury to Luther.
+
+'I remember Uzzah, and am afraid,' he said, in his quizzing way; 'it is
+not everyone who is allowed to uphold the ark. Many a wise man has
+attacked Luther, and what has been effected? The Pope curses, the
+emperor threatens; there are prisons, confiscations, faggots; and all is
+vain. What can a poor pigmy like me do?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+'The world has been besotted with ceremonies. Miserable monks have ruled
+all, entangling men's consciences for their own benefit. Dogma has been
+heaped on dogma. The bishops have been tyrants, the Pope's commissaries
+have been rascals. Luther has been an instrument of God's displeasure,
+like Pharaoh or Nebuchadnezzar, or the Caesars, and I shall not attack
+him on such grounds as these.'
+
+Erasmus was too acute to defend against Luther the weak point of a bad
+cause. He would not declare for him--but he would not go over to his
+enemies. Yet, unless he quarrelled with Adrian, he could not be
+absolutely silent; so he chose a subject to write upon on which all
+schools of theology, Catholic or Protestant--all philosophers, all
+thinkers of whatever kind, have been divided from the beginning of time:
+fate and free will, predestination and the liberty of man--a problem
+which has no solution--which may be argued even from eternity to
+eternity.
+
+The reason of the selection was obvious. Erasmus wished to please the
+Pope and not exasperate Luther. Of course he pleased neither, and
+offended both.
+
+Luther, who did not comprehend his motive, was needlessly angry. Adrian
+and the monks were openly contemptuous. Sick of them and their quarrels,
+he grew weary of the world, and began to wish to be well out of it.
+
+It is characteristic of Erasmus that, like many highly-gifted men, but
+unlike all theologians, he expressed a hope for sudden death, and
+declared it to be one of the greatest blessings which a human creature
+can receive.
+
+Do not suppose that he broke down or showed the white feather to
+fortune's buffets. Through all storms he stuck bravely to his own proper
+work; editing classics, editing the Fathers, writing paraphrases--still
+doing for Europe what no other man could have done.
+
+The Dominicans hunted him away from Louvaine. There was no living for
+him in Germany for the Protestants. He suffered dreadfully from the
+stone, too, and in all ways had a cruel time of it. Yet he continued,
+for all that, to make life endurable.
+
+He moved about in Switzerland and on the Upper Rhine. The lakes, the
+mountains, the waterfalls, the villas on the hill slopes, delighted
+Erasmus when few people else cared for such things. He was particular
+about his wine. The vintage of Burgundy was as new blood in his veins,
+and quickened his pen into brightness and life.
+
+The German wines he liked worse--for this point among others, which is
+curious to observe in those days. The great capitalist winegrowers,
+anti-Reformers all of them, were people without conscience and humanity,
+and adulterated their liquors. Of course they did. They believed in
+nothing but money, and this was the way to make money.
+
+'The water they mix with the wine,' Erasmus says, 'is the least part of
+the mischief. They put in lime, and alum, and resin, and sulphur, and
+salt--and then they say it is good enough for heretics.'
+
+Observe the practical issue of religious corruption. Show me a people
+where trade is dishonest, and I will show you a people where religion is
+a sham.
+
+'We hang men that steal money,' Erasmus exclaimed, writing doubtless
+with the remembrance of a stomach-ache. 'These wretches steal our money
+and our lives too, and get off scot free.'
+
+He settled at last at Basle, which the storm had not yet reached, and
+tried to bury himself among his books. The shrieks of the conflict,
+however, still troubled his ears. He heard his own name still cursed,
+and he could not bear it or sit quiet under it.
+
+His correspondence was still enormous. The high powers still appealed to
+him for advice and help: of open meddling he would have no more; he did
+not care, he said, to make a post of himself for every dog of a
+theologian to defile. Advice, however, he continued to give in the old
+style.
+
+'Put down the preachers on both sides. Fill the pulpits with men who
+will kick controversy into the kennel, and preach piety and good
+manners. Teach nothing in the schools but what bears upon life and duty.
+Punish those who break the peace, and punish no one else; and when the
+new opinions have taken root, allow liberty of conscience.'
+
+Perfection of wisdom; but a wisdom which, unfortunately, was three
+centuries at least out of date, which even now we have not grown big
+enough to profit by. The Catholic princes and bishops were at work with
+fire and faggot. The Protestants were pulling down monasteries, and
+turning the monks and nuns out into the world. The Catholics declared
+that Erasmus was as much to blame as Luther. The Protestants held him
+responsible for the persecutions, and insisted, not without reason, that
+if Erasmus had been true to his conscience, the whole Catholic world
+must have accepted the Reformation.
+
+He suffered bitterly under these attacks upon him. He loved quiet--and
+his ears were deafened with clamour. He liked popularity--and he was the
+best abused person in Europe. Others who suffered in the same way he
+could advise to leave the black-coated jackdaws to their noise--but he
+could not follow his own counsel. When the curs were at his heels, he
+could not restrain himself from lashing out at them; and, from his
+retreat at Basle, his sarcasms flashed out like jagged points of
+lightning.
+
+Describing an emeute, and the burning of an image of a saint, 'They
+insulted the poor image so,' he said, 'it is a marvel there was no
+miracle. The saint worked so many in the good old times.'
+
+When Luther married an escaped nun, the Catholics exclaimed that
+Antichrist would be born from such an incestuous intercourse. 'Nay,'
+Erasmus said, 'if monk and nun produce Antichrist, there must have been
+legions of Antichrists these many years.'
+
+More than once he was tempted to go over openly to Luther--not from a
+noble motive, but, as he confessed, 'to make those furies feel the
+difference between him and them.'
+
+He was past sixty, with broken health and failing strength. He thought
+of going back to England, but England had by this time caught fire, and
+Basle had caught fire. There was no peace on earth.
+
+'The horse has his heels,' he said, when advised to be quiet, 'the dog
+his teeth, the hedgehog his spines, the bee his sting. I myself have my
+tongue and my pen, and why should I not use them?'
+
+Yet to use them to any purpose now, he must take a side, and, sorely
+tempted as he was, he could not.
+
+With the negative part of the Protestant creed he sympathised heartily;
+but he did not understand Luther's doctrine of faith, because he had
+none of his own, and he disliked it as a new dogma.
+
+He regarded Luther's movement as an outburst of commonplace revolution,
+caused by the folly and wickedness of the authorities, but with no
+organising vitality in itself; and his chief distress, as we gather from
+his later letters, was at his own treatment. He had done his best for
+both sides. He had failed, and was abused by everybody.
+
+Thus passed away the last years of one of the most gifted men that
+Europe has ever seen. I have quoted many of his letters. I will add one
+more passage, written near the end of his life, very touching and
+pathetic:--
+
+'Hercules,' he said, 'could not fight two monsters at once; while I,
+poor wretch, have lions, cerberuses, cancers, scorpions every day at my
+sword's point; not to mention smaller vermin--rats, mosquitoes, bugs,
+and fleas. My troops of friends are turned to enemies. At dinner-tables
+or social gatherings, in churches and king's courts, in public carriage
+or public flyboat, scandal pursues me, and calumny defiles my name.
+Every goose now hisses at Erasmus; and it is worse than being stoned,
+once for all, like Stephen, or shot with arrows like Sebastian.
+
+'They attack me now even for my Latin style, and spatter me with
+epigrams. Fame I would have parted with; but to be the sport of
+blackguards--to be pelted with potsherds and dirt and ordure--is not
+this worse than death?
+
+'There is no rest for me in my age, unless I join Luther; and I cannot,
+for I cannot accept his doctrines. Sometimes I am stung with a desire to
+avenge my wrongs; but I say to myself, "Will you, to gratify your
+spleen, raise your hand against your mother the Church, who begot you at
+the font and fed you with the word of God?" I cannot do it. Yet I
+understand now how Arius, and Tertullian, and Wickliff were driven into
+schism. The theologians say I am their enemy. Why? Because I bade monks
+remember their vows; because I told parsons to leave their wranglings
+and read the Bible; because I told popes and cardinals to look at the
+Apostles, and make themselves more like to them. If this is to be their
+enemy, then indeed I have injured them.'
+
+This was almost the last. The stone, advancing years, and incessant toil
+had worn him to a shred. The clouds grew blacker. News came from England
+that his dear friends More and Fisher had died upon the scaffold. He had
+long ceased to care for life; and death, almost as sudden as he had
+longed for, gave him peace at last.
+
+So ended Desiderius Erasmus, the world's idol for so many years; and
+dying heaped with undeserved but too intelligible anathemas, seeing all
+that he had laboured for swept away by the whirlwind.
+
+Do not let me lead you to undervalue him. Without Erasmus, Luther would
+have been impossible; and Erasmus really succeeded--so much of him as
+deserved to succeed--in Luther's victory.
+
+He was brilliantly gifted. His industry never tired. His intellect was
+true to itself; and no worldly motives ever tempted him into
+insincerity. He was even far braver than he professed to be. Had he been
+brought to the trial, he would have borne it better than many a man who
+boasted louder of his courage.
+
+And yet, in his special scheme for remodelling the mind of Europe, he
+failed hopelessly--almost absurdly. He believed, himself, that his work
+was spoilt by the Reformation; but, in fact, under no conditions could
+any more have come of it.
+
+Literature and cultivation will feed life when life exists already; and
+toleration and latitudinarianism are well enough when mind and
+conscience are awake and energetic of themselves.
+
+When there is no spiritual life at all; when men live only for
+themselves and for sensual pleasure; when religion is superstition, and
+conscience a name, and God an idol half feared and half despised--then,
+for the restoration of the higher nature in man, qualities are needed
+different in kind from any which Erasmus possessed.
+
+And now to go back to Luther. I cannot tell you all that Luther did; it
+would be to tell you all the story of the German Reformation. I want you
+rather to consider the kind of man that Luther was, and to see in his
+character how he came to achieve what he did.
+
+You remember that the Elector of Saxony, after the Diet of Worms, sent
+him to the Castle of Wartburg, to prevent him from being murdered or
+kidnapped. He remained there many months; and during that time the old
+ecclesiastical institutions of Germany were burning like a North
+American forest. The monasteries were broken up; the estates were
+appropriated by the nobles; the monks were sent wandering into the
+world. The bishops looked helplessly on while their ancient spiritual
+dominion was torn to pieces and trodden under foot. The Elector of
+Saxony, the Landgrave of Hesse, and several more of the princes,
+declared for the Reformation. The Protestants had a majority in the
+Diet, and controlled the force of the empire. Charles the Fifth, busy
+with his French wars, and in want of money, dared not press questions to
+a crisis which he had not power to cope with; and he was obliged for a
+time to recognise what he could not prevent. You would have thought
+Luther would have been well pleased to see the seed which he had sown
+bear fruit so rapidly; yet it was exactly while all this was going on
+that he experienced those temptations of the devil of which he has left
+so wonderful an account.
+
+We shall have our own opinions on the nature of these apparitions. But
+Luther, it is quite certain, believed that Satan himself attacked him in
+person. Satan, he tells us, came often to him, and said, 'See what you
+have done. Behold this ancient Church--this mother of saints--polluted
+and defiled by brutal violence. And it is you--you, a poor ignorant
+monk, that have set the people on to their unholy work. Are you so much
+wiser than the saints who approved the things which you have denounced?
+Popes, bishops, clergy, kings, emperors--are none of these--are not all
+these together--wiser than Martin Luther the monk?'
+
+The devil, he says, caused him great agony by these suggestions. He fell
+into deep fits of doubt and humiliation and despondency. And wherever
+these thoughts came from, we can only say that they were very natural
+thoughts--natural and right. He called them temptations; yet these were
+temptations which would not have occurred to any but a high-minded man.
+
+He had, however, done only what duty had forced him to do. His business
+was to trust to God, who had begun the work and knew what He meant to
+make of it. His doubts and misgivings, therefore, he ascribed to Satan,
+and his enormous imaginative vigour gave body to the voice which was
+speaking in him.
+
+He tells many humorous stories--not always producible--of the means with
+which he encountered his offensive visitor.
+
+'The devil,' he says, 'is very proud, and what he least likes is to be
+laughed at.' One night he was disturbed by something rattling in his
+room; the modern unbeliever will suppose it was a mouse. He got up, lit
+a candle, searched the apartment through, and could find nothing--the
+Evil One was indisputably there.
+
+'Oh!' he said, 'it is you, is it?' He returned to bed, and went to
+sleep.
+
+Think as you please about the cause of the noise, but remember that
+Luther had not the least doubt that he was alone in the room with the
+actual devil, who, if he could not overcome his soul, could at least
+twist his neck in a moment--and then think what courage there must have
+been in a man who could deliberately sleep in such a presence!
+
+During his retirement he translated the Bible. The confusion at last
+became so desperate that he could no longer be spared; and, believing
+that he was certain to be destroyed, he left Wartburg and returned to
+Wittenberg. Death was always before him as supremely imminent. He used
+to say that it would be a great disgrace to the Pope if he died in his
+bed. He was wanted once at Leipsic. His friends said if he went there
+Duke George would kill him.
+
+'Duke George!' he said; 'I would go to Leipsic if it rained Duke Georges
+for nine days!'
+
+No such cataclysm of Duke Georges happily took place. The single one
+there was would have gladly been mischievous if he could; but Luther
+outlived him--lived for twenty-four years after this, in continued toil,
+re-shaping the German Church, and giving form to its new doctrine.
+
+Sacerdotalism, properly so called, was utterly abolished. The
+corruptions of the Church had all grown out of one root--the notion that
+the Christian priesthood possesses mystical power, conferred through
+episcopal ordination.
+
+Religion, as Luther conceived it, did not consist in certain things done
+to and for a man by a so-called priest. It was the devotion of each
+individual soul to the service of God. Masses were nothing, and
+absolution was nothing; and a clergyman differed only from a layman in
+being set apart for the especial duties of teaching and preaching.
+
+I am not concerned to defend Luther's view in this matter. It is a
+matter of fact only, that in getting rid of episcopal ordination, he
+dried up the fountain from which the mechanical and idolatrous
+conceptions of religion had sprung; and, in consequence, the religious
+life of Germany has expanded with the progress of knowledge, while
+priesthoods everywhere cling to the formulas of the past, in which they
+live, and move, and have their being.
+
+Enough of this.
+
+The peculiar doctrine which has passed into Europe under Luther's name
+is known as Justification by Faith. Bandied about as a watchword of
+party, it has by this time hardened into a formula, and has become
+barren as the soil of a trodden footpath. As originally proclaimed by
+Luther, it contained the deepest of moral truths. It expressed what was,
+and is, and must be, in one language or another, to the end of time, the
+conviction of every generous-minded man.
+
+The service of God, as Luther learnt it from the monks, was a thing of
+desert and reward. So many good works done, so much to the right page in
+the great book; where the stock proved insufficient, there was the
+reserve fund of the merits of the saints, which the Church dispensed for
+money to those who needed.
+
+'Merit!' Luther thought. 'What merit can there be in such a poor caitiff
+as man? The better a man is--the more clearly he sees how little he is
+good for, the greater mockery it seems to attribute to him the notion of
+having deserved reward.'
+
+'Miserable creatures that we are!' he said; 'we earn our bread in sin.
+Till we are seven years old, we do nothing but eat and drink and sleep
+and play; from seven to twenty-one we study four hours a day, the rest
+of it we run about and amuse ourselves; then we work till fifty, and
+then we grow again to be children. We sleep half our lives; we give God
+a tenth of our time: and yet we think that with our good works we can
+merit heaven. What have I been doing to-day? I have talked for two
+hours; I have been at meals three hours; I have been idle four hours!
+Ah, enter not into judgment with thy servant, O Lord!'
+
+A perpetual struggle. For ever to be falling, yet to rise again and
+stumble forward with eyes turned to heaven--this was the best which
+would ever come of man. It was accepted in its imperfection by the
+infinite grace of God, who pities mortal weakness, and accepts the
+intention for the deed--who, when there is a sincere desire to serve
+Him, overlooks the shortcomings of infirmity.
+
+Do you say such teaching leads to disregard of duty? All doctrines, when
+petrified into formulas, lead to that. But, as Luther said, 'where real
+faith is, a good life follows, as light follows the sun; faint and
+clouded, yet ever struggling to break through the mist which envelopes
+it, and welcoming the roughest discipline which tends to clear and raise
+it.
+
+'The barley,' he says, in a homely but effective image--'the barley
+which we brew, the flax of which we weave our garments, must be bruised
+and torn ere they come to the use for which they are grown. So must
+Christians suffer. The natural creature must be combed and threshed. The
+old Adam must die, for the higher life to begin. If man is to rise to
+nobleness, he must first be slain.'
+
+In modern language, the poet Goethe tells us the same truth. 'The
+natural man,' he says, 'is like the ore out of the iron mine. It is
+smelted in the furnace; it is forged into bars upon the anvil. A new
+nature is at last forced upon it, and it is made steel.'
+
+It was this doctrine--it was this truth rather (the word doctrine
+reminds one of quack medicines)--which, quickening in Luther's mind,
+gave Europe its new life. It was the flame which, beginning with a small
+spark, kindled the hearth-fires in every German household.
+
+Luther's own life was a model of quiet simplicity. He remained poor. He
+might have had money if he had wished; but he chose rather, amidst his
+enormous labour, to work at a turning-lathe for his livelihood.
+
+He was sociable, cheerful, fond of innocent amusements, and delighted to
+encourage them. His table-talk, collected by his friends, makes one of
+the most brilliant books in the world. He had no monkish theories about
+the necessity of abstinence; but he was temperate from habit and
+principle. A salt herring and a hunch of bread was his ordinary meal;
+and he was once four days without food of any sort, having emptied his
+larder among the poor.
+
+All kinds of people thrust themselves on Luther for help. Flights of
+nuns from the dissolved convents came to him to provide for them--naked,
+shivering creatures, with scarce a rag to cover them. Eight florins were
+wanted once to provide clothes for some of them. 'Eight florins!' he
+said; 'and where am I to get eight florins?' Great people had made him
+presents of plate: it all went to market to be turned into clothes and
+food for the wretched.
+
+Melancthon says that, unless provoked, he was usually very gentle and
+tolerant. He recognised, and was almost alone in recognising, the
+necessity of granting liberty of conscience. No one hated Popery more
+than he did, yet he said:--
+
+'The Papists must bear with us, and we with them. If they will not
+follow us, we have no right to force them. Wherever they can, they will
+hang, burn, behead, and strangle us. I shall be persecuted as long as I
+live, and most likely killed. But it must come to this at last--every
+man must be allowed to believe according to his conscience, and answer
+for his belief to his Maker.'
+
+Erasmus said of Luther that there were two natures in him: sometimes he
+wrote like an apostle--sometimes like a raving ribald.
+
+Doubtless, Luther could be impolite on occasions. When he was angry,
+invectives rushed from him like boulder rocks down a mountain torrent
+in flood. We need not admire all that; in quiet times it is hard to
+understand it.
+
+Here, for instance, is a specimen. Our Henry the Eighth, who began life
+as a highly orthodox sovereign, broke a lance with Luther for the
+Papacy.
+
+Luther did not credit Henry with a composition which was probably his
+own after all. He thought the king was put forward by some of the
+English bishops--'Thomists' he calls them, as men who looked for the
+beginning and end of wisdom to the writings of Thomas Aquinas.
+
+'Courage,' he exclaimed to them, 'swine that you are! burn me then, if
+you can and dare. Here I am; do your worst upon me. Scatter my ashes to
+all the winds--spread them through all seas. My spirit shall pursue you
+still. Living, I am the foe of the Papacy; and dead, I will be its foe
+twice over. Hogs of Thomists! Luther shall be the bear in your way--the
+lion in your path. Go where you will, Luther shall cross you. Luther
+shall leave you neither peace nor rest till he has crushed in your brows
+of brass and dashed out your iron brains.'
+
+Strong expressions; but the times were not gentle. The prelates whom he
+supposed himself to be addressing were the men who filled our Smithfield
+with the reek of burning human flesh.
+
+Men of Luther's stature are like the violent forces of Nature
+herself--terrible when roused, and in repose, majestic and beautiful. Of
+vanity he had not a trace. 'Do not call yourselves Lutherans,' he said;
+'call yourselves Christians. Who and what is Luther? Has Luther been
+crucified for the world?'
+
+I mentioned his love of music. His songs and hymns were the expression
+of the very inmost heart of the German people. 'Music' he called 'the
+grandest and sweetest gift of God to man.' 'Satan hates music,' he said;
+'he knows how it drives the evil spirit out of us.'
+
+He was extremely interested in all natural things. Before the science of
+botany was dreamt of, Luther had divined the principle of vegetable
+life. 'The principle of marriage runs through all creation,' he said;
+'and flowers as well as animals are male and female.'
+
+A garden called out bursts of eloquence from him; beautiful sometimes as
+a finished piece of poetry.
+
+One April day as he was watching the swelling buds, he exclaimed:--
+
+'Praise be to God the Creator, who out of a dead world makes all alive
+again. See those shoots how they burgeon and swell. Image of the
+resurrection of the dead! Winter is death--summer is the resurrection.
+Between them lie spring and autumn, as the period of uncertainty and
+change. The proverb says--
+
+    Trust not a day
+    Ere birth of May.
+
+Let us pray our Father in heaven to give us this day our daily bread.'
+
+'We are in the dawn of a new era,' he said another time; 'we are
+beginning to think something of the natural world which was ruined in
+Adam's fall. We are learning to see all round us the greatness and glory
+of the Creator. We can see the Almighty hand--the infinite goodness--in
+the humblest flower. We praise Him--we thank Him--we glorify Him--we
+recognise in creation the power of His word. He spoke and it was there.
+The stone of the peach is hard; but the soft kernel swells and bursts it
+when the time comes. An egg--what a thing is that! If an egg had never
+been seen in Europe, and a traveller had brought one from Calcutta, how
+would all the world have wondered!'
+
+And again:--
+
+'If a man could make a single rose, we should give him an empire; yet
+roses, and flowers no less beautiful, are scattered in profusion over
+the world, and no one regards them.'
+
+There are infinite other things which I should like to tell you about
+Luther, but time wears on. I must confine what more I have to say to a
+single matter--for which more than any other he has been blamed--I mean
+his marriage.
+
+He himself, a monk and a priest, had taken a vow of celibacy. The person
+whom he married had been a nun, and as such had taken a vow of celibacy
+also.
+
+The marriage was unquestionably no affair of passion. Luther had come to
+middle age when it was brought about, when temptations of that kind lose
+their power; and among the many accusations which have been brought
+against his early life, no one has ventured to charge him with
+incontinence. His taking a wife was a grave act deliberately performed;
+and it was either meant as a public insult to established ecclesiastical
+usage, or else he considered that the circumstances of the time required
+it of him.
+
+Let us see what those circumstances were. The enforcement of celibacy on
+the clergy was, in Luther's opinion, both iniquitous in itself, and
+productive of enormous immorality. The impurity of the religious orders
+had been the jest of satirists for a hundred years. It had been the
+distress and perplexity of pious and serious persons. Luther himself was
+impressed with profound pity for the poor men, who were cut off from the
+natural companionship which nature had provided for them--who were thus
+exposed to temptations which they ought not to have been called upon to
+resist.
+
+The dissolution of the religious houses had enormously complicated the
+problem. Germany was covered with friendless and homeless men and women
+adrift upon the world. They came to Luther to tell them what to do; and
+advice was of little service without example.
+
+The world had grown accustomed to immorality in such persons. They might
+have lived together in concubinage, and no one would have thought much
+about it. Their marriage was regarded with a superstitious terror as a
+kind of incest.
+
+Luther, on the other hand, regarded marriage as the natural and healthy
+state in which clergy as well as laity were intended to live. Immorality
+was hateful to him as a degradation of a sacrament--impious, loathsome,
+and dishonoured. Marriage was the condition in which humanity was at
+once purest, best, and happiest.
+
+For himself, he had become inured to a single life. He had borne the
+injustice of his lot, when the burden had been really heavy. But time
+and custom had lightened the load; and had there been nothing at issue
+but his own personal happiness, he would not have given further occasion
+to the malice of his enemies.
+
+But tens of thousands of poor creatures were looking to him to guide
+them--guide them by precept, or guide them by example. He had satisfied
+himself that the vow of celibacy had been unlawfully imposed both on him
+and them--that, as he would put it, it had been a snare devised by the
+devil. He saw that all eyes were fixed on him--that it was no use to
+tell others that they might marry, unless he himself led the way, and
+married first. And it was characteristic of him that, having resolved to
+do the thing, he did it in the way most likely to show the world his
+full thought upon the matter.
+
+That this was his motive, there is no kind of doubt whatever.
+
+'We may be able to live unmarried,' he said; 'but in these days we must
+protest in deed as well as word, against the doctrine of celibacy. It is
+an invention of Satan. Before I took my wife, I had made up my mind that
+I must marry some one: and had I been overtaken by illness, I should
+have betrothed myself to some pious maiden.'
+
+He asked nobody's advice. Had he let his intention be suspected, the
+moderate respectable people--the people who thought like Erasmus--those
+who wished well to what was good, but wished also to stand well with the
+world's opinion--such persons as these would have overwhelmed him with
+remonstrances. 'When you marry,' he said to a friend in a similar
+situation, 'be quiet about it, or mountains will rise between you and
+your wishes. If I had not been swift and secret, I should have had the
+whole world in my way.'
+
+Catherine Bora, the lady whom he chose for his wife, was a nun of good
+family, left homeless and shelterless by the breaking-up of her convent.
+She was an ordinary, unimaginative body--plain in person and plain in
+mind, in no sense whatever a heroine of romance--but a decent, sensible,
+commonplace Haus Frau.
+
+The age of romance was over with both of them; yet, for all that, never
+marriage brought a plainer blessing with it. They began with respect,
+and ended with steady affection.
+
+The happiest life on earth, Luther used to say, is with a pious, good
+wife; in peace and quiet, contented with a little, and giving God
+thanks.
+
+He spoke from his own experience. His Katie, as he called her, was not
+clever, and he had numerous stories to tell of the beginning of their
+adventures together.
+
+'The first year of married life is an odd business,' he says. 'At meals,
+where you used to be alone, you are yourself and somebody else. When you
+wake in the morning, there are a pair of tails close to you on the
+pillow. My Katie used to sit with me when I was at work. She thought she
+ought not to be silent. She did not know what to say, so she would ask
+me.
+
+'"Herr Doctor, is not the master of the ceremonies in Prussia the
+brother of the Margrave?"'
+
+She was an odd woman.
+
+'Doctor,' she said to him one day, 'how is it that under Popery we
+prayed so often and so earnestly, and now our prayers are cold and
+seldom?'
+
+Katie might have spoken for herself. Luther, to the last, spent hours of
+every day in prayer. He advised her to read the Bible a little more. She
+said she had read enough of it, and knew half of it by heart. 'Ah!' he
+said, 'here begins weariness of the word of God. One day new lights will
+rise up, and the Scriptures will be despised and be flung away into the
+corner.'
+
+His relations with his children were singularly beautiful. The
+recollection of his own boyhood made him especially gentle with them,
+and their fancies and imaginations delighted him.
+
+Children, to him, were images of unfallen nature. 'Children,' he said,
+'imagine heaven a place where rivers run with cream, and trees are hung
+with cakes and plums. Do not blame them. They are but showing their
+simple, natural, unquestioning, all-believing faith.'
+
+One day, after dinner, when the fruit was on the table, the children
+were watching it with longing eyes. 'That is the way,' he said, 'in
+which we grown Christians ought to look for the Judgment Day.'
+
+His daughter Magdalen died when she was fourteen. He speaks of his loss
+with the unaffected simplicity of natural grief, yet with the faith of a
+man who had not the slightest doubt into whose hands his treasure was
+passing. Perfect nature and perfect piety. Neither one emotion nor the
+other disguised or suppressed.
+
+You will have gathered something, I hope, from these faint sketches, of
+what Luther was; you will be able to see how far he deserves to be
+called by our modern new lights, a Philistine or a heretic. We will now
+return to the subject with which we began, and resume, in a general
+conclusion, the argument of these Lectures.
+
+In part, but not wholly, it can be done in Luther's words.
+
+One regrets that Luther did not know Erasmus better, or knowing him,
+should not have treated him with more forbearance.
+
+Erasmus spoke of him for the most part with kindness. He interceded for
+him, defended him, and only with the utmost reluctance was driven into
+controversy with him.
+
+Luther, on the other hand, saw in Erasmus a man who was false to his
+convictions; who played with truth; who, in his cold, sarcastic
+scepticism, believed in nothing--scarcely even in God. He was unaware of
+his own obligations to him, for Erasmus was not a person who would
+trumpet out his own good deeds.
+
+Thus Luther says:--
+
+'All you who honour Christ, I pray you hate Erasmus. He is a scoffer and
+a mocker. He speaks in riddles; and jests at Popery and Gospel, and
+Christ and God, with his uncertain speeches. He might have served the
+Gospel if he would, but, like Judas, he has betrayed the Son of Man with
+a kiss. He is not with us, and he is not with our foes; and I say with
+Joshua, Choose whom ye will serve. He thinks we should trim to the
+times, and hang our cloaks to the wind. He is himself his own first
+object; and as he lived, he died.
+
+'I take Erasmus to be the worst enemy that Christ has had for a thousand
+years. Intellect does not understand religion, and when it comes to the
+things of God, it laughs at them. He scoffs like Lucian, and by-and-by
+he will say, Behold, how are these among the saints whose life we
+counted for folly.
+
+'I bid you, therefore, take heed of Erasmus. He treats theology as a
+fool's jest, and the Gospel as a fable good for the ignorant to
+believe.'
+
+Of Erasmus personally, much of this was unjust and untrue. Erasmus knew
+many things which it would have been well for Luther to have known; and,
+as a man, he was better than his principles.
+
+But if for the name of Erasmus we substitute the theory of human things
+which Erasmus represented, between that creed and Luther there is, and
+must be, an eternal antagonism.
+
+If to be true in heart and just in act are the first qualities necessary
+for the elevation of humanity--if without these all else is worthless,
+intellectual culture cannot give what intellectual culture does not
+require or imply. You cultivate the plant which has already life; you
+will waste your labour in cultivating a stone. The moral life is the
+counterpart of the natural, alike mysterious in its origin, and alike
+visible only in its effects.
+
+Intellectual gifts are like gifts of strength, or wealth, or rank, or
+worldly power--splendid instruments if nobly used--but requiring
+qualities to use them nobler and better than themselves.
+
+The rich man may spend his wealth on vulgar luxury. The clever man may
+live for intellectual enjoyment--refined enjoyment it may be--but
+enjoyment still, and still centering in self.
+
+If the spirit of Erasmus had prevailed, it would have been with modern
+Europe as with the Roman Empire in its decay. The educated would have
+been mere sceptics; the multitude would have been sunk in superstition.
+In both alike all would have perished which deserves the name of
+manliness.
+
+And this leads me to the last observation that I have to make to you. In
+the sciences, the philosopher leads; the rest of us take on trust what
+he tells us. The spiritual progress of mankind has followed the opposite
+course. Each forward step has been made first among the people, and the
+last converts have been among the learned.
+
+The explanation is not far to look for. In the sciences there is no
+temptation of self-interest to mislead. In matters which affect life and
+conduct, the interests and prejudices of the cultivated classes are
+enlisted on the side of the existing order of things, and their better
+trained faculties and larger acquirements serve only to find them
+arguments for believing what they wish to believe.
+
+Simpler men have less to lose; they come more in contact with the
+realities of life, and they learn wisdom in the experience of suffering.
+
+Thus it was that when the learned and the wise turned away from
+Christianity, the fishermen of the Galilean lake listened, and a new
+life began for mankind. A miner's son converted Germany to the
+Reformation. The London artisans and the peasants of Buckinghamshire
+went to the stake for doctrines which were accepted afterwards as a
+second revelation.
+
+So it has been; so it will be to the end. When a great teacher comes
+again upon the earth, he will find his first disciples where Christ
+found them and Luther found them. Had Luther written for the learned,
+the words which changed the face of Europe would have slumbered in
+impotence on the bookshelves.
+
+In appealing to the German nation, you will agree, I think, with me,
+that he did well and not ill; you will not sacrifice his great name to
+the disdain of a shallow philosophy, or to the grimacing of a dead
+superstition, whose ghost is struggling out of its grave.
+
+
+
+
+THE INFLUENCE OF THE REFORMATION ON THE SCOTTISH CHARACTER:
+
+A LECTURE DELIVERED AT EDINBURGH, NOVEMBER 1865.
+
+
+I have undertaken to speak this evening on the effects of the
+Reformation in Scotland, and I consider myself a very bold person to
+have come here on any such undertaking. In the first place, the subject
+is one with which it is presumptuous for a stranger to meddle. Great
+national movements can only be understood properly by the people whose
+disposition they represent. We say ourselves about our own history that
+only Englishmen can properly comprehend it. The late Chevalier Bunsen
+once said to me of our own Reformation in England, that, for his part,
+he could not conceive how we had managed to come by such a thing. We
+seemed to him to be an obdurate, impenetrable, stupid people, hide-bound
+by tradition and precedent, and too self-satisfied to be either willing
+or able to take in new ideas upon any theoretic subject whatever,
+especially German ideas. That is to say, he could not get inside the
+English mind. He did not know that some people go furthest and go
+fastest when they look one way and row the other. It is the same with
+every considerable nation. They work out their own political and
+spiritual lives, through tempers, humours, and passions peculiar to
+themselves; and the same disposition which produces the result is
+required to interpret it afterwards. This is one reason why I should
+feel diffident about what I have undertaken. Another is, that I do not
+conceal from myself that the subject is an exceedingly delicate one. The
+blazing passions of those stormy sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are
+no longer, happily, at their old temperature. The story of those times
+can now be told or listened to with something like impartiality. Yet, if
+people no longer hate each other for such matters, the traditions of the
+struggle survive in strong opinions and sentiments, which it is easy to
+wound without intending it.
+
+My own conviction with respect to all great social and religious
+convulsions is the extremely commonplace one that much is to be said on
+both sides. I believe that nowhere and at no time any such struggle can
+take place on a large scale unless each party is contending for
+something which has a great deal of truth in it. Where the right is
+plain, honest, wise, and noble-minded men are all on one side; and only
+rogues and fools are on the other. Where the wise and good are divided,
+the truth is generally found to be divided also. But this is precisely
+what cannot be admitted as long as the conflict continues. Men begin to
+fight about things when reason and argument fail to convince them. They
+make up in passion what is wanting in logic. Each side believes that all
+the right is theirs--that their enemies have all the bad qualities which
+their language contains names for; and even now, on the subject on which
+I have to talk to-night, one has but to take up any magazine, review,
+newspaper, or party organ of any kind which touches on it, to see that
+opinion is still Whig or Tory, Cavalier or Roundhead, Protestant or
+Catholic, as the case may be. The unfortunate person who is neither
+wholly one nor wholly the other is in the position of Hamlet's 'baser
+nature,' 'between the incensed points of mighty opposites.' He is the
+Laodicean, neither cold nor hot, whom decent people consider bad
+company. He pleases no one, and hurts the sensitiveness of all.
+
+Here, then, are good reasons why I should have either not come here at
+all, or else should have chosen some other matter to talk about. In
+excuse for persisting, I can but say that the subject is one about which
+I have been led by circumstances to read and think considerably; and
+though, undoubtedly, each of us knows more about himself and his own
+affairs than anyone else can possibly know, yet a stranger's eye will
+sometimes see things which escape those more immediately interested; and
+I allow myself to hope that I may have something to say not altogether
+undeserving your attention. I shall touch as little as possible on
+questions of opinion; and if I tread by accident on any sensitive
+point, I must trust to your kindness to excuse my awkwardness.
+
+Well, then, if we look back on Scotland as it stood in the first quarter
+of the sixteenth century, we see a country in which the old feudal
+organisation continued, so far as it generally affected the people, more
+vigorous than in any other part of civilised Europe. Elsewhere, the
+growth of trade and of large towns had created a middle class, with an
+organisation of their own, independent of the lords. In Scotland, the
+towns were still scanty and poor; such as they were, they were for the
+most part under the control of the great nobleman who happened to live
+nearest to them; and a people, as in any sense independent of lords,
+knights, abbots, or prelates, under whose rule they were born, had as
+yet no existence. The tillers of the soil (and the soil was very
+miserably tilled) lived under the shadow of the castle or the monastery.
+They followed their lord's fortunes, fought his battles, believed in his
+politics, and supported him loyally in his sins or his good deeds, as
+the case might be. There was much moral beauty in the life of those
+times. The loyal attachment of man to man--of liege servant to liege
+lord--of all forms under which human beings can live and work together,
+has most of grace and humanity about it. It cannot go on without mutual
+confidence and affection--mutual benefits given and received. The length
+of time which the system lasted proves that in the main there must have
+been a fine fidelity in the people--truth, justice, generosity in their
+leaders. History brings down many bad stories to us out of those times;
+just as in these islands nowadays you may find bad instances of the
+abuses of rights of property. You may find stories--too many also--of
+husbands ill-using their wives, and so on. Yet we do not therefore lay
+the blame on marriage, or suppose that the institution of property on
+the whole does more harm than good. I do not doubt that down in that
+feudal system somewhere lie the roots of some of the finest qualities in
+the European peoples.
+
+So much for the temporal side of the matter; and the spiritual was not
+very unlike it. As no one lived independently, in our modern sense of
+the word, so no one thought independently. The minds of men were looked
+after by a Church which, for a long time also, did, I suppose, very
+largely fulfil the purpose for which it was intended. It kept alive and
+active the belief that the world was created and governed by a just
+Being, who hated sins and crimes, and steadily punished such things. It
+taught men that they had immortal souls, and that this little bit of
+life was an entirely insignificant portion of their real existence. It
+taught these truths, indeed, along with a great deal which we now
+consider to have been a mistake--a great many theories of earthly things
+which have since passed away, and special opinions clothed in outward
+forms and ritual observances which we here, most of us at least, do not
+think essential for our soul's safety. But mistakes like these are
+hurtful only when persisted in in the face of fuller truth, after truth
+has been discovered. Only a very foolish man would now uphold the
+Ptolemaic astronomy. But the Ptolemaic astronomy, when first invented,
+was based on real if incomplete observations, and formed a groundwork
+without which further progress in that science would have been probably
+impossible. The theories and ceremonials of the Catholic Church suited
+well with an age in which little was known and much was imagined: when
+superstition was active and science was not yet born. When I am told
+here or anywhere that the Middle Ages were times of mere spiritual
+darkness and priestly oppression, with the other usual formulas, I say,
+as I said before, if the Catholic Church, for those many centuries that
+it reigned supreme over all men's consciences, was no better than the
+thing which we see in the generation which immediately preceded the
+Reformation, it could not have existed at all. You might as well argue
+that the old fading tree could never have been green and young.
+Institutions do not live on lies. They either live by the truth and
+usefulness which there is in them, or they do not live at all.
+
+So things went on for several hundred years. There were scandals enough,
+and crimes enough, and feuds, and murders, and civil wars. Systems,
+however good, cannot prevent evil. They can but compress it within
+moderate and tolerable limits. I should conclude, however, that,
+measuring by the average happiness of the masses of the people, the
+mediaeval institutions were very well suited for the inhabitants of these
+countries as they then were. Adam Smith and Bentham themselves could
+hardly have mended them if they had tried.
+
+But times change, and good things as well as bad grow old and have to
+die. The heart of the matter which the Catholic Church had taught was
+the fear of God; but the language of it and the formulas of it were made
+up of human ideas and notions about things which the mere increase of
+human knowledge gradually made incredible. To trace the reason of this
+would lead us a long way. It is intelligible enough, but it would take
+us into subjects better avoided here. It is enough to say that, while
+the essence of religion remains the same, the mode in which it is
+expressed changes and has changed--changes as living languages change
+and become dead, as institutions change, as forms of government change,
+as opinions on all things in heaven and earth change, as half the
+theories held at this time among ourselves will probably change--that
+is, the outward and mortal parts of them. Thus the Catholic formulas,
+instead of living symbols, become dead and powerless cabalistic signs.
+The religion lost its hold on the conscience and the intellect, and the
+effect, singularly enough, appeared in the shepherds before it made
+itself felt among the flocks. From the see of St. Peter to the far
+monasteries in the Hebrides or the Isle of Arran, the laity were shocked
+and scandalised at the outrageous doings of high cardinals, prelates,
+priests, and monks. It was clear enough that these great personages
+themselves did not believe what they taught; so why should the people
+believe it? And serious men, to whom the fear of God was a living
+reality, began to look into the matter for themselves. The first steps
+everywhere were taken with extreme reluctance; and had the popes and
+cardinals been wise, they would have taken the lead in the enquiry,
+cleared their teaching of its lumber, and taken out a new lease of life
+both for it and for themselves. An infallible pope and an infallible
+council might have done something in this way, if good sense had been
+among the attributes of their omniscience. What they did do was
+something very different. It was as if, when the new astronomy began to
+be taught, the professors of that science in all the universities of
+Europe had met together and decided that Ptolemy's cycles and epicycles
+were eternal verities; that the theory of the rotation of the earth was
+and must be a damnable heresy; and had invited the civil authorities to
+help them in putting down by force all doctrines but their own. This, or
+something very like it, was the position taken up in theology by the
+Council of Trent. The bishops assembled there did not reason. They
+decided by vote that certain things were true, and were to be believed;
+and the only arguments which they condescended to use were fire and
+faggot, and so on. How it fared with them, and with this experiment of
+theirs, we all know tolerably well.
+
+The effect was very different in different countries. Here, in Scotland,
+the failure was most marked and complete, but the way in which it came
+about was in many ways peculiar. In Germany, Luther was supported by
+princes and nobles. In England, the Reformation rapidly mixed itself up
+with politics and questions of rival jurisdiction. Both in England and
+Germany, the revolution, wherever it established itself, was accepted
+early by the Crown or the Government, and by them legally recognised.
+Here, it was far otherwise: the Protestantism of Scotland was the
+creation of the commons, as in turn the commons may be said to have been
+created by Protestantism. There were many young high-spirited men,
+belonging to the noblest families in the country, who were among the
+earliest to rally round the Reforming preachers; but authority, both in
+Church and State, set the other way. The congregations who gathered in
+the fields around Wishart and John Knox were, for the most part,
+farmers, labourers, artisans, tradesmen, or the smaller gentry; and
+thus, for the first time in Scotland, there was created an organisation
+of men detached from the lords and from the Church--brave, noble,
+resolute, daring people, bound together by a sacred cause, unrecognised
+by the leaders whom they had followed hitherto with undoubting
+allegiance. That spirit which grew in time to be the ruling power of
+Scotland--that which formed eventually its laws and its creed, and
+determined its after fortunes as a nation--had its first germ in these
+half-outlawed wandering congregations. In this it was that the
+Reformation in Scotland differed from the Reformation in any other part
+of Europe. Elsewhere it found a middle class existing--created already
+by trade or by other causes. It raised and elevated them, but it did not
+materially affect their political condition. In Scotland, the commons,
+as an organised body, were simply created by religion. Before the
+Reformation they had no political existence; and therefore it has been
+that the print of their origin has gone so deeply into their social
+constitution. On them, and them only, the burden of the work of the
+Reformation was eventually thrown; and when they triumphed at last, it
+was inevitable that both they and it should react one upon the other.
+
+How this came about I must endeavour to describe, although I can give
+but a brief sketch of an exceedingly complicated matter. Everybody knows
+the part played by the aristocracy of Scotland in the outward
+revolution, when the Reformation first became the law of the land. It
+would seem at first sight as if it had been the work of the whole
+nation--as if it had been a thing on which high and low were heartily
+united. Yet on the first glance below the surface you see that the
+greater part of the noble lords concerned in that business cared nothing
+about the Reformation at all; or, if they cared, they rather disliked it
+than otherwise. How, then, did they come to act as they did? or, how
+came they to permit a change of such magnitude when they had so little
+sympathy with it? I must make a slight circuit to look for the
+explanation.
+
+The one essentially noble feature in the great families of Scotland was
+their patriotism. They loved Scotland and Scotland's freedom with a
+passion proportioned to the difficulty with which they had defended
+their liberties; and yet the wisest of them had long seen that, sooner
+or later, union with England was inevitable; and the question was, how
+that union was to be brought about--how they were to make sure that,
+when it came, they should take their place at England's side as equals,
+and not as a dependency. It had been arranged that the little Mary
+Stuart should marry our English Edward VI., and the difficulty was to be
+settled so. They would have been contented, they said, if Scotland had
+had the 'lad' and England the 'lass.' As it stood, they broke their
+bargain, and married the little queen away into France, to prevent the
+Protector Somerset from getting hold of her. Then, however, appeared an
+opposite danger; the queen would become a Frenchwoman; her French mother
+governed Scotland with French troops and French ministers; the country
+would become a French province, and lose its freedom equally. Thus an
+English party began again; and as England was then in the middle of her
+great anti-Church revolution, so the Scottish nobles began to be
+anti-Church. It was not for doctrines: neither they nor their brothers
+in England cared much about doctrines; but in both countries the Church
+was rich--much richer than there seemed any occasion for it to be. Harry
+the Eighth had been sharing among the laity the spoils of the English
+monasteries; the Scotch Lords saw in a similar process the probability
+of a welcome addition to their own scanty incomes. Mary of Guise and the
+French stood by the Church, and the Church stood by them; and so it came
+about that the great families--even those who, like the Hamiltons, were
+most closely connected with France--were tempted over by the bait to the
+other side. They did not want reformed doctrines, but they wanted the
+Church lands; and so they came to patronise, or endure, the Reformers,
+because the Church hated them, and because they weakened the Church; and
+thus for a time, and especially as long as Mary Stuart was Queen of
+France, all classes in Scotland, high and low, seemed to fraternise in
+favour of the revolution.
+
+And it seemed as if the union of the realms could be effected at last,
+at the same juncture, and in connexion with the same movement. Next in
+succession to the Scotch crown, after Mary Stuart, was the house of
+Hamilton. Elizabeth, who had just come to the English throne, was
+supposed to be in want of a husband. The heir of the Hamiltons was of
+her own age, and in years past had been thought of for her by her
+father. What could be more fit than to make a match between those two?
+Send a Scot south to be King of England, find or make some pretext to
+shake off Mary Stuart, who had forsaken her native country, and so join
+the crowns, the 'lass' and the 'lad' being now in the right relative
+position. Scotland would thus annex her old oppressor, and give her a
+new dynasty.
+
+I seem to be straying from the point; but these political schemes had so
+much to do with the actions of the leading men at that time, that the
+story of the Reformation cannot be understood without them. It was thus,
+and with these incongruous objects, that the combination was formed
+which overturned the old Church of Scotland in 1559-60, confiscated its
+possessions, destroyed its religious houses, and changed its creed. The
+French were driven away from Leith by Elizabeth's troops; the Reformers
+took possession of the churches; and the Parliament of 1560 met with a
+clear stage to determine for themselves the future fate of the country.
+Now, I think it certain that, if the Scotch nobility, having once
+accepted the Reformation, had continued loyal to it--especially if
+Elizabeth had met their wishes in the important point of the
+marriage--the form of the Scotch Kirk would have been something
+extremely different from what it in fact became. The people were
+perfectly well inclined to follow their natural leaders if the matters
+on which their hearts were set had received tolerable consideration from
+them, and the democratic form of the ecclesiastical constitution would
+have been inevitably modified. One of the conditions of the proposed
+compact with England was the introduction of the English Liturgy and the
+English Church constitution. This too, at the outset, and with fair
+dealing, would not have been found impossible. But it soon became clear
+that the religious interests of Scotland were the very last thing which
+would receive consideration from any of the high political personages
+concerned. John Knox had dreamt of a constitution like that which he had
+seen working under Calvin at Geneva--a constitution in which the clergy
+as ministers of God should rule all things--rule politically at the
+council board, and rule in private at the fireside. It was soon made
+plain to Knox that Scotland was not Geneva. 'Eh, mon,' said the younger
+Maitland to him, 'then we may all bear the barrow now to build the House
+of the Lord.' Not exactly. The churches were left to the ministers; the
+worldly good things and worldly power remained with the laity; and as to
+religion, circumstances would decide what they would do about that.
+Again, I am not speaking of all the great men of those times. Glencairn,
+Ruthven, young Argyll--above all, the Earl of Moray--really did in some
+degree interest themselves in the Kirk. But what most of them felt was
+perhaps rather broadly expressed by Maitland when he called religion 'a
+bogle of the nursery.' That was the expression which a Scotch statesman
+of those days actually ventured to use. Had Elizabeth been conformable,
+no doubt they would in some sense or other have remained on the side of
+the Reformation. But here, too, there was a serious hitch. Elizabeth
+would not marry Arran. Elizabeth would be no party to any of their
+intrigues. She detested Knox. She detested Protestantism entirely, in
+all shapes in which Knox approved of it. She affronted the nobles on one
+side, she affronted the people on another; and all idea of uniting the
+two crowns after the fashion proposed by the Scotch Parliament she
+utterly and entirely repudiated. She was right enough, perhaps, so far
+as this was concerned; but she left the ruling families extremely
+perplexed as to the course which they would follow. They had allowed the
+country to be revolutionised in the teeth of their own sovereign, and
+what to do next they did not very well know.
+
+It was at this crisis that circumstances came in to their help. Francis
+the Second died. Mary Stuart was left a childless widow. Her connexion
+with the Crown of France was at an end, and all danger on that side to
+the liberties of Scotland at an end also. The Arran scheme having
+failed, she would be a second card as good as the first to play for the
+English Crown--as good as he, or better, for she would have the English
+Catholics on her side. So, careless how it would affect religion, and
+making no condition at all about that, the same men who a year before
+were ready to whistle Mary Stuart down the wind, now invited her back to
+Scotland; the same men who had been the loudest friends of Elizabeth now
+encouraged Mary Stuart to persist in the pretension to the Crown of
+England, which had led to all the past trouble. While in France, she had
+assumed the title of Queen of England. She had promised to abandon it,
+but, finding her own people ready to support her in withdrawing her
+promise, she stood out, insisting that at all events the English
+Parliament should declare her next in the succession; and it was well
+known that, as soon as the succession was made sure in her favour, some
+rascal would be found to put a knife or a bullet into Elizabeth. The
+object of the Scotch nobles was political, national, patriotic. For
+religion it was no great matter either way; and as they had before acted
+with the Protestants, so now they were ready to turn about, and openly
+or tacitly act with the Catholics. Mary Stuart's friends in England and
+on the Continent were Catholics, and therefore it would not do to offend
+them. First, she was allowed to have mass at Holyrood; then there was a
+move for a broader toleration. That one mass, Knox said, was more
+terrible to him than ten thousand armed men landed in the country--and
+he had perfectly good reason for saying so. He thoroughly understood
+that it was the first step towards a counter-revolution which in time
+would cover all Scotland and England, and carry them back to Popery. Yet
+he preached to deaf ears. Even Murray was so bewitched with the notion
+of the English succession, that for a year and a half he ceased to speak
+to Knox; and as it was with Murray, so it was far more with all the
+rest--their zeal for religion was gone no one knew where. Of course
+Elizabeth would not give way. She might as well, she said, herself
+prepare her shroud; and then conspiracies came, and under-ground
+intrigues with the Romanist English noblemen. France and Spain were to
+invade England, Scotland was to open its ports to their fleets, and its
+soil to their armies, giving them a safe base from which to act, and a
+dry road over the Marches to London. And if Scotland had remained
+unchanged from what it had been--had the direction of its fortunes
+remained with the prince and with the nobles, sooner or later it would
+have come to this. But suddenly it appeared that there was a new power
+in this country which no one suspected till it was felt.
+
+The commons of Scotland had hitherto been the creatures of the nobles.
+They had neither will nor opinion of their own. They thought and acted
+in the spirit of their immediate allegiance. No one seems to have dreamt
+that there would be any difficulty in dealing with them if once the
+great families agreed upon a common course. Yet it appeared, when the
+pressure came, that religion, which was the play-thing of the nobles,
+was to the people a clear matter of life and death. They might love
+their country: they might be proud of anything which would add lustre to
+its crown; but if it was to bring back the Pope and Popery--if it
+threatened to bring them back--if it looked that way--they would have
+nothing to do with it; nor would they allow it to be done. Allegiance
+was well enough; but there was a higher allegiance suddenly discovered
+which superseded all earthly considerations. I know nothing finer in
+Scottish history than the way in which the commons of the Lowlands took
+their places by the side of Knox in the great convulsions which
+followed. If all others forsook him, they at least would never forsake
+him while tongue remained to speak and hand remained to strike. Broken
+they might have been, trampled out as the Huguenots at last were
+trampled out in France, had Mary Stuart been less than the most
+imprudent or the most unlucky of sovereigns. But Providence, or the
+folly of those with whom they had to deal, fought for them. I need not
+follow the wild story of the crimes and catastrophes in which Mary
+Stuart's short reign in Scotland closed. Neither is her own share, be it
+great or small, or none at all, in those crimes of any moment to us
+here. It is enough that, both before that strange business and after it,
+when at Holyrood or across the Border, in Sheffield or Tutbury, her ever
+favourite dream was still the English throne. Her road towards it was
+through a Catholic revolution and the murder of Elizabeth. It is enough
+that, both before and after, the aristocracy of Scotland, even those
+among them who had seemed most zealous for the Reformation, were eager
+to support her. John Knox alone, and the commons, whom Knox had raised
+into a political power, remained true.
+
+Much, indeed, is to be said for the Scotch nobles. In the first shock of
+the business at Kirk-o'-Field, they forgot their politics in a sense of
+national disgrace. They sent the queen to Loch Leven. They intended to
+bring her to trial, and, if she was proved guilty, to expose and perhaps
+punish her. All parties for a time agreed in this--even the Hamiltons
+themselves; and had they been left alone they would have done it. But
+they had a perverse neighbour in England, to whom crowned heads were
+sacred. Elizabeth, it might have been thought, would have had no
+particular objection; but Elizabeth had aims of her own which baffled
+calculation. Elizabeth, the representative of revolution, yet detested
+revolutionists. The Reformers in Scotland, the Huguenots in France, the
+insurgents in the United Provinces, were the only friends she had in
+Europe. For her own safety she was obliged to encourage them; yet she
+hated them all, and would at any moment have abandoned them all, if, in
+any other way, she could have secured herself. She might have conquered
+her personal objection to Knox--she could not conquer her aversion to a
+Church which rose out of revolt against authority, which was democratic
+in constitution and republican in politics. When driven into alliance
+with the Scotch Protestants, she angrily and passionately disclaimed any
+community of creed with them; and for subjects to sit in judgment on
+their prince was a precedent which she would not tolerate. Thus she
+flung her mantle over Mary Stuart. She told the Scotch Council here in
+Edinburgh that, if they hurt a hair of her head, she would harry their
+country, and hang them all on the trees round the town, if she could
+find any trees there for that purpose. She tempted the queen to England
+with her fair promises after the battle of Langside, and then, to her
+astonishment, imprisoned her. Yet she still shielded her reputation,
+still fostered her party in Scotland, still incessantly threatened and
+incessantly endeavoured to restore her. She kept her safe, because, in
+her lucid intervals, her ministers showed her the madness of acting
+otherwise. Yet for three years she kept her own people in a fever of
+apprehension. She made a settled Government in Scotland impossible;
+till, distracted and perplexed, the Scottish statesmen went back to
+their first schemes. They assured themselves that in one way or other
+the Queen of Scots would sooner or later come again among them. They,
+and others besides them, believed that Elizabeth was cutting her own
+throat, and that the best that they could do was to recover their own
+queen's favour, and make the most of her and her titles; and so they
+lent themselves again to the English Catholic conspiracies.
+
+The Earl of Moray--the one supremely noble man then living in the
+country--was put out of the way by an assassin. French and Spanish money
+poured in, and French and Spanish armies were to be again invited over
+to Scotland. This is the form in which the drama unfolds itself in the
+correspondence of the time. Maitland, the soul and spirit of it all,
+said, in scorn, that 'he would make the Queen of England sit upon her
+tail and whine like a whipped dog.' The only powerful noblemen who
+remained on the Protestant side were Lennox, Morton, and Mar. Lord
+Lennox was a poor creature, and was soon dispatched; Mar was old and
+weak; and Morton was an unprincipled scoundrel, who used the Reformation
+only as a stalking-horse to cover the spoils which he had clutched in
+the confusion, and was ready to desert the cause at any moment if the
+balance of advantage shifted. Even the ministers of the Kirk were fooled
+and flattered over. Maitland told Mary Stuart that he had gained them
+all except one.
+
+John Knox alone defied both his threats and his persuasions. Good reason
+has Scotland to be proud of Knox. He only, in this wild crisis, saved
+the Kirk which he had founded, and saved with it Scottish and English
+freedom. But for Knox, and what he was able still to do, it is almost
+certain that the Duke of Alva's army would have been landed on the
+eastern coast. The conditions were drawn out and agreed upon for the
+reception, the support, and the stay of the Spanish troops. Two-thirds
+of the English peerage had bound themselves to rise against Elizabeth,
+and Alva waited only till Scotland itself was quiet. Only that quiet
+would not be. Instead of quiet came three dreadful years of civil war.
+Scotland was split into factions, to which the mother and son gave
+names. The queen's lords, as they were called, with unlimited money from
+France and Flanders, held Edinburgh and Glasgow; all the border line was
+theirs, and all the north and west. Elizabeth's Council, wiser than
+their mistress, barely squeezed out of her reluctant parsimony enough to
+keep Mar and Morton from making terms with the rest; but there her
+assistance ended. She would still say nothing, promise nothing, bind
+herself to nothing, and, so far as she was concerned, the war would have
+been soon enough brought to a close. But away at St. Andrews, John Knox,
+broken in body, and scarcely able to stagger up the pulpit stairs, still
+thundered in the parish church; and his voice, it was said, was like ten
+thousand trumpets braying in the ear of Scottish Protestantism. All the
+Lowlands answered to his call. Our English Cromwell found in the man of
+religion a match for the man of honour. Before Cromwell, all over the
+Lothians, and across from St. Andrews to Stirling and Glasgow--through
+farm, and town, and village--the words of Knox had struck the inmost
+chords of the Scottish commons' hearts. Passing over knight and noble,
+he had touched the farmer, the peasant, the petty tradesman, and the
+artisan, and turned the men of clay into men of steel. The village
+preacher, when he left his pulpit, doffed cap and cassock, and donned
+morion and steel-coat. The Lothian yeoman's household became for the
+nonce a band of troopers, who would cross swords with the night riders
+of Buccleuch. It was a terrible time, a time rather of anarchy than of
+defined war, for it was without form or shape. Yet the horror of it was
+everywhere. Houses and villages were burned, and women and children
+tossed on pike-point into the flames. Strings of poor men were dangled
+day after day from the walls of Edinburgh Castle. A word any way from
+Elizabeth would have ended it, but that word Elizabeth would never
+speak; and, maddened with suffering, the people half believed that she
+was feeding the fire for her own bad purposes, when it was only that she
+would not make up her mind to allow a crowned princess to be dethroned.
+No earthly influence could have held men true in such a trial. The noble
+lords--the Earl of Morton and such-like--would have made their own
+conditions, and gone with the rest; but the vital force of the Scotch
+nation, showing itself where it was least looked for, would not have it
+so.
+
+A very remarkable account of the state of the Scotch commons at this
+time is to be found in a letter of an English emissary, who had been
+sent by Lord Burleigh to see how things were going there. It was not
+merely a new creed that they had got; it was a new vital power. 'You
+would be astonished to see how men are changed here,' this writer said.
+'There is little of that submission to those above them which there used
+to be. The poor think and act for themselves. They are growing strong,
+confident, independent. The farms are better cultivated; the farmers are
+growing rich. The merchants at Leith are thriving, and, notwithstanding
+the pirates, they are increasing their ships and opening a brisk trade
+with France.'
+
+All this while civil war was raging, and the flag of Queen Mary was
+still floating over Edinburgh Castle. It surprised the English; still
+more it surprised the politicians. It was the one thing which
+disconcerted, baffled, and finally ruined the schemes and the dreams of
+Maitland. When he had gained the aristocracy, he thought that he had
+gained everybody, and, as it turned out, he had all his work still to
+do. The Spaniards did not come. The prudent Alva would not risk invasion
+till Scotland at least was assured. As time passed on, the English
+conspiracies were discovered and broken up. The Duke of Norfolk lost his
+head; the Queen of Scots was found to have been mixed up with the plots
+to murder Elizabeth; and Elizabeth at last took courage and recognised
+James. Supplies of money ceased to come from abroad, and gradually the
+tide turned. The Protestant cause once more grew towards the ascendant.
+The great families one by one came round again; and, as the backward
+movement began, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew gave it a fresh and
+tremendous impulse. Even the avowed Catholics--the Hamiltons, the
+Gordons, the Scotts, the Kers, the Maxwells--quailed before the wail of
+rage and sorrow which at that great horror rose over their country. The
+Queen's party dwindled away to a handful of desperate politicians, who
+still clung to Edinburgh Castle. But Elizabeth's 'peace-makers,' as the
+big English cannon were called, came round, at the Regent's request,
+from Berwick; David's tower, as Knox had long ago foretold, 'ran down
+over the cliff like a sandy brae;' and the cause of Mary Stuart in
+Scotland was extinguished for ever. Poor Grange, who deserved a better
+end, was hanged at the Market Cross. Secretary Maitland, the cause of
+all the mischief--the cleverest man, as far as intellect went, in all
+Britain--died (so later rumour said) by his own hand. A nobler version
+of his end is probably a truer one: He had been long ill--so ill that
+when the Castle cannon were fired, he had been carried into the cellars
+as unable to bear the sound. The breaking down of his hopes finished
+him. 'The secretary,' wrote some one from the spot to Cecil, 'is dead of
+grief, being unable to endure the great hatred which all this people
+bears towards him.' It would be well if some competent man would write a
+life of Maitland, or at least edit his papers. They contain by far the
+clearest account of the inward movements of the time; and he himself is
+one of the most tragically interesting characters in the cycle of the
+Reformation history.
+
+With the fall of the Castle, then, but not till then, it became clear to
+all men that the Reformation would hold its ground. It was the final
+trampling out of the fire which for five years had threatened both
+England and Scotland with flames and ruin. For five years--as late
+certainly as the massacre of St. Bartholomew--those who understood best
+the true state of things, felt the keenest misgivings how the event
+would turn. That things ended as they did was due to the spirit of the
+Scotch commons. There was a moment when, if they had given way, all
+would have gone, perhaps even to Elizabeth's throne. They had passed for
+nothing; they had proved to be everything; had proved--the ultimate test
+in human things--to be the power which could hit the hardest blows, and
+they took rank accordingly. The creed began now in good earnest to make
+its way into hall and castle; but it kept the form which it assumed in
+the first hours of its danger and trial, and never after lost it. Had
+the aristocracy dealt sincerely with things in the earlier stages of the
+business, again I say the democratic element in the Kirk might have been
+softened or modified. But the Protestants had been trifled with by their
+own natural leaders. Used and abused by Elizabeth, despised by the
+worldly intelligence and power of the times--they triumphed after all,
+and, as a natural consequence, they set their own mark and stamp upon
+the fruits of the victory.
+
+The question now is, what has the Kirk so established done for Scotland?
+Has it justified its own existence? Briefly, we might say, it has
+continued its first function as the guardian of Scottish freedom. But
+that is a vague phrase, and there are special accusations against the
+Kirk and its doctrines which imply that it has cared for other things
+than freedom. Narrow, fanatical, dictatorial, intrusive, superstitious,
+a spiritual despotism, the old priesthood over again with a new
+face--these and other such epithets and expressions we have heard often
+enough applied to it at more than one stage of its history. Well, I
+suppose that neither the Kirk nor anything else of man's making is
+altogether perfect. But let us look at the work which lay before it when
+it had got over its first perils. Scotch patriotism succeeded at last in
+the object it had so passionately set its heart upon. It sent a king at
+last of the Scotch blood to England, and a new dynasty; and it never
+knew peace or quiet after. The Kirk had stood between James Stuart and
+his kingcraft. He hated it as heartily as did his mother; and, when he
+got to England, he found people there who told him it would be easy to
+destroy it, and he found the strength of a fresh empire to back him in
+trying to do it. To have forced prelacy upon Scotland would have been to
+destroy the life out of Scotland. Thrust upon them by force, it would
+have been no more endurable than Popery. They would as soon, perhaps
+sooner, have had what the Irish call the 'rale thing' back again. The
+political freedom of the country was now wrapped up in the Kirk; and the
+Stuarts were perfectly well aware of that, and for that very reason
+began their crusade against it.
+
+And now, suppose the Kirk had been the broad, liberal, philosophical,
+intellectual thing which some people think it ought to have been, how
+would it have fared in that crusade; how altogether would it have
+encountered those surplices of Archbishop Laud or those dragoons of
+Claverhouse? It is hard to lose one's life for a 'perhaps,' and
+philosophical belief at the bottom means a 'perhaps' and nothing more.
+For more than half the seventeenth century, the battle had to be fought
+out in Scotland, which in reality was the battle between liberty and
+despotism; and where, except in an intense, burning conviction that they
+were maintaining God's cause against the devil, could the poor Scotch
+people have found the strength for the unequal struggle which was forced
+upon them? Toleration is a good thing in its place; but you cannot
+tolerate what will not tolerate you, and is trying to cut your throat.
+Enlightenment you cannot have enough of, but it must be true
+enlightenment, which sees a thing in all its bearings. In these matters
+the vital questions are not always those which appear on the surface;
+and in the passion and resolution of brave and noble men there is often
+an inarticulate intelligence deeper than what can be expressed in words.
+Action sometimes will hit the mark, when the spoken word either misses
+it or is but half the truth. On such subjects, and with common men,
+latitude of mind means weakness of mind. There is but a certain quantity
+of spiritual force in any man. Spread it over a broad surface, the
+stream is shallow and languid; narrow the channel, and it becomes a
+driving force. Each may be well at its own time. The mill-race which
+drives the water-wheel is dispersed in rivulets over the meadow at its
+foot. The Covenanters fought the fight and won the victory, and then,
+and not till then, came the David Humes with their essays on miracles,
+and the Adam Smiths with their political economies, and steam-engines,
+and railroads, and philosophical institutions, and all the other blessed
+or unblessed fruits of liberty.
+
+But we may go further. Institutions exist for men, not men for
+institutions; and the ultimate test of any system of politics, or body
+of opinions, or form of belief, is the effect produced on the conduct
+and condition of the people who live and die under them. Now, I am not
+here to speak of Scotland of the present day. That, happily, is no
+business of mine. We have to do here with Scotland before the march of
+intellect; with Scotland of the last two centuries; with the three or
+four hundred thousand families, who for half-a-score of generations
+believed simply and firmly in the principles of the Reformation, and
+walked in the ways of it.
+
+Looked at broadly, one would say they had been an eminently pious
+people. It is part of the complaint of modern philosophers about them,
+that religion, or superstition, or whatever they please to call it, had
+too much to do with their daily lives. So far as one can look into that
+commonplace round of things which historians never tell us about, there
+have rarely been seen in this world a set of people who have thought
+more about right and wrong, and the judgment about them of the upper
+powers. Long-headed, thrifty industry,--a sound hatred of waste,
+imprudence, idleness, extravagance,--the feet planted firmly upon the
+earth,--a conscientious sense that the worldly virtues are,
+nevertheless, very necessary virtues, that without these, honesty for
+one thing is not possible, and that without honesty no other excellence,
+religious or moral, is worth anything at all--this is the stuff of which
+Scotch life was made, and very good stuff it is. It has been called
+gloomy, austere, harsh, and such other epithets. A gifted modern writer
+has favoured us lately with long strings of extracts from the sermons of
+Scotch divines of the last century, taking hard views of human
+shortcomings and their probable consequences, and passing hard censures
+upon the world and its amusements. Well, no doubt amusement is a very
+good thing; but I should rather infer from the vehemence and frequency
+of these denunciations that the people had not been in the habit of
+denying themselves too immoderately; and, after all, it is no very hard
+charge against those teachers that they thought more of duty than of
+pleasure. Sermons always exaggerate the theoretic side of things; and
+the most austere preacher, when he is out of the pulpit, and you meet
+him at the dinner-table, becomes singularly like other people. We may
+take courage, I think, we may believe safely that in those
+minister-ridden days, men were not altogether so miserable; we may hope
+that no large body of human beings have for any length of time been too
+dangerously afraid of enjoyment. Among other good qualities, the Scots
+have been distinguished for humour--not for venomous wit, but for
+kindly, genial humour, which half loves what it laughs at--and this
+alone shows clearly enough that those to whom it belongs have not looked
+too exclusively on the gloomy side of the world. I should rather say
+that the Scots had been an unusually happy people. Intelligent industry,
+the honest doing of daily work, with a sense that it must be done well,
+under penalties; the necessaries of life moderately provided for; and a
+sensible content with the situation of life in which men are born--this
+through the week, and at the end of it the 'Cottar's Saturday
+Night'--the homely family, gathered reverently and peacefully together,
+and irradiated with a sacred presence.--Happiness! such happiness as we
+human creatures are likely to know upon this world, will be found there,
+if anywhere.
+
+The author of the 'History of Civilisation' makes a naive remark in
+connexion with this subject. Speaking of the other country, which he
+censures equally with Scotland for its slavery to superstition, he says
+of the Spaniards that they are a well-natured, truthful, industrious,
+temperate, pious people, innocent in their habits, affectionate in their
+families, full of humour, vivacity, and shrewdness, yet that all this
+'has availed them nothing'--'has availed them nothing,' that is his
+expression--because they are loyal, because they are credulous, because
+they are contented, because they have not apprehended the first
+commandment of the new covenant: 'Thou shalt get on and make money, and
+better thy condition in life;' because, therefore, they have added
+nothing to the scientific knowledge, the wealth, and the progress of
+mankind. Without these, it seems, the old-fashioned virtues avail
+nothing. They avail a great deal to human happiness. Applied science,
+and steam, and railroads, and machinery, enable an ever-increasing
+number of people to live upon the earth; but the happiness of those
+people remains, so far as I know, dependent very much on the old
+conditions. I should be glad to believe that the new views of things
+will produce effects upon the character in the long run half so
+beautiful.
+
+There is much more to say on this subject, were there time to say it,
+but I will not trespass too far upon your patience; and I would gladly
+have ended here, had not the mention of Spain suggested one other topic,
+which I should not leave unnoticed. The Spain of Cervantes and Don
+Quixote was the Spain of the Inquisition. The Scotland of Knox and
+Melville was the Scotland of the witch trials and witch burnings. The
+belief in witches was common to all the world. The prosecution and
+punishment of the poor creatures was more conspicuous in Scotland when
+the Kirk was most powerful; in England and New England, when Puritan
+principles were also dominant there. It is easy to understand the
+reasons. Evil of all kinds was supposed to be the work of a personal
+devil; and in the general horror of evil, this particular form of it,
+in which the devil was thought especially active, excited the most
+passionate detestation. Thus, even the best men lent themselves
+unconsciously to the most detestable cruelty. Knox himself is not free
+from reproach. A poor woman was burned at St. Andrews when he was living
+there, and when a word from him would have saved her. It remains a
+lesson to all time, that goodness, though the indispensable adjunct to
+knowledge, is no substitute for it; that when conscience undertakes to
+dictate beyond its province, the result is only the more monstrous.
+
+It is well that we should look this matter in the face; and as
+particular stories leave more impression than general statements, I will
+mention one, perfectly well authenticated, which I take from the
+official report of the proceedings:--Towards the end of 1593 there was
+trouble in the family of the Earl of Orkney. His brother laid a plot to
+murder him, and was said to have sought the help of a 'notorious witch'
+called Alison Balfour. When Alison Balfour's life was looked into, no
+evidence could be found connecting her either with the particular
+offence or with witchcraft in general; but it was enough in these
+matters to be accused. She swore she was innocent; but her guilt was
+only held to be aggravated by perjury. She was tortured again and again.
+Her legs were put in the caschilaws--an iron frame which was gradually
+heated till it burned into the flesh--but no confession could be wrung
+from her. The caschilaws failed utterly, and something else had to be
+tried. She had a husband, a son, and a daughter, a child seven years
+old. As her own sufferings did not work upon her, she might be touched,
+perhaps, by the sufferings of those who were dear to her. They were
+brought into court, and placed at her side; and the husband first was
+placed in the 'lang irons'--some accursed instrument; I know not what.
+Still the devil did not yield. She bore this; and her son was next
+operated on. The boy's legs were set in 'the boot,'--the iron boot you
+may have heard of. The wedges were driven in, which, when forced home,
+crushed the very bone and marrow. Fifty-seven mallet strokes were
+delivered upon the wedges. Yet this, too, failed. There was no
+confession yet. So, last of all, the little daughter was taken. There
+was a machine called the piniwinkies--a kind of thumbscrew, which
+brought blood from under the finger nails, with a pain successfully
+terrible. These things were applied to the poor child's hands, and the
+mother's constancy broke down, and she said she would admit anything
+they wished. She confessed her witchcraft--so tried, she would have
+confessed to the seven deadly sins--and then she was burned, recalling
+her confession, and with her last breath protesting her innocence.
+
+It is due to the intelligence of the time to admit that after this her
+guilt was doubted, and such vicarious means of extorting confession do
+not seem to have been tried again. Yet the men who inflicted these
+tortures would have borne them all themselves sooner than have done any
+act which they consciously knew to be wrong. They did not know that the
+instincts of humanity were more sacred than the logic of theology, and
+in fighting against the devil they were themselves doing the devil's
+work. We should not attempt to apologise for these things, still less to
+forget them. No martyrs ever suffered to instil into mankind a more
+wholesome lesson--more wholesome, or one more hard to learn. The more
+conscientious men are, the more difficult it is for them to understand
+that in their most cherished convictions, when they pass beyond the
+limits where the wise and good of all sorts agree, they may be the
+victims of mere delusion. Yet, after all, and happily, such cases were
+but few, and affected but lightly the general condition of the people.
+
+The student running over the records of other times finds certain
+salient things standing out in frightful prominence. He concludes that
+the substance of those times was made up of the matters most dwelt on by
+the annalist. He forgets that the things most noticed are not those of
+every-day experience, but the abnormal, the extraordinary, the
+monstrous. The exceptions are noted down, the common and usual is passed
+over in silence. The philosophic historian, studying hereafter this
+present age, in which we are ourselves living, may say that it was a
+time of unexampled prosperity, luxury, and wealth; but catching at
+certain horrible murders which have lately disgraced our civilisation,
+may call us a nation of assassins. It is to invert the pyramid and stand
+it on its point. The same system of belief which produced the tragedy
+which I have described, in its proper province as the guide of ordinary
+life, has been the immediate cause of all that is best and greatest in
+Scottish character.
+
+
+
+
+THE PHILOSOPHY OF CATHOLICISM.[C]
+
+
+Not long ago I heard a living thinker of some eminence say that he
+considered Christianity to have been a misfortune. Intellectually, he
+said, it was absurd; and practically, it was an offence, over which he
+stumbled. It would have been far better for mankind, he thought, if they
+could have kept clear of superstition, and followed on upon the track of
+the Grecian philosophy. So little do men care to understand the
+conditions which have made them what they are, and which has created for
+them that very wisdom in which they themselves are so contented. But it
+is strange, indeed, that a person who could deliberately adopt such a
+conclusion should trouble himself any more to look for truth. If a mere
+absurdity could make its way out of a little fishing village in Galilee,
+and spread through the whole civilised world; if men are so pitiably
+silly, that in an age of great mental activity their strongest thinkers
+should have sunk under an abortion of fear and folly, should have
+allowed it to absorb into itself whatever of heroism, of devotion,
+self-sacrifice, and moral nobleness there was among them; surely there
+were nothing better for a wise man than to make the best of his time,
+and to crowd what enjoyment he can find into it, sheltering himself in a
+very disdainful Pyrrhonism from all care for mankind or for their
+opinions. For what better test of truth have we than the ablest men's
+acceptance of it? and if the ablest men eighteen centuries ago
+deliberately accepted what is now too absurd to reason upon, what right
+have we to hope that with the same natures, the same passions, the same
+understandings, no better proof against deception, we, like they, are
+not entangled in what, at the close of another era, shall seem again
+ridiculous? The scoff of Cicero at the divinity of Liber and Ceres
+(bread and wine) may be translated literally by the modern Protestant;
+and the sarcasms which Clement and Tertullian flung at the Pagan creed,
+the modern sceptic returns upon their own. Of what use is it to destroy
+an idol, when another, or the same in another form, takes immediate
+possession of the vacant pedestal?
+
+I shall not argue with the extravagant hypothesis of my friend. In the
+opinion even of Goethe, who was not troubled with credulity, the human
+race can never attain to anything higher than Christianity--if we mean
+by Christianity the religion which was revealed to the world in the
+teaching and the life of its Founder. But even the more limited
+reprobation by our own Reformers of the creed of mediaeval Europe is not
+more just or philosophical.
+
+Ptolemy was not perfect, but Newton had been a fool if he had scoffed at
+Ptolemy. Newton could not have been without Ptolemy, nor Ptolemy without
+the Chaldees; and as it is with the minor sciences, so far more is it
+with the science of sciences--the science of life, which has grown
+through all the ages from the beginning of time. We speak of the errors
+of the past. We, with this glorious present which is opening on us, we
+shall never enter on it, we shall never understand it, till we have
+learnt to see in that past, not error, but instalment of truth,
+hard-fought-for truth, wrung out with painful and heroic effort. The
+promised land is smiling before us, but we may not pass over into the
+possession of it while the bones of our fathers who laboured through the
+wilderness lie bleaching on the sands, or a prey to the unclean birds.
+We must gather their relics and bury them, and sum up their labours, and
+inscribe the record of their actions on their tombs as an honourable
+epitaph. If Catholicism really is passing away, if it has done its work,
+and if what is left of it is now holding us back from better things, it
+is not for our bitterness but for our affectionate acknowledgment, nor
+for our heaping contempt on what it is, but for our reverend and patient
+examination of what it has been, that it will be content to bid us
+farewell, and give us God speed on our further journey.
+
+In the Natural History of Religions, certain broad phenomena perpetually
+repeat themselves; they rise in the highest thought extant at the time
+of their origin; the conclusions of philosophy settle into a creed; art
+ornaments it, devotion consecrates it, time elaborates it. It grows
+through a long series of generations into the heart and habits of the
+people; and so long as no disturbing cause interferes, or so long as the
+idea at the centre of it survives, a healthy, vigorous, natural life
+shoots beautifully up out of the intellectual root. But at last the idea
+becomes obsolete; the numbing influence of habit petrifies the spirit in
+the outside ceremonial, while new questions arise among the thinkers,
+and ideas enter into new and unexplained relations. The old formula will
+not serve; but new formulae are tardy in appearing; and habit and
+superstition cling to the past, and policy vindicates it, and statecraft
+upholds it forcibly as serviceable to order, till, from the combined
+action of folly, and worldliness, and ignorance, the once beautiful
+symbolism becomes at last no better than 'a whited sepulchre full of
+dead men's bones and all uncleanness.' So it is now. So it was in the
+era of the Caesars, out of which Christianity arose; and Christianity, in
+the form which it assumed at the close of the Arian controversy, was the
+deliberate solution which the most powerful intellects of that day could
+offer of the questions which had grown with the growth of mankind, and
+on which Paganism had suffered shipwreck.
+
+Paganism, as a creed, was entirely physical. When Paganism rose, men had
+not begun to reflect upon themselves, or the infirmities of their own
+nature. The bad man was a bad man--the coward, a coward--the liar, a
+liar--individually hateful and despicable: but in hating and despising
+such unfortunates, the old Greeks were satisfied to have felt all that
+it was necessary to feel about them; and how such a phenomenon as a bad
+man came to exist in this world, they scarcely cared to enquire. There
+is no evil spirit in the mythology as an antagonist of the gods. There
+is the Erinnys as the avenger of monstrous villanies; there is a
+Tartarus where the darkest criminals suffer eternal tortures. But
+Tantalus and Ixion are suffering for enormous crimes, to which the small
+wickedness of common men offers no analogy. Moreover, these and other
+such stories are only curiously ornamented myths, representing physical
+phenomena. But with Socrates a change came over philosophy; a
+sign--perhaps a cause--of the decline of the existing religion. The
+study of man superseded the study of nature: a purer Theism came in with
+the higher ideal of perfection, and sin and depravity at once assumed an
+importance, the intensity of which made every other question
+insignificant. How man could know the good and yet choose the evil; how
+God could be all pure and almighty, and yet evil have broken into his
+creation--these were the questions which thenceforth were the perplexity
+of philosophic speculation.
+
+Whatever difficulty there might be in discovering how evil came to be,
+the leaders of all the sects agreed at last upon the seat of it. Whether
+_matter_ was eternal, as Aristotle thought, or created, as Plato
+thought, both Plato and Aristotle were equally satisfied that the secret
+of all the shortcomings in this world lay in the imperfection,
+reluctancy, or inherent grossness of this impracticable substance. God
+would have everything perfect, but the nature of the element in which He
+worked in some way defeated his purpose. Death, disease, decay, clung
+necessarily to everything which was created out of it; and pain, and
+want, and hunger, and suffering. Worse than all, the spirit in its
+material body was opposed and borne down, its aspirations crushed, its
+purity tainted by the passions and appetites of its companion--the
+fleshly lusts which waged perpetual war against the soul.
+
+Matter was the cause of evil, and thenceforth the question was how to
+conquer matter, or, at least, how to set free the spirit from its
+control.
+
+The Greek language and the Greek literature spread behind the march of
+Alexander; but as his generals could only make their conquests permanent
+by largely accepting the Eastern manners, so philosophy could only make
+good its ground by becoming itself Orientalised. The one pure and holy
+God whom Plato had painfully reasoned out for himself had existed from
+immemorial time in the traditions of the Jews; while the Persians, who
+had before taught the Jews at Babylon the existence of an independent
+evil being, now had him to offer to the Greeks as their account of the
+difficulties which had perplexed Socrates. Seven centuries of struggle,
+and many hundred thousand folios, were the results of the remarkable
+fusion which followed. Out of these elements, united in various
+proportions, rose successively the Alexandrian philosophy, the
+Hellenists, the Therapeutae, those strange Essene communists, with the
+innumerable sects of Gnostic or Christian heretics. Finally, the battle
+was limited to the two great rivals, under one or other of which the
+best of the remainder had ranged themselves--Manicheism and Catholic
+Christianity: Manicheism in which the Persian--Catholicism in which the
+Jewish--element most preponderated. It did not end till the close of the
+fifth century, and it ended then rather by arbitration than by a decided
+victory which either side could claim. The Church has yet to acknowledge
+how large a portion of its enemy's doctrines it incorporated through the
+mediation of Augustine before the field was surrendered to it. Let us
+trace something of the real bearings of this section of the world's
+Oriental history, which to so many moderns seems no better than an idle
+fighting over words and straws.
+
+Facts witnessing so clearly that the especial strength of evil lay, as
+the philosophers had seen, in _matter_, it was so far a conclusion which
+both Jew and Persian were ready to accept; the naked Aristotelic view of
+it being most acceptable to the Persian, the Platonic to the Hellenistic
+Jew. But the purer theology of the Jew forced him to look for a solution
+of the question which Plato had left doubtful, and to explain how evil
+had crept into matter. He could not allow that what God had created
+could be of its own nature imperfect. God made it very good; some other
+cause had broken in to spoil it. Accordingly, as before he had reduced
+the independent Arimanes, whose existence he had learnt at Babylon, into
+a subordinate spirit; so now, not questioning the facts of disease, of
+death, of pain, or of the infirmity of the flesh which the natural
+strength of the spirit was unable to resist, he accounted for them under
+the supposition that the first man had deliberately sinned, and by his
+sin had brought a curse upon the whole material earth, and upon all
+which was fashioned out of it. The earth was created pure and lovely--a
+garden of delight, loading itself of its own free accord with fruit and
+flower, and everything most exquisite and beautiful. No bird or beast of
+prey broke the eternal peace which reigned over its hospitable surface.
+In calm and quiet intercourse, the leopard lay down by the kid, the lion
+browsed beside the ox, and the corporeal frame of man, knowing neither
+decay nor death, nor unruly appetite, nor any change or infirmity, was
+pure as the immortal substance of the unfallen angels.
+
+But with the fatal apple all this fair scene passed away, and creation
+as it seemed was hopelessly and irretrievably ruined. Adam sinned--no
+matter how, he sinned; the sin was the one terrible fact: moral evil was
+brought into the world by the only creature who was capable of
+committing it. Sin entered in, and death by sin; death and disease,
+storm and pestilence, earthquake and famine. The imprisoned passions of
+the wild animals were let loose, and earth and air became full of
+carnage: worst of all, man's animal nature came out in gigantic
+strength--the carnal lusts, unruly appetites, jealousies, hatreds,
+rapines, and murders; and then the law, and with it, of course, breaches
+of the law, and sin on sin. The seed of Adam was infected in the animal
+change which had passed over Adam's person, and every child, therefore,
+thenceforth naturally engendered in his posterity, was infected with the
+curse which he had incurred. Every material organisation thenceforward
+contained in itself the elements of its own destruction, and the
+philosophic conclusions of Aristotle were accepted and explained by
+theology. Already, in the popular histories, those who were infected by
+disease were said to be bound by Satan; madness was a 'possession' by
+the Evil Spirit; and the whole creation, from Adam till Christ, groaned
+and travailed under Satan's power. The nobler nature in man still made
+itself felt; but it was a slave when it ought to command. It might will
+to obey the higher law, but the law in the members was over-strong for
+it and bore it down. This was the body of death which philosophy
+detected but could not explain, and from which Catholicism now came
+forward with its magnificent promise of deliverance.
+
+The carnal doctrine of the sacraments, which Protestants are compelled
+to acknowledge to have been taught as fully in the early Church as it is
+now taught by the Roman Catholics, has long been the stumbling-block to
+modern thought. It was the very essence of the original creed. Unless
+the body could be purified, the soul could not be saved; because from
+the beginning, soul and flesh were one man and inseparable. Without his
+flesh, man was not, or would cease to be. But the natural organisation
+of the flesh was infected with evil, and unless organisation could begin
+again from a new original, no pure material substance could exist at
+all. He, therefore, by whom God had first made the world, entered into
+the womb of the Virgin in the form (if I may with reverence say so) of a
+new organic cell; and around it, through the virtue of his creative
+energy, a material body grew again of the substance of his mother, pure
+of taint and clean as the first body of the first man was clean when it
+passed out under his hand in the beginning of all things. In Him thus
+wonderfully born was the virtue which was to restore the lost power of
+mankind. He came to redeem man; and, therefore, He took a human body,
+and He kept it pure through a human life, till the time came when it
+could be applied to its marvellous purpose. He died, and then appeared
+what was the nature of a material human body when freed from the
+limitations of sin. The grave could not hold it, neither was it possible
+that it should see corruption. It was real, for the disciples were
+allowed to feel and handle it. He ate and drank with them to assure
+their senses. But space had no power over it, nor any of the material
+obstacles which limit an ordinary power. He willed, and his body obeyed.
