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GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY FROM THE FIRST CENTURY TO THE DAWN OF THE LUTHERAN ERA BY THE REV. GEORGE MATHESON, M.A. B.D. AUTHOR OF ‘ AIDS TO THE STUDY OF GERMAN THEOLOGY’ VOLUME II. EDINBURGH T AND T CLARK,38 GEORGE STREET 1877 I- la-Jq /-/ '“fl'mm‘e so wide in 'its extent, was not likely to tolerate any heretical effort to subvert his authority. Innocent III. was not a cruel man ; for the poor and weak he showed ever a kindly consideration, and Dean Milman even applies to him the attribute of gentleness. But the relation in which heresy stood to that age was one which pre- cluded any treatment of it, however severe, from incurring the imputation of cruelty. The Church and the State had ceased to be merely united; they had become absolutely one, as they were in the pagan 144. GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. days of Augustus and Tiberius. ' The Church was the State, and the State was the Church; all political offences were violations of religion, and all religious offences were violations of State law. The heretic was therefore a criminal,--a man who had outraged the law of his country, and whose punishment for that outrage was demanded by every principle of justice. The Albigenses had put themselves in this position ; they had set up their judgment in religious matters in opposition to that of the hierarchy, and had thereby publicly declared themselves the voluntary violators of national law; they were guilty of treason, and the punishment of treason was death. Nevertheless, when Innocent III. drew the sword, when he proclaimed a crusade against the Albigenses, and offered a plenary indulgence to all who should embrace his cause, he committed, in our opinion, the one political blunder of his life. We have already expressed our conviction that, from the Papal point of view, all crusades were political blunders; expedients successful for the time, but tending ultimately to weaken that authority which they were devised to sustain. It has proved emphati- cally true of all Churchmen, that ‘ they who take the sword perish with the sword.’ When the spirit of Christianity resorted to physical force, it fell back upon the weapons of paganism; and the weapons of paganism, which had conquered the men of its own day, were utterly unable to subdue the lives of mediaeval Christendom. Even the wars with Moham- medanism were the result of a mistaken policy; but by what name shall we designate the policy which SECOND REVOLT OF THE SCHOOL-LIFE. I45 could turn the sword against the school-life of the Christian Church ? None knew better than Innocent that the Waldensian and Albigensian movements were reactions against a real defect in the spiritual life of the hierarchy; he proved this by instituting two new monastic orders, whose office was to foster piety. He ought to have left this new spiritual element of the orthodox Church to fight the battle alone with the spiritual element of the heretics, abiding by Gamaliel’s counsel, and trusting to the triumph of that cause in whose justice he so implicitly believed. He did not do so; he prepared to vindicate his spiritual position by material weapons, and thereby eventually he lent strength to the opposition, and lowered that moral influence which ever goes far to decide the battle. VOL. II. K CHAPTER XXIX. LAST TRIUMPH OF THE TEMPORAL PAPACY. HE war upon which the Church of the-hierarchy now entered was not so much a fierce struggle as a prolonged massacre. The odds were too unequal. The sons of the rising renaissance, bred in the lap of luxury, and domesticated by the amenities of social life, were no match for the sturdy warriors of the North, whose home was the camp, and whose music was the roar of battle. The Waldenses had indeed been inured to poverty, and in this respect they had the advantage over the natives of Southern France; but theirs had been a poverty which had rather neces- sitated patient endurance than active exercise; they had never found the opportunity of struggling with their condition, and therefore they were not strong. Accordingly, the crusade of the hierarchical Churc' was little more than an assault on the one hand, an an almost unresisting death on the other. Th thought of leniency, of mercy, of compassion, never entered into the heart of the Papal party; they had a commission from Heaven to execute, and they per- formed their bloody work with the utmost Stoicism. No Smithfield fires of persecution, no Bartholomew LAST TRIUMPH OF THE TEMPORAL PAPACY. I47 massacres, no Bulgarian atrocities, surpassed the enor- mities of those deeds of cruelty which the crusaders perpetrated upon their hapless victims. They seem to have acted upon the principle, which is repudiated by the criminal jurisprudence of modern times, that it is better that ten innocent men should perish than that one guilty should escape. When they had taken a town by assault, they proceeded to execute their work of death without discrimination. In every such city there was always a multitude of orthodox Catholics mixed up with the Albigensian heretics; but to dis- tinguish between them would have required a sifting process, which could only have begun when the force of passion had subsided. But this force of passion was looked upon as itself a divine impulse—--God’s command to avenge the breaking of His laws. The crusaders had no desire that it should cool down into calm policy, or subside into lukewarm prudence; they welcomed it as the evidence that they were Heaven’s commissioners, they gave full play to it, they revelled in its influence. They followed up indiscriminately their work of slaughter; all who inhabited the captured city were sacrificed without distinction,—orthodox and heterodox alike went down beneath the sword of the conquerors. ‘ Kill them all ! ’ they cried; ‘the Lord will know His own.’ It is not too much to say, that never since the institution of the Christian Church had the history of that Church appeared in so unfavourable a light. The spirit of Christianity appeared to have changed places with the spirit of paganism; to have mounted that very 148 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. throne of materialism from which paganism had been deposed. In truth, however, such a statement by no means represents the case. The spirit of Christianity had in itself as much life as ever, but it had been dominated by the spirit of paganism. It had been conquered and imprisoned by a resurrection of the old forces of heathendom; a resurrection which re- newed the idea of an empire in which the king was priest, and in which the priest was king; an empire where Church and State were not united, but one, and in which all difference had vanished between material force and spiritual power. The school-life was at war with the schoolmaster, and the schoolmaster had become the tyrant; the ward was at variance with the guardian, and the guardian had become the despot. The spirit of Christianity was assailed by weapons foreign to itself. The policy which the Papal party pursued towards heresy was precisely‘ consistent with that policy which, in the granting of indulgences, it had pursued towards penitence. It tested penitence by a material standard—the provision of resources in money or in war; it applied to heresy also a material standard—the power of the sword and the horrors of the outward battlefield. It would have been well if the Papal party had paused here. War, however dreadful, is by its very nature evanescent, and tends to exterminate itself. But the Papacy proceeded to render perpetual that revival of pagan force which would naturally have been transitory. It proceeded to invest the acts of that day with a lasting significance, by the perpetration of a deed which has LAST TRIUMPH OF THE TEMPORAL PAPACY. I49 left an indelible stain on the history of mediaval Europe, the foundation of that institution which has associated the Christianity of the Middle Ages with the worst days of the Roman empire—the tribunal of the Inquisition. It is only fair to state, that the best Roman Catholic writers are at one with Protestants in repudiating this system. It is only common justice to avow that, according to the best writers, Catholic or Protestant, the Inquisition, in its Spanish or most malignant form, became in the fifteenth century a purely poli- tical institution, passed from the hands of the Church into those of the State, and was thenceforth regarded by the Papacy as an object of aversion. This is the view of Ranke, of Guizot, of Leo, and of Llorente. But while we accept, and accept with gratification, the opinion of these eminent authorities, we cannot close our eyes to the fact, that the way to such a transference had been partially necessitated by cir- cumstances. The Papacy of the fifteenth century was no longer the Papacy of the thirteenth; its material glory had departed, its unity was broken, its temporal power was rapidly passing away. It was no longer able to enforce its physical penalties by physical weapons; the State had obtained the empire over it, and as the voluntary servant of the State it could alone be strong. In such circum- stances, it was easy to relinquish a possession which it had not the strength to support, and no sacrifice to part with that whose potency had lost everything but the name. At the period in which we now 150 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. stand, it was all the reverse. The ecclesiastical power ruled the world. Upon a throne, exalted above all the dynasties of the earth, sat a potentate who incarnated in his own person the majesty of empire and the authority of priesthood; in whose right hand was a sword, and in whose left a cross; whose will was the law of humanity, and whose law was the destruction of human will. Around his person all objects met together in an artificial unity. All ages met there; the paganism of Augustus and Tiberius sought to thrust itself upon the Christianity of the monk and the Cloister. All nations met there ; East and West had for a time united, and Europe had established itself in the heart of Asia. All ranks met there; the Papacy was the head of a republic, in which any man, however lowly, might rise to heights of stupendous power. At the opening of the thirteenth century, the Papacy was absolutely supreme; the originator of every movement, the breath of every wind that blew, it moved the sceptres of sovereigns, it sharpened the swords of armies; apart from this power, the world could do nothing. And it was precisely in this age of unbroken Papal dominion that the Inquisition emerged ’into being. One word, one gesture, one look, from the pontiff would have crushed it at its birth; but that word was not spoken, that gesture was not made, that look was not given. Nay, it is impossible to conceive that without the direct mandate of the pontiff such an institution could ever have existed at all; and all history points to the conviction that it proceeded LAST TRIUMPH OF THE TEMPORAL PAPACY. I51 from such a mandate. It had its germ in the brain of Innocent 111.; its expansion in the Council of Toulouse, which was emphatically a hierarchical council; its maturing in Gregory IX., who formed the inquisitors into a distinct court; and its full deve- lopment in Innocent IV., who gave to that court its complete organization. The Inquisition was really a continuation of that crusade which Innocent III. had proclaimed against the Albigenses; an attempt to render perpetual that exercise of physical force which had been brought to bear upon religious ques~ tions. The spirit of the Inquisition was a crusading spirit. It started from the principle, that the accused should be considered guilty until he was proved to be innocent. The heretic was in reality judged before- hand. He was not permitted to confront his accuser, he was not suffered to see the witnesses against him, he was not even allowed to know the precise offence with which he was charged. The reason of the last prohibition, indeed, is probably not far to seek; the inquisitor in all likelihood did not himself know. He had in his mind the impression of a vague general accusation of heresy, which he was called upon by his office to substantiate in detail; but to get those details, he was in general obliged to trust to the testimony of the unfortunate culprit. The heretic was asked to confess, he commonly replied that he had nothing to confess; he was thereupon, for an indefinite period, remanded to prison, his effects were seized, and his friends immediately went into mourn- ing. The custody of the grave, the enclosure of the 152 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. coffin, the trammels of the winding-sheet, were not reckoned more secure than was the grasp of the inquisitors. It was felt instinctively, that in the pleasant light of the sun, in the busy haunts of men, in the scenes of social intercourse and domestic enjoyment, the victim of ecclesiastical displeasure would appear no more. When next he came before the tribunal it was after a long lapse of time, when the sympathy of public excitement had died away, and when he himself was regarded as one among the dead. He was interrogated as to the whole course of his past life; if his answers were unsatis- factory, if they conveyed the notion of a mental reservation, or suggested the thought of some- thing yet to be explained, the blank left in his information was filled up by physical torture. If in his agonies he uttered words of self—condemnation, the utterance was accepted as a full confession of guilt, dispensing with all need of further inquiry; and he was handed over to the authority of the secular arm, from whose grasp he by no means came forth until he had paid the uttermost farthing; sometimes by death at the stake, sometimes by death on the scaffold, and occasionally by life as a galley slave, which was worse than death itself. In estimating the horror of this institution, we ought, if we can, to separate between the system which pro- duced it and the individuals who inflicted it. The individuals were not of necessity, or in themselves, cruel men. Innocent III. has been honoured by the ascription of gentleness; his commissioner, Dominic, LAST TRIUMPH OF THE TEMPORAL PAPACY. 153 the very founder of the institution, was by nature by no means hard-hearted. The inquisitors were, for the most part, in all other relations of life, capable of the average amount of humanitarian sentiment; we can quite well imagine one of them, on his return from an inquisitorial examination, shedding genuine tears over a spectacle of suffering, and feeling real sorrow for a tale of distress. But in this particular relation of life the inquisitor felt it his duty to let his heart become adamant. When he dealt with reli- gious heresy, he was precisely in the same position as is the modern judge who pronounces sentence of death on the criminal convicted of murder. Murder is not so revolting to the modern heart as was heresy to the mediaeval, for heresy was itself regarded as the murder of the soul. And just as it is the duty of the judge to abstract the prepossessions of individual feeling from his review of legal evidence, so the inquisitor felt it to be his duty, in conducting a trial for religious heresy, to steel himself against the promptings of humanity, and be stern in the service of God. The barbarity of the Inquisition was far too deeply rooted to be the result of mere personal cruelty. It had its source in something more radical than the passions of the heart; it sprang from an error of the intellect. The intellect is the road to the heart, and a man’s intellectual belief is the measure of his moral action. The Inquisition sprang from the revival of the pagan idea, that force is the test of greatness, and that strength is identical with virtue. It arose from the resuscitation of that belief which I GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. once dominated the world, but which the Christian spirit had surmounted ; the belief that the possession of power is the evidence of divine favour, and that resistance to such power is resistance to divine will. Above all, it emerged from the conviction that all forces, religious or political, were forms of one great force,-—the paramount authority of the State ruler; and that where a religious force was in opposition to the paramount authority, it ought to be crushed by the hand of the ruler, and extinguished by the fires of persecution. Nay, in this respect, we have no hesitation in saying that the paganism of medimval Christendom was a vast advance on the paganism of the second century. The paganism of Nero, of Trajan, of Marcus Aurelius, of Antoninus Pius, of all the emperors up to Decius, never seems to have resorted to an organized persecution. It persecuted merely from the anger of the moment, roused into temporary wrath by some passing incident or transient suspicion. Its earliest persecu- tions were but the outbursts of popular fury, venting blindly its disappointment upon those whom it imagined to be the authors of a famine, or the causes of a pestilence, or the occasions of a national reverse; they swept in swift gusts across the sea of human life, and then as quickly subsided into a settled calm. But the persecutions of mediaevalism were no popular outbursts, no ebullitions of vulgar anger, no mani- festations of mere superstitious fury. They were intellectual devices, planned by human reason, devised by calm judgment, methodized by careful deliberation, LAST TRIUMPH OF THE TEMPORAL PAPACY. I and carried out with systematic precision. They came from the spirit, not of Nero nor of Trajan, but from the more developed spirit of Decius and of Diocletian; they exhibited paganism in its full strength, in its perfect consolidation, not as a mere feeling of the heart, but as a thought which had obtained the empire over the judgment, the imagina— tion, and the reason of mankind. It was in strict pursuance of this pagan principle that the Church of the hierarchy proceeded every day to give fresh emphasis to the fact of its independent existence. The Waldensian and Albigensian heresies had been movements of the laity; it was imperative, therefore, that the laity should be made to feel more keenly than ever the Brahminism of Christianity : the predominance of , a sacerdotal caste, whose province it was to rule over them, but whom they themselves were unable to approach by any conceivable efforts. They must be made to feel how great, how impass- able was that gulf that yawned between them and the hierarchy; how unapproachable were those privileges which the priesthood enjoyed as a birthright; how unassailable was that power which the Papacy derived directly from the King of kings. To this end pointed all the measures of the age: the fourth Lateran Council of 1215 made it obligatory that confession should be offered to a priest; the Council of Toulouse, in 1229, forbade to the laity the Scriptures in the vulgar tongue. It seemed for a time as if humanity were about to surrender all rights except that of submission. The Albigenses in every quarter 1 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. were repressed; the Waldenses buried themselves again in their mountain fastnesses ; the kings of the earth bent low and touched the dust. During the last three decades of the first half of this century, there stood one solitary figure breasting the torrent of despotism, a figure so conspicuous by its erect attitude amid the crouching of all other forms, that it has survived the mists of ages, and still lives in modern memory: it was Frederic 11., Emperor of Germany. If Innocent III. was the most remarkable of mediaeval pontiffs, Frederic II. was the most remarkable of mediaeval kings. He combined those qualities, which in the sovereign of any age are rare, which in a sovereign of the Middle Ages are scarcely to be found: military genius and intellectual acquirements. Struggling with insurmountable difficulties, contend- ing with hopeless odds, oppressed through life by foreign and domestic foes, assailed even by the in- gratitude of those of his own household, this man yet obtained over the heart of Europe the victory which he could not obtain over its dominions. His founda- tion of the University of Naples; his encouragement of the medical school of Salerno; his accessibility to all the learning, the art, and the'poetry of his day; his personal merit as an author, so rarely found in any sovereign, ancient or modern; his possession of those knightly accomplishments which spring as much from the heart as from the intellect; his ability to speak six languages, at a time when few men could correctly speak their own; above all, his defence of national freedom against ecclesiastical supremacy, at a season LAST TRIUMPH OF THE TEMPORAL PAPACY. 157 when ecclesiastical supremacy was universally con- ceded, conspired to make him then, and have conspired to render him still, an object of undying interest. We have more than once in the course of this work been tempted to draw historical parallels; it seems to us that here we may draw another. We have always felt that there are many points in which Frederic II. of Germany resembles his illustrious namesake of Prussia. Both lived at periods of extreme political conservatism, which yet contained the germs of coming revolution. Both spent their early years under the influence of a restraint which was far from agreeable : the Prussian king under that of a stern father, the German emperor under that of a rigid pontiff. Both emerged from that restraint, with theological opinions which, to say the least, were free-thinking. Both surrounded themselves with the company of the most illustrious literary men whom their age had produced. Both aspired to be them- selves worthy to rank amidst that com, any, and sought to win a personal niche in the temple of literary fame. Both were animated by an ardent patriotism for their mother-land,—the one for Italy, the other for Prussia. Both struggled to secure the welfare of that land, through wars,'and privations, and dangers,-sometimes inspired with hope, and some- times sunk in despair; but in hope and despair alike unyielding still. In the result of their lives, indeed, the parallel broke down. Frederic of Prussia, after being beset by the armies of continental Europe during seven years of alternate victory and defeat, I GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. came forth with the palm of the conqueror, and returned to his capital in triumph. Frederic of Germany, after thirty years of struggle, after courage not less con- spicuous, and heroism not less signal, sank, weary, by the wayside, and died in the heat of the day. Yet it may be doubted if the memory of the German emperor did not receive as proud a triumph as the person of the Prussian king. For long years he was cherished in the hearts of his people. There was a strange expectation floating ever through the land, that one day he would rise from the dead and finish that work which he had begun,——that even death had only vanquished him for the hour, and would be forced to give him back again to complete the libera- tion of his country. It was one of those anticipations which, while delusive, and even absurd, in the letter, are yet in the spirit prophetically true. The spirit of Frederic did not die; it was crushed, it was buried, but it was not dead ; it was to rise again in a greater leader, and to pursue its work of liberation under higher and more spiritual impulses. Meantime, however, the death of Frederic extin- guished the last spark of opposition to the temporal power of the Papacy, and the pontiff cast his eye over the kingdoms of the earth, and called them all ’his own. And, now, let us look once more at this gigantic power, which has arrived at its full stature. It will be our last look; never again through all the ages shall we behold it in such splendour. A few brief years and its glory will be departed, its unity broken, its authority despised, its armies disbanded, its fulmi- LAST TRIUMPH OF THE TEMPORAL PAPACY. 159 nations received with ridicule and contempt; it has arrived at the summit, and will soon begin to descend. Yet how proud is that summit at which it has now arrived! If ever the mere force of will could be an object worthy of veneration, it must be the force of that Papal will which raised the See of Rome from a simple bishopric into an empire well-nigh co-extensive with the world. Standing on the brow of the moun- tain, we View with amazement the steepness of that ascent by which the Papacy has climbed to power. We see it at the foot of the hill, as yet only medi- tating its upward journey,——claiming, indeed, an honoured place amongst the bishoprics, but rather for its association with St. Peter than for any merit peculiar to itself. We see it advanced one step on its journey, aspiring to priority amongst the episcopal dignities, claiming the uppermost room at the feast and the chief place in the synagogue. We see it progressing farther still, seeking to transform the Church into a representative monarchy, of which itself should be the head and centre. We see it then making strides of advancement, no longer satisfied with being head of a representative monarchy, but aspiring to the sovereignty of an absolute ecclesiastical dominion. We behold next its revulsion from the authority of the State, its refusal to render unto Caesar the things which were Caesar’s, its claim to an independent existence and to a separate empire. Last of all, we witness the greatest of all its preten- sions: the attempt, and the successful issue of the attempt, to subordinate the State itself into the posi- 160 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. tion of one of its vassals—to hold the Church and the world alike within its sway; to rule with an undivided sceptre, unrivalled and alone. Such was the proud pre-eminence to which the Papacy had now attained, a pre-eminence towards which all its footsteps had been bent, and which all its measures had been designed to achieve; the last step of the Isidorian decretals had been reached when the State acknowledged the pontiff as its sovereign lord. And yet in this hour of triumph, the causes were already in preparation which would hasten the hour of downfall. From this epoch of the Papacy there issued two distinct streams,-—a stream of spiritual experience, and a stream of outward circum- stances,--unconnected in their course, but tending towards one common ocean. Both were steadily and surely to flow towards the same goal—the emancipa- tion of the school-life, and the opening of a higher age; both were to progress towards one end, and pause not until their waters should be lost in waters mightier still. We intend to follow the course of each of these. We begin with the stream of spiritual experience, whose windings we shall trace in what remains of this and in the two succeeding chapters. We recur to a remark which we made at the close of Chapter xxviii. We there pointed out that Innocent III. was conscious of a spiritual want in the hierarchy, which had given colour to the Waldensian movement; and we saw that, with the view of remedying that want, he had instituted two new monastic orders. These orders were the Dominicans LAST TRIUMPH OF THE TEMPORAL PAPACY. 161 and the Franciscans, names which have been immor- talized in subsequent history. We have said that they were instituted by him; to speak with strict accuracy, we should rather say that the one was originated, and the other utilized by him. The Fran- ciscan movement was in its germ really spontaneous, and therefore more directly allied to the spirit of incipient Protestantism. Indeed, the fact that either of these orders should have been confirmed by the pontiff, points, in our view, to the conclusion, that the existing want of the Church had been felt by earnest minds within its pale. The heart of Christendom, even of orthodox Christendom, looked out upon the Waldensian movement with a strange feeling of ad- miration mingled with its fear. It beheld a company of men seeking to realize the ideal of that apostolic life which the world had long surmounted, and it asked, not without a sense of pain, where such an ideal was to be found in the bosom of the hierarchy. Where was now the morality which divine lips had proclaimed, in the sermon on the mount, to be the highest standard of conceivable perfection,—-the morality which had its root in poverty of spirit, and its fruition in the power to exist in persecution? Where was that self-denying spirit which had gone forth on its missionary journeys without gold or silver or purse, making no provision for the morrow, and trusting to the divine strength of the hour? Where was that singleness of heart which had ennobled humble fishermen, and poor tent-makers, and despised tax-gatherers,-—which had made heroes’ voL, II. L 162 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. of the world’s weak ones, and kings of the men whom paganism would have held as slaves? Where, finally, was that unselfish society which had all things common, which called nothing its own, which lived only in the community of its members,—that society in which the individual repudiated the glory of per— sonal riches, and valued wealth alone as a means of making wealthy? These days were all gone, and in their room there had crept into the Church of the apostles the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eye, and the pride of life; the desire, at any price, for all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them; the willingness, on any terms, to purchase outward power; the preference, on every side, of the seen and temporal to the unseen and eternal. Ought these things so to be? Was not the spirit of Christianity being crucified afresh, and put to an open shame? was not paganism itself being restored to a firmer throne, and placed upon a stronger basis? Surely these despised dwellers in the valleys were not entirely wrong. Such was the cry that went up from the earnest minds of Christendom; the Papacy heard it, and answered it, and its answer was the institution of the Dominicans. It seemed to the Papal power that there lay open to it a course by which it could restore the fervour of apostolic days without diminishing its own material grandeur. Without being itself mission- ary, might it not be the sender forth of missionaries ? without being itself poor, might it not commission to evangelize the world a new band of disciples, pos- LAST TRIUMPH OF THE TEMPORAL PAPACY. 163 sessed of no worldly substance? Had not the first apostles gone forth at the command of a divine head to teach all nations, to baptize all men in His name ? And was not the Papacy the representative of that divine head ? was it not the vicar of Christ on earth, the vicegerent of God below, the visible manifestation ‘to the world of the power that rules in earth and heaven? Why should not the pontiff still send out his missionaries to preach, to convert, to comfort, to support the weak, and bring down the pride of the strong? Why should not these missionaries, in obedience to a command which still represented the divine, lead lives of poverty, of privation, of toil, trust for their subsistence to the benevolence of the souls they cured, and find their highest joy in making others glad ? And so, as an attempt to work out this thought, the Dominican order arose, an order which sought to transplant the shores of Galilee into the plains of mediaeval Europe. They, like the apostles of - old, were commanded to go and teach all nations. They, like the seventy disciples, were enjoined to take for their journey neither silver nor gold nor apparel. They, like the listeners to the sermon on the mount, were told to take no thought what they should eat or drink, or wherewithal they should be clothed, but to trust for their nourishment to Him who fed the ravens and clothed the lilies. And it was marvellous how warmly the world welcomed them; a welcome which proved beyond all controversy how deeply had been wanted such a manifestation of the Christian spirit. In a very few years the pagan I64 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. ideal grew dim, and the Christian ideal of self- sacrifice began to resume its sway. These sons of voluntary poverty were the observed of all observers, and the admired of all admirers. They multiplied day by day; their ranks were hourly crowded with new recruits; their influence was yearly expanded over all society, until they came at last to mould the counsels of kings. They stretched from sea to sea, and from shore to shore. They passed into France, and secured a chair of theology in the University of Paris; they went over to England, and founded a monastery at Oxford. They planted monastic insti- tutions in every nation of Europe, in nearly every nation of Asia, in many parts of Africa, and eventually in the new world of America; they revealed, for the first time in history, the practical power which dwelt in Christian medimvalism. But whatever the Dominicans were, that were the Franciscans with a tenfold intensity. Theirs, as we have seen, was originally a more spontaneous movement, and to this extent it was nearer to Protestantism. Their character and history have been strikingly epitomised in the life of their founder, Francis of Assisi. That life connected two moral worlds,——the world of romance, and the world of religious earnestness. He was born in the palmy days of the French renaissance,——the days of chivalry, of knightly accomplishments, of the love-song, the joust, and the tournament. He was bred on the lap of luxury; his father was in trade, and had acquired great possessions; and the facilities which LAST TRIUMPH OF THE TEMPORAL PAPACY. 165 such wealth afforded gave the youth easy access to the society of the opulent and the cultured. Into that society he plunged with avidity; in its atmo- sphere of polished gaiety he found a congenial home. He joined in all the pageants of the age, was foremost at the tilt and the tournament, was conspicuous in the feats of chivalry, was distinguished above his fellows in the accomplishments of the knight and gallant; so thoroughly, indeed, did he breathe the French spirit, that his original name of John was superseded by that of Francesco, or the little Frenchman. Amid this life of gaiety, a discerning eye might have detected a germ of the future ; even in these days he was never known to turn a deaf ear to the cry of distress, and he was ever as lavish in providing for the pleasures of others as he was in indulging his own. Suddenly over this fair scene there fell a black cloud; Francis was prostrated on a bed of sickness, and the shadows of death seemed to be drawing near. The world, and the pomp of the world, faded from his vision, and, in communion with his soul, he stood alone. The crisis passed; he recovered, and the world came back to him, but it came back with a changed countenance; its glory was departed, its gold had become dross, its garments were moth- eaten, its pleasures were dust and vanity. From his bed of pain he arose a new man, —an earnest, devoted, self-denying man. From that pride which chivalry had engendered, he sank into the profoundest humility, into the deepest conviction of his own utter nothingness. N o sooner had it become a conviction 166 GROWTH or THE SPIRIT or CHRISTIANITY. than it passed into action; if he was in reality poor, why should he seem to be rich? He dedicated all that he had to God. He exchanged his clothes with a strolling mendicant, and wore ever after the meanest attire. He abjured all family ties; he resigned his claim to the paternal inheritance; he begged his bread at the gates of the monasteries. His example became contagious; in a little time he had gathered a small company around him, and to them he unfolded his rule of life. But his own life was larger than his rule; it brimmed over with enthusiasm for the welfare of humanity. In the glow of that enthusiasm, he felt his individual nature to be lost. As a man with a strong end in view knows not how many miles he travels, nor feels the weari- ness that is creeping over his frame, so Francis of Assisi, travelling over the road of life in pursuit of his brother’s good, knew not how hard he toiled, and felt not how arduous was the way. He sent a mission to Morocco to convert the Moors; he went in person to the East to ask from the Sultan some indulgence for the Christian captives; he wrought with his own hands for the building of churches at home. Nor was it only in spiritual matters that he desired the health of his brother; his was a practical Christianity. He went among the lepers in the hospital of Gubbio, and there, in the presence of the most loathsome disease which humanity has ever encountered, he tended its victims with an assiduity and a tenderness which no relative dared to manifest; stooping to the most menial offices, and ministering LAST TRIUMPH OF THE TEMPORAL PAPACY. 167 to their deepest necessities, alike of body and of soul. And let it be observed, that this instinct to supply the temporal wants of human nature was no ephemeral impulse, arising from the momentary ex- citement that stirred a single man ; it was a principle of life, which the founder of the order communicated to all his followers. In proportion as these followers multiplied, the spirit of active benevolence increased. In the next century, Europe was ravaged by one of the most terrible pestilences which have ever desolated its shores; strong lives were stricken in a moment, and the world in its terror forsook them and fled. But in that hour of danger one band remained stedfast at the post of duty; fearless amidst the fearful, firm amidst the wavering, calm amidst the panic-struck, resigned amidst the despairing, the Franciscan friars tended the last moments of the plague-stricken, and there died of their dauntless band 124,000. There have been noble battlefields in the history of mediaevalism,—-—fields which have dis- played the courage of human nature, and the instinc- tive chivalry which dwells in the human heart; but, to our mind, the noblest, the proudest, the most heroic of them all, is that vast field of mediaeval Europe, where, in the path of duty, and in the en- thusiastic love of man, the 124,000 Franciscans lay down to die. It was when the life of Francis drew near its close that there occurred that remarkable episode which has excited the admiration of one party and the ridicule of another. In an ecstasy of prayer, in a moment 168 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. of rapt enthusiasm,--when the world, and the objects of the world, had completely lost their hold over sense and brain,—he was confronted by a mysterious heavenly stranger, bearing a sword in his hand. He approached the eager suppliant, and imprinted upon his body five distinct wounds, the same which Christ had received in the agonies of crucifixion. We have no doubt at all that the vision was subjective, we have equally little that the wounds were unconsciously self- inflicted; a frame attenuated by intense thought, wearied with long watching, worn out with fasting and with voluntary penury, might well present distorted impressions to a highly-imaginative mind. Yet it does not seem to us that the matter is a subject for ridicule; we are rather inclined to recognise in it the prophecy of coming development. Whence this eagerness of Francis to appropriate the wounds of jesus ? Was it not really an eagerness to appropriate more of His human nature? We have seen how the sense of His divinity had almost absorbed the thought of His humanity; we have seen how His human presence had been supplied by the presence of the Virgin Mother : was there not here the longing for a return, a desire to go back to the earthly life of the Master, and to see Him as He was in the fashion of a suffering man? The longing expressed by Francis of Assisi was to find more vehement utterance in after days. The death of this man was consistent with his life; in the last scene of all, his humility reached its climax. He felt the end approaching, and he LAS'IJ. TRIUMPH OF THE TEMPORAL PAPACY. 169 prepared to meet it in that attitude which he had maintained through his whole career. As if death itself '{VCI'C not a sufficient mark of human poverty and ,helplessness, he desired to be carried out to the church and laid on the bare ground; in that posture, so/expressive of his sense of human nothingness, the founder of the Franciscans closed his eyes and fell aft/sleep. His memory did not die with him; he was greater in his death than in his life—more honoured, more influential, more potent. For the first time since the days of early Christianity, a gentle, self-denying life achieved by self-sacrifice an influence which armies [by conquest failed to win. Looking back upon him through the ages, it is not at once easy to say what precise place he should occupy in history; not easy to separate his character, alike from the extravagant adulation of his friends and the unjust detraction of his foes. Of his personal sincerity, his piety, his earnestness, his self-denying zeal for the welfare of humanity, there can be no doubt ; and that the method by which he exhibited these qualities was carried to extravagance, there can be equally little. It is, indeed, a very simple process to say, that this man was a ‘delirious fanatic;’ nor do we in the least object to the expression, provided only it be conceded that it explains nothing. We want to know what was the fever and what was the fanaticism ? Fevers frequently spring from social neglect; fanaticism is not seldom the result of social reaction. The fanaticism of Francis was emphatically so. The moral atmosphere had long been impure, and the elements which con- I7o CRowTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. duce to life had been looked upon with contempt. When the reaction came, it came furiously} driving helplessly before it the minds and hearts 0 \men, stringing up the nerves into excitement, and firing the blood into fever. Francis of Assisi was the first fruit of this reactionary movement, which, in relathon to the hierarchy, was almost a Protestant movement. He burned with that sense of individual responsibility which had well-nigh been buried in the collective unity of the Church. He glowed with the spontaneous fervour of a life which had awakened to the joys of personal religion. He expressed that spontaneity in a collection of Italian hymns, the earliest written in the dialect of his native country; hymns brimming with the enthusiasm of the love of nature, the love of humanity, and the love of God. And if, in the reaction from long torpor, he felt too deeply the awfulness of human responsibility; if, in the revolt from hierarchical pride, he was overweeningly impressed with the duty of self-abnegation; if, in short, in the suddenness of his waking, he was surprised into an excitement which disordered the balance of his mind, the fault lay with the system he had surmounted, and the virtue was all his own. CHAPTER XXX. SEARCH FOR A RULE OF CONDUCT. E proceed to trace still further the develop- ment of that remarkable moral movement which had already taken its rise in the Catholic Church, and was now widening towards the mighty sea. The Dominicans and Franciscans, in common with other monastic orders, were bound by a threefold vow of chastity, poverty, and obedience. In their case, however, the vow seems to us to have had a special significance. It united them to three ages of history: one in the far past, one in the generation that was fading, and one that had its being in the vigorous life of the present hour. The vow of poverty connected them with the far past ; with the days when the gospel was preached to the poor, and when the common people heard it gladly. The vow of chastity connected them with that age of chivalry, which was already dying; the age when’ man transferred to woman a reflection of that holy light which he had caught from the ideal vision of the Virgin Mother. The vow of obedience connected them with the iron present; with the temporal power of the Papacy, with the indomitable strength of the hierarchy, with all that 172 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. reminded them that they were the subjects of an absolute dominion. It was not long, however, before it became evident that one of the two parties lived in the past alone; not long ere the Dominicans and Franciscans revealed a chasm in their midst. Both "had vowed poverty, but to each of them it had been a different vow ; to the Dominicans it was the ordina- tion to an official ministry, to the Franciscans it was the consecration to a personal life. The Dominicans thought it sufficient not to be rich; the Franciscans deemed it imperative to be in absolute need. The Dominicans abjured the luxuries of life; the F rancis- cans denied themselves almost its necessities. The Dominicans were well content to possess as an order that wealth which they could not hold as individuals ; the Franciscans refused to the community the pos- sessions which they held sinful in the man. A difference so considerable, and threatening day by day to become more marked, was not likely to be contemplated by the Papacy without anxiety. The Pope interfered to restore harmony. He claimed for himself all the possessions of both orders; but he told them that they might freely use that which they could not own, might dwell in the lands and in the castles which belonged to their master, and might live sumptuously as guests while yet in themselves they were penniless and destitute. The reconciliation between this world and the world to come savoured somewhat of sophistry, and was not likely to convince any one not desirous to be convinced. Accordingly, some believed and some doubted. The majority of SEARCH FOR A RULE OF CONDUCT. I 7 3 the Franciscan order succumbed to the lenient inter- pretation, and resigned themselves to the enjoyments of the present world; but there parted from the midst of them a stream which never returned, a band who held fast by the rigid rule, and whom no threats nor promises could draw again within the dominion of the Papacy. They claimed to be the true followers of Francis of Assisi; their fervour supplied the place of their original numerical weakness, and their num- ber itself was augmented day by day. Scattered up and down through many lands, hunted by hierarchical persecution and Dominican fury, stamped by so many epithets of contempt that their individuality has been almost lost to history,--appearing at one time under the name of Spirituals, at another as Brethren of the Free Spirit, now as the Fraticelli, now as the Beghards, and now again as the Beguini,-—they held through all opprobrious names one common unity of nature, and one simultaneous attitude towards the Papal power. It was an attitude of defiance; a defiance not sufficiently wide-spread to constitute a revolt of the school-life, y'et revealing a weapon of attack which no scholastic revolution had as yet dared to wield—the power of the pen. For the first time the Papacy was attacked by literature. In the early part of this century there had appeared a remarkable book, of unknown authorship, which bore the name of The Everlasting Gospel. To be the production of an un- scientific age, it was a work of extraordinary merit; for this, if for no other reason, that it recognised in human history a process of development. It started, as all I GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. books of that day started, from certain theological premises, which werev assumed to be true; and then, proceeding from the divine to the human, it showed how the nature of man reflected the nature of God. There were three persons in the Trinity, and each of these had a distinct manifestation: the Father was the manifestation of power, the Son of wisdom, the Spirit of goodness or inward purity. Each of these manifestations had occupied in turn the sphere of human history. The first age had been that of the Father; it was the age of power, of physical strength, of temporal dominion, of material majesty, of govern- ment by the rod of fear. The second age was that of the Son; it was the period of wisdom, of revela- tion, of light,——the period when men had ceased to be mere mechanical instruments, and were desirous to examine and analyse the objects which lay around them. But there either had begun to appear, or there was shortly to appear in the future, a third and higher manifestation—that of the Holy Spirit; a mani- festation which must supersede those of the Father and the Son, and reign with an empire unfading and imperishable ; the manifestation of goodness, of purity, of love, of the heart unsullied, of the mind at peace, of the life made beautiful, of the will of earth harmonious with the will of heaven: this was the perfect fruit of the gospel tree. It was this remarkable work which Gerhard, one of the recusant Franciscans, now sought to use as a weapon against the hierarchy. He published an exposition of it, in which he pro- ceeded to apply its statements to the features of his SEARCH FOR A RULE OF CONDUCT. 175 own age. Two of the epochs were already past. The age of power had yielded to the period of reason; and the period of reason itself was yielding to another age. A new day had dawned for the world; the proclamation of the gospel of love, the gospel which made all men equal, which levelled the distinction of rich and poor, which forced every man to feel his inherent poverty. The angel of that everlasting gospel, whose coming had been predicted by the seer of Patmos, had already been flying through the air, bearing its universal tidings; that angel was Francis of Assisi. He had been sent to proclaim the essential brotherhood of man, the breaking down of that middle wall of partition which the hierarchy had raised, the abolition of priestly caste, the establishment of Christian equality—an equality whose bond of union was the sense of destitution, of poverty, of nothing- ness. This had been the work of Francis, and it must go on until its task was done. All barriers must be broken, all restrictions must be cleared away, all hindrances to a united brotherhood must be swept into oblivion ; and that age of wisdom, which had been claimed as the exclusive possession of the priesthood, must yield to the age of love, which was as universal as the Spirit of God. This was bold language, but bolder remained behind. Scarcely had the hierar- chical world recovered breath from the surprise of this assault, When john Oliva followed up the attack of Gerhard by an attack more acrimonious still. If Francis was the apocalyptic angel, Papal Rome was the apocalyptic Babylon; Babylon drunk with the 176 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. blood of the saints, Babylon on whose head were to be poured all the phials of the wrath of God. Here the spirit of antichrist had its seat, here the prince of this world had his throne, here the Son of man was crucified afresh, and that holy name blasphemed to which every knee must bend. The sword of heaven was drawn, and the saints were hurrying onward to the field of Armageddon, for the day of the Lord was at hand, and the measure of the city’s transgression was almost full. But while the Franciscans were thus resolute in the demolition of the old landmarks, they were in dreadful unrest as to what they should substitute. in their room. They had cast out from their hearts what seemed to them to be the unclean spirit; its departure had left them empty indeed, but neither swept nor garnished. They felt clinging about them all the old corruptions of their nature; andv in the absence of that which they had once believed to be a source of strength, the feeling was beyond all measure painful. There is something almost tragic in the efforts of these men to find repose. They exhausted every means and appliance to drive out or starve out the old nature: they wore the meanest garments; they ate the coarsest food; they wrought at the most repulsive labour; they engaged in the longest pilgrimages, and they found all in vain. They resorted to more terrible remedies : they fasted until life was almost extinct; they did penance till death itself would have been pleasure; they lashed themselves with merciless fury, that they might re- sEARCH FOR A RULE OF CONDUCT. I77 produce the figure of baptism by blood ; they exposed themselves to the anger of all the elements—to the burning fire, to the keen wind, to the freezing water, to every medium in nature by which they might obtain the washing of regeneration; and again they found it all in vain. There is not, to our mind, a sadder spectacle in all history than that of this moral discomfiture; its sadness is too deep for tears, and too eloquent for description ; it is humanity weighing mediaevalism in the balance, and, in spite of all its glories, finding it wanting. Whence sprang this unrest? It is a question of vast importance, intimately connected with the moral development of human nature; and we shall offer no apology for making a brief inquiry into the sources of its being, and the secret of its power. It seems to us that the unrest of mediaevalism took its rise from three distinct causes: from a just and genuine reac- tion, from a mistake as to the design of religion, and from a very defective system of moral philosophy. We must glance in turn at each of these. And, first, it is evident that the unrest of mediaevalism had at least part of its origin in a reaction which was genuine and just,—a reaction against that tendency to deaden the sense of sin which had been fostered by the increasing practice of indulgences. The Franciscans felt, and felt truly, that no high spiritual nature could be satisfied with such a remedy,-—a remedy which was applied only to an unaffected part, and did not touch the seat of the disease. They felt, at the same time, that a nature of feeble spirituality VOL. II. M I 78 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. would be rendered by this practice more spiritually feeble still, more blunted to the sense of guilt, more blind to the charms of virtue, more deaf to the voice of conscience; ‘from him would be taken even that which he had.’ In the strength of this reaction, the Franciscans magnified sin, felt its power more intensely, experienced its bondage more keenly, and looked more despairingly upon the prospect of obtaining emancipa- tion from its fetters. And by one of those strange coincidences which frequently occur to remind us of the unity of human history, these poor Franciscans, in up- holding the enormity of man’s corruption, received an ally from an unlooked-for quarter—from the opposite side of the social ladder, from the courtly literature of the romantic age. That brilliant renaissance of the human mind which had its birth in the south-east of France, was beginning to grow weary of its home. The spirit of French literature was rapidly dying; the golden age had already given place to one of silver, and the age of silver was gradually yielding to that of iron. Chivalry had lost the dew of its youth, and minstrelsy had lost the clearness .of its song; the spirit of the renaissance turned its eyes away, and looked out for another home. And for that spirit another home was indeed preparing. Along the banks of the Arno, on the site of those plains where of old the strolling merchants had erected their tents of temporary shelter, there had sprung up, with the birth of the free cities of Italy, a city fairest of them all—the beautiful, the cultured Florence. If Rome was the mistress of the world, if Venice was the SEARCH FOR A RULE OF CONDUCT. I mistress of the ocean, Florence was the mistress of the garden; it was into her lap that all the others poured their precious fruits. She was the repository of the world’s treasures, the custodier of the world’s wealth, the refiner of the world’s silver; she received the stores of earthly merchandise, and she gave them .back again in visions of outward beauty—in noble architecture, in finished sculpture, ultimately in perfect painting; she was already the favoured child of nature, she was soon to be the cherished companion of human intelligence. It was to this city of Florence that the renaissance of France was winging its flight; but Florence was by no means ripe for receiving its spirit of freedom. She had bowed her neck to the hierarchy; she had become the handmaid of Papal Rome; she had experienced those corruptions which flow from luxury, and that deadness of conscience which springs from a too easy forgiveness. She was pre-eminently in want of a preacher, and her first preacher was bound to be at the same time her earliest martyr. In point of fact, it proved so. A great preacher was at hand, a Boanerges, a son of thunder ; whose pulpit was a cleft of Parnassus, whose text was the bottomless pit, whose message was the destruction of evil, whose inspiration was the spirit of poetry. Looking back through the distance, we see his gigan- tic figure clear against the clouds of six centuries; the first poet of his own age, the second to none of any age—the immortal, the immortalizing Dante. His life had been singularly moulded by female in- fluences, as if from Very childhood the purest ideal 180 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. of the medimval heart had sought to claim him for its own. Having lost his father in very tender years, he was thrown upon the guardianship of a wise and upright mother, to whom he probably owed the first planting of those seeds which in after days bore so rich a harvest. But to this influence there was added another, so powerful that Dante himself has called it the awakening of a new life within him ; we allude to that attachment to the child Beatrice, that love so chaste, ‘so pure, so unstained by the meretricious or the sensual, which yet was strong enough to direct the current of his life, and absorbing enough to hold him above the waves of temptation. This Beatrice, originally the personal object of his devotion, became in time a typical being; the type of stainless purity, of womanly tenderness, of self-sacrificing love, even of the Virgin Mother herself. When he comes to unfold his revelation of the soul’s destiny beyond the grave, it is Beatrice who appears to him as his guide into the regions of resplendent light. On the poet’s wing he has two flights to traverse: one into the regions of the lost, the other into the abodes of the blessed; his pioneer to the one is Virgil, his con- ductor to the other is Beatrice. Virgil is paganism, Beatrice is Christianity; Virgil is human reason, Beatrice is divine revelation; Virgil is the brow-beat- ing strength of man, Beatrice is the calm, enduring, self-denying power of woman. He was weary of the paganism, weary of the materialism, which had buried the soul; weary of the rites and ceremonies which had made worship an act of the hand rather than of SEARCH FOR A RULE OF CONDUCT. 181 the heart; weary, above all, of that magical salvation which could profess to free a soul from sin, and yet leave it steeped in the depths of its corruptions. He felt that his countrymen wanted to be roused into terror; pagans in heart, they could only be assailed by pagan weapons, and the strongest of all pagan weapons was the sense of fear. To awaken that fear, to stir the echoes of human responsibility, Dante led Italy down into the recesses of that awful world where dwelt the spirits of those from whom all hope had fled. He made no attempt to soften the terrors of that state; he presented it to the eye in its full horror, and in its utmost repulsiveness. As we descend with him down the ever-contracting circles, as we pass with him through the ever-in- creasing miseries, we feel how terribly such physical representations of the consequences of evil were calculated to awaken the Italian world of that day; and we recognise in the great poet a man whose mission was more than poetry, who was sent to be a forerunner of Savonarola, to tell his countrymen that, in spite of hierarchical indulgences, and in spite of Papal absolutions, sin was a dreadful disease, a disease whose progress was destructive, and whose end was death. That was the message of Dante, and we know how his countrymen received it. We know how that befell him which has befallen most ‘prophets: to be ‘without honour in their own country.’ We know how his native Florence cast him out, and how, through all his remaining years, he wan- dered a fugitive and an exile, seeking rest and 182 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. finding none. We know how his dust reposes far from that city which would have gladly paid him in death the honour she denied him in life; these events are amongst the commonplaces of history. But the reformation which Dante began was not one which could be quenched by the extinction of a single life, however noble; it was a movement in the air, and Dante was, after all, only one of its melodious instru- ments. It took hold more or less of all his contem- poraries ; took hold prominently of his beloved friend Giotto, the painter, sculptor, and architect of his day. In his picture of the ‘ Triumph of Death,’ we seem to catch the echoes of Dante’s Dz'm'mz Commedz'a; in his figures of Chastity and Obedience, we seem to hear again the tones of the poet-reformer; Obedience, in the true spirit of the F lorentines, bows her head to curb and yoke, but Chastity stands apart in a rocky fortress, unassailed and unassailable. All this demon- strates that the air had been impregnated with the new spirit, that humanity was becoming more and more restive under the chain, that individual respon- sibility was every day asserting afresh the claim to let its voice be heard, and that the sense of individual sin was each moment waxing deeper and stronger, refusing to be drowned in the Papal waters of forgetfulness. Here, then, was the first source of that unrest which permeated the mind of the Franciscans. It arose from reaction against that tendency to moral lethargy which had been created by the hierarchical spirit. The individual had been so long taught to SEARCH FOR A RULE OF CONDUCT. 183 think of himself as merely a part of the Church, that he had grown forgetful of his own individuality, and of all that moral responsibility which individuality involves. He had been so long taught to think of himself as dependent on the hierarchy for spiritual blessings, that he had ceased to remember that channel of personal appropriation by which alone any blessing can become our own. The Franciscan movement was a revolt against this belief. It was a waking up of the individual to the awfulness of his own being, the untransferableness of his moral nature, the solitariness of his soul before God, the responsi- bility which he had to bear undivided and alone, and, above all, the terrible weight of guilt and sin for which that responsibility called him to account. What wonder that, in the immediate perception of such a vision, in the sudden and instantaneous awakening to a thought which had been suppressed for centuries, the opening experience of the human mind should have been one of unrest and misery? But there was a second source of this unrest: it had its ground in a mistake of the mediaeval world concerning the design of religion. We have become familiar with the platitude that religion is designed to make man happy; in mediaeval times, such a state- ment would have been neither a platitude nor a commonplace, but a very fresh proposition, worthy of being discussed, and ‘open at least to qualification. For there had gradually crept into the heart of mediaevalism, the notion that the design of religion was itself to produce unrest; no man ever said so in 184 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. so many Words, but the belief lies at the very root of the system. It is impossible to study the morality of that age without being convinced that the men of the thirteenth century, those men at least who were in search of a rule of life, estimated the merit of an action by the difficulty involved in its performance. To perform a Work from which the nature of the man revolted; to do what he very much wished to leave undone; to toil through his task with temptations at every turn inciting him to throw it aside ; to struggle up to the attainment of his object in opposition to every natural instinct and every individual propensity, —this was to be a virtuous man, this was to win the crown of holiness. But to do good from the impulse of nature; to enter into life without passing through the strait gate and the narrow way; to manifest the fruits of a spiritual growth without experiencing those hindrances which generally obstruct the progress of the seed; to perform a religious deed because religion had become the very breath of the soul’s atmosphere, -—this was passed over without admiration, and spoken of without praise. If a man should offer up his life to prove his concurrence with the law of sacrifice, he would be esteemed worthy of the highest com- mendation; if he should offer up his life because his love of humanity was stronger than the love of life, and stronger than the fear of death, he would assuredly have been assigned an inferior place in the temple. Or, to descend to a less elevated platform, if a man came in contact with a gold coin, and after sore temptation decided not to appropriate it, he SEARCH FOR A RULE OF CONDUCT. 185 would be reckoned essentially moral; if he passed it by without experiencing the slightest temptation, his position would be less exalted amongst the ranks of the virtuous. Now in all this there is a manifest confusion of thought; the confusion of that which is worthy of praise with that which is worthy of admira— tion. The man who abstains from touching the piece of gold in opposition to the prompting of his whole nature, is an object of greater praise than the man who is never tempted at all ; but why so ? It is be- cause the latter stands upon an eminence higher than praise,—praise would insult him; he is following his nature, and to commend him for following his nature would be to suggest a suspicion that the act was not natural. The truth is, that just in proportion as _we cease to view a good work as meritorious, so much the nobler does that work become. We commend a work of genius because genius is not common to humanity; if genius became common to humanity, it would no longer be an object of commendation, but its universal possession would lift man himself to a higher level. So is it with virtue in the indi~ vidual mind. At first it has to struggle with the natural life; and the struggle is fierce and keen, some- times inclining to the flesh, and sometimes to the spirit. But if the spirit faint not, it will conquer at the last, and the virtue will become no longer meritorious, but natural,-—as natural as the breathing of the air, as natural as the vision of the sunbeams. ‘The seed which was sown in tears will be gathered up in joy, the bread cast on the waters will come back I86 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. to us after many days, the life lost in the shadows will be found again in the sunshine. When a man arrives at this stage, the natural has become one with the spiritual; heaven and earth have met together. He would no more dream of congratulating himself on his merit, than he would dream of considering himself heroic because his heart rejoices in the morning sunlight, or because his mind grows pensive beneath the silent stars ; virtue is -as much his life as sense or memory, and virtue, like sense and memory, is to him not a merit, but a gift. Now, if it be so, it follows that the struggles of virtue, so far from being its crown, are the proofs of its incipiency; that the feeling of sacrifice experienced in its performance, so far from constituting its glory, marks in reality its distance from full development. When that which is perfect has come, that which is in part is done away; the sacrifice ceases whenever the human will has rested in the divine will. We have always felt how grand is that touch in the Hebrew Scriptures, where the patriarch, offering up his son on Mount Moriah, is allowed at the last hour to resume his gift. It is a true picture of the history of all sacrifice. If persevered in, it loses its pain, loses its very sense of loss,—-its death has no Sting, its grave has no victory; the absolute goal of religion will be reached when a man has ceased even to desire the gratification of his individual will in ‘separation from the divine life. Yet, strange to say, this was the very point which the mediaeval world did not see. That world magnified the sacrifice as a sacrifice, and sEARcH FOR A RULE OF CONDUCT. 187 valued the religious life in proportion as it was a life of struggle, until in the thoughts of men unrest became the summer ripeness of the soul, pain its maturest fruit, the endurance of privation its richest harvest. Men weighed themselves in the balance, and found themselves wanting if they did not find the traces of suffering and mortification. To produce those traces, they courted the severest penances, and sought the bitterest lacerations ; and the only spiritual joy which they knew was the melancholy satisfaction that they had actually and intensely succeeded in rendering themselves unhappy. We come now to the third source of that unrest which we have found existing in the heart of medi- aevalism. Its first was the genuine reaction from a superficial view of sin, its. second was a mistaken estimate of the design of the religious life; but it had a third, in one sense more radical than either of the others: a very defective system of moral philosophy. We have become so habituated to think of sin in the abstract, and of virtue in the abstract, that we find great difficulty in realizing the medimval position. That position did not contem- plate either vice or virtue as abstract principles); it viewed'bot‘h of them only as collections of separate acts. Sin was the aggregate number of a series of evil deeds; virtue was the aggregate number of a series of good actions. The whole conception of vice and virtue was numerical. The mediaeval mind did not contemplate the law of God as giving sanction to a pure life, but as ordaining the observance of cer- 188 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. tain definite commandments. The modern Christian reads the Bible that he may catch the impress of the divine life; the mediaeval Christian who was able to read Latin, read the Bible that he might count those precepts which he was expected to obey. God's moral law to the world was by no means con- templated as infinite or absolute. It comprehended a limited number of commandments, all of which a man might keep; nay, which by very strenuous labour a man might surpass. Let us suppose that the New Testament was found to contain a thousand distinct precepts,—the number was large, but not infinite; it was quite possible that a human being might not only exhaust them all, but add to them a new com- mandment not involved in any; by reason of this ten hundred and first precept, he had got beyond the standard even of divine law—he had performed a work of supererogation. . It may be said, In all this where do we find any ground for unrest? It may be foolish, it may be childish, it may be unphilosophical; but is it not at least comforting? To tell a man that God requires from him something less than absolute perfection; that he is not bound to rise to the standard of stain- less purity which he beholds in the divine life; that he is not expected to be perfect as his Father in heaven is perfect; that he is only called upon to keep a limited number of commandments, so limited that they may be counted by a human mind, compassed by a human life, transcended by a human imagination, and actually surpassed by human action,—-this is surely SEARCH FOR A RULE OF CoNDUCT. 189 a solace to a frail perishable being, conscious at once of his own corruption and his own natural impotence. To tell the weary traveller, who is exhausted by climbing the mountain, that he has only a few more peaks to pass ere he shall gain the final summit, is manifestly a source of greater strength than would be the information that the summit was far away, and the points of ascent innumerable. So, in like manner, would not the mediaval traveller, climbing the difficult hill of human duty, be stimulated more to prosecute his course by learning that the course was not immensely long, than he would be by discovering that it almost transcended possibility ? Nevertheless, a deeper examination must lead us to the conclusion, that in the spiritual region it was . not so; that mediaevalism would have received far more rest from contemplating Christianity as a perfect life, than it ever could derive from viewing it as a series of numerical commands. Christianity demands a perfect life, yet the germs of that perfection may be reached in a moment. In the breath of the infant’s life there are involved all the possibilities of manhood; in the soul of simple childhood there are wrapt up all the powers of the philosopher, and’ all thesusceptibili‘ties of highest genius. Now, the life of religion is love. We might write upon tables of stone a thousand moral precepts, directing a human soul how it shall act towards its brother, and we might see that soul, by long and laborious efforts, able at last to exhaust them all; but if we were to erase the writing, if we were to destroy the tablets, 190 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. if we were to leave the moral precepts a blank, and if in their room we were to kindle within the man himself the tiniest spark of love, in an instant the new life would outstrip the stereotyped acts of years, and would bound to the goal on wings of earnest fire. There is no rest in mechanical morality; it is at best but manual labour, it is the work of the anvil ; the only repose it can bring is that of physical exhaustion. It is as if one, in obedience to direction, were to strike with weary hand the notes of a musical instrument, producing in their combination a harmony he never intended, and which, even when produced, he fails to appreciate. The only work of supererogation is the life of love; for it is this alone that transcends the limits of law, and transforms the badge of servitude into the joy of voluntary service. It was this thought which at last, though late, the mediaeval world was beginning to realize. It had tried in the furnace all the external rules of human morality, and had found them all impure. The rule of Benedict, the rule of Dominic, the rule of Francis, had one after another passed in review; each for a moment had seemed to supply the emergencies of the hour, and each had proved in the sequel vanity and vexation of spirit ; they had brought no rest, they had contributed no joy. And the heart of the mediaeval world shrank back from a touch so cold, and recoiled from forms so dead. It wanted a life—a life deeper than the natural life, deeper than the rites and cere- monies of the visible Church, deeper than the hollow pageantry which passed too often for religious devotion. SEARCH FOR A RULE OF CONDUCT. 191 It wanted a hidden communion between itself and the fountain of its being; a communion which would be interrupted by no intermediate agencies, and marred by the presence of no outward witnesses; a com- munion in the solitary silence of the soul, whose joy would be known to itself alone, and whose converse would be heard by no ear but that of the listening spirit. And, in answer to that want, there was rising a new movement of religious life ; a movement noise- less as the summer air, silent as the working of gravitation’s law, yet mighty in its silence, and irre- sistible in the power of its attraction; a movement which was to carry the spirit of Christianity many steps nearer to the object of its labours, and to bring it almost within sight of the promised land: we allude to that phase of thought which men have called mysticism. It was not that now for the first time it had made its appearance. There never wasygnage» of the Christian religion, there never walls—Zn age of any religion, in which there were not to be found some lives imbued with the mystical spirit. It beamed out in many of the hymns of Brahminism ; it flashed forth in some of the deepest aspirings of Platonism ; it was taken up in due season into the light of Christianity. It appe’a'red in some of the writings of Paul ; it tinged the Alexandrian school of the second century; it came forth with Origen in the third, with the monk Diony— sius in the fifth, with Scotus Erigena in the ninth, with Bernard of Clairvaux in the twelfth, and with Bonaventura in the earlier half of the thirteenth century. This system has never at any time been left 192 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. without a witness. But while undoubtedly it is so, while no single age can be found which is not represented by at least one mystical mind, it is now that for the first time we discover what may be called a river of mystical life ; a river continuous and unbroken, forming a distinct feature of the moral land- scape, and resting not until it has mingled its waters with those of the great ocean. We see it rising with the close of this thirteenth century in the speculative, almost pantheistic, mind of Henry Eckart; swelling into greater breadth in the sublime and beautiful life of john Tauler; progressing in its course in the self- forgetting creed of Ruysbroek; and at last reaching its culminating glory in the publication of that work which of all others, next to the Bible, has been dearest to the heart of European Christendom, that book called the [mz'z‘az‘zbn of Christ, which always by the popular voice, and now, after long discussion, by the general consent of the learned, has been‘ ascribed to Thomas a Kempis. From that day mediaeval mysticism gradually disappears; but it disappears only as the forerunner vanishes when that prophet has come for whom he has prepared the way. Mysticism, as Ullmann remarks, was the true forerunner of Protestantism; its work was preparatory, its struggles were but the prelude to a mightier conflict. It was imperative that it should fade; but it faded only into a stronger light, a light whose harbinger it had been, and whose day it had predicted. Its mission, indeed, was not pre- cisely the mission of the Baptist in the wilderness ; it SEARCH FOR A RULE OF CONDUCT. 193 had less of the thunder and the earthquake, more of the still small voice. Its object was not to stimulate to revolution, but silently to prepare the ground for future revolution. The mystic claimed no new system of theology, attached himself to no party, ranged him- self under no sect; he was to be found amongst all parties, he was to be met with amidst all scenes. He aspired not to destroy the Catholic religion, but to spiritualize it, to deepen it, to show that its roots were more firmly fixed in human nature than even Catholi- cism itself had ever dreamed. He aimed to bring out, and he succeeded in bringing out as none had ever done before, the Protestant yearning that lies at the heart of Catholicism, the desire for individual life apart from the life of the collective Church. A system so vast in its scope, so deep in its soundings, so high in its designs, and so far-reaching in its historical results, ought not to be passed over without a separate con- sideration. VOL. II. N CHAPTER XXXI. DISCOVERY OF A NEW WELL-SPRING. HE movement called mysticism, at which we have now arrived, was a Silent protest of the school-life against being retained in school. We say a silent protest, for it did not rebel, it only felt rebellious. It neither strove nor cried, neither did any man hear its voice in the streets; its dissent was expressed inwardly, in the secret places of the heart. It is therefore in no sense to be regarded as an ecclesiastical revolution; it cer- tainly never regarded itself in this light; it professed to be in strictest harmony with Catholic truth. But it sought to place that truth upon a new basis, and by that attempt, while not revolutionary itself, it prepared the way for revolution; it was an internal preparation for those events of Outward history which were to change the aspect of the world and transform the spirit of man. What mysticism ob- jected to, was not the receiving of Catholic truth, but the receiving of Catholic truth in the form of a school lesson; it wanted emancipation from scholasticism. It was essentially an anti-school movement, a reaction against the studies and the modes of study that were DISCOVERY OF A NEW VVELL-SPRING. I95 prevalent in the class-room. It desired separation from the class that it might enjoy individual medita- tion; it craved the liberty to think in solitude, to commune with its own heart, to stand face to face and alone with those mysteries in which it lived and moved and had its being. When we come to examine its position in detail, we find that mysticism constituted a tllreefifld reaction; it was a reactionfiagainst school morality, it was a reaction against sqhpvorlmauthggity, and it was a reaction against school theology. We must advert briefly to each of these. First, then, mysticism was a protest against the morality of the school. It was not that it believed the morality to be bad or hurtful, it simply believed it to be defective. We have seen in the previous chapter what was the character of the Church’s moral teaching; it was the attempt to win salvation by the observance of a definite number of precepts. Mysticism proposed to blot out the handwriting of all the precepts, to destroy the tablets on which they were written, and to write a new law upon the heart itself. It said, Why stand Wang up into heaven, seeking to reach the ascended Christ by the steps of a moral ladder rising line upon line, and precept upon precept! He whom ye seek is already nigh you; dwelling in your hearts, and waiting for recognition by them! Ye have only to turn your eyes inward, and you will behold His glory; ye have only to look on Him, and immediately you will be likened unto Him! Cast but a glance upon His infinite brightness, and your heart will catch fire, 196 GROWTH OF THE sPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. and His brightness will become your brightness! It may be only a spark, but the whole fire is poten- tially in a single spark, and all daylight is enclosed in the first beam of dawn! The light has already come to you, but you are looking too far to find it! You are seeking it on the summits of Mount Sinai, while all the time it is at the door of your spirits; you are striving to reach it by outward acts, while in reality it is itself that must act through you! Your motto in the past has been, ‘Do this and live ; ’ your motto in the future must be, Live, and you will be compelled to do! There is a life which is touching your life—the life of infinite love; receive it, and it will become your own! Gaze upon it, and in your gaze you will be transfigured into its glory,-—you, and the world with you; ‘old things shall pass away, and all things shall be made new!’ You will cease to number the precepts of human duty! You cannot distinguish the drops of the ocean from the ocean itself, no more can you distinguish the acts of love from that ocean of love in which they dwell ! Love breathes in one word the language of all the precepts, concentrates in one sound the voice of all the commandments; it is the soul of the moral universe; it at once fulfils and overleaps the law! That was what mysticism said to the world. A doctrine very trite and commonplace to modern ears, but which must have sounded wondrously fresh to men who had lived so long under the shadow of Sinai. And this protest of mysticism against school- morality was intimately connected with its second DISCOVERY OF A NEW WELL-SPRING. 197 protest against school-authority. Morality had been viewed too much as the mere obedience to an out- ward command; mysticism came to ask if the belief in Christianity itself had not been made to rest too much upon the basis of external authority? The ground for the acceptance of Christian truth had been the universal consent of the Church; and as the Church had become an absolute monarchy, its universal consent was likely to be determined by the one and supreme will of the sovereign pontiff. In the sense of universal consent, there is a confidence; whether it be the consent of churchmen, or the con- sent of the wax papulz'. Let a mandate be given as the result of concurrent agreement, it will be received as having a higher basis than mere outward authority; the concurrence itself will constitute a presumption in favour of its rectitude. But let all confidence be destroyed that there has been any concurrent agree— ment, let there be borne in upon the mind even the suspicion that this seeming harmony is the result of collusion, and that this collusion is itself the result of a command issued by one human will, the mandate will then be received only as an arbitrary law—a law which may be’ good or which may be bad, but which is to be estimated neither by its goodness nor by its badness, but simply by the strength of the authority which has imposed it. Now that was the goal to which the mediaeval world had come. It had grown suspicious of the absolute monarchy, and between suspicion and aversion there is only a step. Thou shalt! thou shalt not! had become weary 198 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. sounds in the ears of a generation which had seen the rise of the Italian renaissance, and read Gerhard’s exposition of T he Ever/[wring Gospel. Everywhere there was a heaving of reactionary life,——-underground, suppressed, half -smothered, but potent still. The first impulse came from the Teutonic mind. If Italy was the home of Christian art, Germany was the nursery of religious reform; Eckart, Tauler, Ruys- broek, and all the leading mystics were Germans. Let it not be thought, however, that this German mysticism proclaimed in so many words, that the days of authority must end; it was too cautious for that, nor was the world yet ripe for such a message ; what it did say was, ‘Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again.’ It said, Even if the hierarchy were to pass away, even if the Papal voice were to lose its power, even if the universal consent of the Church were disunited and broken, Christian belief would not be left without a reason for the hope that was in it, for it had a ‘ building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.’ God was Himself the light of the soul, and in God’s light the soul must see light. Behind the veil of sense, behind the forms of time, there was a temple in the pure heart where the altar fires were ever burning, where day and night ascended the incense of a deep devotion, where every thought was a spiritual song of praise. There, face to face ' h the human spirit, and the human spirit lost itself in God ; lost its meanness, lost its littleness, lost its human nothingness, and was absorbed into the very heart DISCOVERY OF A NEW WELL-SPRING. 199 of the divine life; its pride broken, its selfishness crucified, its darkness dispelled, its weakness banished, its path lighted for evermore. It no longer required the illumination of the’ outward eye, it had no need of the sun nor of the moon to guide it; God was its light, and it could dispense with outward evidences. Heaven and earth might pass away, Pope and hier- archy might cease to be, Rome with its hallowed associations might sink beneath the waves, the records of all the councils constituting the proofs of universal consent might be consumed to ashes ; but this inward evidence, ‘this life that never shone on sea or shore,’ this testimony which was independent of all the Fathers, older than all the councils, more fundamental than all the creeds, must remain an imperishable possession—a word which would not pass away. But there was a third protest uttered by medimval mysticism ; it was the protest against school-theology. It was not that mysticism was opposed to all—or any of the doctrines of the Catholic Church, it professed to be in strictest harmony with these doctrines. But it objected very strongly to having Catholic truth or any other truth presented to it in the form of a school- lesson. With the multiplication of rites, with the reverence for images, with the pomp and pageantry of ceremonial representation, with the gorgeous ritual which attracted the eye and charmed the sense, with the incense and the vestments and the music and the aesthetic culture; in short, with the external helps of religion in general, this movement had little sympathy. It did not say they were wrongj’if’ did not say it 2OO GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. disapproved of them, it did not say men ought not to follow them, it simply did not sympathize with them ; it moved on a different plane. It was quite ready to admit that these outward observances had their place in religious development, it was quite ready to recognise their utility to a primitive age, it was quite prepared to see how powerfully they might influence the transition which every religion must make from the child into the man. But, conceding that they had been helps to the opening school-life, conceding that they had proved beneficial in illustrating abstract truths to minds unaccustomed to abstract reasoning, did it follow that their lives should be extended beyond the conclusion of that work which had been given them to do? The school-life of the Christian spirit was now far advanced, ready even to vanish away in the light of a higher life; was it fitting, was it reasonable, that what was good for the boy should be held binding on the man, and that a mode of tuition which was necessary to an incipient intelligence, should, when that intelligence was ex- panded, be deemed essential still? Yet this was precisely the attitude which the hierarchy had assumed; nay, the importance of ritualism had been made to increase with the advance of medimvalism; it had once been contemplated only as a help, it had now come to be viewed as possessing a magical efficacy. It was at this point that mysticism inter- posed its voice. It said, You stamp our doctrine as vague! you call us mystics! but is not the name more applicable to you? Do you not profess to have a DISCOVERY OF A NEW WELL-SPRING. 201 mystical power residing, not in the heart, which would at least be a legitimate place for it, but in certain outward forms, in certain ceremonial acts which are connected with the life of religion by no other bond than that of long association? Our mysticism, be it false or true, comes at least from within; the com- munion we seek is a communion between soul and soul, we admit no intermediate agencies between our spirits and the infinite spirit! Such a communion is incapable of expression in earthly language, and therefore it must be mystical ; but to seek mysticism in painted symbols and gilded forms, is surely a movement back to the days when men worshipped the fetichl Such was the spirit in which mysticism contemplated the religious life of the hierarchy. It viewed that life as the survival of a past age, an existence superannuated and behind the day. It had once been beneficial, it was now merely ornamental ; it had once been an element of progress, it was now only a memory of the past. There was another point in the school-theology with which the spirit of mysticism had little sympathy. It will be remembered that while the schoolmen were commanded to believe implicitly whatever the will of the Church should dictate, they were allowed, after having believed, to substantiate their belief by proof; forbidden to use reason as a source of religious truth, they were yet allowed to employ it as the messenger of Faith, the handmaid whom Faith sent to gather up her treasures. But if mysticism was opposed to the acceptance of truth upon mere outward authority, it 202 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. was not less strongly opposed to the endorsing of that authority by the steps of a logical demonstration. It held mathematical proof to be just as foreign to the nature of Christianity as was the mere imperative mandate of an external voice, and it regarded both as foreign to it for the same reason; because both belonged to a different region of human nature. The true province of authority was to regulate the actions of the body; it could have no control over the thoughts even of a slave. The true province of reason was to regulate the acts of the daily life; its sphere was the order of nature, and its task was the discovery of nature’s laws. But here, within the heart, was a region independent of natural law,-—a region which owned no atmosphere but the atmosphere of heaven, and no light but the light of God,-—a world beyond sense, and beyond the conditions of sense. Into this world reason dared not intrude, its objects were beyond the reach of reason, it was their glory to be irrational. The kingdom of God could not be reached by a scaling ladder, could not be gained by the steps of human demonstration; it must be seen by an inward sense, beheld by an eye that never gazed upon the visible landscape, heard in its deepest music by an ear that never listened to the sound of earthly voice. It must be mirrored in a light to which all human demonstration would be darkness—a light in which vision was one with knowledge, and in which knowledge was one with intuition,—a light before which grew dim the authority of all councils and the decretals of all pontiffs, and in whose clear and stainless DISCOVERY OF A NEW WELL-SPRING. 203 beam the most perfect reasoning of the greatest mathe- matical genius seemed but the lisping of the child and the groping of the benighted traveller. Such was the claim of mysticism,-—the claim to a faith whose pride it was to be irrational, not beause reason was opposed to it, but because reason was beneath it. It sought an evidence of things not seen, but it sought that evidence, not in the things that were seen, for it felt that the spiritual world could only be approached by the spiritual nature, and that the objects which transcended sense and time could only be perceived by an eye which had been closed to the impressions of the visible and the temporal light. We have now examined all the leading points of reaction which the mediaeval mystics presented to the spirit of the hierarchy, and it must be acknowledged that they were of vast importance, and of far—reaching significance. Why, then, did not the reformation come? With so much in the atmosphere of the age to favour its appearance, should we not have expected that it would have recognised its opportunity? Was there anything to have prevented john Tauler from having been Martin Luther ? These two men had much that was in common. Both were Germans, both lived in seasons of religious reaction, both were endowed by nature with extraordinary gifts, both possessed that power of pulpit eloquence which more than all other powers is calculated to sway the masses and mould the mind of the religious community, both were gifted with that lively and picturesque style which renders the gravest subject interesting and attractive to the 204 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. most superficial intelligence, both denounced the vices of their age—the sins of pope, priest, and people—— with a fire and a vehemence which did honour alike to their moral and their physical courage, and both, in return for such denunciation, were objects of Papal suspicion and aversion. Nay, if we were to confine ourselves to the mere personal qualities of the men, we should say that Tauler ought to bear the palm. He was a more cultured and a more amiable man than Luther, though probably the superior amiability was the result of the superior culture. In self-sacrifice both were equal, neither of them ever for a moment took his personal safety into account. Luther went to the diet of Worms, and Tauler, like the Franciscan friars, administered dying consolations to the victims of that great pestilence which swept the Europe of the fourteenth century. Yet, with such analogies in their character, their destinies were very different; the name of Luther is a household word,-—how few ordi- nary readers ever heard of Tauler? The reason is plain; the name of Luther is connected with a work, and it is the work that gives glory to his name; the name of Tauler has nothing to rest upon save the memory of his own beautiful life. But the question recurs, Why was it so? why did not the reformation movement which ennobled the memory of Luther forestall him by falling into the hands of Tauler? why did not the birth of Protestantism ante- date itself by a century and a half ? The question is a very important one, and we intend briefly to con- sider it. The fault clearly does not lie with Tauler DISCOVERY OF A NEW WELL—SPRING. 205 as a man; it becomes, therefore, of great consequence to inquire whether there lay not some rexalgdeficiency in thatmsystern “of,1ny_stic_ism_ of which he was the noE/lesT representative. We make the inquiry in a purely historical spirit. We have studied above all other studies to render this work strictly scientific and impartial, free from the influence of all polemical bias, and in the interest of no theological school. We therefore consider the question simply as a matter of historical fact, and with that calm and dispassionate judgment which one ought to bring to the problems of history. In this light, then, we ask if there was any essential particular in which the theology of Martin Luther differed from the theology of John: Tauler ; in other words, if there was any doctrine pos-l sessed by Protestantism which did not find a place in i; the system of mediaeval mysticism? Should we be‘ compelled to answer that question in the affirmative, we shall have reached the probable solution of the failure of mysticism as a religious life to lift the world intdihi‘gher atmosphere, and weflshall have discovered at the same time that element of power which gave to the Protestantism of the sixteenth century the wide- spread celebrity and success which the mysticism of the fourteenth had failed to win. Let us see, then, what were the leading features of mediaeval mysticism. Hitherto we have looked at the system only on its negative side, have considered what it was not, what it opposed, what it refused to be; we must now see what it was in itself. It is well known that the mediaeval mystics recognised three W 206 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. essential stages of spiritual life,—three periods of l progression through which every man must pass in his journey from the realms of darkness into the happy land of Beulah. There was them purificatipp, the stage of illLImjWJheMstage of ecstatic unimqnw of all, the soul had to be puruified; cor- rifption could not inherit incorruption, the darkness could not comprehend the light, even though it shone amidst it. There must be a process of cleansing, a washing of regeneration, an obliteration of selfish and worldly passions, and the impartation of a new moral life,—a life of purity, a life of charity, a life of spiritual beauty. Next came the light, the light of the new heavens am new earth,—the light in which the soul stood transfigured and gazed without a veil into the face of God; after purification came illumination. Then, lastl greater still; illumination was followed by ecstatic union. The soul which had been transfigured in the light of God was lost in the light of God, ceased any longer to have a separate being, but merged its own little light in the glorious effulgence of the heavenly sun until it became absolutely blended with the in— finite life,—one with Him in being, one with Him in Such were the three It will not be denied that they open up a picture of spiritual experience, all of which is beautiful, and much of which is true. But the precise question for our consideration is not so much even this triumph was superseded by a triumph purpose, one with Him in will. phases of mysticism. what was truthful or beautiful in the picture, as what in that picture was adapted to meet the wants of the DISCOVERY OF A NEW WELL—SPRING. 207 age? In this light let us examine, one by one, the three mystical stages. The first requirement is that of pugfiication, a good heart, an upright life. But we ask, as a matter of historical fact, Was the first element of mediaeval unrest the absence of this purity? was the immediate desire of the world of that day the attainment of this good heart and this upright spirit ? It may be answered that it ought to have been ; that is a question of moral philosophy, and the only ques- tion for us is one of fact. It is indeed difficult to con- ceive how men can desire that which they have never perceived by any sense external or internal, difficult to imagine how those who have never felt the power of spiritual purity should see any beauty in it that could make it an object of desire. The infant cries before he has ever tasted food, and he cries from the feeling of hunger; yet the infant is altogether unconscious of that particular remedy which is to remove his unrest, all he can be conscious of is the unrest itself. In like manner, if we could imagine a world absolutely desti— tute of the life of spirituality, we might well conceive that world to be subject to a perpetual hunger; but we could not well conceive it to be conscious of that spiritual nourishment which would supply the void and foster a new vitality. , Spiritual purity can only be desired by those who are already partially or latently its possessors. It is indisputable, however, that the medimval world had a deeper unrest than that of the unconscious infant; it was no vague ‘I \special object, and it knew what that object was. It I ‘\indefinite craving that it manifested; it wanted a 208 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. was not sufficiently spiritual to desire spirituality; but even had it seen the beauties of holiness, it would have felt that it had no right to appropriate these beauties until it had removed the preliminary cause of all its troubles. That cause was the sense of a violated law; the conviction that, being evil, it was under the reign of chastisement; the consciousness that no sunshine could be bright in the present until the accumulated clouds of darkness had been rolled away from the past. What the mediaeval world. wanted primarily, wanted as the first step of the ladder, wanted as a possibility of seeking any other good, was the proclamation of an atonemenLtfpr sin. To prove this, we do not need to go deeper thaITTlTé‘“ very surface of medimval history. What was the most pernicious moral element in the history of the Middle Ages ? It was, as we have seen, the granting of indulgences. But why were indulgences granted? It may be answered, Because the priests found them profitable to the funds of the Church. We ask, then, Why did they find them thus profitable? It is the demand, and not the supply, which needs to be accounted for. Even in the most corrupt days of the Roman hierarchy,—even in those days when indul- gences were sold for the purpose of building churches, —the very avidity of the people to buy them proved beyond all controversy, that whatever political motives may or may not have influenced the priesthood, the masses were swayed and dominated by an overwhelm~ ing desire to bury the flaming sword of justice which they believed to be hanging over them. The practice DISCOVERY OF A NEW WELL-SPRING. 