The Catholic World Volume Ii Part 56

"'Sire, the night is darker now.

And the wind blows stronger.

Fails my heart, I know not how, I can go no longer.'

"'Mark my footsteps, good my page; Tread thou in them boldly; Thou shalt find the winter's rage Freeze thy blood less coldly.'

"In his master's steps he trod.

Where the snow lay dinted; Heat was in the very sod Which the saint had printed.

Therefore, Christian men--be sure-- Wealth or rank possessing, Ye who now will bless the poor, Shall yourselves find blessing."

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From The Dublin Review.

THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM.

_The Formation of Christendom_. Part First.

By T. W. ALLIES. London: Longmans.

It is somewhat paradoxical, but strictly true, to say that the greatest and most important revolution which ever took place upon earth is that to which least attention has. .h.i.therto been paid, and concerning which least is known--the subst.i.tution of "Christendom" for the heathen world. Before our own day no historian, no philosopher of modern times has felt any interest in this vast theme, and whatever information with regard to it is attainable must be sought in the fragmentary remains of ancient writers, or in works very recently published on the continent. In the volume before us Mr. Allies has taken ground not yet occupied by any English author. He has availed himself of two works--Dollinger's "Christenthum und Kirche" and Champagny's Histories--and he acknowledges in the most liberal and loyal manner his obligation to them; but, in the main, he has been left to find his way for himself, and no man could well be more highly qualified for the task, whether by the gifts of nature or by the acquirements of many years. We infer from the work itself that his attention was immediately turned to the subject by his appointment as professor of the "Philosophy of History" in the Catholic university of Dublin, under the rectorship of Dr. Newman. The duties of his post obliged him to weigh the question, "what is the philosophy of history?" and the inaugural lecture with which the volume before us commences, although it gives no formal definition of the phrase (which is to be regretted), supplies abundant considerations by the aid of which we may arrive at it. History, in its origin, was far more akin to poetry than to philosophy, and even when it pa.s.ses into prose it is in the half-legendary form, which makes the narrative of Herodotus and of the annalists of the middle ages so charming to all readers. They are ballads without metre. Next came that style of which Thucydides is the model, and which Mr. Allies calls "political history." "Its limit is the nation, and it deals with all that interests the nation."

"Great, indeed, is the charm where the writer can describe with the pencil of a poet and a.n.a.lyze with the mental grasp of a philosopher.

Such is the double merit of Thucydides. And so it has happened that the deepest students of human nature have searched for two thousand years the records of a war wherein the territory of the chief belligerents was not larger than a modern English or Irish county.

What should we say if a quarrel between Kent and Ess.e.x, between Cork and Kerry, had kept the world at gaze ever since? Yet Attica and Laconia were no larger."

And yet it needed something more than territorial greatness in the states of which he wrote to enable even Thucydides himself to realize the idea of a philosophical history. For the five hundred years which followed the Peloponnesian war brought to maturity the greatest empire which has ever existed among men, and although, at the close of that period, one of the ablest and most thoughtful of writers devoted himself especially to its history, yet, says our author, "I do not know that in reading the pages of Polybius, of Livy, or even of Tacitus, we are conscious of a wider grasp of thought, a more enlarged experience of political interests, a higher idea of {357} man, and of all that concerns his personal and public life, than in those of Thucydides." Great, indeed, was the genius of those ancient historians, magnificent were the two languages which they made their instruments--languages "very different in their capacity, but both of them superior in originality, beauty, and expressiveness to any which have fallen to the lot of modern nations. It may be that the marbles of Pentelicus and Carrara insure good sculptors." "In the narrative--that is, the poetic and pictorial part of history--they have equal merit. Their history is a drama in which the actors and the events speak for themselves. What was wanting was the bearing of events on each other, the apprehension of great first principles--the generalization of facts." And this no mere lapse of time could give.

It is wanting in the works of the greatest ancient masters. It is found in moderns in all other respects immeasurably their inferiors.

"What, then, had happened in the interval?" Christianity had happened--Christendom had been formed. '"There was a voice in the world greater, more potent, thrilling, and universal, than the last cry of the old society, _Civis sum Roma.n.u.s_, and this voice was _Sum Christia.n.u.s_. From the time of the great sacrifice it was impossible to sever the history of man's temporal destiny from that of his eternal; and when the virtue of that sacrifice had thoroughly leavened the nations, history is found to a.s.sume a larger basis, to have lost its partial and national cast, to have grown with the growth of man, and to demand for its completeness a perfect alliance with philosophy."