+He was here, He was there. He was visible, He was invisible. He was in
+the midst of his disciples and they saw Him, and then he was gone
+whither who could tell? At last He passed away to heaven; but while in
+heaven, He was still on earth. His body became the body of his Church on
+earth, not in metaphor, but in fact!--his very material body, in which
+and by which the faithful would be saved. His flesh and blood were
+thenceforth to be their food. They were to eat it as they would eat
+ordinary meat. They were to take it into their system, a pure material
+substance, to leaven the old natural substance and assimilate it to
+itself. As they fed upon it it would grow into them, and it would become
+their own real body. Flesh grown in the old way was the body of death,
+but the flesh of Christ was the life of the world, over which death had
+no power. Circumcision availed nothing, nor uncircumcision--but a _new
+creature_--and this new creature, which the child first put on in
+baptism, was born again into Christ of water and the Spirit. In the
+Eucharist he was fed and sustained, and went on from strength to
+strength; and ever as the nature of his body changed, being able to
+render a more complete obedience, he would at last pass away to God
+through the gate of the grave, and stand holy and perfect in the
+presence of Christ. Christ had indeed been ever present with him; but
+because while life lasted some particles of the old Adam would
+necessarily cling to every man, the Christian's mortal eye on earth
+could not see Him. Hedged in by 'his muddy vesture of decay,' his eyes,
+like the eyes of the disciples of Emmaus, are holden, and only in faith
+he feels Him. But death, which till Christ had died had been the last
+victory of evil, in virtue of his submission to it, became its own
+destroyer, for it had power only over the tainted particles of the old
+substance, and there was nothing needed but that these should be washed
+away, and the elect would stand out at once pure and holy, clothed in
+immortal bodies, like refined gold, the redeemed of God.
+
+The being who accomplished a work so vast--a work compared to which the
+first creation appears but a trifling difficulty--what could He be but
+God? God Himself! Who but God could have wrested his prize from a power
+which half the thinking world believed to be his coequal and coeternal
+adversary? He was God. He was man also, for He was the second Adam--the
+second starting-point of human growth. He was virgin born, that no
+original impurity might infect the substance which He assumed; and being
+Himself sinless, He showed, in the nature of his person, after his
+resurrection, what the material body would have been in all of us except
+for sin, and what it will be when, after feeding on it in its purity,
+the bodies of each of us are transfigured after its likeness. Here was
+the secret of the spirit which set St. Simeon on his pillar and sent St.
+Anthony to the tombs--of the night watches, the weary fasts, the
+penitential scourgings, the life-long austerities which have been
+alternately the glory and the reproach of the mediaeval saints. They
+desired to overcome their animal bodies, and anticipate in life the work
+of death in uniting themselves more completely to Christ by the
+destruction of the flesh, which lay as a veil between themselves and
+Him.
+
+Such I believe to have been the central idea of the beautiful creed
+which, for 1,500 years, tuned the heart and formed the mind of the
+noblest of mankind. From this centre it radiated out and spread, as time
+went on, into the full circle of human activity, flinging its own
+philosophy and its own peculiar grace over the common details of the
+common life of all of us. Like the seven lamps before the Throne of God,
+the seven mighty angels, and the seven stars, the seven sacraments shed
+over mankind a never-ceasing stream of blessed influences. The priests,
+a holy order set apart and endowed with mysterious power, represented
+Christ and administered his gifts. Christ, in his twelfth year, was
+presented in the Temple, and first entered on his Father's business; and
+the baptised child, when it has grown to an age to become conscious of
+its vow and of its privilege, again renews it in full knowledge of what
+it undertakes, and receives again sacramentally a fresh gift of grace to
+assist it forward on its way. In maturity it seeks a companion to share
+its pains and pleasures; and, again, Christ is present to consecrate the
+union. Marriage, which, outside the Church, only serves to perpetuate
+the curse and bring fresh inheritors of misery into the world, He made
+holy by his presence at Cana, and chose it as the symbol to represent
+his own mystic union with his Church. Even saints cannot live without at
+times some spot adhering to them. The atmosphere in which we breathe and
+move is soiled, and Christ has anticipated our wants. Christ did penance
+forty days in the wilderness, not to subdue his own flesh--for that
+which was already perfect did not need subduing--but to give to penance
+a cleansing virtue to serve for our daily or our hourly ablution. Christ
+consecrates our birth; Christ throws over us our baptismal robe of pure
+unsullied innocence. He strengthens us as we go forward. He raises us
+when we fall. He feeds us with the substance of his own most precious
+body. In the person of his minister he does all this for us, in virtue
+of that which in his own person He actually performed when a man living
+on this earth. Last of all, when time is drawing to its close with
+us--when life is past, when the work is done, and the dark gate is near,
+beyond which the garden of an eternal home is waiting to receive us, his
+tender care has not forsaken us. He has taken away the sting of death,
+but its appearance is still terrible; and He will not leave us without
+special help at our last need. He tried the agony of the moment; and He
+sweetens the cup for us before we drink it. We are dismissed to the
+grave with our bodies anointed with oil, which He made holy in his last
+anointing before his passion, and then all is over. We lie down and seem
+to decay--to decay--but not all. Our natural body decays, being the last
+remains of the infected matter which we have inherited from Adam; but
+the spiritual body, the glorified substance which has made our life, and
+is our real body as we are in Christ, that can never decay, but passes
+off into the kingdom which is prepared for it; that other world where
+there is no sin, and God is all and in all!
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[C] From the _Leader_, 1851.
+
+
+
+
+A PLEA FOR THE FREE DISCUSSION OF THEOLOGICAL DIFFICULTIES.[D]
+
+
+In the ordinary branches of human knowledge or enquiry, the judicious
+questioning of received opinions has been regarded as the sign of
+scientific vitality, the principle of scientific advancement, the very
+source and root of healthy progress and growth. If medicine had been
+regulated three hundred years ago by Act of Parliament; if there had
+been Thirty-nine Articles of Physic, and every licensed practitioner had
+been compelled, under pains and penalties, to compound his drugs by the
+prescriptions of Henry the Eighth's physician, Doctor Butts, it is easy
+to conjecture in what state of health the people of this country would
+at present be found. Constitutions have changed with habits of life, and
+the treatment of disorders has changed to meet the new conditions. New
+diseases have shown themselves of which Doctor Butts had no cognizance;
+new continents have given us plants with medicinal virtues previously
+unknown; new sciences, and even the mere increase of recorded
+experience, have added a thousand remedies to those known to the age of
+the Tudors. If the College of Physicians had been organised into a board
+of orthodoxy, and every novelty of treatment had been regarded as a
+crime against society, which a law had been established to punish, the
+hundreds who die annually from preventible causes would have been
+thousands and tens of thousands.
+
+Astronomy is the most perfect of the sciences. The accuracy of the
+present theory of the planetary movements is tested daily and hourly by
+the most delicate experiments, and the Legislature, if it so pleased,
+might enact the first principles of these movements into a statute,
+without danger of committing the law of England to falsehood. Yet, if
+the Legislature were to venture on any such paternal procedure in a few
+years gravitation itself would be called in question, and the whole
+science would wither under the fatal shadow. There are many phenomena
+still unexplained to give plausibility to scepticism; there are others
+more easily formularised for working purposes in the language of
+Hipparchus; and there would be reactionists who would invite us to
+return to the safe convictions of our forefathers. What the world has
+seen the world may see again; and were it once granted that astronomy
+were something to be ruled by authority, new popes would imprison new
+Galileos; the knowledge already acquired would be strangled in the cords
+which were intended to keep it safe from harm, and, deprived of the free
+air on which its life depends, it would dwindle and die.
+
+A few years ago, an Inspector of Schools--a Mr. Jellinger
+Symonds--opening, perhaps for the first time, an elementary book on
+astronomy, came on something which he conceived to be a difficulty in
+the theory of lunar motion. His objection was on the face of it
+plausible. The true motions of the heavenly bodies are universally the
+opposite of the apparent motions. Mr. Symonds conceived that the moon
+could not revolve on its axis, because the same side of it was
+continually turned towards the earth; and because if it were connected
+with the earth by a rigid bar--which, as he thought, would deprive it of
+power of rotation--the relative aspects of the two bodies would remain
+unchanged. He sent his views to the 'Times.' He appealed to the common
+sense of the world, and common sense seemed to be on his side. The men
+of science were of course right; but a phenomenon, not entirely obvious,
+had been hitherto explained in language which the general reader could
+not readily comprehend. A few words of elucidation cleared up the
+confusion. We do not recollect whether Mr. Symonds was satisfied or not;
+but most of us who had before received what the men of science told us
+with an unintelligent and languid assent, were set thinking for
+ourselves, and, as a result of the discussion, exchanged a confused idea
+for a clear one.
+
+It was an excellent illustration of the true claims of authority and of
+the value of open enquiry. The ignorant man has not as good a right to
+his own opinion as the instructed man. The instructed man, however
+right he may be, must not deliver his conclusions as axioms, and merely
+insist that they are true. The one asks a question, the other answers
+it, and all of us are the better for the business.
+
+Now, let us suppose the same thing to have happened when the only reply
+to a difficulty was an appeal to the Astronomer-Royal, where the
+rotation of the moon was an article of salvation decreed by the law of
+the land, and where all persons admitted to hold office under the State
+were required to subscribe to it. The Astronomer-Royal--as it was, if we
+remember right, he was a little cross at Mr. Symond's presumption--would
+have brought an action against him in the Court of Arches; Mr. Symonds
+would have been deprived of his inspectorship--for, of course, he would
+have been obstinate in his heresy; the world outside would have had an
+antecedent presumption that truth lay with the man who was making
+sacrifices for it, and that there was little to be said in the way of
+argument for what could not stand without the help of the law. Everybody
+could understand the difficulty; not everybody would have taken the
+trouble to attend to the answer. Mr. Symonds would have been a Colenso,
+and a good many of us would have been convinced in our secret hearts
+that the moon as little turned on its axis as the drawing-room table.
+
+As it is in idea essential to a reverence for truth to believe in its
+capacity for self-defence, so practically, in every subject except one,
+errors are allowed free room to express themselves, and the liberty of
+opinion which is the life of knowledge, as surely becomes the death of
+falsehood. A method--the soundness of which is so evident that to argue
+in favour of it is almost absurd--might be expected to have been
+applied, as a matter of course, to the one subject where mistake is
+supposed to be fatal,--where to come to wrong conclusions is held to be
+a crime for which the Maker of the universe has neither pardon nor pity.
+Yet many reasons, not difficult to understand, have long continued to
+exclude theology from the region where free discussion is supposed to be
+applicable. That so many persons have a personal interest in the
+maintenance of particular views, would of itself be fatal to fair
+argument. Though they know themselves to be right, yet right is not
+enough for them unless there is might to support it, and those who talk
+most of faith show least that they possess it. But there are deeper and
+more subtle objections. The theologian requires absolute certainty, and
+there are no absolute certainties in science. The conclusions of science
+are never more than in a high degree probable; they are no more than the
+best explanations of phenomena which are attainable in the existing
+state of knowledge. The most elementary laws are called laws only in
+courtesy. They are generalisations which are not considered likely to
+require modification, but which no one pretends to be in the nature of
+the cause exhaustively and ultimately true. As phenomena become more
+complicated, and the data for the interpretation of them more
+inadequate, the explanations offered are put forward hypothetically, and
+are graduated by the nature of the evidence. Such modest hesitation is
+altogether unsuited to the theologian, whose certainty increases with
+the mystery and obscurity of his matter; his convictions admit of no
+qualification; his truth is sure as the axioms of geometry; he knows
+what he believes, for he has the evidence in his heart; if he enquire,
+it is with a foregone conclusion, and serious doubt with him is sin. It
+is in vain to point out to him the thousand forms of opinions for each
+of which the same internal witness is affirmed. The Mayo peasant
+crawling with bare knees over the splintered rocks on Croagh Patrick,
+the nun prostrate before the image of St. Mary, the Methodist in the
+spasmodic ecstasy of a revival, alike are conscious of emotions in
+themselves which correspond to their creed: the more passionate, or--as
+some would say--the more unreasoning the piety, the louder and more
+clear is the voice within. But these varieties are no embarrassment to
+the theologian. He finds no fault with the method which is identical in
+them all. Whatever the party to which he himself belongs, he is equally
+satisfied that he alone has the truth; the rest are under illusions of
+Satan.
+
+Again, we hear--or we used to hear when the High Church party were more
+formidable than they are at present--much about 'the right of private
+judgment.' 'Why,' the eloquent Protestant would say, 'should I pin my
+faith upon the Church? the Church is but a congregation of fallible men,
+no better able to judge than I am; I have a right to my own opinion.' It
+sounds like a paradox to say that free discussion is interfered with by
+a cause which, above all others, would have been expected to further it;
+but this in fact has been the effect, because it tends to remove the
+grounds of theological belief beyond the province of argument. No one
+talks of 'a right of private judgment' in anything but religion; no one
+but a fool insists on his 'right to his own opinion' with his lawyer or
+his doctor. Able men who have given their time to special subjects, are
+authorities upon those subjects to be listened to with deference, and
+the ultimate authority at any given time is the collective general sense
+of the wisest men living in the department to which they belong. The
+utmost 'right of private judgment' which anybody claims in such cases,
+is the choice of the physician to whom he will trust his body, or of the
+counsel to whom he will commit the conduct of his cause. The expression,
+as it is commonly used, implies a belief that, in matters of religion,
+the criteria of truth are different in kind from what prevail elsewhere,
+and the efforts which have been made to bring such a notion into harmony
+with common sense and common subjects have not been the least
+successful. The High Church party used to say, as a point against the
+Evangelicals, that either 'the right of private judgment' meant nothing,
+or it meant that a man had a right to be in the wrong. 'No,' said a
+writer in the 'Edinburgh Review,' 'it means only that if a man chooses
+to be in the wrong, no one else has a right to interfere with him. A man
+has no right to get drunk in his own house, but the policeman may not
+force a way into his house and prevent him.' The illustration fails of
+its purpose.
+
+In the first place, the Evangelicals never contemplated a wrong use of
+the thing; they meant merely that they had a right to their own opinions
+as against the Church. They did not indeed put forward their claim quite
+so nakedly; they made it general, as sounding less invidious; but nobody
+ever heard an Evangelical admit a High Churchman's right to be a High
+Churchman, or a Catholic's right to be a Catholic.
+
+But secondly, society has a most absolute right to prevent all manner of
+evil--drunkenness, and the rest of it, if it can--only in doing so,
+society must not use means which would create a greater evil than it
+would remedy. As a man can by no possibility be doing anything but most
+foul wrong to himself in getting drunk, society does him no wrong, but
+rather does him the greatest benefit, if it can possibly keep him sober;
+and in the same way, since a false belief in serious matters is among
+the greatest of misfortunes, so to drive it out of man, by the whip, if
+it cannot be managed by persuasion, is an act of brotherly love and
+affection, provided the belief really and truly is false, and you have a
+better to give him in the place of it. The question is not what to do,
+but merely 'how to do it;' although Mr. Mill in his love of 'liberty,'
+thinks otherwise. Mr. Mill demands for every man a right to say out his
+convictions in plain language, whatever they may be; and so far as he
+means that there should be no Act of Parliament to prevent him, he is
+perfectly just in what he says. But when Mr. Mill goes from Parliament
+to public opinion--when he lays down as a general principle that the
+free play of thought is unwholesomely interfered with by society, he
+would take away the sole protection which we possess from the inroads of
+any kind of folly. His dread of tyranny is so great, that he thinks a
+man better off with a false opinion of his own than with a right opinion
+inflicted upon him from without; while, for our own part, we should be
+grateful for tyranny or for anything else which would perform so useful
+an office for us.
+
+Public opinion may be unjust at particular times and on particular
+subjects; we believe it to be both unjust and unwise on the matter of
+which we are at present speaking: but, on the whole, it is like the
+ventilation of a house, which keeps the air pure. Much in this world has
+to be taken for granted, and we cannot be for ever arguing over our
+first principles. If a man persists in talking of what he does not
+understand, he is put down; if he sports loose views on morals at a
+decent dinner party, the better sort of people fight shy of him, and he
+is not invited again; if he profess himself a Buddhist or a Mahometan,
+it is assumed that he has not adopted those beliefs on serious
+conviction, but rather in wilful levity and eccentricity which does not
+deserve to be tolerated. Men have no right to make themselves bores and
+nuisances; and the common sense of mankind inflicts wholesome
+inconveniences on those who carry their 'right of private judgment' to
+any such extremities. It is a check, the same in kind as that which
+operates so wholesomely in the sciences. Mere folly is extinguished in
+contempt; objections reasonably urged obtain a hearing and are
+reasonably met. New truths, after encountering sufficient opposition to
+test their value, make their way into general reception.
+
+A further cause which has operated to prevent theology from obtaining
+the benefit of free discussion is the interpretation popularly placed
+upon the constitution of the Church Establishment. For fifteen centuries
+of its existence, the Christian Church was supposed to be under the
+immediate guidance of the Holy Spirit, which miraculously controlled its
+decisions, and precluded the possibility of error. This theory broke
+down at the Reformation, but it left behind it a confused sense that
+theological truth was in some way different from other truth; and,
+partly on grounds of public policy, partly because it was supposed to
+have succeeded to the obligations and the rights of the Papacy, the
+State took upon itself to fix by statute the doctrines which should be
+taught to the people. The distractions created by divided opinions were
+then dangerous. Individuals did not hesitate to ascribe to themselves
+the infallibility which they denied to the Church. Everybody was
+intolerant upon principle, and was ready to cut the throat of an
+opponent whom his arguments had failed to convince. The State, while it
+made no pretensions to Divine guidance, was compelled to interfere in
+self-protection; and to keep the peace of the realm, and to prevent the
+nation from tearing itself in pieces, a body of formulas was enacted,
+for the time broad and comprehensive, within which opinion might be
+allowed convenient latitude, while forbidden to pass beyond the border.
+
+It might have been thought that in abandoning for itself, and formally
+denying to the Church its pretensions to immunity from error, the State
+could not have intended to bind the conscience. When this or that law is
+passed, the subject is required to obey it, but he is not required to
+approve of the law as just. The Prayer-Book and the Thirty-nine
+Articles, so far as they are made obligatory by Act of Parliament, are
+as much laws as any other statute. They are a rule to conduct; it is not
+easy to see why they should be more; it is not easy to see why they
+should have been supposed to deprive clergymen of a right to their
+opinions, or to forbid discussion of their contents. The judge is not
+forbidden to ameliorate the law which he administers. If in discharge of
+his duty he has to pronounce a sentence which he declares at the same
+time that he thinks unjust, no indignant public accuses him of
+dishonesty, or requires him to resign his office. The soldier is asked
+no questions as to the legitimacy of the war on which he is sent to
+fight; nor need he throw up his commission if he think the quarrel a bad
+one. Doubtless, if a law was utterly iniquitous--if a war was
+unmistakably wicked--honourable men might feel uncertain what to do, and
+would seek some other profession rather than continue instruments of
+evil. But within limits, and in questions of detail, where the service
+is generally good and honourable, we leave opinion its free play, and
+exaggerated scrupulousness would be folly or something worse. Somehow or
+other, however, this wholesome freedom is not allowed to the clergyman.
+The idea of absolute inward belief has been substituted for that of
+obedience; and the man who, in taking orders, signs the Articles and
+accepts the Prayer Book, does not merely undertake to use the services
+in the one, and abstain from contradicting to his congregation the
+doctrines contained in the other; but he is held to promise what no
+honest man, without presumption, can undertake to promise--that he will
+continue to think to the end of his life as he thinks when he makes his
+engagement.
+
+It is said that if his opinions change, he may resign, and retire into
+lay communion. We are not prepared to say that either the Convocation of
+1562, or the Parliament which afterwards endorsed its proceedings, knew
+exactly what they meant, or did not mean; but it is quite clear that
+they did not contemplate the alternative of a clergyman's retirement. If
+they had, they would have provided means by which he could have
+abandoned his orders, and not have remained committed for life to a
+profession from which he could not escape. If the popular theory of
+subscription be true, and the Articles are articles of belief, a
+reasonable human being, when little more than a boy, pledges himself to
+a long series of intricate and highly-difficult propositions of abstruse
+divinity. He undertakes never to waver or doubt--never to allow his mind
+to be shaken, whatever the weight of argument or evidence brought to
+bear upon him. That is to say, he promises to do what no man living has
+a right to promise to do. He is doing, on the authority of Parliament,
+precisely what the Church of Rome required him to do on the authority of
+a Council.
+
+If a clergyman--in trouble amidst the abstruse subjects with which he
+has to deal, or unable to reconcile some new-discovered truth of science
+with the established formulas--puts forward his perplexities; if he
+ventures a doubt of the omniscience of the statesmen and divines of the
+sixteenth century, which they themselves disowned, there is an instant
+cry to have him stifled, silenced, or trampled down; and if no longer
+punished in life and limb, to have him deprived of the means on which
+life and limb can be supported, while with ingenious tyranny he is
+forbidden to maintain himself by any other occupation.
+
+So far have we gone in this direction, that when the 'Essays and
+Reviews' appeared, it was gravely said--and said by men who had no
+professional antipathy to them--that the writers had broken their faith.
+Laymen were free to say what they pleased on such subjects; clergymen
+were the hired exponents of the established opinions, and were committed
+to them in thought and word. It was one more anomaly where there were
+enough already. To say that the clergy, who are set apart to study a
+particular subject, are to be the only persons unpermitted to have an
+independent opinion upon it, is like saying that lawyers must take no
+part in the amendment of the statute-book; that engineers must be silent
+upon mechanism; and if an improvement is wanted in the art of medicine,
+physicians may have nothing to say to it.
+
+These causes would, perhaps, have been insufficient to repress free
+enquiry, if there had been on the part of the really able men among us a
+determination to break the ice; in other words, if theology had
+preserved the same commanding interest for the more powerful minds with
+which it affected them three hundred years ago. But on the one hand, a
+sense, half serious, half languid, of the hopelessness of the subject
+has produced an indisposition to meddle with it; on the other, there has
+been a creditable reluctance to disturb by discussion the minds of the
+uneducated or half-educated, to whom the established religion is simply
+an expression of the obedience which they owe to Almighty God, on the
+details of which they think little, and are therefore unconscious of its
+difficulties, while in general it is the source of all that is best and
+noblest in their lives and actions.
+
+This last motive no doubt deserves respect, but the force which it once
+possessed it possesses no longer. The uncertainty which once affected
+only the more instructed extends now to all classes of society. A
+superficial crust of agreement, wearing thinner day by day, is
+undermined everywhere by a vague misgiving; and there is an unrest
+which will be satisfied only when the sources of it are probed to the
+core. The Church authorities repeat a series of phrases which they are
+pleased to call answers to objections; they treat the most serious
+grounds of perplexity as if they were puerile and trifling; while it is
+notorious that for a century past extremely able men have either not
+known what to say about them, or have not said what they thought. On the
+Continent the peculiar English view has scarcely a single educated
+defender. Even in England the laity keep their judgment in suspense, or
+remain warily silent.
+
+'Of what religion are you, Mr. Rogers?' said a lady once.
+
+'What religion, madam? I am of the religion of all sensible men.'
+
+'And what is that?' she asked.
+
+'All sensible men, madam, keep that to themselves.'
+
+If Mr. Rogers had gone on to explain himself, he would have said,
+perhaps, that where the opinions of those best able to judge are
+divided, the questions at issue are doubtful. Reasonable men who are
+unable to give them special attention withhold their judgment, while
+those who are able, form their conclusions with diffidence and modesty.
+But theologians will not tolerate diffidence; they demand absolute
+assent, and will take nothing short of it; and they affect, therefore,
+to drown in foolish ridicule whatever troubles or displeases them. The
+Bishop of Oxford talks in the old style of punishment. The Archbishop of
+Canterbury refers us to Usher as our guide in Hebrew chronology. The
+objections of the present generation of 'infidels,' he says, are the
+same which have been refuted again and again, and are such as a child
+might answer. The young man just entering upon the possession of his
+intellect, with a sense of responsibility for his belief, and more
+anxious for truth than for success in life, finds, when he looks into
+the matter, that the archbishop has altogether misrepresented it; that
+in fact, like other official persons, he had been using merely a
+stereotyped form of words, to which he attached no definite meaning. The
+words are repeated year after year, but the enemies refuse to be
+exorcised. They come and come again, from Spinoza and Lessing to Strauss
+and Renan. The theologians have resolved no single difficulty; they
+convince no one who is not convinced already; and a Colenso coming
+fresh to the subject with no more than a year's study, throws the Church
+of England into convulsions.
+
+If there were any real danger that Christianity would cease to be
+believed, it would be no more than a fulfilment of prophecy. The state
+in which the Son of Man would find the world at his coming he did not
+say would be a state of faith. But if that dark time is ever literally
+to come upon the earth, there are no present signs of it. The creed of
+eighteen centuries is not about to fade away like an exhalation, nor are
+the new lights of science so exhilarating that serious persons can look
+with comfort to exchanging one for the other. Christianity has abler
+advocates than its professed defenders, in those many quiet and humble
+men and women who in the light of it and the strength of it live holy,
+beautiful, and self-denying lives. The God that answers by fire is the
+God whom mankind will acknowledge; and so long as the fruits of the
+Spirit continue to be visible in charity, in self-sacrifice, in those
+graces which raise human creatures above themselves, and invest them
+with that beauty of holiness which only religion confers, thoughtful
+persons will remain convinced that with them in some form or other is
+the secret of truth. The body will not thrive on poison, or the soul on
+falsehood; and as the vital processes of health are too subtle for
+science to follow; as we choose our food, not by the most careful
+chemical analysis, but by the experience of its effects upon the system;
+so when a particular belief is fruitful in nobleness of character, we
+need trouble ourselves very little with scientific demonstrations that
+it is false. The most deadly poison may be chemically undistinguishable
+from substances which are perfectly innocent. Prussic acid, we are told,
+is formed of the same elements, combined in the same proportions, as
+gum-arabic.
+
+What that belief is for which the fruits speak thus so positively, it is
+less easy to define. Religion from the beginning of time has expanded
+and changed with the growth of knowledge. The religion of the prophets
+was not the religion which was adapted to the hardness of heart of the
+Israelites of the Exodus. The Gospel set aside the Law; the creed of the
+early Church was not the creed of the Middle Ages, any more than the
+creed of Luther and Cranmer was the creed of St. Bernard and Aquinas.
+Old things pass away, new things come in their place; and they in their
+turn grow old, and give place to others; yet in each of the many forms
+which Christianity has assumed in the world, holy men have lived and
+died, and have had the witness of the Spirit that they were not far from
+the truth. It may be that the faith which saves is the something held in
+common by all sincere Christians, and by those as well who should come
+from the east and the west, and sit down in the kingdom of God, when the
+children of the covenant would be cast out. It may be that the true
+teaching of our Lord is overlaid with doctrines; and theology, when
+insisting on the reception of its huge catena of formulas, may be
+binding a yoke upon our necks which neither we nor our fathers were able
+to bear.
+
+But it is not the object of this paper to put forward either this or any
+other particular opinion. The writer is conscious only that he is
+passing fast towards the dark gate which soon will close behind him. He
+believes that some kind of sincere and firm conviction on these things
+is of infinite moment to him, and, entirely diffident of his own power
+to find his way towards such a conviction, he is both ready and anxious
+to disclaim 'all right of private judgment' in the matter. He wishes
+only to learn from those who are able to teach him. The learned prelates
+talk of the presumptuousness of human reason; they tell us that doubts
+arise from the consciousness of sin and the pride of the unregenerate
+heart. The present writer, while he believes generally that reason,
+however inadequate, is the best faculty to which we have to trust, yet
+is most painfully conscious of the weakness of his own reason; and once
+let the real judgment of the best and wisest men be declared--let those
+who are most capable of forming a sound opinion, after reviewing the
+whole relations of science, history, and what is now received as
+revelation, tell us fairly how much of the doctrines popularly taught
+they conceive to be adequately established, how much to be uncertain,
+and how much, if anything, to be mistaken; there is scarcely, perhaps, a
+single serious enquirer who would not submit with delight to a court
+which is the highest on earth.
+
+Mr. Mansell tells us that in the things of God reason is beyond its
+depth, that the wise and the unwise are on the same level of incapacity,
+and that we must accept what we find established, or we must believe
+nothing. We presume that Mr. Mansell's dilemma itself is a conclusion
+of reason. Do what we will, reason is and must be our ultimate
+authority; and were the collective sense of mankind to declare Mr.
+Mansell right, we should submit to that opinion as readily as to
+another. But the collective sense of mankind is less acquiescent. He has
+been compared to a man sitting on the end of a plank and deliberately
+sawing off his seat. It seems never to have occurred to him that, if he
+is right, he has no business to be a Protestant. What Mr. Mansell says
+to Professor Jowett, Bishop Gardiner in effect replied to Frith and
+Ridley. Frith and Ridley said that transubstantiation was unreasonable;
+Gardiner answered that there was the letter of Scripture for it, and
+that the human intellect was no measure of the power of God. Yet the
+Reformers somehow believed, and Mr. Mansell by his place in the Church
+of England seems to agree with them, that the human intellect was not so
+wholly incompetent. It might be a weak guide, but it was better than
+none; and they declared on grounds of mere reason, that Christ being in
+heaven and not on earth, 'it was contrary to the truth for a natural
+body to be in two places at once.' The common sense of the country was
+of the same opinion, and the illusion was at an end.
+
+There have been 'Aids to Faith' produced lately, and 'Replies to the
+Seven Essayists,' 'Answers to Colenso,' and much else of the kind. We
+regret to say that they have done little for us. The very life of our
+souls is at issue in the questions which have been raised, and we are
+fed with the professional commonplaces of the members of a close guild,
+men holding high office in the Church, or expecting to hold high office
+there; in either case with a strong temporal interest in the defence of
+the institution which they represent. We desire to know what those of
+the clergy think whose love of truth is unconnected with their prospects
+in life; we desire to know what the educated laymen, the lawyers, the
+historians, the men of science, the statesmen think; and these are for
+the most part silent, or confess themselves modestly uncertain. The
+professional theologians alone are loud and confident; but they speak in
+the old angry tone which rarely accompanies deep and wise convictions.
+They do not meet the real difficulties; they mistake them, misrepresent
+them, claim victories over adversaries with whom they have never even
+crossed swords, and leap to conclusions with a precipitancy at which we
+can only smile. It has been the unhappy manner of their class from
+immemorial time; they call it zeal for the Lord, as if it were beyond
+all doubt that they were on God's side--as if serious enquiry after
+truth was something which they were entitled to resent. They treat
+intellectual difficulties as if they deserved rather to be condemned and
+punished than considered and weighed, and rather stop their ears and run
+with one accord upon anyone who disagrees with them than listen
+patiently to what he has to say.
+
+We do not propose to enter in detail upon the particular points which
+demand re-discussion. It is enough that the more exact habit of thought
+which science has engendered, and the closer knowledge of the value and
+nature of evidence, has notoriously made it necessary that the grounds
+should be reconsidered on which we are to believe that one country and
+one people was governed for sixteen centuries on principles different
+from those which we now find to prevail universally. One of many
+questions, however, shall be briefly glanced at, on which the real issue
+seems habitually to be evaded.
+
+Much has been lately said and written on the authenticity of the
+Pentateuch and the other historical books of the Old Testament. The
+Bishop of Natal has thrown out in a crude form the critical results of
+the enquiries of the Germans, coupled with certain arithmetical
+calculations, for which he has a special aptitude. He supposes himself
+to have proved that the first five books of the Bible are a compilation
+of uncertain date, full of inconsistencies and impossibilities. The
+apologists have replied that the objections are not absolutely
+conclusive, that the events described in the Book of Exodus might
+possibly, under certain combinations of circumstances, have actually
+taken place; and they then pass to the assumption that because a story
+is not necessarily false, therefore it is necessarily true. We have no
+intention of vindicating Dr. Colenso. His theological training makes his
+arguments very like those of his opponents, and he and Dr. M'Call may
+settle their differences between themselves. The question is at once
+wider and simpler than any which has been raised in that controversy.
+Were it proved beyond possibility of error that the Pentateuch was
+written by Moses, that those and all the books of the Old and New
+Testaments were really the work of the writers whose names they bear;
+were the Mosaic cosmogony in harmony with physical discoveries; and were
+the supposed inconsistencies and contradictions shown to have no
+existence except in Dr. Colenso's imagination--we should not have
+advanced a single step towards making good the claim put forward for the
+Bible, that it is absolutely and unexceptionably true in all its parts.
+The 'genuineness and authenticity' argument is irrelevant and needless.
+The clearest demonstration of the human authorship of the Pentateuch
+proves nothing about its immunity from errors. If there are no mistakes
+in it, it was not the workmanship of man; and if it was inspired by the
+Holy Spirit, there is no occasion to show that the hand of Moses was the
+instrument made use of. To the most excellent of contemporary histories,
+to histories written by eye-witnesses of the facts which they describe,
+we accord but a limited confidence. The highest intellectual competence,
+the most admitted truthfulness, immunity from prejudice, and the absence
+of temptation to misstate the truth; these things may secure great
+credibility, but they are no guarantee for minute and circumstantial
+exactness. Two historians, though with equal gifts and equal
+opportunities, never describe events in exactly the same way. Two
+witnesses in a court of law, while they agree in the main, invariably
+differ in some particulars. It appears as if men could not relate facts
+precisely as they saw or as they heard them. The different parts of a
+story strike different imaginations unequally; and the mind, as the
+circumstances pass through it, alters their proportions unconsciously,
+or shifts the perspective. The credit which we give to the most
+authentic work of a man has no resemblance to that universal acceptance
+which is demanded for the Bible. It is not a difference of degree: it is
+a difference in kind; and we desire to know on what ground this
+infallibility, which we do not question, but which is not proved,
+demands our belief. Very likely, the Bible is thus infallible. Unless it
+is, there can be no moral obligation to accept the facts which it
+records; and though there may be intellectual error in denying them,
+there can be no moral sin. Facts may be better or worse authenticated;
+but all the proofs in the world of the genuineness and authenticity of
+the human handiwork cannot establish a claim upon the conscience. It
+might be foolish to question Thucydides' account of Pericles, but no
+one would call it sinful. Men part with all sobriety of judgment when
+they come on ground of this kind. When Sir Henry Rawlinson read the name
+of Sennacherib on the Assyrian marbles, and found allusions there to the
+Israelites in Palestine, we were told that a triumphant answer had been
+found to the cavils of sceptics, and a convincing proof of the inspired
+truth of the Divine Oracles. Bad arguments in a good cause are a sure
+way to bring distrust upon it. The Divine Oracles may be true, and may
+be inspired; but the discoveries at Nineveh certainly do not prove them
+so. No one supposes that the Books of Kings or the prophecies of Isaiah
+and Ezekiel were the work of men who had no knowledge of Assyria or the
+Assyrian Princes. It is possible that in the excavations at Carthage
+some Punic inscription may be found confirming Livy's account of the
+battle of Cannae; but we shall not be obliged to believe therefore in the
+inspiration of Livy, or rather (for the argument comes to that) in the
+inspiration of the whole Latin literature.
+
+We are not questioning the fact that the Bible is infallible; we desire
+only to be told on what evidence that great and awful fact concerning it
+properly rests. It would seem, indeed, as if instinct had been wiser
+than argument--as if it had been felt that nothing short of this literal
+and close inspiration could preserve the facts on which Christianity
+depends. The history of the early world is a history everywhere of
+marvels. The legendary literature of every nation upon earth tells the
+same stories of prodigies and wonders, of the appearances of the gods
+upon earth, and of their intercourse with men. The lives of the saints
+of the Catholic Church, from the time of the Apostles till the present
+day, are a complete tissue of miracles resembling and rivalling those of
+the Gospels. Some of these stories are romantic and imaginative; some
+clear, literal, and prosaic; some rest on mere tradition; some on the
+sworn testimony of eye-witnesses; some are obvious fables; some are as
+well authenticated as facts of such a kind can be authenticated at all.
+The Protestant Christian rejects every one of them--rejects them without
+enquiry--involves those for which there is good authority and those for
+which there is none or little in one absolute, contemptuous, and
+sweeping denial. The Protestant Christian feels it more likely, in the
+words of Hume, that men should deceive or be deceived, than that the
+laws of nature should be violated. At this moment we are beset with
+reports of conversations with spirits, of tables miraculously lifted, of
+hands projected out of the world of shadows into this mortal life. An
+unusually able, accomplished person, accustomed to deal with
+common-sense facts, a celebrated political economist, and notorious for
+business-like habits, assured this writer that a certain mesmerist, who
+was my informant's intimate friend, had raised a dead girl to life. We
+should believe the people who tell us these things in any ordinary
+matter: they would be admitted in a court of justice as good witnesses
+in a criminal case, and a jury would hang a man on their word. The
+person just now alluded to is incapable of telling a wilful lie; yet our
+experience of the regularity of nature on one side is so uniform, and
+our experience of the capacities of human folly on the other is so
+large, that when people tell us these wonderful stories, most of us are
+contented to smile; and we do not care so much as to turn out of our way
+to examine them.
+
+The Bible is equally a record of miracles; but as from other histories
+we reject miracles without hesitation, so of those in the Bible we
+insist on the universal acceptance: the former are all false, the latter
+are all true. It is evident that, in forming conclusions so sweeping as
+these, we cannot even suppose that we are being guided by what is called
+historical evidence. Were it admitted that, as a whole, the miracles of
+the Bible are better authenticated than the miracles of the saints, we
+should be far removed still from any large inference, that in the one
+set there is no room for falsehood, in the other no room for truth. The
+writer or writers of the Books of Kings are not known. The books
+themselves are in fact confessedly taken from older writings which are
+lost; and the accounts of the great prophets of Israel are a
+counterpart, curiously like, of those of the mediaeval saints. In many
+instances the authors of the lives of these saints were their companions
+and friends. Why do we feel so sure that what we are told of Elijah or
+Elisha took place exactly as we read it? Why do we reject the account of
+St. Columba or St. Martin as a tissue of idle fable? Why should not God
+give a power to the saint which He had given to the prophet? We can
+produce no reason from the nature of things, for we know not what the
+nature of things is; and if down to the death of the Apostles the
+ministers of religion were allowed to prove their commission by working
+miracles, what right have we, on grounds either of history or
+philosophy, to draw a clear line at the death of St. John--to say that
+before that time all such stories were true, and after it all were
+false?
+
+There is no point on which Protestant controversialists evade the real
+question more habitually than on that of miracles. They accuse those who
+withhold that unreserved and absolute belief which they require for all
+which they accept themselves, of denying that miracles are possible.
+They assume this to be the position taken up by the objector, and
+proceed easily to argue that man is no judge of the power of God. Of
+course he is not. No sane man ever raised his narrow understanding into
+a measure of the possibilities of the universe; nor does any person with
+any pretensions to religion disbelieve in miracles of some kind. To pray
+is to expect a miracle. When we pray for the recovery of a sick friend,
+for the gift of any blessing, or the removal of any calamity, we expect
+that God will do something by an act of his personal will which
+otherwise would not have been done--that he will suspend the ordinary
+relations of natural cause and effect; and this is the very idea of a
+miracle. The thing we pray for may be given us, and no miracle may have
+taken place. It may be given to us by natural causes, and would have
+occurred whether we had prayed or not. But prayer itself in its very
+essence implies a belief in the possible intervention of a power which
+is above nature. The question about miracles is simply one of
+evidence--whether in any given case the proof is so strong that no room
+is left for mistake, exaggeration, or illusion, while more evidence is
+required to establish a fact antecedently improbable than is sufficient
+for a common occurrence.
+
+It has been said recently by 'A Layman,' in a letter to Mr. Maurice,
+that the resurrection of our Lord is as well authenticated as the death
+of Julius Caesar. It is far better authenticated, unless we are mistaken
+in supposing the Bible inspired; or if we admit as evidence that inward
+assurance of the Christian, which would make him rather die than
+disbelieve a truth so dear to him. But if the layman meant that there
+was as much proof of it, in the sense in which proof is understood in a
+court of justice, he could scarcely have considered what he was saying.
+Julius Caesar was killed in a public place, in the presence of friend
+and foe, in a remarkable but still perfectly natural manner. The
+circumstances were minutely known to all the world, and were never
+denied or doubted by any one. Our Lord, on the other hand, seems
+purposely to have withheld such public proof of his resurrection as
+would have left no room for unbelief. He showed himself, 'not to all the
+people'--not to his enemies, whom his appearance would have
+overwhelmed--but 'to witnesses chosen before;' to the circle of his own
+friends. There is no evidence which a jury could admit that he was ever
+actually dead. So unusual was it for persons crucified to die so soon,
+that Pilate, we are told, 'marvelled.' The subsequent appearances were
+strange, and scarcely intelligible. Those who saw Him did not recognise
+Him till He was made known to them in the breaking of bread. He was
+visible and invisible. He was mistaken by those who were most intimate
+with Him for another person; nor do the accounts agree which are given
+by the different Evangelists. Of investigation in the modern sense
+(except in the one instance of St. Thomas, and St. Thomas was rather
+rebuked than praised) there was none, and could be none. The evidence
+offered was different in kind, and the blessing was not to those who
+satisfied themselves of the truth of the fact by a searching enquiry,
+but who gave their assent with the unhesitating confidence of love.
+
+St. Paul's account of his own conversion is an instance of the kind of
+testimony which then worked the strongest conviction. St. Paul, a fiery
+fanatic on a mission of persecution with the midday Syrian sun streaming
+down upon his head, was struck to the ground, and saw in a vision our
+Lord in the air. If such a thing were to occur at the present day, and
+if a modern physician were consulted about it, he would say, without
+hesitation, that it was an effect of an overheated brain and that there
+was nothing in it extraordinary or unusual. If the impression left by
+the appearance had been too strong for such an explanation to be
+satisfactory, the person to whom it occurred, especially if he was a man
+of St Paul's intellectual stature, would have at once examined into the
+facts otherwise known, connected with the subject of what he had seen.
+St. Paul had evidently before disbelieved our Lord's resurrection--had
+disbelieved it fiercely and passionately; we should have expected that
+he would at once have sought for those who could best have told him the
+details of the truth. St. Paul, however, did nothing of the kind. He
+went for a year into Arabia, and when at last he returned to Jerusalem,
+he rather held aloof from those who had been our Lord's companions, and
+who had witnessed his ascension. He saw Peter, he saw James; 'of the
+rest of the apostles saw he none.' To him evidently the proof of the
+resurrection was the vision which he had himself seen. It was to that
+which he always referred when called on for a defence of his faith.
+
+Of evidence for the resurrection, in the common sense of the word, there
+may be enough to show that something extraordinary occurred; but not
+enough, unless we assume the fact to be true on far other grounds, to
+produce any absolute and unhesitating conviction; and inasmuch as the
+resurrection is the keystone of Christianity, the belief in it must be
+something far different from that suspended judgment in which history
+alone would leave us.
+
+Human testimony, we repeat, under the most favourable circumstances
+imaginable, knows nothing of 'absolute certainty;' and if historical
+facts are bound up with the creed, and if they are to be received with
+the same completeness as the laws of conscience, they rest, and must
+rest, either on the divine truth of Scripture, or on the divine witness
+in ourselves. On human evidence the miracles of St. Teresa and St.
+Francis of Assisi are as well established as those of the New Testament.
+
+M. Ernest Renan has recently produced an account of the Gospel story
+which, written as it is by a man of piety, intellect, and imagination,
+is spreading rapidly through the educated world. Carrying out the
+principles with which Protestants have swept modern history clear of
+miracles to their natural conclusions, he dismisses all that is
+miraculous from the life of our Lord, and endeavours to reproduce the
+original Galilean youth who lived and taught, and died in Palestine
+eighteen hundred years ago. We have no intention of reviewing M. Renan.
+He will be read soon enough by many who would better consider their
+peace of mind by leaving him alone. For ourselves, we are unable to see
+by what right, if he rejects the miraculous part of the narrative, he
+retains the rest; the imagination and the credulity which invent
+extraordinary incidents, invent ordinary incidents also; and if the
+divine element in the life is legendary, the human may be legendary
+also. But there is one lucid passage in the introduction which we
+commend to the perusal of controversial theologians:--
+
+'No miracle such as those of which early histories are full has taken
+place under conditions which science can accept. Experience shows,
+without exception, that miracles occur only in times and in countries in
+which miracles are believed in, and in the presence of persons who are
+disposed to believe them. No miracle has ever been performed before an
+assemblage of spectators capable of testing its reality. Neither
+uneducated people, nor even men of the world, have the requisite
+capacity; great precautions are needed, and a long habit of scientific
+research. Have we not seen men of the world in our own time become the
+dupes of the most childish and absurd illusions? And if it be certain
+that no contemporary miracles will bear investigation, is it not
+possible that the miracles of the past, were we able to examine into
+them in detail, would be found equally to contain an element of error?
+It is not in the name of this or that philosophy, it is in the name of
+an experience which never varies, that we banish miracles from history.
+We do not say a miracle is impossible--we say only that no miracle has
+ever yet been proved. Let a worker of miracles come forward to-morrow
+with pretensions serious enough to deserve examination. Let us suppose
+him to announce that he is able to raise a dead man to life. What would
+be done? A committee would be appointed, composed of physiologists,
+physicians, chemists, and persons accustomed to exact investigation; a
+body would then be selected which the committee would assure itself was
+really dead; and a place would be chosen where the experiment was to
+take place. Every precaution would be taken to leave no opening for
+uncertainty; and if, under those conditions, the restoration to life was
+effected, a probability would be arrived at which would be almost equal
+to certainty. An experiment, however, should always admit of being
+repeated. What a man has done once he should be able to do again; and in
+miracles there can be no question of ease or difficulty. The performer
+would be requested to repeat the operation under other circumstances
+upon other bodies; and if he succeeded on every occasion, two points
+would be established: first, that there may be in this world such things
+as supernatural operations; and, secondly, that the power to perform
+them is delegated to, or belongs to, particular persons. But who does
+not perceive that no miracle was ever performed under such conditions as
+these?'
+
+We have quoted this passage because it expresses with extreme precision
+and clearness the common-sense principle which we apply to all
+supernatural stories of our own time, which Protestant theologians
+employ against the whole cycle of Catholic miracles, and which M. Renan
+is only carrying to its logical conclusions in applying to the history
+of our Lord, if the Gospels are tried by the mere tests of historical
+criticism. The Gospels themselves tell us why M. Renan's conditions were
+never satisfied. Miracles were not displayed in the presence of sceptics
+to establish scientific truths. When the adulterous generation sought
+after a sign, the sign was not given; nay, it is even said that in the
+presence of unbelief, our Lord was not able to work miracles. But
+science has less respect for that undoubting and submissive willingness
+to believe; and it is quite certain that if we attempt to establish the
+truth of the New Testament on the principles of Paley--if with Professor
+Jowett 'we interpret the Bible as any other book,' the element of
+miracle which has evaporated from the entire surface of human history
+will not maintain itself in the sacred ground of the Gospels, and the
+facts of Christianity will melt in our hands like a snowball.
+
+Nothing less than a miraculous history can sustain the credibility of
+miracles, and nothing could be more likely, if revelation be a reality
+and not a dream, than that the history containing it should be saved in
+its composition from the intermixture of human infirmity. This is the
+position in which instinct long ago taught Protestants to entrench
+themselves, and where alone they can hope to hold their ground: once
+established in these lines, they were safe and unassailable, unless it
+could be demonstrated that any fact or facts related in the Bible were
+certainly untrue.
+
+Nor would it be necessary to say any more upon the subject. Those who
+believed Christianity would admit the assumption; those who disbelieved
+Christianity would repudiate it. The argument would be narrowed to that
+plain and single issue, and the elaborate treatises upon external
+evidence would cease to bring discredit upon the cause by their
+feebleness. Unfortunately--and this is the true secret of our present
+distractions--it seems certain that in some way or other this belief in
+inspiration itself requires to be revised. We are compelled to examine
+more precisely what we mean by the word. The account of the creation of
+man and the world which is given in Genesis, and which is made by St.
+Paul the basis of his theology, has not yet been reconciled with facts
+which science knows to be true. Death was in the world before Adam's
+sin, and unless Adam's age be thrust back to a distance which no
+ingenuity can torture the letter of Scripture into recognising, men and
+women lived and died upon the earth whole millenniums before the Eve of
+Sacred History listened to the temptation of the snake. Neither has any
+such deluge as that from which, according to the received
+interpretation, the ark saved Noah, swept over the globe within the
+human period. We are told that it was not God's purpose to anticipate
+the natural course of discovery: as the story of the creation was
+written in human language, so the details of it may have been adapted to
+the existing state of human knowledge. The Bible, it is said, was not
+intended to teach men science, but to teach them what was necessary for
+the moral training of their souls. It may be that this is true.
+Spiritual grace affects the moral character of men, but leaves their
+intellect unimproved. The most religious men are as liable as atheists
+to ignorance of ordinary facts, and inspiration may be only infallible
+when it touches on truths necessary to salvation. But if it be so, there
+are many things in the Bible which must become as uncertain as its
+geology or its astronomy. There is the long secular history of the
+Jewish people. Let it be once established that there is room for error
+anywhere, and we have no security for the accuracy of this history. The
+inspiration of the Bible is the foundation of our whole belief; and it
+is a grave matter if we are uncertain to what extent it reaches, or how
+much and what it guarantees to us as true. We cannot live on
+probabilities. The faith in which we can live bravely and die in peace
+must be a certainty, so far as it professes to be a faith at all, or it
+is nothing. It may be that all intellectual efforts to arrive at it are
+in vain; that it is given to those to whom it is given, and withheld
+from those from whom it is withheld. It may be that the existing belief
+is undergoing a silent modification, like those to which the
+dispensations of religion have been successively subjected; or, again,
+it may be that to the creed as it is already established there is
+nothing to be added, and nothing any more to be taken from it. At this
+moment, however, the most vigorous minds appear least to see their way
+to a conclusion; and notwithstanding all the school and church building,
+the extended episcopate, and the religious newspapers, a general doubt
+is coming up like a thunderstorm against the wind, and blackening the
+sky. Those who cling most tenaciously to the faith in which they were
+educated, yet confess themselves perplexed. They know what they believe;
+but why they believe it, or why they should require others to believe,
+they cannot tell or cannot agree. Between the authority of the Church
+and the authority of the Bible, the testimony of history and the
+testimony of the Spirit, the ascertained facts of science and the
+contradictory facts which seem to be revealed, the minds of men are
+tossed to and fro, harassed by the changed attitude in which scientific
+investigation has placed us all towards accounts of supernatural
+occurrences. We thrust the subject aside; we take refuge in practical
+work; we believe, perhaps, that the situation is desperate, and hopeless
+of improvement; we refuse to let the question be disturbed. But we
+cannot escape from our shadow, and the spirit of uncertainty will haunt
+the world like an uneasy ghost, till we take it by the throat like men.
+
+We return then to the point from which we set out. The time is past for
+repression. Despotism has done its work; but the day of despotism is
+gone, and the only remedy is a full and fair investigation. Things will
+never right themselves if they are let alone. It is idle to say peace
+when there is no peace; and the concealed imposthume is more dangerous
+than an open wound. The law in this country has postponed our trial, but
+cannot save us from it; and the questions which have agitated the
+Continent are agitating us at last. The student who twenty years ago was
+contented with the Greek and Latin fathers and the Anglican divines, now
+reads Ewald and Renan. The Church authorities still refuse to look their
+difficulties in the face: they prescribe for mental troubles the
+established doses of Paley and Pearson; they refuse dangerous questions
+as sinful, and tread the round of commonplace in placid comfort. But it
+will not avail. Their pupils grow to manhood, and fight the battle for
+themselves, unaided by those who ought to have stood by them in their
+trial, and could not or would not; and the bitterness of those
+conflicts, and the end of most of them in heart-broken uncertainty or
+careless indifference, is too notorious to all who care to know about
+such things.
+
+We cannot afford year after year to be distracted with the tentative
+scepticism of essayists and reviewers. In a healthy condition of public
+opinion such a book as Bishop Colenso's would have passed unnoticed, or
+rather would never have been written, for the difficulties with which it
+deals would have been long ago met and disposed of. When questions rose
+in the early and middle ages of the Church, they were decided by
+councils of the wisest: those best able to judge met together, and
+compared their thoughts, and conclusions were arrived at which
+individuals could accept and act upon. At the beginning of the English
+Reformation, when Protestant doctrine was struggling for reception, and
+the old belief was merging in the new, the country was deliberately held
+in formal suspense. Protestants and Catholics were set to preach on
+alternate Sundays in the same pulpit; subjects were discussed freely in
+the ears of the people; and at last, when all had been said on both
+sides, Convocation and Parliament embodied the result in formulas.
+Councils will no longer answer the purpose; the clergy have no longer a
+superiority of intellect or cultivation; and a conference of prelates
+from all parts of Christendom, or even from all departments of the
+English Church, would not present an edifying spectacle. Parliament may
+no longer meddle with opinions unless it be to untie the chains which it
+forged three centuries ago. But better than councils, better than
+sermons, better than Parliament, is that free discussion through a free
+press which is the best instrument for the discovery of truth, and the
+most effectual means for preserving it.
+
+We shall be told, perhaps, that we are beating the air--that the press
+is free, and that all men may and do write what they please. It is not
+so. Discussion is not free so long as the clergy who take any side but
+one are liable to be prosecuted and deprived of their means of living;
+it is not free so long as the expression of doubt is considered as a sin
+by public opinion and as a crime by the law. So far are we from free
+discussion, that the world is not yet agreed that a free discussion is
+desirable; and till it be so agreed, the substantial intellect of the
+country will not throw itself into the question. The battle will
+continue to be fought by outsiders, who suffice to disturb a repose
+which they cannot restore; and that collective voice of the national
+understanding, which alone can give back to us a peaceful and assured
+conviction, will not be heard.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[D] _Fraser's Magazine_, 1863.
+
+
+
+
+CRITICISM AND THE GOSPEL HISTORY.[E]
+
+
+The spirit of criticism is not the spirit of religion. The spirit of
+criticism is a questioning spirit; the spirit of religion is a spirit of
+faith, of humility and submission. Other qualities may go to the
+formation of a religious character in the highest and grandest sense of
+the word; but the virtues which religious teachers most generally
+approve, which make up the ideal of a Catholic saint, which the Catholic
+and all other churches endeavour most to cultivate in their children,
+are those of passive and loyal obedience, a devotion without reserve or
+qualification; or to use the technical word, 'a spirit of
+teachableness.' A religious education is most successful when it has
+formed a mind to which difficulties are welcome as an opportunity for
+the triumph of faith--which regards doubts as temptations to be resisted
+like the suggestions of sensuality, and which alike in action or opinion
+follows the path prescribed to it with affectionate and unhesitating
+confidence.
+
+To men or women of the tender and sensitive piety which is produced by
+such a training, an enquiry into the grounds of its faith appears
+shocking and profane. To demand an explanation of ambiguities or
+mysteries of which they have been accustomed to think only upon their
+knees, is as it were to challenge the Almighty to explain his ways to
+his creatures, and to refuse obedience unless human presumption has been
+first gratified.
+
+Undoubtedly, not in religion only, but in any branch of human knowledge,
+teachableness is the condition of growth. We augur ill for the future of
+the youth who sets his own judgment against that of his instructors, and
+refuses to believe what cannot be at once made plain to him. Yet again,
+the wise instructor will not lightly discourage questions which are
+prompted by an intelligent desire of knowledge. That an unenquiring
+submission produces characters of great and varied beauty; that it has
+inspired the most splendid acts of endurance which have given a lustre
+to humanity, no one will venture to deny. A genial faith is one of that
+group of qualities which commend themselves most to the young, the
+generous, and the enthusiastic--to those whose native and original
+nobleness has suffered least from contact with the world--which belong
+rather to the imagination than the reason, and stand related to truth
+through the emotions rather than through the sober calculations of
+probability. It is akin to loyalty, to enthusiasm, to hero-worship, to
+that deep affection to a person or a cause which can see no fault in
+what it loves.
+
+'Belief,' says Mr. Sewell, 'is a virtue; doubt is a sin.' Iago is
+nothing if not critical; and the sceptical spirit--_der Geist der stets
+verneint_--which is satisfied with nothing, which sees in everything
+good the seed of evil, and the weak spot in every great cause or nature,
+has been made the special characteristic--we all feel with justice--of
+the devil.
+
+And yet this devotedness or devotion, this reverence for authority, is
+but one element of excellence. To reverence is good; but on the one
+condition that the object of it be a thing which deserves reverence; and
+the necessary complement, the security that we are not bestowing our
+best affections where they should not be given, must be looked for in
+some quality which, if less attractive, is no less essential for our
+true welfare. To prove all things--to try the spirits whether they be of
+God--is a duty laid upon us by the highest authority; and what is called
+progress in human things--religious as well as material--has been due
+uniformly to a dissatisfaction with them as they are. Every advance in
+science, every improvement in the command of the mechanical forces of
+nature, every step in political or social freedom, has risen in the
+first instance from an act of scepticism, from an uncertainty whether
+the formulas, or the opinions, or the government, or the received
+practical theories were absolutely perfect; or whether beyond the circle
+of received truths there might not lie something broader, deeper, truer,
+and thus better deserving the acceptance of mankind.
+
+Submissiveness, humility, obedience, produce if uncorrected, in politics
+a nation of slaves, whose baseness becomes an incentive to tyranny; in
+religion, they produce the consecration of falsehood, poperies,
+immaculate conceptions, winking images, and the confessional. The spirit
+of enquiry if left to itself becomes in like manner a disease of
+uncertainty, and terminates in universal scepticism. It seems as if in a
+healthy order of things, to the willingness to believe there should be
+chained as its inseparable companion a jealousy of deception; and there
+is no lesson more important for serious persons to impress upon
+themselves than that each of these temperaments must learn to tolerate
+the other; faith accepting from reason the sanction of its service, and
+reason receiving in return the warm pulsations of life. The two
+principles exist together in the highest natures; and the man who in the
+best sense of the word is devout, is also the most cautious to whom or
+to what he pays his devotion. Among the multitude, the units of which
+are each inadequate and incomplete, the elements are disproportionately
+mixed; some men are humble and diffident, some are sceptical and
+enquiring; yet both are filling a place in the great intellectual
+economy; both contribute to make up the sum and proportion of qualities
+which are required to hold the balance even; and neither party is
+entitled to say to the other, 'Stand by; I am holier than thou.'
+
+And as it is with individuals, so is it also with whole periods and
+cycles. For centuries together the believing spirit held undisputed
+sovereignty; and these were what are called 'ages of faith;' ages, that
+is, in which the highest business of the intellect was to pray rather
+than to investigate; when for every unusual phenomenon a supernatural
+cause was instinctively assumed; when wonders were credible in
+proportion to their magnitude; and theologians, with easy command of
+belief, added miracle to miracle and piled dogma upon dogma. Then the
+tide changed; a fresh era opened, which in the eyes of those who
+considered the old system the only right one, was the letting loose of
+the impersonated spirit of evil; when profane eyes were looking their
+idols in the face; when men were saying to the miraculous images, 'You
+are but stone and wood,' and to the piece of bread, 'You are but dust as
+I am dust;' and then the huge mediaeval fabric crumbled down in ruin.
+
+All forms of thought, all objects of devotion, are made thus liable to
+perpetual revision, if only that belief shall not petrify into habit,
+but remain the reasonable conviction of a reasonable soul. The change of
+times and the change of conditions change also the appearance of things
+which in themselves are the same which they always were. Facts supposed
+once to be as fixed as the stars melt into fiction. A closer
+acquaintance with the phenomena of experience has revealed to us the
+action of forces before undreamt of working throughout nature with
+unerring uniformity; and to the mediaeval stories of magic, witchcraft,
+or the miracles of saints, we are thus placed in a new relation. The
+direct evidence on which such stories were received may remain
+unimpaired, but it no longer produces the same conviction. Even in
+ordinary human things where the evidence is lost--as in some of our own
+State trials, and where we know only that it was such as brought
+conviction to judges, juries, and parliaments--historians do not
+hesitate to call their verdicts into question, thinking it more likely
+that whole masses of men should have been led away by passion or fraud
+or cowardice than that this or that particular crime should have been
+committed. That we often go beyond our office and exaggerate the value
+of our new criteria of truth may be possible enough; but it is no less
+certain that this is the tendency of modern thought. Our own age, like
+every age which has gone before it, judges the value of testimony, not
+by itself merely, but by the degree to which it corresponds with our own
+sense of the laws of probability; and we consider events probable or
+improbable by the habit of mind which is the result of our general
+knowledge and culture. To the Catholic of the middle ages a miracle was
+more likely than not; and when he was told that a miracle had been
+worked, he believed it as he would have believed had he been told that a
+shower of rain had fallen, or that the night frost had killed the buds
+upon his fruit trees. If his cattle died, he found the cause in the
+malice of Satan or the evil eye of a witch; and if two or more witnesses
+could have been found to swear that they had heard an old woman curse
+him, she would have been burnt for a sorceress. The man of science, on
+the other hand, knows nothing of witches and sorcerers; when he can find
+a natural cause he refuses to entertain the possibility of the
+intervention of a cause beyond nature; and thus that very element of
+marvel which to the more superstitious temperament was an evidence of
+truth, becomes to the better informed a cause of suspicion.
+
+So it has been that throughout history, as between individuals among
+ourselves, we trace two habits of thought, one of which has given us
+churches, creeds, and the knowledge of God; the other has given us
+freedom and science, has pruned the luxuriance of imaginative reverence,
+and reminds piety of what it is too ready to forget--that God is truth.
+Yet, essential as they are to one another, each keeps too absolutely to
+the circle of its own convictions, and, but half able to recognise the
+merit of principles which are alien to its own, regards the other as its
+natural enemy.
+
+To the warm and enthusiastic pietist the enquirer appears as a hater of
+God, an inveterate blasphemer of holy things, soiling with rude and
+insolent hands what ought only to be humbly adored. The saint when he
+has the power calls the sword to his aid, and in his zeal for what he
+calls the honour of God, makes war upon such people with steel and fire.
+The innovator, on the other hand, knowing that he is not that evil
+creature which his rival represents him as being, knowing that he too
+desires only truth--first suffers, suffers in rough times at stake and
+scaffold, suffers in our own later days in good name, in reputation, in
+worldly fortune; and as the whirligig of time brings round his turn of
+triumph, takes, in French revolutions and such other fits of madness,
+his own period of wild revenge. The service of truth is made to appear
+as one thing, the service of God as another; and in that fatal
+separation religion dishonours itself with unavailing enmity to what
+nevertheless it is compelled at last to accept in humiliation; and
+science, welcoming the character which its adversary flings upon it,
+turns away with answering hostility from doctrines without which its own
+highest achievements are but pyramids of ashes.
+
+Is this antagonism a law of humanity? As mankind move upwards through
+the ascending circles of progress, is it for ever to be with them as
+with the globe which they inhabit--of which one hemisphere is
+perpetually dark? Have the lessons of the Reformation been thrown away?
+Is knowledge always to advance under the ban of religion? Is faith
+never to cease to dread investigation? Is science chiefly to value each
+new discovery as a victory gained over its rival? Is the spiritual world
+to revolve eternally upon an axis of which the two poles are materialism
+and superstition, to be buried in their alternate occultations in
+periods of utter darkness, or lifted into an icy light where there is
+neither life nor warmth?
+
+How it may be in the remote future it is idle to guess; for the present
+the signs are not hopeful. We are arrived visibly at one of those
+recurring times when the accounts are called in for audit; when the
+title-deeds are to be looked through, and established opinions again
+tested. It is a process which has been repeated more than once in the
+world's history; the last occasion and greatest being the Reformation of
+the sixteenth century; and the experience of that matter might have
+satisfied the most timid that truth has nothing to fear; and that
+religion emerges out of such trials stronger and brighter than before.
+Yet Churchmen have not profited by the experience; the pulpits and the
+religious press ring again with the old shrieks of sacrilege; the
+machinery of the law courts is set creaking on its rusty hinges, and
+denunciation and anathema in the old style take the place of reasoning.
+It will not answer; and the worst danger to what is really true is the
+want of wisdom in its defenders. The language which we sometimes hear
+about these things seems to imply that while Christianity is
+indisputably true, it cannot stand nevertheless without bolt and
+shackle, as if the Author of our faith had left the evidence so weak
+that an honest investigation would fail to find it.
+
+Inevitably, the altered relation in which modern culture places the
+minds of all of us towards the supernatural, will compel a
+reconsideration of the grounds on which the acceptance of miracles is
+required. If the English learned clergy had faith as a grain of mustard
+seed, they would be the first to take possession of the field; they
+would look the difficulty in the face fearlessly and frankly, and we
+should not be tossing as we are now in an ocean of uncertainty, ignorant
+whether, if things seem obscure to us, the fault is with our intellects
+or our hearts.
+
+It might have been that Providence, anticipating the effect produced on
+dead testimony by time and change, had raised religion into a higher
+sphere, and had appointed on earth a living and visible authority which
+could not err--guided by the Holy Spirit into truth, and divinely
+sustained in the possession of it. Such a body the Roman Catholic Church
+conceives itself to be; but in breaking away from its communion,
+Protestant Christians have declared their conviction that neither the
+Church of Rome, nor they themselves, nor any other body of men on earth,
+are exempt from a liability to error. It is no longer competent for the
+Anglican communion to say that a doctrine or a fact is true because it
+forms a part of their teaching, because it has come down to them from
+antiquity, and because to deny it is sin. Transubstantiation came down
+to the fathers of the Reformation from antiquity; it was received and
+insisted upon by the Catholic Church of Christendom; yet nevertheless it
+was flung out from among us as a lie and an offence. The theory of the
+Divine authority of the Church was abandoned in the act of Protestantism
+three centuries ago; it was the central principle of that great revolt
+that the establishment of particular opinions was no guarantee for their
+truth; and it becomes thus our duty as well as our right to examine
+periodically our intellectual defences, to abandon positions which the
+alteration of time makes untenable, and to admit and invite into the
+service of the sanctuary the fullest light of advancing knowledge. Of
+all positions the most fatally suicidal for Protestants to occupy is the
+assumption, which it is competent for Roman Catholics to hold, but not
+for them, that beliefs once sanctioned by the Church are sacred, and
+that to impugn them is not error but crime.
+
+With a hope, then, that this reproach may be taken away from us; that,
+in this most wealthily-endowed Church of England, where so many of the
+most gifted and most accomplished men among us are maintained in
+well-paid leisure to attend to such things, we may not be left any
+longer to grope our way in the dark, the present writer puts forward
+some few perplexities of which it would be well if English divinity
+contained a clearer solution than is found there. The laity, occupied in
+other matters, regard the clergy as the trustees of their spiritual
+interests; but inasmuch as the clergy tell them that the safety of their
+souls depends on the correctness of their opinions, they dare not close
+their eyes to the questions which are being asked in louder and even
+louder tones; and they have a right to demand that they shall not be
+left to their own unaided efforts to answer such questions. We go to our
+appointed teachers as to our physicians; we say to them, 'We feel pain
+here, and here, and here: we do not see our way, and we require you to
+help us.'
+
+Most of these perplexities are not new: they were felt with the first
+beginnings of critical investigation; but the fact that they have been
+so many years before the world without being satisfactorily encountered
+makes the situation only the more serious. It is the more strange that
+as time passes on, and divine after divine is raised to honour and
+office for his theological services, we should find only when we turn to
+their writings that loud promises end in no performance; that the chief
+object which they set before themselves is to avoid difficult ground;
+and that the points on which we most cry out for satisfaction are passed
+over in silence, or are disposed of with ineffectual commonplaces.
+
+With a temperament constitutionally religious, and with an instinctive
+sense of the futility of theological controversies, the English people
+have long kept the enemy at bay by passive repugnance. To the
+well-conditioned English layman the religion in which he has been
+educated is part of the law of the land; the truth of it is assumed in
+the first principles of his personal and social existence; and attacks
+on the credibility of his sacred books he has regarded with the same
+impatience and disdain with which he treats speculations on the rights
+of property or the common maxims of right and wrong. Thus, while the
+inspiration of the Bible has been a subject of discussion for a century
+in Germany, Holland, and France; while even in the desolate villages in
+the heart of Spain the priests find it necessary to placard the church
+walls with cautions against rationalism, England hitherto has escaped
+the trial; and it is only within a very few years that the note of
+speculation has compelled our deaf ears to listen. That it has come at
+last is less a matter of surprise than that it should have been so long
+delayed; and though slow to move, it is likely that so serious a people
+will not now rest till they have settled the matter for themselves in
+some practical way. We are assured that if the truth be, as we are told,
+of vital moment--vital to all alike, wise and foolish, educated and
+uneducated--the road to it cannot lie through any very profound
+enquiries. We refuse to believe that every labourer or mechanic must
+balance arduous historical probabilities and come to a just conclusion,
+under pain of damnation. We are satisfied that these poor people are not
+placed in so cruel a dilemma. Either these abstruse historical questions
+are open questions, and we are not obliged under those penalties to hold
+a definite opinion upon them, or else there must be some general
+principle accessible and easily intelligible, by which the details can
+be summarily disposed of.
+
+We shall not be much mistaken, perhaps, if we say that the view of most
+educated English laymen at present is something of this kind. They are
+aware that many questions may be asked, difficult or impossible to
+answer satisfactorily, about the creation of the world, the flood, and
+generally on the historical portion of the Old Testament; but they
+suppose that if the authority of the Gospel history can be well
+ascertained, the rest may and must be taken for granted. If it be true
+that of the miraculous birth, life, death, and resurrection of our Lord,
+we have the evidence of two evangelists who were eye-witnesses of the
+facts which they relate, and of two others who wrote under the direction
+of, or upon the authority of, eye-witnesses, we can afford to dispense
+with merely curious enquiries. The subordinate parts of a divine economy
+which culminated in so stupendous a mystery may well be as marvellous as
+itself; and it may be assumed, we think, with no great want of charity,
+that those who doubt the truth of the Old Testament extend their
+incredulity to the New; that the point of their disbelief, towards which
+they are trenching their way through the weak places in the Pentateuch,
+is the Gospel narrative itself.[F] Whatever difficulty there may be in
+proving the ancient Hebrew books to be the work of the writers whose
+names they bear, no one would have cared to challenge their genuineness
+who was thoroughly convinced of the resurrection of our Lord. And the
+real object of these speculations lies open before us in the now
+notorious work of M. Renan, which is shooting through Europe with a
+rapidity which recalls the era of Luther.
+
+To the question of the authenticity of the Gospels, therefore, the
+common sense of Englishmen has instinctively turned. If, as English
+commentators confidently tell us, the Gospel of St. Matthew, such as we
+now possess it, is undoubtedly the work of the publican who followed our
+Lord from the receipt of custom, and remained with Him to be a witness
+of His ascension; if St. John's Gospel was written by the beloved
+disciple who lay on Jesus' breast at supper; if the other two were
+indeed the composition of the companions of St. Peter and St. Paul; if
+in these four Gospels we have independent accounts of our Lord's life
+and passion, mutually confirming each other, and if it can be proved
+that they existed and were received as authentic in the first century of
+the Christian Church, a stronger man than M. Renan will fail to shake
+the hold of Christianity in England.
+
+We put the question hypothetically, not as meaning to suggest the fact
+as uncertain, but being--as the matter is of infinite moment--being, as
+it were, the hinge on which our faith depends, we are forced beyond our
+office to trespass on ground which we leave usually to professional
+theologians, and to tell them plainly that there are difficulties which
+it is their business to clear up, but to which, with worse than
+imprudence, they close their own eyes, and deliberately endeavour to
+keep them from ours. Some of these it is the object of this paper to
+point out, with an earnest hope that Dean Alford, or Dr. Ellicott, or
+some other competent clergyman, may earn our gratitude by telling us
+what to think about them. Setting aside their duty to us, they will find
+frank dealing in the long run their wisest policy. The conservative
+theologians of England have carried silence to the point of
+indiscretion.
+
+Looking, then, to the three first Gospels, usually called the
+Synoptical, we are encountered immediately with a remarkable common
+element which runs through them all--a resemblance too peculiar to be
+the result of accident, and impossible to reconcile with the theory that
+the writers were independent of each other. It is not that general
+similarity which we should expect in different accounts of the same
+scenes and events, but amidst many differences, a broad vein of
+circumstantial identity extending both to substance and expression.
+
+And the identity is of several kinds.
+
+I. Although the three evangelists relate each of them some things
+peculiar to themselves, and although between them there are some
+striking divergencies--as, for instance, between the account of our
+Lord's miraculous birth in St. Matthew and St. Luke, and in the absence
+in St. Mark of any mention of the miraculous birth at all--nevertheless,
+the body of the story is essentially the same. Out of those words and
+actions--so many, that if all were related the world itself could not
+contain the books that should be written--the three evangelists select
+for the most part the same; the same parables, the same miracles, and,
+more or less complete, the same addresses. When the material from which
+to select was so abundant--how abundant we have but to turn to the
+fourth evangelist to see--it is at least singular that three writers
+should have made so nearly the same choice.
+
+II. But this is not all. Not only are the things related the same, but
+the language in which they are expressed is the same. Sometimes the
+resemblance is such as would have arisen had the evangelists been
+translating from a common document in another language. Sometimes, and
+most frequently, there is an absolute verbal identity; sentences,
+paragraphs, long passages, are word for word the very same; a few
+expressions have been slightly varied, a particle transposed, a tense or
+a case altered, but the differences being no greater than would arise if
+a number of persons were to write from memory some common passages which
+they knew almost by heart. That there should have been this identity in
+the account of the _words_ used by our Lord seems at first sight no more
+than we should expect. But it extends to the narrative as well; and with
+respect to the parables and discourses, there is this extraordinary
+feature, that whereas our Lord is supposed to have spoken in the
+ordinary language of Palestine, the resemblance between the evangelists
+is in the Greek translation of them; and how unlikely it is that a
+number of persons in translating from one language into another should
+hit by accident on the same expressions, the simplest experiment will
+show.
+
+Now, waiving for a moment the inspiration of the Gospels; interpreting
+the Bible, to use Mr. Jowett's canon, as any other book, what are we to
+conclude from phenomena of this kind? What in fact do we conclude when
+we encounter them elsewhere? In the lives of the saints, in the monkish
+histories, there are many parallel cases. A mediaeval chronicler, when he
+found a story well told by his predecessor, seldom cared to recompose
+it; he transcribed the words as they stood into his own narrative,
+contented perhaps with making a few trifling changes to add a finish or
+a polish. Sometimes two chroniclers borrow from a third. There is the
+same identity in particular expressions, the same general resemblance,
+the same divergence, as each improves his original from his independent
+knowledge by addition or omission; but the process is so transparent,
+that when the original is lost, the existence of it can be inferred with
+certainty.
+
+Or to take a more modern parallel--we must entreat our readers to pardon
+any seeming irreverence which may appear in the comparison--if in the
+letters of the correspondents of three different newspapers written from
+America or Germany, we were to read the same incidents told in the same
+language, surrounded it might be with much that was unlike, but
+nevertheless in themselves identical, and related in words which, down
+to unusual and remarkable terms of expression, were exactly the same,
+what should we infer?
+
+Suppose, for instance, the description of a battle; if we were to find
+but a single paragraph in which two out of three correspondents agreed
+verbally, we should regard it as a very strange coincidence. If all
+three agreed verbally, we should feel certain it was more than accident.
+If throughout their letters there was a recurring series of such
+passages, no doubt would be left in the mind of any one that either the
+three correspondents had seen each other's letters, or that each had had
+before him some common narrative which he had incorporated in his own
+account. It might be doubtful which of these two explanations was the
+true one; but that one or other of them was true, unless we suppose a
+miracle, is as certain as any conclusion in human things can be certain
+at all. The sworn testimony of eye-witnesses who had seen the letters so
+composed would add nothing to the weight of a proof which without their
+evidence would be overwhelming; and were the writers themselves, with
+their closest friends and companions, to swear that there had been no
+intercommunication, and no story pre-existing of which they had made
+use, and that each had written _bona fide_ from his own original
+observation, an English jury would sooner believe the whole party
+perjured than persuade themselves that so extraordinary a coincidence
+would have occurred.
+
+Nor would it be difficult to ascertain from internal evidence which of
+the two possible interpretations was the real one. If the writers were
+men of evident good faith; if their stories were in parts widely
+different; if they made no allusion to each other, nor ever referred to
+one another as authorities; finally, if neither of them, in giving a
+different account of any matter from that given by his companions,
+professed either to be supplying an omission or correcting a mistake,
+then we should have little doubt that they had themselves not
+communicated with each other, but were supplementing, each of them from
+other sources of information, a central narrative which all alike had
+before them.
+
+How far may we apply the parallel to the Synoptical Gospels? In one
+sense the inspiration lifts them above comparison, and disposes
+summarily of critical perplexities; there is no difficulty which may not
+be explained by a miracle; and in that aspect the points of disagreement
+between these accounts are more surprising than the similarities. It is
+on the disagreements in fact that the labours of commentators have
+chiefly been expended. Yet it is a question whether, on the whole,
+inspiration does not leave unaffected the ordinary human phenomena; and
+it is hard to suppose that where the rules of judgment in ordinary
+writings are so distinct, God would have thus purposely cast a
+stumbling-block in our way, and contrived a snare into which our reason
+should mislead us. That is hard to credit; yet that and nothing else we
+must believe if we refuse to apply to the Gospel the same canons of
+criticism which with other writings would be a guide so decisive. It may
+be assumed that the facts connected with them admit a natural
+explanation; and we arrive, therefore, at the same conclusion as before:
+that either two of the evangelists borrowed from the third, or else that
+there was some other Gospel besides those which are now extant; existing
+perhaps both in Hebrew and Greek--existing certainly in Greek--the
+fragments of which are scattered up and down through St. Mark, St.
+Matthew, and St. Luke, in masses sufficiently large to be distinctly
+recognisable.
+
+That at an early period in the Christian Church many such Gospels
+existed, we know certainly from the words of St. Luke. St. Paul alludes
+to words used by our Lord which are not mentioned by the evangelists,
+which he assumed nevertheless to be well known to his hearers. He
+speaks, too, of an appearance of our Lord after His resurrection to five
+hundred brethren; on which the four Gospels are also silent. It is
+indisputable, therefore, that besides and antecedent to them there were
+other accounts of our Lord's life in use in the Christian Church. And
+indeed, what more natural, what more necessary, than that from the day
+on which the apostles entered upon their public mission, some narrative
+should have been drawn up of the facts which they were about to make
+known? Then as little as now could the imagination of men be trusted to
+relate accurately a story composed of stupendous miracles without
+mistake or exaggeration; and their very first step would have been to
+compose an account of what had passed, to which they could speak with
+certainty, and which they could invest with authoritative sanction. Is
+it not possible then that the identical passages in the Synoptical
+Gospels are the remains of something of this kind, which the
+evangelists, in their later, fuller, and more complete histories,
+enlarged and expanded? The conjecture has been often made, and English
+commentators have for the most part dismissed it slightingly; not
+apparently being aware that in rejecting one hypothesis they were bound
+to suggest another; or at least to admit that there was something which
+required explanation, though this particular suggestion did not seem
+satisfactory. Yet if it were so, the external testimony for the truth of
+the Gospel history would be stronger than before. It would amount to the
+collective view of the first congregation of Christians, who had all
+immediate and personal knowledge of our Lord's miracles and death and
+resurrection.
+
+But perhaps the external history of the four Gospels may throw some
+light upon the question, if indeed we can speak of light where all is a
+cloud of uncertainty. It would seem as if the sources of Christianity,
+like the roots of all other living things, were purposely buried in
+mystery. There exist no ancient writings whatever of such vast moment to
+mankind of which so little can be authentically known.
+
+The four Gospels, in the form and under the names which they at present
+bear, become visible only with distinctness towards the end of the
+second century of the Christian era. Then it was that they assumed the
+authoritative position which they have ever since maintained, and were
+selected by the Church out of the many other then existing narratives
+as the supreme and exclusive authorities for our Lord's life. Irenaeus is
+the first of the Fathers in whom they are found attributed by name to
+St. Matthew, St. Mark, St. Luke, and St. John. That there were four true
+evangelists, and that there could be neither more nor less than four,
+Irenaeus had persuaded himself because there were four winds or spirits,
+and four divisions of the earth, for which the Church being universal
+required four columns; because the cherubim had four faces, to each of
+which an evangelist corresponded; because four covenants had been given
+to mankind--one before the Deluge in Adam, one after the Deluge in Noah,
+the third in Moses, the fourth and greatest in the New Testament; while
+again the name of Adam was composed of four letters. It is not to be
+supposed that the intellects of those great men who converted the world
+to Christianity were satisfied with arguments so imaginative as these;
+they must have had other closer and more accurate grounds for their
+decision; but the mere employment of such figures as evidence in any
+sense, shows the enormous difference between their modes of reasoning
+and ours, and illustrates the difficulty of deciding at our present
+distance from them how far their conclusions were satisfactory.
+
+Of the Gospels separately the history is immediately lost in legend.
+
+The first notice of a Gospel of St. Matthew is in the well-known words
+of Papias, a writer who in early life might have seen St. John. The
+works of Papias are lost--a misfortune the more to be regretted because
+Eusebius speaks of him as a man of very limited understanding, [Greek:
+panu smikros ton noun]. Understanding and folly are words of
+undetermined meaning; and when language like that of Irenaeus could seem
+profound it is quite possible that Papias might have possessed
+commonplace faculties which would have been supremely useful to us. A
+surviving fragment of him says that St. Matthew put together the
+discourses of our Lord in Hebrew, and that every one interpreted them as
+he could. Pantaenus, said by Eusebius to have been another contemporary
+of the apostles, was reported to have gone to India, to have found there
+a congregation of Christians which had been established by St.
+Bartholomew, and to have seen in use among them this Hebrew Gospel.
+Origen repeats the story, which in his time had become the universal
+Catholic tradition, that St. Matthew's was the first Gospel, that it was
+written in Hebrew, and that it was intended for the use of the Jewish
+converts. Jerome adds that it was unknown when or by whom it was
+rendered into a Greek version. That was all which the Church had to say;
+and what had become of that Hebrew original no one could tell.
+
+That there existed _a_ Hebrew Gospel in very early times is well
+authenticated; there was a Gospel called the Gospel of the Ebionites or
+Nazarenes, of which Origen possessed a copy, and which St. Jerome
+thought it worth while to translate; this too is lost, and Jerome's
+translation of it also; but the negative evidence seems conclusive that
+it was not the lost Gospel of St. Matthew. Had it been so it could not
+have failed to be recognised, although from such accounts of it as have
+been preserved, it possessed some affinity with St. Matthew's Gospel. In
+one instance, indeed, it gave the right reading of a text which has
+perplexed orthodox commentators, and has induced others to suspect that
+that Gospel in its present form could not have existed before the
+destruction of Jerusalem. The Zachariah the son of Barachiah said by St.
+Matthew to have been slain between the temple and the altar, is unknown
+to Old Testament history, while during the siege of Jerusalem a
+Zachariah the son of Barachiah actually was killed exactly in the manner
+described. But in the Ebionite Gospel the same words are found with this
+slight but important difference, that the Zachariah in question is there
+called the son of Jehoiadah, and is at once identified with the person
+whose murder is related in the Second Book of Chronicles. The later
+translator of St. Matthew had probably confused the names.
+
+Of St. Mark's Gospel the history is even more profoundly obscure.
+Papias, again the highest discoverable link of the Church tradition,
+says that St. Mark accompanied St. Peter to Rome as his interpreter; and
+that while there he wrote down what St. Peter told him, or what he could
+remember St. Peter to have said. Clement of Alexandria enlarges the
+story. According to Clement, when St. Peter was preaching at Rome, the
+Christian congregation there requested St. Mark to write a Gospel for
+them; St. Mark complied without acquainting St. Peter, and St. Peter
+when informed of it was uncertain whether to give or withhold his
+sanction till his mind was set at rest by a vision.
+
+Irenaeus, on the other hand, says that St. Mark's Gospel was not written
+till after the death of St. Peter and St. Paul. St. Chrysostom says that
+after it was written St. Mark went to Egypt and published it at
+Alexandria; Epiphanius again, that the Egyptian expedition was
+undertaken at the express direction of St. Peter himself.
+
+Thus the Church tradition is inconsistent with itself, and in all
+probability is nothing but a structure of air; it is bound up with the
+presence of St. Peter at Rome; and the only ground for supposing that
+St. Peter was ever at Rome at all is the passage at the close of St.
+Peter's First Epistle, where it pleased the Fathers to assume that the
+'Babylon' there spoken of must have been the city of the Caesars. This
+passage alone, with the wild stories (now known to have originated in
+the misreading of an inscription) of St. Peter's conflict with Simon
+Magus in the presence of the emperor, form together the light and airy
+arches on which the huge pretences of the Church of Rome have reared
+themselves. If the Babylon of the Epistle was Babylon on the
+Euphrates--and there is not the slightest historical reason to suppose
+it to have been anything else--the story of the origin of St. Mark's
+Gospel perishes with the legend to which it was inseparably attached by
+Church tradition.
+
+Of St. John's Gospel we do not propose to speak in this place; it forms
+a subject by itself; and of that it is enough to say that the defects of
+external evidence which undoubtedly exist seem overborne by the
+overwhelming proofs of authenticity contained in the Gospel itself.
+
+The faint traditionary traces which inform us that St. Matthew and St.
+Mark were supposed to have written Gospels fail us with St. Luke. The
+apostolic and the immediately post-apostolic Fathers never mention Luke
+as having written a history of our Lord at all. There was indeed a
+Gospel in use among the Marcionites which resembled that of St. Luke, as
+the Gospel of the Ebionites resembled that of St. Matthew. In both the
+one and the other there was no mention of our Lord's miraculous birth;
+and later writers accused Marcion of having mutilated St. Luke. But
+apparently their only reason for thinking so was that the two Gospels
+were like each other; and for all that can be historically proved, the
+Gospel of the Marcionites may have been the older of the two. What is
+wanting externally, however, is supposed to be more than made up by the
+language of St. Luke himself. The Gospel was evidently composed in its
+present form by the same person who wrote the Acts of the Apostles. In
+the latter part of the Acts of the Apostles the writer speaks in the
+first person as the companion of St. Paul; and the date of this Gospel
+seems to be thus conclusively fixed at an early period in the apostolic
+age. There is at least a high probability that this reasoning is sound;
+yet it has seemed strange that a convert so eminent as 'the most
+excellent' Theophilus, to whom St. Luke addressed himself, should be
+found impossible to identify. 'Most excellent' was a title given only to
+persons of high rank; and it is singular that St. Paul himself should
+never have mentioned so considerable a name. And again, there is
+something peculiar in the language of the introduction to the Gospel
+itself. Though St. Luke professes to be writing on the authority of
+eye-witnesses, he does not say he had spoken with eye-witnesses; so far
+from it, that the word translated in the English version 'delivered' is
+literally 'handed down;' it is the verb which corresponds to the
+technical expression for 'tradition;' and the words translated 'having
+had perfect understanding of all things from the first,' might be
+rendered more properly, 'having traced or followed up all things from
+the beginning.' And again, as it is humanly speaking certain that in St.
