Remarks on the past and its legacies to American society

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II Night And Morning

NIGHT AND MORNING.

In our hasty progress through the wilderness of history, we will be guided by great landmarks, and fly from one mountain-top to another, whence views may be obtained of boundless regions sunlit by Divine philosophy ; leaving it to inquirers of greater leisure, learning and ability, to explore the intermediate valleys.

The last discourse brought us to the time when Christianity became the religion of Rome — a period which has been fixed upon as the dividing line between ancient and modern history.

The adventurer in Central America, after climbing over range after range of volcanic hills, rising one above another, at length stood upon the dividing summit from which he could see both oceans at once. Turning from the blue Atlantic, its storms and its islands of tropical beauty, before him lay the dark-heaving Pacific, rolling away under the cloud of immensity to those glorious climes, where the dreams of the west had located the paradise of earth. So, at the present stage of our inquiry, we stand upon the stone, that Daniel saw cut out of the mountain without hands, now grown into a sky-piercing pinnacle, overlooking the ancient and the modern world. Behind us are the fairy isles of the ancient civilization ; before us another part of the ocean of eternity, where we may trace the courses of richly freighted argosies, some of which have sunk under the waves of time, while others are still ploughing their way into the boundless future, towards what final destiny is known only to Him whose eye can pierce the clouds and darkness which rest upon that unknown deep.

The political triumph of Christianity, under Constantine and his successors, was fatal to its purity. The alliance of Church and State has always engendered moral corruption and ecclesiastical tyranny. Even before the conversion cf Constantine, the love and humility which distinguished the founders of religion, were giving place to intolerant zeal and fierce disputes about dogmas that no mortal ever could understand.

The first Christians had been content to worship Christ as divine, without clearly defining the inscrutable relations between the Father and the Son. The warm glow of love and devotion could dispense with a rigorous metaphysical accuracy, which in truth, from the very nature of the subject, was unattainable. The attempts of philosophic theologians, from time to time, to give more scientific precision to the Christian doctrine upon this subject, paved the way to the quarrel between Arius and Athanasius, which was finally decided in favor of the latter by the sword of the civil authority. Profane wits have made it matter of jest, that two Greek words, differing only in a single letter, by which the tw r o parties vainly endeavored to designate something beyond the reach of the human faculties, divided the church and convulsed the empire.

As human language is not flexible enough for distinctions too subtle to be grasped by the human understanding, it is not surprising that the best writers, and even the same writer, could be quoted on both sides of the Arian controversy. In attempting to fix a fluctuating abstraction, which would not bear the chains of a definition, the language of men might incline to the one side or the other, according to the point cf view from which they endeavored to form to themselves a distinct notion of what was in itself inconceivable. There is, in fact, no substantial distinction, such at least as the human mind is capable of apprehending, between the doctrine of Arius and that of the Nicene council.

Meanwhile, that free and etherial essence, which had hitherto bound Christian societies together, warming each heart with fire from Heaven, began to crystalize, if I may be allowed the expression, into a Church, with an organization strong enough to withstand the storms that were about to burst upon the empire, and shelter from their fury some remnants of the ancient civilization.

The primitive equality of the humble presbyters gave place to a regular graduation of episcopal rank, which, corresponding with the distribution of the civil authority, was crowned by the patriarchal sees of Rome and Constantinople. Under the later emperors the episcopal authority in the corporate cities was not confined to spiritual matters. This is a fact to which I wish to call the especial attention of the reader. I have already remarked, that one of the great elements of civilization which the Roman empire bequeathed to the modern world, was her municipal institutions, in other words, cities engaged in various branches of industry, with a regular, and to some extent an independent police. In the latter years of the empire, the chief power in many of the towns fortunately fell into the hands of the bishops, who by their moral power over the barbarians, w T ere enabled in a great measure to protect the capitals of their dioceses from the ravages of the northern invaders. Thus, under the sheltering wing of the Christian church, the municipal institutions of Rome survived the wreck of the empire, to become, as we shall see hereafter, the germs of the modern Democracy. Thus, the church, at first supported by the state, was finally enabled to repay the debt, by protecting civil society from utter disorganization.

