Part 2 — THE ARREST OF INQUIRY.

A. D. 50-A. D. 400.

1. From the Early Christian Period to the Time of Augustine.

“A revealed dogma is always opposed to the free research that may contradict it. The result of science is not to banish the divine altogether, but ever to place it at a greater distance from the world of particular facts in which men once believed they saw it.”—Renan, Essay on Islamism and Science.

A detailed account of the rise and progress of the Christian religion is not within the scope of this book. But as that religion, more especially in the elaborated theological form which it ultimately assumed, became the chief barrier to the development of Greek ideas; except, as has been remarked, in the degree that these were represented by Aristotle, and brought into harmony with it; a short survey of its origin and early stages is necessary to the continuity of our story.

The history of that great movement is told according to the bias of the writers. They explain its rapid diffusion and its ultimate triumph over Paganism as due either to its Divine origin and guidance; or to the favourable conditions of the time of its early propagation, and to that wise adaptation to circumstances which linked its fortunes with those of the progressive peoples of Western Europe. In the judgment of every unofficial narrator, this latter explanation best accords with the facts of history, and with the natural causes which largely determine success or failure. The most partisan advocates of its supernatural, and therefore special, character have to show reason why the fortunes of the Christian religion have varied like those of other great religions, both older and younger than it; why, like Buddhism, it has been ousted from the country in which it rose; and why, in competition with Brahmanism, as Sir Alfred Lyall testifies in his Asiatic Studies (p. 110), and with Mohammedanism in Africa, it has less success than these in the mission fields where it comes into rivalry with them. Riven into wrangling sects from an early period of its history, it has, while exercising a beneficent influence in turbulent and lawless ages, brought not “peace on earth, but a sword.” It has been the cause of undying hate, of bloody wars, and of persecutions between parties and nations, whose animosity seems the deeper when stirred by matters which are incapable of proof. As Montaigne says, “Nothing is so firmly believed as that which is least known.” To bring the Christian religion, or, rather, its manifold forms, from the purest spiritualistic to such degraded type as exists, for example, in Abyssinia, within the operation of the law which governs development, and which, therefore, includes partial and local corruption; is to make its history as clear as it is profoundly instructive; while, to demand for it an origin and character different in kind from other religions, is to import confusion into the story of mankind, and to raise a swarm of artificial difficulties. “If,” as John Morley observes in his criticism of Turgot’s dissertation upon The Advantages that the Establishment of Christianity has conferred upon the Human Race (Miscell., vol. ii, p. 90), “there had been in the Christian idea the mysterious self-sowing quality so constantly claimed for it, how came it that in the Eastern part of the Empire it was as powerless for spiritual or moral regeneration as it was for political health and vitality; while in the Western part it became the organ of the most important of all the past transformations of the civilized world? Is not the difference to be explained by the difference in the surrounding medium, and what is the effect of such an explanation upon the supernatural claims of the Christian idea?” Its inclusion as one of other modes, varying only in degree, by which man has progressed from the “ape and tiger” stage to the highest ideals of the race, makes clear what concerns us here, namely, its attitude toward secular knowledge, and the consequent serious arrest of that knowledge. That a religion which its followers claim to be of supernatural origin, and secured from error by the perpetual guidance of a Holy Spirit, should have opposed inquiry into matters the faculty for investigating which lay within human power and province; that it should actually have put to death those who dared thus to inquire, and to make known what they had discovered; is a problem which its advocates may settle among themselves. It is no problem to those who take the opposite view.

In outlining the history of Christianity stress will be here laid only upon those elements which caused it to be an arresting force in man’s intellectual development, and, therefore, in his spiritual emancipation from terrors begotten of ignorance. It does not fall within our survey to speak of that primary element in it which was before all dogma, and which may survive when dogma has become only a matter of antiquarian interest. That element, born of emotion, which, as a crowd of kindred examples show, incarnates, and then deifies the object of its worship, was the belief in the manifestation of the divine through the human Jesus who had borne men’s griefs, carried their sorrows, and offered rest to the weary and heavy-laden. For no religion—and here Evolution comes in as witness—can take root which does not adapt itself to, and answer some need of, the heart of man. Hence the importance of study of the history of all religions.

Evolution knows only one heresy—the denial of continuity. Recognising the present as the outcome of the past, it searches after origins. It knows that both that which revolts us in man’s spiritual history has, alike with that which attracts, its place, its necessary place, in the development of ideas, and is, therefore, capable of explanation from its roots upward. For this age is sympathetic, not flippant. It looks with no favour on criticism that is only destructive, or on ridicule or ribaldry as modes of attack on current beliefs. Hence we have the modern science of comparative theology, with its Hibbert Lectures, and Gifford Lectures, which are critical and constructive; as opposed to Bampton Lectures, Boyle and Hulse Lectures, which are apologetic, the speaker holding an official brief. Of the Boyle Lecturers, Collings the “Deist” caustically said that nobody doubted the existence of the Deity till they set to work to prove it. Religions are no longer treated as true or false, as inventions of priests or of divine origin, but as the product of man’s intellectual speculations, however crude or coarse; and of his spiritual needs, no matter in what repulsive form they are satisfied. For “proofs” and “evidences” we have substituted explanations.

Nevertheless, so strong, often so bitter, are the feelings aroused over the most temperate discussion of the origin of Christianity that it remains necessary to repeat that to explain is not to attack, and that to narrate is not to apportion blame, for no religion can do aught than reflect the temper of the age in which it flourishes.

Let us now summarize certain occurrences which, although familiar enough, must be repeated for the clear understanding of their effects.

Some sixty years after the death of Lucretius there happened, in the subsequent belief of millions of mankind, an event for which all that had gone before in the history of this planet is said to have been a preparation. In the fulness of time the Omnipotent maker and ruler of a universe to which no boundaries can be set by human thought, sent to this earth-speck no less a person than His Eternal Son. He was said to have been born, not by the natural processes of generation, but to have been incarnated in the womb of a virgin, retaining his divine nature while subjecting it to human limitations. This he had done that he might, as sinless man, become an expiatory sacrifice to offended deity, and to the requirements of divine justice, for the sins which the human race had committed since the transgression of Adam and Eve, or which men yet to be born might commit.

The “miraculous” birth of Jesus took place at Nazareth in Galilee, in the reign of Cæsar Augustus, about 750 A. U. C., as the Romans reckoned time. Tradition afterward fixed his birthday on the 25th December, which, curiously enough, although, perhaps, explaining the choice, was the day dedicated to the sun-god Mithra, an Oriental deity to whom altars had been raised and sacrifices performed, with rites of baptisms of blood, in hospitable Rome.

Jesus is said to have lived in the obscurity of his native mountain village till his thirtieth year. Except one doubtful story of his going to Jerusalem with his parents when he was twelve years old, nothing is recorded in the various biographies of him between his birth and his appearance as a public teacher. Probably he followed his father’s trade as a carpenter. The event that seems to have called him from home was the preaching of an enthusiastic ascetic named John the Baptist. At his hands Jesus submitted to the baptismal rite, and then entered on his career, wandering from place to place. The fragments of his discourses, which have survived in the short biographies known as the Gospels, show him to have been gifted with a simple, winning style, and his sermons, brightened by happy illustration or striking parable, went home to the hearts of his hearers. Women, often of the outcast class, were drawn to him by the sympathy which attracted even more than his teaching. Among a people to whom the unvarying order of Nature was an idea wholly foreign—for Greek speculations had not penetrated into Palestine—stories of miracle-working found easy credit, falling in, as they did, with popular belief in the constant intervention of deity. Thus, to the reports of what Jesus taught were added those of the wonders which he had wrought, from feeding thousands of folk with a few loaves of bread to raising the dead to life. His itinerant mission secured him a few devoted followers from various towns and villages, while the effect of success upon himself was to heighten his own conception of the importance of his work. The skill of the Romans in fusing together subject races had failed them in the case of the Jews, whose belief in their special place in the world as the “chosen people” never forsook them. Nor had their misfortunes weakened their belief that the Messiah predicted by their prophets would appear to deliver them, and plant their feet on the neck of the hated conqueror. This hope, as became a pious Jew, Jesus shared, but it set him brooding on some nobler, because more spiritual, conception of it than his fellow-countrymen nurtured. Finally, it led him to the belief, fostered by the ambition of his nearer disciples, which was, however, material in its hopes, that he was the spiritual Messiah. In that faith he repaired to Jerusalem at the time of the Passover feast when the city was crowded with devotees, that he might, before the chief priests and elders, make his appeal to the nation. According to the story, his daring in clearing the holy temple of money-changers and traders led to his appearance before the Sanhedrin, the highest judicial council; his plainness of speech raised the fury of the sects; and when, dreaming of a purer faith, he spoke ominous words about the destruction of the temple, the charge of blasphemy was laid against him. His guilt was made clear to his judges when, answering a question of the high priest, he declared himself to be the Messiah. This, involving claim to kingship over the Jews, and therefore rebellion against the Empire, was made the plea of haling him before the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, for trial. Pilate, looking upon the whole affair as a local émeute, was disinclined to severity, but nothing short of the death of Jesus as a blasphemer (although his chief offence appears to have been his disclaimer of earthly sovereignty) would satisfy the angry mob. Amidst their taunts and jeers he was taken to a place named Calvary, and there put to death by the torturing process of crucifixion, or, the particular mode not being clear, of transfixion on a stake.