+Luke's Gospel there are passages, however they are to be explained,
+which were embodied in it from some other source, so, though extremely
+probable, it is not absolutely certain that those passages in the Acts
+in which the writer speaks in the first person are by the same hand as
+the body of the narrative. If St. Luke had anywhere directly introduced
+himself--if he had said plainly that he, the writer who was addressing
+Theophilus, had personally joined St. Paul, and in that part of his
+story was relating what he had seen and heard, there would be no room
+for uncertainty. But, so far as we know, there is no other instance in
+literature of a change of person introduced abruptly without
+explanation. The whole book is less a connected history than a series of
+episodes and fragments of the proceedings of the apostles; and it is to
+be noticed that the account of St. Paul's conversion, as given in its
+place in the first part of the narrative, differs in one material point
+from the second account given later in the part which was unquestionably
+the work of one of St. Paul's companions. There is a possibility--it
+amounts to no more, and the suggestion is thrown out for the
+consideration of those who are better able than this writer to judge of
+it--that in the Gospel and the Acts we have the work of a careful editor
+of the second century. Towards the close of that century a prominent
+actor in the great movement which gave their present authority to the
+four Gospels was Theophilus, Bishop of Antioch; he it was who brought
+them together, incorporated into a single work--_in unum opus_; and it
+may be, after all, that in him we have the long-sought person to whom
+St. Luke was writing; that the Gospel which we now possess was compiled
+at his desire out of other imperfect Gospels in use in the different
+Churches; and that it formed a part of his scheme to supersede them by
+an account more exhaustive, complete, and satisfactory.
+
+To this hypothesis indeed there is an answer which if valid at all is
+absolutely fatal. We are told that although the names of the writers of
+the Gospels may not be mentioned until a comparatively late period, yet
+that the Gospels themselves can be shown to have existed, because they
+are habitually quoted in the authentic writings of the earliest of the
+Fathers. If this be so, the slightness of the historical thread is of
+little moment, and we may rest safely on the solid ground of so
+conclusive a fact. But is it so? That the early Fathers quoted some
+accounts of our Lord's life is abundantly clear; but did they quote
+these? We proceed to examine this question--again tentatively only--we
+do but put forward certain considerations on which we ask for fuller
+information.
+
+If any one of the primitive Christian writers was likely to have been
+acquainted with the authentic writings of the evangelists, that one was
+indisputably Justin Martyr. Born in Palestine in the year 89, Justin
+Martyr lived to the age of seventy-six; he travelled over the Roman
+world as a missionary; and intellectually he was more than on a level
+with most educated Oriental Christians. He was the first distinctly
+controversial writer which the Church produced; and the great facts of
+the Gospel history were obviously as well known to him as they are to
+ourselves. There are no traces in his writings of an acquaintance with
+anything peculiar either to St. John or St. Mark; but there are extracts
+in abundance often identical with and generally nearly resembling
+passages in St. Matthew and St. Luke. Thus at first sight it would be
+difficult to doubt that with these two Gospels at least he was
+intimately familiar. And yet in all his citations there is this
+peculiarity, that Justin Martyr never speaks of either of the
+evangelists by name; he quotes or seems to quote invariably from
+something which he calls [Greek: apomnemoneumata ton Apostolon], or
+'Memoirs of the Apostles.' It is no usual habit of his to describe his
+authorities vaguely: when he quotes the Apocalypse he names St. John;
+when he refers to a prophet he specifies Isaiah, Jeremiah, or Daniel.
+Why, unless there was some particular reason for it, should he use so
+singular an expression whenever he alludes to the sacred history of the
+New Testament? why, if he knew the names of the evangelists, did he
+never mention them even by accident? Nor is this the only singularity in
+Justin Martyr's quotations. There are those slight differences between
+them and the text of the Gospels which appear between the Gospels
+themselves. When we compare an extract in Justin with the parallel
+passage in St. Matthew, we find often that it differs from St. Matthew
+just as St. Matthew differs from St. Luke, or both from St. Mark--great
+verbal similarity--many paragraphs agreeing word for word--and then
+other paragraphs where there is an alteration of expression, tense,
+order, or arrangement.
+
+Again, just as in the midst of the general resemblance between the
+Synoptical Gospels, each evangelist has something of his own which is
+not to be found in the others, so in these 'Memoirs of the Apostles'
+there are facts unknown to either of the evangelists. In the account
+extracted by Justin from 'the Memoirs,' of the baptism in the Jordan,
+the words heard from heaven are not as St. Matthew gives them--'Thou art
+my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased'--but the words of the psalm,
+'Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten Thee;' a reading which,
+singularly enough, was to be found in the Gospel of the Ebionites.
+
+Another curious addition to the same scene is in the words [Greek: kai
+pur anephthe en Iordane], 'and a fire was kindled in Jordan.'
+
+Again, Justin Martyr speaks of our Lord having promised 'to clothe us
+with garments made ready for us if we keep his commandments'--[Greek:
+kai aionion basileian pronoesai]--whatever those words may precisely
+mean.
+
+These and other peculiarities in Justin may be explained if we suppose
+him to have been quoting from memory. The evangelical text might not as
+yet have acquired its verbal sanctity; and as a native of Palestine he
+might well have been acquainted with other traditions which lay outside
+the written word. The silence as to names, however, remains unexplained;
+and as the facts actually stand there is the same kind of proof, and no
+more, that Justin Martyr was acquainted with St. Matthew and St. Luke as
+there is that one of these evangelists made extracts from the other, or
+both from St. Mark. So long as one set of commentators decline to
+recognise the truth of this relation between the Gospels, there will be
+others who with as much justice will dispute the relation of Justin to
+them. He too might have used another Gospel, which, though like them,
+was not identical with them.
+
+After Justin Martyr's death, about the year 170, appeared Tatian's
+'Diatessaron,' a work which, as its title implies, was a harmony of four
+Gospels, and most likely of _the_ four; yet again not exactly as we have
+them. Tatian's harmony, like so many others of the early evangelical
+histories, was silent on the miraculous birth, and commenced only with
+the public ministration. The text was in other places different, so much
+so that Theodoret accuses Tatian of having mutilated the Gospels; but of
+this Theodoret had probably no better means of judging than we have. The
+'Diatessaron' has been long lost, and the name is the only clue to its
+composition.
+
+Of far more importance than either Justin or Tatian are such writings as
+remain of the immediate successors of the apostles--Barnabas, Clement of
+Rome, Polycarp, and Ignatius: it is asserted confidently that in these
+there are quotations from the Gospels so exact that they cannot be
+mistaken.
+
+We will examine them one by one.
+
+In an epistle of Barnabas there is one passage--it is the only one of
+the kind to be found in him--agreeing word for word with the Synoptical
+Gospels, 'I came not to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.'
+It is one of the many passages in which the Greek of the three
+evangelists is exactly the same; it was to be found also in Justin's
+'Memoirs;' and there can be no doubt that Barnabas either knew those
+Gospels or else the common source--if common source there was--from
+which the evangelists borrowed. More than this such a quotation does not
+enable us to say; and till some satisfactory explanation has been
+offered of the agreement between the evangelists, the argument can
+advance no further. On the other hand, Barnabas like St. Paul had other
+sources from which he drew his knowledge of our Lord's words. He too
+ascribes words to Him which are not recorded by the evangelists, [Greek:
+houto phesin Iesous; hoi thelontes me idein kai hapsasthai mou tes
+basileias opheilousi thlibentes kai pathontes labein me]. The thought is
+everywhere in the Gospels, the words nowhere, nor anything like them.
+
+Both Ignatius and Polycarp appear to quote the Gospels, yet with them
+also there is the same uncertainty; while Ignatius quotes as genuine an
+expression which, so far as we know, was peculiar to a translation of
+the Gospel of the Ebionites--'Handle me and see, for I am not a spirit
+without body,' [Greek: hoti ouk eimi daimonion asomaton].
+
+Clement's quotations are still more free, for Clement nowhere quotes the
+text of the evangelists exactly as it at present stands; often he
+approaches it extremely close; at times the agreement is rather in
+meaning than words, as if he were translating from another language. But
+again Clement more noticeably than either of the other apostolic Fathers
+cites expressions of our Lord of which the evangelists knew nothing.
+
+For instance--
+
+'The Lord saith, "If ye be with me gathered into my bosom, and do not
+after my commandments, I will cast you off, and I will say unto you,
+Depart from me, I know you not, ye workers of iniquity."'
+
+And again:--
+
+'The Lord said, "Ye shall be as sheep in the midst of wolves." Peter
+answered and said unto Him, "Will the wolves then tear the sheep?" Jesus
+said unto Peter, "The sheep need not fear the wolves after they (the
+sheep) be dead: and fear not ye those who kill you and can do nothing to
+you; but fear Him who after you be dead hath power over soul and body to
+cast them into hell-fire."'
+
+In these words we seem to have the lost link in a passage which appears
+in a different connection in St. Matthew and St. Luke. It may be said,
+as with Justin Martyr, that Clement was quoting from memory in the sense
+rather than in the letter; although even so it is difficult to suppose
+that he could have invented an interlocution of St. Peter. Yet no
+hypothesis will explain the most strange words which follow:--
+
+'The Lord being asked when His kingdom should come, said, "When two
+shall be one, and that which is without as that which is within, and the
+male with the female neither male nor female."'
+
+It is needless to say how remote are such expressions as these from any
+which have come down to us through the evangelists; but they were no
+inventions of Clement. The passage reappears later in Clement of
+Alexandria, who found it in something which he called the Gospel of the
+Egyptians.
+
+It will be urged that because Clement quoted other authorities beside
+the evangelists, it does not follow that he did not know and quote from
+them. If the citation of a passage which appears in almost the same
+words in another book is not to be accepted as a proof of an
+acquaintance with that book, we make it impossible, it may be said, to
+prove from quotations at all the fact of any book's existence. But this
+is not the case. If a Father, in relating an event which is told
+variously in the Synoptical Gospels, had followed one of them minutely
+in its verbal peculiarities, it would go far to prove that he was
+acquainted with that one; if the same thing was observed in all his
+quotations, the proof would amount to demonstration. If he agreed
+minutely in one place with one Gospel, minutely in a second with
+another, minutely in a third with another, there would be reason to
+believe that he was acquainted with them all; but when he merely relates
+what they also relate in language which approaches theirs and yet
+differs from it, as they also resemble yet differ from one another, we
+do not escape from the circle of uncertainty, and we conclude either
+that the early Fathers made quotations with a looseness irreconcileable
+with the idea that the language of the Gospels possessed any verbal
+sacredness to them, or that there were in their times other narratives
+of our Lord's life standing in the same relation to the three Gospels as
+St. Matthew stands to St. Mark and St. Luke.
+
+Thus the problem returns upon us; and it might almost seem as if the
+explanation was laid purposely beyond our reach. We are driven back upon
+internal criticism; and we have to ask again what account is to be given
+of that element common to the Synoptical Gospels, common also to those
+other Gospels of which we find traces so distinct--those verbal
+resemblances, too close to be the effect of accident--those differences
+which forbid the supposition that the evangelists copied one another. So
+many are those common passages, that if all which is peculiar to each
+evangelist by himself were dropped, if those words and those actions
+only were retained which either all three or two at least share
+together, the figure of our Lord from His baptism to His ascension would
+remain with scarcely impaired majesty.
+
+One hypothesis, and so far as we can see one only, would make the
+mystery intelligible, that immediately on the close of our Lord's life
+some original sketch of it was drawn up by the congregation, which
+gradually grew and gathered round it whatever His mother, His relations,
+or His disciples afterwards individually might contribute. This primary
+history would thus not be the work of any one mind or man; it would be
+the joint work of the Church, and thus might well be called 'Memoirs of
+the Apostles;' and would naturally be quoted without the name of either
+one of them being specially attached to it. As Christianity spread over
+the world, and separate Churches were founded by particular apostles,
+copies would be multiplied, and copies of those copies; and, unchecked
+by the presence (before the invention of printing impossible) of any
+authoritative text, changes would creep in--passages would be left out
+which did not suit the peculiar views of this or that sect; others would
+be added as this or that apostle recollected something which our Lord
+had said that bore on questions raised in the development of the creed.
+Two great divisions would form themselves between the Jewish and the
+Gentile Churches; there would be a Hebrew Gospel and a Greek Gospel, and
+the Hebrew would be translated into Greek, as Papias says St. Matthew's
+Gospel was. Eventually the confusion would become intolerable; and among
+the conflicting stories the Church would have been called on to make its
+formal choice.
+
+This fact at least is certain from St. Luke's words, that at the time
+when he was writing many different narratives did actually exist. The
+hypothesis of a common origin for them has as yet found little favour
+with English theologians; yet rather perhaps because it would be
+inconvenient for certain peculiar forms of English thought than because
+it has not probability on its side. That the Synoptical Gospels should
+have been a natural growth rather than the special and independent work
+of three separate writers, would be unfavourable to a divinity which has
+built itself up upon particular texts, and has been more concerned with
+doctrinal polemics than with the broader basements of historic truth.
+Yet the text theory suffers equally from the mode in which the first
+Fathers treated the Gospels, if it were these Gospels indeed which they
+used. They at least could have attributed no importance to words and
+phrases; while again, as we said before, a narrative dating from the
+cradle of Christianity, with the testimony in its favour of such broad
+and deep reception, would, however wanting in some details, be an
+evidence of the truth of the main facts of the Gospel history very much
+stronger than that of three books composed we know not when, and the
+origin of which it is impossible to trace, which it is impossible to
+regard as independent, and the writers of which in any other view of
+them must be assumed to have borrowed from each other.
+
+But the object of this article is not to press either this or any other
+theory; it is but to ask from those who are able to give it an answer to
+the most serious of questions. The truth of the Gospel history is now
+more widely doubted in Europe than at any time since the conversion of
+Constantine. Every thinking person who has been brought up a Christian
+and desires to remain a Christian, yet who knows anything of what is
+passing in the world, is looking to be told on what evidence the New
+Testament claims to be received. The state of opinion proves of itself
+that the arguments hitherto offered produce no conviction. Every other
+miraculous history is discredited as legend, however exalted the
+authority on which it seems to be rested. We crave to have good reason
+shown us for maintaining still the one great exception. Hard worked in
+other professions, and snatching with difficulty sufficient leisure to
+learn how complicated is the problem, the laity can but turn to those
+for assistance who are set apart and maintained as their theological
+trustees. We can but hope and pray that some one may be found to give us
+an edition of the Gospels in which the difficulties will neither be
+slurred over with convenient neglect or noticed with affected
+indifference. It may or may not be a road to a bishopric; it may or may
+not win the favour of the religious world; but it will earn at least the
+respectful gratitude of those who cannot trifle with holy things, and
+who believe that true religion is the service of truth.
+
+The last words were scarcely written when an advertisement appeared, the
+importance of which can scarcely be over-estimated. A commentary is
+announced on the Old and New Testaments, to be composed with a view to
+what are called the 'misrepresentations' of modern criticism. It is to
+be brought out under the direction of the heads of the Church, and is
+the nearest approach to an official act in these great matters which
+they have ventured for two hundred years. It is not for us to anticipate
+the result. The word 'misrepresentations' is unfortunate; we should have
+augured better for the work if instead of it had been written 'the
+sincere perplexities of honest minds.' But the execution may be better
+than the promise. If these perplexities are encountered honourably and
+successfully, the Church may recover its supremacy over the intellect of
+the country; if otherwise, the archbishop who has taken the command will
+have steered the vessel direct upon the rocks.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[E] _Fraser's Magazine_, 1864.
+
+[F] I do not speak of individuals; I speak of _tendency_.
+
+
+
+
+THE BOOK OF JOB.[G]
+
+
+It will be matter some day of curious enquiry to ascertain why,
+notwithstanding the high reverence with which the English people regard
+the Bible, they have done so little in comparison with their continental
+contemporaries towards arriving at a proper understanding of it. The
+books named below[H] form but a section of a long list which has
+appeared during the last few years in Germany on the Book of Job alone;
+and this book has not received any larger share of attention than the
+others, either of the Old or the New Testament. Whatever be the nature
+or the origin of these books (and on this point there is much difference
+of opinion among the Germans as among ourselves) they are all agreed,
+orthodox and unorthodox, that at least we should endeavour to understand
+them; and that no efforts can be too great, either of research or
+criticism, to discover their history, or elucidate their meaning.
+
+We shall assent, doubtless, eagerly, perhaps noisily and indignantly, to
+so obvious a truism; but our own efforts in the same direction will not
+bear us out. Able men in England employ themselves in matters of a more
+practical character; and while we refuse to avail ourselves of what has
+been done elsewhere, no book, or books, which we produce on the
+interpretation of Scripture acquire more than a partial or an ephemeral
+reputation. The most important contribution to our knowledge on this
+subject which has been made in these recent years is the translation of
+the 'Library of the Fathers,' by which it is about as rational to
+suppose that the analytical criticism of modern times can be superseded,
+as that the place of Herman and Dindorf could be supplied by an edition
+of the old scholiasts.
+
+It is, indeed, reasonable that as long as we are persuaded that our
+English theory of the Bible, as a whole, is the right one, we should
+shrink from contact with investigations which, however ingenious in
+themselves, are based on what we know to be a false foundation. But
+there are some learned Germans whose orthodoxy would pass examination at
+Exeter Hall; and there are many subjects, such, for instance, as the
+present, on which all their able men are agreed in conclusions that
+cannot rationally give offence to any one. With the Book of Job,
+analytical criticism has only served to clear up the uncertainties which
+have hitherto always hung about it. It is now considered to be, beyond
+all doubt, a genuine Hebrew original, completed by its writer almost in
+the form in which it now remains to us. The questions on the
+authenticity of the Prologue and Epilogue, which once were thought
+important, have given way before a more sound conception of the dramatic
+unity of the entire poem; and the volumes before us contain merely an
+enquiry into its meaning, bringing, at the same time, all the resources
+of modern scholarship and historical and mythological research to bear
+upon the obscurity of separate passages. It is the most difficult of all
+the Hebrew compositions--many words occurring in it, and many thoughts,
+not to be found elsewhere in the Bible. How difficult our translators
+found it may be seen by the number of words which they were obliged to
+insert in italics, and the doubtful renderings which they have suggested
+in the margin. One instance of this, in passing, we will notice in this
+place--it will be familiar to every one as the passage quoted at the
+opening of the English burial service, and adduced as one of the
+doctrinal proofs of the resurrection of the body:--'I know that my
+Redeemer liveth, and that He shall stand at the latter _day_ upon the
+earth; and _though_, after my skin _worms_ destroy this _body_, yet in
+my flesh I shall see God.' So this passage stands in the ordinary
+version. But the words in italics have nothing answering to them in the
+original--they were all added by the translators[I] to fill out their
+interpretation; and for _in my flesh_, they tell us themselves in the
+margin that we may read (and, in fact, we ought to read, and must read)
+'_out of_,' or _'without' my flesh_. It is but to write out the verses,
+omitting the conjectural additions, and making that one small but vital
+correction, to see how frail a support is there for so large a
+conclusion: 'I know that my Redeemer liveth, and shall stand at the
+latter       upon the earth; and after my skin       destroy
+this       ; yet without my flesh I shall see God.' If there is any
+doctrine of a resurrection here, it is a resurrection precisely _not_ of
+the body, but of the spirit. And now let us only add, that the word
+translated Redeemer is the technical expression for the 'avenger of
+blood;' and that the second paragraph ought to be rendered--'and one to
+come after me (my next of kin, to whom the avenging my injuries belongs)
+shall stand upon my dust,' and we shall see how much was to be done
+towards the mere exegesis of the text. This is an extreme instance, and
+no one will question the general beauty and majesty of our translation;
+but there are many mythical and physical allusions scattered over the
+poem, which, in the sixteenth century, there were positively no means of
+understanding; and perhaps, too, there were mental tendencies in the
+translators themselves which prevented them from adequately apprehending
+even the drift and spirit of the composition. The form of the story was
+too stringent to allow such tendencies any latitude; but they appear,
+from time to time, sufficiently to produce serious confusion. With these
+recent assistances, therefore, we propose to say something of the nature
+of this extraordinary book--a book of which it is to say little to call
+it unequalled of its kind, and which will one day, perhaps, when it is
+allowed to stand on its own merits, be seen towering up alone, far away
+above all the poetry of the world. How it found its way into the canon,
+smiting as it does through and through the most deeply-seated Jewish
+prejudices, is the chief difficulty about it now; to be explained only
+by a traditional acceptance among the sacred books, dating back from the
+old times of the national greatness, when the minds of the people were
+hewn in a larger type than was to be found among the Pharisees of the
+great synagogue. But its authorship, its date, and its history, are
+alike a mystery to us; it existed at the time when the canon was
+composed; and this is all that we know beyond what we can gather out of
+the language and contents of the poem itself.
+
+Before going further, however, we must make room for a few remarks of a
+very general kind. Let it have been written when it would, it marks a
+period in which the religious convictions of thinking men were passing
+through a vast crisis; and we shall not understand it without having
+before us clearly something of the conditions which periods of such a
+kind always and necessarily exhibit.
+
+The history of religious speculation appears in extreme outline to have
+been of the following character. We may conceive mankind to have been
+originally launched into the universe with no knowledge either of
+themselves or of the scene in which they were placed; with no actual
+knowledge, but distinguished from the rest of the creation by a faculty
+of gaining knowledge; and first unconsciously, and afterwards
+consciously and laboriously, to have commenced that long series of
+experience and observation which has accumulated in thousands of years
+to what we now see around us. Limited on all sides by conditions which
+they must have felt to be none of their own imposing, and finding
+everywhere forces working, over which they had no control, the fear
+which they would naturally entertain of these invisible and mighty
+agents assumed, under the direction of an idea which we may perhaps call
+inborn and inherent in human nature, a more generous character of
+reverence and awe. The laws of the outer world, as they discovered them,
+they regarded as the decrees, or as the immediate energies of personal
+beings; and as knowledge grew up among them, they looked upon it, not as
+knowledge of nature, but of God, or the gods. All early paganism
+appears, on careful examination, to have arisen out of a consecration of
+the first rudiments of physical or speculative science. The twelve
+labours of Hercules are the labours of the sun, of which Hercules is an
+old name, through the twelve signs. Chronos, or _time_, being measured
+by the apparent motion of the heavens, is figured as their child; Time,
+the universal parent, devours its own offspring, yet is again itself, in
+the high faith of a human soul conscious of its power and its
+endurance, supposed to be baffled and dethroned by Zeus, or _life_; and
+so on through all the elaborate theogonies of Greece and Egypt. They are
+no more than real insight into real phenomena, allegorised as time went
+on, elaborated by fancy, or idealised by imagination, but never losing
+their original character.
+
+Thus paganism, in its very nature, was expansive, self-developing, and,
+as Mr. Hume observed, tolerant; a new god was welcomed to the Pantheon
+as a new scientific discovery is welcomed by the Royal Society; and the
+various nations found no difficulty in interchanging their divinities--a
+new god either representing a new power not hitherto discovered, or one
+with which they were already familiar under a new name. With such a
+power of adaptation and enlargement, if there had been nothing more in
+it than this, such a system might have gone on accommodating itself to
+the change of times, and keeping pace with the growth of human
+character. Already in its later forms, as the unity of nature was more
+clearly observed, and the identity of nature throughout the known world,
+the separate powers were subordinating themselves to a single supreme
+king; and, as the poets had originally personified the elemental forces,
+the thinkers were reversing the earlier process, and discovering the law
+under the person. Happily or unhappily, however, what they could do for
+themselves they could not do for the multitude. Phoebus and Aphrodite
+had been made too human to be allegorised. Humanised, and yet, we may
+say, only half-humanised, retaining their purely physical nature, and
+without any proper moral attribute at all, these gods and goddesses
+remained to the many examples of sensuality made beautiful; and, as soon
+as right and wrong came to have a meaning, it was impossible to worship
+any more these idealised despisers of it. The human caprices and
+passions which served at first to deepen the illusion, justly revenged
+themselves; paganism became a lie, and perished.
+
+In the meantime, the Jews (and perhaps some other nations, but the Jews
+chiefly and principally) had been moving forward along a road wholly
+different. Breaking early away from the gods of nature, they advanced
+along the line of their moral consciousness; and leaving the nations to
+study physics, philosophy, and art, they confined themselves to man and
+to human life. Their theology grew up round the knowledge of good and
+evil, and God, with them, was the supreme Lord of the world, who stood
+towards man in the relation of a ruler and a judge. Holding such a
+faith, to them the toleration of paganism was an impossibility; the laws
+of nature might be many, but the law of conduct was one; there was one
+law and one king; and the conditions under which he governed the world,
+as embodied in the Decalogue or other similar code, were looked upon as
+iron and inflexible certainties, unalterable revelations of the will of
+an unalterable Being. So far there was little in common between this
+process and the other; but it was identical with it in this one
+important feature, that moral knowledge, like physical, admitted of
+degrees; and the successive steps of it were only purchasable by
+experience. The dispensation of the law, in the language of modern
+theology, was not the dispensation of grace, and the nature of good and
+evil disclosed itself slowly as men were able to comprehend it. Thus, no
+system of law or articles of belief were or could be complete and
+exhaustive for all time. Experience accumulates; new facts are observed,
+new forces display themselves, and all such formulae must necessarily be
+from period to period broken up and moulded afresh. And yet the steps
+already gained are a treasure so sacred, so liable are they at all times
+to be attacked by those lower and baser elements in our nature which it
+is their business to hold in check, that the better part of mankind have
+at all times practically regarded their creed as a sacred total to which
+nothing may be added, and from which nothing may be taken away; the
+suggestion of a new idea is resented as an encroachment, punished as an
+insidious piece of treason, and resisted by the combined forces of all
+common practical understandings, which know too well the value of what
+they have, to risk the venture upon untried change. Periods of religious
+transition, therefore, when the advance has been a real one, always have
+been violent, and probably will always continue to be so. They to whom
+the precious gift of fresh light has been given are called upon to
+exhibit their credentials as teachers in suffering for it. They, and
+those who oppose them, have alike a sacred cause; and the fearful
+spectacle arises of earnest, vehement men contending against each other
+as for their own souls, in fiery struggle. Persecutions come, and
+martyrdoms, and religions wars; and, at last, the old faith, like the
+phoenix, expires upon its altar, and the new rises out of the ashes.
+
+Such, in briefest outline, has been the history of religions, natural
+and moral; the first, indeed, being in no proper sense a religion at
+all, as we understand religion; and only assuming the character of it in
+the minds of great men whose moral sense had raised them beyond their
+time and country, and who, feeling the necessity of a real creed, with
+an effort and with indifferent success, endeavoured to express, under
+the systems which they found, emotions which had no proper place in
+them.
+
+Of the transition periods which we have described as taking place under
+the religion which we call moral, the first known to us is marked at its
+opening by the appearance of the Book of Job, the first fierce collision
+of the new fact with the formula which will not stretch to cover it.
+
+The earliest phenomenon likely to be observed connected with the moral
+government of the world is the general one, that on the whole, as things
+are constituted, good men prosper and are happy, bad men fail and are
+miserable. The cause of such a condition is no mystery, and lies very
+near the surface. As soon as men combine in society, they are forced to
+obey certain laws under which alone society is possible, and these laws,
+even in their rudest form, approach the laws of conscience. To a certain
+extent, every one is obliged to sacrifice his private inclinations; and
+those who refuse to do so are punished, or are crushed. If society were
+perfect, the imperfect tendency would carry itself out till the two sets
+of laws were identical; but perfection so far has been only in Utopia,
+and, as far as we can judge by experience hitherto, they have
+approximated most nearly in the simplest and most rudimentary forms of
+life. Under the systems which we call patriarchal, the modern
+distinction between sins and crimes had no existence. All gross sins
+were offences against society, as it then was constituted, and, wherever
+it was possible, were punished as being so; chicanery and those subtle
+advantages which the acute and unscrupulous can take over the simple,
+without open breach of enacted statutes, became only possible under the
+complications of more artificial polities; and the oppression or injury
+of man by man was open, violent, obvious, and therefore easily
+understood. Doubtless, therefore, in such a state of things it would,
+on the whole, be true to experience that, judging merely by outward
+prosperity or the reverse, good and bad men would be rewarded and
+punished as such in this actual world; so far, that is, as the
+administration of such rewards and punishments was left in the power of
+mankind. But theology could not content itself with general tendencies.
+Theological propositions then, as much as now, were held to be absolute,
+universal, admitting of no exceptions, and explaining every phenomenon.
+Superficial generalisations were construed into immutable decrees; the
+God of this world was just and righteous, and temporal prosperity or
+wretchedness were dealt out by Him immediately by His own will to His
+subjects according to their behaviour. Thus the same disposition towards
+completeness which was the ruin of paganism, here, too, was found
+generating the same evils; the half truth rounding itself out with
+falsehoods. Not only the consequences of ill actions which followed
+through themselves, but the accidents, as we call them, of
+nature--earthquakes, storms, and pestilences--were the ministers of
+God's justice, and struck sinners only with discriminating accuracy.
+That the sun should shine alike on the evil and the good was a creed too
+high for the early divines, or that the victims of a fallen tower were
+no greater offenders than their neighbours. The conceptions of such men
+could not pass beyond the outward temporal consequence; and if God's
+hand was not there it was nowhere. We might have expected that such a
+theory of things could not long resist the accumulated contradictions of
+experience; but the same experience shows also what a marvellous power
+is in us of thrusting aside phenomena which interfere with our cherished
+convictions; and when such convictions are consecrated into a creed
+which it is a sacred duty to believe, experience is but like water
+dropping upon a rock, which wears it away, indeed, at last, but only in
+thousands of years. This theory was and is the central idea of the
+Jewish polity, the obstinate toughness of which has been the perplexity
+of Gentiles and Christians from the first dawn of its existence; it
+lingers among ourselves in our Liturgy and in the popular belief; and in
+spite of the emphatic censure of Him after whose name we call ourselves,
+is still the instant interpreter for us of any unusual calamity, a
+potato blight, a famine, or an epidemic: such vitality is there in a
+moral faith, though now, at any rate, contradicted by the experience of
+all mankind, and at issue even with Christianity itself.
+
+At what period in the world's history misgivings about it began to show
+themselves it is now impossible to say; it was at the close, probably,
+of the patriarchal period, when men who really _thought_ must have found
+the ground palpably shaking under them. Indications of such misgivings
+are to be found in the Psalms, those especially passing under the name
+of Asaph; and all through Ecclesiastes there breathes a spirit of
+deepest and saddest scepticism. But Asaph thrusts his doubts aside, and
+forces himself back into his old position; and the scepticism of
+Ecclesiastes is confessedly that of a man who had gone wandering after
+enjoyment; searching after pleasures--pleasures of sense and pleasures
+of intellect--and who, at last, bears reluctant testimony that, by such
+methods, no pleasures can be found which will endure; that he had
+squandered the power which might have been used for better things, and
+had only strength remaining to tell his own sad tale as a warning to
+mankind. There is nothing in Ecclesiastes like the misgivings of a noble
+nature. The writer's own personal happiness had been all for which he
+had cared; he had failed, as all men gifted as he was gifted are sure to
+fail, and the lights of heaven were extinguished by the disappointment
+with which his own spirit had been clouded.
+
+Utterly different from these, both in character and in the lesson which
+it teaches, is the Book of Job. Of unknown date, as we said, and unknown
+authorship, the language impregnated with strange idioms and strange
+allusions, un-Jewish in form, and in fiercest hostility with Judaism, it
+hovers like a meteor over the old Hebrew literature, in it, but not of
+it, compelling the acknowledgment of itself by its own internal majesty,
+yet exerting no influence over the minds of the people, never alluded
+to, and scarcely ever quoted, till at last the light which it had
+heralded rose up full over the world in Christianity.
+
+The conjectures which have been formed upon the date of this book are so
+various, that they show of themselves on how slight a foundation the
+best of them must rest. The language is no guide, for although
+unquestionably of Hebrew origin, the poem bears no analogy to any of the
+other books in the Bible; while of its external history nothing is
+known at all, except that it was received into the canon at the time of
+the great synagogue. Ewald decides, with some confidence, that it
+belongs to the great prophetic period, and that the writer was a
+contemporary of Jeremiah. Ewald is a high authority in these matters,
+and this opinion is the one which we believe is now commonly received
+among biblical scholars. In the absence of proof, however (and the
+reasons which he brings forward are really no more than conjectures),
+these opposite considerations may be of moment. It is only natural that
+at first thought we should ascribe the grandest poem in a literature to
+the time at which the poetry of the nation to which it belongs was
+generally at its best; but, on reflection, the time when the poetry of
+prophecy is the richest, is not likely to be favourable to compositions
+of another kind. The prophets wrote in an era of decrepitude,
+dissolution, sin, and shame, when the glory of Israel was falling round
+them into ruin, and their mission, glowing as they were with the ancient
+spirit, was to rebuke, to warn, to threaten, and to promise. Finding
+themselves too late to save, and only, like Cassandra, despised and
+disregarded, their voices rise up singing the swan song of a dying
+people, now falling away in the wild wailing of despondency over the
+shameful and desperate present, now swelling in triumphant hope that God
+will not leave them for ever, and in His own time will take His chosen
+to Himself again. But such a period is an ill occasion for searching
+into the broad problems of human destiny; the present is all-important
+and all-absorbing; and such a book as that of Job could have arisen only
+out of an isolation of mind, and life, and interest, which we cannot
+conceive of as possible under such conditions.
+
+The more it is studied, the more the conclusion forces itself upon us
+that, let the writer have lived when he would, in his struggle with the
+central falsehood of his own people's creed, he must have divorced
+himself from them outwardly as well as inwardly; that he travelled away
+into the world, and lived long, perhaps all his matured life, in exile.
+Everything about the book speaks of a person who had broken free from
+the narrow littleness of 'the peculiar people.' The language, as we
+said, is full of strange words. The hero of the poem is of strange land
+and parentage--a Gentile certainly, not a Jew. The life, the manners,
+the customs are of all varieties and places--Egypt, with its river and
+its pyramids, is there; the description of mining points to Phoenicia;
+the settled life in cities, the nomad Arabs, the wandering caravans, the
+heat of the tropics, and the ice of the north, all are foreign to
+Canaan, speaking of foreign things and foreign people. No mention, or
+hint of mention, is there throughout the poem of Jewish traditions or
+Jewish certainties. We look to find the three friends vindicate
+themselves, as they so well might have done, by appeals to the fertile
+annals of Israel, to the Flood, to the cities of the plain, to the
+plagues of Egypt, or the thunders of Sinai. But of all this there is not
+a word; they are passed by as if they had no existence; and instead of
+them, when witnesses are required for the power of God, we have strange
+un-Hebrew stories of the eastern astronomic mythology, the old wars of
+the giants, the imprisoned Orion, the wounded dragon, 'the sweet
+influences of the seven stars,' and the glittering fragments of the
+sea-snake Rahab[J] trailing across the northern sky. Again, God is not
+the God of Israel, but the father of mankind; we hear nothing of a
+chosen people, nothing of a special revelation, nothing of peculiar
+privileges; and in the court of heaven there is a Satan, not the prince
+of this world and the enemy of God, but the angel of judgment, the
+accusing spirit whose mission was to walk to and fro over the earth, and
+carry up to heaven an account of the sins of mankind. We cannot believe
+that thoughts of this kind arose out of Jerusalem in the days of Josiah.
+In this book, if anywhere, we have the record of some [Greek: aner
+polutropos] who, like the old hero of Ithaca,
+
+    [Greek:
+    pollon anthropon iden astea kai noon egno,
+    polla d' hog' en ponto pathen algea hon kata thumon,
+    arnumenos psuchen.... ]
+
+but the scenes, the names, and the incidents, are all contrived as if to
+baffle curiosity--as if, in the very form of the poem, to teach us that
+it is no story of a single thing which happened once, but that it
+belongs to humanity itself, and is the drama of the trial of man, with
+Almighty God and the angels as the spectators of it.
+
+No reader can have failed to have been struck with the simplicity of
+the opening. Still, calm, and most majestic, it tells us everything
+which is necessary to be known in the fewest possible words. The history
+of Job was probably a tradition in the East; his name, like that of
+Priam in Greece, the symbol of fallen greatness, and his misfortunes the
+problem of philosophers. In keeping with the current belief, he is
+described as a model of excellence, the most perfect and upright man
+upon the earth, 'and the same was the greatest man in all the east.' So
+far, greatness and goodness had gone hand in hand together, as the
+popular theory required. The details of his character are brought out in
+the progress of the poem. He was 'the father of the oppressed, and of
+those who had none to help them.' When he sat as a judge in the
+market-places, 'righteousness clothed him' there, and 'his justice was a
+robe and a diadem.' He 'broke the jaws of the wicked, and plucked the
+spoil out of his teeth;' and, humble in the midst of his power, he 'did
+not despise the cause of his manservant, or his maidservant, when they
+contended with him,' knowing (and amidst those old people where the
+multitude of mankind were regarded as the born slaves of the powerful,
+to be carved into eunuchs or polluted into concubines at their master's
+pleasure, it was no easy matter to know it)--knowing that 'He who had
+made him had made them,' and _one_ 'had fashioned them both in the
+womb.' Above all, he was the friend of the poor; 'the blessing of him
+that was ready to perish came upon him,' and he 'made the widow's heart
+to sing for joy.'
+
+Setting these characteristics of his daily life by the side of his
+unaffected piety, as it is described in the first chapter, we have a
+picture of the best man who could then be conceived; not a hard ascetic,
+living in haughty or cowardly isolation, but a warm figure of flesh and
+blood, a man full of all human loveliness, and to whom, that no room
+might be left for any possible Calvinistic falsehood, God Himself bears
+the emphatic testimony, that 'there was none like him upon the earth, a
+perfect and upright man, who feared God and eschewed evil.' If such a
+person as this, therefore, could be made miserable, necessarily the
+current belief of the Jews was false to the root; and tradition
+furnished the fact that he had been visited by every worst calamity. How
+was it then to be accounted for? Out of a thousand possible
+explanations, the poet introduces a single one. He admits us behind the
+veil which covers the ways of Providence, and we hear the accusing angel
+charging Job with an interested piety, and of being obedient because it
+was his policy. 'Job does not serve God for nought,' he says; 'strip him
+of his splendour, and see if he will care for God then. Humble him into
+poverty and wretchedness, so only we shall know what is in his heart.'
+The cause thus introduced is itself a rebuke to the belief which, with
+its 'rewards and punishments,' immediately fostered selfishness; and the
+poem opens with a double action, on one side to try the question whether
+it is possible for man to love God disinterestedly--the issue of which
+trial is not foreseen or even foretold, and we watch the progress of it
+with an anxious and fearful interest; on the other side, to bring out,
+in contrast to the truth which we already know, the cruel falsehood of
+the popular faith--to show how, instead of leading men to mercy and
+affection, it hardens their heart, narrows their sympathies, and
+enhances the trials of the sufferer, by refinements which even Satan had
+not anticipated. The combination of evils, as blow falls on blow,
+suddenly, swiftly, and terribly, has all the appearance of a purposed
+visitation (as indeed it was); if ever outward incidents might with
+justice be interpreted as the immediate action of Providence, those
+which fell on Job might be so interpreted. The world turns disdainfully
+from the fallen in the world's way; but far worse than this, his chosen
+friends, wise, good, pious men, as wisdom and piety were then, without
+one glimpse of the true cause of his sufferings, see in them a judgment
+upon his secret sins. He becomes to them an illustration, and even (such
+are the paralogisms of men of this description) a proof of their theory
+that 'the prosperity of the wicked is but for a while;' and instead of
+the comfort and help which they might have brought him, and which in the
+end they were made to bring him, he is to them no more than a text for
+the enunciation of solemn falsehood. And even worse again, the sufferer
+himself had been educated in the same creed; he, too, had been taught to
+see the hand of God in the outward dispensation; and feeling from the
+bottom of his heart, that he, in his own case, was a sure contradiction
+of what he had learnt to believe, he himself finds his very faith in God
+shaken from its foundation. The worst evils which Satan had devised
+were distanced far by those which had been created by human folly.
+
+The creed in which Job had believed was tried and found wanting, and, as
+it ever will be when the facts of experience come in contact with the
+inadequate formula, the true is found so mingled with the false, that
+they can hardly be disentangled, and are in danger of being swept away
+together.
+
+A studied respect is shown, however, to orthodoxy, even while it is
+arraigned for judgment. It may be doubtful whether the writer purposely
+intended it. He probably cared only to tell the real truth; to say for
+the old theory the best which could be said, and to produce as its
+defenders the best and wisest men whom in his experience he had known to
+believe and defend it. At any rate, he represents the three friends, not
+as a weaker person would have represented them, as foolish, obstinate
+bigots, but as wise, humane, and almost great men, who, at the outset,
+at least, are animated only by the kindest feelings, and speak what they
+have to say with the most earnest conviction that it is true. Job is
+vehement, desperate, reckless. His language is the wild, natural
+outpouring of suffering. The friends, true to the eternal nature of man,
+are grave, solemn, and indignant, preaching their half truth, and
+mistaken only in supposing that it is the whole; speaking, as all such
+persons would speak and still do speak, in defending what they consider
+sacred truth against the assaults of folly and scepticism. How beautiful
+is their first introduction:--
+
+'Now when Job's three friends heard of all this evil which was come upon
+him, they came every one from his own place; Eliphaz the Temanite, and
+Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite: for they had made an
+appointment together to come to mourn with him and to comfort him. And
+when they lifted up their eyes afar off, and knew him not, they lifted
+up their voice and wept, and they rent every one his mantle, and
+sprinkled dust upon their heads towards heaven. So they sat down with
+him upon the ground seven days and seven nights, and none spake a word
+unto him, for they saw that his grief was very great.'
+
+What a picture is there! What majestic tenderness! His wife had scoffed
+at his faith, bidding him 'leave God and die.' 'His acquaintance had
+turned from him.' He 'had called his servant, and he had given him no
+answer.' Even the children, in their unconscious cruelty, had gathered
+round and mocked him as he lay among the ashes. But 'his friends
+sprinkle dust towards heaven, and sit silently by him, and weep for him
+seven days and seven nights upon the ground.' That is, they were
+true-hearted, truly loving, devout, religious men; and yet they, with
+their religion, were to become the instruments of the most poignant
+sufferings, the sharpest temptations, which he had to endure. So it was,
+and is, and will be--of such materials is this human life of ours
+composed.
+
+And now, remembering the double action of the drama--the actual trial of
+Job, the result of which is uncertain; and the delusion of these men,
+which is, at the outset, certain--let us go rapidly through the
+dialogue. Satan's share in the temptation had already been overcome.
+Lying sick in the loathsome disease which had been sent upon him, his
+wife, in Satan's own words, had tempted Job to say, 'Farewell to
+God,'--think no more of God or goodness, since this was all which came
+of it; and Job had told her that she spoke as one of the foolish women.
+He 'had received good at the hand of the Lord, and should he not receive
+evil?' But now, when real love and real affection appear, his heart
+melts in him; he loses his forced self-composure, and bursts into a
+passionate regret that he had ever been born. In the agony of his
+sufferings, hope of better things had died away. He does not complain of
+injustice; as yet, and before his friends have stung and wounded him, he
+makes no questioning of Providence,--but why was life given to him at
+all, if only for this? Sick in mind, and sick in body, but one wish
+remains to him, that death will come quickly and end all. It is a cry
+from the very depths of a single and simple heart. But for such
+simplicity and singleness his friends could not give him credit;
+possessed beforehand with their idea, they see in his misery only a
+fatal witness against him; such calamities could not have befallen a
+man, the justice of God would not have permitted it, unless they had
+been deserved. Job had sinned and he had suffered, and this wild passion
+was but impenitence and rebellion.
+
+Being as certain that they were right in this opinion as they were that
+God Himself existed, that they should speak what they felt was only
+natural and necessary; and their language at the outset is, all which
+would be dictated by the tenderest sympathy. Eliphaz opens, the oldest
+and most important of the three, in a soft, subdued, suggestive strain,
+contriving in every way to spare the feelings of the sufferer, to the
+extreme to which his love will allow him. All is general, impersonal,
+indirect,--the rule of the world, the order of Providence. He does not
+accuse Job, but he describes his calamities, and leaves him to gather
+for himself the occasion which had produced them; and then passes off,
+as if further to soften the blow, to the mysterious vision in which the
+infirmity of mortal nature had been revealed to him, the universal
+weakness which involved both the certainty that Job had shared in it,
+and the excuse for him, if he would confess and humble himself: the
+blessed virtue of repentance follows, and the promise that all shall be
+well.
+
+This is the note on which each of the friends strikes successively, in
+the first of the three divisions into which the dialogue divides itself,
+but each with increasing peremptoriness and confidence, as Job, so far
+from accepting their interpretation of what had befallen him, hurls it
+from him in anger and disdain. Let us observe (and the Calvinists should
+consider this), he will hear as little of the charges against mankind as
+of charges against himself. He will not listen to the 'corruption of
+humanity,' because in the consciousness of his own innocency, he knows
+that it is not corrupt: he knows that he is himself just and good, and
+we know it, the Divine sentence upon him having been already passed. He
+will not acknowledge his sin, for he knows not of what to repent. If he
+could have reflected calmly, he might have foreseen what they would say.
+He knew all that as well as they: it was the old story which he had
+learnt, and could repeat, if necessary, as well as anyone: and if it had
+been no more than a philosophical discussion, touching himself no more
+nearly than it touched his friends, he might have allowed for the
+tenacity of opinion in such matters, and listened to it and replied to
+it with equanimity. But, as the proverb says, 'It is ill talking between
+a full man and a fasting:' and in Job such equanimity would have been
+but Stoicism, or the affectation of it, and unreal as the others'
+theories. Possessed with the certainty that he had not deserved what had
+befallen him, harassed with doubt, and worn out with pain and
+unkindness, he had assumed (and how natural that he should assume it)
+that those who loved him should not have been hasty to believe evil of
+him; he had spoken to them as he really felt, and he thought that he
+might have looked to them for something warmer and more sympathising
+than such dreary eloquence. So when the revelation comes upon him of
+what was passing in them, he attributes it (and now he is unjust to
+them) to a falsehood of heart, and not to a blindness of understanding.
+Their sermons, so kindly intended, roll past him as a dismal mockery.
+They had been shocked (and how true again is this to nature) at his
+passionate cry for death. 'Do ye reprove words?' he says, 'and the
+speeches of one that is desperate, which are as wind?' It was but poor
+friendship and narrow wisdom. He had looked to them for pity, for
+comfort, and love. He had longed for it as the parched caravans in the
+desert for the water-streams, and 'his brethren had dealt deceitfully
+with him.' The brooks, in the cool winter, roll in a full turbid
+torrent; 'what time it waxes warm they vanish, when it is hot they are
+consumed out of their place; the caravans of Tema looked for them, the
+companies of Sheba waited for them; they were confounded because they
+had hoped; they came thither, and there was nothing.' If for once these
+poor men could have trusted their hearts, if for once they could have
+believed that there might be 'more things in heaven and earth' than were
+dreamt of in their philosophy--but this is the one thing which they
+could not do, which the theologian proper never has done or will do. And
+thus whatever of calmness or endurance Job alone, on his ash-heap, might
+have conquered for himself, is all scattered away; and as the strong
+gusts of passion sweep to and fro across his heart, he pours himself out
+in wild fitful music, so beautiful because so true, not answering them
+or their speeches, but now flinging them from him in scorn, now
+appealing to their mercy, or turning indignantly to God; now praying for
+death; now in perplexity doubting whether, in some mystic way which he
+cannot understand, he may not, perhaps, after all, really have sinned,
+and praying to be shown his fault; and then staggering further into the
+darkness, and breaking out into upbraidings of the Power which has
+become so dreadful an enigma to him. 'Thou enquirest after my iniquity,
+thou searchest after my sin, and thou knowest that I am not wicked. Why
+didst thou bring me forth out of the womb? Oh, that I had given up the
+ghost, and no eye had seen me. Cease, let me alone. It is but a little
+while that I have to live. Let me alone, that I may take comfort a
+little before I go, whence I shall not return to the land of darkness
+and the shadow of death.' In what other poem in the world is there
+pathos deep as this? With experience so stern as his, it was not for Job
+to be calm, and self-possessed, and delicate in his words. He speaks not
+what he knows, but what he feels; and without fear the writer allows him
+to throw out his passion all genuine as it rises, not overmuch caring
+how nice ears might be offended, but contented to be true to the real
+emotion of a genuine human heart. So the poem runs on to the end of the
+first answer to Zophar.
+
+But now, with admirable fitness, as the contest goes forward, the
+relative position of the speakers begins to change. Hitherto, Job only
+had been passionate; and his friends temperate and collected. Now,
+becoming shocked at his obstinacy, and disappointed in the result of
+their homilies, they stray still further from the truth in an endeavour
+to strengthen their position, and, as a natural consequence, visibly
+grow angry. To them, Job's vehement and desperate speeches are damning
+evidence of the truth of their suspicion. Impiety is added to his first
+sin, and they begin to see in him a rebel against God. At first they had
+been contented to speak generally, and much which they had urged was
+partially true; now they step forward to a direct application, and
+formally and personally accuse himself. Here their ground is positively
+false; and with delicate art it is they who are now growing violent, and
+wounded self-love begins to show behind their zeal for God; while in
+contrast to them, as there is less and less truth in what they say, Job
+grows more and more collected. For a time it had seemed doubtful how he
+would endure his trial. The light of his faith was burning feebly and
+unsteadily; a little more, and it seemed as if it might have utterly
+gone out. But at last the storm was lulling; as the charges are brought
+personally home to him, the confidence in his own real innocence rises
+against them. He had before known that he was innocent; now he feels the
+strength which lies in innocence, as if God were beginning to reveal
+Himself within him, to prepare the way for the after outward
+manifestation of Himself.
+
+The friends, as before, repeat one another with but little difference;
+the sameness being of course intentional, as showing that they were not
+speaking for themselves, but as representatives of a prevailing opinion.
+Eliphaz, again, gives the note which the others follow. Hear this
+Calvinist of the old world: 'Thy own mouth condemneth thee, and thine
+own lips testify against thee. What is man that he should be clean, and
+he that is born of a woman that he should be righteous? Behold, he
+putteth no trust in his saints; yea, the heavens are not clean in his
+sight; how much more abominable and filthy is man, which drinketh
+iniquity like water.' Strange, that after all these thousands of years
+we should still persist in this degrading confession, as a thing which
+it is impious to deny and impious to attempt to render otherwise, when
+Scripture itself, in language so emphatic, declares that it is a lie.
+Job _is_ innocent, perfect, righteous. God Himself bears witness to it.
+It is Job who is found at last to have spoken truth, and the friends to
+have sinned in denying it. And he holds fast by his innocency, and with
+a generous confidence thrusts away the misgivings which had begun to
+cling to him. Among his complainings he had exclaimed, that God was
+remembering upon him the sins of his youth--not denying them; knowing
+well that he, like others, had gone astray before he had learnt to
+control himself, but feeling that at least in an earthly father it is
+unjust to visit the faults of childhood on the matured man; feeling that
+he had long, long shaken them off from him, and they did not even impair
+the probity of his after-life. But now these doubts, too, pass away in
+the brave certainty that God is not less just than man. As the
+denouncings grow louder and darker, he appeals from his narrow judges to
+the Supreme Tribunal--calls on God to hear him and to try his cause--and
+then, in the strength of this appeal the mist rises from before his
+eyes. His sickness is mortal: he has no hope in life, and death is near;
+but the intense feeling that justice must and will be done, holds to him
+closer and closer. God may appear on earth for him; or if that be too
+bold a hope, and death finds him as he is--what is death then? God will
+clear his memory in the place where he lived; his injuries will be
+righted over his grave; while for himself, like a sudden gleam of
+sunlight between clouds, a clear, bright hope beams up, that he too,
+then, in another life, if not in this, when his skin is wasted off his
+bones, and the worms have done their work on the prison of his spirit,
+he too, at last, may then see God; may see Him, and have his pleadings
+heard.
+
+With such a hope, or even the shadow of one, he turns back to the world
+again to look at it. Facts against which he had before closed his eyes
+he allows and confronts, and he sees that his own little experience is
+but the reflection of a law. You tell me, he seems to say, that the good
+are rewarded, and that the wicked are punished; that God is just, and
+that this is always so. Perhaps it is, or will be, but not in the way
+which you imagine. You have known me, you have known what my life has
+been; you see what I am, and it is no difficulty to you. You prefer
+believing that I, whom you call your friend, am a deceiver or a
+pretender, to admitting the possibility of the falsehood of your
+hypothesis. You will not listen to my assurance, and you are angry with
+me because I will not lie against my own soul, and acknowledge sins
+which I have not committed. You appeal to the course of the world in
+proof of your faith, and challenge me to answer you. Well, then, I
+accept your challenge. The world is not what you say. You have told me
+what you have seen of it: I will tell you what I have seen.
+
+'Even while I remember I am afraid, and trembling taketh hold upon my
+flesh. Wherefore do the wicked become old, yea, and are mighty in power?
+Their seed is established in their sight with them, and their offspring
+before their eyes. Their houses are safe from fear, neither is the rod
+of God upon them. Their bull gendereth and faileth not; their cow
+calveth, and casteth not her calf. They send forth their little ones
+like a flock, and their children dance. They take the timbrel and harp,
+and rejoice at the sound of the organ. They spend their days in wealth,
+and in a moment go down into the grave. Therefore they say unto God,
+Depart from us, for we desire not the knowledge of Thy ways. What is the
+Almighty that we should serve Him? and what profit should we have if we
+pray to Him?'
+
+Will you quote the weary proverb? Will you say that 'God layeth up His
+iniquity for His children?' (Our translators have wholly lost the sense
+of this passage, and endeavour to make Job acknowledge what he is
+steadfastly denying.) Well, and what then? What will he care? 'Will his
+own eye see his own fall? Will he drink the wrath of the Almighty? What
+are the fortunes of his house to him if the number of his own months is
+fulfilled?' One man is good and another wicked, one is happy and another
+is miserable. In the great indifference of nature they share alike in
+the common lot. 'They lie down alike in the dust, and the worms cover
+them.'
+
+Ewald, and many other critics, suppose that Job was hurried away by his
+feelings to say all this; and that in his calmer moments he must have
+felt that it was untrue. It is a point on which we must decline
+accepting even Ewald's high authority. Even then, in those old times, it
+was beginning to be terribly true. Even then the current theory was
+obliged to bend to large exceptions; and what Job saw as exceptions we
+see round us everywhere. It was true then, it is infinitely more true
+now, that what is called virtue in the common sense of the word, still
+more that nobleness, godliness, or heroism of character in any form
+whatsoever, have nothing to do with this or that man's prosperity, or
+even happiness. The thoroughly vicious man is no doubt wretched enough;
+but the worldly, prudent, self-restraining man, with his five senses,
+which he understands how to gratify with tempered indulgence, with a
+conscience satisfied with the hack routine of what is called
+respectability,--such a man feels no wretchedness; no inward uneasiness
+disturbs him, no desires which he cannot gratify; and this though he be
+the basest and most contemptible slave of his own selfishness.
+Providence will not interfere to punish him. Let him obey the laws under
+which prosperity is obtainable, and he will obtain it, let him never
+fear. He will obtain it, be he base or noble. Nature is indifferent; the
+famine and the earthquake, and the blight or the accident, will not
+discriminate to strike him. He may insure himself against casualties in
+these days of ours, with the money perhaps which a better man would have
+given away, and he will have his reward. He need not doubt it.
+
+And, again, it is not true, as optimists would persuade us, that such
+prosperity brings no real pleasure. A man with no high aspirations, who
+thrives, and makes money, and envelops himself in comforts, is as happy
+as such a nature can be. If unbroken satisfaction be the most blessed
+state for a man (and this certainly is the practical notion of
+happiness), he is the happiest of men. Nor are those idle phrases any
+truer, that the good man's goodness is a never-ceasing sunshine; that
+virtue is its own reward, &c. &c. If men truly virtuous care to be
+rewarded for it, their virtue is but a poor investment of their moral
+capital. Was Job so happy then on that ash-heap of his, the mark of the
+world's scorn, and the butt for the spiritual archery of the theologian,
+alone in his forlorn nakedness, like some old dreary stump which the
+lightning has scathed, rotting away in the wind and the rain? If
+happiness be indeed what we men are sent into this world to seek for,
+those hitherto thought the noblest among us were the pitifullest and
+wretchedest. Surely it was no error in Job. It was that real insight
+which once was given to all the world in Christianity, however we have
+forgotten it now. Job was learning to see that it was not in the
+possession of enjoyment, no, nor of happiness itself, that the
+difference lies between the good and the bad. True, it might be that God
+sometimes, even generally, gives such happiness--gives it in what
+Aristotle calls an [Greek: epigignomenon telos], but it is no part of
+the terms on which He admits us to His service, still less is it the end
+which we may propose to ourselves on entering His service. Happiness He
+gives to whom He will, or leaves to the angel of nature to distribute
+among those who fulfil the laws upon which _it_ depends. But to serve
+God and to love Him is higher and better than happiness, though it be
+with wounded feet, and bleeding brows, and hearts loaded with sorrow.
+
+Into this high faith Job is rising, treading his temptations under his
+feet, and finding in them a ladder on which his spirit rises. Thus he is
+passing further and even further from his friends, soaring where their
+imaginations cannot follow him. To them he is a blasphemer whom they
+gaze at with awe and terror. They had charged him with sinning on the
+strength of their hypothesis, and he has answered with a deliberate
+denial of it. Losing now all mastery over themselves, they pour out a
+torrent of mere extravagant invective and baseless falsehood, which in
+the calmer outset they would have blushed to think of. They _know_ no
+evil of Job, but they do not hesitate to convert conjecture into
+certainty, and specify in detail the particular crimes which he must
+have committed. He _ought_ to have committed them, and so he had; the
+old argument then as now.--'Is not thy wickedness great?' says Eliphaz.
+'Thou hast taken a pledge from thy brother for nought, and stripped the
+naked of their clothing; thou hast not given water to the weary, and
+thou hast withholden bread from the hungry;' and so on through a series
+of mere distracted lies. But the time was past when words like these
+could make Job angry. Bildad follows them up with an attempt to frighten
+him by a picture of the power of that God whom he was blaspheming; but
+Job cuts short his harangue, and ends it for him in a spirit of
+loftiness which Bildad could not have approached; and then proudly and
+calmly rebukes them all, no longer in scorn and irony, but in high,
+tranquil self-possession. 'God forbid that I should justify you,' he
+says; 'till I die I will not remove my integrity from me. My
+righteousness I hold fast, and will not let it go. My heart shall not
+reproach me so long as I live.'
+
+So far all has been clear, each party, with increasing confidence,
+having insisted on their own position, and denounced their adversaries.
+A difficulty now arises which, at first sight, appears insurmountable.
+As the chapters are at present printed, the entire of the twenty-seventh
+is assigned to Job, and the paragraph from the eleventh to the
+twenty-third verses is in direct contradiction to all which he has
+maintained before--is, in fact, a concession of having been wrong from
+the beginning. Ewald, who, as we said above, himself refuses to allow
+the truth of Job's last and highest position, supposes that he is here
+receding from it, and confessing what an over-precipitate passion had
+betrayed him into denying. For many reasons, principally because we are
+satisfied that Job said then no more than the real fact, we cannot think
+Ewald right; and the concessions are too large and too inconsistent to
+be reconciled even with his own general theory of the poem. Another
+solution of the difficulty is very simple, although it is to be admitted
+that it rather cuts the knot than unties it. Eliphaz and Bildad have
+each spoken a third time; the symmetry of the general form requires that
+now Zophar should speak; and the suggestion, we believe, was first made
+by Dr. Kennicott, that he did speak, and that the verses in question
+belong to him. Any one who is accustomed to MSS. will understand easily
+how such a mistake, if it be one, might have arisen. Even in
+Shakespeare, the speeches in the early editions are in many instances
+wrongly divided, and assigned to the wrong persons. It might have
+arisen from inadvertence; it might have arisen from the foolishness of
+some Jewish transcriber, who resolved, at all costs, to drag the book
+into harmony with Judaism, and make Job unsay his heresy. This view has
+the merit of fully clearing up the obscurity. Another, however, has been
+suggested by Eichorn, who originally followed Kennicott, but discovered,
+as he supposed, a less violent hypothesis, which was equally
+satisfactory. Eichorn imagines the verses to be a summary by Job of his
+adversaries' opinions, as if he said--'Listen now; you know what the
+facts are as well as I, and yet you maintain this;' and then passed on
+with his indirect reply to it. It is possible that Eichorn may be
+right--at any rate, either he is right, or else Dr. Kennicott is.
+Certainly, Ewald is not. Taken as an account of Job's own conviction,
+the passage contradicts the burden of the whole poem. Passing it by,
+therefore, and going to what immediately follows, we arrive at what, in
+a human sense, is the final climax--Job's victory and triumph. He had
+appealed to God, and God had not appeared; he had doubted and fought
+against his doubts, and at last had crushed them down. He, too, had been
+taught to look for God in outward judgments; and when his own experience
+had shown him his mistake, he knew not where to turn. He had been
+leaning on a bruised reed, and it had run into his hand and pierced him.
+But as soon as in the speeches of his friend he saw it all laid down in
+its weakness and its false conclusions--when he saw the defenders of it
+wandering further and further from what he knew to be true, growing
+every moment, as if from a consciousness of the unsoundness of their
+standing ground, more violent, obstinate, and unreasonable, the scales
+fell more and more from his eyes--he had seen the fact that the wicked
+might prosper, and in learning to depend upon his innocency he had felt
+that the good man's support was there, if it was anywhere; and at last,
+with all his heart, was reconciled to the truth. The mystery of the
+outer world becomes deeper to him, but he does not any more try to
+understand it. The wisdom which can compass that mystery, he knows, is
+not in man, though man search for it deeper and harder than the miner
+searches for the hidden treasures of the earth; the wisdom which alone
+is attainable is resignation to God.
+
+'Where,' he cries, 'shall wisdom be found, and where is the place of
+understanding? Man knoweth not the price thereof, neither is it found
+in the land of the living. The depth said it is not with me; and the sea
+said it is not in me. It is hid from the eyes of all living, and kept
+close from the fowls of the air.[K] God understandeth the way thereof,
+and He knoweth the place thereof [He, not man, understands the mysteries
+of the world which He has made]. And unto man He said, Behold! the fear
+of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil, that is
+understanding.'
+
+Here, therefore, it might seem as if all was over. There is no clearer
+or purer faith possible for man; and Job had achieved it. His evil had
+turned to good; and sorrow had severed for him the last links which
+bound him to lower things. He had felt that he could do without
+happiness, that it was no longer essential, and that he could live on,
+and still love God, and cling to Him. But he is not described as of
+preternatural, or at all Titanic nature, but as very man, full of all
+human tenderness and susceptibility. His old life was still beautiful to
+him. He does not hate it because he can renounce it; and now that the
+struggle is over, the battle fought and won, and his heart has flowed
+over in that magnificent song of victory, the note once more changes: he
+turns back to earth to linger over those old departed days, with which
+the present is so hard a contrast; and his parable dies away in a strain
+of plaintive, but resigned melancholy. Once more he throws himself on
+God, no longer in passionate expostulation, but in pleading humility.[L]
+And then comes (perhaps, as Ewald says, it _could not_ have come
+before) the answer out of the whirlwind. Job had called on God, and
+prayed that he might appear, that he might plead his cause with him; and
+now he comes, and what will Job do? He comes not as the healing spirit
+in the heart of man; but, as Job had at first demanded, the outward God,
+the Almighty Creator of the universe, and clad in the terrors and the
+glory of it. Job, in his first precipitancy, had desired to reason with
+him on his government. The poet, in gleaming lines, describes for an
+answer the universe as it then was known, the majesty and awfulness of
+it; and then asks whether it is this which he requires to have explained
+to him, or which he believes himself capable of conducting. The
+revelation acts on Job as the sign of the Macrocosmos on the modern
+Faust; but when he sinks, crushed, it is not as the rebellious upstart,
+struck down in his pride--for he had himself, partially at least,
+subdued his own presumption--but as a humble penitent, struggling to
+overcome his weakness. He abhors himself for his murmurs, and 'repents
+in dust and ashes.' It will have occurred to every one that the secret
+which has been revealed to the reader is not, after all, revealed to Job
+or to his friends, and for this plain reason: the burden of the drama
+is, not that we do, but that we do not, and cannot, know the mystery of
+the government of the world--that it is not for man to seek it, or for
+God to reveal it. We, the readers, are, in this one instance, admitted
+behind the scenes--for once, in this single case--because it was
+necessary to meet the received theory by a positive fact which
+contradicted it. But the explanation of one case need not be the
+explanation of another; our business is to do what we know to be right,
+and ask no questions. The veil which in the AEgyptian legend lay before
+the face of Isis is not to be raised; and we are not to seek to
+penetrate secrets which are not ours.
+
+While, however, God does not condescend to justify his ways to man, he
+gives judgment on the past controversy. The self-constituted pleaders
+for him, the acceptors of his person, were all wrong; and Job--the
+passionate, vehement, scornful, misbelieving Job--he had spoken the
+truth; he at least had spoken facts, and they had been defending a
+transient theory as an everlasting truth.
+
+'And it was so, that after the Lord had spoken these words to Job, the
+Lord said to Eliphaz the Temanite, My wrath is kindled against thee and
+against thy two friends; for ye have not spoken of me the thing that is
+right, as my servant Job hath. Therefore take unto you now seven
+bullocks and seven rams, and go to my servant Job; and offer for
+yourselves a burnt-offering. And my servant Job shall pray for you, and
+him will I accept. Lest I deal with you after your folly, for that ye
+have not spoken of me the thing which is right, like my servant Job.'
+
+One act of justice remains. Knowing as we do the cause of Job's
+misfortunes, and that as soon as his trial was over it was no longer
+operative, our sense of fitness could not be satisfied unless he were
+indemnified outwardly for his outward sufferings. Satan is defeated, and
+Job's integrity proved; and there is no reason why the general law
+should be interfered with, which, however large the exceptions, tends to
+connect goodness and prosperity; or why obvious calamities, obviously
+undeserved, should remain any more unremoved. Perhaps, too, a deeper
+lesson still lies below his restoration--something perhaps of this kind.
+Prosperity, enjoyment, happiness, comfort, peace, whatever be the name
+by which we designate that state in which life is to our own selves
+pleasant and delightful, as long as they are sought or prized as things
+essential, so far have a tendency to disennoble our nature, and are a
+sign that we are still in servitude to selfishness. Only when they lie
+outside us, as ornaments merely to be worn or laid aside as God
+pleases--only then may such things be possessed with impunity. Job's
+heart in early times had clung to them more than he knew, but now he was
+purged clean, and they were restored because he had ceased to need them.
+
+Such in outline is this wonderful poem. With the material of which it is
+woven we have not here been concerned, although it is so rich and
+pregnant that we might with little difficulty construct out of it a
+complete picture of the world as then it was: its life, knowledge, arts,
+habits, superstitions, hopes, and fears. The subject is the problem of
+all mankind, and the composition embraces no less wide a range. But what
+we are here most interested upon is the epoch which it marks in the
+progress of mankind, as the first recorded struggle of a new experience
+with an established orthodox belief. True, for hundreds of years,
+perhaps for a thousand, the superstition against which it was directed
+continued. When Christ came it was still in its vitality. Nay, as we
+saw, it is alive, or in a sort of mock life, among us at this very day.
+But even those who retained their imperfect belief had received into
+their canon a book which treated it with contumely and scorn, so
+irresistible was the majesty of truth.
+
+In days like these, when we hear so much of progress, it is worth while
+to ask ourselves what advances we have made further in the same
+direction? and once more, at the risk of some repetition, let us look at
+the position in which this book leaves us. It had been assumed that man,
+if he lived a just and upright life, had a right to expect to be happy.
+Happiness, 'his being's end and aim,' was his legitimate and covenanted
+reward. If God therefore was just, such a man would be happy; and
+inasmuch as God was just, the man who was not happy had not deserved to
+be. There is no flaw in this argument; and if it is unsound, the fallacy
+can only lie in the supposed right to happiness. It is idle to talk of
+inward consolations. Job felt them, but they were not everything. They
+did not relieve the anguish of his wounds; they did not make the loss of
+his children, or his friends' unkindness, any the less painful to him.
+
+The poet, indeed, restores him in the book; but in life it need not have
+been so. He might have died upon his ash-heap, as thousands of good men
+have died, and will die again, in misery. Happiness, therefore, is _not_
+what we are to look for. Our place is to be true to the best which we
+know, to seek that and do that; and if by 'virtue its own reward' be
+meant that the good man cares only to continue good, desiring nothing
+more, then it is a true and noble saying. But if virtue be valued
+because it is politic, because in pursuit of it will be found most
+enjoyment and fewest sufferings, then it is not noble any more, and it
+is turning the truth of God into a lie. Let us do right, and whether
+happiness come or unhappiness it is no very mighty matter. If it come,
+life will be sweet; if it do not come, life will be bitter--bitter, not
+sweet, and yet to be borne. On such a theory alone is the government of
+this world intelligibly just. The well-being of our souls depends only
+on what we _are_; and nobleness of character is nothing else but steady
+love of good and steady scorn of evil. The government of the world is a
+problem while the desire of selfish enjoyment survives; and when
+justice is not done according to such standard (which will not be till
+the day after doomsday, and not then), self-loving men will still ask,
+why? and find no answer. Only to those who have the heart to say, 'We
+can do without that; it is not what we ask or desire,' is there no
+secret. Man will have what he deserves, and will find what is really
+best for him, exactly as he honestly seeks for it. Happiness may fly
+away, pleasure pall or cease to be obtainable, wealth decay, friends
+fail or prove unkind, and fame turn to infamy; but the power to serve
+God never fails, and the love of Him is never rejected.
+
+Most of us, at one time or other of our lives, have known something of
+love--of that only pure love in which no _self_ is left remaining. We
+have loved as children, we have loved as lovers; some of us have learnt
+to love a cause, a faith, a country; and what love would that be which
+existed only with a prudent view to after-interests. Surely there is a
+love which exults in the power of self-abandonment, and can glory in the
+privilege of suffering for what is good. _Que mon nom soit fletri,
+pourvu que la France soit libre_, said Danton; and those wild patriots
+who had trampled into scorn the faith in an immortal life in which they
+would be rewarded for what they were suffering, went to their graves as
+beds, for the dream of a people's liberty. Justice is done; the balance
+is not deranged. It only seems deranged, as long as we have not learnt
+to serve without looking to be paid for it.
+
+Such is the theory of life which is to be found in the Book of Job; a
+faith which has flashed up in all times and all lands, wherever
+high-minded men were to be found, and which passed in Christianity into
+the acknowledged creed of half the world. The cross was the new symbol,
+the Divine sufferer the great example; and mankind answered to the call,
+because the appeal was not to what was poor and selfish in them, but to
+whatever of best and bravest was in their nature. The law of reward and
+punishment was superseded by the law of love. Thou shalt love God and
+thou shalt love man; and that was not love--men knew it once--which was
+bought by the prospect of reward. Times are changed with us now. Thou
+shalt love God and thou shalt love man, in the hands of a Paley, are
+found to mean no more than, Thou shalt love thyself after an enlightened
+manner. And the same base tone has saturated not only our common
+feelings, but our Christian theologies and our Antichristian
+philosophies. A prudent regard to our future interests; an abstinence
+from present unlawful pleasures, because they will entail the loss of
+greater pleasure by-and-by, or perhaps be paid for with pain,--this is
+called virtue now; and the belief that such beings as men can be
+influenced by any more elevated feelings, is smiled at as the dream of
+enthusiasts whose hearts have outrun their understandings. Indeed, he
+were but a poor lover whose devotion to his mistress lay resting on the
+feeling that a marriage with her would conduce to his own comforts. That
+were a poor patriot who served his country for the hire which his
+country would give to him. And we should think but poorly of a son who
+thus addressed his earthly father: 'Father, on whom my fortunes depend,
+teach me to do what pleases thee, that I, pleasing thee in all things,
+may obtain those good things which thou hast promised to give to thy
+obedient children.' If any of us who have lived in so meagre a faith
+venture, by-and-by, to put in our claims, Satan will be likely to say of
+us (with better reason than he did of Job), 'Did they serve God for
+nought, then? Take their reward from them, and they will curse Him to
+His face.' If Christianity had never borne itself more loftily than
+this, do we suppose that those fierce Norsemen who had learnt, in the
+fiery war-songs of the Edda, of what stuff the hearts of heroes are
+composed, would have fashioned their sword-hilts into crosses, and
+themselves into a crusading chivalry? Let us not dishonour our great
+fathers with the dream of it. The Christians, like the Stoics and the
+Epicureans, would have lived their little day among the ignoble sects of
+an effete civilisation, and would have passed off and been heard of no
+more. It was in another spirit that those first preachers of
+righteousness went out upon their warfare with evil. They preached, not
+enlightened prudence, but purity, justice, goodness; holding out no
+promises in this world except of suffering as their great Master had
+suffered, and rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer for His
+sake. And that crown of glory which they did believe to await them in a
+life beyond the grave, was no enjoyment of what they had surrendered in
+life, was not enjoyment at all in any sense which human thought or
+language can attach to the words; as little like it as the crown of love
+is like it, which the true lover looks for when at last he obtains his
+mistress. It was to be with Christ--to lose themselves in Him.
+
+How these high feelings ebbed away, and Christianity became what we know
+it, we are partially beginning to see. The living spirit organised for
+itself a body of perishable flesh: not only the real gains of real
+experience, but mere conjectural hypotheses, current at the day for the
+solution of unexplained phenomena, became formulae and articles of faith.
+Again, as before, the living and the dead were bound together, and the
+seeds of decay were already planted on the birth of a constructed
+polity.
+
+But there was another cause allied to this, and yet different from it,
+which, though a law of human nature itself, seems nowadays altogether
+forgotten. In the rapid and steady advance of our knowledge of material
+things, we are apt to believe that all our knowledge follows the same
+law; that it is merely generalised experience; that experience
+accumulates daily, and, therefore, that 'progress of the species,' _in
+all senses_, is an obvious and necessary fact. There is something which
+is true in this view, mixed with a great deal which is false. Material
+knowledge, the physical and mechanical sciences, make their way from
+step to step, from experiment to experiment, and each advance is secured
+and made good, and cannot again be lost. One generation takes up the
+general sum of experience where the last laid it down, adds to it what
+it has the opportunity of adding, and leaves it with interest to the
+next. The successive positions, as they are gained, require nothing for
+the apprehension of them but an understanding ordinarily cultivated.
+Prejudices have to be encountered, but prejudices of opinion merely, not
+prejudices of conscience or prejudices of self-love, like those which
+beset our progress in the science of morality. But in morals we enter
+upon conditions wholly different--conditions in which age differs from
+age, man differs from man, and even from himself, at different moments.
+We all have experienced times when, as we say, we should not know
+ourselves; some, when we fall below our average level; some, when we are
+lifted above, and put on, as it were, a higher nature. At such intervals
+as these last (unfortunately, with most of us, of rare occurrence), many
+things become clear to us which before were hard sayings; propositions
+become alive which, usually, are but dry words; our hearts seem purer,
+our motives loftier; our purposes, what we are proud to acknowledge to
+ourselves.
+
+And, as man is unequal to himself, so is man to his neighbour, and
+period to period. The entire method of action, the theories of human
+life which in one era prevail universally, to the next are unpractical
+and insane, as those of this next would have seemed mere baseness to the
+first, if the first could have anticipated them. One epoch, we may
+suppose, holds some 'greatest nobleness principle,' the other some
+'greatest happiness principle;' and then their very systems of axioms
+will contradict one another; their general conceptions and their
+detailed interpretations, their rules, judgments, opinions, practices
+will be in perpetual and endless collision. Our minds take shape from
+our hearts, and the facts of moral experience do not teach their own
+meaning, but submit to many readings according to the power of the eye
+which we bring with us.
+
+The want of a clear perception of so important a feature about us leads
+to many singular contradictions. A believer in popular Protestantism,
+who is also a believer in progress, ought, if he were consistent, to
+regard mankind as growing every day towards a more and more advantageous
+position with respect to the trials of life; and yet if he were asked
+whether it was easier for him to 'save his soul' in the nineteenth
+century than it would have been in the first or second, or whether the
+said soul was necessarily better worth saving, he would be perplexed for
+an answer. There is hardly one of us who, in childhood, has not felt
+like the Jews to whom Christ spoke, that if he had 'lived in the days of
+the Fathers,' if he had had their advantages, he would have found duty a
+much easier matter; and some of us in mature life have felt that in old
+Athens, or old republican Rome, in the first ages of Christianity, in
+the Crusades or at the Reformation, there was a contagious atmosphere of
+heroism, in which we should have been less troubled with the little
+feelings which cling about us now. At any rate, it is at these rare
+epochs only that real additions are made to our moral knowledge. At such
+times, new truths are, indeed, sent down among us, and, for periods
+longer or shorter, may be seen to exercise an elevating influence on
+mankind. Perhaps what is gained on these occasions is never entirely
+lost. The historical monuments of their effects are at least
+indestructible; and when the spirit which gave them birth reappears,
+their dormant energy awakens again.
+
+But it seems from our present experience of what, in some at least of
+its modern forms, Christianity has been capable of becoming, that there
+is no doctrine in itself so pure, but what the meaner nature which is in
+us can disarm and distort it, and adapt it to its own littleness. The
+once living spirit dries up into formulae, and formulae, whether of
+mass-sacrifice or vicarious righteousness, or 'reward and punishment,'
+are contrived ever so as to escape making over-high demands upon the
+conscience. Some aim at dispensing with obedience altogether, and those
+which insist on obedience rest the obligations of it on the poorest of
+motives. So things go on till there is no life left at all; till, from
+all higher aspirations, we are lowered down to the love of self after an
+enlightened manner; and then nothing remains but to fight the battle
+over again. The once beneficial truth has become, as in Job's case, a
+cruel and mischievous deception, and the whole question of life and its
+obligations must again be opened.
+
+It is now some three centuries since the last of such reopenings. If we
+ask ourselves how much during this time has been actually added to the
+sum of our knowledge in these matters; what, in all the thousands upon
+thousands of sermons, and theologies, and philosophies with which Europe
+has been deluged, has been gained for mankind beyond what we have found
+in this Book of Job, how far all this has advanced us in the 'progress
+of humanity,' it were hard, or rather it is easy, to answer. How far we
+have fallen below, let Paley and the rest bear witness. But what moral
+question can be asked which admits now of a grander solution than was
+offered two, perhaps three, thousand years ago? The world has not been
+standing still; experience of man and life has increased; questions have
+multiplied on questions, while the answers of the established teachers
+to them have been growing every day more and more incredible. What other
+answers have there been? Of all the countless books which have appeared,
+there has been only one of enduring importance, in which an attempt is
+made to carry on the solution of the great problem. Job is given over
+into Satan's hand to be tempted; and though he shakes, he does not fall.
+Taking the temptation of Job for his model, Goethe has similarly
+exposed his Faust to trial, and with him the tempter succeeds. His hero
+falls from sin to sin, from crime to crime; he becomes a seducer, a
+murderer, a betrayer, following recklessly his evil angel wherever he
+chooses to lead him; and yet, with all this, he never wholly forfeits
+our sympathy. In spite of his weakness, his heart is still true to his
+higher nature; sick and restless, even in the delirium of enjoyment he
+always longs for something better, and he never can be brought to say of
+evil that it is good. And therefore, after all, the devil is balked of
+his prey; in virtue of this one fact, that the evil in which he steeped
+himself remained to the last hateful to him, Faust is saved by the
+angels.... It will be eagerly answered for the established belief, that
+such cases are its especial province. All men are sinners, and _it_
+possesses the blessed remedy for sin. But, among the countless numbers
+of those characters so strangely mixed among us, in which the dark and
+the bright fibres cross like a meshwork; characters at one moment
+capable of acts of heroic greatness, at another hurried by temptation
+into actions which even common men may deplore, how many are there who
+have never availed themselves of the conditions of reconciliation as
+orthodoxy proffers them, and of such men what is to be said? It was said
+once of a sinner that to her 'much was forgiven, for she loved much.'
+But this is language which theology has as little appropriated as the
+Jews could appropriate the language of Job. It cannot recognise the
+power of the human heart. It has no balance in which to weigh the good
+against the evil; and when a great Burns or a Mirabeau comes before it,
+it can but tremblingly count up the offences committed, and then,
+looking to the end, and finding its own terms not to have been complied
+with, it faintly mutters its anathema. Sin only it can apprehend and
+judge; and for the poor acts of struggling heroism, 'Forasmuch as they
+were not done,' &c., &c., it doubts not but they have the nature of
+sin.[M]
+
+Something of the difficulty has been met by Goethe, but it cannot be
+said that he has resolved it; or at least that he has furnished others
+with a solution which may guide their judgment. In the writer of the
+Book of Job there is an awful moral earnestness before which we bend as
+in the presence of a superior being. The orthodoxy against which he
+contended is not set aside or denied; he sees what truth is in it; only
+he sees more than it, and over it, and through it. But in Goethe, who
+needed it more, inasmuch as his problem was more delicate and difficult,
+the moral earnestness is not awful, is not even high. We cannot feel
+that in dealing with sin he entertains any great horror of it; he looks
+on it as a mistake, as undesirable, but scarcely as more. Goethe's great
+powers are of another kind; and this particular question, though in
+appearance the primary subject of the poem, is really only secondary. In
+substance, Faust is more like Ecclesiastes than it is like Job, and
+describes rather the restlessness of a largely-gifted nature which,
+missing the guidance of the heart, plays experiments with life, trying
+knowledge, pleasure, dissipation, one after another, and hating them
+all; and then hating life itself as a weary, stale, flat, unprofitable
+mockery. The temper exhibited here will probably be perennial in the
+world. But the remedy for it will scarcely be more clear under other
+circumstances than it is at present, and lies in the disposition of the
+emotions, and not in any propositions which can be addressed to the
+understanding.
+
+For that other question--how rightly to estimate a human being; what
+constitutes a real vitiation of character, and how to distinguish,
+without either denying the good or making light of the evil; how to be
+just to the popular theories, and yet not to blind ourselves to their
+shallowness and injustice--that is a problem for us, for the solution of
+which we are at present left to our ordinary instinct, without any
+recognised guidance whatsoever.
+
+Nor is this the only problem which is in the same situation. There can
+scarcely be a more startling contrast between fact and theory than the
+conditions under which, practically, positions of power and influence
+are distributed among us--between the theory of human worth which the
+necessities of life oblige us to act upon, and the theory which we
+believe that we believe. As we look around among our leading men, our
+statesmen, our legislators, the judges on our bench, the commanders of
+our armies, the men to whom this English nation commits the conduct of
+its best interests, profane and sacred, what do we see to be the
+principles which guide our selection? How entirely do they lie beside
+and beyond the negative tests! and how little respect do we pay to the
+breach of this or that commandment in comparison with ability! So wholly
+impossible is it to apply the received opinions on such matters to
+practice--to treat men known to be guilty of what theology calls deadly
+sins, as really guilty of them, that it would almost seem we had fallen
+into a moral anarchy; that ability _alone_ is what we regard, without
+any reference at all, except in glaring and outrageous cases, to moral
+disqualifications. It is invidious to mention names of living men; it is
+worse than invidious to drag out of their graves men who have gone down
+into them with honour, to make a point for an argument. But we know, all
+of us, that among the best servants of our country there have been, and
+there are, many whose lives will not stand scrutiny by the negative
+tests, and who do not appear very greatly to repent, or to have
+repented, of their sins according to recognised methods.
+
+Once more: among our daily or weekly confessions, which we are supposed
+to repeat as if we were all of us at all times in precisely the same
+moral condition, we are made to say that we have done those things which
+we ought not to have done, and to have left undone those things which we
+ought to have done. An earthly father to whom his children were day
+after day to make this acknowledgment would be apt to enquire whether
+they were trying to do better--whether, at any rate, they were
+endeavouring to learn; and if he were told that although they had made
+some faint attempts to understand the negative part of their duty, yet
+that of the positive part, of those things which they ought to do, they
+had no notions at all, and had no idea that they were under obligation
+to form any, he would come to rather strange conclusions about them.
+But, really and truly, what practical notions of duty have we beyond
+that of abstaining from committing sins? Not to commit sin, we suppose,
+covers but a small part of what is expected of us. Through the entire
+tissue of our employments there runs a good and a bad. Bishop Butler
+tells us, for instance, that even of our time there is a portion which
+is ours, and a portion which is our neighbour's; and if we spend more of
+it on personal interests than our own share, we are stealing. This
+sounds strange doctrine; we prefer making vague acknowledgments, and
+shrink from pursuing them into detail. We say vaguely, that in all we
+do we should consecrate ourselves to God, and our own lips condemn us;
+for which among us cares to learn the way to do it? The _devoir_ of a
+knight was understood in the courts of chivalry; the lives of heroic
+men, Pagan and Christian, were once held up before the world as patterns
+of detailed imitation; and now, when such ideals are wanted more than
+ever, Protestantism stands with a drawn sword on the threshold of the
+enquiry, and tells us that it is impious. The law, we are told, has been
+fulfilled for us in condescension to our inherent worthlessness, and our
+business is to appropriate another's righteousness, and not, like
+Titans, to be scaling heaven by profane efforts of our own. Protestants,
+we know very well, will cry out in tones loud enough at such a
+representation of their doctrines. But we know also that unless men may
+feel a cheerful conviction that they can do right if they try,--that
+they can purify themselves, can live noble and worthy lives,--unless
+this is set before them as _the_ thing which they are to do, and _can_
+succeed in doing, they will not waste their energies on what they know
+beforehand will end in failure; and if they may not live for God, they
+will live for themselves.
+
+And all this while the whole complex frame of society is a meshwork of
+duty woven of living fibre, and the condition of its remaining sound is,
+that every thread of it, of its own free energy, shall do what it ought.
+The penalties of duties neglected are to the full as terrible as those
+of sins committed; more terrible, perhaps, because more palpable and
+sure. A lord of the land, or an employer of labour, supposes that he has
+no duty except to keep what he calls the commandments in his own person,
+to go to church, and to do what he will with his own,--and Irish famines
+follow, and trade strikes, and chartisms, and Paris revolutions. We look
+for a remedy in impossible legislative enactments, and there is but one
+remedy which will avail--that the thing which we call public opinion
+learn something of the meaning of human obligation, and demand some
+approximation to it. As things are, we have no idea of what a human
+being ought to be. After the first rudimental conditions we pass at once
+into meaningless generalities; and with no knowledge to guide our
+judgment, we allow it to be guided by meaner principles; we respect
+money, we respect rank, we respect ability--character is as if it had no
+existence.