209 of indulgences would not have lasted for a day, would not have filled the ecclesiastical coffers for a week, would not have been remembered in history for a single year, if there had not been a heaving mass of human beings throbbing, palpitating, panting with the eagerness for a cancelled past. They had violated God’s law, could they be pardoned ? they had insulted the majesty of Heaven, could they obtain forgiveness ? they had incurred the sentence of condemnation, could they escape the endurance of earthly penalties and of purgatorial pains? And let it not be forgotten, that to men suffering from this species of unrest the hier- archy in the granting of indulgences presented an apparent remedy—a bad remedy, a remedy worse than the disease, a remedy which alleviated the moral pain by destroying the moral nerve, and relieved the fear of punishment by undervaluing the power f sin, yet not the less a genuine attempt to meet theFewgencies of the timenand satisfy the wants \\-— T. ’ O \\\ I I O I of the masses?” HOW wttclsmmact in this‘ emergency? How did the religion of the higher life propose to deal with an unrest so wide-sp ad in its prevalence and so definite in its cause? I did not profess to deal with it at all, it simply ign red it. Now we have no hesitation in saying, that sublime as mysticism was in many of its doctrines, noble as were its aspirations, pure as were its impulses, it yet allowed the hierarchy to gain the advantage over it in this one respect. The hierarchy, by the granting of indul- gences, manifested at least an interest in the fears of the multitude trembling at a bar of judgment; the voL. II. o 2 IO GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. mystics, by ignoring the subject altogether, interposed between themselves and the masses a gulf of philo- sophical contempt which prevented, and must ever have prevented, them from becoming the leaders of a popular reformation They showed to the famished crowd the spreading of a rich banquet, but it was spread on the top of a mountain too steep to be climbed by the multitude. The man of daily toil, oppressed with the memories of unhallowed deeds and unkind thoughts, unable to find leisure for reflec- tion on the mysteries of life, and incapable of such I:§_fl_e_c_tion even were the leisure found, conscious only that he had done those things which he ought not to have done, and left undone those things which he ought to have done, and that thereby he was liable to the penalty of transgressors, was not likely to find much solace in the mystical exhortation of john Ruysbroek, to lose himself in the ‘infinite bright- ness.’ That would have been to him very like a plunge from Scylla into Charybdis. It was just the infinite brightness that he most feared. He wanted to know how he, a poor sin-stained man, could stand before the brightness of God without being scorched by it; that fear mysticism did not allay, did not attempt to allay. But Lutheranism did. When Martin Luther swept away indulgences, he held up in their room a thought which, if accepted, would render indulgences superfluous—the idea of a penal sacrifice for sin which was commensurate with all time. Whether that thought be or be not the ultimate reve- lation on the subject, has been the great question of DISCOVERY OF A NEW WELL-SPRING. 2 I I dogmatic theology, but about the power which it exercised over the masses there can be no question at all; it supplied a moral vacuum in the heart of mediaevalism, a vacuum which indulgences had only partially filled, and which their removal left void alto- gether. Luther came from the people, and therefore’‘ he spoke to the people; Eckart, Tauler, and Ruys- broek came from the schools of the philosophers, and * their language had only meaning to those who were; already initiated in philosophic mysteries; their well-‘ spring was too deep to be reached by a thirsty world. This, then, is the conclusion at which we have arrived, on the first head of mystical doctrine; we find that, in beginning their teaching with the pro- 3 clamation of themdbdeauties of virtue, they did not I meet the special ground of that unrest which was rampant in their age. If we pass now to their second head, that of illumination, we shall find that here they are in strict conformity, not only with Lutheran doctrine, but with the doctrine of all evangelical churches. Purification first, illumination afterwards; ‘_ W.“ - - to do the will, M51365 the doctrine, is the order of spiritual life which is prominently set forth in the fourth Gospel, and which is implied in all parts of the Christian creed. Thus far mysticism has presented nothing which admits of legitimate question; its error hitherto, if error there be, has been one purely of defect, of inability to adapt itself to the incipient stages of moral life. That of all positive possessions purity is the first, is undenied and undeniable by any spiritual mind. That the 2 I 2 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. W best road to the attainment of religious light is that which leads along the thorny path of duty; that the best cure for religious scepticism is the performance of honest work; that the best way to know the doctrine is to do the will, or, as the mystics put it, that purification is followed by illumination, is also a statement which will find advocates for its truth amongst all the churches. It is when with mysti- cism we make the transition from illumination into ecstatic union, from the light of God into the life of God, that we are disposed to pause and ask where we are going? Union with God is indeed the goal of Christianity ; but an ecstatic union, a union which lifts the soul right out of humanity, a union which involves the destruction of all earthly conditions, is a destiny upon whose threshold one may be pardoned for wavering. It is marvellous that a system comparatively so Protestant should have been utterly unable to emancipate itself from that domi- nant idea of mediaevalism, the idea that the divine ’ and not the human Christ was the just object of contemplation. Mysticism had transcended image- worship, had transcended Virgin-worship, had tran- scended all intermediate worship, had aspired to enter into the Holy of Holies, and to see the very face of God; but it never dreamed of seeing that the human portraiture of the Master. looked ace in Humanity, even glorified humanity, was A ’ u on as a perishable garment, a vesture which must be folded up an laI as t death, that the spirit might be clothed anew. That the human life of DISCOVERY OF A NEW WELL-SPRING. 2 1 3 Jesus could be that light in which the spirit of man must dwell, that the human side of Christ’s por- traiture could furnish an eternal ideal for the soul of man, never entered into the thoughts of the mystic. The destiny he contemplated for the soul was one which involved the practical annihilation of its present nature; the Christ he desired for the‘ spirit was one whose light was too glorious to be earthly, too divine to be human, too majestic to be consistent with an individual existence; a light in whose unearthly brightness the world and the ob- jects of the world must melt away; a light in whose all-embracing radiance the flickering taper of the individual spirit must be lost and overshadowed, and in whose infinite range of power the feeble. spark of humanity must go out and be extinct. In such a system, to be lost in God was individually to be lost altogether; to be suffused with the infinite brightness was to part with finite beauty; to see the face of God was to know no more the face of man. If we ask now, What was the practical conse- quence of such a system? there clearly can be but one answer; it WQWLC&I£LLQCLLQ__PHLBJ.¥ZC practical effort. If humanity was but a garment, why toil ‘for it? if the finite was necessarily perish- able, why waste so much time upon its welfare? if the world was ready to pass away, why should not we already ‘withdraw ourselves from the world? Such was the legitimate conclusion, and the only conclusion, to be drawn from the premises. When we say that mysticism tended to be unpractical, we 214 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. J do not mean that all the mystics were unpractical men. It has been well remarked by Professor Flint, of Edinburgh, in his Baird Lecture for 1877, that it is unfair to impute to the adherents of a system the holding of those opinions which necessarily flow from it. It is one of the glories of our human nature that it has occasionally the power to become splen- didly illogical, beautifully inconsistent, sublimely unreasoning. There never was a more practical man than ] , none more devoted to the temporal welfare 0 his fellow-creatures, none more bent on the ameliolation of the outward circum- stances of humanity ; \but he was so, not by reason of his system, but in sg’te of his system. Mysticism, as it appeared in the mediaeval world, led logically to a separation from that world, to a want of sympathy with its requirements, to a repudiation of its deepest interests. We have only to take the sublimest work of all its series; that of Thomas a )QKempis on the Imitation of Ckrz'sz‘. Rich in spiri- tual life, full of deep thought, high in religious aspira— tions, beautiful in its portraiture of virtue, it yet portrays a virtue and describes a religion which may be for other worlds, but can findlQplace-i-n this. It is essentially an ascetic work,—a work which breathes the spirit of that early Christian age, when men, dis- gusted with the vices and the vanities of a pagan world, and ignoring the possibility of conquering that world for God, retired into the deserts and into the mountains, and prayed for the coming of the end. Mediaeval mysticism in its last and grandest literary DISCOVERY OF A NEW WELL-SPRING. 215 effort seemed to have accepted as its destiny the proclamation of the regress of humanity, and to have sounded over the field of progress that dolorous trumpet of retreat which informed the powers of this world that they had won the battle over virtue. And yet, after all has been said, was there not in this very regress of mysticism the emanation of a strongly Protestant element? Whence this rupture with mediaeval reality ? Whence this flight alike from the religious and the secular forms of Catholic life? Whence this retirement of the soul within itself, this eagerness to close its outward eye upon surrounding scenes, this absorbing desire to bury even from its thoughts the world in which it lived and moved ? Did it not spring from the deep conviction that mediae- valism was no longer able to fill the heights and the depths of its being; that Catholic life, with its rites so imposing and its forms so beautiful, was yet no longer adequate to meet the requirements of a nature desir- ing a perpetual temple, and craving for an endless worship ? ’Was it not the confession that, after weigh- ing in the balance the pretensions of the hierarchy, the deepest spirit of the mediaeval age had found them grievously wanting? unable to stem the torrent of human passion, unable to lighten the burdens of a single weary soul. My ticism gave up the finite . . . r , because 1n the finite world 0 t a 1 saw nothmg‘!v “Mum. : worth perpetuating; 1t gave‘up human nature, because f in the lives around it, it had failed to find the glory of human nature; and it sought to forget the light of the ’ 2 16 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. natural sun, because the light of the natural sun lit up a scene at variance with the light of God. If we cannot join in the unqualified admiration of Ullmann, if we cannot regard this system as the direct anticipa- tion of Protestantism, we can assuredly regard it as a movement which made for Protestantism ; a movement which recoiled from the world because the world was too small for it, and which sought rest in the impres- sions of the individual heart, because the united heart of Catholicism had become cramped and frozen. In a vastly different department of human study we see at the same period a similar rupture with reality. It would seem as if the mystical spirit had affected the students of nature as well as the students of mind. There was rampant in this age what might be called a scientific mysticism. Amongst the many victims whom the Church offered up to the fury of the Inquisition, no class were more numerous than those who read the stars. Astronomy was passing over from the hands of the Mohammedans into the hands of the Christians, but in their hands it was becoming romantically young again. God had made the stars to give physical light to the earth; why Should they not lend it spiritual radiance too ? God had made the stars to rule the outward night; why should they not rule the deeper darkness of the soul ? Was there not a connection between the heavens and the earth,—a mutual affinity, a responsive sympathy, whereby the impressions of the one were repeated and imprinted on the other; and by this connection, by this affinity, by this responsive sympathy, might not man, gazing DISCOVERY OF A NEW WELL-SPRING. 217 into the night, read his destiny, already photographed in the heavens, and learn by letters of golden light that work which had been given him to do ? Nor let any man despise this youth of the astronomic science. Astrology, with all its absurdities, had both an intel- lectual and a moral basis. Intellectually, it was the groping after a truth which all science in every age is ever freshly unfolding; the unity of this vast universe, the sympathy of all its parts, the interdependence of all its members. Morally, it was the groping after an object far less attainable but not less exalted—the knowledge of the unknown future. It was the desire to pierce the clouds which confine the horizon of the human spirit, to get beyond the trammels which im- . prison alike sense and soul, and to catch but a glimpse of that promised land which to the imagination of every age is waiting for us in the future. And in this moral aspiration there was again manifested the same dissatisfaction with existing objects which we have seen permeating the mystical spirit, the same desire of the individual life to break away from that col- lective life where its individuality was dwarfed, the same Protestant impulse to receive its own revelation, to commune with its own universe, and to read its own destiny. Nor was this search for the unknown limited to the act of star-gazing. To that age the geography of the earth was itself a mystery; humanity had not found the wings on which it could fly from shore to ‘shore. A few Venetian merchants, a few Florentine adven- turers, had indeed, in the interests of commerce, 2 I8 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. undertaken voyages from which they received more than commerce,—a knowledge of other climes; but mankind in general were ignorant of everything beyond the boundaries of their native land, and thoroughly conversant with nothing not included in the boundaries of their native village. The dawn of light in this direction came in the desire to know. The spirit of mysticism, which had shed a mysterious glory over the innermost regions of the soul, diffused a like glory over the unknown regions of the earth. Those lands never visited by the European traveller appeared to the imagination of that world to be blazing with gorgeous palaces, laden with luscious fruits, watered by rivers wandering o’er sands of gold, lighted by suns that never set, and painted by summers whose rosy hue never yielded to an autumn. They were lands of light, of love and joy; lands which death rarely visited, where sorrow seldom entered, but where man basked for ever in the sunshine of perpetual day. These gilded antici- pations of a glorified world, already hidden in the far distance, had no other ground in fact than that enchantment to the view which distance proverbially lends; the lands were fair to contemplate, just because they were unknown. Yet the Utopian dream was not without its practical utility; it awakened the longing, and the longing awakened the action. It stirred up in the heart of man the desire to transcend his narrow limits, to burst the prison doors, and traverse the face of the world. It was during this fourteenth century that there came into prominent DISCOVERY OF A NEW WELL-SPRING. 2 19 use an instrument which was singularly to facilitate the satisfaction of his thirst for enlargement, an in- strument whereby man could steer his way on seas from which had receded all sight of land, and guide his course at will, independent of helps from the shore; that mariner’s compass, known to the nations of remote antiquity, but lost amid the waters of western civilisation, and only lately rediscovered by mediaeval Europe. The position of that Europe was in striking analogy with the position of its incipient voyagers; it too had need of a mariner’s compass. It was about to enter upon a sea from every side of which the vision of the land would vanish; a sea bounded far away by a new earth, and ultimately to be overhung by new heavens too. Already the arms of the frith were widening, already the headlands upon either side were growing fainter and less pro- minent, already the old landmarks were beginning to disappear, and the murmur of what seemed to be a chaos of waters was every moment becoming clearer. Europe must find a new compass, a new object on which to rest its gaze, a new index to point its way, for the old earth was about to vanish, and the revivified earth was not yet come. CHAPTER XXXII. DECLINE OF THE TEMPORAL PAPACY. H ATEVER may be thought of the connection between the silent progress of the stars and the noisy events of earthly history, there can be no doubt of the connection between the events of out- ward history and the silent progress of the human soul. While the mind of man had been thus noise- lessly expanding, while the unuttered longings of his spirit had been going up ever more and more, there had been occurring, in the region of the outward world, a series of incidents surpassing in their sudden- ness, startling in their novelty, and transcendently important in’ their results; incidents which were co-operating with the unspoken desires of the human mind, and hurrying on the world towards its destined goal. It cannot be said that these events were directly caused by the moral aspirations we have been exhibiting in the previous chapters. It is a saying which has become proverbial, that incidents never happen as we expect them. Europe had been under- going a gradual process of religious revolution; yet the crushing stroke at the Papacy was to be made, not by religious revolution, but by political freedom. DECLINE OF THE TEMPORAL PAPACY. 22 I Germany had all along been the champion of this political freedom; it was Germany that had stood face to face with Hildebrand ; it was the Germany of Frederic II. which had opposed the last barrier to the absolute monarchy of Rome; yet the final blow at the temporal Papacy was to be struck, not by Germany, but by a nation which has never left the Catholic fold——the kingdom of France. In these respects, the order of history baffled the calculations of man, and wrought out the ends of humanity in a way which humanity had never contemplated. To the consideration of this great political revolution we must now briefly turn. Never did the temporal power of the Papacy seem more triumphantly manifested than in that hour when Benedict Cajetan ascended the Papal throne by the title of Boniface VIII. His inauguration was marked by peculiar splendour, signalized by unwonted pomp and pageantry. Two sovereigns, the kings of Hun- gary and Sicily, held the reins of his horse as he rode to the Lateran, and stood afterwards, with their crowns on their heads, serving him in the courses of the table. Never perhaps in history has such an appearance of power been followed by so quick, so ignominious a transformation. The very swiftness of the transition proves that the spectacle of magnifi- cence was a counterfeit, an attempt to resuscitate in form a glory which had passed away in fact. N ever- theless it was this empty pageant which Boniface made the key-note of his pontificate. He assumed a double crown, to represent the fact that he was 222 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. wielder alike of the temporal and the spiritual power of the world. Had not Hildebrand uncrowned a German emperor? had not Innocent III. uncrowned a king of England ? why should not he also assert that prerogative which his ancestors had won ? But Boniface had forgotten two important circumstances which distinguished his case from that of either Innocent or Hildebrand: his own personal character, and the distinctive character of his age. Hildebrand and Innocent III. had both been men of the highest principle; pure in intention, upright in action, zealous in duty, and stainless in morality. Boniface, after all deductions have been made from the statements of those who were actuated by personal enmity, seems to have been a man of whom no sacred office could reasonably be proud. Dante, in his Dz'z'z'iza Com- media, has honoured him with a prominent place in the future world; but it is in that region of the future where those souls are believed to dwell whom through all the ages hope shall visit no more. If one half of what is written of him be true, it must be confessed that he was well worthy of it. His enemies, and they comprehended the best men of his time, charged him with every vice under the sun; every species of infidelity, every form of corruption and bribery, every kind of debauchery and immorality, every quality and propensity which is capable of dwelling in a bad heart. Nor does it seem to us that the source of these accusations materially weakens their force. Hildebrand had all Europe openly arrayed against him, Innocent III. had most of the kings of Europe arrayed DECLINE OF THE TEMPORAL PAPACY. 223 against him in their hearts ; yet the enemies of Hilde- brand and of Innocent never imputed to either of them the charge of immoral lives; on the contrary, it was their stainless moral lives which gave them an indomi- table power even over the minds of their adversaries. And it was the want of that stainless purity which made Boniface so contemptible in the eyes of his enemies; when he threw off the life of rectitude, he divested himself of that which to every pontiff has been his strongest armour. It was because he had lost his personal sanctity that he lost the respect of Europe; with that sanctity, even without a soldier, he might have been the greatest of monarchs; with- out it, even with an army at his command, he must have proved the weakest of kings. But in aspiring to the pretensions of Innocent and Hildebrand, there was another element which Boni- face had ignored: the changed character of the age in which he lived. The world into which Boniface was born, was not the world in which he now dwelt. There had been growing up in the interval a new social power,——a power distinct from that of either king, knight, or baron,—the power of the people. It was not yet very strong, but it was daily prophesying its strength, and its prophetic voice was ever in the direction of religious freedom. Kings had begun to discover that in the rise of this new force they would have a powerful ally in their struggle with hierarchical domination, and they had become correspondingly eager to assert their regal claims. At the opening of the fourteenth century, Europe possess/ed two of 224 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. the ablest sovereigns that ever filled a throne ; Edward I. of England, and Philip the Fair of France. They had features not altogether unlike; they were both physically handsome, both personally brave, both intellectually vigorous, both capable when roused of an implacable resentment. On the whole, the English monarch was amenable to the softer traits; he had been in the wars of Palestine, and had caught somewhat of the spirit of chivalry. In his youth, he had defended his father’s crown against that great revolution which ended in the permanent establish- ment of a House of Commons; and although it was his hand that saved the crown, there are not wanting some indications that, to a certain extent, he sympa- thized with the objects of the rebellion; he learned from it, at all events, a lesson which he never forgot. None loved arbitrary power more than the first Edward; but none saw more clearly that the days for arbitrary power had passed away, that the principles of Magna Charta, rightly interpreted and fully evolved, must lead to the suppression of all despotism, and the confirmation of all individual rights. Accordingly, through his whole reign, it was the object of Edward Plantagenet, as it was afterwards the object of Elizabeth Tudor, to discover in what direction the winds were blowing, and to trim the sails in harmony with them, to catch the popular voice and give effect to it; and where the popular voice was raised against his measures, to desist from these measures with the best grace he could command. It is true that as yet the popular voice was chiefly DECLINE OF THE TEMPORAL PAPACY. 225 the utterance of the barons; but we have already seen how the power of the barons presupposed the privileges of the vassal, and in proportion as feudalism declined, it became more and more evident that the voice of the vassal must have weight in framing his country’s laws. Edward, on his part, seemed more desirous for the extension of his kingdom than for the extension of his kingly pre- rogative. He aimed to erect the throne of England into the throne of the British Empire. He was already in possession of Ireland, and he was eager to complete the union. His design was not wholly unsuccessful; he permanently conquered Wales, he temporarily conquered Scotland; at the time of his death he was actually sovereign of a united Britain. But if he desired to keep Britain united in himself, he was determined to keep it separate from all others. He had studied so closely to meet the currents of public opinion, that he had become beloved by his people, and he felt that here lay at once his own strength and the strength of England. He refused to admit that he was the vassal of any sovereign, secular or spiritual; he refused to admit that his kingdom was dependent on any power either of Church or State; and he maintained an attitude of bold opposition to all the pretensions advanced by the Roman See. But England was too insulated in position, either seriously to disturb Boniface, or seriously to be dis- turbed by him; it was on the continent of Europe that the great battle was to be fought between Papal voL. II. P 226 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. absolutism and political freedom. On the throne of France there sat a sovereign who was by no means disposed to hold the reins for any pontiff. Philip the Fair had ascended that throne when a youth of seventeen. He had come into a kingdom circum- scribed on every side, beset by enemies all around, and virtually dominated by its own vassals ; in a very few years, by talent, by intrigue, by courage, and by policy, he had made it a formidable power in the councils of Europe. He had obtained Navarre, Champagne, and Brie by marriage; he had possessed himself of a great part of Flanders by the sword; he had surprised, for a time, even out of the strong grasp of the English Edward, the important duchy of Guienne; he had extended the northern and eastern boundaries of the French nation very nearly to the 'measure of their present limits. If the aim of Edward I. was to establish a united Britain, the aim of Philip the Fair was to establish a united F rance— to be sole and undisputed sovereign over all his dominions. There were two elements which retarded the realization of this plan—the temporal pretensions of the pontiff, and the feudal insolence of the French barons ; the breaking down of these barriers was the task which Philip contemplated as the mission of his life. He seems to have felt that, in order to effect either object, there must be raised into prominence a third power in the nation; that same power which had begun to rise in England with the institution of a House of Commons; that same power which had begun to issue from the universities in a current of DECLINE OF THE TEMPORAL PAPACY. 227 intellectual life. It was from that despised company whom, two hundred years before, a French writer had stigmatized as a herd of slaves, that Philip the Fair resolved to seek a new source of strength for the nation,-a strength which, while inevitably it must restrain the arbitrary power of kings, must free them at the same time from the dangers incidental to an unchecked reign of feudalism,—a strength which, as it flowed from the very heart of liberty, must support the authority of the crown in maintaining national freedom against the claims of an absolute Papacy. It was not long before the ideas of Philip and of Boniface revealed their mutual antagonism. The protracted wars of the French king had exposed him to heavy expenses, and to meet these he was obliged to resort to severe taxation. He saw no reason why any-party in the State should be exempted from bear- ing the burdens of the State. That the clergy should be allowed to exercise temporal privileges, and should yet be held free from contributing to the temporal wealth of the nation, was a notion that, to the mind of Philip, seemed contrary to all the laws of nature. Accordingly he enacted that the public taxa- tion should be shared equally by the clergy and the laity; that the priest, in so far as he was a man and a Frenchman, should regard himself as a citizen of his country, subject to civil law, and bound to lend his support to the temporal good of the community. Such a mandate struck at the very roots of Papal 'absolutism, and could not be suffered to pass unchallenged. The clergy had hitherto acknowledged 228 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. no sovereign but the pontiff ; it was in attestation of that doctrine that Thomas a Becket in England had submitted to privation, to exile, ultimately to death itself. Boniface issued his command to the French clergy to pay no respect whatever to the enactment of Philip, to hold themselves the subjects of heaven, and ignore the tribute to Caesar. Philip retaliated in a very practical manner; he issued a decree that neither money nor valuables should be sent out of the country, and the effect of this mandate was to cut off a main source of the Papal revenue. Boniface despatched his legate to France, hoping to overawe the king by a representative of the Papal presence; but he had mistaken the character of the man with whom he had to deal. The legate indignantly remon- strated, arrogantly declaimed, and insolently repri- manded; Philip replied by ordering him to prison. An act so daring, an act in the view of that age so sacrilegious, could not do otherwise than startle the heart of Europe ; but when a man takes a strong step, his only chance of success is to follow it up by a stronger. Immediately after the imprisonment of the legate, Philip convoked an assembly of the States of France. That was perhaps the most remarkable Parliament which the French nation had ever seen. It was composed, not from one class, but from all classes. The king was there to represent the State- power. The barons were there to represent the power of the aristocracy. Last, but not least, the deputies from the towns were there; no longer as a ‘herd of slaves,’ no longer as a patronized class per- DECLINE ,OF THE TEMPORAL PAPACY. 229 mitted to eat the crumbs which fell from their master’s table, but as a real legislative body forming an in- tegral part of the social system, and holding a pro- minent place in the political decisions of their country. And the conduct of that Parliament was as remarkable as its composition. With one voice, the French nation homologated the acts of their king, declared that his quarrel was their quarrel, his interest their interest, his freedom their freedom, said that they would stand by him to the last extremity, that no Papal interdict, no bull of excommunication would alter their sentiments or shake their allegiance; and that in the face of the whole opposing hierarchy, they would maintain and defend the independence of their native land. The spectacle is fading in the mists of five hundred years; but even through the shadows of the past, its moral grandeur reaches us, and enchains our admiration. It is not the question of a disputed taxation, it is not even the interest of an anti-Papal movement which impresses us; it is the vision of one united nation emerging bodily from the night of superstition; defying interdict, defying ana- thema, defying everything save the love of country and the thirst for political freedom. Never before had the ' history of mediaeval Europe exhibited an attitude so determined, and a course so uncompromis- ing. Proud Germany had quailed before the thunder- bolt of Hildebrand, Norman England had crouched repentant beneath the lash of Innocent, France alone had remained undaunted ‘and unwavering. The German struggle of investitures had been in great 230 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. measure the struggle only of a personal ambition, the will of one sovereign contending with the will of another. The controversy with john of England had in no sense been national; it was but the strife between the claims of a pontiff, and the individual pride of a European potentate. The war with Philip of France was originally the contention with the pride and avarice of Philip himself; but the moment he was supported by the voice of the States- General, it became in the highest sense a national war. It was no longer by the Caprice of a solitary despotic will that the pontiff was assailed, no longer by the personal ambition of a French king, nor even by the secret cabals of a French ministry; it was by the voice of the French people, by the sentiments of the national heart, by the opinions of the public mind. He was opposed by the whole life of the nation, and the moral force of such an opposition was more for- midable than would have been the coalition of all the sovereigns, and the marshalling of all the armies. Boniface felt that this moral force must be counter- acted bya similar movement on his own part. Ac- cordingly he assembled a council at Rome, which supported his view of the question. With the con- sent of this council, Boniface issued one of the most remarkable bulls which has ever proceeded from the chair of St. Peter,-—-a bull which expressed in the most daring and presumptuous terms the utmost stretch of Papal ambition,—-terms which Hildebrand at the height of his power, and Innocent in the zenith of his glory, would never have dared to use. The DECLINE OF THE TEMPORAL PAPACY. 23 I Isidorian decretals had all along contemplated the absolute power of the Papacy. Hildebrand, uncon- sciously to himself, had been working towards that destiny even while he imagined that he was securing only a spiritual empire. Innocent III. had consciously and deliberately ascended the throne of universal dominion, and claimed the sovereignty alike of Church and State, of king and priest, of the temporal and the spiritual world. But neither the Isidorian decretals in their prospective anticipations, nor Hildebrand in his strivings to realize them, nor Innocent in his actual realization of their dream, had ever for a moment contemplated making the absolute power of the Papacy an essential doctrine of Christianity; that was left for a rasher and a weaker man. It is true, the pontiffs of the past had pronounced sentences of excommunication, but they had done so on the ground that they had been constituted custodiers of the divine government on earth. Whatever motives of private resentment may secretly have mingled with their actions, they had nominally inflicted punishment, not on account of a personal insult to themselves, but on account of a spiritual principle which they alleged to have been infringed. But the bull called Umzm Samz‘am which now issued from the deliberations of Boniface and his council, presented to the world a view of the subject which in form at least was alto- gether new. In that bull it was proclaimed that, considered in itself and for its own sake, the belief in Papal absolutism was necessary to salvation; that to separate between the temporal power of the civil 232 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. magistrate and the spiritual power of the pontiff was to enthrone Satan side by side with God; that to distinguish between the political empire of the kingdom and the ecclesiastical empire of the Church was to revive the Manichaean heresy, to go back to the days of Parsism, to worship two principles of nature, the one good, and the other evil. On the receipt of this remarkable document, the French king issued two commands : the first was, that it should be publicly burned; the second, that those of the French clergy who had supported it, should have their property confiscated. In both of these enactments he was seconded by the voice of the nation. Did France at that moment believe itself to be a nation of infidels? did the king of France at that moment believe himself to have shaken off the fetters of all religious faith? did the eyes of united Europe, con- templating the scene, shrink with horror from an act of sacrilege ? On the contrary, Philip professed then and ever to be the strictest of Catholics; France, in the very act of following his footsteps, declared her- self to be a true daughter of the Church of Rome; and mediaeval Europe, so far from instituting a crusade against a heretic nation, looked on sympathetically, and secretly rejoiced. These facts are alone strongly suggestive. They show that the bull of Boniface was not regarded as a legitimate exposition of the doctrines of Catholicism ; that in framing that bull, he had tran- scended the limits of all decretals and of all councils ; that he had added to the subject-matter of the sacred writings a doctrine which even in germ was not con- DECLINE OF THE TEMPORAL PAPACY. 233 tained in them; and that he had subordinated the interests of Catholic truth to the gratification of his own individual passions. Had the sense of all this not been strong in the heart of Europe, the heart of Europe, in beholding the attitude of the French people, would have thrilled with indignation. A hundred years before, the Waldenses had been persecuted for a rebellion not half so great; two hundred years afterwards, the Lutherans were persecuted for a rebellion originally no greater. But at the present juncture, Europe felt that in the very bosom of the hierarchy, in the very central figure of the hierarchy, there was being perpetrated a most portentous heresy,-—-a heresy which, if promulgated, would shake the thrones of the world to their foundation, would extinguish the last spark of temporal power, would quench the waking life of political freedom, would repress the movement of culture that was issuing from the walls of the universities, would arrest the growth of the spirit of Christianity itself, and forbid its further increase in wisdom or in stature. Catholic Europe felt this, and therefore for once, Catholic Europe refused to be Papal; it stood a neutral spectator of the scene, stood with the sword undrawn and the sympathy unexpressed for either side, but waiting the issue of events, hoping for the triumph of secular liberty, and allowing the onward development of humanity to unwind without hindrance its mighty destiny. The burning of the Papal bull brought out the thunderbolt; that thunderbolt which in the hands of 2 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. Hildebrand had brought an emperor to his knees. Boniface issued that long-delayed sentence of excom- munication, whose very delay was calculated to render it more imposing and terrible. Excommunication had been to the Papacy what in an after age the Old Guard was to Napoleon; an unfailing source of strength, which turned the scale of battle even at the eleventh hour. Nor had Boniface any reason to conclude that its thunders would be less potent now than they were when a German emperor stood uncrowned before them at the Castle of Canosa. But Boniface had only been observing the surface of the world, and beneath the surface all was changed. Excommunication had lost its power. The thunder still rolled, but it rolled no longer as the voice of God; the lightning still flashed athwart the sky, but it flashed no longer as an angry gleam from the eye. of the Almighty. The world- had gradually been retiring into the inner chamber of the soul, had been listening to voices more directly divine than those of any natural majesty, had been slowly though surely learning the lesson that physical force is not spiritual power. The minds of men had changed, and silently the times had changed with them, and the evidence for the transformation was shortly to appear; the thunder- bolt which brought the emperor to his knees brought the arms of Philip to the gates of the Roman capital. If a sentence of excommunication did not utterly crush, it was inevitable that it should embolden ; itself an extreme step, it drove its victim to extremity. Instead of being prostrated, Philip prepared for war. DECLINE OF THE TEMPORAL PAPACY. 235 Boniface had now played his last stake; he had launched his imaginary thunders, but he had no real ones. A formidable enemy was on his track; where could he find resources to meet him? Casting his eye over the western world, he could discover no friend. France was already in the field, England was hostile in spirit, Sicily had ceased to hold the reins, Italy was secretly disaffected, Germany was restive and ready to rise at a moment’s notice. He remembered the days of Hildebrand, he remembered how that enterprising pontiff with all his genius had been unable to protect his capital, and he felt that the task must be still more hopeless now. He resolved not to abide the issue; he fled from Rome. He had a country-seat at Anagni; thither he repaired, hoping to be overlooked in its obscurity. His hope was fallacious. The French general Nogaret surrounded him with a band of soldiers, and no man drew a sword in his defence. He surrendered, and the temporal Papacy surrendered with him. They put him on a steed with his face to the tail, and, loaded with every species of ignominy, they led him back to his capital; that capital into which, nine years before, he had ridden in so different an attitude and under such contrary auspices. There they imprisoned him, and for two days he remained in the closest custody. Into the agony of those two days the eye of history cannot penetrate; the effect they produced upon the pontiff alone reveals their horror. He seems to have believed that a scheme had been formed against his life. He refused to taste food lest it should contain poison, and his physical 236 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. strength became exhausted. But all this time the inward passions of the man were blazing with a lurid fire. Impotent rage venting itself in imaginary acts of vengeance, chagrin feeding upon its own disap- pointment, malign hatred wreaking its fury upon victims beyond its reach, the mortified pride which even in ruin shrank from acknowledging that life had been a failure,—all at one moment preyed upon his famished frame. At the end of two days the populace rose and released the pontiff, but they released a raving maniac; his nerves had been unstrung, and reason had fled. For a month he raged in wild delirium, and then the fire of the burning spirit consumed its outward tabernacle, and with the loss even of the empire over his own soul, the last of the temporal pontiffs passed away. i It was the determined resolution of Philip that he should be the last; accordingly he prepared to take such steps as should place the Papacy entirely under his control. He raised to the vacant throne Bertrand of Bordeaux; a Frenchman, and therefore supposed to be interested in France; a creature of his own, and therefore certain to be the tool of all his measures. The new pontiff, who took the name of Clement V., was immediately confronted by two commands of the French king, in both of which he obsequiously acquiesced. The first was the suppression of the Knights-Templars. That order had been originally devised as a body-guard to the Pope. In the days of chivalry it had shared in the prevailing spirit, and had become rather adverse to the Papacy; but now that DECLINE OF THE TEMPORAL PAPACY. 237 chivalry was gone, it was in danger of going back again to its first love. For chivalry had departed from knighthood and had gone down into the valleys; gone down to ennoble the paths of the humble Waldenses, gone down to illuminate and beautify the acts of the self-denying Franciscans. The order of the Knights-Templars had become demoralised, and a demoralised order supporting by military force a demoralised Papacy was a consummation devoutly to be deprecated. We have therefore no hesitation whatever in justifying this act of Philip; we believe their suppression to have been demanded by the interests of the rising civilisation. But when we con- sider the method by which that suppression was effected, when we review the spectacle of merciless persecution in which they were extinguished, we are unable even now to withhold our surprise and horror. That Philip should have confiscated their wealth was perhaps in a measure just; the Templars had taken the oath of poverty, and had no right to the possession of riches. In any case, however, such a confiscation can awaken no surprise, for it was in strict keeping with that avarice which was ever the 'overmastering passion in the heart of the French monarch. But if Philip was’ avaricious, he was not cruel for the sake of cruelty; nay, he has performed one act in the direction of benevolence which has conferred as much honour on himself as benefit on humanity; we allude to the abolition in France of that terrible institution which had disgraced mediaeval civilisation, and thrown a blemish over the history of a church which in many 2 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. of its aspects is worthy to be admired—the deadly tribunal of the Catholic Inquisition. This Philip abolished, and for this humanity is his debtor. Yet it is not too much to say, that the Inquisition in its fieriest days, in the days when it hunted down the unfortunate Albigenses with a more than pagan fury, never surpassed the ferocity of hatred, never tran- scended the horrors of torture, with which Philip pur- sued the Templars on to the bitter end. They were driven from city to city, they were hunted from hiding-place to hiding-place, they were stripped, they were spoiled, they were lacerated, they were burned in hundreds. That they were guilty of one-half the crimes alleged against them we do not believe. They were transparently a demoralised order, but they ought to have borne their punishment as an order, and not as individual men ; nor was any further punishment than suppression demanded by the cir- cumstances. We must not forget, however, that in these deeds of seeming barbarity Philip acted not alone; that here, as ever, he was in strict alliance with the voice of his people; and that if odium there be, France has elected to share it along with him. The spectacle of a united nation, a brave, generous, and humane nation, consenting with one mind to institute a relentless reign of death, may perhaps encourage us to hope that there were features of the case which to us of later times are no longer visible, and that there were grounds for a national severity which have disappeared from our View in the obscurities of a long-vanished age. DECLINE OF THE TEMPORAL PAPACY. 239 The second command which Philip imposed upon the new pontiff was one which involved far less cruelty, and occasioned in its execution far less noise, but which, like many noiseless proceedings, was power- ful in its influence and potent in its results ; it was the command that henceforth the capital of the Papacy should no longer be Rome, but Avignon. The re- quirement, on a superficial view, seems trivial; in reality, it was a blow which struck at the very roots of the Papal dynasty,——a blow compared to which the suppression of ten thousand orders of knighthood and the disbanding of all the Papal armies in Europe would have been but the touch of a feather. If it be ‘ true that Paris is France, it is still more profoundly true that Rome is the Papacy. The concentration of France around the prosperity of Paris is at best a political and social fact; the concentration of the Papal life around the prosperity of Rome is the result of a religious association as close as that which connects the sacred service with the consecrated walls of the cathedral. Even in pagan times we have seen how the Roman Empire centred in the welfare of Rome; we have seen how Nero, when he would break the spirit of that empire, had to attempt the work of subjugation by setting fire to that capital which had given birth to its heroism and its patriotism. The classic associations of Rome had not died with paganism, but to these associations there had been superadded another stronger still, that of Christianity itself. Rome was the chair of St. Peter, the seat of the chief apostle, the bishopric assigned to him who 240 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. had received the power to bind and to loose on earth, and on whom, as on a stedfast rock, the Master Himself had promised to build His Church. To Rome, in a long unbroken line of witnesses, had been entrusted the keeping of the oracles of God, the trans- mission from age to age of the sacred traditions, the preservation of the apostolic light to all generations; Rome had been to the Roman all that jerusalem was to the jew. To transplant the Papacy from Rome was to destroy jerusalem. It was to accomplish without bloodshed and without struggle all that Nero had attempted to accomplish by fire; it was to rob the capital of that sacred association which was now its only claim to majesty; it was to rob the Papacy of i that possession of the capital which was now its only claim to empire. Yet this, and nothing less than this, was the design of the French monarch, and that design he accomplished bloodlessly and effectually. Without a struggle the pontiff yielded; gave up his sacred capital, gave up its hallowed memories, and took up his court at Avignon, to serve as the slave of his master, under the immediate glance of his eye. And now there began for the Papacy that long and dreary period of the seventy years’ exile; that period which Italian writers call the Babylonish captivity, which Protestants perhaps would be more apt to call the captivity of Babylon. For ourselves, we are quite willing to admit the parallel between the position of captive Rome in Avignon and the position of captive Israel in Babylon. Mediaeval Rome and ancient Israel had both been carried into a foreign land, and DECLINE OF THE TEMPORAL PAPACY. 