XV
A HISTORY OF THE INQUISITION OF THE MIDDLE AGES. By HENRY CHARLES LEA[401]
A good many years ago, when Bishop Wilberforce was at Winchester, and the Earl of Beaconsfield was a character in fiction, the bishop was interested in the proposal to bring over the Utrecht Psalter. Mr. Disraeli thought the scheme absurd. "Of course," he said, "you won't get it." He was told that, nevertheless, such things are, that public manuscripts had even been sent across the Atlantic in order that Mr. Lea might write a history of the Inquisition. "Yes," he replied, "but they never came back again." The work which has been awaited so long has come over at last, and will assuredly be accepted as the most important contribution of the new world to the religious history of the old. Other books have shown the author as a thoughtful inquirer in the remunerative but perilous region where religion and politics conflict, where ideas and institutions are as much considered as persons and events, and history is charged with all the elements of fixity, development, and change. It is little to say, now, that he equals Buckle in the extent, and surpasses him in the intelligent choice and regulation, of his reading. He is armed at all points. His information is comprehensive, minute, exact, and everywhere sufficient, if not everywhere complete. In this astonishing press of digested facts there is barely space to discuss the ideas which they exhibit and the law which they obey. M. Molinier lately wrote that a work with this scope and title "serait, à notre sens, une entreprise à peu près chimérique." It will be interesting to learn whether the opinion of so good a judge has been altered or confirmed.
The book begins with a survey of all that led to the growth of heresy, and to the creation, in the thirteenth century, of exceptional tribunals for its suppression. There can be no doubt that this is the least satisfactory portion of the whole. It is followed by a singularly careful account of the steps, legislative and administrative, by which Church and State combined to organise the intermediate institution, and of the manner in which its methods were formed by practice. Nothing in European literature can compete with this, the centre and substance of Mr. Lea's great history. In the remaining volumes he summons his witnesses, calls on the nations to declare their experience, and tells how the new force acted upon society to the end of the Middle Ages. History of this undefined and international cast, which shows the same wave breaking upon many shores, is always difficult, from the want of visible unity and progression, and has seldom succeeded so well as in this rich but unequal and disjointed narrative. On the most significant of all the trials, those of the Templars and of Hus, the author spends his best research; and the strife between Avignon and the Franciscans, thanks to the propitious aid of Father Ehrle, is better still. Joan of Arc prospers less than the disciples of Perfect Poverty; and after Joan of Arc many pages are allotted, rather profusely, to her companion in arms, who survives in the disguise of Bluebeard. The series of dissolving scenes ends, in order of time, at Savonarola; and with that limit the work is complete. The later Inquisition, starting with the Spanish and developing into the Roman, is not so much a prolongation or a revival as a new creation. The mediæval Inquisition strove to control states, and was an engine of government. The modern strove to coerce the Protestants, and was an engine of war. One was subordinate, local, having a kind of headquarters in the house of Saint Dominic at Toulouse. The other was sovereign, universal, centred in the Pope, and exercising its domination, not against obscure men without a literature, but against bishop and archbishop, nuncio and legate, primate and professor; against the general of the Capuchins and the imperial preacher; against the first candidate in the conclave, and the president of the oecumenical council. Under altered conditions, the rules varied and even principles were modified. Mr. Lea is slow to take counsel of the voluminous moderns, fearing the confusion of dates. When he says that the laws he is describing are technically still in force, he makes too little of a fundamental distinction. In the eye of the polemic, the modern Inquisition eclipses its predecessor, and stops the way.
The origin of the Inquisition is the topic of a lasting controversy. According to common report, Innocent III. founded it, and made Saint Dominic the first inquisitor; and this belief has been maintained by the Dominicans against the Cistercians, and by the Jesuits against the Dominicans themselves. They affirm that the saint, having done his work in Languedoc, pursued it in Lombardy: "Per civitates et castella Lombardiae circuibat, praedicans et evangelizans regnum Dei, atque contra haereticos inquirens, quos ex odore et aspectu dignoscens, condignis suppliciis puniebat" (Fontana, Monumenta Dominicana, 16). He transferred his powers to Fra Moneta, the brother in whose bed he died, and who is notable as having studied more seriously than any other divine the system which he assailed: "Vicarium suum in munere inquisitionis delegerat dilectissimum sibi B. Monetam, qui spiritu illius loricatus, tanquam leo rugiens contra haereticos surrexit.... Iniquos cum haereticos ex corde insectaretur, illisque nullo modo parceret, sed igne ac ferro consumeret." Moneta is succeeded by Guala, who brings us down to historic times, when the Inquisition flourished undisputed: "Facta promotione Guallae constitutus est in eius locum generalis inquisitor P.F. Guidottus de Sexto, a Gregorio Papa IX., qui innumeros propemodum haereticos igne consumpsit" (Fontana, Sacrum Theatrum Dominicanum, 595). Sicilian inquisitors produce an imperial privilege of December 1224, which shows the tribunal in full action under Honorius III.: "Sub nostrae indignationis fulmine praesenti edicto districtius praecipiendo mandamus, quatenus inquisitoribus haereticae pravitatis, ut suum libere officium prosequi et exercere valeant, prout decet, omne quod potestis impendatis auxilium" (Franchina, Inquisizione di Sicilia, 1774, 8). This document may be a forgery of the fifteenth century; but the whole of the Dominican version is dismissed by Mr. Lea with contempt. He has heard that their founder once rescued a heretic from the flames; "but Dominic's project only looked to their peaceful conversion, and to performing the duties of instruction and exhortation." Nothing is better authenticated in the life of the saint than the fact that he condemned heretics and exercised the right of deciding which of them should suffer and which should be spared. "Contigit quosdam haereticos captos et per eum convictos, cum redire nollent ad fidem catholicam, tradi judicio saeculari. Cumque essent incendio deputati, aspiciens inter alios quemdam Raymundum de Grossi nomine, ac si aliquem eo divinae praedestinationis radium fuisset intuitus, istum, inquit officialibus curiae, reservate, nec aliquo modo cum caeteris comburatur" (Constantinus, Vita S. Dominici; Echard, Scriptores O.P., 1. 33). The transaction is memorable in Dominican annals as the one link distinctly connecting Saint Dominic with the system of executions, and the only security possessed by the order that the most conspicuous of its actions is sanctioned by the spirit and example of the founder. The original authorities record it, and it is commemorated by Bzovius and Malvenda, by Fontana and Percin, by Echard and Mamachi, as well as in the Acta Sanctorum. Those are exactly the authors to whom in the first instance a man betakes himself who desires to understand the inception and early growth of the Inquisition. I cannot remember that any one of them appears in Mr. Lea's notes. He says indeed that Saint Dominic's inquisitorial activity "is affirmed by all the historians of the order," and he is a workman who knows his tools so well that we may hesitate to impute this grave omission to inacquaintance with necessary literature. It is one of his characteristics to be suspicious of the Histoire Intime as the seat of fable and proper domain of those problems in psychology against which the certitude of history is always going to pieces. Where motives are obscure, he prefers to contemplate causes in their effects, and to look abroad over his vast horizon of unquestioned reality. The difference between outward and interior history will be felt by any one who compares the story of Dolcino here given with the account in Neander. Mr. Lea knows more about him and has better materials than the ponderous professor of pectoral theology. But he has not all Neander's patience and power to read significance and sense in the musings of a reckless erratic mind.
He believes that Pope Gregory IX. is the intellectual originator, as well as the legislative imponent, of the terrific system which ripened gradually and experimentally in his pontificate. It does not appear whether he has read, or knows through Havet the investigations which conducted Ficker to a different hypothesis. The transition of 1231 from the saving of life to the taking of life by fire was nearly the sharpest that men can conceive, and in pursuance of it the subsequent legal forms are mere detail. The spirit and practice of centuries were renounced for the opposite extreme; and between the mercy of 1230 and the severity of 1231 there was no intervening stage of graduated rigour. Therefore it is probable that the new idea of duty, foreign to Italian and specifically to Roman ways, was conveyed by a new man, that a new influence just then got possession of the Pope. Professor Ficker signals Guala as the real contriver of the régime of terror, and the man who acquired the influence imported the idea and directed the policy. Guala was a Dominican prior whom the Pope trusted in emergencies. In the year 1230 he negotiated the treaty of San Germano between Frederic II. and the Church, and was made Bishop of Brescia. In that year Brescia, first among Italian cities, inserted in its statutes the emperor's Lombard law of 1224, which sent the heretic to the stake. The inference is that the Dominican prelate caused its insertion, and that nobody is so likely to have expounded its available purport to the pontiff as the man who had so lately caused it to be adopted in his own see, and who stood high just then in merit and in favour. That Guala was bishop-elect on 28th August, half a year before the first burnings at Rome, we know; that he caused the adoption of Frederic's law at Brescia or at Rome is not in evidence. Of that abrupt and unexplained enactment little is told us, but this we are told, that it was inspired by Honorius: "Leges quoque imperiales per quondam Fredericum olim Romanorum imperatorem, tunc in devotione Romane sedis persistentem, procurante eadem sede, fuerunt edite et Padue promulgate" (Bern. Guidonis, Practica Inquisitionis, 173). At any rate, Gregory, who had seen most things since the elevation of Innocent, knew how Montfort dealt with Albigensian prisoners at Minerve and Lavaur, what penalties were in store at Toulouse, and on what principles Master Conrad administered in Germany the powers received from Rome. The Papacy which inspired the coronation laws of 1220, in which there is no mention of capital punishment, could not have been unobservant of the way in which its own provisions were transformed; and Gregory, whom Honorius had already called "magnum et speciale ecclesie Romane membrum," who had required the university of Bologna to adopt and to expound the new legislation, and who knew the Archbishop of Magdeburg, had little to learn from Guala about the formidable weapon supplied to that prelate for the government of Lombardy. There is room for further conjecture.