+
+In the midst of this loud talk of progress, therefore, in which so many
+of us at present are agreed to believe, which is, indeed, the common
+meeting point of all the thousand sects into which we are split, it is
+with saddened feelings that we see so little of it in so large a matter.
+Progress there is in knowledge; and science has enabled the number of
+human beings capable of existing upon this earth to be indefinitely
+multiplied. But this is but a small triumph if the ratio of the good and
+bad, the wise and the foolish, the full and the hungry, remains
+unaffected. And we cheat ourselves with words when we conclude out of
+our material splendour an advance of the race.
+
+In two things there is progress--progress in knowledge of the outward
+world, and progress in material wealth. This last, for the present,
+creates, perhaps, more evils than it relieves; but suppose this
+difficulty solved--suppose the wealth distributed, and every peasant
+living like a peer--what then? If this is all, one noble soul outweighs
+the whole of it. Let us follow knowledge to the outer circle of the
+universe--the eye will not be satisfied with seeing, nor the ear with
+hearing. Let us build our streets of gold, and they will hide as many
+aching hearts as hovels of straw. The well-being of mankind is not
+advanced a single step. Knowledge is power, and wealth is power; and
+harnessed, as in Plato's fable, to the chariot of the soul, and guided
+by wisdom, they may bear it through the circle of the stars; but left to
+their own guidance, or reined by a fool's hand, the wild horses may
+bring the poor fool to Phaeton's end, and set a world on fire.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[G] _Westminster Review_, 1853.
+
+[H] 1. _Die poetischen Buecher des Alten Bundes._ Erklaert von Heinrich
+Ewald. Goettingen: bei Vanderhoeck und Ruprecht. 1836.
+
+    2. _Kurz gefasstes exegetisches Handbuch zum Alten Testament._ Zweite
+Lieferung. _Hiob._ Von Ludwig Hirzel. Zweite Auflage, durchgesehen von
+Dr. Justus Olshausen. Leipzig. 1852.
+
+    3. _Quaestionum in Jobeidos locos vexatos Specimen._ Von D. Hermannus
+Hupfeld. Halis Saxonum. 1853.
+
+[I] Or rather by St. Jerome, whom our translators have followed.
+
+[J] See Ewald on Job ix. 13, and xxvi. 14.
+
+[K] An allusion, perhaps, to the old bird auguries. The birds, as the
+inhabitants of the air, were supposed to be the messengers between
+heaven and earth.
+
+[L] The speech of Elihu, which lies between Job's last words and God's
+appearance, is now decisively pronounced by Hebrew scholars not to be
+genuine. The most superficial reader will have been perplexed by the
+introduction of a speaker to whom no allusion is made, either in the
+prologue or the epilogue; by a long dissertation, which adds nothing to
+the progress of the argument, proceeding evidently on the false
+hypothesis of the three friends, and betraying not the faintest
+conception of the real cause of Job's sufferings. And the suspicions
+which such an anomaly would naturally suggest, are now made certainties
+by a fuller knowledge of the language, and the detection of a different
+hand. The interpolator has unconsciously confessed the feeling which
+allowed him to take so great a liberty. He, too, possessed with the old
+Jew theory, was unable to accept in its fulness so great a contradiction
+to it: and, missing the spirit of the poem, he believed that God's
+honour could still be vindicated in the old way. 'His wrath was kindled'
+against the friends, because they could not answer Job; and against Job,
+because he would not be answered; and conceiving himself 'full of
+matter,' and 'ready to burst like new bottles,' he could not contain
+himself, and delivered into the text a sermon on the _Theodice_, such,
+we suppose, as formed the current doctrine of the time in which he
+lived.
+
+[M] See the Thirteenth Article.
+
+
+
+
+SPINOZA.[N]
+
+_Benedicti de Spinoza Tractatus de Deo et Homine ejusque Felicitate
+Lineamenta. Atque Annotationes ad Tractatum Theologico-Politicum._
+Edidit et illustravit EDWARDUS BOEHMER. Halae ad Salam. J. F. Lippert.
+1852.
+
+
+This little volume is one evidence among many of the interest which
+continues to be felt by the German students in Spinoza. The actual merit
+of the book itself is little or nothing; but it shows the industry with
+which they are gleaning among the libraries of Holland for any traces of
+him which they can recover; and the smallest fragments of his writings
+are acquiring that factitious importance which attaches to the most
+insignificant relics of acknowledged greatness. Such industry cannot be
+otherwise than laudable, but we do not think it at present altogether
+wisely directed. Nothing is likely to be brought to light which will
+further illustrate Spinoza's philosophy. He himself spent the better
+part of his life in clearing his language of ambiguities; and such
+earlier sketches of his system as are supposed still to be extant in
+MS., and a specimen of which M. Boehmer believes himself to have
+discovered, contribute only obscurity to what is in no need of
+additional difficulty. Of Spinoza's private history, on the contrary,
+rich as it must have been, and abundant traces of it as must be extant
+somewhere in his own and his friends' correspondence, we know only
+enough to feel how vast a chasm remains to be filled. It is not often
+that any man in this world lives a life so well worth writing as Spinoza
+lived; not for striking incidents or large events connected with it, but
+because (and no sympathy with his peculiar opinions disposes us to
+exaggerate his merit) he was one of the very best men whom these modern
+times have seen. Excommunicated, disinherited, and thrown upon the world
+when a mere boy to seek his livelihood, he resisted the inducements
+which on all sides were urged upon him to come forward in the world. He
+refused pensions, legacies, money in many forms; he maintained himself
+with grinding glasses for optical instruments, an art which he had been
+taught in early life, and in which he excelled the best workmen in
+Holland; and when he died, which was at the early age of forty-four, the
+affection with which he was regarded showed itself singularly in the
+endorsement of a tradesman's bill which was sent in to his executors, in
+which he was described as M. Spinoza of 'blessed memory.'
+
+The account which remains of him we owe, not to an admiring disciple,
+but to a clergyman to whom his theories were detestable; and his
+biographer allows that the most malignant scrutiny had failed to detect
+a blemish in his character--that, except so far as his opinions were
+blameable, he had lived to outward appearance free from fault. We
+desire, in what we are going to say of him, to avoid offensive collision
+with popular prejudices; still less shall we place ourselves in
+antagonism with the earnest convictions of serious persons: our business
+is to relate what Spinoza was, and leave others to form their own
+conclusions. But one lesson there does seem to lie in such a life of
+such a man,--a lesson which he taught equally by example and in
+word,--that wherever there is genuine and thorough love for good and
+goodness, no speculative superstructure of opinion can be so extravagant
+as to forfeit those graces which are promised, not to clearness of
+intellect, but to purity of heart. In Spinoza's own beautiful
+language,--'Justitia et caritas unicum et certissimum verae fidei
+Catholicae signum est, et veri Spiritus Sancti fructus: et ubicumque haec
+reperiuntur, ibi Christus re vera est, et ubicumque haec desunt deest
+Christus: solo namque Christi Spiritu duci possumus in amorem justitiae
+et caritatis.' We may deny his conclusions; we may consider his system
+of thought preposterous and even pernicious; but we cannot refuse him
+the respect which is the right of all sincere and honourable men.
+Wherever and on whatever questions good men are found ranged on opposite
+sides, one of three alternatives is always true:--either the points of
+disagreement are purely speculative and of no moral importance--or
+there is a misunderstanding of language, and the same thing is meant
+under a difference of words--or else the real truth is something
+different from what is held by any of the disputants, and each is
+representing some important element which the others ignore or forget.
+In either case, a certain calmness and good temper is necessary, if we
+would understand what we disagree with, or would oppose it with success;
+Spinoza's influence over European thought is too great to be denied or
+set aside; and if his doctrines be false in part, or false altogether,
+we cannot do their work more surely than by calumny or
+misrepresentation--a most obvious truism, which no one now living will
+deny in words, and which a century or two hence perhaps will begin to
+produce some effect upon the popular judgment.
+
+Bearing it in mind, then, ourselves, as far as we are able, we propose
+to examine the Pantheistic philosophy in the first and only logical form
+which as yet it has assumed. Whatever may have been the case with
+Spinoza's disciples, in the author of this system there was no
+unwillingness to look closely at it, or to follow it out to its
+conclusions; and whatever other merits or demerits belong to him, at
+least he has done as much as with language can be done to make himself
+thoroughly understood.
+
+And yet, both in friend and enemy alike, there has been a reluctance to
+see Spinoza as he really was. The Herder and Schleiermacher school have
+claimed him as a Christian--a position which no little disguise was
+necessary to make tenable; the orthodox Protestants and Catholics have
+called him an Atheist--which is still more extravagant; and even a man
+like Novalis, who, it might have been expected, would have had something
+reasonable to say, could find no better name for him than a _Gott
+trunkner Mann_--a God intoxicated man: an expression which has been
+quoted by everybody who has since written upon the subject, and which is
+about as inapplicable as those laboriously pregnant sayings usually are.
+With due allowance for exaggeration, such a name would describe
+tolerably the Transcendental mystics, a Toler, a Boehmen, or a
+Swedenborg; but with what justice can it be applied to the cautious,
+methodical Spinoza, who carried his thoughts about with him for twenty
+years, deliberately shaping them, and who gave them at last to the world
+in a form more severe than with such subjects had ever been so much as
+attempted before? With him, as with all great men, there was no effort
+after sublime emotions. He was a plain, practical person; his object in
+philosophy was only to find a rule by which to govern his own actions
+and his own judgment; and his treatises contain no more than the
+conclusions at which he arrived in this purely personal search, with the
+grounds on which he rested them.
+
+We cannot do better than follow his own account of himself as he has
+given it in the opening of his unfinished Tract, 'De Emendatione
+Intellectus.' His language is very beautiful, but it is elaborate and
+full; and, as we have a long journey before us, we must be content to
+epitomise it.
+
+Looking round him on his entrance into life, and asking himself what was
+his place and business there, he turned for examples to his fellow-men,
+and found little that he could venture to imitate. He observed them all
+in their several ways governing themselves by their different notions of
+what they thought desirable; while these notions themselves were resting
+on no more secure foundation than a vague, inconsistent experience: the
+experience of one was not the experience of another, and thus men were
+all, so to say, rather playing experiments with life than living, and
+the larger portion of them miserably failing. Their mistakes arose, as
+it seemed to Spinoza, from inadequate knowledge; things which at one
+time looked desirable, disappointed expectation when obtained, and the
+wiser course concealed itself often under an uninviting exterior. He
+desired to substitute certainty for conjecture, and to endeavour to
+find, by some surer method, where the real good of man actually lay. We
+must remember that he had been brought up a Jew, and had been driven out
+of the Jews' communion; his mind was therefore in contact with the bare
+facts of life, with no creed or system lying between them and himself as
+the interpreter of experience. He was thrown on his own resources to
+find his way for himself, and the question was, how to find it. Of all
+forms of human thought, one only, he reflected, would admit of the
+certainty which he required. If certain knowledge were attainable at
+all, it must be looked for under the mathematical or demonstrative
+method; by tracing from ideas clearly conceived the consequences which
+were formally involved in them. What, then, were these ideas--these
+_verae ideae_, as he calls them--and how were they to be obtained? If
+they were to serve as the axioms of his system, they must be
+self-evident truths, of which no proof was required; and the
+illustration which he gives of the character of such ideas is ingenious
+and Platonic.
+
+In order to produce any mechanical instrument, Spinoza says, we require
+others with which to manufacture it; and others again to manufacture
+those; and it would seem thus as if the process must be an infinite one,
+and as if nothing could ever be made at all. Nature, however, has
+provided for the difficulty in creating of her own accord certain rude
+instruments, with the help of which we can make others better; and
+others again with the help of those. And so he thinks it must be with
+the mind; there must be somewhere similar original instruments provided
+also as the first outfit of intellectual enterprise. To discover these,
+he examines the various senses in which men are said to know anything,
+and he finds that they resolve themselves into three, or, as he
+elsewhere divides it, four.
+
+We know a thing--
+
+  1. i. _Ex mero auditu_: because we have heard it from some
+     person or persons whose veracity we have no reason to
+     question.
+
+     ii. _Ab experientia vaga_: from general experience: for
+     instance, all facts or phenomena which come to us through
+     our senses as phenomena, but of the causes of which we
+     are ignorant.
+
+  2. We know a thing as we have correctly conceived the laws
+     of its phenomena, and see them following in their
+     sequence in the order of nature.
+
+  3. Finally, we know a thing, _ex scientia intuitiva_, which
+     alone is absolutely clear and certain.
+
+To illustrate these divisions, suppose it be required to find a fourth
+proportional which shall stand to the third of three numbers as the
+second does to the first. The merchant's clerk knows his rule; he
+multiplies the second into the third and divides by the first. He
+neither knows nor cares to know why the result is the number which he
+seeks, but he has learnt the fact that it is so, and he remembers it.
+
+A person a little wiser has tried the experiment in a variety of simple
+cases; he has discovered the rule by induction, but still does not
+understand it.
+
+A third has mastered the laws of proportion mathematically, as he has
+found them in Euclid or other geometrical treatise.
+
+A fourth, with the plain numbers of 1, 2, and 3, sees for himself by
+simple intuitive force that 1:2=3:6.
+
+Of these several kinds of knowledge the third and fourth alone deserve
+to be called knowledge, the others being no more than opinions more or
+less justly founded. The last is the only real insight, although the
+third, being exact in its form, may be depended upon as a basis of
+certainty. Under this last, as Spinoza allows, nothing except the very
+simplest truths, _non nisi simplicissimae veritates_, can be perceived;
+but, such as they are, they are the foundation of all after-science; and
+the true ideas, the _verae ideae_, which are apprehended by this faculty
+of intuition, are the primitive instruments with which nature has
+furnished us. If we ask for a test by which to distinguish them, he has
+none to give us. 'Veritas,' he says to his friends, in answer to their
+question, 'veritas index sui est et falsi. Veritas se ipsam patefacit.'
+All original truths are of such a kind that they cannot without
+absurdity even be conceived to be false; the opposites of them are
+contradictions in terms.--'Ut sciam me scire, necessario debeo prius
+scire. Hinc patet quod certitudo nihil est praeter ipsam essentiam
+objectivam.... Cum itaque veritas nullo egeat signo, sed sufficiat
+habere essentiam rerum objectivam, aut quod idem est ideas, ut omne
+tollatur dubium; hinc sequitur quod vera non est methodus, signum
+veritatis quaerere post acquisitionem idearum; sed quod vera methodus est
+via, ut ipsa veritas, aut essentiae objectivae rerum, aut ideae (omnia illa
+idem significant) debito ordine quaerantur.' (_De Emend. Intell._)
+
+Spinoza will scarcely carry with him the reasoner of the nineteenth
+century in arguments like these. When we remember the thousand
+conflicting opinions, the truth of which their several advocates have as
+little doubted as they have doubted their own existence, we require some
+better evidence than a mere feeling of certainty; and Aristotle's less
+pretending canon promises a safer road. [Greek: Ho pasi dokei], 'what all
+men think,' says Aristotle, [Greek: touto einai phamen] 'this we say
+_is_,'--'and if you will not have this to be a fair ground of
+conviction, you will scarcely find one which will serve you better.' We
+are to see, however, what these _ideae_ are which are offered to us as
+self-evident. Of course, if they are self-evident, if they do produce
+conviction, nothing more is to be said; but it does, indeed, appear
+strange to us that Spinoza was not staggered as to the validity of his
+canon, when his friends, everyone of them, so floundered and stumbled
+among what he regarded as his simplest propositions; when he found them,
+in spite of all that he could say, requiring endless _signa veritatis_,
+and unable for a long time even to understand their meaning, far less to
+'recognise them as elementary certainties.' Modern readers may, perhaps,
+be more fortunate. We produce at length the definitions and axioms of
+the first book of the 'Ethica,' and they may judge for themselves:--
+
+DEFINITIONS.
+
+    1. By a thing which is _causa sui_, its own cause, I mean a thing
+    the essence of which involves the existence of it, or a thing which
+    cannot be conceived except as existing.
+
+    2. I call a thing finite, _suo genere_, when it can be limited by
+    another (or others) of the same nature--_e.g._ a given body is
+    called finite, because we can always conceive another body
+    enveloping it; but body is not limited by thought, nor thought by
+    body.
+
+    3. By substance I mean what exists in itself and is conceived by
+    itself; the conception of which, that is, does not involve the
+    conception of anything else as the cause of it.
+
+    4. By attribute I mean whatever the intellect perceives of substance
+    as constituting the essence of substance.
+
+    5. Mode is an affection of substance, or is that which is in
+    something else, by and through which it is conceived.
+
+    6. God is a being absolutely infinite; a substance consisting of
+    infinite attributes, each of which expresses his eternal and
+    infinite essence.
+
+
+EXPLANATION.
+
+    I say _absolutely_ infinite, not infinite _suo genere_--for of what
+    is infinite _suo genere_ only, the attributes are not infinite but
+    finite; whereas what is infinite absolutely contains in its own
+    essence everything by which substance can be expressed, and which
+    involves no impossibility.
+
+    7. That thing is 'free' which exists by the sole necessity of its
+    own nature, and is determined in its operation by itself only. That
+    is 'not free' which is called into existence by something else, and
+    is determined in its operation according to a fixed and definite
+    method.
+
+    8. Eternity is existence itself, conceived as following necessarily
+    and solely from the definition of the thing which is eternal.
+
+
+EXPLANATION.
+
+    Because existence of this kind is conceived as an eternal verity,
+    and, therefore, cannot be explained by duration, even though the
+    duration be without beginning or end.
+
+So far the definitions; then follow the
+
+
+AXIOMS.
+
+    1. All things that exist, exist either of themselves or in virtue of
+    something else.
+
+    2. What we cannot conceive of as existing in virtue of something
+    else, we must conceive through and in itself.
+
+    3. From a given cause an effect necessarily follows, and if there be
+    no given cause no effect can follow.
+
+    4. Things which have nothing in common with each other cannot be
+    understood through one another--_i.e._ the conception of one does
+    not involve the conception of the other.
+
+    5. To understand an effect implies that we understand the cause of
+    it.
+
+    6. A true idea is one which corresponds with its _ideate_.
+
+    7. The essence of anything which can be conceived as non-existent
+    does not involve existence.
+
+Such is our metaphysical outfit of simple ideas with which to start upon
+our enterprise of learning. The larger number of them, so far from being
+simple, must be absolutely without meaning to persons whose minds are
+undisciplined in metaphysical abstraction; they become only intelligible
+propositions as we look back upon them with the light of the system
+which they are supposed to contain.
+
+Although, however, we may justly quarrel with such unlooked-for
+difficulties, the important question, after all, is not of the obscurity
+of these axioms, but of their truth. Many things in all the sciences are
+obscure to an unpractised understanding, which are true enough and clear
+enough to people acquainted with the subjects, and they may be fairly
+made the foundations of a scientific system, although rudimentary
+students must be contented to accept them upon faith. Of course, also,
+it is entirely competent to Spinoza, or to any one, to define the terms
+which he intends to use just as he pleases, provided it be understood
+that any conclusions which he derives out of them apply only to the
+ideas so defined, and not to any supposed object existing which
+corresponds with them. Euclid defines his triangles and circles, and
+discovers that to figures so described, certain properties previously
+unknown may be proved to belong. But as in nature there are no such
+things as triangles and circles exactly answering the definition, his
+conclusions, as applied to actually existing objects, are either not
+true at all or only proximately so. Whether it be possible to bridge
+over the gulf between existing things and the abstract conception of
+them, as Spinoza attempts to do, we shall presently see. It is a royal
+road to certainty if it be a practicable one; but we cannot say that we
+ever met any one who could say honestly Spinoza's reasonings had
+convinced him; and power of demonstration, like all other powers, can be
+judged only by its effects. Does it prove? does it produce conviction?
+If not, it is nothing.
+
+We need not detain our readers among these abstractions. The power of
+Spinozism does not lie so remote from ordinary appreciation, or we
+should long ago have heard the last of it. Like all other systems which
+have attracted followers, it addresses itself, not to the logical
+intellect, but to the imagination, which it affects to set aside. We
+refuse to submit to the demonstrations by which it thrusts itself upon
+our reception; but regarding it as a whole, as an attempt to explain the
+nature of the world of which we are a part, we can still ask ourselves
+how far the attempt is successful. Some account of these things we know
+that there must be, and the curiosity which asks the question regards
+itself, of course, as competent in some degree to judge of the answer to
+it.
+
+Before proceeding, however, to regard this philosophy in the aspect in
+which it is really powerful, we must clear our way through the fallacy
+of the method.
+
+The system is evolved in a series of theorems in severely demonstrative
+order out of the definitions and axioms which we have translated. To
+propositions 1-6 we have nothing to object; they will not, probably,
+convey any very clear ideas, but they are so far purely abstract, and
+seem to follow (as far as we can speak of 'following' in such subjects)
+by fair reasoning. 'Substance is prior in nature to its affections.'
+'Substances with different attributes have nothing in common,' and,
+therefore, 'one cannot be the cause of the other.' 'Things really
+distinct are distinguished by difference either of attribute or mode
+(there being nothing else by which they can be distinguished), and,
+therefore, because things modally distinguished do not _qua_ substance
+differ from one another, there cannot be more than one substance of the
+same attribute. Therefore (let us remind our readers that we are among
+what Spinoza calls _notiones simplicissimas_), since there cannot be two
+substances of the same attribute, and substances of different attributes
+cannot be the cause one of the other, it follows that no substance can
+be produced by another substance.'
+
+The existence of substance, he then concludes, is involved in the nature
+of the thing itself. Substance exists. It does and must. We ask, why?
+and we are answered, because there is nothing capable of producing it,
+and therefore it is self-caused--_i.e._ by the first definition the
+essence of it implies existence as part of the idea. It is astonishing
+that Spinoza should not have seen that he assumes the fact that
+substance does exist in order to prove that it must. If it cannot be
+produced _and_ exists, then, of course, it exists in virtue of its own
+nature. But supposing it does not exist, supposing it is all a delusion,
+the proof falls to pieces. We have to fall back on the facts of
+experience, on the obscure and unscientific certainty that the thing
+which we call the world, and the personalities which we call ourselves,
+are a real substantial something, before we find ground of any kind to
+stand upon. Conscious of the infirmity of his demonstration, Spinoza
+winds round it and round it, adding proof to proof, but never escaping
+the same vicious circle: substance exists because it exists, and the
+ultimate experience of existence, so far from being of that clear kind
+which can be accepted as an axiom, is the most confused of all our
+sensations. What is existence? and what is that something which we say
+exists? Things--essences--existences! these are but the vague names with
+which faculties, constructed only to deal with conditional phenomena,
+disguise their incapacity. The world in the Hindoo legend was supported
+upon the back of the tortoise. It was a step between the world and
+nothingness, and served to cheat the imagination with ideas of a
+fictitious resting-place.
+
+    If any one affirms (says Spinoza) that he has a clear,
+    distinct--that is to say, a true--idea of substance, but that
+    nevertheless he is uncertain whether any such substance exist, it is
+    the same as if he were to affirm that he had a true idea, but yet
+    was uncertain whether it was not false. Or if he says that
+    substance can be created, it is like saying that a false idea can
+    become a true idea--as absurd a thing as it is possible to conceive;
+    and therefore the existence of substance, as well as the essence of
+    it, must be acknowledged as an eternal verity.
+
+It is again the same story. Spinoza speaks of a clear idea of substance;
+but he has not proved that such an idea is within the compass of the
+mind. A man's own notion that he sees clearly, is no proof that he
+really sees clearly; and the distinctness of a definition in itself is
+no evidence that it corresponds adequately with the object of it. No
+doubt a man who professes to have an idea of substance as an existing
+thing, cannot doubt, as long as he has it, that substance so exists.
+This is merely to say that as long as a man is certain of this or that
+fact, he has no doubt of it. But neither his certainty nor Spinoza's
+will be of any use to a man who has no such idea, and who cannot
+recognise the lawfulness of the method by which it is arrived at.
+
+From the self-existing substance it is a short step to the existence of
+God. After a few more propositions, following one another with the same
+kind of coherence, we arrive successively at the conclusion that there
+is but one substance; that this substance being necessarily existent, it
+is also infinite; that it is therefore identical with the Being who had
+been previously defined as the 'Ens absolute perfectum.'
+
+Demonstrations of this kind were the characteristics of the period. Des
+Cartes had set the example of constructing them, and was followed by
+Cudworth, Clarke, Berkeley, and many others besides Spinoza. The
+inconclusiveness of the method may perhaps be observed most readily in
+the strangely opposite conceptions formed by all these writers of the
+nature of that Being whose existence they nevertheless agreed, by the
+same process, to gather each out of their ideas. It is important,
+however, to examine it carefully, for it is the very keystone of the
+Pantheistic system.
+
+As stated by Des Cartes, the argument stands something as follows:--God
+is an all-perfect Being,--perfection is the idea which we form of Him:
+existence is a mode of perfection, and therefore God exists. The sophism
+we are told is only apparent. Existence is part of the idea--as much
+involved in it as the equality of all lines drawn from the centre to the
+circumference of a circle is involved in the idea of a circle. A
+non-existent all-perfect Being is as inconceivable as a quadrilateral
+triangle.
+
+It is sometimes answered that in this way we may prove the existence of
+anything--Titans, Chimaeras, or the Olympian Gods; we have but to define
+them as existing, and the proof is complete. But, this objection
+summarily set aside; none of these beings are by hypothesis absolutely
+perfect, and, therefore, of their existence we can conclude nothing.
+With greater justice, however, we may say, that of such terms as
+perfection and existence we know too little to speculate. Existence may
+be an imperfection for all we can tell; we know nothing about the
+matter. Such arguments are but endless _petitiones principii_--like the
+self-devouring serpent, resolving themselves into nothing. We wander
+round and round them, in the hope of finding some tangible point at
+which we can seize their meaning; but we are presented everywhere with
+the same impracticable surface, from which our grasp glides off
+ineffectual.
+
+Spinoza himself, however, obviously felt an intense conviction of the
+validity of his argument. His opinion is stated with sufficient
+distinctness in one of his letters. 'Nothing is more clear,' he writes
+to his pupil De Vries, 'than that, on the one hand, everything which
+exists is conceived by or under some attribute or other; that the more
+reality, therefore, a being or thing has, the more attributes must be
+assigned to it;' 'and conversely' (and this he calls his _argumentum
+palmarium_ in proof of the existence of God), '_the more attributes I
+assign to a thing, the more I am forced to conceive it as existing_.'
+Arrange the argument how we please, we shall never get it into a form
+clearer than this:--The more perfect a thing is, the more it must exist
+(as if existence could admit of more or less); and therefore the
+all-perfect Being must exist absolutely. There is no flaw, we are told,
+in the reasoning; and if we are not convinced, it is from the confused
+habits of our own minds.
+
+Some persons may think that all arguments are good when on the right
+side, and that it is a gratuitous impertinence to quarrel with the
+proofs of a conclusion which it is so desirable that all should receive.
+As yet, however, we are but inadequately acquainted with the idea
+attached by Spinoza to the word perfection; and if we commit ourselves
+to his logic, it may lead us out to unexpected consequences. All such
+reasonings presume, as a first condition, that we men possess faculties
+capable of dealing with absolute ideas; that we can understand the
+nature of things external to ourselves as they really _are_ in their
+absolute relation to one another, independent of our own conception. The
+question immediately before us is one which can never be determined. The
+truth which is to be proved is one which we already believe; and if, as
+we believe also, our conviction of God's existence is, like that of our
+own existence, intuitive and immediate, the grounds of it can never
+adequately be analysed; we cannot say exactly what they are, and
+therefore we cannot say what they are not. Whatever we receive
+intuitively, we receive without proof; and stated as a naked
+proposition, it must involve a _petitio principii_. We have a right,
+however, to object at once to an argument in which the conclusion is
+more obvious than the premises; and if it lead on to other consequences
+which we disapprove in themselves, we reject it without difficulty or
+hesitation. We ourselves believe that God is, because we experience the
+control of a 'power' which is stronger than we; and our instincts teach
+us so much of the nature of that power as our own relation to it
+requires us to know. God is the being to whom our obedience is due; and
+the perfections which we attribute to him are those moral perfections
+which are the proper object of our reverence. Strange to say, the
+perfections of Spinoza, which appear so clear to him, are without any
+moral character whatever; and for men to speak of the justice of God, he
+tells us, is but to see in him a reflection of themselves; as if a
+triangle were to conceive of him as _eminenter triangularis_, or a
+circle to give him the property of circularity.
+
+Having arrived at existence, we next find ourselves among ideas, which
+at least are intelligible, if the character of them is as far removed as
+before from the circle of ordinary thought. Nothing exists except
+substance, the attributes under which substance is expressed, and the
+modes or affections of those attributes. There is but one substance
+self-existent, eternal, necessary, and that is the absolutely Infinite
+all-perfect Being. Substance cannot produce substance, and therefore
+there is no such thing as creation; and everything which exists is
+either an attribute of God, or an affection of some attribute of him,
+modified in this manner or in that. Beyond him there is nothing, and
+nothing like him or equal to him; he therefore alone in himself is
+absolutely free, uninfluenced by anything, for nothing is except
+himself; and from him and from his supreme power, essence, intelligence
+(for these words mean the same thing), all things have necessarily
+flowed, and will and must flow for ever, in the same manner as from the
+nature of a triangle it follows, and has followed, and will follow from
+eternity to eternity, that the angles of it are equal to two right
+angles. It would seem as if the analogy were but an artificial play upon
+words, and that it was only metaphorically that in mathematical
+demonstration we speak of one thing as following from another. The
+properties of a curve or a triangle are what they are at all times, and
+the sequence is merely in the order in which they are successively known
+to ourselves. But according to Spinoza, this is the only true sequence;
+and what we call the universe, and all the series of incidents in earth
+or planet, are involved formally and mathematically in the definition of
+God.
+
+Each attribute is infinite _suo genere_; and it is time that we should
+know distinctly the meaning which Spinoza attaches to that important
+word. Out of the infinite number of the attributes of God, two only, he
+says, are known to us--'extension,' and 'thought,' or 'mind.' Duration,
+even though it be without beginning or end, is not an attribute; it is
+not even a real thing. Time has no relation to Being, conceived
+mathematically; it would be absurd to speak of circles or triangles as
+any older to-day than they were at the beginning of the world. These and
+everything of the same kind are conceived, as Spinoza rightly says, _sub
+quadam specie aeternitatis_. But extension, or substance extended, and
+thought, or substance perceiving, are real, absolute, and objective. We
+must not confound extension with body; for though body be a mode of
+extension, there is extension which is not body, and it is infinite
+because we cannot conceive it to be limited except by itself--or, in
+other words, to be limited at all. And as it is with extension, so it is
+with mind, which is also infinite with the infinity of its object. Thus
+there is no such thing as creation, and no beginning or end. All things
+of which our faculties are cognizant under one or other of these
+attributes are produced from God, and in him they have their being, and
+without him they would cease to be.
+
+Proceeding by steps of rigid demonstration (and most admirably indeed is
+the form of the philosophy adapted to the spirit of it), we learn that
+God is the only _causa libera_; that no other thing or being has any
+power of self-determination; all moves by fixed laws of causation,
+motive upon motive, act upon act; there is no free will, and no
+contingency; and however necessary it may be for our incapacity to
+consider future things as in a sense contingent (see _Tractat. Theol.
+Polit._ cap. iv., sec. 4), this is but one of the thousand convenient
+deceptions which we are obliged to employ with ourselves. God is the
+_causa immanens omnium_; he is not a personal being existing apart from
+the universe; but himself in his own reality, he is expressed in the
+universe, which is his living garment. Keeping to the philosophical
+language of the time, Spinoza preserves the distinction between _natura
+naturans_ and _natura naturata_. The first is being in itself, the
+attributes of substance as they are conceived simply and alone; the
+second is the infinite series of modifications which follow out of the
+properties of these attributes. And thus all which _is_, is what it is
+by an absolute necessity, and could not have been other than it is. God
+is free, because no causes external to himself have power over him; and
+as good men are most free when most a law to themselves, so it is no
+infringement on God's freedom to say that he _must_ have acted as he has
+acted, but rather he is absolutely free because absolutely a law himself
+to himself.
+
+Here ends the first book of Spinoza's Ethics--the book which contains,
+as we said, the _notiones simplicissimas_, and the primary and
+rudimental deductions from them. _His Dei naturam_, he says, in his
+lofty confidence, _ejusque proprietates explicui_. But, as if conscious
+that his method will never convince, he concludes this portion of his
+subject with an analytical appendix; not to explain or apologise, but to
+show us clearly, in practical detail, the position into which he has led
+us. The root, we are told, of all philosophical errors lies in our
+notion of final causes; we invert the order of nature, and interpret
+God's action through our own; we speak of his intentions, as if he were
+a man; we assume that we are capable of measuring them, and finally
+erect ourselves, and our own interests, into the centre and criterion of
+all things. Hence arises our notion of evil. If the universe be what
+this philosophy has described it, the perfection which it assigns to
+God is extended to everything, and evil is of course impossible; there
+is no shortcoming either in nature or in man; each person and each thing
+is exactly what it has the power to be, and nothing more. But men
+imagining that all things exist on their account, and perceiving their
+own interests, bodily and spiritual, capable of being variously
+affected, have conceived these opposite influences to result from
+opposite and contradictory powers, and call what contributes to their
+advantage good, and whatever obstructs it, evil. For our convenience we
+form generic conceptions of human excellence, as archetypes after which
+to strive; and such of us as approach nearest to such archetypes are
+supposed to be virtuous, and those who are most remote from them to be
+wicked. But such generic abstractions are but _entia imaginationis_, and
+have no real existence. In the eyes of God each thing is what it has the
+means of being. There is no rebellion against him, and no resistance of
+his will; in truth, therefore, there neither is nor can be such a thing
+as a bad action in the common sense of the word. Actions are good or
+bad, not in themselves, but as compared with the nature of the agent;
+what we censure in men, we tolerate and even admire in animals; and as
+soon as we are aware of our mistake in assigning to man a power of free
+volition, our notion of evil as a positive thing will cease to exist.
+
+    If I am asked (concludes Spinoza) why then all mankind were not
+    created by God, so as to be governed solely by reason? it was
+    because, I reply, there was to God no lack of matter to create all
+    things from the highest to the lowest grade of perfection; or, to
+    speak more properly, because the laws of God's nature were ample
+    enough to suffice for the production of all things which can be
+    conceived by an Infinite Intelligence.
+
+It is possible that readers who have followed us so far will now turn
+away from a philosophy which issues in such conclusions; resentful,
+perhaps, that it should have been ever laid before them at all, in
+language so little expressive of aversion and displeasure. We must
+claim, however, in Spinoza's name, the right which he claims for
+himself. His system must be judged as a whole; and whatever we may think
+ourselves would be the moral effect of such doctrines if they were
+generally received, in his hands and in his heart they are worked into
+maxims of the purest and loftiest morality. And at least we are bound
+to remember that some account of this great mystery of evil there must
+be; and although familiarity with commonly-received explanations may
+disguise from us the difficulties with which they too, as well as that
+of Spinoza, are embarrassed, such difficulties none the less exist. The
+fact is the grand perplexity, and for ourselves we acknowledge that of
+all theories about it Spinoza's would appear to us the least irrational,
+setting conscience, and the voice of conscience, aside. The objections,
+with the replies to them, are well drawn out in the correspondence with
+William de Blyenburg. It will be seen at once with how little justice
+the denial of evil as a positive thing can be called equivalent to
+denying it relatively to man, or to confusing the moral distinctions
+between virtue and vice.
+
+    We speak (writes Spinoza, in answer to Blyenburg, who had urged
+    something of the kind), we speak of this or that man having done a
+    wrong thing, when we compare him with a general standard of
+    humanity; but inasmuch as God neither perceives things in such
+    abstract manner, nor forms to himself such generic definitions, and
+    since there is no more reality in anything than God has assigned to
+    it, it follows, surely, that the absence of good exists only in
+    respect of man's understanding, not in respect of God's.
+
+    If this be so, then (replies Blyenburg), bad men fulfil God's will
+    as well as good.
+
+    It is true (Spinoza answers) they fulfil it, yet not as the good nor
+    as well as the good, nor are they to be compared with them. The
+    better a thing or a person be, the more there is in him of God's
+    spirit, and the more he expresses God's will; while the bad, being
+    without that divine love which arises from the knowledge of God, and
+    through which alone we are called (in respect of our understandings)
+    his servants, are but as instruments in the hand of the
+    artificer--they serve unconsciously, and are consumed in their
+    service.
+
+Spinoza, after all, is but stating in philosophical language the extreme
+doctrine of Grace; and St. Paul, if we interpret his real belief by the
+one passage so often quoted, in which he compares us to 'clay in the
+hands of the potter, who maketh one vessel to honour and another to
+dishonour,' may be accused with justice of having held the same opinion.
+If Calvinism be pressed to its logical consequences, it either becomes
+an intolerable falsehood, or it resolves itself into the philosophy of
+Spinoza. It is monstrous to call evil a positive thing, and to assert,
+in the same breath, that God has predetermined it,--to tell us that he
+has ordained what he hates, and hates what he has ordained. It is
+incredible that we should be without power to obey him except through
+his free grace, and yet be held responsible for our failures when that
+grace has been withheld. And it is idle to call a philosopher
+sacrilegious who has but systematised the faith which so many believe,
+and cleared it of its most hideous features.
+
+Spinoza flinches from nothing, and disguises no conclusions either from
+himself or from his readers. We believe for ourselves that logic has no
+business with such questions; that the answer to them lies in the
+conscience and not in the intellect. Spinoza thinks otherwise; and he is
+at least true to the guide which he has chosen. Blyenburg presses him
+with instances of monstrous crime, such as bring home to the heart the
+natural horror of it. He speaks of Nero's murder of Agrippina, and asks
+if God can be called the cause of such an act as that.
+
+    God (replies Spinoza, calmly) is the cause of all things which have
+    reality. If you can show that evil, errors, crimes express any real
+    things, I agree readily that God is the cause of them; but I
+    conceive myself to have proved that what constitutes the essence of
+    evil is not a real thing at all, and therefore that God cannot be
+    the cause of it. Nero's matricide was not a crime, in so far as it
+    was a positive outward act. Orestes also killed his mother; and we
+    do not judge Orestes as we judge Nero. The crime of the latter lay
+    in his being without pity, without obedience, without natural
+    affection--none of which things express any positive essence, but
+    the absence of it; and therefore God was not the cause of these,
+    although he was the cause of the act and the intention.
+
+    But once for all (he adds), this aspect of things will remain
+    intolerable and unintelligible as long as the common notions of free
+    will remain unremoved.
+
+And of course, and we shall all confess it, if these notions are as
+false as Spinoza supposes them--if we have no power to be anything but
+what we are, there neither is nor can be such a thing as moral evil; and
+what we call crimes will no more involve a violation of the will of God,
+they will no more impair his moral attributes if we suppose him to have
+willed them, than the same actions, whether of lust, ferocity, or
+cruelty, in the inferior animals. There will be but, as Spinoza says, an
+infinite gradation in created things, the poorest life being more than
+none, the meanest active disposition something better than inertia, and
+the smallest exercise of reason better than mere ferocity. 'The Lord has
+made all things for himself, even the wicked for the day of evil.'
+
+The moral aspect of the matter will be more clear as we proceed. We
+pause, however, to notice one difficulty of a metaphysical kind, which
+is best disposed of in passing. Whatever obscurity may lie about the
+thing which we call Time (philosophers not being able to agree what it
+is, or whether properly it _is_ anything), the words past, present,
+future, do undoubtedly convey some definite idea with them: things will
+be which are not yet, and have been which are no longer. Now, if
+everything which exists be a necessary mathematical consequence from the
+nature or definition of the One Being, we cannot see how there can be
+any time but the present, or how past and future have room for a
+meaning. God is, and therefore all properties of him _are_, just as
+every property of a circle exists in it as soon as the circle exists. We
+may if we like, for convenience, throw our theorems into the future, and
+say, _e.g._ that if two lines in a circle cut each other, the rectangle
+under the parts of the one _will_ equal that under the parts of the
+other. But we only mean in reality that these rectangles _are_ equal;
+and the _future_ relates only to our knowledge of the fact. Allowing,
+however, as much as we please, that the condition of England a hundred
+years hence lies already in embryo in existing causes, it is a paradox
+to say that such condition exists already in the sense in which the
+properties of the circle exist; and yet Spinoza insists on the
+illustration.
+
+It is singular that he should not have noticed the difficulty; not that
+either it or the answer to it (which no doubt would have been ready
+enough) are likely to interest any person except metaphysicians, a class
+of thinkers, happily, which is rapidly diminishing.
+
+We proceed to more important matters--to Spinoza's detailed theory of
+nature as exhibited in man and in man's mind. His theory for its bold
+ingenuity is by far the most remarkable which on this dark subject has
+ever been proposed. Whether we can believe it or not, is another
+question; yet undoubtedly it provides a solution for every difficulty;
+it accepts with equal welcome the extremes of materialism and of
+spiritualism: and if it be the test of the soundness of a philosophy
+that it will explain phenomena and reconcile contradictions, it is hard
+to account for the fact that a system which bears such a test so
+admirably, should nevertheless be so incredible as it is.
+
+Most people have heard of the 'Harmonie Pre-etablie' of Leibnitz; it is
+borrowed without acknowledgment from Spinoza, and adapted to the
+Leibnitzian philosophy. 'Man,' says Leibnitz, 'is composed of mind and
+body; but what is mind and what is body, and what is the nature of their
+union? Substances so opposite in kind cannot affect one another; mind
+cannot act on matter, or matter upon mind; and the appearance of their
+reciprocal operation is an appearance only and a delusion.' A delusion
+so general, however, required to be accounted for; and Leibnitz
+accounted for it by supposing that God, in creating a world composed of
+material and spiritual phenomena, ordained that these several phenomena
+should proceed from the beginning in parallel lines side by side in a
+constantly corresponding harmony. The sense of seeing results, it
+appears to us, from the formation of a picture upon the retina. The
+motion of the arm or the leg appears to result from an act of will; but
+in either case we mistake coincidence for causation. Between substances
+so wholly alien there can be no intercommunion; and we only suppose that
+the object seen produces the idea, and that the desire produces the
+movement, because the phenomena of matter and the phenomena of spirit
+are so contrived as to flow always in the same order and sequence. This
+hypothesis, as coming from Leibnitz, has been, if not accepted, at least
+listened to respectfully; because while taking it out of its proper
+place, he contrived to graft it upon Christianity; and succeeded, with a
+sort of speculative legerdemain, in making it appear to be in harmony
+with revealed religion. Disguised as a philosophy of Predestination, and
+connected with the Christian doctrine of Retribution, it steps forward
+with an air of unconscious innocence, as if interfering with nothing
+which Christians generally believe. And yet, leaving as it does no
+larger scope for liberty or responsibility than when in the hands of
+Spinoza,[O] Leibnitz, in our opinion, has only succeeded in making it
+infinitely more revolting. Spinoza could not regard the bad man as an
+object of Divine anger and a subject of retributory punishment. He was
+not a Christian, and made no pretension to be considered such; and it
+did not occur to him to regard the actions of a being which, both with
+Leibnitz and himself, is (to use his own expression) an _automaton
+spirituale_, as deserving a fiery indignation and everlasting vengeance.
+
+'Deus,' according to Spinoza's definition, 'est ens constans infinitis
+attributis quorum unumquodque aeternam et infinitam essentiam exprimit.'
+Under each of these attributes _infinita sequuntur_, and everything
+which an infinite intelligence can conceive, and an infinite power can
+produce,--everything which follows as a possibility out of the divine
+nature,--all things which have been, and are, and will be,--find
+expression and actual existence, not under one attribute only, but under
+each and every attribute. Language is so ill adapted to explain such a
+system, that even to state it accurately is all but impossible, and
+analogies can only remotely suggest what such expressions mean. But it
+is as if it were said that the same thought might be expressed in an
+infinite variety of languages; and not in words only, but in action, in
+painting, in sculpture, in music, in any form of any kind which can be
+employed as a means of spiritual embodiment. Of all these infinite
+attributes, two only, as we said, are known to us--extension and
+thought. Material phenomena are phenomena of extension; and to every
+modification of extension an idea corresponds under the attribute of
+thought. Out of such a compound as this is formed man, composed of body
+and mind; two parallel and correspondent modifications eternally
+answering one another. And not man only, but all other beings and things
+are similarly formed and similarly animated; the anima or mind of each
+varying according to the complicity of the organism of its material
+counterpart. Although body does not think, nor affect the mind's power
+of thinking, and mind does not control body, nor communicate to it
+either motion or rest or any influence from itself, yet body with all
+its properties is the object or ideate of mind: whatsoever body does,
+mind perceives; and the greater the energising power of the first, the
+greater the perceiving power of the second. And this is not because they
+are adapted one to the other by some inconceivable preordinating power,
+but because mind and body are _una et eadem res_, the one absolute being
+affected in one and the same manner, but expressed under several
+attributes; the modes and affections of each attribute having that being
+for their cause, as he exists under that attribute of which they are
+modes, and no other; idea being caused by idea, and body affected by
+body; the image on the retina being produced by the object reflected
+upon it, the idea or image in our minds by the idea of that object, &c.
+&c.
+
+A solution so remote from all ordinary ways of thinking on these matters
+is so difficult to grasp, that one can hardly speak of it as being
+probable, or as being improbable. Probability extends only to what we
+can imagine as possible, and Spinoza's theory seems to lie beyond the
+range within which our judgment can exercise itself. In our own opinion,
+indeed, as we have already said, the entire subject is one with which we
+have no business; and the explanation of our nature, if it is ever to be
+explained to us, is reserved till we are in some other state of
+existence. We do not disbelieve Spinoza because what he suggests is in
+itself incredible. The chances may be millions to one against his being
+right; yet the real truth, if we knew it, would be probably at least as
+strange as his conception of it. But we are firmly convinced that of
+these questions, and of all like them, practical answers only lie
+within the reach of human faculties; and that in 'researches into the
+absolute' we are on the road which ends nowhere.
+
+Among the difficulties, however, most properly akin to this philosophy
+itself, there is one most obvious, viz., that if the attributes of God
+be infinite, and each particular thing is expressed under them all, then
+mind and body express but an infinitesimal portion of the nature of each
+of ourselves; and this human nature exists (_i.e._, there exists
+corresponding modes of substance) in the whole infinity of the divine
+nature under attributes differing each from each, and all from mind and
+all from body. That this must be so follows from the definition of the
+Infinite Being, and the nature of the distinction between the two
+attributes which are known to us; and if this be so, why does not the
+mind perceive something of all these other attributes? The objection is
+well expressed by a correspondent (Letter 67):--'It follows from what
+you say,' a friend writes to Spinoza, 'that the modification which
+constitutes my mind, and that which constitutes my body, although it be
+one and the same modification, yet must be expressed in an infinity of
+ways: one way by thought, a second way by extension, a third by some
+attribute unknown to me, and so on to infinity; the attributes being
+infinite in number, and the order and connexion of modes being the same
+in them all. Why, then, does the mind perceive the modes of but one
+attribute only?'
+
+Spinoza's answer is curious: unhappily, a fragment of his letter only is
+extant, so that it is too brief to be satisfactory:--
+
+    In reply to your difficulty (he says), although each particular
+    thing be truly in the Infinite mind, conceived in Infinite modes,
+    the Infinite idea answering to all these cannot constitute one and
+    the same mind of any single being, but must constitute Infinite
+    minds. No one of all these Infinite ideas has any connexion with
+    another.
+
+He means, we suppose, that God's mind only perceives, or can perceive,
+things under their Infinite expression, and that the idea of each
+several mode, under whatever attribute, constitutes a separate mind.
+
+We do not know that we can add anything to this explanation; the
+difficulty lies in the audacious sweep of the speculation itself; we
+will, however, attempt an illustration, although we fear it will be to
+illustrate _obscurum per obscurius_. Let A B C D be four out of the
+Infinite number of the Divine attributes. A the attribute of mind; B the
+attribute of extension; C and D other attributes, the nature of which is
+not known to us. Now, A, as the attribute of mind, is that which
+perceives all which takes place under B C and D, but it is only as it
+exists in God that it forms the universal consciousness of all
+attributes at once. In its modifications it is combined separately with
+the modifications of each, constituting in combination with the modes of
+each attribute a separate being. As forming the mind of B, A perceives
+what takes place in B, but not what takes place in C or D. Combined with
+B, it forms the soul of the human body, and generally the soul of all
+modifications of extended substance; combined with C, it forms the soul
+of some other analogous being; combined with D, again of another; but
+the combinations are only in pairs, in which A is constant. A and B make
+one being, A and C another, A and D a third; but B will not combine with
+C, nor C with D; each attribute being, as it were, conscious only of
+itself. And therefore, although to those modifications of mind and
+extension which we call ourselves, there are corresponding modifications
+under C and D, and generally under each of the Infinite attributes of
+God, each of ourselves being in a sense Infinite--nevertheless, we
+neither have nor can have any knowledge of ourselves in this Infinite
+aspect; our actual consciousness being limited to the phenomena of
+sensible experience.
+
+English readers, however, are likely to care little for all this; they
+will look to the general theory, and judge of it as its aspect affects
+them. And first, perhaps, they will be tempted to throw aside as absurd
+the notion that their bodies go through the many operations which they
+experience them to do, undirected by their minds. It is a thing, they
+may say, at once preposterous and incredible. It is, however, less
+absurd than it seems; and, though we could not persuade ourselves to
+believe it, absurd in the sense of having nothing to be said for it, it
+certainly is not. It is far easier, for instance, to imagine the human
+body capable by its own virtue, and by the laws of material
+organisation, of building a house, than of _thinking_; and yet men are
+allowed to say that the body thinks, without being regarded as
+candidates for a lunatic asylum. We see the seed shoot up into stem and
+leaf and throw out flowers; we observe it fulfilling processes of
+chemistry more subtle than were ever executed in Liebig's laboratory,
+and producing structures more cunning than man can imitate. The bird
+builds her nest, the spider shapes out its delicate web, and stretches
+it in the path of his prey; directed not by calculating thought, as we
+conceive ourselves to be, but by some motive influence, our ignorance of
+the nature of which we disguise from ourselves, and call it instinct,
+but which we believe at least to be some property residing in the
+organisation. We are not to suppose that the human body, the most
+complex of all material structures, has slighter powers in it than the
+bodies of a seed, a bird, or an insect. Let us listen to Spinoza
+himself:--
+
+    There can be no doubt (he says) that this hypothesis is true; but
+    unless I can prove it from experience, men will not, I fear, be
+    induced even to reflect upon it calmly, so persuaded are they that
+    it is by the mind only that their bodies are set in motion. And yet
+    what body can or cannot do no one has yet determined; body, _i.e._,
+    by the law of its own nature, and without assistance from mind. No
+    one has so probed the human frame as to have detected all its
+    functions and exhausted the list of them; there are powers exhibited
+    by animals far exceeding human sagacity; and, again, feats are
+    performed by somnambulists on which in the waking state the same
+    persons would never venture--itself a proof that body is able to
+    accomplish what mind can only admire. Men _say_ that mind moves
+    body, but how it moves it they cannot tell, or what degree of motion
+    it can impart to it; so that, in fact, they do not know what they
+    say, and are only confessing their own ignorance in specious
+    language. They will answer me, that whether or not they understand
+    how it can be, yet that they are assured by plain experience that
+    unless mind could perceive, body would be altogether inactive; they
+    know that it depends on the mind whether the tongue speaks or is
+    silent. But do they not equally experience that if their bodies are
+    paralysed their minds cannot think?--that if their bodies are asleep
+    their minds are without power?--that their minds are not at all
+    times equally able to exert themselves even on the same subject, but
+    depend on the state of their bodies? And as for experience proving
+    that the members of the body can be controlled by the mind, I fear
+    experience proves very much the reverse. But it is absurd (they
+    rejoin) to attempt to explain from the mere laws of body such things
+    as pictures, or palaces, or works of art; the body could not build a
+    church unless mind directed it. I have shown, however, that we do
+    not yet know what body can or cannot do, or what would naturally
+    follow from the structure of it; that we experience in the feats of
+    somnambulists something which antecedently to that experience would
+    have seemed incredible. This fabric of the human body exceeds
+    infinitely any contrivance of human skill, and an infinity of
+    things, as I have already proved, ought to follow from it.
+
+We are not concerned to answer this reasoning, although if the matter
+were one the debating of which could be of any profit, it would
+undoubtedly have its weight, and would require to be patiently
+considered. Life is too serious, however, to be wasted with impunity
+over speculations in which certainty is impossible, and in which we are
+trifling with what is inscrutable.
+
+Objections of a far graver kind were anticipated by Spinoza himself,
+when he went on to gather out of his philosophy 'that the mind of man
+being part of the Infinite intelligence, when we say that such a mind
+perceives this thing or that, we are, in fact, saying that God perceives
+it, not as he is Infinite, but as he is represented by the nature of
+this or that idea; and similarly, when we say that a man does this or
+that action, we say that God does it, not _qua_ he is Infinite, but
+_qua_ he is expressed in that man's nature.' 'Here,' he says, 'many
+readers will no doubt hesitate, and many difficulties will occur to them
+in the way of such a supposition.'
+
+We confess that we ourselves are among these hesitating readers. As long
+as the Being whom Spinoza so freely names remains surrounded with the
+associations which in this country we bring with us out of our
+childhood, not all the logic in the world would make us listen to
+language such as this. It is not so--we know it, and that is enough. We
+are well aware of the phalanx of difficulties which lie about our
+theistic conceptions. They are quite enough, if religion depended on
+speculative consistency, and not in obedience of life, to perplex and
+terrify us. What are we? what _is_ anything? If it be not divine--what
+is it then? If created--out of what is it created? and how created--and
+why? These questions, and others far more momentous which we do not
+enter upon here, may be asked and cannot be answered; but we cannot any
+the more consent to Spinoza on the ground that he alone consistently
+provides an answer; because, as we have said again and again, we do not
+care to have them answered at all. Conscience is the single tribunal to
+which we choose to be referred, and conscience declares imperatively
+that what he says is not true. It is painful to speak of all this, and
+as far as possible we designedly avoid it. Pantheism is not Atheism, but
+the Infinite Positive and the Infinite Negative are not so remote from
+one another in their practical bearings; only let us remember that we
+are far indeed from the truth if we think that God to Spinoza was
+_nothing else_ but that world which we experience. It is but one of
+infinite expressions of him--a conception which makes us giddy in the
+effort to realise it.
+
+We have arrived at last at the outwork of the whole matter in its
+bearings upon life and human duty. It was in the search after this last,
+that Spinoza, as we said, travelled over so strange a country, and we
+now expect his conclusions. To discover the true good of man, to direct
+his actions to such ends as will secure to him real and lasting
+felicity, and, by a comparison of his powers with the objects offered to
+them, to ascertain how far they are capable of arriving at these
+objects, and by what means they can best be trained towards them--is the
+aim which Spinoza assigns to philosophy. 'Most people,' he adds, 'deride
+or vilify their nature; it is a better thing to endeavour to understand
+it; and however extravagant my proceeding may be thought, I propose to
+analyse the properties of that nature as if it were a mathematical
+figure.' Mind being, as he conceives himself to have shown, nothing else
+than the idea corresponding to this or that affection of body, we are
+not, therefore, to think of it as a faculty, but simply and merely as an
+act. There is no general power called intellect, any more than there is
+any general abstract volition, but only _hic et ille intellectus et haec
+et illa volitio_.
+
+Again, by the word Mind is understood not merely an act or acts of will
+or intellect, but all forms also of consciousness of sensation or
+emotion. The human body being composed of many small bodies, the mind is
+similarly composed of many minds, and the unity of body and of mind
+depends on the relation which the component portions maintain towards
+each other. This is obviously the case with body; and if we can
+translate metaphysics into common experience, it is equally the case
+with mind. There are pleasures of sense and pleasures of intellect; a
+thousand tastes, tendencies, and inclinations form our mental
+composition; and since one contradicts another, and each has a tendency
+to become dominant, it is only in the harmonious equipoise of their
+several activities, in their due and just subordination, that any unity
+of action or consistency of feeling is possible. After a masterly
+analysis of all these tendencies (the most complete by far which has
+ever been made by any moral philosopher), Spinoza arrives at the
+principles under which unity and consistency can be obtained as the
+condition upon which a being so composed can look for any sort of
+happiness; and these principles, arrived at as they are by a route so
+different, are the same, and are proposed by Spinoza as being the same,
+as those of the Christian religion.
+
+It might seem impossible in a system which binds together in so
+inexorable a sequence the relations of cause and effect, to make a place
+for the action of self-control; but consideration will show that,
+however vast the difference between those who deny and those who affirm
+the liberty of the will (in the sense in which the expression is usually
+understood), it is not a difference which affects the conduct or alters
+the practical bearings of it. Conduct may be determined by laws--laws as
+absolute as those of matter; and yet the one as well as the other may be
+brought under control by a proper understanding of those laws. Now,
+experience seems plainly to say, that while all our actions arise out of
+desire--that whatever we do, we do for the sake of something which we
+wish to be or to obtain--we are differently affected towards what is
+proposed to us as an object of desire, in proportion as we understand
+the nature of such object in itself and in its consequences. The better
+we know, the better we act; and the fallacy of all common arguments
+against necessitarianism lies in the assumption that it leaves no room
+for self-direction: it merely insists, in exact conformity with
+experience, on the conditions under which self-determination is
+possible. Conduct, according to the necessitarian, depends on knowledge.
+Let a man certainly know that there is poison in the cup of wine before
+him, and he will not drink it. By the law of cause and effect, his
+desire for the wine is overcome by the fear of the pain or the death
+which will follow. So with everything which comes before him. Let the
+consequences of any action be clear, definite, and inevitable, and
+though Spinoza would not say that the knowledge of them will be
+absolutely sufficient to determine the conduct (because the clearest
+knowledge may be overborne by violent passion), yet it is the best
+which we have to trust to, and will do much if it cannot do all.
+
+On this hypothesis, after a diagnosis of the various tendencies of human
+nature, called commonly the passions and affections, he returns upon the
+nature of our ordinary knowledge to derive out of it the means for their
+subordination. All these tendencies of themselves seek their own
+objects--seek them blindly and immoderately; and the mistakes and the
+unhappinesses of life arise from the want of due understanding of these
+objects, and a just moderation of the desire for them. His analysis is
+remarkably clear, but it is too long for us to enter upon it; the
+important thing being the character of the control which is to be
+exerted. To arrive at this, he employs a distinction of great practical
+utility, and which is peculiarly his own.
+
+Following his tripartite division of knowledge, he finds all kinds of it
+arrange themselves under one of two classes, and to be either adequate
+or inadequate. By adequate knowledge he does not mean what is exhaustive
+and complete, but what, as far as it goes, is distinct and unconfused:
+by inadequate, he means what we know merely as fact either derived from
+our own sensations, or from the authority of others, while of the
+connexion of it with other facts, of the causes, effects, or meaning of
+it we know nothing. We may have an adequate idea of a circle, though we
+are unacquainted with all the properties which belong to it; we conceive
+it distinctly as a figure generated by the rotation of a line, one end
+of which is stationary. Phenomena, on the other hand, however made known
+to us--phenomena of the senses, and phenomena of experience, as long as
+they remain phenomena merely, and unseen in any higher relation--we can
+never know except as inadequately. We cannot tell what outward things
+are by coming in contact with certain features of them. We have a very
+imperfect acquaintance even with our own bodies, and the sensations
+which we experience of various kinds rather indicate to us the nature of
+these bodies themselves than of the objects which affect them. Now, it
+is obvious that the greater part of mankind act only upon knowledge of
+this latter kind. The amusements, even the active pursuits, of most of
+us remain wholly within the range of uncertainty, and, therefore, are
+full of hazard and precariousness: little or nothing issues as we
+expect. We look for pleasure and we find pain; we shun one pain and
+find a greater; and thus arises the ineffectual character which we so
+complain of in life--the disappointments, failures, mortifications which
+form the material of so much moral meditation on the vanity of the
+world. Much of all this is inevitable from the constitution of our
+nature. The mind is too infirm to be entirely occupied with higher
+knowledge. The conditions of life oblige us to act in many cases which
+cannot be understood by us except with the utmost inadequacy; and the
+resignation to the higher will which has determined all things in the
+wisest way, is imperfect in the best of us. Yet much is possible, if not
+all; and, although through a large tract of life 'there comes one event
+to all, to the wise and to the unwise,' 'yet wisdom excelleth folly as
+far as light excelleth darkness.' The phenomena of experience, after
+inductive experiment, and just and careful consideration, arrange
+themselves under laws uniform in their operation, and furnishing a guide
+to the judgment; and over all things, although the interval must remain
+unexplored for ever, because what we would search into is Infinite, may
+be seen the beginning of all things, the absolute eternal God. 'Mens
+humana,' Spinoza continues, 'quaedam agit, quaedam vero patitur.' In so
+far as it is influenced by inadequate ideas--'eatenus patitur'--it is
+passive and in bondage, it is the sport of fortune and caprice: in so
+far as its ideas are adequate--'eatenus agit'--it is active, it is
+itself. While we are governed by outward temptations, by the casual
+pleasures, by the fortunes or the misfortunes of life, we are but
+instruments, yielding ourselves to be acted upon as the animal is acted
+on by its appetites, or the inanimate matter by the laws which bind it;
+we are slaves--instruments, it may be, of some higher purpose in the
+order of nature, but in ourselves nothing; instruments which are
+employed for a special work, and which are consumed in effecting it. So
+far, on the contrary, as we know clearly what we do, as we understand
+what we are, and direct our conduct not by the passing emotion of the
+moment, but by a grave, clear, and constant knowledge of what is really
+good, so far we are said to act--we are ourselves the spring of our own
+activity--we pursue the genuine well-being of our entire nature, and
+_that_ we can always find, and it never disappoints us when found.
+
+All things desire life; all things seek for energy, and fuller and
+ampler being. The component parts of man, his various appetites and
+passions, are seeking larger activity while pursuing each its immoderate
+indulgence; and it is the primary law of every single being that it so
+follows what will give it increased vitality. Whatever will contribute
+to such increase is the proper good of each; and the good of man as a
+united being is measured and determined by the effect of it upon his
+collective powers. The appetites gather power from their several objects
+of desire; but the power of the part is the weakness of the whole; and
+man as a collective person gathers life, being, and self-mastery only
+from the absolute good,--the source of all real good, and truth, and
+energy,--that is, God. The love of God is the extinction of all other
+loves and all other desires. To know God, as far as man can know him, is
+power, self-government, and peace. And this is virtue, and this is
+blessedness.
+
+Thus, by a formal process of demonstration, we are brought round to the
+old conclusions of theology; and Spinoza protests that it is no new
+doctrine which he is teaching, but that it is one which in various
+dialects has been believed from the beginning of the world. Happiness
+depends on the consistency and coherency of character, and that
+coherency can only be given by the knowledge of the One Being, to know
+whom is to know all things adequately, and to love whom is to have
+conquered every other inclination. The more entirely our minds rest on
+him--the more distinctly we regard all things in their relation to him,
+the more we cease to be under the dominion of external things; we
+surrender ourselves consciously to do his will, and as living men and
+not as passive things we become the instruments of his power. When the
+true nature and true causes of our affections become clear to us, they
+have no more power to influence us. The more we understand, the less can
+feeling sway us; we know that all things are what they are, because they
+are so constituted that they could not be otherwise, and we cease to be
+angry with our brother, because he disappoints us; we shall not fret at
+calamity, nor complain of fortune, because no such thing as fortune
+exists; and if we fail it is better than if we had succeeded, not
+perhaps for ourselves, yet for the universe. We cannot fear, when
+nothing can befall us except what God wills, and we shall not violently
+hope, when the future, whatever it be, will be the best which is
+possible. Seeing all things in their place in the everlasting order,
+Past and Future will not affect us. The temptation of present pleasure
+will not overcome the certainty of future pain, for the pain will be as
+sure as the pleasure, and we shall see all things under a rule of
+adamant. The foolish and the ignorant are led astray by the idea of
+contingency, and expect to escape the just issues of their actions; the
+wise man will know that each action brings with it its inevitable
+consequences, which even God cannot change without ceasing to be
+himself.
+
+In such a manner, through all the conditions of life, Spinoza pursues
+the advantages which will accrue to man from the knowledge of God, God
+and man being what his philosophy has described them. His practical
+teaching is singularly beautiful; although much of its beauty is perhaps
+due to associations which have arisen out of Christianity, and which in
+the system of Pantheism have no proper abiding place. Retaining, indeed,
+all that is beautiful in Christianity, he even seems to have relieved
+himself of the more fearful features of the general creed. He
+acknowledges no hell, no devil, no positive and active agency at enmity
+with God; but sees in all things infinite gradations of beings, all in
+their way obedient, and all fulfilling the part allotted to them.
+Doubtless a pleasant exchange and a grateful deliverance, if only we
+could persuade ourselves that a hundred pages of judiciously arranged
+demonstrations could really and indeed have worked it for us; if we
+could indeed believe that we could have the year without its winter, day
+without night, sunlight without shadow. Evil is unhappily too real a
+thing to be so disposed of.
+
+But if we cannot believe Spinoza's system taken in its entire
+completeness, yet we may not blind ourselves to the disinterestedness
+and calm nobility which pervades his theories of human life and
+obligation. He will not hear of a virtue which desires to be rewarded.
+Virtue is the power of God in the human soul, and that is the exhaustive
+end of all human desire. 'Beatitudo non est virtutis pretium, sed ipsa
+virtus. Nihil aliud est quam ipsa animi acquiescentia, quae ex Dei
+intuitiva cognitione oritur.' The same spirit of generosity exhibits
+itself in all his conclusions. The ordinary objects of desire, he says,
+are of such a kind that for one man to obtain them is for another to
+lose them; and this alone would suffice to prove that they are not what
+any man should labour after. But the fulness of God suffices for us
+all; and he who possesses this good desires only to communicate it to
+every one, and to make all mankind as happy as himself. And again:--'The
+wise man will not speak in society of his neighbour's faults, and
+sparingly of the infirmity of human nature; but he will speak largely of
+human virtue and human power, and of the means by which that nature can
+best be perfected, so to lead men to put away that fear and aversion
+with which they look on goodness, and learn with relieved hearts to love
+and desire it.' And once more:--'He who loves God will not desire that
+God should love him in return with any partial or particular affection,
+for that is to desire that God for his sake should change his
+everlasting nature and become lower than himself.'
+
+One grave element, indeed, of a religious faith would seem in such a
+system to be necessarily wanting. Where individual action is resolved
+into the modified activity of the Universal Being, all absorbing and all
+evolving, the individuality of the personal man is but an evanescent and
+unreal shadow. Such individuality as we now possess, whatever it be,
+might continue to exist in a future state as really as it exists in the
+present, and those to whom it belongs might be anxious naturally for its
+persistence. Yet it would seem that if the soul be nothing except the
+idea of a body actually existing, when that body is decomposed into its
+elements, the soul corresponding to it must accompany it into an
+answering dissolution. And this, indeed, Spinoza in one sense actually
+affirms, when he denies to the mind any power of retaining consciousness
+of what has befallen it in life, 'nisi durante corpore.' But Spinozism
+is a philosophy full of surprises; and our calculations of what _must_
+belong to it are perpetually baffled. The imagination, the memory, the
+senses, whatever belongs to inadequate perception, perish necessarily
+and eternally; and the man who has been the slave of his inclinations,
+who has no knowledge of God, and no active possession of himself, having
+in life possessed no personality, loses in death the appearance of it
+with the dissolution of the body.
+
+Nevertheless, there is in God an idea expressing the essence of the
+mind, united to the mind as the mind is united to the body, and thus
+there is in the soul something of an everlasting nature which cannot
+utterly perish. And here Spinoza, as he often does in many of his most
+solemn conclusions, deserts for a moment the thread of his
+demonstrations, and appeals to the consciousness. In spite of our
+non-recollection of what passed before our birth, in spite of all
+difficulties from the dissolution of the body, 'Nihilominus,' he says,
+'sentimus experimurque nos aeternos esse. Nam mens non minus res illas
+sentit quas intelligendo concipit, quam quas in memoria habet. Mentis
+enim oculi quibus res videt observatque sunt ipsae demonstrationes.'
+
+This perception, immediately revealed to the mind, falls into easy
+harmony with the rest of the system. As the mind is not a faculty, but
+an act or acts,--not a power of perception, but the perception itself,
+in its high union with the highest object (to use the metaphysical
+language which Coleridge has made popular and partially intelligible),
+the object and the subject become one. If knowledge be followed as it
+ought to be followed, and all objects of knowledge be regarded in their
+relations to the One Absolute Being, the knowledge of particular outward
+things, of nature, or life, or history, becomes, in fact, knowledge of
+God; and the more complete or adequate such knowledge, the more the mind
+is raised above what is perishable in the phenomena to the idea or law
+which lies beyond them. It learns to dwell exclusively upon the eternal,
+not upon the temporary; and being thus occupied with the everlasting
+laws, and its activity subsisting in its perfect union with them, it
+contracts in itself the character of the objects which possess it. Thus
+we are emancipated from the conditions of duration; we are liable even
+to death only _quatenus patimur_, as we are passive things and not
+active intelligences; and the more we possess such knowledge and are
+possessed by it, the more entirely the passive is superseded by the
+active--so that at last the human soul may 'become of such a nature that
+the portion of it which will perish with the body in comparison with
+that of it which shall endure, shall be insignificant and _nullius
+momenti_.' (Eth. v. 38.)
+
+Such are the principal features of a philosophy, the influence of which
+upon Europe, direct and indirect, it is not easy to over-estimate. The
+account of it is far from being an account of the whole of Spinoza's
+labours; his 'Tractatus Theologico-Politicus' was the forerunner of
+German historical criticism; the whole of which has been but the
+application of principles laid down in that remarkable work. But this is
+not a subject on which, upon the present occasion, we have cared to
+enter. We have designedly confined ourselves to the system which is most
+associated with the name of its author. It is this which has been really
+powerful, which has stolen over the minds even of thinkers who imagine
+themselves most opposed to it. It has appeared in the absolute Pantheism
+of Schelling and Hegel, in the Pantheistic Christianity of Herder and
+Schleiermacher. Passing into practical life it has formed the strong,
+shrewd judgment of Goethe, while again it has been able to unite with
+the theories of the most extreme materialism.
+
+It lies too, perhaps (and here its influence has been unmixedly good),
+at the bottom of that more reverent contemplation of nature which has
+caused the success of our modern landscape painting, which inspired
+Wordsworth's poetry, and which, if ever physical science is to become an
+instrument of intellectual education, must first be infused into the
+lessons of nature; the sense of that 'something' interfused in the
+material world--
+
+    Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
+    And the round ocean, and the living air,
+    And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;--
+    A motion and a spirit, which impels
+    All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
+    And rolls through all things.
+
+If we shrink from regarding the extended universe, with Spinoza, as an
+actual manifestation of Almighty God, we are unable to rest in the mere
+denial that it is this. We go on to ask what it _is_, and we are obliged
+to conclude thus much at least of it, that every smallest being was once
+a thought in his mind; and in the study of what he has made, we are
+really and truly studying a revelation of himself.
+
+It is not here, it is not on the physical, it is rather on the moral
+side, that the stumbling-block is lying; in that excuse for evil and for
+evil men which the necessitarian theory will furnish, disguise it in
+what fair-sounding words we will. So plain this is, that common-sense
+people, and especially English people, cannot bring themselves even to
+consider the question without impatience, and turn disdainfully and
+angrily from a theory which confuses their instincts of right and wrong.
+Although, however, error on this side is infinitely less mischievous
+than on the other, no vehement error can exist in this world with
+impunity; and it does appear that in our common view of these matters we
+have closed our eyes to certain grave facts of experience, and have
+given the fatalist a vantage ground of real truth which we ought to have
+considered and allowed. At the risk of tediousness we shall enter
+briefly into this unpromising ground. Life and the necessities of life
+are our best philosophers if we will only listen honestly to what they
+say to us; and dislike the lesson as we may, it is cowardice which
+refuses to hear it.
+
+The popular belief is, that right and wrong lie before every man, and
+that he is free to choose between them, and the responsibility of choice
+rests with himself. The fatalist's belief is that every man's actions
+are determined by causes external and internal over which he has no
+power, leaving no room for any moral choice whatever. The first is
+contradicted by facts, the second by the instinct of conscience. Even
+Spinoza allows that for practical purposes we are obliged to regard the
+future as contingent, and ourselves as able to influence it; and it is
+incredible that both our inward convictions and our outward conduct
+should be built together upon a falsehood. But if, as Butler says,
+whatever be the speculative account of the matter, we are practically
+forced to regard ourselves as free, this is but half the truth, for it
+may be equally said that practically we are forced to regard each other
+as _not_ free; and to make allowance, every moment, for influences for
+which we cannot hold each other personally responsible. If not,--if
+every person of sound mind (in the common acceptation of the term) be
+equally able at all times to act right if only he _will_,--why all the
+care which we take of children? why the pains to keep them from bad
+society? why do we so anxiously watch their disposition, to determine
+the education which will best answer to it? Why in cases of guilt do we
+vary our moral censure according to the opportunities of the offender?
+Why do we find excuses for youth, for inexperience, for violent natural
+passion, for bad education, bad example? Why, except that we feel that
+all these things do affect the culpability of the guilty person, and
+that it is folly and inhumanity to disregard them? But what we act upon
+in private life we cannot acknowledge in our ethical theories, and
+while our conduct in detail is humane and just, we have been contented
+to gather our speculative philosophy out of the broad and coarse
+generalisations of political necessity. In the swift haste of social
+life we must indeed treat men as we find them. We have no time to make
+allowances; and the graduation of punishment by the scale of guilt is a
+mere impossibility. A thief is a thief in the law's eye though he has
+been trained from his cradle in the kennels of St. Giles's; and definite
+penalties must be attached to definite acts, the conditions of political
+life not admitting of any other method of dealing with them. But it is
+absurd to argue from such rude necessity that each act therefore, by
+whomsoever committed, is of specific culpability. The act is one thing,
+the moral guilt is another. There are many cases in which, as Butler
+again allows, if we trace a sinner's history to the bottom, the guilt
+attributable to himself appears to vanish altogether.
+
+This is plain matter of fact, and as long as we continue to deny or
+ignore it, there will be found men (not bad men, but men who love the
+truth as much as ourselves) who will see only what we neglect, and will
+insist upon it, and build their systems upon it.
+
+And again, if less obvious, yet not less real, are those natural
+tendencies which each of us brings with him into the world,--which we
+did not make, and yet which almost as much determine what we are to be,
+as the properties of the seed determine the tree which shall grow from
+it. Men are self-willed, or violent, or obstinate, or weak, or generous,
+or affectionate; there is as large difference in their dispositions as
+in the features of their faces. Duties which are easy to one, another
+finds difficult or impossible. It is with morals as it is with art. Two
+children are taught to draw; one learns with ease, the other hardly or
+never. In vain the master will show him what to do. It seems so easy: it
+seems as if he had only to _will_, and the thing would be done; but it
+is not so. Between the desire and the execution lies the incapable organ
+which only wearily, and after long labour, imperfectly accomplishes what
+is required of it. And the same, _to a certain extent_, unless we will
+deny the patent facts of experience, holds true in moral actions. No
+wonder, therefore, that evaded or thrust aside as these things are in
+the popular beliefs, as soon as they are recognised in their full
+reality they should be mistaken for the whole truth, and the free-will
+theory be thrown aside as a chimera.
+
+It may be said, and it often is said, that such reasonings are merely
+sophistical--that however we entangle ourselves in logic, we are
+conscious that we are free; we know--we are as sure as we are of our
+existence--that we have power to act this way or that way, exactly as we
+choose. But this is less plain than it seems; and if granted, it proves
+less than it appears to prove. It may be true that we can act as we
+choose, but can we _choose_? Is not our choice determined for us? We
+cannot determine from the fact, because we always _have chosen_ as soon
+as we act, and we cannot replace the conditions in such a way as to
+discover whether we could have chosen anything else. The stronger motive
+may have determined our volition without our perceiving it; and if we
+desire to prove our independence of motive, by showing that we _can_
+choose something different from that which we should naturally have
+chosen, we still cannot escape from the circle, this very desire
+becoming, as Mr. Hume observes, itself a _motive_. Again, consciousness
+of the possession of any power may easily be delusive; we can properly
+judge what our powers are only by what they have actually accomplished;
+we know what we _have_ done, and we may infer from having done it that
+our power was equal to what it achieved. But it is easy for us to
+over-rate our strength if we try to measure our abilities in themselves.
+A man who can leap five yards may think that he can leap six; yet he may
+try and fail. A man who can write prose may only learn that he cannot
+write poetry from the badness of the verses which he produces. To the
+appeal to consciousness of power there is always an answer:--that we may
+believe ourselves to possess it, but that experience proves that we may
+be deceived.
+
+There is, however, another group of feelings which cannot be set aside
+in this way, which do prove that, in some sense or other, in some degree
+or other, we are the authors of our own actions. It is one of the
+clearest of all inward phenomena, that, where two or more courses
+involving moral issues are before us, whether we have a consciousness of
+_power_ to choose between them or not, we have a consciousness that we
+_ought_ to choose between them; a sense of duty--[Greek: hoti dei touto
+prattein]--as Aristotle expresses it, which we cannot shake off.
+Whatever this consciousness involves (and some measure of freedom it
+must involve or it is nonsense), the feeling exists within us, and
+refuses to yield before all the batteries of logic. It is not that of
+the two courses we know that one is in the long run the best, and the
+other more immediately tempting. We have a sense of obligation
+irrespective of consequence, the violation of which is followed again by
+a sense of self-disapprobation, of censure, of blame. In vain will
+Spinoza tell us that such feelings, incompatible as they are with the
+theory of powerlessness, are mistakes arising out of a false philosophy.
+They are primary facts of sensation most vivid in minds of most vigorous
+sensibility; and although they may be extinguished by habitual
+profligacy, or possibly, perhaps, destroyed by logic, the paralysis of
+the conscience is no more a proof that it is not a real power of
+perceiving real things, than blindness is a proof that sight is not a
+real power. The perceptions of worth and worthlessness are not
+conclusions of reasoning, but immediate sensations like those of seeing
+and hearing; and although, like the other senses, they may be mistaken
+sometimes in the accounts they render to us, the fact of the existence
+of such feelings at all proves that there is something which corresponds
+to them. If there be any such things as 'true ideas,' or clear, distinct
+perceptions at all, this of praise and blame is one of them, and
+according to Spinoza's own rule we must accept what it involves. And it
+involves that some where or other the influence of causes ceases to
+operate, and that some degree of power there is in men of
+self-determination, by the amount of which, and not by their specific
+actions, moral merit or demerit is to be measured. Speculative
+difficulties remain in abundance. It will be said in a case, _e.g._ of
+moral trial, that there may have been _power_; but was there _power
+enough_ to resist the temptation? If there was, then it was resisted. If
+there was not, there was no responsibility. We must answer again from
+practical instinct. We refuse to allow men to be considered all equally
+guilty who have committed the same faults; and we insist that their
+actions must be measured against their opportunities. But a similar
+conviction assures us that there is somewhere a point of freedom. Where
+that point is--where other influences terminate, and responsibility
+begins--will always be of intricate and often impossible solution. But
+if there be such a point at all, it is fatal to necessitarianism, and
+man is what he has been hitherto supposed to be--an exception in the
+order of nature, with a power not differing in degree but differing in
+kind from those of other creatures. Moral life, like all life, is a
+mystery; and as to anatomise the body will not reveal the secret of
+animation, so with the actions of the moral man. The spiritual life,
+which alone gives them meaning and being, glides away before the logical
+dissecting knife, and leaves it but a corpse to work upon.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[N] _Westminster Review_, 1854.
+
+[O] Since these words were written a book has appeared in Paris by an
+able disciple of Leibnitz, which, although it does not lead us to modify
+the opinion expressed in them, yet obliges us to give our reasons for
+speaking as we do. M. de Careil[P] has discovered in the library at
+Hanover, a MS. in the hand-writing of Leibnitz, containing a series of
+remarks on the book of a certain John Wachter. It does not appear who
+this John Wachter was, nor by what accident he came to have so
+distinguished a critic. If we may judge by the extracts at present
+before us, he seems to have been an absurd and extravagant person, who
+had attempted to combine the theology of the Cabbala with the very
+little which he was able to understand of the philosophy of Spinoza;
+and, as far as he is concerned, neither his writings nor the reflections
+upon them are of interest to any human being. The extravagance of
+Spinoza's followers, however, furnished Leibnitz with an opportunity of
+noticing the points on which he most disapproved of Spinoza himself; and
+these few notices M. de Careil has now for the first time published as
+_The Refutation of Spinoza_, by Leibnitz. They are exceedingly brief and
+scanty; and the writer of them would assuredly have hesitated to
+describe an imperfect criticism by so ambitious a title. The modern
+editor, however, must be allowed the privilege of a worshipper, and we
+will not quarrel with him for an exaggerated estimate of what his master
+had accomplished. We are indebted to his enthusiasm for what is at least
+a curious discovery, and we will not qualify the gratitude which he has
+earned by industry and good will. At the same time, the notes themselves
+confirm the opinion which we have always entertained, that Leibnitz did
+not understand Spinoza. Leibnitz did not understand him, and the
+followers of Leibnitz do not understand him now. If he were no more than
+what he is described in the book before us--if his metaphysics were
+'miserable,' if his philosophy was absurd, and he himself nothing more
+than a second-rate disciple of Descartes--we can assure M. de Careil
+that we should long ago have heard the last of him.
+
+There must be something else, something very different from this, to
+explain the position which he holds in Germany, or the fascination which
+his writings exerted over such minds as those of Lessing or of Goethe;
+the fact of so enduring an influence is more than a sufficient answer to
+mere depreciating criticism. This, however, is not a point which there
+is any use in pressing. Our present business is to justify the two
+assertions which we have made. First, that Leibnitz borrowed his _Theory
+of the Harmonie Pre-etablie_ from Spinoza, without acknowledgment; and,
+secondly, that this theory is quite as inconsistent with religion as is
+that of Spinoza, and only differs from it in disguising its real
+character.
+
+First for the _Harmonie Pre-etablie_. Spinoza's _Ethics_ appeared in
+1677; and we know that they were read by Leibnitz. In 1696, Leibnitz
+announced as a discovery of his own, a Theory of _The Communication of
+Substances_, which he illustrates in the following manner:--
+
+'Vous ne comprenez pas, dites-vous, comment je pourrois prouver ce que
+j'ai avance touchant la communication, ou l'harmonie de deux substances
+aussi differentes que l'ame et le corps? Il est vrai que je crois en
+avoir trouve le moyen; et voici comment je pretends vous satisfaire.
+Figurez-vous deux horloges ou montres qui s'accordent parfaitement. Or
+cela se peut faire de trois manieres. La 1^{e} consiste dans une
+influence mutuelle. La 2^{e} est d'y attacher un ouvrier habile qui les
+redresse, et les mette d'accord a tous moments. La 3^{e} est de
+fabriquer ces deux pendules avec tant d'art et de justesse, qu'on se
+puisse assurer de leur accord dans la suite. Mettez maintenant l'ame et
+le corps a la place de ces deux pendules; leur accord peut arriver par
+l'une de ces trois manieres. La voye d'influence est celle de la
+philosophie vulgaire; mais comme l'on ne sauroit concevoir des
+particules materielles qui puissent passer d'une de ces substances dans
+l'autre, il faut abandonner ce sentiment. La voye de l'assistance
+continuelle du Createur est celle du systeme des causes occasionnelles;
+mais je tiens que c'est faire intervenir Deus ex machina, dans une chose
+naturelle et ordinaire, ou selon la raison il ne doit concourir, que do
+la maniere qu'il concourt a toutes les autres choses naturelles. Ainsi
+il ne reste que mon hypothese; c'est-a-dire que la voye de l'harmonie.
+Dieu a fait des le commencement chacune de ces deux substances de telle
+nature, qu'en ne suivant que ces propres loix qu'elle a recues avec son
+etre, elle s'accorde pourtant avec l'autre tout comme s'il y avoit une
+influence mutuelle, ou comme si Dieu y mettoit toujours la main au-dela
+de son concours general. Apres cela je n'ai pas besoin de rien prouver a
+moins qu'on ne veuille exiger que je prouve que Dieu est assez habile
+pour se servir de cette artifice,' &c.--LEIBNITZ, _Opera_, p. 133.
+Berlin edition, 1840.
+
+Leibnitz, as we have said, attempts to reconcile his system with
+Christianity, and therefore, of course, this theory of the relation of
+mind and body wears a very different aspect under his treatment, from
+what it wears under that of Spinoza. But Spinoza and Leibnitz both agree
+in this one peculiar conception in which they differ from all other
+philosophers before or after them--that mind and body have no direct
+communication with each other, and that the phenomena of them merely
+correspond. M. de Careil says they both borrowed it from Descartes; but
+that is impossible. Descartes held no such opinion; it was the precise
+point of disagreement at which Spinoza parted from him; and therefore,
+since in point of date Spinoza had the advantage of Leibnitz, and we
+know that Leibnitz was acquainted with his writings, we must either
+suppose that he was directly indebted to Spinoza for an obligation which
+he ought to have acknowledged, or else, which is extremely improbable,
+that having read Spinoza and forgotten him, he afterwards re-originated
+for himself one of the most singular and peculiar notions which was ever
+offered to the belief of mankind.
+
+So much for the first point, which, after all, is but of little moment.
+It is more important to ascertain whether, in the hands of Leibnitz,
+this theory can be any better reconciled with what is commonly meant by
+religion; whether, that is, the ideas of obedience and disobedience,
+merit and demerit, judgment and retribution, have any proper place under
+it. Spinoza makes no pretension to anything of the kind, and openly
+declares that these ideas are ideas merely, and human mistakes.
+Leibnitz, in opposition to him, endeavours to re-establish them in the
+following manner. He conceives that the system of the universe has been
+arranged and predetermined from the moment at which it was launched into
+being; from the moment at which God selected it, with all its details,
+as the best which could exist; but that it is carried on by the action
+of individual creatures (monads as he calls them) which, though
+necessarily obeying the laws of their existence, yet obey them with a
+'character of spontaneity,' which although 'automata,' are yet voluntary
+agents; and therefore, by the consent of their hearts to their actions,
+entitle themselves to moral praise or moral censure. The question is,
+whether by the mere assertion of the co-existence of these opposite
+qualities in the monad man, he has proved that such qualities can
+co-exist. In our opinion, it is like speaking of a circular ellipse, or
+of a quadrilateral triangle. There is a plain dilemma in these matters
+from which no philosophy can extricate itself. If men can incur guilt,
+their actions might be other than they are. If they cannot act otherwise
+than they do, they cannot incur guilt. So at least it appears to us;
+yet, in the darkness of our knowledge, we would not complain merely of a
+theory, and if our earthly life were all in all, and the grave remained
+the extreme horizon of our hopes and fears, the _Harmonie Pre-etablie_
+might be tolerated as credible, and admired as ingenious and beautiful.