The simplicity of the early worship was supplanted by a splendid ritual, adapted to strike the imaginations of our barbarous ancestors, part of which was borrowed from the pagan temples, but was none the worse for that — any more than the classic architecture of the buildings themselves, many of which were converted into Christian churches. Music, painting, sculpture, architecture, ceremonies — what are all these things but modes in which men strive to give expression to the deep sense of beauty and sublimity, which often swells their souls with emotions too vast and too indefinite for articulate utterance.

It need not surprise us that even Christianity could not regenerate the Roman people, from whom all freedom and energy departed under the ruthless tyranny of the Caesars. Every corrupt society and every absolute despotism may reach a stage of disease, in which no remedy can be effectual without an infusion of new life and energy from some external source. Moral and intellectual culture, which gradually softens and regulates the robust energies of barbarous freedom, only adds to the weakness of enervate and spiritless slavery.

I have before remarked that, as the preservation of the natural body requires that fair play be given to all its functions, so the health and durability of society of the body politic, requires a free development of all its capabilities. In the rear of the moral and intellectual chambers of the brain, are the equally God-created organs of the passioiis and propensities, and without a proportionate energy of these propelling forces of humanity, which give fixedness and intensity to the will, the former make but a feeble character. The moral part of our nature finds its most wholesome food in the Christian religion, the intellectual and semi-intellectual faculties feed upon science and literature, the passions and propensities grow strong in the eager pursuit and acquisition of wealth, fame, power, domestic pleasures, and the endless variety of objects that minister to worldly enjoyment. Now the element which was wanting in the Roman empire, and the progressive evolution of which is the key of modern history, was liberty, which is nothing more nor less than a free and harmonious development of the wlwle man, as an individual and as a member of society. The glorious facts of modern history, the soul-stirring grandeur and mighty progress of the Christian civilization, have been produced by great energy of the various properties of our nature, involving perpetual antagonism ; inasmuch as power of every sort is infinitely expansive, and incessantly strives for absolute mastery.

It is true that the ideal perfection of man and society, in short, of every organization, consists in the unbroken harmony of all the forces acting in it ; but then there are all sorts of harmony, from the jingling of a jews-harp to the music of the spheres ; and unless all the chords of the spiritual harp, from which a Divine hand extracts the music of humanity, were at once miraculously replaced, by which the idea of progress would be excluded, discord must intervene between the lower and the higher harmony. That moral music of humanity was destined to rise through the trumpet-blasts of war, the thunder-drum of revolution, the crash of falling empires, and even the death-song of dissolving worlds, to that lofty anthem, which shall roll forever through the star-fretted arches of the " palace of eternity."

The Roman empire had done its allotted work, in laying a deep and broad foundation for the Christian civilization, and now the deadening unity of an absolute despotism was to give place to tumultuous life, to spontaneity, to Liberty. Let us turn to those regions, whence the infusion of barbarous freedom and energy was to be poured into the flaccid veins of the Roman body.

The people who, from time immemorial, had inhabited all the northern and western parts of Europe, may be distinguished into the Celtic and German nations. The Celts, who inhabited the British isles, Spain and the greater part of France, seem to have had more fire and vivacity than the Germans; yet so great was the similarity, that a picture of the manners of any one of the numerous tribes included under these two general appellations, would answer with little variation for the whole. The Gauls, a Celtic tribe, three centuries before Christ, carried their arms into Greece and Italy, and even took the city of Rome, but as they were impelled, rather by a restless love of war and plunder, than by the desire of making permanent conquests, they were easily bought off, and the republic was saved from irretrievable ruin. Their mode of fighting was mailed by the extreme of savage ferocity, and they rushed upon their enemies, less with the courage of soldiers, than with the fury of madmsn. They formed the main strength of the army of Hannibal, and it tasked to the utmost the unrivalled skill and resources of Julius Coesar to subdue these fierce barbarians. But they were subdued — Spain, Gaul and Britain became Roman provinces, made great advances in civilization, and adopted to a great extent the Latin tongue, which, more or less corrupted by provincialisms and admixture of native idioms, gave rise to what are called the Romance languages.

