Other formats

    Adobe Portable Document Format file (facsimile images)   TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 39

Lecture II. — The Connection of History

page 29

Lecture II.

The Connection of History.

On the last occasion we asked if the history of mankind throughout past ages might not have some meaning and uses for us here to-day? We saw grounds to believe that in its right knowledge, there are some lessons for us all. We saw that our daily life and action in any high sense depends upon our truly comprehending the movement of that great stream of human civilization on which we are borne. We saw that to conceive history aright we must approach it in no pedantic, narrow, or ungenerous spirit. That we must look into it for its mighty deeds and its great men, believing that they who have slowly built up the world of to-day and surrounded our life with infinite creations of thought and toil, wisdom and skill, are worthy of memory, and sympathy, and reverence—a reverence not narrowed to a few ages, or squandered without thought, but one which can reach back into the twilight of our race, and embrace all its true teachers and guides. We saw, too, how history shows us one continuous march of progress, checked and obscured at times, but never stagnant—how age hands on its work to age—nation beckons across sea or desert to its brother nation—race gives to race the choicest product—thinker hands down to thinker ideas and truths long husbanded and stored as heirlooms of mankind, until at last generation after generation, and people with people take up the tale in the yet half-told drama of the world, of which the catastrophe and issue rest with us and our lives.

page 30

Let us now try to sketch the outline of this story, link century to century, continent to continent, and judge the share each has in the common work of civilization. To do so, we must go back to ages long before records began. It is but of the latter and the shorter portion of the duration of progress, that any record has been made or preserved. Yet for a general view materials of certain knowledge exist. If we write the biography of a man we do not begin only with the year of his life in which his diary opens; we seek to know his parentage, education, and early association. To understand him we must do so. So, too, the biography of mankind must not confine itself to the eras of chronological tables, and of recorded specific events. Let us remember also that in all large instances the civilization of an epoch or a people has a certain unity in it—that their philosophy, their policy, their habits, and their religion must more or less accord, and all depend at last upon the special habit of their minds. It is this central form of belief which determines all the rest. Separately no item which makes up their civilization as a whole, can be long or seriously changed. It is what a man believes, which makes him act as he does. Thus shall we see that as their reasoning powers develope all else developes likewise, their science, their art break up or take new forms; their system of society expands; their life, their morality, and their religion gradually are dissolved and reconstructed.

Let us then place ourselves back in imagination at a period when the whole surface of the earth was quite unlike what it is now. Let us suppose it as it was after the last great geologic change—the greater portion of its area covered with primeval forests, vast swamps, dense jungles, and arid deserts. Let us not think the earth had always the same face as now. Such as it is it has been made by man—the rich pasturages and open plains have all been created by his toil—even the grain, and fruits, and page 31 flowers that grow upon its soil have been made what they are by his care. As yet the now teeming valleys of the great rivers, such as the Nile, or the Euphrates, or the Po, were wildernesses or swamps. The rich meadows of our own island were marshes, where its corn fields stand now were trackless forests. As yet such countries as Holland were swept over by every tide of the sea, and such countries as Switzerland, and Norway, America, or Russia, were submerged beneath endless pine woods. And through these forests and wastes ranged countless races of animals, many, doubtless, long extinct, in variety and numbers more than we can even conceive. And where in this terrible world was man? Scanty, perhaps, in number, confined to a few favourable spots, helpless, dispersed, and alone, man sustained a precarious existence, not yet the lord of creation, inferior to the brutes in strength, only just superior to them in mind,—nothing but the first of the animals. As are the lowest of all savages now, perhaps even lower, man once was. Conceive what Robinson Crusoe would have been had his island been a dense jungle overrun with savage beasts, without his gun, or his knife, or his knowledge, with nothing but his human hand and his human brain. Ages have indeed passed since then—perhaps some twenty thousand years—perhaps far more—have rolled by. But they should not be quite forgotten, and all recollection perish of that dark time when man waged a struggle for life or death with nature. Let us be just even to those who fought that fight with the brutes, hunted down and exterminated step by step the races too dangerous to man, and cleared the ground of these monstrous rivals. Every nation has its primeval heroes, whose hearts quailed not before the lion or the dragon. Its Nimrod, a mighty hunter before the Lord; its Hercules, whose club smote the serpent hydra; its Odin, who slew monsters. The forests, too, had to be cleared. Step by step man won his way into the heart of those dark jungles; slowly the rank vege- page 32 tation was swept off, here and there a space was cleared, here and there a plain was formed which left a patch of habitable soil. Everywhere man began as a hunter, a savage hunter, of the woods or the wilderness, without implements, without clothing, without homes, perhaps without the use of fire. Man's supremacy over the brutes was first asserted when his mind taught him how to make the rude bow, or the flint knife, or to harden clay or wood by heat. But not only were all the arts and uses of life yet to be found, but all the human institutions had to be formed. As yet language, family, marriage, property, tribe, were not, or only were in germ. A few cries assisted by gesture, a casual association of the sexes, a dim trace of parentage or brotherhood, were all that was. Language, as we know it, has been slowly built up, stage after stage, by the instinct of the entire race. Necessity led to new sounds which use developed, sounds became words, words were worked into sentences, and half-animal cries grew into intelligible speech. We must remember this with gratitude, and with no less gratitude those whose higher instincts first taught them to unite in permanent pairs, to cling to the children of one home, to form into parties and companies, to clothe themselves, and put checks upon the violent passions. Surely they who first drew savage man out of the life of unbridled instinct and brutal loneliness; who first showed the practices of personal decency and cleanliness; who first taught men to be faithful and tender to the young and the old, the woman, and the mother; who first brought these wild hunters together and made them trust each other and their chief—surely these were the first great benefactors of mankind;—surely this is the beginning of the history of the race.

