A PECULIAR HISTORY.* Trra writer of this review is a
Churchman attached with some warmth to his Church, and with a belief that its diseatablishment would not be good for religion ; accustomed also to honour the gentler and purer sex of women. This much of his own private
personality he obtrudes, that he may not be misunderstood when he says that these three volumes could have been produced only by a woman or a parson, for you may favour a thing without being blind to its oddities. Women, at any rate in England, have more of the devotee in them than men ; parsons endue themselves very many of them with no degree of professional esprit beyond what is
proper and natural to their exceptional profession, but occasionally they are distinguished by a mood which amounts to a sort of ecclesiastical arrogance. Woman and parson have combined to produce these lectures, double-high-flavoured with ecclesi- asticalmindedness. The lectures are a history of England —meant for boys and girls—from the Roman Invasion to the end of Henry III. The especial reason assigned for adding this one more to the pile of other works already at the disposal of youth and its preceptors, is one to which no ex- ception can be taken,—much the contrary. An expounder of our history is expected not to confine himself to battles and treaties, but to tell us of the social life and manners of our forefathers here in England : in these lectures the aim is to do something more—to chronicle the condition of our ancestors as regards religion—"For I hold it to be capable of proof," it is somewhat oddly said in the introduction, "that any history of a people must be imperfect, and convey imperfect ideas to the mind, unless the growth of religion among that people, and the way in which their lives and actions were affected by it, be clearly set forth therein." Truly, since the fear of God and the love of our neighbour, which is religion, is the end of man's being, his value in that matter must needs be the most important item to be set out in an account of any man, and doubtless very difficult to come at. As for the religion of peoples, you can relate what tangible machinery they had to the same end, and mark what was the outcome in their deeds and moods. A child's history must be a very elementary one, a picture in few colours and bright ; and it will need some hardihood to venture to sum up definitely every now and then and clearly set forth :—Thus much religion had the people of this nation at such and such a time. But the task, as the authors of these lectures set it themselves, is a simpler one ; they have a hydrometer of their own for testing the current of history, and the tests they use are,—"The Church,"—The deference paid from time to time to "the Church,"—and so on. These three volumes are designed to the ultimate end of guiding young people into moods of godliness by the means of showing them what godly men of their own forefathers have done, and by offering to them, to be imbibed with their first drinks of history, the creed that "the Church" is something supernatural over all—the "Divine Right" of "the Church "— " the Church" arbiter over all men—" Is such and such a thing to be pronounced good or bad ? Then first, what is its attitude towards the Church '?"
'This is certainly a creed utterly foreign to anything held by the present reviewer. Probably, no arguments of his, more probably no arguments at all, would ever have availed to change the authors' minds upon the subject ; moreover, this is not the time to reason on that matter. The proper way of dealing with the work in a review will be,—passing unquestioned this preliminary theory, to note merely the manner in which the picture from this point of view is carried out. It is done with evident sincerity, and in the main with much charity, of purpose. There is evidently no desire, but the contrary, to set out, in stating facts or smelting out esti-
• Historical Lectures on the Early British, Anglo-Saxon, and Norman Period, cc- tended/or the Use of Teachers of English History. By Frances A. Trevelyan. Edited by the late Boy. Charles Marriott, S.D., Fellow of OrieL London J. T. Hayes.
mates, anything but that whichjis fair and true. In pronouncing judgments on the deeds and characters of actors in these historic scenes, the authors often exhibit, especially where the subjects are cleric, a very scrupulous anxiety to be just and charitable. Lay people and things do not indeed meet with the same leniency, but that appears to be occasioned, not by any want of candour on the part of the writers, but by certain presumptions of fact arising from the peculiar theory with which they start. They set down opposite various institu- tions, movements, and events which come across them in their narration, some most startling estimates and opinions, and con- clusions based on strangely insufficient premisses or no premisses at -all ; but it would not be correct to represent the writers as having been "blinded by prejudice," when their peculiar point of view is allowed for. There are cases in which certain facts may be considered as establishing presumptions which render further proof unnecessary. If you trace a man to the edge of a precipice and establish the fact that he fell over, you need no proof that he died. The compilers of this history evidently believe that to differ from -"the Church," and not be willing to submit, is merely a synonyme for being abandoned to evil. After finding that the party refused to knock under, it is the precipice case again ; there is no occasion for further inquiry, but without wasting labour, they may proceed to write him down as contumaciously travelling along the broad way that leadeth to destruction. For instance, the Magna Charta Barons, who when they started their open opposition to King John styled themselves the "Army of God and the Holy Church," fell under the censure of the Pope the summer after Runnymede; John had knocked under to the Papal See, and Innocent chose to pronounce the Barons' demands unreasonable and themselves con- tumacious for insisting. In vain did Archbishop Langton en- deavour to get his Holiness to comprehend, or at any rate recog- nize, the true value of the situation, the Pope chose to adhere to his disapprobation of the Barons and their Charter ; the Barons remained contumacious, and when they were excommunicated, they said the excommunication could not hurt them, because it was founded on misrepresentation. And so they held to their 'Charter, on which our liberties of this day are founded. It follows consequently that
Henceforth, their course was, in a moral point of view, a complete downward progress, as is generally the case when parties take the initiative in upsetting the established order of a kingdom, and however the Pope's displeasure might be scorned, it had an unseen power in bringing about their destruction. I am not now speaking of the blighting power supposed to be conveyed by ecclesiastical censure, but simply of the change which would naturally come over a body of men who at first claimed and believed themselves to be upheld by Church authority in the support of questionable proceedings, and then, when they found their mistake, persevered in spite of it, in direct violation of the principle by which they had professed to be guided."
