BOOKS.
LECKY'S HISTORY OF EUROPEAN MORALS.*
IT is, perhaps, a hazardous assertion to make, and yet we feel ourselves almost warranted in saying that, since Gibbon wrote his fifteenth and sixteenth chapters in the Decline and Fall, there has not appeared among us a more laborious contribution to the history of the rise and progress of Christianity in Europe than is furnished by the present work of Mr. Lecky. We remember, as we write, the labours of not a few distinguished men in the field which Mr. Lecky has selected for investigation, and conspicuous among them are the histories of Milman, Merivale, and Isaac Taylor's Ancient Christianity. That Mr. Lecky possesses the scholarship or first-hand information of any of these three writers we do not affirm. Indeed, to judge from his foot-note references, we should feel largely justified in concluding that Mr. Lecky has at least to a very considerable extent been satisfied with the materials which other inquirers have offered him, instead of drawing his resources directly from primary authorities. However, on this matter it is quite impossible to pronounce, with fairness, a positive opinion. And in any case, Mr. Lecky's reading is so catholic in its modern range and so voluminous in extent, that readers who have neither the leisure nor the means at hand of verifying his quotations from Pagan or early Christian writers, may feel perfectly safe in his hands.
But the service—the very great service, as we must consider it-- which our author has rendered to the elucidation of early Christian history does not consist in the production of fresh evidence, but in his skilful grouping of phenomena, and in his masterly generaliza- tions. The three recent authorities to whom we have just alluded —not to mention other names—have with tolerable fullness pre- sented to us all the leading facts and circumstances which relate to the moral character of the declining Roman Empire, to the gradual emergence of Christianity from a condition of obscurity, suspicion, and occasional tremendous suffering, until it was strong enough to secure the alliance of the Roman Emperor himself, as well as to the tendencies and results which issued in, and flowed from, the predominance of moral asceticism in the Church of the Nicene period. But, nevertheless, Mr. Lecky has given us a book which has the rare merit not only of freshness, but of originality. And, speaking for ourselves, we could not on the instant recall the work of any essayist, or historian, in whose pages the centuries from Augustus to Charlemagne are rehabilitated with so much life and vigour.
Mr. Lecky has designated his work a History of Morals, and he has thought it necessary, or at any rate desirable, to put his readers in possession of his own c2nceptions of the elements which
* History of European Morals, from Augustus to Charlemagne. By W. E. H. Lecky, ILA. 2 vole. London: Longmane. 1869. ultimately constitute the subject-matter of all truly ethical judg- ment, before unfolding his chart of ethical development. But in so doing, it seems to us, he was forgetting, for the time, that his work was not a history of moral philosophy—such as Sir James Mackintosh, too briefly, alas ! sketched out for the Encyclo- pmdia Britannica in his ripe and scholarly dissertation—but was a representation of moral results. As a preface to an exhibition of the immense revolution in thought, in sentiment, in action which Christianity has effected in Europe, Mr. Lecky's discussion of the utilitarian standard of ethics is altogether illogical. It is illogical in a twofold sense. In the first place, if his polemic against the school of Hume, Bentham, and Mill could be legiti- mately introduced into a history which, if worthy of the name, should lioe purely inductive, it should have formed the epilogue and not the prologue of his work. As the crown and conclusion, or blossoming flower, of his inquiries, Mr. Lecky might have summed up with his anti-utilitarian theses, and demonstrated, or tried to demonstrate, that the philosophy he so cordially dislikes is anta- gonistic in spirit to the moral ideal which, amid all confusions and misapprehensions, has yielded us our modern and noblest civiliza- tion. He might have said then, the ideas of truth, of goodness, of the love of God, have made us what we are ; and history, telling us what is in man, compels us to believe that no mere doctrine of happiness, or cold calculation of what would in any given circum- stances be most conducive to man's earthly welfare, could ever have caused the grand self-sacrifices and martyrdoms which have tended to lift humanity up to levels on which it never stood before, and which form the special glory of Christian morals. He might, in the case supposed, have added, it is wholly gratuitous to assume that the mere happiness of the indivi- dual or of the many is the final cause of existence, and, there- fore, its primary moral consideration in human conduct, for- asmuch as the men whose lives and deaths have best served the permanent interests of the world were governed by principles which include in their natural issues, but do not in the first in- stance regard at all, the things seen and temporal. Of course, the utilitarian would reply, "Perfectly true," but I am only apply- ing a scientific test to an unconscious morality, and the very heroes of the faith whom you eulogize so much are the best illus- trations that could be supplied of my faith in the worth of virtue. Nevertheless, in form and appearance at least, Mr. Lecky would have retained his character as historian by relegating his defence of intuitive morality to the end of his second volume. It is quite another question whether our author is really, as yet, sufficiently master of philosophic habits of thought and abstract inquiry to be able to pronounce judicially on the Utilitarian philosophy.
