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be considered scientific and trustworthy. It is true the Church of Christ is one, in an important sense, and we should be able to grasp some view of it as a whole; but, as something to be submitted to historical and critical research, it naturally divides itself into many separate, although not entirely independent, portions. For example, Christianity has taken up its abode in many kingdoms, different from each other in language, political customs, and social manners. To treat of all these obviously requires that the various languages in which the documentary evidence is found should be understood, and the secular features of each country thoroughly known. But what man could be found equally at home in searching for his materials in the mass of the medice et infimæ Latinitatis, the Teutonic archives of Germany, and the still more recondite lore of Ethiopia and Syria?

But, apart from this geographical separation of the materials of Church History, the growth of Christianity presents widely distinct phenomena, according to the moral and even physical circumstances into which it is cast. While it never loses the character given of it by its Divine author, as a little leaven which leavens the whole lump, yet the mass into which it falls still retains much of its original character, in whatever degree it may be purified and improved by the operation of the new element. Mental idiosyncrasies in individuals are not destroyed by the converting power of Gospel truth, and the same is true of whole communities or nations. This observation involves the recognition of a deep philosophy which is too often ignored and forgotten, in the futile attempts made to reduce the varied aspects of the Christian field to one monotonous level.

By severing Latin Christianity from the Greek and Oriental forms of the same Divine instrument for the regeneration of mankind, Dean Milman has defined a portion of the great field of research, which possesses very marked and distinctive features. If we compare the present aspects of the Papacy with those of the Greek Church, and both of these systems with modern Protestantism, an unreflecting observer will see only varied forms of error, contrasting, in his estimation, with a state of things much more apostolical and pure. And this opinion is true, but it labours under the fault of being too partial in its deductions, and leaving out of sight those earlier historical circumstances which both made those forms of Christianity what they were, and at the same time adapted them as instruments of immense good to departed ages and nations of mankind. No one can form any enlightened conception of Church History who surveys merely the two extremities of the last eighteen centuries, and comparing the gigantic errors and follies of existing systems with primitive truth, gives them his

indiscriminate condemnation. These departures from the faith and practice of the earliest times were not sudden, and completed at once; but were the growth and result of states of things in themselves inevitable, and adapted by divine Providence for the furtherance of the Gospel. It is true that this forms no excuse for those who in the light of the present persist in preferring the darkness of the past; but neither does it acquit those of rashness and ignorance who involve the interesting movements and principles of departed ages in one indiscriminate censure.

Dr. Milman has well pointed out the distinct characteristics of the Church of the West, and traced carefully the often minute, and, as far as man is concerned, the accidental circumstances which gradually caused and confirmed the spiritual and political power of the Papacy. It was no master-spirit which in the fourth and fifth centuries threw its prophetic glance upon the future, and then laid out a plan of aggrandizement which after-ages were to work out and complete. Some people talk of the Papacy in this manner, and as though one individual mind had, in the possession of immortality, presided over the counsels of centuries and moulded into perfection a preconceived ideal of priestly sway. But how different is this theory from the facts of the case; from that actual slow accretion of power, civil and religious, often more given than sought after, and certainly more often a blessing than an evil at its first possession. In the work before us these causes are traced with great precision, and this is one feature of Dr. Milman's labours, for which we tender him our thanks. Latin Christianity was the growth of circumstances, and, in many of its most striking features, took an inevitable impress from the moulds into which it was involuntarily cast. In the following passages the thesis is briefly stated, which the whole work is designed to confirm and illustrate :

'Greek Christianity could not but be affected both in its doctrinal process and in its polity by its Greek origin. Among the Greeks had been for centuries agitated all those primary questions which lie at the bottom of all religions, the formation of the worlds-the existence and nature of the Deity-the origin and cause of evil, though this seems to have been studied even with stronger predilection in the trans-Euphratic East. Hence Greek Christianity was insatiably inquisitive, speculative. Confident in the inexhaustible copiousness and fine precision of its language, it endured no limitation to its curious investigations. As each great question was settled or worn out, it was still ready to propose new ones. It began with the Divinity of Christ (still earlier perhaps with some of the Gnostic Cosmogonical, or Theophanic theories), so onward to the Trinity: it expired, or at least drew near its end, as the religion of the Roman East, discussing the Divine Light on Mount Tabor.'

The further peculiarities of the Greek Church are then pointed out at some length. The author then proceeds to sketch out his plan in the following language

'Latin Christianity, on the other hand, seemed endowed with an inexhaustible principle of expanding life. No sooner had the northern tribes entered its magic circle, than they submitted to its yoke: and, not content with thus conquering its conquerors, it was constantly pushing forward its own frontier, and advancing into the strongholds of Northern Paganism. Gradually it became a monarchy, with all the power of a concentrated dominion. The clergy assumed an absolute despotism over the mind of man: not satisfied with ruling princes and kings, themselves became princes and kings. Their organisation was coincident with the bounds of Christendom; they were a second universal magistracy, exercising always equal, and asserting, and for a long period possessing, superior power to the civil government. They had their own jurisprudence the canon law-co-ordinate with and of equal authority with the Roman or the various national codes, only with penalties infinitely more terrific, almost arbitrarily administered, and admitting no exception, not even that of the greatest temporal sovereign. Western Monasticism, in its general character, was not the barren, idly laborious or dreamy quietude of the East. It was industrious and productive: it settled colonies, preserved arts and letters, built splendid edifices, fertilized deserts. If it rent from the world the most powerful minds, having trained them by its stern discipline, it sent them back to rule the world. It continually, as it were, renewed its youth, and kept up a constant infusion of vigorous life, now quickening into enthusiasm, now darkening into fanaticism; and by its perpetual rivalry, stimulating the zeal, or supplying the deficiencies of the secular clergy. In successive ages it adapted itself to the state of the human mind. At first a missionary to barbarous nations, it built abbeys, hewed down forests, cultivated swamps, enclosed domains, retrieved or won for civilisation tracts which had fallen to waste or had never known culture. With St. Dominic it turned its missionary zeal upon Christianity itself, and spread as a preaching order throughout Christendom; with St. Francis it became even more popular, and lowered itself to the very humblest of mankind. In Jesuitism it made a last effort to govern mankind by an incorporated caste. But Jesuitism found it necessary to reject many of the peculiarities of Monasticism: it made itself secular to overcome the world. But the compromise could not endure. Over the Indians of South America alone, but for the force of circumstances, it might have been lasting. In Eastern India it became a kind of Christian Paganism; in Europe a moral and religious Rationalism, fatal both to morals and religion.