Thus, then, the "philosophy of history" is the comparison and arrangement of its great events by one whose mind is stored with the facts which it records, and who at the same time possesses the great first principles which qualify him to judge of it. We may, therefore, lay it down as an absolute rule, that without Christianity no really philosophical history could have been written.

Not unnaturally, then, the first example of the philosophy of history was given by a man whose mind, if not the greatest ever informed by Christianity, was at least among a very few in the first cla.s.s, was moreover so thoroughly penetrated by Christian principles, that to review the events of the world in any other aspect, or through any other medium, would have been to him as impossible as to examine in detail without the light of the sun the expanse of plains and hills, rivers and forests, which lay under him as he stood on some predominant mountain peak. G.o.d, the Almighty Creator--G.o.d incarnate, who had once lived and suffered on earth, and now reigned on high until he should put all enemies under his feet, and who was coming again to judge the world which he had redeemed--the Church founded by him to enlighten and govern all generations throughout all nations, and in which dwelt the infallible guidance of G.o.d the Holy Ghost--the evil spirits, powerless against the divine presence in the Church, but irresistible by mere human power--the saints, no longer seen by man, but whose intercession influenced and moulded all the events of his life,--all these were ever before the mind of St. Augustine, not merely as articles of faith which he confessed, but as practical realities. To trace the events of the world without continually referring to all these, would have been to him not merely irreligious, but as unreal, unmeaning, and fallacious as it would be to a natural philosopher of our own day to investigate the phenomena of the material world without taking into consideration the attraction of the earth and the resistance of the air. This should be noticed, because we have all met men who, while professing to believe most, if not all, of these things, would consider it bad taste to introduce such considerations into any practical affair. They are, in short, part of that very {358} remarkable phenomenon, the "Sunday religion" of a respectable English gentleman, which he holds as an inseparable part of his respectability, but which is well understood to have no bearing at all upon the business of the week. Living as St. Augustine did at the crisis at which the civilization of the ancient world was finally breaking up, his eye was cast back in review over the whole gorgeous line of ancient history, which swept by him like a Roman triumph.

Egypt, a.s.syria, Greece, Rome, each had its day; the last and greatest of them all he saw tottering to its fall. But far more important than this comprehensive survey, which the circ.u.mstances of his times made natural to so great an intellect, was his possession of fixed and certain principles, the truth of which he knew beyond the possibility of doubt, and which were wide enough to solve every question which the history of the world brought before him. Great men there had been before him, but the deeper their thoughts, the more had they found that the world itself and their own position in it were but a hopeless enigma without an answer, a cypher without a key. A flood of light had been poured upon the piercing mental eye of St. Augustine when the waters of baptism fell from the hand of the holy Ambrose upon his outward frame. Every part of the Old Testament history glowed before him, as when from behind a cloud which covers all the earth the light of the sun falls concentrated upon some mountain-peak; and the man who reverences and ponders as divine that inspired history has learned to read the inner meaning of the whole history of the world as no one else can. In every age, no doubt, Almighty G.o.d rules and directs in justice and mercy the world which he has created; but in general he hides himself behind an impenetrable veil. "Clouds and darkness are round about him, justice and judgment the establishment of his throne." To many an ordinary spectator, the world seems only the theatre of man's labor and suffering. He pa.s.ses through it as he might through one of the a.r.s.enals of ancient Greece or Rome, where indeed great works were wrought, but where the hand of the workman was always as visible as the result produced. A more thoughtful man might see proofs of some unknown power, just as in an a.r.s.enal of our day works, compared to which the fabled labors of giants and cyclops were as child's play, are hourly performed by the stroke of huge hammers welding vast ma.s.ses of glowing metal, while nothing is seen to cause or explain their motion. All this is understood by one who has once been allowed to see at work the engine itself which sets all in motion. So does the Old Testament history unveil to the eye of faith the hidden causes, not only of the Jewish history, but of the great events of secular history. All that seemed before only results without cause, is seen to be fully accounted for; not that we can always understand the ends which the Almighty Worker designs to accomplish, or the means by which he is accomplishing them, but everywhere faith sees the operation of Almighty power directed by infinite wisdom and love, and, while able to understand much, it is willing to await in reverent adoration the development of that which as yet is beyond its comprehension. It sees that the history of other nations is distinguished from that of the children of Israel, not so much by the character of the events which it records (for the extraordinary manifestations of divine power were chiefly confined to a few special periods), as to the principle and spirit in which it has been written, and that secular history viewed by eyes supernaturally enlightened a.s.sumes the same appearance.

