AN INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY.*
THIS is a very excellent and suggestive outline of the history of the Mediaeval Church from Gregory the Great till the suppression of the Templars. Those whose impression of the writer's standpoint is drawn from a recent controversy in the course of which he was made a scapegoat may be reassured. Inoffenso peck percurras ; they will find in it neither what Paley calls the " sneer " of a Gibbon, nor the irony of a Duehesne. The estimate • An Introduction to the History of Christianity, 4.1D. seo-1814. BY B. 7. BcoSes Sodom. lontlen: Macmillan. 120.. sell of the Popes of the period is high ; a Jesuit censor might have passed the reference to Honorius as " unfortunate in leaving behind him a reputation of doubtful orthodoxy." The VIth Ecumenical Council took a stronger view ; and in his commend- able anxiety to do justice to that mixed magnitude, the Papacy, the author has perhaps given that well-known American book of reference, The Catholic Encyclopaedia, credit for greater detachment and authority than it is entitled to claim. He hopes to continue the present work in a volume which " may fitly be described as The Decline and Fall of the Church Empire ' " :— " This Empire, like that of Rome, has vanished ; but it has left its mark indelibly upon the world ' ; and, the more we know of the conditions of those times, the plainer does it become that our problems are often the same under different names ; and that even modem views, which pass for being advanced, have their counterparts in those clays."
The pillars, of the Mediaeval Church were Monasticism and the Papacy. Neither is either Scriptural or primitive. But, of the former, " it is hardly too much to say that thereby Christi- anity was saved from being utterly overwhelmed by the constant inroads of the barbarians " ; while, with regard to the latter, Gibbon reminds us that " from every cause, .either of a civil or an ecclesiastical nature, it was easy to foresee that Rome must enjoy the respect, and would soon claim the obedience, of the provinces " ; and our author, that " the Mediaeval Church in the West was a body which tended more and more to centralize authority in the Church of Rome." The Roman conception of Christianity had no serious competitor in the Western world, and the highest social and religious forces then at work among men were on its side. This is the foundation of the panegyric of the Papacy familiar in Catholic apologetic ; which, however, errs when it is transferred from a period of history to history as a whole. Were it limited to the age between the fall of the old civilization and the birth of the new, it would be justified. The Popes could• not save the old world ; but they could, and did, prevent the forces of barbarism from laying waste the ground out of which the new world was in due time to arise.
Hence the debt of gratitude which this new world owes to the Papacy. It was our pedagogue ; and it was assuredly lighter than darkness, if it was also darker than light.
The distinctive merit of Professor Foakes Jackson's book is the correct perspective in which it sees the Eastern Empire. This Empire, he rightly insists, cannot be described as Mediaeval, because, till its destruction by Turkish barbarism in 1453, " the civilization which radiated from Constantinople was that of the ancient world. New Rome had for eleven centuries conserved the art, the literature, the laws of Greece and Imperial Rome. She had never sunk into the barbarous condition of the ancient city ; nor had the lands under the sway of the Caesars of Byzantium suffered the utter destruction which had over- whelmed the Gauls, Spain and Britain, and compelled the reconstruction of society with little assistance from the experience of the past. It must never be forgotten that Constantinople was New Rome ; the Emperor, the Roman Emperor ; the army, the Roman army ; and the inhabitants called themselves Romans. To speak of the Greek Empire is entirely incorrect."
If this is overlooked, or forgotten, a feature of Church history the significance of which is still unexhausted will be missed.
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