This tragic event, on which, as is still widely held, hang the destinies of mankind to the end of time, attracted no attention outside Judæa. In the Roman eye, cold, contemptuous, and practical, it was but the execution of a troublesome fanatic who had embroiled himself with his fellow-countrymen, and added the crime of sedition to the folly of blasphemy. Pilate himself passed on, without more ado, to the next duty. Tradition, anxious to prove that retribution followed his criminal act, as it was judged in after-time to be, tells how he flung himself in remorse from the mountain known as Pilatus, which overlooks the lake of Lucerne. With truer insight, a striking modern story, L’Etui de Nacre, by Anatole France, makes Pilate, on his retirement to Sicily in old age, thus refer to the incident in conversation with a Roman friend who had loved a Jewish maiden.

“A few months after I had lost sight of her I heard by accident that she had joined a small party of men and women who were following a young Galilean miracle-worker. His name was Jesus, he came from Nazareth, and he was crucified for I don’t know what crime. Pontius, do you remember this man? Pontius Pilate knit his brow, and put his hand to his forehead like one who is searching his memory; then after a few moments of silence: ‘Jesus,’ murmured he, ‘Jesus of Nazareth. No, I don’t remember him.’”

On the third day after his death, Jesus is said to have risen from the grave, and appeared to a faithful few of his disciples. On the fortieth day after his resurrection he is said to have ascended to heaven. Both these statements rest on the authority of the biographies which were compiled some years after his death. Jesus wrote nothing himself; therefore the “brethren,” as his intimate followers called one another, had no other sacred books than those of the Old Testament. They believed that Jesus was the Messiah predicted in Daniel and some of the apocryphal writings, and they cherished certain “logia” or sayings of his which formed the basis of the first three Gospels. The earliest of these, that bearing the name of Mark, probably took the shape in which we have it (some spurious verses at the end excepted) about 70 A. D. The fourth Gospel, which tradition attributes to John, is generally believed to be half a century later than Mark. It seems likely that the importance of collecting the words of Jesus into any permanent form did not occur to those who had heard them, because the belief in his speedy return was all-powerful among them, and their life and attitude toward everything was shaped accordingly.

Without sacred books, priesthood, or organization, these earliest disciples, whom the fate of their leader had driven into hiding for a time, gathered themselves into groups for communion and worship. “In the church of Jerusalem,” says Selden in his Table Talk (xiv), “the Christians were but another sect of Jews that did believe the Messias was come.” From that sacred city there went forth preachers of this simple doctrine through the lands where Greek-speaking Jews, known as those of the Dispersion, had been long settled. These formed a very important element in the Roman Empire, being scattered from Asia Minor to Egypt, and thence in all the lands washed by the Mediterranean. As their racial isolation and national hopes made them the least contented among the subject-peoples, a series of tolerant measures securing them certain privileges, subject to loyal behaviour, had been prudently granted by their Roman masters. The new teaching spread from Antioch to Alexandria and Rome. But early in the onward career of the movement a division broke out among the immediate disciples of Jesus which ended in lasting rupture. A distinguished convert had been won to the faith in the person of the Apostle Paul. He is the real founder of Christianity as a more or less systematized creed, and all the development of dogma which followed are integral parts of the structure raised by him. He converted it from a local religion into a widespread faith. This came about, at the start, through his defeat of the narrower section headed by Peter, who would have compelled all non-Jewish converts to submit to the rite of circumcision.

The unity of the Empire gave Christianity its chance. Through the connection of Eurasia from the Euphrates to the Atlantic by magnificent roads, communication between peoples followed the lines of least resistance. Happily for the future of Christianity, the early missionaries travelled westward, in the wake of the dispersed Jews, along the Mediterranean seaboard, and thus its fortunes became identified with the civilizing portion of mankind. Had they travelled eastward, it might have been blended with Buddhism, or, as its Gnostic phases show, become merged in Oriental mysticism. The story of progress ran smoothly till A. D. 64, when we first hear of the “Christians”—for by such name they had become known—in “profane” history, as it was once oddly called. Tacitus, writing many years after the event, tells how on the night of the 18th July, in the sixty-fourth year of our era, a fierce fire broke out in Rome, causing the destruction of magnificent buildings raised by Augustus, and of priceless works of Greek art. Suspicion fell on Nero, and he, as has been suggested, was instigated by his wife Poppaea Sabina, an unscrupulous woman, and, according to some authorities, a convert to Judaism, “to put an end to the common talk, by imputing the fire to others, visiting, with a refinement of punishment, those detestable criminals who went by the name of Christians. The author of that denomination was Christus, who had been executed in the time of Tiberius, by the procurator, Pontius Pilate.” Tacitus goes on to describe Christianity as “a pestilent superstition,” and its adherents as guilty of “hatred to the human race.” The indictment, on the face of it, seems strange, but it has an explanation, although the Christians were brutally murdered on the charge of arson, and not of superstition. So far as religious persecution went, they suffered this first at the hands of Jews, the Empire intervening to protect them. Broadly speaking, the Roman note was toleration. Throughout the Empire religion was a national affair, because it began and ended with the preservation of the State. Thereupon it was the binding duty—religio—of every citizen to pay due honour to the protecting gods on whose favour the safety of the State depended. That done, a man might believe what he chose. Polytheism is, from its nature, easy-going and tolerant; so long as there was no open opposition to the authorized public worship, the worshipper could explain it any way he chose. In Greece a man “might believe or disbelieve that the Mysteries taught the doctrine of immortality; the essential thing was that he should duly sacrifice his pig.” In Rome, that vast Cosmopolis, “the ordinary pagan did not care two straws whether his neighbour worshipped twenty gods or twenty-one.” Why should he care?

Now, against all this, the Christians set their faces sternly, and the result was to make them regarded as anti-patriotic and anti-social. Their success among the lower classes had been rapid. Christianity levelled all distinctions: it welcomed the master and his slave, the outcast and the pure: it treated woman as the spiritual equal of man: it held out to each the hope of a future life. Thus far, all was to the good, although the old Mithraic religion had done well-nigh as much. But Christianity held aloof from the common social life, putting itself out of touch with the manifold activity of Rome. It sought to apply certain maxims of Jesus literally; it discouraged marriage, it brought disunion into family life; it counselled avoidance of service in the army or acceptance of any public office. This general attitude was wholly due to the belief that with the return of Jesus, the end of the world was at hand. For Jesus had foretold his second coming, and the earliest epistles of the apostles bade the faithful prepare for it. Here there was no continuing city; citizenship was in heaven, for the kingdom of Christ was not of this world. Therefore to give thought to the earthly and fleeting was folly and impiety, for who would care to heap up wealth, to strive for place or to pursue pleasure, or to search after what men called “wisdom,” when these imperilled the soul, and blocked the way to heaven?

The prejudice created by this belief, expressed in such direct action as refusal to worship the guardian gods and the “genius” of the Emperor, was deepened by ugly, although baseless, rumours as to the cruel and immoral things done by the Christians at their secret meetings. And so it came to pass that Tacitus spoke of Christianity in the terms quoted; that Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius (who refers to it only once in his Meditations) dismissed it with a scornful phrase; that the common people called it atheistic; and that, finally, it became a proscribed and persecuted religion.

Further than this there is no need to pursue its career until, with wholly changed fortunes, we meet it as a tolerated religion under a so-called Christian Emperor. The object in tracing it thus far is to indicate how enthusiasts, thus filled with an anti-worldly spirit, would become and remain an arresting force against the advance of inquiry and, therefore, of knowledge; and how, as their religion gathered power, and itself became worldly in policy, it would the more strongly assert supremacy over the reason. For intellectual activity would lead to inquiry into the claims and authority of the Church, and inquiry, therefore, was the thing to be proscribed. Then, too, the committal of the floating biographies of Jesus to written form, and their grouping, with the letters of the apostles, into one more or less complete collection, to be afterward called the New Testament (a collection held to embrace, as the theory of inspiration became formulated, all that it is needful for man to know), would create a further barrier against intellectual activity. Then, as Christianity came into nearer touch with the enfeebled remnants of Greek philosophy, and with other foreign influences shaping its dogmas, discussions about the person of Christ became active. The simple fluent creed of the early Christians took rigid form in the subtleties of the Nicene Creed, and as “Very God of Very God” the final appeal was, logically, to the words of Jesus. Hence another barrier against inquiry.

Conflict has never arisen on the ethical sayings of Jesus, which, making allowance for the impracticableness of a few, place him high among the sages of antiquity. Comparing their teaching with his, it is easy to group together maxims which do not yield to the more famous examples in the Sermon on the Mount as guides to conduct, or as inspiration to high ideals. The “golden rule” is anticipated by Plato’s “Thou shalt not take that which is mine, and may I do to others as I would that they should do to me” (Jowett’s translation, v, p. 483). And it is paralleled by Isocrates, a contemporary of Plato, in those words spoken by the King Nicocles when addressing his governors, “You should be to others what you think I should be to you.” But if there was nothing new in what Jesus taught, there was freshness in the method. Conflict is waged only over statements the nature and limits of which might be expected from the place and age when they were delivered. They who hold that Jesus was God the Son Eternal, and therefore incapable of error, may reconcile, as best they can with this, his belief in the mischievous delusions of his time. If they say that so much of this as may be reported in the records of his life are spurious, they throw the whole contents of the gospels into the melting-pot of criticism.