In fact, it is not difficult to write a history of the reigns of David and Solomon and their successors down to the fall of the Hebrew monarchy which sounds very much like that of any other Oriental kingdom. The {359} thing has been done of late years, both in Germany and in England. It was by this that Dean Milman, many years ago, so greatly shocked the more religious portion of English readers. Nor were they shocked without cause; for his was a history of the Jews from which, as far as possible, Almighty G.o.d was left out, while the characteristic of the inspired narrative is, that it is a record not so much of the doings of men as of the great acts of G.o.d by man and among men. Only Dean Milman was more consistent than those who condemned him. He was right in perceiving that the greater part of the history of the Jews is not materially different from that of other nations. But he went on to infer that, therefore, we may leave G.o.d out of sight in judging of Jewish history, as we do in that of other nations, instead of learning from the example of the Jews that in every age G.o.d is as certainly working among every nation. That by which he offended religious Protestants was the application of their own ordinary principles to the one history in which they had been taught from childhood to see and acknowledge with exceptional reverence the working of Almighty G.o.d in the affairs of the world.

This it is which gives its peculiar character to many of the chronicles of the middle ages. It is impossible not to feel that the writers see no broad distinction between the history of the nations and times of which they are writing and that of the ancient people of G.o.d. And hence in their annals we have far more of the philosophy of history, in the true sense of the word, than was possible to any ancient author. For with all their ignorance of physical causes, which led them into many mistakes, their main principles were both true and vitally important, and were wholly unknown to Thucydides and Tacitus.

But the circ.u.mstances of their times made it impossible that they should survey the extensive range of facts which lies before a modern historian. In many instances, also, they were led by the imperfect state of physical science to attribute to a supernatural interference of G.o.d in the world things which we are now able to refer to natural causes. That G.o.d has before now interfered with the course of nature which he has established in the world, and may whenever he pleases so interfere again, these were to them first principles. And so far they reasoned truly and justly, although their imperfect acquaintance with other branches of human knowledge sometimes led them to apply amiss their true principle. Their minds were so much accustomed to dwell upon the thought of G.o.d, and upon his acts in the world, that they were always prepared to see and hear him everywhere, and in every event. When they heard of any event supposed to be supernatural, they might be awestruck and impressed, but could not be said to be surprised; and hence, no doubt, they sometimes accepted as supernatural events which, if examined by a shrewd man who starts with the first principle that nothing supernatural can really have taken place, could have been otherwise explained. Beside, their comparative unacquaintance with physical science led them into errors in accounting for and even in observing those which they themselves did not imagine to be supernatural. But their first principles were true.

And the modern who a.s.sumes, whether explicitly or implicitly, that the course of the world is modified and governed only by the pa.s.sions and deeds of man, is in his first principles fundamentally wrong. They fell into accidental error; he cannot be more than accidentally right.

Our author says:

"In the middle ages, and notably in the thirteenth century, there were minds which have left us imperishable memorials of themselves, and which would have taken the largest and most philosophical view of history had the materials existed ready to their hand. {360} Conceive, for instance, a history from the luminous mind of St.

Thomas with the stores of modern knowledge at his command. But the invention of printing, one of the turning points of the human race, was first to take place, and then on that soil of the middle ages, so long prepared and fertilized by so patient a toil, a mighty harvest was to spring up. Among the first-fruits of labors so often depreciated by those who have profited by them, and in the land of children who despise their sires, we find the proper alliance of philosophy with history. Then at length the province of the historian is seen to consist, not merely in the just, accurate, and lively narrative of facts, but in the exhibition of cause and effect. 'What do we now expect in history?' says M. de Barante; and he replies, 'Solid instruction and complete knowledge of things; moral lessons, political counsels; comparison with the present, and the general knowledge of facts.' Even in the age of Tacitus, the most philosophic of ancient historians, no individual ability could secure all such powers" (p. 12).

