The Press. — London, England, 1854-04-08 00:00:00

•RWM. w - rr - . the Western Church was the practical one, on which the Bast looked almost with indifference, the origin and motive p r inciple of human action—grace and free will. T'nur, from Augustine to Luther and Jansennur, was the . interminab le, still r eviving problem. Latin Christian literature, like Greek, might have seemed already to have passed its meridian after Tertullian, Cyprian, Ambrose, and, high above all, Augustine. The age of true Latin poetry, no doubt, had long been over ; the imaginative in Christianity could only find its expression to some extent in the legend and in the ritual; but, except in a very few hymns, it was not till out of the wedlock of Latin with the Northern tongues, not till after new languages had been born in the freshness of youth, that there were great Christian poets ; poets not merely writing on religious subjects, but instinct with the religious life of Christianity,—Dante, Ariosto, Tasso, Shakspeare, Milton, Calderon, Schiller. But not merely did Latin theology expand into another vast and teeming period, that of the Schoolmen, culminating in Aquinas ; but Latin being the common language, the clergy the only learned body throughout Europe, it was that of law, in both its branches; of science, of philosophy, even of history; of letters; in short, of civilisation. Latin Christianity, when her time was come, had her great sera of art, not only as the preserver of the traditions of Greek and Roman skill in architecture, and some of the technical operations in sculpture and painting, but original and creative. It was art comprehending architecture, painting, sculpture, and music, Christian in its fullest sense, as devoted entirely to Christian uses, expressive of Christian sentiments, arising out of and kindling in congenial spirits Christian thought and feeling. Such is the theme of his present labour — such is the fitting prelude to his profound and deeply-interesting performance. Nor shall we omit the passage in the introduction in which he sketches the Teutonic Christianity that is to form the subject of his future continua tion : Latin Christianity maintained its unshaken dominion until, what I venture to call, Teutonic Christianity, aided by the invention of paper and of printing, asserted its independence, threw off the great mass of traditionary religion, and out of the Bible summoned forth a more simple faith, which seized at once on the reason, on the conscience, and on the passions of men. This faith, with a less perfectly organised outward system, has exercised a more profound moral control, through the sense of strictly personal responsibility. Christianity became a vast influence working irregularly on individual minds, rather than a great social system, coerced by a central supremacy, by an all-embracing spiritual control, and held together by rigid usage, or by outward signs of common citizenship. Its multiplicity and variety, rather than its unity, was the manifestation of its life ; or rather its unity lay deeper in its being, and consisted more in intellectualsympathies, in affinities of thought and feeling, of principles and motives, in a more remote or rather untraceable kindred through the common Father and common Saviour. Ceremonial uniformity seemed to retire into subordinate importance and estimation. Books gradually became, as far as the instruction of the human race, a co-ordinate priesthood No longer rare, costly, inaccessible, or unintelligible, they descended to classes which they had never before ap proached. Eloquence or argument, instead of expiring on the ears of an entranced but limited auditory,addressed mankind at large, flew through kingdoms, crossed seas, perpetuated and promulgated themselves Wan incalculable extent. Individual men could not but be working out in their own studies, in their own chambers, in their own minds, the great problems of faith. The primal records of Christianity, in a narrow compass, passed into all the vernacular languages of the world, where they could not be followed by the vast, scattered, and ambiguous volumes of tradition. The clergy became less and less a separate body (the awakened conscience of men refused to be con tent with vicarious religion through them) ; they ceased to be the sole arbiters of man's destiny in another life : they sank back into society, to be distinguished only as the models and promoters of moral and religions virtue, and so of order, happiness, peace, and the hope of immortality. They derived their influence less from a traditionary divine commission, or vested authority, than from their individual virtue, knowledge, and earnest, if less authoritative, inculcation of divine truth. Monasticism was rejected as alien to the primal religion of the Gospel; the fitmily life, the life of the Christian family, resumed its place as the highest state of Christian grace and perfec tion. This progressive development of Christianity seems the inevitable consequence of man's progress in know ledge, and in the more general dissemination of that knowledge. Human thought is almost compelled to assert, and cannot help asserting, its original freedom. And as that progress is manifestly a law of human nature, proceeding from the divine Author of our being, this self adaptation of the one true religion to that progress must have the divine sanction, and may be supposed, without presumption, to have been contemplated in the counsels of Infinite Wisdom. The full and more explicit expansion of these views on this Avatar of Teutonic Christianity must await its proper place at the close of our history. There is felicity of style in the foregoing remarks ; but some of our readers, trained in a less modern school of expression, will see something faulty in the indeterminate juxta position of "original freedom" and "progress" along with a fixed and positive revelation. A note highly characteristic