Taking the narratives as we have them, documents stamped with the hall-mark of the centuries, “declaring,” as a body of clergymen proclaimed recently, “incontrovertibly the actual historical truth in all records, both of past events, and of the delivery of predictions to be thereafter fulfilled,” we learn that Jesus accepted the accuracy of the sacred writings of his people; that he spoke of Moses as the author of the Pentateuch; that he referred to its legends as dealing with historical persons, and as reporting actual events. All these beliefs are refuted by the critical scholarship of to-day. We need not go to Germany for the verdict; it is indorsed by eminent Hebraists, officials of the Church of England. Canon Driver, Professor of Hebrew at Oxford, says that “like other people, the Jews formed theories to account for the beginnings of the earth and man”; that “they either did this for themselves, or borrowed from their neighbours,” and that “of the theories current in Assyria and Phoenicia fragments have been preserved which exhibit parts of resemblance to the Bible narratives sufficient to warrant the inference that both are derived from the same cycle of traditions.” If, therefore, the cosmogonic and other legends are inspired, so must also the common original of these and their corresponding stories be inspired. The matter might be pursued through the patriarchal age to the eve of the Exodus, showing that, here also, the mythical element is dominant; the existence of Abraham himself dissolving in the solution of the “higher criticism.” As to the Pentateuch, the larger number of scholars place its composition, in the form in which we have it—older documents being blended therein—about the sixth and fifth centuries B. C.

Jesus spoke of the earth as if it were flat, and the most important among the heavenly bodies. Knowledge of the active speculations that went on centuries before his time on the Ionian seaboard; prevision of what secrets men would wrest from the stars centuries hence—of neither did he dream. That Homer and Virgil had sung; that Plato had discoursed; that Buddha had founded a religion with which his, when Western activity met Eastern passivity, would vainly compete; these, and aught else that had moved the great world without, were unknown to the Syrian teacher.

Jesus believed in an arch-fiend, who was permitted by Omnipotence, the Omnipotence against which he had rebelled, to set loose countless numbers of evil spirits to work havoc on men and animals. Jesus also believed in a hell of eternal torment for the wicked; and in a heaven of unending happiness for the good. There is no surer index of the intellectual stage of any people than the degree in which belief in the supernatural, and, especially in the activity of supernatural agents, rules their lives. The lower we descend, the more detailed and familiar is the assumption of knowledge of the behaviour of these agents, and of the nature of the places they come from or haunt. Of this, mediæval speculations on demonology, and modern books of anthropology, supply any number of examples. Here we are concerned only with the momentous fact that belief in demoniacal activity pervades the New Testament from beginning to end, and, therefore, gave the warrant for the unspeakable cruelties with which that belief has stained the annals of Christendom. John Wesley was consistent when he wrote that “Giving up the belief in witchcraft was in effect giving up the Bible,” and it may be added that giving up belief in the devil is giving up belief in the atonement—the central doctrine of the Christian faith. To this the early Christians would have subscribed: so, also, would the great Augustine, who said that “nothing is to be accepted save on the authority of Scripture, since greater is that authority than all the powers of the human mind”; so would all who have followed him in ancient confessions of the faith. It is only the amorphous form of that faith which, lingering on, anæmic and boneless, denies by evasion.

But they who abandon belief in maleficent demons and in witches; as also, for this follows, in beneficent agents, as angels; land themselves in serious dilemma. For to this are such committed. If Jesus, who came “that he might destroy the works of the devil,” and who is reported, among other proofs of his divine ministry, to have cast out demons from “possessed” human beings, and, in one case, to have permitted a crowd of the infernal agents to enter into a herd of swine; if he verily believed that he actually did these things; and if it be true that the belief is a superstition limited to the ignorant or barbaric mind; what value can be attached to any statement that Jesus is reported to have made about a spiritual world?

Here then (1) in the attitude of the early Christians toward all mundane affairs as of no moment compared with those affecting their souls’ salvation; (2) in the assumed authority of Scripture as a full revelation of both earthly and heavenly things; and (3) in the assumed infallibility of the words of Jesus reported therein; we have three factors which suffice to explain why the great movement toward discovery of the orderly relations of phenomena was arrested for centuries, and theories of capricious government of the universe sheltered and upheld.

While, as has been said, the unity of the Empire secured Christianity its fortunate start; the multiform elements of which the Empire was made up—philosophic and pagan—being gradually absorbed by Christianity, secured it acceptance among the different subject-peoples. The break up of the Empire secured its supremacy.

The absorption of foreign ideas and practices by Christianity, largely through the influence of Hellenic Jews, was an added cause of arrest of inquiry. The adoption of pagan rites and customs, resting, as these did, on a bedrock of barbarism, dragged it to a lower level. The intrusion of philosophic subtleties led to terms being mistaken for explanations: as Gibbon says, “the pride of the professors and of their disciples was satisfied with the science of words.” The inchoate and mobile character of Christianity during the first three centuries gave both influences—pagan and philosophic—their opportunity. For long years the converts scattered throughout the Empire were linked together, in more or less regular federation, by the acknowledgment of Christ as Lord, and by the expectation of his second coming. There was no official priesthood, only overseers—“episkopoi”—for social purposes, who made no claims to apostolic succession; no formulated set of doctrines; no Apostles’ Creed; no dogmas of baptismal regeneration or of the real presence; no worship or apotheosis of Mary as the Mother of God; no worship of saints or relics.

On the philosophic side, it was the Greek influence in the person of the more educated converts that shaped the dogmas of the Church and sought to blend them with the occult and mysterious elements in Oriental systems, of which modern “Theosophy” is the tenuous parody. That old Greek habit of asking questions, of seeking to reach the reason of things, which, as has been seen, gave the great impulse to scientific inquiry, was as active as ever. Appeals to the Old Testament touched not the Greek as they did the Jewish Christian, and the Canon of the New Testament was as yet unsettled. Strange as it may seem in view of the assumed divine origin of the Gospels and Epistles, human judgment took upon itself to decide which of them were, and which were not, an integral part of supernatural revelation. The ultimate verdict, so far as the Western Church was concerned, was delivered by the Council of Carthage in the early part of the fifth century. There arose a school of Apologists, founders of theology, who, to quote Gibbon, “equipped the Christian religion for the conquest of the Roman world by changing it into a philosophy, attested by Revelation. They mingled together the metaphysics of Platonism, the doctrine of the Logos, which came from the Stoics, morality partly Platonic, partly Stoic, methods of argument and interpretation learnt from Philo, with the pregnant maxims of Jesus and the religious language of the Christian congregations.” Thus the road was opened for additions to dogmatic theology, doctrines of the Trinity, of the Virgin Birth, and whatever else could be inferentially extracted from the Scriptures, and blended with foreign ideas. The growing complexity of creed called for interpretation of it, and this obviously fell to the overseers or bishops, chosen for their special gifts of “the grace of the truth.” These met, as occasion required, to discuss subjects affecting the faith and discipline of the several groups. Among such, precedence, as a matter of course, would be accorded to the overseer of the most important Christian society in the Empire; and hence the prominence and authority, from an early period, of the bishop of Rome. In the simple and business-like act of his election as chairman of the gatherings lay the germ of the audacious and preposterous claims of the Papacy.

On the pagan side, the course of development is not so easily traced. To determine when and where this or that custom or rite arose is now impossible; indeed, we may say, without exaggeration, that it never arose at all, because the conditions for its adoption were present throughout in human tendencies. The first Christian disciples were Jews: and the ritual which they followed was the direct outcome of ideas common to all barbaric religions, so that certain of the pagan rites and ceremonies with which they came in contact in all parts of the Empire fitted in with custom, tradition, and desire. And this applies, with stronger force, to the converts scattered from Edessa, east of the Euphrates, to the Empire’s westernmost limits in Britain. Moreover, we know that a policy of adaptation and conciliation wisely governed the ruling minds of the Church, in whom, stripped of all the verbiage about them as semi-inspired successors of the apostles, there was deep-seated superstition. Paganism might, in its turn, be suppressed by Imperial edict, but it had too much in common with the later forms of Christianity not to survive in fact, however changed in name.

