Зображення сторінки
PDF
ePub

They first arose in Venice and Florence, the great industrial centres of the middle ages; and they arose from the increase of industry and its concurrent division of employments. Moreover, the industrial element is democratic. It brings the nation-the peopleupon the stage, where, formerly, a few privileged individuals strutted and declaimed. It

was the industrial element which first emancipated the masses from slavery and servage. It has now risen to such a height that, instead of suffering the nation to be ruled according to the whims of a few captains and chiefs, it has taken the government very much into its own hands. An army does not govern: it is the hired servant of the nation. Great warriors are not our leaders. Men who have led victorious armies, and extended our empire, have not more weight in the affairs of the nation than a Manchester manufacturer.

"It is remarkable that the two greatest and most salutary social revolutions which have taken place in England, that revolution which, in the thirteenth century, put an end to the tyranny of nation over nation, and that revolution which, a few generations later, put an end to the property effected. They struck contemporary observers of man in man, were silently and imperceptibly with no surprise, and have received from historians a very scanty measure of attention. They were brought about neither by legislative regulation nor by physical force. Moral causes noiselessly effaced, first the distinction between Norman and Saxon, and then the distinction between master and slave. None can venture to fix the

precise moment at which either distinction ceased. Some faint traces of the old Norman feeling might, perhaps, have been found late in the fourteenth century. Some faint traces of the institution of villenage were detected by the curious so late as the days of the Stuarts; nor has that institution ever, to this hour, been abolished by

statute.

"It would be most unjust not to acknowledge There is one great influence traceable to that the chief agent in these two great deliverthe extinction of the military spirit as the ances was religion; and it may, perhaps, be preponderating element of society, which it doubted, whether a purer religion might not have would take us some pages to exhibit in full been found a less efficient agent. The benevoforce, and we can only therefore give a pass-lent spirit of the Christian morality is undoubtedly ing indication of it. The preponderance of the industrial spirit has powerfully accelerated our advance in civilization, by the development of our social tendencies, and by the subjugation of those more animal and in stinctive tendencies which created and fostered the military spirit.

We must not be led into an essay, though the subject demands one. The observations already made will be sufficient for our present purpose, which is to point out a serious deficiency in Macaulay's history. Indeed, one may say, that what is called the philosophy of history has little troubled Macaulay; neither the temper of his mind, nor the direction of his studies have been such as to lead him to probe deep beneath the surface of events. History is to him a subject for an artist, not for a philosopher. Rightly considered, it is a subject for both, and the historian should possess the deep insight of the philosopher no less than the cunning hand of the artist. This is, perhaps, an ideal we shall not see realized. But thus much may confidently be asserted, that the story of a nation's life is incomplete if it omit any vital element; and the industrial element is not only vital, it is one of the most powerful of those which have created our history. Macaulay has not seen its significance, or seeing it, has omitted to proclaim it. He is only struck by the abolition of slavery, which he attributes to the Church.

adverse to distinctions of caste. But to the Church of Rome such distinctions are peculiarly odious, for they are incompatible with other distinctions which are essential to her system. She ascribes to every priest a mysterious dignity which entitles him to the reverence of every layman; and she does not consider any man as disqualified, by reason of his nation or of his family, sacerdotal character, however erroneous they may for the priesthood. Her doctrines respecting the be, have repeatedly mitigated some of the worst evils which can afflict society. That superstition cannot be regarded as unmixedly noxious which, in regions cursed by the tyranny of race over race, creates an aristocracy altogether independent of race, inverts the relation between the oppressor and the oppressed, and compels the hereditary the hereditary bondman. To this day, in some master to kneel before the spiritual tribunal of countries where negro slavery exists, Popery appears in advantageous contrast to other forms of Christianity. It is notorious that the antipathy between the European and African races is by no means so strong at Rio Janeiro as at Washing.

ton.

