Volume 5 — From the Dublin Review Lecky's History Of Rationalism.[Footnote 12]

It has been said by a very high authority that the study of history is destined to assume a new aspect, from the application to it of a higher order of minds and a more philosophical method of treatment. We are passing out of the age of speciality into the age of generalization. Innumerable observers have collected facts, and innumerable speculators have multiplied theories; and we now seem to have arrived at that period when it becomes the proper function of the thinker to co-ordinate the stores of knowledge which have been set apart for him by others; evolve laws from the multitude of instances; separate the truth from the falsehood of conflicting theories; conjoin effects with their causes, and trace the half-revealed and far-reaching relations between distant and apparently unconnected phenomena. The influence of such a spirit—long felt in the less complicated sciences—is now, even in England, beginning to act on those which are more intricate. For history the time is rapidly passing away during which a great but much erring thinker could say that it was the unfortunate peculiarity of the history of man that, although its separate parts had each been handled with considerable ability, hardly anyone had hitherto attempted to combine them into a whole, or to ascertain the way in which they are connected with each other. On the contrary, he said, a strange idea prevailed among historians that their business was merely to narrate events; so that, according to the notion of history in his day prevalent, any writer who, from indolence of thought or from natural incapacity, was unfit to deal with the highest branches of knowledge, had only to pass some years in reading a certain number of books, and then he was, ipso facto, qualified to be a historian. The time is fast coming when those dreary and monotonous narratives of court intrigues and party cabals will exist only to memorialize an age when the history of kings was substituted for the history of nations, and the consideration of the actions of a few individuals for the exposition of the life of the whole social organization. History is growing to be less of a chronicle and more of a science; her office is no longer thought to be confined to the registration of a few superficially prominent facts; but the discovery, by a scientific induction, of historical laws, and the investigation of causes, is chiefly aimed at; and, as the circumstances which have to be taken into account in such a method of writing history are often dismissed by the older school of writers as almost unworthy of notice, and are, moreover, exceedingly numerous and of almost infinite complication, a far wider and more diversified range of learning and a far greater power of analysis than were formerly either required or expected are supposed in the historian.

It would be idle to imagine that the influence of this more philosophical way of writing history will not extend, or has not extended, to theology. One of its first results has been the unpremeditated vindication by non-Catholic writers of the mediaeval church. And that naturally; for the action of the church in the middle ages was founded on their social state, and it was therefore only when history descended into the bosom of society that she could receive a fuller meed of justice. The Catholic Church has been more philosophically treated, and her primary attribute, that she is a kingdom, more perfectly realized; while a flood of light has been thrown on the historical character of Protestantism, and to that farrago of heresies the conclusions arrived at have been almost uniformly unfavorable. Nor must we suppose that it will affect only the treatment of the external history of Christianity, and leave untouched the history of its dogmas. It has effected, and will hereafter, to a still greater extent effect, that both Catholic doctrines and heretical opinions will be studied not only, as heretofore, in their objective aspect—with respect to their evidence and connections one with another—but more and more in their subjective aspect, as to their influence on the minds of those who hold them. We have, to a great extent, yet to see the results of a profound and extensive study of dogmas in this light; but to study them in this light is undoubtedly the tendency of the present age. We have thus opened to us a field of investigation almost new, and in its nature very different from the beaten tracks in which controversialists have hitherto followed one another. Whatever be the results that may be thus finally arrived at, there cannot be a doubt but that they will be fraught with immense advantage to the cause of truth; and in the course of any researches that may be made into the subjective influence of individual dogmas a number of facts hitherto but little attended to—will be brought forward from the most various sources; so that it will exceedingly behove those who have to attend to the defence of Christianity to make sure that these are truly alleged and represented.

Mr. Lecky, as we have before noticed, endeavors to apply to religious the more advanced method or secular history. He attempts to trace the subjective influence of religious opinions, the manner in which they mutually affected each other, and in which they acted or were reacted on by the other influences of their time. He does not pay much attention to the question of evidence, or to the arguments by which they were supported, except in so far as the use of particular arguments or lines of argument affords him some indication of the temper of the times of which he writes. The very idea of his work—a history of religious opinions—compelled him to attend to this rather than to the alleged evidence of particular doctrines: the latter being the proper province of the theologian as the former is of the historian. But from this necessary one-sidedness of his work Mr. Lecky seems to have been led into a corresponding one-sidedness of mind. Every one will grant that education, disposition, the opinions, and, still more, the tone of those around us make it exceedingly difficult to treat religious questions on the sole ground of evidence; and Catholics are continually urging this against the Protestants who, by their denial of the infallibility of the church, multiply indefinitely the number of questions which have to be thus decided; but Mr. Lecky goes further, and says that there really is not sufficient evidence for us, situated as we are, to come to a reliable conclusion at all. It is natural, therefore, that he should now and then take occasion to sift supposititious evidence and fallacious arguments; and in several places he states with great force the nature and logical value of the reasons given against some or other of the old doctrines now denied by Protestants. An instance of this may be interesting to our readers; the subjoined passage is taken from his second chapter On the Miracles of the Church:

"If we ask, what are the grounds on which the cessation the of miracles is commonly maintained; they may, I suppose, be summed up such as follows:

"Miracles, it is said, are the divine credentials of an inspired messenger announcing doctrines which could not otherwise be established. They prove that he is neither an imposter nor an enthusiast; that his teaching is neither the work of a designing intellect nor of an overheated imagination. From the nature of the case, this could not be proved in any other way. ... Miracles are, therefore, no more improbable than a revelation; for a revelation would be ineffectual without miracles. But, while this consideration destroys the common objection to the gospel miracles, it separates them clearly from those of the Church of Rome. The former were avowedly exceptional; they were designed to introduce a new religion, and to establish a supernatural message. The latter were simply means of edification; they were directed to no object that could not otherwise be attained, and they were represented as taking place in a dispensation that was intended to be not of sight but of faith. Besides this, miracles should be regarded as the most awful and impressive manifestations of divine power. To make them habitual and commonplace would be to degrade if not to destroy their character, which would be still further abased if we admitted those which appear trivial and puerile. The miracles of the New Testament were always characterized by dignity and solemnity; they always conveyed some spiritual lesson, and conferred some actual benefit, besides attesting the character or the worker. The mediaeval miracles, on the contrary, were often trivial, purposeless, and unimpressive; constantly verging on the grotesque, and not unfrequently passing the border.