It may be taken as a truism that in the ceremonies of the higher religions there are no inventions, only survivals. This fact sent thinkers like Hobbes, and dealers in literary antiquities of the type of Burton, Bishop Newton, and, notablest of all, Conyers Middleton, on the search after parallels, which have received astonishing confirmation in our day. Burton sees the mimicry of the “arch-deceiver in the strange sacraments, the priests, and the sacrifices,” as the Romanist missionaries to Tibet saw the same diabolical parody of their rites in Buddhist temples. But Hobbes, with the sagacity which might be expected of him, recognises the continuity of ideas: “mutato nomine tantum; Venus and Cupid (Hobbes might have added Isis and Horus) appearing as ‘the Virgin Mary and her Sonne,’ and the Αποθέωσις of the Heathen surviving in the Canonization of Saints. The carrying of the Popes ‘by Switzers under a Canopie’ is a ‘Relique of the Divine Honours given to Cæsar’; the carriage of Images in Procession ‘a Relique of the Greeks and Romans.’ ... ‘The Heathen had also their Aqua Lustralis, that is to say, Holy Water. The Church of Rome imitates them also in their Holy Dayes. They had their Bacchanalia, and we have our Wakes answering to them; They their Saturnalia, and we our Carnevalls and Shrove-tuesdays liberty of Servants; They their Procession of Priapus, we our fetching-in, erection, and dancing about May-Poles; and Dancing is one kind of worship; They had their Procession called Ambarvalia, and we our Procession about the Fields in the Rogation week.’”

Middleton examined the matter on the spot, and in his celebrated Letter from Rome gives numerous examples of “an exact Conformity between Popery and Paganism.” Since few read his book now-a-days, some of these may be cited, because their presence goes far to explain why the conglomerate religion which Christianity had become was proof against ideas spurned alike by pagans and ecclesiastics. Visiting the place for classical study, and “not to notice the fopperies and ridiculous ceremonies of the present Religion,” Middleton soon found himself “still in old Heathen Rome,” with its rituals of primitive Paganism, as if handed down by an uninterrupted succession from the priests of old to the priests of new Rome. The “smoak of the incense” in the churches transports him to the temple of the Paphian Venus described by Virgil (Æneid, I, 420); the surpliced boy waiting on the priest with the thurible reminds him of sculptures on ancient bas-reliefs representing heathen sacrifice, with a white-clad attendant on a priest holding a little chest or box in his hand. The use of holy water suggests numerous parallels. At the entrance to Pagan temples stood vases of holy liquid, a mixture of salt and common water; and, on bas-reliefs, the aspergillum or brush for the ceremony of sprinkling is carved. In the annual festival of the benediction of horses, when the animals were sent to the convent of St. Anthony to be sprinkled (Middleton had his own horses thus blest “for about eighteenpence of our money”) there is the survival of a ceremony in the Circensian games. In the lamps and wax candles before the shrines of the Madonna and Saints he is reminded of a passage in Herodotus as to the use of lights in the Egyptian temples, while we know that lamps to the Madonna took the place of those before the images of the Lares, whose chapels stood at the corners of the streets. The Synod of Elviri (305 A. D.) forbade the lighting of wax candles during the day in cemeteries lest the spirits of the saints should be disquieted, but the custom was too deeply rooted to be abolished. As for votive offerings, Middleton truly says that “no one custom of antiquity is so frequently mentioned by all their writers” ... “but the most common of all offerings were pictures representing the history of the miraculous cure or deliverance vouchsafed upon the vow of the donor.” Of which offerings, the blessed Virgin is so sure always to carry off the greatest share, that it may be truly said of her what Juvenal says of the Goddess Isis, whose religion was at that time in the greatest vogue in Rome, that the “painters got their livelihood out of her.” Middleton tells the story from Cicero which, not without covert sympathy, Montaigne quotes in his Essay on Prognostications. Diagoras, surnamed the Atheist, being found one day in a temple, was thus addressed by a friend: “You, who think the gods take no care of human affairs, do not you see here by this number of pictures how many people, for the sake of their vows, have been saved in storms at sea, and got safe into harbour?” “Yes,” answered Diagoras, “I see how it is; for those are never painted who happen to be drowned.” There is nothing new under the sun. Horace (Odes, Bk. I, v) tells of the shipwrecked sailor who hung up his clothes as a thank-offering in the temple of the sea-god who had preserved him; Polydorus Vergilius, who lived in the early part of the sixteenth century, that is, some 1,500 years after Horace, describes the classic custom of ex voto offerings at length, while Pennant the antiquary, describing the well of Saint Winifred in Flintshire in the last century, tells of the votive offerings, in the shape of crutches and other objects, which were hung about it. To this day the store is receiving additions. The sick crowd thither as of old they crowded into the temples of Æsculapius and Serapis; mothers bring their sick children as in Imperial Rome they took them to the Temple of Romulus and Remus. A draught of water from the basin near the bath, or a plunge in the bath itself, is followed by prayers at the altar of the chapel which incloses the well. When the saint’s feast-day is held, the afflicted gather to kiss the reliquary that holds her bones. Perhaps one of the most pathetic sights in Catholic churches, especially in out-of-the-way villages, is the altars on which are hung votive offerings, rude daubs depicting the disease or danger from which the worshipper has been delivered.

As to the images, tricked out in curious robes and gewgaws, Middleton “could not help recollecting the picture which old Homer draws of Q. Hecuba of Troy, prostrating herself before the miraculous Image of Pallas,” while his wonder at the Loretto image of the “Queen of Heaven” with “a face as black as a Negus” reminds him of the reference in Baruch to the idols black with the “perpetual smoak of lamps and incense.” In his Hibbert Lectures Professor Rhys refers to churches dedicated to Notre Dame in virtue of legends of discovery of images of the Virgin on the spot. These were usually of wood, which had turned black in the soil. Such a black “Madonna” was found near Grenoble, in the commune of La Zouche. Then, in the titles of the new deities, Middleton correctly sees those of the old. The Queen of Heaven reminds him of Astarte or Mylitta; the Divine Mother of the Magna Mater, the “great mother” of Oriental cults. In other attributes of Mary, lineal descendant of Isis, there survive those of Venus, Lucina, Cybele, or Maria. He gives amusing examples of myths and misreadings through which certain “saints” have a place in the Roman Calendar. He apparently knew nothing of the strange confusion by which Buddha appears therein under the title of Saint Josaphat; but he tells how, by misinterpretation of a boundary stone, Proefectus Viarum, an overseer of highways, became S. Viar; how S. Veronica secured canonization through a blunder over the words Vera Icon: still more droll, how hagiology includes both a mountain and a mantle!

The marks of hands or feet on rocks, said to be made by the apparition of some saint or angel, call to mind “the impression of Hercules’ feet on a stone in Scythia”; the picture of the Virgin, which came from heaven, suggests the descent of Numa’s shield “from the clouds”; that of the weeping Madonna the statue of Apollo, which Livy says wept for three successive days and nights; while the periodical miracle of the liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius is obviously paralleled in the incidents named by Horace on his journey to Brundusium, when the priests of the temple at Gnatia sought to persuade him that “the frankincense used to dissolve and melt miraculously without the help of fire” (Sat., v, 97-100).

Middleton, and those of his school, thought that they were near primary formations when they struck on these suggestive classic or pagan parallels to Christian belief and custom. But in truth they had probed a comparatively recent layer; since, far beneath, lay the unsuspected prehistoric deposits of barbaric ideas which are coincident with, and composed of, man’s earliest speculations about himself and his surroundings. When, however, we borrow an illustration from geology, it must be remembered that our divisions, like those into which the strata of the globe are separated, are artificial. There is no real detachment. The difference between former and present methods of research is that nowadays we have gone further down for discovery of the common materials of which barbaric, pagan, and civilized ideas are compounded. They arise in the comparison which exists in the savage mind between the living and the non-living, and in the attribution of like qualities to things superficially resembling one another; hence belief in their efficacy, which takes active form in what may be generally termed magic. For example, the rite of baptism is explained when we connect it with barbaric lustrations and water-worship generally; as also that of the Eucharist by reference to sacrificial feasts in honour of the gods; feasts at which they were held to be both the eaters and the eaten. Middleton, himself a clergyman, shows perplexity when watching the elevation of the host at mass. He lacked that knowledge of the origin of sacramental rites which study of barbaric customs has since supplied. In Mr. Frazer’s Golden Bough, the “central idea” of which is “the conception of the slain god,” he shows at what an early stage in his speculations man formulated the conception of deity incarnated in himself, or in plant or animal, and as afterward slain, both the incarnation and the death being for the benefit of mankind. The god is his own sacrifice, and in perhaps the most striking form, as insisted upon by Mr. Frazer, he is, as corn-spirit, killed in the person of his representative; the passage in this mode of incarnation to the custom of eating bread sacramentally being obvious. The fundamental idea of this sacramental act, as the mass of examples collected by Mr. Frazer further goes to show, is that by eating a thing its physical and mental qualities are acquired. So the barbaric mind reasons, and extends the notion to all beings. To quote Mr. Frazer: “By eating the body of the god he shares in the god’s attributes and powers. And when the god is a corn-god, the corn is his proper body; when he is a vine-god, the juice of the grape is his blood; and so by eating the bread and drinking the wine the worshipper partakes of the real body and blood of his god. Thus the drinking of wine in the rites of a vine-god like Dionysus is not an act of revelry; it is a solemn sacrament.” It is, perhaps, needless to point out that the same explanation applies to the rites attaching to Demeter, or to add what further parallels are suggested in the belief that Dionysus was slain, rose again, and descended into Hades to bring up his mother Semele from the dead. This, however, by the way. What has to be emphasized is, that in the quotation just given we have transubstantiation clearly anticipated as the barbaric idea of eating the god. In proof of the underlying continuity of that idea two witnesses—Catholic and Protestant—may be cited.