In our own country, this peculiarity of the Roman Catholic system produced, during the middle ages, many salutary effects. It is true that, shortly after the battle of Hastings, Saxon prelates and abbots were violently deposed, and

that ecclesiastical adventurers from the Continent were intruded by hundreds into lucrative benefices. Yet even these pious divines of Norman blood raised their voices against such a violation of the constitution of the Church, refused to ac

cept mitres from the hands of the Conqueror, and charged him, on the peril of his soul, not to forget that the vanquished islanders were his fellow Christians. The first protector whom the Eng

lish found among the dominant caste, was Archhishop Anselm. At a time when the English name was a reproach, and when all the civil and military dignities of the kingdom were supposed to belong exclusively to the countrymen of the Conqueror, the despised race learned, with transports of delight, that one of themselves, Nicholas Breakspear, had been elevated to the papal throne, and held out his foot to be kissed by ambassadors sprung from the noblest houses of Normandy. It was a national as well as a religious feeling that drew great multitudes to the shrine of Becket, the first Englishman who, since the Conquest, had been terrible to the foreign tyrants. A successor of Becket was foremost among those who obtained that charter which secured at once the privileges of the Norman barons and the Saxon yeomanry. How great a part the Catholic ecclesiastics subsequently had in the abolition of villenage we learn from the unexceptionable testimony of Sir Thomas Smith, one of the ablest Protestant councillors of Elizabeth. When the dying slaveholder asked for the last sacrament, his spiritual attendants regularly adjured him, as he loved his soul, to emancipate his brethren for whom Christ had died. So successfully had the church used her formidable machinery, that, before the Reformation came, she had enfranchised almost all the bondmen in the kingdom except her own, who, to do her justice, seem to have been very tenderly

treated.

66

There can be no doubt that, when these two great revolutions had been effected, our forefathers were by far the best governed people in Europe. During three hundred years the social system had been in a constant course of improvement. Under the first Plantagenets there had been barons able to bid defiance to the sovereign, and peasants degraded to the level of the swine and oxen which they tended. The exorbitant power of the baron had been gradually reduced. The condition of the peasant had been gradually elevated. Between the aristocracy and the working people had sprung up a middle class, agricultural and commercial. There was still, it may be, more inequality than is favorable to the happiness and virtue of our species; but no man was altogether above the restraints of law; and no man was altogether below its protection."

This passage is sufficient to convince us that the writer has not speculated much upon the under-currents of history, or he would scarcely have attributed to the Church the amount of influence he there speaks of. That the church was a powerful agent is incontestable; that her doctrines are opposed to slavery is no less so. But there is no fact more certain than that Christianity as a doctrine, or the Church as an establishment, could not, and did not abolish slavery in early times, nor has it succeeded in abolishing slavery even in our own times. It has done its part, and done it well, but it has been by means of that great agent, which

all the Greek philosophers would have pronounced impossible, and which the early Fathers would have pronounced indefinitely distant-namely, the industrial element.

We have no more objections to make to this history. We read it with exquisite pleasure, and have meditated on it with profit. Many new lights have been thrown upon old questions, and the whole story has become clearer. The impartiality of a Hallam must not be looked for; and yet one must say that, on the whole, impartiality has been well preserved. In ecclesiastical matters this is a peculiar merit, for theological questions have in all times been firebrands. He seems to us to have stated the case with great fairness towards all parties; it is quite evident that he has no partisanship. All parties will, we suppose, be irritated at this tolerance. Here is a striking picture of the composition of the Church of England—a picture for which he must expect some illwill:

"As the government needed the support of the Protestants, so the Protestants needed the protection of the government. Much was therefore and the fruit of that union was the Church of given up on both sides; an union was effected; England.

"To the peculiarities of this great institution, and to the strong passions which it has called forth in the minds both of friends and of enemies, are to be attributed many of the most important events which have, since the Reformation, taken place in our country; nor can the secular history of England be at all understood by us, unless we study it in constant connection with the history of her ecclesiastical polity. The man who took the chief part in settling the conditions of the alliance which produced the Anglican church was Thomas Cranmer. He was the representative of both the parties which at that time needed each other's assistance. He was at once a divine and a states

man.