In those days it was discovered that Arragon was infested with heresy; and the king's confessor proposed that the Holy See be applied to for means of active suppression. With that object, in 1230 he was sent to Rome. The envoy's name was Raymond, and his home was on the coast of Catalonia in the town of Pennaforte. He was a Bolognese jurist, a Dominican, and the author of the most celebrated treatise on morals made public in the generation preceding the scholastic theology. The five years of his abode in Rome changed the face of the Church. He won the confidence of Gregory, became penitentiary, and was employed to codify the acts of the popes militant since the publication of Gratian. Very soon after Saint Raymond appeared at the papal court, the use of the stake became law, the inquisitorial machinery had been devised, and the management given to the priors of the order. When he departed he left behind him instructions for the treatment of heresy, which the pope adopted and sent out where they were wanted. He refused a mitre, rose to be general, it is said in opposition to Albertus Magnus, and retired early, to become, in his own country, the oracle of councils on the watch for heterodoxy. Until he came, in spite of much violence and many laws, the popes had imagined no permanent security against religious error, and were not formally committed to death by burning. Gregory himself, excelling all the priesthood in vigour and experience, had for four years laboured, vaguely and in vain, with the transmitted implements. Of a sudden, in three successive measures, he finds his way, and builds up the institution which is to last for centuries. That this mighty change in the conditions of religious thought and life and in the functions of the order was suggested by Dominicans is probable. And it is reasonable to suppose that it was the work of the foremost Dominican then living, who at that very moment had risen to power and predominance at Rome.
No sane observer will allow himself to overdraw the influence of national character on events. Yet there was that in the energetic race that dwell with the Pyrenees above them and the Ebro below that suited a leading part in the business of organised persecution. They are among the nations that have been inventors in politics, and both the constitution of Arragon and that of the society of Jesus prove their constructive science. While people in other lands were feeling their way, doubtful and debonair, Arragon went straight to the end. Before the first persecuting pope was elected, before the Child of Apulia, who was to be the first persecuting emperor, was born, Alfonso proscribed the heretics. King and clergy were in such accord that three years later the council of Girona decreed that they might be beaten while they remained, and should be burnt if they came back. It was under this government, amid these surroundings, that Saint Dominic grew up, whom Sixtus V., speaking on authority which we do not possess, entitled the First Inquisitor. Saint Raymond, who had more to do with it than Saint Dominic, was his countryman. Eymerici, whose Directorium was the best authority until the Practica of Guidonis appeared, presided during forty years over the Arragonese tribunal; and his commentator Pegna, the Coke upon Littleton of inquisitorial jurisprudence, came from the same stern region.
The Histoire Générale de Languedoc in its new shape has supplied Mr. Lea with so good a basis that his obligations to the present editors bring him into something like dependence on French scholarship. He designates monarchs by the names they bear in France--Louis le Germanique, Charles le Sage, Philippe le Bon, and even Philippe; and this habit, with Foulques and Berenger of Tours, with Aretino for Arezzo, Oldenburg for Altenburg, Torgau for Zürich, imparts an exotic flavour which would be harmless but for a surviving preference for French books. Compared with Bouquet and Vaissète, he is unfamiliar with Böhmer and Pertz. For Matthew Paris he gets little or no help from Coxe, or Madden, or Luard, or Liebermann, or Huillard. In France few things of importance have escaped him. His account of Marguerite Porrette differs from that given by Hauréau in the Histoire Littéraire, and the difference is left unexplained. No man can write about Joan of Arc without suspicion who discards the publications of Quicherat, and even of Wallon, Beaucourt, and Luce. Etienne de Bourbon was an inquisitor of long experience, who knew the original comrade and assistant of Waldus. Fragments of him scattered up and down in the works of learned men have caught the author's eye; but it is uncertain how much he knows of the fifty pages from Stephanus printed in Echard's book on Saint Thomas, or of the volume in which Lecoy de la Marche has collected all, and more than all, that deserves to live of his writings. The "Historia Pontificalis," attributed to John of Salisbury, in the twentieth volume of the Monumenta, should affect the account of Arnold of Brescia. The analogy with the Waldenses, amongst whom his party seems to have merged, might be more strongly marked. "Hominum sectam fecit que adhuc dicitur heresis Lumbardorum.... Episcopis non parcebat ob avariciam et turpem questum, et plerumque propter maculam vite, et quia ecclesiam Dei in sanguinibus edificare nituntur." He was excommunicated and declared a heretic. He was reconciled and forgiven. Therefore, when he resumed his agitation his portion was with the obstinate and relapsed. "Ei populus Romanus vicissim auxilium et consilium contra omnes homines et nominatim contra domnum papam repromisit, eum namque excommunicaverat ecclesia Romana.... Post mortem domni Innocentii reversus est in Italiam, et promissa satisfactione et obediencia Romane ecclesie, a domno Eugenio receptus est apud Viterbum." And it is more likely that the fear of relics caused them to reduce his body to ashes than merely to throw the ashes into the Tiber.
The energy with which Mr. Lea beats up information is extraordinary even when imperfectly economised. He justly makes ample use of the Vitae Paparum Avenionensium, which he takes apparently from the papal volume of Muratori. These biographies were edited by Baluze, with notes and documents of such value that Avignon without him is like Athenæus without Casaubon, or the Theodosian Code without Godefroy. But if he neglects him in print, he constantly quotes a certain Paris manuscript in which I think I recognise the very one which Baluze employed. Together with Guidonis and Eymerici, the leading authority of the fourteenth century is Zanchini, who became an inquisitor at Rimini in 1300, and died in 1340. His book was published with a commentary by Campeggio, one of the Tridentine fathers; and Campeggio was further annotated by Simancas, who exposes the disparity between Italian and Spanish usage. It was reprinted, with other treatises of the same kind, in the eleventh volume of the Tractatus. Some of these treatises, and the notes of Campeggio and Simancas, are passed over by Mr. Lea without notice. But he appreciates Zanchini so well that he has had him copied from a manuscript in France. Very much against his habit, he prints one entire sentence, from which it appears that his copy does not agree to the letter with the published text. It is not clear in every case whether he is using print or manuscript. One of the most interesting directions for inquisitors, and one of the earliest, was written by Cardinal Fulcodius, better known as Clement IV. Mr. Lea cites him a dozen times, always accurately, always telling us scrupulously which of the fifteen chapters to consult. The treatise of Fulcodius occupies a few pages in Carena, De Officio S.S. Inquisitionis, in which, besides other valuable matter, there are notes by Carena himself, and a tract by Pegna, the perpetual commentator of the Inquisition. This is one of the first eight or ten books which occur to any one whose duty it is to lay in an inquisitor's library. Not only we are never told where to find Fulcodius, but when Carena is mentioned it is so done as to defy verification. Inartistic references are not, in this instance, a token of inadequate study. But a book designed only for readers who know at a glance where to lay their finger on S. Francis. Collat. Monasticae, Collat. 20, or Post constt. IV. XIX. Cod. I. v. will be slow in recovering outlay.
Not his acquaintance with rare books only, which might be the curiosity of an epicurean, but with the right and appropriate book, amazes the reader. Like most things attributed to Abbot Joachim, the Vaticinia Pontificum is a volume not in common use, and decent people may be found who never saw a copy. Mr. Lea says: "I have met with editions of Venice issued in 1589, 1600, 1605, and 1646, of Ferrara in 1591, of Frankfort in 1608, of Padua in 1625, and of Naples in 1660, and there are doubtless numerous others." This is the general level throughout; the rare failures disappear in the imposing supererogation of knowledge. It could not be exceeded by the pupils of the Göttingen seminary or the École des Chartes. They have sometimes a vicious practice of overtopping sufficient proof with irrelevant testimony: but they transcribe all deciding words in full, and for the rest, quicken and abridge our toil by sending us, not to chapter and verse, but to volume and page, of the physical and concrete book. We would gladly give Bluebeard and his wife--he had but one after all--in exchange for the best quotations from sources hard of access which Mr. Lea must have hoarded in the course of labours such as no man ever achieved before him, or will ever attempt hereafter. It would increase the usefulness of his volumes, and double their authority. There are indeed fifty pages of documentary matter not entirely new or very closely connected with the text. Portions of this, besides, are derived from manuscripts explored in France and Italy, but not it seems in Rome, and in this way much curious and valuable material underlies the pages; but it is buried without opportunity of display or scrutiny. Line upon line of references to the Neapolitan archives only bewilder and exasperate. Mr. Lea, who dealt more generously with the readers of Sacerdotal Celibacy, has refused himself in these overcrowded volumes that protection against overstatement. The want of verifiable indication of authorities is annoying, especially at first; and it may be possible to find one or two references to Saint Bonaventure or to Wattenbach which are incorrect. But he is exceedingly careful in rendering the sense of his informants, and neither strains the tether nor outsteps his guide. The original words in very many cases would add definiteness and a touch of surprise to his narrative.
