History Of Civilisation In Europe. (continued 3)

But here a fundamental objection arises, from the absence of anything to ordain and impose, and from nothing coercitive being legitimate. That there is, in fact, no scope for government, since liberty ought to subsist unrestricted.

It is, I believe, a very confined and rude idea of government to imagine it to reside solely, or even with regard to the force which it exhibits to insure obedience, in its coercitive element.

I leave the religious point of view, and take civil government, following the simple course of events. Society exists: there is something to do, no matter what, for its interest, or in its name; there is a law to give, a measure to take, or a judgment to pronounce. Most assuredly there is likewise a good law to make, a good resolve to follow, and a good judgment to deliver. Whatsoever may be the subject under discussion, or the interest brought in question, upon all occasions there is a truth necessary to be known, and which ought to decide the conduct.

The first act of government is to seek out this truth, and to discover what is just and reasonable, and what is suitable to the society. When it has found it, it proclaims it. Then it must endeavour to impress upon the minds of those upon whom it is to act, that it is right, so as to gain their approval and acquiescence. Is there anything coercive in all this? Certainly not. Now suppose that the truth, which ought to decide the affair, whatever it may be, is found out and proclaimed, that all understandings are immediately convinced, all inclinations determined, that all universally recognise the government to be right, and give it spontaneous obedience; there is still no coercion, there is no need for the employment of force. But is it to be concluded from this that government has not subsisted, that, in fact, there has been no government? Most clearly there has been a government, and it has accomplished its true task. Coercion comes only when the resistance of individual wills presents itself, when the idea, or the measure which government has adopted, obtains not the approbation or the voluntary submission of all. Then the government employs force to make itself be obeyed, a necessary result of human imperfection, an imperfection residing at once both in the governing power and in the society. There will never be any means for absolutely avoiding it; civil governments will always be obliged to have recourse to it in a certain degree. But surely coercion does not constitute them; whenever they can dispense with it, they do so, to the great advantage of all, and their highest state of perfection is to pass from it, and to rely upon purely moral means, upon the influence exercised over the intelligence of men; insomuch that the more a government departs from coercion, the more faithful is it to its true nature, and the better fulfils its end. It is not, therefore, lowered or unduly contracted, as is vulgarly echoed; it acts in another manner, and that manner infinitely more general and powerful. Those governments which employ most coercion, effect much less than those which employ none. By addressing itself to good sense, by convincing free wills, by acting with means purely intellectual, a government, instead of lowering itself, is extended and elevated, and it is under such circumstances that it accomplishes its greatest actions. On the contrary, it is when it is obliged to ceaselessly employ coercion that it contracts and shrinks, effects very little, and that little very badly.

The essence of government, then, is far from residing in coercion, or the employment of force. That which constitutes it most especially, is a system of means and powers, based on the principle of truly seeking the discovery of what is fitting to be done upon each occasion, the discovery of the truth which ought to govern society, so that it may be afterwards made to penetrate the minds of men, and procure their voluntary and free adoption. The necessity for, and the existence of a government, are therefore quite conceivable, even when there is no scope given to coercion, or when it is absolutely interdicted.

Now this is exactly the government of a religious society. There is no doubt that coercion is prohibited in it, for inasmuch as the human conscience is its only territory, the employment of force is unquestionably illegitimate, whatever may be the object in view; but it does not the less subsist, nor is it the less incumbent upon it to accomplish all those things previously mentioned. It behoves it diligently to search for the religious doctrines which solve the problems upon the human destiny, or if there be already a general system of articles of belief in which those problems are solved, then, in each particular case, to unveil and place in full light the ordinances of the system; it must promulgate and enforce the precepts which correspond to its doctrines, and it must preach and expound them, and when society falls from them, call it back. But nothing compulsory; simply investigation into, the preaching and the expounding of, religious truths; in case of need, admonitions and censure. In this lies the task, as also the duty, of the religious government. Set aside coercion out of view altogether, still, all the essential questions as to the organisation of government arise and claim a solution. For instance, the question whether a body of religious magistrates be necessary, or whether it be possible to trust to the religious inspiration of individuals?— a question which is at issue between the majority of religious societies and the Quakers—is one which will always exist, and must always demand discussion. So also the question, whether, when it is agreed that a body of religious magistrates is necessary, preference should be given to a system of equality, where the ministers of religion are equal amongst themselves, and deliberate in common, or to a hierarchical constitution with different degrees of power? is one which will never cease, on account simply of all coercitive power being denied to the ecclesiastical magistrates, whatever may be their denomination. Instead, therefore, of seeking the dissolution of the religious society, so as to attain a right to destroy the religious government, we are bound to remember that the religious society is formed in the natural order of things, and that the government results as naturally from the society; and that the real problem to resolve is, to determine upon what conditions this government ought to subsist, and what are the bases, the principles, the conditions of its legitimacy. This is the true investigation which the necessary existence of the religious government, as of every other, imposes.

Now the conditions of legitimacy are the same for the government of the religious society as for every other. They may be reduced to two: the first, that the power devolves upon and remains constantly in the hands of the best and most capable, so far, at least, as is practicable in the imperfection of human affairs; that the men, legitimately superior, scattered through society, be sought out, brought forward, and called upon to decide the social law, and to exercise the power; the second, that power, rightfully constituted, respects the rightful liberties of those upon whom it is exercised. A good system in the formation and organisation of power, and a good system of guarantees for liberty, are the two conditions which imply the goodness of government in general, religious or civil. They must all be judged by this twofold criterion.

Therefore, instead of urging its existence as a reproach to the church, or government of the Christian world, it is incumbent upon us to investigate how it was constituted, and whether its principles corresponded to the two essential conditions of every good government. Let us examine the church under this double aspect.

With regard to the creation and transmission of power in the church, there is a word in frequent use in speaking of the Christian clergy, which I desire to repudiate—namely, the appellation of caste. The body of ecclesiastical magistrates has been often styled a caste. The expression is far from being a just one; for the idea of hereditary descent is inherent in that of caste. If we take the countries in which the system of castes was produced, India and Egypt, we shall find it was essentially hereditary, the transmission of the same situation and power from father to son. Where the hereditary principle did not prevail, neither did the caste, but a corporation. The spirit engendered in an established body has its evil results, but it is quite different from the spirit arising from the system of castes. The word caste cannot be at all applied to the Christian church. The celibacy of the priests prevented the Christian clergy from becoming a caste.

Now the consequences of this difference are considerable. To the system of caste, to the fact of hereditary descent, monopoly is inevitably attached. The very definition of the word proves it. When the same functions and powers become hereditary in the same families, it is clear that an exclusive privilege is transmitted, and that no one can acquire these functions or powers independently of his origin. Such, in fact, was the result; for where the religious government fell into the hands of a caste, it became matter of privilege, and no person entered it but those who sprang from the families of the caste. But nothing of this sort is met in the Christian church, and indeed so far from that being the case, the church maintained the principle of the equal admissibility of all men, whatever might be their origin, to all its charges and dignities. The ecclesiastical career, more particularly from the fifth to the twelfth century, was open to all. The church was recruited from all ranks, from the inferior as well as the superior, and most frequently, indeed, from the inferior. All things were crumbling around it, under the influence of the exclusive system; it alone maintained the principle of equality and fair competition, and summoned the possessors of legitimate superiority to the assumption of power. This was the first great consequence that naturally resulted from it being a body and not a caste.

Again, there is a spirit inherent in castes, that of immutability or stagnation. This assertion has no need of proof. All history informs us that the spirit of stagnation has possessed all societies, political or religious, in which the system of castes predominated. The fear of change or progress was certainly introduced into the Christian church at a certain epoch, and up to a certain point. But we cannot say that it predominated, nor can we assert that the church has remained immovable and stationary: during many ages it was in movement and progress, sometimes stimulated by the attacks of an outward opposition, sometimes impelled from within by the necessities for internal reform and development. Upon the whole, it is a society which has constantly changed and progressed, and whose history is marked with corresponding characteristics. It admits of no doubt that the indiscriminate admission of all men to ecclesiastical charges, and the continual recruitment of the church upon a principle of equality, powerfully aided in maintaining and unceasingly reanimating its activity and energy, and in preventing the triumph of the immutable or stagnant spirit.

How was the church, thus admitting all men to power, assured as to the justness of their claims? How did it discover, and draw out from the obscurity of the mass, those legitimately superior spirits entitled to take part in the government?

Two principles were vigorous in the church: first, the election of the inferior by the superior, a power of choice and nomination exercised by the latter; secondly, the election of the superior by subordinates, properly an election such as we esteem it at the present day.