241 they had both experienced that fate for the same reason. Israel had forgotten that its strength lay in its theocratic power; it had aimed at a purely tem- poral dominion, and had lost sight of the object of its worship in the forms which symbolized Him. Rome had forgotten that the apostolic mission which it claimed had, in the hands of the apostles, been a spiritual work—the proclamation of peace on earth and goodwill to men ; and it, too, had lost sight of the object of its worship in the images by which it repre- sented Him. Therefore Rome, like Israel, passed over into bondage, and the Papal reign was over- shadowed by the temporal power of kings. The successors of St. Peter entered upon along and ignominious captivity; a captivity which wore out the heart by the expectation of a deliverance it so bitterly deferred, until at last it was closed by a catastrophe yet more dismal, and by a fate more ignominious still. The history of those seventy years may be described as the history of an intellectual thaw. Everywhere the ice of outward restraint was melting, and the waters of long-imprisoned life were rushing over it. The renaissance which had risen in Italy with the muse of Dante diffused itself more and more, and Petrarch sang its sonnets and Boccaccio told its tal Flanders caught the glow and burst into a life ' of msthetic and of civil freedom,—th in the triumphs of art, the other in sur- rectionary movement which appe ed in the followers of Jakob van Artivelde. The French peasants VOL. 11. Q 24.2 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. received the infection, and rose with that brutal licence which in the first stages of political revolution the populace are apt to mistake for liberty. But stretching through all ranks, from knight to peasant, from lofty to obscure, there was a power permeating society which was calculated alike to confirm the freedom and to calm the violence; that power was the life of the universities. The universities were to the secular world what the Church was to the ecclesias- tical; both were republican institutions, into whose fold, without distinction, could be admitted all who desired the privilege ; within whose precincts rich and poor might gather side by side and listen to the words of earthly or of heavenly wisdom, and from whose precincts rich and poor could emerge with advantages which, intellectually at least, were not unequally shared. From these universities the captivity of the Papacy lifted a chain. The Sorbonne of Paris gave rein to that speculative tendency which had ever secretly characterized it, and in proportion as the Papacy declined, waxed bolder day by day. Oxford, from her thirty thousand students, poured forth every year streams of intellectual life, and sent out into the world of history men who were to shape its course and direct its way,-—-the subtle, powerful, hair-splitting ns Scotus; the anti~Papal, rationalistic, half-scep— am; the clear, judicious, legal-minded Brad- rave, enterprising, liberal-hearted Groste , nest, zealous, life-seeking Richard of Armagh. We h inimical to Papal absolutism, we might have gone a . ve said that the universities were DECLINE OF THE TEMPORAL PAPACY. 243 step farther—the universities were inimical to all exclusive clerical influence, wheresoever manifested and in whatever sphere displayed. Their great work for society was the education of the laity, and the education of the laity meant inevitably the depression of clerical influence. Before their work had begun to bear fruit, the clergy had almost monopolized the learned professions,—they were statesmen, they were kings’ counsellors, they were lawyers, they were physicians, they were philosophic lecturers, they were frequently everything but pastors, and many of them left their parishes to the care of delegates. It must be confessed that, if the parishes were sufferers, the public were generally gainers. If the clergy of those days had not monopolized the professions, the profes- sions would for the most part have remained unappro- priated; the laity were inadequate to conduct them, the mass of the people had received no training, and the churchmen shone like stars in a dark firmament. The clergy had up to this time been the sole supports of culture, and were therefore worthy of that respect and influence which humanity had accorded them. But with the development of university life there was coming a great change. The laity were becom- ing a power; not merely a fighting, or an agricul- tural, or a labouring power,—in these capacities they had always been distinguished. But, for the first time, the laity were rising into the dignity of an educational power. They were making strides of advancement over the path of human knowledge, they were growing in that knowledge which is most essen- 244. GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. tial of all—the knowledge of their own souls, of their possibilities, their responsibilities, their powers as human beings, and the individual rights which flowed from the possession of such powers. By and by the learned professions became divided ; they ceased to be a monopoly of the Church, they were parted amongst many lives. From the ranks of the laity there began to rise separate communities of students, each devoting itself to a distinct branch of study, and deprecating mutual interference; some followed the law, some healed the sick, some served in the cabinet, some lectured on the platform. The Church was thus driven more and more within its own province. The clergy, expelled from the exclusive empire over secular civilisation, were forced to become clergymen indeed, to devote themselves to their peculiar work, to limit themselves to their special sphere of operation. And while the Church gained by the change, the laity did not lose. They were left unfettered to pursue their investigations, to study the laws of nature apart from ecclesiastical jurisdiction, to meditate on the mysteries of mind outside the superintendence of the clerical eye. Science began more and more to be viewed in its own light, philosophy more and more to be studied by its own laws, while religion kept to the sphere of its own dominion, and allowed the secular world to tread its unmolested way. As the sum of the whole matter, those seventy years exhibited a diffusion of the arts of peace. That such a diffusion did not at once produce a diminution in the arts of war is trans- parent on the face of history. It was in this age of DECLINE OF THE TEMPORAL PAPACY. 245 violent political changes, in this age when England, Scotland, France, Flanders, Italy, and Germany writhed in convulsive struggles, that Europe wit- nessed the introduction of artillery. Yet we are not sure that the introduction of artillery was not itself a messenger of peace. In proportion as the weapons become deadlier, the conflict grows shorter; may we not add that, in proportion as fire takes the place of sword, the conflict grows less bitter too? It is no longer the encounter hand to hand with an enemy whose every look is marked, whose every tone is heard, whose every stroke is seen; men fall in hundreds, but they fall by a scientific mechanism which is set in motion by a far-off foe. Above all, such an agency rubs off the gloss of war, divests it of those opportunities of personal heroism which have made it a sphere of chivalry, and reveals it in all its naked horror, in all its undisguised atrocity. So was it pre-eminently with the world of mediaevalism. Chivalry ceased to find a home on the battle-field, and therefore it ceased to desire the battle. It passed over from the camp into the city, passed over from the scenes of physical power to the scenes of intellectual and moral strength, passed over from the ephemeral accomplishments of knighthood to embrace the less gilded but more valuable posses— sions of social life, to ,shine in the relations of the family circle, to adorn and beautify the thought of home, to contribute to the decrease of pauperism and the increase of comfort, to establish institutions of benevolence for the needy and of training for the 246 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. ignorant, to redress the wrongs of the oppressed and down - trodden, and to seek everywhere for such political and religious reforms as might disseminate among the masses the seeds of life and light. CHAPTER XXXIII. THIRD REVOLT OF THE SCHOOL-LIFE. HE changes we have been exhibiting in the pre- vious chapter were as yet only of a political and social nature. The school-life, which was now the university-life, had been awakened into a sense of individuality; but it is not necessary that a sense of individuality should manifest itself in a religious form. Man has many outlets into the realization of personal responsibility; as yet the school-life of the Christian Church had found only one—the responsibility which flows from the right of citizenship. There was clearly something wanted higher and deeper than this. The members of the Christian school-life were not merely the citizens of a political constitution; they were the citizens of the city of God, and any reformation must fall short of the goal which did not lead them to realize this. When the spiritual force of a man is once aroused, its direction is commonly determined by circumstances, and so was it here. The life of the Christian Church was about to be diverted from a poli- tical into a religious channel by one of those sobering events which come to the world at large as personal calamities come to the individual mind. About the 248 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. middle of the fourteenth century mankind was visited by one of the most'dreadful pestilences that has ever touched the earth; it is known to posterity as the ‘ black death.’ It is not too much to say, that subse- quent history furnishes no parallel to the character of this malady. We read with horror the details of the Great Plague of I66 5 ; some of us can remember with horror the terrible outburst of cholera in 18 3 I. But the plague of 166 5 was limited to London; the cholera of 1831, though widely diffused, was, in comparison with the mediaeval pestilence, a mere trifle. This was a pestilence which made a sensible diminution in the population of the earth, which swept away from every country of Europe one-third of its inhabitants, which carried off from London alone 5o,ooo souls; which, beginning in the north of Asia, penetrated through every European capital and thinned every rank of society, from the residents in the palace to the peasants in the village. In an age which believed the earth to be the centre of the universe, in an age which was profoundly ignorant of the reign of law, in an age which made every unusual occurrence identical with the supernatural, it is not surprising that such a catastrophe should have been received by many as a direct judgment from Heaven. It is still less surprising, that in this or in any other age the perpetual presence of death should have roused men into a sense of moral earnestness. Here, in the midst of human ambition, in the midst of hierarchical claims and Papal aspirations, in the midst of the strife of kings for empire and of Parliaments THIRD REVOLT OF THE SCHOOL-LIFE. 249 for supremacy, there appeared a handwriting on the wall which proclaimed that these objects of human idolatry had been weighed in the balance and found wanting. Man was suddenly awakened to behold the nothingness of power, to see the emptiness and the vanity of the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them in the presence of ,the. great leveller, death. And the levelling power/‘off death had itself a moral suggestiveness; it drew nearer those ranks of society which feudalism had divided, it showed that the points in which they differed were as nothing in comparison with that great load of human frailty which they had all alike to bear. Men not only began to think earnestly, but they began to think unanimously. The Sense Of human brotherhood was kindled by the feel- ing of human nothingness in the presence of the great destroyer, who knocked impartially at the door of Pfirlace and of hovel ; and the recognition of a common 'j'need, binding in unity the lives of men, was the origin of a bond of sympathy which knit the interests of the hamlet to the engrossments of the throne. This current of moral earnestness running through humanity changed the tendency to political revolution into the desire for religious reform; in other words, it transformed what had been only a revolt of the State into a revolt of the school-life. The first symptoms of this revolt appeared in England. Here, the ravages of the plague had been specially severe. It had spared no class of society, it had removed two members of the royal family, it had carried off the learned Bradwardine from the Church, it had swept 250 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. away multitudes from the marts of commerce and the scenes of agricultural labour. England being thus united in a common suffering, became united also in a common aim—the endeavour after a revived religious life. It was around the University of Oxford that this union centred, specially around one majestic form which Occupied its theological throne; a form which, even in ani’age rich in its historical figures, has left all its contemporaries in the shade; the zealous, the illustrious john Wicliffe. His biography belongs to the history of England, and specially to the history of the mediaeval Church Of England. The point which concerns uS is the Work of the man; his place in human development, and his contribution to the growth of the Christian life. Great as Wicliffe was, he was not an originator; he fOllowed the course of his times, and his life was the pI'Oduet of his times. It is therefore of importance to see what was that position which he occupied in the‘ Church’s pilgrimage, what stage of its journey he marked, what advance upon the past his life was designed to indicate. Wicliffe derived his name from the place of his birth, a village in Yorkshire. It is remarkable that nearly all the great English Reformers had sprung from the northern counties. Caedmon had inaugurated the birth of Saxon poetry in Northumberland ; Bede, the first of Saxon commentators, was a native of Durham; Alcuin, the greatest of Saxon educators, was master of the school of York ; and Wicliffe was now to add another to the list. But if Wicliffe was THIRD REVOLT OF THE SCHOOL-LIFE. 251 born in that region, which had in days of old been the home of liberty, he was bred in that school, which in mediaeval days had ever been esteemed the strongest guardian of its interest—the University of Oxford. With Oxford were associated the days of his youth, with Oxford were blended his hopes of greatness, with Oxford were shared his first literary triumphs. It is as Master of Balliol College that he makes his earliest appearance in history; before that time, he had led a hidden life. We know not the beginning of his spiritual struggles, we are unable to trace the rise of his Papal antipathies. When he stands before us, he is a man of thirty-seven, with a mind intensely spiritual, and a Papal antipathy, if not fully developed, certainly very clearly manifested. Doubtless, like other Englishmen, he had been impressed with the horrors of the great pestilence, roused to think of the nothingness of the outer world, and the awful reality of the inner. But he possessed a power which other Englishmen did not possess ; he could rouse others to think. His lectures of 1363 opened a new era in Oxford. Students who had once been attracted by the subtlety of theological debate, or by the novelty of theological speculation, were now stimulated by the exhibition of that religious life which is deeper than all subtlety, and higher than all speculation. They listened to a man whose researches were made, not into the manuscripts of the doctors, nor even into the writings of the Fathers, but chiefly and primarily into the secret places of the human heart. At first, all Oxford, in the course of a 252 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. few years all England, was thrilled. Never before had the heart of the English people been stirred so unanimously. A community of interest had made all ranks one. Edward III. was Struggling with the Papacy to obtain the remission of that tribute which Pope Innocent had enacted from King john. The Duke of Lancaster, his brother, was animated by a personal admiration for \Nicliffe, and perhaps also by a prepossession in favour of his doctrines. The Parliament was at one with the king in contending for the liberties of the nation. The best men in the Church were stimulated by that fervour which pervaded the moral atmosphere of the day. The burghers were in sympathy with a creed which seemed to recognise the individual rights of man. The peasantry themselves had been recently raised into enthusiasm by the publication of an anonymous work called Piers the Ploug/zman, in which the practices of the hierarchy were satirized, and the abuses of the Papacy held up to ridicule. With such a unity of sentiment permeating the land, Wicliffe found no difficulty in making his voice heard over its length and breadth. As by an electric current of sympathy, his words were borne far and near into the hearts of all, and irrespective of age or circumstance or station, they found a responsive echo in every mind. But perhaps the most singular fact is, that this impression should have been so enduring. That an age of religious revival should find representatives in all classes, is not surprising, but that such an age should be prolonged for many years, is contrary to general THIRD REvoLT OF THE SCHOOL-LIFE. 2 53 experience. In proportion as such movements are strong, they are commonly short-lived; in proportion as the fire burns fiercely, it is the sooner extinguished. But in the reformation of Wicliffe we have a very remarkable exception to the ordinary rule. From the time when he delivered his Oxford lectures in 1363. till the day when he was summoned before the Convocation of I 382, his influence never declined, and his star never paled. Although the Pope fulminated five bulls against him, although king and Parliament, archbishop and university, were alike importuned to silence his declamations, although thrice in the course of these years he was called to answer before an ecclesiastical tribunal of his country, his person remained unharmed, and his power con- tinued unshaken. It is true that the final Convocation of 1382 did pronounce upon his doctrines the long deferred sentence of condemnation; but why? If we are not greatly mistaken, it was for reasons rather political than religious. In the preceding year there had been a great rebellion of the populace—a rebellion which aimed at nothing less than the destruction of monarchy and the establishment of a democratic constitution. Was it unnatural that in the public mind the political outburst should have been associated with the movement of religious reform? Connection between them there was none, except the connection flowing from the fact that, when the spirit of innovation has moved in one sphere, it tends towards a simultaneous motion in another. Yet the public might be excused for imagining a 254 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. real connection between religious reform and political radicalism; at all events, they did imagine it, and the cause of religious reform suffered accordingly. From that day many of his best supporters walked no more with Wicliffe. As long as they believed his reformation to be in harmony with the interests of the State, they were enthusiastic in its cause; it' was only when they conceived it to be politically dangerous, that they opposed themselves to its further progress. Were the ridiculous rebellion of Wat Tyler erased from history, we can see no reason why the transformation effected under Henry VIII. should not have found its accomplishment in the days of Chaucer. N ow, whence proceeded this long-enduring power of Wicliffe? It cannot be accounted for by mere enthusiasm, for that tends to expend itself. It cannot be explained by the exciting events of the religious world, for the excitement Caused by historical incidents is by its very nature temporary and evanescent. It must clearly have its ground in some deeper source. If the movement of Wicliffe endured longer than the movements of his predecessors, it must have been because it contained some elements of strength which were wanting in previous efforts. And, indeed, we shall not look far ere we shall discover in the system of Wicliffe many elements which naturally made for permanence. There is one feature of this reform which on the very surface marks it out from all its forerunners. The keen eye of Wicliffe travelled over the organizations of the hierarchy, and in the per- THIRD REVOLT or THE SCHOOL-LIFE. 255 fection of these organizations it beheld the reason of that success which the hierarchy had so long enjoyed. Wicliffe saw that the Papacy had triumphed because it had never acted alone, because it had always sur- rounded itself with a body-guard of emissaries whose mission was to strike in its defence, to ward off the blows of its enemies, and to spread the reputation of its power. And Wicliffe asked why the sons of re— ligious reform had not adopted a similar expedient? Papal Rome had its Templars, its Dominicans, its Franciscans; why should not reforming England institute an association of reformers who should ac- complish for religious freedom what these orders had accomplished for Papal aggrandisement. Wicliffe answered that question by instituting the order of the Lollards. The meaning of their name has been lost in the lapse of ages, but the nature of their office is still clearly discernible. They were to be to mediaeval Christianity what the first disciples were to opening Christianity; the diffusers of the message of peace, the preachers of the kingdom of righteousness, the baptizers into a higher faith and into a purer life. But Wicliffe knew well the evanescent effect of even the most eloquent preaching. He knew that while it was easy to rouse the passions of men, it was supremely difficult to imbue them with principles of action. He desired, therefore, to approach the people by a more certain avenue than the hearing of the ear. He desired to address them through a perpetual medium; a medium which would not vanish when the preacher’s voice was withdrawn. To secure such a 256 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. medium Wicliffe began, continued, and ended the distinctive work of his life; he translated the whole Bible into the English tongue, and put copies for distribution into the hands of his missionary Lollards. The work had more than a religious value ; it marked a new era in literature. The English language was as yet only in its infancy; it had been born of the union of north and south, the amalgamation of the Saxon and the Latin races. But an infant language will perish unless it be nourished. There is nothing which tends so much to consolidate a new tongue as its embodiment in a standard work, for its terms thereby become the household words of all ages. The aristocracy of England had already received the instalment of such a standard in the first productions of one who was to bear the proud pre-eminence of being the father of English poetry. Chaucer was blazing in the literary firmament, and was shedding over the northern shores that light which he had caught from Italian skies. He had seen many lands, he had passed through varied circumstances, he had talked with all classes of men, and therefore to some extent he was a universal man. But the spirit which had most powerfully laid hold of him was the spirit of Boccaccio, of Petrarch, of the great renaissance of Italy; it was in him that the life of Florence first found a meeting-place with the life of England. Yet the poetry of Chaucer, just because it breathed the spirit of the renaissance, was better adapted to the higher than to the lower orders of society; it was the poetry of the king, of the court, of the knight, of the aristo- THIRD REvoLT OF THE SCHOOL-LIFE. ‘ 2 57 cracy, and as such it fixed the language only in the spheres of the great and noble. There was wanted a man who would perform for the middle and lower orders that work which Chaucer had accomplished for the higher, and that man was found in Wicliffe. He professed to do for the citizen and for t e peasant what Chaucerjhad done for the knight and for the courtier; to give them a standard book,——a book in whose pages they would find food for meditation, yet food adapfc/ed to the simplicity of their daily wants; a book f ee from all verbal subtleties and removed from all’ scholastic definitions, but powerful in the plainnes of its utterance, and strong in the directness of its meaning. In accomplishing that work, Wicliffe did ftythe English language even more than Chaucer; \rhe p etry of the Italian renaissance could speak to the cultured, but the Bible had a voice alike for the refin d and the unlearned; it bore the household into every household, and made the language land a universal possession. I there‘ is another element to be taken into t in estimating the ground of Wicliffe’s pro— d popularity. It must be remembered that, while rofessed to be a reformer, he never claimed to '1 ve advanced the development of Christian truth. \lliiicliffe disarmed suspicion by turning his eye, not towards the future, but towards the past, by, con— templating as the object of desire not a progress, but a regress. If we were asked, in few ‘words, to indicate to modern times the theological position .of Wicliffe, we would point for answer to the Old Catholic move- voL. II. R 2 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. ment of Germany. It seems to us.that the attitude of Wicliffe in the mediaeval world bears a strong resemblance to the attitude of Dollinger in the modern world. Wicliffe desired not to separate from the Catholic Church, but to lead back that Church to its primitive simplicity and purity. ' It ‘is true he opposed the Roman pontiff with all the vehemence at his command, and in language neither measured nor ambiguous. ‘The Antichrist,’ ‘the pro“ d worldly priest of Rome,’ ‘the cursed clipper,’ ‘th wicked purse-kerver,’ are amongst the‘ choice epither‘ts which he bestowed on the chair of St.. Peter; the last two are obsolete, and exist only as survivals of mediaeval passion. But if Wicliffe spared, not the Oman pontiff, he would have been quite ready to re rence the Roman bishop. He objected to.a Papal a OIII-J/ tism, he objected to a temporal Papacy of any k /d, but he would have willingly acknowledged the bi ' of Rome as the spiritual head of the Church ; a d in this he was a good Catholic of the olden time. ain, Wicliffe translated the Bible. into- English, a doing so he was undoubtedly at variance with th of his Church, yet that law was no older than Previous to the Counciltof Toulouse, it had been q allowable to translate the Scriptures into the separa ,, dialect of each: country; the hierarchy did not ext/- courage the process, but. neither did they forbid it. It was only when the commotion excited by Peter Waldo’s translation began to alarm the clergy, that they took steps to prevent the diffusion of the fire. Wicliffe, therefore, might well appeal to a time when THIRD REVOLT OF THE SCHOOL—LIFE. 259 Catholicism was the religion of the world, and when, consistently with that Catholicism, the Scriptures might be disseminated among the masses; in this respect also he was a Catholic of the old school. His repugnance to the practice of indulgences led him to emphasize intensely the doctrine of predestination, as indeed, for the same cause, the Albigenses had done before him; but Wicliffe and the Albigenses alike could point to a time when the Catholic Church was a predestinarian Church, and could cite in proof of their averment that decree by which the- Council of Orange homologated the doctrine of Augustine. Finally, Wicliffe challenged the belief in transub- stantiation; but we have seen how slow in the Catholic Church was the acceptance of that belief; here, also, he could point to all the days which preceded Pascasius Radbert, and claim to be still a Catholic, though he rejected the later additions to Catholicism. Paradoxical‘ as it may sound, the aim of Wicliffe was to lead the men of his age towards reform by lead- ing them back to conservative principles, to purify Catholicism by forcing it to retrace its steps, to revivify the life of Christianity by restoring the life of the past. We know that in‘ a future generation Luther made a similar attempt, we know that his first design was to reform by a conservative movement. In the days of Luther such a compromise was no longer possible, in the days of Wicliffe it was perhaps the best course which could be‘ devised. Wicliffe made the nearest approach to a reformation which at the time could have been made with safety or success. 260 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. He held fast by the original standards of his Church, and he showed himself to be a man with whom the belief in church standards was a matter not merely of speculation but of life ; yet in adhering to the essence he swept away the accidents, in holding fast by the original growth he opposed himself to all the accretions. He sought to present to the English people a Catholi~ cism which was comparatively pure from its very primitiveness, and more accessible to reason because nearer to the historical sources of sacred truth; and the English people were at once attracted by the comparative purity, and relieved from apprehension by the manifest oldness of the faith. It cannot be denied that the cause of Wicliffe was greatly strengthened at this period by a series of important events which occurred on the Continent. The seventy years of the ‘ Babylonish captivity ’ had now come to a close. The Papacy, weary of its long exile, had resolved at all hazards to return to its own land. To Gregory X1., the reigning pontiff at Avignon, it seemed that a time had come in every respect favourable for the resumption of Papal dignity. The France in which he sojourned was no longer the France of Philip the Fair; since the days of that monarch, its pride and its power had been brought low. Its fleet had been scattered, its armies had been vanquished, its territories had been dismembered, its king had been lodged a captive in the English capital. Of late, its fortunes had begun to revive, but their revival was Slow and difficult. At best, all that France hoped to achieve was restoration to THIRD REVOLT or THE SCHOOL-LIFE. 261 political independence ; it was no longer in a condition to hope for the exercise of political domination. A nation thus fettered by adverse circumstances had ceased to present any formidable barrier to the return of Israel from bondage. Accordingly, Gregory XI. seized the opportunity, and set out once more for that sacred capital whose walls had grown more sacred by the endearment of long absence. His exodus was unmolested, and he arrived at his destination in peace; it is probable that, had he lived .to recon- solidate his power, Papal Rome might have retrieved its fortunes, but these hopes were dissipated by his death within two years after his return to Italy. And now there opened a scene so humiliating and'so dark for Papal Rome, that one, in looking back, cannot but marvel that the chair of St. Peter has passed through it and yet lived. The death of Gregory XI. was the signal for a great conflict; the cardinals of France and Italy strove for the election of the new pontiff. Italy had the claim of long antiquity, the claim of having been for ages the seat of the Papal throne. France had been in possession of the field for the last seventy years, and was not disposed without a struggle to surrender that advantage. An agreement on the subject was hopeless. The Italians elected an Italian, the French made choice of a Frenchman; the former assumed the title of Urban vII., the latter took the name of Clement VI. This was the beginning of the great western schism,—-a schism which proved more injurious to the Papacy than all the seventy years of Babylonian bondage. 262 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. It was not merely that its physical strength was weakened by division; that was indeed a collateral result. The two pontiffs defied each other, reviled each other, anathematized each other, and .at last, pro- ceeding from words to blows, they engaged in a fierce conflict, in which the arms of Urban prevailed, and Clement was driven within the walls of Avignon. But this physical enfeeblement would not in itself have ruined the Papacy. Hildebrand, without an army, without a capital, almost without a friend, was still formidable in the eyes of his enemies. The glory of Papal Rome had all along consisted in the moral strength of its individual rulers; it had never been great or glorious when its bishops had been mean and despicable. The deepest fall which the Papacy experienced by the outburst of the western schism, was the decline of moral influence which that schism necessitated. The brightest feature of the Papacy had ever been its representation of the idea of father- hood. With all its unconscious errors, and they were many, with all its deliberate faults, and they were not few, it had yet succeeded in representing to the eyes of the medimval world the thought that that world was itself a vast family in the created universe, presided over by one common fatherhood, and linked together by the sympathetic ties of brotherhood. Europe was peopled by nations differing widely in manners, in customs, in laws, in institutions; separated by impass- able mountains, and not less impassable seas, and if possible, even more divided by the differences of mental constitution and temperament. Yet these THIRD REVOLT OF THE scHooL-LIFE. 263 diverse nations had merged their diversities in a common unity—a unity external, artificial, rather material than spiritual, yet surely not undesirable where spiritual unity was not to be attained. They had gathered around one centre, as the family gathers around the household board; they had sat at one table, they had received their spiritual food from the hands of one father, and that fact had been to them a greater symbol of union than if they had inhabited one plain, and spoken the same language. The Papacy was the fatherhood of the Christian Church; that is and must ever be its proudest prerogative, because it is its oldest claim to antiquity. Before the Pope was recognised as the absolute temporal ruler, before even he was recognised as the source of spiritual power, he was reverenced as the father of Christendom; and to be the father of Christendom is an incomparably higher honour than to be sovereign of the kings of Christendom. But if the Papacy was built on the idea of fatherhood, the idea of fatherhood was built on the fact that the Papacy was undivided; its unity was essential to the very existence of the thought; let that once be broken, and whatever the Papacy might retain, it must lose its oldest claim to respect and veneration in losing the relation of fatherhood. The western schism broke this unity. There had been schisms before in the Papal Church, but these had proceeded, not from the heart of the Church, but from the efforts of kings and emperors to raise up rivals to the pontifical power; here was a division which had originated in the very heart 'of 264 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. Christendom, and which divided into two camps the collective nations of Europe. When each side could boast of such a multitude of supporters, it was clear that neither could have possessed a claim much superior to his rival; yet the very conception of a divided pontificate was suicidal to that office. It was destructive to its holiest element, the idea of father- hood. It broke the unity of the household of faith; it destroyed the common meeting-place for the hearts of the distant nations; it made a partition in the temple, and divided the souls of the worshippers. The human race ceased to be one spiritual family when it ceased to hold one spiritual head. And, indeed, at this time the Church had more than ordinary need of concentration; its very foundation was in danger of being shaken. We have seen how the doctrines of Wicliffe had permeated England; it was impossible that such doctrines should long be confined to England. In a very few years from their first pro- mulgation, they had passed over into Bohemia, and there they found at once a congenial soil and an able advocate. The soil was one which had been long prepared for the seeds of political and religious revolution, the advocate was one in every respect qualified to be the spiritual successor of Wicliffe; that advocate was john Huss. There is, as it seems to us, a singular analogy between the outward life of Huss and the outward life of Wicliffe. Both were born into a world ready for revolt against conven- tionalism. Both were educated at the best and most liberal universities of their time; Wicliffe at Oxford, THIRD REvoLT OF THE SCHOOL-LIFE. 265 Huss at Prague. Both rose to distinction in their respective universities, and ultimately delivered lectures to their respective students. Both subse— quently passed from the life of the professor into the office of the preacher, and wielded the same power over the people which they had already exercised over the students. Both, in addition to the populace and the students, obtained access to the ear of royalty; Wicliffe as friend of the Duke of Lancaster, Huss as confessor to Queen Sophia. We are sorry to be obliged to add one parallel more: both were arrested in their career by the suspicion that their Protestantism would interfere with the political constitution of empires. Wicliffe’s movement was suppressed by Convocation, because it was suspected of connection with Wat Tyler’s rebellion; the movement 'of Huss was extinguished in blood, because it was accused of lending support to Ladislaus of Naples. In the case of Wicliffe, the political connection was imaginary; in that of Huss, it must be acknowledged to have been real, and this has always seemed to us a matter for regret. The circumstances may be stated in a few sentences. The Council of Pisa had made a laudable effort to put an end to the western schism, had deposed both the rival pontiffs, and had elected in their room Peter de Candia, by the title of Alexander v., thus temporarily restoring the idea of unity. Almost the earliest exercise of authority on the part of the restored pontificate was its proclamation of a crusade against the kingdom of Naples ; and to obtain soldiers for the enterprise, it resorted to the usual 266 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. expedient of granting indulgences to those who should serve. Huss raised his voice against this, and declared it to be a practice contrary to the spirit of Christianity. Though it is probable that he sympa- thized with the King of Naples, it is certain that his deepest motive was his genuine abhorrence of the practice of indulgences. But while his opposition to that practice was right in theory, we believe that in this instance it was erroneous in policy. To dis- organize an army on the eve of battle was a danger— ous political offence. Huss should have begun by attacking indulgences as they appeared in domestic life, and as they were granted to individual men; to attack them first in their political relations was an error of judgment, and an error which contributed to weaken the cause of the reformer. It seems to us that some explanation of this sort is required to account for the extraordinary virulence which was subsequently manifested towards him by the most liberal assembly that ever met in the mediaeval Church. To that Council of Constance, itself an anti-Papal meeting, there could have been nothing in the doctrines of Huss so repellent as to lead it to condemn him to the flames. We are unable to find any essential point in which he was more heretical than his judges. Of the thirty-nine charges preferred against him at his trial, he positively denied many, and refused to admit the heresy of those to which he confessed. He belonged to the school of Wicliffe, but not more so than did the Council of Constance. Huss does not appear to have adopted the views of THIRD REVoLT OF THE SCHOOL-LIFE. 267 Wicliffe which touched most nearly on heresy; he assuredly did not deny the doctrine of transubstantia- tion. It seems evident, therefore, that his subsequent judges must have been embittered against him by certain acts of his life which cast a shade over his doctrines, and gave to these doctrines an appearance of danger which was not inherent in themselves. The attempt to interfere with a military arrangement which had existed, and been a source of strength for two centuries, might well have excited alarm even in men who were no friends to the abuse of indulgences ; it was too sweeping and too radical a measure to be attempted at once with safety, and the boldness of the aim wrecked the cause of the reformer. There was, however, another element which in- creased the danger of Huss’ position. He had the misfortune to possess a friend whose zeal outran his discretion. jerome of Prague was, in many respects, the greater man of the two. He had more learning, and he had more eloquence. His life was, in a more strict sense than that of Huss, stimulated by the breath of the universities. Huss had studied at Prague ; jerome, after completing his studies there, had passed through the universities of Heidelberg, Cologne, Paris, and Oxford, thus receiving the impressions of many lands, and extending by varied sympathies the range of his knowledge of men. Yet, if jerome was superior to Huss in the gifts of nature, he was inferior to him in its graces. Bold, generous, earnest, enthusiastic, per— vaded with the spirit of piety, and with the spirit of the incipient reformation, he was yet deficient in those 268 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. solid moral qualities which are necessary to constitute a great leader. Surpassing Huss in eloquence, he fell beneath him in judgment ; transcending him in know- ledge, he did not equal him in that calmness which knowledge ought to bring. His mind wanted a just balance; he took insufficient time to mature his measures, he acted ever on the impulse of the moment, and his momentary impulses were not seldom outrageous. He was not satisfied, like Huss, with condemning indulgences ; he trampled the relics under his feet. He was not satisfied, like Huss, with inveighing against the monks; he cast some of them into prison, and threw one of them into the Moldau. jerome was among the reformers what Peter was among the apostles. He was courageous, and he over-estimated the influence of his own courage; he was zealous, and he allowed his zeal to warp his judg- ment. He attempted to walk over the sea of human passions, and then recoiled from the danger created by his own temerity. He arrived first at the door of the sepulchre; but when he looked into its ghastly depths, he shrank back from the spectacle, and allowed another first to enter. jerome and Huss both travelled over the road to martyrdom, but they travelled over it at a very different pace. jerome beheld the grim shadow of death standing in the midst of the fiery furnace; he beheld it, and he ran with alacrity to meet it; yet, when he stood within the reach of that terrible hand, his courage quailed for a moment, and he retreated in dismay. Huss, too, looked upon the ghastly spectacle, and went forth to THIRD REvoLT OF THE SCHOOL—LIFE. 269 encounter it; not perhaps with alacrity, not certainly with eager haste: he did not run, but walked to the goal; yet, when he reached the opening of the furnace, he arrested his progress not a moment, but slowly, deliberately, and stedfastly walked into the arms of death. He that was last became first. Such were the characters of the two great leaders of the Bohemian movement. In the meantime, that movement was greatly facilitated by the continued dissensions in the hierarchy. The temporary unity, which had been established by the Council of Pisa, had failed to produce peace. Alexander V. had died shortly after his election, and had been succeeded by John XXIII.; but the new election was the signal for a re-assertion of the old claims on the part of the rival pontiffs who had been deposed. Accordingly at one moment there were three men in existence, ea'ch professing to be sole sovereign of the spiritual world, and each issuing his decrees as the inviolable mandates of Heaven. In such a Church there could be nothing but anarchy, and religious revolution was as likely to prosper as religious orthodoxy. It was in vain that Archbishop Sbinko burned the books of Wicliffe; the books of Wicliffe had already been re- written in the hearts of the people. It was in vain that he prohibited the preaching of Huss; the voice of the populace, of the court, and of the univer- sity obliged him to withdraw his prohibition. It was in vain that a mandate was issued summoning the reformer to appear before the Pope ‘at Rome; he simply refused to go, and the sternest Catholic might 270 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. have hesitated to pronounce his refusal an illegal act. Who was the Pope? who had the right to summon him? who really sat on the chair of St. Peter? who was the schoolmaster to whose training the life of the Church was subject? These were questions which even a believer in the Papacy might well have asked. And these were questions which the whole Church was about to ask. It was becoming clear to the most obtuse mind that a change was coming over the aspect of the world, that old things must pass away, that all things must become new. Two influences had been long at work,—the influence of physical power, and the influence of rising intelligence. For two centuries they had been dividing the Christian world, and their battle had been fierce and fluctuating. But now at last the physical power was yielding, and the intelli- gence was growing mightier day by day. Could the Church close- its eyes to this fact? could it re- fuse to see the approach of that change which ere long must make itself felt? Such a course was no longer possible. The school—life was stirred by wild impulses towards freedom ; in some respects towards licence. It was not prepared, indeed, to give the full rein even to its own impulses; there were counter— acting motives which still bound it to the past. The memories of the school, the ancient sanctity which had encircled the person of the schoolmaster, the many historic associations of victory and renown which clustered around the bygone days, all contributed to render a rupture with those days difficult in the extreme. But the school-life felt that, if its impulses THIRD REVOLT OF THE SCHOOL-LIFE. 2 71 were exaggerated, they yet pointed instinctively to a real want; that, if its desires required to be mode- rated, they must not be suppressed. Whence, with all its reverence for the past, came that dissatisfaction which would not let it rest in the past? Whence, with all that power of memory which bound it to the former days, came that spirit of inquietude which urged it to break away from the old trammels, and. travel in freedom over nature’s fields? Was it not because the school-life was now too old for school, because the days for scholastic education were past, and the days for a new and higher education had be- gun ? Slowly, yet surely, this conviction was forcing itself upon the heart of Christendom. Day by day it was becoming more apparent that the rules which had been admirable in former years, had lost their power and had lost their usefulness. Day by day it was growing more evident, that the customs and the employments which had been congenial to a period of transition, had become repulsive to an age whose transition was almost perfected. The modes of thought and the systems of discipline that had been sufficient to guide the scholar through the school, ,were no longer sufficient to guide the youth through those dangerous avenues which lead to manhood; and the life of the Christian Church awoke to the conviction that a new mode of tuition must be opened, in preparation for the new heavens and the new earth. CHAPTER XXXIV. CLOSE OF THE SCHOOL-LIFE; THE NEGATIVE REFORMATION COMPLETED. HE school-life had now arrived at a definite conviction, the conviction that it was too advanced for scholasticism. It accordingly determined to proclaim its majority, to declare itself capable of self-action, to assert its right and its power to be an independent existence. It was expressly with this design that the Church of mediaeval Christendom convoked that great council which was to express its full voice and declare its united sentiment. The Council of Constance was one of the most remarkable assemblies which had ever met in medimval Europe. Other councils had been convoked by the pressure of local circumstances or by the voice of Papal authority; this was assembled as the answer to a universal prayer which had been long going up from the united heart of Christendom. Its meeting arose from no local necessity, it was dictated by no private interest; it was necessitated by the common good, it was demanded by the longing of the entire Church. Men had looked forward to such a concourse, as benighted travellers look forward to the first ray of morning; CLosE OF THE SCHOOL-LIFE. 273 \ they wanted light, and they wanted no individual light but that which emanated from the combined lustre of all Christian minds; they felt that in the multitude of counsellors wisdom could alone be found. And the assemblage, in number and in quality, was worthy of that unanimity which had called it. Never had a council of the Christian Church embraced the representatives of so many classes of society, because never before had society itself so many classes to be represented. Humanity had become varied in pro- portion as it had become cultured. It could no longer be classified under the wide designations of aristocrat and serf, king and peasant; it had come to inhabit many mansions, each of which had to be described by its own separate name. Therefore this Council of Constance, as it professed to be the voice of universal Christendom, was compelled to include the represen- tatives of every stage of Christian progress, and marvellously did it succeed in realizing its idea. As we cast our eye over the vast concourse which gathered there, we are struck with the immense varieties of opinion which that concourse represented. There stood Pope John XXIII., to symbolize the old things that were passing away, holding a firm grasp on the tottering throne, and refusing to let the sceptre go. There stood Sigismund of Germany, accompanied by a long train of German princes, to symbolize that victory of political power over Papal domination which was now at last secured, but which Henry IV. and Frederic II. had struggled in vain to win. There stood the ambassadors of nearly all the European voL. II. s 274 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. courts, to indicate that all Europe participated in the triumph of political freedom. There stood the Uni- versity of Paris, represented by its chancellor, Gerson, the worthy representative of a worthy university, combining the desire for Catholic purity with the earnest thirst for an increase of religious liberty. And there, too, were the leaders of what might be called the ’ radical religious movement, john Huss and jerome of Prague, men whose hearts were in the right place, but whose heads were too heated to await the natural development of the Christian life, and who, therefore, had been summoned to the council to stand their trial as heretics. Such were the elements which composed that vast assembly; elements which, if united and harmonious, must render its strength irresistible, and give to its measures the authority of law. Nor were the deliberations of that council marked by less harmony than was evinced in its social groupings; its voice was as the voice of one