If there is anywhere the least infidelity in the statement of an author's meaning, it is in the denial that Marsilius, the imperial theorist, and the creator with Ockam of the Ghibelline philosophy that has ruled the world, was a friend of religious liberty. Marsilius assuredly was not a Whig. Quite as much as any Guelph, he desired to concentrate power, not to limit or divide it. Of the sacred immunities of conscience he had no clearer vision than Dante. But he opposed persecution in the shape in which he knew it, and the patriarchs of European emancipation have not done more. He never says that there is no case in which a religion may be proscribed; but he speaks of none in which a religion may be imposed. He discusses, not intolerance, but the divine authority to persecute, and pleads for a secular law. It does not appear how he would deal with a Thug. "Nemo quantumcumque peccans contra disciplinas speculativas aut operativas quascumque punitur vel arcetur in hoc saeculo praecise in quantum huiusmodi, sed in quantum peccat contra praeceptum humanae legis.... Si humana lege prohibitum fuerit haereticum aut aliter infidelem in regione manere, qui talis in ipsa repertus fuerit, tanquam legis humanae transgressor, poena vel supplicio huic transgressioni eadem lege statutis, in hoc saeculo debet arceri." The difference is slight between the two readings. One asserts that Marsilius was tolerant in effect; the other denies that he was tolerant in principle.
Mr. Lea does not love to recognise the existence of much traditional toleration. Few lights are allowed to deepen his shadows. If a stream of tolerant thought descended from the early ages to the time when the companion of Vespucci brought his improbable tale from Utopia, then the views of Bacon, of Dante, of Gerson cannot be accounted for by the ascendency of a unanimous persuasion. It is because all men were born to the same inheritance of enforced conformity that we glide so easily towards the studied increase of pain. If some men were able to perceive what lay in the other scale, if they made a free choice, after deliberation, between well-defined and well-argued opinions, then what happened is not assignable to invincible causes, and history must turn from general and easy explanation to track the sinuosities of a tangled thread. In Mr. Lea's acceptation of ecclesiastical history intolerance was handed down as a rule of life from the days of St. Cyprian, and the few who shrank half-hearted from the gallows and the flames were exceptions, were men navigating craft of their own away from the track of St. Peter. Even in his own age he is not careful to show that the Waldenses opposed persecution, not in self-defence, but in the necessary sequence of thought. And when he describes Eutychius as an obscure man, who made a point at the fifth general council, for which he was rewarded with the patriarchate of Constantinople--Eutychius, who was already patriarch when the council assembled; and when he twice tears Formosus from his grave to parade him in his vestments about Rome,--we may suspect that the perfect grasp of documentary history from the twelfth century does not reach backwards in a like degree.
If Mr. Lea stands aloft, in his own domain, as an accumulator, his credit as a judge of testimony is nearly as high. The deciding test of his critical sagacity is the masterly treatment of the case against the Templars. They were condemned without mercy, by Church and State, by priest and jurist, and down to the present day cautious examiners of evidence, like Prutz and Lavocat, give a faltering verdict. In the face of many credulous forerunners and of much concurrent testimony Mr. Lea pronounces positively that the monster trial was a conspiracy to murder, and every adverse proof a lie. His immediate predecessor, Schottmüller, the first writer who ever knew the facts, has made this conclusion easy. But the American does not move in the retinue of the Prussian scholar. He searches and judges for himself; and in his estimate of the chief actor in the tragedy, Clement V., he judges differently. He rejects, as forgeries, a whole batch of unpublished confessions, and he points out that a bull disliked by inquisitors is not reproduced entire in the Bullarium Dominicanum. But he fails to give the collation, and is generally jealous about admitting readers to his confidence, taking them into consultation and producing the scales. In the case of Delicieux, which nearly closes the drama of Languedoc, he consults his own sources, independently of Hauréau, and in the end adopts the marginal statement in Limborch, that the pope aggravated the punishment. In other places, he puts his trust in the Historia Tribulationum, and he shows no reason for dismissing the different account there given of the death of Delicieux: "Ipsum fratrem Bernardum sibi dari a summo pontifice petierunt. Et videns summus pontifex quod secundum accusationes quas de eo fecerant fratres minores justitiam postularent, tradidit eis eum. Qui, quum suscepissent eum in sua potestate, sicut canes, cum vehementer furiunt, lacerant quam capiunt bestiam, ita ipsi diversis afflictionibus et cruciatibus laniaverunt eum. Et videntes quod neque inquisitionibus nec tormentis poterant pompam de eo facere in populo, quam quaerebant, in arctissimo carcere eum reduxerunt, ibidem eum taliter tractantes, quod infra paucos menses, quasi per ignem et aquam transiens, de carcere corporis et minorum et praedicatorum liberatus gloriose triumphans de mundi principe, migravit ad coelos."
We obtain only a general assurance that the fate of Cecco d' Ascoli is related on the strength of unpublished documents at Florence. It is not stated what they are. There is no mention of the epitaph pronounced by the pope who had made him his physician: "Cucullati Minores recentiorum Peripateticorum principem perdiderunt." We do not learn that Cecco reproached Dante with the same fatalistic leaning for which he himself was to die: "Non è fortuna cui ragion non vinca." Or how they disputed: "An ars natura fortior ac potentior existeret," and argument was supplanted by experiment: "Aligherius, qui opinionem oppositam mordicus tuebatur, felem domesticam Stabili objiciebat, quam ea arte instituerat, ut ungulis candelabrum teneret, dum is noctu legeret, vel coenaret. Cicchius igitur, ut in sententiam suam Aligherium pertraheret, scutula assumpta, ubi duo musculi asservabantur inclusi, illos in conspectum felis dimisit; quae naturae ingenio inemendabili obsequens, muribus vix inspectis, illico in terram candelabrum abjecit, et ultro citroque cursare ac vestigiis praedam persequi instituit." Either Appiani's defence of Cecco d' Ascoli has escaped Mr. Lea, who nowhere mentions Bernino's Historia di tutte l' Heresie where it is printed; or he may distrust Bernino for calling Dante a schismatic; or it may be that he rejects all this as legend, beneath the certainty of history. But he does not disdain the legendary narrative of the execution: "Tradition relates that he had learned by his art that he should die between Africa and Campo Fiore, and so sure was he of this that on the way to the stake he mocked and ridiculed his guards; but when the pile was about to be lighted he asked whether there was any place named Africa in the vicinage, and was told that that was the name of a neighbouring brook flowing from Fiesole to the Arno. Then he recognised that Florence was the Field of Flowers, and that he had been miserably deceived." The Florentine document before me, whether the same or another I know not, says nothing about untimely mockery or miserable deception: "Aveva inteso dal demonio dover lui morire di morte accidentale infra l'Affrica e campo di fiore; per lo che cercando di conservare la reputazione sua, ordinò di non andar mai nelle parti d'Affrica; e credendo tal fallacia è di potere sbeffare la gente, pubblicamente in Italia esecutava l'arte della negromanzia, et essendo per questo preso in Firenze e per la sua confessione essendo già giudicato al fuoco e legato al palo, nè vedendo alcun segno della sua liberazione, avendo prima fatto i soliti scongiuri, domandò alle persone che erano all'intorno, se quivi vicino era alcun luogo che si chiamasse Affrica, et essendogli risposto di si, cioè un fiumicello che correva ivi presso, il quale discende da Fiesole ed è chiamato Affrica, considerando che il demonio per lo campo de' fiori aveva inteso Fiorenza, e per l'Affrica quel fiumicello, ostinato nella sua perfidia, disse al manigoldo che quanto prima attaccasse il fuoco."
Mr. Lea thinks that the untenable conditions offered to the count of Toulouse by the council of Arles in 1211 are spurious. M. Paul Meyer has assigned reasons on the other side in his notes to the translation of the Chanson de la Croisade, pp. 75-77; and the editors of Vaissète (vi. 347) are of the same opinion as M. Paul Meyer. It happens that Mr. Lea reads the Chanson in the editio princeps of Fauriel; and in this particular place he cites the Histoire du Languedoc in the old and superseded edition. From a letter lately brought to light in the Archiv für Geschichte des Mittelalters, he infers that the decree of Clement V. affecting the privilege of inquisitors was tampered with before publication. A Franciscan writes from Avignon when the new canons were ready: "Inquisitores etiam heretice pravitatis restinguuntur et supponuntur episcopis"--which he thinks would argue something much more decisive than the regulations as they finally appeared. Ehrle, who publishes the letter, remarks that the writer exaggerated the import of the intended change; but he says it not of this sentence, but of the next preceding. Mr. Lea has acknowledged elsewhere the gravity of this Clementine reform. As it stands, it was considered injurious by inquisitors, and elicited repeated protests from Bernardus Guidonis: "Ex predicta autem ordinatione seu restrictione nonnulla inconvenientia consecuntur, que liberum et expeditum cursum officii inquisitoris tam in manibus dyocesanorum quam etiam inquisitorum diminuunt seu retardant.... Que apostolice sedis circumspecta provisione ac provida circumspectione indigent, ut remedientur, aut moderentur in melius, seu pocius totaliter suspendantur propter nonnulla inconvenientia que consecuntur ex ipsis circa liberum et expeditum cursum officii inquisitoris."
The feudal custom which supplied Beaumarchais with the argument of his play recruits a stout believer in the historian of the Inquisition, who assures us that the authorities may be found on a certain page of his Sacerdotal Celibacy. There, however, they may be sought in vain. Some dubious instances are mentioned, and the dissatisfied inquirer is passed on to the Fors de Béarn, and to Lagrèze, and is informed that M. Louis Veuillot raised an unprofitable dust upon the subject. I remember that M. Veuillot, in his boastful scorn for book learning, made no secret that he took up the cause because the Church was attacked, but got his facts from somebody else. Graver men than Veuillot have shared his conclusion. Sir Henry Maine, having looked into the matter in his quick, decisive way, declared that an instance of the droit du seigneur was as rare as the Wandering Jew. In resting his case on the Pyrenees, Mr. Lea shows his usual judgment. But his very confident note is a too easy and contemptuous way of settling a controversy which is still wearily extant from Spain to Silesia, in which some new fact comes to light every year, and drops into obscurity, riddled with the shafts of critics.