The Church of Rome, and in this the Greek Church is at one therewith, thus defines the term transubstantiation in the Canon of the Council of Trent:

“If any one shall say that in the most holy sacrament of the Eucharist there remains the substance of bread and wine together with the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, and shall deny that wonderful and singular conversion of the whole substance of the bread into the body, and of the whole substance of the wine into the blood, the species of bread and wine alone remaining—which conversion the Catholic Church most fittingly calls Transubstantiation—let him be anathema.”

The Church of England, through the medium of a letter to a well-known newspaper, the British Weekly (29th August, 1895), supplies the following illustration of the position of its “High” section, and this, it is interesting to note, from the church of which Mr. Gladstone’s son is rector, and in which the distinguished statesman himself often reads the lessons:

“A few Sundays ago—8 o’clock celebration of Holy Communion. Rector, officiating minister (Hawarden Church).

“When the point was reached for the communicants to partake, cards containing a hymn to be sung after Communion were distributed among the congregation. This hymn opened with the following couplet:—

And my attention was arrested by an asterisk referring to a footnote. The word ‘in,’ in the second line, was printed in italics, and the note intimated that those who had not communicated should sing ‘with’ instead of ‘in,’ i. e. those who had taken the consecrated elements to sing ‘Thou art in us now,’ and those who had not, to sing ‘Thou art with us now.’”

Whether, therefore, the cult be barbaric or civilized, we find theory and practice identical. The god is eaten so that the communicant thereby becomes a “partaker of the divine nature.”

In the gestures denoting sacerdotal benediction we have probably an old form of averting the evil eye; in the act of breathing on a bishop at the service of consecration there was the survival of belief in transference of spiritual qualities, the soul being, as language evidences, well-nigh universally identified with breath. The modern spiritualist who describes apparitions as having the “consistency of cigar-smoke,” is one with the Congo negroes who leave the house of the dead unswept for a time lest the dust should injure the delicate substance of the ghost. The inhaling of the last breath of the dying Roman by his nearest kinsman has parallel in the breathing of the risen Jesus on his disciples that they might receive the Holy Ghost (John xx, 22). In the offering of prayers for the dead; in the canonization and intercession of saints; in the prayers and offerings at the shrines of the Virgin and saints, and at the graves of martyrs; there are the manifold forms of that great cult of the departed which is found throughout the world. To this may be linked the belief in angels, whether good or bad, or guardian, because the element common to the whole is animistic, the peopling of the heavens above, as well as the earth beneath, with an innumerable company of spiritual beings influencing the destinies of men. Well might Jews and Moslems reproach the Christians, as they did down to the eighth century, with having filled the world with more gods than they had overthrown in the pagan temples; while we have Erasmus, in his Encomium Moriae, when reciting the names and functions of saints, adding that “as many things as we wish, so many gods have we made.” Closely related to this group of beliefs is the adoration of relics, the vitality of which has springs too deep in human nature to be wholly abolished, whether we carry about us a lock from the hair of some dead loved one, or read of the fragments of saints or martyrs which lie beneath every Catholic altar, or of the skull-bones of his ancestor which the savage carries about with him as a charm. Then there is the long list of church festivals, the reference of which to pagan prototypes is but one step toward their ultimate explanation in nature-worship; there are the processions which are the successors of Corybantic frenzies, and, more remotely, of savage dances and other forms of excitation; there is that now somewhat casual belief in the Second Advent which is a member of the widespread group wherein human hopes fix eyes on the return of long-sleeping heroes; of Arthur and Olger Dansk, of Väinämöinen and Quetzalcoatl, of Charlemagne and Barbarossa, of the lost Marko of Servia and the lost King Sebastian. We speak of it as “casual,” because among the two hundred and eighty-odd sects scheduled in Whitaker’s Almanack the curious in such inquiries will note only three distinctive bodies of Adventists.

All changes in popular belief have been, and, practically, remain superficial; the old animism pervades the higher creeds. In our own island, for example, the Celtic and pre-Celtic paganism remained unleavened by the old Roman religion. The legions took back to Rome the gods which they brought with them. The names of Mithra and Serapis occur on numerous tablets, the worship of the one—that “Sol invictus” whose birthday at the winter solstice became (see p. 42) the anniversary of the birth of Christ—had ranged as far west as South Wales and Northumberland; while the foundations of a temple to the other have been unearthed at York. The chief Celtic gods, in virtue of common attributes as elemental nature-deities, were identified with certain dii majores of the Roman pantheon, and the deae matres equated with the gracious or malevolent spirits of the indigenous faith. But the old names were not displaced. Neither did the earlier Christian missionaries effect any organic change in popular beliefs, while, during the submergence of Christianity under waves of barbaric invasion, there were infused into the old religion kindred elements from oversea which gave it yet more vigorous life. The eagle penetration of Gibbon detected this persistent element at work when he described the sequel to the futile efforts of Theodosius to extirpate paganism. The ancestor worship which lay at the core of much of it took shape among the Christianized pagans in the worship of martyrs and in the scramble after their relics. The bodies of prophets and apostles were discovered by the strangest coincidences, and transported to the churches by the Tiber and the Bosphorus, and although the supply of these more important remains was soon exhausted, there was no limit to the production of relics of their person or belongings, as of filings from the chains of S. Peter, and from the gridiron of S. Lawrence. The catacombs yielded any number of the bodies of martyrs, and Rome became a huge manufactory to meet the demands for wonder-working relics from every part of Christendom. A sceptical feeling might be aroused at the claims of a dozen abbeys to possession of the veritable crown of thorns wherewith the majesty of the suffering Christ was mocked, but it was silenced before the numerous fragments of his cross, since ingenuity has computed that this must have contained at least one hundred and eighty million cubic millemetres, whereas the total cubic volume of all the known relics is but five millions. “It must,” remarks Gibbon (Decline and Fall, end of chap. xxviii), “ingeniously be confessed that the ministers of the Catholic Church imitated the profane model which they were impotent to destroy. The most respectable bishops had persuaded themselves that the ignorant rustics would more cheerfully renounce the superstitions of paganism if they found some resemblance, some compensation, in the bosom of Christianity. The religion of Constantine achieved, in less than a century, the final conquest of the Roman Empire, but the victors themselves were insensibly subdued by the arts of their vanquished rivals.”

Enough has been said on a topic to which prominence has been given because it brings into fuller relief the fact that in a religion for which its apologists claim divine origin and guidance “to the end of the world” we have the same intrusion of the rites and customs of lower cults which marks other advanced faiths. Hence, science and superstition being deadly foes, the explanation of that hostile attitude toward inquiry and that dread of its results which marked Christianity down to modern times. While the intrusion of corrupting elements presents difficulties which the theory of the supernatural history of Christianity alone creates, it accords with all that might be predicted of a religion whose success was due to its early escape from the narrow confines of Judaism; and to its fortunate contact with the enterprising peoples to whom the civilization of Europe and the New World is due.

2. From Augustine to Lord Bacon.

A. D. 400-A. D. 1600.

The foregoing slight outline of the causes which operated for centuries against the freedom of the human mind will render it needless to follow the history of the development of Christian polity and dogma—the temporalizing of the one, and the crystallizing of the other. Yet one prominent actor in that history demands a brief notice, because of the influence which his teaching wielded from the fifth to the fifteenth centuries. The annals of the churches in Africa, along whose northern shores Christianity had spread early and rapidly, yield notable names, but none so distinguished as that of Augustine, Bishop of Hippo from 395 to 430 A. D. This greatest of the Fathers of the Church sought, as has been remarked already, to bring the system of Aristotle, the greatest of ancient naturalists, into line with Christian theology. His range of study was well-nigh as wide as that of the famous Stagirite, but we are here concerned only with so much of it as bears on an attempt to graft the development theory on the dogma of special creation. Augustine, accepting the Old Testament cosmogony as a revelation, believed that the world was created out of nothing, but, this initial paradox accepted, he argued that God had endowed matter with certain powers of self-development which left free the operation of natural causes in the production of plants and animals. With this, however, as already noted, he held, with preceding philosophers and with his fellow-theologians, the doctrine of spontaneous generation. It explained to him the existence of apparently purposeless creatures, as flies, frogs, mice, etc. “Certain very small animals,” he says, “may not have been created on the fifth and sixth days, but may have originated later from putrefying matter.” Not till the seventeenth century did the experiments of Redi refute a doctrine which had held part of the biological field for above two thousand years, and which still has adherents. Of course Augustine, as do modern Catholic biologists, excepted man from the operation of secondary causes, and held that his soul was created by the direct intervention of the Creator. Augustine’s concessions are, therefore, more seeming than real, and, moreover, we find him denying the existence of the antipodes on the ground that Scripture is silent about them, and also, that if God had placed any races there, they could not see Christ descending at his second coming. To Augustine the air was full of devils who are the cause of “all diseases of Christians.” In other words, he was not ahead of the illusions of his age. Then, too, he shows that allegorizing spirit which was manifest in Greece a thousand years earlier; the spirit which reads hidden meanings in Homer, in Horace, and in Omar Khayyám; and which, in the hands of present-day Gnostics, mostly fantastic or illiterate cabalists, converts the plain narratives of Old and New Testaments into vehicles of mysterious types and esoteric symbols. It is in such allegorical vein that Augustine explains the outside and inside pitching of the ark as typifying the safety of the Church from the leaking-in of heresy; while the ghastly application of symbolical exegetics is seen in his citation of the words of Jesus, “Compel them to come in,” as a Divine warrant for the slaughter of heretics.