man. Its first great act was the assertion of its own power; without such an assertion, its proceedings would have been a burlesque, but the council knew where the foundation must be laid. It began by proclaiming the majority of the school-life, by an- nouncing that the Christian Church was of age to be a law unto itself. There were three pontiffs in the field; the council deposed all of them, and elected a pontiff of its own by the title of Martin v. But the new pontiff no longer occupied the position of the Pope of former days; he was declared to be subject to the will of the council. At one stroke the Isidorian CLOSE OF THE SCHOOL-LIFE. 275 decretals were swept away, and that power which Hildebrand had striven for, and which Innocent 111. had lived to realize, was seen to crumble into ruins. It was not merely that the Papacy was deprived of its temporal sovereignty among the nations; such a judgment it might still have borne with dignity, for Hildebrand himself had never in words laid claim to the empire of Papal absolutism. But the judgment of this council was a sentence annulling that power which of all others was most dear to the heart of the Papacy, nay, which constituted the very sinews of its strength and the very breath of its life—the power of spiritual headship. In making the will of the pontiff subordinate to its own decrees, the Council of Constance robbed him in a moment of the secret of his ascendancy, deprived him of the empire not only over the will of nations, but over the hearts of Christendom, and reduced him to a position very little superior to that which he had held in the days of Cyprian and of Augustine. Thus far the acts of the Council of Constance had been in strict harmony with the growing Protestant spirit. There are, however, two measures of this council which greatly mar that feeling of exultation with which the Protestant reader contemplates its opening actions—measures, one of which, in the minds of all, the other in the minds of many, must attach to its memory an indelible stain. The first of these was the condemnation to death of john Huss and jerome of Prague. It is impossible by' any casuistry or by any special pleading to vindicate this act; in the case 276 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. of Huss especially, it was an ungenerous, a false, and a shameful deed, because he had come to the council under the promise of a safe-conduct from the Emperor Sigismund himself. But although nothing can be said in vindication, a few remarks may perhaps be offered in explanation. The difficulty, to our mind, has always been, not to account for the condemnation of the men, but to account for the condemnation of their doctrine. We believe john Huss to have been up to this time as good, though perhaps not so discreet, a Catholic as john Gerson, yet the Council of Constance decided otherwise. It seems almost necessary to believe that the members of that council approached the articles of Huss under the bias of a personal prejudice against himself, and in the course of the previous chapter we have endeavoured to point out what in our view constituted the ground of such prejudice. We are acquainted with almost no theological statement which might not be interpreted heretically, if heresy were the object hunted for; and assuredly the somewhat heated utterances of Huss and jerome might well have furnished ' heretical matter for those predisposed to find it. All difficulty must vanish if we once grant the predisposition, and if the view we have suggested be adopted, there can be no difficulty in granting it. Be this as it may, however, it is unquestionable that the Council of Constance did condemn the opinions of Huss and jerome. And now for the first time in their lives, these men stand before us in the attitude of advanced Protestants—assume a position not unlike that assumed by Luther after the Diet of Worms. CLosE OF THE SCHOOL—LIFE. 277 They refused to accept the decision of the council; Huss refused throughout, Jerome after a temporary submission. That refusal transplanted both of them in a moment from the position of agitators for Catholic reform, into the position of agitators for Catholic dissolution. There was more heresy in the one act than in all the alleged opinions put together, and the act was a matter neither of interpret'affigh {for of inference; it was a patent, clemg/dnmistakeable defiance of the highest tribiyn’zffbf ecclesiastical power. The council had pronorxlficled their opinions heretical. Jerome and Huss we'fe unable to discover the grounds for that condem’rfation, yet their inability to see the truth of the’ judgment did not make it the less necessary fé/or them as good Catholics to acquiesce in its justice. In the Catholic Church, as in all churches, the private sentiments of the individual may be frequenjtly at variance with the collective voice; but in the; Catholic Church it becomes incumbent on the indivjdual, when he has heard the collective voice, to crucify his own individual sentiments. Huss and Jerome’ were called upon to accept the judgment of the council; they were not required to see its truth, mucfl less to vindicate its truth; they were simply askerli formally to acknowledge that its ways were higher than their ways, and its thoughts than their thoughts. That acknowledgment they declined to give, and thereby they ceased to be Catholics in any sense, approached more nearly to the standpoint of a’ developed Protestantism than any reformer had done since the opening of the mediaeval world. But the 278 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. Council of Constance was not prepared for Protestan- tism; it wanted a liberalized church as far as Catholic liberality would stretch, but it would have repudiated the idea of abandoning its ancient landmarks. On this point, indeed, it was peculiarly tenacious, on account of its own somewhat equivocal position. It hadxproduced a great innovation, alike in the Catholic Churml‘ in the Catholic world ; it had deprived of its sovereignFy‘Toq/lerk both worlds the power which had held that sovereignty\fOr\ ‘two hundred years, and it had seated itself upon the t’hi’cqne from which its rival had been driven. Under these”‘ci\rcumstances, was it not in danger of being reckoned subverter of all religion, a leader of revolution, an inahgu ator of uni- versal anarchy? and must it not use all The influence at its command to counteract the impression and refute the charge ? It was, we believe, for‘, this reason that the Council of Constance was so eager to avoid the imputation of heresy, so anxious to ’e regarded as a standard of orthodox Catholicism; i\\ found it safer in its present position to condemn theKopinions of Huss than to incur the reproach of free thought by homologating ambiguous statements. But if the Council of Constance was zealous for the reputation of its orthodoxy, it was still more zealous folr the recognition of its newly asserted authority. It is true of communities as of individuals, that they are inore prone to assert their power in proportion as it rests upon a recently laid foundation; despotism often springs from the conviction of a doubtful title. It was the misfortune of Huss and jerome that they CLOSE OF THE SCHOOL-LIFE. 279 were the earliest to defy the council. They threw themselves against that armour which had been newly sharpened, and which the wielders were eager to see in exercise; they rushed into antagonism with that pride which could not brook restraint in its first hour of possession. The sacrifice of their lives was as much a political as a religious offering; it was the proclamation to all the world that the Catholic Church meant to be obeyed. We have attempted to explain what we cannot vindicate. We believe the burning of the Bohemian reformers to have been an act at once cruel and impolitic; but we do not believe it to have been an arbitrary act, and we have sought as briefly as possible to indicate what seem to us to have been the motives which prompted its performance. We come now to the second of those deeds which have cast a shade over the glory of this council; it was here that for the first time the cup was forbidden to the laity in the sacrament of communion. Vast as is the difference between the character of these two deeds, they have yet been placed side by side by the course of history. It was the prohibition of the cup to the laity which the followers of Huss took hold of as the rallying cry against the council. No doubt their real motive was the natural desire to avenge what seemed to them an act of deliberate murder; but they knew well .that any opposition founded either on the affectionate remembrance of a leader, or on the desire to revenge his untimely fate, must inevitably lose its power as the years rolled on. Mere feeling could not 28O GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. protract a warfare, for feeling is calmed by time, and changed with temporal changes. The Hussites felt that, if they would preserve the name of their master, and maintain the integrity of his cause, they must lay hold of some real principle, must unite on some moral basis, must strike at some actually existing evil. ' The taking of the cup from the laity seemed to furnish such a point of attack, and the Hussites seized it. They could call it with truth a retrogressive act. They could point to the course of the last three centuries as a proof that the Council of Constance had arrested the advance of human development. They could declare the rights of the laity to have been guaranteed by a series of inalienable privileges, and they could affirm, without fear of contradiction, that the periods of greatest national prosperity had been the periods when the privileges of the people were most widely diffused. They could then turn to that council which professed to be a reforming council, and ask, not without an air of plausibility, if the new reform was to sweep away all the old reforms, if the people were to lose the position they had so hardly won, and if the sons of the hierarchy were once more to ride over the prostrate forms of the laity? Such in spirit was the line of attack adopted by the followers of the Bohemian leader. Yet, on calm reflection, we are not at all sure that its power was equal to its imposingness. The prohibition of the cup to the laity was certainly in form a retrogressive act, but it was only in form. It never occurred to the Council of Constance that the laity were suffering any CLosE OF THE SCHOOL-LIFE. 281 wrong, or that they were losing any privilege what- ever. The council had certainly a motive for the prohibition, but its motive was not the depression of the laity; it was the preservation of the blood of Christ. If there appears a strong Catholic element in the decree, it is seen not in the effort to infringe public freedom, but in the excessive prominence given to the doctrine of transubstantiation. The cup was believed to contain the veritable blood of the Master, and in the transmission of that cup from hand to hand, it was feared that the blood of the Master might be spilt; that alone was the motive which dictated the proceedings of Constance. The council forbade the cup to the laity, in order that the sacred element which the cup contained might not be trampled under the foot of the passer-by. Yet the council maintained that, in limiting the laity to the partaking of the sacred bread, it was depriving them of no privilege, and debarring them from no part of Christ’s communion. The blood may be separated from the body, but the body cannot as a living organism exist without the blood. To partake of the sacred bread was really to have communion in both kinds, for the blood of Christ was contained in the body of Christ, and so metaphorically might the element of the cup be said to be contained in the elements of the broken bread. The laity, according to this interpretation, received all that they had ever received ; and we cannot say that, conceding the truth of transubstantiation, the interpretation was itself either strained or unnatural. The innovation created 282 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. for a time the great opposition of the Hussites; nor can we wonder that it should have done so, for the very forms of our religion become dear to us by long use, and the loss of one so hallowed could not be experienced without sadness. This act of the Council of Constance was the breaking of an old association, and no Old association can be broken without a wrench to the moral nature. The Hussites therefore resisted the change fiercely and long, and had they continued united, they might perhaps have resisted it success- fully. But as long as they were themselves believers in transubstantiation, they had not a settled principle on which to base their opposition ; they were united only by individual feeling. A cord so loose could not bind their hearts together; they quarrelled, and broke up into hostile camps. Some professed to hold by the old rallying cry, and called themselves the Calixtines, or men of the cup; others retired into a solitary mountain, and strove to forget the world in the ecstasies of mysticism. The former ultimately went back into the bosom of the Catholic Church; the latter, in all probability, eventually mingled with those waters of popular revolution, which appeared simultaneously with the Lutheran Reformation. It is not, however, in the followers of Huss that the deepest preparation for that Lutheran reform must be sought; it is in the life of the Catholic Church itself. We have now brought that life down to the close of a distinct period. We have traced the history of Christianity through the days of its child- hood, we have traced it through the days of its cLosE OF THE SCHOOL-LIFE. 283 school-life, and we have marked throughout that school-life the anticipations and foreshadowings of a higher stage of being. The Council of Constance may be said to have realized these anticipations; it was the proclamation of the Church’s majority—the assertion of its capability of self-guidance and self- action. In the title of this chapter, we have called the close of the school-life the completion of the negative reformation. _It will be seen from the whole course of this work, that we regard the Reformation, not as an act, but as a process, not as a great event which suddenly and unexpectedly flashed upon the world of the sixteenth century, but as the last stage in the maturing of a splendid life—the manhood of an existence which for centuries had been expand- ing towards the consummation of its being. If this view of the subject be true, it will follow that the Reformation which culminated in Luther had its beginning and its development in the bosom of the Catholic Church. We have endeavoured to mark throughout the history of mediaevalism, the indica- tions of this growing spirit of reform. We have seen it in its repeated revolts against conventionalism, in its repeated aspirings aftera higher life, in the repeated evidence it yielded of dissatisfaction with the world in which it moved. It seems to us that the history of the Reformation ought scientifically to be divided into two great periods, which may appropriately be called its negative and its positive stages. The negative reformation begins with the image contro- versy, and terminates with the Council of Constance; 284 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. the positive reformation begins with the work of Luther, while the short intermediate period is a pre- paratory stage of transition. 'We have brought this history to the close of the former period—to the completion of what we have called the negative re- formation. All completed stages of existence are appropriate seasons for reflection, times for retrospect, hours for self-measurement. Let us therefore pause here to consider how far the Christian life has ad- vanced, to estimate that point of development which it has already attained, and to anticipate that point of development which it may legitimately hope to attain. And, first of all, let us define what we mean by a negative reformation. When the mind of a human being is passing from one stage into another, it encounters two experiences: one of destruction, and the other of reconstruction. Before the mind of man can be attracted towards the new, it must be weaned from the old. The child cannot adopt the pleasures of youth, until he has ceased to relish the pleasures of childhood; the youth cannot adopt the pursuits of manhood, until he has ceased to find delight in that love of adventure which characterises youthful days. Now this destructive process, this weaning from the old, this rupture with the past which precedes our joy in the future, is what we call the negative reformation. We call it negative, because it creates a sense of void without immediately filling it; it destroys the old temple of worship, and leaves a blank on the spot where it stood. The negative CLOSE OF THE SCHOOL-LIFE. 285 reformation of the mediaeval world was the revolt against absolute authority, the revolt against Papal domination, the revolt against the exclusive promi- nence given to rites, to Ceremonies, to forms. It was the reaction of human nature against the restraints to its humanity; it was the rebellion of the school-life against the will of the schoolmaster. The negative reformation said: ‘ Thou shalt not;’ it was not yet prepared to say : ‘ Thou shalt.’ It had not determined what course it ought to follow; it had thoroughly determined what course it ought not to follow. It had not devised a system of truth which it could substitute for old opinions, nor had it an authoritative standard on which to base the formation of any system; yet it was convinced that the absolute will of a sovereign pontiff could no longer furnish such a standard, and meantime it preferred resting without an authority, to being subject to an authority whose foundation was on the shifting sands. It was a negative reformation, because as yet it had learned only what it could no longer retain. The second point requiring illustration is the state- ment that this negative reform was fully completed before Luther entered on his distinctive work. It may seem singular that a statement so obvious should demand illustration, but in truth there is no subject on which there has been a more wide-spread misconcep- tion. Even in many standard books it is not difficult to find the traces of this misconception. If a man, for the first time, were to attempt to acquire a knowledge of the Lutheran Reformation from the pages of Hume’s 286 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. Hz'sz‘ory of England, he would inevitably be led to the conclusion that Luther startled the world into surprise by denying that Papal authority which had never been questioned before. He would inevitably be led to infer that the Lutheran Reformation was simply a revolt from old customs, and a declamation against old abuses, succeeding by reason of its boldness, and gathering strength by widening its invectives. Yet we have no hesitation in saying that, had this been the sole work of Luther, so far from startling the world by the sur- prise of novelty, it would have exposed him to con- tempt through its want of originality. Since the days of Philip the Fair, the hierarchical party had received nothing but invectives ; there were reformers in every country, and every reformer did over and over again what Luther is here represented as having done as a novelty. We hear it frequently averred in popular and colloquial language, that Luther accomplished the reformation from Popery. Is it meant by this that Luther emancipated the Church from submission to the pontiff as a temporal power? The work was per- formed nearly two centuries before his birth by Philip the Fair of France. Is it meant that Luther freed the Church from subservience to the pontiff as an absolute spiritual head in matters of faith ? The work was performed nearly seventy years before his birth by a decree of the Council of Constance. The truth is, that Luther did not accomplish what is popularly styled the Reformation from Popery—he accomplished a far greater Work; that was only a work of destruc- tion, his task was emphatically one of reconstruction. CLOSE OF THE SCHOOL-LIFE. 287 At the very outset of his mission, Luther took it for granted that the negative reformation had been completed. When he was censured by Cardinal Cajetan, who professed to act under Papal direction, he appealed from the Pope ‘badly informed’ to the Pope ‘better instructed.’ He appealed to him, how- ever, not as an authority, but as one good Catholic, conscious of his integrity, may submit his cause to another good Catholic whose high positionin the Church is recognised; he felt that the approval of the pontiff would give him a moral support. When he failed to win that approval he appealed to a council; but in so doing he acted in strict conformity with the laws of the Catholic Church ; there was nothing revolutionary in the measure, it was precisely that step which in all times of difficulty the Council of Constance had recommended future ages to adopt. Previous to the Diet of Worms, Luther was no more than a follower of the Waldenses, of Wicliffe, and of Huss; it was after his dissent from that Diet that his opposition assumed a positive character, and it is from that date his distinctive work begins. The work called the Refor- mation from Popery was a Catholic process. It had its origin in the Church of Rome itself; not in a sect of that Church, not in a heresy, not in a schism, not in the opinions of restless or eccentric minds, but in the very bosom of Catholicism, in the very heart of Latin Christianity, in the very soul of mediaeval Europe. It was a reform effected by the Church of Rome while continuing to be the Church of Rome, wrought out by its own hands and devised by its own heart. The 288 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. Council of Constance may be said to have stamped with its imprimatur all the previous revolutionary movements of the school—life, to have acknowledged their justice, and to have upheld their necessity ; when it abolished the absolute power of the Papacy, whether temporal or spiritual, it affixed its seal to the labours of its forefathers. Nor can it in any degree alter the place of this Council in the development of history, that the (Ecumenical Council of 1871 has virtually reversed its decree. It is competent for any age to break away from the previous course of human development; in so doing it may‘ alter its course for the future, but it cannot obliterate its line of progress in the past. We are not now considering the (Ecumenical Council of 1871 ; we are considering the course of the spirit of Christianity through the world of Catholicism, and we must trace that course as it was, not as hereafter it may be. The conclusion at which we must arrive is this : that the history of the medimval world is the history of .a progressive school- life growing in wisdom and knowledge, gradually out- growing the limits of scholastic education, and ulti- mately asserting its right and its power to be the arbiter of its own actions; the realization of that desire completes the negative reformation. But there is a third point requiring illustration, and it is exactly the converse of the preceding point. If it be true that the negative reformation was fully com- pleted before the distinctive work of Luther began, it is not less profoundly true, that before the beginning of Luther’s work it never attained to any positive CLosE OF THE SCHOOL-LIFE. 289 character, never reached a new principle of life, never extended further than the act of demolition. If we take a retrospective view of these mediaeval efforts at reform, we shall be struck with the fact that not one of them approaches the standard of a positive reformation ; they are all negative, they are all revolu— tionary, they all stop short at the mandate, ‘ Thou shalt not.’ The first revolt of the school-life was, it will be remembered, the great image-controversy of the eighth century. We have seen how violent on that occasion was the outburst of the East against idolatry, and how its fire was fomented and fed by that kindred spirit of Mohammedanism which had just risen into life. Yet we have seen also that this image-contro- versy, powerful as it was in the work of destruction, was utterly unable to rebuild. It was prepared with fire and sword to destroy the idols in the temple, but it was altogether unprepared to place a new object of reverence on their vacant altar. The second revolt of the school-life was in some respects analogous to the first; this, too, was a reaction against the exclu- sive worship of the letter, only it came not from the east, but from the west ; not from the Grecian plains, but from the Alpine valleys. Yet we have seen that even these Waldenses, with all their moral purity, and with all that high chivalry of nature which made their very poverty transcendently noble, were unable to reach the standard of a positive reformation. They were anti -hierarchical, but they were not anti- Catholic ; they were weary of outward authority as a basis of faith, but they had not yet found any other VOL. II. T 290 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. basis on which they could rear the temple of truth. That great intellectual revival, which preceded, accompanied, and followed the Waldensian move- ment, was still less able to constitute the foundation of a positive reform. In so far as that revival bore any relation to religion, it was affected towards it with that spirit of scepticism which the sudden influx of intellectual light is apt to awaken in long darkened minds. Every negative reformation involves scepti~ cism. Men would never part with the old if they had not learned to doubt its value; yet scepticism itself can never create, it can only destroy. The third revolt of the school-life was more radical and more prolonged than either of its predecessors. It was that revolution which, after having prepared its way by Franciscan unrest and mystical longing, burst forth with terrible power in the fiery utterances of Huss and Wicliffe. The image-controversy had been originated by the breath of kings; the Waldensian movement had sprung from the hearts of the peasantry; the reformation of Huss and Wicliffe was supported by the whole mass of mediaeval society,— by king and peasant, by priest and layman, by the unlettered sons of the village, and the most learned sons of the most learned universities. The image- controversy died aftef a century; the Waldensian movement was within a few years driven back into the valleys whence it had sought to extend itself; the reformation of Huss and Wicliffe cannot strictly be said to have ever been suppressed, it tarried until the greater light came. It compelled the Church of CLOSE OF THE SCHOOL-LIFE. 291 mediaevalism to take cognisance of its wants, it forced the Council of Constance to seal its proceedings with its approbation ; and that Council, in the very act of condemning the leader, was unconsciously supporting the movement which he led. Even when Luther came, the work of Wicliffe had not ceased; there were still abuses to be redressed, there were still cor- ruptions to be exposed. But by that time the work of Wicliffe had no glory, by reason of a glory that excelled it. It had become patent to the heart of Christendom that mere negation would not regenerate the world. The movement of Wicliffe, in so far as it was a reform, had not passed the limits of a protest against additions to the Catholic faith. It had been content to accept the principles of mediaeval Chris- tianity, purified only from the servitude of Papal abso- lutism and the corruptions of a licentious age. But the age of Luther was no longer content in any form to accept mediaeval Christianity; it wanted a new element of life. It felt that the moral nature of man would never be regenerated by the simple process of breaking down the walls and barriers to human pro- gress. It felt that if the soul would be great and noble, it must study not so much what it ought not to be, as what it ought to be; that all prohibition of wrong was included in the sense of right. It felt, above all, that to implant a new principle of religious faith was the only course which would\ give perman- ence to the desire of reformation, the only course which would transform that desire from a violent and fluctuating impulseinto a calm and stedfast resolve, 292 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. and give it a motive for action higher than mere opposition to the men and measures of a passing age. That was the work of Luther. All who went before him only cleared the ground. It was their task to tear the old barriers from the field, and make room for the entrance of the spiritual seed ; it was the task of Luther to plant the seed itself, and people the vacant field with new forms of life and beauty. We have said that between the two periods of the negative and the positive reformation there was inter- posed a third or transitional age, and it is at this age that we have now arrived. The spirit of Christianity has completed its school-life, it has burst the trammels of scholastic education, it has proclaimed to the world that it has reached its majority. But its manhood has not yet dawned. It believes, doubtless, that manhood lzas dawned; but the belief is a delusion, and will be found to be a delusion. The spirit of Christianity is in that stage between the school-boy and the man-— the stage of youth. All youth tends to over-estimate itself; it can scarcely do otherwise. Its aspirations are very high, and all aspiration is the prophecy of power; what wonder that youth should frequently mistake the prophecy for the realization? Yet the aspirations of youth outrun its capacities; it is not really equal to the work it assigns itself to do. It forms a transition between two worlds—the world of school-life, and the world of manhood; and therefore, while it points to the possibilities of the man, it retains somewhat of the“ imperfections of the school. So was it emphatically with the spirit of Christianity as it CLOSE OF THE SCHOOL—LIFE. 293 emerged from the Council of Constance. It came forth in many respects a changed existence. The chains of outward authority which so long had bound it had been broken, and the spirit of Christianity was free. It looked out for the first time upon the vast world before it, it looked in for the first time upon the vast possibilities within it. It felt itself to have the promise of a great destiny, and the joy of that promise was the joy of youth. Yet the spirit of Christianity had not wholly lost the impress of earlier years. The mere striking off of the outward chains could not instantaneously emancipate it from the mental and moral imperfections which are fostered by a lengthened servitude. Its actual strength was not equal to what it believed it to be. It was over-confident in its present power to‘work out that destiny which dawned before it, over-persuaded of its present ability to carve out a road to its attainment of perfect happiness. In all this it was consistently the spirit of youth, for the spirit of youth is essentially the spirit of independence. It sees not the intermediate difficulties; it beholds only the goal, it believes not in the steepness of the mountain; it keeps its eye only on the summit bathed in light. CHAPTER XXXV. THE INDEPENDENCE OF YOUTH. THERE are two powers which youth appropriates as peculiarly within its province; the power to secure riches, and the power to win immortality. We do not say that these desires always or even commonly reside in the same mind. He who seeks Wealth is generally indifferent to posthumous fame; he who seeks posthumous fame is not seldom indifferent to wealth. Yet these desires, although not often con- joined in the hearts of the young, are possessions common to the spirit of youth, the two forms under one or other of which youthful aspiration clothes itself. There is an analogy between the buoyancy of youth and the joy of childhood, but their difference is deeper than their analogy. Childhood is joyous, from the predominance of the present over the future; youth is buoyant, from the predominance of the future over the present. Youth lives and moves and has its being in the future; this is ‘the light of its common day,’ ‘the master light of all its seeing.’ And not only so, but youth sees the very future it desires to see. Goethe says that man weaves for God the garment by which he beholds Him; that is just what THE INDEPENDENCE OF YOUTH. 295 youth does for the future. It clothes it in bright colours—the colours in which its own hope has painted it; and it falls down and worships the idol of its own creation, and consecrates to its service its labour and its life. Now this was precisely the position in which mediaeval Europe found itself at the close of the Council of Constance. The heart of Christendom was bounding with youth, vibrating with that hope of a great destiny which youth inspires, and pulsating with that conviction of power to realize it which is ever born of the prophecy of greatness. There was nothing vague or dreamy in this hope of Christian Europe; it pointed to two definite objects, the same which we have seen to be the objects of individual aspiration-—-the desire for wealth, and the desire for immortality. The future of medimval Europe, like the future of youthful man, was decked in two colours—the golden and the green. The two objects of its ambition were to be ever rich and to be ever young. Nor did it pursue these objects as one pursues a castle in the air, by idle dreams and reveries. Strange to say, it sought them not only practically, but through the most practical sources. It looked out upon the different metals,-—the gold, the silver, the mercury, the iron, the lead, the tin,——and it asked whether between these there were any bond of connection? There was a link which bound man to man in the moral world, and by that sympathetic link one human being could be assimilated to another. And was there no corresponding affinity in the objects 296 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. of material nature? was there no sympathetic link by which the base iron and lead could be transmuted into the precious gold ? Was it not possible that these substances, so different in their outward ap- pearance, were in reality only the modifications of one substance which underlay’ them all ? The light which is reflected by sea and shore bears a different aspect to the light reflected by the sky, yet the light of sea and shore is one with the light of the sky. The iron, the lead, and the tin were very different in aspect from the silver and the gold; yet might it not be that the aspect alone constituted the difference, and that the precious substance which had formed the gold was to be found in all the baser metals ? And if so, if there were even a hope, a chance, a possibility of such a great discovery, should it not be the business of the world to seek out its source and to unearth its secret ? If there were in the base copper all the preciousness of the yellow gold, if there were in the common tin all the value of the polished silver, why should not humanity discover it ? Why should not chemistry by its varied analytic labours refine away the dross until it reached the pure ore, eliminate those accidental elements which made the apparent difference between the comparatively worthless and the transcendently valuable, until it arrived at last at the one substance sleeping underneath the many forms, the one common life which had animated such a variety of features? Then, indeed, would the world possess a philosopher’s stone which would transmute whatever it touched into gold. Each man would carry within the palm of his THE INDEPENDENCE OF YOUTH. 297 hand the potential wealth of all the world, for he would bear that talisman which could conjure up the riches of untold ages, could create more wealth than had ever yet been united in the richest land, and could place the sons of daily toil on a height of affluence level with the luxury of kings. But the Utopian dream of mediaeval youth did not stop with the desire of boundless wealth; it wanted also boundless life to enjoy it. The philo- sopher’s stone would have been little without the elixir of life ; to have every want supplied would have been but a poor privilege, if the satisfaction were cancelled at last by the great negation, death. And so the independence of mediaeval youth sought not only the means of living, but the means of living for ever; and this, too, it sought by an appeal to the order of nature. Was there no element of life in nature? This universe was not surely a dead mechanism; it was instinct with vitality, with force, with intelligence. And if so, must there not be a special substance in which this force resided? Did not all life inhabit a locality ? Had not all life its seat in some material form, and must there not in the great organism of nature be some material form which was as it were the brain of the universe, the seat of its life, and the centre of its power? Might not this too be sought for? Might not the source of life as well as the source of gold be found? nay, was there anything impossible in the thought that the source of life might itself be the source of gold ? might not the two secrets of happiness be reduced to one? Such 298 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. was the reasoning of mediaeval Europe, and it sought to reduce its reasoning to practice. It sought the talisman of eternal life through the same chemical process by which it had endeavoured to find the element of universal riches. It is difficult to see how, even if found, it would have been equally available. A man who had discovered the substance common to all the metals, might well be able to transmute the base into the precious, to transform the copper into the gold. But even if a man should discover a sub- stance which contained the very essence of life, it is not at all easy to perceive by what means he could have that essence transferred into his own nature. The philosophers of mediaeval Europe proposed to boil it into a fluid, and take it as an elixir. After having discovered it, such a process would indeed not be difficult; but even after the elixir had been taken, it is by no means clear to Protestant minds that it would produce the desired effect. We say to Pro- testant minds, for we must not forget that the men who promulgated this doctrine were firm believers in transubstantiation, nor must we forget that the believer in transubstantiation could find no special difficulty here. A Protestant is unable to see how, even con- -ceding the change of the bread and wine into the body and blood, the partaking of that body and blood could produce any effect on the recipient; the Catholic does see this. He, therefore, in relation to this matter, stands on a totally different platform from the Pro- testant. The idea that a divine life could, through a material medium, be received into human nature, so THE INDEPENDENCE OF YOUTH. 299 as to become a portion of itself, was one with which he had been long familiarised by his solemn sacra- ment of communion, and he was accordingly in no position to reject as inherently absurd, the doctrine that the elemental life of nature might, if discovered and appropriated, become the perpetual life of man. The science by which mediaeval Christendom sought to work out these problems was called alchemy. It was not new to the Christian world ; nay, it belonged to the pre-Christian world. Its home was in Egypt; it passed thence into Greece and Rome, and from the Greeks and Romans it was received by the Arabs. When the Arabs conquered Spain, they brought it into Christian Europe, and in Christian Europe it found not altogether an uncon- genial soil. There was so much about it which pointed to progress and human development, that it arrested and fascinated the activity of the western mind. It is a remarkable fact, that the periods when this science had its most brilliant epochs were those times of revolution in which the school-life struggled to be free. These were the seasons in which the coming independence of youth seemed to foreshadow itself, and anticipate its future boldness. Three times did the science of alchemy absorb the attention of the learned world, and each of them was a period of scholastic revolution. In the eighth century, it blazed out in the chemical work of Gebir. In the thirteenth, it shone forth in many phases of scholastic life, and was dignified by the patronage of many illustrious names—of Roger Bacon, of Albertus Magnus, of 300 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. Thomas Aquinas, of Raymond Lully. It was for- hidden by one of the pontiffs of the Babylonish captivity; but the Council of Constance loosed the chain of all Papal prohibitions, and in the fifteenth century, the science of alchemy emerged into new life with Basil Valentine. From that time its course knew no pause, until the Lutheran Reformation had become an established fact; and little more than a hundred years after the meeting of the Council of Constance, it had attained its culminating triumph in the speculations of the great Paracelsus. It may seem very strange that, in a region so religious as mediaeval Europe, speculations in their origin so pagan, and in their character so dubious, should have found acceptance and countenance. It is true, the hierarchical party were unfavourable to them, and most of them owed their safety to the secrecy of those monastic retreats in which they were perpetrated. But the hierarchical party were not really the spiritual party; their prohibition was dictated by that selfish policy which found security in sur- rounding ignorance. What we want to know is, why men of undoubted spirituality, of sincere piety, of earnest life, and of upright aim, should have lent themselves to a practice which apparently partook so much of the nature of irreverence. Perhaps we ought to bear in mind, that what is irreverent in mature age, may admit in youth of a softer name. The charac- teristic of youth is the spirit of independence, and the spirit of independence presupposes the sense of self- sufficiency; the belief in its ability to break through THE INDEPENDENCE OF YOUTH. 301 all barriers, to traverse impassable paths, and to tread forbidden ground. Yet it is not too much to say, that had this been the sole aspect of the subject, it never would have found favour with the heart of Christian Europe. That heart was daring and venturesome, but it was always daring and venture- some in a spiritual direction, ‘and with a spiritual end. It is clear, therefore, that beneath the seeming irreverence of this science of alchemy, it must have discovered something that was good and true. Can we, looking back from this distance, recognise any such element; can we find beneath these fantastic speculations any glimmerings of genuine light,——light that has consumed the very systems which enshrined it, but which still remains as a monument of their power ? We think it must be evident that the specu- lations of the alchemist did indeed point to an eternal truth. In attempting to find in one object the source of all metals, and the source of all vitality, he was groping after an idea which theology approves, and which science is more and more confirming; the idea that there is but one plan of creation, and that if we only knew it, it is a very simple plan. The unity of God had been greatly obscured by image-worship; here was a scientific protest in favour of the unity of God. It declared that this universe with all its varied forms, and with all its complex laws, had sprung from one source, and issued from the simplest plan. Polytheism, and that image-worship which was the reflex of polytheism, was no longer possible to intellectual minds. The changeless had been seen 302 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. amidst the mutable ; God was one, and His universe had one law. Strangely have the aspects of modern science corroborated and confirmed that truth after which the alchemist of old was groping. We no longer hear, indeed, of the transmutation of metals, but we hear much of the correlation of forces. We no longer say that lead may become gold, or that copper may become silver, but we say constantly that light may be changed into heat, and that heat may become electricity. Modern Science has reproduced on a higher plane, and on a wider scale, the question which was debated centuries ago. It has taught us as the alchemist sought to teach us, and with a certainty which the alchemist never attained, that all the forces of nature are but the varied forms in which man beholds the presence of the one inscrutable force, and that beneath these changing and fluctuating appearances, there resides one immutable, incompre- hensible life. It has enabled us to transfer into the realms of material nature that thought which our English poet has portrayed in the realms of spirit : ‘ Our little systems have their day, They have their day, and cease to be ; They are but broken lights of Thee, And Thou, oh Lord, art more than they.’ We have already pointed out, in the chapter on mysticism, that in the hands of the mediaeval world the science of astronomy was being subjected to a similar treatment. Every science at the beginning of its course is youthful and romantic; it assumes a form adapted to the intellectual life of a nation which is only rising into manhood. Chemistry began THE INDEPENDENCE OF YOUTH. 303 with alchemy, and astronomy began with astrology. We have seen that medimval astrology was actuated by the same motive which impelled mediaeval alchemy. It wanted to bring the universe into unity, to find a meeting-place between these cold, apparently unsym- pathetic stars, and the warm, earnest, stirring lives of men. It desired to see heaven and earth joined together, to believe that the destinies of this world were not too small to attract the starry firmament, to read in that starry firmament the proofs of a sympathy with the fate of man. And we have seen that the astrologist, like the alchemist, was groping after the great truth of modern science— groping after the golden chain that holds the worlds in unity. It was peculiarly natural, that in the mediaeval world this scientific idea should take the form of a handwriting on the heavens of man’s future destiny. Modern science tells us that the existence of our earth is bound up with the existence of all stars and planets; but modern science does not tell us that all stars and planets exist only in order that earth may live and shine, only in order that they may foretell the fates of men. The reason lies in the fact that we are living under the system of new heavens. The mediaeval world believed that earth was the centre of the universe; we have how learned that earth is only one amidst a myriad of stars, whose common centre is unknown. Yet who can fail to see how peculiarly the former belief was adapted to the spirit of youthful inde- pendence? Mediaeval Europe, emerging from its school-life, cast its buoyant gaze over the starry realms 304 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. of space, and declared them to be all its own; the sense of vast possession fitly followed the sense of boundless freedom. Were not all the worlds, and the glory of them, made for man? Were they not appointed to rule the day and the night of human destiny ? Were they not designed to give light upon the earth to all dark places and to all dark circum- stances, to enable the human spirit to pierce the surrounding clouds, and discern its promised land? And in the message of the stars, it was, indeed, a promised land that the youth of Christendom dis- cerned; the land promised by its own hope, the land of boundless gold, and the land of endless life. What earth predicted with its subterranean metals, heaven foretold with its exalted stars, and earth and heaven alike shouted in the ear of Christendom one jubilant song of future glory, honour, and immortality. It was a thought born of the independence of youth, and it fostered that independence which gave it birth. With all the stores of earth below, with all the wealth of heaven above, the youthful heart of Christendom felt itself overflowing with joy, realized more and more its self-sufficiency and its power, and looked higher and higher for the consummation of its glory. There is another point to which we have alluded in the chapter on mysticism, but which perhaps finds‘ its most prominent illustration here. It was in this fifteenth century that the course of geographical dis- covery may be said to have systematically begun. It was this century which was to witness the boldest THE INDEPENDENCE OF YOUTH. 305 efforts that had hitherto been made in the cause of navigation. It was to see Giovanni Cabot breasting the waves of the Atlantic in search of lands unknown. It was to see Sebastian Cabot reaching the shores of Labrador. It was to see Vasco de Gama with his Portuguese sailors doubling the Cape of Good Hope, and penetrating to the East Indies. It was to see Christopher Columbus discovering Hispaniola and Cuba, the first-fruits of a new world. The comple- tion of these events lies beyond our chronological limits, and the details of them belong not to our province; but we cannot but point out once more that relation, which we have already indicated, between the thirst for discovery and the waking sense of freedom. The independence of youth tempted it to seek a large sphere. The old confines were too small for it; it wanted wider fields to traverse, and vaster scenes to contemplate. And, as we have said, these scenes in the mind’s vision were all prospectively glorious; youth was in this again true to its own nature. The same eye of hope which enabled it to behold bound~ less treasures in the earth, and boundless prophecies of glory in the stars, enabled it to see on the map of the world, lands brighter than the sun, and more luxuriant than the summer. There it might find the realization of its dreams. There it might discover a race of men on whom the golden shower had been perpetually pouring. whom poverty, privation, and toil had passed by on the other side, whom affluence, comfort, and luxury had crowned with their precious fruits. There at last it might meet a people who had voL. II. U 306 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. found the secret of everlasting life, whose spring-time of existence never faded, and whose autumn never came; a people who had partaken of the blessed elixir, and thereby had received the bloom of immortal youth, the brightness of eternal noonday, the glory of perpetual joy. Such were the dreams which mediaeval Europe wove around that paradise which lived only in the realms of its imagination; yet who shall say that these dreams were not the prolific sources of great and deathless realities? It was these dreams which stimulated the mariner to brave unheard -of dangers, to bear appalling privations, to confront terrific trials. Beyond sight of all land, he saw ever this land of his dreams; beyond reach of all aid, he beheld ever this haven of his rest; in the perpetual presence of danger and of death, his eye was ever riveted on the vision of a country where danger and death were unknown. It is true the vision was a delusion, but the power which it exerted was no delusion. That which the mariner accomplished was not that which he meant to accomplish, but it was far better. He wanted to reach a paradise of fadeless earthly joys ; and had he reached it, he would have gained only a source of personal and selfish gratifi— cation. But all the time his vision, delusive to himself, was working out for humanity a real and a permanent good, was leading him unconsciously and involuntarily to become the benefactor of mankind. For what was it that the mariner was really doing while he was traversing the seas in search of a delusion ? He was doing what the alchemist was doing, what the astro— THE INDEPENDENCE OF YOUTH. 