An instance of too facile use of authorities occurs at the siege of Béziers. "A fervent Cistercian contemporary informs us that when Arnaud was asked whether the Catholics should be spared, he feared the heretics would escape by feigning orthodoxy, and fiercely replied, 'Kill them all, for God knows his own.'" Caesarius, to whom we owe the locus classicus, was a Cistercian and a contemporary, but he was not so fervent as that, for he tells it as a report, not as a fact, with a caution which ought not to have evaporated. "Fertur dixisse: Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius!" The Catholic defenders had been summoned to separate from the Cathari, and had replied that they were determined to share their fate. It was then resolved to make an example, which we are assured bore fruit afterwards. The hasty zeal of Citeaux adopted the speech of the abbot and gave it currency. But its rejection by the French scholars, Tamizey de Larroque and Auguste Molinier, was a warning against presenting it with a smooth surface, as a thing tested and ascertained. Mr. Lea, in other passages, has shown his disbelief in Caesarius of Heisterbach, and knows that history written in reliance upon him would be history fit for the moon. Words as ferocious are recorded of another legate at a different siege (Langlois, Règne de Philippe le Hardi, p. 156). Their tragic significance for history is not in the mouth of an angry crusader at the storming of a fortress, but in the pen of an inoffensive monk, watching and praying under the peaceful summit of the Seven Mountains.
Mr. Lea undertakes to dispute no doctrine and to propose no moral. He starts with an avowed desire not to say what may be construed injuriously to the character or feelings of men. He writes pure history, and is methodically oblivious of applied history. The broad and sufficient realm of fact is divided by a scientific frontier from the outer world of interested argument. Beyond the frontier he has no cognisance, and neither aspires to inflame passions nor to compose the great eirenikon. Those who approach with love or hatred are to go empty away; if indeed he does not try by turns to fill them both. He seeks his object not by standing aloof, as if the name that perplexed Polyphemus was the proper name for historians, but by running successively on opposing lines. He conceives that civilised Europe owes its preservation to the radiant centre of religious power at Rome, and is grateful to Innocent III. for the vigour with which he recognised that force was the only cure for the pestiferous opinions of misguided zealots. One of his authorities is the inquisitor Bernardus Guidonis, and there is no writer whom, in various shapes, he quotes so often. But when Guidonis says that Dolcino and Margarita suffered per juditium ecclesie, Mr. Lea is careful to vindicate the clergy from the blame of their sufferings.
From a distinction which he draws between despotism and its abuse, and from a phrase, disparaging to elections, about rivers that cannot rise above the level of their source, it would appear that Mr. Lea is not under compulsion to that rigid liberalism which, by repressing the time-test and applying the main rules of morality all round, converts history into a frightful monument of sin. Yet, in the wake of passages which push the praises of authority to the verge of irony, dire denunciations follow. When the author looks back upon his labours, he discerns "a scene of almost unrelieved blackness." He avers that "the deliberate burning alive of a human being simply for difference of belief, is an atrocity," and speaks of a "fiendish legislation," "an infernal curiosity," a "seemingly causeless ferocity which appears to persecute for the mere pleasure of persecuting." The Inquisition is "energetic only in evil"; it is "a standing mockery of justice, perhaps the most iniquitous that the arbitrary cruelty of man has ever devised."
This is not the protest of wounded humanity. The righteous resolve to beware of doctrine has not been strictly kept. In the private judgment of the writer, the thinking of the Middle Ages was sophistry and their belief superstition. For the erring and suffering mass of mankind he has an enlightened sympathy; for the intricacies of speculation he has none. He cherishes a disbelief, theological or inductive it matters not, in sinners rescued by repentance and in blessings obtained by prayer. Between remitted guilt and remitted punishment he draws a vanishing line that makes it doubtful whether Luther started from the limits of purgatory or the limits of hell. He finds that it was a universal precept to break faith with heretics, that it was no arbitrary or artificial innovation to destroy them, but the faithful outcome of the traditional spirit of the Church. He hints that the horror of sensuality may be easily carried too far, and that Saint Francis of Assisi was in truth not very much removed from a worshipper of the devil. Prescott, I think, conceived a resemblance between the god of Montezuma and the god of Torquemada; but he saw and suspected less than his more learned countryman. If any life was left in the Strappado and the Samarra, no book would deserve better than this description of their vicissitudes to go the way of its author, and to fare with the flagrant volume, snatched from the burning at Champel, which is still exhibited to Unitarian pilgrims in the Rue de Richelieu.
In other characteristic places we are taught to observe the agency of human passion, ambition, avarice, and pride; and wade through oceans of unvaried evil with that sense of dejection which comes from Digby's Mores Catholici or the Origines de la France Contemporaine, books which affect the mind by the pressure of repeated instances. The Inquisition is not merely "the monstrous offspring of mistaken zeal," but it is "utilised by selfish greed and lust of power." No piling of secondary motives will confront us with the true cause. Some of those who fleshed their swords with preliminary bloodshed on their way to the holy war may have owed their victims money; some who in 1348 shared the worst crime that Christian nations have committed perhaps believed that Jews spread the plague. But the problem is not there. Neither credulity nor cupidity is equal to the burden. It needs no weighty scholar, pressed down and running over with the produce of immense research, to demonstrate how common men in a barbarous age were tempted and demoralised by the tremendous power over pain, and death, and hell. We have to learn by what reasoning process, by what ethical motive, men trained to charity and mercy came to forsake the ancient ways and made themselves cheerfully familiar with the mysteries of the torture-chamber, the perpetual prison, and the stake. And this cleared away, when it has been explained why the gentlest of women chose that the keeper of her conscience should be Conrad of Marburg, and, inversely, how that relentless slaughterer directed so pure a penitent as Saint Elizabeth, a larger problem follows. After the first generation, we find that the strongest, the most original, the most independent minds in Europe--men born for opposition, who were neither awed nor dazzled by canon law and scholastic theology, by the master of sentences, the philosopher and the gloss--fully agreed with Guala and Raymond. And we ask how it came about that, as the rigour of official zeal relaxed, and there was no compulsion, the fallen cause was taken up by the Council of Constance, the University of Paris, the States-General, the House of Commons, and the first reformers; that Ximenes outdid the early Dominicans, while Vives was teaching toleration; that Fisher, with his friend's handy book of revolutionary liberalism in his pocket, declared that violence is the best argument with Protestants; that Luther, excommunicated for condemning persecution, became a persecutor? Force of habit will not help us, nor love and fear of authority, nor the unperceived absorption of circumambient fumes.
Somewhere Mr. Lea, perhaps remembering Maryland, Rhode Island, and Pennsylvania, speaks of "what was universal public opinion from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century." The obstacle to this theory, as of a ship labouring on the Bank, or an orb in the tail of a comet, is that the opinion is associated with no area of time, and remains unshaken. The Dominican democrat who took his seat with the Mountain in 1848 never swerved from the principles of his order. More often, and, I think, more deliberately, Mr. Lea urges that intolerance is implied in the definition of the mediæval Church, that it sprang from the root and grew with "the very law of its being." It is no desperate expedient of authority at bay, for "the people were as eager as their pastors to send the heretic to the stake." Therefore he does not blame the perpetrator, but his inherited creed. "No firm believer in the doctrine of exclusive salvation could doubt that the truest mercy lay in sweeping away the emissaries of Satan with fire and sword." What we have here is the logic of history, constraining every system to utter its last word, to empty its wallets, and work its consequences out to the end. But this radical doctrine misguides its author to the anachronism that as early as the first Leo "the final step had been taken, and the Church was definitely pledged to the suppression of heresy at whatever cost."
We do not demand that historians shall compose our opinions or relieve us from the purifying pains of thought. It is well if they discard dogmatising, if they defer judgment, or judge, with the philosopher, by precepts capable of being a guide for all. We may be content that they should deny themselves, and repress their sentiments and wishes. When these are contradictory, or such as evidently to tinge the medium, an unholy curiosity is engendered to learn distinctly not only what the writer knows, but what he thinks. Mr. Lea has a malicious pleasure in baffling inquiry into the principle of his judgments. Having found, in the Catechism of Saint Sulpice, that devout Catholics are much on a par with the fanatics whose sympathy with Satan made the holy office a requisite of civilisation, and having, by his exuberant censure, prepared us to hear that this requisite of civilisation "might well seem the invention of demons," he arrives at the inharmonious conclusion that it was wrought and worked, with benefit to their souls, by sincere and godly men. The condemnation of Hus is the proper test, because it was the extreme case of all. The council was master of the situation, and was crowded with men accustomed to disparage the authority of the Holy See and to denounce its acts. Practically, there was no pope either of Rome or Avignon. The Inquisition languished. There was the plausible plea of deference to the emperor and his passport; there was the imperative consideration for the religious future of Bohemia. The reforming divines were free to pursue their own scheme of justice, of mercy, and of policy. The scheme they pursued has found an assiduous apologist in their new historian. "To accuse the good fathers of Constance of conscious bad faith" is impossible. To observe the safe-conduct would have seemed absurd "to the most conscientious jurists of the council." In a nutshell, "if the result was inevitable, it was the fault of the system and not of the judges, and their conscience might well feel satisfied."
There may be more in this than the oratorical precaution of a scholar wanting nothing, who chooses to be discreet rather than explicit, or the wavering utterance of a mind not always strung to the same pitch. It is not the craving to rescue a favourite or to clear a record, but a fusion of unsettled doctrines of retrospective contempt. There is a demonstration of progress in looking back without looking up, in finding that the old world was wrong in the grain, that the kosmos which is inexorable to folly is indifferent to sin. Man is not an abstraction, but a manufactured product of the society with which he stands or falls, which is answerable for crimes that are the shadow and the echo of its own nobler vices, and has no right to hang the rogue it rears. Before you lash the detected class, mulct the undetected. Crime without a culprit, the unavenged victim who perishes by no man's fault, law without responsibility, the virtuous agent of a vicious cause--all these are the signs and pennons of a philosophy not recent, but rather inarticulate still and inchoate, which awaits analysis by Professor Flint.