"Such is, I think, a fair epitome of the common arguments in favor of the cessation of miracles; and they are undoubtedly very plausible and very cogent; but, after all, what do they prove? Not that miracles have ceased, but that, supposing them to have ceased, there is nothing surprising or alarming in the fact. ... This is the full extent to which they can legitimately be carried. As an à priori proof, they are far too weak to withstand the smallest amount of positive testimony. Miracles, it is said, are intended exclusively to accredit an inspired messenger. But, after all, what proof is there of this? It is simply an hypothesis, plausible and consistent it may be, but entirely unsupported by positive testimony. Indeed, we may go further, and say that it is distinctly opposed by your own facts. ... You must admit that the Old Testament relates many miracles which will not fall under your canon. ... But the ecclesiastical miracles, it is said, are often grotesque; and appear primâ facie absurd, and excite an irresistible repugnance. A sufficiently dangerous test in an age when men find it more and more difficult to believe any miracles whatever. A sufficiently dangerous test for those who know the tone that has been long adopted, over an immense part of Europe, toward such narratives as the deluge or the exploits of Samson, the speaking ass or the possessed pigs! Besides this, a great proportion of the ecclesiastical miracles are simply reproductions of those which are recorded in the Bible; and if there are mingled with them some that appear manifest impostures, this may be a very good reason for treating these narratives with a more jealous scrutiny, but is certainly no reason for maintaining that they are all below contempt. The Bible neither asserts nor implies the revocation of supernatural gifts; and if the general promise that these gifts should be conferred may have been intended to apply only to the apostles, it is at least as susceptible of a different interpretation. If these miracles were actually continued, it is surely not difficult to discover the beneficial purpose which they would fulfil. They would stimulate a languid piety; they would prove invaluable auxiliaries to missionaries laboring among barbarous and unreasoning savages, who, from their circumstances and habits of mind, are utterly incapable of forming any just estimate of the evidences of the religion they are called upon to embrace. .... To say that these miracles are false because they are Roman Catholic is to assume the very question at issue."—Vol. i. pp. 173-177.

There is nothing, indeed, that is particularly new in this reasoning; our readers must have frequently seen or heard it urged against Protestants; but it is valuable in Mr. Lecky's history, as showing the view taken of the ordinary Protestant arguments by the higher class of anti-Catholic writers. In a similar manner he disposes of the vulgar arguments against magic and sorcery in a passage which, however, is, we regret to say, too long for quotation (Vol. i. pp. 9-16). He there concludes by saying that the evidence on that subject is so vast and so varied, that it is impossible to disbelieve it without what, on any other subject, we should consider the most extraordinary rashness. The subject was examined in tens of thousands of cases, in almost every country in Europe, by tribunals which included the acutest lawyers and ecclesiastics of the age, on the scene and at the time when the alleged acts had taken place, and with the assistance of innumerable sworn witnesses. As condemnation would be followed by a fearful death, and the accused were, for the most part, miserable beings whose destruction can have been an object to no one, the judges can have had no sinister motives in convicting, and had, on the contrary, the most urgent reasons for exercising their power with the utmost caution and deliberation. The accusations were often of such a character that all must have known the truth or falsehood of what was alleged. The evidence is essentially cumulative. Some cases, it is added, may be explained by monomania, others by imposture, others by chance coincidences, and others by optical delusions; but, when we consider the multitudes of strange statements that were sworn to and registered in legal documents, he confesses that it is very difficult to frame a general rationalistic explanation which will not involve an extreme improbability.

And now, passing to another subject, even Catholics may find in the following passage something worthy of being dwelt on:

"The world is governed by its ideals, and seldom or never has there been one which has exercised a more profound and on the whole a more salutary influence than the mediaeval conception of the Virgin. For the first time woman was elevated to her rightful position, and the sanctity of weakness was recognized as well as the sanctity of sorrow. No longer the slave or toy of man, no longer associated only with ideas of degradation and of sensuality, woman rose, in the person of the Virgin Mother, into a new sphere, and became the object of a reverential homage of which antiquity had had no conception. Love was idealized. The moral charm and beauty of female excellence was for the first time felt. A new type of character was called into being; a new kind of admiration was fostered. Into a harsh and ignorant and benighted age this ideal type infused a type of gentleness and of purity unknown to the proudest civilizations of the past. In the pages of living tenderness which many a monkish writer has left in honor of his celestial patron; in the millions who, in many lands and in many ages, have sought with no barren desire to mould their character into her image; in those holy maidens who, for the love of Mary, have separated themselves from all the glories and pleasures of the world, to seek in fastings and vigils and humble charity to render themselves worthy of her benediction; in the new sense of honor, in the chivalrous respect, in the softening of manners, in the refinement of tastes displayed in all the walks of society; in these and in many other ways we detect its influence. All that was best in Europe clustered around it, and it is the origin of many of the purest elements of our civilization,"—Vol. i. pp. 234-235.

"But," he is pleased to add, "the price, and perhaps the necessary price, of this was the exaltation of the Virgin as an omnipresent deity of infinite power as well as of infinite condescension." Here we have an example of the extraordinary mistakes which are occasionally made by Mr. Lecky. We by no means accuse him of intentional misrepresentation; and in a work of nearly a thousand pages, of which there is scarcely a page without a note, and scarcely a note without six or seven references or quotations, it was impossible but that some inaccuracies should creep in. But he unfortunately often uses a looseness and generality of reference which makes his notes almost useless to anyone desirous of verifying them, and his inaccuracies, some of which bear with them an appearance of great carelessness, are incredibly frequent; while we desiderate in him that fulness of theological knowledge which a writer ought to possess who criticises dogmatic systems so dogmatically as he does. In the present case he actually seems to think that the Blessed Virgin was regarded as an omnipresent deity because it was believed that she could hear prayers anywhere addressed to her. But the teaching of Catholic theologians makes a very great difference between the omnipresence of God and the manner in which the Blessed Virgin and the saints are cognizant of the prayers poured out to them on earth. The Scotists ordinarily teach that God reveals to the saints in glory whatever it is expedient that they should know; the Thomists that they see in the vision of God the prayers and the necessities of men; some have urged the elevation and expansion of even their natural faculties consequent on their entrance into the state of glory; but none have ever supposed them to be present, as God is, to the whole created universe. Mr. Lecky, proceeds to state that before the belief that a finite spirit could hear prayer wherever offered was firmly established, it was believed that at least they hovered round the places where their relics had been deposited, and there, at least, attended to the prayers of their suppliants. In support of this assertion he quotes the following words as from St. Jerome: "Ergo cineres suos amant animae martyrum, et circumvolant eos, semperque praesentes sunt; ne forte si aliquis precator advenerit absentes audire non possint," to which he gives the extraordinary reference, "Epistolae, 1. iii. c. 13." These words indeed occur in St. Jerome; but they occur as the sarcasm of an opponent which St. Jerome gives only in order to refute it. The passage is quoted from Vigilantius in St. Jerome's book against that heretic; but the saint himself calls it a "portent worthy of hell," and argues, in reply to the idea expressed in it, that we cannot set laws to God; that the martyrs follow the Lamb wheresoever he goeth; that the demons wander over the whole world; and are the martyrs to be shut up in a box? As to the Blessed Virgin being regarded as a deity of infinite power and infinite condescension, those Catholic writers who in their devotional writings have spoken the most strongly of her power, have merely said that God will never refuse her anything she asks, and that she will never ask anything inconsistent with his Providence. Mr. Lecky shows in many other places the grossest ignorance of Catholic theology. He quotes, in evidence of the present belief of the Roman Church in demoniacal possession, a ritual which, he says, "is used in the diocese of Tarbes." He need not have gone to an obscure provincial ritual for proof of his assertion; he will hardly find any Catholic theologian who denies it; and the most used, and best known of our modern theological writers has devoted a special chapter to the subject (Perrone, De Deo Creatore, Part I., c. v.) The doctrine of punishment by a material fire "still lingers," he tells us, "in the Roman Catholic manuals for the poor." If by this he meant that it does not remain also among theologians, this is not true; Perrone, one of the most moderate, calls it, "sententia communiter reccpta." (De Deo Creatore, Part III., c. vi. a. 3.)

