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Pp. 471-631
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ful change. It had become obviously useless any longer to assert an immobility of humanity when men were standing face to face with the new forms into which it had been transposed. New ideas had driven out old ones. Natural phenomena could not again be likened to human acts, nor the necessities of man regarded as determining the movements of the universe. A better appreciation of the nature of evidence was arising, perhaps in part through the influence of the lawyers, but in part through a commencing taste for criticism. We see it in such facts as the denial that a miracle can be taken as the proof of any thing else than the special circumstances with which it is connected; we see it in the assertion that the martyrdom of men in support of a dogma, so far from proving its truth, proves rather its doubtfulness, no geometer having ever thought it worth his while to die in order to establish any mathematical proposition, truth needing no such sacrifices, which are actually unserviceable and useless to it, since it is able spontaneously to force its own way. In Italy, where the popular pecuniary interests were obviously identical with those of the Church, a dismal disbelief was silently engendering. And now occurred an event the results of which it is impossible to exaggerate. About A.D. 1440 the art of printing seems to have been invented in Europe. It is not material to our purpose to inquire into the its particulars of its history, whether we should attribute it to Coster of Haarlaem or Gutemberg of Mentz, or whether, in reality, it was introduced by the Venetians from China, where it had been practiced for nearly two thousand years. In Venice a decree was issued in 1441 in relation to printing, which would seem to imply that it had been known there for some years. Coster is supposed to have printed the " Speculum Humanse Salvationis" about 1440, and Gutemberg and Faust the Mentz Bible without date, 1455. The art reached perfection at once; their Bible is still admired for its beautiful typography. Among the earliest specimens of printing extant is an exhortation to take up arms against the Turks, 1454; there are also two letters of indulgence of Nicolas V. of the same date. In the beginning each
Page was engraved on a block of wood, but soon movable types were introduced. Impressions of the former kind pass under the name of block books; at first they were sold as manuscripts. Two of Faust's workmen commenced printing in Italy, but not until 1465; they there published an edition of "Lactantius," one of "Cicero de Officiis," and one of "Augustine de Civitate Dei." The art was carried to France 1469, and in a few years was generally practiced in all the large European towns. The printers were their own booksellers; the number of copies in each edition usually about three hundred. Folios were succeeded by quartos, and in 1501 duodecimos were introduced. Very
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472 PROGRESS OF PRINTING IN EUROPE.
soon the price of books was reduced by four fifths, and existing interests required regulations not only respecting the cost, but also respecting the contents. Thus the University of Paris established a tariff for their sale, and also exercised a supervision in behalf of the Church and the State. From the outset it was clear that printing would inevitably influence the intellectual movement synchronously occurring. Some authors have endeavored to estimate the intellectual condition of different countries in Europe at the close of the fifteenth century by the literary activity they displayed in the preparation and printing of editions of books. Though it is plain that such estimates can hardly be rigorously correct, since to print a book not only implies literary capacity, but also the connections of business and trade, and hence works are more likely to be issued in places where there is a mercantile activity, yet such estimates are perhaps the most exact that we can now obtain; they also lead us to some very interesting and unexpected results of singular value in their connection with that important epoch. Thus it appears that in all Europe, between 1470 and 1500, more than ten thousand editions of books and pamphlets were printed, and of them a majority in Italy, demonstrating that Italy was in the van of the intellectual movement. Out of this large number, in Venice there had been printed 2835; Milan, 625; Bologna, 298; Rome, 925; fifty other Italian cities had presses; Paris, 751; Cologne, 530; Nuremberg, 382; Leipsic, 351; Bale, 320; Strasburg, 526; Augsburg, 256; Louvain, 116; Mentz, 134; Deventer, 169; London, 130; Oxford, 7'; St. Alban's, 4. Venice, therefore, took the lead. England was in a very backward state. This conclusion is confirmed by many other circumstances, which justify the statement that Italy was as far advanced intellectually in 1400 as England in 1500. Paris exhibits a superiority sixfold over London, and in the next ten years the disproportion becomes even more remarkable, for in Paris four hundred and thirty editions were printed, in London only twenty-six. The light of learning became enfeebled by distance from its Italian focus. As late as 1550, a complete century after the establishment of the art, but seven works had been printed in Scotland, and among them not a single classic. It is an amusing proof how local tastes were consulted in the character of the books thus put forth, that the first work issued in Spain, 1474, was on the "Conception of the Virgin." The invention of printing operated in two modes altogether distinct: first, in the multiplying and cheapening of books, and, second, in substituting reading for pulpit instruction. First, as to the multiplication and cheapening of books, there is no reason to suppose that the supply had ever been inadequate. As, under the Ptolemies, book manufacture was carried forward
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CONSEQUENCES OF PRINTING. 473
in the Museum at Alexandria to an extent which fully satisfied demands, so in all the great abbeys there was an apartment-the Scriptorium-for the copying and making of books. Such a sedentary occupation could not but be agreeable to persons of a contemplative or quiet habit of life. But Greece, Rome, Egypt-indeed, all the ancient governments except that of China, were founded upon elements among which did not appear that all-important one of modern times, a reading class. Information passed from mouth to mouth, not from eye to eye. With a limited demand, the compensation to the copier was sufficient, and the cost to the purchaser moderate. It is altogether a mistake to suppose that the methods and advantages of printing were unknown. Modifications of that art were used wherever occasion called for them. We do not need the Roman stamps to satisfy us of that fact; every Babylonian brick and signet ring is an illustration. Printing processes of various kinds were well enough known. The real difficulty was the want of paper. That substance was first made in Europe by the Spanish Moors from the fine flax of Valentia and Mercia. Cotton paper, sold as charta Damascena, had been previously made at Damascus, and several different varieties had long been manufactured in China. Had there been more readers, paper would have been more abundantly produced, and there would have been more copiers-nay, even there would have been printers. An increased demand would have been answered by an increased supply. As soon as such a demand arose in Europe the press was introduced, as it had been thousands of years before in China. So far as the public is concerned, printing has been an unmixed advantage; not so, however, in its bearing on authors. The longevity of books is greatly impaired, a melancholy conclusion ed. to an ambitious intellect. The duration of many ancient books which have escaped the chances of time is to be hoped for no more. In this shortening of their term the excessive multiplication of works greatly assists. A rapid succession soon makes those of distinction obsolete, and then consigns them to oblivion. No author can now expect immortality. His utmost hope is only this, that his book may live a little longer than himself. But it was with printing as with other affairs of the market-an increased demand gave origin to an increased supply, which, in its turn reacting, increased the demand. Cheap books bred readers. When the monks, abandoning their useless and lazy life of saying their prayers a dozen times a day, turned to the copying and illustrating of manuscripts, a mental elevation of the whole order was the result; there were more monks who could read. And so, on the greater scale, as books through the press became more abundant, there were more to whom they became a necessity.
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474 EFFECT UPON THE CHURCH
But, secondly, as to the change which ensued in the mode of communicating information-a change felt instantly in the ecclesiastical, and, at a later period, in the political world. The whole system of public worship was founded on the condition of a non-reading people; hence the reading of prayers and the sermon. Whoever will attentively compare the thirteenth with the nineteenth century can not fail to see how essential oral instruction was to the former, how subordinate to the latter. The invention of the printing-press pit instruction gave an instant, a formidable rival to the pulpit. It made possible that which had been impossible before in Christian Europe direct communication between the government and the people without any religious intermedium, and was the first step in that important change subsequently carried out in America, the separation of Church and State. Though in this particular the effect was desirable, in another its advantages are doubtful, for the Church adhered to her ancient method when it had lost very much of its real force, and this even at the risk of falling into a lifeless and impassive condition. And yet we must not undervalue the power once exercised on a non-reading community by oral and scenic teachings. What could better instruct it than a formal congregating of neighborhoods people. together each Sabbath-day to listen in silence and without questioning? In those great churches, the architectural grandeur of which is still the admiration of our material age, nothing was wanting to impress the worshiper. The vast pile, with its turrets or spire pointing to heaven; its steep inclining roof; its walls, with niches and statues; its echoing belfry; its windows of exquisite hues and of every form, lancet, or wheel, or rose, through which stole in the many-colored light; its chapels, with their pictured walls; its rows of slender, clustering columns,'and arches tier upon tier; its many tapering pendants; the priest emerging from his scenic retreat; his chalice and forbidden wine; the covering paten, the cibory, and the pix. Amid clouds of incense from smoking censers, the blaze of lamps, and tapers, and branching candlesticks, the tinkling of silver bells, the play of jeweled vessels and gorgeous dresses of violet, green, and gold, banners and crosses were borne aloft through lines of kneeling worshipers in processional services along the aisles. The chanting of litanies and psalms gave a foretaste of the melodies of heaven, and the voices of the choristers and sounds of the organ now thundered forth glory to God in the highest, now whispered to the broken in spirit peace. If such were the influences in the cathedral, not less were those that gathered round the little village church. To the peasant it was endeared by the most touching incidents of his life. At its font his parents had given him his name; at its altar he had plighted his matrimonial vows; beneath the little grass mounds in its
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THE PULPIT AND THE PRESS. 475
yard there awaited the resurrection those who had been untimely taken away. Connected thus with the profoundest and holiest sentiments of humanity, the pulpit was for instruction a sole and sufficient means. Nothing like it had existed in paganism. The irregular, ill-timed, occasional eloquence of the Greek republican orators can not for an instant be set in comparison with such a steady and enduring systematic institution. In a temporal as well as in a spiritual sense, the public authorities appreciated its power. Queen Elizabeth was not the only sovereign who knew how to thunder through a thousand pulpits. For a length of time, as might have been expected, considering its power and favoring adventitious circumstances, the pulpit maintained itself successfully against the press. Nevertheless, its eventual subordination was none the less sure. If there are disadvantages in the method of acquiring knowledge by reading, there are also signal advantages; for, though upon the printed
Page the silent letters are mute and unsustained by any scenic help, yet often-a wonderful contradiction-they pour forth emphatic eloquence, that can make the heart leap with emotion, or kindle on the cheek the blush of shame. The might of persuasiveness does not always lie in articulate speech. The strong are often the silent. God never speaks. There is another condition which gives to reading a great advantage over listening. In the affairs of life, how wide is the difference between having a thing done for us and doing it ourselves! In the latter case, how great is the interest awakened, how much more thorough the examination, how much more perfect the acquaintance. To listen implies merely a passive frame of mind; to read, an active. But the latter is more noble. From these and other such considerations, it might have been foreseen that the printing-press would at last deprive the pulpit of its supremacy, making it become ineffective, or reducing it to an ancillary aid. It must have been clear that the time would arrive when, though adorned by the eloquence of great and good men, the sermon would lose its power for moving popular masses or directing public thought. Upon temporal as well as ecclesiastical authority influence of this great change was also felt. During the Turktish war of 1563 newspapers first made their appearance in Venice. They were in manuscript. The "Gazette de France" commenced in 1631. There seems to be doubt as to the authenticity of the early English papers reputed to have been published during the excitement of the Spanish Armada, and of which copies remain in the British Museum. It was not until the civil wars that, under the names of Mercuries, Intelligences, etc., newspapers fairly established themselves in England. What I have said respecting the influence of the press upon religious
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476 APPROACH OF THE REFORMATION.