Thus philosophical history is one of the results of Christianity.

Professor Max Muller makes a similar remark with regard to his own favorite study of ethnology. Before the day of Pentecost, he says, no man, not even the greatest minds, ever thought of tracing the genealogy of nations by their languages, because they did not know the unity of the human race. The unity of mankind is naturally connected in the order of ideas with the unity of G.o.d. Those who worshipped many G.o.ds, and believed that each race and nation had its own tutelary divinity, not unnaturally regarded each nation as a separate race. So far was this feeling carried by the most civilized races of the old world, that they thought it a profanation that the worship of the G.o.ds of one race should be offered by a priest not sprung from that race.

The most moderate and popular of the Roman patricians rejected the demand of the _plebs_ to be admitted to the highest offices of the state, not as politically dangerous, but as profane. The Roman consul, in virtue of his office, was the priest of the Capitoline Jove, to whom, on certain solemn occasions, he had to offer sacrifice. It would be a pollution that a plebeian, not sprung from any of the tribes of Romulus, should presume to offer that sacrifice. In fact, the consulship would hardly have been thrown open to the _plebs_ until the long continued habit of intermarriage had welded the two portions of the Roman people so completely into one that the plebeian began, at last, to be regarded as of the same blood with the Furii, the Cornelii, and the Julii. The first measure by which the tribunes commenced their attack upon the exclusive privilege of the great houses was wisely chosen; it was the Canuleian law, by which marriages between the two orders were made legal and valid. Before that, patricians and plebeians were two nations living in one city, and, according to the universal opinion of the ancient world, this implied that they had different G.o.ds, different priests, a different ritual, and different temples. But the day of Pentecost blended all nations into a new unity--the unity of the body of Christ; and its first effect was, that the preachers of the new law proclaimed everywhere, that "G.o.d had made of one blood all nations of men, to dwell upon the face of the whole earth." The professor points out what curiously completes the a.n.a.logy between the two cases, that while Christianity, by collecting into one church all the nations of the world, and by teaching their original unity, naturally suggested the idea that all their different languages had some common origin, any satisfactory investigation of the subject was long delayed by the unfounded notion that the Hebrew must needs be the root from which they all sprang.

Thus, in both cases, the germ of studies, whose development was delayed for ages by the {361} imperfection of human knowledge, appears to have been contained in the revelation of the gospel of Christ.

It is important to bring these considerations into prominence, because the knowledge which would never have existed without Christianity, is, in many cases, retained by men who forget or deny the faith to which they are indebted for it. Our author draws comparison between Tacitus and Gibbon (page 14):

"The world of thought in which we live is, after all, formed by Christianity. Modern Europe is a relic of Christendom, the virtue of which is not gone out of it. Gregory VII. and Innocent III. have ruled over generations which have ignored them; have given breadth to minds which condemned their benefactors as guilty of narrow priestcraft, and derided the work of those benefactors as an exploded theory. Let us take an example in what is, morally, perhaps the worst and most shocking period of the last three centuries--the thirty years preceding the great French revolution.

We shall see that at this time even minds which had rejected, with all the firmness of a reprobate will, the regenerating influence of Christianity, could not emanc.i.p.ate themselves from the virtue of the atmosphere which they had breathed. They are immeasurably greater than they would have been in pagan times, by the force of that faith which they misrepresented and repudiated. To prove the truth of my words, compare for a moment the great artist who drew Tiberius and Domitian and the Roman empire in the first century with him who wrote of its decline and fall in the second and succeeding centuries. How far wider a grasp of thought, how far more manifold an experience, combined with philosophic purposes, in Gibbon than in Tacitus. He has a standard within him by which he can measure the nations as they come in long procession before him.

In that vast and wondrous drama of the Antonines and Constantine Athanasius and Leo, Justinian and Charlemagne, Mahomet, Zenghis Khan, and Timour, Jerusalem and Mecca, Rome and Constantinople, what stores of thought are laid up--what a train of philosophic induction exhibited! How much larger is this world become than that which trembled at Caesar! The very apostate profits by the light which has shone on Thabor, and the blood which has flowed on Calvary. He is a greater historian than his heathen predecessor because he lives in a society to which the G.o.d whom he has abandoned has disclosed the depth of its being, the laws of its course, the importance of its present, the price of its futurity."