In the latter part of his chapter "on the Developments of Rationalism," Mr. Lecky has put forward an opinion that the doctrine of the material character of the penal fire is closely connected with the ancient opinion, that the soul is in some sense material. The doctrine of a material fire became, he says, the foundation of all opinion that the soul is of a material nature; and he refers to Tertullian, citing De Anima, c. viii. This assertion is, however, utterly without foundation. It nowhere appears that this was the chief foundation on which this error was rested. Far from making this material conception of punishment the chief ground of his argument, Tertullian, in the passage quoted by Mr. Lecky, does not argue from the materiality of the fire at all. What he does argue from is the corporeal manner in which Abraham, Dives, and Lazarus, are represented in the Gospel; from Abraham's bosom the tongue or Dives, and the finger of Lazarus; and he mentions the "ignis" merely in an incidental manner, and not to argue from its material nature, but to found his reasoning on the general proposition that whatever is susceptible of "fovela" or of "passio" must be corporeal. It is, of course, quite conceivable that a writer, who believed the soul to be of a material nature, might argue from the commonly received opinion of a material fire; but the origin of this opinion was in fact quite different. Some of those who held it even believed the "fire" of hell to be metaphorical. But before the advent of Christianity the minds of the people had been constantly and persistently directed to the sensible and the material; from the ranks of the people Christianity was recruited; and it is not wonderful if somewhat of their former habits of thought clung to those who were converted. It was only by degrees, and after a patient and silent opposition to prevailing habits of thought, that Christianity succeeded in spiritualizing religious conceptions; and the time which elapsed before this had been effected—a period of more than three hundred years—was one of no little confusion in this regard. But no one seems to have been led into the error of supposing the human soul to be material by the notion of a material fire. Some believed this to be the case because they could not see how it could possibly be otherwise; they were unable to rise to the idea of a spirit, properly so called; they could not conceive anything to be real, and not material. That this was the case, in particular, with Tertullian, cannot be doubted, whether we consider his way of speaking in the whole book De Anienâ, in the book Adv. Praxeam, c. xi., and in the De Carne Christi, c. xi., or the pre-eminently sensuous and realistic character of his mind. The Platonic philosophy was another foundation of this opinion respecting the human soul. Some writers who were especially attached to Platonism, as Origen, explained the Platonic doctrine of emanation as meaning that God alone is a pure Spirit, all beings proceeding from God having a trace of materiality greater or less as they are more or less removed from him. They therefore believed all created spirits to be in some sense material; and forms of expression which may seem properly to belong to this opinion remained, as is often the case, long after the opinion itself had vanished. But the source of the whole error was, as is evident, the materialized method of conception of pre-Christian times.

But Mr. Lecky goes much further than this. He tells us that this opinion of the materiality of the human soul—which, if we except at most two or three writers, had certainly died out in the sixth, if not in the fifth century—was the dominant opinion in the middle ages:

"Under the influence of mediaeval habits of thought, every spiritual conception was materialized, and what at an earlier and a later period was generally deemed the language of metaphor, was universally regarded as the language of fact. The realizations of the people were all derived from paintings, sculpture, or ceremonies that appealed to the senses, and all subjects were therefore reduced to palpable images. The angel in the last judgment was constantly represented weighing the souls in a literal balance, while devils clinging to the scales endeavored to disturb the equilibrium. Sometimes the soul was portrayed as a sexless child, rising out of the mouth of the corpse. But, above all, the doctrine of purgatory arrested and enchained the imagination. ... Men who believed in a physical soul readily believed in a physical punishment, men who materialized their view of the punishment, materialized their view of the sufferers.

"We find, however," he proceeds, "some time before the reformation, evident signs of an endeavor on the part of a few writers to rise to a purer conception of the soul." And he goes on to attribute this to "the pantheistic writings that flowed from the school of Averrhoes;" and to ascribe to the Cartesian philosophy "the final downfall of the materialistic hypothesis." Vol. i. pp. 373-378.

It is not too much to say that the whole of this is entirely unsupported by evidence. Anyone who likes to glance over the Coimbricenses De Animâ, the beginning of the second book of the Sentences, the questions De Animâ in the Summa of St. Thomas, the recapitulation of the scholastic theology on that subject in the third volume of Suarez, or the very earliest treatises De Angelis, will see that, far from there being merely "a few writers" who maintained the spirituality of the soul, the notion of immateriality was as well defined in the dominant scholastic philosophy as ever it was by Descartes; whose doctrine that the essence of the soul is thought, was clearly stated by the scholastics in the sense that intellection can only belong to the spiritual, and not to the material and the extended. [Footnote 13] The manner in which the Scholastics explained the punishment of a spiritual being by a material fire affords us a test-question on this subject. Did their "intense realization" of this doctrine lead them to infer the materiality of the soul? Certainly not. On the contrary; because all thoroughly realized the spirituality of the soul, all felt this difficulty regarding the manner of its punishment; but, although there was sufficient diversity among them as to its explanation, not one had recourse to the materialistic hypothesis.

Nor is Mr. Lecky correct in stating that the Arabian philosophy had a spiritualizing influence on philosophy and theology. That philosophy eminently favored the "multiplicatio entium sine necessitate," than which nothing is more unspiritualizing. Some of those who held it expounded the doctrine of matter and form in a manner dangerous to the spirituality of the soul. [Footnote 14] They held the perilous doctrine of emanation, and it would be quite a mistake to suppose that the description of error which they taught had any conformity of spirit with the poetical and sentimental pantheistic theories of the present day.