The ordination of priests, for example, the faculty of making a man a priest, belonged to the superior alone; the choice was exercised by the superior upon the inferior. Likewise with regard to the presentation to certain ecclesiastical benefices, amongst other benefices attached to feudal grants, it was the superior, whether king, pope, or lord, who named the incumbent. In other cases, the principle of election proper was in force. The bishops had been for a long time, and were frequently, at the epoch which now engages our attention, elected by the body of the clergy, and the congregations even sometimes interfered. In the cloisters of the monasteries, the abbot was elected by the monks. At Rome, the pope was elected by the college of cardinals, and formerly the whole Roman clergy took part in that nomination. Therefore we find these two principles, the choice of the inferior by the superior, and the election of the superior by subordinates, recognised and active in the church, especially at the epoch in question, and it was by the one or the other of these means that it designed the men called to exercise a portion of the ecclesiastical power.

The co-existence of two principles so essentially different was accompanied by a struggle for mastery. After many ages and vicissitudes, the nomination of the inferior by the superior has prevailed in the Christian church. But in general it was the other principle, the choice of the superior by the subordinates, which prevailed from the fifth to the twelfth century. There is no reason for astonishment in the co-existence of two principles so very distinct; for looking at society in general, at the natural course of things, and at the manner in which power is transmitted in the world, it is unquestionable that this transmission is effected, sometimes according to one of these modes, and sometimes according to the other. The church did not invent them; it found them in the providential arrangement of human things, and it thence borrowed them. There is much sound sense and utility in each mode, and their combination might often be the best means of discovering the really legitimate claimant to power. It is a great misfortune, in my opinion, that one of the two, the choice of the inferior by the superior, has been victorious in the church. But the other has never completely perished, and under different names it has been reproduced more or less successfully at every era, so as at all events to enter protests, and interrupt the prescription.

Returning to the epoch immediately under view, the Christian church then derived a prodigious strength from its respect for equality and legitimately superior minds. It was a society in the highest degree popularised, illimitably accessible and open to all the faculties, to all the noble aspirations, in human nature. Thence sprang its power, much more than from its riches and the illegitimate means of influence which it has too frequently employed.

With regard to the second condition of a good government, respect for liberty, the church was greatly deficient.

Two evil principles met in it; the one avowed and incorporated, so to speak, in its doctrines; the other introduced into it by human weakness, not as a legitimate consequence of its doctrines.

The first was the debasement of the rights of individual reason, the pretension to transmit articles of belief from high to low throughout the whole religious society, without allowing any one the right of private judgment. It is more easy to lay down this pretension as a principle, than to make it actually prevail. A conviction does not penetrate the human intellect, unless the intellect be itself accessory to its admission; it must be made acceptable to reason. In whatever manner it presents itself, whatever sanction it may invoke, reason weighs it, and if it prevail with the human understanding, it is because of its rationality. Thus there is always, under whatever form it may be veiled, an action of individual reason upon the ideas which are pretended to be imposed upon it. It is true, nevertheless, that reason may be perverted; it may to a certain extent nullify or emasculate itself; it may be induced to make a bad use of its faculties, or not to make such use of them as it has a right to do. Such, in fact, has been the consequence of this evil principle admitted into the church, although it never had, and never could have, an unmixed and uncontrollable action.

The second evil principle was the right of coercion arrogated to itself by the church—a right contrary to the nature of a religious society, to the origin of the church itself, and to its primitive maxims—a right contested by several of the illustrious fathers of the church, Saint Ambrose, Saint Hilary, and Saint Martin—but which, nevertheless, was upheld, and became a predominant assertion. The pretension of forcing to believe—if we can put these two words together—or of physically punishing belief, as the persecution of heresy—that is to say, contempt for the legitimate liberty of human thought, is an error which was introduced into the church even before the fifth century, and has cost it dear.

If, therefore, we consider the church in its relations with the liberty of its members, we perceive that its principles in this respect were less legitimate and salutary than those which presided at the formation of the ecclesiastical power. We are not, however, to conclude that one evil principle radically vitiates an institution, nor even that it does all the mischief with which it is pregnant. Nothing falsifies history more than logic. When the human understanding has fixed upon an idea, it deduces therefrom all possible consequences; it makes it bring forth all that in pure possibility it could bring forth, and then represents it in history as attended by all these results. But matters do not come out after this fashion; events are not so prompt as the deductions of the human mind. There is in all things a mixture of bad and good so deep-seated and invincible, that when you dive to the most hidden elements of society or the mind, whatever portion you open out, you there find these two orders of things co-existent, developing themselves side by side, and struggling with, but not exterminating each other. Human nature never goes to the last limits either of good or bad; it passes unceasingly from one to the other, recovering itself when it seems nearest the fall, and faltering at the moment that its step seems firmest. We discover here once more that characteristic of discordance, variety, and strife, which I have already remarked as the fundamental characteristic of European civilisation.

There is, furthermore, a general fact illustrative of the government of the church of which it is necessary to take notice. At the present day, when the idea of a government, whatever may be its nature, presents itself to us, we feel that there is no longer any pretension of controlling aught else than the outward actions of men, and their civil relations amongst themselves; governments profess to go no farther. As to the human thought and conscience, morality, properly so called, or as to individual opinions and private manners, they do not interfere; those matters fall to the domain of liberty.

Now the Christian church did, or wished to do, directly the reverse. Human thought, human liberty, private manners, and individual opinions, were precisely what it endeavoured to rule over. It did not make a code like other powers, to define the actions at once morally culpable and socially dangerous, and to award them punishment in proportion only as they bore this double character; but it set out a catalogue of all actions morally culpable, and, under the name of sins, it punished and acted on the design of repressing them all; in a word, the government of the church was not applied, like modern governments, to the outward man, and to the purely civil relations of men amongst themselves; it was applied to the inward man, to the thought and the conscience—that is to say, to what is held by man as most intimately his own, to what is most free and restive to constraint. The church, then, by the very nature of its enterprise, in combination with the tendency of some of the principles upon which its government was founded, was placed in peril of becoming tyrannical, and of using an illegitimate employment of force. But at the same time the force encountered an opposition which it could not vanquish. However little movement or scope may be left to them, human thought and love of liberty react energetically against every attempt to prostrate them, and repeatedly compel the very despotism which they endure to step down and abdicate its supremacy. This is what happened in the bosom of the Christian church. We have enumerated the proscription of heresy, the anathema upon the right of examination, the contempt for individual reason, and the principle of the imperative transmission of doctrines through those in authority. Yet scarcely a society is to be found in which individual reason has been more boldly developed than in the church. What are sects and heresies but the fruit of individual opinions? And these sects and heresies, and all this species of opposition encountered by the Christian church, afford incontestible proof of the moral life and activity which reigned in it; a troubled and painful life, strewed with dangers, errors, and crimes, yet noble and potential, and giving scope to the finest developments of intellect and opinion. But setting aside the opposition, and entering into the ecclesiastical government itself, we find it constituted and acting in a manner quite different to what some of its principles seem to have prescribed. It denied the right of examination, it wished to deprive individual reason of its liberty; yet it is to reason that it for ever addressed its appeals; liberty was actually its mainspring. What were its institutions and means of action? Provincial councils, national councils, œcumenical councils, a continual correspondence and an incessant publication of letters, admonitions, and other writings. Never did any government proceed to such an extent in the way of discussion and common deliberation. We might imagine ourselves in the schools of the Greek philosophy. And yet it was not a mere discussion or investigation of truth which was at issue; it involved questions of authority, of measures to adopt, of decrees to promulgate, a government in fact. But the energy of the intellectual life in the heart of this government was such, that it became the predominant and universal standard to which all others yielded, and the main fact displayed on all sides was the exercise of reason and liberty.

I am very far from concluding, on this account, that the evil principles which I have endeavoured to unfold as existing, in my opinion, in the system of the church, remained without effect. At the epoch which now engages our attention, they had already produced bitter consequences, and afterwards they were productive of much more disastrous results; but what I mean to affirm is, that they did not perpetrate all the mischief of which they were capable, and that they did not smother the good which was growing out of the same soil.

Such was the church considered in itself, in its internal state, in its nature. I proceed to its relations with sovereigns, the masters of temporal power. It is the second point of view under which I promised to consider it.

When the Empire fell, and instead of the old Roman system, instead of that government in the midst of which it had taken root, with which it had common feelings and long-formed ties, the church found itself exposed to those barbarous kings and chiefs roaming over the country or quartered in their castles, to whom no tie founded on a community of traditions, creeds, or sentiments, united it; the danger which impended over it was great, and of corresponding magnitude was its terror.