of the Dean of St. Paul's peculiar manner is subjoined to the passage : It is obvious that I use Christianity, and indeed Teutonic Christianity, in its most comprehensive signifi- THE PRESS. cane, from national episcopal churches, like that of England, which aspires to maintain the doctrines and organisation of the apostolic, or immediately post-apostolic, ages, onward to that dubious and undefinable verge where Christianity melts into a high moral theism, a faith which would expand to purer spirituality with less distinct dogmatic system ; or that which would hardly call itself more than a Christian philosophy, a religious rationalism. I presume not, neither is it the office of the historian, to limit the blessings of oar religion either in this world or the world to come ; " there is one who will know his own." As an historian I can disfranchise none who claim, even on the slightest grounds, the privileges and hopes of Christianity : repudiate none who do not place themselves without the pale of believers and worshippers of Christ, or of God through Christ. This note smacks too much of the "li beralised " theology which prevails in some of the continental schools. Assuredly it never can be within the province of a histo rian (or of any other human being) "to limit " the blessings of our religion either in this " world or in the world to come; " nor is it within the ability of any writer to enfranchise or "disfranchise." To register, to indicate, and to recount, are faculties very different from those grand privileges which the Dean of St. Paul's would seem to claim for the historian. The passage is hazy in its logic and nebulous in its rhetoric, and is too sentimental for our sober English school of thinking. It shows too much toleration of those Rationalistic and Unitarian thinkers who, with self-righteous ness in their hearts and Christianity on their lips, have scarcely even a nominal right to be counted by a historian amongst the supporters of the religion of the Cross. But, in saying this, we admit that in a work of this nature we are not too rigorously to expect dogmatic accuracy in every passage. Turning from these considerations, we will proceed to exemplify the general ability that characterises every chapter. The aspect of Christianity after its first five centuries of struggle is well portrayed as the author approaches the narration of the conversion of the Teutonic races : Christianity within the Roman empire might seem en dangered in its vital existence by these ungenial inward dissensions. Its lofty assertions that it came down from heaven as a religion of peace—of peace to the individual heart of man, as reconciling it with God, and instilling the serene hope of another life—of peace which should in corporate mankind in one harmonious brotherhood, the type and pre-establishment of the sorrowless and strifeless state of beatitude—might appear utterly belied by the claims of conflicting doctrines, on the belief, all declared to be essential to salvation, and the animosities and bloody quarrels which desolated Christian cities. Anathema instead of benediction had almost become the general lan guage of the Church. Religious wars, at least rare in the Pagan state of society, seemed now a new and perpetual source of human misery—a cause and a sign of the weak ness and decay, and so of the inevitable dissolution, of the Roman empire. But Christianity had sunk into depths of the human heart, unmoved by these tumults, which so fiercely agitated the surface of the Christian world. Far below, less observed, less visible in its mode of operation, though manifest in its effects, was that profound conviction of the truth of the Gospel, that infelt sense of its blessings, which enabled it to pursue its course of conversion throughout the world, to bring the Roman mind more completely under subjection, and one by one to subdue the barbarian tribes which began to overspread and mingle with the Greek and Latin popu lation of the empire. For Christianity had that within it which overawed, captivated, enthralled the innate or at least universal religiousness of mankind ; that which was suffi ciently simple to arrest by its grandeur the ruder bar barian, while, by its deeper mysteries, it led on the philo sophic and reflective mind through unending regions of contemplation. It had its one Creator and Ruler of the universe, one God, one Redeemer, one Spirit, under which the ancient polytheism subsided into a subordinate hierarchy of intermediate beings, which kept the imagi nation in play, and left undisturbed almost all the hereditary superstitions of each race. It satisfied that yearning after the invisible, which seems inseparable from our nature, the fears and hopes which more or less vaguely have shadowed out some future being, the fears of retri bution appeased by the promises of pardon, the hope of beatitude by its presentiments of peace. It had its ex• quisite goodness, which appealed to the indelible moral sense of mankind, to the best affections of his being ; it had that equality as to religious privileges, duties, and ad. vantages, to which it drew up all ranks and classes, and both sexes ( slaves and females being alike with others under the divine care), and the abolition, so far, of the ordinary castes and divisions of men; with the substitution of the one distinction, the clergy and the laity, and perhaps also that of the ordinary Christian and the monk, who aspired to what was asserted and believed to be a higher Christianity. All this was, in various degrees, at once the manifest sign of its divinity, and the secret of its gradual subjugation of nations at such different stages of civilisa tion. It prepared or found ready the belief in those miraculous powers which it still constantly declared itself to possess; and made belief not merely prompt to accept, but creative of, wonder, and of perpetual preterhuman inter• ference. Some special