life applies substantially to civil life also. Oratory has sunk into a secondary position, being every day more and more thoroughly supplanted by journalism. No matter how excellent it may be in its sphere of action, it is essentially limited, and altogether incompetent to the influencing of masses of men in the manner which our modern social system requires. Without a newspaper, what would be the worth of the most eloquent parliamentary attempts? It is that which really makes them instruments of power, and gives to them political force, which takes them out of a little circle of cultivated auditors, and throws them broadcast over nations. Such was the literary condition of Western Europe, such the new power that had been found in the press. These were but initiatory to the great drama now commencing. We have already seen that synchronously with this intellectual there was a moral impulse coming into play. The two were in harmony. At the time now occupying our attention there was a possibility for the moral impulse to act under several different forms. The special mode in which it came into effect was determined by the pecuniary necessities of Italy. It very soon, however, assumed larger proportions, and became what is known to us as the Reformation. The movement against Rome that had been abandoned for a century was now recommenced. The variation of human thought proceeds in a continuous manner, new ideas springing out of old ones either as corrections or developments, but never spontaneously originating. With them as with organic forms, each requires a germ, a seed. The intellectual phase of humanity observed at any moment is therefore an embodiment of many different things. It is connected with the past, is in unison with the present, and contains the embryo of the future. Human opinions must hence, of absolute necessity, undergo transformation. What has been received by one generation as undoubted, to a subsequent one becomes so conspicuously fallacious as to excite the wonder of those who do not distinctly appreciate the law of psychical advance that it could ever have been received as true. These phases of transformation are not only related in a chronological way, so as to be obvious when we examine the ideas of society at epochs of a few years or of centuries apart- they exist also contemporaneously in different nations or in different social grades of the same nation, according as the class of persons considered has made a greater or less intellectual progress. Notwithstanding the assertion of Rome, the essential ideas of the Italian system had undergone unavoidable modifications. An illiterate people, easily imposed upon, had accepted as true the asseveration that there had been no change even from the apostolic times. But the time had now come when that fiction could no longer be main-
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CONTEMPORANEOUS STATE OF EUROPE. 477
tained, the divergence no longer concealed. In the new state of things, it was impossible that dogmas in absolute opposition to reason, such as that of transubstantiation, could any longer hold their ground. The scholastic theology and scholastic philosophy, though supported by the universities, had become obsolete. With the revival of pure Latinity and the introduction of Greek, the foundations of a more correct criticism were laid. An age of erudition was unavoidable, in which whatever could not establish its claims against a searching examination must necessarily be overthrown. We are thus brought to the great movement known as the Reformation. The term is usually applied in reference to the Protestant nations, and therefore is not sufficiently comprehensive, for all Europe was in truth involved. A clear understanding of its origin, its process, its effects, is perhaps best obtained by an examination of the condition of the northern and southern nations, and the issue of the event in each respectively. Germany had always been sincere, and therefore always devout. Of her disposition she had given many proofs from the time when the Emperor Otho descended into Italy, his expedition having been, as was said, an armed procession of ecclesiastics resolved to abate the scandals of the Church. The Councils of Constance and Basle may be looked upon as an embodiment of the same sentiment. The resolution to limit the papal authority and to put a superior over the pope arose from a profound conviction of the necessity of such a measure. Those councils were precursors of the coming Reformation. In other countries events had long been tending in the same direction: in Sicily and Italy by the acts of Frederick II; in France through those of Philip the Fair. The educated had been estranged by the Saracens and Jews; the enthusiastic by such works as the Everlasting Gospel; the devout had been shocked by the tale of the Templars and the detected immoralities in Rome; the patriotic had been alienated by the assumptions of the papal court and its incessant intermeddling in political affairs; the inferior, unreflecting orders were in all directions exasperated by its importunate, unceasing exactions of money. In England, for instance, though less advanced intellectually than the southern nations, the commencement of the Reformation is perhaps justly referred as far back as the reign of Edward III., who, under the suggestion of Wiclif, refused to do homage to the pope, but a series of weaker princes succeeding, it was not until Henry VII. that the movement could be continued. In that country the immediately exciting causes were no doubt of a material kind, such as the alleged avarice and impurity of the clergy, the immense amount of money taken from the realm, the intrusion of foreign ecclesiastics. In the South of France and in Italy, where the intellectual condition was much more advanced, the movement was cor-
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478 SUPEREROGATION AND INDULGENCE.
respondingly of a more intellectual kind. To this difference between the north and the south must be referred not only the striking geographical distribution of belief which was soon apparent, but also the speedy and abrupt limitation of the Reformation, restrictedly so called. In recent ages, under her financial pressure, Rome had asserted that the infinite merits of our Savior, together with the good works of supererogation of many holy men, constituted, as' it were, a fund from which might be discharged penalties of sins of every kind, for the dead as well as the living, and therefore available for those who had passed into Purgatory, as well as for us who remain. This fund, committed to the care of St. Peter and his successors, may be disbursed, under the form of indulgences, by sale for money. A traffic in indulgences was thus carried on to a great extent through the medium of the monks, who received a commission upon the profits. Of course, it is plain that the religious conception of such a transaction is liable to adverse criticism-the bartering for money so holy a thing as the merit of our Redeemer. This was, however, only the ostensible explanation, which it was judged necessary to present to sincerely pious communities; behind it there lay the real reason, which was essentially of a political kind. It was absolutely necessary that papal Rome should control a revenue far beyond that arising in a strictly legitimate way. As all the world had been drained of money by the senate and Caesars for the support of republican or imperial power, so too there was a need of a like supply for the use of the pontiffs. The collection of funds had often given rise to contentions between the ecclesiastical and temporal authorities, and in some of the more sturdy countries had been resolutely resisted. To collect a direct tax is often a troublesome affair; but such is human nature-a man from whom it might be difficult to extort the payment of an impost lawfully laid, will often cheerfully find means to purchase for himself indulgence for sin. In such a semi-barbarian but yet religious population as that with which the Church was dealing, it was quite clear that this manner of presenting things possessed singular advantages, an obvious equivalent being given for the money received. The indulgence implied not only a release from celestial, but also, in many cases, from civil penalties. It was an absolute guarantee from hell. It is said that the attention of Martin Luther, formerly an Augustinian monk, was first attracted to this subject by the traffic having been conferred on the Dominicans instead of upon his own order at the time when Leo X. was raising funds by this means for building St. Peter's at Rome, A.D. 1517. That was probably only an insinuation of Luther's adversaries, and is very far from being borne out by his subsequent conduct. His first public movement was the putting forth of ninety-five theses against the practice. He posted them on the
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MARTIN LUTHER.-REFORMATION IN GERMANY. 479
door of the cathedral of Wittenberg, and enforced them in his sermons, though at this time he professed obedience to the papal authority. With a rapidity probably unexpected by him, his acts excited public attention so strongly, that, though the pope was at first disposed to regard the whole affair as a mere monkish squabble for gains, it soon became obvious, from the manner in which the commotion was spreading, that something must be done to check it. The pope therefore summoned Luther to Rome to answer for himself; but, through the influence of certain great personages, and receiving a submissive letter from the accused, he, on reconsideration, referred the matter to Cardinal Cajetan, his legate in Germany. The cardinal, on looking into the affair, ordered Luther to retract; and now came into prominence the mental qualities of this great man. Luther, with respectful firmness, refused; but remembering John Huss, and fearing that the imperial safe-conduct which had been given to him would be insufficient for his protection, he secretly returned to Wittenberg, having first, however, solemnly appealed from the pope, ill informed at the time, to the pope when he should have been better instructed. Thereupon he was condemned as a heretic. Undismayed, he continued to defend his opinions; but, finding himself in imminent danger, he fell upon the suggestion which, since the days of Philip the Fair, had been recognized as the true method of dealing with the papacy, and appealed to a general council as the true representative of the Church, and therefore superior to the pope, who is not infallible any more than St. Peter himself had been. To this denial of papal authority he soon added a dissent from the doctrines of purgatory, auricular confession, absolution. It was now that the grand idea which had hitherto silently lain at the bottom of the whole movement emerged into prominence-the right of individual judgment under the dogma that it is not papal authority which should be the guide of life, but the Bible, and that the Bible is to be interpreted by private judgment. Thus far it had been received that the Bible derives its authenticity and authority from the Church; now it was asserted that the Church derives her authenticity and authority from the Bible. At this moment there was but one course for the Italian court to take with the audacious offender, for this new doctrine of the right of exercising private judgment in matters of faith was dangerous to the last extreme, and not to be tolerated for a moment. Luther was therefore ordered to recant, and to burn his own works, under penalty, if disobedient, of being excommunicated, and delivered over unto Satan. The bull thus issued directed all secular princes to seize his person and punish his crimes. But Luther was not to be intimidated; nay, more, he retaliated. He denounced the pope, as Frederick and the Fratricelli had formerly done, as the Man of Sin, the Anti-Christ. He called
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480 REFORMATION IN SWITZERLAND.
upon all Christian princes to shake off his tyranny. In the presence of a great concourse of applauding spectators, he committed the volumes of the canon law and the bull of excommunication to the flames. The pope now issued another bull expelling him from the Church. This was in January, 1521. This separation opened to Luther an unrestrained career. He forthwith proceeded to an examination of the Italian system of theology and policy, in which he was joined by many talented men who participated in his views. The Emperor Charles V. found it necessary to use all his influence to check the spreading Reformation. But it was already too late, for Luther had obtained the firm support of many personages of influence, and his doctrines were finding defenders among some of the ablest men in Europe. An imperial diet was therefore held at Worms, before which Luther, being summoned, appeared. But nothing could induce him to retract his opinions. An edict was published putting him under the ban of the empire; but the Elector of Saxony concealed him in the castle of Warburg. While he was in this retirement his doctrines were rapidly extending, the Augustinians of Wittenberg not hesitating to change the usages of the Church, abolishing private masses, and giving the cup as well as the bread to the laity. While Germany was agitated to her centre, a like revolt against Italian supremacy broke out in Switzerland. It too commenced on the question of indulgences, and found a leader in Zuinglius. Even at this early period the inevitable course of events was beginning to be plainly displayed in sectarian decomposition; for, while the German and Swiss Reformers agreed in their relation toward the papal authority, they differed widely from each other on some important doctrinal points, more especially as to the nature of the Eucharist. The Germans supposed that the body and blood of Christ are actually present in the bread and wine in some mysterious way; the Swiss believed that those substances are only emblems or symbols. Both totally rejected the Italian doctrine of transubstantiation. The old ideas of Berengar were therefore again fermenting among men. An attempt was made, under the auspices of the Landgrave of Hesse, to compose the dissension in a conference at Marburg; but it was found, after a long disputation, that neither party would give up its views, and they therefore separated, as it was said, in Christian charity, but not in brotherhood. At the first Diet of Spires, held in 1526, it was tried to procure the execution of the sentence passed upon Luther, but the party of the Reformation proved to be too strong for the Catholics. At a second diet, held at the same place three years subsequently, it was resolved that no change should be made in the established religion before the action of a general council, which had been recommended by both diets, should
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PROGRESS AND EXTENT OF THE REFORMATION. 481
be known. On this occasion the Catholic interest preponderated sufficiently to procure a revocation of the power which had been conceded to the princes of the empire of managing for a time the ecclesiastical matters of their own dominions. Against this action several princes and cities protested, this being the origin of the designation Protestants subsequently given to the Reformers. At a diet held the following year at Augsburg, a statement, composed by Luther and Melancthon, of the doctrines of the Reformers was presented; it also treated to some extent of the errors and superstitions of the Catholics. This is what is known as the Confession of Augsburg. But the diet not only rejected it, but condemned most of its doctrines. The Organization of Protestants, therefore, in an assembly at Smalcalde, contract- the Reformation ed a treaty for their common defense, and this may be looked upon as the epoch of organization of the Reformation. This league did not, however, include the Reformers of Switzerland, who could not conscientiously adopt the Confession of Augsburg, which was its essential basis. The Sacramentarians, as they were called, became thus politically divided from the Lutherans. Moreover, in Switzerland the process of decomposition went on, Calvin establishing a new sect, characterized by the manner in which it insisted on the Augustinian doctrines of predestination and election, by the abolition of all festivals, and the discontinuance of Church ceremonies. At a later period the followers of Zuinglius and Calvin coalesced. The political combinations which had thus occurred as Protestantism rapidly acquired temporal power gave rise, as might have been anticipated, to wars. The peace of Augsburg, 1555, furnished the Reformers the substantial advantages they sought-freedom from Italian ecclesiastical authority, the right of all Germans to judge for themselves in matters of religion, equality in civil privileges for them and the Catholics. A second time, sixty-four years subsequently, war broke out-the Thirty Years' War-and finally the dispute was composed by the treaty of Westphalia. This may be regarded as the culmination of the Reformation. Peace was made in spite of all the intrigues and opposition of Rome. The doctrines of the Reformation were adopted with singular avidity throughout the north of Europe, and established themselves for a time in France and in Italy. Even as early as 1558 movement a report of the Venetian embassador estimates the Catholics of the German empire at only one tenth of the population. For twenty years not a student of the University of Vienna had become a priest. Such was the Reformation among the German nations. It is not possible, however, to comprehend correctly that great movement without understanding the course of events in Italy, for that peninsula was involved, though in a very different way. In its intel-
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482 CONTEMPORANEOUS STATE OF ITALY.