In his character of divine, he was perfectly ready to go as far in the way of change as any Swiss or Scottish reformer. In his character of statesman he was desirous to preserve that organization which had, during many ages, admirably served the purposes of the bishops of Rome, and might be expected now to serve equally well the purposes of the English kings and of their minis

ters.

His temper and his understanding eminently fitted him to act as a mediator. Saintly in his professions, unscrupulous in his dealings, zealous for nothing, bold in speculation, a coward and a time-server in action, a placable enemy and a lukewarm friend; he was in every way qualified religious and the worldly enemies of Popery. to arrange the terms of the coalition between the

[ocr errors]

To this day the constitution, the doctrines, and the services of the Church, retain the visible marks of the compromise from which she sprang. She occupies a middle position between the

churches of Rome and Geneva. Her doctrinal | to the horror of weak minds, the robe of white confessions and discourses composed by Protest- linen, which typified the purity which belonged to ants, set forth principles of theology in which her as the mystical spouse of Christ. Discarding Calvin or Knox would have found scarcely a word a crowd of pantomimic gestures which, in the to disapprove. Her prayers and thanksgivings, Roman Catholic worship, are substituted for inderived from the ancient liturgies, are very gene- telligible words, she yet shocked many rigid Prorally such, that Bishop Fisher or Cardinal Pole testants by marking the infant just sprinkled from might have heartily joined in them. A controver- the font with the sign of the cross. The Roman sialist who puts an Arminian sense on her arti- Catholic addressed his prayers to a multitude of cles and homilies, will be pronounced by candid saints, among whom were numbered many men men to be as unreasonable as a controversialist of doubtful, and some of hateful, character. The who denies that the doctrine of baptismal regene- Puritan refused the addition of saint even to the ration can be discovered in her liturgy. apostle of the Gentiles, and to the disciple whom Jesus loved. The Church of England, though she asked for the intercession of no created being, still set apart days for the commemoration of some who had done and suffered great things for the faith. She retained confirmation and ordination as edifying rites, but she degraded them from the rank of sacraments. Thrift was no part of her system. Yet she gently invited the dying penitent to confess his sins to a divine, and empowered her ministers to soothe the departing soul by an absolution, which breathes the very spirit of the old religion. In general, it may be said, that she appeals more to the understanding, and less to the senses and the imagination, than the Church of Rome-and that she appeals less to the understanding, and more to the senses and imagination, than the Protestant churches of Scotland, France, and Switzerland."

"The Church of Rome held that episcopacy was of divine institution, and that certain supernatural graces of a high order had been transmitted by the imposition of hands through fifty generations, from the eleven who received their commission on the Galilean mount, to the bishops who met at Trent. A large body of Protestants, on the other hand, regarded prelacy as positively unlawful, and persuaded themselves that they found a very different form of ecclesiastical government prescribed in Scripture. The founders of the Anglican Church took a middle course. They retained episcopacy; but they did not declare it to be an institution essential to the welfare of a Christian society, or to the efficacy of the sacraments. Cranmer, indeed, plainly avowed his conviction that, in the primitive times, there was no distinction between bishops and priests, and that the laying on of hands was altogether

unnecessary.

In closing our notice of this work, let us "Among the Presbyterians, the conduct of not omit to mention the decided position its public worship is, to a great extent, left to the author takes up against the grumblers who minister. Their prayers, therefore, are not exactly the same in any two assemblies on the same laud the days that are gone, and see only day, or on any two days in the same assembly. In degeneracy and misery in the present. These one parish they are fervent, eloquent, and full of grumblers are not unhappily confined to the meaning. In the next parish they may be lan- twaddlers who provoked the scorn of Horaguid or absurd. The priests of the Roman Cath- tius Flaccus. When such men as Carlyle olic church, on the other hand, have, during many denounce the present as the age of cant, as a generations, daily chaunted the same ancient conmiserable time, in which all sense of truth, , of fessions, supplications, and thanksgivings, in India and Lithuania, in Ireland and Peru. The morality, and of spiritual supremacy is exservice, being in a dead language, is intelligible tinct, and "flunkeyism," "egotism," and only to the learned; and the great majority of the "shams" fill men's souls, it is worth while to congregation may be said to assist as spectators rise up against the old dogma, and to test it rather than auditors. Here, again, the Church of by an examination of the past. Macaulay's England took a middle course. She copied the volumes form an ample refutation; and he Roman Catholic forms of prayer, but translated them into the vulgar tongue, and invited the illit- has in three or four places admirably vindierate multitude to join its voice to that of the min-cated the character of the present. We

ister.