No propositions are simpler or more comprehensive than the two, that an incorrigible misbeliever ought to burn, or that the man who burns him ought to hang. The world as expanded on the liberal and on the hegemonic projection is patent to all men, and the alternatives, that Lacordaire was bad and Conrad good, are clear in all their bearings. They are too gross and palpable for Mr. Lea. He steers a subtler course. He does not sentence the heretic, but he will not protect him from his doom. He does not care for the inquisitor, but he will not resist him in the discharge of his duty. To establish a tenable footing on that narrow but needful platform is the epilogue these painful volumes want, that we may not be found with the traveller who discovered a precipice to the right of him, another to the left, and nothing between. Their profound and admirable erudition leads up, like Hellwald's Culturgeschichte, to a great note of interrogation. When we find the Carolina and the savage justice of Tudor judges brought to bear on the exquisitely complex psychological revolution that proceeded, after the year 1200, about the Gulf of Lyons and the Tyrrhene Sea, we miss the historic question. When we learn that Priscillian was murdered (i. 214), but that Lechler has no business to call the sentence on John Hus "ein wahrer Justizmord" (ii. 494), and then again that the burning of a heretic is a judicial murder after all (i. 552), we feel bereft of the philosophic answer.
Although Mr. Lea gives little heed to Pani and Hefele, Gams and Du Boys, and the others who write for the Inquisition without pleading ignorance, he emphasises a Belgian who lately wrote that the Church never employed direct constraint against heretics. People who never heard of the Belgian will wonder that so much is made of this conventional figleaf. Nearly the same assertion may be found, with varieties of caution and of confidence, in a catena of divines, from Bergier to Newman. To appear unfamiliar with the defence exposes the writer to the thrust that you cannot know the strength or the weakness of a case until you have heard its advocates. The liberality of Leo XIII., which has yielded a splendid and impartial harvest to Ehrle, and Schottmüller, and the École Française, raises the question whether the Abbé Duchesne or Father Denifle supplied with all the resources of the archives which are no longer secret would produce a very different or more complete account. As a philosophy of religious persecution the book is inadequate. The derivation of sects, though resting always upon good supports, stands out from an indistinct background of dogmatic history. The intruding maxims, darkened by shadows of earth, fail to ensure at all times the objective and delicate handling of mediæval theory. But the vital parts are protected by a panoply of mail. From the Albigensian crusade to the fall of the Templars and to that Franciscan movement wherein the key to Dante lies, the design and organisation, the activity and decline of the Inquisition constitute a sound and solid structure that will survive the censure of all critics. Apart from surprises still in store at Rome, and the manifest abundance of Philadelphia, the knowledge which is common property, within reach of men who seriously invoke history as the final remedy for untruth and the sovereign arbiter of opinion, can add little to the searching labours of the American.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 401: English Historical Review, 1888.]
XVI. THE AMERICAN COMMONWEALTH. By JAMES BRYCE[402]
THE AMERICAN COMMONWEALTH cancels that sentence of Scaliger which Bacon amplifies in his warning against bookish politicians: "Nec ego nec alius doctus possumus scribere in politicis." The distinctive import of the book is its power of impressing American readers. Mr. Bryce is in a better position than the philosopher who said of another, "Ich hoffe, wir werden uns recht gut verständigen können; und wenn auch keiner den andern ganz versteht, wird doch jeder dem andern dazu helfen, dass er sich selbst besser verstehe." He writes with so much familiarity and feeling--the national, political, social sympathy is so spontaneous and sincere--as to carry a very large measure indeed of quiet reproach. The perfect tone is enough to sweeten and lubricate a medicine such as no traveller since Hippocrates has administered to contrite natives. Facts, not comments, convey the lesson; and I know no better illustration of a recent saying: "Si un livre porte un enseignement, ce doit être malgré son auteur, par la force même des faits qu'il raconte."
If our countryman has not the chill sententiousness of his great French predecessor, his portable wisdom and detached thoughts, he has made a far deeper study of real life, apart from comparative politics and the European investment of transatlantic experience. One of the very few propositions which he has taken straight from Tocqueville is also one of the few which a determined fault-finder would be able to contest. For they both say that the need for two chambers has become an axiom of political science. I will admit that the doctrine of Paine and Franklin and Samuel Adams, which the Pennsylvanian example and the authority of Turgot made so popular in France, is confuted by the argument of Laboulaye: "La division du corps législatif est une condition essentielle de la liberté. C'est la seule garantie qui assure la nation contre l'usurpation de ses mandataires." But it may be urged that a truth which is disputed is not an axiom; and serious men still imagine a state of things in which an undivided legislature is necessary to resist a too powerful executive, whilst two chambers can be made to curb and neutralise each other. Both Tocqueville and Turgot are said to have wavered on this point.
It has been said that Tocqueville never understood the federal constitution. He believed, to his last edition, that the opening words of the first section, "all legislative powers herein granted," meant "tous les pouvoirs législatifs déterminés par les représentants." Story thought that he "has borrowed the greater part of his reflections from American works [meaning his own and Lieber's] and little from his own observation." The French minister at Washington described his book as "intéressant mais fort peu exact"; and even the Nation calls it "brilliant, superficial, and attractive." Mr. Bryce can never be accused of imperfect knowledge or penetration, of undue dependence upon others, or of writing up to a purpose. His fault is elsewhere. This scholar, distinguished not only as a successful writer of history, which is said to be frequent, but as a trained and professed historian, which is rare, altogether declines the jurisdiction of the HISTORICAL REVIEW. His contumacy is in gross black and white: "I have had to resist another temptation, that of straying off into history." Three stout volumes tell how things are, without telling how they came about. I should have no title to bring them before this tribunal, if it were not for an occasional glimpse at the past; if it were not for a strongly marked and personal philosophy of American history which looms behind the Boss and the Boom, the Hoodlum and the Mugwump.
There is a valid excuse for preferring to address the unhistoric mind. The process of development by which the America of Tocqueville became the America of Lincoln has been lately described with a fulness of knowledge which no European can rival. Readers who thirst for the running stream can plunge and struggle through several thousand pages of Holst's Verfassungsgeschichte, and it is better to accept the division of labour than to take up ground so recently covered by a work which, if not very well designed or well composed, is, by the prodigious digestion of material, the most instructive ever written on the natural history of federal democracy. The author, who has spent twenty years on American debates and newspapers, began during the pause between Sadowa and Wörth, when Germany was in the throes of political concentration that made the empire. He explains with complacency how another irrepressible conflict between centre and circumference came and went, and how the welfare of mankind is better served by the gathering than by the balance or dispersion of forces. Like Gneist and Tocqueville, he thinks of one country while he speaks of another; he knows nothing of reticence or economy in the revelation of private opinion; and he has none of Mr. Bryce's cheery indulgence for folly and error. But when the British author refuses to devote six months to the files of Californian journalism, he leaves the German master of his allotted field.
The actual predominates so much with Mr. Bryce that he has hardly a word on that extraordinary aspect of democracy, the union in time of war; and gives no more than a passing glance at the confederate scheme of government, of which a northern writer said: "The invaluable reforms enumerated should be adopted by the United States, with or without a reunion of the seceded States, and as soon as possible." There are points on which some additional light could be drawn from the roaring loom of time. In the chapter on Spoils it is not stated that the idea belongs to the ministers of George III. Hamilton's argument against removals is mentioned, but not the New York edition of The Federalist with the marginal note that "Mr. H. had changed his view of the constitution on that point." The French wars of speculation and plunder are spoken of; but, to give honour where honour is due, it should be added that they were an American suggestion. In May 1790, Morris wrote to two of his friends at Paris: "I see no means of extricating you from your troubles, but that which most men would consider as the means of plunging you into greater--I mean a war. And you should make it to yourselves a war of men, to your neighbours a war of money.... I hear you cry out that the finances are in a deplorable situation. This should be no obstacle. I think that they may be restored during war better than in peace. You want also something to turn men's attention from their present discontents." There is a long and impartial inquiry into parliamentary corruption as practised now; but one wishes to hear so good a judge on the report that money prevailed at some of the turning-points of American history; on the imputations cast by the younger Adams upon his ablest contemporaries; on the story told by another president, of 223 representatives who received accommodation from the bank, at the rate of a thousand pounds apiece, during its struggle with Jackson.
America as known to the man in the cars, and America observed in the roll of the ages, do not always give the same totals. We learn that the best capacity of the country is withheld from politics, that there is what Emerson calls a gradual withdrawal of tender consciences from the social organisation, so that the representatives approach the level of the constituents. Yet it is in political science only that America occupies the first rank. There are six Americans on a level with the foremost Europeans, with Smith and Turgot, Mill and Humboldt. Five of these were secretaries of state, and one was secretary of the treasury. We are told also that the American of to-day regards the national institutions with a confidence sometimes grotesque. But this is a sentiment which comes down, not from Washington and Jefferson, but from Grant and Sherman. The illustrious founders were not proud of their accomplished work; and men like Clay and Adams persisted in desponding to the second and third generation. We have to distinguish what the nation owes to Madison and Marshall, and what to the army of the Potomac; for men's minds misgave them as to the constitution until it was cemented by the ordeal and the sacrifice of civil war. Even the claim put forward for Americans as the providers of humour for mankind seems to me subject to the same limitation. People used to know how often, or how seldom, Washington laughed during the war; but who has numbered the jokes of Lincoln?