lectual condition it was far in advance of the rest of Europe, as is proved by such facts as those to which we have alluded respecting the printing of books. Between it and the nations of which we have been speaking there was also a wide difference in material interests. What was extorted from them was enjoyed by it. The mental and material condition of Italy soon set a limit to the progress of the Reformation. The Italians had long looked upon the transalpine nations with contempt. On the principle that the intellectually strong may lawfully prey on the intellectually weak, they had systematically drained them of their wealth. As we exchange with savages beads, and looking-glasses, and nails, for gold, they had driven a profitable barter with the valiant but illiterate barbarians, exchanging possessions in heaven for the wealth of the earth, and selling for money immunities or indulgences for sin. But in another respect they had looked upon them with dread-they had felt the edge of the French and German sword. The educated classes, though seeking the widest liberty of thought for themselves, were not disposed to more than a very select propagandism of opinions, which plainly could only be detrimental to the pecuniary interests of their country. Their faith had long ago ceased to be that of conviction; it had become a mere outward patriotic acquiescence. Even those who were willing enough to indulge themselves in the utmost latitude of personal free-thinking never made an objection when some indiscreet zealot of their own kind was compelled by ecclesiastical pressure to fly beyond the Alps. No part of Europe was so full of irreligion as Italy. It amounted to a philosophical infidelity among the higher classes; to Arianism among the middle and less instructed; to an utter carelessness, not even giving itself the trouble of disbelief, among the low. The universities and learned academies were hot-beds of heresy; thus the University of Padua was accused of having been for long a focus of atheism, and again and again learned academies, as those of Modena and Venice, had been suppressed for heresy. The device of the Academy of the Lyncei indicated only too plainly the spirit of these institutions; it was a lynx, with its eyes turned upward to heaven, tearing the tripleheaded Cerberus with its claws. Nor was this alarming condition restricted to Italy; France had long participated in it. From the University of Paris, that watch-tower of the Church, the alarm had often been sounded; now it was against men, now against books. Once, under its suggestions, the reading of the physics and metaphysics of Aristotle had been prohibited, and works of philosophy interdicted until they should have been corrected by the theologians of the Church. The physical heresies of Galileo, the pantheism of Cesalpinus, had friendly counterparts in France. Even the head of the Church, Leo X, at the inception of the Reformation, could not escape obloquy, and stories were
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ARREST OF THE REFORMATION. 483.
circulated touching his elevation to the pontificate at once prejudicial to his morals and to his belief. In such an ominous condition, the necessity of carrying out the policy to which Italy had so long been committed perpetually forced the papal government to acts against which the in- structed judgment of its own officials revolted. It was a continual struggle between their duty and their disposition. Why should they have thought it expedient to suppress the Koran when it was printed in Venice, 1530? why, when Paul IV., 1559, promulgated the Index Expurgatorius of prohibited books, was it found necessary that not less than forty-eight editions of the Bible should be included in it, sixty-one printers put under the ban, and all their publications forbidden, at first the interdict being against all prohibited books, and, on this being found insufficient, even those that had not been permitted being prohibited? Why was it that Galileo was dealt with so considerately and yet so malignantly? It was plain that toleration, either of men or books, was altogether irreconcilable with the principles of the Holy See, and that under its stern exigencies the former must be disposed of, and the latter suppressed or burnt, no matter what personal inclinations or favoring sentiments might be in the way. If any faltering took place in the carrying out of this determination, the control of Rome over the human mind would be put into the most imminent jeopardy. So stood affairs in Italy at the beginning and during the active period of the Reformation, the ancient system inexorably pressing upon the leading men, and impelling them to acts against which their better judgment revolted. They were bound down to the interests of their country, those interests being interwoven with conditions which they could no longer intellectually accept. For men of this class the German and Swiss reformations did not go far enough. They affirmed that things were left just as inconsistent with reason, just as indefensible as before. Doubtless they considered that the paring away of the worship of saints, of absolution for money, penances, indulgences, freedom from papal taxation, the repudiation of intrusive foreign ecclesiastics, was all to the detriment of the pecuniary interests of Italy. They affirmed that the doctrines put forth by the Reformers made good their ground, not through the force of reason, but through appeals to the ignorant, and even to women; not through an improved and sounder criticism, but, as it was declared, through the inward light of the Spirit; that nothing had been done to alleviate the ancient intolerant dogmatism, the forcible suppression of freedom of thought. Leo X., it is well known, at first altogether mistook the nature of the Reformation. He was a man of refined tastes and pleasure, delighting in sumptuous feasts, and too often scandalizing the devout by his indecent conversation and licentious conduct. He gloried
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484 ARREST OF THE REFORMATION.
in being the patron of the learned, devoting all his attention to the progress of literature and the fine arts, a connoisseur in antiques. The amenities of the life of an accomplished gentleman were not to be disturbed. He little dreamt that in the coarse German monk there was an antagonist worthy of the papacy. The gay Italians looked upon Luther with ineffable contempt, as introducing ideas even more absurd than those he was trying to displace, and, what was perhaps a still greater offense, upholding his bad doctrines in worse Latin. They affected to believe that they discerned a taint of insanity in the Reformer's account of his conflicts with the Devil, yet were willing to concede that there was a method in his madness, since he was bent on having a wife. In their opinion, the result of the German movement must be exceedingly detrimental to learning, and necessarily lead to the production of very vulgar results, exciting among the common people a revolutionary and destructive spirit. Nor was this personal distaste for Luther altogether undeserved. The caricatures which that great man permitted himself to put forth were too indelicate to be described to a modern reader. They would be worthy of Our disgust and indignation did we not find some palliation in the coarseness of the communities and times in which he lived. Leo awoke to his blunder when it was too late, and found that he had been superciliously sneering at what he should have combated with all his migit. It is now more than three centuries since the Reformation commenced, and we are able, with some degree of accuracy, to ascertain its influence. Founded as it was on the right of private interpretation of the Scriptures, it introduced a better rule of life, and made a great advance toward intellectual liberty. It compelled men to be more moral, and permitted them to be more learned. For the traditions of superstition it substituted the dictates of common sense; it put an end to the disgraceful miracles that for so many ages had been the scandal of Europe. The assertion of the Italians that it was a great injury to letters is untrue. Though not to be regarded in any respect as a learned man, Luther approved of the study of Greek and Hebrew, recognized by all parties to be dangerous to the Latin system. And even if the accusation is admitted that he approved of their cultivation, not from any love to them, but from hatred to it, the world was equally a gainer. Toward the close of his life it seemed as if there was no other prospect for papal power than total ruin; yet at this day, out of three hundred millions of Christians, more than half owe allegiance to Rome. Almost as if by enchantment the Reformation suddenly ceased to advance. Rome was not only able to check its spread, but even to gain back a portion of what she had lost. The cause of this, which may seem at first an extraordinary result, is not to be attributed to any supernatural influence, as some have supposed. When natural causes suffice, it is needless to look for supernatural.
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CAUSES OF THAT ARREST. 485
Though there might be sovereigns who, like Henry VIII., had personal reasons for discontent with the Italian court; though there were some who sought to usurp the power and prerogatives of the popes; though there might be nobles who, as the Prince of Wales' tutor wrote to Sir W.
Paget, were " importunate wolves, as are able to devour chantries, cathedral churches, universities, and a thousand times as much;" some who desired the plunder of establishments endowed by the piety of ages, and who therefore lent all their influence in behalf of this great revolution; there was among such and above such that small but all-important body of men who see human affairs from the most general point of view. To these, whatever might be the nation to which they happened to belong, it was perfectly evident that the decomposition of faith which had set in, if permitted to go on unchecked, could not possibly end in any other way than in producing an anarchy of sects. In their opinion the German Reformation did not go far enough. It still practically left untouched the dependency of the Church upon the State. In the southern nations of the Continent it had merely irritated the great European ulcer, whereas what was required was the complete amputation of the rotten mass. In their judgment it was better to leave things as they were until a thorough eradication could be accomplished, and this, at the time, was obviously impossible. Not understanding, perhaps, how much -human affairs are developed according to law, and how little by the volition of individuals, they liberally conceded that Catholicism had been the civilizing agency of Europe, and had become inwoven with the social fabric for good or for evil. It could not now be withdrawn without pulling the whole texture to pieces. Moreover, the curtain of papal authority, which at one time enveloped all Europe in its ample folds, had, in the course of these late events, been contracted and stretched across the Continent, dividing the northern and southern nations from each other. The people of the south saw on its embroidered surface nothing but forms of usefulness and beauty, they on the north a confusion of meaningless threads. But the few who considered it as a whole, and understood the relations of both sides, knew well enough that the one is the necessary incident of the other, and that it is quite as useless to seek for explanations as to justify appearances. To them it was perfectly clear that the tranquillity and happiness of Christendom were best subserved by giving no encouragement to opinions which had already occasioned so much trouble, and which seemed to contain in their very constitution principles of social disorganization. A second reason for the sudden loss of expansive force in the Reformation is found in its own intrinsic nature. The principle of decomposition which it represented, and with which it was inextricably entangled, necessarily implied oppugnancy. For a short
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486 CAUSES OF THAT ARREST.
season the attention of Protestantism was altogether directed to the papal authority from which it had so recently separated itself; but, with its growing strength and ascertained independence, that object ceased to occupy it, becoming, as it were, more distant and more obscure. Upon the subordinate divisions which were springing from it, or which were of collateral descent from the original Catholic stock, the whole view of each denomination was concentrated. The bitterness once directed against the papacy lost none of its intensity when pointed at rivals or enemies nearer home. Nor was it alone dissensions among the greater sects, oppositions such as those between the Church of England and the Church of Scotland, whose discords were founded on points admitted by all to be great and essential; the same principle ran down through all the modes of sectarian combination as they emerged into life, producing among those of equal power struggles, and in the strong toward the weak persecution. Very soon the process of decomposition had advanced to such an extent that minor sects came into existence on very unessential points. Yet even among these little bodies there was just as much acrimony, just as much hatred as among the great. These differences were carried into the affairs of civil life, each sect forming a society within itself, and abstaining, as far as might be, from associations with its rivals. Of such a state of things the necessary result was weakness, and, had there been no other reason, this in itself would have been quite sufficient in the end to deprive Protestantism of its aggressive power. An army divided against itself is in no condition to make warfare against a watchful and vigorous enemy. But this was not all. It was in the nature of Protestantism from its outset that it was not constructive. Unlike its great antagonist, it contained no fundamental principle that could combine distant communities and foreign countries together. It originated in dissent, and was embodied by separation. It could not possess a concentrated power, nor recognize one apostolic man who might compress its disputes, harmonize its powers, wield it as a mass. For the attainment of his aims the Protestant had only wishes, the Catholic had a will. The Church of England, of Scotland, or of any other Protestant nation, undoubtedly did discharge its duty excellently well for the community in which it was placed, but, at the most, it was only a purely local institution, altogether insignificant in comparison with that great old Church, hoary and venerable with age, which had seen every government and every institution in Europe come into existence, many of them at its bidding, which had extirpated paganism from the Roman empire, compelled the Caesars to obey its mandates, precipitated the whole white race upon the Holy Land; that great old Church, once the more than imperial sovereign of Christendom, and of which the most respectable national Church was only a fragment of a fragment.