"In every part of her system the same policy may be traced. Utterly rejecting the doctrine of transubstantiation, and condemning as idolatrous all adoration paid to the Sacramental bread and wine, she yet, to the disgust of the Puritan, required her children to receive the memorials of divine love, meekly kneeling upon their knees. Discarding many rich vestments which surrounded the altars of the ancient faith, she yet retained,

would especially direct attention to pages 424, 425, and 426, of the first volume; indeed, to the whole of that chapter.

And having applauded him for the spirit of his work, we have only to declare our conviction, that with all its faults it will become an English classic, and to express a desire for the speedy publication of the remainder. |

From the North British Review.

MACAULAY'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND.

The History of England, from the Accession of James II. By THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY. In 2 vols. London, 1849. 1300 pp.

We have never perused a work of litera- | ture or science, or even one of fiction, with such an intense interest as that with which we have devoured the two remarkable volumes now before us. We have cheated our mind of its usual food, and our body of its usual rest, in order to grasp, by one mental effort, the great truths which they teach, and imbibe the noble lessons which they convey. Were we among the personal friends of Mr. Macaulay, or did we adopt the latitudinarian views of religious truth which he has presented to us in all the fascination of language and of sentiment, we might have suspected that our judgment was partial, and our admiration extravagant; but, though our Presbyterian feelings have been often offended, and our most venerated martyrs but slightly honored, and our national creed not unfrequently reviled, yet these penumbral spots disappear, while we study in his bright and eloquent pages the vindication of our country's liberties, the character and the fate of the sages who asserted them,—and the righteous but terrible doom of the Princes from whom they were wrung.

and in the bloodthirstiness of its captains— we see the germ of that revolutionary tempest which swept into one irresistible tide the otherwise conflicting elements of society. The Giant of Reaction, in his most grim and savage form, summoned a patient and oppressed people to revolt, and with its scorpion lash hurried one sovereign to the scaffold, and another into exile.

But while we shudder over the recitals in which these crimes are emblazoned, and through which our liberties were secured, the mind searches for some powerful principle of action to which they can be referred. Why was the prince perfidious, the judge sanguinary, and the priest corrupt? It was because an idolatrous superstition reigned in Christendom-irritated at the progress of Protestant truth-inculcating the heresy of passive obedience to kings-exercising an authority over the souls and bodies of menusurping the sceptre, and assuming the ermine of the Church's Head-sealing the ark of divine truth, and closing or poisoning the fountains of education and knowledge. In the lap of this superstition even Protestant There is no period of the history of Eng- England slumbered. Truth, secular and diland in which the events are so closely re- vine, had indeed begun to throw its mingled lated to those of the present day as the few radiance among the ignorant and immoral years of oppression and judicial murder which masses of English life. It had long before constitute the reign of James II. In watch- gilded and braced the Scottish mind, and ing at present the revival of Popery, and in raised the Scottish heart to a sense of its resisting its insidious approach, we must duties and its wrongs. The noble doctrines study its spirit and its power previous to the of the school of Calvin, which Scripture Revolution; and in contemplating our domes- taught and philosophy confirmed, had been tic disturbances, and the political convulsions accepted as the creed of Presbytery, and which are now shaking the civilized world, formed the basis of its simple discipline and we may discover their cause and their cure worship. Through the unity and power of by a careful study of Mr. Macaulay's vol- her faith, and the indomitable courage of her umes. In the arbitrary rule of the House of people, the Church of our fathers would have Stuart-in the perfidy and immorality of its maintained her ground against all the power princes-in the bigotry and licentiousness of of the Papacy, if wielded only by her doits priests—in the venality of its statesmen-mestic princes; but the Union of the Crown

[merged small][ocr errors]

up in rank luxuriance-now budding under the surplice-now bearing fruit under the mitre. The breath of a bigoted minister, or the fiat of an unprincipled monarch, is alone wanting to plant the poison-tree in our land, and renew the battle of faith which was waged and won by our fathers.

