BOOKS.
MAURICE'S LECTURES ON ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY..
Tim lectures in this volume have never been delivered, nor were they written for delivery, though the form of address to a class is maintained throughout. They arose out of an attempt on the part of some of Mr. liartrice's friends to reproduce the lectures actually delivered by him at King's College from notes taken by the stu-
dents; upon the failure of which College, Mr. Maurice undertook
himself to compose anew a series of discourses upon Ecclesiastical History, which, without servilely imitating the course delivered, should fairly represent his teaching on this subject while he held the Professor's chair of which the Council deprived him last year. He has accomplished his purpose in this volume as far as the close of the second century, and he proposes to continue his work to the commencement of the present century. Mr. Maurice, in spite of his habitual dislike to long words, pre- fers to term his subject "Ecclesiastical History" rather than the "History of the Church," because the former phrase brings into clearer light the idea that the Church is a body called out from something, and called out to be and to do something. Re- cognizing in history, in literature, in philosophy, and in the personal experience of every man, a struggle between a higher and a lower principle—between an animal nature worship- ing the visible good and pleasant, and a spiritual crea- ture, seeking its true blessedness in an order and constitution not perceived by the senses—he finds the key to this enigma in the fact disclosed by the earliest revelation, that the Creator of all things visible is the Lord of man's spirit, has made man in his own image, and has called him out from the visible world to rule over it and over his own relations to it, to acknowledge and to make his own that higher relationship for which his Maker has intended him, and to which his distinguishing faculties of will, reason, and conscience, are ever pointing. Upon this call the "Ecclesia " rests ; by this are its nature and functions explained; to this Jewish sacrifices and ceremonies, Christian doctrines and rites, bear evidence, and derive from it their meaning and worth. The great central fact of revelation, that the Word of God became flesh and dwelt with men—that Word which is "the light of the world, and lighteth every man who cometh into the world "—would itself be unmeaning except as the highest evidence of that primal call, as the most transcendent proof that the human race is consti- tuted the lord and not the slave of the visible world, the wor- shiper and friend of the Creator, not the idolater and victim of the divided and jarring powers of nature. Wherever, therefore, this call has been acknowledged—where it has been dimly felt or brought out into the full light of con- sciousness—there is a church element ; there has the Divine teacher of man's spirit been not wholly resisted, his light not wholly quenched in the dark fogs of appetite and sloth. Church History becomes thus in the profoundest sense the history of hu- man progress ; and Science herself can but reverently confess that such theology as this in no way contravenes her decisions or sets them at defiance, though it furnishes a key to facts from which she can only draw generalizations. Whether we choose to accept the key or not, we cannot say, as of so many that are offered to us, that it does not fit the lock.
Of course Mr. Maurice does not in this volume profess to be 'writing in detail of the Church in this broad sense, but specifically of that portion of it which acknowledged Christ as its head, and re- ceived the teaching of the Apostles. But he does, in the earlier lec- tures, trace the call to a higher life, from Adam through Abraham and the Jewish nation, through the great "Babel empires" of the East, through Greek philosophy and art, through Roman order and energy, through all that is recorded of man's evil and man's good, up to the time when a Divine person manifested himself as man, and proclaimed that the prisoners of despair were free, that the Ruler of the world was a righteous Being who cared for man, and that so men were not under the dreadful alternative, too seemingly imminent in that day, of bowing submissively to brute force, or of flying from all communion with their fellows. How terribly so- ciety had been shaken to its foundations, and how profoundly the sense of mere force as the highest deliverer from evil and the sole bond of society had penetrated to the heart of the peoples, has never been more vividly described than in this closing passage of the second lecture.