We shall meet with no other such commanding figure in Church history till nine hundred years have passed, when Thomas Aquinas, the “Angel of the Schools,” appears, but although that period marks no advance of the Church from her central position, it witnessed changes in her fortune through the intrusion of a strange people into her territory and sanctuaries.

Perhaps there are few events in history more impressive than the conversion of the wild and ignorant Arab tribes of the seventh century from stone-worship to monotheism. The series of conquests which followed had also, as an indirect and unforeseen result, effects of vast importance in the revival and spread of Greek culture from the Tigris to the Guadalquivir. It is not easy, neither does the inquiry fall within our present purpose, to discover the special impulses which led Mohammed, the leader of the movement, to preach a new faith whose one creed, stripped of all subtleties, was the unity of God. Large numbers of Jews and Christians had settled in Arabia long before his time, and he had become acquainted with the narrowness of the one, and with the causes of the wranglings of the other, riven, as these last-named were, into sects quarrelling over the nature of the Person of Christ. These, and the fetichism of his fellow-countrymen, may, perhaps, have impelled him to start a crusade the mandate for which he, in fanatic impulse, believed came from heaven. The result is well known. The hitherto untamed nomads became the eager instruments of the prophet. Under his leadership, and that of the able Khalifs who succeeded him, the flag of Islam was carried from East to West, till within one hundred years of the flight of Mohammed from Mecca (622 A. D.) it waved from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic. With the conquest of Syria there was achieved one of the greatest and most momentous of triumphs in the capture of Jerusalem, and the seizure of sites sanctified to Christians by association with the crucifixion, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. Only a few years before (614 A. D.), the holy city had been taken by Chosroes; the sacred buildings raised over the venerated tomb had been burned, and the cross—a spurious relic—carried off by the Persian king. These places have been, as it were, the cockpit of Christendom from the time of the siege of Jerusalem under Titus to that of the Crimean war, when blood was spilt like water in a conflict stirred by squabbles between Latin and Greek Christians over possession of the key of the Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem. In the Church of the Holy Sepulchre these sectaries are still kept from flying at one another’s throats by the muskets of Mohammedan soldiers.

The Arabian conquest of Persia followed that of Syria. The turn of Egypt soon came, the city of Alexandria being taken in 640, seven years after the prophets’ death. Since the loss of Greek freedom, and the decay of intellectual life at Athens, that renowned place had become, notably under the Ptolemies, the chief home of science and philosophy. Through the propagandism of Christianity among the Hellenized Jews, of whom, as of Greeks, large numbers had settled there, it was also the birthplace of dogmatic theology, and, therefore, the fountain whence welled the controversies whose logomachies were the gossip of the streets of Constantinople and the cause of bloody persecution. After a few years’ pause, the Saracens (Ar., sharkiin, orientals) resumed their conquering march. They captured and burnt Carthage, another famous centre of Christianity, and then crossed over to Spain. In “the fair and fertile isle of Andalusia” the Gothic king Roderick was aroused from his luxurious life in Toledo to lead his army in gallant, but vain, attempt to repel the infidel invaders. So rapid was their advance that in six years they had subdued the whole of Spain, the north and northwestern portions excepted, for the hardy Basque mountaineers maintained their independence against the Arabs, as they had maintained it against Celt, Roman, and Goth. Only before the walls of Tours did the invaders meet with a rebuff from Charles Martel and his Franks, which arrested their advance in Western Europe; as, in a more momentous defeat before Constantinople by Leo III. in 718, fourteen years earlier, the torrent of Mohammedan conquest was first checked.

Enough, however, of Saracenic wars and their destructive work, which, if tradition lies not, included the burning of the remnants of the vast Alexandrian library. “A revealed dogma is always opposed to the free research that may contradict it,” and Islam has ever been a worse foe to science than Christianity. Its association, as a religion, with the renaissance of knowledge, was as wholly accidental as the story of it is interesting.

Under the Sassanian kings, Persia had become an active centre of intellectual life, reaching the climax of its Augustan age in the reign of Chosroes. Jew, Greek, and Christian alike had welcome at his court, and translations of the writings of the Indian sages completed the eclecticism of that enlightened monarch. Then came the ruthless Arab, and philosophy and science were eclipsed. But with the advent of the Abbaside Khalifs, who number the famous Haroun al-Raschid among them, there came revival of the widest toleration, and consequent return of intellectual activity. Baghdad arose as the seat of empire. Situated on the high road of Oriental commerce, along which travelled foreign ideas and foreign culture, that city became also the Oxford of her time. Arabic was the language of the conquerors, and into that poetic, but unphilosophic, tongue, Greek philosophy and science were rendered. Under the rule of those Khalifs, says Renan, “nontolerant, nonreluctant persecutors,” free thought developed; the Motecallenim or “disputants” held debates, where all religions were examined in the light of reason. Aristotle, Euclid, Galen, and Ptolemy were text-books in the colleges, the repute of whose teachers brought to Baghdad and Naishapur (dear to lovers of “old” Khayyám) students westward from Spain, and eastward from Transoxiana.

“Arab” philosophy, therefore, is only a name. It has been well described as “a system of Greek thought expressed in a Semitic tongue; and modified by Oriental influences called into existence by the patronage of the more liberal princes, and kept alive by the zeal of a small band of thinkers.” In the main, it began and ended with the study of Aristotle, commentaries on whom became the chief work of scholars, at whose head stands the great name of Averroes. Through these—a handful of Jews and Moslems—knowledge of Greek science, of astronomy, algebra, chemistry, and medicine, was carried into Western Europe. By the latter half of the tenth century, one hundred and fifty years after the translation of Aristotle into Arabic, Spain had become no mean rival of Baghdad and Cairo. Schools were founded; colleges to which the Girton girls of the period could repair to learn mathematics and history were set up by lady principals; manufactures and agriculture were encouraged; and lovely and stately palaces and mosques beautified Seville, Cordova, Toledo, and Granada, which last-named city the far-famed Alhâmra or Red Fortress still overlooks. Seven hundred years before there was a public lamp in London, and when Paris was a town of swampy roadways bordered by windowless dwellings, Cordova had miles of well-lighted, well-paved streets; and the constant use of the bath by the “infidel” contrasted with the saintly filth and rags which were the pride of flesh-mortifying devotees and the outward and odorous signs of their religion. The pages of our dictionaries evidence in familiar mathematical and chemical terms; in the names of the principal “fixed” stars; and in the words “admiral” and “chemise”; the influence of the “Arab” in science, war, and dress.

It forms no part of our story to tell how feuds between rival dynasties and rival sects of Islam, becoming more acute as time went on, enabled Christianity to recover lost ground, and, in the capture of Granada in 1492, to put an end to Moorish rule in Spain. Before that event, a knowledge of Greek philosophy had been diffused through Christendom by the translation of the works of Avicenna, Averroes, and other scholars, into Latin. That was about the middle of the twelfth century, when Aristotle, who had been translated into Arabic some three centuries earlier, also appeared in Latin dress. The detachment of any branch of knowledge from theology being a thing undreamed of, the deep reverence in which the Stagirite was held by his Arabian commentators ultimately led to his becoming “suspect” by the Christians, since that which approved itself to the followers of Mohammed must, ipso facto, be condemned by the followers of Jesus. Hence came reaction, and recourse to the Scriptures as sole guide to secular as well as sacred knowledge; recourse to a method which, as Hallam says, “had not untied a single knot, or added one unequivocal truth to the domain of philosophy.”

So far as the scanty records tell (for we may never know how much was suppressed, or fell into oblivion, under ecclesiastical frowns and threats; nor how many thinkers toiled in secret and in dread), none seemed possessed either of courage or desire to supplement the revealed word by examination into things themselves. To supplant it was not dreamed of. But, in the middle of the thirteenth century, one notable exception occurred in the person of Roger Bacon, sometimes called Friar Bacon in virtue of his belonging to the order of Franciscans. He was born in 1214 at Ilchester, in Somerset, whence he afterward removed to Oxford, and thence to Paris. That this remarkable and many-sided man, classic and Arabic scholar, mathematician, and natural philosopher, has not a more recognised place in the annals of science is strange, although it is, perhaps, partly explained by the fact that his writings were not reissued for more than three centuries after his death. He has been credited with a number of inventions, his title to which is however doubtful, although the doubt in nowise impairs the greatness of his name. He shared the current belief in alchemy, but made a number of experiments in chemistry pointing to his knowledge of the properties of the various gases, and of the components of gunpowder. If he did not invent spectacles, or the microscope and telescope, he was skilled in optics, and knew the principles on which those instruments are made, as the following extract from his Opus Majus shows: “We can place transparent bodies in such a form and position between our eyes and other objects that the rays shall be refracted and bent toward any place we please, so that we shall see the object near at hand, or at a distance, under any angle we please; and thus from an incredible distance we may read the smallest letters, and may number the smallest particles of sand, by reason of the greatness of the angle under which they appear.” He knew the “wisdom of the ancients” in the cataloguing of the stars, and suggested a reform of the calendar—following the then unknown poet-astronomer of Naishapur. But he believed in astrology, that bastard science which from remotest times had ruled the life of man, and which has no small number of votaries among ourselves to this day. Roger Bacon’s abiding title to fame rests, however, on his insistence on the necessity of experiment, and his enforcement of this precept by practice. As a mathematician he laid stress on the application of this “first of all the sciences”; indeed, as “preceding all others, and as disposing us to them.” His experiments, both from their nature and the seclusion in which they were made, laid him open to the charge of black magic, in other words, of being in league with the devil. This, in the hands of a theology thus “possessed,” became an instrument of awful torture to mankind. Roger Bacon’s denial of magic only aggravated his crime, since in ecclesiastical ears, this was tantamount to a denial of the activity, nay more, of the very existence of Satan. So, despite certain encouragement in his scientific work from an old friend who afterward became Pope Clement IV., for whose information he wrote his Opus Majus, he was, on the death of that potentate, thrown into prison, whence tradition says he emerged, after ten years, only to die.