And if this was the material and moral condition of man, what was his intellectual; what was his knowledge, his worship, and his religion? Turn to the earliest traditions of men, to the simple ideas of childhood, and especially to the page 33 savage tribes we know, and we have the answer. Man's intellect was far feebler than his activity or his feelings. He knew nothing, he rested in the first imagination. He reasoned on nothing, he supposed everything. He looked upon nature, and saw it full of life, motion, and strength. He knew what struggles he had with it, he felt it often crush him, he felt he could often crush it, and he thought that all, brutes, plants, rivers, storms, forests, and mountains, were powers, living, feeling, and acting like himself. Is it hard to conceive this? Do not the primeval legends, the fairy tales of all nations, show it to us? Does not the child punish its doll, and the savage defy the thunder, and the horse start at a gnarled oak swaying its boughs like arms in the wind. Man then looked out upon nature, and thought it a living thing—a simple belief which answered all questions. He knew nothing of matter, or elements, or laws. His celestial and his terrestrial philosophy was summed up in this—things act so because they choose. He never asked why the sun or moon rose and set. They were bright beings who walked their own paths when and as they pleased. He never thought why a volcano smoked, or a river overflowed, or thought only that the one was wroth and roared; and that the other had started in fury from his bed. And what was his religion? What could it but be? Affection for the fruits and flowers of the earth—dread and prostration before the terrible in nature—worship of the bright sun, or sheltering grove or mountain—in a word, the adoration of nature, the untutored impulse towards the master powers around such as we see it in the negro or the Chinese. As yet nothing was fixed, nothing common. Each worshipped in love or dread what most seized his fancy—each family had its own fetishes—each tribe its mountains; often it worshipped its own dead—friends who had begun a new existence. Such was their religion, the unguided faith of childhood, exaggerating all the feelings and sympathies, stimulating love, and hatred, page 34 and movement, and destruction, but leaving everything vague, giving no fixity, no unity, no permanence. In such a condition, doubtless, man passed through many thousand years, tribe struggling with tribe in endless battles for their hunting grounds, often, we may fear, devouring their captives, without any fixed abode, or definite association, or material progress, yet gradually forming the various arts and institutions of life, gradually learning the use of clothes, of metals, of implements, of speech—a race whose life depended solely upon the chase, whose only society was the tribe, whose religion was the worship of natural objects.