A very little thought will show that, const.i.tuted as man's nature is, this could not have been otherwise. Man differs from the inferior animals in that he is richly endowed with faculties which, until they have been developed by education, he can never use, and appreciates and embraces truths, when they have been set before him, which he could never have discovered una.s.sisted. This is the most obvious distinction between reason and instinct. The caterpillar, hatched from an egg dropped by a parent whom it never saw, knows at once what food and what habits are necessary for its new life. Weeks pa.s.s away, and its first skin begins to die; but (as if it had been fully instructed in what has to be done) it draws its body out of it as from a glove, and comes forth in a new one. A few weeks later it forsakes the food which has. .h.i.therto been necessary for its life, and buries itself in the earth, which up to that very day would have been certain death.

There a mysterious change pa.s.ses upon it, and it lies as if dead till the time for another change approaches. It then gradually works its way to the surface, and comes out a b.u.t.terfly or a moth. It is now indifferent to the plants which in its former state were necessary to its existence, but yet it chooses those plants on which to deposit its eggs. {362} We are so apt to delude ourselves with the notion that we understand everything to which we give a name, that ninety-nine people out of a hundred seem to think they account for this marvelous power of the inferior animals to act exactly right under circ.u.mstances so strangely changed, by calling it "instinct." But, in truth, why or how the creature does what it does, we no more know when we have called it "instinct" than we did before. All we can suppose is that as the Creator has left none of his creatures dest.i.tute of the kind and degree of knowledge necessary to enable it to discharge its appointed office in creation, the appet.i.tes and desires of the insect are modified from time to time in the different stages of its existence so that they impel it exactly to the course necessary for it to take, with much greater certainty than if it understood what the result was to be. How different is the case of man. Not only is he a free agent, and therefore to be guided by reason, not by mere propensity, but neither reason nor speech, nor indeed life itself, could be preserved or made of any use except by means of training and education received from others. A man left to shift for himself like the animal whose changes we have been tracing, would die at each state of his existence for want of some one to teach him what must be done for his preservation. This same training is equally necessary for his physical, intellectual, moral, and spiritual life. But he is so const.i.tuted that the different things needful for him to know for each of these purposes approve themselves to him as soon as they are presented to his mind from without, and the things which thus approve themselves, although he could never have discovered them, we truly call natural to man, because no external teaching would have made him capable of learning them unless the faculty had been as much a part of his original const.i.tution as the unreasoning desires which we call instinct are part of the const.i.tution of brutes. And therefore, when once developed by education, they remain a part of the man, even when he casts away from him those teachers by whom they were developed.

Nero would never have learnt the use of speech if he had not caught it from his mother; yet when he used it to order her murder he did not lose what she had taught him, because it was a part of his nature. And so of higher powers, the result of a superior training. Principles which men would never have known without Christian training are retained when Christianity itself is rejected, because they are a part of the spiritual endowment given to man by his Creator, although without training he would never have been able to develop them. His rejection of Christianity results from an evil will. The parts of Christian teaching against which that will does not rebel he calls and believes to be the lessons of his natural reason, although the experience of the greatest and wisest heathen shows that his una.s.sisted natural faculties never would have discovered them.

Nor is this true only of individuals. Nations trained for many generations in Christian faith have before now fallen away from Christianity. But it does not seem that they are able to reduce themselves to the level of heathen nations in their moral standard, their perception and appreciation of good and evil, justice and wrong, or of the nature and destinies of the human race. In some respects they are morally much worse than heathen. But it does not appear that in these points they can sink so low, because their nature, fallen though it be, approves and accepts some of the truths taught it by Christianity. Hence, in order to judge what man can or cannot do without the revelation of G.o.d in Jesus Christ, we must examine him in nations to which the faith has never been given, rather than in those which have rejected it. Unhappily, there are at this moment parts of Europe in which the belief in the supernatural {363} seems wanting. An intelligent correspondent of the _Times_ a year ago described such a state of things as existing in parts of northern Germany and Scandinavia. The population believes nothing, and practises no religion. Public worship is deserted, not because the people have devised any new heresy of their own as to the manner in which man should approach G.o.d, but because they have ceased to trouble themselves about the matter at all. Lutheranism is dead and gone; but nothing has been subst.i.tuted for it. The intelligent Protestant writer was surprised to find a population thus wholly without religion orderly and well-behaved, hard-working, and by no means forgetful of social duties. The phenomenon is, no doubt, remarkable; but it is by no means without example. Many parishes (we fear considerable districts) in France are substantially in the same state. The peasantry are sober, industrious, and orderly to a degree unknown in England. They reap the temporal fruits of these good qualities in a general prosperity equally unknown here. They are saving to a degree almost incredible, so that it is a matter of ordinary experience that a peasant who began life with nothing except his bodily strength, leaves behind him several hundreds, not unfrequently some thousands, of pounds sterling. But in this same district whole villages are so absolutely without religion, that, although there is not one person for many miles who calls himself a Protestant, the churches are almost absolutely deserted, and the _cures_ (generally good and zealous men) are reduced almost to inactivity by absolute despair. Some give themselves up to prayer, seeing nothing else that they can do; some will say that they are not wholly without encouragement, because, after fifteen or twenty years of labor, they have succeeded in bringing four or five persons to seek the benefit of the sacraments out of a population of as many hundreds, among whom when they came there was not one such person to be found. [Footnote 52]