+It is when forcibly attached to a creed of the future, with which it has
+no natural connection, that it assumes its repulsive features. The world
+may be in the main good; while the good, from the unknown condition of
+its existence, may be impossible without some intermixture of evil; and
+although Leibnitz was at times staggered even himself by the misery and
+wickedness which he witnessed, and was driven to comfort himself with
+the reflection that this earth might be but one world in the midst of
+the universe, and perhaps the single chequered exception in an infinity
+of stainless globes, yet we would not quarrel with a hypothesis because
+it was imperfect; it might pass as a possible conjecture on a dark
+subject, when nothing better than conjecture was attainable.
+
+But as soon as we are told that the evil in these human 'automata' being
+a necessary condition of this world which God has called into being, is
+yet infinitely detestable to God; that the creatures who suffer under
+the accursed necessity of committing sin are infinitely guilty in God's
+eyes, for doing what they have no power to avoid, and may therefore be
+justly punished in everlasting fire; we recoil against the paradox.
+
+No disciple of Leibnitz will maintain, that unless he had found this
+belief in an eternity of penal retribution an article of the popular
+creed, such a doctrine would have formed a natural appendage of his
+system; and if M. de Careil desires to know why the influence of
+Spinoza, whose genius he considers so insignificant, has been so deep
+and so enduring, while Leibnitz has only secured for himself a mere
+admiration of his talents, it is because Spinoza was not afraid to be
+consistent, even at the price of the world's reprobation, and refused to
+purchase the applause of his own age at the sacrifice of sincerity.
+
+[P] _Refutation Inedite de Spinoza._ Par Leibnitz. _Precedee d'une
+Memoire_, par Foucher de Careil. Paris. 1854.
+
+
+
+
+THE DISSOLUTION OF THE MONASTERIES.[Q]
+
+
+To be entirely just in our estimate of other ages is not difficult--it
+is impossible. Even what is passing in our presence we see but through a
+glass darkly. The mind as well as the eye adds something of its own,
+before an image, even of the clearest object, can be painted upon it.
+
+And in historical enquiries, the most instructed thinkers have but a
+limited advantage over the most illiterate. Those who know the most,
+approach least to agreement. The most careful investigations are
+diverging roads--the further men travel upon them, the greater the
+interval by which they are divided. In the eyes of David Hume, the
+history of the Saxon Princes is 'the scuffling of kites and crows.'
+Father Newman would mortify the conceit of a degenerate England by
+pointing to the sixty saints and the hundred confessors who were trained
+in her royal palaces for the Calendar of the Blessed. How vast a chasm
+yawns between these two conceptions of the same era! Through what common
+term can the student pass from one into the other?
+
+Or, to take an instance yet more noticeable. The history of England
+scarcely interests Mr. Macaulay before the Revolution of the seventeenth
+century. To Lord John Russell, the Reformation was the first outcome
+from centuries of folly and ferocity; and Mr. Hallam's more temperate
+language softens, without concealing, a similar conclusion. These
+writers have all studied what they describe. Mr. Carlyle has studied the
+same subject with power at least equal to theirs, and to him the
+greatness of English character was waning with the dawn of English
+literature; the race of heroes was already failing. The era of action
+was yielding before the era of speech.
+
+All these views may seem to ourselves exaggerated; we may have settled
+into some moderate _via media_, or have carved out our own ground on an
+original pattern; but if we are wise, the differences in other men's
+judgments will teach us to be diffident. The more distinctly we have
+made history bear witness in favour of our particular opinions, the more
+we have multiplied the chances against the truth of our own theory.
+
+Again, supposing that we have made a truce with 'opinions,' properly so
+called; supposing we have satisfied ourselves that it is idle to quarrel
+upon points on which good men differ, and that it is better to attend
+rather to what we certainly know; supposing that, either from superior
+wisdom, or from the conceit of superior wisdom, we have resolved that we
+will look for human perfection neither exclusively in the Old World nor
+exclusively in the New--neither among Catholics nor Protestants, among
+Whigs or Tories, heathens or Christians--that we have laid aside
+accidental differences, and determined to recognise only moral
+distinctions, to love moral worth, and to hate moral evil, wherever we
+find them;--even supposing all this, we have not much improved our
+position--we cannot leap from our shadow.
+
+Eras, like individuals, differ from one another in the species of virtue
+which they encourage. In one age, we find the virtues of the warrior; in
+the next, of the saint. The ascetic and the soldier in their turn
+disappear; an industrial era succeeds, bringing with it the virtues of
+common sense, of grace, and refinement. There is the virtue of energy
+and command, there is the virtue of humility and patient suffering. All
+these are different, and all are, or may be, of equal moral value; yet,
+from the constitution of our minds, we are so framed that we cannot
+equally appreciate all; we sympathise instinctively with the person who
+most represents our own ideal--with the period when the graces which
+most harmonise with our own tempers have been especially cultivated.
+Further, if we leave out of sight these refinements, and content
+ourselves with the most popular conceptions of morality, there is this
+immeasurable difficulty--so great, yet so little considered,--that
+goodness is positive as well as negative, and consists in the active
+accomplishment of certain things which we are bound to do, as well as in
+the abstaining from things which we are bound not to do. And here the
+warp and woof vary in shade and pattern. Many a man, with the help of
+circumstances, may pick his way clear through life, never having
+violated one prohibitive commandment, and yet at last be fit only for
+the place of the unprofitable servant--he may not have committed either
+sin or crime, yet never have felt the pulsation of a single unselfish
+emotion. Another, meanwhile, shall have been hurried by an impulsive
+nature into fault after fault--shall have been reckless, improvident,
+perhaps profligate, yet be fitter after all for the kingdom of heaven
+than the Pharisee--fitter, because against the catalogue of faults there
+could perhaps be set a fairer list of acts of comparative generosity and
+self-forgetfulness--fitter, because to those who love much, much is
+forgiven. Fielding had no occasion to make Blifil, behind his decent
+coat, a traitor and a hypocrite. It would have been enough to have
+coloured him in and out alike in the steady hues of selfishness, afraid
+of offending the upper powers as he was afraid of offending
+Allworthy--not from any love for what was good, but solely because it
+would be imprudent--because the pleasure to be gained was not worth the
+risk of consequences. Such a Blifil would have answered the novelist's
+purpose--for he would have remained a worse man in the estimation of
+some of us than Tom Jones.
+
+So the truth is; but unfortunately it is only where accurate knowledge
+is stimulated by affection, that we are able to feel it. Persons who
+live beyond our own circle, and, still more, persons who have lived in
+another age, receive what is called justice, not charity; and justice is
+supposed to consist in due allotments of censure for each special act of
+misconduct, leaving merit unrecognised. There are many reasons for this
+harsh method of judging. We must decide of men by what we know, and it
+is easier to know faults than to know virtues. Faults are specific,
+easily described, easily appreciated, easily remembered. And again,
+there is, or may be, hypocrisy in virtue; but no one pretends to vice
+who is not vicious. The bad things which can be proved of a man we know
+to be genuine. He was a spendthrift, he was an adulterer, he gambled, he
+equivocated. These are blots positive, unless untrue, and when they
+stand alone, tinge the whole character.
+
+This also is to be observed in historical criticism. All men feel a
+necessity of being on some terms with their conscience, at their own
+expense or at another's. If they cannot part with their faults, they
+will at least call them by their right name when they meet with such
+faults elsewhere; and thus, when they find accounts of deeds of violence
+or sensuality, of tyranny, of injustice of man to man, of great and
+extensive suffering, or any of those other misfortunes which the
+selfishness of men has at various times occasioned, they will vituperate
+the doers of such things, and the age which has permitted them to be
+done, with the full emphasis of virtuous indignation, while all the time
+they are themselves doing things which will be described, with no less
+justice, in the same colour, by an equally virtuous posterity.
+
+Historians are fond of recording the supposed sufferings of the poor in
+the days of serfdom and villanage; yet the records of the strikes of the
+last ten years, when told by the sufferers, contain pictures no less
+fertile in tragedy. We speak of famines and plagues under the Tudors and
+Stuarts; but the Irish famine, and the Irish plague of 1847, the last
+page of such horrors which has yet been turned over, is the most
+horrible of all. We can conceive a description of England during the
+year which has just closed over us (1856), true in all its details,
+containing no one statement which can be challenged, no single
+exaggeration which can be proved; and this description, if given without
+the correcting traits, shall make ages to come marvel why the Cities of
+the Plain were destroyed, and England was allowed to survive. The frauds
+of trusted men, high in power and high in supposed religion; the
+wholesale poisonings; the robberies; the adulteration of food--nay, of
+almost everything exposed for sale--the cruel usage of women--children
+murdered for the burial fees--life and property insecure in open day in
+the open streets--splendour such as the world never saw before upon
+earth, with vice and squalor crouching under its walls--let all this be
+written down by an enemy, or let it be ascertained hereafter by the
+investigation of a posterity which desires to judge us as we generally
+have judged our forefathers, and few years will show darker in the
+English annals than the year which we have just left behind us. Yet we
+know, in the honesty of our hearts, how unjust such a picture would be.
+Our future advocate, if we are so happy as to find one, may not be able
+to disprove a single article in the indictment; and yet we know that, as
+the world goes, he will be right if he marks the year with a white
+stroke--as one in which, on the whole, the moral harvest was better than
+an average.
+
+Once more: our knowledge of any man is always inadequate--even of the
+unit which each of us calls himself; and the first condition under which
+we can know a man at all is, that he be in essentials something like
+ourselves; that our own experience be an interpreter which shall open
+the secrets of his experience; and it often happens, even among our
+contemporaries, that we are altogether baffled. The Englishman and the
+Italian may understand each other's speech, but the language of each
+other's ideas has still to be learnt. Our long failures in Ireland have
+risen from a radical incongruity of character which has divided the Celt
+from the Saxon. And again, in the same country, the Catholic will be a
+mystery to the Protestant, and the Protestant to the Catholic. Their
+intellects have been shaped in opposite moulds; they are like
+instruments which cannot be played in concert. In the same way, but in a
+far higher degree, we are divided from the generations which have
+preceded us in this planet--we try to comprehend a Pericles or a
+Caesar--an image rises before us which we seem to recognise as belonging
+to our common humanity. There is this feature which is familiar to
+us--and this--and this. We are full of hope; the lineaments, one by one,
+pass into clearness; when suddenly the figure becomes enveloped in a
+cloud--some perplexity crosses our analysis, baffling it utterly, the
+phantom which we have evoked dies away before our eyes, scornfully
+mocking our incapacity to master it.
+
+The English antecedent to the Reformation are nearer to us than Greeks
+or Romans; and yet there is a large interval between the baron who
+fought at Barnet field, and his polished descendant in a modern
+drawing-room. The scale of appreciation and the rule of judgment--the
+habits, the hopes, the fears, the emotions--have utterly changed.
+
+In perusing modern histories, the present writer has been struck dumb
+with wonder at the facility with which men will fill in chasms in their
+information with conjecture; will guess at the motives which have
+prompted actions; will pass their censures, as if all secrets of the
+past lay out on an open scroll before them. He is obliged to say for
+himself that, wherever he has been fortunate enough to discover
+authentic explanations of English historical difficulties, it is rare
+indeed that he has found any conjecture, either of his own or of any
+other modern writer, confirmed. The true motive has almost invariably
+been of a kind which no modern experience could have suggested.
+
+Thoughts such as these form a hesitating prelude to an expression of
+opinion on a controverted question. They will serve, however, to
+indicate the limits within which the said opinion is supposed to be
+hazarded. And in fact, neither in this nor in any historical subject is
+the conclusion so clear that it can be enunciated in a definite form.
+The utmost which can be safely hazarded with history is to relate
+honestly ascertained facts, with only such indications of a judicial
+sentence upon them as may be suggested in the form in which the story is
+arranged.
+
+Whether the monastic bodies of England, at the time of their
+dissolution, were really in that condition of moral corruption which is
+laid to their charge in the Act of Parliament by which they were
+dissolved, is a point which it seems hopeless to argue. Roman Catholic,
+and indeed almost all English, writers who are not committed to an
+unfavourable opinion by the ultra-Protestantism of their doctrines, seem
+to have agreed of late years that the accusations, if not false, were
+enormously exaggerated. The dissolution, we are told, was a
+predetermined act of violence and rapacity; and when the reports and the
+letters of the visitors are quoted in justification of the Government,
+the discussion is closed with the dismissal of every unfavourable
+witness from the court, as venal, corrupt, calumnious--in fact, as a
+suborned liar. Upon these terms the argument is easily disposed of; and
+if it were not that truth is in all matters better than falsehood, it
+would be idle to reopen a question which cannot be justly dealt with. No
+evidence can affect convictions which have been arrived at without
+evidence--and why should we attempt a task which it is hopeless to
+accomplish? It seems necessary, however, to reassert the actual state of
+the surviving testimony from time to time, if it be only to sustain the
+links of the old traditions; and the present paper will contain one or
+two pictures of a peculiar kind, exhibiting the life and habits of those
+institutions, which have been lately met with chiefly among the
+unprinted Records. In anticipation of any possible charge of unfairness
+in judging from isolated instances, we disclaim simply all desire to
+judge--all wish to do anything beyond relating certain ascertained
+stories. Let it remain, to those who are perverse enough to insist upon
+it, an open question whether the monasteries were more corrupt under
+Henry the Eighth than they had been four hundred years earlier. The
+dissolution would have been equally a necessity; for no reasonable
+person would desire that bodies of men should have been maintained for
+the only business of singing masses, when the efficacy of masses was no
+longer believed. Our present desire is merely this--to satisfy ourselves
+whether the Government, in discharging a duty which could not be
+dispensed with, condescended to falsehood in seeking a vindication for
+themselves which they did not require; or whether they had cause really
+to believe the majority of the monastic bodies to be as they
+affirmed--whether, that is to say, there really were such cases either
+of flagrant immorality, neglect of discipline, or careless waste and
+prodigality, as to justify the general censure which was pronounced
+against the system by the Parliament and the Privy Council.
+
+Secure in the supposed completeness with which Queen Mary's agents
+destroyed the Records of the visitation under her father, Roman Catholic
+writers have taken refuge in a disdainful denial; and the Anglicans, who
+for the most part, while contented to enjoy the fruits of the
+Reformation, detest the means by which it was brought about, have taken
+the same view. Bishop Latimer tells us that, when the Report of the
+visitors of the abbeys was read in the Commons House, there rose from
+all sides one long cry of 'Down with them.' But Bishop Latimer, in the
+opinion of High Churchmen, is not to be believed. Do we produce letters
+of the visitors themselves, we are told that they are the slanders
+prepared to justify a preconceived purpose of spoliation. No witness, it
+seems, will be admitted unless it be the witness of a friend. Unless
+some enemy of the Reformation can be found to confess the crimes which
+made the Reformation necessary, the crimes themselves are to be regarded
+as unproved. This is a hard condition. We appeal to Wolsey. Wolsey
+commenced the suppression. Wolsey first made public the infamies which
+disgraced the Church; while, notwithstanding, he died the devoted
+servant of the Church. This evidence is surely admissible? But no:
+Wolsey, too, must be put out of court. Wolsey was a courtier and a
+time-server. Wolsey was a tyrant's minion. Wolsey was--in short, we know
+not what Wolsey was, or what he was not. Who can put confidence in a
+charlatan? Behind the bulwarks of such objections, the champion of the
+abbeys may well believe himself secure.
+
+And yet, unreasonable though these demands may be, it happens, after
+all, that we are able partially to gratify them. It is strange that, of
+all extant accusations against any one of the abbeys, the heaviest is
+from a quarter which even Lingard himself would scarcely call
+suspicious. No picture left us by Henry's visitors surpasses, even if it
+equals, a description of the condition of the Abbey of St. Albans, in
+the last quarter of the fifteenth century, drawn by Morton, Henry the
+Seventh's minister, Cardinal Archbishop, Legate of the Apostolic See, in
+a letter addressed by him to the Abbot of St. Albans himself. We must
+request our reader's special attention for the next two pages.
+
+In the year 1489, Pope Innocent the Eighth--moved with the enormous
+stories which reached his ear of the corruption of the houses of
+religion in England--granted a commission to the Archbishop of
+Canterbury to make enquiries whether these stories were true, and to
+proceed to correct and reform as might seem good to him. The regular
+clergy were exempt from episcopal visitation, except under especial
+directions from Rome. The occasion had appeared so serious as to make
+extraordinary interference necessary.
+
+On the receipt of the Papal commission, Cardinal Morton, among other
+letters, wrote the following letter:--
+
+    John, by Divine permission, Archbishop of Canterbury, Primate of all
+    England, Legate of the Apostolic See, to William, Abbot of the
+    Monastery of St. Albans, greeting.
+
+    We have received certain letters under lead, the copies whereof we
+    herewith send you, from our most holy Lord and Father in Christ,
+    Innocent, by Divine Providence Pope, the eighth of that name. We
+    therefore, John, the Archbishop, the visitor, reformer, inquisitor,
+    and judge therein mentioned, in reverence for the Apostolic See,
+    have taken upon ourselves the burden of enforcing the said
+    commission; and have determined that we will proceed by, and
+    according to, the full force, tenor, and effect of the same.
+
+    And it has come to our ears, being at once publicly notorious and
+    brought before us upon the testimony of many witnesses worthy of
+    credit, that you, the abbot afore-mentioned, have been of long time
+    noted and diffamed, and do yet continue so noted, of simony, of
+    usury, of dilapidation and waste of the goods, revenues, and
+    possessions of the said monastery, and of certain other enormous
+    crimes and excesses hereafter written. In the rule, custody, and
+    administration of the goods, spiritual and temporal, of the said
+    monastery, you are so remiss, so negligent, so prodigal, that
+    whereas the said monastery was of old times founded and endowed by
+    the pious devotion of illustrious princes, of famous memory,
+    heretofore kings of this land, the most noble progenitors of our
+    most serene Lord and King that now is, in order that true religion
+    might flourish there, that the name of the Most High, in whose
+    honour and glory it was instituted, might be duly celebrated there;
+
+    And whereas, in days heretofore, the regular observance of the said
+    rule was greatly regarded, and hospitality was diligently kept;
+
+    Nevertheless, for no little time, during which you have presided in
+    the same monastery, you and certain of your fellow-monks and
+    brethren (whose blood, it is feared, through your neglect, a severe
+    Judge will require at your hand) have relaxed the measure and form
+    of religious life; you have laid aside the pleasant yoke of
+    contemplation, and all regular observances--hospitality, alms, and
+    those other offices of piety which of old time were exercised and
+    ministered therein have decreased, and by your faults, your
+    carelessness, your neglect and deed, do daily decrease more and
+    more, and cease to be regarded--the pious vows of the founders are
+    defrauded of their just intent--the ancient rule of your order is
+    deserted; and not a few of your fellow-monks and brethren, as we
+    most deeply grieve to learn, giving themselves over to a reprobate
+    mind, laying aside the fear of God, do lead only a life of
+    lasciviousness--nay, as is horrible to relate, be not afraid to
+    defile the holy places, even the very churches of God, by infamous
+    intercourse with nuns, &c. &c.
+
+    You yourself, moreover, among other grave enormities and abominable
+    crimes whereof you are guilty, and for which you are noted and
+    diffamed, have, in the first place, admitted a certain married
+    woman, named Elena Germyn, who has separated herself without just
+    cause from her husband, and for some time past has lived in adultery
+    with another man, to be a nun or sister in the house or Priory of
+    Bray, lying, as you pretend, within your jurisdiction. You have next
+    appointed the same woman to be prioress of the said house,
+    notwithstanding that her said husband was living at the time, and is
+    still alive. And finally, Father Thomas Sudbury, one of your brother
+    monks, publicly, notoriously, and without interference or punishment
+    from you, has associated, and still associates, with this woman as
+    an adulterer with his harlot.
+
+    Moreover, divers other of your brethren and fellow-monks have
+    resorted, and do resort, continually to her and other women at the
+    same place, as to a public brothel or receiving house, and have
+    received no correction therefor.
+
+    Nor is Bray the only house into which you have introduced disorder.
+    At the nunnery of Sapwell, which you also contend to be under your
+    jurisdiction, you change the prioresses and superiors again and
+    again at your own will and caprice. Here, as well as at Bray, you
+    depose those who are good and religious; you promote to the highest
+    dignities the worthless and the vicious. The duties of the order are
+    cast aside; virtue is neglected; and by these means so much cost and
+    extravagance has been caused, that to provide means for your
+    indulgence you have introduced certain of your brethren to preside
+    in their houses under the name of guardians, when in fact they are
+    no guardians, but thieves and notorious villains; and with their
+    help you have caused and permitted the goods of the same priories to
+    be dispensed, or to speak more truly to be dissipated, in the
+    above-described corruptions and other enormous and accursed
+    offences. Those places once religious are rendered and reputed as it
+    were profane and impious; and by your own and your creatures'
+    conduct, are so impoverished as to be reduced to the verge of ruin.
+
+    In like manner, also, you have dealt with certain other cells of
+    monks, which you say are subject to you, even within the monastery
+    of the glorious proto-martyr Alban himself. You have dilapidated the
+    common property; you have made away with the jewels; the copses, the
+    woods, the underwood, almost all the oaks, and other forest trees,
+    to the value of eight thousand marks and more, you have made to be
+    cut down without distinction, and they have by you been sold and
+    alienated. The brethren of the abbey, some of whom, as is reported,
+    are given over to all the evil things of the world, neglect the
+    service of God altogether. They live with harlots and mistresses
+    publicly and continuously, within the precincts of the monastery and
+    without. Some of them, who are covetous of honour and promotion, and
+    desirous therefore of pleasing your cupidity, have stolen and made
+    away with the chalices and other jewels of the church. They have
+    even sacrilegiously extracted the precious stones from the very
+    shrine of St. Alban; and you have not punished these men, but have
+    rather knowingly supported and maintained them. If any of your
+    brethren be living justly and religiously, if any be wise and
+    virtuous, these you straightway depress and hold in hatred.... You
+    ...
+
+But we need not transcribe further this overwhelming document. It
+pursues its way through mire and filth to its most lame and impotent
+conclusion. After all this, the abbot was not deposed; he was invited
+merely to reconsider his doings, and, if possible, amend them. Such was
+Church discipline, even under an extraordinary commission from Rome.
+But the most incorrigible Anglican will scarcely question the truth of a
+picture drawn by such a hand; and it must be added that this one
+unexceptionable indictment lends at once assured credibility to the
+reports which were presented fifty years later, on the general
+visitation. There is no longer room for the presumptive objection that
+charges so revolting could not be true. We see that in their worst form
+they could be true, and the evidence of Legh and Leghton, of Rice and
+Bedyll, as it remains in their letters to Cromwell, must be shaken in
+detail, or else it must be accepted as correct. We cannot dream that
+Archbishop Morton was mistaken, or was misled by false information. St.
+Albans was no obscure priory in a remote and thinly-peopled county. The
+Abbot of St. Albans was a peer of the realm, taking precedence of
+bishops, living in the full glare of notoriety, within a few miles of
+London. The archbishop had ample means of ascertaining the truth; and,
+we may be sure, had taken care to examine his ground before he left on
+record so tremendous an accusation. This story is true--as true as it is
+piteous. We will pause a moment over it before we pass from this, once
+more to ask our passionate Church friends whether still they will
+persist that the abbeys were no worse under the Tudors than they had
+been in their origin, under the Saxons, or under the first Norman and
+Plantagenet kings. We refuse to believe it. The abbeys which towered in
+the midst of the English towns, the houses clustered at their feet like
+subjects round some majestic queen, were images indeed of the civil
+supremacy which the Church of the Middle Ages had asserted for itself;
+but they were images also of an inner spiritual sublimity, which had won
+the homage of grateful and admiring nations. The heavenly graces had
+once descended upon the monastic orders, making them ministers of mercy,
+patterns of celestial life, breathing witnesses of the power of the
+Spirit in renewing and sanctifying the heart. And then it was that art
+and wealth and genius poured out their treasures to raise fitting
+tabernacles for the dwelling of so divine a soul. Alike in the village
+and the city, amongst the unadorned walls and lowly roofs which closed
+in the humble dwellings of the laity, the majestic houses of the Father
+of mankind and of his especial servants rose up in sovereign beauty.
+And ever at the sacred gates sat Mercy, pouring out relief from a
+never-failing store to the poor and the suffering; ever within the
+sacred aisles the voices of holy men were pealing heavenwards in
+intercession for the sins of mankind; and such blessed influences were
+thought to exhale around those mysterious precincts, that even the poor
+outcasts of society--the debtor, the felon, and the outlaw--gathered
+round the walls as the sick men sought the shadow of the apostle, and
+lay there sheltered from the avenging hand, till their sins were washed
+from off their souls. The abbeys of the middle ages floated through the
+storms of war and conquest, like the ark upon the waves of the flood, in
+the midst of violence remaining inviolate, through the awful reverence
+which surrounded them. The abbeys, as Henry's visitors found them, were
+as little like what they once had been, as the living man in the pride
+of his growth is like the corpse which the earth makes haste to hide for
+ever.
+
+The official letters which reveal the condition into which the monastic
+establishments had degenerated, are chiefly in the Cotton Library, and a
+large number of them have been published by the Camden Society. Besides
+these, however, there are in the Rolls House many other documents which
+confirm and complete the statements of the writers of those letters.
+There is a part of what seems to have been a digest of the 'Black
+Book'--an epitome of iniquities, under the title of the 'Compendium
+Compertorum.' There are also reports from private persons, private
+entreaties for enquiry, depositions of monks in official examinations,
+and other similar papers, which, in many instances, are too offensive to
+be produced, and may rest in obscurity, unless contentious persons
+compel us to bring them forward. Some of these, however, throw curious
+light on the habits of the time, and on the collateral disorders which
+accompanied the more gross enormities. They show us, too, that although
+the dark tints predominate, the picture was not wholly black; that as
+just Lot was in the midst of Sodom, yet was unable by his single
+presence to save the guilty city from destruction, so in the latest era
+of monasticism there were types yet lingering of an older and fairer
+age, who, nevertheless, were not delivered, like the patriarch, but
+perished most of them with the institution to which they belonged. The
+hideous exposure is not untinted with fairer lines; and we see traits
+here and there of true devotion, mistaken but heroic.
+
+Of these documents two specimens shall be given in this place, one of
+either kind; and both, so far as we know, new to modern history. The
+first is so singular, that we print it as it is found--a genuine
+antique, fished up, in perfect preservation, out of the wreck of the old
+world.
+
+About eight miles from Ludlow, in the county of Herefordshire, once
+stood the abbey of Wigmore. There was Wigmore Castle, a stronghold of
+the Welsh Marches, now, we believe, a modern, well-conditioned mansion;
+and Wigmore Abbey, of which we do not hear that there are any remaining
+traces. Though now vanished, however, like so many of its kind, the
+house was three hundred years ago in vigorous existence; and when the
+stir commenced for an enquiry, the proceedings of the abbot of this
+place gave occasion to a memorial which stands in the Rolls collection
+as follows:--[R]
+
+    Articles to be objected against John Smart, Abbot of the Monastery
+    of Wigmore, in the county of Hereford, to be exhibited to the Right
+    Honourable Lord Thomas Cromwell, the Lord Privy Seal and Vice-gerent
+    to the King's Majesty.
+
+    1. The said abbot is to be accused of simony, as well for taking
+    money for advocation and putations of benefices, as for giving of
+    orders, or more truly, selling them, and that to such persons which
+    have been rejected elsewhere, and of little learning and light
+    consideration.
+
+    2. The said abbot hath promoted to orders many scholars when all
+    other bishops did refrain to give such orders on account of certain
+    ordinances devised by the King's Majesty and his Council for the
+    common weal of this realm. Then resorted to the said abbot scholars
+    out of all parts, whom he would promote to orders by sixty at a
+    time, and sometimes more, and otherwhiles less. And sometimes the
+    said abbot would give orders by night within his chamber, and
+    otherwise in the church early in the morning, and now and then at a
+    chapel out of the abbey. So that there be many unlearned and light
+    priests made by the said abbot, and in the diocese of Llandaff, and
+    in the places afore named--a thousand, as it is esteemed, by the
+    space of this seven years he hath made priests, and received not so
+    little money of them as a thousand pounds for their orders.
+
+    3. Item, that the said abbot now of late, when he could not be
+    suffered to give general orders, for the most part doth give orders
+    by pretence of dispensation; and by that colour he promoteth them to
+    orders by two and three, and takes much money of them, both for
+    their orders and for to purchase their dispensations after the time
+    he hath promoted them to their orders.
+
+    4. Item, the said abbot hath hurt and dismayed his tenants by
+    putting them from their leases, and by enclosing their commons from
+    them, and selling and utter wasting of the woods that were wont to
+    relieve and succour them.
+
+    5. Item, the said abbot hath sold corradyes, to the damage of the
+    said monastery.
+
+    6. Item, the said abbot hath alienate and sold the jewels and plate
+    of the monastery, to the value of five hundred marks, _to purchase
+    of the Bishop of Rome his bulls to be a bishop, and to annex the
+    said abbey to his bishopric, to that intent that he should not for
+    his misdeeds be punished, or deprived from his said abbey_.
+
+    7. Item, that the said abbot, long after that other bishops had
+    renounced the Bishop of Rome, and professed them to the King's
+    Majesty, did use, but more verily usurped, the office of a bishop by
+    virtue of his first bulls purchased from Rome, till now of late, as
+    it will appear by the date of his confirmation, if he have any.
+
+    8. Item, that he the said abbot hath lived viciously, and kept to
+    concubines divers and many women that is openly known.
+
+    9. Item, that the said abbot doth yet continue his vicious living,
+    as it is known, openly.
+
+    10. Item, that the said abbot hath spent and wasted much of the
+    goods of the said monastery upon the foresaid women.
+
+    11. Item, that the said abbot is malicious and very wrathful, not
+    regarding what he saith or doeth in his fury or anger.
+
+    12. Item, that one Richard Gyles bought of the abbot and convent of
+    Wigmore a corradye, and a chamber for him and his wife for term of
+    their lives; and when the said Richard Gyles was aged and was very
+    weak, he disposed his goods, and made executors to execute his will.
+    And when the said abbot now being ---- perceived that the said
+    Richard Gyles was rich, and had not bequested so much of his goods
+    to him as he would have had, the said abbot then came to the chamber
+    of the said Richard Gyles, and put out thence all his friends and
+    kinsfolk that kept him in his sickness; and then the said abbot set
+    his brother and other of his servants to keep the sick man; and the
+    night next coming after the said Richard Gyles's coffer was broken,
+    and thence taken all that was in the same, to the value of forty
+    marks; and long after the said abbot confessed, before the executors
+    of the said Richard Gyles, that it was his deed.
+
+    13. Item, that the said abbot, after he had taken away the goods of
+    the said Richard Gyles, used daily to reprove and check the said
+    Richard Gyles, and inquire of him where was more of his coin and
+    money; and at the last the said abbot thought he lived too long, and
+    made the sick man, after much sorry keeping, to be taken from his
+    feather-bed, and laid upon a cold mattress, and kept his friends
+    from him to his death.
+
+    15. Item, that the said abbot consented to the death and murdering
+    of one John Tichkill, that was slain at his procuring, at the said
+    monastery, by Sir Richard Cubley, canon and chaplain to the said
+    abbot; which canon is and ever hath been since that time chief of
+    the said abbot's council; and is supported to carry crossbowes, and
+    to go whither he lusteth at any time, to fishing and hunting in the
+    king's forests, parks, and chases; but little or nothing serving the
+    quire, as other brethren do, neither corrected of the abbot for any
+    trespass he doth commit.
+
+    16. Item, that the said abbot hath been perjured oft, as is to be
+    proved and is proved; and as it is supposed, did not make a true
+    inventory of the goods, chattels, and jewels of his monastery to the
+    King's Majesty and his Council.
+
+    17. Item, that the said abbot hath infringed all the king's
+    injunctions which were given him by Doctor Cave to observe and keep;
+    and when he was denounced _in pleno capitulo_ to have broken the
+    same, he would have put in prison the brother as did denounce him to
+    have broken the same injunctions, save that he was let by the
+    convent there.
+
+    18. Item, that the said abbot hath openly preached against the
+    doctrine of Christ, saying he ought not to love his enemy, but as he
+    loves the devil; and that he should love his enemy's soul, but not
+    his body.
+
+    19. Item, that the said abbot hath taken but small regard to the
+    good-living of his household.
+
+    20. Item, that the said abbot hath had and hath yet a special favour
+    to misdoers and manquellers, thieves, deceivers of their neighbours,
+    and by them [is] most ruled and counselled.
+
+    21. Item, that the said abbot hath granted leases of farms and
+    advocations first to one man, and took his fine, and also hath
+    granted the same lease to another man for more money; and then would
+    make to the last taker a lease or writing, with an antedate of the
+    first lease, which hath bred great dissension among gentlemen--as
+    Master Blunt and Master Moysey, and other takers of such leases--and
+    that often.
+
+    22. Item, the said abbot having the contrepaynes of leases in his
+    keeping, hath, for money, rased out the number of years mentioned in
+    the said leases, and writ a fresh number in the former taker's
+    lease, and in the contrepayne thereof, to the intent to defraud the
+    taker or buyer of the residue of such leases, of whom he hath
+    received the money.
+
+    23. Item, the said abbot hath not, according to the foundation of
+    his monastery, admitted freely tenants into certain alms-houses
+    belonging to the said monastery; but of them he hath taken large
+    fines, and some of them he hath put away that would not give him
+    fines: whither poor, aged, and impotent people were wont to be
+    freely admitted, and [to] receive the founder's alms that of the old
+    customs [were] limited to the same--which alms is also diminished by
+    the said abbot.
+
+    24. Item, that the said abbot did not deliver the bulls of his
+    bishopric, that he purchased from Rome, to our sovereign lord the
+    king's council till long after the time he had delivered and
+    exhibited the bulls of his monastery to them.
+
+    25. Item, that the said abbot hath detained and yet doth detain
+    servants' wages; and often when the said servants hath asked their
+    wages, the said abbot hath put them into the stocks, and beat them.
+
+    26. Item, the said abbot, in times past, hath had a great devotion
+    to ride to Llangarvan, in Wales, upon Lammas-day, to receive pardon
+    there; and on the even he would visit one Mary Hawle, an old
+    acquaintance of his, at the Welsh Poole, and on the morrow ride to
+    the foresaid Llangarvan, to be confessed and absolved, and the same
+    night return to company with the said Mary Hawle, at the Welsh Poole
+    aforesaid, and Kateryn, the said Mary Hawle her first daughter, whom
+    the said abbot long hath kept to concubine, and had children by her,
+    that he lately married at Ludlow. And [there be] others that have
+    been taken out of his chamber and put in the stocks within the said
+    abbey, and others that have complained upon him to the king's
+    council of the Marches of Wales; and the woman that dashed out his
+    teeth, that he would have had by violence, I will not name now, nor
+    other men's wives, lest it would offend your good lordship to read
+    or hear the same.
+
+    27. Item, the said abbot doth daily embezzle, sell, and convey the
+    goods and chattels, and jewels of the said monastery, having no need
+    so to do: for it is thought that he hath a thousand marks or two
+    thousand lying by him that he hath gotten by selling of orders, and
+    the jewels and plate of the monastery and corradyes; and it is to be
+    feared that he will alienate all the rest, unless your good lordship
+    speedily make redress and provision to let the same.
+
+    28. Item, the said abbot was accustomed yearly to preach at
+    Leynt-warden on the Festival of the Nativity of the Virgin Mary,
+    where and when the people were wont to offer to an image there, and
+    to the same the said abbot in his sermons would exhort them and
+    encourage them. But now the oblations be decayed, the abbot, espying
+    the image then to have a cote of silver plate and gilt, hath taken
+    away of his own authority the said image, and the plate turned to
+    his own use; and left his preaching there, saying it is no manner of
+    profit to any man, and the plate that was about the said image was
+    named to be worth forty pounds.
+
+    29. Item, the said abbot hath ever nourished enmity and discord
+    among his brethren; and hath not encouraged them to learn the laws
+    and the mystery of Christ. But he that least knew was most cherished
+    by him; and he hath been highly displeased and [hath] disdained when
+    his brothers would say that 'it is God's precept and doctrine that
+    ye ought to prefer before your ceremonies and vain constitutions.'
+    This saying was high disobedient, and should be grievously punished;
+    when that lying, obloquy, flattery, ignorance, derision, contumely,
+    discord, great swearing, drinking, hypocrisy, fraud, superstition,
+    deceit, conspiracy to wrong their neighbour, and other of that kind,
+    was had in special favour and regard. Laud and praise be to God that
+    hath sent us the true knowledge. Honour and long prosperity to our
+    sovereign lord and his noble council, that teaches to advance the
+    same. Amen.
+
+    By John Lee, your faithful bedeman, and canon of the said monastery
+    of Wigmore.
+
+    Postscript.--My good lord, there is in the said abbey a cross of
+    fine gold and precious stones, whereof one diamond was esteemed by
+    Doctor Booth, Bishop of Hereford, worth a hundred marks. In that
+    cross is enclosed a piece of wood, named to be of the cross that
+    Christ died upon, and to the same hath been offering. And when it
+    should be brought down to the church from the treasury, it was
+    brought down with lights, and like reverence as should have been
+    done to Christ himself. I fear lest the abbot upon Sunday next, when
+    he may enter the treasury, will take away the said cross and break
+    it, or turn it to his own use, with many other precious jewels that
+    be there.
+
+    All these articles afore written be true as to the substance and
+    true meaning of them, though peradventure for haste and lack of
+    counsel, some words be set amiss or out of their place. That I will
+    be ready to prove forasmuch as lies in me, when it shall like your
+    honourable lordship to direct your commission to men (or any man)
+    that will be indifferent and not corrupt to sit upon the same, at
+    the said abbey, where the witnesses and proofs be most ready and the
+    truth is best known, or at any other place where it shall be thought
+    most convenient by your high discretion and authority.
+
+The statutes of Provisors, commonly called Praemunire statutes, which,
+forbade all purchases of bulls from Rome under penalty of outlawry, have
+been usually considered in the highest degree oppressive; and more
+particularly the public censure has fallen upon the last application of
+those statutes, when, on Wolsey's fall, the whole body of the clergy
+were laid under a praemunire, and only obtained pardon on payment of a
+serious fine. Let no one regret that he has learnt to be tolerant to
+Roman Catholics as the nineteenth century knows them. But it is a
+spurious charity which, to remedy a modern injustice, hastens to its
+opposite; and when philosophic historians indulge in loose invective
+against the statesmen of the Reformation, they show themselves unfit to
+be trusted with the custody of our national annals. The Acts of
+Parliament speak plainly of the enormous abuses which had grown up under
+these bulls. Yet even the emphatic language of the statutes scarcely
+prepares us to find an abbot able to purchase with jewels stolen from
+his own convent a faculty to confer holy orders, though he had never
+been consecrated bishop, and to make a thousand pounds by selling the
+exercise of his privileges. This is the most flagrant case which has
+fallen under the eyes of the present writer. Yet it is but a choice
+specimen out of many. He was taught to believe, like other modern
+students of history, that the papal dispensations for immorality, of
+which we read in Fox and other Protestant writers, were calumnies, but
+he has been forced against his will to perceive that the supposed
+calumnies were but the plain truth; he has found among the records--for
+one thing, a list of more than twenty clergy in one diocese who had
+obtained licences to keep concubines.[S] After some experience, he
+advises all persons who are anxious to understand the English
+Reformation to place implicit confidence in the Statute Book. Every
+fresh record which is brought to light is a fresh evidence in its
+favour. In the fluctuations of the conflict there were parliaments, as
+there were princes, of opposing sentiments; and measures were passed,
+amended, repealed, or censured, as Protestants and Catholics came
+alternately into power. But whatever were the differences of opinion,
+the facts on either side which are stated in an Act of Parliament may be
+uniformly trusted. Even in the attainders for treason and heresy we
+admire the truthfulness of the details of the indictments, although we
+deplore the prejudice which at times could make a crime of virtue.
+
+We pass on to the next picture. Equal justice, or some attempt at it,
+was promised, and we shall perhaps part from the friends of the
+monasteries on better terms than they believe. At least, we shall add to
+our own history and to the Catholic martyrology a story of genuine
+interest.
+
+We have many accounts of the abbeys at the time of their actual
+dissolution. The resistance or acquiescence of superiors, the
+dismissals of the brethren, the sale of the property, the destruction of
+relics, &c., are all described. We know how the windows were taken out,
+how the glass appropriated, how the 'melter' accompanied the visitors to
+run the lead upon the roofs, and the metal of the bells into portable
+forms. We see the pensioned regulars filing out reluctantly, or exulting
+in their deliverance, discharged from their vows, furnished each with
+his 'secular apparel,' and his purse of money, to begin the world as he
+might. These scenes have long been partially known, and they were rarely
+attended with anything remarkable. At the time of the suppression, the
+discipline of several years had broken down opposition, and prepared the
+way for the catastrophe. The end came at last, but as an issue which had
+been long foreseen.
+
+We have sought in vain, however, for a glimpse into the interior of the
+houses at the first intimation of what was coming--more especially when
+the great blow was struck which severed England from obedience to Rome,
+and asserted the independence of the Anglican Church. Then, virtually,
+the fate of the monasteries was decided. As soon as the supremacy was
+vested in the Crown, enquiry into their condition could no longer be
+escaped or delayed; and then, through the length and breadth of the
+country, there must have been rare dismay. The account of the London
+Carthusians is indeed known to us, because they chose to die rather than
+yield submission where their consciences forbade them; and their
+isolated heroism has served to distinguish their memories. The pope, as
+head of the Universal Church, claimed the power of absolving subjects
+from their allegiance to their king. He deposed Henry. He called on
+foreign princes to enforce his sentence; and, on pain of
+excommunication, commanded the native English to rise in rebellion. The
+king, in self-defence, was compelled to require his subjects to disclaim
+all sympathy with these pretensions, and to recognise no higher
+authority, spiritual or secular, than himself within his own dominions.
+The regular clergy throughout the country were on the pope's side,
+secretly or openly. The Charterhouse monks, however, alone of all the
+order, had the courage to declare their convictions, and to suffer for
+them. Of the rest, we only perceive that they at last submitted; and
+since there was no uncertainty as to their real feelings, we have been
+disposed to judge them hardly as cowards. Yet we who have never been
+tried, should perhaps be cautious in our censures. It is possible to
+hold an opinion quite honestly, and yet to hesitate about dying for it.
+We consider ourselves, at the present day, persuaded honestly of many
+things; yet which of them should we refuse to relinquish if the scaffold
+were the alternative--or at least seem to relinquish, under silent
+protest?
+
+And yet, in the details of the struggle at the Charterhouse, we see the
+forms of mental trial which must have repeated themselves among all
+bodies of the clergy wherever there was seriousness of conviction. If
+the majority of the monks were vicious and sensual, there was still a
+large minority labouring to be true to their vows; and when one entire
+convent was capable of sustained resistance, there must have been many
+where there was only just too little virtue for the emergency--where the
+conflict between interest and conscience was equally genuine, though it
+ended the other way. Scenes of bitter misery there must have been--of
+passionate emotion wrestling ineffectually with the iron resolution of
+the Government: and the faults of the Catholic party weigh so heavily
+against them in the course and progress of the Reformation, that we
+cannot willingly lose the few countervailing tints which soften the
+darkness of their conditions.
+
+Nevertheless, for any authentic account of the abbeys at this crisis, we
+have hitherto been left to our imagination. A stern and busy
+administration had little leisure to preserve records of sentimental
+struggles which led to nothing. The Catholics did not care to keep alive
+the recollection of a conflict in which, even though with difficulty,
+the Church was defeated. A rare accident only could have brought down to
+us any fragment of a transaction which no one had an interest in
+remembering. That such an accident has really occurred, we may consider
+as unusually fortunate. The story in question concerns the abbey of
+Woburn, and is as follows:--
+
+At Woburn, as in many other religious houses, there were representatives
+of both the factions which divided the country; perhaps we should say of
+three--the sincere Catholics, the Indifferentists, and the Protestants.
+These last, so long as Wolsey was in power, had been frightened into
+silence, and with difficulty had been able to save themselves from
+extreme penalties. No sooner, however, had Wolsey fallen, and the
+battle commenced with the papacy, than the tables turned, the persecuted
+became persecutors--or at least threw off their disguise--and were
+strengthened with the support of the large class who cared only to keep
+on the winning side. The mysteries of the faith came to be disputed at
+the public tables; the refectories rang with polemics; the sacred
+silence of the dormitories was broken for the first time by lawless
+speculation. The orthodox might have appealed to the Government: heresy
+was still forbidden by law, and, if detected, was still punished by the
+stake. But the orthodox among the regular clergy adhered to the pope as
+well as to the faith, and abhorred the sacrilege of the Parliament as
+deeply as the new opinions of the Reformers. Instead of calling in the
+help of the law, they muttered treason in secret; and the Reformers,
+confident in the necessities of the times, sent reports to London of
+their arguments and conversations. The authorities in the abbey were
+accused of disaffection; and a commission of enquiry was sent down
+towards the end of the spring of 1536, to investigate. The depositions
+taken on this occasion are still preserved; and with the help of them,
+we can leap over three centuries of time, and hear the last echoes of
+the old monastic life in Woburn Abbey dying away in discord.
+
+Where party feeling was running so high, there were, of course,
+passionate arguments. The Act of Supremacy, the spread of Protestantism,
+the power of the Pope, the state of England--all were discussed; and the
+possibilities of the future, as each party painted it in the colours of
+his hopes. The brethren, we find, spoke their minds in plain language,
+sometimes condescending to a joke.
+
+Brother Sherborne deposes that the sub-prior, 'on Candlemas-day last
+past (February 2, 1536), asked him whether he longed not to be at Rome
+where all his bulls were?' Brother Sherborne answered that 'his bulls
+had made so many calves, that he had burned them. Whereunto the
+sub-prior said he thought there were more calves now than there were
+then.'
+
+Then there were long and furious quarrels about 'my Lord Privy Seal'
+(Cromwell)--who was to one party, the incarnation of Satan; to the
+other, the delivering angel.
+
+Nor did matters mend when from the minister they passed to the master.
+
+Dan John Croxton being in 'the shaving-house' one day with certain of
+the brethren having their tonsures looked to, and gossiping, as men do
+on such occasions, one 'Friar Lawrence did say that the king was dead.'
+Then said Croxton, 'Thanks be to God, his Grace is in good health, and I
+pray God so continue him;' and said further to the said Lawrence, 'I
+advise thee to leave thy babbling.' Croxton, it seems, had been among
+the suspected in earlier times. Lawrence said to him, 'Croxton, it
+maketh no matter what thou sayest, for thou art one of the new world;'
+whereupon hotter still the conversation proceeded. 'Thy babbling
+tongue,' Croxton said, 'will turn us all to displeasure at length.'
+'Then,' quoth Lawrence, 'neither thou nor yet any of us all shall do
+well as long as we forsake our head of the Church, the Pope.' 'By the
+mass!' quoth Croxton, 'I would thy Pope Roger were in thy belly, or thou
+in his, for thou art a false perjured knave to thy prince.' Whereunto
+the said Lawrence answered, saying, 'By the mass, thou liest! I was
+never sworn to forsake the Pope to be our head, and never will be.'
+'Then,' quoth Croxton, 'thou shalt be sworn spite of thine heart one
+day, or I will know why nay.'
+
+These and similar wranglings may be taken as specimens of the daily
+conversation at Woburn, and we can perceive how an abbot with the best
+intentions would have found it difficult to keep the peace. There are
+instances of superiors in other houses throwing down their command in
+the midst of the crisis in flat despair, protesting that their subject
+brethren were no longer governable. Abbots who were inclined to the
+Reformation could not manage the Catholics; Catholic abbots could not
+manage the Protestants; indifferent abbots could not manage either the
+one or the other. It would have been well for the Abbot of Woburn--or
+well as far as this world is concerned--if he, like one of these, had
+acknowledged his incapacity, and had fled from his charge.
+
+His name was Robert Hobbes. Of his age and family, history is silent. We
+know only that he held his place when the storm rose against the pope;
+that, like the rest of the clergy, he bent before the blast, taking the
+oath to the king, and submitting to the royal supremacy, but swearing
+under protest, as the phrase went, with the outward, and not with the
+inward man--in fact, perjuring himself. Though infirm, so far, however,
+he was too honest to be a successful counterfeit, and from the jealous
+eyes of the Neologians of the abbey he could not conceal his tendencies.
+We have significant evidence of the _espionage_ which was established
+over all suspected quarters, in the conversations and trifling details
+of conduct on the part of the abbot, which were reported to the
+Government.
+
+In the summer of 1534, orders came that the pope's name should be rased
+out wherever it was mentioned in the Mass books. A malcontent, by name
+Robert Salford, deposed that 'he was singing mass before the abbot at
+St. Thomas's altar within the monastery, at which time he rased out with
+his knife the said name out of the canon.' The abbot told him to 'take a
+pen and strike or cross him out.' The saucy monk said those were not the
+orders. They were to rase him out. 'Well, well,' the abbot said, 'it
+will come again one day.' 'Come again, will it?' was the answer; 'if it
+do, then we will put him in again; but I trust I shall never see that
+day.' The mild abbot could remonstrate, but could not any more command;
+and the proofs of his malignant inclinations were remembered against him
+for the ear of Cromwell.
+
+In the general injunctions, too, he was directed to preach against the
+pope, and to expose his usurpation; but he could not bring himself to
+obey. He shrank from the pulpit; he preached but twice after the
+visitation, and then on other subjects, while in the prayer before the
+sermon he refused, as we find, to use the prescribed form. He only said,
+'You shall pray for the spirituality, the temporality, and the souls
+that be in the pains of purgatory; and did not name the king to be
+supreme head of the Church in neither of the said sermons, nor speak
+against the pretended authority of the Bishop of Rome.'
+
+Again, when Paul the Third, shortly after his election, proposed to call
+a general council at Mantua, against which, by advice of Henry the
+Eighth, the Germans protested, we have a glimpse how eagerly anxious
+English eyes were watching for a turning tide. 'Hear you,' said the
+abbot one day, 'of the Pope's holiness and the congregation of bishops,
+abbots, and princes gathered to the council at Mantua? They be gathered
+for the reformation of the universal Church; and here now we have a book
+of the excuse of the Germans, by which we may know what heretics they
+be: for if they were Catholics and true men as they pretend to be, they
+would never have refused to come to a general council.'
+
+So matters went with the abbot for some months after he had sworn
+obedience to the king. Lulling his conscience with such opiates as the
+casuists could provide for him, he watched anxiously for a change, and
+laboured with but little reserve to hold his brethren to their old
+allegiance.
+
+In the summer of 1535, however, a change came over the scene, very
+different from the outward reaction for which he was looking, and a
+better mind woke in the abbot: he learnt that in swearing what he did
+not mean with reservations and nice distinctions, he had lied to heaven
+and lied to man; that to save his miserable life he had perilled his
+soul. When the oath of supremacy was required of the nation, Sir Thomas
+More, Bishop Fisher, and the monks of the Charterhouse--mistaken, as we
+believe, in judgment, but true to their consciences, and disdaining
+evasion or subterfuge--chose, with deliberate nobleness, rather to die
+than to perjure themselves. This is no place to enter on the great
+question of the justice or necessity of those executions; but the story
+of the so-called martyrdoms convulsed the Catholic world. The pope shook
+upon his throne; the shuttle of diplomatic intrigue stood still;
+diplomatists who had lived so long in lies that the whole life of man
+seemed but a stage pageant, a thing of show and tinsel, stood aghast at
+the revelation of English sincerity, and a shudder of great awe ran
+through Europe. The fury of party leaves little room for generous
+emotion, and no pity was felt for these men by the English Protestants.
+The Protestants knew well that if these same sufferers could have had
+their way, they would themselves have been sacrificed by hecatombs; and
+as they had never experienced mercy, so they were in turn without mercy.
+But to the English Catholics, who believed as Fisher believed, but who
+had not dared to suffer as Fisher suffered, his death and the death of
+the rest acted as a glimpse of the Judgment Day. Their safety became
+their shame and terror; and in the radiant example before them of true
+faithfulness, they saw their own falsehood and their own disgrace. So it
+was with Father Forest, who had taught his penitents in confession that
+they might perjure themselves, and who now sought a cruel death in
+voluntary expiation; so it was with Whiting, the Abbot of Glastonbury;
+so with others whose names should be more familiar to us than they are;
+and here in Woburn we are to see the feeble but genuine penitence of
+Abbot Hobbes. He was still unequal to immediate martyrdom, but he did
+what he knew might drag his death upon him if disclosed to the
+Government, and surrounded by spies he could have had no hope of
+concealment.
+
+'At the time,' deposed Robert Salford, 'that the monks of the
+Charterhouse, with other traitors, did suffer death, the abbot did call
+us into the Chapter-house, and said these words:--"Brethren, this is a
+perilous time; such a scourge was never heard since Christ's passion. Ye
+hear how good men suffer the death. Brethren, this is undoubted for our
+offences. Ye read, so long as the children of Israel kept the
+commandments of God, so long their enemies had no power over them, but
+God took vengeance of their enemies. But when they broke God's
+commandments, then they were subdued by their enemies, and so be we.
+Therefore let us be sorry for our offences. Undoubted He will take
+vengeance of our enemies; I mean those heretics that causeth so many
+good men to suffer thus. Alas, it is a piteous case that so much
+Christian blood should be shed. Therefore, good brethren, for the
+reverence of God, every one of you devoutly pray, and say this Psalm,
+'Oh God, the heathen are come into thine inheritance; thy holy temple
+have they defiled, and made Jerusalem a heap of stones. The dead bodies
+of thy servants have they given to be meat to the fowls of the air, and
+the flesh of thy saints unto the beasts of the field. Their blood have
+they shed like water on every side of Jerusalem, and there was no man to
+bury them. We are become an open scorn unto our enemies, a very scorn
+and derision unto them that are round about us. Oh, remember not our old
+sins, but have mercy upon us, and that soon, for we are come to great
+misery. Help us, oh God of our salvation, for the glory of thy name. Oh,
+be merciful unto our sins for thy name's sake. Wherefore do the heathen
+say, Where is now their God?' Ye shall say this Psalm," repeated the
+abbot, "every Friday, after the litany, prostrate, when ye lie upon the
+high altar, and undoubtedly God will cease this extreme scourge." And
+so,' continues Salford, significantly, 'the convent did say this
+aforesaid Psalm until there were certain that did murmur at the saying
+of it, and so it was left.'
+
+The abbot, it seems, either stood alone, or found but languid support;
+even his own familiar friends whom he trusted, those with whom he had
+walked in the house of God, had turned against him; the harsh air of the
+dawn of a new world choked him: what was there for him but to die? But
+his conscience still haunted him: while he lived he must fight on, and
+so, if possible, find pardon for his perjury. The blows in those years
+fell upon the Church thick and fast. In February 1536, the Bill passed
+for the dissolution of the smaller monasteries; and now we find the
+sub-prior with the whole fraternity united in hostility, and the abbot
+without one friend remaining.
+
+'He did again call us together,' says the next deposition, 'and
+lamentably mourning for the dissolving the said houses, he enjoined us
+to sing "Salvator mundi, salva nos omnes," every day after lauds; and we
+murmured at it, and were not content to sing it for such cause; and so
+we did omit it divers days, for which the abbot came unto the chapter,
+and did in manner rebuke us, and said we were bound to obey his
+commandment by our profession, and so did command us to sing it again
+with the versicle "Let God arise, and let his enemies be scattered. Let
+them also that hate him flee before him." Also he enjoined us at every
+mass that every priest did sing, to say the collect, "Oh God, who
+despisest not the sighing of a contrite heart." And he said if we did
+this with good and true devotion, God would so handle the matter, that
+it should be to the comfort of all England, and so show us mercy as he
+showed unto the children of Israel. And surely, brethren, there will
+come to us a good man that will rectify these monasteries again that be
+now supprest, because "God can of these stones raise up children to
+Abraham."'
+
+'Of the stones,' perhaps, but less easily of the stony-hearted monks,
+who, with pitiless smiles, watched the abbot's sorrow, which should soon
+bring him to his ruin.
+
+Time passed on, and as the world grew worse, so the abbot grew more
+lonely. Desolate and unsupported, he was still unable to make up his
+mind to the course which he knew to be right; but he slowly strengthened
+himself for the trial, and as Lent came on, the season brought with it a
+more special call to effort; he did not fail to recognise it. The
+conduct of the fraternity sorely disturbed him. They preached against
+all which he most loved and valued, in language purposely coarse; and
+the mild sweetness of the rebukes which he administered, showed plainly
+on which side lay, in the abbey of Woburn, the larger portion of the
+spirit of Heaven. Now, when the passions of those times have died away,
+and we can look back with more indifferent eyes, how touching is the
+following scene. There was one Sir William, curate of Woburn Chapel,
+whose tongue, it seems, was rough beyond the rest. The abbot met him one
+day, and spoke to him. 'Sir William,' he said, 'I hear tell ye be a
+great railer. I marvel that ye rail so. I pray you teach my cure the
+Scripture of God, and that may be to edification. I pray you leave such
+railing. Ye call the pope a bear and a bandog. Either he is a good man
+or an ill. _Domino suo stat aut cadit._ The office of a bishop is
+honourable. What edifying is this to rail? Let him alone.'
+
+But they would not let him alone, nor would they let the abbot alone. He
+grew 'somewhat acrased,' they said; vexed with feelings of which they
+had no experience. He fell sick, sorrow and the Lent discipline weighing
+upon him. The brethren went to see him in his room; one Brother Dan
+Woburn came among the rest, and asked him how he did; the abbot
+answered, 'I would that I had died with the good men that died for
+holding with the pope. My conscience, my conscience doth grudge me every
+day for it.' Life was fast losing its value for him. What was life to
+him or any man when bought with a sin against his soul? 'If the abbot be
+disposed to die, for that matter,' Brother Croxton observed, 'he may die
+as soon as he will.'
+
+All Lent he fasted and prayed, and his illness grew upon him; and at
+length in Passion week he thought all was over, and that he was going
+away. On Passion Sunday he called the brethren about him, and as they
+stood round his bed, with their cold, hard eyes, 'he exhorted them all
+to charity;' he implored them 'never to consent to go out of their
+monastery; and if it chanced them to be put from it, they should in no
+wise forsake their habit.' After these words, 'being in a great agony,
+he rose out of his bed, and cried out and said, "I would to God, it
+would please him to take me out of this wretched world; and I would I
+had died with the good men that have suffered death heretofore, for
+they were quickly out of their pain."'[T] Then, half wandering, he
+began to mutter to himself aloud the thoughts which had been working in
+him in his struggles; and quoting St. Bernard's words about the pope, he
+exclaimed, 'Tu quis es primatu Abel, gubernatione Noah, auctoritate
+Moses, judicatu Samuel, potestate Petrus, unctione Christus. Aliae
+ecclesiae habent super se pastores. Tu pastor pastorum es.'
+
+Let it be remembered that this is no sentimental fiction begotten out of
+the brain of some ingenious novelist, but the record of the true words
+and sufferings of a genuine child of Adam, labouring in a trial too hard
+for him.
+
+He prayed to die, and in good time death was to come to him; but not,
+after all, in the sick bed, with his expiation but half completed. A
+year before, he had thrown down the cross when it was offered him. He
+was to take it again--the very cross which he had refused. He recovered.
+He was brought before the council; with what result, there are no means
+of knowing. To admit the papal supremacy when officially questioned was
+high treason. Whether the abbot was constant, and received some
+conditional pardon, or whether his heart again for the moment failed
+him--whichever he did, the records are silent. This only we ascertain of
+him: that he was not put to death under the statute of supremacy. But,
+two years later, when the official list was presented to the Parliament
+of those who had suffered for their share in 'the Pilgrimage of Grace,'
+among the rest we find the name of Robert Hobbes, late Abbot of Woburn.
+To this solitary fact we can add nothing. The rebellion was put down,
+and in the punishment of the offenders there was unusual leniency; not
+more than thirty persons were executed, although forty thousand had been
+in arms. Those only were selected who had been most signally implicated.
+But they were all leaders in the movement; the men of highest rank, and
+therefore greatest guilt. They died for what they believed their duty;
+and the king and council did their duty in enforcing the laws against
+armed insurgents. He for whose cause each supposed themselves to be
+contending, has long since judged between them; and both parties perhaps
+now see all things with clearer eyes than was permitted to them on
+earth.
+
+We also can see more distinctly. We will not refuse the Abbot Hobbes a
+brief record of his trial and passion. And although twelve generations
+of Russells--all loyal to the Protestant ascendancy--have swept Woburn
+clear of Catholic associations, they, too, in these later days, will not
+regret to see revived the authentic story of its last abbot.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Q] From _Fraser's Magazine_, 1857.
+
+[R] Rolls House MS., _Miscellaneous Papers_, First Series. 356.
+
+[S] Tanner MS. 105, Bodleian Library, Oxford.
+
+[T] Meaning, as he afterwards said, More and Fisher and the Carthusians.
+
+
+
+
+ENGLAND'S FORGOTTEN WORTHIES.[U]
+
+1. _The Observations of Sir Richard Hawkins, Knt., in his Voyage in the
+South Sea in 1593._ Reprinted from the Edition of 1622, and Edited by R.
+H. Major, Esq., of the British Museum. Published by the Hakluyt Society.
+
+2. _The Discoverie of the Empire of Guiana._ By Sir Walter Ralegh, Knt.
+Edited, with copious Explanatory Notes, and a Biographical Memoir, by
+Sir Robert H. Schomburgk, Phil. D., &c.
+
+3. _Narratives of Early Voyages undertaken for the Discovery of a
+Passage to Cathaia and India by the North-west_; with Selections from
+the Records of the Worshipful Fellowship of the Merchants of London,
+trading into the East Indies, and from MSS. in the Library of the
+British Museum, now first published, by Thomas Rundall, Esq.
+
+
+The Reformation, the Antipodes, the American Continent, the Planetary
+system, and the infinite deep of the Heavens, have now become common and
+familiar facts to us. Globes and orreries are the playthings of our
+school-days; we inhale the spirit of Protestantism with our earliest
+breath of consciousness. It is all but impossible to throw back our
+imagination into the time when, as new grand discoveries, they stirred
+every mind which they touched with awe and wonder at the revelation
+which God had sent down among mankind. Vast spiritual and material
+continents lay for the first time displayed, opening fields of thought
+and fields of enterprise of which none could conjecture the limit. Old
+routine was broken up. Men were thrown back on their own strength and
+their own power, unshackled, to accomplish whatever they might dare. And
+although we do not speak of these discoveries as the cause of that
+enormous force of heart and intellect which accompanied them (for they
+were as much the effect as the cause, and one reacted on the other),
+yet at any rate they afforded scope and room for the play of powers
+which, without such scope, let them have been as transcendant as they
+would, must have passed away unproductive and blighted.
+
+An earnest faith in the supernatural, an intensely real conviction of
+the divine and devilish forces by which the universe was guided and
+misguided, was the inheritance of the Elizabethan age from Catholic
+Christianity. The fiercest and most lawless men did then really and
+truly believe in the actual personal presence of God or the devil in
+every accident, or scene, or action. They brought to the contemplation
+of the new heaven and the new earth an imagination saturated with the
+spiritual convictions of the old era, which were not lost, but only
+infinitely expanded. The planets, whose vastness they now learnt to
+recognise, were, therefore, only the more powerful for evil or for good;
+the tides were the breathing of Demogorgon; and the idolatrous American
+tribes were real worshippers of the real devil, and were assisted with
+the full power of his evil army.
+
+It is a form of thought which, however in a vague and general way we may
+continue to use its phraseology, has become, in its detailed application
+to life, utterly strange to us. We congratulate ourselves on the
+enlargement of our understanding when we read the decisions of grave law
+courts in cases of supposed witchcraft; we smile complacently over
+Raleigh's story of the island of the Amazons, and rejoice that we are
+not such as he--entangled in the cobwebs of effete and foolish
+superstition. Yet the true conclusion is less flattering to our vanity.
+That Raleigh and Bacon could believe what they believed, and could be
+what they were notwithstanding, is to us a proof that the injury which
+such mistakes can inflict is unspeakably insignificant: and arising, as
+they arose, from a never-failing sense of the real awfulness and mystery
+of the world, and of the life of human souls upon it, they witness to
+the presence in such minds of a spirit, the loss of which not the most
+perfect acquaintance with every law by which the whole creation moves
+can compensate. We wonder at the grandeur, the moral majesty of some of
+Shakespeare's characters, so far beyond what the noblest among ourselves
+can imitate, and at first thought we attribute it to the genius of the
+poet, who has outstripped nature in his creations. But we are
+misunderstanding the power and the meaning of poetry in attributing
+creativeness to it in any such sense. Shakespeare created, but only as
+the spirit of nature created around him, working in him as it worked
+abroad in those among whom he lived. The men whom he draws were such men
+as he saw and knew; the words they utter were such as he heard in the
+ordinary conversations in which he joined. At the Mermaid with Raleigh
+and with Sidney, and at a thousand unnamed English firesides, he found
+the living originals for his Prince Hals, his Orlandos, his Antonios,
+his Portias, his Isabellas. The closer personal acquaintance which we
+can form with the English of the age of Elizabeth, the more we are
+satisfied that Shakespeare's great poetry is no more than the rhythmic
+echo of the life which it depicts.
+
+It was, therefore, with no little interest that we heard of the
+formation of a society which was to employ itself, as we understood, in
+republishing in accessible form some, if not all, of the invaluable
+records compiled or composed by Richard Hakluyt. Books, like everything
+else, have their appointed death-day; the souls of them, unless they be
+found worthy of a second birth in a new body, perish with the paper in
+which they lived; and the early folio Hakluyts, not from their own want
+of merit, but from our neglect of them, were expiring of old age. The
+five-volume quarto edition, published in 1811, so little people then
+cared for the exploits of their ancestors, consisted but of 270 copies.
+It was intended for no more than for curious antiquaries, or for the
+great libraries, where it could be consulted as a book of reference; and
+among a people, the greater part of whom had never heard Hakluyt's name,
+the editors are scarcely to be blamed if it never so much as occurred to
+them that general readers would care to have the book within their
+reach.
+
+And yet those five volumes may be called the Prose Epic of the modern
+English nation. They contain the heroic tales of the exploits of the
+great men in whom the new era was inaugurated; not mythic, like the
+Iliads and the Eddas, but plain broad narratives of substantial facts,
+which rival legend in interest and grandeur. What the old epics were to
+the royally or nobly born, this modern epic is to the common people. We
+have no longer kings or princes for chief actors, to whom the heroism
+like the dominion of the world had in time past been confined. But, as
+it was in the days of the Apostles, when a few poor fishermen from an
+obscure lake in Palestine assumed, under the Divine mission, the
+spiritual authority over mankind, so, in the days of our own Elizabeth,
+the seamen from the banks of the Thames and the Avon, the Plym and the
+Dart, self-taught and self-directed, with no impulse but what was
+beating in their own royal hearts, went out across the unknown seas
+fighting, discovering, colonising, and graved out the channels, paving
+them at last with their bones, through which the commerce and enterprise
+of England has flowed out over all the world. We can conceive nothing,
+not the songs of Homer himself, which would be read among us with more
+enthusiastic interest than these plain massive tales; and a people's
+edition of them in these days, when the writings of Ainsworth and Eugene
+Sue circulate in tens of thousands, would perhaps be the most blessed
+antidote which could be bestowed upon us. The heroes themselves were the
+men of the people--the Joneses, the Smiths, the Davises, the Drakes; and
+no courtly pen, with the one exception of Raleigh, lent its polish or
+its varnish to set them off. In most cases the captain himself, or his
+clerk or servant, or some unknown gentleman volunteer, sat down and
+chronicled the voyage which he had shared; and thus inorganically arose
+a collection of writings which, with all their simplicity, are for
+nothing more striking than for the high moral beauty, warmed with
+natural feeling, which displays itself through all their pages. With us,
+the sailor is scarcely himself beyond his quarter-deck. If he is
+distinguished in his profession, he is professional merely; or if he is
+more than that, he owes it not to his work as a sailor, but to
+independent domestic culture. With them, their profession was the school
+of their nature, a high moral education which most brought out what was
+most nobly human in them; and the wonders of earth, and air, and sea,
+and sky, were a real intelligible language in which they heard Almighty
+God speaking to them.
+
+That such hopes of what might be accomplished by the Hakluyt Society
+should in some measure be disappointed, is only what might naturally be
+anticipated of all very sanguine expectation. Cheap editions are
+expensive editions to the publisher; and historical societies, from a
+necessity which appears to encumber all corporate English action,
+rarely fail to do their work expensively and infelicitously. Yet, after
+all allowances and deductions, we cannot reconcile ourselves to the
+mortification of having found but one volume in the series to be even
+tolerably edited, and that one to be edited by a gentleman to whom
+England is but an adopted country--Sir Robert Schomburgk. Raleigh's
+'Conquest of Guiana,' with Sir Robert's sketch of Raleigh's history and
+character, form in everything but its cost a very model of an excellent
+volume. For the remaining editors,[V] we are obliged to say that they
+have exerted themselves successfully to paralyse whatever interest was
+reviving in Hakluyt, and to consign their own volumes to the same
+obscurity to which time and accident were consigning the earlier
+editions. Very little which was really noteworthy escaped the industry
+of Hakluyt himself, and we looked to find reprints of the most
+remarkable of the stories which were to be found in his collection. The
+editors began unfortunately with proposing to continue the work where he
+had left it, and to produce narratives hitherto unpublished of other
+voyages of inferior interest, or not of English origin. Better thoughts
+appear to have occurred to them in the course of the work; but their
+evil destiny overtook them before their thoughts could get themselves
+executed. We opened one volume with eagerness, bearing the title of
+'Voyages to the North-west,' in hope of finding our old friends Davis
+and Frobisher. We found a vast unnecessary Editor's Preface: and instead
+of the voyages themselves, which with their picturesqueness and moral
+beauty shine among the fairest jewels in the diamond mine of Hakluyt, we
+encountered an analysis and digest of their results, which Milton was
+called in to justify in an inappropriate quotation. It is much as if
+they had undertaken to edit 'Bacon's Essays,' and had retailed what they
+conceived to be the substance of them in their own language; strangely
+failing to see that the real value of the actions or the thoughts of
+remarkable men does not lie in the material result which can be gathered
+from them, but in the heart and soul of the actors or speakers
+themselves. Consider what Homer's 'Odyssey' would be, reduced into an
+analysis.
+
+The editor of the 'Letters of Columbus' apologises for the rudeness of
+the old seaman's phraseology. Columbus, he tells us, was not so great a
+master of the pen as of the art of navigation. We are to make excuses
+for him. We are put on our guard, and warned not to be offended, before
+we are introduced to the sublime record of sufferings under which a man
+of the highest order was staggering towards the end of his earthly
+calamities; although the inarticulate fragments in which his thought
+breaks out from him, are strokes of natural art by the side of which
+literary pathos is poor and meaningless.
+
+And even in the subjects which they select they are pursued by the same
+curious fatality. Why is Drake to be best known, or to be only known, in
+his last voyage? Why pass over the success, and endeavour to immortalise
+the failure? When Drake climbed the tree in Panama, and saw both oceans,
+and vowed that he would sail a ship in the Pacific; when he crawled out
+upon the cliffs of Terra del Fuego, and leaned his head over the
+southernmost angle of the world; when he scored a furrow round the globe
+with his keel, and received the homage of the barbarians of the
+antipodes in the name of the Virgin Queen, he was another man from what
+he had become after twenty years of court life and intrigue, and Spanish
+fighting and gold-hunting. There is a tragic solemnity in his end, if we
+take it as the last act of his career; but it is his life, not his
+death, which we desire--not what he failed to do, but what he did.
+
+But every bad has a worse below it, and more offensive than all these is
+the editor of Hawkins's 'Voyage to the South Sea.' The narrative is
+striking in itself; not one of the best, but very good; and, as it is
+republished complete, we can fortunately read it through, carefully
+shutting off Captain Bethune's notes with one hand, and we shall then
+find in it the same beauty which breathes in the tone of all the
+writings of the period.
+
+It is a record of misfortune, but of misfortune which did no dishonour
+to him who sunk under it; and there is a melancholy dignity in the style
+in which Hawkins tells his story, which seems to say, that though he had
+been defeated, and had never again an opportunity of winning back his
+lost laurels, he respects himself still for the heart with which he
+endured a shame which would have broken a smaller man. It would have
+required no large exertion of editorial self-denial to have abstained
+from marring the pages with puns of which 'Punch' would be ashamed, and
+with the vulgar affectation of patronage with which the sea captain of
+the nineteenth century condescends to criticise and approve of his
+half-barbarous precursor. And what excuse can we find for such an
+offence as this which follows. The war of freedom of the Araucan Indians
+is the most gallant episode in the history of the New World. The
+Spaniards themselves were not behindhand in acknowledging the chivalry
+before which they quailed, and, after many years of ineffectual efforts,
+they gave up a conflict which they never afterwards resumed; leaving the
+Araucans alone, of all the American races with which they came in
+contact, a liberty which they were unable to tear from them. It is a
+subject for an epic poem; and whatever admiration is due to the heroism
+of a brave people whom no inequality of strength could appal and no
+defeats could crush, these poor Indians have a right to demand of us.
+The story of the war was well known in Europe; Hawkins, in coasting the
+western shores of South America, fell in with them, and the finest
+passage in his book is the relation of one of the incidents of the
+war:--
+
+    An Indian captain was taken prisoner by the Spaniards, and for that
+    he was of name, and known to have done his devoir against them, they
+    cut off his hands, thereby intending to disenable him to fight any
+    more against them. But he, returning home, desirous to revenge this
+    injury, to maintain his liberty, with the reputation of his nation,
+    and to help to banish the Spaniard, with his tongue intreated and
+    incited them to persevere in their accustomed valour and reputation,
+    abasing the enemy and advancing his nation; condemning their
+    contraries of cowardliness, and confirming it by the cruelty used
+    with him and other his companions in their mishaps; showing them his
+    arms without hands, and naming his brethren whose half feet they had
+    cut off, because they might be unable to sit on horseback; with
+    force arguing that if they feared them not, they would not have used
+    so great inhumanity--for fear produceth cruelty, the companion of
+    cowardice. Thus encouraged he them to fight for their lives, limbs,
+    and liberty, choosing rather to die an honourable death fighting,
+    than to live in servitude as fruitless members of the commonwealth.
+    Thus using the office of a sergeant-major, and having loaden his two
+    stumps with bundles of arrows, he succoured them who, in the
+    succeeding battle had their store wasted; and changing himself from
+    place to place, animated and encouraged his countrymen with such
+    comfortable persuasions, as it is reported and credibly believed,
+    that he did more good with his words and presence, without striking
+    a stroke, than a great part of the army did with fighting to the
+    utmost.
+
+It is an action which may take its place by the side of the myth of
+Mucius Scaevola, or the real exploit of that brother of the poet
+AEschylus, who, when the Persians were flying from Marathon, clung to a
+ship till both his hands were hewn away, and then seized it with his
+teeth, leaving his name as a portent even in the splendid calendar of
+Athenian heroes. Captain Bethune, without call or need, making his
+notes, merely, as he tells us, from the suggestions of his own mind as
+he revised the proof-sheets, informs us, at the bottom of the page, that
+'it reminds him of the familiar lines--
+
+    For Widdrington I needs must wail,
+      As one in doleful dumps;
+    For when his legs were smitten off,
+      He fought upon his stumps.'
+
+It must not avail him, that he has but quoted from the ballad of Chevy
+Chase. It is the most deformed stanza[W] of the modern deformed version
+which was composed in the eclipse of heart and taste, on the restoration
+of the Stuarts; and if such verses could then pass for serious poetry,
+they have ceased to sound in any ear as other than a burlesque; the
+associations which they arouse are only absurd, and they could only have
+continued to ring in his memory through their ludicrous doggrel.
+
+When to these offences of the Society we add, that in the long laboured
+appendices and introductions, which fill up valuable space, which
+increase the expense of the edition, and into reading which many readers
+are, no doubt, betrayed, we have found nothing which assists the
+understanding of the stories which they are supposed to illustrate--when
+we have declared that we have found what is most uncommon passed
+without notice, and what is most trite and familiar encumbered with
+comment--we have unpacked our hearts of the bitterness which these
+volumes have aroused in us, and can now take our leave of them and go on
+with our more grateful subject.
+
+Elizabeth, whose despotism was as peremptory as that of the
+Plantagenets, and whose ideas of the English constitution were limited
+in the highest degree, was, notwithstanding, more beloved by her
+subjects than any sovereign before or since. It was because,
+substantially, she was the people's sovereign; because it was given to
+her to conduct the outgrowth of the national life through its crisis of
+change, and the weight of her great mind and her great place were thrown
+on the people's side. She was able to paralyse the dying efforts with
+which, if a Stuart had been on the throne, the representatives of an
+effete system might have made the struggle a deadly one; and the history
+of England is not the history of France, because the resolution of one
+person held the Reformation firm till it had rooted itself in the heart
+of the nation, and could not be again overthrown. The Catholic faith was
+no longer able to furnish standing ground on which the English or any
+other nation could live a manly and a godly life. Feudalism, as a social
+organisation, was not any more a system under which their energies could
+have scope to move. Thenceforward, not the Catholic Church, but any man
+to whom God had given a heart to feel and a voice to speak, was to be
+the teacher to whom men were to listen; and great actions were not to
+remain the privilege of the families of the Norman nobles, but were to
+be laid within the reach of the poorest plebeian who had the stuff in
+him to perform them. Alone, of all the sovereigns in Europe, Elizabeth
+saw the change which had passed over the world. She saw it, and saw it
+in faith, and accepted it. The England of the Catholic Hierarchy and the
+Norman Baron, was to cast its shell and to become the England of free
+thought and commerce and manufacture, which was to plough the ocean with
+its navies, and sow its colonies over the globe; and the first
+appearance of these enormous forces and the light of the earliest
+achievements of the new era shines through the forty years of the reign
+of Elizabeth with a grandeur which, when once its history is written,
+will be seen to be among the most sublime phenomena which the earth as
+yet has witnessed. The work was not of her creation; the heart of the
+whole English nation was stirred to its depths; and Elizabeth's place
+was to recognise, to love, to foster, and to guide. The Government
+originated nothing; at such a time it was neither necessary nor
+desirable that it should do so; but wherever expensive enterprises were
+on foot which promised ultimate good, and doubtful immediate profit, we
+never fail to find among the lists of contributors the Queen's Majesty,
+Burghley, Leicester, Walsingham. Never chary of her presence, for
+Elizabeth could afford to condescend, when ships were fitting for
+distant voyages in the river, the queen would go down in her barge and
+inspect. Frobisher, who was but a poor sailor adventurer, sees her wave
+her handkerchief to him from the Greenwich Palace windows, and he brings
+her home a narwhal's horn for a present. She honoured her people, and
+her people loved her; and the result was that, with no cost to the
+Government, she saw them scattering the fleets of the Spaniards,
+planting America with colonies, and exploring the most distant seas.
+Either for honour or for expectation of profit, or from that unconscious
+necessity by which a great people, like a great man, will do what is
+right, and must do it at the right time, whoever had the means to
+furnish a ship, and whoever had the talent to command one, laid their
+abilities together and went out to pioneer, and to conquer, and take
+possession, in the name of the Queen of the Sea. There was no nation so
+remote but what some one or other was found ready to undertake an
+expedition there, in the hope of opening a trade; and, let them go where
+they would, they were sure of Elizabeth's countenance. We find letters
+written by her, for the benefit of nameless adventurers, to every
+potentate of whom she had ever heard--to the Emperors of China, Japan,
+and India, the Grand Duke of Russia, the Grand Turk, the Persian
+'Sofee,' and other unheard-of Asiatic and African princes; whatever was
+to be done in England, or by Englishmen, Elizabeth assisted when she
+could, and admired when she could not. The springs of great actions are
+always difficult to analyse--impossible to analyse perfectly--possible
+to analyse only very proximately; and the force by which a man throws a
+good action out of himself is invisible and mystical, like that which
+brings out the blossom and the fruit upon the tree. The motives which
+we find men urging for their enterprises seem often insufficient to have
+prompted them to so large a daring. They did what they did from the
+great unrest in them which made them do it, and what it was may be best
+measured by the results in the present England and America.
+
+Nevertheless, there was enough in the state of the world, and in the
+position of England, to have furnished abundance of conscious motive,
+and to have stirred the drowsiest minister of routine.
+
+Among material occasions for exertion, the population began to outgrow
+the employment, and there was a necessity for plantations to serve as an
+outlet. Men who, under happier circumstances, might have led decent
+lives, and done good service, were now driven by want to desperate
+courses--'witness,' as Richard Hakluyt says, 'twenty tall fellows hanged
+last Rochester assizes for small robberies;' and there is an admirable
+paper addressed to the Privy Council by Christopher Carlile,
+Walsingham's son-in-law, pointing out the possible openings to be made
+in or through such plantations for home produce and manufacture.
+
+Far below all such prudential economics and mercantile ambitions,
+however, lay a chivalrous enthusiasm which in these dull days we can
+hardly, without an effort, realise. The life-and-death wrestle between
+the Reformation and the old religion had settled in the last quarter of
+the sixteenth century into a permanent struggle between England and
+Spain. France was disabled. All the help which Elizabeth could spare
+barely enabled the Netherlands to defend themselves. Protestantism, if
+it conquered, must conquer on another field; and by the circumstances of
+the time the championship of the Reformed faith fell to the English
+sailors. The sword of Spain was forged in the gold-mines of Peru; the
+legions of Alva were only to be disarmed by intercepting the gold ships
+on their passage; and, inspired by an enthusiasm like that which four
+centuries before had precipitated the chivalry of Europe upon the East,
+the same spirit which in its present degeneracy covers our bays and
+rivers with pleasure yachts, then fitted out armed privateers, to sweep
+the Atlantic, and plunder and destroy Spanish ships wherever they could
+meet them.
+
+Thus, from a combination of causes, the whole force and energy of the
+age was directed towards the sea. The wide excitement, and the greatness
+of the interests at stake, raised even common men above themselves; and
+people who in ordinary times would have been no more than mere seamen,
+or mere money-making merchants, appear before us with a largeness and
+greatness of heart and mind in which their duties to God and their
+country are alike clearly and broadly seen and felt to be paramount to
+every other.
+
+Ordinary English traders we find fighting Spanish war ships in behalf of
+the Protestant faith. The cruisers of the Spanish Main were full of
+generous eagerness for the conversion of the savage nations to
+Christianity. And what is even more surprising, sites for colonisation
+were examined and scrutinised by such men in a lofty statesmanlike
+spirit, and a ready insight was displayed by them into the indirect
+effects of a wisely-extended commerce on every highest human interest.
+
+Again, in the conflict with the Spaniards, there was a further feeling,
+a feeling of genuine chivalry, which was spurring on the English, and
+one which must be well understood and well remembered, if men like
+Drake, and Hawkins, and Raleigh are to be tolerably understood. One of
+the English Reviews, a short time ago, was much amused with a story of
+Drake having excommunicated a petty officer as a punishment for some
+moral offence; the reviewer not being able to see in Drake, as a man,
+anything more than a highly brave and successful buccaneer, whose
+pretences to religion might rank with the devotion of an Italian bandit
+to the Madonna. And so Hawkins, and even Raleigh, are regarded by
+superficial persons, who see only such outward circumstances of their
+history as correspond with their own impressions. The high nature of
+these men, and the high objects which they pursued, will only rise out
+and become visible to us as we can throw ourselves back into their times
+and teach our hearts to feel as they felt. We do not find in the
+language of the voyagers themselves, or of those who lent them their
+help at home, any of that weak watery talk of 'protection of
+aborigines,' which, as soon as it is translated into fact, becomes the
+most active policy for their destruction, soul and body. But the stories
+of the dealings of the Spaniards with the conquered Indians, which were
+widely known in England, seem to have affected all classes of people,
+not with pious passive horror, but with a genuine human indignation. A
+thousand anecdotes in detail we find scattered up and down the pages of
+Hakluyt, who, with a view to make them known, translated Peter Martyr's
+letters; and each commonest sailor-boy who had heard these stories from
+his childhood among the tales of his father's fireside, had longed to be
+a man, that he might go out and become the avenger of a gallant and
+suffering people. A high mission, undertaken with a generous heart,
+seldom fails to make those worthy of it to whom it is given; and it was
+a point of honour, if of nothing more, among the English sailors, to do
+no discredit by their conduct to the greatness of their cause. The high
+courtesy, the chivalry of the Spanish nobles, so conspicuous in their
+dealings with their European rivals, either failed to touch them in
+their dealings with uncultivated idolators, or the high temper of the
+aristocracy was unable to restrain or to influence the masses of the
+soldiers. It would be as ungenerous as it would be untrue, to charge
+upon their religion the grievous actions of men who called themselves
+the armed missionaries of Catholicism, when the Catholic priests and
+bishops were the loudest in the indignation with which they denounced
+them. But we are obliged to charge upon it that slow and subtle
+influence so inevitably exercised by any religion which is divorced from
+life, and converted into a thing of form, or creed, or ceremony, or
+system--which could permit the same men to be extravagant in a sincere
+devotion to the Queen of Heaven, whose entire lower nature, unsubdued
+and unaffected, was given up to thirst of gold, and plunder, and
+sensuality. If religion does not make men more humane than they would be
+without it, it makes them fatally less so; and it is to be feared that
+the spirit of the Pilgrim Fathers, which had oscillated to the other
+extreme, and had again crystallised into a formal antinomian fanaticism,
+reproduced the same fatal results as those in which the Spaniards had
+set them their unworthy precedent. But the Elizabethan navigators, full
+for the most part with large kindness, wisdom, gentleness, and beauty,
+bear names untainted, as far as we know, with a single crime against the
+savages of America; and the name of England was as famous in the Indian
+seas as that of Spain was infamous. On the banks of the Oronoko there
+was remembered for a hundred years the noble captain who had come there
+from the great queen beyond the seas; and Raleigh speaks the language of
+the heart of his country, when he urges the English statesmen to
+colonise Guiana, and exults in the glorious hope of driving the white
+marauder into the Pacific, and restoring the Incas to the throne of
+Peru.