In the second place, Mr. Lecky has been illogical in substituting a dissertation on the philosophy of ethics for a consideration of the foundations of the Christian Church. He raises at starting a false issue, and the subject which he should have manfully grappled with in his opening chapters was not that of the reasons which ultimately guide or control our moral judgments, but rather this: What was the morality first taught by Christ and His Apostles? We have no sympathy at all with those critics who class Mr. Lecky with anti-Christian writers. On the contrary, it seems to us, that only a profound believer in the transcendent excellence of the character and teaching of Christ could write as Mr. Leckywrites in these volumes of "the brief life of three years which has done more than all philosophies to regenerate the world." At the same time, we must honestly confess that his book, as it stands, leaves on us the impression which a traveller's narrative would do in which we had an account of the overflowings of the Nile, but which left us in entire ignorance of the great feeding reservoirs which modern discovery has made known to us. Christianity without Christ is a stream without a fountain, and Mr. Lecky's history of European morals is simply the picturesque delineation, always eloquent, always suggestive, of an effect without an adequate cause.
For in truth these volumes are, after all, only a representation of these two great facts, (1) the conquest of the Roman Empire by Christianity ; (2) the use Christianity made of the victory. Most of our readers are, we presume, familiar with what Gibbon has written on both of these subjects, but especially on the first. Of the "five causes" which, according to Gibbon, who always tries so hard to show you that he is not mocking, were suffi- cient for, or mainly efficient in, enthroning the religion of the Christians in the seat of the Cmsars, Mr. Lecky accepts four. These are, "The inflexible zeal of the Christians," "The doctrine of a future life," "The pure and austere morals of the Chris- tians," and" The union and discipline of the Christian republic." Most of us agree with Mr. Lecky. We can detect beneath Gibbon's irony the substratum of transcendent moral worth which character- ized the hated sect of the Nazarenes, and which the sceptic himself could not but secretly respect. But with one of Gibbon's causes Mr. Lecky has a quarrel, and that is "The miraculous powers ascribed to the Church." For his dissent from the author of the Decline and Fall on this to some vital question Mr. Lecky may c,alculate on a considerable amount of censure. But not from us. On the contrary, all that he writes on this matter has our fullest acquiescence, especially as we recall his very candid note on the subject of miracles in his history of Rationalism, and we are of opinion that in the whole of his pages there is nothing which equals the ability and candour with which he has treated the probable influence of miracles on the mind of the Romans of the Empire. At th,e time when the various cities in Asia Minor and Europe were first visited by the heralds of the Cross, the atmosphere was tremulous with thaumaturgic influence, and the mere report of an additional series of extraordinary occurrences was not in itself significant enough to command a special inquiry or arrest the conscience of the world. We need not inform the readers of this journal that the reality of the wholly transcendental phenomena ascribed in the Gospel narratives to the will of Christ is not with us an open question. We believe the message returned to the Baptist, that the deaf heard, the dumb spake, the lepers were cleansed, the blind saw, and the dead were raised up. But from all that we can gather of the teaching of our Lord or of His Apostles, the evidence on which they based their respective appeals was not physical, but moral. The mood which deinauds signs and wonders is assuredly not the spiritual condition on which the New Testament looks propitiously, or to which it promises any special benediction. On the contrary, it is distinctly affirmed that if the inner vision is so paralyzed that it sees no divineness in the ethical proclamations of Moses and the prophets, no merely out- ward event, however extraordinary in its surroundings, could effect any desirable mental revolution in the beholder. It is specially in the New Testament teachings that we are ap- prised of the vast difference between the blind credulity or slavish fear which is the appropriate attribute of believers in magic, and the childlike trust, yet, withal, manful re- verence and repentance, which characterize the spirit of the recipient to whom a deeper insight into the will of God is imparted. We accordingly agree with Mr. Lecky in his convic- tion—if we understand him aright—that by eliminating the physically unnatural element from the causes which subserved the immediate surrender of the ethnic populations to the love of Christ, we do not derogate from the divineness of the Gospel, but are rather doing honour to its internal claims. Given the life and the resurrection of Christ—the latter a sequel, in which, to quote the substance of what Lady Byron says so beautifully and truth- fully in one of her letters to Crabb Robinson, the whole tenor of the life anterior to the Cross "is reproduced so homogeneously, and without the faintest taint of the suspicions and degrading elements which .adhere to all the manifestations of so-called spiritualism,"—the election of Christianity by the individuals and nations that were ready to embrace the sacrifices imposed upon those who would convert the world into a kingdom of Heaven is very explicable indeed. That life of apparent defeat, and that resurrection of substantial victory, brought in the saving principle of hope, without which the old civilization was sinking down into dismal depths of degradation. And whether Mr. Leaky shall be obliged to us or not, we, for our parts, are exceedingly obliged to him for anew suggesting to us that Christ himself is the great miracle of Christianity, and that the attractive forces revealed in His life and death, and augmented by His resurrec- tion, are in themselves quite sufficient to account for the "new ness of life" which, eighteen centuries ago, began to permeate mankind.