[Footnote 52: It should be observed that the morality said to exist in those parts of France which have so nearly lost the faith is not Catholic morality: in fact, the population in those districts is decreasing, and that (it is universally admitted) from immorality.

It should also be remember that there is a most marked contrast between these districts and those Lutheran districts of which the _Times_ spoke: In the latter, Lutheranism has died out of itself. In the worst districts of France, the Catholic religion has not died out, but has been displaced by a systematic infidel education inflicted on the people by a G.o.dless government. Lastly, even where things are the worst, there are a few in each generation who, in the midst of a G.o.dless population, turn out saints, really worthy of that name. It is seldom that a mission is preached in any village without some such being rescued from the corrupt ma.s.s around them.

Nothing, in fact, can more strongly mark the contrast between the Catholic religion and Lutheranism. The subject is far too large to be discussed here, but we have suggested these considerations to avoid misconceptions of our meaning.]

Appalling as is this state of things, the natural virtues (such as they are) of populations which have thus lost faith are themselves the remains of Christianity. History gives us no trace of any people in such a state except those who have once been Christians. For instance, in all others, however civilized, slavery has been established both by law and practice; no one of them has been without divorce; infanticide has been allowed and practised. Nowhere has the unity of man's nature been acknowledged, and, what follows from that, the duties owing to him as man, not merely as fellow countryman. And hence, nowhere has there existed what we call the law of nations, a rule which limits the conduct of men, not only toward those of other nations, but, what is much more, toward those with whom they are in a state of war, or whom they have conquered. In the most civilized times of ancient Greece and Rome no rights were recognized in such foreigners. All these things are the legitimate progeny of Christianity, and of Christianity alone, although they are now accepted as natural principles by nations by whom, but for the gospel of Christ, they would never have been heard of.

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We have enlarged upon this point because, not only in what he says of Gibbon, but in many parts of his subsequent chapters, Mr. Allies attributes to the influence of Christianity things which a superficial observer may attribute rather to some general progress in the world toward a higher civilization. We shall see instances of this as we proceed. We are satisfied that the objection is utterly unfounded. We see no reason to believe that without Christianity any higher or better civilization than that of Rome under Augustus and Athens under Pericles would ever have been attained. That those who lived under that state, so far from expecting any "progress," believed that the world was getting worse and worse, and that there remained no hope of improvement, nor any principles from which it could possibly arise, is most certain. Nor do we believe that those who thus judged of the natural tendency of the world were mistaken, although by a stupendous interference of the Creator with the course of nature an improvement actually took place.

The philosophy of history then sifts and arranges the facts which it records, and judges of them by fixed and eternal principles of right and wrong; drawing from the past lessons of wisdom and virtue for the future. It will approach nearer and nearer to perfection as the range of facts investigated becomes wider, and as the principles by which they are judged are more absolutely true, and applied more correctly, more practically, and more universally. Hence, it would never have existed without Christianity, and although in Christian nations it is found in men partially or wholly unworthy of the Christian name, but who retain many ideas and principles derived from Christianity alone, yet even in them it is exercised imperfectly in proportion as they are less and less Christian.