+
+    Who will not be persuaded (he says) that now at length the great
+    Judge of the world hath heard the sighs, groans, and lamentations,
+    hath seen the tears and blood of so many millions of innocent men,
+    women, and children, afflicted, robbed, reviled, branded with hot
+    irons, roasted, dismembered, mangled, stabbed, whipped, racked,
+    scalded with hot oil, put to the strapado, ripped alive, beheaded in
+    sport, drowned, dashed against the rocks, famished, devoured by
+    mastiffs, burned, and by infinite cruelties consumed, and purposeth
+    to scourge and plague that cursed nation, and to take the yoke of
+    servitude from that distressed people, as free by nature as any
+    Christian?
+
+Poor Raleigh! if peace and comfort in this world were of much importance
+to him, it was in an ill day that he provoked the revenge of Spain. The
+strength of England was needed at the moment at its own door; the Armada
+came, and there was no means of executing such an enterprise. And
+afterwards the throne of Elizabeth was filled by a Stuart, and Guiana
+was to be no scene of glory for Raleigh; rather, as later historians are
+pleased to think, it was the grave of his reputation.
+
+But the hope burned clear in him through all the weary years of unjust
+imprisonment; and when he was a grey-headed old man, the base son of a
+bad mother used it to betray him. The success of his last enterprise was
+made the condition under which he was to be pardoned for a crime which
+he had not committed; and its success depended, as he knew, on its being
+kept secret from the Spaniards. James required of Raleigh on his
+allegiance a detail of what he proposed, giving him at the same time his
+word as a king that the secret should be safe with him. The next day it
+was sweeping out of the port of London in the swiftest of the Spanish
+ships, with private orders to the Governor of St. Thomas to provoke a
+collision when Raleigh should arrive there, which should afterwards cost
+him his heart's blood.
+
+We modern readers may run rapidly over the series of epithets under
+which Raleigh has catalogued the Indian sufferings, hoping that they
+are exaggerated, seeing that they are horrible, and closing our eyes
+against them with swiftest haste; but it was not so when every epithet
+suggested a hundred familiar facts; and some of these (not resting on
+English prejudice, but on sad Spanish evidence, which is too full of
+shame and sorrow to be suspected) shall be given in this place, however
+old a story it may be thought; because, as we said above, it is
+impossible to understand the actions of these men, unless we are
+familiar with the feelings of which their hearts were full.
+
+The massacres under Cortez and Pizarro, terrible as they were, were not
+the occasion which stirred the deepest indignation. They had the excuse
+of what might be called, for want of a better word, necessity, and of
+the desperate position of small bands of men in the midst of enemies who
+might be counted by millions. And in De Soto, when he burnt his guides
+in Florida (it was his practice, when there was danger of treachery,
+that those who were left alive might take warning); or in Vasco Nunnez,
+praying to the Virgin on the mountains of Darien, and going down from
+off them into the valleys to hunt the Indian caciques, and fling them
+alive to his bloodhounds; there was, at least, with all this fierceness
+and cruelty, a desperate courage which we cannot refuse to admire, and
+which mingles with and corrects our horror. It is the refinement of the
+Spaniard's cruelty in the settled and conquered provinces, excused by no
+danger and provoked by no resistance, the details of which witness to
+the infernal coolness with which it was perpetrated; and the great
+bearing of the Indians themselves under an oppression which they
+despaired of resisting, raises the whole history to the rank of a
+world-wide tragedy, in which the nobler but weaker nature was crushed
+under a malignant force which was stronger and yet meaner than itself.
+Gold hunting and lust were the two passions for which the Spaniards
+cared; and the fate of the Indian women was only more dreadful than that
+of the men, who were ganged and chained to a labour in the mines which
+was only to cease with their lives, in a land where but a little before
+they had lived a free contented people, more innocent of crime than
+perhaps any people upon earth. If we can conceive what our own feelings
+would be--if, in the 'development of the mammalia,' some baser but more
+powerful race than man were to appear upon this planet, and we and our
+wives and children at our own happy firesides were degraded from our
+freedom, and became to them what the lower animals are to us, we can
+perhaps realise the feelings of the enslaved nations of Hispaniola.
+
+As a harsh justification of slavery, it is sometimes urged that men who
+do not deserve to be slaves will prefer death to the endurance of it;
+and that if they prize their liberty, it is always in their power to
+assert it in the old Roman fashion. Tried even by so hard a rule, the
+Indians vindicated their right; and, before the close of the sixteenth
+century, the entire group of the Western Islands in the hands of the
+Spaniards, containing, when Columbus discovered them, many millions of
+inhabitants, were left literally desolate from suicide. Of the anecdotes
+of this terrible self-immolation, as they were then known in England,
+here are a few out of many.
+
+The first is simple, and a specimen of the ordinary method. A Yucatan
+cacique, who was forced with his old subjects to labour in the mines, at
+last 'calling those miners into an house, to the number of ninety-five,
+he thus debateth with them:'--
+
+    'My worthy companions and friends, why desire we to live any longer
+    under so cruel a servitude? Let us now go unto the perpetual seat of
+    our ancestors, for we shall there have rest from these intolerable
+    cares and grievances which we endure under the subjection of the
+    unthankful. Go ye before, I will presently follow you.' Having so
+    spoken, he held out whole handfuls of those leaves which take away
+    life, prepared for the purpose, and giving every one part thereof,
+    being kindled to suck up the fume; who obeyed his command, the king
+    and his chief kinsmen reserving the last place for themselves.
+
+We speak of the crime of suicide, but few persons will see a crime in
+this sad and stately leave-taking of a life which it was no longer
+possible to bear with unbroken hearts. We do not envy the Indian, who,
+with Spaniards before him as an evidence of the fruits which their creed
+brought forth, deliberately exchanged for it the old religion of his
+country, which could sustain him in an action of such melancholy
+grandeur. But the Indians did not always reply to their oppressors with
+escaping passively beyond their hands. Here is a story with matter in it
+for as rich a tragedy as OEdipus or Agamemnon; and in its stern and
+tremendous features, more nearly resembling them than any which were
+conceived even by Shakespeare.
+
+An officer named Orlando had taken the daughter of a Cuban cacique to be
+his mistress. She was with child by him, but, suspecting her of being
+engaged in some other intrigue, he had her fastened to two wooden spits,
+not intending to kill her, but to terrify her; and setting her before
+the fire, he ordered that she should be turned by the servants of the
+kitchen.
+
+    The maiden, stricken with fear through the cruelty thereof, and
+    strange kind of torment, presently gave up the ghost. The cacique
+    her father, understanding the matter, took thirty of his men and
+    went to the house of the captain, who was then absent, and slew his
+    wife, whom he had married after that wicked act committed, and the
+    women who were companions of the wife, and her servants every one.
+    Then shutting the door of the house, and putting fire under it, he
+    burnt himself and all his companions that assisted him, together
+    with the captain's dead family and goods.
+
+This is no fiction or poet's romance. It is a tale of wrath and revenge,
+which in sober dreadful truth enacted itself upon this earth, and
+remains among the eternal records of the doings of mankind upon it. As
+some relief to its most terrible features, we follow it with a story
+which has a touch in it of diabolical humour.
+
+The slave-owners finding their slaves escaping thus unprosperously out
+of their grasp, set themselves to find a remedy for so desperate a
+disease, and were swift to avail themselves of any weakness, mental or
+bodily, through which to retain them in life. One of these proprietors
+being informed that a number of his people intended to kill themselves
+on a certain day, at a particular spot, and knowing by experience that
+they were too likely to do it, presented himself there at the time which
+had been fixed upon, and telling the Indians when they arrived that he
+knew their intention, and that it was vain for them to attempt to keep
+anything a secret from him, he ended with saying, that he had come there
+to kill himself with them; that as he had used them ill in this world,
+he might use them worse in the next; 'with which he did dissuade them
+presently from their purpose.' With what efficacy such believers in the
+immortality of the soul were likely to recommend either their faith or
+their God; rather, how terribly all the devotion and all the
+earnestness with which the poor priests who followed in the wake of the
+conquerors laboured to recommend it were shamed and paralysed, they
+themselves too bitterly lament.
+
+It was idle to send out governor after governor with orders to stay such
+practices. They had but to arrive on the scene to become infected with
+the same fever; or if any remnant of Castilian honour, or any faintest
+echoes of the faith which they professed, still flickered in a few of
+the best and noblest, they could but look on with folded hands in
+ineffectual mourning; they could do nothing without soldiers, and the
+soldiers were the worst offenders. Hispaniola became a desert; the gold
+was in the mines, and there were no slaves left remaining to extract it.
+One means which the Spaniards dared to employ to supply the vacancy,
+brought about an incident which in its piteous pathos exceeds any story
+we have ever heard. Crimes and criminals are swept away by time, nature
+finds an antidote for their poison, and they and their ill consequences
+alike are blotted out and perish. If we do not for give the villain, at
+least we cease to hate him, as it grows more clear to us that he injures
+none so deeply as himself. But the [Greek: theriodes kakia], the
+enormous wickedness by which humanity itself has been outraged and
+disgraced, we cannot forgive; we cannot cease to hate that; the years
+roll away, but the tints of it remain on the pages of history, deep and
+horrible as the day on which they were entered there.
+
+    When the Spaniards understood the simple opinion of the Yucatan
+    islanders concerning the souls of their departed, which, after their
+    sins purged in the cold northern mountains should pass into the
+    south, to the intent that, leaving their own country of their own
+    accord, they might suffer themselves to be brought to Hispaniola,
+    they did persuade those poor wretches, that they came from those
+    places where they should see their parents and children, and all
+    their kindred and friends that were dead, and should enjoy all kinds
+    of delights with the embracements and fruition of all beloved
+    beings. And they, being infected and possessed with these crafty and
+    subtle imaginations, singing and rejoicing left their country, and
+    followed vain and idle hope. But when they saw that they were
+    deceived, and neither met their parents nor any that they desired,
+    but were compelled to undergo grievous sovereignty and command, and
+    to endure cruel and extreme labour, they either slew themselves, or,
+    choosing to famish, gave up their fair spirits, being persuaded by
+    no reason or violence to take food. So these miserable Yucatans came
+    to their end.
+
+It was once more as it was in the days of the Apostles. The New World
+was first offered to the holders of the old traditions. They were the
+husbandmen first chosen for the new vineyard, and blood and desolation
+were the only fruits which they reared upon it. In their hands it was
+becoming a kingdom, not of God, but of the devil, and a sentence of
+blight went out against them and against their works. How fatally it has
+worked, let modern Spain and Spanish America bear witness. We need not
+follow further the history of their dealings with the Indians. For their
+colonies, a fatality appears to have followed all attempts at Catholic
+colonisation. Like shoots from an old decaying tree which no skill and
+no care can rear, they were planted, and for a while they might seem to
+grow; but their life was never more than a lingering death, a failure,
+which to a thinking person would outweigh in the arguments against
+Catholicism whole libraries of faultless _catenas_, and a _consensus
+patrum_ unbroken through fifteen centuries for the supremacy of St.
+Peter.
+
+There is no occasion to look for superstitious causes to explain the
+phenomenon. The Catholic faith had ceased to be the faith of the large
+mass of earnest thinking capable persons; and to those who can best do
+the work, all work in this world sooner or later is committed. America
+was the natural home for Protestants; persecuted at home, they sought a
+place where they might worship God in their own way, without danger of
+stake or gibbet, and the French Huguenots, as afterwards the English
+Puritans, early found their way there. The fate of a party of Coligny's
+people, who had gone out as settlers, shall be the last of these
+stories, illustrating, as it does in the highest degree, the wrath and
+fury with which the passions on both sides were boiling. A certain John
+Ribault, with about 400 companions, had emigrated to Florida. They were
+quiet inoffensive people, and lived in peace there several years,
+cultivating the soil, building villages, and on the best possible terms
+with the natives. Spain was at the time at peace with France; we are,
+therefore, to suppose that it was in pursuance of the great crusade, in
+which they might feel secure of the secret, if not the confessed,
+sympathy of the Guises, that a powerful Spanish fleet bore down upon
+this settlement. The French made no resistance, and they were seized and
+flayed alive, and their bodies hung out upon the trees, with an
+inscription suspended over them, 'Not as Frenchmen, but as heretics.' At
+Paris all was sweetness and silence. The settlement was tranquilly
+surrendered to the same men who had made it the scene of their atrocity;
+and two years later, 500 of the very Spaniards who had been most active
+in the murder were living there in peaceable possession, in two forts
+which their relation with the natives had obliged them to build. It was
+well that there were other Frenchmen living, of whose consciences the
+Court had not the keeping, and who were able on emergencies to do what
+was right without consulting it. A certain privateer, named Dominique de
+Gourges, secretly armed and equipped a vessel at Rochelle, and, stealing
+across the Atlantic and in two days collecting a strong party of
+Indians, he came down suddenly upon the forts, and, taking them by
+storm, slew or afterwards hanged every man he found there, leaving their
+bodies on the trees on which they had hanged the Huguenots, with their
+own inscription reversed against them--'Not as Spaniards, but as
+murderers.' For which exploit, well deserving of all honest men's
+praise, Dominique de Gourges had to fly his country for his life; and,
+coming to England, was received with honourable welcome by Elizabeth.
+
+It was at such a time, and to take their part amidst such scenes as
+these, that the English navigators appeared along the shores of South
+America, as the armed soldiers of the Reformation, and as the avengers
+of humanity. As their enterprise was grand and lofty, so for the most
+part was the manner in which they bore themselves worthy of it. They
+were no nation of saints, in the modern sentimental sense of that word;
+they were prompt, stern men--more ready ever to strike an enemy than to
+parley with him; and, private adventurers as they all were, it was
+natural enough that private rapacity and private badness should be found
+among them as among other mortals. Every Englishman who had the means
+was at liberty to fit out a ship or ships, and if he could produce
+tolerable vouchers for himself, received at once a commission from the
+Court. The battles of England were fought by her children, at their own
+risk and cost, and they were at liberty to repay themselves the expense
+of their expeditions by plundering at the cost of the national enemy.
+Thus, of course, in a mixed world, there were found mixed marauding
+crews of scoundrels, who played the game which a century later was
+played with such effect by the pirates of the Tortugas. Negro hunters
+too, there were, and a bad black slave trade--in which Elizabeth
+herself, being hard driven for money, did not disdain to invest her
+capital--but on the whole, and in the war with the Spaniards, as in the
+war with the elements, the conduct and character of the English sailors,
+considering what they were and the work which they were sent to do,
+present us all through that age with such a picture of gallantry,
+disinterestedness, and high heroic energy, as has never been
+overmatched; the more remarkable, as it was the fruit of no drill or
+discipline, no tradition, no system, no organised training, but was the
+free native growth of a noble virgin soil.
+
+Before starting on an expedition, it was usual for the crew and the
+officers to meet and arrange among themselves a series of articles of
+conduct, to which they bound themselves by a formal agreement, the
+entire body itself undertaking to see to their observance. It is quite
+possible that strong religious profession, and even sincere profession,
+might be accompanied, as it was in the Spaniards, with everything most
+detestable. It is not sufficient of itself to prove that their actions
+would correspond with it, but it is one among a number of evidences; and
+coming as most of these men come before us, with hands clear of any
+blood but of fair and open enemies, their articles may pass at least as
+indications of what they were.
+
+Here we have a few instances:--
+
+Richard Hawkins's ship's company was, as he himself informs us, an
+unusually loose one. Nevertheless, we find them 'gathered together every
+morning and evening to serve God;' and a fire on board, which only
+Hawkins's presence of mind prevented from destroying ship and crew
+together, was made use of by the men as an occasion to banish swearing
+out of the ship.
+
+    With a general consent of all our company, it was ordained that
+    there should be a palmer or ferula which should be in the keeping of
+    him who was taken with an oath; and that he who had the palmer
+    should give to every one that he took swearing, a palmada with it
+    and the ferula; and whosoever at the time of evening or morning
+    prayer was found to have the palmer, should have three blows given
+    him by the captain or the master; and that he should still be bound
+    to free himself by taking another, or else to run in danger of
+    continuing the penalty, which, being executed a few days, reformed
+    the vice, so that in three days together was not one oath heard to
+    be sworn.
+
+The regulations for Luke Fox's voyage commenced thus:--
+
+    For as much as the good success and prosperity of every action doth
+    consist in the due service and glorifying of God, knowing that not
+    only our being and preservation, but the prosperity of all our
+    actions and enterprises do immediately depend on His Almighty
+    goodness and mercy; it is provided--
+
+    First, that all the company, as well officers as others, shall duly
+    repair every day twice at the call of the bell to hear public
+    prayers to be read, such as are authorised by the church, and that
+    in a godly and devout manner, as good Christians ought.
+
+    Secondly, that no man shall swear by the name of God, or use any
+    profane oath, or blaspheme His holy name.
+
+To symptoms such as these, we cannot but assign a very different value
+when they are the spontaneous growth of common minds, unstimulated by
+sense of propriety or rules of the service, or other official influence
+lay or ecclesiastic, from what attaches to the somewhat similar
+ceremonials in which, among persons whose position is conspicuous,
+important enterprises are now and then inaugurated.
+
+We have said as much as we intend to say of the treatment by the
+Spaniards of the Indian women. Sir Walter Raleigh is commonly
+represented by historians as rather defective, if he was remarkable at
+all, on the moral side of his character. Yet Raleigh can declare
+proudly, that all the time he was on the Oronoko, 'neither by force nor
+other means had any of his men intercourse with any woman there;' and
+the narrator of the incidents of Raleigh's last voyage acquaints his
+correspondent 'with some particulars touching the government of the
+fleet, which, although other men in their voyages doubtless in some
+measure observed, yet in all the great volumes which have been written
+touching voyages, there is no precedent of so godly severe and martial
+government, which not only in itself is laudable and worthy of
+imitation, but is also fit to be written and engraven on every man's
+soul that coveteth to do honour to his country.'
+
+Once more, the modern theory of Drake is, as we said above, that he was
+a gentleman-like pirate on a large scale, who is indebted for the place
+which he fills in history to the indistinct ideas of right and wrong
+prevailing in the unenlightened age in which he lived, and who
+therefore demands all the toleration of our own enlarged humanity to
+allow him to remain there. Let us see how the following incident can be
+made to coincide with this hypothesis:--
+
+A few days after clearing the Channel on his first great voyage, he fell
+in with a small Spanish ship, which he took for a prize. He committed
+the care of it to a certain Mr. Doughtie, a person much trusted by, and
+personally very dear to him, and this second vessel was to follow him as
+a tender.
+
+In dangerous expeditions into unknown seas, a second smaller ship was
+often indispensable to success; but many finely intended enterprises
+were ruined by the cowardice of the officers to whom such ships were
+entrusted; who shrank as danger thickened, and again and again took
+advantage of darkness or heavy weather to make sail for England and
+forsake their commander. Hawkins twice suffered in this way; so did Sir
+Humfrey Gilbert; and, although Drake's own kind feeling for his old
+friend has prevented him from leaving an exact account of his offence,
+we gather from the scattered hints which are let fall, that he, too, was
+meditating a similar piece of treason. However, it may or may not have
+been thus. But when at Port St. Julien, 'our General,' says one of the
+crew,--
+
+    Began to inquire diligently of the actions of Mr. Thomas Doughtie,
+    and found them not to be such as he looked for, but tending rather
+    to contention or mutiny, or some other disorder, whereby, without
+    redresse, the success of the voyage might greatly have been
+    hazarded. Whereupon the company was called together and made
+    acquainted with the particulars of the cause, which were found,
+    partly by Mr. Doughtie's own confession, and partly by the evidence
+    of the fact, to be true, which, when our General saw, although his
+    private affection to Mr. Doughtie (as he then, in the presence of us
+    all, sacredly protested) was great, yet the care which he had of the
+    state of the voyage, of the expectation of Her Majesty, and of the
+    honour of his country, did more touch him, as indeed it ought, than
+    the private respect of one man; so that the cause being throughly
+    heard, and all things done in good order as near as might be to the
+    course of our law in England, it was concluded that Mr. Doughtie
+    should receive punishment according to the quality of the offence.
+    And he, seeing no remedy but patience for himself, desired before
+    his death to receive the communion, which he did at the hands of Mr.
+    Fletcher, our minister, and our General himself accompanied him in
+    that holy action, which, being done, and the place of execution made
+    ready, he, having embraced our General, and taken leave of all the
+    company, with prayers for the Queen's Majesty and our realm, in
+    quiet sort laid his head to the block, where he ended his life. This
+    being done, our General made divers speeches to the whole company,
+    persuading us to unity, obedience, love, and regard of our voyage,
+    and for the better confirmation thereof, willed every man the next
+    Sunday following to prepare himself to receive the communion, as
+    Christian brethren and friends ought to do, which was done in very
+    reverent sort, and so with good contentment every man went about his
+    business.
+
+The simple majesty of this anecdote can gain nothing from any comment
+which we might offer upon it. The crew of a common English ship
+organising, of their own free motion, on that wild shore, a judgment
+hall more grand and awful than any most elaborate law court, is not to
+be reconciled with the pirate theory. Drake, it is true, appropriated
+and brought home a million and a half of Spanish treasure, while England
+and Spain were at peace. He took that treasure because for many years
+the officers of the Inquisition had made free at their pleasure with the
+lives and goods of English merchants and seamen. The king of Spain, when
+appealed to, had replied that he had no power over the Holy House; and
+it was necessary to make the king of Spain, or the Inquisition, or
+whoever were the parties responsible, feel that they could not play
+their pious pranks with impunity. When Drake seized the bullion at
+Panama, he sent word to the viceroy that he should now learn to respect
+the properties of English subjects; and he added, that if four English
+sailors, who were prisoners in Mexico, were molested, he would execute
+2,000 Spaniards and send the viceroy their heads. Spain and England were
+at peace, but Popery and Protestantism were at war--deep, deadly, and
+irreconcileable.
+
+Wherever we find them, they are still the same. In the courts of Japan
+or of China; fighting Spaniards in the Pacific, or prisoners among the
+Algerines; founding colonies which by-and-by were to grow into enormous
+Transatlantic republics, or exploring in crazy pinnaces the fierce
+latitudes of the Polar seas,--they are the same indomitable God-fearing
+men whose life was one great liturgy. 'The ice was strong, but God was
+stronger,' says one of Frobisher's men, after grinding a night and a day
+among the icebergs, not waiting for God to come down and split the ice
+for them, but toiling through the long hours, himself and the rest
+fending off the vessel with poles and planks, with death glaring at
+them out of the rocks. Icebergs were strong, Spaniards were strong, and
+storms, and corsairs, and rocks and reefs, which no chart had then
+noted--they were all strong; but God was stronger, and that was all
+which they cared to know.
+
+Out of the vast number of illustrations it is difficult to make wise
+selections, but the attention floats loosely over generalities, and only
+individual instances can seize it and hold it fast. We shall attempt to
+bring our readers face to face with some of these men; not, of course,
+to write their biographies, but to sketch the details of a few scenes,
+in the hope that they may tempt those under whose eyes they may fall to
+look for themselves to complete the perfect figure.
+
+Some two miles above the port of Dartmouth, once among the most
+important harbours in England, on a projecting angle of land which runs
+out into the river at the head of one of its most beautiful reaches,
+there has stood for some centuries the Manor House of Greenaway. The
+water runs deep all the way to it from the sea, and the largest vessels
+may ride with safety within a stone's throw of the windows. In the
+latter half of the sixteenth century there must have met, in the hall of
+this mansion, a party as remarkable as could have been found anywhere in
+England. Humfrey and Adrian Gilbert, with their half-brother, Walter
+Raleigh, here, when little boys, played at sailors in the reaches of
+Long Stream; in the summer evenings doubtless rowing down with the tide
+to the port, and wondering at the quaint figure-heads and carved prows
+of the ships which thronged it; or climbing on board, and listening,
+with hearts beating, to the mariners' tales of the new earth beyond the
+sunset. And here in later life, matured men, whose boyish dreams had
+become heroic action, they used again to meet in the intervals of quiet,
+and the rock is shown underneath the house where Raleigh smoked the
+first tobacco. Another remarkable man, of whom we shall presently speak
+more closely, could not fail to have made a fourth at these meetings. A
+sailor boy of Sandwich, the adjoining parish, John Davis, showed early a
+genius which could not have escaped the eye of such neighbours, and in
+the atmosphere of Greenaway he learned to be as noble as the Gilberts,
+and as tender and delicate as Raleigh. Of this party, for the present we
+confine ourselves to the host and owner, Humfrey Gilbert, knighted
+afterwards by Elizabeth. Led by the scenes of his childhood to the sea
+and to sea adventures, and afterwards, as his mind unfolded, to study
+his profession scientifically, we find him as soon as he was old enough
+to think for himself, or make others listen to him, 'amending the great
+errors of naval sea cards, whose common fault is to make the degree of
+longitude in every latitude of one common bigness;' inventing
+instruments for taking observations, studying the form of the earth, and
+convincing himself that there was a north-west passage, and studying the
+necessities of his country, and discovering the remedies for them in
+colonisation and extended markets for home manufactures. Gilbert was
+examined before the Queen's Majesty and the Privy Council, and the
+record of his examination he has himself left to us in a paper which he
+afterwards drew up, and strange enough reading it is. The most admirable
+conclusions stand side by side with the wildest conjectures.
+
+Homer and Aristotle are pressed into service to prove that the ocean
+runs round the three old continents, and that America therefore is
+necessarily an island. The Gulf Stream, which he had carefully observed,
+eked out by a theory of the _primum mobile_, is made to demonstrate a
+channel to the north, corresponding to Magellan's Straits in the south,
+Gilbert believing, in common with almost everyone of his day, that these
+straits were the only opening into the Pacific, and the land to the
+South was unbroken to the Pole. He prophesies a market in the East for
+our manufactured linen and calicoes:--
+
+    The Easterns greatly prizing the same, as appeareth in Hester, where
+    the pomp is expressed of the great King of India, Ahasuerus, who
+    matched the coloured clothes wherewith his houses and tents were
+    apparelled, with gold and silver, as part of his greatest treasure.
+
+These and other such arguments were the best analysis which Sir Humfrey
+had to offer of the spirit which he felt to be working in him. We may
+think what we please of them; but we can have but one thought of the
+great grand words with which the memorial concludes, and they alone
+would explain the love which Elizabeth bore him:--
+
+    Never, therefore, mislike with me for taking in hand any laudable
+    and honest enterprise, for if through pleasure or idleness we
+    purchase shame, the pleasure vanisheth, but the shame abideth for
+    ever.
+
+    Give me leave, therefore, without offence, always to live and die in
+    this mind: that he is not worthy to live at all that, for fear or
+    danger of death, shunneth his country's service and his own honour,
+    seeing that death is inevitable and the fame of virtue immortal,
+    wherefore in this behalf _mutare vel timere sperno_.
+
+Two voyages which he undertook at his own cost, which shattered his
+fortune, and failed, as they naturally might, since inefficient help or
+mutiny of subordinates, or other disorders, are inevitable conditions
+under which more or less great men must be content to see their great
+thoughts mutilated by the feebleness of their instruments, did not
+dishearten him, and in June 1583 a last fleet of five ships sailed from
+the port of Dartmouth, with commission from the queen to discover and
+take possession from latitude 45 deg. to 50 deg. North--a voyage not a little
+noteworthy, there being planted in the course of it the first English
+colony west of the Atlantic. Elizabeth had a foreboding that she would
+never see him again. She sent him a jewel as a last token of her favour,
+and she desired Raleigh to have his picture taken before he went.
+
+The history of the voyage was written by a Mr. Edward Hayes, of
+Dartmouth, one of the principal actors in it, and as a composition it is
+more remarkable for fine writing than any very commendable thought in
+the author. But Sir Humfrey's nature shines through the infirmity of his
+chronicler; and in the end, indeed, Mr. Hayes himself is subdued into a
+better mind. He had lost money by the voyage, and we will hope his
+higher nature was only under a temporary eclipse. The fleet consisted
+(it is well to observe the ships and the size of them) of the 'Delight,'
+120 tons; the barque 'Raleigh,' 200 tons (this ship deserted off the
+Land's End); the 'Golden Hinde' and the 'Swallow,' 40 tons each; and the
+'Squirrel,' which was called the frigate, 10 tons. For the uninitiated
+in such matters, we may add, that if in a vessel the size of the last, a
+member of the Yacht Club would consider that he had earned a club-room
+immortality if he had ventured a run in the depth of summer from Cowes
+to the Channel Islands.
+
+    We were in all (says Mr. Hayes) 260 men, among whom we had of every
+    faculty good choice. Besides, for solace of our own people, and
+    allurement of the savages, we were provided of music in good
+    variety, not omitting the least toys, as morris dancers, hobby
+    horses, and May-like conceits to delight the savage people.
+
+The expedition reached Newfoundland without accident. St. John's was
+taken possession of, and a colony left there; and Sir Humfrey then set
+out exploring along the American coast to the south, he himself doing
+all the work in his little 10-ton cutter, the service being too
+dangerous for the larger vessels to venture on. One of these had
+remained at St. John's. He was now accompanied only by the 'Delight' and
+the 'Golden Hinde,' and these two keeping as near the shore as they
+dared, he spent what remained of the summer examining every creek and
+bay, marking the soundings, taking the bearings of the possible
+harbours, and risking his life, as every hour he was obliged to risk it
+in such a service, in thus leading, as it were, the forlorn hope in the
+conquest of the New World. How dangerous it was we shall presently see.
+It was towards the end of August.
+
+    The evening was fair and pleasant, yet not without token of storm to
+    ensue, and most part of this Wednesday night, like the swan that
+    singeth before her death, they in the 'Delight' continued in
+    sounding of drums and trumpets and fifes, also winding the cornets
+    and hautboys, and in the end of their jollity left with the battell
+    and ringing of doleful knells.
+
+Two days after came the storm; the 'Delight' struck upon a bank, and
+went down in sight of the other vessels, which were unable to render her
+any help. Sir Humfrey's papers, among other things, were all lost in
+her; at the time considered by him an irreparable misfortune. But it was
+little matter, he was never to need them. The 'Golden Hinde' and the
+'Squirrel' were now left alone of the five ships. The provisions were
+running short, and the summer season was closing. Both crews were on
+short allowance; and with much difficulty Sir Humfrey was prevailed upon
+to be satisfied for the present with what he had done, and to lay off
+for England.
+
+    So upon Saturday, in the afternoon, the 31st of August, we changed
+    our course, and returned back for England, at which very instant,
+    even in winding about, there passed along between us and the land,
+    which we now forsook, a very lion, to our seeming, in shape, hair,
+    and colour; not swimming after the manner of a beast by moving of
+    his feet, but rather sliding upon the water with his whole body,
+    except his legs, in sight, neither yet diving under and again
+    rising as the manner is of whales, porpoises, and other fish, but
+    confidently showing himself without hiding, notwithstanding that we
+    presented ourselves in open view and gesture to amaze him. Thus he
+    passed along, turning his head to and fro, yawning and gaping wide,
+    with ougly demonstration of long teeth and glaring eyes; and to
+    bidde us farewell, coming right against the 'Hinde,' he sent forth a
+    horrible voice, roaring and bellowing as doth a lion, which
+    spectacle we all beheld so far as we were able to discern the same,
+    as men prone to wonder at every strange thing. What opinion others
+    had thereof, and chiefly the General himself, I forbear to deliver.
+    But he took it for _Bonum Omen_, rejoicing that he was to war
+    against such an enemy, if it were the devil.
+
+We have no doubt that he did think it was the devil; men in those days
+believing really that evil was more than a principle or a necessary
+accident, and that in all their labour for God and for right, they must
+make their account to have to fight with the devil in his proper person.
+But if we are to call it superstition, and if this were no devil in the
+form of a roaring lion, but a mere great seal or sea-lion, it is a more
+innocent superstition to impersonate so real a power, and it requires a
+bolder heart to rise up against it and defy it in its living terror,
+than to sublimate it away into a philosophical principle, and to forget
+to battle with it in speculating on its origin and nature. But to follow
+the brave Sir Humfrey, whose work of fighting with the devil was now
+over, and who was passing to his reward. The 2nd of September the
+General came on board the 'Golden Hinde' 'to make merry with us.' He
+greatly deplored the loss of his books and papers, but he was full of
+confidence from what he had seen, and talked with eagerness and warmth
+of the new expedition for the following spring. Apocryphal gold-mines
+still occupying the minds of Mr. Hayes and others, they were persuaded
+that Sir Humfrey was keeping to himself some such discovery which he had
+secretly made, and they tried hard to extract it from him. They could
+make nothing, however, of his odd, ironical answers, and their sorrow at
+the catastrophe which followed is sadly blended with disappointment that
+such a secret should have perished. Sir Humfrey doubtless saw America
+with other eyes than theirs, and gold-mines richer than California in
+its huge rivers and savannahs.
+
+    Leaving the issue of this good hope (about the gold), (continues Mr.
+    Hayes), to God, who only knoweth the truth thereof, I will hasten
+    to the end of this tragedy, which must be knit up in the person of
+    our General, and as it was God's ordinance upon him, even so the
+    vehement persuasion of his friends could nothing avail to divert him
+    from his wilful resolution of going in his frigate; and when he was
+    entreated by the captain, master, and others, his well-wishers in
+    the 'Hinde,' not to venture, this was his answer--'I will not
+    forsake my little company going homewards, with whom I have passed
+    so many storms and perils.'
+
+Two-thirds of the way home they met foul weather and terrible seas,
+'breaking-short and pyramid-wise.' Men who had all their lives 'occupied
+the sea' had never seen it more outrageous. 'We had also upon our
+mainyard an apparition of a little fier by night, which seamen do call
+Castor and Pollux.'
+
+    Monday the ninth of September, in the afternoon, the frigate was
+    near cast away oppressed by waves, but at that time recovered, and
+    giving forth signs of joy, the General, sitting abaft with a book in
+    his hand, cried out unto us in the 'Hinde' so often as we did
+    approach within hearing, 'We are as near to heaven by sea as by
+    land,' reiterating the same speech, well beseeming a soldier
+    resolute in Jesus Christ, as I can testify that he was. The same
+    Monday night, about twelve of the clock, or not long after, the
+    frigate being ahead of us in the 'Golden Hinde,' suddenly her lights
+    were out, whereof as it were in a moment we lost the sight; and
+    withal our watch cried, 'The General was cast away,' which was too
+    true.
+
+    Thus faithfully (concludes Mr. Hayes, in some degree rising above
+    himself) I have related this story, wherein some spark of the
+    knight's virtues, though he be extinguished, may happily appear; he
+    remaining resolute to a purpose honest and godly as was this, to
+    discover, possess, and reduce unto the service of God and Christian
+    piety, those remote and heathen countries of America. Such is the
+    infinite bounty of God, who from every evil deriveth good, that
+    fruit may grow in time of our travelling in these North-Western
+    lands (as has it not grown?), and the crosses, turmoils, and
+    afflictions, both in the preparation and execution of the voyage,
+    did correct the intemperate humours which before we noted to be in
+    this gentleman, and made unsavoury and less delightful his other
+    manifold virtues.
+
+    Thus as he was refined and made nearer unto the image of God, so it
+    pleased the Divine will to resume him unto Himself, whither both his
+    and every other high and noble mind have always aspired.
+
+Such was Sir Humfrey Gilbert; still in the prime of his years when the
+Atlantic swallowed him. Like the gleam of a landscape lit suddenly for a
+moment by the lightning, these few scenes flash down to us across the
+centuries: but what a life must that have been of which this was the
+conclusion! We have glimpses of him a few years earlier, when he won his
+spurs in Ireland--won them by deeds which to us seem terrible in their
+ruthlessness, but which won the applause of Sir Henry Sidney as too high
+for praise or even reward. Chequered like all of us with lines of light
+and darkness, he was, nevertheless, one of a race which has ceased to
+be. We look round for them, and we can hardly believe that the same
+blood is flowing in our veins. Brave we may still be, and strong perhaps
+as they, but the high moral grace which made bravery and strength so
+beautiful is departed from us for ever.
+
+Our space is sadly limited for historical portrait painting; but we must
+find room for another of that Greenaway party whose nature was as fine
+as that of Gilbert, and who intellectually was more largely gifted. The
+latter was drowned in 1583. In 1585 John Davis left Dartmouth on his
+first voyage into the Polar seas; and twice subsequently he went again,
+venturing in small ill-equipped vessels of thirty or forty tons into the
+most dangerous seas. These voyages were as remarkable for their success
+as for the daring with which they were accomplished, and Davis's epitaph
+is written on the map of the world, where his name still remains to
+commemorate his discoveries. Brave as he was, he is distinguished by a
+peculiar and exquisite sweetness of nature, which, from many little
+facts of his life, seems to have affected everyone with whom he came in
+contact in a remarkable degree. We find men, for the love of Master
+Davis, leaving their firesides to sail with him, without other hope or
+motion; we find silver bullets cast to shoot him in a mutiny; the hard
+rude natures of the mutineers being awed by something in his carriage
+which was not like that of a common man. He has written the account of
+one of his northern voyages himself; one of those, by-the-by, which the
+Hakluyt Society have mutilated; and there is an imaginative beauty in
+it, and a rich delicacy of expression, which is called out in him by the
+first sight of strange lands and things and people.
+
+To show what he was, we should have preferred, if possible, to have
+taken the story of his expedition into the South Seas, in which, under
+circumstances of singular difficulty, he was deserted by Candish, under
+whom he had sailed; and after inconceivable trials from famine, mutiny,
+and storm, ultimately saved himself and his ship, and such of the crew
+as had chosen to submit to his orders. But it is a long history, and
+will not admit of being curtailed. As an instance of the stuff of which
+it was composed, he ran back in the black night in a gale of wind
+through the Straits of Magellan, _by a chart which he had made with the
+eye in passing up_. His anchors were lost or broken; the cables were
+parted. He could not bring up the ship; there was nothing for it but to
+run, and he carried her safe through along a channel often not three
+miles broad, sixty miles from end to end, and twisting like the reaches
+of a river.
+
+For the present, however, we are forced to content ourselves with a few
+sketches out of the north-west voyages. Here is one, for instance, which
+shows how an Englishman could deal with the Indians. Davis had landed at
+Gilbert's Sound, and gone up the country exploring. On his return he
+found his crew loud in complaints of the thievish propensities of the
+natives, and urgent to have an example made of some of them. On the next
+occasion he fired a gun at them with blank cartridge; but their nature
+was still too strong for them.
+
+    Seeing iron (he says), they could in no case forbear stealing;
+    which, when I perceived, it did but minister to me occasion of
+    laughter to see their simplicity, and I willed that they should not
+    be hardly used, but that our company should be more diligent to keep
+    their things, supposing it to be very hard in so short a time to
+    make them know their evils.
+
+In his own way, however, he took an opportunity of administering a
+lesson to them of a more wholesome kind than could be given with
+gunpowder and bullets. Like the rest his countrymen, he believed the
+savage Indians in their idolatries to be worshippers of the devil. 'They
+are witches,' he says; 'they have images in great store, and use many
+kinds of enchantments.' And these enchantments they tried on one
+occasion to put in force against himself and his crew.
+
+    Being on shore on the 4th day of July, one of them made a long
+    oration, and then kindled a fire, into which with many strange words
+    and gestures he put divers things, which we supposed to be a
+    sacrifice. Myself and certain of my company standing by, they
+    desired us to go into the smoke. I desired them to go into the
+    smoke, which they would by no means do. I then took one of them and
+    thrust him into the smoke, and willed one of my company to tread out
+    the fire, and spurn it into the sea, which was done to show them
+    that we did contemn their sorceries.
+
+It is a very English story--exactly what a modern Englishman would do;
+only, perhaps, not believing that there was any real devil in the case,
+which makes a difference. However, real or not real, after seeing him
+patiently put up with such an injury, we will hope the poor Greenlander
+had less respect for the devil than formerly.
+
+Leaving Gilbert's Sound, Davis went on to the north-west, and in lat.
+63 deg. fell in with a barrier of ice, which he coasted for thirteen days
+without finding an opening. The very sight of an iceberg was new to all
+his crew; and the ropes and shrouds, though it was midsummer, becoming
+compassed with ice,--
+
+    The people began to fall sick and faint-hearted--whereupon, very
+    orderly, with good discretion, they entreated me to regard the
+    safety of mine own life, as well as the preservation of theirs; and
+    that I should not, through overbouldness, leave their widows and
+    fatherless children to give me bitter curses.
+
+    Whereupon, seeking counsel of God, it pleased His Divine Majesty to
+    move my heart to prosecute that which I hope shall be to His glory,
+    and to the contentation of every Christian mind.
+
+He had two vessels--one of some burthen, the other a pinnace of thirty
+tons. The result of the counsel which he had sought was, that he made
+over his own large vessel to such as wished to return, and himself,
+'thinking it better to die with honour than to return with infamy,' went
+on, with such volunteers as would follow him, in a poor leaky cutter, up
+the sea now in commemoration of that adventure called Davis's Straits.
+He ascended 4 deg. North of the furthest known point, among storms and
+icebergs, when the long days and twilight nights alone saved him from
+being destroyed, and, coasting back along the American shore, he
+discovered Hudson's Straits, supposed then to be the long-desired
+entrance into the Pacific. This exploit drew the attention of
+Walsingham, and by him Davis was presented to Burleigh, 'who was also
+pleased to show him great encouragement.' If either these statesmen or
+Elizabeth had been twenty years younger, his name would have filled a
+larger space in history than a small corner of the map of the world;
+but if he was employed at all in the last years of the century, no
+_vates sacer_ has been found to celebrate his work, and no clue is left
+to guide us. He disappears; a cloud falls over him. He is known to have
+commanded trading vessels in the Eastern seas, and to have returned five
+times from India. But the details are all lost, and accident has only
+parted the clouds for a moment to show us the mournful setting with
+which he, too, went down upon the sea.
+
+In taking out Sir Edward Michellthorne to India, in 1604, he fell in
+with a crew of Japanese, whose ship had been burnt, drifting at sea,
+without provisions, in a leaky junk. He supposed them to be pirates, but
+he did not choose to leave them to so wretched a death, and took them on
+board; and in a few hours, watching their opportunity, they murdered
+him.
+
+As the fool dieth, so dieth the wise, and there is no difference; it was
+the chance of the sea, and the ill reward of a humane action--a
+melancholy end for such a man--like the end of a warrior, not dying
+Epaminondas-like on the field of victory, but cut off in some poor brawl
+or ambuscade. But so it was with all these men. They were cut off in the
+flower of their days, and few of them laid their bones in the sepulchres
+of their fathers. They knew the service which they had chosen, and they
+did not ask the wages for which they had not laboured. Life with them
+was no summer holiday, but a holy sacrifice offered up to duty, and what
+their Master sent was welcome. Beautiful is old age--beautiful as the
+slow-dropping mellow autumn of a rich glorious summer. In the old man,
+nature has fulfilled her work; she loads him with her blessings; she
+fills him with the fruits of a well-spent life; and, surrounded by his
+children and his children's children, she rocks him softly away to a
+grave, to which he is followed with blessings. God forbid we should not
+call it beautiful. It is beautiful, but not the most beautiful. There is
+another life, hard, rough, and thorny, trodden with bleeding feet and
+aching brow; the life of which the cross is the symbol; a battle which
+no peace follows, this side the grave; which the grave gapes to finish,
+before the victory is won; and--strange that it should be so--this is
+the highest life of man. Look back along the great names of history;
+there is none whose life has been other than this. They to whom it has
+been given to do the really highest work in this earth--whoever they
+are, Jew or Gentile, Pagan or Christian, warriors, legislators,
+philosophers, priests, poets, kings, slaves--one and all, their fate has
+been the same--the same bitter cup has been given to them to drink. And
+so it was with the servants of England in the sixteenth century. Their
+life was a long battle, either with the elements or with men; and it was
+enough for them to fulfil their work, and to pass away in the hour when
+God had nothing more to bid them do. They did not complain, and why
+should we complain for them? Peaceful life was not what they desired,
+and an honourable death had no terrors for them. Theirs was the old
+Grecian spirit, and the great heart of the Theban poet lived again in
+them:--
+
+    [Greek:
+    Thanein d' hoisin ananka, ti ke tis anonumon
+    geras en skoto kathemenos hepsoi matan,
+    hapanton kalon ammoros?]
+
+'Seeing,' in Gilbert's own brave words, 'that death is inevitable, and
+the fame of virtue is immortal; wherefore in this behalf _mutare vel
+timere sperno_.'
+
+In the conclusion of these light sketches we pass into an element
+different from that in which we have been lately dwelling. The scenes in
+which Gilbert and Davis played out their high natures were of the kind
+which we call peaceful, and the enemies with which they contended were
+principally the ice and the wind, and the stormy seas and the dangers of
+unknown and savage lands. We shall close amidst the roar of cannon, and
+the wrath and rage of battle. Hume, who alludes to the engagement which
+we are going to describe, speaks of it in a tone which shows that he
+looked at it as something portentous and prodigious; as a thing to
+wonder at--but scarcely as deserving the admiration which we pay to
+actions properly within the scope of humanity--and as if the energy
+which was displayed in it was like the unnatural strength of madness. He
+does not say this, but he appears to feel it; and he scarcely would have
+felt it if he had cared more deeply to saturate himself with the temper
+of the age of which he was writing. At the time, all England and all the
+world rang with the story. It struck a deeper terror, though it was but
+the action of a single ship, into the hearts of the Spanish people; it
+dealt a more deadly blow upon their fame and moral strength than the
+destruction of the Armada itself; and in the direct results which arose
+from it, it was scarcely less disastrous to them. Hardly, as it seems to
+us, if the most glorious actions which are set like jewels in the
+history of mankind are weighed one against the other in the balance,
+hardly will those 300 Spartans who in the summer morning sate 'combing
+their long hair for death' in the passes of Thermopylae, have earned a
+more lofty estimate for themselves than this one crew of modern
+Englishmen.
+
+In August 1591, Lord Thomas Howard, with six English line-of-battle
+ships, six victuallers, and two or three pinnaces, was lying at anchor
+under the Island of Florez. Light in ballast and short of water, with
+half his men disabled by sickness, Howard was unable to pursue the
+aggressive purpose on which he had been sent out. Several of the ships'
+crews were on shore: the ships themselves 'all pestered and rommaging,'
+with everything out of order. In this condition they were surprised by a
+Spanish fleet consisting of 53 men-of-war. Eleven out of the twelve
+English ships obeyed the signal of the admiral, to cut or weigh their
+anchors and escape as they might. The twelfth, the 'Revenge,' was unable
+for the moment to follow. Of her crew of 190, ninety were sick on shore,
+and, from the position of the ship, there was some delay and difficulty
+in getting them on board. The 'Revenge' was commanded by Sir Richard
+Grenville, of Bideford, a man well known in the Spanish seas, and the
+terror of the Spanish sailors; so fierce he was said to be, that mythic
+stories passed from lip to lip about him, and, like Earl Talbot or
+Coeur de Lion, the nurses at the Azores frightened children with the
+sound of his name. 'He was of great revenues, of his own inheritance,'
+they said, 'but of unquiet mind, and greatly affected to wars;' and from
+his uncontrollable propensities for blood-eating, he had volunteered his
+services to the queen; 'of so hard a complexion was he, that I (John
+Huighen von Linschoten, who is our authority here, and who was with the
+Spanish fleet after the action) have been told by divers credible
+persons who stood and beheld him, that he would carouse three or four
+glasses of wine, and take the glasses between his teeth and crush them
+in pieces and swallow them down.' Such Grenville was to the Spaniard. To
+the English he was a goodly and gallant gentleman, who had never turned
+his back upon an enemy, and was remarkable in that remarkable time for
+his constancy and daring. In this surprise at Florez he was in no haste
+to fly. He first saw all his sick on board and stowed away on the
+ballast; and then, with no more than 100 men left him to fight and work
+the ship, he deliberately weighed, uncertain, as it seemed at first,
+what he intended to do. The Spanish fleet were by this time on his
+weather bow, and he was persuaded (we here take his cousin Raleigh's
+beautiful narrative, and follow it in Raleigh's words) 'to cut his
+mainsail and cast about, and trust to the sailing of the ship:'--
+
+    But Sir Richard utterly refused to turn from the enemy, alledging
+    that he would rather choose to die than to dishonour himself, his
+    country, and her Majesty's ship, persuading his company that he
+    would pass through their two squadrons in spite of them, and enforce
+    those of Seville to give him way: which he performed upon diverse of
+    the foremost, who, as the mariners term it, sprang their luff, and
+    fell under the lee of the 'Revenge.' But the other course had been
+    the better; and might right well have been answered in so great an
+    impossibility of prevailing: notwithstanding, out of the greatness
+    of his mind, he could not be persuaded.
+
+The wind was light; the 'San Philip,' 'a huge high-carged ship' of 1,500
+tons, came up to windward of him, and, taking the wind out of his sails,
+ran aboard him.
+
+    After the 'Revenge' was entangled with the 'San Philip,' four others
+    boarded her, two on her larboard and two on her starboard. The fight
+    thus beginning at three o'clock in the afternoon continued very
+    terrible all that evening. But the great 'San Philip,' having
+    received the lower tier of the 'Revenge,' shifted herself with all
+    diligence from her sides, utterly misliking her first entertainment.
+    The Spanish ships were tilled with soldiers, in some 200, besides
+    the mariners, in some 500, in others 800. In ours there were none at
+    all, besides the mariners, but the servants of the commander and
+    some few voluntary gentlemen only. After many enterchanged vollies
+    of great ordnance and small shot, the Spaniards deliberated to enter
+    the 'Revenge,' and made divers attempts, hoping to force her by the
+    multitude of their armed soldiers and musketeers; but were still
+    repulsed again and again, and at all times beaten back into their
+    own ship or into the sea. In the beginning of the fight the 'George
+    Noble,' of London, having received some shot through her by the
+    Armadas, fell under the lee of the 'Revenge,' and asked Sir Richard
+    what he would command him; but being one of the victuallers, and of
+    small force, Sir Richard bade him save himself and leave him to his
+    fortune.
+
+This last was a little touch of gallantry, which we should be glad to
+remember with the honour due to the brave English sailor who commanded
+the 'George Noble;' but his name has passed away, and his action is an
+_in memoriam_, on which time has effaced the writing. All that August
+night the fight continued, the stars rolling over in their sad majesty,
+but unseen through the sulphurous clouds which hung over the scene. Ship
+after ship of the Spaniards came on upon the 'Revenge,' 'so that never
+less than two mighty galleons were at her side and aboard her,' washing
+up like waves upon a rock, and falling foiled and shattered back amidst
+the roar of the artillery. Before morning fifteen several Armadas had
+assailed her, and all in vain; some had been sunk at her side; and the
+rest, 'so ill approving of their entertainment, that at break of day
+they were far more willing to hearken to a composition, than hastily to
+make more assaults or entries.' 'But as the day increased,' says
+Raleigh, 'so our men decreased; and as the light grew more and more, by
+so much the more grew our discomfort, for none appeared in sight but
+enemies, save one small ship called the "Pilgrim," commanded by Jacob
+Whiddon, who hovered all night to see the success, but in the morning,
+bearing with the "Revenge," was hunted like a hare among many ravenous
+hounds--but escaped.'
+
+All the powder in the 'Revenge' was now spent, all her pikes were
+broken, 40 out of her 100 men killed, and a great number of the rest
+wounded. Sir Richard, though badly hurt early in the battle, never
+forsook the deck till an hour before midnight; and was then shot through
+the body while his wounds were being dressed, and again in the head. His
+surgeon was killed while attending on him; the masts were lying over the
+side, the rigging cut or broken, the upper works all shot in pieces, and
+the ship herself, unable to move, was settling slowly in the sea; the
+vast fleet of Spaniards lying round her in a ring, like dogs round a
+dying lion, and wary of approaching him in his last agony. Sir Richard,
+seeing that it was past hope, having fought for fifteen hours, and
+'having by estimation eight hundred shot of great artillery through
+him,' 'commanded the master gunner, whom he knew to be a most resolute
+man, to split and sink the ship, that thereby nothing might remain of
+glory or victory to the Spaniards; seeing in so many hours they were not
+able to take her, having had above fifteen hours' time, above ten
+thousand men, and fifty-three men-of-war to perform it withal; and
+persuaded the company, or as many as he could induce, to yield
+themselves unto God and to the mercy of none else; but as they had, like
+valiant resolute men, repulsed so many enemies, they should not now
+shorten the honour of their nation by prolonging their own lives for a
+few hours or a few days.'
+
+The gunner and a few others consented. But such [Greek: daimonie arete]
+was more than could be expected of ordinary seamen. They had dared do
+all which did become men, and they were not more than men. Two Spanish
+ships had gone down, above 1,500 of their crew were killed, and the
+Spanish admiral could not induce any one of the rest of his fleet to
+board the 'Revenge' again, 'doubting lest Sir Richard would have blown
+up himself and them, knowing his dangerous disposition.' Sir Richard
+lying disabled below, the captain, 'finding the Spaniards as ready to
+entertain a composition as they could be to offer it,' gained over the
+majority of the surviving company; and the remainder then drawing back
+from the master gunner, they all, without further consulting their dying
+commander, surrendered on honourable terms. If unequal to the English in
+action, the Spaniards were at least as courteous in victory. It is due
+to them to say, that the conditions were faithfully observed; and 'the
+ship being marvellous unsavourie,' Alonzo de Bacon, the Spanish admiral,
+sent his boat to bring Sir Richard on board his own vessel.
+
+Sir Richard, whose life was fast ebbing away, replied that 'he might do
+with his body what he list, for that he esteemed it not;' and as he was
+carried out of the ship he swooned, and reviving again, desired the
+company to pray for him.
+
+The admiral used him with all humanity, 'commending his valour and
+worthiness, being unto them a rare spectacle, and a resolution seldom
+approved.' The officers of the fleet, too, John Higgins tells us,
+crowded round to look at him; and a new fight had almost broken out
+between the Biscayans and the 'Portugals,' each claiming the honour of
+having boarded the 'Revenge.'
+
+    In a few hours Sir Richard, feeling his end approaching, showed not
+    any sign of faintness, but spake these words in Spanish, and said,
+    'Here die I, Richard Grenville, with a joyful and quiet mind, for
+    that I have ended my life as a true soldier ought to do that hath
+    fought for his country, queen, religion, and honour. Whereby my soul
+    most joyfully departeth out of this body, and shall always leave
+    behind it an everlasting fame of a valiant and true soldier that
+    hath done his duty as he was bound to do.' When he had finished
+    these or other such like words, he gave up the ghost with great and
+    stout courage, and no man could perceive any sign of heaviness in
+    him.
+
+Such was the fight at Florez, in that August of 1591, without its equal
+in such of the annals of mankind as the thing which we call history has
+preserved to us; scarcely equalled by the most glorious fate which the
+imagination of Barrere could invent for the 'Vengeur.' Nor did the
+matter end without a sequel awful as itself. Sea battles have been often
+followed by storms, and without a miracle; but with a miracle, as the
+Spaniards and the English alike believed, or without one, as we moderns
+would prefer believing, 'there ensued on this action a tempest so
+terrible as was never seen or heard the like before.' A fleet of
+merchantmen joined the Armada immediately after the battle, forming in
+all 140 sail; and of these 140, only 32 ever saw Spanish harbour. The
+rest foundered, or were lost on the Azores. The men-of-war had been so
+shattered by shot as to be unable to carry sail; and the 'Revenge'
+herself, disdaining to survive her commander, or as if to complete his
+own last baffled purpose, like Samson, buried herself and her 200 prize
+crew under the rocks of St. Michael's.
+
+    And it may well be thought and presumed (says John Huighen) that it
+    was no other than a just plague purposely sent upon the Spaniards;
+    and that it might be truly said, the taking of the 'Revenge' was
+    justly revenged on them; and not by the might or force of man, but
+    by the power of God. As some of them openly said in the Isle of
+    Terceira, that they believed verily God would consume them, and that
+    he took part with the Lutherans and heretics ... saying further,
+    that so soon as they had thrown the dead body of the Vice-Admiral
+    Sir Richard Grenville overboard, they verily thought that as he had
+    a devilish faith and religion, and therefore the devil loved him, so
+    he presently sunk into the bottom of the sea and down into hell,
+    where he raised up all the devils to the revenge of his death, and
+    that they brought so great a storm and torments upon the Spaniards,
+    because they only maintained the Catholic and Romish religion. Such
+    and the like blasphemies against God they ceased not openly to
+    utter.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[U] _Westminster Review_, 1853.
+
+[V] This essay was written 15 years ago.
+
+[W] Here is the old stanza. Let whoever is disposed to think us too hard
+on Captain Bethune compare them:--
+
+    'For Wetharrington my harte was wo,
+      That even he slayne sholde be;
+    For when both his leggis were hewen in to,
+      He knyled and fought on his knee.'
+
+Even Percy, who, on the whole, thinks well of the modern ballad, gives
+up this stanza as hopeless.
+
+
+
+
+HOMER.[X]
+
+
+Troy fell before the Greeks; and in its turn the war of Troy is now
+falling before the critics. That ten years' death-struggle, in which the
+immortals did not disdain to mingle--those massive warriors, with their
+grandeur and their chivalry, have, 'like an unsubstantial pageant,
+faded' before the wand of these modern enchanters; and the Iliad and the
+Odyssey, and the other early legends, are discovered to be no more than
+the transparent myths of an old cosmogony, the arabesques and frescoes
+with which the imagination of the Ionian poets set off and ornamented
+the palace of the heavens, the struggle of the earth with the seasons,
+and the labours of the sun through his twelve signs.
+
+Nay, with Homer himself it was likely at one time to have fared no
+better. His works, indeed, were indestructible, yet if they could not be
+destroyed, they might be disorganised; and with their instinctive hatred
+of facts, the critics fastened on the historical existence of the poet.
+The origin of the poems was distributed among the clouds of pre-historic
+imagination; and--instead of a single inspired Homer for their author,
+we were required to believe in some extraordinary spontaneous
+generation, or in some collective genius of an age which ignorance had
+personified.
+
+But the person of a poet has been found more difficult of elimination
+than a mere fact of history. Facts, it was once said, were stubborn
+things; but in our days we have changed all that; a fact, under the
+knife of a critic, splits in pieces, and is dissected out of belief with
+incredible readiness. The helpless thing lies under his hand like a
+foolish witness in a law court, when browbeaten by an unscrupulous
+advocate, and is turned about and twisted this way and that way, till
+in its distraction it contradicts itself, and bears witness against
+itself; and to escape from torture, at last flies utterly away, itself
+half doubting its own existence.
+
+But it requires more cunning weapons to destroy a Homer; like his own
+immortals, he may be wounded, but he cannot have the life carved out of
+him by the prosaic strokes of common men. His poems have but to be
+disintegrated to unite again, so strong are they in the individuality of
+their genius. The singleness of their structure--the unity of
+design--the distinctness of drawing in the characters--the inimitable
+peculiarities of manner in each of them, seem to place beyond serious
+question, after the worst onslaught of the Wolfian critics, that both
+Iliad and Odyssey, whether or not the work of the same mind, are at
+least each of them singly the work of one.
+
+Let them leave us Homer, however, and on the rank and file of facts they
+may do their worst; we can be indifferent to, or even thankful for, what
+slaughter they may make. In the legends of the Theogonia, in that of
+Zeus and Cronus, for instance, there is evidently a metaphysical
+allegory; in the legends of Persephone, or of the Dioscuri, a physical
+one; in that of Athene, a profoundly philosophical one; and fused as the
+entire system was in the intensely poetical conception of the early
+thinkers, it would be impossible, even if it were desirable, at this
+time of day, to disentangle the fibres of all these various elements.
+Fact and theory, the natural and the supernatural, the legendary and the
+philosophical, shade off so imperceptibly one into the other, in the
+stories of the Olympians, or of their first offspring, that we can never
+assure ourselves that we are on historic ground, or that, antecedent to
+the really historic age, there is any such ground to be found anywhere.
+The old notion, that the heroes were deified men, is no longer tenable.
+With but few exceptions, we can trace their names as the names of the
+old gods of the Hellenic or Pelasgian races; and if they appeared later
+in human forms, they descended from Olympus to assume them. Diomed was
+the OEtolian sun-god; Achilles was worshipped in Thessaly long before
+he became the hero of the tale of Troy. The tragedy of the house of
+Atreus, and the bloody bath of Agamemnon, as we are now told with
+appearance of certainty,[Y] are humanised stories of the physical
+struggle of the opposing principles of life and death, light and
+darkness, night and day, winter and summer.
+
+And let them be so; we need not be sorry to believe that there is no
+substantial basis for these tales of crime. The history of mankind is
+not so pure but that we can afford to lose a few dark pages out of the
+record. Let it be granted that of the times which Homer sung
+historically we know nothing literal at all--not any names of any kings,
+of any ministers, wars, intrigues, revolutions, crimes. They are all
+gone--dead--passed away; their vacant chronicles may be silent as the
+tombs in which their bones are buried. Of such stuff as that with which
+historians fill their pages there is no trace; it is a blank, vacant as
+the annals of the Hottentot or of the Red Indian. Yet when all is said,
+there remain still to us in Homer's verse, materials richer, perhaps,
+than exist for any period of the ancient world, richer than even for the
+brilliant days of Pericles, or of the Caesars, to construct a history of
+another kind--a history, a picture not of the times of which he sang,
+but of the men among whom he lived. How they acted; how they thought,
+talked, and felt; what they made of this earth, and of their place in
+it; their private life and their public life; men and women; masters and
+servants; rich and poor--we have it all delineated in the marvellous
+verse of a poet who, be he what he may, was in this respect the greatest
+which the earth has ever seen. In extent, the information is little
+enough; but in the same sense as it has been said that an hour at an
+Athenian supper-party would teach us more Grecian life and character
+than all Aristophanes, Homer's pictures of life and manners are so
+living, so distinct, so palpable, that a whole prose encyclopaedia of
+disconnected facts could give us nothing like them. It is the marvellous
+property of verse--one, if we rightly consider it, which would excuse
+any superstition on the origin of language--that the metrical and
+rhythmic arrangement of syllable and sound is able to catch and express
+back to us, not the stories of actions, but the actions themselves, with
+all the feelings which inspire them; to call up human action, and all
+other outward things in which human hearts take interest--to produce
+them, or to reproduce them, with a distinctness which shall produce the
+same emotions which they would themselves produce when really existing.
+The thing itself is made present before us by an exercise of creative
+power as genuine as that of Nature herself; which, perhaps, is but the
+same power manifesting itself at one time in words, at another in
+outward phenomena. Whatever be the cause, the fact is so. Poetry has
+this life-giving power, and prose has it not; and thus the poet is the
+truest historian. Whatever is properly valuable in history the poet
+gives us--not events and names, but emotion, but action, but life. He is
+the heart of his age, and his verse expresses his age; and what matter
+is it by what name he describes his places or his persons? What matter
+is it what his own name was, while we have himself, and while we have
+the originals, from which he drew? The work and the life are all for
+which we need care, are all which can really interest us; the names are
+nothing. Though Phoeacia was a dream-land, or a symbol of the Elysian
+fields, yet Homer drew his material, his island, his palaces, his
+harbour, his gardens of perennial beauty, from those fair cities which
+lay along the shores of his own Ionia; and like his blind Demodocus,
+Homer doubtless himself sung those very hymns which now delight us so,
+in the halls of many a princely Alcinous.
+
+The prose historian may give us facts and names; he may catalogue the
+successions, and tell us long stories of battles, and of factions, and
+of political intrigues; he may draw characters for us, of the sort which
+figure commonly in such features of human affairs, men of the unheroic,
+unpoetic kind--the Cleons, the Sejanuses, the Tiberiuses, a Philip the
+Second or a Louis Quatorze, in whom the noble element died out into
+selfishness and vulgarity. But great men--and all MEN properly so called
+(whatever is genuine and natural in them)--lie beyond prose, and can
+only be really represented by the poet. This is the reason why such men
+as Alexander, or as Caesar, or as Cromwell, so perplex us in histories,
+because they and their actions are beyond the scope of the art through
+which we have looked at them. We compare the man as the historian
+represents him, with the track of his path through the world. The work
+is the work of a giant; the man, stripped of the vulgar appendages with
+which the stunted imagination of his biographer may have set him off, is
+full of meannesses and littlenesses, and is scarcely greater than one
+of ourselves. Prose, that is, has attempted something to which it is not
+equal. It describes a figure which it calls Caesar; but it is not Caesar,
+it is a monster. For the same reason, prose fictions, novels, and the
+like, are worthless for more than a momentary purpose. The life which
+they are able to represent is not worth representing. There is no person
+so poor in his own eyes as not to gaze with pleasure into a
+looking-glass; and the prose age may value its own image in the novel.
+But the value of all such representations is ephemeral. It is with the
+poet's art as with the sculptor's--sandstone will not carve like marble,
+its texture is too loose to retain a sharply moulded outline. The
+actions of men, if they are true, noble, and genuine, are strong enough
+to bear the form and bear the polish of verse; if loose or feeble, they
+crumble away into the softer undulations of prose.
+
+What the life was whose texture bore shaping into Homer's verse, we
+intend to spend these pages in examining. It is, of course, properly to
+be sought for in the poems themselves. But we shall here be concerned
+mainly with features which in the original are rather secondary than
+prominent, and which have to be collected out of fragments, here a line,
+and there a line, out of little hints, let fall by Homer as it were by
+accident. Things too familiar to his own hearers to require dwelling on,
+to us, whose object is to make out just those very things which were
+familiar, are of special and singular value. It is not an enquiry which
+will much profit us, if we come to it with any grand notions of the
+'progress of the species,' for in many ways it will discourage the
+belief in progress.
+
+We have fallen into ways of talking of the childhood and infancy of the
+race, as if no beards had grown on any face before the modern
+Reformation; and even people who know what old Athens was under
+Pericles, look commonly on earlier Greece as scarcely struggling out of
+its cradle. It would have fared so with all early history except for the
+Bible. The Old Testament has operated partially to keep us in our modest
+senses, and we can see something grand about the patriarchs; but this is
+owing to exceptional causes, which do not apply to other literature; and
+in spite of our admiration of Homer's poetry, we regard his age, and the
+contemporary periods in the other people of the earth, as a kind of
+childhood little better than barbarism. We look upon it, at all events,
+as too far removed in every essential of spirit or of form from our own,
+to enable us to feel for it any strong interest or sympathy. More or
+less, we have, every one of us, felt something of this kind. Homer's men
+are, at first sight, unlike any men that we have ever seen; and it is
+not without a shock of surprise that, for the first time, we fall, in
+reading him, across some little trait of humanity which in form as well
+as spirit is really identical with our own experience. Then, for the
+moment, all is changed with us--gleams of light flash out, in which the
+drapery becomes transparent, and we see the human form behind it, and
+that entire old world in the warm glow of flesh and blood. Such is the
+effect of those few child scenes of his, which throw us back into our
+old familiar childhood. With all these years between us, there is no
+difference between their children and ours, and child would meet child
+without sense of strangeness in common games and common pleasures.
+
+The little Ulysses climbing on the knees of his father's guest, coaxing
+for a taste of the red wine, and spilling it as he starts at the unusual
+taste; or that other most beautiful picture of him running at Laertes's
+side in the garden at Ithaca, the father teaching the boy the names of
+the fruit-trees, and making presents to him of this tree and of that
+tree for his very own, to help him to remember what they were called;
+the partition wall of three thousand years melts away as we look back at
+scenes like these; that broad, world-experienced man was once, then,
+such a little creature as we remember ourselves, and Laertes a calm,
+kind father of the nineteenth century. Then, as now, the children loved
+to sport upon the shore, and watch the inrolling waves;--then, as now,
+the boy-architect would pile the moist sand into mimic town or castle,
+and when the work was finished, sweep it away again in wanton humour
+with foot and hand;--then, as now, the little tired maiden would cling
+to her mother's skirt, and, trotting painfully along beside her, look up
+wistfully and plead with moist eyes to be carried in her arms. Nay, and
+among the grown ones, where time has not changed the occupation, and the
+forms of culture have little room to vary, we meet again with very
+familiar faces. There is Melantho, the not over-modest tittering
+waiting-maid--saucy to her mistress and the old housekeeper, and always
+running after the handsome young princes. Unhappy Melantho, true child
+of universal nature! grievous work we should make with most households,
+if all who resemble thee were treated to as rough a destiny. And there
+are other old friends whom it is pleasant enough to recognise at so long
+a distance. 'Certain smooth-haired, sleek-faced fellows--insolent where
+their lords would permit them; inquisitive and pert, living but to eat
+and drink, and pilfering the good things, to convey them stealthily to
+their friends outside the castle wall.' The thing that hath been, that
+shall be again. When Homer wrote, the type had settled into its long
+enduring form. 'Such are they,' he adds, in his good-natured irony, 'as
+the valet race ever love to be.'
+
+With such evidence of identity among us all, it is worth while to look
+closer at the old Greeks, to try to find in Homer something beyond fine
+poetry, or exciting adventures, or battle-scenes, or material for
+scholarship; for awhile to set all that aside, and look in him for the
+story of real living men--set to pilgrimise in the old way on the same
+old earth--men such as we are, children of one family, with the same
+work to do, to live the best life they could, and to save their
+souls--with the same trials, the same passions, the same difficulties,
+if with weaker means of meeting them.
+
+And first for their religion.
+
+Let those who like it, lend their labour to the unravelling the secrets
+of the mythologies. Theogonies and Theologies are not religion; they are
+but its historic dress and outward or formal expression, which, like a
+language, may be intelligible to those who see the inward meaning in the
+sign, but no more than confused sound to us who live in another
+atmosphere, and have no means of transferring ourselves into the
+sentiment of an earlier era. It is not in these forms of a day or of an
+age that we should look for the real belief--the real feelings of the
+heart; but in the natural expressions which burst out
+spontaneously--expressions of opinion on Providence, on the relation of
+man to God, on the eternal laws by which this world is governed. Perhaps
+we misuse the word in speaking of religion; we ought rather to speak of
+piety: piety is always simple; the emotion is too vast, too
+overpowering, whenever it is genuine, to be nice or fantastic in its
+form; and leaving philosophies and cosmogonies to shape themselves in
+myth and legend, it speaks itself out with a calm and humble clearness.
+We may trifle with our own discoveries, and hand them over to the fancy
+or the imagination for elaborate decoration. We may shroud over supposed
+mysteries under an enigmatic veil, and adapt the degrees of initiation
+to the capacities of our pupils; but before the vast facts of God and
+Providence, the difference between man and man dwarfs into nothing. They
+are no discoveries of our own with which we can meddle, but revelations
+of the Infinite, which, like the sunlight, shed themselves on all alike,
+wise and unwise, good and evil, and they claim and they permit no other
+acknowledgment from us than the simple obedience of our lives, and the
+plainest confession of our lips.
+
+Such confessions, except in David's Psalms, we shall not anywhere find
+more natural or unaffected than in Homer--most definite, yet never
+elaborate--as far as may be from any complimenting of Providence, yet
+expressing the most unquestioning conviction. We shall not often
+remember them when we set about religion as a business; but when the
+occasions of life stir the feelings in us on which religion itself
+reposes, if we were as familiar with the Iliad as with the Psalms, the
+words of the old Ionian singer would leap as naturally to our lips as
+those of the Israelite king.
+
+Zeus is not always the questionable son of Cronus, nor the gods always
+the mythologic Olympians. Generally, it is true, they appear as a larger
+order of subject beings--beings like men, and subject to a higher
+control--in a position closely resembling that of Milton's angels, and
+liable like them to passion and to error. But at times, the father of
+gods and men is the Infinite and Eternal Ruler--the living Providence of
+the world--and the lesser gods are the immortal administrators of his
+Divine will throughout the lower creation. For ever at the head of the
+universe there is an awful spiritual power; when Zeus appears with a
+distinct and positive personality, he is himself subordinate to an
+authority which elsewhere is one with himself. Wherever either he or the
+other gods are made susceptible of emotion, the Invisible is beyond and
+above them. When Zeus is the personal father of Sarpedon, and his
+private love conflicts with the law of the eternal order, though he has
+power to set aside the law, he dares not break it; but in the midst of
+his immortality, and on his own awful throne, he weeps tears of blood in
+ineffectual sorrow for his dying child. And again, there is a power
+supreme both over Zeus and over Poseidon, of which Iris reminds the
+latter, when she is sent to rebuke him for his disobedience to his
+brother. It is a law, she says, that the younger shall obey the elder,
+and the Erinnys will revenge its breach even on a god.
+
+But descending from the more difficult Pantheon among mankind, the
+Divine law of justice is conceived as clearly as we in this day can
+conceive it. The supreme power is the same immortal lover of justice and
+the same hater of iniquity; and justice means what we mean by justice,
+and iniquity what we mean by iniquity. There is no diffidence, no
+scepticism on this matter; the moral law is as sure as day and night,
+summer and winter. Thus in the sixteenth Iliad--
+
+'When in the market-place men deal unjustly, and the rulers decree
+crooked judgment, not regarding the fear of God,' God sends the storm,
+and the earthquake, and the tempest, as the executors of his vengeance.
+
+Again, Ulysses says--
+
+'God looks upon the children of men, and punishes the wrong-doer.'
+
+And Eumaeus--
+
+'The gods love not violence and wrong; but the man whose ways are
+righteous, him they honour.'
+
+Even when as mere Olympians they put off their celestial nature, and mix
+in earthly strife, and are thus laid open to earthly suffering, a
+mystery still hangs about them; Diomed, even while he crosses the path
+of Ares, feels all the while 'that they are short-lived who contend with
+the Immortals.' Ajax boasts that he will save himself in spite of
+heaven, and immediately the wave dashes him upon the rocks. One light
+word escaped Ulysses in the excitement of his escape from the Cyclops,
+which nine years of suffering hardly expiated.
+
+The same spirit which teaches Christians that those who have no earthly
+friend have specially a friend above to care for and to avenge them,
+taught the Ionians a proverb which appears again and again in Homer,
+that the stranger and the poor man are the patrimony of God; and it
+taught them, also, that sometimes men entertained the Immortals
+unawares. It was a faith, too, which was more than words with them; for
+we hear of no vagrant acts or alien acts, and it was sacrilege to turn
+away from the gate whoever asked its hospitality. Times are changed. The
+world was not so crowded as it is now, and perhaps rogues were less
+abundant; but at any rate those antique Greeks did what they said. We
+say what they said, while in the same breath we say, too, that it is
+impossible to do it.
+
+In every way, the dependence of man on a special heavenly Providence was
+a matter of sure and certain conviction with them. Telemachus appeals to
+the belief in the Council at Ithaca. He questions it at Pylos, and is at
+once rebuked by Athene. Both in Iliad and Odyssey to live justly is the
+steady service which the gods require, and their favour as surely
+follows when that service is paid, as a Nemesis sooner or later follows
+surely, too, on the evil-doers.
+
+But without multiplying evidence, as we easily might, from every part of
+both Iliad and Odyssey, the sceptical and the believing forms of thought
+and feeling on this very subject are made points of dramatic contrast,
+to show off the opposition of two separate characters; and this is clear
+proof that such thoughts and feelings must have been familiar to Homer's
+hearers: if it were not so, his characters would have been without
+interest to his age--they would have been individual, and not universal;
+and no expenditure of intellect, or passion, would have made men care to
+listen to him. The two persons who throughout the Iliad stand out in
+relief in contrast to each other are, of course, Hector and Achilles;
+and faith in God (as distinct from a mere recognition of him) is as
+directly the characteristic of Hector as in Achilles it is entirely
+absent. Both characters are heroic, but the heroism in them springs from
+opposite sources. Both are heroic, because both are strong; but the
+strength of one is in himself, and the strength of the other is in his
+faith. Hector is a patriot; Achilles does not know what patriotism
+means;--Hector is full of tenderness and human affection; Achilles is
+self-enveloped. Even his love for Patroclus is not pure, for Patroclus
+is as the moon to the sun of Achilles, and Achilles sees his own glory
+reflected on his friend. They have both a forecast of their fate; but
+Hector, in his great brave way, scoffs at omens; he knows that there is
+a special providence in the fall of a sparrow, and defies augury. To do
+his duty is the only omen for which Hector cares; and if death must be,
+he can welcome it like a gallant man, if it find him fighting for his
+country. Achilles is moody, speculative, and subjective; he is too proud
+to attempt an ineffectual resistance to what he knows to be inevitable,
+but he alternately murmurs at it and scorns it. Till his passion is
+stirred by his friend's death, he seems equally to disdain the greatness
+of life and the littleness of it; the glories of a hero are not worth
+dying for; and like Solomon, and almost in Solomon's words, he complains
+that there is one event to all--
+
+    [Greek: En de ie time e men kakos ee kai esthlos.]
+
+To gratify his own spleen, he will accept an inglorious age in Thessaly,
+in exchange for a hero's immortality; as again in the end it is but to
+gratify his own wounded pride that he goes out to brave a fate which he
+scorns while he knows that it will subdue him. Thus, Achilles is the
+hero of the stern human, self-sufficing spirit, which does not deny or
+question destiny, but seeing nothing in it except a cold, iron law,
+meets force with force, and holds up against it an unbroken, unbending
+will. Human nature is at its best but a miserable business to him; death
+and sorrow are its inevitable lot. As a brave man, he will not fear such
+things, but he will not pretend to regard them as anything but
+detestable; and he comforts the old, weeping king of Troy, whose age he
+was himself bringing down to the grave in sorrow, with philosophic
+meditations on the vanity of all things, and a picture of Zeus mixing
+the elements of life out of the two urns of good and evil.
+
+Turn to Hector, and we turn from shadow into sunlight. Achilles is all
+self, Hector all self-forgetfulness; Achilles all pride, Hector all
+modesty. The confidence of Achilles is in himself and in his own arm;
+Hector knows (and the strongest expressions of the kind in all the Iliad
+are placed pointedly in Hector's mouth) that there is no strength except
+from above. 'God's will,' he says, 'is over all; he makes the strong man
+to fear, and gives the victory to the weak, if it shall please him.' And
+at last, when he meets Achilles, he answers his bitter words, not with a
+defiance, but calmly saying, 'I know that thou art mighty, and that my
+strength is far less than thine; but these things lie in the will of
+the gods, and I, though weaker far than thou, may yet take thy life from
+thee, if the Immortals choose to have it so.'
+
+So far, then, on the general fact of Divine Providence, the feeling of
+Homer, and therefore of his countrymen, is distinct. Both the great
+poems bearing his name speak in the same language. But beyond the
+general fact, many questions rise in the application of the creed, and
+on one of these (it is among several remarkable differences which seem
+to mark the Odyssey as of a later age) there is a very singular
+discrepancy. In the Iliad, the life of man on this side the grave is
+enough for the completion of his destiny--for his reward, if he lives
+nobly; for his punishment, if he be base or wicked. Without repinings or
+scepticisms at the apparent successes of bad men, the poet is contented
+with what he finds, accepting cheerfully the facts of life as they are;
+it never seems to occur to him as seriously possible that a bad man
+could succeed or a good one fail; and as the ways of Providence,
+therefore, require no vindicating, neither his imagination nor his
+curiosity tempts him into penetrating the future. The house of Hades is
+the long home to which men go when dismissed out of their bodies; but it
+is a dim, shadowy place, of which we see nothing, and concerning which
+no conjectures are ventured. Achilles, in his passion over Patroclus,
+cries out, that although the dead forget the dead in the halls of the
+departed, yet that he will remember his friend; and through the Iliad
+there is nothing clearer than these vague words to show with what hopes
+or fears the poet looked forward to death. So far, therefore, his faith
+may seem imperfect; yet, perhaps, not the less noble because imperfect;
+religious men in general are too well contented with the promise of a
+future life, as of a scene where the seeming shortcomings of the Divine
+administration will be carried out with larger equity. But whether
+imperfect or not, or whatever be the account of the omission, the theory
+of Hades in the Odyssey is developed into far greater distinctness; the
+future is still, indeed, shadowy, but it is no longer uncertain; there
+is the dreadful prison-house, with the judge upon his throne--and the
+darker criminals are overtaken by the vengeance which was delayed in
+life. The thin phantoms of the great ones of the past flit to and fro,
+mourning wearily for their lost mortality, and feeding on its memory.
+And more than this, as if it were beginning to be felt that something
+more was wanted after all to satisfy us with the completeness of the
+Divine rule, we have a glimpse--it is but one, but it is like a ray of
+sunshine falling in upon the darkness of the grave--'of the far-off
+Elysian fields where dwells Rhadamanthus with the golden hair, where
+life is ever sweet, and sorrow is not, nor winter, nor any rain or
+storm, and the never-dying zephyrs blow soft and cool from off the
+ocean.'
+
+However vague the filling up of such a picture, the outline is correct
+to the best which has been revealed even in Christianity, and it speaks
+nobly for the people among whom, even in germ, such ideas could root
+themselves. But think what we will of their notions of the future, the
+old Greek faith, considered as a practical and not a theological system,
+is truly admirable, clear, rational, and moral; if it does not profess
+to deal with the mysteries of evil in the heart, it is prompt and stern
+with them in their darker outward manifestations, and, as far as it
+goes, as a guide in the common daily business of life, it scarcely
+leaves anything unsaid.
+
+How far it went we shall see in the details of the life itself, the most
+important of which in the eyes of a modern will be the social
+organisation; and when he looks for organisation, he will be at once at
+a loss, for he will find the fact of government yet without defined
+form;--he will find law, but without a public sword to enforce it; and a
+'social machine' moving without friction under the easy control of
+opinion. There are no wars of classes, no politics, no opposition of
+interests, a sacred feeling of the will of the gods keeping every one in
+his proper subordination. It was a sacred duty that the younger should
+obey the elder, that the servant should obey his master, that property
+should be respected; in war, that the leader should be obeyed without
+questioning; in peace, that public questions should be brought before
+the assembly of the people, and settled quietly as the Council
+determined. In this assembly the prince presided, and beyond this
+presidency his authority at home does not seem to have extended. Of
+course there was no millennium in Ionia, and men's passions were pretty
+much what they are now. Without any organised means of repressing crime
+when it did appear, the people were exposed to, and often suffered
+under, extreme forms of violence--violence such as that of the suitors
+at Ithaca, or of AEgisthus at Argos. On the other hand, what a state of
+cultivation it implies, what peace and comfort in all classes, when
+society could hold together for a day with no more complete defence.
+And, moreover, there are disadvantages in elaborate police systems.
+Self-reliance is one of the highest virtues in which this world is
+intended to discipline us; and to depend upon ourselves even for our own
+personal safety is a large element in moral training.
+
+But not to dwell on this, and to pass to the way in which the men of
+those days employed themselves.
+
+Our first boy's feeling with the Iliad is, that Homer is pre-eminently a
+poet of war; that battles were his own passion, and tales of battles the
+delight of his listeners. His heroes appear like a great fighting
+aristocracy, such as the after Spartans were, Homer himself like another
+Tyrtaeus, and the poorer occupations of life too menial for their notice
+or for his. They seem to live for glory--the one glory worth caring for
+only to be won upon the battle-field, and their exploits the one worthy
+theme of the poet's song. This is our boyish impression, and, like other
+such, it is very different from the truth. If war had been a passion
+with the Ionians, as it was with the Teutons and the Norsemen, the god
+of battles would have been supreme in the Pantheon; and Zeus would
+scarcely have called Ares the most hateful spirit in Olympus--most
+hateful, _because_ of his delight in war and carnage. Mr. Carlyle looks
+forward to a chivalry of labour. He rather wishes than expects that a
+time may come when the campaign of industry against anarchic nature may
+gather into it those feelings of gallantry and nobleness which have
+found their vent hitherto in fighting only. The modern man's work, Mr.
+Carlyle says, is no longer to splinter lances or break down walls, but
+to break soil, to build barns and factories, and to find a high
+employment for himself in what hitherto has been despised as degrading.
+How to elevate labour--how to make it beautiful--how to enlist the
+_spirit_ in it (for in no other way can it be made humanly profitable),
+that is the problem which he looks wistfully to the future to solve for
+us. He may look to the past as well as to the future; in the old Ionia
+he will find all for which he wishes. The wise Ulysses built his own
+house, and carved his own bed. Princes killed and cooked their own
+food. It was a holy work with them--their way of saying grace for it;
+for they offered the animal in his death to the gods, and they were not
+butchers, but sacrificing priests. Even a keeper of swine is called
+noble, and fights like a hero; and the young princess of Phoeacia--the
+loveliest and gracefullest of Homer's women--drove the clothes-cart and
+washed linen with her own beautiful hands. Not only was labour free--for
+so it was among the early Romans; or honourable, so it was among the
+Israelites,--but it was beautiful--beautiful in the artist's sense, as
+perhaps elsewhere it has never been. In later Greece--in what we call
+the glorious period--toil had gathered about it its modern crust of
+supposed baseness--it was left to slaves; and wise men, in their
+philosophic lecture-rooms, spoke of it as unworthy of the higher
+specimens of cultivated humanity.
+
+But Homer finds, in its most homely forms, fit illustrations for the
+most glorious achievements of his heroes; and in every page we find, in
+simile or metaphor some common scene of daily life worked out with
+elaborate beauty. What the popular poet chooses for his illustrations
+are as good a measure as we can have of the popular feeling, and the
+images which he suggests are, of course, what he knows his hearers will
+be pleased to dwell upon. There is much to be said about this, and we
+shall return to it presently; in the meantime, we must not build on
+indirect evidence. The designs on the shield of Achilles are, together,
+a complete picture of Homer's microcosm; Homer surely never thought
+inglorious or ignoble what the immortal art of Hephaistos condescended
+to imitate.
+
+The first groups of figures point a contrast which is obviously
+intentional; and the significance becomes sadly earnest when we remember
+who it was that was to bear the shield. The moral is a very modern one,
+and the picture might be called by the modern name of Peace and War.
+There are two cities, embodying in their condition the two ideas. In
+one, a happy wedding is going forward; the pomp of the hymeneal
+procession is passing along the streets; the air is full of music, and
+the women are standing at their doors to gaze. The other is in the
+terrors of a siege; the hostile armies glitter under the walls, the
+women and children press into the defence, and crowd to the
+battlements. In the first city, a quarrel rises, and wrong is made
+right, not by violence and fresh wrong, but by the majesty of law and
+order. The heads of the families are sitting gravely in the
+market-place, the cause is heard, the compensation set, the claim
+awarded. Under the walls of the other city an ambush lies, like a wild
+beast on the watch for its prey. The unsuspecting herdsmen pass on with
+their flocks to the waterside; the spoilers spring from their
+hiding-place, and all is strife, and death, and horror, and confusion.
+If there were other war-scenes on the shield, it might be doubted
+whether Homer intended so strong a contrast as he executed; but fighting
+for its own sake was evidently held in slight respect with him. The
+forms of life which were really beautiful to him follow in a series of
+exquisite Rubens-like pictures: harvest scenes and village festivals;
+the ploughing and the vintage, or the lion-hunt on the reedy margin of
+the river; and he describes them with a serene, sunny enjoyment which no
+other old world art or poetry gives us anything in the least resembling.