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THE COUNTER-REFORMATION AND THE INQUISITION. 487
Very different was it with Catholicism. It possessed an organization which concentrated in the hand of one man irresistible power, and included all the southern countries of Europe not Mohammedan. 'It could enforce its policy by the armies and fleets of obedient kings. It is not surprising, when this state of things is considered, that the spread of the Reformation was limited to its first fervor that the men who saw its origin saw also its culmination. It is not to be wondered at that, with the political weakening arising from a tendency to subdivision and disintegration on one side, and the preparing of a complete and effective organization against the danger that was threatening on the other, the issue should have turned out as it did. Rome, awaking at last to her danger, met the Reformation with four weapons-a counter-reformation, an increased vigor in the Inquisition, the institution of the Jesuits, and a greater embellishment of worship. The disposition of the northern nations was to a simplification of worship, that of the south to adorn it with whatever could captivate the senses. Ranke asserts that the composition of the mass of Marcellus by Palestrina, 1560, had a wonderful effect in the revival of religion; there can be no doubt that it constituted an epoch in devotion. But of all these, the first and best was moral change which she instantly imposed upon herself. Henceforth it was her intention that in the chair of St. Peter should never again be seen atheists, poisoners, thieves, murderers, blasphemers, adulterers, but men, who, if they were sometimes found, as must be the case, considering the infirmities of humanity, incompetent to deal with the great trials which often befell them, were yet of such personal purity, holiness of life, and uprightness of intention as to command profound respect. Those scandals that hitherto had every where disgraced her began to disappear, a true reformation, but not a schism, occurring through all ecclesiastical grades. Had Protestantism produced no other result than this, it would have been an unspeakable blessing to the world. By another very different means the Italian power sought to insure its domination-by an increased activity of the Inquisition. It is difficult to understand how men of capacity could have justified this iniquitous institution. Certainly it could not have been upon any principles of Christian morality, nor even upon those of high statesmanship. For the Inquisition to accomplish its purpose, it must needs be as all-seeing as Providence, as inexorable as the grave; not inflicting punishments which the sufferer could remember, but remorselessly killing outright; not troubling itself to ascertain the merits of a case and giving the accused the benefits of a doubt, but regarding suspicion and certainty as the same thing. If worked with the unscrupulous, impassive resolution of Machiavellianism, this great engine for the coercion of the human mind could be made to accomplish its purpose.
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488 THE JESUIT.
It thoroughly extinguished Protestantism in Spain and Italy, and in those countries maintained a barrier against the progressive reason of man. But the most effective weapon to which the papacy resorted was the institution of the order of the Jesuits. It was established by a bull of Paul III., 1540, the rules being that the general chosen for life should be obeyed as God; that they should vow poverty, chastity, obedience, and go wherever they were commanded; their obedience was to the pope, not to the Church a most politic distinction, for thereby an unmistakable responsibility was secured. They had no regular hours of prayer; their duties were preaching, the direction of consciences, education. By the Jesuits Rome penetrated into the remotest corners of the earth, established links of communication with her children who remained true to her in the heart of Protestant countries, and, with a far-seeing policy for the future, silently engrossed the education of the young. At the confessional she extorted from women the hidden secrets of their lives and those of their families, took the lead in devotion wherever there were pious men, and was equally foremost in the world of fashion and dissipation. There was no guise under which the Jesuit might not be found-a barefoot beggar, clothed in rags; a learned professor, lecturing gratuitously to scientific audiences; a man of the world, living in profusion and princely extravagance; there have been Jesuits the wearers of crowns. There were no places into which they did not find their way: a visitor to one of the loyal old families of England could never be sure but that there was a Jesuit hidden in the garret or secreted behind the wainscot of the bedroom. They were the advisers of the leading men of the age, sat in the cabinets of kings, and were their confessors. They boasted that they were the link between religious opinion and literature. With implicit and unquestioning obedience to his superior, like a good soldier, it was the paramount duty of the Jesuit to obey his orders, whatever those orders might be. It was for him to go, at the summons of a moment, with his life in his hand, to the very centre of pagan or of re, formed and revolted countries, where his presence was death by law, and execute the mission intrusted to him. If he succeeded, it was well; if he should fall, it was also well. To him all things were proper for the sake of the Church. It was his business to consider how the affair he had in hand was to be most surely accomplished-to resort to justifiable means if they should appear sufficient, if not, to unjustifiable; to the spiritual weapon, but also to be prepared with the carnal; to sacrifice candor if the occasion should require, if necessary even truth, remembering that the end justifies the means, if that end is the good of the Church. While some religious orders were founded on retirement, and aimed
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THEIR SUPPRESSION. 489
at personal improvement by solitude, the Jesuits were instructed to mix in the affairs of men, and gather experience in the ways of worldly wisdom. And since it is the infirmity of humanity, whatever may be the vigor of its first intentions, too often to weary in well-doing, provision was made to re-enforce the zeal of those becoming lukewarm, to admonish the delinquent, by making each a spy on all the others, under oath to reveal every thing to his superior. In that manner a control was exercised over the brotherhood in all parts of the world. In Europe they had, in a very short time, stealthily but largely engrossed public education; had mixed themselves up with every public affair; were at the bottom of every intrigue, making their power felt through the control they exerted over sovereigns, ministers of state, and great court ladies, influencing the last through the spiritual means of the confessional, or by the more natural but equally effectual entanglements of requited love. Already they had recognized the agency of commerce in promoting and diffusing religious belief, and hence simultaneously became great missionaries and great merchants. With the Indies, East and West, they carried forward extensive commercial undertakings, and had depots in various parts of Europe. In these operations they were necessarily absolved from their vows of poverty and became immensely rich. In South America they obtained a footing in Paraguay, and commenced their noble attempt at the civilization of the Indians, bringing them into communities, teaching them social usages, agricultural arts, and the benefits arising to themselves and the community from labor. They gave them a military organization, subdivided, according to the European system, into the customary arms-infantry, cavalry, artillery; they supplied them with munitions of war. It was their hope that from this basis they should be able to spread the rule of the Church over America, as had been done in preceding ages over Europe. An intolerable apprehension of their invisible presence and unscrupulous agency made all Europe put them down at last. The amenities of exquisite courteousness, the artifices of infinite dissimulation, can not forever deceive. Men found, bybitter experience, that under the silken glove there was an iron hand. From their general in Rome, who was absolute commander of their persons and unchallengeable administrator of their prodigious wealth, down to the humblest missionary who was. wearing away his life among the Andes, or on the banks of the Hoang-ho, or in the solitary prairies of Missouri, or under the blazing sun of Abyssinia; whether he was confessing the butterfly ladies of Paris, whispering devilish suggestions into the ear of the King of Spain, consoling the dying peasant in an Irish cabin, arguing with mandarins in the palace of the Emperor of China, stealing away the hearts of the rising generation in the lower schools and academies, extorting the admiration of learned societies by the profundity of his
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490 EFFECTS OF CRITICISM.
philosophy and the brilliancy of his scientific discoveries; whether he was to be seen in the exchanges and marts of the great capitals, supervising commercial operations on a scale which up to that time had been attempted by none but the Jews; whether he was held in an English jail as a suspected vagabond, or sitting on the throne of France; whether he appeared as a great landed proprietor, the owner of countless leagues in the remote parts of India or South America; whether he was mixing with crowds in the streets of London, and insinuating in Protestant ears the rights of subjects to oppose and even depose their monarchs, or in the villages of Castile and Leon, preaching before Catholic peasants the paramount duty of a good Christian implicitly to obey the mandates of his king; wherever the Jesuit was, or whatever he was doing, men universally felt that the thing he had in hand was only auxiliary to some higher, some hidden design. The stealth, and silence, and power became at last so intolerable that they were banished from France, Spain, Portugal, and other Catholic countries. But such was their vitality that, though the order was abolished by a papal bull in 1773, they have been again restored. Though it is sometimes said that Rome in this manner, by her admirable combinations and irresistible movement, succeeded at last in checking the Reformation, a full consideration of the state of affairs would lead us to receive that assertion with very considerable restriction. She came out of the conflict much less powerful than she had entered it. If we attribute to her policy all that it can justly claim, we must also attribute to causes over which she had no kind of control their rightful influence. The Reformation had been, to no small extent, due to the rise of criticism, which still continued its development, and was still fruitful of results. Latin had fallen from its high estate; the modern languages were in all directions expanding and improving; the printing-press was not only giving Greek learning to the world, but countless translations and commentaries. The doctrine successfully established by Luther and his colleagues, the right of private interpretation and judgment, was the practical carrying out of the organic law of criticism to the highest affairs with which man can be concerned-affairs of religion. The Reformation itself, philosophically considered, really meant the casting off of authority, the installation of individual inquiry and personal opinion. If criticism, thus standing upon the basis of the Holy Scriptures, had not hesitated to apply itself to an examination of public faith, and, as the consequence thereof, had laid down new rules for morality and the guidance of life, it was not to be expected that it would hesitate to deal with minor things-that it would spare the philosophy, the policy, the literature of antiquity. And so, indeed, it went on, comparing classical authors with classical authors, the fathers with the fathers, often the same writer with
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SECESSION OF THE GREAT CRITICS. 491
himself. Contradictions were pointed out, errors exposed, weakness detected, and new views offered of almost every thing within the range of literature. From this burning ordeal one book alone came out unscathed. It was the Bible. It spontaneously vindicated for itself what Wiclif in the former times, and Luther more lately, had claimed for it. And not only did it hold its ground, but it truly became incalculably more powerful than ever it had been before. The press multiplied it in every language without end, until there was scarcely a cottage in reformed Europe that did not possess a copy. But if criticism was thus the stimulating principle that had given life to the Reformation, it had no little to do with its pause; and this is the influence over which Rome had no kind of control, and to which I have made allusion. The phases through which the Reformation passed were dependent on the coincident advances of learning. First it relied on the Scriptures, which were to the last its surest support; then it included the fathers. But, from a more intimate study of the latter, many erudite Protestants were gradually brought back to the ancient fold. Among such may be mentioned Erasmus, who by degrees became alienated from the Reformers, and subsequently Grotius, the publication of whose treatise, "De jure belli et pacis," 1625, really constituted an epoch in the political system of Europe. This great man had gradually become averse to the Reformation, believing that, all things considered, it had done more harm than good; he had concluded that it was better to throw differences into oblivion for the sake of peace, and to enforce silence on one's own opinions, rather than to expect that the Church should be compelled to accommodate herself to them. If such men as Erasmus, Casaubon, and Grotius had been brought to this dilemma by their profound philosophical meditations, their conclusion was confirmed among the less reflecting by the unhappy intolerance of the new as well as the old Church. Men asked what was the difference between the vindictiveness with which Rome dealt with Antonio de Dominis, at once an ecclesiastic and a natural philosopher, who, having gone over to Protestantism and then seceded, imprudently visited Rome, was there arrested, and, dying, his body was dug up and burnt, and the rigor of Calvin, who seized Servetus, the author of the " Christianismi Restitutio," and in part the discoverer of the circulation of the blood, when he happened to pass through Geneva, and committed him to the flames. Criticism had thus, in its earlier stage, produced well-marked results. As it developed it lost none of its power. It had enthroned patristic theology; now it wrenched from its hand the scepter. In the works of Daille it showed that the fathers are of no kind of use they are too contradictory of one another; even Jeremy Tay-
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492 CONTINUATION OF THE REFORMATION IN AMERICA.