The second groat division of his work, that, namely, in which our author treats of the estate of European morals as induced and dominated by Christianity, we have only space to say a few words. And, first, he is wholly unimpeachable, and free from aught like partiality or partizanship in his statement of facts. He gives all due prominence,—and in the art of giving prominence to a particular subject, or set of phenomena, lies, as it seems to us, one chief element of Mr. Lecky's genius,—to such results of the Christian battle with Paganism as these; the imparting of quite a new value to individual life, and the purification of the sexual relations. Christianity claimed each human soul for God, and for immortality, and however questionable some of the adjuncts of its claim, nevertheless, it succeeded in abolishing infanticide, human
sacrifices, which were perpetrated even down to the third century
(according to Gieseler), the gladiatorial brutalities, and Roman slavery.f Christianity consecrated the family life, and made each house a home. We cannot imagine that any one could honestly take exception to the spirit in which Mr. Lecky has written on these great achievements of our common faith in its "rudimentary" conflict with heathenism, and " rudimentary " is a pet word with Mr. Lecky. In all the exquisitely ordered sentences in which he represents these victories of the Christian congregations scattered throughout the empire, Mr. Lecky shows himself fully alive to the importance of the moral results involved. And those who, like ourselves, believe that Christ was the representative of each son of man, only recognize in these beneficent issues the natural outcome of the mission of our Lord. Mr. Lecky, again, may safely be brought to book when he paints for us the reverse of the picture, and shows us the lowly bride of Jesus transformed into the spouse of the secular power, and wielding a remorseless tyranny over the whole outer and inner relations of life. For nothing less than this was the transformation—a wonderfully inverse course of development. Under the native influence of the Church, as Mr. Lecky forcibly states the case, doctrines concerning the natureof God, the immortality of the soul, and human duties which the noblest intellects of antiquity could hardly grasp, became truisms of the village school, the proverbs of the cottage and of the alley. On the other hand, Christianity in its second estate had the field of the world, to do with it what it chose. It directed the course of legislation for a thousand years, and that period turns out to be one of the most contemptible of human history. The dominant Christian doctors, in their anxiety to christen Paganism, paganized Christianity ; ,and fanatical asceticism and antheinatizing bigotry leavened the whole mass of ethics and theology. The simplicities of natural goodness, and the direct moral trusts in an Infinite Fatherhood of love, gave place to the Manichmism which at once crowded the deserts with solitaries, and drenched the remaining section of society with measureless sensuality, and to the dogma- tism which enthroned an Almighty Author of Curses which were ready to come down with eternal consequences on all who dis- sented in the minutest particular from the accepted creed. Wrangling and denouncing one another because of differences of opinion as to how Christ was the Son of God, all the divines seemed to forget that he was really the Son of Man.
But while Mr. Lecky's statements of the tremendous corruptions which flowed throughout Christendom in the period he treats of are all reliable,—and not less trustworthy are all his indications of the good that, notwithstanding the abounding evils, was at work,—we cannot but think that he ought to have been a little more explicit, as was implied above, in exhibiting the whereabouts of the line which marks off the Christianity of Christ from that of the Catholic Fathers.
We wish we could have spoken at length of a great " point " Mr. Lecky makes in showing how specially the genius of Christianity appealed to the virtues of the slave, enlisted them, and made them divine. On the other hand, we should like to state the reasons of our difference from him on two subjects, (1) the alleged affinity of Romanist-1i for the female and of Puritanism for the masculine division of humanity,—the Duke of Alva being a Catholic, and Mrs. Colonel Hutchinson a Puritan ;—and (2) the supposed tendency of pure Christianity to ignore the patriotic, and cherish only the domestic and amiable virtues,—as if Zwingle, or Knox, or Milton were false to Christianity in espousing with such intense devotion the secular interests of their respective countries. Then some of the side-lights in Mr. Lecky's volumes have all the charm of romance, such as his account of the philosophers who, quite as much as the modern priest, were the indispensable directors and father confessors of many Pagan Roman families ; or his sketches of hermit life, in one of which he gives us a graphic picture of the courtesies exchanged between two old cave occupants, who spent a whole afternoon in discovering whether the guest, who was upwards of ninety, or the host, who had completed his century of years, should break the whole loaf which the ravens had that day brought in honour of the visitor, instead of the customary half one ; or finally, the remarkable para- graph in which he demonstrates that all the glory ascribed in song and legend to Charlemagne was in reality a fiction, —the name of Charlemagne being substituted for that of Charles Martel.
But we must take our leave of Mr. Lecky, which we do with much sympathy in the main, and with cordial admiration for his great industry, eloquence, and ability.
Is not Mr. Lecky acquainted with Blair on Roman Slavery? He does not ever seem to quote from him.
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