causes will appear which seemed peculiarly to propitiate certain races towards Christianity, while their distinctive character reacted on their own SATURDAY, Christianity, and through them, perhaps, on that of the world. The account of the Teutonic races, of the spirit of their religion, and of their incorpora tion with Christianity, is perhaps the most highly-finished portion of the first volume. For didactic value, possibly the able disser tation on the Justinian code, with its vigorous analysis and fulness of statement, will obtain most approval. For biographic interest, the account of Pope Gregory the Great is most popular and generally attractive. We have marked for extract several passages, but we will close our present citations with the ac count of Pope Gregory:— Times of emergency call forth great men—men at least if not great in relation to the true intellectual, moral, and spiritual dignity of man, great in relation to the state and to the necessities of their age ; engrossed by the powerful and dominant principles of their time, and bringing to the advancement of those principles surpassing energies of cha raider, inflexible resolution, the full conviction of the wis dom, justice, and holiness of their cause in religious affairs, of the direct and undeniable sanction of God. Such was Gregory 1., to whom his own age and posterity have as signed the appellation of the Great. Now was the crisis in which the Papacy, the only power which lay not entirely and absolutely prostrate before the disasters of the times—which had an inherent strength, and might resume its majesty—the power which was most imperatively required to preserve that which was to survive out of the crumbling wreck of Roman civilisation, must reawaken its obscured and suspended life. To Western Christianity was absolutely necessary a centre, standing alone. strong in traditionary reverence, and in acknowledged claims to supremacy. Even the perfect organisation of the Christian hierarchy might in all human probability have fallen to pieces in perpetual conflict : it might have degenerated into a half-secular feudal caste, with hereditary benefices more and more entirely subservient to the civil power, a priesthood of each nation or each tribe, and gra dually sinking to the intellectual or religious level of the nation or tribe. On the rise of a power both controlling and conservative, hung, humanly speaking, the life and death of Christianity—of Christianity as a permanent, aggres sive, expansive, and, to a certain extent, uniform system. There must be a counterbalance to barbaric force, to the unavoidable anarchy of Tentonism, with its tribal, or at the utmost national, independence, forming a host of small conflicting, antagonistic kingdoms. All Europe had been what England was under the Octarchy, what Germany was when her emperors were weak ; and even her emperors she owed to Rome, to the Church, to Christianity. Pro vidence might have otherwise ordained it, but it is impos sible for man to imagine by what other organising or con solidating force the commonwealth of the Western nations could have grown up to a discordant, indeed, and conflict ing league, but still to a league, with that unity and con formity of manners, usages, laws, religion, which have made their rivalries, oppugnancies, and even their long ceaseless wars, on the whole to issue in the noblest, highest, most intellectual form of civilisation known to man. It is inconceivable that Teutonic Europe, or Europe so deeply interpenetrated with Teutonisrn, could have been condensed or compelled into a vast Asiatic despotism, or succession of despotisms. Immense and interminable as have been the evils and miseries of the conflict between the southern and northern, the Teutonic and Roman, the hierarchical and civil elements of our social system, out of these conflicts has at length arisen the balance and har mony of the great states which constitute European Christendom, and are now peopling other continents with kindred and derivative institutions. It is impossible to conceive what had been the confusion, the lawlessness, the chaotic state of the middle ages, without the mediaeval Papacy ; and of the mediaeval Papacy the real father is Gregory the Great. In all his predecessors there was much of the uncertainty and indefiniteness of a new do minion. Christianity had converted the Western world — it had by this time transmuted it ; in all except the Roman law, it was one with it. Even Leo the Great bad some thing of the Roman dictator. Gregory is the Roman alto gether merged in the Christian bishop. It is a Christian dominion, of which be lays the foundations in the Eternal City, not the old Rome associating Christian influence to her ancient title of sovereignty. The commencement of the foregoing pas sage has too much pleonasm; and the chief literary fault that we have to remark in this work is the want of conciseness in parti cular parts where Dean Milman's fluent pen becomes too diffuse. From the peculiar struc ture of his style his tendency is to the ex pansive, and he should, therefore, be on his guard against tautology. But such faults are not of frequent occurrence, and they could be easily amended in the second edition. The incidents of the following extract will always have great interest for all English readers : But a mind of such force and ability as Gregory's could not be permitted to slumber in the holy quiet of a mo nastery. He himself began to comprehend that there were higher religions avocations and nobler services to God. He was still a monk of St. Andrew when that incident took place which, by the divine blessing, led to the con version of our Saxon ancestors. The tale, though often repeated, is too pleasing not to find a place here. In the market-place of Rome Gregory saw some beautiful and fair-haired boys exposed for sale. He inquired from whence they came. From Britain." " Are they Christians ?"