lor speaks of their authority and reputation as clean gone forever. In a few years they had sunk into desuetude, a neglect shared by many classical authors, whose opinions were now only quoted with a respectful smile. The admiration for antiquity was diminishing under the effect of searching examination. Books were beginning to appear, turning the old historians into ridicule for their credulity. The death of Servetus was not without advantage to the world. There was not a pious or thoughtful man in all reformed Europe who was not shocked when the circumstances under which that unhappy physician had been brought to the stake at Geneva by John Calvin were made known. For two hours he was roasted in the flames of a slow fire, begging for the love of God that they would put on more wood, or do something to end his torture. Men asked, with amazement and indignation, if the atrocities of the Inquisition were again to be revived. On all sides they began to inquire how far it is lawful to inflict the punishment of death for difference of opinion. It opened their eyes to the fact that, after all they had done, the state of civilization in which they were living was still characterized by its intolerance. In 1546 the Venetian embassador at the court of Charles V. reported to his government that in Holland and Friesland more than thirty thousand persons had suffered death at the hands of justice for Anabaptist errors. From such an unpromising state of things toleration could only emerge with difficulty. It was the offspring, not of a philosophical charity, but of the checked animosities of ever-multiplying sects, and their detected impossibility of coercing one another. The history of the Reformation does not close, where many European authors have imagined, in a balanced and final distribution of the north and south between the Protestant and the Catholic. The predestined issue of sectarian differences and dissensions is individual liberty of thought. So long as there was one vast overshadowing, intolerant corporation, every man must bring his understanding to its measure, and think only as it instructed him to do. As soon as dissenting confessions gathered sufficient military power to maintain their right of existence-as soon as from them, in turn, incessant offshoots were put forth, toleration became not only possible, but inevitable, and that is perhaps as far as the movement has at this time advanced in Europe. But Macaulay and others who have treated of the Reformation have taken too limited a view of it, supposing that this was its point of arrest. It made another enormous stride when, at the American Revolution, the State and the Church were solemnly and openly dissevered from one another. Now might the vaticinations of the prophets of evil expect to find credit; a great people had irrevocably broken off its politics from its theology, and it might surely have been expected that the unbridled interests, and instincts, and passions of
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SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE. 493
men would have dragged every thing into the abyss of anarchy. Yet what do we, who are living nearly a century after that time, find the event to be? Sectarian decomposition, passing forward to its last extreme, is the process by which individual mental liberty is engendered and maintained. A grand and imposing religious unity implies tyranny to the individual; the increasing emergence of sects gives him increasing latitude of thought-with their utmost multiplication he gains his utmost liberty. In this respect, unity and liberty are in opposition; as the one diminishes, the other increases. The Reformation broke down unity; it gave liberty to masses of men grouped together in sufficient numbers to insure their position; it is now invisibly, but irresistibly making steps, never to be stayed until there is an absolute mental emancipation for man. Great revolutions are not often accomplished without much suffering and many crimes. It might have been supposed before the event, perhaps it is supposed by many who are not privileged to live among the last results, that this decomposition of religious faith must be to the detriment of personal and practical piety. Yet America, in which, of all countries, the Reformation at the present moment has farthest advanced, should offer to thoughtful men much encouragement. Its cities are filled with churches built by voluntary gifts; its clergy is voluntarily sustained, and is, in all directions, engaged in enterprises of piety, education, mercy. What a difference between its private life and that of ecclesiastics before the Reformation! Not, as in the old times, does the layman look upon them as the cormorants and curse of society; they are his faithful advisers, his honored friends, under whose suggestion and supervision are instituted educational establishments, colleges, hospitals, whatever can be of benefit to men in this life, or secure for them happiness in the life to come.
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494 SOCIAL CONDITION OF ENGLAND.
CHAPTER XXI. DIGRESSION ON THE CONDITION OF ENGLAND AT THE END OF THE AGE OF FAITH. RESULTS PRODUCED BY THE AGE OF FAITH
Condition of England at the Suppression of the Monasteries. Condition of England at the Close of the seventeenth Century.-Locomotion, Literature, Libraries.-Social and private Life of the Laity and Clergy.-Brutality in the Administration of Law.-Profligacy of Literature.-The Theatre, its three Phases.-Miracle, Moral, and Real Plays. Estimate of the Advance made in the Age of Faith Comparison with that already made in the Age of Reason. /
ARRIVED at the commencement of the Age of Reason, we might profitably examine the social condition of those countries destined to become conspicuous in the new order of things. I have not space to present such an examination as extensively as it deserves, and must limit my remarks to that nation which, of all others, is most interesting to the American reader-that England, which we picture to ourselves as foremost in civilization, her universities dating back for many centuries; her charters and laws, on which individual, and therefore social liberty rests, spoken of as the ancient privileges of the realm; her people a clear-headed race, lovers and stout defenders of freedom. During by far the greater part of the past period she had been Catholic, but she had also been reformed-ever, as she will always be religious. A correct estimate of her national and individual life will point out to us all that had been done in the Age of Faith. From her condition we may gather what is the progress made by man when guided by such theological ideas as those which had been her rule of life. The following paragraphs convey an instructive lesson. They dissipate some romantic errors; they are a verdict on a political system from its practical results. What a contrast with the prodigious advancement within a few years when the Age of Reason had set in! How strikingly are we reminded of the inconsequential, the fruitless actions of youth, and the deliberate, the durable undertakings of manhood! For many of the facts I have now to mention the reader will find authorities in the works of Lord Macaulay and Mr. Froude on English history. My own reading in other directions satisfies me that the picture here offered represents the actual condition of things. At the time of the suppression of the monasteries in England the in-
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MONASTERIES, CASTLES, CABINS. 495
fluences which had been in operation for so many centuries had come to an end. Had they endured for a thousand years longer they could have accomplished nothing more. The condition of human life shows what their uses and what their failures had been. There were forests extending over great districts; fens forty or fifty miles in length, reeking with miasm and fever, though round the walls of the abbeys there might be beautiful gardens, green lawns, shady walks, and many murmuring streams. In trackless woods where men should have been, herds of deer were straying; the sandy hills were alive with conies, the downs with flocks of bustard. The peasant's cabin was made of reeds or sticks plastered over with mud. His fire was chimneyless-often it was made of peat. In the objects and manner of his existence he was but a step above the industrious beaver who was building his dam in the adjacent stream. There were highwaymen on the roads, pirates on the rivers, vermin in abundance in the clothing and beds. The common food was peas, vetches, fern roots, and even the bark of trees. There was no commerce to put off famine. Man was altogether at the mercy of the seasons. The population, sparse as it was, was perpetually thinned by pestilence and want. Nor was the state of the townsman better than that of the rustic; his bed was a bag of straw, with a fair round log for his pillow. If he was in easy circumstances, his clothing was of leather; if poor, a wisp of straw wrapped round his limbs kept off the cold. It was a melancholy social condition when nothing intervened between reed cabins in the fen, the miserable wigwams of villages, and the conspicuous walls of the castle and monastery. Well might they who lived in those times bewail the lot of the plague-stricken peasant, and point, not without indignation, to the troops of pilgrims, mendicants, pardoners, and ecclesiastics of every grade who hung round the Church, to the nightly wassail and rioting drunkenness in the castle-hall, secure in its moats, its battlements, and its warders. The local pivots round which society revolved were the red-handed baron, familiar with scenes of outrage and deeds of blood, and the abbot, indulging in the extreme of luxury, magnificent in dress, exulting in his ambling palfrey, his hawk, his hounds. Rural life had but little improved since the time of Caesar; in its physical aspect it was altogether neglected. As to the mechanic, how was it possible that he could exist where there were no windows made of glass, no, not of oiled paper, no workshop warmed by a fire. For the poor there was no physician, for the dying the monk and his crucifix. The aim was to smooth the sufferer's passage to the next world, not to save him for this. Sanitary provisions there were none except the paternoster and the ave. In the cities the pestilence walked unstayed, its triumphs numbered by the sounds of the death-crier in the streets or the knell for the soul that was passing away.
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496 STATE OF MORAL.
Our estimate of the influence of the system under which men were thus living as a regulator of their passions may at this point derive much exactness from incidents such as those offered by the history of syphilis and the usages of war. For this purpose we may for a moment glance at the Continent. The attention of all Europe was suddenly arrested by a disease which broke out soon after the discovery of America. It raged with particular violence in the French army commanded by Charles VIII. at the siege of Naples, A.D. 1495, and spread almost like an epidemic. It was syphilis. Though there have been medical authors who supposed that it was only an exacerbation of a malady known from antiquity, that opinion cannot be maintained after the learned researches of Astruc. That it was something recognized at the time as altogether new seems to be demonstrated by the accusations of different nations against each other of having given origin to it. Very soon, however, the truth appeared. It had been brought by the sailors of Columbus from the West Indies. Its true character, and the conditions of its propagation, were fully established by Fernel. Now, giving full weight to the fact that the virulence of a disease may be greatest at its first invasion, but remembering that there is nothing in the history of syphilis that would lead us to suppose it ever was, or indeed could be infectious, but only contagious, or communicated by direct contact from person to person; remembering also the special circumstances under which, in this disease, that contagion is imparted, the rapidity of its spread all over Europe is a significant illustration of the fearful immorality of the times. If contemporary authors are to be trusted, there was not a class, married or unmarried, clergy or laity, from the holy father, Leo X., to the beggar by the wayside, free from it. It swept over Europe, not as Asiatic cholera did, running along the great lines of trade, and leaving extensive tracts untouched, settling upon and devastating great cities here and there, while others had an immunity. The march of syphilis was equable, unbroken, universal, making good its ground from its point of appearance in the southwest, steadily and swiftly taking possession of the entire Continent, and offering an open manifestation and measure of the secret wickedness of society.' If thus the sins man practices in privacy became suddenly and accidentally exposed, that exposure showing how weak is the control that any system can exercise over human passions, we are brought to the same melancholy conclusion when we turn to those crimes that may be perpetrated in the face of day. The usages of war in the civil contests of the fifteenth century, or in the religious conflicts of the sixteenth and seventeenth, are perfectly appalling; the annals of those evil days are full of wanton and objectless barbarities,
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CONDITION OF THE LOWER ORDERS. 497
refusal of quarter, murder in cold blood, killing of peasants. Invading armies burnt and destroyed every thing in their way; the taking of plunder and ransom of prisoners were recognized sources of wealth. Prosperous countries were made "a sea of fire;" the horrible atrocities of the Spaniards in America were rivaled by those practiced in Europe; deliberate directions were given to make whole tracts "a desert." Attempts had been made to introduce some amelioration into warfare again and again, either by forbidding hostilities at certain times, as was the object of the "truces of God," repeatedly enforced by ecclesiastical authority, or by establishing between the combatants themselves those courtesies which are at once the chief grace and glory of chivalry; but, to judge by the result as offered, even so late as the eighteenth century, those attempts must be regarded as having proved altogether abortive. England, at the close of the Age of Faith, had for long been a chief pecuniary tributary to Italy, the source from which large revenues had been drawn, the fruitful field in which herds of Italian ecclesiastics had been pastured. A wonderful change was impending. At the beginning of the sixteenth century the island was far more backward intellectually and politically than is commonly supposed. Its population hardly reached five millions, and was stationary at that point, not so much because of the effects of civil and foreign war as merely through the operation of ordinary economical causes. There was no reason to call more men into existence. It was regarded as good statesmanship to maintain the population at a constant standard. The municipal policy corresponded to the national; it was not so much advanced as that contemporaneously existing in Peru. Swarms of idle ecclesiastics had set such a pernicious example that the indisposition among common people to work had become quite a formidable difficulty. In every village there were stocks for the punishment of "valiant beggars," as they were termed. By the act of 1531, vagrants "whole and mighty in body" caught begging for the first time might be whipped at the cart-tail; the second time their ears were to be slit; by the act of 1536, if caught the third time, they were to be put to death. In all directions large towns were falling into decay, a misfortune popularly attributed to the laziness of the lower orders, but in reality due to causes of a very different kind. Hitherto land had been the representative of authority and the source of power. Society had been organized upon that imperfect basis; a descending scale of landed proprietors had been established, and in that system every man had a place assigned to him, just as in Peru, though less perfectly. It was a system of organized labor, the possession of land being a trust, not a property. But now commerce was beginning to disturb the foundations on which all these arrangements had been sustained, and to compel a new distribution of population; trading compa-