It is chiefly from the character of the then religious art, which (of course) represented spiritual subjects by material symbols, that Mr. Lecky argues that the middle ages materialized all spiritual conceptions. Thus, in a note to p. 232, vol. 1., he speaks thus:

"The strong desire natural to the middle ages to give a palpable form to the mystery of the Incarnation, was shown curiously in the notion of a conception by the ear. In a hymn, ascribed to St. Thomas à Becket, occur the lines:—

And in an old glass window, now I believe in one of the museums of Paris, the Holy Ghost is represented hovering over the Virgin in the form of a dove, while a ray of light passes from his beak to her ear, along which ray an infant Christ is descending."—Langlois, Peinture sur Verre, p. 157.

And our readers will remember remarks of a like bearing in the quotation last given. Such criticisms are, however, to us merely evidence of so many curious misapprehensions. They merely show that an acquaintance with the history of religious art is but a very inadequate preparation for writing the history of religious dogmas. It is perfectly impossible to represent spiritual things in painting and sculpture otherwise than by material images. Nothing is more common than so to represent them even among Protestants of the present day; nothing was more common in the Old Testament, the very stronghold of the ancient anthropomorphites. We feel no inclination to deny that it is exceedingly difficult for the poor and the ignorant to rise to the conception of a spirit, and almost all mankind represent to themselves even the very Deity under some refined material image; but when such representations occupied a prominent position in public worship, there was an opportunity, and that frequently made use of, of correcting an untruthful imagination.

We have no hesitation in saying that there is far more unconscious anthropomorphism among the Protestant than among the Catholic poor. The doctrines of revelation make known a world akin to, yet not the same as, this; they tell of an order of things itself unseen, but possessing counterparts and shadows here. It is, therefore, not wonderful that there exists a constant tendency to forget that these are but imperfect types and symbols, and to remodel the truths of faith into conformity with what we see around us. To correct this tendency is one of the functions of the science of theology; and the conclusions of theology, infiltrating among the people, keep them from sinking into earthly and anthropomorphic views of religion, these conclusions being communicated by the ordinary resources in the hands of the church, which, certainly, are far more efficacious in the Catholic than in the Protestant system. Indeed, of all the reproaches which have been directed against the theology of the middle ages, that of being in its spirit gross and material is one of the most unfounded and the most unjust. With far greater truth might such a reproach be directed against the Protestant theology of the last three centuries. In the middle ages, theology had a code and a standard of her own; she was the queen of the sciences; she regulated and moulded the ideas of the time. Now, condemned to occupy a subordinate position, she is content to take her ideas from those current in the world, and to use her terms, not in their proper and theological signification, but in the meanings derived from the manner of their present use in physical science and in common life. An example of this occurs in the case of the word person, the loss of the theological meaning of which among Protestants has confused, if not obliterated, the doctrine of the Trinity. In Protestantism, the belief of the people lives chiefly by a tradition propagated through no recognized theological channel; a tradition which, consequently, daily grows more feeble and less definite; which is continually becoming more and more corrupted, more low, and earthly, and anthropomorphous. Look at the common Protestant idea of the happiness of the blessed. The great Catholic doctrine which places the essence of the beatitude of man, not in a prolongation and refinement of the pleasures of this world, not even in the sight of Christ's humanity, but in that vision of God as God which is emphatically called beatific, had almost faded out of sight. They look forward to an earthly millennium, which is little better than a glorification of commerce, material prosperity, and natural virtue, to be succeeded by a heaven of which the joys very much resemble those which some Catholic theologians with Suarez [Footnote 15] assign to infants who die without baptism. But against the reproach of lowness and materialism of conception being ever directed against the theologians of mediaeval times, the doctrine of the beatific vision, which they so fully and so beautifully evolved, stands a perpetual protest. For in what was this coarseness and lowness of thought more likely to appear, than in their conception of the greatest happiness of man? Or who were more likely to teach what is far removed from vulgar and worldly conceptions than men who placed the sum of all happiness in the vision and fruition of divine essence, which, according to them, could be seen by no corporal eye, [Footnote 16] and in which was, they said, that joy which eye had not seen nor ear heard, neither had it entered into the heart of man to conceive? The whole of the scholastic treatise De Deo Uno is but another magnificent protest against such an accusation. The heresy of Gilbert Porretanus [Footnote 17] would never be condemned by the Protestants of the present day; nor has ever the conception of the divine simplicity in perfection been so fully realized as it was by those much-abused theologians. The mediatorship of our blessed Lord is now commonly apprehended by Protestants in a manner which makes a real difference of character between the father and son; but no one who knows anything of the scholastic doctrine of the Trinity and the Incarnation can imagine that these theologians would have tolerated for a moment a notion so frightfully heretical. With respect to psychology, the scholastic age saw the death of Traducianism; and anyone who has attended to the earlier scholastic opinions respecting the manner in which spirits suffer in the penal fire, will have seen that they are of a more "spiritual" tendency than those of most Protestant theologians. [Footnote 18]

Mr. Lecky's criticisms on the opinion that the penal fire is literal and material, and on the supposed general materialism of religious conception in the middle ages, have led us into somewhat of a digression. We have yet, however, one more remark to make. While he concedes that after the time of Averrhoes "a few writers" endeavored to rise to a more spiritual manner of conceiving the truths of faith, he asserts that in the preceding period, before his influence and that of such sects as the Beguins had begun to be felt, the state of things was infinitely worse. From the sixth to the twelfth century materialism in religion was absolutely dominant. That the period preceding the advent of the scholastic epoch was one of great depression of theological science, cannot be doubted; and the amount of what may in a general way be called anthropomorphism current at any period is to a great extent conditioned by the want of general cultivation. But it is very easy to overrate this depression. The episcopal and synodical letters, for instance, which were exchanged concerning the subject of adoptionism do not present to us theological science at, by any means, a low ebb. The same may be said respecting the controversy in the ninth century on the Eucharist; and the controversy on Predestination, if it do not reveal any large amount of historical learning, at least exhibits considerable activity of mind. Such of the writings of authors of that period as the present writer has looked into, show an amount of learning and acuteness which was certainly unexpected by him. That period was necessarily uncritical; but we regard the taste for allegorizing, then as formerly prevalent, to be an indication of something very different from a degraded and material habit of thought. The great teacher of the pre-scholastic age was St. Augustine, one of the most spiritual of the fathers; and the writer who was chosen to supplement him was St. Gregory the Great, who went farther than, and improved on, St. Augustine himself. And, as to the religious art of that period, Mr. Lecky has himself alluded to a peculiarity which, strangely enough, seems to have given him no disquietude as to his general conclusion. In that period, he says:

"We do not find the smallest tendency to represent God the Father. [Footnote 19] Scenes, indeed, in which he acted were frequently depicted, but the First Person of the Trinity was invariably superseded by the Second. Christ, in the dress and with the features appropriated to him in the representations of scenes from the New Testament, and often with the monogram underneath his figure, is represented creating man, condemning Adam and Eve to labor, ... or giving the law to Moses. With the exception of a hand sometimes extended from the cloud, and occasionally encircled with a nimbus, we find in this period no traces in art of the Creator. At first we can easily imagine that a purely spiritual conception of the Deity, and also the hatred that was inspired by the type of Jupiter, would have discouraged artists from attempting such a subject, and Gnosticism, which exercised a very great influence over Christian art, and which emphatically denied the divinity of the God of the Old Testament, tended in the same direction; but it is very unlikely that these reasons can have had any weight between the sixth and the twelfth centuries. For the more those centuries are studied, the more evident it becomes that the universal and irresistible tendency was then to materialize every spiritual conception, to form a palpable image of everything that was reverenced, to reduce all subjects within the domain of the senses."—(Vol. i. pp. 224-5.)

The most celebrated of the theologians of the middle ages is undoubtedly St. Thomas Aquinas. St. Thomas, however, comes in for an extra share of misrepresentation. At p. 72, vol. ii., we read of him, that he was one of the ablest writers of the fourteenth century—he died in the thirteenth— and that "he assures us that diseases and tempests are the direct acts of the devil, that he can transport men at his pleasure through the air," and that "omnes angeli, boni, et mali, ex naturali virtute habent potestatem transmutandi corpora nostra." Now all this is precisely what St. Thomas denies. In the first place, anyone would imagine from the manner in which our author writes, that the great mediaeval theologian imagined that, in the ordinary course of things, diseases and tempests are produced by Satanic agency. St. Thomas never taught any such thing, but over and over again refers both the one and the other to natural causes. [Footnote 20]

Mr. Lecky ought to have written "may be;" but the meaning of the words would have been very different, and their point would have been taken away. Secondly, while St. Thomas teaches, in accordance with Holy Writ, that the demons can exercise power over material things, he also teaches that they cannot directly change the qualities of things, nor produce any preternatural change except local motion: nor that at their pleasure; for it is a principle with him that God does not permit them to do all that which they have per se the power of doing. [Footnote 21]

Thirdly, as to their natural power of transmuting our bodies. We have not been able to find the exact words quoted above, but many similar phrases occur in the objections in the ninth article of the Quaestio de Daemonibus, which, it is sufficient to say, St. Thomas solves by saying:

But on the other hand, St. Augustine [Footnote 22] says "Non solum animam sed nec corpus quidem nulla ratione crediderim daemonom arte vel potestate in brutalia lineamenta poese converti." ... I reply that, as the apostle says, "all things made by God in order," whence, as St. Augustine says, "the excellence of the universe is the excellence of order. ... and therefore Satan always uses natural agents as his instruments in the production of physical effects, and can so produce effects which exceed the efficacy of the natural agents; [Footnote 23] but he cannot cause the form of the human body to be changed into that of an animal, because this would be contrary to the order established by God; and all such conversions are, therefore, as Augustine shows in the place quoted, according to phantastical appearance rather than truth.

At p. 350 of vol. I., Mr. Lecky tells us that the mediaeval writers taught that God would make the contemplation of the sufferings of the lost an essential elements in the happiness of the blessed. He does not know of what he writes. It was taught that the essential element in their happiness —the Essentia Beatitudinis,—is the vision of God; all else accessory and subordinate. In a note to justify his assertion, he adds these words:—"St. Thomas Aquinas says, 'Beati in regno coelesti videbunt poenas damnatorum ut beatitudo illis magis complaceat.'" The quotation is not accurate. After quoting Isaias, ult. 24, be says, "Respondeo dicendum ad primam questionem quòd a beatis nihil subtrahi debet quod ad perfectionem beatitudinis eorum pertineat: unumquodque autem ex comparatione contrarii magis cognoscitur, quia contraria juxta se posita magis elucescunt; et ideò, ut beatitudo sanctorum eis magis complaceat, et de eá uberiores gratias Deo agant, datur eis ut poenam impiorum perfecte intueantur." [Footnote 24] The passage of St. Thomas, as given by Mr. Lecky, is just one of those which may very well bear either of two meanings. It might mean something very repulsive and very cruel. But the unmutilated passage can bear but one interpretation. St. Thomas does not say that they rejoice in the sufferings themselves; but that they are permitted to see them, in order that they may feel yet more intensely how precious is their own beatitude, and thank God the more heartily for their own escape.

In a note to his chapter on the Industrial History of Rationalism, Mr. Lecky charges St. Thomas with what is nothing less than moral obliquity. The Duchess of Brabant, he says, had a scruple of conscience about tolerating the Jews. She therefore consulted St. Thomas; "who replied, among other things that the Jews were doomed to perpetual servitude, and that all their property being derived from usury might lawfully be taken from them." Mr. Lecky is inaccurate both as to the confiscation of their property and as to the perpetual servitude. St. Thomas does not say that all their property was derived from usury, and it would, indeed, have been rather a rash judgment in him to say so. But the Duchess of Brabant had apparently desired to impose new burdens on the Jews, and in writing to St. Thomas had stated that all their property seemed to be derived from usury; to which he replied, that if this were so, they might lawfully be compelled to make restitution. Nor does this by any means imply that all their property was to be taken away from them, as appears from St. Thomas's letter among his opuscula, [Footnote 25] and from his general doctrine respecting restitution. [Footnote 26] With respect to the perpetual servitude what St. Thomas does say is this: "Although according to the laws the Jews be, or were, through their own fault doomed to perpetual servitude, and thus princes could appropriate their possessions as their own, yet this is to be understood leniently, so that the necessaries of life be by no means taken from them. But since we ought, as the apostle declares, to walk honestly in the sight of those who are without, of Jews and Gentiles, and the Church of God, as the laws declare, compulsory service is not to be required of them, which they were not wont to perform in time past." He goes on to say that if ill-gotten goods were taken from the Jews, it would be unlawful for her to retain them, but they would have to be restored to those from whom they had been unjustly taken; and even under these conditions he declines to sanction any proceeding against them, but only "si nihil aliud obsistat." Mr. Lecky also quotes, he says, the Histriones of St. Thomas. What the Histriones of St. Thomas are, we have not, we confess, the most remote idea.