The idea which then seized predominantly upon the church was to gain possession of the new-comers, or, in other words, to convert them. The relations between the church and the barbarians had scarcely any other object at first.

In order to captivate the barbarians, it was chiefly necessary to address their senses and imagination. Therefore we find that at this epoch the number, pomp, and variety of ceremonious rites were augmented. The chronicles prove that it was mainly by these means that the church acted upon the barbarians. She converted them by imposing spectacles.

When the barbarians were finally established and converted, and some ties formed between them and the church, it did not cease to incur great danger from them. The brutality and recklessness in the barbarian manners were such, that the new creed, and the sentiments with which it had inspired them, exercised very little sway over them. Violence soon reassumed the upper hand, and the church was a victim to it equally with the rest of society. As a means of defence, it proclaimed a principle formerly asserted, although more indefinitely, under the Empire—namely, the separation of spiritual from temporal power, and their reciprocal independence. By the aid of this principle it was that the church continued unmolested by the barbarians. The church maintained that force could have no action upon a system of religious articles, hopes, and promises, and therefore that the temporal world was completely severed from the spiritual.

The salutary consequences resulting from this principle are discernible at a glance. Independently of the temporary utility it was to the church, it had the inestimable advantage of placing on the basis of right the separation of the two powers, and of controlling them by means of each other. Furthermore, by sustaining the independence of the intellectual world in general, in its full extent, the church prepared the way for the independence of individual intellect and of thought. The church said that the system of religious belief could not fall under the yoke of force, so each individual was tempted to use the same language on his own account. The principle of free discussion or examination, and of liberty for individual thought, is exactly the same as that of the independence of the general spiritual authority with respect to the temporal power.

Unfortunately, it is an easy matter to pass from the want of liberty to the lust of dominion. The church exhibited a proof of it at this period. By a tendency natural to human ambition and pride, the church endeavoured to establish for the spiritual power not only independence, but supremacy over the temporal power. Yet we must not believe that this pretension had no other source than the failings of humanity; there were others still deeper, which it behoves us to inquire into.

When liberty reigns in the intellectual world, when the human thought and conscience are not subjected to a power which denies them the right of discussion and decision, and employs force to crush them—when, in fact, there is no visible and constituted spiritual government, arrogating and exercising the right of dictating opinions—then is the idea of the dominion of a spiritual order over a temporal impossible. Such is pretty nearly the present state of the world. But when there exists, as in the tenth century did exist, a government of the spiritual order; when thought and conscience come under laws, institutions, and powers, which assert a right to command and coerce them; in a word, when the spiritual power is constituted, when it has taken effective possession, under the sanction of right and of force, of human reason and conscience, it is natural that it should be tempted to lay claim to dominion over the temporal order, and that it should exclaim, 'How! I have right and sway over what is most lofty and independent in man—over his reason, his inward will, his conscience—and shall I not have right over his outward, material, and fleeting interests? I, who am the interpreter of justice and truth, shall I be debarred from regulating earthly matters according to justice and truth?' By the mere provocative of this reasoning, the spiritual order was sure to be urged into an invasion of the temporal order. And this was still more certain when the spiritual order monopolised all the developments of the human mind then possible: there was but one science, theology; but one spiritual order, the theological: all the other sciences, rhetoric, arithmetic, even music, everything was comprised in theology.

The spiritual power thus finding itself at the head of the whole activity of the human brain, naturally fell into a self-assumption of the general government of the world.

A second cause was equally powerful in urging it to this appropriation—namely, the frightful state of the temporal order, and the violence and iniquity which prevailed in the temporal government of all communities.

We can speak of the rights of the temporal power without difficulty; but at the epoch under review, the power in question was a mere brute force, an intractable ruffianism. The church, however imperfect its notions of morals and of justice might still be, was infinitely superior to such a government, and the cry of the people was continually raised, beseeching it to take its place. When a pope or a few bishops proclaimed a sovereign denuded of his rights, and his subjects freed from the oath of fidelity, such an intervention, although doubtless open to serious abuses, was often in particular cases legitimate and salutary. In general, whenever liberty has been wanting to mankind, its restoration has been the work of religion. In the tenth century, the people were not in a state to defend themselves, or to make their rights available against civil violence, and religion came to the rescue in the name of Heaven. This is one of the reasons which have mainly contributed to the victories of the theocratic principle.

There is a third cause for the arrogation of the spiritual order, which has been too little noticed, arising out of the complexity in the situation of the chiefs of the church, and the variety of aspects under which they appeared in society. On the one hand they were prelates, members of the ecclesiastical order, part and parcel of the spiritual power, and by right thereof independent; on the other they were vassals, and, as such, engaged in the bonds of civil feudalism. And, furthermore, they were not only vassals, but also subjects: some portion of the old relations of the Roman emperors with the bishops and clergy had passed into those formed between the priesthood and the barbarian kings. By a series of causes which it would be too tedious to develop, the bishops had been led to regard, to a certain extent, the barbarian sovereigns as successors of the Roman emperors, and to attribute to them all their prerogatives. The chiefs of the clergy had therefore a triple character—an ecclesiastical character, and, as such, independent; a feudal character, and, as such, bound to certain duties, and holding by certain services; and the character of a simple subject, and, as such, held to obey an absolute sovereign. Now, the temporal sovereigns, who were not less greedy or ambitious than the bishops, frequently availed themselves of their rights as lords or sovereigns to encroach upon the spiritual independence, and to possess themselves of the presentation to benefices, the nomination to bishoprics, &c. On their side, the bishops often intrenched themselves behind their spiritual independence, to get rid of their obligations as vassals or subjects. In this manner there was an almost inevitable tendency leading the sovereigns, on the one hand, to destroy the spiritual independence; and the chiefs of the church, on the other, to make that independence an instrument to work out universal dominion.

This result has been illustrated by facts notorious to all, as in the disputes concerning investitures, and the struggles between the priesthood and the empire. The distinct positions of the chiefs of the church, and the difficulty of reconciling them, have been the real source of the uncertainty and the contests with regard to these pretensions.

Finally, the church had a third relation with the sovereigns, the least favourable, and the most disastrous, for itself: it laid claim to coercion, to the right of repressing and punishing heresy: but it had no means to effect this; it had no physical force at its disposal; so that when it had condemned heresy, it was unable of itself to put its judgment in execution. In this strait it invoked what was called the secular arm; in other words, it borrowed the force of the civil power as a means of coercion. In consequence, it placed itself, with regard to the civil power, in a situation of dependence and inferiority. Such was the deplorable necessity to which the adoption of the evil principle of coercion and persecution reduced the church.

There remains to be considered the relations of the church with the people, which I shall enter upon in the next lecture, as well as such other questions as arise out of this branch of our inquiry.

Lecture VI. Relations Of The Church With The People.

I have preliminarily laid down that the church ought to be considered under three principal aspects: firstly, in itself, in its internal constitution, in its nature, and as a distinct and independent society; secondly, in its relations with sovereigns and the temporal power; and finally, in its relations with the people. We have accomplished the two first divisions of this task, and I now proceed to the last. I shall subsequently endeavour to draw from this triple examination a general appreciation of the influence of the church upon European civilisation from the fifth to the twelfth century. I shall then verify my assertions by an epitome of facts, by the history of the church at that epoch.

In speaking of the relations of the church with the people, I am of course obliged to restrict myself to very general terms. I cannot enter into a detail of the usages of the church, or of the every-day relations of the clergy with the faithful. The predominant principles, and the great results of the system, and of the conduct of the church towards the Christian people, are what I concern myself with.

The main characteristic, and the radical vice (for so it must be called) of the relations of the church with the people, was the separation of the governing and the governed, the non-influence of the governed over their government, the independence of the Christian clergy, with reference to the body of the faithful.

This evil must have been provoked, one would imagine, by the state of man and of society, for it was introduced into the Christian church at a very early date. The separation was not fully consummated at the era we are contemplating, as upon certain occasions, the elections of bishops, for instance, there was still an occasional direct interference by the Christian flocks in their government. But such efforts were weak and rare; and even from the second century of our era, this intervention had commenced a visible and rapid decline. A tendency to the isolation and independence of the clergy is in some degree the burden of church history from its dawn.