Page 498
498 CONDITION OF THE CLERGY.
nies were being established; men were unsettled by the rumors or realities of immense fortunes rapidly gained in foreign adventure. Maritime enterprise was thus not only dislocating society, but even destroying its spirit, substituting self-interest for loyalty. A nation so illiterate that many of its peers in Parliament could neither read nor write, was hardly able to trace the troubles befalling it to their proper source with one voice it imputed them to the bad example and short comings of the clergy. Long before Henry VIII., England was ready for the suppression of the monasteries. She regarded them as the very hot-beds of her evils. There were incessant complaints against the clergy for their scandalous lusts, for personal impurities such as in modern times we do not allude to, for their holding of livings in plurality, for their extortion of exorbitant profits, and neglect in the discharge of their duty. In the public opinion, to so great an extent had these immoralities gone that it was openly asserted that there were one hundred thousand women in England made dissolute by the clergy. It was well known that brothels were kept in London for their use. It was affirmed that the confessional was shamefully abused, and, through it, advantage taken of females; that the vilest crime in an ecclesiastic might be commuted for money, six shillings and eightpence being sufficient in the case of mortal sin. Besides these general causes of complaint, there were some which, though of a minor, were not of a less irritating kind; such, for instance, as the mortuary, soul-shot, or corpse present, a claim for the last dress worn by persons brought to a priest for burial, or some exaggerated commutation thereof. That such was the demoralized condition of the English Church, and such its iniquitous relations to the people, we have the most unimpeachable evidence, under circumstances of an imposing and solemn character. The House of Commons brought an accusation against the clergy before the king. When Parliament met A.D. 1529, that House, as its very first act, declared to the sovereign that sedition and heresy were pervading the land, and that it had become absolutely necessary to apply a corrective. It affirmed that the troubles into which the realm had fallen were attributable to the clergy; that the chief foundation, occasion, and cause thereof was the parallel jurisdiction of the Church and State; that the incompatible legislative authority of convocation lay at the bottom of the mischief. Among other specific points it alleged the following: That the houses of convocation made laws without the royal assent, and without the consent or even the knowledge of the people; that such laws were never published in the English language, and that, nevertheless, men were daily punished under them without ever having had an opportunity to eschew the penalties; that the demoralization extended from the Archbishop of Canterbury down to the lowest priest, that dignitary having tampered
Page 499
ACCUSATION OF PARLIAMENT AGAINST THEM. 499
with the dispatch of justice in his Court of Arches; that parsons, vicars, priests, and curates were in the habit of denying the administration of the sacraments save upon the payment of money; that poor men were harassed without any legal cause in the spiritual courts for the mere purpose of extortion, and exorbitant fees were exacted from them without cause; that the probate of wills was denied except on the gratification of the appetite of prelates and ordinaries for money; that the high ecclesiastics extorted large sums for the induction of persons into benefices, and that they did daily confer benefices on "young folk," their nephews and relatives, being minors, for the purpose of detaining the fruits and profits in their own hands; that the bishops illegally imprisoned, sometimes for a year or more, persons in their jails, without informing them of the cause of their imprisonment or the name of their accuser; that simple, unlearned men, and even "well-witted" ones, were entrapped by subtle questions into heresy in the ecclesiastical courts, and punishment procured against them. These are serious charges; they imply that the Church had degenerated into a contrivance for the extortion of money. The House of Commons petitioned the king to make such laws as should furnish a remedy. The king submitted the petition to the bishops, and required of them an answer. In that answer the ecclesiastical manner of thought is very striking. The bishops insist that the laws of the realm shall give way to the canon law, or, if incompatible, shall be altered so as to suit it; they identify attacks on themselves with those on the doctrine of the Church, a time-honored and well-tried device; they affirm that they have no kind of enmity against the laymen, "their ghostly children," but only against the pestilent poison of heresy; that their authority for making laws is grounded on the Scriptures, to which the laws of the realm must be made to conform; that they can not conscientiously permit the king's consent to the laws, since that would be to put him in the stead of God, under whose inspiration they are made; that, as to troubling poor men, it is the Holy Ghost who inspireth them to acts tending to the wealth of his elect folk, that, if any ecclesiastic hath offended in this respect, though "in multis offendimus omnes," as St. James hath it, let him bear his own fault, and let not the whole Church be blamed; that the Protestants, their antagonists, are lewd, idle fellows, who have embraced the abominable opinions recently sprung up in Germany; that there are many advantages in commuting Church penances and censures for money; that tithes are a divine institution, and that debts of money owing to God may be recovered after one hundred or seven hundred years of non-payment, since God can never lose his rights thereto; that, however, it is not well to collect a tithe twice over; that priests may lawfully engage in secular occupations of a cer-
Page 500
500 COMPULSORY SUBMISSION OF THE CLERGY.
tain kind; that the punishments inflicted on the laymen have been for the health of their souls, and that, generally, the saints may claim powers to which common men are not entitled. A fierce struggle between the Commons and the bishops ensued; but the House was firm, and passed several bills, and among them the Clergy Discipline Act. The effect was to cut down ecclesiastical incomes, probate and legacy duties were defined, mortuaries were curtailed, extortionate fees for burial terminated, clergymen were forbidden to engage in farming, tanning, brewing, or to buy merchandise for the purpose of selling it again. It was made unlawful any longer to hold eight or nine benefices, or to purchase dispensations for not doing duty; they were compelled to reside in the parishes for the care of which they were paid, under penalty of ~10 a month; and it was made a high penal offense to obtain dispensations from any of the provisions of this act from Rome. Nothing could be more significant of the position of the parties than the high-toned, the conservative moderation of these acts. The bishops did not yield, however, without a struggle. In all directions is compelled from the pulpits arose a cry of "atheism," "lack of faith," "heresy." But the House resolutely stood to its ground. Still more, it sent its speaker to the king with a complaint against the Bishop of Rochester, who had dared to stigmatize it as "infidel." The bishop was compelled to equivocate and apologize. The English nation and their king were thus together in the suppression of the monasteries; they were together in the enforcing of ecclesiastical reforms. It was nothing but this harmony which so quickly brought the clergy to reason, and induced them, in 1532, to anticipate both Parliament and the people in actually offering to separate themselves from Rome. In the next year the king had destroyed the vast power which in so many centuries had gathered round ecclesiastical institutions, and had forced the clergy into a fitting subordination. Henceforth there was no prospect that they would monopolize all the influential and lucrative places in the realm; henceforth, year by year, with' many vicissitudes and changes, their power continued to decline. Their special pursuit, theology, was separated more and more perfectly from politics. In the House of Lords, of which they had once constituted one half, they sank to a mere shadow. Henry VIII. can not, therefore, be properly considered as the author of the downfall of ecclesiasticism in England, though he was the instrument by which it was ostensibly accomplished. The derisive insinuation that the Gospel light had flashed upon him from Anna Boleyn's eyes was far from expressing all the truth.' The nullity of papal disciplines, excommunications, interdicts, penances, proved that the old tone of thought was utterly decayed. This oblivion
Page 501
THE ROADS, LOCOMOTION, AND MAILS. 501
of old emotions, this obsoleteness of old things, was by no means confined to England. On the Continent the attacks of Erasmus on the monks were every where received with applause. In 1527 one printer issued an edition of 24,000 copies of the Colloquies of Erasmus, and actually sold them all. He understood the signs of the times. From this digression on parties and policy in England, let us again return to special details, descending for that purpose to the close of the seventeenth century. For a long time London had been the most populous capital in Europe; yet it was dirty, ill at the close of the built, without sanitary provisions. The deaths were one in twenty-three each year; now, in a much more crowded population, they are not one in forty. Much of the country was still heath, swamp, warren. Almost within sight of the city was a tract twenty-five miles round nearly in a state of nature; there were but three houses in it. Wild animals roamed here and there, very much as they do in our Western territories. It is incidentally mentioned that Queen Anne, on a journey to Portsmouth, saw a herd of five hundred red deer. With such small animals as the marten and badger, found every where, there was still seen occasionally the wild bull. Nothing more strikingly shows the social condition than the provisions for locomotion. In the rainy seasons the roads were all but impassable, justifying the epithet often applied to them of being in a horrible state. Through such gullies, half filled with mud, carriages were dragged, often by oxen, or, when horses were used, it was as much a matter of necessity as in the city a matter of display to drive half a dozen of them. If the country was open the track of the road was easily mistaken. It was no uncommon thing for persons to lose their way, and have to spend the night out in the air. Between places of considerable importance the roads were sometimes very little known, and such was the difficulty for wheeled carriages that a principal mode of transport was by pack-horses, of which passengers took advantage, stowing themselves away between the packs. We shall probably not dissent from their complaint that this method of traveling was hot in summer and cold in winter. The usual charge for freight was thirty cents per ton per mile. Toward the close of the century what were termed " flying coaches" were established; they could move at the rate of from thirty to fifty miles in a day. Many persons thought the risk so great that it was a tempting of Providence to go in them. The mail-bag was carried on horseback at about five miles an hour. A penny-post had been established in the city, but with much difficulty, for many long-headed men, who knew very well what they were saying, had denounced it as an insidious "popish contrivance." Only a few years before the period under consideration Parliament
Page 502
502 LIBRARIES, PRINTING-PRESSES, SOCIAL DISCIPLINE.
had resolved that " all pictures in the royal collection which contained representations of Jesus or the Virgin Mother should be burnt; Greek statues were delivered over to Puritan stone-masons to be made decent." A little earlier, Lewis Muggleton had given himself out as the last and greatest of the prophets, having power to save or damn whom he pleased. It had been revealed to him that God is only six feet high, and the sun only four miles off. The country beyond the Trent was still in a state of barbarism, and near the sources of the Tyne there were people scarcely less savage than American Indians, their " half-naked women chanting a wild measure, while the men, with brandished dirks, danced a war-dance." At the beginning of the eighteenth century there were thirty-four counties without a printer. The only press in England north of the Trent was at York. As to private libraries, there were none deserving the name. "An esquire passed for a great scholar if Hudibras, Baker's Chronicle, Tarleton's Jests, and the Seven Champions of Christendom lay in his hall-window." It might be expected that the women were ignorant enough when very few men knew how to write correctly or even intelligibly, and it had become unnecessary for clergymen to read the Scriptures in the original tongues. Social discipline was very far from being of that kind which we call moral. The master whipped his apprentice, the pedagogue his scholar, the husband his wife. Public punishments partook of the general brutality. It was a day for the rabble when some' culprit was set in the pillory to be pelted with brickbats, rotten eggs, and dead cats; when women were fastened by the legs in the stocks at the market-place, or a pilferer flogged through the town at the carttail, a clamor not unfrequently arising unless the lash were laid on hard enough " to make him howl." In punishments of higher offenders these whippings were perfectly horrible; thus Titus Oates, after standing twice in the pillory, was whipped, and, after an interval of two days, whipped again. A virtuoso in these matters gives us the incredible information that he counted as many as seventeen hundred stripes administered. So far from the community being shocked at such an exhibition, they appeared to agree in the sentiment that, "since his face could not be made to blush, it was well enough to try what could be done with his back." Such a hardening of heart was in no little degree promoted by the atrocious punishments of state offenders: thus, after the decapitation of Montrose and Argyle, their heads decorated the top of the Tolbooth; and gentlemen, after the rising of Monmouth, were admonished to be careful of their ways, by hanging in chains to their park gate the corpse of a rebel to rot in the air. To a debased public life private life corresponded. The houses of the rural population were huts covered with straw-thatch; their in
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PUBLIC MORALITY. 503
mates, if able to procure fresh meat once a week, were considered to be in prosperous circumstances. One half of the families in England could hardly do that. Children of six years old were not unfrequently set to labor. The lord of the manor spent his time in rustic pursuits; was not an unwilling associate of peddlers and drovers; knew how to ring a pig or shoe a horse; his wife and daughters "stitched and spun, brewed gooseberry wine, cured marigolds, and made the crust for the venison pasty." Hospitality was displayed in immoderate eating, and drinking of beer, the guest not being considered as having done justice to the occasion unless he had gone under the table. The dining-room was uncarpeted; but then it was tinted with a decoction of " soot and small beer." The chairs were rush-bottomed. In London the houses were mostly of wood and plaster, the streets filthy beyond expression. After nightfall a passenger went at his peril, for chamber windows were opened and slop-pails unceremoniously emptied down. There were no lamps in the streets until Master Heming established his public lanterns. As a necessary consequence, there were plenty of shoplifters, highwaymen, and burglars. As to the moral condition, it is fearfully expressed in the statement that men not unfrequently were willing to sacrifice their country for their religion. Hardly any personage died who was not popularly suspected to have been made away with by poison, an indication of the morality generally supposed to prevail among the higher classes. If such was the state of society in its serious aspect, it was no better in its lighter. We can scarcely credit the impurity and immodesty of the theatrical exhibitions. What is said about them would be beyond belief if we did not remember that they were the amusements of a community whose ideas of female modesty and female sentiment were altogether different from ours. Indecent jests were put into the mouths of lively actresses, and the dancing was not altogether of a kind to meet our approval. The rural clergy could do but little to withstand this flood of immorality. Their social position for the last hundred years had been rapidly declining; for, though the Church possessed among her dignitaries great writers and great preachers, her lower orders, partly through the political troubles that had befallen the state, but chiefly in consequence of sectarian bitterness, had been reduced to a truly menial condition. It was the business of the rich man's chaplain to add dignity to the dinner-table by saying grace " in full canonicals," buth4e was also intended to be a butt for the mirth of the company. " The young Levite," such was the phrase then in use, "might fill himself with the corned beef and the carrots, but as soon as the tarts and cheese-cakes made their appearance he quitted his seat, and stood aloof till he was summoned to return thanks for the repast," the daintiest part of which he had not tasted. If need arose, he
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504 ADMINISTRATION OF LAW.