307 logist was doing, what the course of history was doing—bringing the world into unity. He was help- ing to unite races which as yet were ignorant of each other’s existence, to join hand in hand those who had been separated by vast tracts of land, and by vaster expanse of sea, to restore that sense of a united brotherhood which humanity had lost in proportion as it had wandered from its parental home. The mariner of medimval Europe was to the nations which he sought, what the missionary had formerly been to the Gentile world; a messenger of peace, and a pioneer of progress. He planted amidst savage tribes the seeds of Western civilisation ; and the Western civilisa- tion of the fifteenth century exhibited the highest outward culture which humanity had yet attained. And as, at the close of the Roman Empire, the barbarous tribes of Europe, by the very spontaneity of their wild nature, had been fit subjects for the reception of civilising impressions, so the savage tribes of the newly-discovered lands were, by the very simplicity of their untutured nature, well prepared to receive the imprint of European culture. The mariners of the fifteenth century were the messengers sent to proclaim the unity of the raceof man, and to establish the sense of a common brotherhood, by imparting to distant realms the privileges of a common civilisation. But the development of the age would have alto- gether mistaken its province, if it had sought for the brotherhood of humanity merely in distant realms. There was lying at the very door of civilisation a region which might be called an undiscovered land; 308 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. a region whose boundaries were contiguous to every great city, and whose representatives were found in the proudest centres of civilisation and refinement—— the region of the unlettered poor. In such cities as Venice and Florence there might be seen the meeting of the extremes of civilisation; the culture which no age has surpassed, and which'few ages have equalled, side by side with the superstition and the barbarism which no period of the world hopes again to see.‘ The cities of Italy, nay, all learned cities of every land, exhibited a conjunction of light and darkness which made the light and the darkness alike more conspicuous by contrast. It is true that the ranks of the unlettered poor had been gradually thinned by a succession of recruits into the army of the learned. The decline of slavery had done much, the progress of social freedom had done more, the rise of the universities had done most of all, to diffuse the culture of the upper classes amongst the inhabitants of the villages. The translation of the Gospels which Peter Waldo gave to the Waldenses, and the translation of the entire Bible which john Wicliffe gave to the English people, circulated as these came to be from shore to shore, must have powerfully contributed to expand the limits of the unlettered mind. It was clearly a literature which to that mind was the desideratum. It wanted something higher than itself to rouse it into emulation, and to inspire it with a lofty ideal. Yet, hitherto, for the masses, such a literature had not been found. The Bible would indeed, to them, have supplied all the purposes of the THE INDEPENDENCE OF YOUTH. 309 greatest works of antiquity; the difficulty was not to find the book, but to find the means of making it known. The transcription of manuscripts was of necessity slow, and the number of manuscripts which could be transcribed was, in comparison to the need and the demand, limited in the extreme. What was wanted was a medium which could economise time and labour; a medium which could compress into days the work of months, and issue in hundreds those copies of standard books which had once come forth in tens. Such an apparatus would greatly equalise the advantages of men, and would place the materials of human knowledge at the disposal of all who had the mind and means to use them. In the absence of such a medium, there was clearly a greater difficulty in reaching brotherhood at home than could ever be found in establishing brotherhood with newly dis- covered lands. The savage tribes, as we have said, were impressible by their very spontaneity; but the unlettered peasantry had become rigid by the long disuse of natural powers. Their minds, moreover, had been paralyzed by hierarchical terrors. These terrors had once filled the world, they lingered still in the world’s lowliest spots; cramping the spontaneous efforts of the human spirit, and making the gulf between the ignorant and the learned wider than ‘ the farthest separation between the European and American continents. But it was just at this era that there was discovered that very medium which was wanted to circulate amongst the masses the results of scientific research 310 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. and literary culture. We allude to the invention of that art, which perhaps more than all other mediaeval influences has contributed to enlarge the limits of the human mind and to widen the domain of human investigation—the art of printing. Two nations contend for the honour of its birth—Holland and Germany. Holland assigns the merit of the con- trivance to her countryman, Laurence Coster, of Haarlem; Germany attributes its glory to johann Gansfleisch, a member of the Gutenberg family. It is difficult, at this distance of time, to decide between the claimants; much can be said in favour of each. There seems no reason to doubt that, apart from the question who was the first in the field, the discovery on the part of each was original and spontaneous. That ‘was an age in which the spirit of youth breathed everywhere, and the spirit of youth is ever the spirit of invention; its very sense of independence impels it to contrive. The art of printing, though new to the world as an object of discovery, was not new to the world as an object of desire. Men had long craved for a means of communicating thought similar or analogous to this. They had craved for it, and they had groped after its attainment in regions far remote and in ages long gone by. The Assyrians and the Chinese alike had seen this day afar off; dimly, im- perfectly, unsatisfactorily, but prophetically still. Is it surprising, then, that at a period of intense literary fervour, at a time when thought was everywhere in action, and when the passion for the new dominated all, two minds, richly imbued with the spirit of their THE INDEPENDENCE OF YOUTH. 31 1 age, should without collusion light upon the same secret. Columbus discovered Hispaniola and Cuba five years before Cabot reached the shores of Labra~ dor, yet we are not quite sure that the fame of Columbus’ discovery had reached the ears of Cabot. In this case, though the priority in time must assign the glory to the former, the personal merit of the latter must be allowed to rank on equal ground. So, in like manner, it would seem that Coster claims the chronological priority; yet we have no reason to believe that his work was known to Gutenberg, and no reason to deny to both the merit of originating genius. It was not long before this new art passed from the mind of its originators into the possession of the united world. It found its earliest exercise at Haarlem, Mayence, and Strasburg; but in the course of a few years it travelled beyond the scenes of its nativity. It came to Rome, the centre of the Catholic world, to Venice, the home of merchandise, to Florence, the picture gallery of the earth, to Paris, the seat of the most liberal of universities, to Tours, almost the nursery of mediaeval education, to Britain, un- questionably the nursery of national mediaeval reform. Speaking from centres of such venerable fame, the new art could not fail to rule. Scarcely had the last echoes of the triumph died away, when a storm was heard in the East; a storm which shattered the oldest dynasty of the Christian world, but which bore upon its blast new seeds of intellectual life. Since the days when Charles Martel had rolled back the Mohammedan wave from France, 3 1 2 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. the Musulman power had ceased to be the assailant of Europe. The West had assumed the offensive, and the Mohammedans had been content merely to defend themselves. The assaults which Mohammed- anism had made on mediaeval Europe had up to this time been intellectual assaults, and we have seen how powerfully the mind of the East had dominated and moulded the intellect of the West. Yet, during all these ages, the Musulman had never for a moment lost sight of one object of ambition—~the conquest of the Greek Empire. Great as had been the triumphs of the Mohammedan power in Asia and Africa, it had effected little in Europe. It had conquered Spain, but its conquest of Spain had contributed rather to advance its intellectual than its temporal dominion, and had brought it no nearer to the realizing of that project which in the European world was the goal of all its aspirations. Constantinople, the last monument of a world which had passed away, the last relic of that mighty power which once had filled the earth with its ‘glory, had lingered behind for centuries as the ghost of the departed. Around it were woven all the associations of pagan greatness, around it were entwined the memories of that hour when Christianity first became the professed religion of the pagan great. Yet its grand political associations and its hallowed Christian memories had not been able to preserve it from corruption and decay. Whatever the union of Church and State may have been to the West, it had proved paralysis to the East. Rarely throughout the mediaeval centuries had the Church of Chrysostom THE INDEPENDENCE 0F YOUTH. 313 flashed forth into that spirit of independence which would have revealed its parentage. The image- controversy had at one time seemed to promise a revival of Eastern Christianity, but the gleam died away in deeper night, and the mind of Eastern Europe assumed an attitude not altogether dissimilar to the mind of China; an attitude of rigid movelessness and of waveless apathy. From intellectual apathy physical power cannot flow; the repression of thought does not strengthen the arm. Constantinople was as weak in empire as it was lifeless in religion, and the imperial weakness was in great measure owing to the want of religious life. For centuries it had dragged out an existence unworthy of the name, but the time had come when even that must be surrendered. The spirit of Mohammedanism seemed to be renewing its youth. It appeared once more to have revived its thirst for conquest, and the prize on which it fixed its eye was the venerable city of Constantine. On _the throne of the Ottoman Empire, at the middle of the fifteenth century, sat a man well qualified to execute its schemes of ambition ; a man who in some respects represented the Mohammedan religion of every age. Mohammed 11., whom posterity has styled ‘ The Great,’ was at this period a youth of three-and- twenty, yet even at that early age he exhibited all the leading features which have characterised the suc- cessive phases of eastern development. He had the fire, the impetuosity, the courage, the enterprise, and the cruelty which marked the first era of the Mohammedan religion. He had the intellectual 314 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. acquirements which distinguished its second epoch; he was master of four languages, he was conversant with the natural sciences, he was familiar with ancient history, he had studied somewhat those facts of geography which Arabian enterprise had early made accessible to his forefathers. Amidst his unquestion- able cruelty there were not wanting occasional gleams of generosity and chivalry, and these, perhaps, he had caught from the ages when the Musulman armies had stood face to face with the hosts of crusading Europe. He had the Sagacity, the policy, the states- manship of an age which had ceased to be warlike, and had become blunted to the sense of military glory; and he had, last of all, that practical know- ledge of the fine arts, which by its intense power of representation tends to reproduce all ages in one. Such was the man who resolved to renew the military strength of the Crescent, and to retaliate upon Europe the injuries of the crusading wars. And his pre- parations were equal to his abilities for using them. These preparations occupied an entire year, and at the end of that time there was gathered an army of 258,000 men and a fleet of 320 vessels. With this formidable support from land and sea, the successor of the great prophet approached the walls of Constantinople. r Thus, on the 6th of April I453, Europe and Asia met face to face once more; met after long years, and after many changes, resolved to decide that great question which had long been pending between the East and West,——the question whether THE INDEPENDENCE OF YOUTH. 315 the Eastern or Western civilisation should dominate the mind of the future world. And though Europe was assailed in its weakest point, it made an admir- able defence. Sometimes, shortly before death, the strength of a man seems to revive ; so was it with the city of Constantine in its dying hour. It had more glory in its hour of death than in 'all the centuries of its life which had followed the second Nicene Council. Beset by a multitudinous host by land, barricaded by a mighty fleet by sea, assailed by the most powerful artillery which that age could command, the garrison, aided by 2000 Genoese strangers, under the heroic justiniani, struggled long and fiercely to preserve their liberty and their name. Seven weeks the engines battered the walls, and seven weeks they battered in vain. At last a great assault was made; land and sea alike and simultaneously poured forth their armies. The combat was long and deadly. At length the Greeks prevailed ; the seamen were driven back to the ships, the troops were driven back from the ramparts, and Constantinople stood a victor on the field. But it was a victory which had all the effect of defeat. The brave justiniani was wounded, the flower of the Grecian ranks had perished, and all felt instinctively that in resisting further they were resist- ing for honour alone. A panic spread amongst the defenders. The courage, which had nerved them in the hour of emergency, forsook them in the season _ of momentary reaction. The Sultan saw his oppor- tunity, and seized it. He led back his beaten troops. The janizaries made a dreadful charge, and 316 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. the Greeks step by step gave way. At last their emperor himself died fighting in the breach, and with him died the only surviving representative of a world which was no more. Over the corpse of him who had filled the last throne of the Caesars the victorious Musulman armies poured into the devoted city. The capture of Constantinople produced important effects, both physical and literary. It was the founda- tion of Turkish power in Europe, and as such it brought the Crescent and the Cross into immediate proximity and into direct antagonism. For some time it seemed as if the Crescent were about to sup- plant the Cross. The fall of Constantinople was followed by a succession of triumphs ; quick, brilliant, and decided. Belgrade, indeed, Stood firm, and the Hungarians displayed that spirit of patriotism which has since continued to characterise them. But if the Mohammedan power was foiled here, it had ample compensation for the failure. The Morea, the Crimea, the kingdom of Epirus, the kingdom of Trebizond, and the kingdom of Servia went down before it. The Genoese were deprived of Caffa; the Venetians were stript of F riuli, Istria, Negropont, and Lemnos; and Italy was forced to part with Otranto. It was not till seventy years later that its appalling course was stayed, and its victorious march arrested, before the walls of the Austrian capital. But it is with the literary effects of this revolution that we have chiefly to do. To the eyes of any c611- temporary who beheld the destruction of the great Greek Empire, the catastrophe must have seemed to THE INDEPENDENCE 0F YOUTH. 317 be an unparalleled blow inflicted on Christian litera- ture. And yet it was to Christian literature one of the greatest boons which the fifteenth century, prolific as it was in benefits, ever conferred. On this occasion it was not the influx of the Mohammedans which proved the boon; it was the dispersion of the Greek Empire. The Greeks had never been deficient in learning, and had never wanted a roll of illustrious literati. Their deficiency in later years had lain in the lethargy which had crept over them. They had been content to remain self-contained and isolated,—-content to occupy the rear of human progress, and to derive all their glory from the memories of their past. Their learning had thus been of no service to humanity; their exclusive nationality had led them to contribute nothing to the welfare of mankind. It was clear that no greater boon could befall ‘mankind than the break- ing up of this exclusive nationality; and that benefit was unconsciously conferred by the armies of the Turkish Sultan. Turkey broke down the walls, and the imprisoned life ran free; ran over that world from which it had long been isolated, and enriched it, fertilized it, glorified it. The Grecian sages, driven from their homes, and exiled from their country, wandered over the length and breadth of the earth in search of a new home and a new country. They bore along with them the atmosphere of ancient learn- ingzsand they carried more than an atmosphere. As in days of "old the eastern sages of Asia had brought the gold, the frankincense, and the myrrh to lay at the feet of infant Christianity, so in mediaeval days 318 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. the eastern sages of Europe brought to the more developed Christian spirit gifts more precious still. They conveyed into the centres of civilisation many of those writings of the illustrious dead which, by the great mass of mankind, had been for ages overlooked and forgotten; manuscripts dusty, moth-eaten, age- worn, bearing externally the marks of that long descent which made them venerable, but which yet, on the wings of the new printer’s art, were to renew their youth, and to be wafted far and near. The fall of Constantinople was to the fifteenth century what the fall of imperial Rome was to the fifth, and what the fall of ancient jerusalem was to the first. Each of these catastrophes was the death of a nation, but each of these deaths was a life added to the world beyond the nation. The walls which constituted its national embodiment were destroyed, but that national spirit which lived behind the walls went forth to people future worlds; it was expedient for humanity that these empires should pass away. We have now reviewed those sources which sup- plied the first stimulus to the independence of mediaeval youth. We have seen that this independ- ence was chiefly manifested in weaving the vision of an imaginary future. It becomes now natural to ask whether, amidst these fancied anticipations, there were to be found no anticipations of that future which was really coming. It is the nature of youth to be pro- phetic. It is the boundary-line between two worlds, and if it bears somewhat the imperfections of that which is gone, would we not expect it also to prefigure THE INDEPENDENCE OF voUTH. 319 somewhat the glories of that which is drawing near ? There are two directions in which we must seek in mediaeval youth for a process preparatory to approach- ing manhood; there must be a moral and there must be an intellectual preparation. We intend in the two following chapters to exhibit each of these succes- sively. In the course of these chapters we shall find it necessary to mention individual names which over- lap in order of time the limits of this work, to consider the works of men which were chronologically subse- quent to the birth of Luther. But if the lives of the Italian renaissance overlap the birth of Luther in order of time, they all precede it in order of thought; their work was preparatory to his work, and there- fore with reference to religious development their lives were ideally earlier than his. Before entering, however, upon the survey of the great moral and intellectual preparation, it may be well to ask, What is that which medimval youth is preparing for? Mediaeval youth itself had clearly no notion that it was preparing for anything, or that it had anything left to desire. It appeared to have reached the climax of all its wishes, and to have arrived at the summit of all its perfections. It believed itself to be already partaker of the spirit of manhood, and it was this belief that induced it to give such pre-eminence to its assertion of independence. It seemed to stand upon a watch-tower, and survey beneath its feet a whole world of possessions. It had power over the land. It had command over the sea. It had the prospect of boundless wealth. It had the hope of immortal 320 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. bloom. It had access to the treasures of the human mind in the past. It had a destiny in the future, watched over by the stars of heaven. With such privileges in hand, and with such glories in anticipation, why should it esteem itself at less than the highest value? Why should it look forward to a time when it must yield up its stage of development and become the servant of a higher life? Did not all objects point to the conclusion that it had reached the ultimate height, and seen the furthest expanse over which the human mind could travel. With such beliefs as these the exhortation to progress would have seemed an impossible command, and the idea that this mediaeval glory was after all but a point of transition, would have sounded in the ear of the youthful world as a jest or a fable. Yet such was in reality the case. Medizeval youth had fallen short of the spirit of man- hood through that very sense of independence, which it mistook for the evidence of manhood. There are two ideas which youth is specially apt to confound-— the sense of independence and the sense of individual responsibility. There is one point in common be- tween them; they both imply the possession of freedom, or at all events the belief in such possession. He who feels himself to be independent believes him- self to be free; he who feels himself to be responsible believes that he has the power over his own actions. But there the agreement ends and the difference begins. A man’s sense of independence is the belief in his freedom to act for himself; a man’s sense of responsibility is the belief in his freedom to act for a THE INDEPENDENCE 0F YOUTH. 32 I higher power. The one is essentially will-worship; the other is distinctively the depression of the individual will, and the recognition at once of its duty and its ability to serve a mandate higher than its own. This was what mediaeval youth did not see, this was what the future must compel it to see. In the revelation of this neglected truth was to lie the secret of that great preparation by which the heart and the intellect alike of mediaeval Europe were to be prepared for the entrance into a higher life. It was necessary that the pride of its youth should be depressed, in order that the sense of its responsibility might be exalted. It was essential that the feeling of its independence should be shaken, in order that it might learn the existence of '1 nobler freedom ; a freedom which should find its glory in self-surrender, and which should reach the proudest consummation of its strength in attaining the power of a voluntary service. VOL. 11. X CHAPTER XXXVI. THE MORAL PREPARATION OF YOUTH. ET us here ask, What is that train of experiences which we would consider best adapted to further the moral development of Europe as it now stands? We see it in the flush of youthful ardour, impressed above all other sentiments with the sense of its own independence; its ability in its Own strength to accomplish all ends. It is this sense of indepen- dence which constitutes at once its danger and its weakness. It over-estimates its power, it underrates its frailty. As long as this sense of independence endures, the conviction of responsibility cannot come, for the false idea of freedom repels the true. The heart of Christian Europe is as yet too much turned inward upon itself to contemplate any object higher than itself; and without such contemplation of the higher, the feeling of responsibility must be dead. It is clear that, before Europe can emerge from the false freedom of self-exaltation which is youth, into the true freedom of self-surrender which is manhood, the belief in its independence must be shattered and dispelled. It must be taught that, so far from being able to do everything, it cannot even direct its own THE MORAL PREPARATION OF YOUTH. 323 moral life; that, so far from being adequate to the sovereignty of the universe, it is incapable of ruling the passions of its own nature. It follows, then, from this, that the best moral pre- paration for the heart of mediaeval Europe was the increasing prevalence of its corruption. It was necessary that the sense of independence should be broken; and in order to be broken, it must be proved to be delusive. Its delusiveness must be shown through the increase of those moral evils which the self-will, if it could, would have averted. It must be shown in the inability to find rest which would never have existed, had the independence of youth been real. It must be shown in the growing dissatisfaction with all those objects and attainments which youth had originally esteemed its perfection and its goal; and it must be shown in that craving for a nameless good, that aspiration after an unknown joy, that long- ing to find a light that shines not on sea or land, which is ever the certain proof that man is not an end to himself. These were the experiences which were best fitted morally to prepare the youth of Christendom, and these were the experiences through which the youth of Christendom was to pass. It is a singular historical fact, that in the prominent nations of Europe, the close of the school-life was followed by a period of political and social decline,—a decline which would be unaccountable if we did not view it as itself a species of school training, destined to break the pride and to curb the self-will of youth. We intend in the course of this chapter to take a rapid 324 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. view of the circumstances of some of these nations. We shall find the study somewhat discouraging,— discouraging, that is, from the world’s own standpoint. We shall fail to discover any realization of those high hopes which had throbbed in the heart of youthful Christendom; we shall fail to See any fulfilment of those magnificent dreams which had peopled the future with starry forms. We shall find, on the‘ contrary, many tokens of retrogression, many evidences of a fading glory, many signs of a declining day. Yet in these very discouragements we shall be able to trace the preparation for a real development. We shall see in them the breaking down of the old ruins preparatory to the building of a new temple, the destruction of the fabric of human pride preliminary to the rearing of a structure whose foundation will be deeper than the life of self. We begin with that nation which, as a united people, had always shown itself the most active in the cause of religious reform—the kingdom of England. At the very moment when the Council of Constance was emancipating the school-life from the restraints of outward authority, England was stamping out the last fires of Lollardism. These unfortunate followers of Wicliffe had fallen upon evil days. They had been subjected to bitter persecution at the hands of a new king, and that king the son of the very Duke of Lancaster who had been the leading supporter of Wicliffe’s doctrine amongst the aristocracy. We are not quite sure that Henry IV., in so far as he had any religious leanings, was not himself a Lollard; we THE MORAL PREPARATION OF YOUTH. 325 are perfectly sure that his motive for persecuting them was not horror of their religious tenets. His position was somewhat peculiar. He had broken the long line of hereditary descent, and had by a violent revolution placed himself on the throne. His title was more than doubtful, his tenure far from firm ; any moment might sweep the sceptre from his hand. His conscious insecurity made him tenacious of authority ; he acted despotically in proportion as he feared his right to act at all. He dreaded all popular ferments, and he dreaded whatever promoted these. He remembered how strongly the English people had been influenced by that religious movement patronised by his father, and he remembered how close upon the rise of that movement had followed the dangerous political revolution of Wat Tyler and the populace. He naturally connected them, and transferred to the religious movement the odium of the political revolu- tion. He resolved to suppress Lollardism ; not, how- ever, as a religious sect, but as a species of rebellion; it was in this light, and in this light alone, that he disliked and feared it. Not the less on that account did the cause of Wicliffe suffer. At the close of Henry’s short reign, the sect was almost extinguished, and in the persecution continued by his son and successor it altogether expired. With the fall of Lollardism, the spirit of the English people seems itself to have sunk, and for a time that feudalism which had been greatly diminished, appears to have asserted itself once more. Throughout that long and bloody period, known as the Wars of the Roses, the history of 326 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. England is the history of the English barons. F eudalism rose from the grave in the person of the Earl of Warwick, and with him, on the field of Barnet, it went down to the grave again. It was but a temporary resurrection; yet it lasted long enough to roll back by several generations the development of the English people. The aristocracy of the land exterminated themselves, but they first exterminated the aspirations of the middle classes, tore up from the national soil those seeds of freedom which the centuries had sown. When the carnage of Bosworth field extin- guished the miserable struggle, and when the Tudors came into possession of the English throne, they came into possession of a kingdom approaching nearer to the appearance of an absolute monarchy than any English sovereign had ever previously known. We say the appearance of an absolute monarchy, for it was not so in reality. The English constitution had not been altered, the privileges of the people had not been really impaired. But the people had no longer a heart to assert their privileges. Had they possessed such a heart, they might have risen to greater power than ever. The feudal barons had been swept away, and between them and the crown there was no inter- mediate class; it was clear that now was the time in which either king or people might make themselves supreme. But the people had not the spirit to seize the moment; that spirit had been crushed out of them by the temporary revival of feudalism, and the second death of feudalism could not bring back their life. And what the people had not the heart to do, the THE MORAL PREPARATION OF YOUTH. 327 new house of Tudor did; it seized the reins of empire, and became practically despotic. It was not that the Tudors beat down the will of the people ; the people for the most part had no will to beat down. In any conflict between public opinion and the desire of the crown, the desire of the crown must have yielded; but in the age preceding the Lutheran Reformation, no such conflict arose. The popular voice was silent, the voice of public opinion was silent, the voice of religious reform was silent; and those who had once aspired to political freedom, lifted up their eyes with awe to the majesty of the throne. If during this period the idea of Papal headship somewhat revived, it was precisely for the same reason. The Council of Constance had freed religious England as effectually from an absolute Papacy, as the House of Commons had freed secular England from the danger of an absolute monarchy. If, in defiance alike of its own religious and constitutional privileges, England still persisted in relinquishing its secular and its sacred rights, it could only be because its moral degeneracy had made these privileges no longer dear. There arises here another point which is highly suggestive. It is a remarkable fact that the darkest period of English history, since the days of the Nor- man Conquest, is that period which intervenes between the opening of the Wars of the Roses and the acces- sion of Henry Tudor. When we say the darkest period, we do not mean that it was the bloodiest, the most cruel, or the most superstitious; we mean some- 328 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. thing far more remarkable. We refer to the fact that nowhere are the annals so bare, nowhere the records so meagre, nowhere the Statements so inconsistent and irreconcilable. And this is in the age of dis- covery, in the age of scientific investigation, in the age which witnessed the invention of printing, nay, in the age when the art of printing was introduced by Caxton into England itself. Why should the period of greatest literary light be marked by the densest obscurity in the materials of historical knowledge? Now in answering this question we must bear in mind the source whence historical knowledge had hitherto flowed. That source was the monastery. The monks had been the earliest chroniclers of English history. To them we are indebted for nearly all the historic light which has been thrown over the early and mediaeval annals of our country. It will be found, we think, that in periods of religious fervour these annals are most full, that in seasons of religious decadence they are comparatively meagre. On this principle it will follow that, in the age which elapsed between the opening of the Wars of the Roses and the accession of Henry Tudor, the monastic life was passing through a stage of spiritual decadence. And this, indeed, is in strict keeping with all the facts of the case. It is not denied, even by the admirers of monastic life, that in the period preceding the Refor- mation the monasteries had become intensely cor- rupted. No one will suspect Mr. Froude of an undue bias against mediaevalism, yet Mr. Froude has in the strongest terms declared this to be his convic- THE MORAL PREPARATION OF YOUTH. 329 tion. We do not for a moment suppose that the monasteries of England had become worse than the mohasteries of other lands. There are two reasons why the immorality of the English monasteries has furnished a favourite text to Protestant writers. The first is, the fact that in England monastic life more than Papal life was the source of the national religion. The second is, the fact that in England, through political circumstances, the corruption of the monas- teries was detected in a way that it could not be on the Continent. Neither of these facts, however, would warrant us in concluding that the decline of English monasticism was anything more than one part of a universal decline; one illustration of a great decad- ence of monastic life which was taking place through- ‘out the whole world. Nor, if the matter ended here, would we be disposed to lay immense stress upon it. We have already pointed out in an earlier part of this work, that in the period preceding the Lutheran Re- formation the monasteries had ceased to be the schools of the Christian spirit, that by this time they had long since served their day, and existed only as survivals of a past culture. When institutions are suffered to exist after they have served their day, and after they have no further work to do, we cannot expect that they will exist in a healthy state, or that their existence will contribute to the moral health of the community. It will not therefore surprise us, that the English monasteries of the fifteenth century had become the homes of moral disease; nor shall we be disposed to infer from that fact alone, that the entire Catholic 330 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. system had become debased. The monasteries were no longer the representatives of that system, and Catholicism must now be judged by another standard. When, however, we Search for that standard, we shall be convinced that not only was the decline of the English monasteries the phase of a universal mon- astic decline, but that the monastic decline itself was only one phase of a wider decadence extending to the whole moral fabric. It will be found that when institutions professedly sacred become secularized, institutions professedly secular become time-serving. The monasteries affected the universities. The universities, indeed, had borne to the monasteries a very close relation in the order of historical develop- ment. When the sacred tuition of the school-life had closed, they had become its secular teachers. It is true, even the universities were no longer to be the boundaries of the Christian intellect, but they were still to be the tributaries to that intellect, and as such it was imperative that their waters should be pure. We find, however, that if the universities had not partaken in the glaring vices of the monasteries, they had been infected by the monasteries with a moral lethargy. It is true of all nations, it is pre-eminently true of the English nation, that periods of moral lethargy are unfavourable to mental expansion. The times when the English universities poured forth their greatest Students, were the times of moral fervour, if not of religious enthusiasm. The fourteenth century had filled the English firmament with literary stars, the sixteenth century was to fill that firmament with THE MORAL PREPARATION 'OF YOUTH. 331 literary stars again. But the intermediate period was almost starless. There is perhaps no epoch of British history which presents in every department 01 literature such an absence of illustrious names. The age of Chaucer was past, and the footsteps of the new poetic age were not yet heard approaching. The days of Wicliffe were gone, and the days of Tindal and of Latimer had given no sign of their coming. Had the universities been full of their wonted life, there would have been no such dearth of greatness; and had the universities been pervaded by their wonted spirit of moral earnestness, their intellectual life would have been full to overflowing. The English mind is so eminently practical, that it can neither reason, study, nor investigate, unless in that study and investigation it can discern a practical good; and where it has ceased to care for the practical good, where it has ceased to be animated with a moral motive, its intellectual aspirings will be lukewarm, and its intellectual efforts will be feeble. But it is when we cross the Channel, it is when we pass from England into France, that we are most impressed with the decay of university life. The Sorbonne of Paris had been unquestionably the greatest theological faculty in the world; it had con~ tained life in itself, and it had been a source of life to all other schools of learning. One great cause of this had been its moral disinterestedness. It had sought truth for its own sake; fearlessly, uncompromisingly, devotedly, and often in the face of great opposition. But the period of the Council of Constance is, strange 332 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. to say, the period of its decline. It is not that sub- sequent to that council the University of Paris lost its influence on the nation. On the contrary, after that date it rose to a height of influence which it had never occupied before. But it obtained this proud position by deserting its own legitimate sphere—obtained it, not as a university, but as a political institution. There was indeed room in France for a new political institution. Here, as in England, the fifteenth century presents the darkest period which had yet marked the national history. Never had there been witnessed in the past, only once has there been witnessed in the future, an age of such complete anarchy as that which immediately followed the Council of Constance. A lunatic king, a profligate queen, an abandoned court, a disorganized society, a perpetual reign of terror resulting from the alternate domination of rival factions, all contributed to weaken and degrade the life of the French people. The Dukes of Orleans and of Burgundy strove for the reins of government, and scrupled at ‘no means by which they might attain their end. Open war, brutal violence, deliberate murder, and secret assassination, wer'e alike in turn resorted to. The butchers and the carpenters ranged themselves on different sides. The fact is highly significant, as it indicates the growing power of the middle classes. But what was a source of political exaltation to the butchers and the carpenters, was a source of moral degradation to the University of Paris. That university ought to have remained as a city set upon a hill, conspicuous by its height, and luminous THE MORAL PREPARATION OF YOUTH. by its literary glory. Instead of that, the University of Paris came down into the heat of the fray, and identified its interests with the interests of the political struggle. The result was what might have been expected. An institution so influential throwing the weight of its authority into the scale could not do otherwise than secure vast political power, but it secured that power at the expense of that disinterested morality which in former years had been its crown. Its students became soldiers, its professors took the , lead in city brawls, or became in public harangues the champions of those who did so. The university was no longer searching for truth, it was searching for empire. It was no longer seeking to benefit humanity, it was seeking to support a very inferior section of mankind. It was no longer advocating the freedom of the French people, it was advocating the liberty of one faction to fetter the hands of another. By and by there came a cloud which for a time swept the whole spectacle from view,—king, queen, court, university, and rival factions. The intestine war was swallowed up and lost in a far more tremendous struggle; a struggle which prostrated the French monarchy, and destroyed for a season the national independence. In the great war with England, France was brought to the verge of ruin. Her armies were beaten, her strongholds were dismantled, her capital was con- quered, and the crown was torn from her brow; for a few years an English king nominally and virtually occupied the French throne. And though recovery came, it was slow and painful. The beginning of her GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. recovery was the revival of her spiritual life. It was when she had been bruised and broken, when her pride had been humbled in the dust, when her sense of independence had been transmuted into a sense of nothingness, that the spirit of religion began to dawn once more. The flower which is crushed gives forth its perfume; and the mind, whether national or indi- vidual, which has been crushed by adversity, emits the fragrance of a broken and a contrite spirit. France woke up to spiritual fervour in the hour of her utmost outward exhaustion, and it was the power of 'her spiritual fervour that bore her back to her place amongst the nations. Those armies which, under the command of the first generals of their age, had been beaten and shattered, were now content to march under the generalship of a peasant girl, because they believed that in that peasant girl there dwelt the inspiration of the divine life. It was that belief which led them on to victory. It emboldened their hearts with the confidence of a divine mission, and it para- lyzed the hearts of their enemies with the terror of a divine judgment. It carried them from city to city, and from fortress to fortress, until at last they stood as conquerors upon the liberated soil of their native land. There have been many instances in history of the power of religious faith. The annals of judaism supply one national example, and the annals of Mohammedanism furnish another. But we doubt if in all history there is to be found so striking an instance of the power of faith as is that spectacle of a mediaeval army led from the depths of despair back to THE MORAL PREPARATION OF YOUTH. victory and freedom by the belief in the divine mission of the Maid of Orleans. If we pass now to Holland and Germany, we shall find a more promising aspect of affairs. It is to be remarked that, in general, the nations of the north were more ripe for a positive reformation than those of the south. The Teutonic mind had always re- tained something of its primitive spontaneity, and was incapable of being permanently moulded by mediaeval forms of culture. Nevertheless, at this period the attitude of Holland and of Germany towards the reformation was by no means identical. Both of these nations claimed a share in the invention of the art of printing, yet to each of them the new art was valuable on different grounds. To Holland it had a speculative, to Germany it had a practical, importance. It is singular that the German mind, which ultimately immersed itself in speculation, should in the period preceding the Reformation have been desirous only of practical progress, have sought only for the light in order that it might have a guide to its footsteps. The Germany of the fifteenth century and the Holland of the fifteenth century differed from the rest of Europe in this respect, that they were both dissatisfied; neither of them could be charged with the pride of self-independence. Yet they were each dissatisfied in a different way. Holland wanted speculation, Germany desired action. Holland wanted theological thought, Germany desired religious work. Holland wanted the power to investigate, Germany desired the liberty to believe. Holland wanted the emancipation 336 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. which flows from culture, Germany desired the freedom of religious truth. Holland Wanted an Erasmus, Germany desired a Luther. But it must not be forgotten, that however promis- ing the aspect of Germany may have been, its influ- ence was almost neutralized by its subsequent and long-continued union with a country which was destined to be the mainstay of the most rigid Catholicism. Spain, in the fifteenth century, was only emerging into distinct nationality; but in the course of that century it was to attain a prominent place amongst the nations. It may seem strange, that a people whose nationality was so young should thus early have begun to exhibit the germs of a religious spirit; severe, morose, exclusive, narrow and bigoted. Youthful nations are generally more prone to spontaneity than to rigidity. But we must remem- ber the peculiar circumstances in which Spain had stood for centuries. It was divided into separate kingdoms, and in the midst of them there was one which belonged not to the Cross. The Moors had from the eighth century obtained a footing in Spain, and had manifested the singular spectacle of a Moham- medan power in the very heart of Catholic Europe. It will be found that wheresoever a nation has been called to battle with extreme opinions, its own opinions have been carried to an opposite extreme. It was so with Spain. That country had for centuries stood face to face with a religion which in all its aspects was peculiarly opposed to the spirit of Catholicism. It is not wonderful that, in its recoil from the vision of the THE MORAL PREPARATION OF YOUTH. false Prophet, Spain should have become more Catholic still; more rigid, more austere, more formal, more devoted to the letter of hierarchical law, and more resolved to maintain the integrity of medimval worship. Every man is partly the result of his age, and every nation is partly the product of the external influences which surround it. It is not surprising that the Spain of the fifteenth century should have been rather hardening than softening; but it would have been surprising in the extreme, if that hardening of its moral nature had proved a favourable omen for the great Reformation. If we pass now to that land which was the very head and centre of the Catholic life, we shall see the spirit of youth at once in its glory and in its shame. Italy bounded from the Council of Constance, as a slave bounds from the chain. Nowhere did the youth of Europe display such intense consciousness of the joys which awaited it, and of the possibilities which lay before it. The heart of Christendom, long restrained from self-expression, burst forth into exuberant delight, and forgot everything but the rapture of the hour. It was in Italy that the spirit of youth found its special home, it was in Italy that it abandoned itself to its deepest dissipations. It plunged into the glare and glitter of the gorgeous cities, it stole the delights of life from flower to flower. It had long been denied liberty, and it indemnified itself by licence; it had long been compelled to strain at the gnat, and in compensa- tion it swallowed the camel. There are two periods of mediaeval history in which the life of Italy has ex- VOL. II. ' Y GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. hibited intense moral corruption. The first is that period familiarly known as the Dark Ages; the second is the age immediately preceding the Reformation. Between these epochs of history it would indeed not be easy to choose. Alexander VI., at the close of the fifteenth, was equal to the worst pontiffs of the tenth century. Nevertheless these similar effects were the result of vastly different, even of contrary causes. The corruption of the tenth century sprang from the lethargy of life, the corruption of the fifteenth origi- nated in the fact that life was overflowing. The debasement of the tenth century proceeded from the absence of self-respect, the degeneracy of the fifteenth resulted from the recklessness of an exaggerated self- esteem. The sensualities of the tenth century sprang from the predominance of brute instinct, the moral impurities of the fifteenth had their source in the overweening power of a brilliant and unbalanced ima~ gination. There was indeed in this latter epoch every- thing which could contribute to feed and foster such an imagination. In Republican Florence, one family, that of the Medici, had risen to almost regal power by the wealth and the munificence it had showered upon the city. Its immense riches had been the enrichment of Florence, and the enrichment of Florence was the beautifying of Italy. Through the opulence, the generosity, the literary taste, and the aesthetic culture of that family, the city of Florence directly, and all the cities of Italy indirectly, were basking in a sunshine of artistic glory. All that eye had seen, all that ear had heard, all that it had entered THE MORAL PREPARATION OF YOUTH. into the heart of man to conceive, had been gathered into one blaze of splendour within the central home of Catholic life. All nature had poured its treasures at the feet of Italy. Her ocean had spread its blue waves before her, inviting enterprise, and tempting the spirit of discovery. The skies had spread their serenest canopy above her, to lift her thoughts into the region of creative beauty. Wealth had poured its treasures into her bosom, to enable her to add the triumphs of art to the gifts of natural beauty. The poetic muse had gifted her with a soul susceptible to the impressions of that loveliness which surrounded her, and had empowered her to wed the harmonies of nature to the harmonious utterances of the human spirit. It is not surprising that, in the first awakening to her resplendent position, her eyes should have been dazzled by the glare. It is not wonderful that, when the first flush of youthful independence was added to the knowledge of such boundless treasures, her heart should have forgotten that spirit of self- sacrifice which is itself the spirit of Christianity. In- disputable it is that the eyes of Italy were dazzled, and that her heart was rendered worldly. Her pre- paration for the great reform was also to be the lesson, that the sense of independence is spiritual death. And the more the fifteenth century advanced, the more was that lesson borne home upon the heart of Italy. The remarkable experience in her case is, that while she had greater outward advantages than any other nation of Europe, she was of all the nations of Europe furthest removed from happiness. In proof 340 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. of this, We have only to appeal to the fact that the Italian renaissance of the fifteenth century was the sphere in which the Roman hierarchy reaped the largest profits from the sale of indulgences. Pre- valent as that practice had been in former days, it attained in this country, and in this century, a preva- lence and a power which hitherto had been unknown. And here we must repeat a remark which we made in a former part of this Work. We there said that the matter to be accounted for was not the Supply but the demand. The hierarchy would never have issued indulgences if there had not been in the public mind a want felt for these, or for something equivalent to these ; and the very avidity with which the indulgences were purchased by the men of that generation, is a proof how strong must have been the want, and how deep must have been the craving. But the question which suggests itself is this, Why should there have been such a want? In Italy, the home of the renais- sance, the palace of the beautiful, the throne of art, the capital of commerce, the abode of all luxury and refinement, where could room be found for the admis- sion of an ungratified desire? Yet it was in this Italy so beautiful and so favoured, so rich in worldly wealth and so full of mental glory, that the worst symptoms appeared of that old unrest which had proved a source of gain to the priesthood of former days. The worldly riches and the mental glory had failed to reach the needs of the spiritual nature, had failed to remove from the soul the sense of its separation from the divine life, had failed to answer the question by what THE MORAL PREPARATION OF YOUTH. 