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. WE have never perused a work of literature 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. 1300 pp. and in the bloodthirstiness of its captainswe 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 of Scotland with that of England, which in happier times has been the source of her glory and her strength, threw her back a century in the race of civilization and knowledge. 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 the munitions of war the enemies of our they lifted it in vain, for their dynasty pe- faith, and thus arm a Catholic priesthood rished in the wreck of the superstition which against a Protestant shrine, and marshal a they upheld. Under a Protestant race of wild population against the peace and liberkings, and a Protestant constitution, the ties of the empire. Had we at the helm of sceptres of England and Scotland have been State some modern Orpheus, who could welded into one. Their Churches have charm with his lyre of gold the denizens of flourished and grown together--the one the moral wilderness, or some Indian sage rich and powerful--the other humble and who could cajole the poison-tooth from the contented. Their literature and science- snake in the grass, we might expect by a their trade and their commerce-their arts stipendiary bribe to loose the Jesuit from his and their arms--have achieved throughout vows, or the priest from his allegiance; but the civilized world a glorious and imperish-history proclaims to us, by a handwriting on able 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 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 utterly irreconcilable.-With the faith of science it is at variance. To the spread of education and knowledge it is bitterly opposed. From the sage equally as from the novice it demands the secrets of the life and the heart; and over the domestic sanctuary, the seat of the purest and holiest of our affections, it has exercised, and insists upon exercising, the control of a parent, and it has wielded, and insists upon wielding, the sceptre of a god. Gathering these truths from the work before us, and entertaining the opinion which we do of its transcendent merits, we cannot but record our satisfaction at the rapid and extensive circulation which it has already obtained, and express the wish that it may adorn every library and enlighten every family in the kingdom. And notwithstanding the imperfections which in our eyes it bears, and the errors of opinion which to us it occasionally exhibits, and the hard judgments which it sometimes pronounces against truths which we accept and revere, we would yet wish to see it in an abridged form, diffusing through middle life its great truths and lessons, and we should not object to have it read in our schools, and studied in our universities, as the best history of our Revolution, and the safest expositor of our civil and religious liberties. does not himself hold, to descant freely and consistently on the events of other times, and to protect those stern decisions which he pronounces for posterity, from the taint of passing interests and contemporary feeling. Mr. Macaulay has, in our judgment, stood clear of this Scylla and Charybdis of history, and we feel assured that even his political adversaries will not venture to assert that he has chronicled the reign of James II. with the temper of a partisan, or sought to magnify his own political opinions by distorting the facts or suppressing the truths of history. The first volume of the work, which we shall now proceed to analyze, is divided into five chapters. In the first, Mr. Macaulay gives a condensed and elegant sketch of English history from the earliest times to the Revolution in 1660. In the second chapter, he details the leading events in the reign of Charles II. In the third, he describes the state of England at the accession of James II., treating of its statistics, its literature and science, its arts, its agriculture, manufactures and commerce, the state of its towns and villages, and the condition of its population; and in the remaining two chapters, he gives the history of the last of the Stuarts, which is continued and concluded in the five chapters of the second volume. The great event of the conversion of the As Mr. Macaulay's History of England is Anglo-Saxons to Christianity is justly reto be brought "down to a time which is garded by Mr. Macaulay as the "first of a within the memory of men still living," it will long series of salutary revolutions” which laid no doubt include the chronicle of the Great the foundation of that noble constitution by Revolution, which, at the close of the last which England has been distinguished from century, subverted European dynasties, and other nations. The predominance of the which, after being itself subverted, has re- sacerdotal over the civil power, which marked appeared with redoubled energy, threaten- this early period of our history, and which ing the extinction, or heralding the improve- was continued for a great length of time, he ment, of every political institution. The conceives to have been a real blessing to “a path of the historian will therefore lie among society sunk in ignorance, and