could curry a horse, " carry a parcel ten miles," or " cast up the farrier's bill." The "wages" of a parish priest were at starvation-point. The social degradation of the ecclesiastic is well illustrated by an order of Queen Elizabeth, that no clergyman should presume to marry a servant girl without the consent of her master or mistress. The clergy, however, had not fallen into this condition without in a measure deserving it. Their time had been too much occupied in persecuting Puritans and other sectaries, with whom they would have gladly dealt in the same manner as they had dealt with the Jews, who, from the thirteenth century till Cromwell, were altogether interdicted from public worship. The University of Oxford had ordered the political works of Buchanan, Milton, and Baxter to be publicly burnt in the court of the schools. The immortal vagabond, Bunyan, had been committed to jail for preaching out of his head the way of salvation to the common people, and had remained there twelve years, the stout old man refusing to give his promise not to offend in that manner again. The great doctrine inculcated from the pulpit was submission to temporal power. Men were taught that rebellion is a sin not less deadly than witchcraft. On a community thirsting after the waters of life were still inflicted wearisome sermons respecting "the wearing of surplices, position at the Eucharist, or the sign of the cross at baptism," things that were a stench in the nostrils of the lank haired Puritan, who, with his hands clasped on his bosom, his face corrugated with religious astringency, the whites of his eyes turned upward to heaven, rocking himself alternately on his heels and the tips of his toes, delivered, in a savory prayer uttered through his nose, all such abominations of the Babylonish harlot to the Devil, whose affairs they were. In administering the law, whether in relation to political or religious offenses, there was an incredible atrocity. In London, the crazy old bridge over the Thames was decorated with grinning and mouldering heads of criminals, under ah idea that these ghastly spectacles would fortify the common people in their resolves to act according to law. The toleration of the times may be understood from a law enacted by the Scotch Parliament, May 8,1685, that whoever preached or heard in a conventicle should be punished with death and the confiscation of his goods. That such an infamous spirit did not content itself with mere dead-letter laws there is too much practical evidence to permit any one to doubt. A silly laboring man, who had taken it into his head that he could not conscientiously attend the Episcopal worship, was seized by a troop of soldiers, "rapidly examined, convicted of non-conformity, and sentenced to death in the presence of his wife, who led one little child by the hand, and it was easy to see was about to give birth to another. He was shot before her face, the widow
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PUBLIC PUNISHMENTS. 505
crying out in her agony,' Well, sir, well, the day of reckoning will come.'" Shrieking Scotch Covenanters were submitted to torture by crushing their knees flat in the boot; women were tied to stakes on the sea-sands and drowned by the slowly advancing tide because they would not attend Episcopal worship, or branded on their cheeks and then shipped to America; gallant but wounded soldiers were hung in Scotland for fear they should die before they could be got to England. In the troubles connected with Monmouth's rising, in one county alone, Somersetshire, two hundred and thirty-three persons were hanged, drawn, and quartered, to say nothing of military executions, for the soldiers amused themselves by hanging a culprit for each toast they drank, and making the drums and fifes play, as they said, to his dancing. It is needless to recall such incidents as the ferocity of Kirk's lambs, for such was the name popularly given to the soldiers of that colonel, in allusion to the Paschal lamb they bore on their flag- or the story of Tom Boilman, so nicknamed from having been compelled by those veterans to seethe the remains of his quartered friends in melted pitch. Women, for such idle words as women are always using, were sentenced to be whipped at the cart's-tail through every market town in Dorset; a lad named Tutching condemned to be flogged once a fortnight for seven years. Eight hundred and forty-one human beings judicially condemned to transportation to the West India islands, and suffering all the horrible pains of a slave-ship in the middle passage, "were never suffered to go on deck;" in the holds below, " all was darkness, stench, lamentation, disease, and death." One fifth of them were thrown overboard to the sharks before they reached their destination, and the rest obliged to be fattened before they could be offered in the market to the Jamaica planters. The court ladies, and even the Queen of England herself, were so utterly forgetful of womanly mercy and common humanity as to join in this infernal traffic. That princess requested that a hundred of the convicts should be given to her. "The profit which she cleared on the cargo, after making a large allowance for those who died of hunger and fever during the passage, can not be estimated at less than a thousand guineas." It remains to add a few words respecting the state of literature. This, at the end of the seventeenth century, had become indescribably profligate, and, since the art of reading was by no means generally cultivated, the most ready method of literary communication was through theatrical representation. It was for that reason that playwriting was the best means of literary remuneration, if we except the profit derived from the practice which, to some extent, survives, though its disgraceful motive has ceased, of dedicating books to rich men for the sake of the fee they would give. It is said that books have actually been printed in consideration of the profits of the dedication. Espe
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506 THE THEATRE.
cially in the composition of plays was it judged expedient to minister to the depraved public taste by indecent expressions, or allusions broad and sly. The playwright was at the mercy of an audience who were critical on that point, and in a position, if he should not come up to the required standard, to damn him and his work in an instant. From these remarks must be excepted the writings of Milton, which are nowhere stained by such a blemish. And yet posterity will perhaps with truth assert that Paradise Lost has wrought more intellectual evil than even its base contemporaries, since it has familiarized educated minds with images which, though in one sense sublime, in another are most unworthy, and has taught the public a dreadful materialization of the great and invisible God. A Manichean composition in reality, it was mistaken for a Christian poem. The progress of English literature not only offers striking proofs of the manner in which it was affected by theatrical representions, but also furnishes an interesting illustration of that necessary course through which intellectual development must pass. It is difficult for us, who live in a reading community, to comprehend the influence once exercised by the pulpit and the stage in the instruction of a non-reading people. As late as the sixteenth century they were the only means of mental access to the public, and we should find, if we were to enter on a detailed examination of either one or the other, that they furnish a vivid reflection of the popular intellectual condition. Leaving to others such interesting researches into the comparative anatomy of the English pulpit, I may, for a moment, direct attention to theatrical exhibitions. There are three obvious phases through which the drama has passed, corresponding to as many phases in the process of intellectual development. These are respectively the miracle play, corresponding to the stage of childhood; the moral, corresponding to that of youth; the real, corresponding to that of manhood. In them respectively the supernatural, the theological, the positive predominates. The first went out of fashion soon after the middle of the fifteenth century, the second continued for about one hundred and fifty years, the third still remains. By the miracle play is understood a representation of Scripture incidents, enacted, however, without any regard to the probabilities of time, place, or action; such subjects as the Creation, the fall of man, the Deluge, being considered as suitable, and in these scenes, without any concern for chronology, other personages, as the pope or Mohammed, being introduced, or the Virgin Mary wearing a French hood, or Virgil worshiping the Savior. Our forefathers were not at all critical historians; they indulged without stint in a highly pleasing credulity. They found no difficulty in admitting that Mohammed was originally a cardinal, who turned heretic out of spite because he was not
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MIRACLE PLAYS. 507
elected pope; that, since the taking of the true cross by the Turks, all Christian children have twenty-two instead of thirty-two teeth, as was the case before that event; and that men have one rib less than women, answering to that taken from Adam. The moral play personifies virtues, vices, passions, goodness, courage, honesty, love. The real play introduces human actors, with a plot free from the supernatural, and probability is outraged as little as possible. Its excellency consists in the perfect manner in which it delineates human character and action. The miracle play was originally introduced by the Church, the first dramas of the kind, it is said, having been composed by Gregory Nazianzen. They were brought from Constantinople by the Crusaders; the Byzantines were always infatuated with theatrical shows. The parts of these plays were often enacted by ecclesiastics, and not unfrequently the representations took place at the abbey gate. So highly did the Italian authorities prize the influence of these exhibitions on the vulgar, that the pope granted a thousand days of pardon to any person who should submit to the pleasant penance of attending them. All the arguments that had been used in behalf of picture-worship were applicable to these plays; even the Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension were represented. Over illiterate minds a coarse but congenial influence was obtained; a recollection, though not an understanding of sacred things. In the play of " the Fall of Lucifer," that personage was introduced, according to the vulgar acceptation, with horns, and tail, and cloven hoof; his beard, however, was red, our forefathers having apparently indulged in a singular antipathy against hair of that color. There still remain accounts of the expenses incurred on some of these occasions, the coarse quaintness of which is not only amusing, but also shows the debased ideas of the times. For instance, in "Mysteries," enacted at Coventry, are such entries as "paid for a pair of gloves for God;" " paid for gilding God's coat;" " dyvers necessaries for the trimmynge of the Father -of Heaven." In the play of the "Shepherds" there is provision for green cheese and Halton ale, a suitable recruitment after their long journey to the birthplace of our Savior. " Payd to the players for rehearsal: imprimis, to God, iis. viiid.; to Pilate his wife, iis.; item, for keeping fyer at hell's mouth, iiid." A strict attention to chronology is not exacted; Herod swears by Mohammed, and promises one of his councilors to make him pope. Noah's wife, who, it appears, was a termagant, swears by the Virgin Mary that she will not go into the ark, and, indeed, is only constrained so to do by a sound cudgeling administered by the patriarch, the rustic justice of the audience being particularly directed to the point that such a flogging should not be given with a stick thicker than her husband's thumb. The sentiment of modesty seems not to have been very exacting, since in the play of "the Fall of Man" Adam and Eve appear entirely naked; one