It cannot be denied that from this circumstance has arisen the major part of the abuses which, at this period, and still more at a later date, have so injured the church. We must not, however, impute them absolutely to it, or regard this tendency to isolation as peculiar to the Christian clergy. There is, in the very nature of a religious society, a strong inclination to raise the government far above the governed, and to attribute to the former something distinct and holy. It comes from the mission itself with which they are charged, and from the character under which they offer themselves to the eyes of the multitude. Yet this result is more baneful in a religious society than in any other. What is at stake to the governed? Their reason, their conscience, their immortal destiny—that is to say, such considerations as are most strictly inward, most individual to each, and most incapable of thraldom. We can, to a certain extent, imagine that, although some evil may result from it, mankind may abandon to a visible authority the direction of their material interests and temporal destiny. We can understand the philosopher who, on being informed that his house was on fire, answered, 'Go and tell my wife: I have nothing to do with the affairs of the household.' But when the matter at issue is conscience, thought, the inward moral existence, for men to abdicate the government of themselves, and to give themselves up to a foreign sway, is an actual moral suicide, a servitude a hundred times more abject than can befall the body, or than that endured by the tethered serf.

Such, nevertheless, was the evil which overbore the church in its relations with the faithful, though its weight became alleviated, as I shall hereafter demonstrate. We have already seen, that for the clergymen themselves, and in the heart of the church, liberty had no guarantee. For laymen, and outside the church, the matter was much worse. Amongst ecclesiastics, there was at all events discussion, deliberation, and a deployment of individual faculties; with them the excitement of dispute supplied in some sort the lack of liberty. But there was nothing of this description between the clergy and the people. The laymen assisted in the government of the church as simple spectators. And thus we perceive that idea so early vegetate and expand, that theology, or religious questions and affairs, are the privileged domain of the clergy, that the clergy alone have a right to decide, or even to canvass them, and that on no account, or under any pretence, ought laymen to interfere. At the era under review this theory was already in full blossom; and it has required ages and terrible revolutions to subdue it, and to bring back, even partially, religious questions and science to the public domain.

Therefore, in principle as well as in fact, the legal separation of the clergy and the Christian people was nearly complete before the twelfth century.

In spite of this, however, the Christian people were not without influence, even at this epoch, upon their government. Legal interference was wanting to it, but not influence. In fact its extinction is scarcely possible in any government, much less in one founded upon articles of belief common to the governing and the governed. Whenever an actual community of ideas is developed, or an intellectual movement of the same order is participated by both government and people, a bond necessarily exists between them which no viciousness in the organisation can utterly break. To give a clear explanation of my meaning, I will take an example from our own history of the political cast. At no date in the history of France have the French people had less legal control over their government, by means of institutions, than in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, under Louis XIV. and Louis XV. Every one knows that almost all the direct and official interference of the country, in the exercise of authority, had died away at those periods. Yet there is no doubt that the public and the country then exercised much more influence over the government than at other times—in those, for instance, in which the States-General were frequently convoked, in which the parliaments took considerable part in politics, and in which the legal participation of the people with power was unquestionably greater.

It is because there is a force which laws do not entomb, and which, upon occasion, can shake off the burden of institutions, the force of ideas, of public intelligence and opinion. In the France of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there was a public opinion much more potential than at any other epoch. Although it was debarred from legal means of acting on the government, it acted indirectly, by the sway of ideas common to the governing and the governed, and by the impossibility experienced by the rulers to set at nought the opinion of society. A similar fact occurred in the Christian church of the fifth to the twelfth centuries: the Christian people, it is true, were deficient in means of legal action, but there was a great mental movement in religious matters, which operated conjointly upon laymen and ecclesiastics, and gave means of action to the people upon the clergy.

In studying history, it is essential to set great value upon indirect influences in all things, for they are much more efficacious, and sometimes more salutary, than are commonly represented. It is natural for men to wish that their action should be prompt and palpable, and to derive pleasure from taking part in their own success, power, and triumph. But this is not always possible, nor even useful. There are times and situations in which indirect and imperceptible influences are alone advantageous and practicable. I will again adduce an example of the political order. More than once, in 1641 especially, the English parliament has claimed, like many other assemblies in analogous cases, the right of directly nominating the great officers of the crown, the ministers and councillors of state, &c. regarding this direct interference in the government as a great and precious guarantee. It has sometimes exercised this privilege, and the experiment has always met with bad success. Yet what takes place now in England? Is it not the influence of the two houses of parliament which decides the formation of the ministry, and the nomination of all the great officers of the crown? Certainly; but it is an indirect and general influence, instead of a special intervention. The result for which England has long laboured is produced, but by another course; the first had never worked beneficially.

There is a reason for this, upon which I shall linger for a moment. The direct action requires, in those to whom it is confided, an unusual share of enlightenment, sound sense, and prudence: as they aim at reaching their point at once, and without delay, they have good need of caution, lest their enterprise be ill-timed, and fail. Indirect influences, on the contrary, encounter obstacles ere they come into play, and undergo trials which test and rectify them: before succeeding, they are subjected to discussion, opposition, and restriction: their triumph is slow, and upon conditions, in a certain degree. Therefore, when the minds of men are not sufficiently advanced and ripened to render the direct action secure, indirect and mitigated influences are preferable. It was thus that the Christian people acted on their government, very incompletely, and far too stintedly, I am aware, yet they certainly did act.

There was likewise another cause of reconcilement between the church and laymen, existing in the dispersion, so to speak, of the Christian clergy amongst all the conditions of society. Almost everywhere, when a church has been constituted independent of the people whom it governed, the body of priests has been formed of men nearly in the same situation; not that marked inequalities did not prevail amongst them; but still, upon the whole, the power has been vested in colleges of priests, living in community, and governing, from the depths of a temple, the people bowing under their yoke. The Christian church was quite differently organised. From the miserable hut of the boor or serf, at the foot of the feudal castle, to the palace of the king, there was throughout society a priest or member of the clerical body. Clergymen were associated to all conditions of men. This diversity in the situation of the Christian priests, this sharing in all fortunes, has been a great principle of union between the clergy and laymen, which has been entirely wanting to the majority of churches invested with power. The bishops and chiefs of the Christian church were furthermore, as has been previously mentioned, mixed up with the feudal organisation, and were members of the civil as well as of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Hence arose common interests, usages, and manners, between the civil and religious orders. It has been judged scandalous, and reasonably, that bishops waged war, and that priests led the life of laymen. Assuredly it was a great abuse, and yet one infinitely less disastrous than was elsewhere the existence of those priests who never issued out of the temple, and who were altogether separated from the people in their course of life. The bishops, who took part, to a certain extent, in the civil disorders, were of more avail than priests, complete strangers to the population, its affairs, and its manners. In this respect there was a parity of destiny and situation between the clergy and the people, which, if it did not correct, certainly lessened, the evil of the separation between the rulers and the governed.

Now, this separation being admitted, and its limits and countervailing influences determined, let us next inquire how the church governed, in what manner it acted upon the populations subject to its empire; what it effected, on the one hand, for the development of the man, for the moral advancement of the individual, and, on the other, for the amelioration of the social state.

To speak the truth, I do not believe that, at the era in question, the church concerned itself greatly about the development of the individual. It endeavoured to inspire the powerful in the world with milder sentiments, and to induce them to act with more justice in their relations with the weak; and it taught the oppressed to lead a moral life, and to indulge in sentiments and hopes of a loftier order than those to which their immediate destiny condemned them. Yet for individual development, properly so called, for imparting value to the personal nature of men, I do not believe that the church then did much, at least so far as laymen were concerned. What it did was confined to the ecclesiastical society itself; it made great exertions for the development of the clergy, for the instruction of priests; for them it had schools, and all the institutions which the deplorable state of society allowed. But they were ecclesiastical schools, appointed for the instruction of the clergy alone, and, with their exception, the church acted indirectly, and by very slow means, towards the progress of ideas and manners. It doubtless gave a stimulus to general mental activity by the career it proffered to all those whom it judged capable of serving it; but that was pretty nearly all it did, at that period, for the intellectual development of the laity.

It had a greater influence, and acted in a more efficacious manner, towards the amelioration of the social state. It resolutely struggled against the great vices of the social state—for example, against slavery. It has been often asserted that the abolition of slavery in modern Europe was exclusively owing to Christianity. I think that is saying too much. Slavery long existed in the heart of the Christian society, without greatly exciting its astonishment, or drawing down its anathema. A multitude of causes, and a great development in other ideas of civilisation, were required to eradicate this evil of evils, this iniquity of iniquities. Yet it is indubitable that the church employed its influence in restraining it. There exists an unquestionable proof of this fact. The greater part of the formulas of enfranchisement, made out at different eras, are founded upon a religious motive; it is upon the invocation of religious ideas, of hopes of eternal bliss, and of the equality of men in the eyes of Heaven, that the enfranchisement is almost invariably pronounced.