Far other and mightier destinies were reserved for the German tribes. Under this general name I include the Gothic and Vandalic nations, who, emigrating at an early period from Scandinavia, took possession of the country lying between the Baltic and the Black seas. Here they mixed to such an extent with their neighbors of the Sclavonic family, that the northern limits of ancient Germany are somewhat indefinite.

While the Celts, as already remarked, were subdued by the arms and civilized by the laws and municipal institutions and the literature of Rome, the Germans maintained their rude independence. Though often defeated by the legions, it sometimes came to their turn to exact a terrible revenge, and national pride still dwells upon the name of Herman or Arminius, as it has been Latinized, who decoyed a Roman army into the depths of his native forests, and destroyed it utterly.

As our American liberty had its origin in the German forests, we may dwell with some detail upon the manners of our ferocious ancestors. Imagine a village of wooden huts upon the margin of a river, surrounding a building of greater size but equally rude construction, in which the councils and wild revels of the tribe are held. A body of men of tall stature and noble forms, some on foot, some on horseback, their flaxen locks falling upon their shoulders, their sanguine complexions glowing with health, their clear blue eyes lighted up with the animation of the chase, and armed with long spears and bows and arrows, leave the small patch of cultivated ground, and plunge into the trackless forest in pursuit of the deer and wild boar. In the evening they return loaded with game, the women prepare a mighty feast, and the warriors take their seats around the rude table on which it is spread. Beside them are their swords, and their drinking cups made of the skulls of enemies they have slain in battle. Having satisfied their savage appetites, they fill their ghastly goblets with home-brewed beer, or with the fiery wines which they have brought away from their last foray into Gaul or Italy. Then ensue fierce quarrels in which swords clash and blood flows, and the drowsy ear of night is vexed with a hideous uproar of revelry and rage.

Take another scene. The chiefs have recommended some warlike enterprise, and the great council of the tribe, in which all the warriors who have reached the age of maturity, have an equal voice, has met to deliberate upon the mea- 7 sure. An orator rises, and sets forth with rude but powerful eloquence the wrongs of other times, or the glory and booty to be gathered in the Roman provinces. He is answered by a fierce clashing of swords and shields, and the shouts of his approving audience. Then to inflame the ardor of the warriors, the bards sing the exploits of Odin and the ancient heroes, and promise to all who fall in battle, an immediate entrance into the star-paved dwelling of the Gods. In a storm of frenzied enthusiasm, the crowd rushes into the dark forests and in the awful twilight of that natural temple a mighty fire is kindled, on which the priests offer human sacrifices to the God of war. The whole tribe then prepare to remove, taking with them their families and as much of their property, as they can find means of transporting.

When they were about to meet the enemy, the Germans were in the habit of placing their women and children within a circle formed of their carts and wagons. If their husbands and brothers were cut to pieces, the women sometimes maintained the fight with masculine courage, and when all hope was at an end, saved their freedom and honor by putting an end to their own lives.

The German chiefs were freely chosen by the people, and though birth was not entirely disregarded, the principal grounds of preference were superior courage and ability. Their power seems to have been limited to leading the warriors to battle, and presiding in the popular assemblies, to which all important measures were submitted.

It forms no part of the plan of these essays to follow in detail the frequent inroads of the German tribes upon the declining empire, nor that final inundation which well nigh swept away the humanity and civilization of the ancient world. The struggles of the expiring empire were tremendous, and sometimes, as on the plains of Chalons for example, revived the recollection of her former glory. When she finally sunk under the repeated blows of her inexorable assailants, Europe presented a scene of wo and conflagration and bloodshed and ruffian violence, such as no pen can describe, nor any imagination conceive. The world resounded with the shouts of licentious and blood-thirsty savages, and the shrieks of their helpless victims. Art, learning, refinement seemed to have perished forever in that deluge of barbarism.