Mr. Allies thus compares Tacitus and St. Augustine:

"The atmosphere of Tacitus and the lurid glare of his Rome compared with St. Augustine's world are like the shades in which Achilles deplored the loss of life contrasted with a landscape bathed in the morning light of a southern sun. Yet how much more of material misery was there in the time of St. Augustine than in the time of Tacitus! In spite of the excesses in which the emperors might indulge within the walls of their palace or of Rome, the fair fabric of civilization filled the whole Roman world, the great empire was in peace, and its mult.i.tude of nations were brethren. Countries which now form great kingdoms of themselves, were then tranquil members of one body politic. Men could travel the coasts of Italy, Gaul, Spain, Africa, Syria, Asia Minor, and Greece, round to Italy again, and find a rich smiling land covered by prosperous cities, enjoying the same laws and inst.i.tutions, and possessed in peace by its children. In St. Augustine's time all had been changed; on many of these coasts a ruthless, uncivilized, unbelieving, or misbelieving enemy had descended. Through the whole empire there was a feeling of insecurity, a cry of helplessness, and a trembling at what was to come. Yet in the pages of the two writers the contrast is in the inverse ratio. In the pagan, everything seems borne on by an iron fate, which tramples upon the free will of man, and overwhelms the virtuous before the wicked. In the Christian, order shines in the midst of destruction, and mercy dispenses the severest humiliations. It was the symbol of the coming age. And so that great picture of the doctor, saint, and philosopher laid hold of the minds of men during those centuries of violence which followed, and in which peace and justice, so far from embracing each other, seemed to have deserted the earth. And in modern times a great genius has seized upon it, and developed it in the discourse on universal history. Bossuet is worthy to receive the torch from St. Augustine.

Scarcely could a more majestic voice, or a more {365} philosophic spirit, set forth the double succession of empire and of religion, or exhibit the tissue wrought by Divine Providence, human free will, and the permitted power of evil."

After this estimate of St. Augustine, he speaks of

"A living author--at once statesman, orator, philosopher, and historian of the higest rank--who has given us, on a less extensive scale, a philosophy of history in its most finished and amiable form. The very attempt on the part of M. Guizot to draw out a picture of civilization during fourteen hundred years, and to depict, amongst that immense and ever-changing period, the course of society in so many countries, indicates no ordinary power; and the partial fulfilment of the design may be said to have elevated the philosophy of history into a science. In this work may be found the moat important rules of the science accurately stated; but the work itself is the best example of philosophic method and artistic execution, united to ill.u.s.trate a complex subject. A careful study of original authorities, a patient induction of facts, a cautious generalization, the philosophic eye to detect a.n.a.logies, the painter's power to group results, and, above all, a unity of conception which no multiplicity of details can embarra.s.s; these are some of the main qualifications for a philosophy of history which I should deduce from these works. Yet, while the action of Providence and that of human free will are carefully and beautifully brought out, while both may be said to be points of predilection with the author, he has not alluded, so far as I am aware, to the great evil spirit and his personal operation. Strong as he is, he has been apparently too weak to bear the scoff of modern infidelity--"he believes in the devil"--unless, indeed, the cause of this lies deeper, and belongs to his philosophy; for if there be one subject out of which eclecticism can pick nothing to its taste, it would be the permitted operation of the great fallen spirit. Nor will the warmest admiration of his genius be mistaken for a concurrence in all his judgments. I presume not to say how far such an author is sometimes, in spite of himself, unjust, from the point of view at which he draws his picture. Whether, and how far, he be an eclectic philosopher, let others decide. It would be grievous to feel it true of such a mind; for it is the original sin of that philosophy to make the universe rotate round itself. Great is its complacency in its own conclusions, but there runs through them one mistake--to fancy itself in the place of G.o.d" (p. 31).

Those who have ever made the attempt to a.n.a.lyze in a few lines the genius of a great writer will best be able to estimate the combination of keen intellect, patient thought, and scrupulous candor in this criticism. We must not deny ourselves one more quotation:

"St. Augustine, Bossuet, Guizot, Balmez, Schlegel: I have taken these names not to exhaust but to ill.u.s.trate the subject. Here we have the ancient and the modern society, Africa and France, Spain and Germany, and the Christian mind in each, thrown upon the facts of history. They point out, I think, sufficiently a common result.