"I have told you that Judma was a distinct and separate nation, and that it was a witness against those great empires which tried to be universal and to swallow up all nations in themselves. Rome, as it is described to us by Judas Maceabmus, was a nation, standing upon an acknowledgment of a righteous Being, though it was continually confounding Him with the works of His hands ; confessing a law by which individuals and nations are bound, though it was very frequently violating that law in its own acts ; reveren- cing the bonds of the family, though those bonds were always liable to become loose. But the false worship, the violations of right, the breaches of domes- tic discipline, were now becoming stronger than all which restrained them. The factions of leaders, the divisions of classes, made mockery of the law to which they all appealed. Money was mighty over the order of the state and the consciences of men. The ablest citizens might, in such a time, be- come the subverters of the commonwealth. After a wretched civil war, Julius Caasar, the beloved of the people, became Dictator. Men who dreamed that they could restore the old Roman Republic conspired against him and slew him. That act hastened its fall, and threw it into the hands of a much worse chief. Octavius Caesar became the ruler of the world which Rome had subdued, and was hailed as a deliverer from its anarchy. He was called the Imperator or General of the Republic. All its civil offices and institutions • Lectures on the Ecclesiastical 'History of the First and Second Centuries. By Frederic Denison Maurice, M.A., Chaplain of Lincoln's Inn. Published by Mac- millan and Co., Cambridge. gathered round him who bore this military name. The most civilized part of the universe did homage to one whose title and whose glory was that he was the chief of the army. But he was not only called a general, he was also called a god. The union of names expresses the inmoet feeling of the people of that age. Mere power, the power which comes forth in hosts, was their god. He who governed them was really in their minds the King of kings and Lord of lords. They might worship a multitude of powers, as they had done before; they might have abundance of religion, and be full of fears about the future and the unseen world. But this was the person to whom they looked up ; this Man-god was he to whom priests and peoples bowed down."
We think that the consideration so forcibly put in these latter sentences has never been allowed its due weight in estimating the causes of the rapid progress of Christianity. We hear it called a gospel, a deliverence, and are too apt to think only of the life to come; whereas it was a proclamation of moral freedom at once—a deliverance of the soul from the iron of a ruthless des- potism, however it left the chains round the body ; and it rapidly became, as all the wisest Emperors perceived, antagonistic to and inconsistent with the maintenance of the Imperial fabric. In one of the later lectures some striking remarks occur on this point. After speaking of the disinclination of the earlier Chris- tian leaders to interfere in politics, Mr. Maurice goes on— "But the Church was not under the direction of the individual men who composed it ; they had not the power to determine how far they should affect the politics of the earth. We may say boldly, the Church could not have borne that protest which it did bear against Paganism, without bearing at the very same moment a protest against the military despotism of Rome ; it could not undermine the one without undermining the other. This truth has never been fairly and fully proclaimed either by Pagan, Christian, or In- fidel writers ; but all these have implicitly confessed it. The conviction has been forced upon them, that the rise of the Church was necessarily contem- poraneous with the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. "The Emperors themselves had a clearer instinct on this subject than the members of the Church. There was not one of them, from Nerve to Coin- modus, who was not a man of much more than average intelligence and average benevolence ; not one, with the exception perhaps of Hadrian for whom we may not claim positive moral worth. It may be asserted Hadrian, as confidently, that just in proportion to their worth, was their suspicion of the Christian Church. Trojan feared it more than Hadrian ; Marcus Aure- lius feared it more than Trojan. The fact is undoubted ; how is it to be ac- counted for?
"To say that the Emperors were interested in the support of Paganism is true ; what I told you in the last lecture but one will show you how true it is. The whole social condition of the Empire was bound up with the wor- ship of the gods ; the hierarchy could not be separated from the Imperial system. But this is not all the truth. The Emperors evidently felt that the Christian Church, as such, was dangerous to the Empire, as such; mighty as the one was, insignificant as the other was, they were antagonists, one of which must perish if the other was to live. And the more you consider the Church in that light in which I have endeavoured to set it before you—as a family or patriarchal society growing up in each city, with a father as its head, that father being a witness of a common Father in heaven—the more you will perceive how reasonable this apprehension was; • how much more formidable such a body was than one which came forward with greater ap- parent pretensions, which encountered the military power with its own wea- pons, or which merely exhibited the pattern of a national fellowship, as the Jews had done, in contrast with it."