6

Throughout this period, then, of at least ten centuries, Latin Christianity was the religion of the Western nations of Europe: Latin the religious language; the Latin translation of the Scriptures the religious code of mankind. Latin theology was alone inexhaustibly prolific,

and held wide and unshaken authority. On most speculative tenets this theology had left to Greek controversialists to argue out the endless transcendental questions of religion, and contented itself with resolutely embracing the results, which she fixed in her inflexible theory of doctrine. The only controversy which violently disturbed the Western Church was the practical one, on which the East looked almost with indifference, the origin and motive principle of human action-grace and free will. This, from Augustine to Luther and Jansenius, was the interminable, still reviving problem. Latin Christian literature, like Greek, might have seemed equally to have passed its meridian after Tertullian, Cyprian, Ambrose, and, high above all, Augustine. The age of true Latin poetry, no doubt, had long been over; the imaginative in Christianity could only find its expression to some extent in the legend and the ritual; but, except in a very few hymns, it was not till out of the wedlock of Latin with the Northern tongues, not till after new languages had been born in the freshness of youth, that there were great Christian poets; poets not merely writing on religious subjects, but instinct with the religious life of ChristianityDante, Ariosto, Tasso, Shakspeare, Milton, Calderon, Schiller. But not merely did Latin theology expand into another vast and teeming period, that of the Schoolmen, culminating in Aquinas; but Latin being the common language, the clergy the only learned body throughout Europe, it was that of law in both its branches; of science, of philosophy, even of history; of letters; in short, of civilisation. Latin Christianity, when her time was come, had her great æra of art, not only as the preserver of the traditions of Greek and Roman skill in architecture, and some of the technical operations in sculpture and painting, but original and creative. It was art comprehending architecture, painting, sculpture, and music, Christian in its fullest sense, as devoted entirely to Christian purposes, expressive of Christian sentiments, arising out of and kindling in congenial spirits Christian thought and feeling.

'The characteristic of Latin Christianity was that of the old Latin world—a firm and even obstinate adherence to legal form, whether of traditionary usage or written statute; the strong assertion of, and the severe subordination to authority. Its wildest and most eccentric fanaticism, for the most part, and for many centuries, respected external unity. It was the Roman empire, again extended over Europe by an universal code and a provincial government; by an hierarchy of religious prætors or proconsuls, and a host of inferior officers, each in strict subordination to those immediately above them, and gradually descending to the very lowest ranks of society: the whole with a certain degree of freedom of action, but a constrained and limited freedom, and with an appeal to the spiritual Cæsar in the last resort.'vol. i. pp. 2-8.

The inroad of what Dean Milman calls Teutonic Christianity is then alluded to, and its blessings are graphically described. The spirit in which the great result of the mingling of this new element,

namely, the Reformation, is viewed by the author, may be gathered from the following passage:

"The progressive development of Christianity seems the inevitable consequence of man's progress in knowledge, and in the more general dissemination of that knowledge. Human thought is almost compelled to assert, and cannot help asserting, its original freedom. And as that progress is manifestly a law of human nature, proceeding from the Divine Author of our being, this self-adaptation of the one true religion to that progress, must have the divine sanction, and may be supposed, without presumption, to have been contemplated in the counsels of Infinite Wisdom.

'The full and more explicit expansion of these views on this Avatar of Teutonic Christianity must await its proper place at the close of our history.'-vol. i. p. 10.

Such is the department of visible Christianity, selected by the author, a portion only of which is treated of in these volumes. It may be said, without the least hesitation, that hitherto the world has witnessed nothing to equal this phase of her history, considered both in its intrinsic grandeur and in its existing results. What may come under the notice of future historians, should the world be subjected to the influence of Christian doctrines and institutions, during another period of two thousand years, it is impossible to predict-perhaps something to throw into the shade the mighty phenomenon we are now contemplating. But confining our view to the past, the growth, progress, completion, and consequences of the Papacy occupy far more of the field of vision than all other developments of Christianity besides, and furnish more abundant materials for the historian. It is this fact, coupled with the baseless idea, as we think, of the near approach of the end of the Christian Dispensation, that leads to a concentration of prophetic declarations, and scriptural descriptions of apostacy, upon the Roman Church. Presuming that Christianity is near its consummation, then indeed it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that a system ultimately so corrupt and so universally diffused, must be the subject of the Apocalyptic and other denunciations. But if we enlarge our conception of Christianity, as being yet probably in its earlier stages, and destined to exist for five or ten thousand years, we can easily see how its Latin form may one day yield in importance to other even more powerful and corrupt developments. For our own part, we think, this is by far the most reasonable view, and that most of the would-be interpreters of Christian prophecy are wrong, because they narrow, without any competent authority, the duration of Christianity. The Church historian of the year A.D. 5000, should such a date ever be subjected to the pen of man, will have to recognize and de

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