34I means the spirit of man could become united to the Spirit of God. It may be said, indeed, that these cries for indulg- ences were not sent up by the same class who revelled in the glories of the renaissance, that they came chiefly from the poor, who were unable to appreciate the advantages of the present world, and were forced to fix their thoughts upon the possible joys and the possible sorrows which might await them in the future. No doubt, to a certain extent, this is true. The sale of indulgences was most effectual amongst primitive minds. Excessive culture is apt to blunt the spontaneity of feeling, and in an age of inherent corruption the sense of sin was not likely to be most keenly felt by those who were immersed in specula- tive studies. Yet it by no means follows, that where the sense of sin was blunted there was an absence of all unrest. The unrest of the Italian renaissance showed itself for the most part in the sense of a nameless voyage; undefined, indefinable, conspicuous only by the blank it left in the soul. If the desire for indulgences found its peculiar sphere amongst the uncultured, the unrest which knew not what to desire found almost its exclusive sphere amongst the sons of the great literary revival. It was not long before Italy was to receive a striking illustration of this. It was to come not from the valleys, not from the haunts of poverty, not fromthe homes of ignorance. It was to be manifested in the life of one who, by birth, by education, and by circumstances, occupied the heights of society, and dwelt in the very blaze of Italian glory. 342 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. jerome Savonarola was beyond all question the most remarkable man of the fifteenth century. His life was bounded by three worlds,-—a world which was dead, a world which was living, and a world which was coming,—-and by each of these he was - distinctly influenced. It is by the combination of these different influences that we shall be best able to arrive at a true portrait of the man; a portrait which has been variously painted, and which, in the varieties of its delineation, has not always been allowed to preserve the golden mean between the traces of flattery and the touch of deprecia- tion. Savonarola cannot be separated either from the present, the past, or the future; and if we would see him as he was, we must consider what his life derived from each of these sources. From that present into which he was born he received a high social position, and all the advantages which such a position affords. He came into the World when the spirit of Christianity was in the bloom of its youth, and in the full conviction of its strength of independ— ence. He came into a part of the world where the spirit of Christianity had intimately associated itself with the spirit of culture, of discovery, and of investigation. He was born at a season peculiarly favourable to the development of intellectual life. just one year after his birth, occurred that great catastrophe which sank an empire in the dust; and sent forth its life to vivify other shores—the capture of Constantinople. In no land were the fugitive strangers so warmly received as in Italy, in no city so THE MORAL PREPARATION OF YOUTH. warmly welcomed as in Florence, by no family so ardently patronised as by the Medici. The result was, that they gave back more than they received, and rendered Italy more rich, from the riches it had showered on them. The world which was contem- porary with Savonarola, was a world in which the_ spirit of ancient Greece had revived, and in which the learning of ancient Greece had become the recognised standard of erudition. The classical had taken the place of the medimval, and for a time the pagan models seemed to have supplanted the Christian. And with the revival of Greek learning had been increasingly fostered that thirst for freedom which had peculiarly belonged to the ancient Greek spirit, before that spirit had been curbed by the iron yoke of the Byzantine power. In this world of Greek resur- rection Savonarola spent his earliest years, drank of its streams and gazed on its beauties, and travelled over its paths; nor did there seem any reason which should prevent him, with his talents and his opportunities, from becoming in after life one of its leading citizens. But while, in outward circumstances and in intel- lectual characteristics, there was no such restraining reason, there was in the heart of Savonarola an obstacle more potent than any outward circumstance, or than any intellectual disqualification could have been. That obstacle was the sense of a spiritual void,——a void which the Greek renaissance could not even meet, much less supply. Influenced as he was by his own age and surroundings, the shadows of a coming age seem to have fallen upon his path, darken- 344 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. ing his present enjoyment, and imparting to all objects a pensive shade of sadness. What was this world of revived paganism contributing to the soul of man? What was it doing for his spiritual nature? What was it adding to that immortal element which hungered within him ? Was it not really destroying human spirituality by a new species of image-worship? —the worship of those objects which the tempter had offered to the Master of old as worthy of adoration,— the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life. Was not all Italy repeating the sin of ancient judea,—bowing down to the golden calf, and paying abject homage to the work of its own hands ? And ought not the spirit of man to revolt against this image-worship of paganism as strongly as it had revolted against the image-worship of Christianity? Nay, was not this new evil the worse pestilence of the two? The images of saint and martyr had at least evoked a sense of religious emotion; but the images of wealth and rank and sensuous magnificence could only evoke the deepest selfishness of the soul. It was these questionings which led Savonarola to become the forerunner of Luther. He failed to find satisfaction in the world which surrounded him, and he cast his eyes forward to that world which was coming. Not that Savonarola ever attained, or eve claimed to attain, the rank of a positive reformer. At no time did he contemplate a separation from the Church of his fathers, and in his last awful hour, when he was called to pass through his baptism of fire, he professed ‘himself a true adherent of the Catholic THE MORAL PREPARATION OF YoU'rH. 34 5 faith. The position of Savonarola was not unlike that of the Waldenses ; he sought, like them, a wor- ship more primitive in its simplicity, and a faith which manifested its fruits less in the form and more in the life. There was, indeed, one marked difference between the Waldenses and Savonarola,—— they objected to vanities they had never enjoyed; he repudiated these vanities after he had tasted all their pleasures. Savonarola’s dissatisfaction with the world came from a personal proof of its inadequacy. He found that it could not meet the wants of his deepest nature. The discovery was made at the age of twenty- two,—a period when human life in general is absorbed in the interests of the passing hour. If thus early he could pronounce an unfavourable verdict on the world, it was not likely that such a verdict would be softened by~ the gravity of maturer years. Savonarola seems to have felt this; he accepted the decision of his youth as a final decision. With him there was no pause between resolve and action; the moment his heart had condemned the world, he prepared to leave it. He withdrew himself from its pomp and its vanity, from its learning and its glory, and retired into the seclusion of the Cloister. There the experi— ence happened to him which had befallen Hildebrand in the monastery of Cluny. There fell upon his soul the conviction of a great work given him to do, the sense of a heavenly mission, the power of a call from God. He must regenerate this abandoned Italy; must wake it to a sense of danger ; must open its eyes to behold the dreadful precipice on whose brink it 346 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. revelled. He must proclaim anew the thunders of Mount Sinai ; must tell the world that life was short, and that after life was judgment; must rouse mankind into a perception of the awful responsibility of exist- ence, and the terrible trust involved in the keeping of one human soul. Fired with this sense of a heavenly mission, Savonarola in a few years appeared once more in the world of men, no longer to be its votary, but to be its adversary, and, if possible, its conqueror. His appearance as a public preacher was in that year which immediately preceded the birth of the great German reformer, as if the star of Savonarola were not to set until the star of Luther had dawned to fill its place in the future. But it seemed at first as if the Italian preacher had over-estimated his strength and mistaken his destiny. Seldom has subsequent oratorical eminence been inaugurated by so ominous a beginning. Nature had denied to him all those gifts which form the popular orator. His harsh voice, his unmusical intona- tion, so rare amongst his countrymen, his ungainly delivery, so repulsive to the men of every country, all contributed to deprive his words of that force which they really contained. He failed, and he covered his failure by a new retirement. For a few years we lose all sight of him, and when next he appears before us, it is in a world where all is changed. He is no longer the despised orator, resorted to by few, and listened to long by none. He is the observed and the admired of all, the centre of applauding crowds, and the point of attraction where rest the THE MORAL PREPARATION OF YOUTH. eyes of myriads. What has effected the transforma- tion? What has brought thousands to hang on the lips of a man whom a few years ago none cared to patronise? Is it that Savonarola has improved his defective utterance, or is it that his piety and zeal have kindled him into yet greater fire? Perhaps, to some extent, both of these causes may have operated ; yet we think both of them combined will not suffice to explain the change. That change, if we mistake not, lay not in Savonarola, but in society. The gay circles of Florence had during his absence caught the spirit of the reformer, been seized with that vague dissatisfaction which had been to him the beginning of life. To them also the world had lost its charm, upon them also the world’s pleasures had begun to pall. It was this more than any actual increase in Savonarola’s power which lent to his second ministry so terrible a force. Never since the days of apostolic fervour were human words attended with so startling an effect. The public square was crowded with ladies of the highest fashion; ladies whose lives had been one scene of uninterrupted gaiety, whose thoughts had been bounded by the vanities of the day and hour, whose hearts had been hardened by perpetual contemplation of self-interest. They came now, laden with their costliest jewels, and bedecked with their most precious ornaments; but they came in order that in this thoroughfare, which had been the scene of their vanity, they might renounce that vanity for ever. They came with their jewels that they might cast them away before the eyes of multitudes, throw them GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. on the highway like useless lumber, and leave them to be trodden under the feet of man and beast. Such a spectacle could not have been produced by the passing impression of any sermon ; it must have been the last result of meditative years. In front of the cathedral was to be witnessed a spectacle not less startling, and not less significant. There were gathered there some of the foremost writers of the age, and they came to consume their writings in the flames. The gallant brought his licentious love- songs, the novelist carried his immoral works of fiction, even the grave philosopher brought his pagan treatises to burn them. Still less than in the former case could such a scene have been produced by the preaching of an hour. It must have been the final voice of a long dissatisfaction, the last utterance of a protracted spiritual unrest which had tasted all the pleasures earth had to give, and had found their taste to be the gall of bitterness. We have seen Savonarola in relation to two worlds: that of the living, and that of the coming age. But Savonarola was also influenced by the world of the dead. He shared in that mediaeval dream which had haunted the heart of the Catholic hierarchy—the dream of a revived jewish theocracy. He looked forward to the establishment of a great republic, whose only king should be God, and whose only law should be the gospel; and the city of Florence was that spot where he hoped to see his vision realized. It did not seem to strike Savonarola that the estab- lishment of such a republic would be the restoration THE MORAL PREPARATION OF YOUTH. to the hierarchy of all that it had lost. It did not seem to strike him that it would be purchased by the total subordination of the secular to the priestly power, and therefore by the surrender of everything which Savonarola himself held clear. But there was one evil consequence of this republican dream which Savonarola did see, and for which we regret to say he must in great measure be held responsible. He knew that Florence could only receive such a consti- tution at the point of the sword; yet he did not shrink from that knowledge. On the contrary, he invited the arms of France to the invasion of Italy, and he hailed Charles VIII. as the national saviour. In all this we do not doubt the sincerity of Savonarola. We do not doubt that his politics were subordinate to his piety, and that he desired the invasion of foreign enemies only that he might transform his country into a visible kingdom of God. Nevertheless, we are glad that we are not called to follow him through his closing years. Strange to say, we like him better in his self-denying life than we do in his martyr’s death. We are made painfully conscious that his was, after all, only a political martyrdom. Savo- narola never suffered death for his religious opinions; he met the fate of one who had conspired to subvert the constitution of his native land. He died, not for the cause of Christian truth, but for the sake of a Utopian dream,—-of a dream of theocratic empire, which never could have been realized on earth, and which, if it had been realized, would have ended in the re-establishment of an absolute Papacy. On 3 5o GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. these grounds, we shall prefer to think of Savonarola as he was in his youth and freshness, shall prefer to associate his name with the days when his religion dwelt apart from his politics. We shall raise to him a monument in our hearts, but we shall place that monument, not in front of the French invading army, nor yet in front of those awful flames in which his form was consumed to ashes. We shall raise it in the public square of Florence, and shall fashion it after his attitude in that day when he stood proclaim- ing in words of terrific power the vanity of earth, and the nothingness of worldly joys. We have now completed our review of the moral preparation of youth for the stage of approaching manhood. We say that at best it was only a negative preparation; when it had revealed the sense of dependence, its work was done. All that it could do was to show the inadequacy of the world to bring rest. But during all this time, through the channel of youthful imagination, there was going forward a great intellectual movement,—-a movement which was preparing the mind of Christendom for a higher life than it had ever enjoyed before, and was leading the footsteps of human progress right into the 'promised land. This movement, which forms in our view the true intellectual transition to the age of Luther, will be the subject of our attention in the following chapter. CHAPTER XXXVII. THE INTELLECTUAL PREPARATION OF YOUTH IN ITS RELATION TO ART AND THE REFORMATION. \ E have observed, in the course of mediaeval history, an increasing demand for adequate forms to express the Christian spirit. We have found that, While the school-life was forced to represent the truths of Christianity by outward images or symbols, it was never able to rest long satisfied with any of these; for the spirit was perpetually outgrowing the form, and the thought ever leaving the representation far’ in the background. We have seen how the simple engravings were superseded by the statues, and we have marked how the statues themselves were ulti- mately inadequate to meet the longings of the Christian heart. They were too cold, too lifeless, too unimpassioned to represent the objects of eternal adoration, and the Church had been compelled to institute a higher mode of expression, in which the forms of the sacred dead should be seen to live and move. Accordingly, the miracle-plays and mysteries had arisen, and men for a time found the images of the past reproduced in all their freshness, and exhibited in all their power. But the spirit of 352 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. Christianity had since these days expanded further still, and the form had again become too small to contain the thought. Men wanted to see more than even life or action; they wanted to behold the evidences of a human soul. They desired to gaze upon the forms of the sacred dead, not as mere forms, nor yet merely as forms in motion, but as forms which expressed the voice of a soul, which revealed the depth of love, and the warmth of passion, and the strength of enthusiasm, which Suggested an infinitude of power which they were unable to portray, and lifted the eye of the beholder beyond their own visible representations to that invisible and spiritual world which they strove faintly to prefigure. It was such images as these that the spirit of Christianity desired when it arrived at the days of its youth; images which should reveal in form and feature not only what the eye could see, but what the heart could feel ; not only what the sense could admire, but what the soul could love; not only what the hand could reverently touch, but what the spirit could silently adore. And it was in answer to this demand that Italian art arose. In the triumphs of the canvas, image- representation reached its. highest possible perfection, and mediaevalism reached, we believe, the nearest approach it ever made to the standard of Protestant theology. It is on this account that we have called art the intellectual preparation of youth. We regard it as the real point of transition between the intellect of mediaeval and the intellect of Protestant Europe, and it is in this light alone that we propose to view it. THE INTELLECTUAL PREPARATION OF YOUTH. 3 \Vith art in itself, with the rules of the painter and the intrinsic beauties of the paintings, we have here nothing to do. We want to know what was the relation of art to the spirit of Christianity, what was that special want in medimvalism which it was designed to meet, and what was that special contri- bution which it furnished to the development of the human race ? There is one thought which has run like a thread through this whole historical narrative, and that is the divorce in the mind of the mediaeval world between the divine and the human Christ. We have re- peatedly directed attention to the fact that, from the days of Gnostic speculation, divinity was regarded as something inharmonious with and opposed to humanity. We have seen that, from that time, that which was human in the person of the Master ceased to occupy any large share in the thoughts of men. The Christ on whom the mediaeval world fixed its eye was a Christ outside the range of human nature ; a Christ so supernatural that He was inapproachable, and so transcendent that He had no meeting-place in His being for the wants of lower life. He was a Christ whose works were all on a large scale, and for whom it would be degradation to operate in minute details. He atoned not for petty sins, but only for such sins as merited eternal death. He came not into immediate connection with the course of human history; His province was only to sum up that history in a final act of judgment. Hence between Him and humanity there was a chasm ; a chasm which must be voL. 11. z GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. filled up, lest the very memory of His presence should be banished altogether. We know how the mediaval world attempted to fill up that chasm. We know how it sought to bridge the distance it had created between earth‘ and heaven, by interposing a ladder of communication, on which the angels of God ascended and descended. We know, above all, how it en- deavoured to supply the void it had made, by the creation of an ideal of human purity, the apotheosis of the Virgin Mother. We have already pointed out that, in this reverence for the Virgin, the spirit of Christianity was seeking the living among the dead, was trying to discover in the forms of its own imagination that portrait of human beauty which had been perfectly delineated in the earthly side of the Master’s character. Gradually, as the years rolled on, there had crept over the heart of Christendom the conviction that, in lending to a creation what belonged to the veritable Master, it was denuding that Master of one-half of His glory. In the desires of Francis of Assisi to receive the impress of the wounds of jesus, we see already a reaction from the contempla- tion of a Christ who was purely supernatural. Yet not even with Francis of Assisi did the world reach the true estimate of the humanity of jesus. He deified the wounds of the Master, yet the wounds were only physical, and even these were to him invested with a supernatural or magical significance. That region of Christ’s nature which had not been appropriated by the world was the region of the pure human soul: distinct from the supernatural on the THE INTELLECTUAL PREPARATION OF YOUTH. one hand, and from the physical on the other; and therefore removed at once from that transcendentalism which overleaps humanity, and from that materialism which degrades it. Man wanted communion with God, and that communion he had hitherto failed to find. He had failed to find it, because God, even an incarnate God, had been represented as a being foreign to his soul, distinct from his nature, separate from his humanity. He had made frantic efforts to scale that tremendous height, on whose summit the mediaeval world had placed the supernatural. That the supernatural was at the door of nature, and had manifested itself through nature, had not entered into the thoughts of that world, and so man had to climb in search of that which was touching the very threshold of his being. And he did climb, manfully and courageously. He heaped Pelion on the top of Ossa, that he might reach the dizzy height which transcended human thought, and distanced human nature. He climbed on the head of angel and archangel, striving by an ever—ascending series of gradations to attain the wondrous summit. He reached at last that form which was divided by no other from the divine life of the Master,-—the image of the Virgin Mother. But here bitterest disappoint- ment awaited him. He found that, although no intermediate form divided the human virgin from the divine Christ, they were separated by an impediment more terrible than any intermediate form—a gulf of boundless distance. And then slowly the conviction forced itself upon his reluctant mind that he was 356 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. searching for an impossible good, that if the divine were incompatible with the human, he could never attain it until he had laid down his humanity, that as long as he remained a finite individual he must wander at an infinite distance from the promised land, and that communion with God was a boon never to be reached below. It is not difficult to see what was wanted to dispel such a delusion. It had originated in an error, it could be eradicated by the removal of that error. Let but the truth be borne home upon the human spirit, that the divine was not antagonistic to the human; let but the medimval world be convinced that the earthly side of the Master’s portraiture was itself the mediator between God and man, and in an instant the whole intermediate paraphernalia would be swept away. Virgin, angel, archangel, relics of martyrs, tombs of saints, consecrated images of wood and stone, would cease to have any value as possible avenues to the divine, when one short and certain avenue had been opened through the human soul of the Master. The question was, How such a thought was to be presented to the mediaeval world? We know that with the Lutheran Reformation it burst upon the mind with startling power, but it would never have proved so effective if the mind had not been partially prepared for it. What was the source of this preparation? Mediaeval youth could not be reasoned with ; logic was too slow a process to enlist the attention of its buoyant spirit. Nor would mediaeval youth consent to be taught and disciplined; THE INTELLECTUAL PREPARATION OF YOUTH. it was too conscious of its independence, and too confident in its strength. One course alone remained. It must be approached through its own nature, through that very channel of youthful imagination which it held to be its peculiar glory. The mediaeval world must be taught, without knowing that it was taught. It must be instructed by a voice professing only to amuse, moulded by a hand claiming only to caress, dominated by a power pretending only to minister to its selfish desires. That voice, that hand, that power was art. Art was to be to the mediaeval world what the poet is to all worlds ; an unconscious teacher, an educator whose design is not to educate, but only to please; an elevator of the moral nature who yet has aspired to be no more than a minister to human imagination. Art came to be the servant of the mediaeval world, and it became its master; came to amuse its leisure hours, and became the guide of its greatest moments. It imparted a new truth to the world, that truth after which it had been vainly groping for ages. It brought, for the first time, before the Catholic mind, the full vision of the Master’s human glory, withdrew the curtain which for centuries had shrouded the earthly hemisphere of His being, showed to the eyes of men how beautiful, how sublime was‘that humanity which He bore, and how sublime is all humanity because it was borne by Him. It revealed in language swifter and more eloquent than words, that truth which lies at the basis of Christianity, and which all paganism before and since had ignored, the truth that self-sacrifice is the 358 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. highest strength, and that the glory of suffering virtue excels the glory of conquering power. This, then, we believe to have been the peculiar province of art, in so far as art related to the de- velopment of the Christian spirit. It was to bring into prominence that element which had been long neglected—the vision of Christ’s humanity; and it was thus to open for the heart of man a door of direct communion with the life of God. This tendency of Christian art towards the representation of a human Christ had already prefigured itself in the previous age. All revolts of the school-life were anticipations of the spirit of youth, prophetic of its coming, and suggestive of its message. In that great poetic outburst of religious life which was inaugurated by the visions of Dante, Christian art, for the first time, lifted its voice in the praise of the human soul. We have seen how Giotto of Florence was imbued with the spirit of Dante, and we have seen how powerfully he expressed in painting that love of purity which Dante expressed in song. With Giotto, the purity had a different incarnation; it was enshrined, not in the heart of an imaginary Beatrice, but in the human soul of the living Master. In his work the Catholic world, for the first time, beheld what might be called the apotheosis of Christ’s humanity; the lifting up to the highest heaven of that which hitherto had been esteemed too lowly for reverence. He was the first who painted the crucifixion as an expression of love. Before his time that scene had been indeed depicted, but it had been depicted chiefly in its aspects of THE INTELLECTUAL PREPARATION OF YOUTH. physical terror; with Giotto, the centre of all the spectacle is the human soul of jesus. The eye ceases to linger upon the merely physical agonies, and rests no more upon that preternatural darkness which covered His dying hour, for it is arrested and riveted by that light of His human countenance which even the darkness cannot dim—the light of a love that passeth knowledge. It was not to be supposed that the new attitude assumed by mediaeval art would all at once be con- sistently maintained. Giotto was rather prophetic of the future than representative of the present. He owed his superior power partly to that intellectual outburst which marked the transition of the renaissance from France into Italy; the same outburst which had inspired the soul and tuned the voice of his friend and companion, Dante. Both these men were in advance of their time. They were the representatives of a real stage of humanity, but that stage had not yet come. Their mission was a prophetic and an anticipative mission; they had been sent to spy out the promised land, and to bring back into the world of the present, specimen fruits of the world which was coming. Accordingly we are not surprised that, after the first impulse of the Italian renaissance had subsided, the world fell back somewhat upon its original position. In the age immediately succeeding that of Giotto, art especially appears to have ex- perienced what may be called a theological relapse. When we say so, we do not mean that it became in itself less artistic, we do not mean that its touch was 36o GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. more coarse, or its delineation less vivid. It is not in the mode of expression, but in the thought which is expressed, that we observe a relapse. Mediaevalism seems to recoil once more from the exaltation of the human soul of jesus. As an example of this, we may take the very striking representation of the Last judgment, by Andrea Orcagna. It is conceived in the true spirit of Catholicism. The dead, small and great, stand before God awaiting their final sentence; on the right are the souls of the sanctified; on the left are the spirits of the unregenerate. Two thrones stand in the centre; one is occupied by Christ, the other by the Virgin Mother. Nothing can be more unlike than the attitude of these heavenly personages. Christ, true to the mediaeval conception, is delineated in all the terrors of majestic power. His countenance bespeaks mingled authority and anger; conscious majesty, and the indignation of outraged honour. He turns to the left; His thoughts bent upon the gloomy side of the picture, and His aspect wearing the impress of the gloom. He uncovers His wounded side, to remind the trembling host of the unregenerate that they are looking upon Him whom they pierced. His hand is raised with a menacing gesture, to tell them of His power and His determination to use it; and the sentence of condemnation, ‘ Depart from me,’ is expressed more vividly in His look than if it had been uttered by His voice, or written by His hand on the face of heaven. Far different is the attitude of the Virgin Mother. All that ought to have been contemplated in the human jesus is here transferred THE INTELLECTUAL PREPARATION OF YOUTH. 361 to her. Unlike her divine Son, she loves to dwell upon the hopeful view. She turns her eyes to the right, that they may rest upon the army of the saved, and also that they may hide themselves from the vision of the lost. There is discernible in her averted counte- nance the horror with which her pitying soul beholds the condemnation of multitudes, and mingling with that horror there is seen the look of unspeakable tenderness that would fain recall the erring within the pale of salvation. There is no need to point the moral of this picture; like all true art, it points its own moral. Volumes would not have expressed so clear a comment on mediaeval morality as is furnished at a glance by this one painting. Orcagna certainly did not intend it for a satire ; but had he so intended it, he could not more forcibly have portrayed the truth that mere supernatural power is powerless to win love, that divinity divorced from humanity is divorced from human sympathy, and that a heaven repelling earth must be repelled by earth in turn. This painting of Orcagna, however, may be regarded as the last outburst of the older mediaevalism, the last strong effort to maintain the worship of a Christ separated from human nature. The spirit of Giotto was still alive, and there were causes at work older than the spirit of Giotto. The gradual diffusion of learning, and the steady advance of the renaissance, had raised the dignity of man in his own estimation, had led him insensibly to the conclusion that humanity was, after all, not so mean a gift. He became less timorous in attributing to the Master that which he 362 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. felt not ignoble in himself; he began to dwell more habitually and more endearingly on the human soul of jesus. Accordingly the age which followed Orcagna was a regress to the age of Giotto. In the paintings of Masaccio, the human soul beams forth once more, and in the works of Fra Angelico it shines with even greater lustre. Whatever F ra Angelico portrays is eminently human. Whether it be the Virgin Mother, or the images of the saints, or the forms of the celestial hierarchy, we feel that the portrait is drawn by the touch of a sympathetic man. And when he seeks to unfold the divine image of the Master, he clothes that divinity in all that is best in human nature; clothes it in the calmness of a restful heart, in the purity of a sinless soul, in the self-sacrificing devotion of one in whose being all other beings live and move. It might be said that such a treatment of the subject had its chief ground in the nature of the man, did we not see the same course of thought manifested in the art of his contemporaries. While Fra Angelico in Florence was painting the crucifix surrounded by adoring saints, the four members of the Van Eyck family were jointly delineating in Flanders their great picture, the ‘ Adoration of the Lamb.’ Here we have the same transition into the reverence for the gentler attributes, the discovery of the glory of self-sacrifice, and the recognition of the majesty which may reside in suffering weakness. If we pass now to Venice, we shall find art passing through a similar experience, only in an intensified degree. The portraits of Christ by Gian Bellini exceed in moral grandeur all that had THE INTELLECTUAL PREPARATION OF YOUTH. gone before them, and are unsurpassed by any that follow them. It is the moral element in these paint- ings that makes them grand. Not only is there no effort at adventitious ornament, but there is a very strenuous effort to suppress such ornament. It had been customary to surround the head of the Saviour with a halo of glory, which was called a nimbus. In the portraits of Bellini, the Saviour stands forth with no nimbus encircling His head, with no outward glory enshrining His form. He stands with no adorn- ment but that which comes from within. The light which transfigures Him, is the light which irradiates His countenance from His own pure spirit; the glory which attracts all eyes, is the glory which emanates from a heart of perfect love ; the beauty which trans- fixes the gaze, is the beauty which shines transpar- ently from a sinless human soul. Can we fail to perceive that in the very conception of such a portrait humanity has already risen from its self-abasement, has learned those glories that are slumbering within it, has awakened to those infinite possibilities which lie before it? It no longer fears to attribute to the object of its worship a nature kindred to its own. It glories in such an ascription, it rejoices to behold the Christ clothed in that garb familiar to its sense and to its spirit, and it paints Him in the chambers of its imagination, no longer as a giant of portentous power, but as one who was found in the fashion of a man. And now there rise in the firmament of art four resplendent stars,—stars which were sent to shed their GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. light upon that age which ushered in the great Refor- mation, but whose light through all the ages was to know no setting. Their names have become familiar to us as household words; they are Leonardo da Vinci, Titian, Michael Angelo, and Raphael. In Leonardo da Vinci we find the pursuance of that same ideal which Fra Angelico had sought, and which Gian Bellini had attained—the ideal of a Christ whose glory was His perfect humanity. His great picture is a description of the Last Supper, in which the lead- ing thought is that mutual human love which binds together the disciple and his Lord. The Master sits at a long table, and on either side of Him there is seated a group of His disciples. The ages of these disciples are marked in their countenances, and we can trace the gradation of their years, from the youth- ful face of john to the grave maturity which marks the visage of Peter. The Master is uttering the words: ‘One of you shall betray me,’ and the reply to that utterance is a crowd of different emotions, rising in the hearts and beaming out in the faces of His auditors. On the one side we see doubt, in- credulity, the sense of impossibility; on the other we discern the glance of suspicion, which indicates the fear of treachery. Here we have the expression of boundless astonishment; there we see depicted the utmost indignation which the human heart can feel: the words of the Master bring out the respective characters of His disciples. That Master Himself remains calm; He Who knew what was in man, is not shaken by the deceitfulness of the human heart. His THE INTELLECTUAL PREPARATION OF YOUTH. 36 5 countenance expresses perfect resignation. It is not the resignation of stolidity; the clear presentiment of death is written on that brow. It is not the resigna— tion of impassiveness; in His look there is infinite pain, only it is pain not for Himself but for His betrayer. It is the resignation of a heart which is capable of suffering deeply, but whose sufferings are all impersonal, and whose sense of individual sorrow sinks into utter nothingness, when weighed against that load of human sin and misery which it is longing to remove. Titian of Venice is not essentially a religious painter. It is true, in his picture of the entombment of Christ, he shows that he has caught the spirit of his age, and is in harmony with the tendency to exalt human nature. He who makes the entombment of Christ a subject for the canvas, has ceased to dis- sociate human sacrifice from divine strength. N ever- theless, the genius of Titian is essentially secular, and tends rather towards the beautiful than the moral. Venice was always more disposed than Florence to expatiate on the glories of light and colour; a fact which makes the purely moral grandeur of the por- traits of Bellini all the more remarkable, and all the more significant. Titian followed his countrymen in their ordinary practice of bowing down to physical beauty, and it was perhaps on this account that he found a more congenial field in pagan than in Christian sub- jects. Yet the paintings of Titian are by no means confined to the delineation of outward form and colouring. Forms and colours there are, but these are 366 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT or CHRISTIANITY. the vesture of a spirit which dwells Within them, and that spirit is the life of the Greek renaissance. It is here that Titian comes into union with the general preparation for reform. Living in the days of the Greek revival, he had caught the glow of freedom which that revival had kindled. The study of Grecian literature had inspired him with the breath of Grecian freedom. True, it carried his heart rather back to the past than forward to, the future, yet the very desire to retrace his steps indicated dissatisfaction with the present. His past was, after all, a Utopian past—a future in disguise. He invested it with a freedom which it never really held, except in the fond imaginations of its poets and its sages; and while he sought a paradise in the revival of a world which was dead, he was unconsciously forecasting his gaze on that world which was about to be. When We consider Michael Angelo and Raphael in their relation to Christianity, we find it necessary to view them not separately, but in combination. They are the two halves of one whole. Raphael is the counterpart of Michael Angelo; Michael Angelo is the complement of Raphael. Angelo exhibits Chris- tianity in its strength ; Raphael shows it in its gentle- ness. Angelo portrays the Christ in His grandeur as the head of humanity ; Raphael delineates Him in His beauty at the lowest stage of human frailty—the stage of infancy. Angelo reveals the majesty of Christian truth; Raphael paints the loveliness of Christian purity. Angelo exhibits the Christ in His power to convict; Raphael sets Him forth in His THE INTELLECTUAL PREPARATION OF YOUTH. 367 power to attract. Angelo is the Dante, Raphael is the Petrarch of Christian art. Angelo is john the Baptist standing in the moral wilderness of the world, and cry- ing in a voice of thunder: ‘ Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand ;’ Raphael is john the Evangelist leaning on the bosom of the Master, and seeking, by means of contact, to catch the impress of His divine gentleness. Yet, while they are thus con- trasted, they are not wholly separated. There are points in which the difference between them seems to be bridged over, and each lends to the other a portion of his own life. Angelo is generally the stern reformer, denouncing the vices of his age, and exhibit- ing the judgment on these vices in figures of terrible wrath. Yet, who will deny that, mingled with the severity of his portraits, there lurks an unmistakeable touch of sadness, which reveals beneath his frown a yearning for humanity ? Raphael, on the other hand, is generally the very incarnation of gentleness, so absorbed in the love of the beautiful, that he has seldom leisure to turn his gaze upon the darker sides of human nature. Yet, occasionally, even his gentle- ness flashes out into the fire of the reformer, and he becomes one with Michael Angelo in his mission of purifying mankind. There is one picture in which he describes the union of heaven and earth. They are united by a sacramental altar, on either side of which are groups of saints and angels. Amongst these groups Raphael has the moral courage to place the figures of two men who had been peculiarly the objects of Papal and hierarchical displeasure; the 368 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. one was the poet Dante, who had spent his life in exile; the other was the reformer Savonarola, who, only ten years before, had closed the life of a non- conformist with the death of a martyr. We have said that to do this required moral courage ; in truth, it re- quired more. It presupposed in the heart of Raphael the possibility of righteous anger, the capability of warming into passion in beholding the spectacle of human iniquity, the power of rising up in revolution against the prevalence of vices whose long continu- ance had given them the weight of social convention- alities. Raphael and Angelo here met side by side. Let us now glance for a few moments at each of them in turn. It was not possible that the paintings of Michael Angelo could fail to exhibit the evidences of the great Reformation struggle. He lived and moved and had his being in that struggle. His long life of eighty-eight years witnessed the preparation for it, the beginning of it, the progress, middle, and end of it. He was born eight years before the birth of Luther, and he died long after Luther and the greater part of his illustrious band had passed to their rest. The world into which he was born was not the world in which he died. The light rose upon him when the Italian renaissance was in its glory, and his sun went down in death when the Italian renaissance was beginning to fade into the light of Elizabethan Eng- land. Living thus amid the struggles of a changing society, it was inevitable that he should be affected by the severity of the atmosphere which he breathed; and we find that his latest work, the picture of the Last THE INTELLECTUAL PREPARATION OF YOUTH. Judgment, is impregnated with that severity. As, however, it is the production of his old age, it lies far beyond our historical limits. The work of Michael Angelo, which expresses our present stage of development, is one which belongs to the days of his youth, and which has generally been esteemed his masterpiece ; it is the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. It bears fewer marks of the contemporary conflict than most of his other works; indeed, it is essen- tially rather conciliatory than polemical. Its leading idea seems to be the ingathering of the whole world under the headship of Christ; and it is the contem— plation of this headship as a direct object of worship which here places Michael Angelo amongst the ranks of the reformers. The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel contains the representation of some of the principal events recorded in the Old Testament; but these are all contemplated in their relation to the great event _ of the New. In one compartment we see the ancestors of the Virgin leading up to Christ; in another we are confronted by figures of the prophets and the sibyls foretelling the approach of the Son of man. It is the thought expressed in this second com- partment which especially strikes us. The union of the prophets and the sibyls is a very bold conjunction. It indicates the meeting of Judaism and heathenism ; and therefore it implies a conviction that there is a basis of Catholic truth underlying and permeating both. The joint prediction of the prophets and the sibyls is also a remarkable‘ and suggestive circumstance. It indicates that in the mind of Michael Angelo there voL. II. 2 A 370 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. was a deep persuasion that all the religions of the past had a divine mission to fulfil; that heathenism, like judaism, was contributing to the development of man- kind, and leading the world upward to the summit of the sunlit hills. Above all, in this picture of Michael Angelo there is seen an exaltation of Christ which the mediaeval world had never witnessed before. The Son of man stands before us as the head of all humanity, as the goal of all progress, as the consummation of all earthly glory. He is the ‘sum of the thoughts of God ;’ the realization of the dreams alike of prophet and of sibyl ; the unconscious object of worship in all heathen temples and in all pagan aspirations, and the light in whose resplendent beams are blended the unities which bind the hearts of men, and eliminated the differences which hold their hearts asunder. The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is the most eloquent of all sermons on the immediate communion of Christ with a whole united world. The life of Raphael, unlike that of Angelo, was not spent amid struggle. He was born in the same year as Luther, and he died at the early age of thirty-seven, before Luther’s distinctive work can be said to have begun. His life was therefore passed in a comparative calm. He lived amidst the glories of the renaissance, and he did not survive to witness that social dis- organization which followed the outburst of Lutheran- ism. His works, accordingly, are in keeping with the atmosphere which surrounded him. Perceiving no anarchy in the affairs of men, he does not contemplate Christianity in its aspect of authority over men. He THE INTELLECTUAL PREPARATION OF YOUTH. 