Although Mr. Bryce has too much tact to speak as freely as the Americans themselves in the criticism of their government, he insists that there is one defect which they insufficiently acknowledge. By law or custom no man can represent any district but the one he resides in. If ten statesmen live in the same street, nine will be thrown out of work. It is worth while to point out (though this may not be the right place for a purely political problem) that even in that piece of censure in which he believes himself unsupported by his friends in the States, Mr. Bryce says no more than intelligent Americans have said before him. It chances that several of them have discussed this matter with me. One was governor of his State, and another is among the compurgators cited in the preface. Both were strongly persuaded that the usage in question is an urgent evil; others, I am bound to add, judged differently, deeming it valuable as a security against Boulangism--an object which can be attained by restricting the number of constituencies to be addressed by the same candidate. The two American presidents who agreed in saying that Whig and Tory belong to natural history, proposed a dilemma which Mr. Bryce wishes to elude. He prefers to stand half-way between the two, and to resolve general principles into questions of expediency, probability, and degree: "The wisest statesman is he who best holds the balance between liberty and order." The sentiment is nearly that of Croker and De Quincey, and it is plain that the author would discard the vulgar definition that liberty is the end of government, and that in politics things are to be valued as they minister to its security. He writes in the spirit of John Adams when he said that the French and the American Revolution had nothing in common, and of that eulogy of 1688 as the true Restoration, on which Burke and Macaulay spent their finest prose. A sentence which he takes from Judge Cooley contains the brief abstract of his book: "America is not so much an example in her liberty as in the covenanted and enduring securities which are intended to prevent liberty degenerating into licence, and to establish a feeling of trust and repose under a beneficent government, whose excellence, so obvious in its freedom, is still more conspicuous in its careful provision for permanence and stability." Mr. Bryce declares his own point of view in the following significant terms: "The spirit of 1787 was an English spirit, and therefore a conservative spirit.... The American constitution is no exception to the rule that everything which has power to win the obedience and respect of men must have its roots deep in the past, and that the more slowly every institution has grown, so much the more enduring is it likely to prove.... There is a hearty puritanism in the view of human nature which pervades the instrument of 1787.... No men were less revolutionary in spirit than the heroes of the American Revolution. They made a revolution in the name of Magna Charta and the Bill of Rights." I descry a bewildered Whig emerging from the third volume with a reverent appreciation of ancestral wisdom, Burke's Reflections, and the eighteen Canons of Dort, and a growing belief in the function of ghosts to make laws for the quick.
When the last Valois consulted his dying mother, she advised him that anybody can cut off, but that the sewing on is an acquired art. Mr. Bryce feels strongly for the men who practised what Catharine thought so difficult, and he stops for a moment in the midst of his very impersonal treatise to deliver a panegyric on Alexander Hamilton. Tanto nomini nullum par elogium. His merits can hardly be overstated. Talleyrand assured Ticknor that he had never known his equal; Seward calls him "the ablest and most effective statesman engaged in organising and establishing the union"; Macmaster, the iconoclast, and Holst, poorly endowed with the gift of praise, unite in saying that he was the foremost genius among public men in the new world; Guizot told Rush that The Federalist was the greatest work known to him, in the application of elementary principles of government to practical administration; his paradox in support of political corruption, so hard to reconcile with the character of an honest man, was repeated to the letter by Niebuhr. In estimating Hamilton we have to remember that he was in no sense the author of the constitution. In the convention he was isolated, and his plan was rejected. In The Federalist, written before he was thirty, he pleaded for a form of government which he distrusted and disliked. He was out of sympathy with the spirit that prevailed, and was not the true representative of the cause, like Madison, who said of him, "If his theory of government deviated from the republican standard, he had the candour to avow it, and the greater merit of co-operating faithfully in maturing and supporting a system which was not his choice." The development of the constitution, so far as it continued on his lines, was the work of Marshall, barely known to us by the extracts in late editions of the Commentaries. "The Federalist," says Story, "could do little more than state the objects and general bearing of these powers and functions. The masterly reasoning of the chief-justice has followed them out to their ultimate results and boundaries with a precision and clearness approaching, as near as may be, to mathematical demonstration." Morris, who was as strong as Hamilton on the side of federalism, testifies heavily against him as a leader: "More a theoretic than a practical man, he was not sufficiently convinced that a system may be good in itself, and bad in relation to particular circumstances. He well knew that his favourite form was inadmissible, unless as the result of civil war; and I suspect that his belief in that which he called an approaching crisis arose from a conviction that the kind of government most suitable, in his opinion, to this extensive country, could be established in no other way.... He trusted, moreover, that in the changes and chances of time we should be involved in some war, which might strengthen our union and nerve the executive. He was of all men the most indiscreet. He knew that a limited monarchy, even if established, could not preserve itself in this country.... He never failed, on every occasion, to advocate the excellence of, and avow his attachment to, monarchical government.... Thus, meaning very well, he acted very ill, and approached the evils he apprehended by his very solicitude to keep them at a distance." The language of Adams is more severe; but Adams was an enemy. It has been justly said that "he wished good men, as he termed them, to rule; meaning the wealthy, the well-born, the socially eminent." The federalists have suffered somewhat from this imputation; for a prejudice against any group claiming to serve under that flag is among the bequests of the French Revolution. "Les honnêtes gens ont toujours peur: c'est leur nature," is a maxim of Chateaubriand. A man most divergent and unlike him, Menou, had drawn the same conclusion: "En révolution il ne faut jamais se mettre du côté des honnêtes gens: ils sont toujours balayés." And Royer Collard, with the candour one shows in describing friends, said: "C'est le parti des honnêtes gens qui est le moins honnête de tous les partis. Tout le monde, même dans ses erreurs, était honnête à l'assemblée constituante, excepté le côté droit." Hamilton stands higher as a political philosopher than as an American partisan. Europeans are generally liberal for the sake of something that is not liberty, and conservative for an object to be conserved; and in a jungle of other motives besides the reason of state we cannot often eliminate unadulterated or disinterested conservatism. We think of land and capital, tradition and custom, the aristocracy and the services, the crown and the altar. It is the singular superiority of Hamilton that he is really anxious about nothing but the exceeding difficulty of quelling the centrifugal forces, and that no kindred and coequal powers divide his attachment or intercept his view. Therefore he is the most scientific of conservative thinkers, and there is not one in whom the doctrine that prefers the ship to the crew can be so profitably studied.
In his scruple to do justice to conservative doctrine Mr. Bryce extracts a passage from a letter of Canning to Croker which, by itself, does not adequately represent that minister's views. "Am I to understand, then, that you consider the king as completely in the hands of the Tory aristocracy as his father, or rather as George II. was in the hands of the Whigs? If so, George III. reigned, and Mr. Pitt (both father and son) administered the government, in vain. I have a better opinion of the real vigour of the crown when it chooses to put forth its own strength, and I am not without some reliance on the body of the people." The finest mind reared by many generations of English conservatism was not always so faithful to monarchical traditions, and in addressing the incessant polemist of Toryism Canning made himself out a trifle better than he really was. His intercourse with Marcellus in 1823 exhibits a diluted orthodoxy: "Le système britannique n'est que le butin des longues victoires remportées par les sujets contre le monarque. Oubliez-vous que les rois ne doivent pas donner des institutions, mais que les institutions seules doivent donner des rois?... Connaissez-vous un roi qui mérite d'être libre, dans le sens implicite du mot?... Et George IV., croyez-vous que je serais son ministre, s'il avait été libre de choisir?... Quand un roi dénie au peuple les institutions dont le peuple a besoin, quel est le procédé de l'Angleterre? Elle expulse ce roi, et met à sa place un roi d'une famille alliée sans doute, mais qui se trouve ainsi, non plus un fils de la royauté, confiant dans le droit de ses ancêtres, mais le fils des institutions nationales, tirant tous ses droits de cette seule origine.... Le gouvernement représentatif est encore bon à une chose que sa majesté a oubliée. Il fait que des ministres essuient sans répliquer les épigrammes d'un roi qui cherche à se venger ainsi de son impuissance."
Mr. Bryce's work has received a hearty welcome in its proper hemisphere, and I know not that any critic has doubted whether the pious founder, with the dogma of unbroken continuity, strikes the just note or covers all the ground. At another angle, the origin of the greatest power and the grandest polity in the annals of mankind emits a different ray. It was a favourite doctrine with Webster and Tocqueville that the beliefs of the pilgrims inspired the Revolution, which others deem a triumph of pelagianism; while J.Q. Adams affirms that "not one of the motives which stimulated the puritans of 1643 had the slightest influence in actuating the confederacy of 1774." The Dutch statesman Hogendorp, returning from the United States in 1784, had the following dialogue with the stadtholder: "La religion, monseigneur, a moins d'influence que jamais sur les esprits.... Il y a toute une province de quakers?... Depuis la révolution il semble que ces sortes de différences s'évanouissent.... Les Bostoniens ne sont-ils pas fort dévots?... Ils l'étaient, monseigneur, mais à lire les descriptions faites il y a vingt ou même dix ans, on ne les reconnaît pas de ce côté-là." It is an old story that the federal constitution, unlike that of Hérault de Séchelles, makes no allusion to the Deity; that there is none in the president's oath; and that in 1796 it was stated officially that the government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion. No three men had more to do with the new order than Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson. Franklin's irreligious tone was such that his manuscripts, like Bentham's, were suppressed, to the present year. Adams called the Christian faith a horrid blasphemy. Of Jefferson we are assured that, if not an absolute atheist, he had no belief in a future existence; and he hoped that the French arms "would bring at length kings, nobles, and priests to the scaffolds which they have been so long deluging with human blood." If Calvin prompted the Revolution, it was after he had suffered from contact with Tom Paine; and we must make room for other influences which, in that generation, swayed the world from the rising to the setting sun. It was an age of faith in the secular sense described by Guizot: "C'était un siècle ardent et sincère, un siècle plein de foi et d'enthousiasme. Il a eu foi dans la vérité, car il lui a reconnu le droit de régner."