As a matter of fact, the Barons were not destroyed ; no doubt they were hard pushed by the foreign freebooters whom the King „got round him, but John lay a dead man at Newark before the -end of October, and with him the cause of the quarrel had passed away. King John had ceased from troubling, and the Barons had won the Great Charter, which was forthwith supplemented under the regency by the Carta de Forest:1. To justify any assertion of this " destruction " of "the Barons," it would be necessary to identify the party who supported the waning pretensions of Louis up to the overthrow which is called "The Fair of Lincoln," as a sole, dwindled remnant of the power that won Magna 'Charta ; which is absurd. The proceedings which resulted in the Great Charter may have been "questionable proceedings ;" Xing John questioned them very much indeed, and the Pope pronounced the Charter unreasonable ; succeeding centuries have been very thankful for it, however. No doubt these Bigods and Bohuns and their followers were rough men, and would seem rude and gross to us in many ways, and were no better than they need be ; yet with Hallam, one can only marvel at the wonder of that "just solicitude for the people" and that "moderation" which was the outoome of them in this transaction. But, of course, we are not thinking of entering on a serious vindication of the Charter transaction from the unique estimate of it announced in these lectures. To us these postulates and peremptory assertions are gratuitous assumptions at variance with facts ; from the author's side they are, no doubt, a priori deductions which require no verification. But it might just as reasonably have been deduced that the Barons were overtaken by the fate of Borah, Dathan, and Abiram ; and indeed it is stated that after the Barons 'had fortified themselves in London, "they fell back on sensual indulgences in order to escape the misery of their own corroding thoughts,"—desperately eaten into (we suppose) by the vitriol of the excommunication. The "sense" of the chapter seems to be, that because the Pope (admittedly without understanding the issue) ordered the Barons to cease their opposition, and re- probated Magna Charts, the Barons ought to have knocked under and flung their Charter to the winds. It is right to say we have examined the three volumes with some care, and that they are certainly not a hoax, or anything cunningly contrived by any Church Association to cast odium on extreme tenets.
The fact is that whoever travels with the theorists who write this book will meet with very strange conclusions for his bed- fellows. In some respects, indeed, the authors even go beyond the consequences of their theory. What Mr. Froude has termed "the luxurious self-indulgence of modern Christianity" may well honour the self-denying asceticism of the early Angle ecclesiastics, but it can hardly be a necessary sequence, even from the premisses here postulated, to inculcate as an article of faith an acceptance of the miracles related by Bede and his fellow-writers. Yet, apparently, in the uncompromising logic of the present com- pilers, the Angle fathers wrote for "the Church," and therefore whatever they wrote is to be swallowed whole. This verges on the ludicrous, when we find the compilers adopting gravely and unsuspectingly Bede's partizan treatment of the Angle con- troversy with the British Christians who would persist in their own tonsure and their own notion of the season for keeping Easter.
In short, the whole series of lectures is churcholatry run rampant. Paul preached "not ourselves, but Christ Jesus, the Lord," and, to the present writer's notion, these lectures preach "not ourselves, nor Christ Jesus, but 'the Church ;' " this, how- ever, is trenching on a controversy which we promised to forbear. As a history for boys and girls, the work possesses very few attributes of success. It is not by beginning chapters with "my dear young friends," that the interest of young readers can be secured. There are no rallying-points and no kind of perspec- tive, while the diction is dogmatic without being forcible. Setting aside what we have allowed for as the logicAl sequence of the com- piler's peculiar views, the history of the period treated is by no means adequately represented, or even accurately as far as it goes. The editor has added copious notes of a character which, while it evinces considerable erudition, conveys very little information ; and there is an index, constructed upon some enigmatic principle, by which such matters as Brunauburh battle and Magna Charts are omitted altogether.
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