The church laboured likewise for the suppression of a great many barbarous practices, and for the amelioration of the criminal and civil legislation. Although containing certain principles of liberty, the laws were absurd, and fruitful of injustice; the most stupid ordeals, the judicial combat, and the unsupported oaths of a specified number of men, were esteemed the only means of arriving at the discovery of truth. The church strove to have more rational and legitimate means substituted. I have already spoken of the difference observable between the laws of the Visigoths, derived principally from the councils of Toledo, and the other barbarian laws. It is impossible to compare them, without being struck with the immense superiority of the ideas of the church on the subject of legislation and the administration of justice, in all that relates to the investigation of truth and of what is befitting to man. Doubtless most of these ideas were borrowed from the Roman legislation; but if the church had not preserved and asserted them, and done its utmost to propagate them, they would certainly have perished. For example, the employment of the oath in process is wisely regulated in the law of the Visigoths.

'Let the judge, in order fully to understand the cause, first interrogate the witnesses, and then examine the writings, so that the truth may be discovered with more certainty, and the oath not too lightly administered. A determination according to truth and justice requires that the writings on both sides be carefully examined, and that the necessity for the oath, kept in suspense over the heads of the parties, come upon them unexpectedly. Let the oath be administered only in causes in which the judge shall not succeed in discovering any writing, any proof, or any certain clue to the truth.'—(For. Jud. 1. ii. tit. i. 1. 21.)

In criminal matters, the relation of the punishments to the offences is determined according to philosophical and moral notions, of singular justness. The efforts of an enlightened legislator struggling against the violence and irreflectiveness of the barbarian manners, are clearly distinguishable. The enactments under the title or head of 'Cœde et morte hominum'—['Of the slaying and death of men'], compared to those of a correspondent nature in use amongst other nations, is a very remarkable example of these characteristics. In other codes, it is almost exclusively the damage which is held to constitute the crime, and the penalty is comprised in that tangible reparation which results from a principle of composition. But here the crime is reduced to its moral and true element, intention. The different shades of criminality, the purely involuntary homicide, accidental homicide, justifiable homicide, and homicide with or without premeditation, are distinguished and defined almost as well as in our codes, and the punishments vary on a very equitable scale. The legislator has rendered justice more indiscriminate; he has attempted, if not to abolish, at least to lessen, that diversity in the legal value of men established by the other barbarian laws. The only distinction he has maintained is that of the free man and the slave. With regard to free men, the punishment is not varied either according to the national origin, or according to the rank of the defunct, but simply according to the different degrees of moral culpability in the murderer. With regard to slaves, not venturing to completely deprive masters of the right of life and death, attempts are at all events made to restrain it, by making it subject to a public and regular process. The text of the law deserves to be cited.

'If no malefactor or accomplice in a crime ought to remain unpunished, how much more ought he to be put down who commits murder wickedly and trivially! Thus, as masters in their pride frequently put their slaves to death without any fault on their parts, it is expedient to utterly abrogate this license, and to ordain that this law shall be for ever observed by all. No master or mistress shall be allowed to inflict death, without public judgment, upon any of their slaves, male or female, or upon any person dependent upon them. If a slave or any other servant commits a crime which may subject him to capital punishment, his master or his accuser shall immediately make it known to the judge of the place where the action has been committed, or the count, or the duke. After investigation into the matter, if the crime is proved, let the guilty undergo, either through the judge or his own master, the sentence of death he has deserved; provided that, if the judge will not put the criminal to death, he shall draw up in writing a capital sentence against him, and then it shall be in the discretion of the master to slay him or to spare his life. At the same time, if the slave, by a fatal audacity, offering resistance to his master, has struck him, or attempted to strike him, with a weapon, a stone, or any other thing, and if the master, endeavouring to defend himself, has slain the slave in his anger, he shall not be at all held amenable to the penalties of homicide. But it shall be necessary to prove that the fact has thus happened, and that by the testimony or oath of the male or female slaves who were present, and by the oath of the perpetrator himself. Whoever, from pure wickedness, by his own hand, or by that of another, shall kill his slave without public judgment, shall be declared infamous, and incapable of appearing as a witness, condemned to pass the rest of his life in exile and penitence, and his possessions fall to his next of kin, to whom the law accords the inheritance.'—(For. Jud. 1. vi. tit. v. 1. 12.)

In the institutions of the church there was an article which has been hitherto very little noticed—namely, its penitential system. The study of this system is rendered much more interesting at the present day, since it is almost completely in accordance with the ideas of modern philosophy as to the principles and objects of the penal law. If we investigate the nature of the punishments used by the church, of the public penances which were its principal mode of inflicting chastisement, we shall find that their main design was to excite repentance in the mind of the criminal, and moral terror by the example in the beholders. There was also another idea mixed up with it—that of expiation. In a general point of view, I do not know if it be possible to separate the idea of expiation from that of punishment, and if there be not in every punishment a hidden and imperative demand for the expiation of the wrong committed, independently of the design of leading the guilty to repentance, and of scaring those who might be tempted to fall into crime. But putting aside this question, it is quite clear that repentance and example were the objects proposed by the church in its penitential system. Are these not also the objects of truly philosophic legislation? Have not the most enlightened jurists of the last age, and of our own days, advocated reform in the European penal legislation, upon the allegation of these very principles? Look at their works—look at those of Bentham, for example—and you will be surprised at the numerous resemblances you will find between the penal modes proposed by them and those employed by the church. They most certainly did not borrow them from her, nor could she have foreseen that her example might be one day adduced in aid of plans propounded by the least devout of philosophers.

By all sorts of methods the church likewise strove to repress the tendency of society to violence and continual wars. Every one is aware that it was by 'the truce of God,' and numerous measures of the same nature, that the church struggled against the employment of force, and devoted itself to introduce into society a greater degree of order and mildness. These facts are so well known, that I am spared the trouble of entering into any detail. [Footnote 9]

Such are the principal points which I have to bring forward regarding the relations of the church with the people. We have now considered it under the three aspects which I first announced, and gained a knowledge of it both within and without, both in its internal constitution, and in its twofold outward position. It now remains to apply our knowledge to decide, by means of induction and conjecture, its general influence upon European civilisation. This is a labour almost accomplished, or at least much advanced, as the simple announcement of the predominant facts and principles in the church reveals and explains its influence; the results have in some sort already passed before us with the causes. However, in summing them up, we are led, I think, to two general conclusions.

The first is, that the church must necessarily have exercised a very considerable influence upon moral and intellectual order in modern Europe, and upon public ideas, sentiments, and manners. That the fact is unquestionable, is proved by the moral and intellectual development of Europe being essentially theological. A survey of history from the fifth to the sixteenth century exhibits theology possessing and directing the human understanding, and giving its impress to all opinions: philosophical, political, and historical questions, were all considered under a theological point of view. The church was so supreme in the intellectual order, that even mathematical and physical sciences were held to be subject to its doctrines. The theological spirit was, as it were, the blood which flowed in the veins of the European world, until Bacon and Descartes—Bacon in England, and Descartes in France—were the first to carry intellect out of the beaten tracks of theology.

The same fact is found in all branches of literature; theological modes of thought, feeling, and expression, are displayed at every step.

Upon the whole, this influence was salutary. Not only did it keep up, and render productive, the intellectual movement in Europe, but the system of doctrines and precepts, under sanction of which it imparted the movement, was very superior to anything that the ancient world had known. Movement and advancement existed at one and the same time.

The situation of the church, furthermore, has given an extension and variety to the development of the human mind which it never had previously. In the East, intellectual progress was altogether religious; in the Greek society it was almost exclusively human; in the one, humanity, properly so called, its actual nature and destiny, completely disappeared; in the other, it was man himself, his immediate passions, sentiments, and interests, which occupied the whole stage. In the modern world, the religious spirit has mingled with all things, without excluding any. Modern intelligence is impressed at once with humanity and divinity. Human sentiments and interests hold a material place in our literatures, and yet the religious character of man—that portion of his existence which is directed to another world—appears at every step therein; insomuch that the two great sources of the development of man, humanity and religion, have flowed abundantly, and at the same time; so that, in spite of all the evil and all the abuses mixed up with it, in spite of all its acts of tyranny, in an intellectual point of view the church has exercised an influence more calculated for development than repression, for expansion than contraction.