+Even we ourselves, in our own pastorals, are struggling with but half
+success, after what Homer entirely possessed. What a majesty he has
+thrown into his harvest scene! The yellow corn falling, the boys
+following to gather up the large arms-full as they drop behind the
+reapers; in the distance a banquet preparing under the trees; in the
+centre, in the midst of his workmen, the king sitting in mellow silence,
+sceptre in hand, looking on with gladdened heart. Again we see the
+ploughmen, unlike what are to be seen in our corn-grounds, turning their
+teams at the end of the furrow, and attendants standing ready with the
+wine-cup, to hand to them as they pass. Homer had seen these things, or
+he would not have sung of them; and princes and nobles might have shared
+such labour without shame, when kings took part in it, and gods designed
+it, and the divine Achilles bore its image among his insignia in the
+field.
+
+Analogous to this, and as part of the same feeling, is that intense
+enjoyment of natural scenery, so keen in Homer, and of which the
+Athenian poets show not a trace; as, for instance, in that night
+landscape by the sea, finished off in a few lines only, but so
+exquisitely perfect! The broad moon, gleaming through the mist as it
+parts suddenly from off the sky; the crags and headlands, and soft
+wooded slopes, shining out in the silver light, and earth and sea
+transformed into fairy land.
+
+We spoke of Homer's similes as illustrative of the Ionic feelings about
+war. War, of course, was glorious to him--but war in a glorious cause.
+Wars there were--wars in plenty, as there have been since, and as it is
+like there will be for some time to come; and a just war, of all human
+employments, is the one which most calls out whatever nobleness there is
+in man. It was the thing itself, the actual fighting and killing, as
+apart from the heroism for which it makes opportunities, for which we
+said that he showed no taste. His manner shows that he felt like a
+cultivated man, and not like a savage. His spirit stirs in him as he
+goes out with his hero to the battle; but there is no drunken delight in
+blood; we never hear of warriors as in that grim Hall of the Nibelungen,
+quenching their thirst in the red stream; never anything of that fierce
+exultation in carnage with which the war poetry of so many nations, late
+and old, is crimsoned. Everything, on the contrary, is contrived so as
+to soften the merely horrible, and fix our interest only on what is
+grand or beautiful. We are never left to dwell long together on scenes
+of death, and when the battle is at its fiercest, our minds are called
+off by the rapid introduction (either by simile or some softer turn of
+human feeling) of other associations, not contrived, as an inferior
+artist would contrive, to deepen our emotions, but to soften and relieve
+them. Two warriors meet, and exchange their high words of defiance; we
+hear the grinding of the spear-head, as it pierces shield and
+breast-plate, and the crash of the armour, as this or that hero falls.
+But at once, instead of being left at his side to see him bleed, we are
+summoned away to the soft water meadow, the lazy river, the tall poplar,
+now waving its branches against the sky, now lying its length along in
+the grass beside the water, and the woodcutter with peaceful industry
+labouring and lopping at it.
+
+In the thick of the universal melee, when the stones and arrows are
+raining on the combatants, and some furious hailstorm is the slightest
+illustration with which we should expect him to heighten the effect of
+the human tempest, so sure Homer is that he has painted the thing itself
+in its own intense reality, that his simile is the stillest phenomenon
+in all nature--a stillness of activity, infinitely expressive of the
+density of the shower of missiles, yet falling like oil on water on the
+ruffled picture of the battle; the snow descending in the _still_ air,
+covering first hills, then plains and fields and farmsteads; covering
+the rocks down to the very water's edge, and clogging the waves as they
+roll in. Again, in that fearful death-wrestle at the Grecian wall, when
+gates and battlements are sprinkled over with blood, and neither Greeks
+nor Trojans can force their way against the other, we have, first, as an
+image of the fight itself, two men in the field, with measuring rods,
+disputing over a land boundary; and for the equipoise of the two armies,
+the softest of all home scenes, a poor working woman weighing out her
+wool before weaving it, to earn a scanty subsistence for herself and for
+her children. Of course the similes are not all of this kind; it would
+be monotonous if they were; but they occur often enough to mark their
+meaning. In the direct narrative, too, we see the same tendency.
+Sarpedon struck through the thigh is borne off the field, the long spear
+trailing from the wound, and there is too much haste to draw it out.
+Hector flies past him and has no time to speak; all is dust, hurry, and
+confusion. Even Homer can only pause for a moment, but in three lines he
+lays the wounded hero under a tree, he brings a dear friend to his side,
+and we refresh ourselves in a beautiful scene, when the lance is taken
+out, and Sarpedon faints, and comes slowly back to life, with the cool
+air fanning him. We may look in vain through the Nibelungen Lied for
+anything like this. The Swabian poet can be tender before the battle,
+but in the battle itself his barbaric nature is too strong for him, and
+he scents nothing but blood. In the Iliad, on the contrary, the very
+battles of the gods, grand and awful as they are, relieve rather than
+increase the human horror. In the magnificent scene, where Achilles,
+weary with slaughter, pauses on the bank of the Scamander, and the angry
+river god, whose course is checked by the bodies of the slain, swells up
+to revenge them and destroy him, the natural and the supernatural are so
+strangely blended, that when Poseidon lights the forest, and god meets
+god and element meets element, the convulsion is too tremendous to
+enhance the fierceness of Achilles; it concentrates the interest on
+itself, and Achilles and Hector, flying Trojan and pursuing Greek, for
+the time melt out and are forgotten.
+
+We do not forget that there is nothing of this kind, no relief, no
+softening, in the great scene at the conclusion of the Odyssey. All is
+stern enough and terrible enough there; more terrible, if possible,
+because more distinct, than its modern counterpart in Criemhildas Hall.
+But there is an obvious reason for this, and it does not make against
+what we have been saying. It is not delight in slaughter, but it is the
+stern justice of revenge which we have here; not, as in the Iliad, hero
+meeting hero, but the long crime receiving at last its Divine
+punishment; the breaking of the one storm, which from the beginning has
+been slowly and awfully gathering.
+
+With Homer's treatment of a battle-field, and as illustrating the
+conclusion which we argue from it, we are tempted to draw parallels from
+two modern poets--one a German, who was taken away in the morning of his
+life; the other, the most gifted of modern Englishmen. Each of these two
+has attempted the same subject, and the treatment in each case embodies,
+in a similar manner, modern ways of thinking about it.
+
+The first is from the 'Albigenses' of young Lenau, who has since died
+lunatic, we have heard, as he was not unlikely to have died with such
+thoughts in him. It is the eve of one of those terrible struggles at
+Toulouse, and the poet's imagination is hanging at moon-rise over the
+scene. 'The low broad field scattered over thick with corpses, all
+silent, dead,--the last sob spent,'--the priest's thanksgiving for the
+Catholic victory having died into an echo, and only the 'vultures crying
+their Te Deum laudamus.'
+
+    Hat Gott der Herr den Koerperstoff erschaffen,
+    Hat ihn hervorgebracht ein boeser Geist,
+    Darueber stritten sie mit allen Waffen
+    Und werden von den Voegeln nun gespeist,
+    Die, ohne ihren Ursprung nachzufragen,
+    Die Koerper da sich lassen wohl behagen.
+
+'Was it God the Lord who formed the substance of their bodies? or did
+some evil spirit bring it forth? It was for this with all their might
+they fought, and now they are devoured there by the wild birds, who sit
+gorging merrily over their carrion, _without asking from whence it
+came_.'
+
+In Homer, as we saw, the true hero is master over death--death has no
+terror for him. He meets it, if it is to be, calmly and proudly, and
+then it is over; whatever offensive may follow after it, is concealed,
+or at least passed lightly over. Here, on the contrary, everything most
+offensive is dwelt upon with an agonising intensity, and the triumph of
+death is made to extend, not over the body only, but over the soul,
+whose heroism it turns to mockery. The cause in which a man dies, is
+what can make his death beautiful; but here nature herself, in her
+stern, awful way, is reading her sentence over the cause itself as a
+wild and frantic dream. We ought to be revolted--doubly revolted, one
+would think, and yet we are not so; instead of being revolted, we are
+affected with a sense of vast, sad magnificence. Why is this? Because we
+lose sight of the scene, or lose the sense of its horror, in the tragedy
+of the spirit. It is the true modern tragedy; the note which sounds
+through Shakespeare's 'Sonnets,' through 'Hamlet,' through 'Faust;' all
+the deeper trials of the modern heart might be gathered out of those few
+lines; the sense of wasted nobleness--nobleness spending its energies
+upon what time seems to be pronouncing no better than a dream--at any
+rate, misgivings, sceptic and distracting; yet the heart the while, in
+spite of the uncertainty of the issue, remaining true at least to
+itself. If the spirit of the Albigensian warriors had really broken
+down, or if the poet had pointed his lesson so as to say, Truth is a
+lie; faith is folly; eat, drink, and die,--then his picture would have
+been revolting; but the noble spirit remains, though it is borne down
+and trifled with by destiny, and therefore it is not revolting, but
+tragic.
+
+Far different from this--as far inferior in tone to Lenau's lines, as it
+exceeds them in beauty of workmanship--is the well-known picture of the
+scene under the wall in the Siege of Corinth:--
+
+    He saw the lean dogs beneath the wall
+    Hold o'er the dead their carnival;
+    Gorging and growling o'er carcass and limb;
+    They were too busy to bark at him!
+    From a Tartar's skull they had stripp'd the flesh,
+    As ye peel the fig when its fruit is fresh;
+    And their white tusks crunch'd o'er the whiter skull,
+    As it slipp'd through their jaws when their edge grew dull,
+    As they lazily mumbled the bones of the dead,
+    When they scarce could rise from the spot where they fed;
+    So well had they broken a lingering fast
+    With those who had fallen for that night's repast.
+    And Alp knew, by the turbans that roll'd on the sand,
+    The foremost of these were the best of his band:
+
+      .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .
+
+    The scalps were in the wild dog's maw,
+    The hair was tangled round his jaw.
+    Close by the shore, on the edge of the gulf,
+    There sate a vulture flapping a wolf,
+    Who had stolen from the hills, but kept away,
+    Scared by the dogs, from the human prey;
+    But he seized on his share of a steed that lay,
+    Pick'd by the birds, on the sands of the bay.
+
+For a parallel to the horribleness of this wonderfully painted scene we
+need not go to the Nibelungen, for we shall find nothing like it there:
+we must go back to the carved slabs which adorned the banquet halls of
+the Assyrian kings, where the foul birds hover over the stricken fields,
+and trail from their talons the entrails of the slain.
+
+And for what purpose does Byron introduce these frightful images? Was it
+in contrast to the exquisite moonlight scene which tempts the renegade
+out of his tent? Was it to bring his mind into a fit condition to be
+worked upon by the vision of Francesca? It does but mar and untune the
+softening influences of nature, which might have been rendered more
+powerful, perhaps, by some slight touch to remind him of his past day's
+work, but are blotted out and paralysed by such a mass of horrors.
+
+To go back to Homer.
+
+We must omit for the present any notice of the domestic pictures, of
+which there are so many, in the palaces of Ulysses, of Nestor, or of
+Alcinous; of the games, so manly, yet, in point of refinement, so
+superior even to those of our own middle ages; of the supreme good of
+life as the Greeks conceived it, and of the arts by which they
+endeavoured to realise that good. It is useless to notice such things
+briefly, and the detail would expand into a volume. But the impression
+which we gather from them is the same which we have gathered all
+along--that if the proper aim of all human culture be to combine, in the
+highest measure in which they are compatible, the two elements of
+refinement and of manliness, then Homer's age was cultivated to a degree
+the like of which the earth has not witnessed since. There was more
+refinement under Pericles, as there is more in modern London and Paris;
+but there was, and there is, infinitely more vice. There was more
+fierceness (greater manliness there never was) in the times of
+feudalism. But take it for all in all, and in a mere human sense, apart
+from any other aspect of the world which is involved in Christianity, it
+is difficult to point to a time when life in general was happier, and
+the character of man set in a more noble form. If we have drawn the
+picture with too little shadow, let it be allowed for. The shadow was
+there, doubtless, though we see it only in a few dark spots. The
+Margites would have supplied the rest, but the Margites, unhappily for
+us, is lost. Even heroes have their littlenesses, and Comedy is truer to
+the details of littleness than Tragedy or Epic. The grand is always more
+or less ideal, and the elevation of a moment is sublimed into the spirit
+of a life. Comedy, therefore, is essential for the representing of men;
+and there were times, doubtless, when the complexion of Agamemnon's
+greatness was discoloured, like Prince Henry's, by remembering, when he
+was weary, that poor creature--small beer--_i.e._ if the Greeks had got
+any.
+
+A more serious discoloration, however, we are obliged to say that we
+find in Homer himself, in the soil or taint which even he is obliged to
+cast over the position of women. In the Iliad, where there is no sign of
+male slavery, women had already fallen under the chain, and though there
+does not seem to have been any practice of polygamy, the female
+prisoners fell, as a matter of course, into a more degraded position. It
+is painful, too, to observe that their own feelings followed the
+practice of the times, and that they composed themselves to bear without
+reluctance whatever their destiny forced upon them. When Priam ventured
+into the Grecian camp for Hector's body, and stood under the roof of
+Achilles, he endured to do what, as he says, no mortal father had ever
+yet endured--to give his hand to his son's destroyer. Briseis, whose bed
+was made desolate by the hand of the same Achilles, finds it her one
+greatest consolation, that the conqueror stoops to choose her to share
+his own. And when Hector in his last sad parting scene anticipates a
+like fate for his own Andromache, it is not with the revolted agony of
+horror with which such a possible future would be regarded by a modern
+husband; nor does Andromache, however bitterly she feels the danger,
+protest, as a modern wife would do, that there was no fear for
+her--that death by sorrow's hand, or by her own, would preserve her to
+rejoin him.
+
+Nor, again, was unfaithfulness, of however long duration, conclusively
+fatal against a wife; for we meet Helen, after a twenty years'
+elopement, again the quiet, hospitable mistress in the Spartan palace,
+entertaining her husband's guests with an easy matronly dignity, and not
+afraid even in Menelaus's presence to allude to the past--in strong
+terms of self-reproach, indeed, but with nothing like despairing
+prostration. Making the worst of this, however, yet even in this respect
+the Homeric Greeks were better than their contemporaries in Palestine;
+and on the whole there was, perhaps, no time anterior to Christianity
+when women held a higher place, or the relation between wife and husband
+was of a more free and honourable kind.
+
+For we have given but one side of the picture. When a woman can be the
+theme of a poet, her nature cannot be held in slight esteem; and there
+is no doubt that Penelope is Homer's heroine in the Odyssey. One design,
+at least, which Homer had before him was to vindicate the character of
+the virtuous matron against the stain which Clytemnestra had inflicted
+on it. Clytemnestra has every advantage, Penelope every difficulty: the
+trial of the former lasted only half as long as that of the latter.
+Agamemnon in leaving her gave herself and his house in charge to a
+divine [Greek: aoidos], a heaven-inspired prophet, who should stand
+between her and temptation, and whom she had to murder before her
+passion could have its way. Penelope had to bear up alone for twenty
+weary years, without a friend, without a counsellor, and with even a
+child whose constancy was wavering. It is obvious that Homer designed
+this contrast. The story of the Argos tragedy is told again and again.
+The shade of Agamemnon himself forebodes a fate like his own to Ulysses.
+It is Ulysses's first thought when he wakes from his sleep to find
+himself in his own land; and the scene in Hades, in the last book, seems
+only introduced that the husband of Clytemnestra may meet the shades of
+the Ithacan suitors, and learn, in their own tale of the sad issue of
+their wooing, how far otherwise it had fared with Ulysses than with
+himself. Women, therefore, according to Homer, were as capable of heroic
+virtue as men were, and the ideal of this heroism is one to which we
+have scarcely added.
+
+For the rest, there is no trace of any oriental seraglio system. The
+sexes lived together in easy unaffected intercourse. The ladies appeared
+in society naturally and gracefully, and their chief occupations were
+household matters, care of clothes and linen, and other domestic
+arrangements. When a guest came, they prepared his dressing-room,
+settled the bath, and arranged the convenience of his toilet-table. In
+their leisure hours, they were to be found, as now, in the hall or the
+saloon, and their work-table contained pretty much the same materials.
+Helen was winding worsted as she entertained Telemachus, and Andromache
+worked roses in very modern cross-stitch. A literalist like Mr. Mackay,
+who finds out that the Israelites were cannibals, from such expressions
+as 'drinking the blood of the slain,' might discover, perhaps, a similar
+unpleasant propensity in an excited wish of Hecuba, that she might eat
+the heart of Achilles; but in the absence of other evidence, it is
+unwise in either case to press a metaphor; and the food of ladies,
+wherever Homer lets us see it, is very innocent cake and wine, with such
+fruits as were in season. To judge by Nausicaa, their breeding must have
+been exquisite. Nausicaa standing still, when the uncouth figure of
+Ulysses emerged from under the wood, all sea slime and nakedness, and
+only covered with a girdle of leaves--standing still to meet him when
+the other girls ran away tittering and terrified, is the perfect
+conception of true female modesty; and in the whole scene between them,
+Homer shows the most finished understanding of the delicate and
+tremulous relations which occur occasionally in the accidents of
+intercourse between highly cultivated men and women, and which he could
+only have learnt by living in a society where men and women met and felt
+in the way which he has described.
+
+Who, then, was Homer? What was he? When did he live? History has
+absolutely nothing to answer. His poems were not written; for the art of
+writing (at any rate for a poet's purpose) was unknown to him. There is
+a vague tradition that the Iliad, and the Odyssey, and a comic poem
+called the Margites, were composed by an Ionian whose name was Homer,
+about four hundred years before Herodotus, or in the ninth century B.C.
+We know certainly that these poems were preserved by the Rhapsodists, or
+popular reciters, who repeated them at private parties or festivals,
+until writing came into use, and they were fixed in a less precarious
+form. A later story was current, that we owe the collection to
+Pisistratus; but an exclusive claim for him was probably only Athenian
+conceit. It is incredible that men of genius in Homer's own
+land--Alcaeus, for instance--should have left such a work to be done by a
+foreigner. But this is really all which is known; and the creation of
+the poems lies in impenetrable mystery. Nothing remains to guide us,
+therefore, except internal evidence (strangely enough, it is the same
+with Shakespeare), and it has led to wild conclusions: yet the wildest
+is not without its use; it has commonly something to rest upon; and
+internal evidence is only really valuable when outward testimony has
+been sifted to the uttermost. The present opinion seems to be, that each
+poem is unquestionably the work of one man; but whether both poems are
+the work of the same is yet _sub judice_. The Greeks believed they were;
+and that is much. There are remarkable points of resemblance in style,
+yet not greater than the resemblances in the 'Two Noble Kinsmen' and in
+the 'Yorkshire Tragedy' to 'Macbeth' and 'Hamlet;' and there are more
+remarkable points of non-resemblance, which deepen upon us the more we
+read. On the other hand, tradition is absolute. If the style of the
+Odyssey is sometimes unlike the Iliad, so is one part of the Iliad
+sometimes unlike another. It is hard to conceive a genius equal to the
+creation of either Iliad or Odyssey to have existed without leaving at
+least a legend of his name; and the difficulty of criticising style
+accurately in an old language will be appreciated by those who have
+tried their hand in their own language with the disputed plays of
+Shakespeare. There are heavy difficulties every way; and we shall best
+conclude our own subject by noting down briefly the most striking points
+of variation of which as yet no explanation has been attempted. We have
+already noticed several: the non-appearance of male slavery in the Iliad
+which is common in the Odyssey; the notion of a future state; and
+perhaps a fuller cultivation in the female character. Andromache is as
+delicate as Nausicaa, but she is not as grand as Penelope; and in marked
+contrast to the feeling expressed by Briseis, is the passage where the
+grief of Ulysses over the song of Demodocus is compared to the grief of
+a young wife flinging herself on the yet warm body of her husband, and
+looking forward to her impending slavery with feelings of horror and
+repulsion. But these are among the slightest points in which the two
+poems are dissimilar. Not only are there slaves in the Odyssey, but
+there are [Greek: Thetes], or serfs, an order with which we are familiar
+in later times, but which again are not in the Iliad. In the Odyssey the
+Trojans are called [Greek: epibetores hippon], which must mean _riders_.
+In the Iliad, horses are never ridden; they are always in harness.
+
+Wherever in the Odyssey the Trojan war is alluded to (and it is very
+often), in no one case is the allusion to anything which is mentioned in
+the Iliad. We hear of the wooden horse, the taking of Troy, the death of
+Achilles, the contention of Ulysses with Ajax for his arms. It might be
+said that the poet wished to supply afterwards indirectly what he had
+left in the Iliad untold; but again, this is impossible, for a very
+curious reason. The Iliad opens with the wrath of Achilles, which caused
+such bitter woe to the Achaians. In the Odyssey it is still the wrath of
+Achilles; but singularly _not with Agamemnon, but with Ulysses_. Ulysses
+to the author of the Odyssey was a far grander person at _Troy_ than he
+appears in the Iliad. In the latter poem he is great, but far from one
+of the greatest; in the other, he is evidently the next to Achilles; and
+it seems almost certain that whoever wrote the Odyssey was working from
+some other legend of the war. There were a thousand versions of it. The
+tale of Ilium was set to every lyre in Greece, and the relative position
+of the heroes was doubtless changed according to the sympathies or the
+patriotism of the singer. The character of Ulysses is much stronger in
+the Odyssey; and even when the same qualities are attributed to him--his
+soft-flowing tongue, his cunning, and his eloquence--they are held in
+very different estimation. The Homer of the Iliad has little liking for
+a talker. Thersites is his pattern specimen of such; and it is the
+current scoff at unready warriors to praise their father's courage, and
+then to add--
+
+    [Greek:
+                                alla ton huion
+    geinato heio cherea mache, agore de t' ameino.]
+
+But the Phoeacian Lord who ventured to reflect, in the Iliad style, on
+the supposed unreadiness of Ulysses, is taught a different notion of
+human excellence. Ulysses tells him that he is a fool. 'The gods,'
+Ulysses says, 'do not give all good things to all men, and often a man
+is made unfair to look upon, but over his ill favour they fling, like a
+garland, a power of lovely speech, and the people delight to _look_ on
+him. He speaks with modest dignity, and he shines among the multitude.
+As he walks through the city, men gaze on him as on a god.'
+
+Differences like these, however, are far from decisive. The very
+slightest external evidence would weigh them all down together. Perhaps
+the following may be of more importance:--
+
+In both poems there are 'questionings of destiny,' as the modern phrase
+goes. The thing which we call human life is looked in the face--this
+little chequered island of lights and shadows, in the middle of an ocean
+of darkness; and in each we see the sort of answer which the poet finds
+for himself, and which might be summed up briefly in the last words of
+Ecclesiastes, 'Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the
+whole duty of man.' But the world bears a different aspect, and the
+answer looks different in its application. In the Iliad, in spite of the
+gloom of Achilles, and his complaint of the double urn, the sense of
+life, on the whole, is sunny and cheerful. There is no yearning for
+anything beyond--nothing vague, nothing mystical. The earth, the men,
+the gods, have all a palpable reality about them. From first to last, we
+know where we are, and what we are about. In the Odyssey we are
+breathing another atmosphere. The speculations on the moral mysteries of
+our being hang like a mist over us from the beginning to the end; and
+the cloud from time to time descends on the actors, and envelopes them
+with a preternatural halo. The poet evidently dislikes the expression of
+'suffering being the lot of mortals,' as if it had been abused already
+for ungodly purposes. In the opening of the first book, Zeus reproves
+the folly of mortal men for casting the blame upon the gods, when they
+themselves, in spite of all the gods can do to save them, persist in
+their own perverseness; and we never know as we go on, so fast we pass
+from one to the other, when we are among mere human beings, and when
+among the spiritual or the mystical. Those sea-nymphs, those cannibals,
+those enchantresses, if intended to be real, are neither mortal nor
+divine--at any rate, like nothing divine which we had seen in Olympus,
+or on the plains of Ilium; and at times there is a strangeness even in
+the hero himself. Sometimes it is Ulysses painfully toiling his way home
+across the unknown ocean; sometimes it is we that are Ulysses, and that
+unknown ocean is the life across which we are wandering, with too many
+Circes, and Sirens, and 'Isles of Error' in our path. In the same spirit
+death is no longer the end; and on every side long vistas seem to
+stretch away into the infinite, peopled with shadowy forms.
+
+But, as if this palpable initiation into the unseen were still
+insufficient or unconvincing, the common ground on which we are treading
+sometimes shakes under us, and we feel as Humboldt describes himself to
+have felt at the first shock of an earthquake. Strange pieces of
+mysterious wildness are let fall in our way, coming suddenly on us like
+spectres, and vanishing without explanation or hint of their purpose.
+What are those Phoeacian ships meant for, which required neither sail
+nor oar, but of their own selves read the hearts of those they carried,
+and bore them wherever they would go?--or the wild end of the ship which
+carried Ulysses home?--or that terrible piece of second sight in the
+Hall at Ithaca, for which the seer was brought from Pylos?--or those
+islands, one of which is for ever wasting while another is born into
+being to complete the number?--or those mystical sheep and oxen, which
+knew neither age nor death, nor ever had offspring born to them, and
+whose flesh upon the spits began to crawl and bellow?--or Helen singing
+round the horse inside the Trojan walls, when every Grecian chief's
+heart fainted in him as he thought he heard the voice of his own dear
+wife far away beyond the sea?
+
+In the far gates of the Loestrygones, 'where such a narrow rim of
+night divided day from day, that a man who needed not sleep might earn a
+double hire, and the cry of the shepherd at evening driving home his
+flock was heard by the shepherd going out in the morning to pasture,' we
+have, perhaps, some tale of a Phoenician mariner, who had wandered
+into the North Seas, and seen 'the Norway sun set into sunrise.' But
+what shall we say to that Syrian isle, 'where disease is not, nor
+hunger, nor thirst, and where, when men grow old, Apollo comes with
+Artemis, and slays them with his silver bow?' There is nothing in the
+Iliad like any of these stories.
+
+Yet, when all is said, it matters little who wrote the poems. Each is
+so magnificent, that to have written both could scarcely have increased
+the greatness of the man who had written one; and if there were two
+Homers, the earth is richer by one more divine-gifted man than we had
+known. After all, it is perhaps more easy to believe that the
+differences which we seem to see arise from Homer's own choice of the
+material which best suited two works so different, than that nature was
+so largely prodigal as to have created in one age and in one people two
+such men; for whether one or two, the authors of the Iliad and the
+Odyssey stand alone with Shakespeare far away above mankind.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[X] _Fraser's Magazine_, 1851.
+
+[Y] Mackay's _Progress of the Intellect_.
+
+
+
+
+THE LIVES OF THE SAINTS.
+
+1850.
+
+
+If the enormous undertaking of the Bollandist editors had been
+completed, it would have contained the histories of 25,000 saints. So
+many the Catholic Church acknowledged and accepted as her ideals--as men
+who had not only done her honour by the eminence of their sanctity, but
+who had received while on earth an openly divine recognition of it in
+gifts of supernatural power. And this vast number is but a selection;
+the editors chose only out of the mass before them what was most
+noteworthy and trustworthy, and what was of catholic rather than of
+national interest. It is no more than a fraction of that singular
+mythology which for so many ages delighted the Christian world, which is
+still held in external reverence among the Romanists, and of which the
+modern historians, provoked by its feeble supernaturalism, and by the
+entire absence of critical ability among its writers to distinguish
+between fact and fable, have hitherto failed to speak a reasonable word.
+Of the attempt in our own day to revive an interest in them we shall say
+little in this place. The 'Lives' have no form or beauty to give them
+attraction in themselves; and for their human interest the broad
+atmosphere of the world suited ill with these delicate plants, which had
+grown up under the shadow of the convent wall; they were exotics, not
+from another climate, but from another age; the breath of scorn fell on
+them, and having no root in the hearts and beliefs of men any more, but
+only in the sentimentalities and make-beliefs, they withered and sank.
+And yet, in their place as historical phenomena, the legends of the
+saints are as remarkable as any of the Pagan mythologies; to the full as
+remarkable, perhaps far more so, if the length and firmness of hold
+they once possessed on the convictions of mankind is to pass for
+anything in the estimate--and to ourselves they have a near and peculiar
+interest, as spiritual facts in the growth of the Catholic faith.
+
+Philosophy has rescued the old theogonies from ridicule; their
+extravagancies, even the most grotesque of them, can be now seen to have
+their root in an idea, often a deep one, representing features of
+natural history or of metaphysical speculation, and we do not laugh at
+them any more. In their origin, they were the consecration of the
+first-fruits of knowledge; the expression of a real reverential belief.
+Then time did its work on them; knowledge grew, and they could not grow;
+they became monstrous and mischievous, and were driven out by
+Christianity with scorn and indignation. But it is with human
+institutions as it is with men themselves; we are tender with the dead
+when their power to hurt us has passed away; and as Paganism can never
+more be dangerous, we have been able to command a calmer attitude
+towards it, and to detect under its most repulsive features sufficient
+latent elements of genuine thought to satisfy us that even in their
+darkest aberrations men are never wholly given over to falsehood and
+absurdity. When philosophy has done for mediaeval mythology what it has
+done for Hesiod and for the Edda, we shall find there also at least as
+deep a sense of the awfulness and mystery of life, and we shall find a
+moral element which the Pagans never had. The lives of the saints are
+always simple, often childish, seldom beautiful; yet, as Goethe
+observed, if without beauty, they are always good.
+
+And as a phenomenon, let us not deceive ourselves on the magnitude of
+the Christian hagiology. The Bollandists were restricted on many sides.
+They took only what was in Latin--while every country in Europe had its
+own home growth in its own language--and thus many of the most
+characteristic of the lives are not to be found at all in their
+collection. And again, they took but one life of each saint, composed in
+all cases late, and compiled out of the mass of various shorter lives
+which had grown up in different localities out of popular tradition; so
+that many of their longer productions have an elaborate literary
+character, with an appearance of artifice, which, till we know how they
+came into existence, might blind us to the vast width and variety of
+the traditionary sources from which they are drawn. In the twelfth
+century there were sixty-six lives extant of St. Patrick alone; and that
+in a country where every parish had its own special saint and special
+legend of him. These sixty-six lives may have contained (Mr. Gibbon says
+_must_ have contained) at least as many thousand lies. Perhaps so. To
+severe criticism, even the existence of a single apostle, St. Patrick,
+appears problematical. But at least there is the historical fact, about
+which there can be no mistake, that the stories did grow up in some way
+or other, that they were repeated, sung, listened to, written, and read;
+that these lives in Ireland, and all over Europe and over the earth,
+wherever the Catholic faith was preached, stories like these, sprang out
+of the heart of the people, and grew and shadowed over the entire
+believing mind of the Catholic world. Wherever church was founded, or
+soil was consecrated for the long resting-place of those who had died in
+the faith; wherever the sweet bells of convent or of monastery were
+heard in the evening air, charming the unquiet world to rest and
+remembrance of God, there dwelt the memory of some apostle who had laid
+the first stone, there was the sepulchre of some martyr whose relics
+reposed beneath the altar, of some confessor who had suffered there for
+his Master's sake, of some holy ascetic who in silent self-chosen
+austerity had woven a ladder there of prayer and penance, on which the
+angels of God were believed to have ascended and descended. It is not a
+phenomenon of an age or of a century; it is characteristic of the
+history of Christianity. From the time when the first preachers of the
+faith passed out from their homes by that quiet Galilean lake, to go to
+and fro over the earth, and did their mighty work, and at last
+disappeared and were not any more seen, these sacred legends began to
+grow. Those who had once known the Apostles, who had drawn from their
+lips the blessed message of light and life, one and all would gather
+together what fragments they could find of their stories. Rumours blew
+in from all the winds. They had been seen here, had been seen there, in
+the farthest corners of the earth, preaching, contending, suffering,
+prevailing. Affection did not stay to scrutinise. When some member of a
+family among ourselves is absent in some far place from which sure news
+of him comes slowly and uncertainly; if he has been in the army, or on
+some dangerous expedition, or at sea, or anywhere where real or
+imaginary dangers stimulate anxiety; or when one is gone away from us
+altogether--fallen perhaps in battle--and when the story of his end can
+be collected but fitfully from strangers, who only knew his name, but
+had heard him nobly spoken of; the faintest threads are caught at;
+reports, the vagueness of which might be evident to indifference, are to
+love strong grounds of confidence, and 'trifles light as air' establish
+themselves as certainties. So, in those first Christian communities,
+travellers came through from east and west; legions on the march, or
+caravans of wandering merchants; and one had been in Rome, and seen
+Peter disputing with Simon Magus; another in India, where he had heard
+St. Thomas preaching to the Brahmins; a third brought with him, from the
+wilds of Britain, a staff which he had cut, as he said, from a thorn
+tree, the seed of which St. Joseph had sown there, and which had grown
+to its full size in a single night, making merchandise of the precious
+relic out of the credulity of the believers. So the legends grew, and
+were treasured up, and loved, and trusted; and alas! all which we have
+been able to do with them is to call them lies, and to point a shallow
+moral on the impostures and credulities of the early Catholics. An
+Atheist could not wish us to say more. If we can really believe that the
+Christian Church was made over in its very cradle to lies and to the
+father of lies, and was allowed to remain in his keeping, so to say,
+till yesterday, he will not much trouble himself with any faith which
+after such an admission we may profess to entertain. For, as this spirit
+began in the first age in which the Church began to have a history, so
+it continued so long as the Church as an integral body retained its
+vitality, and only died out in the degeneracy which preceded and which
+brought on the Reformation. For fourteen hundred years these stories
+held their place, and rang on from age to age, from century to century;
+as the new faith widened its boundaries, and numbered ever more and more
+great names of men and women who had fought and died for it, so long
+their histories, living in the hearts of those for whom they laboured,
+laid hold of them and filled them: and the devout imagination, possessed
+with what was often no more than the rumour of a name, bodied it out
+into life, and form, and reality. And doubtless, if we try them by any
+historical canon, we have to say that quite endless untruths grew in
+this way to be believed among men; and not believed only, but held
+sacred, passionately and devotedly; not filling the history books only,
+not only serving to amuse and edify the refectory, or to furnish matter
+for meditation in the cell, but claiming days for themselves of special
+remembrance, entering into liturgies and inspiring prayers, forming the
+spiritual nucleus of the hopes and fears of millions of human souls.
+
+From the hard barren standing ground of the fact idolator, what a
+strange sight must be that still mountain-peak on the wild west Irish
+shore, where, for more than ten centuries, a rude old bell and a carved
+chip of oak have witnessed, or seemed to witness, to the presence long
+ago there of the Irish apostle; and where, in the sharp crystals of the
+trap rock, a path has been worn smooth by the bare feet and bleeding
+knees of the pilgrims, who still, in the August weather, drag their
+painful way along it as they have done for a thousand years. Doubtless
+the 'Lives of the Saints' are full of lies. Are there none in the Iliad?
+or in the legends of AEneas? Were the stories sung in the liturgy of
+Eleusis all so true? so true as fact? Are the songs of the Cid or of
+Siegfried true? We say nothing of the lies in these; but why? Oh, it
+will be said, but they are fictions; they were never supposed to be
+true. But they _were_ supposed to be true, to the full as true as the
+'Legenda Aurea.' Oh, then, they are poetry; and besides, they have
+nothing to do with Christianity. Yes, that is it; they have nothing to
+do with Christianity. Religion has grown such a solemn business with us,
+and we bring such long faces to it, that we cannot admit or conceive to
+be at all naturally admissible such a light companion as the
+imagination. The distinction between secular and religious has been
+extended even to the faculties; and we cannot tolerate in others the
+fulness and freedom which we have lost or rejected for ourselves. Yet it
+has been a fatal mistake with the critics. They found themselves off the
+recognised ground of Romance and Paganism, and they failed to see the
+same principles at work, though at work with new materials. In the
+records of all human affairs, it cannot be too often insisted on that
+two kinds of truth run for ever side by side, or rather, crossing in and
+out with each other, form the warp and the woof of the coloured web
+which we call history: the one, the literal and external truths
+corresponding to the eternal and as yet undiscovered laws of fact; the
+other, the truths of feeling and of thought, which embody themselves
+either in distorted pictures of outward things, or in some entirely new
+creation--sometimes moulding and shaping real history; sometimes taking
+the form of heroic biography, of tradition, or popular legend; sometimes
+appearing as recognised fiction in the epic, the drama, or the novel. It
+is useless to tell us that this is to confuse truth and falsehood. We
+are stating a fact, not a theory; and if it makes truth and falsehood
+difficult to distinguish, that is nature's fault, not ours. Fiction is
+only false, when it is false, not to fact, else how could it be fiction?
+but when it is--to _law_. To try it by its correspondence to the real is
+pedantry. Imagination creates as nature creates, by the force which is
+in man, which refuses to be restrained; we cannot help it, and we are
+only false when we make monsters, or when we pretend that our inventions
+are facts, when we substitute truths of one kind for truths of another;
+when we substitute,--and again we must say when we _intentionally_
+substitute:--whenever persons, and whenever facts seize strongly on the
+imagination (and of course when there is anything remarkable in them
+they must and will do so), invention glides into the images which form
+in our minds; so it must be, and so it ever has been, from the first
+legends of a cosmogony to the written life of the great man who died
+last year or century, or to the latest scientific magazine. We cannot
+relate facts as they are; they must first pass through ourselves, and we
+are more or less than mortal if they gather nothing in the transit. The
+great outlines alone lie around us as imperative and constraining; the
+detail we each fill up variously, according to the turn of our
+sympathies, the extent of our knowledge, or our general theories of
+things: and therefore it may be said that the only literally true
+history possible is the history which mind has left of itself in all the
+changes through which it has passed.
+
+Suetonius is to the full as extravagant and superstitious as Surius, and
+Suetonius was most laborious and careful, and was the friend of Tacitus
+and Pliny. Suetonius gives us prodigies, where Surius has miracles, but
+that is all the difference; each follows the form of the supernatural
+which belonged to the genius of his age. Plutarch writes a life of
+Lycurgus, with details of his childhood, and of the trials and
+vicissitudes of his age; and the existence of Lycurgus is now quite as
+questionable as that of St. Patrick or of St. George of England.
+
+No rectitude of intention will save us from mistakes. Sympathies and
+antipathies are but synonyms of prejudice, and indifference is
+impossible. Love is blind, and so is every other passion. Love believes
+eagerly what it desires; it excuses or passes lightly over blemishes, it
+dwells on what is beautiful; while dislike sees a tarnish on what is
+brightest, and deepens faults into vices. Do we believe that all this is
+a disease of unenlightened times, and that in our strong sunlight only
+truth can get received?--then let us contrast the portrait, for
+instance, of Sir Robert Peel as it is drawn in the Free Trade Hall at
+Manchester,[Z] at the county meeting, and in the Oxford Common Room. It
+is not so. Faithful and literal history is possible only to an impassive
+spirit. Man will never write it, until perfect knowledge and perfect
+faith in God shall enable him to see and endure every fact in its
+reality; until perfect love shall kindle in him under its touch the one
+just emotion which is in harmony with the eternal order of all things.
+
+How far we are in these days from approximating to such a combination we
+need not here insist. Criticism in the hands of men like Niebuhr seems
+to have accomplished great intellectual triumphs; and in Germany and
+France, and among ourselves, we have our new schools of the philosophy
+of history: yet their real successes have hitherto only been
+destructive. When philosophy reconstructs, it does nothing but project
+its own idea; when it throws off tradition, it cannot work without a
+theory: and what is a theory but an imperfect generalisation caught up
+by a predisposition? What is Comte's great division of the eras but a
+theory, and facts are but as clay in his hands, which he can mould to
+illustrate it, as every clever man will find facts to be, let his theory
+be what it will? Intellect can destroy, but it cannot restore life; call
+in the creative faculties--call in Love, Idea, Imagination, and we have
+living figures, but we cannot tell whether they are figures which ever
+lived before. The high faith in which Love and Intellect can alone
+unite in their fulness, has not yet found utterance in modern
+historians.
+
+The greatest man who has as yet given himself to the recording of human
+affairs is, beyond question, Cornelius Tacitus. Alone in Tacitus a
+serene calmness of insight was compatible with intensity of feeling. He
+took no side; he may have been Imperialist, he may have been Republican,
+but he has left no sign whether he was either: he appears to have sifted
+facts with scrupulous integrity; to administer his love, his scorn, his
+hatred, according only to individual merit: and his sentiments are
+rather felt by the reader in the life-like clearness of his portraits,
+than expressed in words by himself. Yet such a power of seeing into
+things was only possible to him, because there was no party left with
+which he could determinedly side, and no wide spirit alive in Rome
+through which he could feel. The spirit of Rome, the spirit of life had
+gone away to seek other forms, and the world of Tacitus was a heap of
+decaying institutions; a stage where men and women, as they themselves
+were individually base or noble, played over their little parts. Life
+indeed was come into the world, was working in it, and silently shaping
+the old dead corpse into fresh and beautiful being. Tacitus alludes to
+it once only, in one brief scornful chapter; and the most poorly gifted
+of those forlorn biographers whose unreasoning credulity was piling up
+the legends of St. Mary and the Apostles, which now drive the
+ecclesiastical historian to despair, knew more, in his divine hope and
+faith, of the real spirit which had gone out among mankind, than the
+keenest and gravest intellect which ever set itself to contemplate them.
+
+And now having in some degree cleared the ground of difficulties, let us
+go back to the Lives of the Saints. If Bede tells us lies about St.
+Cuthbert, we will disbelieve his stories; but we will not call Bede a
+liar, even though he prefaces his life with a declaration that he has
+set down nothing but what he has ascertained on the clearest evidence.
+We are driven to no such alternative; our canons of criticism are
+different from Bede's, and so are our notions of probability. Bede would
+expect _a priori_, and would therefore consider as sufficiently attested
+by a consent of popular tradition, what the oaths of living witnesses
+would fail to make credible to a modern English jury. We will call Bede
+a liar only if he put forward his picture of St. Cuthbert as a picture
+of a life which he considered admirable and excellent, as one after
+which he was endeavouring to model his own, and which he held up as a
+pattern of imitation, when in his heart he did not consider it admirable
+at all, when he was making no effort at the austerities which he was
+lauding. The histories of the saints are written as ideals of a
+Christian life; they have no elaborate and beautiful forms; single and
+straightforward as they are,--if they are not this they are nothing. For
+fourteen centuries the religious mind of the Catholic world threw them
+out as its form of hero worship, as the heroic patterns of a form of
+human life which each Christian within his own limits was endeavouring
+to realise. The first martyrs and confessors were to those poor monks
+what the first Dorian conquerors were in the war songs of Tyrtaeus, what
+Achilles and Ajax and Agamemnon and Diomed were wherever Homer was sung
+or read; or in more modern times, what the Knights of the Round Table
+were in the halls of the Norman castles. The Catholic mind was
+expressing its conception of the highest human excellence; and the
+result is that immense and elaborate hagiology. As with the battle
+heroes, too, the inspiration lies in the universal idea; the varieties
+of character (with here and there an exception) are slight and
+unimportant; the object being to create examples for universal human
+imitation. Lancelot or Tristram were equally true to the spirit of
+chivalry; and Patrick on the mountain, or Antony in the desert, are
+equal models of patient austerity. The knights fight with giants,
+enchanters, robbers, unknightly nobles, or furious wild beasts; the
+Christians fight with the world, the flesh, and the devil. The knight
+leaves the comforts of home in quest of adventures, the saint in quest
+of penance, and on the bare rocks or in desolate wildernesses subdues
+the devil in his flesh with prayers and penances; and so alien is it all
+to the whole thought and system of the modern Christian, that he either
+rejects such stories altogether as monks' impostures, or receives them
+with disdainful wonder, as one more shameful form of superstition with
+which human nature has insulted heaven and disgraced itself.
+
+Leaving, however, for the present, the meaning of monastic asceticism,
+it seems necessary to insist that there really was such a thing; there
+is no doubt about it. If the particular actions told of each saint are
+not literally true, as belonging to him, abundance of men did for many
+centuries lead the sort of life which saints are said to have led. We
+have got a notion that the friars were a snug, comfortable set, after
+all; and the life in a monastery pretty much like that in a modern
+university, where the old monks' language and affectation of
+unworldliness does somehow contrive to co-exist with as large a mass of
+bodily enjoyment as man's nature can well appropriate. Very likely this
+was the state into which many of the monasteries had fallen in the
+fifteenth century. It was a symptom of a very rapid disorder which had
+set in among them, and which promptly terminated in dissolution. But
+long, long ages lay behind the fifteenth century, in which, wisely or
+foolishly, these old monks and hermits did make themselves a very hard
+life of it; and the legend only exceeded the reality in being a very
+slightly idealised portrait. We are not speaking of the miracles; that
+is a wholly different question. When men knew little of the order of
+nature, whatever came to pass without an obvious cause was at once set
+down to influences beyond nature and above it; and so long as there were
+witches and enchanters, strong with the help of the bad powers, of
+course the especial servants of God would not be left without graces to
+outmatch and overcome the devil. And there were many other reasons why
+the saints should work miracles. They had done so under the old
+dispensation, and there was no obvious reason why Christians should be
+worse off than Jews. And again, although it be true, in the modern
+phrase, which is beginning to savour a little of cant, that the highest
+natural is the highest supernatural, nevertheless natural facts permit
+us to be so easily familiar with them, that they have an air of
+commonness; and when we have a vast idea to express, there is always a
+disposition to the extraordinary. But the miracles are not the chief
+thing; nor ever were they so. Men did not become saints by working
+miracles, but they worked miracles because they had become saints; and
+the instructiveness and value of their lives lay in the means which they
+had used to make themselves what they were: and as we said, in this part
+of the business there is unquestionable basis of truth--scarcely even
+exaggeration. We have documentary evidence, which has been filtered
+through the sharp ordeal of party hatred, of the way in which some men
+(and those, not mere ignorant fanatics, but men of vast mind and vast
+influence in their days) conducted themselves, where _myth_ has no room
+to enter. We know something of the hair-shirt of Thomas a Becket; and
+there was another poor monk, whose asceticism imagination could not
+easily outrun; he who, when the earth's mighty ones were banded together
+to crush him under their armed heels, spoke but one little word, and it
+fell among them like the spear of Cadmus; the strong ones turned their
+hands against each other, and the armies melted away; and the proudest
+monarch of the earth lay at that monk's threshold three winter nights in
+the scanty clothing of penance, suing miserably for forgiveness. Or
+again, to take a fairer figure. There is a poem extant, the genuineness
+of which, we believe, has not been challenged, composed by Columbkill,
+commonly called St. Columba. He was a hermit in Arran, a rocky island in
+the Atlantic, outside Galway Bay; from which he was summoned, we do not
+know how, but in a manner which appeared to him to be a Divine call, to
+go away and be Bishop of Iona. The poem is a 'Farewell to Arran,' which
+he wrote on leaving it; and he lets us see something of a hermit's life
+there. 'Farewell,' he begins (we are obliged to quote from memory), 'a
+long farewell to thee, Arran of my heart. Paradise is with thee; the
+garden of God within the sound of thy bells. The angels love Arran. Each
+day an angel comes there to join in its services.' And then he goes on
+to describe his 'dear cell,' and the holy happy hours which he had spent
+there, 'with the wind whistling through the loose stones, and the sea
+spray hanging on his hair.' Arran is no better than a wild rock. It is
+strewed over with the ruins which may still be seen of the old
+hermitages; and at their best they could have been but such places as
+sheep would huddle under in a storm, and shiver in the cold and wet
+which would pierce through the chinks of the walls.
+
+Or, if written evidence be too untrustworthy, there are silent witnesses
+which cannot lie, that tell the same touching story. Whoever loiters
+among the ruins of a monastery will see, commonly leading out of the
+cloisters, rows of cellars half under-ground, low, damp, and
+wretched-looking; an earthen floor, bearing no trace of pavement; a roof
+from which the mortar and the damp keep up (and always must have kept
+up) a perpetual ooze; for a window a narrow slip in the wall, through
+which the cold and the wind find as free an access as the light. Such as
+they are, a well-kept dog would object to accept a night's lodging in
+them; and if they had been prison cells, thousands of philanthropic
+tongues would have trumpeted out their horrors. The stranger perhaps
+supposes that they were the very dungeons of which he has heard such
+terrible things. He asks his guide, and his guide tells him they were
+the monks' dormitories. Yes; there on that wet soil, with that dripping
+roof above them, was the self-chosen home of those poor men. Through
+winter frost, through rain and storm, through summer sunshine,
+generation after generation of them, there they lived and prayed, and at
+last lay down and died.
+
+It is all gone now--gone as if it had never been; and it was as foolish
+as, if the attempt had succeeded, it would have been mischievous, to
+revive a devotional interest in the Lives of the Saints. It would have
+produced but one more unreality in an age already too full of such. No
+one supposes we should have set to work to live as they lived; that any
+man, however earnest in his religion, would have gone looking for earth
+floors and wet dungeons, or wild islands to live in, when he could get
+anything better. Either we are wiser, or more humane, or more
+self-indulgent; at any rate we are something which divides us from
+mediaeval Christianity by an impassable gulf which this age or this epoch
+will not see bridged over. Nevertheless, these modern hagiologists,
+however wrongly they went to work at it, had detected, and were
+endeavouring to fill, a very serious blank in our educational system; a
+very serious blank indeed, and one which, somehow, we must contrive to
+get filled if the education of character is ever to be more than a name
+with us. To try and teach people how to live without giving them
+examples in which our rules are illustrated, is like teaching them to
+draw by the rules of perspective, and of light and shade, without
+designs in which to study the effects; or to write verse by the laws of
+rhyme and metre, without song or poem in which rhyme and metre are
+exhibited. It is a principle which we have forgotten, and it is one
+which the old Catholics did not forget. We do not mean that they set out
+with saying to themselves, 'We must have examples, we must have
+ideals;' very likely they never thought about it at all; love for their
+holy men, and a thirst to know about them, produced the histories; and
+love unconsciously working gave them the best for which they could have
+wished. The boy at school at the monastery, the young monk disciplining
+himself as yet with difficulty under the austerities to which he had
+devoted himself, the old one halting on toward the close of his
+pilgrimage,--all of them had before their eyes, in the legend of the
+patron saint, a personal realisation of all they were trying after;
+leading them on, beckoning to them, and pointing, as they stumbled among
+their difficulties, to the marks which his own footsteps had left, as he
+had trod that hard path before them. It was as if the Church was for
+ever saying to them:--'You have doubts and fears, and trials and
+temptations, outward and inward; you have sinned, perhaps, and feel the
+burden of your sin. Here was one who, like you, _in this very spot_,
+under the same sky, treading the same soil, among the same hills and
+woods and rocks and rivers, was tried like you, tempted like you, sinned
+like you; but here he prayed, and persevered, and did penance, and
+washed out his sins; he fought the fight, he vanquished the Evil One, he
+triumphed, and now he reigns a saint with Christ in heaven. The same
+ground which yields you your food, once supplied him; he breathed, and
+lived, and felt, and died _here_; and now, from his throne in the sky,
+he is still looking lovingly down on his children, making intercession
+for you that you may have grace to follow him, that by-and-by he may
+himself offer you at God's throne as his own.' It is impossible to
+measure the influence which a personal reality of this kind must have
+exercised on the mind, thus daily and hourly impressed upon it through a
+life; there is nothing vague any more, no abstract excellences to strain
+after; all is distinct, personal, palpable. It is no dream. The saint's
+bones are under the altar; nay, perhaps, his very form and features
+undissolved. Under some late abbot the coffin may have been opened and
+the body seen without mark or taint of decay. Such things have been, and
+the emaciation of a saint will account for it without a miracle. Daily
+some incident of his story is read aloud, or spoken of, or preached
+upon. In quaint beautiful forms it lives in light in the long chapel
+windows; and in the summer matins his figure, lighted up in splendour,
+gleams down on the congregation as they pray, or streams in mysterious
+tints along the pavement, clad, as it seems, in soft celestial glory,
+and shining as he shines in heaven. Alas, alas! where is it all gone?
+
+We are going to venture a few thoughts on the wide question, what
+possibly may have been the meaning of so large a portion of the human
+race, and so many centuries of Christianity, having been surrendered and
+seemingly sacrificed to the working out this dreary asceticism. If right
+once, then it is right now; if now worthless, then it could never have
+been more than worthless; and the energies which spent themselves on it
+were like corn sown upon the rock, or substance given for that which is
+not bread. We supposed ourselves challenged recently for our facts. Here
+is an enormous fact which there is no evading. It is not to be slurred
+over with indolent generalities, with unmeaning talk of superstition, of
+the twilight of the understanding, of barbarism, and of nursery
+credulity; it is matter for the philosophy of history, if the philosophy
+has yet been born which can deal with it; one of the solid, experienced
+facts in the story of mankind which must be accepted and considered with
+that respectful deference which all facts claim of their several
+sciences, and which will certainly not disclose its meaning (supposing
+it to have a meaning) except to reverence, to sympathy, to love. We must
+remember that the men who wrote these stories, and who practised these
+austerities, were the same men who composed our liturgies, who built our
+churches and our cathedrals--and the gothic cathedral is, perhaps, on
+the whole, the most magnificent creation which the mind of man has as
+yet thrown out of itself. If there be any such thing as a philosophy of
+history, real or possible, it is in virtue of there being certain
+progressive organising laws in which the fretful lives of each of us are
+gathered into and subordinated in some larger unity, through which age
+is linked to age, as we move forward, with an horizon expanding and
+advancing. And if this is true, the magnitude of any human phenomenon is
+a criterion of its importance, and definite forms of thought working
+through long historic periods imply an effect of one of these vast
+laws--imply a distinct step in human progress. Something previously
+unrealised is being lived out, and rooted into the heart of mankind.
+
+Nature never half does her work. She goes over it, and over it, to make
+assurance sure, and makes good her ground with wearying repetition. A
+single section of a short paper is but a small space to enter on so vast
+an enterprise; nevertheless, a few very general words shall be ventured
+as a suggestion of what this monastic or saintly spirit may possibly
+have meant.
+
+First, as the spirit of Christianity is antagonistic to the world,
+whatever form the spirit of the world assumes, the ideals of
+Christianity will of course be their opposite; as one verges into one
+extreme, the other will verge into the contrary. In those rough times
+the law was the sword; animal might of arm, and the strong animal heart
+which guided it, were the excellences which the world rewarded; and
+monasticism, therefore, in its position of protest, would be the
+destruction and abnegation of the animal nature. The war hero in the
+battle or the tourney yard might be taken as the apotheosis of the
+fleshly man--the saint in the desert of the spiritual.
+
+But this interpretation is slight, imperfect, and if true at all only
+partially so. The animal and the spiritual are not contradictories; they
+are the complements in the perfect character; and in the middle ages, as
+in all ages of genuine earnestness, they interfused and penetrated each
+other. There were warrior saints and saintly warriors; and those grand
+old figures which sleep cross-legged in the cathedral aisles were
+something higher than only one more form of the beast of prey.
+Monasticism represented something more positive than a protest against
+the world. We believe it to have been the realisation of the infinite
+loveliness and beauty of personal purity.
+
+In the earlier civilisation, the Greeks, however genuine their reverence
+for the gods, do not seem to have supposed any part of their duty to the
+gods to consist in keeping their bodies untainted. Exquisite as was
+their sense of beauty, of beauty of mind as well as beauty of form, with
+all their loftiness and their nobleness, with their ready love of moral
+excellence when manifested, as fortitude, or devotion to liberty and to
+home, they had little or no idea of what we mean by morality. With a few
+rare exceptions, pollution, too detestable to be even named among
+ourselves, was of familiar and daily occurrence among their greatest
+men; was no reproach to philosopher or to statesman; and was not
+supposed to be incompatible, and was not, in fact, incompatible with any
+of those especial excellences which we so admire in the Greek character.
+
+Among the Romans (that is, the early Romans of the republic), there was
+a sufficiently austere morality. A public officer of state, whose
+business was to enquire into the private lives of the citizens, and to
+punish offences against morals, is a phenomenon which we have seen only
+once on this planet. There was never a nation before, and there has been
+none since, with sufficient virtue to endure it. But the Roman morality
+was not lovely for its own sake, nor excellent in itself. It was
+obedience to law, practised and valued, loved for what resulted from it,
+for the strength and rigid endurance which it gave, but not loved for
+itself. The Roman nature was fierce, rugged, almost brutal; and it
+submitted to restraint as stern as itself, as long as the energy of the
+old spirit endured. But as soon as that energy grew slack--when the
+religion was no longer believed, and taste, as it was called, came in,
+and there was no more danger to face, and the world was at their feet,
+all was swept away as before a whirlwind; there was no loveliness in
+virtue to make it desired, and the Rome of the Caesars presents, in its
+later ages, a picture of enormous sensuality, of the coarsest animal
+desire, with means unlimited to gratify it. In Latin literature, as
+little as in the Greek, is there any sense of the beauty of purity.
+Moral essays on temperance we may find, and praise enough of the wise
+man whose passions and whose appetites are trained into obedience to
+reason. But this is no more than the philosophy of the old Roman life,
+which got itself expressed in words when men were tired of the reality.
+It involves no sense of sin. If sin could be indulged without weakening
+self-command, or without hurting other people, Roman philosophy would
+have nothing to say against it.
+
+The Christians stepped far out beyond philosophy. Without speculating on
+the _why_, they felt that indulgence of animal passion did, in fact,
+pollute them, and so much the more, the more it was deliberate.
+Philosophy, gliding into Manicheism, divided the forces of the universe,
+giving the spirit to God, but declaring matter to be eternally and
+incurably evil; and looking forward to the time when the spirit should
+be emancipated from the body, as the beginning of, or as the return to,
+its proper existence, a man like Plotinus took no especial care what
+became the meanwhile of its evil tenement of flesh. If the body sinned,
+sin was its element; it could not do other than sin; purity of conduct
+could not make the body clean, and no amount of bodily indulgence could
+shed a taint upon the spirit--a very comfortable doctrine, and one
+which, under various disguises, has appeared a good many times on the
+earth. But Christianity, shaking all this off, would present the body to
+God as a pure and holy sacrifice, as so much of the material world
+conquered from the appetites and lusts, and from the devil whose abode
+they were. This was the meaning of the fastings and scourgings, the
+penances and night-watchings; it was this which sent St. Anthony to the
+tombs and set Simeon on his pillar, to conquer the devil in the flesh,
+and keep themselves, if possible, undefiled by so much as one corrupt
+thought.
+
+And they may have been absurd and extravagant. When the feeling is
+stronger than the judgment, men are very apt to be extravagant. If, in
+the recoil from Manicheism, they conceived that a body of a saint thus
+purified had contracted supernatural virtue and could work miracles,
+they had not sufficiently attended to the facts, and so far are not
+unexceptionable witnesses to them. Nevertheless they did their work, and
+in virtue of it we are raised to a higher stage--we are lifted forward a
+mighty step which we can never again retrace. Personal purity is not the
+whole for which we have to care: it is but one feature in the ideal
+character of man. The monks may have thought it was all, or more nearly
+all than it is; and therefore their lives may seem to us poor, mean, and
+emasculate. Yet it is with life as it is with science; generations of
+men have given themselves exclusively to single branches, which, when
+mastered, form but a little section in a cosmic philosophy; and in life,
+so slow is progress, it may take a thousand years to make good a single
+step. Weary and tedious enough it seems when we cease to speak in large
+language, and remember the numbers of individual souls who have been at
+work at the process; but who knows whereabouts we are in the duration
+of the race? Is humanity crawling out of the cradle, or tottering into
+the grave? Is it in nursery, in schoolroom, or in opening manhood? Who
+knows? It is enough for us to be sure of our steps when we have taken
+them, and thankfully to accept what has been done for us. Henceforth it
+is impossible for us to give our unmixed admiration to any character
+which moral shadows overhang. Henceforth we require, not greatness only,
+but goodness; and not that goodness only which begins and ends in
+conduct correctly regulated, but that love of goodness, that keen pure
+feeling for it, which resides in a conscience as sensitive and
+susceptible as woman's modesty.
+
+So much for what seems to us the philosophy of this matter. If we are
+right, it is no more than a first furrow in the crust of a soil which
+hitherto the historians have been contented to leave in its barrenness.
+If they are conscientious enough not to trifle with the facts, as they
+look back on them from the luxurious self-indulgence of modern
+Christianity, they either revile the superstition or pity the ignorance
+which made such large mistakes on the nature of religion--and, loud in
+their denunciations of priestcraft and of lying wonders, they point
+their moral with pictures of the ambition of mediaeval prelacy or the
+scandals of the annals of the papacy. For the inner life of all those
+millions of immortal souls who were struggling, with such good or bad
+success as was given them, to carry Christ's cross along their journey
+through life, they set it by, pass it over, dismiss it out of history,
+with some poor commonplace simper of sorrow or of scorn. It will not do.
+Mankind have not been so long on this planet altogether, that we can
+allow so large a chasm to be scooped out of their spiritual existence.
+
+We intended to leave our readers with something lighter than all this in
+the shape of literary criticism, and a few specimens of the biographical
+style: in both of these we must now, however, be necessarily brief.
+Whoever is curious to study the lives of the saints in their originals,
+should rather go anywhere than to the Bollandists, and universally never
+read a late life when he can command an early one; for the genius in
+them is in the ratio of their antiquity, and, like river-water, is most
+pure nearest to the fountain. We are lucky in possessing several
+specimens of the mode of their growth in late and early lives of the
+same saints, and the process in all is similar. Out of the unnumbered
+lives of St. Bride, three are left; out of the sixty-six of St. Patrick,
+there are eight; the first of each belonging to the sixth century, the
+latest to the thirteenth. The earliest in each instance are in verse;
+they belong to a time when there was no one to write such things, and
+were popular in form and popular in their origin. The flow is easy, the
+style graceful and natural; but the step from poetry to prose is
+substantial as well as formal; the imagination is ossified, and we
+exchange the exuberance of legendary creativeness for the dogmatic
+record of fact without reality, and fiction without grace. The
+marvellous in the poetical lives is comparatively slight; the
+after-miracles being composed frequently out of a mistake of poets'
+metaphors for literal truth. There is often real, genial, human beauty
+in the old verse. The first two stanzas, for instance, of St. Bride's
+Hymn are of high merit, as may, perhaps, be imperfectly seen in a
+translation:--
+
+    Bride the queen, she loved not the world;
+    She floated on the waves of the world
+    As the sea-bird floats upon the billow.
+
+    Such sleep she slept as the mother sleeps
+    In the far land of her captivity,
+    Mourning for her child at home.
+
+What a picture is there of the strangeness and yearning of the poor
+human soul in this earthly pilgrimage!
+
+The poetical 'Life of St. Patrick,' too, is full of fine, wild, natural
+imagery. The boy is described as a shepherd on the hills of Down, and
+there is a legend, well told, of the angel Victor coming to him, and
+leaving a gigantic footprint on a rock from which he sprang back into
+heaven. The legend, of course, rose from some remarkable natural feature
+of the spot; as it is first told, a shadowy unreality hangs over it, and
+it is doubtful whether it is more than a vision of the boy; but in the
+later prose all is crystalline; the story is drawn out, with a barren
+prolixity of detail, into a series of angelic visitations. And again,
+when Patrick is described, as the after-apostle, raising the dead Celts
+to life, the metaphor cannot be left in its natural force, and we have a
+long weary list of literal deaths and literal raisings. So in many ways
+the freshness and individuality was lost with time. The larger saints
+swallowed up the smaller and appropriated their exploits; chasms were
+supplied by an ever ready fancy; and, like the stock of good works laid
+up for general use, there was a stock of miracles ever ready when any
+defect was to be supplied. So it was that, after the first impulse, the
+progressive life of a saint rolled on like a snowball down a mountain
+side, gathering up into itself whatever lay in its path, fact or legend,
+appropriate or inappropriate--sometimes real jewels of genuine old
+tradition, sometimes the debris of the old creeds and legends of
+heathenism; and on, and on, till at length it reached the bottom, and
+was dashed in pieces on the Reformation.
+
+One more illustration shall serve as evidence of what the really
+greatest, most vigorous, minds in the twelfth century could accept as
+possible or probable, which they could relate (on what evidence we do
+not know) as really ascertained facts. We remember something of St.
+Anselm: both as a statesman and as a theologian, he was unquestionably
+among the ablest men of his time alive in Europe. Here is a story which
+Anselm tells of a certain Cornish St. Kieran. The saint, with thirty of
+his companions, was preaching within the frontiers of a lawless Pagan
+prince; and, disregarding all orders to be quiet or to leave the
+country, continued to agitate, to threaten, and to thunder even in the
+ears of the prince himself. Things took their natural course.
+Disobedience provoked punishment. A guard of soldiers was sent, and the
+saint and his little band were decapitated. The scene of the execution
+was a wood, and the heads and trunks were left lying there for the
+wolves and the wild birds.
+
+    But now a miracle, such as was once heard of before in the Church in
+    the person of the holy Denis, was again wrought by Divine Providence
+    to preserve the bodies of these saints from profanation. The trunk
+    of Kieran rose from the ground, and selecting first his own head,
+    and carrying it to a stream, and there carefully washing it, and
+    afterwards performing the same sacred office for each of his
+    companions, giving each body its own head, he dug graves for them
+    and buried them, and last of all buried himself.
+
+It is even so. So it stands written in a life claiming Anselm's
+authorship; and there is no reason why the authorship should not be his.
+Out of the heart come the issues of evil and of good, and not out of the
+intellect or the understanding. Men are not good or bad, noble or
+base--thank God for it!--as they judge well or ill of the probabilities
+of nature, but as they love God and hate the devil. And yet the story is
+instructive. We have heard grave good men--men of intellect and
+influence--with all the advantages of modern science, learning,
+experience; men who would regard Anselm with sad and serious pity; yet
+tell us stories, as having fallen within their own experience, of the
+marvels of mesmerism, to the full as ridiculous (if anything is
+ridiculous) as this of the poor decapitated Kieran.
+
+      Mutato nomine, de te
+    Fabula narratur.
+
+We see our natural faces in the glass of history, and turn away and
+straightway forget what manner of men we are. The superstition of
+science scoffs at the superstition of faith.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Z] Written in 1850.
+
+
+
+
+REPRESENTATIVE MEN.
+
+1850.
+
+
+From St. Anselm to Mr. Emerson, from the 'Acta Sanctorum' to the
+'Representative Men;' so far in seven centuries we have travelled. The
+races of the old Ideals have become extinct like the Preadamite
+Saurians; and here are our new pattern specimens on which we are to
+look, and take comfort and encouragement to ourselves.
+
+The philosopher, the mystic, the poet, the sceptic, the man of the
+world, the writer; these are the present moral categories, the _summa
+genera_ of human greatness as Mr. Emerson arranges them. From every
+point of view an exceptionable catalogue. They are all thinkers, to
+begin with, except one: and thought is but a poor business compared to
+action. Saints did not earn canonisation by the number of their folios;
+and if the necessities of the times are now driving our best men out of
+action into philosophy and verse-making, so much the worse for them and
+so much the worse for the world. The one pattern actor, 'the man of the
+world,' is Napoleon Bonaparte, not in the least a person, as we are most
+of us at present feeling, whose example the world desires to see
+followed. Mr. Emerson would have done better if he had kept to his own
+side of the Atlantic. He is paying his own countrymen but a poor
+compliment by coming exclusively to Europe for his heroes; and he would
+be doing us in Europe more real good by a great deal if he would tell us
+something of the backwoodsmen in Kentucky and Ohio. However, to let that
+pass; it is not our business here to quarrel either with him or his
+book; and the book stands at the head of our article rather because it
+presents a very noticeable deficiency of which its writer is either
+unaware or careless.
+
+These six predicables, as the logician would call them, what are they?
+Are they _ultimate genera_ refusing to be classified farther? or is
+there any other larger type of greatness under which they fall? In the
+naturalist's catalogue, poet, sceptic, and the rest will all be
+classified as men--man being an intelligible entity. Has Mr. Emerson any
+similar clear idea of great man or good man? If so, where is he? what is
+he? It is desirable that we should know. Men will not get to heaven
+because they lie under one or other of these predicables. What is that
+supreme type of character which is in itself good or great, unqualified
+with any farther _differentia_? Is there any such? and if there be,
+where is the representative of this? It may be said that the generic man
+exists nowhere in an ideal unity--that if considered at all, he must be
+abstracted from the various sorts of men, black and white, tame or
+savage. So if we would know what a great man or a good man means, we
+must look to some specific line in which he is good, and abstract our
+general idea. And that is very well, provided we know what we are about;
+provided we understand, in our abstracting, how to get the essential
+idea distinctly out before ourselves, without entangling ourselves in
+the accidents. Human excellence, after all the teaching of the last
+eighteen hundred years, ought to be something palpable by this time. It
+is the one thing which we are all taught to seek and to aim at forming
+in ourselves; and if representative men are good for anything at all, it
+can only be, not as they represent merely curious combinations of
+phenomena, but as they illustrate us in a completely realised form, what
+we are, every single one of us, equally interested in understanding. It
+is not the 'great man' as 'man of the world' that we care for, but the
+'man of the world' as a 'great man'--which is a very different thing.
+Having to live in this world, how to live greatly here is the question
+for us; not, how, being great, we can cast our greatness in a worldly
+mould. There may be endless successful 'men of the world' who are mean
+or little enough all the while; and the Emersonian attitude will confuse
+success with greatness, or turn our ethics into a chaos of absurdity. So
+it is with everything which man undertakes and works in. Life has grown
+complicated; and for one employment in old times there are a hundred
+now. But it is not _they_ which are anything, but _we_. We are the end,
+they are but the means, the material--like the clay, or the marble, or
+the bronze in which the sculptor carves his statue. The _form_ is
+everything; and what is the form? From nursery to pulpit every teacher
+rings on the one note--be good, be noble, be men. What is goodness then?
+and what is nobleness? and where are the examples? We do not say that
+there are none. God forbid! That is not what we are meaning at all. If
+the earth had ceased to bear men pleasant in God's sight, it would have
+passed away like the cities in the plain. But who are they? which are
+they? how are we to know them? They are our leaders in this life
+campaign of ours. If we could see them, we would follow them, and save
+ourselves many and many a fall, and many an enemy whom we could have
+avoided, if we had known of him. It cannot be that the thing is so
+simple, when names of highest reputation are wrangled over, and such
+poor counterfeits are mobbed with applauding followers. In art and
+science we can detect the charlatan, but in life we do not recognise him
+so readily--we do not recognise the charlatan, and we do not recognise
+the true man. Rajah Brooke is alternately a hero or a pirate; and fifty
+of the best men among us are likely to have fifty opinions on the merits
+of Elizabeth or Cromwell.
+
+But surely, men say, the thing is simple. The commandments are simple.
+It is not that people do not know, but that they will not act up to what
+they know. We hear a great deal of this in sermons, and elsewhere; and
+of course, as everybody's experience will tell him, there is a great
+deal too much reason why we should hear of it. But there are two sorts
+of duty, positive and negative; what we ought to do, and what we ought
+not to do. To the latter of these, conscience is pretty much awake; but
+by cunningly concentrating its attention on one side of the matter,
+conscience has contrived to forget altogether that any other sort exists
+at all. 'Doing wrong' is breaking a commandment which forbids us to do
+some particular thing. That is all the notion which in common language
+is attached to the idea. Do not kill, steal, lie, swear, commit
+adultery, or break the Lord's day--these are the commandments; very
+simple, doubtless, and easy to be known. But, after all, what are they?
+They are no more than the very first and rudimental conditions of
+goodness. Obedience to these is not more than a small part of what is
+required of us; it is no more than the foundation on which the
+superstructure of character is to be raised. To go through life, and
+plead at the end of it that we have not broken any of these
+commandments, is but what the unprofitable servant did, who kept his
+talent carefully unspent, and yet was sent to outer darkness for his
+uselessness. Suppose these commandments obeyed--what then? It is but a
+small portion of our time which, we will hope, is spent in resisting
+temptation to break them. What are we to do with the rest of it? Or
+suppose them (and this is a high step indeed) resolved into love of God
+and love of our neighbour. Suppose we know that it is our duty to love
+our neighbour as ourselves. What are we to do, then, for our neighbour,
+besides abstaining from doing him injury? The saints knew very well what
+_they_ were to do; but our duties, we suppose, lie in a different
+direction; and it does not appear that we have found them. 'We have
+duties so positive to our neighbour,' says Bishop Butler, 'that if we
+give more of our time and of our attention to ourselves and our own
+matters than is our just due, we are taking what is not ours, and are
+guilty of fraud.' What does Bishop Butler mean? It is easy to answer
+generally. In detail, it is not only difficult, it is impossible to
+answer at all. The modern world says--'Mind your own business, and leave
+others to take care of theirs;' and whoever among us aspires to more
+than the negative abstaining from wrong, is left to his own guidance.
+There is no help for him, no instruction, no modern ideal which shall be
+to him what the heroes were to the young Greek or Roman, or the martyrs
+to the middle age Christian. There is neither track nor footprint in the
+course which he will have to follow, while, as in the old fairy tale,
+the hillside which he is climbing is strewed with black stones mocking
+at him with their thousand voices. We have no moral criterion, no idea,
+no counsels of perfection; and surely this is the reason why education
+is so little prosperous with us; because the only education worth
+anything is the education of character, and we cannot educate a
+character unless we have some notion of what we would form. Young men,
+as we know, are more easily led than driven. It is a very old story that
+to forbid this and that (so curious and contradictory is our nature) is
+to stimulate a desire to do it. But place before a boy a figure of a
+noble man; let the circumstances in which he has earned his claim to be
+called noble be such as the boy himself sees round himself; let him see
+this man rising over his temptation, and following life victoriously and
+beautifully forward, and, depend on it, you will kindle his heart as no
+threat of punishment here or anywhere will kindle it.
+
+People complain of the sameness in the 'Lives of the Saints.' It is that
+very sameness which is the secret of their excellence. There is a
+sameness in the heroes of the 'Iliad;' there is a sameness in the
+historical heroes of Greece and Rome. A man is great as he contends best
+with the circumstances of his age, and those who fight best with the
+same circumstances, of course grow like each other. And so with our own
+age--if we really could have the lives of our best men written for us
+(and written well, by men who knew what to look for, and what it was on
+which they should insist), they would be just as like as each other too,
+and would for that reason be of such infinite usefulness. They would not
+be like the old Ideals. Times are changed; they were one thing, we have
+to be another--their enemies are not ours. There is a moral
+metempsychosis in the change of era, and probably no lineament of form
+or feature remains identical; yet surely not because less is demanded of
+us--not less, but more--more, as we are again and again told on Sundays
+from the pulpits; if the preachers would but tell us in what that 'more'
+consists. The loftiest teaching we ever hear is, that we are to work in
+the spirit of love; but we are still left to generalities, while action
+divides and divides into ever smaller details. It is as if the Church
+said to the painter or to the musician whom she was training, you must
+work in the spirit of love and in the spirit of truth; and then adding,
+that the Catholic painting or the Catholic music was what he was _not_
+to imitate, supposed that she had sent him out into the world equipped
+fully for his enterprise.
+
+And what comes of this? Emersonianism has come, modern hagiology has
+come, and Ainsworth novels and Bulwer novels, and a thousand more
+unclean spirits. We have cast out the Catholic devil, and the Puritan
+has swept the house and garnished it; but as yet we do not see any
+symptoms showing of a healthy incoming tenant, and there may be worse
+states than Catholicism. If we wanted proof of the utter spiritual
+disintegration into which we have fallen, it would be enough that we
+have no biographies. We do not mean that we have no written lives of our
+fellow-creatures; there are enough and to spare. But not any one is
+there in which the ideal tendencies of this age can be discerned in
+their true form; not one, or hardly any one, which we could place in a
+young man's hands, with such warm confidence as would let us say of
+it--'Read that; there is a man--such a man as you ought to be; read it,
+meditate on it; see what he was, and how he made himself what he was,
+and try and be yourself like him.' This, as we saw lately, is what
+Catholicism did. It had its one broad type of perfection, which in
+countless thousands of instances was perpetually reproducing itself--a
+type of character not especially belonging to any one profession; it was
+a type to which priest and layman, knight or bishop, king or peasant,
+might equally aspire: men of all sorts aspired to it, and men of all
+sorts attained to it; and as fast as she had realised them (so to say),
+the Church took them in her arms, and held them up before the world as
+fresh and fresh examples of victory over the devil. This is what that
+Church was able to do, and it is what we cannot do; and yet, till we can
+learn to do it, no education which we can offer has any chance of
+prospering. Perfection is not easy; it is of all things most difficult;
+difficult to know and difficult to practise. Rules of life will not do;
+even if our analysis of life in all its possible forms were as complete
+as it is in fact rudimentary, they would still be inefficient. The
+philosophy of the thing might be understood, but the practice would be
+as far off as ever. In life, as in art, and as in mechanics, the only
+profitable teaching is the teaching by example. Your mathematician, or
+your man of science, may discourse excellently on the steam engine, yet
+he cannot make one; he cannot make a bolt or a screw. The master workman
+in the engine-room does not teach his apprentice the theory of
+expansion, or of atmospheric pressure; he guides his hand upon the
+turncock, he practises his eye upon the index, and he leaves the science
+to follow when the practice has become mechanical. So it is with
+everything which man learns to do; and yet for the art of arts, the
+trade of trades, for _life_, we content ourselves with teaching our
+children the catechism and the commandments; we preach them sermons on
+the good of being good, and the evil of being evil; in our higher
+education we advance to the theory of habit and the freedom of the will;
+and then, when failure follows failure, _ipsa experientia reclamante_,
+we hug ourselves with a complacent self-satisfied reflection that the
+fault is not ours, that all which men could do we have done. The freedom
+of the will!--as if a blacksmith would ever teach a boy to make a
+horseshoe, by telling him he could make one if he chose.
+
+In setting out on our journey through life, we are like strangers set to
+find their way across a difficult and entangled country. It is not
+enough for us to know that others have set out as we set out, that
+others have faced the lions in the path and overcome them, and have
+arrived at last at the journey's end. Such a knowledge may give us
+heart--but the help it gives is nothing beyond teaching us that the
+difficulties are not insuperable. It is the _track_, which these others,
+these pioneers of godliness, have beaten in, that we cry to have shown
+us; not a mythic 'Pilgrim's Progress,' but a real path trodden in by
+real men. Here is a crag, and there is but one spot where it can be
+climbed; here is a morass or a river, and there is a bridge in one
+place, and a ford in another. There are robbers in this forest, and wild
+beasts in that; the tracks cross and recross, and, as in the old
+labyrinth, only one will bring us right. The age of the saints has
+passed; they are no longer any service to us; we must walk in their
+spirit, but not along their road; and in this sense we say, that we have
+no pattern great men, no biographies, no history, which are of real
+service to us. It is the remarkable characteristic of the present time,
+as far as we know--a new phenomenon since history began to be written;
+one more proof, if we wanted proof, that we are entering on another era.
+In our present efforts at educating, we are like workmen setting about
+to make a machine which they know is to be composed of plates and
+joints, and wheels and screws and springs:--they temper their springs,
+and smooth their plates, and carve out carefully their wheels and
+screws, but having no idea of the machine in its combination, they
+either fasten them together at random, and create some monster of
+disjointed undirected force, or else pile the finished materials into a
+heap together, and trust to some organic spirit in themselves which will
+shape them into unity. We do not know what we would be at--make our
+children into men, says one--but what sort of men? The Greeks were men,
+so were the Jews, so were the Romans, so were the old Saxons, the
+Normans, the Duke of Alva's Spaniards, and Cromwell's Puritans. These
+were all men, and strong men too; yet all different, and all differently
+trained. 'Into Christian men,' say others: but the saints were Christian
+men; yet the modern Englishmen have been offered the saints'
+biographies, and have with sufficient clearness expressed their opinion
+of them.
+
+Alas! in all this confusion, only those keen-eyed children of this world
+find their profit; their idea does not readily forsake them. In their
+substantial theory of life, the business of man in it is to get on, to
+thrive, to prosper, to have riches in possession. They will have their
+little ones taught, by the law of demand, what will fetch its price in
+the market; and this is clear, bold, definite, straightforward--and
+therefore it is strong, and works its way. It works and will prevail for
+a time; for a time--but not for ever, unless indeed religion be all a
+dream, and our airy notions of ourselves a vision out of which our wise
+age is the long-waited-for awakening.
+
+It would be a weary and odious business to follow out all the causes
+which have combined to bring us into our present state. Many of them lie
+deep down in the roots of humanity, and many belong to that large system
+of moral causation which works through vast masses of mankind--which,
+impressing peculiar and necessary features on the eras as they succeed,
+leaves individuals but a limited margin within which they may determine
+what they will be. One cause, however, may be mentioned, which lies near
+the surface, and which for many reasons it may be advantageous to
+consider. At first thought it may seem superficial and captious; but we
+do not think it will at the second, and still less at the third.
+
+Protestantism, and even Anglo-Protestantism, has not been without its
+great men. In their first fierce struggle for existence, these creeds
+gave birth to thousands whose names may command any rank in history. But
+alone of all forms of religion, past or present, and we will add (as we
+devoutly hope), to come (for in her present form, at least, the Church
+of England cannot long remain), Protestantism knows not what to do with
+her own offspring; she is unable to give them open and honourable
+recognition. Entangled in speculative theories of human depravity, of
+the worthlessness of the best which the best men can do, Protestantism
+is unable to say heartily of any one, 'Here is a good man to be loved
+and remembered with reverence.' There are no saints in the English
+Church. The English Church does not pretend to saints. Her children may
+live purely, holily, and beautifully, but her gratitude for them must be
+silent; she may not thank God for them--she may not hold them up before
+her congregation. They may or they may not have been really good, but
+she may not commit herself to attributing a substantial value to the
+actions of a nature so corrupt as that of man. Among Protestants, the
+Church of England is the worst, for she is not wholly Protestant. In the
+utterness of the self-abnegation of the genuine Protestant there is
+something approaching the heroic. But she, ambitious of being Catholic
+as well as Protestant, like that old Church of evil memory which would
+be neither hot nor cold, will neither wholly abandon merit, nor wholly
+claim it; but halts on between two opinions, claiming and disclaiming,
+saying and in the next breath again unsaying. The Oxford student being
+asked for the doctrine of the Anglican Church on good works, knew the
+rocks and whirlpools among which an unwary answer might involve him, and
+steering midway between Scylla and Charybdis, replied, with laudable
+caution, 'a few of them would not do a man any harm.' It is scarcely a
+caricature of the prudence of the Articles. And so at last it has come
+to this with us. The soldier can raise a column to his successful
+general; the halls of the law courts are hung round with portraits of
+the ermined sages; Newton has his statue, and Harvey and Watt, in the
+academies of the sciences; and each young aspirant after fame, entering
+for the first time upon the calling which he has chosen, sees high
+excellence highly honoured; sees the high career, and sees its noble
+ending, marked out each step of it in golden letters. But the Church's
+aisles are desolate, and desolate they must remain. There is no statue
+for the Christian. The empty niches stare out like hollow eye-sockets
+from the walls. Good men live in the Church and die in her, whose story
+written out or told would be of inestimable benefit, but she may not
+write it. She may speak of goodness, but not of the good man; as she may
+speak of sin, but may not censure the sinner. Her position is critical;
+the Dissenters would lay hold of it. She may not do it, but she will do
+what she can. She cannot tolerate an image indeed, or a picture of her
+own raising; she has no praise to utter at her children's graves, when
+their lives have witnessed to her teaching. But if others will bear the
+expense and will risk the sin, she will offer no objection. Her walls
+are naked. The wealthy ones among her congregation may adorn them as
+they please; the splendour of a dead man's memorial shall be, not as his
+virtues were, but as his purse; and his epitaph may be brilliant
+according as there are means to pay for it. They manage things better at
+the museums and the institutes.
+
+Let this pass, however, as the worst case. There are other causes at
+work besides the neglect of churches; the neglect itself being as much a
+result as a cause. There is a common dead level over the world, to which
+churches and teachers, however seemingly opposite, are alike condemned.
+As it is here in England, so it is with the American Emerson. The fault
+is not in them, but in the age of which they are no more than the
+indicators. We are passing out of old forms of activity into others new
+and on their present scale untried; and how to work nobly in them is the
+one problem for us all. Surius will not profit us, nor the 'Mort
+d'Arthur.' Our calling is neither to the hermitage nor to the round
+table. Our work lies now in those peaceful occupations which, in ages
+called heroic, were thought unworthy of noble souls. In those it was the
+slave who tilled the ground, and wove the garments. It was the ignoble
+burgher who covered the sea with his ships, and raised up factories and
+workshops; and how far such occupations influenced the character, how
+they could be made to minister to loftiness of heart, and high and
+beautiful life, was a question which could not occur while the
+atmosphere of the heroic was on all sides believed so alien to them.
+Times have changed. The old hero worship has vanished with the need of
+it; but no other has risen in its stead, and without it we wander in the
+dark. The commonplaces of morality, the negative commandments, general
+exhortations to goodness, while neither speaker nor hearer can tell what
+they mean by goodness--these are all which now remain to us; and thrown
+into a life more complicated than any which the earth has yet
+experienced, we are left to wind our way through the labyrinth of its
+details without any clue except our own instincts, our own knowledge,
+our own hopes and desires.
+
+We complain of generalities; we will not leave ourselves exposed to the
+same charge. We will mention a few of the thousand instances in which we
+cry for guidance and find none; instances on which those who undertake
+to teach us ought to have made up their minds.
+
+On the surface at least of the Prayer-book, there seems to be something
+left remaining of the Catholic penitential system. Fasting is spoken of
+and abstinence, and some form or other of self-inflicted self-denial is
+necessarily meant. This thing can by no possibility be unimportant, and
+we may well smile at the exclusive claims of a church to the cure of our
+souls, who is unable to say what she thinks about it. Let us ask her
+living interpreters then, and what shall we get for an answer? either no
+answer at all, or contradictory answers; angrily, violently,
+passionately, contradictory. Among the many voices, what is a young man
+to conclude? He will conclude naturally according to his inclination;
+and if he chooses right, it will most likely be on a wrong motive.