371’ portrays Christ, not as the head of humanity, but as the member of a human family; not in His earthly sovereignty, but in His earthly sonship. Michael Angelo had contemplated 'the Redeemer as He ap- peared in the fulness of time, Raphael preferred to look upon Him as His life dawned in the days of infancy. We would almost imagine that a presenti- ment of his own short life had prompted him to measure the strength of the divine existence rather by the intensity than by the duration of its years. We would think so, did we not know that in the gay I heart of Raphael there were no presentiments. Seldom has a human life exhibited fewer traces of sadness. Enjoying the pleasures of the hour, he disturbed himself not with anticipations of the future. He was too gentle to ruffle others, too placid to be easily ruffled by them, and too hopeful to be troubled by imaginary calamities. And being joyous himself, he loved to think of all others as joyous, and strove to paint all others in the colours of his own joy. It was this, we believe, which attracted him peculiarly towards the infancy of jesus. That life of suffering humanity, which succeeded to the child-life of the Master, was too awful to be contemplated by the gentle soul of Raphael. His heart was too tender to dwell long upon such a vision, and without dwelling on the vision he could never on the canvas have realized it. But in the child-jesus he found a con- genial theme; perfect humanity, perfect beauty, perfect sinlessness, unaccompanied as yet by one shade of sorrow. And so Raphael fastened on this 37 2 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. spectacle, and made it his own. His portraits of the child-Christ mark a new era in the history of art. It is not that the child-jesus was absent from the works of previous artists; Raphael was by no means the earliest who sought to depict the first days of the Son of man. But he was assuredly the earliest who perfectly succeeded. The portraiture of the child- jesus is his distinctive work ; not because he was the first who tried it, but because he was the first who _ finished it; the first who gave to the infancy of the Redeemer the full tribute of beauty which art could lend. Men hitherto had been too exclusively bent on the Madonna; here the Madonna was not for- gotten, but she had to share her glories with the child. We do not mean to say that, in his descriptions of the infant Saviour, even Raphael reaches the purely human standpoint. Artistically, his portraits of the child-Christ are perfect; theologically, we should still like a little less of the preternatural, less of the effort to find the man in the child. We shall see this by a single illustration. Here is a brief sketch of one of his finest Madonnas. john the Baptist is repre- sented in boyhood as capturing a goldfinch, and bringing it in triumphant glee to the infant jesus, who is standing between His mother’s knees, with His foot resting upon hers. The infant Christ lays His hand upon the bird, and as He does so the aspect of His countenance is striking. It bespeaks at once the majesty of a creator and the love of a preserver, the conviction that the creature is in His power, side by side with the desire to ward off any injury which may THE INTELLECTUAL PREPARATION OF YOUTH. befall it. The bird remains passive under His touch, as if the consciousness that it lay in its Creator’s hand dispelled all fear. Over against this. picture of Raphael, let us, by way of contrast, place another. It is that in which the Virgin Mother is represented in all her youth and beauty, seated on a low chair, and clasping to her breast the infant Jesus, who is over- come with weariness. We do not ask, Which of these portraits is the finer picture? that is a question for the art critics, and amongst these we do not claim to rank. We profess to deal with art only in so far as it relates to the dawning spirit of the Reformation. We shall therefore put the question in another form, and ask, Which of the pictures marks the highest Christological development? To describe creative majesty in the face of the infant Christ may require a greater stretch of ~genius than merely to represent the infant in that attitude of weariness which is natural to all infancy. But is an infancy which manifests in its countenance creative majesty as perfect as that infancy which is subject to the weariness of so fragile an age? We feel assured it is not. We are con- vinced that every preternatural attribute added to the infant Jesus detracts from the perfection of His infant year's, makes Him no longer a child, but a man in the disguise of a child, and robs Him of that human interest which the evangelist endeavoured to create, when he described Him nineteen centuries ago as growing in wisdom and in stature. It was not, indeed, surprising that mediaevalism should not all at once have emancipated itself from its dominating idea—the GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. idea of a superhuman Christ. We mention the fact not to detract from the great painter, but merely to Show that the conception of a glorified humanity was still in a stage of development. Let us acknowledge, how- ever, with gladness, that the step which mediaevalism had already attained was a step of real progress. It had found in the child-jesus a meeting—place for the grandest thoughts of the human soul, and the very effort to render that childhood preternatural was an unconscious striving to exalt humanity. It was groping after a proclamation of the truth that the divine can stoop to the very level of the human, and that the human, without the aid of images or of angels, may rise immediately into communion with the divine. It seems to us, however, that even in the depart- ment of art, the real transition into the age of the Reformation is made not by Italy but by Germany. The development of German art had been of far later origin and of far slower growth than that of Italy; and the cause lay partly in the difference of their respective natural surroundings, and partly in the difference in the character of the national mind. Northern and Southern Europe were originally strongly contrasted in their characteristic features. The North, the home of the barbarous tribes, was more active than receptive, more disposed to leave on surrounding objects the imprint of its presence, than to be itself impressed and moulded by these objects. The South, the abode of classical refinement, was, in later days at least, more receptive than active, less THE INTELLECTUAL PREPARATION OF YOUTH. 5 prone to alter the aspect of the world, than to be itself moulded and dominated by that world of beauty which environed it. Accordingly the South received with avidity all impressions of the beautiful, until it became naturally, and almost spontaneously, the very soil of poetry and art. The North, on the other hand, resisted long the influence of culture, and made the very spontaneity of its existence an obstacle to the reception of foreign impressions. But If the reader will refer to the concluding portion of the seventeenth Chapter, he will find that we there anticipated a time when the bald North would be clothed in the luxu- riance of the sunny South, and when the stern spirit of the religious reformation would be refined and softened by its union with the spirit of the Italian renaissance. At that time we have now arrived. We have come to a period when Germany was to catch the glow of Italy, and when the art of the South was to be transported into the rugged North. Nay, the time had come when the North was to accomplish by art what the South had never done—the direct transition into a new age. Italy had revealed the human Christ in all the glorious colours which its luxuriant imagination could command, but Italy had rested when the work of imagination was done. Germany was also to reveal the imagination of a human Christ, but it was to pass from a creation of the fancy into an active longing of the soul. Italy was content to picture, Germany desired to find the picture a reality. The man Whom Germany sent forth to be the 376 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. representative in art of that reformation spirit which Luther was to inaugurate in religion, was Albrecht Diirer, of Nuremberg. He had this in common with Michael Angelo and Raphael, that he was impressed with the spirit of his time. But we have seen that Angelo and Raphael had each caught a different phase of the age; Angelo had received the sternness of its reformers, Raphael had imbibed the softness of its culture. Diirer, on his part, was affected by his time in a different way from either. If Raphael was rendered gay, if Angelo was made stern, Dtirer, by the contemplation of the surrounding world, was forced to be sad. There is no finer proof of the fact, that similar men may behold the same object with dif- ferent eyes. Diirer looked at the world from the German side. The character of his nation was grave and serious; his own individual bent was towards solemn contemplation, and the natural tendency had been fostered by the outward circumstances of a some- what sad domestic experience. The same cause, therefore, which repelled Raphael from dwelling on the portraiture of the sorrowful Christ, impelled Diirer to make the life of the Man of Sorrows the peculiar object of his study. He may be said to have reached in his delineations the deification of human suffering. There is one of his woodcuts which embraces this thought in a single figure. It is that which represents the Redeemer bearing the cross along the Dolorous Way, and fainting under the weight of His burden. Here we arrive at the grand truth, that divine great- ness can exist in union with the utmost human pain. THE INTELLECTUAL PREPARATION OF YOUTH. We see the portraiture of the Master, not merely in the innocence of infancy, but in the conscious frailty of manhood. Nor alone do we see the portraiture; we are compelled to adore it. We are constrained to bow down with reverence before the image of a Christ who has divested Himself of the awful majesty, and stooped to the servant’s form. We are arrested and riveted by a gaze whose claim to admiration is not the dazzling lustre which transcends humanity, but the very pain of humanity itself. We rise for the first time into perfect communion with the divine life; for we see that life for the first time depicted in its perfect communion with ourselves, touching our nature at its lowest base, meeting us in the utmost frailty of that weakest of all hours, the hour of death. The Master, fainting beneath the load of His burden, annuls the worship of a Christ who transcends the human, and dismisses the intermediate host of intercessors, by standing Himself on a level with the suffering soul. When Durer deals with the infancy of Jesus, he manifests the same absence of the preternatural. There is another of his woodcuts called the Repose in Egypt, where the Virgin Mother spins beside the cradle of the sleeping babe, around whom beautiful angels hover in the attitude of worship. The angelic worship expresses with sufficient strength the thought of the potential majesty, yet that majesty is not mani- fested in the infant; His attribute is the common attribute of infancy; He sleeps in human frailty. Nor does it seem to Durer that the spinning in which GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. the Virgin is engaged, is an occupation too un- poetic for the painter’s art. He knows that it should be the aim of all art to make all things beauti- ful, to lift the mean into the glorious, to turn the water into wine. In raising up the human, he raises up the earthly; in exalting the soul of man, he ennobles the commonplaces of man’s life. But in the works of Dtirer there is something more than imaginative portraiture; there is active longing. He represents here the spirit of his nation ; he is not content to paint, he desires to see his painting realized. He has expressed that desire in one of the most re- markable engravings on which the eye of man has ever gazed. It purports to be a description of Melan- choly, which it represents as a sorrowful winged woman; sorrowful amidst prosperity, and destitute amidst abundance. She stands surrounded by all the implements of the philosopher, the man of science, the artist, and the mechanician—the keys to all the avenues of nature. The book is there, as the repre- sentative of the treasures of literature. The chart is there, to indicate the triumphs of discovery. The lever, the plane, and the hammer are there, to suggest the progress of architecture. The crystal and the crucible are there, to tell of the researches of alchemy. And amidst them all the woman stands sorrowful still, with the great void in her heart speaking through her eyes. The picture is evidently allegorical. It is more than a mere representation of Melancholy, it has evidently a historical significance. The interpretation of the parable has been much disputed, yet it seems THE INTELLECTUAL PREPARATION OF YOUTH. to us that its meaning is not veiled. The winged woman is the spirit of mediaevalism; the wings express the spirituality, and the sex expresses the ideal type of the Catholic world. That world whose glory had been the exaltation of womanhood, stands in the bloom of her youth resplendent and dissatisfied. Around her are the trophies she has won by land and sea. All the beauties of art encircle her, all the triumphs of literature do her homage, all the voices of the newly-discovered lands ring her praises across the ocean. But her eyes rest not on the trophies, her ear listens not to the plaudits; her eye is far away in a future of her own dreams, her ear is strained to catch a music she has never heard. The past and the present have poured their treasures into her bosom; but where her heart is, there alone can her treasure be. And her heart is not here. It pants for holier joys, it throbs for diviner beauties, it vibrates with the anticipation of a more celestial life. Mediaevalism has exhausted all her pleasures, drained all her cups, admired all her pictures, traversed all her worlds, and the verdict she has written at the close, is the verdict of Israel’s ancient preacher: ‘Vanity of vanities; all is vanity.’ CHAPTER XXXVIII. THE DAWN OF A NEW DAY. E have heard a prolonged cry going up from the heart of mediaevalism; a cry which had been swelling through the years, and which had now at last become articulate in the voice of Albrecht Diirer. That cry was an unmistakeable revelation that the days of youth were beginning to melt into the age of manhood; that youthful independence had lost the confidence in its own powers, which for a time had blinded it to the coming future. The spirit of Christianity, emancipated from the authority of school, was longing for the guidance of a new authority; a power on which its helplessness might repose, and on whose- supporting arm it might pursue its journey. The sorrowful winged woman in the portrait of Albrecht Diirer, revealed to the world that a new age was coming, for her sorrow was the evi- dence of a spiritual enlargement, and her dissatisfaction was the prophecy of higher heights to gain. What, then, were those Objects for which the world waited? What were those wants, in the mediaeval heart, which all the mediaeval pleasures had failed to fill ? What were those unsatisfied desires which had THE DAWN OF A NEW DAY. 381 wrung forth that prolonged and bitter cry ? It seems to us that they may be summed up under three heads. There were three distinct objects which the world was waiting for. First of all, it wanted a great indulgence. It had been seeking to find rest in a series of succes- sive pardons. At the repetition of every flagrant sin, it had repaired to the hierarchy to obtain the assur- ance of forgiveness. But it was weary of going daily up to the mount of blessing. It was weary of those partial resting-places, where it could find repose only for a brief hour, and which at every fresh transgres- sion it must leave to seek a fresh pardon. It wanted a final act of indulgence; an indulgence which would not only forgive, but would forgive once for all, which would not only free from the punishment of the latest sin, but would liberate by one great pardon from the punishment of all sins—past, present, and future. The world desired to be forgiven, but it desired to be for- given no longer by instalments, but in full. It wanted a cancelling of the past, but it wanted that past to be cancelled no longer by the repetition of the words of mercy at each closing day, but by the proclamation of one great indulgence, which should cover all the days of life: ‘ Thy sins, which are many, are all for- given thee.’ But again, the world wanted more than a great indulgence; it desired a great sacrifice. It sought an indulgence which would pardon sin without making light of sin. The mediaeval world felt that a mere act of indemnity would not elevate its moral nature. It longed for such a forgiveness as would pardon the 382 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. offender, without diminishing the guilt of the offence. This was what the hierarchy had failed to do. They had told the suppliant that his sin was forgiven, but the comfort which they had imparted to him had been purchased at the price of blunting his moral sense. The world asked forgiveness; but it asked forgiveness not as a mere act of divine condescension, but as an act which was grounded on the fact of expiation. It desired to believe not merely that sin was pardoned, but that sin had received an atone- ment; an atonement which had fully revealed its heinousness and its horror, and had fully confessed the misery of its thrall. It sought to rest upon an indulgence which reposed on sacrifice; a sacrifice enfolding all ages and all climes; a sacrifice for uni- versal sin, ‘temporal or eternal, mortal or venial; a sacrifice which covered all donations, embraced all penances, and rendered the struggles of individual life requisite no more. But there was a third requirement of the mediaeval heart, and that the most important of all. It wanted a direct and immediate communion between the human and the divine. The great indulgence and the great sacrifice were only the preliminary steps to this highest good. The sacrifice was to blot out the terrors of a past which Seemed to cry for vengeance; the indul- gence was to grant forgiveness for a future which seemed filled with the clouds of impending wrath; but both were only steps leading to the temple, not the door of the temple itself. That door was the communion of the soul with God; the communion of THE DAWN OF A NEw DAY. 383 peace and joy which followed the removal of the enmity; and it was this that most of all the weary Church desired. To meet face to face with ‘the Eternal ; to be granted a direct approach into the holy of holies; to be suffered to pass by the intercessory host of angel and archangel, cherubim and seraphim, saint and martyr; to be allowed an entrance into the divine presence, unaccompanied even by the Virgin Mother, and without the need of being aided by her prayers; to stand at last on equal ground of communion with Him whose paradise had long been guarded by the flaming sword of judgment, was now the dearest desire of the heart of Christendom. It had toiled for it, it had longed for it, it had struggled for it; last of all, in the delineations of the canvas, it had sought to portray it, and the very portraiture of its fondly cherished vision was bringing more near the possibility of its fulfilment. The time, indeed, had now arrived when all these desires were about to be accomplished. The great indulgence, the great sacrifice, and the great com- munion, were each and all on the eve of proclamation. From land to land there was to spread the message of a forgiveness which included in its benevolent range all acts of sin that were, or are, or shall be. As the ground of that forgiveness, there was to be proclaimed a sacrifice commensurate with all time, which would prevent the sin-stained soul from asking indulgences any more. Finally, as the fruit of both the forgiveness and the sacrifice, humanity was to be invited into direct and immediate divine com- 384 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. munion,-—a communion unassisted by celestial spirits, unsupported by earthly intercessions, but resting on the union of the human soul with the human life that dwelt in the heart of God. We have said that the time had come for the accomplishment of these desires; in truth, their accom- plishment had already begun. That great movement which was to usher in the Church’s manhood was, unconsciously alike to Church and world, rising silently from the valleys. Like all great movements, it had dawned in the life of one individual soul. While Raphael and Michael Angelo were still in the days of their boyhood; while Albrecht Diirer was preparing in the stages of school-life to be in the world of art the greatest of religious reformers, there was born in the village of Eisleben a life whose work and destinies were to change the course of history, and impart a new impulse to the development of the human soul. On the 10th of November 1483, Martin Luther saw the light of that World which he was to guide into a light more resplendent still. It is beyond the limits we have assigned to this volume to trace the experience of the great reformer; the subject is too large to be entered upon with justice at so late'a stage. For the present, we must leave him in the dawn, trusting that hereafter we may be able to resume the history of the march of mind. Yet, standing as we are in the grey light of morning, we cannot but remark how marvellously the destinies of this man converged toward the accomplishment of his great mission. Luther was to be the founder of a new religious TIIE DAwN OF A NEW DAY. 38 5 world, and he who would attain that pre-eminence must find his preparation for it in a life of wide experiences. No man can be the centre of a world who has not within himself a meeting-place for all types of human character; no man can attract the common mind who has not within his soul something common to all minds. It is this extreme difficulty of finding a many-sided nature which has caused the number of world-reformers to be few. There have been multitudes who have made a figure in their age, few who can claim the suffrages of all ages ; multitudes who have been adored by their party, few who have been acknowledged as the benefactors of mankind. In this latter light, Martin Luther must be allowed to stand. His work went far beyond his party. He not only imparted a positive character to the life of Protestantism ; he brought a reforming influence over the very life of Catholicism. He forced the Catholic world to take notice of the moral elements it had neglected, and to strengthen the faith which was ready to vanish away. Luther’s Reformation, though it was distinctively Protestant, was in truth a reformation of all Europe, and it was so because Luther the reformer was himself a world-wide man. It is the unconscious preparation of his life for becoming the meeting-place of the nations, that causes us to marvel as we stand in the dawn. It would seem as if in that life were to be recapitulated once more all the stages through which the spirit of Christianity had already passed, in order that by the experience of all, it might be able to deal with all. We see the son of the poor miner, voL. II. 2 B 386 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. born in obscurity, bred in poverty, growing up amid the neglect of the surrounding world, and we are reminded of that early time when all Christianity was poor, despised, neglected. We see him in the school of Mansfeld, his self -will absolutely crushed beneath the cruel lash of a stern task- master, his days become a burden, and his nights a weariness, and We feel that here he is repeating the experience of mediaeval Christendom. We see him in the University of Erfurt, immersed in the studies of the schoolmen, and recapitulating the university-life of the whole Christian Spirit; its out- bursts of freedom, its struggles for emancipation, its weariness of the old, its efforts after the new, its doubts of all that once had been cherished truths, its straining to compensate for the weakness of religious life by a strong life of culture and refinement. Then we see that befalling him which had befallen the spirit of Christianity at large; dissatisfaction with all the efforts, inability to find rest in all the culture. We behold him, like the winged woman of Albrecht Diirer, throwing aside the works of the schoolmen and the memorials of classic literature, and seeking, as the Franciscans had done before, to reach a purer life by penance and abnegation. Once more, like the Christendom of the fourteenth century, he emerges from the cloister, and stands forth in the face of day, but, like that Christendom also, it is no longer as the pupil, but as one who aspires to be the teacher. In the University of Wittenberg, he repeats the experience of Wicliffe and of Huss; he arrests the THE DAWN OF A NEW DAY. 387 students by his boldness, and he holds them bound by the spell of his eloquence. Last of all, we find him at Rome, in the heart of the great renaissance, striving to preserve his reverence for the sacred city, in the vision of its frightful corruptions, and with all his veneration striving in vain. From that hour the life of Luther becomes identified with the religious life of Europe. Here, then, in the history of a single man, we have what may be called a microcosm of the whole history of Christianity, a repetition of the successive and varied stages through which the collective Church had to pass in the process of its development. And can we fail to perceive that this widely diffused experience inevitably gave to Luther a widely diffu- sive power? He sprang from the lowest ranks of society, and that alone placed him on vantage ground as a reformer. He spoke not, like Tauler, to the philosophers; he spoke not, like Savonarola, to the politicians; he spoke to the people, and the people heard him gladly. They knew his voice, and he knew their wants. He knew that, first of all, they wanted the one great indulgence and the one great sacrifice; and therefore, first of all, he proclaimed redemption by the cross. Yet Luther was more than the man of the people; he was the man of the univer- sities too. He had read much, and pondered more. His was no faith which believed on mere authority; he had a reason for the hope that was in him. If he held the beginning of religion to be the sense of sin forgiven, he held its joy and crown to be the '388 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. personal communion with the divine light. Tauler himself, in this respect, was not a greater mystic than he. Nor would Luther allow any man to lead him to the light. All the scepticism of the universities lingered in his nature; his own eyes must see, or his heart would not believe. But the wideness of Luther’s range did not end here. He was not only the popular preacher proclaiming man’s need of redemp- tion, he was not only the university professor asserting man’s right of private judgment; he was the social reformer aspiring to be the elevator and the renovator of human society. Catholicism had dealt with society in two ways: by caresses and by frowns. In the renaissance of France and Italy, it had pandered to its vices; in the rigid austerities of monasticism, it had sought to ignore its very existence. Luther repudiated both courses. He had stood in the streets of Rome, and he had recoiled with horror from the spectacle of a city given over to the worship of its own corruptions ; with a society thus constituted, his soul refused to have fellowship. But Luther would not therefore conclude that man ought to shun the Contact with his brother man. If he had seen the corruptions of Rome, he had also seen the corruptions of the Cloister. He had lived for three years in the isolation of the convent, striving to find rest, and struggling by forgetfulness of others to crucify the passions of his own nature. And he had found that experience of monasticism to be the experience of bitter failure. He had found that the concentration of thought upon himself had narrowed THE DAwN OF A NEw DAY. 389 his sympathies, and restrained the warm impulses of his heart ; that forgetfulness of the interests of others had rendered his very virtue a form of selfishness. Therefore Luther emerged from the convent resolved to battle through life with monasticism and monastic vows, resolved to defend and maintain man’s right to be a social being. He felt that the system which called itself Catholic, sacrificed the catholicity of human nature, presented to God the offering of a maimed and a mutilated humanity, and purchased the redemption of the human spirit by the captivity and the slavery of the human body and the outward life. Luther claimed for Christian manhood what manhood alone can claim—--the right of a perfect brotherhood, the unfettered intercourse of soul with soul, the privilege of appropriating the world, and making it. sublime. Thus marvellously were the events of this man’s life converging towards his great mission as the religious regenerator of Europe. But there was another side of the picture. All the time that the destinies of Luther were weaving for Europe, the destinies of Europe were equally weaving for Luther. The civilised world was gathering fast into unity. Its unity was essential to the success of any reforma- tion ; it was necessary that the blow which struck one part should reverberate over all. Accordingly, in preparation for a united manhood, Europe was rapidly becoming a politically united continent. Spain was expelling from her dominions those followers of the Crescent who long had held sway upon her soil. Germany was entering into a union 390 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. with Spain which was to blend together the most Catholic and the least Catholic of European lands. Italy was to find herself overshadowed by the Empire of Germany, incapable of self -action, and governed by imperial rule. France, before the united power of Spain, Italy, and Germany, was to sink for a time prostrate, and yield her king a captive. Nay. the new world itself—that world which Columbus had recently found—was to be partially overshadowed by the great German Empire. Spain was to enter Mexico and Peru with fire and sword, carrying desolation and horror into the heart of the trans-Atlantic world; a cruel, a bloody, and unhallowed warfare, yet a war- fare which was the source of much moral gain. The legions of Spain thought they were engaged on a mission only of conquest and rapine; they believed that when they had subjugated the new lands, and appropriated the new treasures, they had fulfilled that work which was assigned them to do. But in truth, unconsciously to themselves, there had been assigned to them a greater, a nobler, a more enduring work. While they imagined that they were merely over- powering the Mexican and Peruvian tribes, they were in reality stretching across the Atlantic an electric wire of sympathy, on which the current of the reformation- life would bound from the European to the American continent. Thus, in various forms and in diverse manners, by the power of the sword or by the force of political expediency, the nations of the earth were being drawn into one. The many families were becoming one family. Papal unity had fallen, and THE DAWN OF A NEW DAY. 391 with it the glory of Catholicism had passed away; but Protestant unity was rising, and its centre was the heart of Protestantism. It was around Germany that all the nations clustered; by a singular concurrence of circumstances, the land of Luther had become the focus of the earth. The throne of Charles v. was the political centre of the world. It prompted the counsels of Wolsey, the Prime Minister of England; it subjugated the imperious will of Francis the First of France; it dominated the fairest provinces of Italy; it held in absolute subjection Clement the Seventh of Rome; it stretched its empire over Spain, and, in enfolding Spain, it embraced an immense tract of the new world of America. When Luther proclaimed the German Reformation, he proclaimed the Reformation of the united earth. Thus we have brought the world to the very threshold of modern times. We have carried it to the verge of that boundary line which divides the medimval ages from those ages which we proudly call our own. Standing on the frontier between the old and the new, we see mediaevalism everywhere fading, its forms melting, its shadows vanishing, its life dying. Yet its death is no sudden convulsion, no violent explosion, no abrupt catastrophe ; it is a transition so ‘ silent and gentle, that we are not at once conscious of the change. The life of mediaevalism quits not the old tenement until it has caused that tenement to be swept and garnished and prepared for the entrance of the new and higher spirit. The past parts not in anger from that future which has met it face to face; 392 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. it is Content to be the forerunner of the greater’ light, and it makes haste to prepare its way. And now, ere the vision of that past has quite faded, let us cast back our eye once more over the long course through which we have travelled. We have been engaged in a lengthened pilgrimage. Has it led us to any per- manent resting-place ? Have we reached, as the result of this historical inquiry, the scientific determination of any eternal truth? Let us marshal once again the testimonies of the past. We have seen the mind of man sleeping profoundly in China, dreaming wildly in Brahma, reposing restlessly in Buddha, half-waking in Persia, fully conscious in Egypt, strongly active in Greece. Then we have seen the life of strength taken up into the life of sacrifice, the power to do transmuted into the power to suffer, and paganism fading in the light of Christianity. Christianity itself we have beheld rising from very small beginnings: first, the infant that could only wonder; next, at the Pentecostal outpouring, the child learning to speak; then, in the home associations of jerusalem, the Child learning to feel. By and by we have seen these home associations broken, and Christianity driven forth to seek an enlarged sympathy and a wider brotherhood. We have seen the child’s first guesses at truth, its first experiences of worldly Contact, and its first dreams of worldly ambition. We have marked how these dreams were disappointed in the very act of their fulfilment, and how the attainment of childhood’s goal was the death of childhood’s joy. Then we have followed the spirit of Christianity from the life of THE DAWN OF A NEW DAY. childhood into the life of school, have seen it first trained under the abbot, and afterwards under the rod of the Roman bishop. We have observed the gradual yet steady development of that scholastic life from its beginning in the representation of truth by images, to its glorious consummation in the incarnation of truth in art. We have marked how, at each successive stage of development, the school-life became more and more dissatisfied with school, and how, as the spirit grew larger than the form, the form became increasingly repulsive to the spirit. We have traced the violent revolutions by which that repulsiveness was manifested, from the image~controversy of the East to the rising of Wicliffe in the West. At last, in the Council of Constance, we have beheld the close of the school-life, and the entrance into the age of youth. We have followed Christianity through its youthful Utopian dreams, have seen the castles of its fancy and the lands of its imagination beyond the sea, and have heard the proud boast of independence by which it asserted its newly found freedom. And we have seen how the castles crumbled into ruins, we have marked how the lands faded into empty space, we have heard how the proud boast was transformed into a bitter cry—the cry of disappointed hope, the cry of unsatisfied desire. We have seen, finally, how the conscious helplessness of youth was to be the regenerative hour of manhood, joining together the long-separated elements of indi- vidual freedom and individual responsibility; the power of self-actionand the necessity to act for God. 394 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. Thus far we have journeyed, and we need journey no further in order to reach the great conclusion that this world is not a chaos, but a cosmos; not a series of chances, but a grand moral order. It is not that here and there in the history of the past we observe the outburst of great practical movements. It is not that in some apparently isolated events the historian can succeed in tracing a deep connection; Such facts would be powerfully suggestive, but they would not necessarily be persuasive. But here is a river of life, never diverted, never broken; a river sometimes corrupted in its waters by the soil it is passing through, sometimes retarded in its course by the artificial embankments raised by man, yet through all corruptions and through all retardations swelling surely onward to the mighty sea. The course of humanity has been an onward course. Individual men have gone back, individual nations have gone back, but humanity itself has never receded. And wheresoever Christianity has breathed, it has ac- celerated the movement of humanity. It has quickened the pulses of life, it has stimulated the incentives to thought, it has tuned the passions into peace, it has warmed the heart into brotherhood, it has fanned the imagination into genius, it has freshened the soul into purity. The progress of Christian Europe has been the progress of mind over matter. It has been the progress of intellect over force, of political right over arbitrary power, of human liberty over the chains of slavery, of moral law over social corruption, of order over anarchy, of enlightenment THE DAWN OF A NEW DAY. 395 over ignorance, of life over death. As we survey that spectacle of the past, we are impressed that the study of history is the strongest evidence for God. We hear no argument from design, but we feel the breath of the designer. We see the universal life moulding the individual lives, the one will dominating the many wills, the infinite wisdom utilizing the finite folly, the changeless truth permeating the restless error, the boundless beneficence bringing blessing out of all. We do not say with Leibnitz, ‘This is the best of possible worlds ;’ but we do say, that for such a world as this, the course of past development has been of all others the best. And what shall we say of the future ? We do not mean the future of the sixteenth century, but all the futures of all the centuries. Does this reflected light of the past cast any prophetic lustre upon the days to come? To us, indeed, it seems unquestionable that all our hope for the future must reside in the teachings of the past. There are days in the depth of winter, when the mid-day sun is hidden in folds of impene- trable gloom, but we do not therefore conclude that the sun will not rise on the morrow; we fearlessly repose in the uniform experience of nature, and our confidence in the future rests in our knowledge of the past. There are frequent fogs in the spiritual world, causing night where the eye expected noonday; hours of darkness, hours of coldness, hours that are impregnated with an unhealthy moral atmosphere. But we will not therefore conclude that the sun of human progress will appear no more; we will 396 GROWTH OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY. fearlessly repose in the uniform experience of mind. We trust the laws of physical nature when they tell us that that which was shall be, yet the laws of the human soul are at least as invariable as those of nature. Tracing these laws in the past, we find that the life of mind has been a life of progress. Have we any reason to believe that the course of the moral universe will be altered by a miracle, that thought will Cease to expand, that humanity will cease to grow? There have been those in our age, as in all ages, who have seen in the future only the blackness of desola- tion ; clouds without silver, nights without star, winters without prophecy of spring. We know not how much of that gloom may belong to the actual surroundings, we know not how much may have been lent to them by the melancholy eye of the beholder. Ours is a position in some respects analogous to that of the mediaeval world; the landmarks of the past are fading, the lights in the future are but dimly seen. Yet it is the study of the landmarks that helps us to wait for the light, and our highest’ hope is born of memory. In the view of that retrospect We cannot long despair. We may have moments of heart- sickness, when we look exclusively at the present hour; we may ‘have times of despondency, when we measure only what the eye can see. But, looking on the accumulated results of bygone ages as they lie open to the gaze of history, the scientific conclusion at which we must arrive is this, that the course of Christi— anity Shall be, as it has been, the path of a shining light, shining more and more unto the perfect day. INDEX. + ABELARD, Peter, ii. 87. Adonis, i. 34. ‘ Adoration of the Lamb,’ ii. 362. Adrian, i. 148. Alaric, the Goth, i. 276. Albertus Magnus, ii. 299. Albigenses, ii. 120, 134-145. Alchemy, ii. 299-302. Alcuin, i. 364; ii. 250. Alexander the Great, 1. 37. Alexander Severus, i. 179. Alexander 11., ii. 59. Alexander V., ii. 265. Alexander VI. , ii. 338. Alexandria, i. 201. , Church of, i. 110, 124-129. Alexandrian Clement, i. 7, I44. Alexandrian-library, Burning of, i. 341. Alexandrian school, ii. 191. Alfred the Great, i. 371 ; ii. 27. Andrea Orcagna, ii. 360. Angelo, Michael, ii. 364-370. Anselm, Archbishop, ii. 86. Antioch, Church of, 1. 205-209. Antoninus Pius, i. 148, I 59. Apollos, Party of, i. 108. Apostolic Constitutions, i. 182. Canons, i. 182. Aquinas, Thomas, ii. 300. Architecture, ii. 34. Arianism, i. 209. Arius, i. 209, 235-240. Arles, Council of, i. 300, 302. Armagh, Richard of, ii. 242. Arnold, Matthew, ii. 35. Arnolf, Archbishop, ii. 39. Artevelde, Jakob Von, ii. 241. Artillery, Introduction of, ii. 245. Astrology, ii. 217. Astronomy, ii. 216. Ptolemaic theory of, i. 326. Athanasius, i. 222, 234-240, 248. Athenagoras, i. 144. Augustine, i. 7, 66, I45, 250, 268, 285. -—, The monk, i. 311. Augustus, Philip, ii. 143. Aurelian, i. 179, 217. Aurelius, Marcus, i. 160. BACON, Roger, ii. 299. Barbarossa, Frederic, ii. 117. Barcochba, i. 124. Basil Valentine, ii. 300. Basilides, i. 133. Baur, i. 201. Becket of Canterbury, ii. 117. Bede, i. 362-364; ii. 250. Belisarius, i. 295. Bellini, Gian, ii. 362. Benedict of Nursia, i. 305. Benedictine monasteries, Foundation of, i. 303. Berengarius, ii. 58. Bernard of Clairvaux, ii. 86, 191. Bertram, ii. 20. Boccaccio, ii. 241, 256. Bolingbroke, i. 5. Bonaventura, ii. 191. Boniface VIIL, ii. 221-236. Bradwardine, ii. 242, 249. Brahm, i. 51. . Brahminism, i. 23-26. British feudalism, Decline of, ii. 92. Buddhism, i. 27-29, 145. ——-, Chinese, i. 2I. CABoT, Sebastian, ii. 305. Caedmon, i. 361; ii. 250. Caesar, Tiberius, i. 117. Caracalla, i. 179. Carlyle, i. 291; ii. 102. Carthage, Church of, i. 191. Celsus, Epicurean, i. 148. Cerinthus, i. 133. Charlemagne, i. 366-375; ii. 7-16. Charles V. of Germany, i. 367. mu, ii. 349. Chaucer, ii.. 256. China, i. 19, 23, 44. Christ, Party of, i. 108. Church and State, Earliest disruption between, ii. 61-65. Claudius of Turin, ii. 46, 126. Clement V., ii. 236. Clement VI.,. ii. 261. Clement of Rome, i. 116, 285. Clementine Homilies, i. 154-182. Clovis, i. 311. Coalitionists, i. 124. Columba, i. 311. Columbus, ii. 305. Confucius, i. 208. 398 INDEX. Constance, Council of, ii. 272-282, 332. Constantine, i. 208. Constantine, Copronymus, i. 357. Constantinople, i. 230; ii. 312-316. Constantius Chlorus, i. 223. Continental poetry, Birth of, ii. 82. Copernicus, i. 342. Corinth, Church of, i. 108. Crusaders, The, ii. 73-98. Cyprian, i. 179. DANTE, ii. 179-182, 222, 241, 256, 358. Dark Ages, The, ii. 23-50. Darwin, i. 20. Dean Milman, ii. 52-143. Dean Milner, i. 2 ; ii. 122. Dean Stanley, i. 351. Decian persecution, i. 179. Decius, i. 217. Diocletian, i. 217-224. Diognetus, Epistle to, i. 143. Dionysius, ii. 191. Diospolis, Synod of, i. 265. D'Ollinger, ii. 258. Dominic, ii. 152. Dominicans, ii. 162-164, 170—172. Domitian, i. 131, 147. Donatism, i. 264. Draper, i. 292; ii. 39. Duns Scotus, ii. 242. Diirer, Albrecht, ii. 376-379. EARL OF WARWICK, ii. 326. Easter, Observance of, i. 124. Ebionism, i. 124, 134. Eckart, ii. 192, 198, 211. Edward I. of England, ii. 224. Egbert, i. 371. Egypt. 1 I9, 34- Elixir of life, ii. 297. Emerson, ii. 14. England, ii. 324-331. English poetry, Birth of, i. 360. Ephesus, Council of, i. 322. Epiphanius, i. 198. Erasmus, i. 109. Erigena, i. 372; ii. 20, 191. Essenes, i. 62—65. Eusebius of Caesarea, i. 219-223, 235- 240, 288. Everlasting gospel, The, ii. 173. FENELON, ii. 52. Feudal system, The, ii. 18. Feudalism, ii. 326. Florence, ii. 178, 338. Foundling hospitals, Rise of, i. 299. Fra Angelico, ii. 362, ‘In France, ii. 331. Francis of Assisi, ii. 164-170, 354. Franciscans, ii. 164, 170-178. Frankfort, Council of, i. 372; ii. 7. Frederic 11. of Germany, ii. 143, 156- 158. Frederic 11. of Prussia, ii. 157. F roude, i. 291 ; ii. 328. GALERIUS, i. 224. Galileo, i. 342. G'alnsfleisch, ii. 310. Gebir, ii. 299. Geographical discovery, ii. 304. Geography, ii. 217. Gerhard, 1i. 174. Germany, ii. 335. Gerson, ii. 274. Gibbon, i. 8, 271. Giotto, ii. 182, 358. Giovanni, ii. 305. Gnosticism, i. 132-146, 164, 183. Goethe, ii. 294. Goths, i. 243. Greece, i. 19-38, 164, 183. Gregory X1., ii. 260. Grostete, ii. 242. Guiraut Riquier, ii. 82. Guiscard, Robert, ii. 70. Guizot, ii. 149. HARDWICKE, i. 5. Hegel, i. 20, 21. Heliogabalus, i. 179. Hellenism, i. 134.. Hengstenberg, i. 291. Henry 11. of England, ii. 117. Henry IV. of England, ii. 324. Henry IV. of Germany, ii. 65-70. Henry VIII., ii. 254. Heruli, i. 243. I Hildebrand, ii. 51-72. Holland, ii. 335. Hospitals, 97. IGNATIUS, Age of, i. 143. Images, i. 315-329. ‘ Imitation of Christ,’ ii. 192, 214. Incarnation, Doctrine of, i. 16. India, i. 19, 24-26. Infanticide, Abolition of, i. 298. Innocent 111.,ii. 142-145, 150, I 56, 160. Inquisition, The, ii. 149-155. Investiture, Ceremony of, ii. 62. Ire1gaeus, i. 6, 66, 156-159, 173,203, 2 5. Irene, i. 357; ii. 7.’ Isidore of Seville, ii. 20. INDEX. 399 Isidorian Decretals, ii. 20. Isis, i. 34. Italian art, Rise of, ii. 352. Italian renaissance, ii. 340-350. Italy, ii. 337. JAMEs, i. 285. jerome, i. 198; ii. 267-271, 274-279. jerusalem, Synod of, i. 264. jerusalem, Council of, i. 102-107. john, Life of, i. 6, 125-129. john of England, ii. 143. john Oliva, ii. 175. John Tauler, ii. 192, 198, 203, 211, 214. john Wicliffe, ii. 250-260, 264, 267. John Huss, ii. 264-271, 274, 279. john xx111., ii. 269, 273. judaic Christianity, i. 112-129. judaism, i. 31-34, 43. Judea, i. 36-39, 56. Julian, i. 244-249, 254. jury, Trial by, ii. 28. Justin, i. 253. justin Martyr, i. 6, 144, 285. justinian, i. 295-305. justiniani, ii. 315. KNIGHTS TEMPLARS, ii. 79. ——, Suppression of, 236-238. LAD1sLAUs, ii. 265. Lanfranc, ii. 58. Languedoc, ii. 134. ‘ Last judgment,’ ii. 360. Lateran, Council of, 1215, ii. 1 5 5. Laurence Coster, ii. 310. Leckie, i. 292. Leibnitz, ii. 395. Leo the Isaurian, i. 357. Leo 1v., i. 357. Leo, ii. 149. Leonardo da Vinci, ii. 364, 365. Llorente, ii. 149. Lollardism, Fall of, ii. 325. Lollards, ii. 255, 324 Louis the Meek, ii. 14. Lunatic asylums, Rise of, i. 346. Luther, i. 109; ii. 203-205, 285-293, 384-391- Lyell, Sir Charles, i. 20. Lyons, Poor men of, ii. 130. MACARIUS, i. 372. Macaulay,‘ i. 291 ; ii. 134. Magi, i. 86 Manichaeans, i. 256. Marcion, i. 133. Marcion, Followers of, i. 6. Mariner's compass, ii. 218. Mariolatry, i. 322-326. Martel, Charles, ii. 311. Martin V., ii. 274. Masaccio, ii. 362. Max Miiller, i. 81. Maxentius, i. 224-225. Maximian, i. 179, 224. Medici, The, ii. 338. Merovingian dynasty, Fall of, i. 336. Middle Ages, Church of, i. 141. Milan, Edict of, i. 267. Miracle plays, ii. 110. Mohammed, i. 330-346. Mohammed 11., ii. 313. ' M ohammedanism, i. 334-337. Monasteries, ii. 328-331. Monasticism, i. 249. Monnica, i. 253. Montanism, i. 161-172, 176-183. Montanus of Phrygia, i. 161. Muratori, ii. 38. Mysticism, ii. 194-216. NARsEs, i. 295. Neancler, i. 83. Neo-Platonism, Age of, i. 143. Nero, i. 119, 147, I60. Nestorians, ii. 40. Newton, 1. 342. Nice, Council of, i. 233, 237, 372; ii. 7. N icephorus, i. 358. Nominalists, ii. 104-107. North Africa, Church of, i. 7. Novatian, i. 191. N ovatus, i. 189. OCCAM, ii. 242. Orders of Chivalry, Rise of, ii. 78. Orientalism, i. 134. Origen, i. 144, 145, 198, 202, 285 ; u. 191. Orleans, Maid of, ii. 335. Osiris, i. 34. Otho 111., ii. 47. Otho the Great, ii. 33, 46, 47. PAPACY, Rise of the temporal, ii. 4. Paracelsus, ii. 350. Paris, University of, ii. 332. Parsism, i. 29-31, 46, 47, I 35. Pascasius Radbert, ii. 20. Patricius, i. 252. Paul, i. 6, 97-124, 285 ; ii. 1, 4, 74. , Party of, i. 108. Pelagianism, i. 264-266. Pentecost, i. 82-84. 413C) INDEX. Pepin, i. 366. Persia, i. 19, 51. Peter, i. 285. , Party of, i. 108. Petrarch, ii. 241, 256. Pharisees, i. 61-70. Philip the Arabian, i. 180. Philip ‘the Fair’ of France, ii. 224-241, 286. Philo, i. 38-40. Philosopher’s stone, ii. 296. Phoenicia, i. 34. ‘ Piers the Ploughman,’ ii. 252. Pisa, Council of, ii. 265. Pitt, William, ii. 60. Platonism, i. 48-51, 258. Praxeas, i. 141. Printing, Invention of, ii. 310. Provence, ii. 134. RANKE, ii. 149. Raphael, ii. 364-368, 370-374. Raymond Lully, ii. 300. Raymond of Toulouse, ii. 134. Realists, ii. 104-107. Recognitions, The, i. 153, 182. Religious scepticism, Birth of, ii. 84. Rheims, Synod of, ii. 39. Roman Empire, Desolation of, i. 281. Rome, Burning of, i. 118. Roses, Wars of the, ii. 325. Rouen, Council of, i. 299. Ruysbroek, ii. 192, 198, 211. SABELLIANISM, i. 209. Sadducees, i. 62-65. Saul of Tarsus, i. 174. Savonarola, ii. 342-350. Sbinko, Archbishop, ii. 269. Schelling, i. 18. Schlegel, i. 19. Schleiermacher, i. 291. Schola Palatina, i. 369. Scholasticism, i. 229; ii. 103. Secular education, Diffusion of, ii. 89. Sermon on the Mount, i. 44. Shiva, i. 51. - Sigismund of Germany, ii. 273. Spain, ii. 336. Sphinx, i. 34. St. john, Knights of, ii. 79. St. Mary, Teutonic Knights of, ii. 79. Stephen of Rome, i. 192-197, 265, 287. Stilicho, i. 276. Stoics, i. 49. Strauss, i. 201. Swero, ii. 143. Swevi, i. 243. Sylvester 11., ii. 47, 73. TAINE, M., ii. 100. Tatian, i. 6, 144. Tertullian, i. 7, 66, 173-178, 183, 203, 285. Teuton, i. 278. The ‘Black Death,’ ii. 248. Theatre, Rise of, ii. 109-111. Theodora, i. 358. Theophilus, i. 144. Thomas a Kempis, ii. 192, 216. Tindal, i. 5. Titian, ii. 364-366. Toulouse, Council of, 1229, ii. 155. Tours, Council of, ii. 57. Trajan, i. 148. Transubstantiation, Doctrine of, ii. 20, 57759- . . Trinity, Doctrine of, 1. 16, 50-52. Troubadours, The, ii. 82. Tiibingen, School of, i. 201. Tudors, The, ii. 326. Tyre, Council of, i. 240. ULLMANN, ii. 192, 216. Ulphilas, i. 244. Universities, Rise of, ii. 89. Urban 11., ii. 65. Urban VIL, ii. 261. VALENTINIAN, i. 278. Valentinus, i. 133. Valerian, i. 217. Valerian’s persecution, i. 195. Vandals, i. 243, 277. Van Eyck family, ii. 362. Vasco de Gama, ii. 305. Venice, ii. 113-117. Victor, i. 159. Vishnu, i. 51. WALDENSES, ii. 120-135, 289. Waldo, Peter, ii. 127-132. Wat Tyler, ii. 254. Western schism, ii. 261-264. William of Poitiers, ii. 82. Woman, Influence of, ii. 41-43, 80. ZOSIMUS, ii. 265, 266, 287. "/,.z;¥.9f/ Eff/EX.- lljlflllllll jumnml! '5 21a F 701 2f... .. , . a f 2... . . . .. 1).. , . a5..- (a... , , . .. {AAA _ _ >._.~.,. ./L . _ . v _ _ V1 . , _, , . . .. . 96111501.?“ . . . . . . 1A. . . lllllllu g I . ml a 9015 III! I! . Jar/1 Aiisi’efafwfl’fl’afi a w‘ , a)”. .. l ear,» .. A a . . . S . C _ . . . .1. .. . . . . . S .1 . . .. z. . .. , , f. I. . . . . . s. ., s. ; . 2. . . . . . , I? . w . I a . . . .. . . ... . i . . w. s. _. .. i. . . i . . . . . .. . . .. C . .. . J . . I .I .1... . .. . ... 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