Page 508
508 MIRACLE PLAYS AND REAL PLAY.
of the chief incidents is the adjustment of the fig-leaves. Many such circumstances might be related, impressing us perhaps with an idea of the obscenity and profanity of the times. But this would scarcely be a just conclusion. As the social state improved, we begin to find objections raised by the more thoughtful ecclesiastics, who refused to lend the holy vestments for such purposes, and at last succeeded in excluding these exhibitions from consecrated places. After dwindling down by degrees, these plays lingered in the booths at fairs or on market-days, the Church having resigned them to the guilds of different trades, and these, in the end, giving them up to the mountebank. And so they died. Their history is the outward and visible sign of a popular intellectual condition in process of passing away. The mystery and miracle plays were succeeded by the moral play. It has been thought by some, who have studied the history of the English theatre, that these plays were the result of the Reformation, with the activity of which movement their popularity was coincident. But perhaps the reader who is impressed with the principle of that definite order of social advancement so frequently referred to in this book will agree with me that this relation of cause and effect can hardly be sustained, and that devotional exercises and popular recreations are in common affected by antecedent conditions. Of the moral play, a very characteristic example still remains under the title of " Everyman." It often delineates personification and allegory with very considerable power. This short phase of our theatrical career deserves a far closer attention than it has hitherto obtained, for it has left an indelible impression on our literature. I think that it is to this, in its declining days, that we are indebted for much of the machinery of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. Whoever will compare that work with such plays as "Everyman" and " Lusty Juventus," can not fail to be struck with their resemblances. Such personages as "Good Counsel," "Abominable Living," "Hypocrasie," in the play, are of the same family as those in the Progress. The stout Protestantism of both is at once edifying and amusing. An utter contempt for "holy stocks and holy stones, holy clouts and holy bones," as the play has it, animates them all. And it can hardly be doubted that the immortal tinker, in the carnal days when he played at tipcat and romped with the girls on the village green at Elstow, indulged himself in the edification of witnessing these dramatic representations. As to the passage from this dramatic phase to the real, in which the character and actions of man are portrayed, to the exclusion of the supernatural, it is only necessary to allude with brevity -indeed, it is only necessary to recall one name, and that one name is Shakspeare. He stands, in his relations to English literature, in the same position that the great Greek sculptors stood with respect to an-
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DISSEMINATION OF INTELLIGENCE.-NEWSPAPERS. 509
cient art, embodying conceptions of humanity in its Various attributes with indescribable skill, and with an exquisite agreement to nature. Not without significance is it that we find mystery in the pulpit and mystery on the stage. They appertain to social infancy. Such dramas as those I have alluded to, and many others that, if space had permitted, might have been quoted, were in unison with the times. The abbeys were boasting of such treasures as the French hood of the Virgin, " her smocke or shifte," the manger in which Christ was laid, the spear which pierced his side, the crown of thorns. The transition from this to the following stage is not without its political attendants, the prohibition of interludes containing any thing against the Church of Rome, the royal proclamation against preaching out of one's'own brain, the appearance of the Puritan upon the national stage, an increasing acerbity of habit and sanctimoniousness of demeanor. With peculiar facility we may therefore, through an examination of the state of the drama, determine national mental condition. The same may be done by a like examination of the state of the pulpit. Whoever will take the trouble to compare the results together can not fail to observe how remarkably they correspond. Such was the state of the literature of amusement; as to political literature, even at the close of the period we are considering, it could not be expected to flourish after the judges had declared that no man could publish political news except he had been duly authorized by the crown. Newspapers were, however, beginning to be periodically issued, and, if occasion called for it, broadsides, as they were termed, were added. In addition, newsletters were written by enterprising individuals in the metropolis, and sent to rich persons who subscribed for them; they then circulated from family to family, and doubtless enjoyed a privilege which has not descended to their printed contemporary, the newspaper, of never becoming stale. Their authors compiled them from materials picked up in the gossip of the coffee-houses. The coffee-houses, in a non-reading community, were quite an important political as well as social institution. They were of every kind, prelatical, popish, Puritan, scientific, literary, Whig, Tory. Whatever a man's notions might be, he could find in London, in a double sense, a coffee-house to his taste. In towns of considerable importance the literary demand was insignificant; thus it is said that the father of Dr. Johnson, the lexicographer, peddled books from town to town, and was accustomed to open a stall in Birmingham on market-days, and it is added that this supply of literature was equal to the demand. The liberty of the press has been of slow growth. Scarcely had printing been invented when it was found necessary every where to place it under some restraint, as was, for instance, done by Rome in her Index Expurgatorius of prohibited books, and the
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putting of printers who had offended under the ban; the action of the University of Paris, alluded to (p. 472), was essentially of the same kind. In England, at first, the press was subjected to the common law; the crown judges themselves determined the offense, and could punish the offender with fine, imprisonment, or even death. Within the last century this power of determination has been taken from them, and a jury must decide, not only on the fact, but also on the character of the publication, whether libelous, seditious, or otherwise offensive. The press thus came to be a reflector of public opinion, casting light back upon the public; yet, as with other reflectors, a portion of the illuminating power is lost. The restraints under which it is laid are due, not so much to the fear that liberty would degenerate into license, for public opinion would soon correct that; they are rather connected with the necessities of the social state. Whoever will examine the condition of England at successive periods during her passage through the Age of Faith will see how slow was her progress, and will, perhaps, be surprised to find at its close how small was her advance. The ideas that had served her for so many centuries as a guide had rather obstructed than facilitated her way. B-at whoever will consider what she has done since she fairly entered on her Age of Reason will remark a wonderful contrast. There has not been a progress in physical conditions only - a securing of better food, better clothing, better shelter, swifter locomotion, the procurement of individual happiness, an extension of the term of life. There has been a great moral advancement. Such atrocities as those mentioned in the foregoing paragraphs are now impossible, and so unlike our own manners that doubtless we read of them at first with incredulity, and with difficulty are brought to believe that these are the things our ancestors did. What a difference between the dilatoriness of the past, its objectless exertions, its unsatisfactory end, and the energy, the well-directed intentions of the present age, which have already yielded results like the prodigies of romance.
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. CHAPTER XXII. THE EUROPEAN AGE OF REASON. REJECTION OF AUTHORITY AND TRADITION, AND ADOPTION OF SCIENTIFIC TRUTH.-DISCOVERY OF THE TRUE POSITION OF THE EARTH IN THE UNIVERSE.
Ecclesiastical Attempt to enforce the GEOCENTRIC DOCTRINE that the Earth is the Centre of the Universe, and the most important Body in it. The HELIOCENTRIC DOCTRINE that the Sun is the Centre of the Solar System, and the Earth a small Planet, comes gradually into Prominence. Struggle between the Ecclesiastical and Astronomical Parties.-Activity of the Inquisition.Burning of Bruno.-Imprisonment of GALILEO. INVENTION OF THE TELESCOPE. - Complete Overthrow of the Ecclesiastical Idea.- Rise of Physical Astronomy.-NEWTON.-Rapid and resistless Development of all Branches of Natural Philosophy. Final Establishment of the Doctrine that the Universe is under the Dominion of mathematical, and, therefore, necessary Laws. Progress of Man from Anthropocentric Ideas to the Discovery of his true Position and Insignificance in the Universe.
THE Age of Reason in Europe was ushered in by an astronomical controversy. Is the earth the greatest and most noble body in the universe, round which, as an immovable centre, the sun, and the various planets, and stars revolve, ministering by their light and other qualities to the wants and pleasures of man, or is it an insignificant orb -a mere point-submissively revolving, among a crowd of compeers and superiors, around a central sun? The former of these views was authoritatively asserted by the Church; the latter, timidly suggested by a few thoughtful and religious men at first, in the end gathered strength and carried the day. Behind this physical question-a mere scientific problem-lay something of the utmost importance-the position of man in the universe. The conflict broke out upon an ostensible issue, but every one saw what was the real point in the dispute. In the history of the Age of Reason in Europe, which is to fill the remaining pages of this book, I am constrained to commence with this astronomical controversy, and have therefore been led by that circumstance to complete the survey of the entire period from the same, that is, the scientific point of view. Many different modes of treating it spontaneously present themselves; but so vast are the subjects to be brought under consideration, so numerous their connections, and so limited the space at my disposal, that I must give the preference
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to one which, with sufficient copiousness, offers also precision. Whoever will examine the progress of European intellectual advancement thus far manifested will find that it has concerned itself with three great questions: 1. The ascertainment of the position of the earth in the universe; 2. The history of the earth in time; 3. The position of man among living beings. Under this last is ranged all that he has done in scientific discovery, and all those inventions which are the characteristics of the present industrial age. Where am I? What am I? we may imagine to have been the first exclamations of the first man awakening to conscious existence. Here, in our Age of Reason, we have been dealing with the same thoughts. They are the same which, as we have seen, occupied Greek intellectual life. When Halley's comet appeared in 1456, it was described by those who saw it as an object of "unheard-of magnitude;" its tail, which shook down "diseases, pestilence, and war" upon earth, reached over a third part of the heavens. It was considered as connected with the progress of Mohammed II., who had just then taken Constantinople. It struck terror into all people. From his seat, invisible to it, in Italy, the sovereign pontiff, Calixtus III., issued his ecclesiastical fulminations; but the comet in the heavens, like the sultan on the earth, pursued its course undeterred. In vain were all the bells in Europe ordered to be rung to scare it away; in vain was it anathematized; in vain were prayers put up in all directions to stop it. True to its time, it punctually returns from the abysses of space, uninfluenced by any thing save agencies of a material kind. A signal lesson for the meditations of every religious man. Among the clergy there were, however, some who had more correct cosmic ideas than those of Calixtus. A century before Copernicus, Cardinal de Cusa had partially adopted the heliocentric theory, as taught in the old times by Philolaus, Pythagoras, and Archimedes. He ascribed to the earth a globular form, rotation on its axis, and a movement in space; he believed that it moves round the sun, and both together round the pole of the universe. By geocentric theory is meant that doctrine which asserts the earth to be the immovable centre of the universe; by heliocentric and theory that which demonstrates the sun to be the centre of our planetary system, implying, as a necessary inference, that the earth is a very small and subordinate body revolving round the sun. I have already, in sufficient detail, described how the Roman Church had been constrained by her position to uphold the geocentric doctrine. She had come to regard it as absolutely essential to her system, the intellectual basis of which she held would be sapped if this doctrine should be undermined. Hence it was that such an alarm was shown at the assertion of the globular form of the
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earth, and hence the surpassing importance of the successful voyage of Magellan's ship. That indisputable demonstration of the globular figure was ever a solid support to the scientific party in the portentous approaching conflict. Preparations had been silently making for a scientific revolution in various directions. The five memoirs of Cardinal Alliacus "On the Concordance of Astronomy with Theology," show the turn that thought was taking. His Imago mundi was published in 1460, and is said to have been a favorite work with Columbus. In the very Cathedral of Florence, Toscanelli had constructed his celebrated gnomon, 1468, a sun-ray, auspicious omen! being admitted through a plate of brass in the lantern of the cupola. John Muller, better known as Regiomontanus, had published an abridgment of Ptolemy's Almagest, 1520. Euclid had been printed with diagrams on copper as long before as 1482, and again in Venice twenty-three years subsequently. The Optics of Vitello had been published 1533. Fernel, physician to Henry II of France, had even ventured so far, supported by Magellan's voyage, as to measure, 1527, the size of the earth, his method being to observe the height of the pole at Paris, then to proceed northward until its elevation was increased exactly one degree, and to ascertain the distance between the stations by the number of revolutions of his carriage wheel. He concluded that it is 24,480 Italian miles round the globe. The last attempt of the kind had been that of the Khalif Almaimon seven hundred years previously on the shore of the Red Sea, and with nearly the same result. The mathematical sciences were undergoing rapid advancement. Rhaeticus had published his trigonometrical tables; Cardan, Tartaglia, Scipio Ferreo, and Stefel were greatly improving algebra. The first formal assertion of the heliocentric theory was made in a timid manner, strikingly illustrative of the expected opposition. It was by Copernicus, a Prussian, speaking of the revolutions of the heavenly bodies; the year was about 1536. In his preface, addressed to Pope Paul III, whether written by himself, or, as some have affirmed, for him by Andreas Osiander, he complains of the imperfections of the existing system, states that he has sought among ancient writers for a better way, and so had learned the heliocentric doctrine. " Then I too began to meditate on the motion of the earth, and, though it appeared an absurd opinion, yet, since I knew that in previous times others had been allowed the privilege of feigning what circles they chose in order to explain the phenomena, I conceived that I might take the liberty of trying whether, on the supposition of the earth's motion, it was possible to find better explanations than the ancient ones of the revolutions of the celestial orbs." " Having, then, assumed the motions of the earth, which are hereafter explained, by laborious and long observation I at length found that, if
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the motions of the other planets be compared with the revolution of the earth, not only their phenomena follow from the suppositions, but also that the several orbs and the whole system are so connected in order and magnitude that no one point can be transposed without disturbing the rest, and introducing confusion into the whole universe." The apologetic air with which he thus introduces his doctrine is again remarked in his statement that he had kept his book for thirty-six years, and only now published it at the entreaty of Cardinal Schomberg. The cardinal had begged of him a manuscript copy. " Though I know that the thoughts of a philosopher do not depend on the judgment of the many, his study being to seek out truth in all things as far as is permitted by God to human reason, yet, when I considered how absurd my doctrine would appear, I long hesitated whether I should publish my book, or whether it were not better to follow the example of the Pythagoreans and others, who delivered their doctrine only by tradition and to friends." He concludes: " If there be vain babblers, who, knowing nothing of mathematics, yet assume the right of judging on account of some place of Scripture perversely wrested to their purpose, and who blame and attack my undertaking, I heed them not, and look upon their judgments as rash and contemptible." Copernicus clearly recognized not only the relative position of the earth, but also her relative magnitude. He says the magnitude of the world is so great that the distance of the earth from the sun has no apparent magnitude when compared with the sphere of the fixed stars. To the earth Copernicus attributed a triple motion-a daily rotation on her axis, an annual motion round the sun, a motion of declination of the axis. The latter seemed to be necessary to account for the constant direction of the pole; but as this was soon found to be a misconception, the theory was relieved of it. With this correction, the doctrine of Copernicus presents a clear and great advance, though in the state in which he offered it he was obliged to retain the mechanism of epicycles and eccentrics, because he considered the planetary motions to be circular. It was the notion that, since the circle is the most simple of all geometrical forms, it must therefore be the most natural, which led to this imperfection. His work was published in 1543. He died a few days after he had seen a copy. Against the opposition it had to encounter, the