Mr. Lecky professes to give the analyses of various theological beliefs and tones of thought which have prevailed in other times. Of these, however, he has had but little or no practical experience. He consequently puts before us only certain restricted points of view, which have strongly impressed themselves on his mind in the course of his studies and meditations. We are hurried along by his words as by a flood; but while the effects which some particular doctrine possibly might produce if it were held alone are vividly set before us, he totally loses sight of those other doctrines, which were organically connected with it, and modified and regulated its action. To evade one difficulty be falls into another: he concentrates his gaze on a point that he may see more clearly; but, confining it there, loses sight of those harmonies and contrasts, which make up the beauty of the whole. In one direction this defect has had very great influence. "Veritas" is, it is said, "in medio;" the present age has gone wrong all on one side; and Mr. Lecky, who is an advanced disciple of the present age, consequently considers that preceding ages have gone wrong all on the other. He sees that there is a very great difficulty in adequately realizing phases of thought so very different from those which now prevail. And, because of this, he expends his strength on the points of difference, neglecting for their sake things nearer to his apprehension; and the very natural consequence is that he gives us a distorted and exaggerated picture in which the common elements are not sufficiently brought out.

An instance of this occurs in his treatment of the subject of eternal punishment. The general organization and want of order which pervades his work is quite insufficient to account for the pertinacity with which he again and again recurs to the subject. Like the whole anti-Christian party, and very naturally, he detests the doctrine with his whole spirit; and he allows this detestation to color his whole views of the middle ages. He attributes to its influence whatever he finds, or imagines himself to have found, of a hard, cruel, and repulsive character in their theory and practice. He begins by misrepresenting the character of the doctrine itself. He separates it from the conditioning doctrines which were taught along with it, and which regulated and directed its influence. He dwells almost entirely on the terrible side of the then existing Christianity, and almost altogether neglects the operation of the concurring principle of love, the opposite pole of the Christian motives. And then he concludes that to its influence was due the severity of punishments in the middle ages. A universal terrorism was produced. The sense of the divine mercy was destroyed. The sufferings of the lost were at first regarded with horror; but as men became more used to the thing, the horror was changed to indifference, and the indifference to a barbarous delight in the contemplation and even the infliction of pain. It will not require many arguments to show that such a method of treatment is monstrous. Mr. Lecky ought to have noticed that the causes which in the middle ages led to peculiar stress being laid on the doctrine of eternal punishment, were causes external to, and mostly in direct opposition, to the church; and that their tendency was met by a corresponding realization of an opposite pole of Christian feeling.

We cannot better introduce what we have to say on the severity of punishments, and the alleged callousness of disposition in mediaeval times, and, indeed, on Mr. Lecky's whole criticism of the subject of eternal punishment, than by a passage from a most able writer:

"One of the effects of civilization (not to say one of the ingredients in it) is, that the spectacle, and even the very idea, of pain, is kept more and more out of sight of those classes who enjoy in their full the benefits of civilization. The state of perpetual personal conflict, rendered necessary by the circumstances of former times, and from which it was hardly possible for any person, in whatever rank of society, to be exempt, necessarily habituated everyone to the spectacle of harshness, rudeness, and violence, to the struggle of one indomitable will against another, and to the alternate suffering and infliction of pain. These things, consequently, were not as revolting even to the best and most actively benevolent men of former days, as they are to our own; and we find the recorded conduct of those men frequently such as would be universally considered very unfeeling in a person of our own day. They, however, thought less of the infliction of pain, because they thought less of pain altogether. When we read of actions of the Greeks and Romans, or of our own ancestors, denoting callousness to human suffering, we must not think that those who committed these actions were as cruel as we must become before we could do the like. The pain which they inflicted, they were in the habit of voluntarily undergoing from slight causes; it did not appear to them as great an evil as it appears, and as it really is, to us, nor did it in any way degrade their minds." [Footnote 27]

The scale, in fact, according to which degrees of pain were computed, was much less minute then than now. This arose from the imperfect subdivision of labor in society, and the consequently more frequently recurring necessity of personally putting forth powers of endurance and of action; from the continual wars and commotions; from the imperfection of the mechanical appliances which now alleviate suffering; from a sterner and rougher manner of living, necessitated by the undeveloped state of the social arts; from the intimate intermingling of the civil and the military life, arising out of the feudal system; and from a multitude of other causes. To these, however, we must add another of far more potent influence. The inchoate mediaeval nations were only emerging from a state of barbarism; and the associations of that barbarism still tenaciously clung to them in the gloomy superstitions common among northern nations, in cruel ordeals, in internecine warfare, in the whole texture of their social and national traditions. The causes referred to by Mr. Mill were in operation almost as much in the civilization of Greece and Rome as in the middle ages; but this circumstance, which is one on which we need not dilate, increased, and must have increased, to an enormous extent the activity of the tendencies on which be remarks. If indeed, there were two nations exactly alike in every particular, except that the one believed eternal punishment and set small store by pain, so as severely and even barbarously to punish offenses, while the other did neither of these things—we should in that case plausibly assert a direct causal connexion between holding the eternity of future punishment and a hardness and callousness of temper. But we cannot argue in this free and easy manner, where the instances from which we have to make our induction are so multifariously different as are the social condition of the present day and the social condition of mediaeval times. We must not thus arbitrarily single one from out of a multitude of causes. Reasoning from the known principles of human nature, we can say with all confidence that the causes just enumerated must have operated, and operated very powerfully, to produce many and severe punishments, the carelessness for and of suffering, the trials by ordeal and by torture, which existed at the period of which we write. And thus we also see that those representations of the torments of the lost, on which Mr. Lecky expends such a vast amount of rhetoric, must have produced these effects immeasurably less than they would now produce; far more powerful means had to be resorted to then to produce an amount of feeling for which gentler methods now suffice.

Nor has Mr. Lecky fairly represented the doctrine of eternal punishment in itself. To contemplate the infliction of pain naturally produces, he says, a callousness and hardness of feeling. This statement embodies only a half truth, and the reasoning founded on it is in the highest degree fallacious. When the Catholics of ancient times contemplated the anguish of the lost, the habits which they endeavoured to form were habits of horror for the sin which entailed that anguish. There is a great difference between thus actively contemplating suffering, and beholding it merely in a passive manner, and with a view to some other end. The surgical operator, the public executioner, the soldier, who look at it in this latter light, may and do in time become hardened and indifferent. But it is far otherwise in the former case; and there is a great difference between reflecting on the pains of others, and reflecting on the pains which may one day be our own. It is reasonable and natural to suppose, and is found to be in reality the case, that one who contemplates the sufferings of others merely and purely as of others, and habitually avoids referring them in any way to himself, will in the end become hard and cruel. But the very essence of sympathy consists in an unconscious association of ourselves with others in their sufferings. The Calvinist, therefore, the believer in "assurance," who fancies himself to be one of the elect, and from his security safely thinks of all the torments of the reprobate as things in which it would be sinful for him even for a moment to imagine that he can have part, may but grow callous at the thought of hell—may even delight to think of it, and revel in the representation of the anguish there. But such a spirit is altogether opposed to the whole bent of Catholic meditation on that subject. The Catholic, when he meditates on these torments, thinks of them as of others, only that the thought may more vividly come home to himself; he thinks of them as of what he may one day have to endure. And again, the thought of our own personal suffering can make us hard and firm only when we consider it as a thing not to be avoided, but to be braved. It is almost a truism to say, that those men are of all the most soft and timid, who are continually representing to themselves means of escape from vividly imagined dangers. And no Catholic would meditate on these torments that he might nerve himself to brave them, but that he might seek means to avoid them. Catholics, of course, accept, on the ground of God's Word, that awful doctrine of our faith which we are now contemplating. So far as they argue for it from reason at all, they say that this doctrine is the necessary sanction of the moral law; and the force of that argument will be felt by none more strongly than by Catholics themselves, who, from holding the existence both of a future temporal and of a future eternal punishment for sin, are better able to judge what effects would be likely to be produced, if hell were, in the common teaching, resolved into a kind of purgatory. But it must never be forgotten that in the Catholic religion the doctrine of eternal punishment, is taught under certain accompanying conditions, which intimately affect its practical bearing. The first of these conditions is the doctrine of purgatory, of which M. Comte thus speaks:

Il serait facile de reconnaître que l'institution, si amèrement critiquée, du purgatoire fut, au contraire, très-heureusement introduite, dans la pratique sociale du Catholicisme, à titre d'indispensable correctif fondamental de l'eternité des peines futures; oar, autrement, cette éternité, sans laquelle les prescriptions religieuses ne pouvaient être efficaces, eût évidemment déterminé souvent ou un relâchement funeste, ou un effroyable désespoir, égalemeut dangereux l'un et l'autre pour l'individu et pour la société, et entre lesquels le génie Catholique est parvenu à organiser cette ingénieuse issue, qui permettait de graduer immédiatement, avec une scrupuleuse précision, l'application effective du procédé religieux aux convenances de chaque cas réel. [Footnote 28]

In reading this quotation, it must be remembered that M. Comte was not a Catholic, and regarded the Catholic Church as merely a human institution. But, the truths to which that unhappy thinker here draws attention, are so evident, that they hardly require proof. If the sole future punishment of sin be believed to be an eternal punishment, such as is that of hell, it is not difficult to perceive what effects will follow. The timid, and those who are naturally religiously minded, will form a gloomy and austere notion of religion, which will produce some of the effects noted by Mr. Lecky, and in the end, by provoking a necessary reaction, work the destruction of all religion whatever. Those, on the contrary, who are irreligiously inclined, will be still further moved to give up all ideas of religion as impracticable, and will be disgusted by its tone and spirit; while the doctrine of eternal punishment will lose its force by being applied to light and trivial offences.

But we must also notice another condition of the realization of this doctrine; which is provided in the Catholic system; and which, like that of purgatory, has been rather neglected by Protestantism. It has been noticed by some writers that the sacramental system of the church provides an admirable safeguard, and one in an especial manner necessary in the middle ages, against outbreaks of fanaticism. According to the teaching of the Catholic Church, the sacraments are the great means, channels, and conditions of grace. And this produces a system and an order, a definite method of procedure in the spiritual life, which, assisted by the ascetical and mystical theology so minutely cultivated, abundantly directs enthusiasm and represses fanaticism. And we do not doubt that if Protestantism, with its doctrine of private judgment and private direction, had been the form of Christianity existing in the middle ages, Christianity would have sunk into a condition of which paganism and the Gnostic heresies alone afford a parallel. But this sacramental system has also another, though a co-ordinate effect. Grace is insensible and unfelt, to confound it with the natural religious feelings and emotions is to make religion no longer a discipline and a duty, but a sentiment. And because it is unfelt, it is necessary that it should ordinarily be given through some external and sensible rite, in order to ward off undue and pernicious doubt and anxiety. Now, according to Catholic teaching, while, on the one hand, it is impossible for any one to know with absolute certainty what is his spiritual state before God; on the other hand, the doctrine of confession and absolution supplies all with a means of knowing, with a greater of less amount of probability, what their real condition is. On the morally beneficial tendency of the first part of this teaching it is unnecessary to dilate, and any scrupulosity or vain terror which, if it stood alone, it might excite, is amply provided against by the second. And thus, through the correlative doctrines of purgatory, of the consequent distinction between mortal and venial sins, of confession and absolution, and by means of its moral theology, Catholicism provides that the doctrine of eternal punishment shall press with greater or less force, exactly as its influence is more or less required. It does not leave the believer to the diseased imaginations of his own mind, but provides an external code to which he must submit, and an external direction by which he will be guided. It provides a means by which he may know whether he is or is not in a state of sin, and a definite remedy whereby he may extricate himself from it; while it holds out a hope of salvation to all, and teaches that no man ever existed whose case was so desperate that he could not, if he co-operated with grace, as he has the power of co-operating, look for pardon. With the heretical sects the case is widely different. The very name of Calvinism calls up associations on which it would be painful to dwell. The conjunction of the doctrines of eternal punishment and necessitarianism must always, even where these doctrines are but to a very inadequate extent realized, produce a type of religious thought and feeling as repulsive as it is degrading. Of this it would be superfluous to speak. But Protestantism repudiates the practice of confession and the doctrine of absolution. Then, indeed, wherever the eternity of punishment was realized, it produced a diseased and unhealthy state of mind. Anxiety, doubt, terror, were necessarily the predominating feelings in the minds of men; an anxiety which could be calmed no longer now that there was no confessional, and a doubt which admitted of no direction now that each man had to be almost entirely his own counsellor, while all were faltering and divided as to the "direction of the ways of life." The "doctrine of final assurance" was, indeed, put forward to remedy the evil. But that doctrine only served to aggravate it. For to one class of minds it only supplied a new cause of terror; and to another it gave a very fruitful occasion of cultivating a disposition perhaps the most detestably proud, callous, and selfish, which has ever appeared among mankind.