+
+Again, _courage_ is, on all hands, considered as an essential of high
+character. Among all fine people, old and modern, wherever we are able
+to get an insight into their training system, we find it a thing
+particularly attended to. The Greeks, the Romans, the old Persians, our
+own nation till the last two hundred years, whoever of mankind have
+turned out good for anything anywhere, knew very well, that to exhort a
+boy to be brave without training him in it, would be like exhorting a
+young colt to submit to the bridle without breaking him in. Step by
+step, as he could bear it, the boy was introduced to danger, till his
+pulse ceased to be agitated, and he became familiarised with peril as
+his natural element. It was a matter of carefully considered, thoroughly
+recognised, and organised education. But courage nowadays is not a
+paying virtue. Courage does not help to make money, and so we have
+ceased to care about it; and boys are left to educate one another by
+their own semi-brutal instincts, in this, which is perhaps the most
+important of all features in the human character. Schools, as far as the
+masters are concerned with them, are places for teaching Greek and
+Latin--that, and nothing more. At the universities, fox-hunting is,
+perhaps, the only discipline of the kind now to be found, and
+fox-hunting, by forbidding it and winking at it, the authorities have
+contrived to place on as demoralising a footing as ingenuity could
+devise.[AA]
+
+To pass from training to life. A boy has done with school and college;
+he has become a man, and has to choose his profession. It is the one
+most serious step which he has yet taken. In most cases, there is no
+recalling it. He believes that he is passing through life to eternity;
+that his chance of getting to heaven depends on what use he makes of his
+time; he prays every day that he may be delivered from temptation; it is
+his business to see that he does not throw himself into it. Now, every
+one of the many professions has a peculiar character of its own, which,
+with rare exceptions, it inflicts on those who follow it. There is the
+shopkeeper type, the manufacturer type, the lawyer type, the medical
+type, the clerical type, the soldier's, the sailor's. The nature of a
+man is
+
+            Like the dyer's hand,
+    Subdued to what it works in;
+
+and we can distinguish with ease, on the slightest intercourse, to what
+class a grown person belongs. It is to be seen in his look, in his
+words, in his tone of thought, his voice, gesture, even in his
+hand-writing; and in everything which he does. Every human employment
+has its especial moral characteristic, its peculiar temptations, its
+peculiar influences--of a subtle and not easily analysed kind, and only
+to be seen in their effects. Here, therefore--here, if anywhere, we want
+Mr. Emerson with his representatives, or the Church with her advice and
+warning. But, in fact, what attempt do we see to understand any of this,
+or even to acknowledge it; to master the moral side of the professions;
+to teach young men entering them what they are to expect, what to avoid,
+or what to seek? Where are the highest types--the pattern lawyer, and
+shopkeeper, and merchant? Are they all equally favourable to excellence
+of character? Do they offer equal opportunities? Which best suits this
+disposition, and which suits that? Alas! character is little thought of
+in the choice. It is rather, which shall I best succeed in? Where shall
+I make most money? Suppose an anxious boy to go for counsel to his
+spiritual mother; to go to her, and ask her to guide him. Shall I be a
+soldier? he says. What will she tell him? This and no more--you may,
+without sin. Shall I be a lawyer, merchant, manufacturer, tradesman,
+engineer? Still the same answer. But which is best? he demands. We do
+not know: we do not know. There is no guilt in either; you may take
+which you please, provided you go to church regularly, and are honest
+and good. If he is foolish enough to persist further, and ask, in what
+goodness and honesty consist in _his especial department_ (whichever he
+selects), he will receive the same answer; in other words, he will be
+told to give every man his due and be left to find out for himself in
+what 'his due' consists. It is like an artist telling his pupil to put
+the lights and shadows in their due places, and leaving it to the
+pupil's ingenuity to interpret such instructive directions.
+
+One more instance of an obviously practical kind. Masters, few people
+will now deny, owe certain duties to their workmen beyond payment at the
+competition price for their labour, and the workmen owe something to
+their masters beyond making their own best bargain. Courtesy, on the one
+side, and respect on the other, are at least due; and wherever human
+beings are brought in contact, a number of reciprocal obligations at
+once necessarily arise out of the conditions of their position. It is
+this question which at the present moment is convulsing an entire branch
+of English trade. It is this question which has shaken the Continent
+like an earthquake, and yet it is one which, the more it is thought
+about, the more clearly seems to refuse to admit of being dealt with by
+legislation. It is a question for the Gospel and not for the law. The
+duties are of the kind which it is the business, not of the State, but
+of the Church, to look to. Why is the Church silent? There are duties;
+let her examine them, sift them, prove them, and then point them out.
+Why not--why not? Alas! she cannot, she dare not give offence, and
+therefore must find none. It is to be feared that we have a rough trial
+to pass through, before we find our way and understand our obligations.
+Yet far off we seem to see a time when the lives, the actions of the
+really great, great good masters, great good landlords, great good
+working men, will be laid out once more before their several orders,
+laid out in the name of God, as once the saints' lives were; and the
+same sounds shall be heard in factory and in counting-house as once
+sounded through abbey, chapel, and cathedral aisle--'Look at these men;
+bless God for them, and follow them.'
+
+And let no one fear that, if such happy time were come, it would result
+in a tame and weary sameness; that the beautiful variety of individual
+form would be lost, drilled away in regimental uniformity. Even if it
+were so, it need not be any the worse for us; we are not told to
+develope our individualities, we are told to bear fruit. The poor
+vagabond, with all his individualities about him, if by luck he falls
+into the hands of the recruiting sergeant, finds himself, a year later,
+with his red coat and his twelve months' training, not a little the
+better for the loss of them. But such schooling as we have been speaking
+of will drill out only such individualities as are of the unworthy kind,
+and will throw the strength of the nature into the development of the
+healthiest features in it. Far more, as things now are, we see men
+sinking into sameness--an inorganic, unwholesome sameness, in which the
+higher nature is subdued, and the _man_ is sacrificed to the profession.
+The circumstances of his life are his world; and he sinks under them, he
+does not conquer them. If he has to choose between the two, God's
+uniform is better than the world's. The first gives him freedom; the
+second takes it from him. Only here, as in everything, we must
+understand the nature of the element in which we work; understand it;
+understand the laws of it. Throw off the lower laws; the selfish,
+debasing influences of the profession; obey the higher; follow love,
+truthfulness, manliness; follow these first, and make the profession
+serve them; and that is freedom; there is none else possible for man.
+
+    Das Gesetz soll nur uns Freiheit geben;
+
+and whatever individuality is lost in the process, we may feel assured
+that the devil has too much to do with, to make us care to be rid of it.
+
+But how to arrive at this? so easy as it is to suggest on paper, so easy
+to foretell in words. Raise the level of public opinion, we might say;
+insist on a higher standard; in the economist's language, increase the
+demand for goodness, and the supply will follow; or, at any rate, men
+will do their best. Until we require more of one another, more will not
+be provided. But this is but to restate the problem in other words. How
+are we to touch the heart; how to awaken the desire? We believe that the
+good man, the great man, whatever he be, prince or peasant, is really
+lovely; that really and truly, if we can only see him, he more than
+anything will move us; and at least, we have a right to demand that the
+artificial hindrances which prevent our lifting him above the crowd,
+shall be swept away. He in his beautiful life is a thousand times more
+God's witness than any preacher in a pulpit, and his light must not be
+concealed any more. As we said, what lies in the way of our sacred
+recognition of great men is more than anything else the Protestant
+doctrine of good works. We do not forget what it meant when the world
+first heard of it. It was a cry from the very sanctuary of the soul,
+flinging off and execrating the accursed theory of merits, the sickening
+parade of redundant saintly virtues, which the Roman Church had
+converted into stock, and dispensed for the benefit of the believers.
+This is not the place to pour out our nausea on so poor, yet so
+detestable a farce. But it seems with all human matters, that as soon as
+spiritual truths are petrified into doctrines, it is another name for
+their death. They die, corrupt, and breed a pestilence. The doctrine of
+good works was hurled away by an instinct of generous feeling, and this
+feeling itself has again become dead, and a fresh disease has followed
+upon it. Nobody (or, at least, nobody good for anything) will lay a
+claim to merit for this or that good action which he may have done.
+Exactly in proportion as a man is really good, will be the eagerness
+with which he will refuse all credit for it; he will cry out, with all
+his soul, 'Not unto us--not unto us.'
+
+And yet, practically, we all know and feel that between man and man
+there is an infinite moral difference; one is good, one is bad, another
+hovers between the two; the whole of our conduct to each other is
+necessarily governed by a recognition of this fact, just as it is in the
+analogous question of the will. Ultimately, we are nothing of ourselves;
+we know that we are but what God has given us grace to be--we did not
+make ourselves--we do not keep ourselves here--we are but what in the
+eternal order of Providence we were designed to be--exactly that and
+nothing else; and yet we treat each other as responsible; we cannot
+help it. The most rigid Calvinist cannot eliminate his instincts; his
+loves and hatreds seem rather to deepen in intensity of colouring as,
+logically, his creed should lead him to conquer them as foolish. It is
+useless, it is impossible, to bring down these celestial mysteries upon
+our earth, to try to see our way by them, or determine our feelings by
+them; men are good, men are bad, relatively to us and to our
+understandings if you will, but still really, and so they must be
+treated.
+
+There is no more mischievous falsehood than to persist in railing at
+man's nature, as if it were all vile together, as if the best and the
+worst which comes of it were in God's sight equally without worth. These
+denunciations tend too fatally to realise themselves. Tell a man that no
+good which he can do is of any value, and depend upon it he will take
+you at your word--most especially will the wealthy, comfortable,
+luxurious man, just the man who has most means to do good, and whom of
+all things it is most necessary to stimulate to it. Surely we should not
+be afraid. The instincts which God has placed in our hearts are too
+mighty for us to be able to extinguish them with doctrinal sophistry. We
+love the good man, we praise him, we admire him--we cannot help it; and
+surely it is mere cowardice to shrink from recognising it
+openly--thankfully, divinely recognising it. If true at all, there is no
+truth in heaven or earth of deeper practical importance to us; and
+Protestantism must have lapsed from its once generous spirit, if it
+persists in imposing a dogma of its own upon our hearts, the touch of
+which is fatal as the touch of a torpedo to any high or noble endeavours
+after excellence.
+
+'Drive out nature with a fork, she ever comes running back;' and while
+we leave out of consideration the reality, we are filling the chasm with
+inventions of our own. The only novels which are popular among us are
+those which picture the successful battles of modern men and women with
+modern life, which are imperfect shadows of those real battles which
+every reader has seen in some form or other, or has longed to see in his
+own small sphere. It shows where the craving lies if we had but the
+courage to meet it; why need we fall back on imagination to create what
+God has created ready for us? In every department of human life, in the
+more and the less, there is always one man who is the best, and one
+type of man which is the best, living and working his silent way to
+heaven in the very middle of us. Let us find this type then--let us see
+what it is which makes such men the best, and raise up their
+excellencies into an acknowledged and open standard, of which they
+themselves shall be the living witnesses. Is there a landlord who is
+spending his money, not on pineries and hothouses, but on schools, and
+washhouses, and drains, who is less intent on the magnificence of his
+own grand house, than in providing cottages for his people where decency
+is possible; then let us not pass him by with a torpid wonder or a
+vanishing emotion of pleasure--rather let us seize him and raise him up
+upon a pinnacle, that other landlords may gaze upon him, if, perhaps,
+their hearts may prick them; and the world shall learn from what one man
+has done what they have a right to require that others shall do.
+
+So it might be through the thousand channels of life. It should not be
+so difficult; the machinery is ready, both to find your men and to use
+them. In theory, at least, every parish has its pastor, and the state of
+every soul is or ought to be known. We know not what turn things may
+take, or what silent changes are rushing on below us. Even while the
+present organisation remains--but, alas! no--it is no use to urge a
+Church bound hand and foot in State shackles to stretch its limbs in any
+wholesome activity. If the teachers of the people really were the wisest
+and best and noblest men among us, this and a thousand other blessed
+things would follow from it; till then let us be content to work and
+pray, and lay our hand to the wheel wherever we can find a spoke to
+grasp. _Corruptio optimi est pessima_; the national Church as it ought
+to be is the soul and conscience of the body politic, but a man whose
+body has the direction of his conscience we do not commonly consider in
+the most hopeful moral condition.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[AA] Written 1850.
+
+
+
+
+REYNARD THE FOX.[AB]
+
+
+Lord Macaulay, in his Essay on Machiavelli, propounds a singular theory.
+Declining the various solutions which have been offered to explain how a
+man supposed to be so great could have lent his genius to the doctrine
+of 'the Prince,' he has advanced a hypothesis of his own, which may or
+may not be true, as an interpretation of Machiavelli's character, but
+which, as an exposition of a universal ethical theory, is as
+questionable as what it is brought forward to explain. We will not show
+Lord Macaulay the disrespect of supposing that he has attempted an
+elaborate piece of irony. It is possible that he may have been
+exercising his genius with a paradox, but the subject is not of the sort
+in which we can patiently permit such exercises. It is hard work with
+all of us to keep ourselves straight, even when we see the road with all
+plainness as it lies out before us; and clever men must be good enough
+to find something else to amuse themselves with, instead of dusting our
+eyes with sophistry.
+
+According to this conception of human nature, the basenesses and the
+excellencies of mankind are no more than accidents of circumstance, the
+results of national feeling and national capabilities; and cunning and
+treachery, and lying, and such other 'natural defences of the weak
+against the strong,' are in themselves neither good nor bad, except as
+thinking makes them so. They are the virtues of a weak people, and they
+will be as much admired, and are as justly admirable; they are to the
+full as compatible with the highest graces and most lofty features of
+the heart and intellect as any of those opposite so called heroisms
+which we are generally so unthinking as to allow to monopolise the name.
+Cunning is the only resource of the feeble; and why may we not feel for
+victorious cunning as strong a sympathy as for the bold, downright, open
+bearing of the strong? That there may be no mistake in the essayist's
+meaning, that he may drive the nail home into the English understanding,
+he takes an illustration which shall be familiar to all of us in the
+characters of Iago and Othello. To our northern thought, the free and
+noble nature of the Moor is wrecked through a single infirmity, by a
+fiend in the human form. To one of Machiavelli's Italians, Iago's
+keen-edged intellect would have appeared as admirable as Othello's
+daring appears to us, and Othello himself little better than a fool and
+a savage. It is but a change of scene, of climate, of the animal
+qualities of the frame, and evil has become good, and good has become
+evil. Now, our displeasure with Lord Macaulay is, not that he has
+advanced a novel and mischievous theory: it was elaborated long ago in
+the finely tempered dialectics of the Schools of Rhetoric at Athens; and
+so long as such a phenomenon as a cultivated rogue remains possible
+among mankind, it will reappear in all languages and under any number of
+philosophical disguises. Seldom or never, however, has it appeared with
+so little attempt at disguise. It has been left for questionable poets
+and novelists to idealise the rascal genus; philosophers have escaped
+into the ambiguities of general propositions, and we do not remember
+elsewhere to have met with a serious ethical thinker deliberately laying
+two whole organic characters, with their vices and virtues in full life
+and bloom, side by side, asking himself which is best, and answering
+gravely that it is a matter of taste.
+
+Lord Macaulay has been bolder than his predecessors; he has shrunk from
+no conclusion, and has looked directly into the very heart of the
+matter; he has struck, as we believe, the very lowest stone of our
+ethical convictions, and declared that the foundation quakes under it.
+
+For, ultimately, how do we know that right is right, and wrong is wrong?
+People in general accept it on authority; but authority itself must
+repose on some ulterior basis; and what is that? Are we to say that in
+morals there is a system of primary axioms, out of which we develope our
+conclusions, and apply them, as they are needed, to life? It does not
+appear so. The analogy of morals is rather with art than with geometry.
+The grace of heaven gives us good men, and gives us beautiful creations;
+and we, perceiving by the instincts within ourselves that celestial
+presence in the objects on which we gaze, find out for ourselves the
+laws which make them what they are, not by comparing them with any
+antecedent theory, but by careful analysis of our own impressions, by
+asking ourselves what it is which we admire in them, and by calling that
+good, and calling that beautiful.
+
+So, then, if admiration be the first fact--if the sense of it be the
+ultimate ground on which the after temple of morality, as a system,
+upraises itself--if we can be challenged here on our own ground, and
+fail to make it good, what we call the life of the soul becomes a dream
+of a feeble enthusiast, and we moralists a mark for the sceptic's finger
+to point at with scorn.
+
+Bold and ably-urged arguments against our own convictions, if they do
+not confuse us, will usually send us back over our ground to re-examine
+the strength of our positions: and if we are honest with ourselves, we
+shall very often find points of some uncertainty left unguarded, of
+which the show of the strength of our enemy will oblige us to see better
+to the defence. It was not without some shame, and much uneasiness,
+that, while we were ourselves engaged in this process, full of
+indignation with Lord Macaulay, we heard a clear voice ringing in our
+ear, 'Who art thou that judgest another?' and warning us of the presence
+in our own heart of a sympathy, which we could not 'deny,' with the
+sadly questionable hero of the German epic, 'Reynard the Fox.' With our
+vulpine friend, we were on the edge of the very same abyss, if, indeed,
+we were not rolling in the depth of it. By what sophistry could we
+justify ourselves, if not by the very same which we had just been so
+eagerly condemning? And our conscience whispered to us that we had been
+swift to detect a fault in another, because it was the very fault to
+which, in our own heart of hearts, we had a latent leaning.
+
+Was it so indeed, then? Was Reineke no better than Iago? Was the sole
+difference between them, that the _vates sacer_ who had sung the
+exploits of Reineke loved the wicked rascal, and entangled us in loving
+him? It was a question to be asked. And yet we had faith enough in the
+straight-forwardness of our own sympathies to feel sure that it must
+admit of some sort of answer. And, indeed, we rapidly found an answer
+satisfactory enough to give us time to breathe, in remembering that
+Reineke, with all his roguery, has no malice in him. It is not in his
+nature to hate; he could not do it if he tried. The characteristic of
+Iago is that deep motiveless malignity which rejoices in evil as its
+proper element--which loves evil as good men love virtue. In
+calculations on the character of the Moor, Iago despises Othello's
+unsuspicious trustingness as imbecility, while he hates him as a man
+because his nature is the perpetual opposite and perpetual reproach of
+his own. Now, Reineke would not have hurt a creature, not even
+Scharfenebbe, the crow's wife, when she came to peck his eyes out, if he
+had not been hungry; and that [Greek: gastros ananke], that craving of
+the stomach, makes a difference quite infinite. It is true that, like
+Iago, Reineke rejoices in the exercise of his intellect: the sense of
+his power and the scientific employment of his time are a real delight
+to him; but then, as we said, he does not love evil for its own sake; he
+is only somewhat indifferent to it. If the other animals venture to take
+liberties with him, he will repay them in their own coin, and get his
+quiet laugh at them at the same time; but the object generally for which
+he lives is the natural one of getting his bread for himself and his
+family; and, as the great moralist says, 'It is better to be bad for
+something than for nothing.' Badness generally is undesirable; but
+badness in its essence, which may be called heroic badness, is
+gratuitous.
+
+But this first thought served merely to give us a momentary relief from
+our alarm, and we determined we would sift the matter to the bottom, and
+no more expose ourselves to be taken at such disadvantage. We went again
+to the poem, with our eyes open, and our moral sense as keenly awake as
+a genuine wish to understand our feelings could make it. We determined
+that we would really know what we did feel and what we did not. We would
+not be lightly scared away from our friend, but neither would we any
+more allow our judgment to be talked down by that fluent tongue of his;
+he should have justice from us, he and his biographer, as far as it lay
+with us to discern justice and to render it.
+
+And really on this deliberate perusal it did seem little less than
+impossible that we could find any conceivable attribute illustrated in
+Reineke's proceedings which we could dare to enter in our catalogue of
+virtues, and not blush to read it there. What sin is there in the
+Decalogue in which he has not steeped himself to the lips? To the lips,
+shall we say? nay, over head and ears--rolling and rollicking in sin.
+Murder, and theft, and adultery; sacrilege, perjury, lying--his very
+life is made of them. On he goes to the end, heaping crime on crime, and
+lie on lie, and at last, when it seems that justice, which has been so
+long vainly halting after him, has him really in her iron grasp, there
+is a solemn appeal to heaven, a challenge, a battle ordeal, in which, by
+means we may not venture even to whisper, the villain prospers, and
+comes out glorious, victorious, amidst the applause of a gazing world.
+To crown it all, the poet tells us that under the disguise of the animal
+name and form the world of man is represented, and the true course of
+it; and the idea of the book is, that we who read it may learn therein
+to discern between good and evil, and choose the first and avoid the
+last. It seemed beyond the power of sophistry to whitewash Reineke, and
+the interest which still continued to cling to him seemed too nearly to
+resemble the unwisdom of the multitude, with whom success is the one
+virtue, and failure the only crime.
+
+It appeared, too, that although the animal disguises were too
+transparent to endure a moment's reflection, yet that they were so
+gracefully worn that such moment's reflection was not to be come at
+without an effort. Our imagination following the costume, did
+imperceptibly betray our judgment; we admired the human intellect, the
+ever ready prompt sagacity and presence of mind. We delighted in the
+satire on the foolishnesses and greedinesses of our own
+fellow-creatures; but in our regard for the hero we forgot his humanity
+wherever it was his interest that we should forget it, and while we
+admired him as a man we judged him only as a fox. We doubt whether it
+would have been possible, if he had been described as an open
+acknowledged biped in coat and trousers, to have retained our regard for
+him. Something or other in us, either real rightmindedness, or humbug,
+or hypocrisy, would have obliged us to mix more censure with our liking
+than most of us do in the case as it stands. It may be that the dress of
+the fox throws us off our guard, and lets out a secret or two which we
+commonly conceal even from ourselves. When we have to pass an opinion
+upon bad people, who at the same time are clever and attractive, we say
+rather what we think that we ought to feel than what we feel in reality;
+while with Reineke, being but an animal, we forget to make ourselves up,
+and for once our genuine tastes show themselves freely. Some degree of
+truth there undoubtedly is in this. But making all allowance for
+it--making all and over allowance for the trick which is passed upon our
+senses, there still remained a feeling unresolved. The poem was not
+solely the apotheosis of a rascal in whom we were betrayed into taking
+an interest; and it was not a satire merely on the world, and on the men
+whom the world delight to honour. There was still something which really
+deserved to be liked in Reineke, and what it was we had as yet failed to
+discover.
+
+'Two are better than one,' and we resolved in our difficulty to try what
+our friends might have to say about it. The appearance of the Wurtemburg
+animals at the Exhibition came fortunately _apropos_ to our assistance:
+a few years ago it was rare to find a person who had read the Fox Epic;
+and still more, of course, to find one whose judgment would be worth
+taking about it. But now the charming figures of Reineke himself, and
+the Lion King, and Isegrim, and Bruin, and Bellyn, and Hintze, and
+Grimbart, had set all the world asking who and what they were, and the
+story began to get itself known. The old editions, which had long slept
+unbound in reams upon the shelves, began to descend and clothe
+themselves in green and crimson. Mr. Dickens sent a summary of it round
+the households of England. Everybody began to talk of Reineke; and now,
+at any rate, we said to ourselves, we shall see whether we are alone in
+our liking--whether others share in this strange sympathy, or whether it
+be some unique and monstrous moral obliquity in ourselves.
+
+We set to work, therefore, with all earnestness, feeling our way first
+with fear and delicacy, as conscious of our own delinquency, to gather
+judgments which should be wiser than our own, and correct ourselves, if
+it proved that we required correction, with whatever severity might be
+necessary. The result of this labour of ours was not a little
+surprising. We found that women invariably, with that clear moral
+instinct of theirs, at once utterly reprobated and detested our poor
+Reynard; detested the hero and detested the bard who sang of him with so
+much sympathy; while men we found almost invariably feeling just as we
+felt ourselves, only with this difference, that we saw no trace of
+uneasiness in them about the matter. It was no little comfort to us,
+moreover, to find that the exceptions were rather among the half-men,
+the would-be extremely good, but whose goodness was of that dead and
+passive kind which spoke to but a small elevation of thought or
+activity; while just in proportion as a man was strong, and real, and
+energetic, was his ability to see good in Reineke. It was really most
+strange: one near friend of ours--a man who, as far as we knew (and we
+knew him well), had never done a wrong thing--when we ventured to hint
+something about roguery, replied, 'You see, he was such a clever rogue,
+that he had a right.' Another, whom we pressed more closely with that
+treacherous cannibal feast at Malepartus, on the body of poor Lampe,
+said off-hand and with much impatience of such questioning, 'Such
+fellows were made to be eaten.' What could we do? It had come to
+this;--as in the exuberance of our pleasure with some dear child, no
+ordinary epithet will sometimes reach to express the vehemence of our
+affection, and borrowing language out of the opposites, we call him
+little rogue or little villain, so here, reversing the terms of the
+analogy, we bestow the fulness of our regard on Reineke because of that
+transcendently successful roguery.
+
+When we asked our friends how they came to feel as they did, they had
+little to say. They were not persons who could be suspected of any
+latent disposition towards evil-doing; and yet though it appeared as if
+they were falling under the description of those unhappy ones who, if
+they did not such things themselves, yet 'had pleasure in those who did
+them,' they did not care to justify themselves. The fact was so: [Greek:
+arche to hoti]: it was a fact--what could we want more? Some few
+attempted feebly to maintain that the book was a satire. But this only
+moved the difficulty a single step; for the fact of the sympathy
+remained unimpaired, and if it was a satire we were ourselves the
+objects of it. Others urged what we said above, that the story was only
+of poor animals that, according to Descartes, not only had no souls, but
+scarcely had even life in any original and sufficient sense, and
+therefore we need not trouble ourselves. But one of two alternatives it
+seemed we were bound to choose, either of which was fatal to the
+proposed escape. Either there was a man hiding under the fox's skin; or
+else, if real foxes have such brains as Reineke was furnished withal, no
+honest doubt could be entertained that some sort of conscience was not
+forgotten in the compounding of him, and he must be held answerable
+according to his knowledge.
+
+What would Mr. Carlyle say of it, we thought, with his might and right?
+'The just thing in the long run is the strong thing.' But Reineke had a
+long run out and came in winner. Does he only 'seem to succeed?' Who
+does succeed, then, if he no more than seems? The vulpine intellect
+knows where the geese live, it is elsewhere said; but among Reineke's
+victims we do not remember one goose, in the literal sense of goose; and
+as to geese metaphorical, the whole visible world lies down complacently
+at his feet. Nor does Mr. Carlyle's expressed language on this very poem
+serve any better to help us--nay, it seems as if he feels uneasy in the
+neighbourhood of so strong a rascal, so briefly he dismisses him.
+'Worldly prudence is the only virtue which is certain of its reward.'
+Nay, but there is more in it than that: no worldly prudence would
+command the voices which have been given in to us for Reineke.
+
+Three only possibilities lay now before us: either we should, on
+searching, find something solid in the Fox's doings to justify success;
+or else the just thing was not always the strong thing; or it might be,
+that such very semblance of success was itself the most miserable
+failure; that the wicked man who was struck down and foiled, and foiled
+again, till he unlearnt his wickedness, or till he was disabled from any
+more attempting it, was blessed in his disappointment; that to triumph
+in wickedness, and to continue in it and to prosper to the end, was the
+last, worst penalty inflicted by the divine vengeance. [Greek: Hin'
+athanatos e adikos on]--to go on with injustice through this world and
+through all eternity, uncleansed by any purgatorial fire, untaught by
+any untoward consequence to open his eyes and to see in its true
+accursed form the miserable demon to which he has sold himself--this, of
+all catastrophes which could befal an evil man, was the deepest, lowest,
+and most savouring of hell, which the purest of the Grecian moralists
+could reason out for himself,--under which third hypothesis many an
+uneasy misgiving would vanish away, and Mr. Carlyle's broad aphorism
+might be accepted by us with thankfulness.
+
+It appeared, therefore, at any rate, to have to come to this--that if we
+wanted a solution for our sphinx enigma, no OEdipus was likely to rise
+and find it for us; and that if we wanted help, we must take it for
+ourselves. This only we found, that if we sinned in our regard for the
+unworthy animal, we shared our sin with the largest number of our own
+sex; comforted with the sense of good fellowship, we went boldly to work
+upon our consciousness; and the imperfect analysis which we succeeded in
+accomplishing, we here lay before you, whoever you may be, who have
+felt, as we have felt, a regard which was a moral disturbance to you,
+and which you will be pleased if we enable you to justify--
+
+            Si quid novisti rectius istis,
+    Candidus imperti; si non, his uttere mecum.
+
+Following the clue which was thrust into our hand by the marked
+difference of the feelings of men upon the subject, from those of women,
+we were at once satisfied that Reineke's goodness, if he had any, must
+lay rather in the active than the passive department of life. The
+negative obedience to prohibitory precepts, under which women are bound
+as well as men, as was already too clear, we were obliged to surrender
+as hopeless. But it seemed as if, with respect to men whose business is
+to do, and to labour, and to accomplish, this negative test was a
+seriously imperfect one; and it was quite as possible that a man who
+unhappily had broken many prohibitions might yet exhibit positive
+excellences, as that he might walk through life picking his way with the
+utmost assiduity, risking nothing and doing nothing, not committing a
+single sin, but keeping his talent carefully wrapt up in a napkin, and
+get sent, in the end, to outer darkness for his pains, as an
+unprofitable servant. And this appeared the more important to us, as it
+was very little dwelt upon by religions or moral teachers: at the end of
+six thousand years, the popular notion of virtue, as far as it could get
+itself expressed, had not risen beyond the mere abstinence from certain
+specific bad actions.
+
+The king of the beasts forgives Reineke on account of the substantial
+services which at various times he has rendered. His counsel was always
+the wisest, his hand the promptest in cases of difficulty; and all that
+dexterity, and politeness, and courtesy, and exquisite culture had not
+been learnt without an effort, or without conquering many undesirable
+tendencies in himself. Men are not born with any art in its perfection,
+and Reineke had made himself valuable by his own sagacity and exertion.
+Now, on the human stage, a man who has made himself valuable is certain
+to be valued. However we may pretend to estimate men according to the
+wrong things which they have done, or abstained from doing, we in fact
+follow the example of Nobel, the king of the beasts: we give them their
+places among us according to the service-ableness and capability which
+they display. We might mention not a few eminent public servants, whom
+the world delights to honour--ministers, statesmen, lawyers, men of
+science, artists, poets, soldiers, who, if they were tried by the
+negative test, would show but a poor figure; yet their value is too real
+to be dispensed with; and we tolerate unquestionable wrong to secure the
+services of eminent ability. The world really does this, and it always
+has really done it from the beginning of the human history; and it is
+only indolence or cowardice which has left our ethical teaching halting
+so far behind the universal and necessary practice. Even questionable
+prima donnas, in virtue of their sweet voices, have their praises hymned
+in drawing-room and newspaper, and applause rolls over them, and gold
+and bouquets shower on them from lips and hands which, except for those
+said voices, would treat them to a ruder reward. In real fact, we take
+our places in this world, not according to what we are not, but
+according to what we are. His Holiness Pope Clement, when his
+audience-room rang with furious outcries for justice on Benvenuto
+Cellini, who, as far as half-a-dozen murders could form a title, was as
+fair a candidate for the gallows as ever swung from that unlucky wood,
+replied, 'All this is very well, gentlemen: these murders are bad
+things, we know that. But where am I to get another Benvenuto if you
+hang this one for me?'
+
+Or, to take an acknowledged hero, one of the old Greek sort, the theme
+of the song of the greatest of human poets, whom it is less easy to
+refuse to admire than even our friend Reineke. Take Ulysses. It cannot
+be said that he kept his hands from taking what was not his, or his
+tongue from speaking what was not true; and if Frau Ermelyn had to
+complain (as indeed there was too much reason for her complaining) of
+certain infirmities in her good husband Reineke, Penelope, too, might
+have urged a thing or two, if she had known as much about the matter as
+we know, which the modern moralist would find it hard to excuse.
+
+After all is said, the capable man is the man to be admired. The man who
+tries and fails, what is the use of him? We are in this world to do
+something--not to fail in doing it. Of your bunglers--helpless,
+inefficient persons, 'unfit alike for good or ill,' who try one thing,
+and fail because they are not strong enough, and another, because they
+have not energy enough, and a third, because they have no
+talent--inconsistent, unstable, and therefore never to excel, what shall
+we say of them? what use is there in them? what hope is there of them?
+what can we wish for them? [Greek: to mepot' einai pant' ariston]. It
+were better for them they had never been born. To be able to do what a
+man tries to do, that is the first requisite; and given that, we may
+hope all things for him. 'Hell is paved with good intentions,'the
+proverb says; and the enormous proportion of bad successes in this life
+lie between the desire and the execution. Give us a man who is able to
+do what he settles that he desires to do, and we have the one thing
+indispensable. If he can succeed doing ill, much more he can succeed
+doing well. Show him better, and, at any rate, there is a chance that he
+will do better.
+
+We are not concerned here with Benvenuto or with Ulysses further than to
+show, through the position which we all consent to give them, that there
+is much unreality in our common moral talk, against which we must be on
+our guard. And if we fling off an old friend, and take to affecting a
+hatred of him which we do not feel, we have scarcely gained by the
+exchange, even though originally our friendship may have been misplaced.
+
+Capability no one will deny to Reineke. That is the very _differentia_
+of him. An 'animal capable' would be his sufficient definition. Here is
+another very genuinely valuable feature about him--his wonderful
+singleness of character. Lying, treacherous, cunning scoundrel as he is,
+there is a wholesome absence of humbug about him. Cheating all the
+world, he never cheats himself; and while he is a hypocrite, he is
+always a conscious hypocrite--a form of character, however paradoxical
+it may seem, a great deal more accessible to good influences than the
+other of the unconscious sort. Ask Reineke for the principles of his
+life, and if it suited his purpose to tell you, he could do so with the
+greatest exactness. There would be no discrepancy between the profession
+and the practice. He is most truly single-minded, and therefore stable
+in his ways, and therefore, as the world goes, and in the world's sense,
+successful. Whether really successful is a question we do not care here
+to enter on; but only to say this--that of all unsuccessful men in every
+sense, either divine, or human, or devilish, there is none equal to
+Bunyan's Mr. Facing-both-ways--the fellow with one eye on heaven and one
+on earth--who sincerely preaches one thing, and sincerely does another;
+and from the intensity of his unreality is unable either to see or feel
+the contradiction. Serving God with his lips, and with the half of his
+mind which is not bound up in the world, and serving the devil with his
+actions, and with the other half, he is substantially trying to cheat
+both God and the devil, and is, in fact, only cheating himself and his
+neighbours. This, of all characters upon the earth, appears to us to be
+the one of whom there is no hope at all--a character becoming, in these
+days, alarmingly abundant; and the abundance of which makes us find even
+in a Reineke an inexpressible relief.
+
+But what we most thoroughly value in him is his capacity. He can do what
+he sets to work to do. That blind instinct with which the world shouts
+and claps its hand for the successful man, is one of those latent
+impulses in us which are truer than we know; it is the universal
+confessional to which Nature leads us, and, in her intolerance of
+disguise and hypocrisy, compels us to be our own accusers. Whoever can
+succeed in a given condition of society, can succeed only in virtue of
+fulfilling the terms which society exacts of him; and if he can fulfil
+them triumphantly, of course it rewards him and praises him. He is what
+the rest of the world would be, if their powers were equal to their
+desires. He has accomplished what they all are vaguely, and with
+imperfect consistency, struggling to accomplish; and the character of
+the conqueror--the means and appliances by which he has climbed up that
+great pinnacle on which he stands victorious, the observed of all
+observers, is no more than a very exact indicator of the amount of real
+virtue in the age, out of which he stands prominent.
+
+We are forced to acknowledge that it was not a very virtuous age in
+which Reineke made himself a great man; but that was the fault of the
+age as much as the fault of him. His nature is to succeed wherever he
+is. If the age had required something else of him, then he would have
+been something else. Whatever it had said to him, 'Do, and I will make
+you my hero,' that Reineke would have done. No appetite makes a slave of
+him--no faculty refuses obedience to his will. His entire nature is
+under perfect organic control to the one supreme authority. And the one
+object for which he lives, and for which, let his lot have been cast in
+whatever century it might, he would always have lived, is to rise, to
+thrive, to prosper, and become great.
+
+The world as he found it said to him--Prey upon us; we are your oyster,
+let your wit open us. If you will only do it cleverly--if you will take
+care that we shall not close upon your fingers in the process, you may
+devour us at your pleasure, and we shall feel ourselves highly honoured.
+Can we wonder at a fox of Reineke's abilities taking such a world at its
+word?
+
+And let it not be supposed that society in this earth of ours is ever so
+viciously put together, is ever so totally without organic life, that a
+rogue, unredeemed by any merit, can prosper in it. There is no strength
+in rottenness; and when it comes to that, society dies and falls in
+pieces. Success, as it is called, even worldly success, is impossible,
+without some exercise of what is called moral virtue, without some
+portion of it, infinitesimally small, perhaps, but still some. Courage,
+for instance, steady self-confidence, self-trust, self-reliance--that
+only basis and foundation stone on which a strong character can rear
+itself--do we not see this in Reineke? While he lives, he lives for
+himself; but if he comes to dying, he can die like his betters; and his
+wit is not of that effervescent sort which will fly away at the sight of
+death and leave him panic-stricken. It is true there is a meaning to
+that word courage, which was perhaps not to be found in the dictionary
+in which Reineke studied. 'I hope I am afraid of nothing, Trim,' said my
+uncle Toby, 'except doing a wrong thing.' With Reineke there was no
+'except.' His digestive powers shrank from no action, good or bad, which
+would serve his turn. Yet it required no slight measure of courage to
+treat his fellow-creatures with the steady disrespect with which Reineke
+treats them. To walk along among them, regardless of any interest but
+his own; out of mere wantonness to hook them up like so many
+cock-chafers, and spin them for his pleasure; not like Domitian, with an
+imperial army to hold them down during the operation, but with no other
+assistance but his own little body and large wit; it was something to
+venture upon. And a world which would submit to be so treated, what
+could he do but despise?
+
+To the animals utterly below ourselves, external to our own species, we
+hold ourselves bound by no law. We say to them, _vos non vobis_, without
+any uneasy misgivings. We rob the bees of their honey, the cattle of
+their lives, the horse and the ass of their liberty. We kill the wild
+animals that they may not interfere with our pleasures; and acknowledge
+ourselves bound to them by no terms except what are dictated by our own
+convenience. And why should Reineke have acknowledged an obligation any
+more than we, to creatures so utterly below himself? He was so clever,
+as our friend said, that he had a right. That he _could_ treat them so,
+Mr. Carlyle would say, proves that he had a right.
+
+But it is a mistake to say he is without a conscience. No bold creature
+is ever totally without one. Even Iago shows some sort of conscience.
+Respecting nothing else in heaven or earth, he respects and even
+reverences his own intellect. After one of those sweet interviews with
+Roderigo, his, what we must call conscience, takes him to account for
+his company; and he pleads to it in his own justification--
+
+    For I mine own gained knowledge should _profane_
+    Were I to waste myself with such a snipe
+    But for my sport and profit.
+
+Reineke, if we take the mass of his misdeeds, preyed chiefly, like our
+own Robin Hood, on rogues who were greater rogues than himself. If Bruin
+chose to steal Rusteviel's honey, if Hintze trespassed in the priest's
+granary, they were but taken in their own evildoings. And what is
+Isegrim, the worst of Reineke's victims, but a great heavy, stupid,
+lawless brute?--fair type, we will suppose, of not a few Front-de-Boeufs
+and other so-called nobles of the poet's era, whose will to do mischief
+was happily limited by their obtuseness. We remember that French
+baron--Gilbert de Retz, we believe, was his name--who, like Isegrim, had
+studied at the universities, and passed for learned, whose after-dinner
+pastime for many years, as it proved at last, was to cut children's
+throats for the pleasure of watching them die. We may well feel
+gratitude that a Reineke was provided to be the scourge of such monsters
+as these; and we have a thorough pure, exuberant satisfaction in seeing
+the intellect in that little weak body triumph over them and trample
+them down. This, indeed, this victory of intellect over brute force, is
+one great secret of our pleasure in the poem, and goes far, in the
+Carlyle direction, to satisfy us that, at any rate, it is not given to
+mere base physical strength to win in the battle of life, even in times
+when physical strength is apparently the only recognised power.
+
+We are insensibly falling from our self-assumed judicial office into
+that of advocacy; and sliding into what may be plausibly urged, rather
+than standing fast on what we can surely affirm. Yet there are cases
+when it is fitting for the judge to become the advocate of an undefended
+prisoner; and advocacy is only plausible when a few words of truth are
+mixed with what we say, like the few drops of wine which colour and
+faintly flavour the large draught of water. Such few grains or drops,
+whatever they may be, we must leave to the kindness of Reynard's friends
+to distil for him, while we continue a little longer in the same strain.
+
+After all, it may be said, what is it in man's nature which is really
+admirable? It is idle for us to waste our labour in passing Reineke
+through the moral crucible unless we shall recognise the results when we
+obtain them; and in these moral sciences our analytical tests can only
+be obtained by a study of our own internal experience. If we desire to
+know what we admire in Reineke, we must look for what we admire in
+ourselves. And what is that? Is it what on Sundays, and on set
+occasions, and when we are mounted on our moral stilts, we are pleased
+to call goodness, probity, obedience, humility? Is it? Is it really? Is
+it not rather the face and form which Nature made--the strength which is
+ours, we know not how--our talents, our rank, our possessions? It
+appears to us that we most value in ourselves and most admire in our
+neighbour, not acquisitions, but _gifts_. A man does not praise himself
+for being good. If he praise himself he is not good. The first condition
+of goodness is forgetfulness of self; and where self has entered, under
+however plausible a form, the health is but skin-deep, and underneath
+there is corruption. And so through everything; we value, we are vain
+of, proud of, or whatever you please to call it, not what we have done
+for ourselves, but what has been done for us--what has been given to us
+by the upper powers. We look up to high-born men, to wealthy men, to
+fortunate men, to clever men. Is it not so? Whom do we choose for the
+county member, the magistrate, the officer, the minister? The good man
+we leave to the humble enjoyment of his goodness, and we look out for
+the able or the wealthy. And again of the wealthy, as if on every side
+to witness to the same universal law, the man who with no labour of his
+own has inherited a fortune, ranks higher in the world's esteem than his
+father who made it. We take rank by descent. Such of us as have the
+longest pedigree, and are therefore the farthest removed from the first
+who made the fortune and founded the family, we are the noblest. The
+nearer to the fountain, the fouler the stream; and that first ancestor,
+who has soiled his fingers by labour, is no better than a parvenu.
+
+And as it is with what we value, so it is with what we blame. It is an
+old story, that there is no one who would not in his heart prefer being
+a knave to being a fool; and when we fail in a piece of attempted
+roguery, as Coleridge has wisely observed, though reasoning unwisely
+from it, we lay the blame, not on our own moral nature, for which we are
+responsible, but on our intellectual, for which we are not responsible.
+We do not say what knaves, we say what fools, we have been; perplexing
+Coleridge, who regards it as a phenomenon of some deep moral disorder;
+whereas it is but one more evidence of the universal fact that _gifts_
+are the true and proper object of appreciation; and as we admire men for
+possessing gifts, so we blame them for their absence. The noble man is
+the gifted man; the ignoble is the ungifted; and therefore we have only
+to state a simple law in simple language to have a full solution of the
+enigma of Reineke. He has gifts enough: of that, at least, there can be
+no doubt; and if he lacks the gift to use them in the way which we call
+good, at least he uses them successfully. His victims are less gifted
+than he, and therefore less noble; and therefore he has a right to use
+them as he pleases.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And, after all, what are these victims? Among the heaviest charges
+which were urged against him was the killing and eating of that wretched
+Scharfenebbe--Sharpbeak--the crow's wife. It is well that there are two
+sides to every story. A poor weary fox, it seemed, was not to be allowed
+to enjoy a quiet sleep in the sunshine but what an unclean carrion bird
+must come down and take a peck at him. We can feel no sympathy with the
+outcries of the crow husband over the fate of the unfortunate Sharpbeak.
+Wofully, he says, he flew over the place where, a few moments before, in
+the glory of glossy plumage, a loving wife sate croaking out her passion
+for him, and found nothing--nothing but a little blood and a few torn
+feathers--all else clean gone and utterly abolished. Well, and if it was
+so, it was a blank prospect for him, but the earth was well rid of her;
+and for herself, it was a higher fate to be assimilated into the body of
+Reineke than to remain in a miserable individuality to be a layer of
+carrion crows' eggs.
+
+And then for Bellyn, and for Bruin, and for Hintze, and the rest, who
+would needs be meddling with what was no concern of theirs--what is
+there in them to challenge either regret or pity? They made love to
+their occupation.
+
+    'Tis dangerous when the baser nature falls
+    Between the pass and fell incensed points
+    Of mighty opposites:
+    They lie not near our conscience.
+
+Ah! if they were all. But there is one misdeed, one which outweighs all
+others whatsoever--a crime which it is useless to palliate, let our
+other friend say what he pleased; and Reineke himself felt it so. It
+sate heavy, _for him_, on his soul, and alone of all the actions of his
+life we are certain that he wished it undone--the death and eating of
+that poor foolish Lampe, the hare. It was a paltry revenge in Reineke.
+Lampe had told tales of him; he had complained that Reineke, under
+pretence of teaching him his Catechism, had seized him and tried to
+murder him; and though he provoked his fate by thrusting himself, after
+such a warning, into the jaws of Malepartus, Reineke betrays an
+uneasiness about it in confession; and, unlike himself, feels it
+necessary to make some sort of an excuse.
+
+Grimbart, the badger, Reineke's father confessor, had been obliged to
+speak severely of the seriousness of the offence. 'You see,' Reineke
+answers:--
+
+    To help oneself out through the world is a queer sort of business:
+        one can not
+    Keep, you know, quite altogether as pure as one can in the cloister.
+    When we are handling honey we now and then lick at our fingers.
+    Lampe sorely provoked me; he frisked about this way and that way,
+    Up and down, under my eyes, and he looked so fat and so jolly,
+    Really I could not resist it. I entirely forgot how I loved him.
+    And then he was so stupid.
+
+But even this acknowledgment does not satisfy Reineke. His mind is
+evidently softened, and it was on that occasion that he poured out his
+pathetic lamentation over the sad condition of the world--so fluent, so
+musical, so touching, that Grimbart listened with wide eyes, unable,
+till it had run to the length of a sermon, to collect himself. It is
+true that at last his office as ghostly father obliged him to put in a
+slight demurrer:--
+
+    Uncle, the badger replied, why these are the sins of your neighbours;
+    Yours, I should think, were sufficient, and rather more now
+        to the purpose.
+
+But he sighs to think what a bishop Reineke would have made.
+
+And now, for the present, farewell to Reineke Fuchs, and to the song in
+which his glory is enshrined--the Welt Bibel, Bible of this world, as
+Goethe called it, the most exquisite moral satire, as we will call it,
+which has ever been composed. It is not addressed to a passing mode of
+folly or of profligacy, but it touches the perennial nature of mankind,
+laying bare our own sympathies, and tastes, and weaknesses, with as keen
+and true an edge as when the living world of the old Swabian poet winced
+under its earliest utterance.
+
+Humorous in the high pure sense, every laugh which it gives may have its
+echo in a sigh, or may glide into it as excitement subsides into
+thought; and yet, for those who do not care to find matter there either
+for thought or sadness, may remain innocently as a laugh.
+
+Too strong for railing, too kindly and loving for the bitterness of
+irony, the poem is, as the world itself, a book where each man will find
+what his nature enables him to see, which gives us back each our own
+image, and teaches us each the lesson which each of us desires to
+learn.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[AB] _Fraser's Magazine_, 1852.
+
+
+
+
+THE CAT'S PILGRIMAGE.
+
+1850.
+
+
+PART I.
+
+'It is all very fine,' said the Cat, yawning, and stretching herself
+against the fender, 'but it is rather a bore; I don't see the use of
+it.' She raised herself, and arranging her tail into a ring, and seating
+herself in the middle of it, with her fore paws in a straight line from
+her shoulders, at right angles to the hearth-rug, she looked pensively
+at the fire. 'It is very odd,' she went on, 'there is my poor Tom; he is
+gone. I saw him stretched out in the yard. I spoke to him, and he took
+no notice of me. He won't, I suppose, ever any more, for they put him
+under the earth. Nice fellow he was. It is wonderful how little one
+cares about it. So many jolly evenings we spent together; and now I seem
+to get on quite as well without him. I wonder what has become of him;
+and my last children, too, what has become of them? What are we here
+for? I would ask the men, only they are so conceited and stupid they
+can't understand what we say. I hear them droning away, teaching their
+little ones every day; telling them to be good, and to do what they are
+bid, and all that. Nobody ever tells me to do anything; if they do I
+don't do it, and I am very good. I wonder whether I should be any better
+if I minded more. I'll ask the Dog.'
+
+'Dog,' said she, to a little fat spaniel coiled up on a mat like a
+lady's muff with a head and tail stuck on to it, 'Dog, what do you make
+of it all?'
+
+The Dog faintly opened his languid eyes, looked sleepily at the Cat for
+a moment, and dropped them again.
+
+'Dog,' she said, 'I want to talk to you; don't go to sleep. Can't you
+answer a civil question?'
+
+'Don't bother me,' said the Dog, 'I am tired. I stood on my hind legs
+ten minutes this morning before I could get my breakfast, and it hasn't
+agreed with me.'
+
+'Who told you to do it?' said the Cat.
+
+'Why, the lady I have to take care of me,' replied the Dog.
+
+'Do you feel any better for it, Dog, after you have been standing on
+your legs?' asked she.
+
+'Hav'n't I told you, you stupid Cat, that it hasn't agreed with me; let
+me go to sleep and don't plague me.'
+
+'But I mean,' persisted the Cat, 'do you feel improved, as the men call
+it? They tell their children that if they do what they are told they
+will improve, and grow good and great. Do you feel good and great?'
+
+'What do I know?' said the Dog. 'I eat my breakfast and am happy. Let me
+alone.'
+
+'Do you never think, oh Dog without a soul! Do you never wonder what
+dogs are, and what this world is?'
+
+The Dog stretched himself, and rolled his eyes lazily round the room. 'I
+conceive,' he said, 'that the world is for dogs, and men and women are
+put into it to take care of dogs; women to take care of little dogs like
+me, and men for the big dogs like those in the yard--and cats,' he
+continued, 'are to know their place, and not to be troublesome.'
+
+'They beat you sometimes,' said the Cat. 'Why do they do that? They
+never beat me.'
+
+'If they forget their places, and beat me,' snarled the Dog, 'I bite
+them, and they don't do it again. I should like to bite you, too, you
+nasty Cat; you have woke me up.'
+
+'There may be truth in what you say,' said the Cat, calmly; 'but I think
+your view is limited. If you listened like me you would hear the men say
+it was all made for them, and you and I were made to amuse them.'
+
+'They don't dare to say so,' said the Dog.
+
+'They do, indeed,' said the Cat. 'I hear many things which you lose by
+sleeping so much. They think I am asleep, and so they are not afraid to
+talk before me; but my ears are open when my eyes are shut.'
+
+'You surprise me,' said the Dog. 'I never listen to them, except when I
+take notice of them, and then they never talk of anything except of me.'
+
+'I could tell you a thing or two about yourself which you don't know,'
+said the Cat. 'You have never heard, I dare say, that once upon a time
+your fathers lived in a temple, and that people prayed to them.'
+
+'Prayed! what is that?'
+
+'Why, they went on their knees to you to ask you to give them good
+things, just as you stand on your toes to them now to ask for your
+breakfast. You don't know either that you have got one of those bright
+things we see up in the air at night called after you.'
+
+'Well, it is just what I said,' answered the Dog. 'I told you it was all
+made for us. They never did anything of that sort for you?'
+
+'Didn't they? Why, there was a whole city where the people did nothing
+else, and as soon as we got stiff and couldn't move about any more,
+instead of being put under the ground like poor Tom, we used to be
+stuffed full of all sorts of nice things, and kept better than we were
+when we were alive.'
+
+'You are a very wise Cat,' answered her companion; 'but what good is it
+knowing all this?'
+
+'Why, don't you see,' said she, 'they don't do it any more. We are going
+down in the world, we are, and that is why living on in this way is such
+an unsatisfactory sort of thing. I don't mean to complain for myself,
+and you needn't, Dog; we have a quiet life of it; but a quiet life is
+not the thing, and if there is nothing to be done except sleep and eat,
+and eat and sleep, why, as I said before, I don't see the use of it.
+There is something more in it than that; there was once, and there will
+be again, and I sha'n't be happy till I find it out. It is a shame, Dog,
+I say. The men have been here only a few thousand years, and we--why, we
+have been here hundreds of thousands; if we are older, we ought to be
+wiser. I'll go and ask the creatures in the wood.'
+
+'You'll learn more from the men,' said the Dog.
+
+'They are stupid, and they don't know what I say to them; besides, they
+are so conceited they care for nothing except themselves. No, I shall
+try what I can do in the woods. I'd as soon go after poor Tom as stay
+living any longer like this.'
+
+'And where is poor Tom?' yawned the Dog.
+
+'That is just one of the things I want to know,' answered she. 'Poor Tom
+is lying under the yard, or the skin of him, but whether that is the
+whole I don't feel so sure. They didn't think so in the city I told you
+about. It is a beautiful day, Dog; you won't take a trot out with me?'
+she added, wistfully.
+
+'Who? I' said the Dog. 'Not quite.'
+
+'You may get so wise,' said she.
+
+'Wisdom is good,' said the Dog; 'but so is the hearth-rug, thank you!'
+
+'But you may be free,' said she.
+
+'I shall have to hunt for my own dinner,' said he.
+
+'But, Dog, they may pray to you again,' said she.
+
+'But I sha'n't have a softer mat to sleep upon, Cat, and as I am rather
+delicate, that is a consideration.'
+
+
+PART II.
+
+So the Dog wouldn't go, and the Cat set off by herself to learn how to
+be happy, and to be all that a Cat could be. It was a fine sunny
+morning. She determined to try the meadow first, and, after an hour or
+two, if she had not succeeded, then to go off to the wood. A Blackbird
+was piping away on a thornbush as if his heart was running over with
+happiness. The Cat had breakfasted, and so was able to listen without
+any mixture of feeling. She didn't sneak. She walked boldly up under the
+bush, and the bird, seeing she had no bad purpose, sate still and sung
+on.
+
+'Good morning, Blackbird; you seem to be enjoying yourself this fine
+day.'
+
+'Good morning, Cat.'
+
+'Blackbird, it is an odd question, perhaps. What ought one to do to be
+as happy as you?'
+
+'Do your duty, Cat.'
+
+'But what is my duty, Blackbird?'
+
+'Take care of your little ones, Cat.'
+
+'I hav'n't any,' said she.
+
+'Then sing to your mate,' said the bird.
+
+'Tom is dead,' said she.
+
+'Poor Cat!' said the bird. 'Then sing over his grave. If your song is
+sad, you will find your heart grow lighter for it.'
+
+'Mercy!' thought the Cat. 'I could do a little singing with a living
+lover, but I never heard of singing for a dead one. But you see, bird,
+it isn't Cats' nature. When I am cross, I mew. When I am pleased, I
+purr; but I must be pleased first. I can't purr myself into happiness.'
+
+'I am afraid there is something the matter with your heart, my Cat. It
+wants warming; good-bye.'
+
+The Blackbird flew away. The Cat looked sadly after him. 'He thinks I am
+like him; and he doesn't know that a Cat is a Cat,' said she. 'As it
+happens now, I feel a great deal for a Cat. If I hadn't got a heart I
+shouldn't be unhappy. I won't be angry. I'll try that great fat fellow.'
+
+The Ox lay placidly chewing, with content beaming out of his eyes and
+playing on his mouth.
+
+'Ox,' she said, 'what is the way to be happy?'
+
+'Do your duty,' said the Ox.
+
+'Bother,' said the Cat, 'duty again! What is it, Ox?'
+
+'Get your dinner,' said the Ox.
+
+'But it is got for me, Ox; and I have nothing to do but to eat it.'
+
+'Well, eat it, then, like me.'
+
+'So I do; but I am not happy for all that.'
+
+'Then you are a very wicked, ungrateful Cat.'
+
+The Ox munched away. A Bee buzzed into a buttercup under the Cat's nose.
+
+'I beg your pardon,' said the Cat, 'it isn't curiosity--what are you
+doing?'
+
+'Doing my duty; don't stop me, Cat.'
+
+'But, Bee, what is your duty?'
+
+'Making honey,' said the Bee.
+
+'I wish I could make honey,' sighed the Cat.
+
+'Do you mean to say you can't?' said the Bee. 'How stupid you must be.
+What do you do, then?'
+
+'I do nothing, Bee. I can't get anything to do.'
+
+'You won't get anything to do, you mean, you lazy Cat! You are a
+good-for-nothing drone. Do you know what we do to our drones? We kill
+them; and that is all they are fit for. Good morning to you.'
+
+'Well, I am sure,' said the Cat, 'they are treating me civilly; I had
+better have stopped at home at this rate. Stroke my whiskers! heartless!
+wicked! good-for-nothing! stupid! and only fit to be killed! This is a
+pleasant beginning, anyhow. I must look for some wiser creatures than
+these are. What shall I do? I know. I know where I will go.'
+
+It was in the middle of the wood. The bush was very dark, but she found
+him by his wonderful eye. Presently, as she got used to the light, she
+distinguished a sloping roll of feathers, a rounded breast, surmounted
+by a round head, set close to the body, without an inch of a neck
+intervening. 'How wise he looks!' she said; 'What a brain! what a
+forehead! His head is not long, but what an expanse! and what a depth of
+earnestness!' The Owl sloped his head a little on one side; the Cat
+slanted hers upon the other. The Owl set it straight again, the Cat did
+the same. They stood looking in this way for some minutes; at last, in a
+whispering voice, the Owl said, 'What are you who presume to look into
+my repose? Pass on upon your way, and carry elsewhere those prying
+eyes.'
+
+'Oh, wonderful Owl,' said the Cat, 'you are wise, and I want to be wise;
+and I am come to you to teach me.'
+
+A film floated backwards and forwards over the Owl's eyes; it was his
+way of showing that he was pleased.
+
+'I have heard in our schoolroom,' went on the Cat, 'that you sate on the
+shoulder of Pallas, and she told you all about it.'
+
+'And what would you know, oh, my daughter?' said the Owl.
+
+'Everything,' said the Cat, 'everything. First of all, how to be happy.'
+
+'Mice content you not, my child, even as they content not me,' said the
+Owl. 'It is good.'
+
+'Mice, indeed!' said the Cat; 'no, Parlour Cats don't eat mice. I have
+better than mice, and no trouble to get it; but I want something more.'
+
+'The body's meat is provided. You would now fill your soul.'
+
+'I want to improve,' said the Cat. 'I want something to do. I want to
+find out what the creatures call my duty.'
+
+'You would learn how to employ those happy hours of your leisure--rather
+how to make them happy by a worthy use. Meditate, oh Cat! meditate!
+meditate!'
+
+'That is the very thing,' said she. 'Meditate! that is what I like above
+all things. Only I want to know how: I want something to meditate about.
+Tell me, Owl, and I will bless you every hour of the day as I sit by the
+parlour fire.'
+
+'I will tell you,' answered the Owl, 'what I have been thinking of ever
+since the moon changed. You shall take it home with you and think about
+it too; and the next full moon you shall come again to me; we will
+compare our conclusions.'
+
+'Delightful! delightful!' said the Cat. 'What is it? I will try this
+minute.'
+
+'From the beginning,' replied the Owl, 'our race have been considering
+which first existed, the Owl or the egg. The Owl comes from the egg, but
+likewise the egg from the Owl.'
+
+'Mercy!' said the Cat.
+
+'From sunrise to sunset I ponder on it, oh Cat! When I reflect on the
+beauty of the complete Owl, I think that must have been first, as the
+cause is greater than the effect. When I remember my own childhood, I
+incline the other way.'
+
+'Well, but how are we to find out?' said the Cat.
+
+'Find out!' said the Owl. 'We can never find out. The beauty of the
+question is, that its solution is impossible. What would become of all
+our delightful reasonings, oh, unwise Cat! if we were so unhappy as to
+know?'
+
+'But what in the world is the good of thinking about it, if you can't,
+oh Owl?'
+
+'My child, that is a foolish question. It is good, in order that the
+thoughts on these things may stimulate wonder. It is in wonder that the
+Owl is great.'
+
+'Then you don't know anything at all,' said the Cat. 'What did you sit
+on Pallas's shoulder for? You must have gone to sleep.'
+
+'Your tone is over flippant, Cat, for philosophy. The highest of all
+knowledge is to know that we know nothing.'
+
+The Cat made two great arches with her back and her tail.
+
+'Bless the mother that laid you,' said she. 'You were dropped by mistake
+in a goose nest. You won't do. I don't know much, but I am not such a
+creature as you, anyhow. A great white thing!'
+
+She straitened her body, stuck her tail up on end, and marched off with
+much dignity. But, though she respected herself rather more than before,
+she was not on the way to the end of her difficulties. She tried all the
+creatures she met without advancing a step. They had all the old story,
+'Do your duty.' But each had its own, and no one could tell her what
+hers was. Only one point they all agreed upon--the duty of getting their
+dinner when they were hungry. The day wore on, and she began to think
+she would like hers. Her meals came so regularly at home that she
+scarcely knew what hunger was; but now the sensation came over her very
+palpably, and she experienced quite new emotions as the hares and
+rabbits skipped about her, or as she spied a bird upon a tree. For a
+moment she thought she would go back and eat the Owl--he was the most
+useless creature she had seen; but on second thought she didn't fancy he
+would be nice: besides that, his claws were sharp and his beak too.
+Presently, however, as she sauntered down the path, she came on a little
+open patch of green, in the middle of which a fine fat Rabbit was
+sitting. There was no escape. The path ended there, and the bushes were
+so thick on each side that he couldn't get away except through her paws.
+
+'Really,' said the Cat, 'I don't wish to be troublesome; I wouldn't do
+it if I could help it; but I am very hungry, I am afraid I must eat you.
+It is very unpleasant, I assure you, to me as well as to you.'
+
+The poor Rabbit begged for mercy.
+
+'Well,' said she, 'I think it is hard; I do really--and, if the law
+could be altered, I should be the first to welcome it. But what can a
+Cat do? You eat the grass; I eat you. But, Rabbit, I wish you would do
+me a favour.'
+
+'Anything to save my life,' said the Rabbit.
+
+'It is not exactly that,' said the Cat; 'but I haven't been used to
+killing my own dinner, and it is disagreeable. Couldn't you die? I shall
+hurt you dreadfully if I kill you.'
+
+'Oh!' said the Rabbit, 'you are a kind Cat; I see it in your eyes, and
+your whiskers don't curl like those of the cats in the woods. I am sure
+you will spare me.'
+
+'But, Rabbit, it is a question of principle. I have to do my duty; and
+the only duty I have, as far as I can make out, is to get my dinner.'
+
+'If you kill me, Cat, to do your duty, I sha'n't be able to do mine.'
+
+It was a doubtful point, and the Cat was new to casuistry. 'What is your
+duty?' said she.
+
+'I have seven little ones at home--seven little ones, and they will all
+die without me. Pray let me go.'
+
+'What! do you take care of your children?' said the Cat. 'How
+interesting! I should like to see that; take me.'
+
+'Oh! you would eat them, you would,' said the Rabbit. 'No! better eat me
+than them. No, no.'
+
+'Well, well,' said the Cat, 'I don't know; I suppose I couldn't answer
+for myself. I don't think I am right, for duty is pleasant, and it is
+very unpleasant to be so hungry; but I suppose you must go. You seem a
+good Rabbit. Are you happy, Rabbit?'
+
+'Happy! oh, dear beautiful Cat! if you spare me to my poor babies!'
+
+'Pooh, pooh!' said the Cat, peevishly; 'I don't want fine speeches; I
+meant whether you thought it worth while to be alive! Of course you do!
+It don't matter. Go, and keep out of my way; for, if I don't get my
+dinner, you may not get off another time. Get along, Rabbit.'
+
+
+PART III.
+
+It was a great day in the Fox's cave. The eldest cub had the night
+before brought home his first goose, and they were just sitting down to
+it as the Cat came by.
+
+'Ah, my young lady! what, you in the woods? Bad feeding at home, eh?
+Come out to hunt for yourself?'
+
+The goose smelt excellent; the Cat couldn't help a wistful look. She was
+only come, she said, to pay her respects to her wild friends.
+
+'Just in time,' said the Fox. 'Sit down and take a bit of dinner; I see
+you want it. Make room, you cubs; place a seat for the lady.'
+
+'Why, thank you,' said the Cat, 'yes; I acknowledge it is not unwelcome.
+Pray, don't disturb yourselves, young Foxes. I am hungry. I met a Rabbit
+on my way here. I was going to eat him, but he talked so prettily I let
+him go.'
+
+The cubs looked up from their plates, and burst out laughing.
+
+'For shame, young rascals,' said their father. 'Where are your manners?
+Mind your dinner, and don't be rude.'
+
+'Fox,' she said, when it was over, and the cubs were gone to play, 'you
+are very clever. The other creatures are all stupid.' The Fox bowed.
+'Your family were always clever,' she continued. 'I have heard about
+them in the books they use in our schoolroom. It is many years since
+your ancestor stole the crow's dinner.'
+
+'Don't say stole, Cat; it is not pretty. Obtained by superior ability.'
+
+'I beg your pardon,' said the Cat; 'it is all living with those men.
+That is not the point. Well, but I want to know whether you are any
+wiser or any better than Foxes were then?'
+
+'Really,' said the Fox, 'I am what Nature made me. I don't know. I am
+proud of my ancestors, and do my best to keep up the credit of the
+family.'
+
+'Well, but Fox, I mean do you improve? do I? do any of you? The men are
+always talking about doing their duty, and that, they say, is the way to
+improve, and to be happy. And as I was not happy I thought that had,
+perhaps, something to do with it, so I came out to talk to the
+creatures. They also had the old chant--duty, duty, duty; but none of
+them could tell me what mine was, or whether I had any.'
+
+The Fox smiled. 'Another leaf out of your schoolroom,' said he. 'Can't
+they tell you there?'
+
+'Indeed,' she said, 'they are very absurd. They say a great deal about
+themselves, but they only speak disrespectfully of us. If such creatures
+as they can do their duty, and improve, and be happy, why can't we?'
+
+'They say they do, do they?' said the Fox. 'What do they say of me?'
+
+The Cat hesitated.
+
+'Don't be afraid of hurting my feelings, Cat. Out with it.'
+
+'They do all justice to your abilities, Fox,' said she; 'but your
+morality, they say, is not high. They say you are a rogue.'
+
+'Morality!' said the Fox. 'Very moral and good they are. And you really
+believe all that? What do they mean by calling me a rogue?'
+
+'They mean you take whatever you can get, without caring whether it is
+just or not.'
+
+'My dear Cat, it is very well for a man, if he can't bear his own face,
+to paint a pretty one on a panel and call it a looking-glass; but you
+don't mean that it takes _you_ in.'
+
+'Teach me,' said the Cat. 'I fear I am weak.'
+
+'Who get justice from the men unless they can force it? Ask the sheep
+that are cut into mutton. Ask the horses that draw their ploughs. I
+don't mean it is wrong of the men to do as they do; but they needn't lie
+about it.'
+
+'You surprise me,' said the Cat.
+
+'My good Cat, there is but one law in the world. The weakest goes to the
+wall. The men are sharper-witted than the creatures, and so they get the
+better of them and use them. They may call it just if they like; but
+when a tiger eats a man I guess he has just as much justice on his side
+as the man when he eats a sheep.'
+
+'And that is the whole of it,' said the Cat. 'Well, it is very sad. What
+do you do with yourself?'
+
+'My duty, to be sure,' said the Fox; 'use my wits and enjoy myself. My
+dear friend, you and I are on the lucky side. We eat and are not eaten.'
+
+'Except by the hounds now and then,' said the Cat.
+
+'Yes; by brutes that forget their nature, and sell their freedom to the
+men,' said the Fox, bitterly. 'In the meantime my wits have kept my skin
+whole hitherto, and I bless Nature for making me a Fox and not a goose.'
+
+'And are you happy, Fox?'
+
+'Happy! yes, of course. So would you be if you would do like me, and use
+your wits. My good Cat, I should be as miserable as you if I found my
+geese every day at the cave's mouth. I have to hunt for them, lie for
+them, sneak for them, fight for them; cheat those old fat farmers, and
+bring out what there is inside me; and then I am happy--of course I am.
+And then, Cat, think of my feelings as a father last night, when my dear
+boy came home with the very young gosling which was marked for the
+Michaelmas dinner! Old Reineke himself wasn't more than a match for that
+young Fox at his years. You know our epic?'
+
+'A little of it, Fox. They don't read it in our schoolroom. They say it
+is not moral; but I have heard pieces of it. I hope it is not all quite
+true.'
+
+'Pack of stuff! it is the only true book that ever was written. If it is
+not, it ought to be. Why, that book is the law of the world--_la
+carriere aux talents_--and writing it was the honestest thing ever done
+by a man. That fellow knew a thing or two, and wasn't ashamed of himself
+when he did know. They are all like him, too, if they would only say so.
+There never was one of them yet who wasn't more ashamed of being called
+ugly than of being called a rogue, and of being called stupid than of
+being called naughty.'
+
+'It has a roughish end, this life of yours, if you keep clear of the
+hounds, Fox,' said the Cat.
+
+'What! a rope in the yard! Well, it must end some day; and when the
+farmer catches me I shall be getting old, and my brains will be taking
+leave of me; so the sooner I go the better, that I may disgrace myself
+the less. Better be jolly while it lasts, than sit mewing out your life
+and grumbling at it as a bore.'
+
+'Well,' said the Cat, 'I am very much obliged to you. I suppose I may
+even get home again. I shall not find a wiser friend than you, and
+perhaps I shall not find another good-natured enough to give me so good
+a dinner. But it is very sad.'
+
+'Think of what I have said,' answered the Fox. 'I'll call at your house
+some night; you will take me a walk round the yard, and then I'll show
+you.'
+
+'Not quite,' thought the Cat, as she trotted off; 'one good turn
+deserves another, that is true; and you have given me a dinner. But they
+have given me many at home, and I mean to take a few more of them; so I
+think you mustn't go round our yard.'
+
+
+PART IV.
+
+The next morning, when the Dog came down to breakfast, he found his old
+friend sitting in her usual place on the hearth-rug.
+
+'Oh! so you have come back,' said he. 'How d'ye do? You don't look as if
+you had had a very pleasant journey.'
+
+'I have learnt something,' said the Cat. 'Knowledge is never pleasant.'
+
+'Then it is better to be without it,' said the Dog.
+
+'Especially, better to be without knowing how to stand on one's hind
+legs, Dog,' said the Cat; 'still you see, you are proud of it; but I
+have learnt a great deal, Dog. They won't worship you any more, and it
+is better for you; you wouldn't be any happier. What did you do
+yesterday?'
+
+'Indeed,' said the Dog, 'I hardly remember. I slept after you went away.
+In the afternoon I took a drive in the carriage. Then I had my dinner.
+My maid washed me and put me to bed. There is the difference between you
+and me; you have to wash yourself and put yourself to bed.'
+
+'And you really don't find it a bore, living like this? Wouldn't you
+like something to do? Wouldn't you like some children to play with? The
+Fox seemed to find it very pleasant.'
+
+'Children, indeed!' said the Dog, 'when I have got men and women.
+Children are well enough for foxes and wild creatures; refined dogs know
+better; and, for doing--can't I stand on my toes? can't I dance? at
+least, couldn't I before I was so fat?'
+
+'Ah! I see everybody likes what he was bred to,' sighed the Cat. 'I was
+bred to do nothing, and I must like that. Train the cat as the cat
+should go, and the cat will be happy and ask no questions. Never seek
+for impossibilities, Dog. That is the secret.'
+
+'And you have spent a day in the woods to learn that,' said he. 'I could
+have taught you that. Why, Cat, one day when you were sitting scratching
+your nose before the fire, I thought you looked so pretty that I should
+have liked to marry you; but I knew I couldn't, so I didn't make myself
+miserable.'
+
+The Cat looked at him with her odd green eyes. 'I never wished to marry
+you, Dog; I shouldn't have presumed. But it was wise of you not to fret
+about it. But, listen to me, Dog--listen. I met many creatures in the
+wood, all sorts of creatures, beasts and birds. They were all happy;
+they didn't find it a bore. They went about their work, and did it, and
+enjoyed it, and yet none of them had the same story to tell. Some did
+one thing, some another; and, except the Fox, each had got a sort of
+notion of doing its duty. The Fox was a rogue; he said he was; but yet
+he was not unhappy. His conscience never troubled him. Your work is
+standing on your toes, and you are happy. I have none, and that is why I
+am unhappy. When I came to think about it, I found every creature out in
+the wood had to get its own living. I tried to get mine, but I didn't
+like it, because I wasn't used to it; and as for knowing, the Fox, who
+didn't care to know anything except how to cheat greater fools than
+himself, was the cleverest fellow I came across. Oh! the Owl, Dog--you
+should have heard the Owl. But I came to this, that it was no use trying
+to know, and the only way to be jolly was to go about one's own business
+like a decent Cat. Cats' business seems to be killing rabbits and
+such-like; and it is not the pleasantest possible; so the sooner one is
+bred to it the better. As for me, that have been bred to do nothing,
+why, as I said before, I must try to like that; but I consider myself an
+unfortunate Cat.'
+
+'So don't I consider myself an unfortunate Dog,' said her companion.
+
+'Very likely you do not,' said the Cat.
+
+By this time their breakfast was come in. The Cat ate hers, the Dog did
+penance for his; and if one might judge by the purring on the
+hearth-rug, the Cat, if not the happiest of the two, at least was not
+exceedingly miserable.
+
+
+
+
+FABLES.
+
+I.--THE LIONS AND THE OXEN.
+
+
+Once upon a time a number of cattle came out of the desert to settle in
+the broad meadows by a river. They were poor and wretched, and they
+found it a pleasant exchange; except for a number of lions, who lived in
+the mountains near, and who claimed a right, in consideration of
+permitting the cattle to remain, to eat as many as they wanted among
+them. The cattle submitted, partly because they were too weak to help
+it, partly because the lions said it was the will of Jupiter; and the
+cattle believed them. And so they went on for many ages, till at last,
+from better feeding, the cattle grew larger and stronger, and multiplied
+into great numbers; and at the same time, from other causes, the lions
+had much diminished: they were fewer, smaller, and meaner-looking than
+they had been; and except in their own opinion of themselves, and in
+their appetites, which were more enormous than ever, there was nothing
+of the old lion left in them.
+
+One day a large ox was quietly grazing, when one of these lions came up,
+and desired the ox to lie down, for he wanted to eat him. The ox raised
+his head, and gravely protested; the lion growled; the ox was mild, yet
+firm. The lion insisted upon his legal right, and they agreed to refer
+the matter to Minos.
+
+When they came into court, the lion accused the ox of having broken the
+laws of the beasts. The lion was king, and the others were bound to
+obey. Prescriptive usage was clearly on the lion's side. Minos called on
+the ox for his defence.
+
+The Ox said that, without consent of his own being asked, he had been
+born into the meadow. He did not consider himself much of a beast, but,
+such as he was, he was very happy, and gave Jupiter thanks. Now, if the
+lion could show that the existence of lions was of more importance than
+that of oxen in the eyes of Jupiter, he had nothing more to say; he was
+ready to sacrifice himself. But this lion had already eaten a thousand
+oxen. Lions' appetites were so insatiable that he was forced to ask
+whether they were really worth what was done for them,--whether the life
+of one lion was so noble that the lives of thousands of oxen were not
+equal to it? He was ready to own that lions had always eaten oxen, but
+lions when they first came to the meadow were a different sort of
+creature, and they themselves, too (and the ox looked complacently at
+himself), had improved since that time. Judging by appearances, though
+they might be fallacious, he himself was quite as good a beast as the
+lion. If the lions would lead lives more noble than oxen could live,
+once more he would not complain. As it was, he submitted that the cost
+was too great.
+
+Then the Lion put on a grand face and tried to roar; but when he opened
+his mouth he disclosed a jaw so drearily furnished that Minos laughed,
+and told the ox it was his own fault if he let himself be eaten by such
+a beast as that. If he persisted in declining, he did not think the lion
+would force him.
+
+
+II.--THE FARMER AND THE FOX.
+
+A farmer, whose poultry-yard had suffered severely from the foxes,
+succeeded at last in catching one in a trap. 'Ah, you rascal!' said he,
+as he saw him struggling, 'I'll teach you to steal my fat geese!--you
+shall hang on the tree yonder, and your brothers shall see what comes of
+thieving!' The farmer was twisting a halter to do what he threatened,
+when the fox, whose tongue had helped him in hard pinches before,
+thought there could be no harm in trying whether it might not do him one
+more good turn.
+
+'You will hang me,' he said, 'to frighten my brother foxes. On the word
+of a fox they won't care a rabbit-skin for it; they'll come and look at
+me; but you may depend upon it, they will dine at your expense before
+they go home again!'
+
+'Then I shall hang you for yourself, as a rogue and a rascal,' said the
+farmer.
+
+'I am only what Nature, or whatever you call the thing, chose to make
+me,' the Fox answered. 'I didn't make myself.'
+
+'You stole my geese,' said the man.
+
+'Why did Nature make me like geese, then?' said the Fox. 'Live and let
+live; give me my share, and I won't touch yours; but you keep them all
+to yourself.'
+
+'I don't understand your fine talk,' answered the Farmer; 'but I know
+that you are a thief, and that you deserve to be hanged.'
+
+His head is too thick to let me catch him so, thought the Fox; I wonder
+if his heart is any softer! 'You are taking away the life of a
+fellow-creature,' he said; 'that's a responsibility--it is a curious
+thing that life, and who knows what comes after it? You say I am a
+rogue--I say I am not; but at any rate I ought not to be hanged--for if
+I am not, I don't deserve it; and if I am, you should give me time to
+repent!' I have him now, thought the Fox; let him get out if he can.
+
+'Why, what would you have me do with you?' said the man.
+
+'My notion is that you should let me go, and give me a lamb, or goose or
+two, every month, and then I could live without stealing; but perhaps
+you know better than me, and I am a rogue; my education may have been
+neglected; you should shut me up, and take care of me, and teach me. Who
+knows but in the end I may turn into a dog?'
+
+'Very pretty,' said the Farmer; 'we have dogs enough, and more, too,
+than we can take care of, without you. No, no, Master Fox, I have caught
+you, and you shall swing, whatever is the logic of it. There will be one
+rogue less in the world, anyhow.'
+
+'It is mere hate and unchristian vengeance,' said the Fox.
+
+'No, friend,' the Farmer answered, 'I don't hate you, and I don't want
+to revenge myself on you; but you and I can't get on together, and I
+think I am of more importance than you. If nettles and thistles grow in
+my cabbage-garden, I don't try to persuade them to grow into cabbages. I
+just dig them up. I don't hate them; but I feel somehow that they
+mustn't hinder me with my cabbages, and that I must put them away; and
+so, my poor friend, I am sorry for you, but I am afraid you must
+swing.'
+
+
+
+
+PARABLE OF THE BREAD-FRUIT TREE.
+
+
+It was after one of those heavy convulsions which have divided era from
+era, and left mankind to start again from the beginning, that a number
+of brave men gathered together to raise anew from the ground a fresh
+green home for themselves. The rest of the surviving race were
+sheltering themselves amidst the old ruins, or in the caves on the
+mountains, feeding on husks and shells; but these men with clear heads
+and brave hearts ploughed and harrowed the earth, and planted seeds, and
+watered them, and watched them; and the seeds grew and shot up with the
+spring, but one was larger and fairer than the rest, and the other
+plants seemed to know it, for they crawled along till they reached the
+large one; and they gathered round it, and clung to it, and grew into
+it; and soon they became one great stem, with branching roots feeding it
+as from many fountains. Then the men got great heart in them when they
+saw that, and they laboured more bravely, digging about it in the hot
+sun, till at last it became great and mighty, and its roots went down
+into the heart of the earth, and its branches stretched over all the
+plain.
+
+Then many others of mankind, when they saw the tree was beautiful, came
+down and gathered under it, and those who had raised it received them
+with open arms, and they all sat under its shade together, and gathered
+its fruits, and made their homes there, rejoicing in its loveliness. And
+ages passed away, and all that generation passed away, and still the
+tree grew stronger and fairer, and their children's children watched it
+age after age, as it lived on and flowered and seeded. And they said in
+their hearts, the tree is immortal--it will never die. They took no care
+of the seed; the scent of the flowers and the taste of the sweet fruit
+was all they thought of: and the winds of heaven, and the wild birds,
+and the beasts of the field caught the stray fruits and seed-dust, and
+bore the seed away, and scattered it in far-off soils.
+
+And by-and-by, at a great great age, the tree at last began to cease to
+grow, and then to faint and droop: its leaves were not so thick, its
+flowers were not so fragrant; and from time to time the night winds,
+which before had passed away, and had been never heard, came moaning and
+sighing among the branches. And the men for a while doubted and
+denied--they thought it was the accident of the seasons; and then a
+branch fell, and they said it was a storm, and such a storm as came but
+once in a thousand years. At last there could be no doubt that the
+leaves were thin and sere and scanty--that the sun shone through
+them--that the fruit was tasteless. But the generation was gone away
+which had known the tree in its beauty, and so men said it was always
+so--its fruits were never better--its foliage never was thicker.
+
+So things went on, and from time to time strangers would come among
+them, and would say, Why are you sitting here under the old tree? there
+are young trees grown of the seed of this tree, far away, more beautiful
+than it ever was; see, we have brought you leaves and flowers to show
+you. But the men would not listen. They were angry, and some they drove
+away, and some they killed, and poured their blood round the roots of
+the tree, saying, They have spoken evil of our tree; let them feed it
+now with their blood. At last some of their own wiser ones brought out
+specimens of the old fruits, which had been laid up to be preserved, and
+compared them with the present bearing, and they saw that the tree was
+not as it had been; and such of them as were good men reproached
+themselves, and said it was their own fault. They had not watered it;
+they had forgotten to manure it. So, like their first fathers, they
+laboured with might and main, and for a while it seemed as if they might
+succeed, and for a few years branches, which were almost dead when the
+spring came round, put out some young green shoots again. But it was
+only for a few years; there was not enough of living energy in the tree.
+Half the labour which was wasted on it would have raised another nobler
+one far away. So the men grew soon weary, and looked for a shorter way:
+and some gathered up the leaves and shoots which the strangers had
+brought, and grafted them on, if perhaps they might grow; but they could
+not grow on a dying stock, and they, too, soon drooped and became as the
+rest. And others said, Come, let us tie the preserved fruits on again;
+perhaps they will join again to the stem, and give it back its life. But
+there were not enough, for only a few had been preserved; so they took
+painted paper and wax and clay, and cut sham leaves and fruits of the
+old pattern, which for a time looked bright and gay, and the world, who
+did not know what had been done, said--See, the tree is immortal: it is
+green again. Then some believed, but many saw that it was a sham, and
+liking better to bear the sky and sun, without any shade at all, than to
+live in a lie, and call painted paper leaves and flowers, they passed
+out in search of other homes. But the larger number stayed behind; they
+had lived so long in falsehood that they had forgotten there was any
+such thing as truth at all; the tree had done very well for them--it
+would do very well for their children. And if their children, as they
+grew up, did now and then happen to open their eyes and see how it
+really was, they learned from their fathers to hold their tongues about
+it. If the little ones and the weak ones believed, it answered all
+purposes, and change was inconvenient. They might smile to themselves at
+the folly which they countenanced, but they were discreet, and they
+would not expose it. This is the state of the tree, and of the men who
+are under it at this present time:--they say it still does very well.
+Perhaps it does--but, stem and boughs and paper leaves, it is dry for
+the burning, and if the lightning touches it, those who sit beneath will
+suffer.
+
+
+
+
+COMPENSATION.
+
+
+One day an Antelope was lying with her fawn at the foot of the flowering
+Mimosa. The weather was intensely sultry, and a Dove, who had sought
+shelter from the heat among the leaves, was cooing above her head.
+
+'Happy bird!' said the Antelope. 'Happy bird! to whom the air is given
+for an inheritance, and whose flight is swifter than the wind. At your
+will you alight upon the ground, at your will you sweep into the sky,
+and fly races with the driving clouds; while I, poor I, am bound a
+prisoner to this miserable earth, and wear out my pitiable life crawling
+to and fro upon its surface.'
+
+Then the Dove answered, 'It is sweet to sail along the sky, to fly from
+land to land, and coo among the valleys; but, Antelope, when I have sate
+above amidst the branches and watched your little one close its tiny
+lips upon your breast, and feed its life on yours, I have felt that I
+could strip off my wings, lay down my plumage, and remain all my life
+upon the ground only once to know such blessed enjoyment.'
+
+The breeze sighed among the boughs of the Mimosa, and a voice came
+trembling out of the rustling leaves: 'If the Antelope mourns her
+destiny, what should the Mimosa do? The Antelope is the swiftest among
+the animals. It rises in the morning; the ground flies under its
+feet--in the evening it is a hundred miles away. The Mimosa is feeding
+its old age on the same soil which quickened its seed cell into
+activity. The seasons roll by me and leave me in the old place. The
+winds sway among my branches, as if they longed to bear me away with
+them, but they pass on and leave me behind. The wild birds come and go.
+The flocks move by me in the evening on their way to the pleasant
+waters. I can never move. My cradle must be my grave.'
+
+Then from below, at the root of the tree, came a voice which neither
+bird, nor Antelope, nor tree had ever heard, as a Rock Crystal from its
+prison in the limestone followed on the words of the Mimosa.
+
+'Are ye all unhappy?' it said. 'If ye are, then what am I? Ye all have
+life. You! O Mimosa, you! whose fair flowers year by year come again to
+you, ever young, and fresh, and beautiful--you who can drink the rain
+with your leaves, who can wanton with the summer breeze, and open your
+breast to give a home to the wild birds, look at me and be ashamed. I
+only am truly wretched.'
+
+'Alas!' said the Mimosa, 'we have life, which you have not, it is true.
+We have also what you have not, its shadow--death. My beautiful
+children, which year by year I bring out into being, expand in their
+loveliness only to die. Where they are gone I too shall soon follow,
+while you will flash in the light of the last sun which rises upon the
+earth.'
+
+
+LONDON
+
+PRINTED BY SPOTTISWOODE AND CO.
+
+NEW-STREET SQUARE
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Notes:
+
+Page 67: popositions: typo for propositions. Corrected.
+
+Page 118: seventeeth: typo for seventeenth. Corrected.
+
+Page 198: assults: typo for assaults. Corrected.
+
+Page 279: reely: typo for freely. Corrected.
+
+Page 300: appal: alternate spelling for appall.
+
+Page 301: doggrel: alternate spelling for doggerel.
+
+Page 316: throughly: alternate spelling for thoroughly.
+
+Page 322: ougly: alternate spelling for ugly.
+
+Page 329: rommaging: alternate spelling for rummaging.
+
+Page 330: carged: In 'a huge high-carged' [May mean high-charged as with
+many weapons, or cargo, as heavy freight?]
+
+Page 330: enterchanged: alternate spelling for interchanged.
+
+Page 408: befal: alternate spelling for befall.
+
+Page 440: wanton: probably means to frolic or move freely in this
+context.
+
+Page various: sate: alternate, archaic spelling for sat.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Short Studies on Great Subjects, by
+James Anthony Froude
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