And again-
" Pliny found the Christians in Bithynia effecting a real and practical if not a permanent revolution. He was too wise a man not to know that a movement in the heart of a society, affecting its habits, customs' principles, is far more serious than any which disturbs its surface. He had a right to feel and to warn his master, that he should not slight the indications of such a movement merely because the conduct of those who professed the new superstition was orderly. He had a right to think that a faith of this kind could not be treated as it was the policy of the Empire to treat the religions with which he had up to that time been acquainted. There was a something in it which, as a statesman, he could not but acknowledge, had a political, not merely a religious, significance. "This conclusion he arrived at upon evidence far less clear and decisive than that which Trojan found out for himself. The venerable appearance of Ignatius made the sort of influence he was exerting more conspicuous. He was not merely the teacher of a doctrine' his disciples reverenced him on some other ground than the words which he spoke. There was an order and government of a very peculiar sort among his people ; they were evidently connected, by secret ramifications, with men whom they had never seen or heard of. Secret societies were prohibited by the wisdom of the Empire, as freemasons' lodges are in some countries of modern Europe ; here was a secret society which might spread underground through Europe and Asia, and which, if not checked, might make itself known by some tremendous explosion. "Such language applied to the fathers of the Church may seem to us very strange ; but we insist not evade the force of it by false pleas, which are as inconsistent with our faith as they would be with Trojan's. The real ques- tion is whether the Church was revolutionary or regenerative ; whether it had a commission to destroy Roman greatness, or to bring it forth out of the mass of corruption under which it was hidden ; whether it was disturbing the laws and principles which bind man to man, or vindicating them and placing them on their true and eternal foundation ; whether it was going back to the source of order, and refinement, and civilization, or merely hastening a return to barbarism. This question must of course be answered differently according as we thiuk that the Church was or was not a body called out to be a blessing to mankind. But the conclusions of the Emperors corresponded more strictly to the facts which they saw—they have been more confirmed by the experience of the world—than the doctrines of those who pretend that the Church was a harmless fellowship, which would have work- ed no mischief to the dynasties of the earth, which would have left them as it found them if they had not rudely endeavoured to crush it. The case is not so. We say of the principles of this society- " Igneus est ollis vigor et crelestis origo " and its fiery strength was to manifest itself by consuming what was corrupt and insincere ; the celestial origin was to make itself good by overcoming that which had a dark and subterranean origin."
Mr. Maurice comments on the story of the Church rather than narrates it. His lectures are intended as a guide to the reading of documents, not as a substitute for it. But his point of view is so thoroughly human the philosopher and the man predominate so completely over the antiquarian and the controversialist, that a student will really derive from him a much better and truer con- ception of the early Church than from most professedly complete
narratives. We have never read a Church History in which the ordinary points of controversy were more subordinated, and yet we know none in which the importance of the Catholic doctrine and discipline is more clearly brought out. Heretics were certainly never treated more charitably, but never was orthodoxy more satisfactorily vindicated. The possession of a conviction which nothing can shake makes a man calm, reasonable, and patient: this is the secret at once of Mr. Maurice's charity and of his firmness, of 'his tenderness for persons who hold what he considers erro- neous opinions and of his clear insight into and searching ex- posure of the tendencies of such opinions. We find the heretics in this book intelligible beings; enter into their struggles of intellect and conscience ; are led to see how they deviated from Catholic belief, under what temptations, and in search of what objects. The book abounds consequently in what we can call nothing less than masterly historical portraits. Perhaps the most living and com- plete of all is that of Tertullian ; and we regret that the limits of our space prevent us from quoting it,—especially as Mr. Maurice mainly carries on his story by biographical sketches' for which his quick sympathy admirably qualifies him, and which form a marked characteristic of the volume. The same plan carried through the succeeding centuries, with a research which, if not as profound as that of a German professor, always goes to original authorities, and is never unattended by a clear unclouded temper and practi- cal knowledge of the human heart and mind, will produce a series of volumes of the deepest interest.
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