A considerable period after the fall of the western empire is almost a blank in history. The dim gigantic forms of men and things flit shadowy through the night, for a time untouched even by that golden aurora of mythical poetry which always heralds the dawn of authentic history. But happily for mankind, religion survived the general ruin, and when the smoke and dust-clouds that hovered over the wrecks of a demolished world began to disperse, the first glimmer of returning light discloses the dove of Christianity winging her flight over that wild, weltering chaos, with the olivebranch in her mouth, and shaking from her heavenly plumage the seeds of a new and mightier civilization. As of old, when the spirit of God moved upon the great deep, green islets, emerging from the dreary waste, spring up in myrtle bowers of poetry and art, and then the broad, firm earth, begins to appear, teeming with the germs of that vigorous growth, which in after ages was to yield the peaceable fruits of order and liberty, of productive industry and national prosperity. Let us rapidly trace the progress of these changes before entering upon the great revolutions of modern society.

As the literature of Greece conquered the Romans, so the religion of Rome triumphed over the barbarians. Even in that enfeebled and corrupt society, which was overrun by the northern invaders, enough of moral and intellectual power remained to assert the rightful supremacy of mind over physical force. Some of the German tribes had been converted to Christianity in their native forests by Arian missionaries. Nevertheless, had the empire been overthrown at once by the first great irruption from the northern hive, the triumph of the barbarians might have been fatal to civilization. But the struggle was fortunately protracted; many of the barbarians even enlisted in the legions, and each successive swarm that poured down upon the empire found multitudes of their own countrymen who had adopted the manners and religion of the conquered provinces. Mixing among a Christian people and intermarrying with the subject provincials, or those of their own countrymen who had been converted to Christianity; witnessing the monastic austerities, which to their sensual and superstitious souls appeared miraculous ; admiring the imposing ritual of the churches, the dignity and unity of the hierarchy, the zeal, piety and learning of many of the clergy, the German tribes who established themselves in the conquered provinces, were all, by one means or other, brought under the influence of religion. Satisfied with their undisputed martial superiority, they the more willingly acknowledged the moral and mental advantages of the conquered, and knowing that they would always be masters of their teachers, they would be less reluctant to learn from them than from rivals in military prowess.

Many of the chiefs may have professed religion from motives of policy, hoping to find in the attachment of the subject provincials — who, notwithstanding the wanton destruction of life and property, were still, in many parts of Europe, superior in wealth and numbers to their conquerors, — the means of curbing the pride and turbulence of their own refractory clansmen. Others were persuaded by their Christian wives to lend a willing ear to the teachers of religion.

Whatever might be the motives of the chief, his example was followed by all his warriors.

It is difficult to estimate how much the modern world is indebted to female influence, exerted at this critical period in favor of a religion which finds its most congenial soil in the heart of woman. The history of the world might have been totally different from what it has been, but for Clotilda, the christian wife of the terrible Clovis, chief of the Salian Franks. By the conversion of her husband from heathenism, she was chiefly instrumental in bringing over to the side of the true religion the whole of that warlike tribe, who were afterwards the victorious defenders of the Christian civilization against the pagan Saxons and the Mohammedan Arabs. It will be recollected that to female influence must also be attributed the introduction of Christianity among the Anglo- Saxons.

It required ages for the Christian religion, already obscured by superstition, to effect any appreciable change in the moral character of the barbarians. But the regard which they paid to the inviolable sanctity of religious institutions, of the churches, the monasteries and the persons of the ecclesiastics, was productive of very important results.

We shall have frequent occasion to observe how even the errors and excesses of men are laid under contribution by Providence for the promotion of beneficent purposes. To speak with greater precision, profound principles of human nature to meet particular exigencies of society, are developed with a power which is sure to run into excesses, and are embodied in institutions, which in a long course of time, especially after they have done serving the purposes for which they were intended by Providence, become incrusted with manifold perversions and abuses, — the inevitable results of the imperfection of human nature. There is no better illustration of these remarks than the history of monasteries.