ruled by mere thorns and quicksands, exposing him to the physical force." Viewing the power of priestassaults of vindictive factions-of men rush- craft as mental, and "that which naturally ing headlong to change, or checking the and properly belongs to intellectual superimarch of that great civilization which the ority," he pronounces it to be "nobler and highest oracles have taught us to anticipate. better than that which consists merely in The manner in which Mr. Macaulay has corporeal strength; and as the priests were traced his course through the intricacies of by far the wisest portion of society, he deour own revolutionary period is the best cides "that it was on the whole good that earnest of his future success; and though we they should be respected and obeyed, and sometimes start at what is perhaps only the that their dominion in the Dark Ages had shadow of secular leanings, when he refers been, in spite of many abuses, a legitimate to conflicting creeds, and treats of ecclesias- and a salutary guardianship." Even "the tical strife, we yet look foward with confi- spiritual supremacy arrogated by the Pope in dence, and even with delight to his future the Dark Ages is held to have been produclabors. It is difficult for a statesman em- tive of far more good than evil;" and Mr. broiled in the politics of his own day, and Macaulay reaches the climax of his admiration committed often to party opinions which he when he expresses his doubt whether a purer Although we regard these laudations of sacerdotal and papal supremacy, and of the pilgrimages, and sanctuaries, and crusades, and monastic institutions of the Middle Ages, as an oblation to the political liberalism of the hour, and as a stumbling-block at the very threshold of Mr. Macaulay's labors, we yet feel some difficulty in reducing such general assertions into a proposition which can be fairly analyzed. That the ascendency of mental power as a principle of government is superior to "that which consists merely in corporeal strength," or, as elsewhere expressed, to that which governs "by vigor of muscle and by audacity of spirit," is a truth too palpable to be denied. But when we express it in another form, and aver that the government of Popery, as exercised in the Middle Ages, was better than that of a purer faith, and better, too, than that of the muscular and audacious baron, who, in the same age, led his hereditary bondsmen to battle, there is not a Protestant versed in history that will not give it an indignant denial. The mental power to which we do homage in the statesman and lawgiver is essentially different from the mental power of the priest. The one is the efflatus of a god embodied in the sage to bless and elevate his species; the other the spirit of Belial displayed in fraud and imposture--in false legends and in lying miracles. Under the priestly sway, knowledge was placed in bond for the purpose of deception. The vicegerent of Heaven encouraged crime by absolving the criminal, and the moral and mental power which he thus wielded descended unimpaired to his successors, and is potently exercised at this moment over every kingdom in Christian Europe. A purer religion than this-the faith of Luther, or even the faith of Pascal and Arnaud, would doubtless have been a more efficient agent in the civilization of mankind. But even the audacious autocrat exercised a sway more humane and improving than that of the priests. He laid no embargo upon knowledge he put forth no claim to divine power, and he transmitted none to his race. If he fell in battle, a son or a chieftain less warlike than himself was not prevented by his caste from acquiring and diffusing a taste for the arts of peace, and from exercising a milder sway over his serfs. If he returned from conquest, he might import some new ideas from his enemies, or bring back some refined or intellectual captive, or introduce into his fastnesses some instrument or process of civilization. But if the audacious prince was a less humane and enlightened ruler than the priest if the prelate St. Dunstan was a nobler character than the warrior Penda, whence arose the formidable contrast? The priest himself was the cause. He it was that intercepted the rays of civilization and science, which Heaven was gradually shedding over our race. He it was that selfishly converged them into the gloomy crypt of his sanctuary, and dispensed them at an usurious interest in magic and in jugglery, to deceive and enslave mankind. There was indeed a species of learning which emanated from the hierarchy duty free. They not only tolerated but taught the botany of the holy thorn, the osteology of saintly vertebræ, the odontology of the Virgin, and the physiology of St. Januarius' blood; and every monastery and temple had its museum of crowns and vestments, of ropes and chains, of crucifixes and crosses, of teeth and toes, labelled in duplicates and triplicates to establish their mendacious legends. It was thus that knowledge nestled in the monasteries, and thus that science was contraband in the baronial hall. Did our narrow space permit us to continue the discussion of this subject, we would present it to our readers under another phase. We would direct their attention to the