The theories of mediæval schoolmen—a monotonous record of unprogressive ideas—need not be scheduled here, the more so as we approach the period of discoveries momentous in their ultimate effect upon opinions which now possess only the value attaching to the history of discredited conceptions of the universe. Commerce, more than scientific curiosity, gave the impetus to the discovery that the earth is a globe. Trade with the East was divided between Genoa and Venice. These cities were rivals, and the Genoese, alarmed at the growing success of the Venetians, resolved to try to reach India from the west. Their schemes were justified by reports of land indications brought by seamen who had passed through the “Pillars of Hercules” to the Atlantic. The sequel is well known. Columbus, after clerical opposition, and rebuffs from other states, “offering,” as Mr. Payne says, in his excellent History of America, “though he knew it not, the New World in exchange for three ships and provisions for twelve months,” finally secured the support of the Spanish king, and sailed from Cadiz on the 3d of August, 1492. On 11th of October he sighted the fringes of the New World, and believing that he had sailed from Spain to India, gave the name West Indies to the island-group. America itself had been discovered by roving Norsemen five hundred years before, but the fact was buried in Icelandic tradition. Following Columbus, Vasco de Gama, a Portuguese, set sail in 1497, and taking a southerly course, doubled the Cape of Good Hope. Twenty-two years later, Ferdinand Magellan started on a voyage more famous than that of Columbus, since his ambition was to sail round the world, and thus complete the chain of proof against the theory of its flatness. For “though the Church hath evermore from Holy Writ affirmed that the earth should be a widespread plain bordered by the waters, yet he comforted himself when he considered that in the eclipses of the moon the shadow cast of the earth is round; and as is the shadow, such, in like manner, is the substance.” Doubling Cape Horn through the straits that bear his name, Magellan entered the vast ocean whose calm surface caused him to call it the Pacific, and after terrible sufferings, he reached the Ladrone Islands where, either at the hands of a mutinous crew, or of savages, he was killed. His chief lieutenant, Sebastian d’Eleano, continued the voyage, and after rounding the Cape of Good Hope, brought the San Vittoria—name of happy omen—to anchor at St. Lucar, near Seville, on 7th of September, 1522. Brought, too, the story of a circumnavigated globe, and of new groups of stars never seen under northern skies.

The scene shifts, for the time being, from the earth to the heavens. The Church had barely recovered from the blow struck at her authority on matters of secular knowledge, when another dealt, and that by an ecclesiastic, Copernicus, Canon of Frauenburg, in Prussia. But before pursuing this, some reference to the revolt against the Church of Rome, which is the great event of the sixteenth century, is necessary, if only to inquire whether the movement known as the Reformation justified its name as freeing the intellect from theological thraldom. Far-reaching as were the areas which it covered and the effects which it wrought, its quarrel with the Church of Rome was not because of that Church’s attitude toward freedom of thought. On the Continent it was a protest of nobler minds against the corruptions fostered by the Papacy; in England, it was personal and political in origin, securing popular support by its anti-sacerdotal character, and its appeal to national irritation against foreign control. But, both here and abroad, it sought mending rather than ending; “not to vary in any jot from the faith Catholic.” It disputed the claim of the Church to be the sole interpreter of Scripture, and contended that such interpretation was the right and duty of the individual. But it would not admit the right of the individual to call in question the authority of the Bible itself: to that book alone must a man go for knowledge of things temporal as of things spiritual. So that the Reformation was but an exchange of fetters, or, as Huxley happily puts it, the scraping of a little rust off the chains which still bound the mind. “Learning perished where Luther reigned,” said Erasmus, and in proof of it we find the Reformer agreeing with his coadjutor, Melanchthon, in permitting no tampering with the written Word. Copernicus notwithstanding, they had no doubt that the earth was fixed and that sun and stars travelled round it, because the Bible said so. Peter Martyr, one of the early Lutheran converts, in his Commentary on Genesis, declared that wrong opinions about the creation as narrated in that book would render valueless all the promises of Christ. Wherein he spoke truly. As for the schoolmen, Luther called them “locusts, caterpillars, frogs, and lice.” Reason he denounced as the “arch whore” and the “devil’s bride,” Aristotle is a “prince of darkness, horrid impostor, public and professed liar, beast, and twice execrable.” Consistently enough, Luther believed vehemently in a personal devil, and in witches; “I would myself burn them,” he says, “even as it is written in the Bible that the priests stoned offenders.” To him demoniacal possession was a fact clear as noonday: idiocy, lunacy, epilepsy and all other mental and nervous disorders were due to it. Hence, a movement whose intent appeared to be the freeing of the human spirit riveted more tightly the bolts that imprisoned it; arresting the physical explanation of mental diseases and that curative treatment of them which is one of the countless services of science to suffering mankind. To Luther, the descent of Christ into hell, which modern research has shown to be a variant of an Orphic legend of the underworld, was a real event, Jesus going thither that he might conquer Satan in a hand-to-hand struggle.

Therefore, freedom of thought, as we define it, had the bitterest foe in Luther, although, in his condemnation of “works,” and his fanatical dogma of man’s “justification by faith alone,” which made him reject the Epistle of James as one “of straw,” and as unworthy of a place in the Canon, he unwittingly drove in the thin end of the rationalist wedge. The Reformers had hedged the canonical books with theories of verbal inspiration which extended even to the punctuation of the sentences. They thus rendered intelligent study of the Bible impossible, and did grievous injury to a collection of writings of vast historical value, and of abiding interest as records of man’s primitive speculations and spiritual development. But Luther’s application of the right of private judgment to the omission or addition of this or that book into a canon which had been closed by a Council of the Church, surrendered the whole position, since there was no telling where the thing might stop.

Copernicus waited full thirty years before he ventured to make his theory public. The Ptolemaic system, which assumed a fixed earth with sun, moon, and stars revolving above it, had held the field for about fourteen hundred years. It accorded with Scripture; it was adopted by the Church; and, moreover, it was confirmed by the senses, the correction of which still remains, and will long remain, a condition of intellectual advance. Little wonder is it, then, that Copernicus hesitated to broach a theory thus supported, or that, when published, it was put forth in tentative form as a possible explanation more in accord with the phenomena. A preface, presumably by a friendly hand, commended the Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies to Pope Paul III. It urged that “as in previous times others had been allowed the privilege of feigning what circles they chose in order to explain the phenomena,” Copernicus “had conceived that he might take the liberty of trying whether, on the supposition of the earth’s motion, it was possible to find better explanations than the ancient ones of the revolutions of the celestial orbs.” A copy of the book was placed in the hands of its author only a few hours before his death on 23d of May, 1543.

This “upstart astrologer,” this “fool who wishes to reverse the entire science of astronomy,” for “sacred Scripture tells us that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, and not the earth”—these are Luther’s words—was, therefore, beyond the grip of the Holy Inquisition. But a substitute was forthcoming. Giordano Bruno, a Dominican monk, had added to certain heterodox beliefs the heresy of Copernicanism, which he publicly taught from Oxford to Venice. For these cumulative crimes he was imprisoned and, after two years, condemned to be put to death “as mercifully as possible and without the shedding of his blood,” a Catholic euphemism for burning a man alive. The murder was committed in Rome on 17th of February, 1600.

The year 1543 marks an epoch in biology as in astronomy. As shown in the researches of Galen, an Alexandrian physician of the second century, there had been no difficulty in studying the structure of the lower animals, but, fortified both by tradition and by prejudice, the Church refused to permit dissection of the human body, and in the latter part of the thirteenth century, Boniface VIII. issued a Bull of the major excommunication against offenders. Prohibition, as usual, led to evasion, and Vesalius, Professor of Anatomy in Padua University, resorted to various devices to procure “subjects,” the bodies of criminals being easiest to obtain. The end justified the means, as he was able to correct certain errors of Galen, and to give the quietus to the old legend, based upon the myth of the creation of Eve, that man has one rib less than woman. This was among the discoveries announced in his De Corporis Humani Fabrica, published when he was only twenty-eight years of age. The book fell under the ban of the Church because Vesalius gave no support to the belief in an indestructible bone, nucleus of the resurrection body, in man. The belief had, no doubt, near relation to that of the Jews in the os sacru, and may remind us of Descartes’ fanciful location of the soul in the minute cone-like part of the brain known as the conarium, or pineal gland. On some baseless charge of attempting the dissection of a living subject, the Inquisition haled Vesalius to prison, and would have put him to death “as mercifully as possible,” but for the intervention of King Charles V. of Spain, to whom Vesalius had been physician. Returning in October, 1564, from a pilgrimage taken, presumably, as atonement for his alleged offence, he was shipwrecked on the coast of Zante, and died of exhaustion.