Now in this first struggle with nature man was not alone. Slowly he won over to his side one or two of the higher animals. Was not this a wonderful victory, assuring his ultimate ascendancy? The dog was won from his wolf-like state to join and aid in the chase. The horse bowed his strength in generous submission to a master. Do we reflect enough upon the efforts that this cost? Are we forgetful of the wonders of patience, gentleness, sympathy, sagacity, and nerve, which were required for the first domestication of animals? Do we sufficiently think upon the long centuries of care which were needed to change the very nature of these noble brutes, without whom we should indeed be helpless? By degrees the ox, the sheep, the goat, the camel, and the ass were reared by man, formed part of his simple family, and became the lower portion of the tribe. Their very natures, their external forms were changed. Milk and its compounds formed the basis of food. The hunter's life became less precarious, less rambling, less violent. In short, the second great stage of human existence began, and pastoral life commenced. Surely this was a great advance! Larger tribes could now collect, for there was now no lack of food; tribes gathered into a horde; something like society began. It had its leaders, its elders, perhaps its teachers, page 35 poets, and wise men. Men ceased to rove for ever. They stay upon a favourable pasture for long together. Next property, that is stored up subsistence, began; flocks and herds; accumulated; men were no longer torn daily by the wants of hunger; and leisure, repose, and peace were possible. The women were relieved from the crushing toil of the past. The old were no longer abandoned or neglected through want. Reflection, observation, thought began, and with thought religion. As life became more fixed worship became less vague and general. Some fixed great powers alone were adored, chiefly the host of heaven, the stars, the moon, and the great sun itself. Then some elder, freed from toil or war, meditating on the world around him, as he watched the horde start forth at the rising of the sun, the animals awakening and nature opening beneath his rays, first came to think all nature moved at the will of that sun himself, perhaps even of some mysterious power of whom that sun was but the image. From this would rise a regular worship common to the whole horde, uniting them together, explaining their course of life, stimulating their powers of thought. With this some kind of knowledge commenced. Their vast herds and flocks needed to be numbered, distinguished, and separated. Arithmetic began; the mode of counting, of adding and subtracting was slowly worked out. The horde's course, also, must be directed by the seasons and the stars. Hence astronomy began. The course of the sun was steadily observed, the recurrence of the seasons noted. Slowly the first ideas of order, regularity, and permanence arose. The world was no longer a chaos of conflicting forces. The earth had its stated times, all governed by the all-ruling sun. Now, too, the horde had a permanent existence. Its old men could remember the story of its wanderings and the deeds of its mighty ones, and would tell them to the young when the day was over. Poetry, narrative, and history had began. Leisure brought page 36 the use of fresh implements. Metals were found and worked. The loom was invented; the wheeled car came into use; the art of the smith, the joiner, and the boat-builder. New arts required a subdivision of labour, and division of labour required orderly rule. Society had begun. A greater step was yet at hand. Around some sacred mountain or grove, in some more favoured spot, where the horde would longest halt or oftenest return, some greater care to clear the ground, to protect the pasture, and to tend the plants was shown; some patches of soil were scratched to grow some useful grains, some rude corn ears were cultivated into wheat, the earth began to be tilled. Man passed into the third great stage of material existence, and agriculture began. Agriculture once commenced a new era was at hand. Now organized society was possible. Do we estimate duly this the greatest effort towards progress ever accomplished by mankind? Do we remember how much had to be learnt, how many arts had to be invented, before the savage hunter could settle down into the peaceful, the provident, and the intelligent husbandman? What is all our vaunted progress to this great step? What are all our boasted inventions compared with the first great discoveries of man, the spinning-wheel and loom, the plough, the clay-vessel, the wheel, the boat, the bow, the hatchet, and the forge? Surely, if we reflect, our inventions are chiefly modes of multiplying or saving force; these were the transformations of substances, or the interchange of force. Ours are, for the most part, but expansions of the first idea; these are the creations.

Since it is with agriculture that organized society alone can start, it is with justice that the origin of civilization is always traced to those great plains where agriculture alone was then possible. It was in the basins of the great Asian rivers, the Euphrates, the Tigris, the Ganges, and in that of the Nile, that fixed societies began. There, where irriga- page 37 tion is easy, the soil rich, and country open, cultivation arose, and with cultivation of the soil, the accumulation of its produce, and with more easy sustenance, leisure, thought, and observation. Use taught man to distinguish between matter and life, man and animal, thought and motion. Men's eyes were opened, and they saw that nature was not alive, and had no will. They watched the course of the sun and saw that it moved in fixed ways. They watched the sea, and saw that it rose and fell by tides. Then, too, they needed knowledge and they needed teachers. They needed men to measure their fields, their barns, to teach them to build strongly, to calculate the seasons for them, to predict the signs of the weather, to expound the will of the great powers who ruled them. Thus slowly rose the notion of gods, the unseen rulers of these powers of earth and sky, a god of the sea, of the river, of the sky, of the sun, and between them and their gods rose the first priests, the ministers and interpreters of their will, and polytheism and theocracies began. Thus simply amidst these great settled societies of the plain began the great human institution—the priesthood—at first only some wiser elders who had some deeper knowledge of the arts of settled life. Gradually knowledge advanced; knowledge of the seasons and of the stars or of astronomy, of enumeration or arithmetic, of measurement or geometry, of medicine and surgery, of building, of the arts, of music, of poetry; gradually this knowledge became deposited in the hands of a few, and transmitted and accumulated from father to son. The intellect asserted its power, and the rule over a peaceful and industrious race slowly passed into the hands of a priesthood, or an educated and sacred class. These were the men who founded the earliest form of civilized existence; the most complete, the most enduring, the most consistent of all human societies, the great theocracies or religious societies of Asia and Egypt. Thus for thousands of years before the earliest records of history, in all the great plains of Asia and page 38 along the Nile, nations flourished in a high and elaborate form of civilization. We will examine one only, the best known to us, the type, the earliest and the greatest—the Egyptian.