We must not, however, be supposed to deny that, through causes the character of which may partially be gathered from the preceding remarks, the doctrine of eternal punishment was very prominent in the middle ages. And how, it will be asked, did the church of those ages meet this extraordinary prominence? To have met it by merely insisting on the blessedness of heaven, would obviously have been most inadequate. Our natural constitution, and the circumstances of our life here, are such that our ideas of happiness, and especially of permanent happiness, are, as it has often been urged, far less definite and far less acute than our ideas of pain; and for this reason it has been wisely brought about that what has been made known to us of the blessedness of heaven is far less definite and complete, than is what we know of the punishment of the wicked. But for this very reason, the prominence of the doctrine of their eternal punishment could not be efficaciously met by insisting on this blessedness. But there is another set of ideas and feelings directly opposed to the despair and unmitigated fear which would be produced by the sole contemplation of the torments of the lost; and it is a set of ideas and feelings which nowhere find so natural a home as in Catholicism. From the manner in which the doctrine of the Incarnation is dwelt on in the Catholic system, and from the consequently almost human character which is given to the love of God and to the contemplation of the divine perfections as set forth in Christ, there results an ardor, an intensity, an active continuity of that love, which is simply incomprehensible to those who are external to the machinery of the Catholic Church. If it be asked, then, how did the church of those times meet the extraordinary, development of the doctrine we have been considering, the answer is patent to the most superficial reader of the mediaeval saints and theologians. They met it by an, at least, equal development of the doctrine of divine love. St. Bernard, Hugo of St. Victor, St. Anselm, all especially breathe in their works this sweet and devout spirit. The writings of St. Bernard, and those passages of such exquisitely tender devotion which occur in the writings of St. Augustine, became, in particular, the texts on which succeeding writers expanded and dilated. A spirit of meekness and tenderness of devotion, an intense and fervid love of God, are the themes on which they peculiarly delight to dwell, and the virtues on which they peculiarly love to insist. It was this age that produced the Imitation; toward the close of it appeared the Paradisus Animae: and whoever was the actual author of the former work, it possesses remarkable affinity with the spirit and even the style of Gerson. Nor was this temper of mind confined to purely mystical writers. The writings of St. Francis of Assisi, of St. Bridget, St. Catherine of Sienna, and others, attest, indeed, that the type of sanctity was, in some sense, changing under its influence; but it passed on to the great theological teachers of the age. St. Thomas of Aquino, the best and greatest of them all, lived and struggled in the very midst of the conflict with infidelity which was then agitating the church, and yet even he found time to write a number of short spiritual treatises which display the most tender and the most delicate devotion. This is especially seen in his book De Beatitudine. Richard of St. Victor wrote a work De Gradibus Violentae Charitatis, "On the degrees of violent charity." St. Bonaventure received the name of "The Seraphic Doctor" from the ardor of his piety; the titles of a few of his works—De Septem Itineribus AEternitatis, Stimulus Amoris, Amatorium, Itinerarium Mentis ad Deum—will be sufficient to show its character. The tender and loving spirit which those great doctors manifested in their devotion, broke out also in their correspondence with their friends, as may be perceived even from the extracts from the letters and sermons of certain of them which the Count de Montalembert has inserted in his Monks of the West. Other momenta of a more general nature show the operation of the same tendency. For the first time detailed lives of our blessed Lord came into general circulation. Devotion to the passion assumed a far more prominent position than before; of the spirit which animated it we have a most touching example in the little book attributed to St. Juliana of Norwich. The Canticle of Canticles suddenly took a place in the affections of the pious, which even in the primitive church it had never known. St. Bernard composed on it his celebrated Sermones super Cantica, St. Bonaventure and Richard of St. Victor both wrote commentaries on it; St. Thomas has left us two, and it was while dictating the second of these that he passed out of this world, celebrating the blessedness of divine love. Nor can we altogether omit to notice three devotions, two of which certainly exercised a very considerable influence. In an age in which the spirit of love and devotion to our blessed Lord had assumed such large proportions, in which the doctrine of the Incarnation was for the first time completely treated in a scientific manner, and in which the subject of original sin was more profoundly investigated, and the questions concerning the Immaculate Conception consequently began to be cleared up and to assume a definite form and coherence, it was natural that a great devotion should manifest itself to our Blessed Lady. And of the tendency and the effects of this devotion Mr. Lecky has himself spoken. The character of the devotion to St. Joseph, also, is sufficiently well known, and it was first, we believe, treated at length by Albertus Magnus. Devotion to the Blessed Sacrament was to an indefinite extent stimulated by the institution of the Feast of Corpus Christi; and it, of a truth, is a devotion which of all others breathes a spirit of tenderness and of love.

We can now only make a few concluding remarks. We have already given a general estimate of the work, on a few points of which we have here touched; for we considered it better to speak of two or three connected subjects more fully, than to distract ourselves and our readers by flying comments on the many and very diverse subjects there treated. We have only explicitly to add what we have before implied, that we consider it a very dangerous book. It is all the more dangerous, because Mr. Lecky is not a furious fanatic; because of his spurious candor; because of his partial admissions; because of his engaging style. And in an age like the present, when the dogmatic principle is so bitterly attacked by those without, and sits so lightly on the necks even of believers, it is exceedingly dangerous. For, as was to be expected, it sets the dogmatic principle utterly at defiance, and from beginning to end is a continued protest against it. Mr. Lecky's idea of education, and his theory of the manner of formation of religious opinions, are alike thoroughly opposed to it. In education he would have the bare principles of morality only, as far as possible, inculcated; dogma, as far as possible, excluded; and if any amount of dogmatic teaching is unavoidably admitted, it is to be taught only so as to rest as lightly as possible on the mind, and with the proviso that the opinions then taught will have to be reconsidered in after life. With respect to the formation of religious opinions, his book teaches a kind of Hegelianism. Society is continually changing, and the best thing we can do is to follow the most advanced minds in society. There is an everlasting process, in which we can never be sure that we have definitely attained to the truth. The end of this, of course, is to make all opinions uncertain. We may know what we like best, or what the tendencies of society incline it and us to believe; but we can never, as to religious opinions, know what is objectively true.

It is not very difficult to discover what is the nature of this process which is called rationalism. In former times the religious spirit predominated over the secular; but from a variety of causes, and in particular on account of the immense development of secular science since the time of Bacon and Descartes, the secular scientific spirit has since predominated over the religious. And rationalism is merely one of the results of this predominance; a consequence of the application to religious subjects of secular habits of thought. This may manifest itself, now in one way, now in another; in the denial now of transubstantiation, now of the doctrine of the Trinity; but its root and origin is the same: it tends (and this quite takes the romance out of it) to the elimination of the religious ideas, and it is strengthened by whatever strengthens what we have called the secular scientific, or weakens the religious, spirit. Hence that dislike of authority and that over-clouding of the moral character of religious truth; hence that distaste for the miraculous and the mysterious, and that tendency to put into the background, and even to deny, the doctrine of grace; and if the internal wants of those who have just "escaped from the wilderness of Christianity, and still have some of the thorns and brambles sticking to their clothes," make it necessary that something should be substituted for that which is being taken away—a baseless and often unreal sentimentalism is substituted for honest religious duty and earnest devotion. It is only too much to be feared that the world will educate itself out of this also; and that, in the case of those who refuse submission to the Catholic Church, the secular spirit will more and more grow toward its full ascendancy, and therefore toward a total extinction of the already weakened religious ideas.