7S NIGHT AND MORNING.

Asceticism, the soul of monastic institutions, is deeply founded in nature and truth. In some form or other, it has appeared among the devotees of every religious system, from the Hindoo fakir, who stands motionless for years until his body is enclosed in a matted mass of vegetation, to the Calvinistic puritan, who proscribes all those delights of the senses and imagination which may divert the mind from the contemplation of divine things. This self-immolation, if confined to a sincere desire and constant effort, with Divine assistance, to bring our senses and our passions into subordination to the law of cur highest well-being, is right and proper. Transcending these limits, it may degenerate into that strange kind of spiritual ambition, which supported Simon Stylites on his pillar for so many years, exposed to the heat and storms of the Syrian deserts.

Notwithstanding the absurd excesses of a few, I am not sure that we ought to censure the mode, in which asceticism generally manifested itself in the early church. Many persons of warm devotional feelings, disgusted with the vices then prevalent, and desirous to devote themselves wholly to the service of God, retired to the deserts of Upper Egypt and Syria, and spent their lives in prayer, mortification and hard work. Perhaps we take a little too much upon ourselves, when we pronounce these men misguided enthusiasts. Men's ideas of duty may in different conditions of society manifest themselves in different modes. If St. Anthony chose to live upon roots which he raised with his own hands, while furnishing an asylum to many poor creatures who were driven into the deserts by oppression and want, I do not know that any one had a right to complain. On the other hand, if it should appear that monastic institutions were extremely useful in the sixth century, it by no means follows that they should be revived in the nineteenth.

The ascetic spirit, first strongly developed in the east, spread rapidly over the Christian world ; and the dreadful disorders, which followed the downfall of the western empire, drove into the monasteries many men of high moral feelings and cultivated minds, who could have no peace or self-respect in a state of society, where brute force was the law, and physical qualities alone were regarded. The religious houses became the secure repositories of the ancient learning ; and one of the principal occupations of the monks was copying manuscripts. In this way were preserved the Bible, and the literary remains of antiquity, which, after social order had been at least partially reestablished, were brought forth from their hiding places, and awakened the intellect of the Germanic nations. The monasteries were useful in other respects. — Schools and hospitals were often connected with them. The vast property which they acquired by the donations of superstition and remorse, was, at least in the earlier ages, chiefly devoted to charitable uses, and at a later period, their lands furnished places of refuge from the tyranny of the feudal barons.

Meanwhile the " eternal city" became the centre of a new spiritual dominion, which pervaded and gradually subdued the empire of physical force. Though many of the secular clergy were corrupt and ignorant enough, the ecclesiastical State, with the pope at its head, was undoubtedly the stronghold of intellect and morals in their long warfare with ignorant and ferocious animalism. The little learning of the time was almost monopolized by the ecclesiastics, who alone had sufficient power over the minds of the barbarians to restrain their passions, and vindicate the supremacy of intellect over physical force.

In this connection we must not overlook the important fact, that the Latin continued to be everywhere the language of the Church service, and of all ecclesiastical proceedings. Those walls of partition, which the rude dialects of the

German tribes erected between the nations of Western Europe, might have been for ages impervious barriers to the' diffusion of knowledge, had not the necessities of the ehurcrj preserved a common medium of intercourse between the members of that great spiritual commonwealth, which pervaded the entire Christian world. The liturgy, the scriptures, the writings of eminent theologians, the decrees of provincial synods and general councils were all in Latin, and thus the clergy, the most influential body of men in all the Christian countries, were obliged to know something of that language, and became, to that extent at least, identified with the protection and encouragement of learning. One of the best, perhaps the very best, means of mental discipline is the study of a language ©f very scientific structure and great compass of inflection.

As already intimated, many of the cities, under the protection of their bishops, survived the ruin of the empire, and though their importance was very much diminished, they preserved till happier times, some vestiges of their former prosperity and refinement. They were small points of light, scarcely visible for ages through the darkness that surrounded them, but destined, at a subsequent period, to become the centres of a glorious radiation of intelligence and liberty.