It is not probable that such a direct agency will be employed, but there are crooked lines of policy by which treason finds an easier and a quicker path to its crimes. There may be a minister, and there may be a parliament, so blind to religious truth, so ignorant of the lessons which history has read to them, and so reckless of the temporal and spiritual in

A despicable king, in carrying off its Crown, forgot his duty to the land which gave him birth, striving to overturn its bloodcemented Church, and launching against its priesthood and its people the formidable power of his double sovereignty. Her humble temple fell beneath the sword of the tyrant, but only to rise again with a nobler pediment and a loftier peristyle. The same godless princes who had desecrated our altars and slain our martyrs lifted their blood-terests which they control, as to supply with stained hand against the Sister Church; but they lifted it in vain, for their dynasty perished in the wreck of the superstition which they upheld. Under a Protestant race of kings, and a Protestant constitution, the sceptres of England and Scotland have been welded into one. Their Churches have flourished and grown together--the one rich and powerful-the other humble and contented. Their literature and sciencetheir trade and their commerce-their arts and their arms-have achieved throughout the civilized world a glorious and imperishable name. We have now nothing to fear from perfidious and criminal sovereigns, from unprincipled statesmen, from venal judges, or from sanguinary chiefs. We have nothing to fear from political turbulence. The progressive reform of our institutions, and their gradual accommodation to the ever-varying necessities of man, and the ever-changing phases of social life, can always be secured by the moral energy of an educated and religious people. We have still less to fear from foreign invasion. The diffusion of knowledge, and the local approximation and mutual interests of nations, have exorcised the spirit of war; and should it reappear, with its iron vizor and its bloody drapery, we have bulwarks of steel and of oak that may defy the hostile levies of the world.

But we

have much to fear from that gigantic superstition which has so often erected the stake and the scaffold in our land, and which is again girding itself for the recovery of its power. Crowds of its devotees have been long stationing themselves in our towns and villages. Idolatrous altars are rising thick around us. The Upas seeds of Papal error, long concealed in the rubrics and liturgies of a neighboring Church, have already begun to germinate-now hiding their blanched vegetation from the eye of day-now rising

the munitions of war the enemies of our faith, and thus arm a Catholic priesthood against a Protestant shrine, and marshal a wild population against the peace and liberties of the empire. Had we at the helm of State some modern Orpheus, who could charm with his lyre of gold the denizens of the moral wilderness, or some Indian sage who could cajole the poison-tooth from the snake in the grass, we might expect by a stipendiary bribe to loose the Jesuit from his vows, or the priest from his allegiance; but history proclaims to us, by a handwriting on the wall, what the experience of the nation confirms, that every concession which truth makes to error is but a new buttress to support it, and that every shackle which toleration strikes from fanaticism, adds but to its virulence and power. To our Roman Catholic brethren we would cheerfully extend every right and privilege which we ourselves enjoy-to every civil and military office we would admit them-with every honorable distinction we would adorn them. Whatever, indeed, be his creed, we would welcome the wise man to our board, and we would clasp the good man to our bosom-some modern Augustine if he exists-some living Pascal if he is to be found-but we would never consent, even under the tortureboot of James II., to pay out of the hard earnings of Protestant toil the stipend of a Catholic priest, or build his superstitious altar, or purchase the relics of his idolatry.

We have no desire to support these views by any arguments of our own. We are content to refer our readers to the truth-speaking and heart-stirring pages of Mr. Macaulay. In his history of James II., every fact has but one meaning, every event but one tongue, and every mystery but one interpretation. We here learn that with civil liberty Popery cannot co-exist.-With Scripture truth it is

« НазадПродовжити »