In a political point of view, the matter is very different. There can be no doubt that by softening feelings and manners, by decrying and suppressing a great number of barbarous practices, the church powerfully contributed to the amelioration of the social state; but in the political order, as properly defined, in that which affects the relations of government with subjects, of power with liberty, I do not believe that, upon the whole, its influence has been beneficial. Under this head the church has always come forward as the interpreter and defender of two systems—the theocratical and the imperial—that is to say, of despotism, sometimes under a religious form, sometimes under a civil form. Taking all its institutions, its entire legislation—taking its canons, and its modes of procedure—the principle of theocracy, or of the old empire, is throughout found predominant. When weak, the church sheltered itself under the absolute power of the emperors; when strong, it claimed that absolutism on its own account, on the plea of its spiritual power. We need not linger in adducing facts or particular cases. There is no question that the church often invoked the rights of the people against the bad government of the sovereigns; it often even approved of, and stimulated, insurrections; and it likewise frequently advocated, in its intercourse with the sovereigns, the rights and interests of the people. But whenever the question of political guarantees has arisen between power and liberty, whenever attempts have been made to establish a system of permanent institutions, which might truly and effectually shelter liberty from the encroachments of power, the church has generally ranged itself on the side of despotism.

There is no occasion for much astonishment at this, or to charge upon the clergy an undue proportion of human weakness, or to imagine it a vice peculiar to the Christian church. It has a much deeper and more powerful origin.

What does every religion lay claim to? The governance of human passions and of human will. Every religion is a curb, a power, a government. It comes in the name of divine law to subdue human nature. Therefore human liberty is its especial antagonist, which it is its object to vanquish. To this purpose is its mission and hope directed.

But although religions have to struggle with human liberty, and although they aspire to cast the will of man in a new mould, at the same time they have no other moral means of acting upon man than what he himself supplies, than his own will and liberty. When they act by outward means, as by force or seduction—in other words, by means other than the free concurrence of man— they treat him as we would one of the elements, water or wind, as a purely physical or material power; and they fail in their object, for they do not thereby reach or influence the inclination. For religions really to accomplish their task, it is necessary that man yields himself up to them, but voluntarily and of his own free will, and that he preserves his liberty even amidst his submission. Religions are thus called to solve a double problem.

This they have too often overlooked. They have considered liberty as an obstacle, and not as a means; they have forgotten the nature of the force to which they were to address themselves, and have acted with the human soul as with a material object. It is in consequence of this error that they have been led to range themselves on the side of power or despotism against human liberty, regarding it only as an adversary, and straining much more to subdue it than to procure it guarantees. If religions had well considered their means of action, if they had not given way to a natural but deceitful tendency, they would have discovered that their province was to strengthen liberty, in order morally to control it, that religion can, and ought to act only by moral influences; and they would have respected the free will of mankind, whilst applying themselves to direct it. This they have not done, and in the end the religious influence has itself suffered as much as liberty.

I will not go further with the examination into the general consequences of the influence of the church upon European civilisation. I sum them up in this twofold result—a great and salutary influence upon the intellectual and moral development; an influence more disastrous than beneficial upon the political order of things, properly so called. We have now to test our assertions by facts, and to verify by history what we have deduced from the mere nature of the ecclesiastical society, and the situation occupied by it. Let us see what was the condition of the Christian church from the fifth to the twelfth century, and whether, in fact, the principles which I have laid down, and the results I have endeavoured to draw from them, were such in their development as I have ventured to surmise.

We are not to believe that these principles and consequences have all appeared at once, and as connectedly as I have presented them. It is a signal, and yet a very common error, when contemplating the past at the distance of many centuries, to forget with a singular obliviousness that history is essentially successive. Take the life of a man, of Cromwell, Gustavus Adolphus, or Cardinal Richelieu. He enters upon his career, and marches forward; great events influence him, he influences great events; finally he reaches the goal. Then we know him, but in his entirety, such as long experience and varied events have made him. [Footnote 10]

Now, at starting he was not what he thus became, nor at any single period of his life was he complete and fully fashioned: his development was by a successive process. Men have a moral growth as well as a physical: every day brings its change: their being is perpetually undergoing modifications. The Cromwell of 1650 was not the Cromwell of 1640. There is, of course, always a certain individuality at bottom—it is the same man who works his way; but how changed are his ideas, his feelings, his designs! How many things were lost and acquired! In a word, whatever moment we may select in the life of a man, there is none in which he was such as we behold him when its term is reached.

Nevertheless, the majority of historians have fallen into error upon this point. Because they have acquired a complete idea of a man, they see him such during the whole course of his career: to them it is the same Cromwell who entered parliament in and who died thirty years afterwards in Whitehall palace. And with regard to institutions and general influences, the same mistake is incessantly committed. Let us take care to avoid it. I have sketched in their whole bearing the principles of the church and their consequences, but historically the picture is not correct. The whole has been partial, successive, distributed here and there over space and time. Our entirety, our prompt and systematic concatenation, will not be found in the recital of actual facts. Here one principle shoots forth, there another; all is incomplete, dissimilar, and scattered; and it is only by coming to modern times, to the end of the career, that the whole result is perceived.

I shall proceed to represent the different states through which the church passed from the fifth to the twelfth century. I thereby go to the fountain head; and if I fail in the complete demonstration of the assertions that I have thrown out, yet perhaps enough will be shown to evince them warrantable.

The first state in which the church is found in the fifth century is that of the imperial church, the church of the Roman Empire. At the period the Roman Empire fell, the church was indulging in the idea that her mission was accomplished, her triumph assured. She had then completely vanquished paganism. The last emperor who had assumed the office of pontifex maximus, a pagan dignity, was the Emperor Gratian, who had died at the end of the fourth century. She likewise believed herself at the end of her contest with heretics, especially with the Arians, the principal heretics of the day. The Emperor Theodosius had drawn up against them a peculiar and stringent body of laws at the end of the fourth century. The church, therefore, was in possession of the government, and had triumphed over her two greatest enemies. She was in this prosperous state when the Roman Empire suddenly failed her, and she found herself opposed to other pagans and heretics in the shape of the barbarians, as the Goths, Vandals, Burgundians, and Franks. It was a prodigious fall. It may be easily imagined that a warm attachment for the Empire must have been preserved in the bosom of the church. Thus we see her steadily adhere to what remained of it, the municipal system and absolute power; and when the barbarians were converted, the church attempted to resuscitate the Empire. She addressed herself to the barbarian kings, and besought them to declare themselves Roman emperors, to assume all the rights formerly held by them, and to enter into the same relations with the church as she had had with the Roman Empire. It was especially to this point that the bishops of the fifth and sixth centuries laboured, and they imparted the general feature to the whole church.

It was impossible for this attempt to succeed. There were no means amongst the barbarians to reconstitute the Roman society. Like the civil world around it, therefore, the church itself fell into barbarism. That was its second state. When a comparison is made between the writings of the ecclesiastical chroniclers of the eighth century, and of those in the preceding ages, an immense difference is found. Every vestige of Roman civilisation disappeared, even to the language, and barbarism was at its very acme. For, on the one hand, barbarians entered into the clerical order, and became priests and bishops; and on the other, bishops adopted the barbarian life, and without quitting their bishoprics, constituted themselves chiefs of banditti, roaming over the country, pillaging and fighting, like the companions of Clovis. Gregory of Tours mentions several bishops who passed their lives after this fashion.

Two important facts, nevertheless, received their development in the bosom of this barbarian church. The first was the separation between the spiritual and temporal powers, which principle took its stand at that epoch, as a natural consequence of the state of things. The church not having succeeded in resuscitating the absolute power of the Roman Empire, so as to gain a share of it for herself, was driven to seek safety in independence. She was called upon to defend herself on every side, for she was incessantly threatened. The bishops and priests saw their barbarian neighbours interfere every instant in the affairs of the church, in order to seize upon her riches, her lands, and her power, and they had no other means of defending themselves than alleging—'The spiritual order is completely separated from the temporal, and you have no right to intervene in its affairs.' This principle became the defensive weapon of the church against barbarism in all quarters.

The second important fact which belongs to the same epoch, is the development of the monastic order in the West. It was at the commencement of the sixth century that Saint Benedict instituted his order amongst the monks of the West, who were then very few in number, but who subsequently multiplied prodigiously. The monks were not, up to that period, members of the clerical body, but were still regarded as laymen. No doubt priests and even bishops had been sought out amongst them; but it was not until the end of the fifth, and the beginning of the sixth century, that the monks in general were considered as forming part of the clergy, properly so called. After that, matters were reversed; priests and bishops became monks, conceiving that they thereby made a new progress in the religious life. Thus the monastic order took all at once an excessive development in Europe. The monks struck the imagination of the barbarians more forcibly than the secular clergy; their numbers, as well as the singularity of their lives, had an imposing effect upon them. The secular clergy, indeed—the bishop and the simple priest—were less reverently looked upon by the barbarians, accustomed as they were to see, maltreat, and despoil them. An attack on a monastery, on so many holy men congregated in one holy place, was a much more serious affair. Thus the monasteries were, during the barbarian epoch, places of asylum for the church, as she herself was a resort for refuge to the laity. Pious men flocked to them for shelter, as in the East they fled to the Thebaide to escape a worldly life and the contamination of Constantinople.