The task to be accomplished was immense. It was nothing less than the foundation of permanent and organized society. Till this was done all was in danger. All knowledge might be lost, the arts might perish, the civil community might break up. Hitherto there had been no permanence, no union, no system. What was needed was to form the intellectual and material framework of a fixed nation. And this the Egyptian priesthood undertook. The spot was favourable to the attempt. In that great, rich plain, walled off on all sides by the desert or by the sea, it was possible to found a society at once industrial, peaceful, and settled. They needed judges to direct them, teachers to instruct them, men of science to help them, governors to rule them, preachers to admonish them, physicians to heal them, artists to train them, and priests to sacrifice for them. To meet these wants a special order of men spontaneously arose, by whose half-conscious efforts a complete system of society was gradually and slowly formed. In their hands was concentrated the whole intellectual product of ages, this they administered for the common good. Gradually by their care there arose a system of regular industry. To this end they divided out by their superior skill all the arts and trades of life. Each work was apportioned, each art had its subordinate arts. Then as a mode of perpetuating skill in crafts, to insure a sound apprenticeship of every labour, they caused or enabled each man's work to become hereditary within certain broad limits, and thus created or sanctioned a definite series of castes. Then to give sanction to the whole, they consecrated each labour, and made each workman's toil a part of his religious duty. Then they organized a scheme of general education. They provided a system of teaching common to all, adapted to the work of each. They page 39 provided for the special education of the sacred class in the whole circle of existing knowledge; they collected observations, they treasured up discoveries, and recorded events. Next they organized a system of government. They established property, they divided out the land, they set up landmarks, they devised rules for its tenure, they introduced law, and magistrates, and governors; provinces were divided into districts, towns, and villages; violence was put down, a strict police exercised, regular taxes imposed. Next they organized a strict system of morality, the social, the domestic, and the personal duties were minutely defined; practices relating to health, cleanliness, and temperance, were enforced by religious obligations, every act of life, every moment of existence was made a part of sacred duty. Lastly, they organized national life by a vast system of common religious rites, by imposing ceremonies which awakened the imagination and kindled the emotions, bound up the whole community into an united people, and gave stability to their national existence, by the awful majesty of a common and mysterious belief.

Do we want to know what such a system of life was like? Let us go into some museum of Egyptian antiquities, where we may see representations of their mode of existence carved upon their walls. There we may see nearly all the arts of life as we know them—weaving and spinning, working in pottery, glass-blowing, building, carving, and painting, ploughing, sowing, threshing, and gathering into bams, boating, irrigation, fishing, wine-pressing, dancing, singing, and playing—a vast community, in short, orderly, peaceful, and intelligent; capable of gigantic works and of refined arts, before which we are lost in wonder; a civilized community busy and orderly as a hive of bees, amongst whom every labour and function was arranged in perfect harmony and distinctness; all this may be seen upon monuments at least 5000 years old.