In point both of principle and policy, Mr. Bryce does well to load the scale that is not his own, and to let the jurist within him sometimes mask the philosophic politician. I have to speak of him not as a political reasoner or as an observer of life in motion, but only in the character which he assiduously lays aside. If he had guarded less against his own historic faculty, and had allowed space to take up neglected threads, he would have had to expose the boundless innovation, the unfathomed gulf produced by American independence, and there would be no opening to back the Jeffersonian shears against the darning-needle of the great chief-justice. My misgiving lies in the line of thought of Riehl and the elder Cherbuliez. The first of those eminent conservatives writes: "Die Extreme, nicht deren Vermittelungen und Abschwächungen, deuten die Zukunft vor." The Genevese has just the same remark: "Les idées n'ont jamais plus de puissance que sous leur forme la plus abstraite. Les idées abstraites ont plus remué le monde, elles ont causé plus de révolutions et laissé plus de traces durables que les idées pratiques." Lassalle says, "Kein Einzelner denkt mit der Consequenz eines Volksgeistes." Schelling may help us over the parting ways: "Der erzeugte Gedanke ist eine unabhängige Macht, für sich fortwirkend, ja, in der menschlichen Seele, so anwachsend, dass er seine eigene Mutter bezwingt und unterwirft." After the philosopher, let us conclude with a divine: "C'est de révolte en révolte, si l'on veut employer ce mot, que les sociétés se perfectionnent, que la civilisation s'établit, que la justice règne, que la vérité fleurit."
The anti-revolutionary temper of the Revolution belongs to 1787, not to 1776. Another element was at work, and it is the other element that is new, effective, characteristic, and added permanently to the experience of the world. The story of the revolted colonies impresses us first and most distinctly as the supreme manifestation of the law of resistance, as the abstract revolution in its purest and most perfect shape. No people was so free as the insurgents; no government less oppressive than the government which they overthrew. Those who deem Washington and Hamilton honest can apply the term to few European statesmen. Their example presents a thorn, not a cushion, and threatens all existing political forms, with the doubtful exception of the federal constitution of 1874. It teaches that men ought to be in arms even against a remote and constructive danger to their freedom; that even if the cloud is no bigger than a man's hand, it is their right and duty to stake the national existence, to sacrifice lives and fortunes, to cover the country with a lake of blood, to shatter crowns and sceptres and fling parliaments into the sea. On this principle of subversion they erected their commonwealth, and by its virtue lifted the world out of its orbit and assigned a new course to history. Here or nowhere we have the broken chain, the rejected past, precedent and statute superseded by unwritten law, sons wiser than their fathers, ideas rooted in the future, reason cutting as clean as Atropos. The wisest philosopher of the old world instructs us to take things as they are, and to adore God in the event: "Il faut toujours être content de l'ordre du passé, parce qu'il est conforme à la volonté de Dieu absolue, qu'on connoît par l'évènement." The contrary is the text of Emerson: "Institutions are not aboriginal, though they existed before we were born. They are not superior to the citizen. Every law and usage was a man's expedient to meet a particular case. We may make as good; we may make better." More to the present point is the language of Seward: "The rights asserted by our forefathers were not peculiar to themselves, they were the common rights of mankind. The basis of the constitution was laid broader by far than the superstructure which the conflicting interests and prejudices of the day suffered to be erected. The constitution and laws of the federal government did not practically extend those principles throughout the new system of government; but they were plainly promulgated in the declaration of independence. Their complete development and reduction to practical operation constitute the progress which all liberal statesmen desire to promote, and the end of that progress will be complete political equality among ourselves, and the extension and perfection of institutions similar to our own throughout the world." A passage which Hamilton's editor selects as the keynote of his system expresses well enough the spirit of the Revolution: "The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the Divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power. I consider civil liberty, in a genuine, unadulterated sense, as the greatest of terrestrial blessings. I am convinced that the whole human race is entitled to it, and that it can be wrested from no part of them without the blackest and most aggravated guilt." Those were the days when a philosopher divided governments into two kinds, the bad and the good, that is, those which exist and those which do not exist; and when Burke, in the fervour of early liberalism, proclaimed that a revolution was the only thing that could do the world any good: "Nothing less than a convulsion that will shake the globe to its centre can ever restore the European nations to that liberty by which they were once so much distinguished."
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 402: English Historical Review, 1889.]
XVII
HISTORICAL PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE AND FRENCH BELGIUM AND SWITZERLAND.
By ROBERT FLINT[403]
When Dr. Flint's former work appeared, a critic, who, it is true, was also a rival, objected that it was diffusely written. What then occupied three hundred and thirty pages has now expanded to seven hundred, and suggests a doubt as to the use of criticism. It must at once be said that the increase is nearly all material gain. The author does not cling to his main topic, and, as he insists that the science he is adumbrating flourishes on the study of facts only, and not on speculative ideas, he bestows some needless attention on historians who professed no philosophy, or who, like Daniel and Velly, were not the best of their kind. Here and there, as in the account of Condorcet, there may be an unprofitable or superfluous sentence. But on the whole the enlarged treatment of the philosophy of history in France is accomplished not by expansion, but by solid and essential addition. Many writers are included whom the earlier volume passed over, and Cousin occupies fewer pages now than in 1874, by the aid of smaller type and the omission of a passage injurious to Schelling. Many necessary corrections and improvements have been made, such as the transfer of Ballanche from theocracy to the liberal Catholicism of which he is supposed to be the founder.
Dr. Flint's unchallenged superiority consists alike in his familiarity with obscure, but not irrelevant authors, whom he has brought into line, and in his scrupulous fairness towards all whose attempted systems he has analysed. He is hearty in appreciating talent of every kind, but he is discriminating in his judgment of ideas, and rarely sympathetic. Where the best thoughts of the ablest men are to be displayed, it would be tempting to present an array of luminous points or a chaplet of polished gems. In the hands of such artists as Stahl or Cousin they would start into high relief with a convincing lucidity that would rouse the exhibited writers to confess that they had never known they were so clever. Without transfiguration the effect might be attained by sometimes stringing the most significant words of the original. Excepting one unduly favoured competitor, who fills two pages with untranslated French, there is little direct quotation. Cournot is one of those who, having been overlooked at first, are here raised to prominence. He is urgently, and justly, recommended to the attention of students. "They will find that every page bears the impress of patient, independent, and sagacious thought. I believe I have not met with a more genuine thinker in the course of my investigations. He was a man of the finest intellectual qualities, of a powerful and absolutely truthful mind." But then we are warned that Cournot never wrote a line for the general reader, and accordingly he is not permitted to speak for himself. Yet it was this thoughtful Frenchman who said: "Aucune idée parmi celles qui se réfèrent à l'ordre des faits naturels ne tient de plus près à la famille des idées religieuses que l'idée du progrès, et n'est plus propre à devenir le principe d'une sorte de foi religieuse pour ceux qui n'en ont pas d'autres. Elle a, comme la foi religieuse, la vertu de relever les âmes et les caractères."
The successive theories gain neither in clearness nor in contrast by the order in which they stand. As other countries are reserved for other volumes, Cousin precedes Hegel, who was his master, whilst Quetelet is barely mentioned in his own place, and has to wait for Buckle, if not for Oettingen and Rümelin, before he comes on for discussion. The finer threads, the underground currents, are not carefully traced. The connection between the juste milieu in politics and eclecticism in philosophy was already stated by the chief eclectic; but the subtler link between the Catholic legitimists and democracy seems to have escaped the author's notice. He says that the republic proclaimed universal suffrage in 1848, and he considers it a triumph for the party of Lafayette. In fact, it was the triumph of an opposite school--of those legitimists who appealed from the narrow franchise which sustained the Orleans dynasty to the nation behind it. The chairman of the constitutional committee was a legitimist, and he, inspired by the abbé de Genoude, of the Gazette de France, and opposed by Odilon Barrot, insisted on the pure logic of absolute democracy.
It is an old story now that the true history of philosophy is the true evolution of philosophy, and that when we have eliminated whatever has been damaged by contemporary criticism or by subsequent advance, and have assimilated all that has survived through the ages, we shall find in our possession not only a record of growth, but the full-grown fruit itself. This is not the way in which Dr. Flint understands the building up of his department of knowledge. Instead of showing how far France has made a way towards the untrodden crest, he describes the many flowery paths, discovered by the French, which lead elsewhere, and I expect that in coming volumes it will appear that Hegel and Buckle, Vico and Ferrari, are scarcely better guides than Laurent or Littré. Fatalism and retribution, race and nationality, the test of success and of duration, heredity and the reign of the invincible dead, the widening circle, the emancipation of the individual, the gradual triumph of the soul over the body, of mind over matter, reason over will, knowledge over ignorance, truth over error, right over might, liberty over authority, the law of progress and perfectibility, the constant intervention of providence, the sovereignty of the developed conscience--neither these nor other alluring theories are accepted as more than illusions or half-truths. Dr. Flint scarcely avails himself of them even for his foundations or his skeleton framework. His critical faculty, stronger than his gift of adaptation, levels obstructions and marks the earth with ruin. He is more anxious to expose the strange unreason of former writers, the inadequacy of their knowledge, their want of aptitude in induction, than their services in storing material for the use of successors. The result is not to be the sifted and verified wisdom of two centuries, but a future system, to be produced when the rest have failed by an exhaustive series of vain experiments. We may regret to abandon many brilliant laws and attractive generalisations that have given light and clearness and simplicity and symmetry to our thought; but it is certain that Dr. Flint is a close and powerful reasoner, equipped with satisfying information, and he establishes his contention that France has not produced a classic philosophy of history, and is still waiting for its Adam Smith or Jacob Grimm.