Chronicles of Arabia, and the noble institutions which, during the Dark Ages, sprang up under the religion of the Crescent. When a corrupt superstition, as Mr. Macaulay allows it to be, was blighting with its sirocco currents the green buds of secular knowledge, and imprisoning within their fruit-vessel the long ripened seeds of sacred truth, the Caliphs of the East, the depositaries of physical force, and the heroes of many battles, were introducing among the ferocious Saracens the elements of art and science, and establishing schools and academies for the instruction of the children of the Prophet. A Christian physician, unfettered by Mohamedan tests, presided over the academy of Khorasan, composed of men of all countries and creeds. The orthodox Mussulmans indeed murmured at the liberality of their princes, but the Arabian youth resorted to the gymnasium, and neither his academies nor his colleges were denounced as godless. Such were the labors of Almamon. With a vigor of muscle, and an audacity of spirit" not inferior to that of any of the captains of his age, he drew his sword against his enemies, but he returned it to its scabbard, more eager than before for the instruction and civilization of his subjects. As if conscious of the weakness of his position, Mr. Macaulay re-states his heresy with modifying expressions, and contents himself with the affirmation, "that that superstition (namely, the Catholic) cannot be regarded as "unmixedly noxious" which creates an aristocracy altogether independent of race, and compels the hereditary master to kneel before the spiritual tribunal of the hereditary bondsman." To the proposition in this form we willingly assent. There is no superstition unmixedly noxious--no institution, either social or political, in which something innocuous may not be found. Even in slavery, the climax of institutional baseness, we may contrast the African in chains, braving the horrors of the middle passage, with the slave spending the rest of his life under the roof of a kind and even a Christian master. Among the causes by which England was, at an early period, advantageously distinguished from most of the neighboring countries, Mr. Macaulay, in a very interesting pasage, mentions the relation in which the nobility stood to the commonalty : -- "There was," he says, "a strong hereditary aristocracy, but it was of all hereditary aristocracies the least insolent and exclusive. It had none of the invidious character of a caste. It was con * * * | sult a class into which his own children must de- After briefly referring to the government of the Plantagenets and Tudors, Mr. Macaulay treats of the Reformation and its consequences. He finds it difficult to say whether England owes more to the Roman Catholic religion or to the Reformation, and yet he admits that, "for political and intellectual freedom, and for all the blessings which political and intellectual freedom have brought stantly receiving members from the people, and in their train, she is chiefly indebted to the constantly sending down members to mingle with great rebellions of the Laity against the the people. Any gentleman might become a Triesthood." The origin and peculiar charpeer. The younger son of a peer was but a gen-acter of the English Church, and the relatleman. Grandsons of peers yielded precedence to newly made knights. The dignity of knighthood was not beyond the reach of any man who could by diligence and thrift realize a good estate, or who could attract notice by his valor in a battle or a siege. It was regarded as no disparagement for the daughter of a duke, nay, of a royal duke, to espouse a distinguished commoner. *** Good blood, indeed, was held in high respect; but between good blood and the privileges of the peerage, there was most fortunately for our country no necessary connexion. Pedigrees as long, and scutcheons as old, were to be found out of the House of Lords as in it. There were new men who bore the highest titles. There were untitled men well known to have been descended from knights who had broken the Saxon ranks at Hast-mined that they should be persecuted. Persecuings, and scaled the walls of Jerusalem. ** There was, therefore, here no line like that which in some other countries divided the patrician from the plebeian. The yeoman was not inclined to murmur at dignities to which his own children might rise. The grandee was not inclined to in * tion in which it stood to the State, next passes under review. He points out the advantages which the Crown derived from an establishment which inculcated the doctrine of passive obedience, and describes the indignation of the Puritans when they saw "an institution younger by many years than themselves, and which had under their own eyes gradually received its form from the passions and interests of a Court, begin to mimic the lofty style of Rome." "Since these men," (the Puritans,) says Mr. Macaulay, " could not be convinced, it was deter tion produced its natural effects upon them. It found them a sect; it made them a faction. To their hatred of the Church was now added hatred of the Crown. The two sentiments were intermingled, and each embittered the other. The opinions of the Puritan concerning the relation of |