Such are the two great facts which appertain to the barbarian epoch in the history of the church: on the one hand, the development of the principle of the separation between the spiritual and temporal powers; and on the other, the development of the monastic system in the West.

Towards the end of the barbarian epoch, there was a new attempt to resuscitate the Roman Empire made by Charlemagne. The church and the civil sovereign contracted once more a strict alliance. It was a period of great docility, and therefore of great advancement to the Papacy. The attempt at resuscitation again failed; the Empire of Charlemagne fell, but the advantages that the church had drawn from its alliance remained with her. The Papacy was definitively planted at the head of Christianity.

After the death of Charlemagne, chaos came again; the church relapsed into it as well as civil society, and emerged in like manner to enter into the frame of feudalism. This was its third state. The dissolution of the Empire of Charlemagne produced in the ecclesiastical order almost the same effect as in the civil—the complete disappearance of unity, a break-up into local, partial, and individual distributions. This situation of the clergy, then, originated a struggle not previously known up to that period—namely, the struggle between the sentiments and interests of a fief-holder and those of a priest. The chiefs of the church were between these two temptations, each striving for the mastery; the ecclesiastical spirit was no longer so powerful or universal, private interest had more charms, whilst the taste for independence, and the habits of a feudal life, relaxed the bonds of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. An attempt was made in the bosom of the church to avert the effects of this relaxation, and by a system of federation, by means of general assemblies and deliberations, to organise in various quarters national churches. It is at this epoch, under the feudal system, that we perceive the greatest number of councils and convocations, of provincial and national ecclesiastical assemblies, held. This essay at unity appears to have been especially followed out in France. Hincmar, archbishop of Rheims, may be considered as the chief organ of this idea; he was constantly engaged in the labour of organising the French church; he sought out and employed all the means of intercourse and correspondence which might restore some portion of unity to the feudal church. Hincmar maintained, on the one hand, the independence of the church with regard to the temporal power, and on the other, its irresponsibility to the Papacy. It was he who, knowing that the Pope wished to come into France, and threatened to excommunicate some bishops, said, 'Si excommunicaturus venerit, excommunicatus abibit' ('If he come here to excommunicate, he shall go back with an anathema at his own head.')

But the endeavour thus to organise the feudal church, had no better success than the previous one to restore the organisation of the imperial church. There were no means available to reestablish unity in that church. Its disorganisation was continually increasing. Each bishop, prelate, and abbot, isolated himself more and more in his diocese or in his monastery. Disorders multiplied from the same cause. This period was distinguished for the greatest abuses of simony, for the completely arbitrary disposition of ecclesiastical benefices, and for the most deplorable corruption of manners amongst the priests.

These disorders were extremely revolting both to the people and the better-minded portion of the clergy. Hence we see that at an early date a spirit of reform arose in the church, and a desire to find some authority competent to rally the stray elements and give them law. Claude, bishop of Turin, and Agobard, archbishop of Lyons, made some attempts of this sort in their respective dioceses; but they were in no condition to accomplish so great a work. There was only one force within the church itself which could succeed in such an object, and that was the court of Rome, the Papacy. In consequence, it was not long in becoming predominant. In the course of the eleventh century the church passed to her fourth state, that of a theocratical and monastical church. The creator of this new form assumed by the church, so far as it belongs to a man to create, was Gregory VII.

We are accustomed to regard Gregory VII. as a man who strove to render all things stagnant, as an adversary of intellectual development and of social progress, as a man, in fact, who laboured to retain the world in a stationary or retrograding system. No idea can be less correct; Gregory VII. was a reformer by means of despotism, like Charlemagne and Peter the Great. He was in the ecclesiastical order pretty nearly what Charlemagne in France and Peter the Great in Russia were in the civil order. His object was to reform the church, and, through her, civil society—to introduce into them a greater degree of morality, justice, and regularity; and this he wished to effect through the Holy See, and to its advantage.

At the same time that he endeavoured to subject the civil world to the church, and the church to the Papacy, in the spirit of reform and advancement, and not of stagnation or retrogression, an attempt of the same nature was made, a similar movement was produced, in the cloisters of the monasteries. A desire for order, discipline, and rigid morality was zealously manifested. It was the period in which Robert de Molême introduced a severe order at Citeaux, it was the era of St. Norbert, and the reform of the prebendaries, of the reform of Cluny, and finally of the great reform of St. Bernard. A general ferment reigned in the monasteries; the old monks stood up in their own defence, asserted innovation to be a thing of evil, proclaimed their liberty infringed upon, maintained that the people ought to rest satisfied with the manners of the age, that it was out of the question to return to the primitive strictness of the church, and treated all these reformers as madmen, dreamers, and tyrants. Look at the history of Normandy by Orderic Vital, and these complaints will be found unceasingly urged.

All, therefore, seemed turning to the advantage of the church, to its unity and power. But whilst the Papacy was striving to clutch the government of the world, and the monasteries were reforming themselves in a moral point of view, a few vigorous-minded, although isolated, men asserted the right of human reason to be considered of some value, and to take part in the constitution of opinions. The majority of them did not attack the received doctrines, the articles of religious belief; they merely said that reason had a right to investigate them, and that it was not sufficient that they were affirmed by authority. John Erigena (Scotus), Roscelin, and Abelard—these were the advocates by whom individual reason recommenced to claim its inheritance; these were the first authors of the movement made for liberty, which was contemporaneous with the movement for reform made by Hildebrand and St. Bernard. When we inquire into the predominant character of this movement, we perceive it was not a change of opinion, or a revolt against the public articles of faith, but merely an assertion of the right of reason to exercise its functions. The scholars of Abelard asked him, as he tells us himself in his 'Introduction to Theology,' 'for philosophical arguments proper to satisfy reason, begging him to instruct them, not merely so as to repeat by rote what he communicated to them, but to understand him; for no one can believe without first comprehending, and it is absurd to preach to others of things which neither he who professes, nor those whom he teaches, can understand. What object can the study of philosophy have, if not to lead to that of God, to whom all ought to be referred? With what view are the faithful permitted to read the writings treating of the events of the age and the books of the Gentiles, unless it be to form them for the understanding of the truths of the Holy Scriptures, and to give them the necessary ability to defend them? It is especially necessary to be fortified by all the powers of reason, in order to prevent, upon questions so difficult and complicated as those which are the objects of the Christian faith, the subtleties of its enemies succeeding too easily in adulterating the purity of our faith.'

The importance of this first attempt at liberty, of this reproduction of the spirit of examination, was soon felt. Although occupied in reforming itself, the church did not the less take alarm: it immediately declared war against these new reformers, whose appearance threatened it much more than their doctrines. Behold the great fact which illustrates the end of the eleventh and the commencement of the twelfth century, whilst the church presented itself in the theocratic and monastic state! For the first time, a serious contest arose between the clergy and the free-thinkers. The quarrels of Abelard and St. Bernard, the councils of Soissons and Sens, in which Abelard was condemned, are but the evidences of that fact which has held so important a place in the history of modern civilisation. It was the principal circumstance in the state of the church in the twelfth century, the point of time at which we shall now leave it.

A movement of a different nature took place at the very same period, the movement towards the enfranchisement of the boroughs. It was attended by a singular proof of the inconsistency of barbarian and rude minds. If those burgesses who maintained their own freedom with such zeal, had been told that there were men who asserted the rights of human reason, of free examination, and were denounced by the church as heretics, they would have stoned or burnt them on the instant. Abelard and his friends were exposed to this danger more than once. On the other hand, those very writers who were the champions of the rights of human reason, spoke of the efforts for enfranchisement of the boroughs as productive of abominable disorder, and of the overthrow of society. Thus war seemed declared between the philosophical and the municipal movement, between intellectual and political enfranchisement. To reconcile these two great actions, and to bring them to a comprehension of the community of their interests, ages have been required. In the twelfth century they were utterly severed, as we shall see in our succeeding inquiry into the enfranchisement of the boroughs.

Lecture VII. Boroughs And Their Influence.

The feudal system and the church, the two first great fundamental elements of modern civilisation, have now been brought down to the twelfth century, and our present object will be to trace the third of those elements, the boroughs, to the same era, confining ourselves within the limits we have observed with regard to the other two.