The kindred topic of development recurs repeatedly, as an important factor in modern science. It is still a confused and unsettled chapter, and in one place Dr. Flint seems to attribute the idea to Bossuet; in another he says that it was scarcely entertained in those days by Protestants, and not at all by Catholics; in a third he implies that its celebrity in the nineteenth century is owing in the first place to Lamennais. The passage, taken from Vinet, in which Bossuet speaks of the development of religion is inaccurately rendered. His words are the same which, on another page, are rightly translated "the course of religion"--la suite de la religion. Indeed, Bossuet was the most powerful adversary the theory ever encountered. It was not so alien to Catholic theology as is here stated, and before the time of Jurieu is more often found among Catholic than Protestant writers. When it was put forward, in guarded, dubious, and evasive terms, by Petavius, the indignation in England was as great as in 1846. The work which contained it, the most learned that Christian theology had then produced, could not be reprinted over here, lest it should supply the Socinians with inconvenient texts. Nelson hints that the great Jesuit may have been a secret Arian, and Bull stamped upon his theory amid the grateful applause of Bossuet and his friends. Petavius was not an innovator, for the idea had long found a home among the Franciscan masters: "Proficit fides secundum statum communem, quia secundum profectum temporum efficiebantur homines magis idonei ad percipienda et intelligenda sacramenta fidei.--Sunt multae conclusiones necessario inclusae in articulis creditis, sed antequam sunt per Ecclesiam declaratae et explicatae non oportet quemcumque eas credere. Oportet tamen circa eas sobrie opinari, ut scilicet homo sit paratus eas tenere pro tempore, pro quo veritas fuerit declarata." Cardinal Duperron said nearly the same thing as Petavius a generation before him: "L'Arien trouvera dans sainct Irénée, Tertullien et autres qui nous sont restez en petit nombre de ces siècles-là, que le Fils est l'instrument du Père, que le Père a commandé au Fils lors qu'il a esté question de la création des choses, que le Père et le Fils sont aliud et aliud; choses que qui tiendroit aujourd'huy, que le langage de l'Eglise est plus examiné, seroit estimé pour Arien luy-mesme." All this does not serve to supply the pedigree which Newman found it so difficult to trace. Development, in those days, was an expedient, an hypothesis, and not even the thing so dear to the Oxford probabilitarians, a working hypothesis. It was not more substantial than the gleam in Robinson's farewell to the pilgrims: "I am very confident that the Lord has more truth yet to break forth out of His holy word." The reason why it possessed no scientific basis is explained by Duchesne: "Ce n'est guère avant la seconde moitié du xviie siècle qu'il devint impossible de soutenir l'authenticité des fausses décrétales, des constitutions apostoliques, des 'Récognitions Clémentines,' du faux Ignace, du pseudo-Dionys et de l'immense fatras d'oeuvres anonymes ou pseudonymes qui grossissait souvent du tiers ou de la moitié l'héritage littéraire des auteurs les plus considérables. Qui aurait pu même songer à un développement dogmatique?" That it was little understood, and lightly and loosely employed, is proved by Bossuet himself, who alludes to it in one passage as if he did not know that it was the subversion of his theology: "Quamvis ecclesia omnem veritatem funditus norit, ex haeresibus tamen discit, ut aiebat magni nominis Vincentius Lirinensis, aptius, distinctius, clariusque eandem exponere."
The account of Lamennais suffers from the defect of mixing him up too much with his early friends. No doubt he owed to them the theory that carried him through his career, for it may be found in Bonald, and also in De Maistre, though not, perhaps, in the volumes he had already published. It was less original than he at first imagined, for the English divines commonly held it from the seventeenth century, and its dirge was sung only the other day by the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol.[404] A Scottish professor would even be justified in claiming it for Reid. But of course it was Lamennais who gave it most importance, in his programme and in his life. And his theory of the common sense, the theory that we can be certain of truth only by the agreement of mankind, though vigorously applied to sustain authority in State and Church, gravitated towards multitudinism, and marked him off from his associates. When he said quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus, he was not thinking of the Christian Church, but of Christianity as old as the creation; and the development he meant led up to the Bible, and ended at the New Testament instead of beginning there. That is the theory which he made so famous, which founded his fame and governed his fate, and to which Dr. Flint's words apply when he speaks of celebrity. In that sense it is a mistake to connect Lamennais with Möhler and Newman; and I do not believe that he anticipated their teaching, in spite of one or two passages which do not, on the face of them, bear date B.C., and may, no doubt, be quoted for the opposite opinion.
In the same group Dr. Flint represents De Maistre as the teacher of Savigny, and asserts that there could never be a doubt as to the liberalism of Chateaubriand. There was none after his expulsion from office; but there was much reason for doubting in 1815, when he entreated the king to set bounds to his mercy; in 1819, when he was contributing to the Conservateur; and in 1823, when he executed the mandate of the absolute monarchs against the Spanish constitution. His zeal for legitimacy was at all times qualified with liberal elements, but they never became consistent or acquired the mastery until 1824. De Maistre and Savigny covered the same ground at one point; they both subjected the future to the past. This could serve as an argument for absolutism and theocracy, and on that account was lovely in the eyes of De Maistre. If it had been an argument the other way he would have cast it off. Savigny had no such ulterior purpose. His doctrine, that the living are not their own masters, could serve either cause. He rejected a mechanical fixity, and held that whatever has been made by process of growth shall continue to grow and suffer modification. His theory of continuity has this significance in political science, that it supplied a basis for conservatism apart from absolutism and compatible with freedom. And, as he believed that law depends on national tradition and character, he became indirectly and through friends a founder of the theory of nationality.
The one writer whom Dr. Flint refuses to criticise, because he too nearly agrees with him, is Renouvier. Taking this avowal in conjunction with two or three indiscretions on other pages, we can make a guess, not at the system itself, which is to console us for so much deviation, but at its tendency and spirit The fundamental article is belief in divine government. As Kant beheld God in the firmament of heaven, so too we can see him in history on earth. Unless a man is determined to be an atheist, he must acknowledge that the experience of mankind is a decisive proof in favour of religion. As providence is not absolute, but reigns over men destined to freedom, its method is manifested in the law of progress. Here, however, Dr. Flint, in his agreement with Renouvier, is not eager to fight for his cause, and speaks with a less jubilant certitude. He is able to conceive that providence may attain its end without the condition of progress, that the divine scheme would not be frustrated if the world, governed by omnipotent wisdom, became steadily worse. Assuming progress as a fact, if not a law, there comes the question wherein it consists, how it is measured, where is its goal. Not religion, for the Middle Ages are an epoch of decline. Catholicism has since lost so much ground as to nullify the theories of Bossuet; whilst Protestantism never succeeded in France, either after the Reformation, when it ought to have prevailed, nor after the Revolution, when it ought not. The failure to establish the Protestant Church on the ruins of the old régime, to which Quinet attributes the breakdown of the Revolution, and which Napoleon regretted almost in the era of his concordat, is explained by Mr. Flint on the ground that Protestants were in a minority. But so they were in and after the wars of religion; and it is not apparent why a philosopher who does not prefer orthodoxy to liberty should complain that they achieved nothing better than toleration. He disproves Bossuet's view by that process of deliverance from the Church which is the note of recent centuries, and from which there is no going back. On the future I will not enlarge, because I am writing at present in the HISTORICAL, not the PROPHETICAL, REVIEW. But some things were not so clear in France in 1679 as they are now at Edinburgh. The predominance of Protestant power was not foreseen, except by those who disputed whether Rome would perish in 1710 or about 1720. The destined power of science to act upon religion had not been proved by Newton or Simon. No man was able to forecast the future experience of America, or to be sure that observations made under the reign of authority would be confirmed by the reign of freedom.
If the end be not religion, is it morality, humanity, civilisation, knowledge? In the German chapters of 1874 Dr. Flint was severe upon Hegel, and refused his notion that the development of liberty is the soul of history, as crude, one-sided, and misunderstood. He is more lenient now, and affirms that liberty occupies the final summit, that it profits by all the good that is in the world, and suffers by all the evil, that it pervades strife and inspires endeavour, that it is almost, if not altogether, the sign, and the prize, and the motive in the onward and upward advance of the race for which Christ was crucified. As that refined essence which draws sustenance from all good things it is clearly understood as the product of civilisation, with its complex problems and scientific appliances, not as the elementary possession of the noble savage, which has been traced so often to the primeval forest. On the other hand, if sin not only tends to impair, but does inevitably impair and hinder it, providence is excluded from its own mysterious sphere, which, as it is not the suppression of all evil and present punishment of wrong, should be the conversion of evil into an instrument to serve the higher purpose. But although Dr. Flint has come very near to Hegel and Michelet, and seemed about to elevate their teaching to a higher level and a wider view, he ends by treating it coldly, as a partial truth requiring supplement, and bids us wait until many more explorers have recorded their soundings. That, with the trained capacity for misunderstanding and the smouldering dissent proper to critics, I might not mislead any reader, or do less than justice to a profound though indecisive work, I should have wished to piece together the passages in which the author indicates, somewhat faintly, the promised but withheld philosophy which will crown his third or fourth volume. Any one who compares pages 125, 135, 225, 226, 671, will understand better than I can explain it the view which is the master-key to the book.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 403: English Historical Review, 1895.]
[Footnote 404: [Dr. Ellicott.]]