But amid the founders of a new science, who shall represent our own country? Can I hesitate, or can I venture, in this place and company [_i.e._, before the Catholic University of Dublin, in the chair of which this lecture was delivered], to mention the hand which has directed the scattered rays of light from so many sources on the wild children of Central Asia, and produced the Turk before us in his untameable ferocity--the outcast of the human race, before whom earth herself ceases to be a mother--by whom man's blood has ever been shed like water, woman's honor counted as the vilest of things, nature's most sacred laws publicly and avowedly outraged,--has produced him before us for the abhorrence of mankind, the infamy of nations? To sketch the intrinsic {366} character of barbarism and civilization, and out of common historical details, travel, and observation to show the ineffaceable stamp of race and tribe, reproducing itself through the long series of ages, surely expresses the idea which we mean by the philosophy of history" (p. 38).

We have given a disproportionate s.p.a.ce to this inaugural lecture, both for its intrinsic importance and because it gives a shadow of the whole plan of Mr. Allies's work, both that part which lies before us and that which remains to be published; for the volume before us is "only a portion, perhaps about a fourth, of the author's design." In the six lectures which it contains, he gives us an estimate, first, of the physical and political condition of the Roman empire in its palmy days; then, of the force by which it pleased G.o.d to const.i.tute the new creation in the midst of it. In the last four lectures he compares the vital principles of these two vast social organizations--the heathen and the Christian--first in a representative man of each cla.s.s, then in the effects produced upon society at large by the influence of each; then in the primary relation of man to woman in marriage; and, lastly, in the virginal state; although under this last head there can hardly be said to be a comparison, as heathen society has simply nothing to set against that wonderful creation of Christianity--holy virginity.

We know not where we have met any painting of the Roman empire so striking as that contained in the first lecture. Of the mult.i.tude of Englishmen who read more or less of the cla.s.sical Latin authors, a very small proportion have ever paid any attention to the Roman empire, as it is displayed by Tacitus and Juvenal. This is the natural result of the grace and eloquence of Livy and Cicero, much rather than of any strong preference for republican inst.i.tutions. Indeed it is impossible not to be struck with the vast influence which Roman republicanism exercises in France compared with England. Nor is it difficult to account for this. France, except to a limited degree under the monarchy of July, has never enjoyed const.i.tutional liberty.

The Frenchman, therefore, who dreams of liberty at all, places his dreamland in a Roman republic. Boys who in England would rant about John Hampden are found in France ranting about Junius Brutus. For what the Englishman means when he talks about liberty is "English liberty;"

the Frenchman means the Roman republic. So much has this been the case, that even in America the war of independence began, not in any aspiration after a republic, but for the rights of English subjects.

The sword had been drawn for a year before the colonies claimed independence, and very shortly before Washington had declared that "there was no thought of separation, only of English liberty." What proves that these were not mere words was, that even after independence had been achieved, the leaders, who met in congress, agreed almost to a man in expressing their preference for "an English const.i.tution," if circ.u.mstances had placed it within their reach. All the world knows that France became a republic chiefly because Rome in her palmy days had been so called; nay, to this hour all the terms adopted by the revolutionary party have been borrowed from cla.s.sical times. Such was the term "citizen," so appropriate to a people whose boast was that they were free of a city which had conquered the world, so absurd as denoting the members of a great nation in which not even centuries of extreme centralization have prevented political rights from being exercised by each man in his own province. Such, again, was that inundation of pagan names which the revolutionary times subst.i.tuted for those of the saints, and which are still characteristic of France--Camille, Emile, Antonine, and even Brute and Timoleon. This we take to be one great reason why many sensible {367} persons in France are so greatly afraid of cla.s.sical studies in schools and colleges. They say that they turn the heads of boys, especially French boys. It is highly characteristic of the man, that the officers of the House of Commons, who made forcible entry into the house of Sir Francis Burdett when he was committed by order of the House, found him reading with his little son, not Plutarch's life of Brutus or Cato, as would a.s.suredly have been the case with a Frenchman, but "Magna Charta." He was not less theatrical, but he was a thoroughly English actor.

And yet we strongly suspect that out of a hundred boys who leave a cla.s.sical school more than ninety believe that Roman history ends with Augustus. The university no doubt, gives a somewhat more extended view. But even there Tacitus is usually about the limit. We wonder how far this feeling was carried before Gibbon published the "Decline and Fall."

Hence we especially value the wonderful picture of the empire painted by our author.