While the heretical character and tendencies of discoveries in astronomy and anatomy awoke active opposition from the Church, the work of men of the type of Gesner, the eminent Swiss naturalist, and of Caesalpino, professor of botany at Padua, passed unquestioned. No dogma was endangered by the classification of plants and animals. But when a couple of generations after the death of Copernicus had passed, the Inquisition found a second victim in the famous Galileo, who was born at Pisa in 1564. After spending some years in mechanical and mathematical pursuits, he began a series of observations in confirmation of the Copernican theory, of the truth of which he had been convinced in early life. With the aid of a rude telescope, made by his own hands, he discovered the satellites of Jupiter; the moon-like phases of Venus and Mars; mountains and valleys in the moon; spots on the sun’s disk; and the countless stars which composed the luminous band known as the Milky Way. Nought occurred to disturb his observations till, in a work on the Solar Spots, he explained the movements of the earth and of the heavenly bodies according to Copernicus. On the appearance of that book the authorities contented themselves with a caution to the author. But action followed his supplemental Dialogue on the Copernican and Ptolemaic Systems. Through that convenient medium which the title implies, Galileo makes the defender of the Copernican theory an easy victor, and for this he was brought before the Inquisition in 1633. After a tedious trial, and threats of “rigorous personal examination,” a euphemism for “torture,” he was, despite the plea—too specious to deceive—that he had merely put the pros and cons as between the rival theories, condemned to abjure all that he had taught. There is a story, probably fictitious, since it was first told in 1789, that when the old man rose from his knees, he muttered his conviction that the earth moves, in the words “e pur si muove.” As a sample of the arguments used by the ecclesiastics when they substituted, as rare exception, the pen for the faggot, the reasoning advanced by one Sizzi against the existence of Jupiter’s moons, may be cited. “There are seven windows given to animals in the domicile of the head, through which the air is admitted to the tabernacle of the body, viz.: two nostrils, two eyes, two ears, and one mouth. So, in the heavens, as in a macrocosm, or great world, there are two favourable stars, Jupiter and Venus; two unpropitious, Mars and Saturn; two luminaries, the sun and moon, and Mercury alone undecided and indifferent. From these and many other phenomena of Nature, which it were tedious to enumerate, we gather that the number of planets is necessarily seven. Moreover, the satellites are invisible to the naked eye, and, therefore, can exercise no influence over the earth, and would, of course, be useless; and, therefore, do not exist.”

In this brief summary of the attitude of the Church toward science, it is not possible, and if it were so, it is not needful, to refer in detail to the contributions of the more speculative philosophers, who, although they made no discoveries, advocated those methods of research and directions of inquiry which made the discoveries possible. Among these a prominent name is that of Lord Bacon, whose system of philosophy, known as the Inductive, proceeds from the collection, examination and comparison of any group of connected facts to the relation of them to some general principle. The universal is thus explained by the particular. But the inductive method was no invention of Bacon’s; wherever observation or testing of a thing preceded speculation about it, as with his greater namesake, there the Baconian system had its application. Lord Bacon, moreover, undervalued Greek science; he argued against the Copernican theory; and either knew nothing of, or ignored, Harvey’s momentous discovery of the circulation of the blood. A more illustrious name than his is that of René Descartes, a man who combined theory with observation; “one who,” in Huxley’s words, “saw that the discoveries of Galileo meant that the remotest parts of the universe were governed by mechanical laws, while those of Harvey meant that the same laws presided over the operations of that portion of the world which is nearest to us, namely, our own bodily frame.” The greatness of this man, a good Catholic, whom the Jesuits charged with Atheism, has no mean tribute in his influence on an equally remarkable man, Benedict Spinoza. Spinoza reduced the Cartesian analysis of phenomena into God, mind and matter to one phenomenon, namely, God, of whom matter and spirit, extension and thought, are but attributes. His short life fell within the longer span of Newton’s, whose strange subjection to the theological influences of his age is seen in this immortal interpreter of the laws of the universe wasting his later years on an attempt to interpret unfulfilled prophecy. These and others, as Locke, Leibnitz, Herder, and Schelling, like the great Hebrew leader, had glimpses of a goodly land which they were not themselves to enter. But, perhaps, in the roll of illustrious men to whom prevision came, none have better claim to everlasting remembrance than Immanuel Kant. For in his Theory of the Heavens, published in 1755, he anticipates that hypothesis of the origin of the present universe which, associated with the succeeding names of Laplace and Herschel, has, under corrections furnished by modern physics, common acceptance among us. Then, as shown in the following extract, Kant foresees the theory of the development of life from formless stuff to the highest types: “It is desirable to examine the great domain of organized beings by means of a methodical comparative anatomy, in order to discover whether we may not find in them something resembling a system, and that too in connection with their mode of generation, so that we may not be compelled to stop short with a mere consideration of forms as they are—which gives no insight into their generation—and need not despair of gaining a full insight into this department of Nature. The agreement of so many kinds of animals in a certain common plan of structure, which seems to be visible not only in their skeletons, but also in the arrangement of the other parts—so that a wonderfully simple typical form, by the shortening or lengthening of some parts, and by the suppression and development of others, might be able to produce an immense variety of species—gives us a ray of hope, though feeble, that here perhaps some results may be obtained, by the application of the principle of the mechanism of Nature; without which, in fact, no science can exist. This analogy of forms (in so far as they seem to have been produced in accordance with a common prototype, notwithstanding their great variety) strengthens the supposition that they have an actual blood-relationship, due to derivation from a common parent; a supposition which is arrived at by observation of the graduated approximation of one class of animals to another, beginning with the one in which the principle of purposiveness seems to be most conspicuous, namely, man, and extending down to the polyps, and from these even down to mosses and lichens, and arriving finally at raw matter, the lowest stage of Nature observable by us. From this raw matter and its forces, the whole apparatus of Nature seems to have been derived according to mechanical laws (such as those which resulted in the production of crystals); yet this apparatus, as seen in organic beings, is so incomprehensible to us, that we feel ourselves compelled to conceive for it a different principle. But it would seem that the archæologist of Nature is at liberty to regard the great Family of creatures (for as a Family we must conceive it, if the above-mentioned continuous and connected relationship has a real foundation) as having sprung from their immediate results of her earliest revolutions, judging from all the laws of their mechanisms known to or conjectured by him.”

In our arrival at the age of these seers, we feel the play of a freer, purer air; a lull in the miasmatic currents that bring intolerance on their wings. The tolerance that approaches is due to no surrender of its main position by dogmatic theology, but to that larger perception of the variety and complexity of life, ignorance of, or wilful blindness to, which is the secret of the survival of rigid opinion. The demonstration of the earth’s roundness; the discovery of America; the growing conception of inter-relation between the lowest and the highest life-forms; the slow but sure acceptance of the Copernican theory; and, above all, the idea of a Cosmos, an unbroken order, to which every advance in knowledge contributes, justified and fostered the free play of the intellect. Foreign as yet, however, to the minds of widest breadth, was the conception of the inclusion of Man himself in the universal order. Duality—Nature overruled by supernature—was the unaltered note; the supernature as part of Nature a thing undreamed of. Nor could it be otherwise while the belief in diabolical agencies still held the field, sending wretched victims to the stake on the evidence of conscientious witnesses, and with the concurrence of humane judges. Animism, the root of all personification, whether of good or evil, had lost none of its essential character, and but little of its vigour.

“I flatter myself,” says Hume, in the opening words of the essay upon Miracles, in his Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, “that I have discovered an argument of a like nature (he is referring to Archbishop Tillotson’s argument on Transubstantiation) which, if just, will, with the wise and learned, be an everlasting check to all kind of superstitious delusion, and, consequently, will be useful as long as the world endures.” Hume certainly did not overrate the force of the blow which he dealt at supernaturalism, one of a series of attacks which, in France and Britain, carried the war into the camp of the enemy, and changed its tactics from aggressive to defensive. But none the less is it true that the “superstitious delusions” against which he planted his logical artillery were killed neither by argument nor by evidence. Delusion and error do not perish by controversial warfare. They perish under the slow and silent operation of changes to which they are unable to adapt themselves. The atmosphere is altered: the organism can neither respond nor respire; therefore, it dies. Thus, save where lurks the ignorance which is its breath of life, has wholly perished belief in witchcraft; thus, too, is slowly perishing belief in miracles, and, with this, belief in the miraculous events, the incarnation, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus, on which the fundamental tenets of Christianity are based, and in which lies so largely the secret of its long hostility to knowledge.