Here we have the rudiments of a robust, progressive and diversified civilization. The fierce independence and undisciplined energies of the German masters, the remnants of ancient institutions and maimers, preserved by the subject provincials, and the moral power of the church, restraining violence, protecting the weak, gradually taming the fierce passions of the conquerors, and in general asserting the supremacy of mind over physical force. In that seething mass of blood and ashes, in which the ancient civilization had been trodden out, were sown broadcast the seeds of a new and better order of things. Those seeds had scarcely begun to germinate, when a new and terrible power arose in the east r which poured over Asia and Africa a resistless torrent of fiery valor, swept away the Gothic kingdom of Spain, and descending like an avalanche from the summits of the Pyrenees, was stayed in its course by Karl the Hammer and his warlike Franks, who snatched Europe and civilization from the paralyzing grasp of the Moslem domination.

The Arabs, to whom we are indebted for much of our knowledge, were undoubtedly a noble and intellectual people. Even the robbers of the desert have always been remarkable for hospitality, a free, magnanimous spirit, and a dignified simplicity of manners, that reminds the traveller of those beautiful pictures of patriarchal life which we find in the Bible. In the Arabian peninsula, the peculiar spirit and striking features of oriental society have always been more fully developed, and more strongly marked than in anyother eastern country. In those primitive seats of the human race, a burning sun, a brilliant sky, the strong contrasts of beauty and barrenness, the awful solitudes of black rocksand limitless sands, the sparkling fountains shaded by palm trees, the pastoral valleys and tropical bowers, that load the gales with fragrance, the frequent revolutions and romantic vicissitudes of individuals, the vestiges and recollections of a glorious antiquity and a splendid civilization, all combined to produce a character unknown in the west, at the period of which we have been speaking, in any of its most beautiful and striking qualities. These qualities were least diluted by foreign admixtures among the Arabs, for the simple reason, that they alone, of all the eastern nations, had been able at all times, to maintain their independence.

The foundation, or rather the vital principle, of those beautiful traits of eastern life, which were destined, by means of the Mohammedan conquests, to be embroidered, as it were, upon the stronger but coarser ground of western character, was an excessive poetical enthusiasm, which transported the mind into a land of dreams more beautiful than the gardens of the Hesperides, and peopled with all the wild creations of oriental imagination. It was this noble idealism which inspired the disdain of vulgar engrossments, the love of literature and science, the romantic generosity, the delicate courtesy and refinement of sentiment which distinguished the Arab conquerors of Spain, from whom was borrowed much of the spirit of western chivalry, and of the inspiration of Provencal poetry.

Like most great men of action, Mohammed was an embodiment of the peculiarities of his own people in the highest degree of intensity. Born and brought up in poverty and obscurity, he scarcely acquired even the rudiments of knowledge. But he possessed an independent and penetrating mind, a powerful though undisciplined imagination, and much generous enthusiasm for the great and the beautiful. The underlying principle of his nature, which imparted an overpowering energy to the whole mass of his moral and intellectual qualities, was a fiery and unquenchable ambition to place himself at the head of a great movement of society. He was no doubt unconscious of the extent to which this love of power mixed up with his more generous impulses, for self-deception is the most common of all delusions.

I do not believe that a mere imposture ever obtained a lasting hold upon the human mind. No one will meet with deep and lasting sympathy who is not in earnest himself. He may indeed, upon the principle that the end justifies the means, employ claptrap and dissimulation for the accomplishment of what appears to him a great and good purpose. Something of the Charlatan may appear upon the surface of such characters as Mohammed and Cromwell and Napoleon, and even a Luther may not be free from selfishness and dissimulation and vulgar truculence, yet there lies at the bottom of all such great natures a generous and heart-felt conviction that they have a mission from God, and a great work to do in the world, and they are straitened until it be accomplished. The mighty heart of a great people will not heave in obedience to anything but enthusiastic earnestness. A purely selfish man, a mere impostor, never did and never can gain a lasting hold upon the loyalty of large masses of his fellowmen.