Our inquiry into boroughs commences with a different situation from that held by the church or the feudal system. From the fifth to the twelfth century, these latter, although they afterwards underwent new developments, exhibited themselves as nearly complete, and in a definitive state; their birth, growth, and maturity, all occurred within that interval. It was very different with boroughs. It was not until the end of the epoch upon which our attention is engaged, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, that they took any place in history; not meaning thereby that their previous history calls for no examination, or that the traces of their existence long before that period are not discoverable, but that it was only in the eleventh century that they made a distinct appearance on the great stage of the world, and came out as an important element of modern civilisation. Thus, in surveying the feudal system and the church from the fifth to the twelfth century, we have found effects developed and produced from causes, or, in other words, whenever, by induction or conjecture, we have deduced results from certain principles, we have been able to verify them by reference to facts. This is a facility which we do not possess with the boroughs. At the present moment, I shall only speak of causes and origins; and what I may say upon the effects of their existence, and upon their influence on the progress of European civilisation, will be in some sort by way of prediction, as the adducement of contemporary and known facts will be impossible. It is not until a later date, in the period stretching from the twelfth to the fifteenth century, that we shall perceive corporations take their development, as an institution bear fruit, and history prove our predictions. I mark this difference of situation the more emphatically, in order to obviate objections against the incompleteness and prematureness of the picture I am about to give.

I will suppose that a burgher of the twelfth century had suddenly appeared amongst us in 1789, at the moment that the terrible regeneration of France commenced, and that there had been given him to read (for we must endow him with the power to read) one of those pamphlets which then so violently agitated the minds of men; for example, the pamphlet of M. Sieyes—'What is the third estate?' Let us imagine his eyes falling on this phrase—the main point of the publication—'The third estate is the French nation, less the nobility and the clergy.' I ask, what impression would such a phrase produce on the mind of this man? Would he understand it? The words, 'the French nation,' would be beyond his comprehension, for they would convey no idea of anything known to him, or existing in his own day; but if he should understand the phrase—if he had a clear conception of that sovereignty attributed to the third estate over all society, it would assuredly appear to him a nearly insane and impious proposition, so much would it be in contradiction to what he had seen, and to the entire bent of his ideas and sentiments.

Now, ask this bewildered burgher to follow you, and conduct him to some of the then boroughs of France, to Rheims, Beauvais, Laon, or Noyon. A surprise of a different nature would here await him. On entering the town he would perceive no towers, no ramparts, no burgher guard, no means of defence, but all open and exposed to the first hostile occupant. The safety of such a municipality would appear to him very uncertain and weakly guaranteed. Penetrating into the interior, and inquiring into what was there passing, into the manner in which it was governed, and into the condition of the inhabitants, he would be told that there was a power outside which taxed them as it pleased, summoned their militia, and sent it to distant wars, regardless of their consent; that there were magistrates, mayors, and sheriffs, whom the burgesses had no share in nominating, and that the affairs of the borough were not decided in the borough itself, but that a man named by the king, an intendant, alone and from a distance, administered them. Furthermore, he would be told that the inhabitants had no right to assemble and deliberate in common upon what concerned them—that the bell of their church did not summon them to the public square. The burgess of the twelfth century would be perfectly at a loss to comprehend these matters. First he was bewildered and dismayed at the grandeur and importance that the burgher community, the third estate, attributed to itself, and now he finds it, upon its own hearthstone, in a state of servitude, weakness, and nullity, worse than anything he had known as most disastrous. Passing from one contemplation to the other—from the idea of a sovereign commonalty to the survey of its powerlessness—how could he comprehend and reconcile the difference, or disentangle his mind from confusion?

On the other hand, let us carry a burgess of the nineteenth century back to the twelfth, and he will find things under the same double aspect, but the situations changed. Contemplating the general affairs of the age, the state, the government of the country, and society at large, we see or hear nothing of the burgesses; they are altogether without importance in the state. And not only so, but in speaking or thinking of themselves and their situation in relation to the general government of France, their language is timid and humble in the extreme. Their old masters, the lords of fiefs, from whom they wrung their franchises, are found treating them, in words at least, with a pride which surprises us, but was far from astonishing or irritating them.

But entering into the borough itself, and surveying what is there passing, we find the scene changed. We are in a sort of fortified place, defended by the armed burgesses, who tax themselves, elect their own magistrates, sit in judgment, inflict punishments, and assemble to deliberate upon their own affairs; making war even against their lord, and having their own militia. In a word, they govern themselves, and are superior to control.

Here is a contrast of the same order as that which so much surprised the burgess of the twelfth century in the France of the eighteenth, only the parts are reversed. In the latter, the burgher order or nation is everything, the borough nothing; in the former, the degrees of importance are diametrically opposite.

Assuredly many things and many extraordinary events must have passed, and many revolutions have been accomplished between the twelfth and eighteenth centuries, to produce so prodigious a change in the state of one social class. Yet, in spite of this change, there is no doubt that the third estate of 1789 was, politically speaking, the descendant and heir of the burghers of the twelfth century. That haughty and ambitious 'French nation,' which raised its pretensions so high, proclaimed its sovereignty with such pomposity, and pretended not only to regenerate and govern itself, but also to govern and regenerate the world, incontestibly descended from those borough communities, who made their obscure though courageous stands in the twelfth century, with the sole object of throwing off the tyrannical yoke of nameless lords in their respective isolated corners.

Now, although there is no question that the explication of so great a metamorphosis will not be found in the state of the boroughs in the twelfth century, but that it has been effected and has its causes in the events which have occurred between the twelfth and eighteenth centuries, yet the origin of the third estate has been of great consequence in its history; and whilst we shall not therein discover the full secret of its destiny, we may at least discern the germ thereof; for what it was at first, is found again in what it has become, to a much greater extent than appearances would lead us to presume. A survey, although an incomplete one, of the state of the boroughs in the twelfth century, will, I think, be decisive of the fact.

In entering upon an investigation into this state, in order fully to comprehend it, we must consider the boroughs in two main points of view. There are two important questions to resolve: the first, that of the enfranchisement of the boroughs themselves, the inquiry how the revolution operated, and from what causes, what change it produced in the situation of the burghers, and what was its effect upon society at large, upon the other classes, and upon the state. The second question is relative to the government of the boroughs, the internal condition of the enfranchised towns, the relations of the burgesses amongst themselves, and the principles, the forms, and the manners in vogue within the communities.

From these two sources—on the one hand, from the change introduced into the social position of the burghers, and on the other, from their internal or borough government—all their influence on modern civilisation has been derived. That influence has been productive of no one fact which may not be referred to one or other of these two causes. Therefore, when we shall have thoroughly sifted them, and obtained an insight into the circumstances of their enfranchisement on the one hand, and their government on the other, we shall possess, as it were, the two keys to their history.

I will first say a few words on the diversity in the state of boroughs throughout Europe. The facts which I shall bring forward will not apply indifferently to all the Italian, Spanish, English, and French boroughs; some of them are referable to them all; but there are great and important differences. These I will indicate as I go on: we shall subsequently find them in the progress of civilisation, and will then investigate them more narrowly.

To have a proper idea of the enfranchisement of the boroughs, it is necessary to go back to the state of towns from the fifth to the tenth century, from the fall of the Roman Empire to the time at which the borough revolution commenced. The differences were, I repeat, very great; the condition of towns varied extensively in the different countries of Europe, yet there are some general facts which may be affirmed of almost all towns, to which I shall endeavour to restrict myself. When I have done with them, the more special matter will apply to the boroughs of France, and particularly to those in the north of France, above the Rhone and the Loire. These will be prominent points in the picture it is my object to draw.

After the fall of the Roman Empire, from the fifth to the tenth century, the towns were in a state neither of liberty nor of servitude. In the use of words, we run the same chance of error as I previously remarked took place in the description of men and of events. When a society has endured for a long period, and also its language, words take a complete, determinate, and precise meaning, a legal and official sense, as it were. Time has introduced into the meaning of each term a multitude of ideas which are awakened as soon as it is pronounced, but which, not being all included at the same date, are not all applicable to one period. For example, the words slavery and liberty arouse ideas in our minds at the present day infinitely more precise and perfect than correspond to the facts existing in the eighth, ninth, or tenth centuries. If we say that the towns were in a state of liberty in the eighth, we say far too much, for we attach at present a meaning to the word 'liberty' which does not portray the state of things in that century. We fall into the same error if we say that the towns were in servitude, for this word implies something very different from the municipal conditions of the period. Thus, I repeat, the towns were not then in a state either of servitude or of liberty; they suffered all the evils which befall weakness, and were a prey to the continual violence and depredations of the strong; but in spite of so many and such frightful disorders, in spite of their impoverishment and depopulation, they never lost a certain degree of importance. In the major part there was a clergy or a bishop who exercised considerable power, having influence over the inhabitants, and serving as a link between them and their conquerors, thus maintaining the town in a species of independence, and covering it with the shield of religion.