Here, then, we have civilization itself. All the arts of page 40 life had been brought to perfection, and indelibly implanted on the mind of men in away that they could never be utterly lost. All that constitutes orderly government, the institutions of society, had been equally graven into human existence. A check had been placed upon the endless and desultory warfare of tribes; and great nations existed. The ideas of domestic life, marriage, filial duty, care for the aged and the dead, had become a second nature. The wholesome practices of social life, of which we think so lightly, had all been invented and established. The practice of regular holidays, and social gatherings, and common celebrations began—the record and division of past ages, the exact times of the seasons, and of the year, the months, and its festivals; the great yet little prized institution of the week. Nor were the gains to thought less. In the peaceful rolling on of those primeval ages, observations had been stored up by an unbroken succession of priests, without which science never would have existed. It was no small feat in science first to have determined the exact length of the year. It needed observations stretching over a cycle of 1500 years. But the Egyptian priests had enumerated the stars, and could calculate for centuries in advance the times of their appearance. They possessed the simpler processes of arithmetic and geometry; they knew something of chemistry, and much of botany, and even a little of surgery. There was one invention yet more astonishing; the Egyptians invented, the Phenicians perfected, the art of writing, and transmitted the alphabet—our alphabet—to the Greeks. Do we rightly estimate the amazing intellectual effort required for the formation of the alphabet; not to shape the forms, but first to conceive that the sounds we utter could be classified, and reduced down to those simple elements we call the letters. Truly I can imagine hardly any effort of abstract thought more difficult than this, and certainly none more essential to the progress of the human mind.

page 41

They were indeed great minds who did all this; great because they not so much promoted civilization as created it. Never perhaps before or since have single minds ever received this universal culture; never perhaps have shown this many-sided activity and strength. Never before or since has such power been concentrated in the same hands—the entire moral and material control over society. They were great minds, great souls also who could conceive and carry through such a task, greater perhaps in this that they did not care to celebrate themselves for posterity, but passed away when their work was done, contented to have seen it done, as Moses did when he went up alone to die in secret, that no man might know or worship at his tomb. The debt we owe these men and these times is great. It is said that man learns more in the first year of his childhood than in any year subsequently of his life. And in this long childhood of the world, how many things were learnt. Is it clear that they could have been learnt in any other way? Caste, in its decline, is the most degrading of human institutions. Can we be sure that without it the arts of life could have been taught and preserved in those unsettled ages of war and migration. We rebel justly against all priestly tyranny over daily life and customs. Are we sure that without these sanctions of religion and law, the rules of morality, of decency, and health could ever have been imposed upon the lawless instincts of mankind. We turn with repugnance from the monotony of those unvarying ages, and of that almost stagnant civilization; but are we sure that without it, it would have been possible to collect the observations of distant ages, and the records of dynasties and eras on which all science and all history rest: would it have been possible to provide a secure and tranquil field in which the slow growth of language, art, and thought could have worked out generation after generation, their earliest and most difficult result?

No form of civilization has ever endured so long; its page 42 consequences are stamped deeply still upon our daily life; yet the time came when even these venerable systems must die.

Their work was done, and it was time for them to pass away. Century after century had gone by teaching the same lessons, but adding nothing new. Human life began to be stifled in these primeval forms. The whole empire of the priests grew evil and corrupt. We know them chiefly in their decline, when kings and conquerors had usurped and perverted the patient energies of these long tutored peoples. These great societies passed from industrial and social communities into stupendous tyrannies, made up of cruelty and pride. It was the result of the great and fatal error which lay beneath the whole priestly system. They had misconceived their strength and their knowledge. They had undertaken to organize society whilst their own knowledge was feeble and imperfect. They had tried to establish the rule of mind, of all rules the most certainly destined to fail; and they based that rule upon error and misconception. They pretended to govern society instead of confining themselves to the only possible task, to teach it. They who had begun by securing progress, now were its worst obstacles. They who began to rule by the right of intelligence, now dreaded and crushed intelligence. They fell as every priesthood has fallen, which has ever based its claims upon imperfect knowledge, or pretended to command in the practical affairs of life. Yet there was only one way in which the nightmare of this intellectual and social oppression could be shaken off, and these strong systems broken up. It was no doubt by the all-powerful instinct of conquest, and by the growth of vast military monarchies that the change was accomplished. Those antique societies of peace and industry degenerated at last into conquering empires, and, during 1000 years which precede the Persian empire, Asia was swept from side to side by the armies of Assyrian, page 43 Median, Babylonian, and Egyptian conquerors. Empire after empire rose and fell with small result, save that they broke the death-like sleep of ages, and brought distant people from the ends of the earth into contact with each other.

The world seemed in danger of perishing by exhaustion. It needed a new spirit to revive it. But now another race appears upon the scene; a branch of that great Aryan people, who from the high lands of central Asia have swept over Assyria, India, and Europe, the people who as Greeks, Romans, Gauls, or Teutons have been the foremost of mankind, of whom we ourselves are but a younger branch. Now, too, the darkness which covered those earlier ages of the world rolls off, and accurate history begins, and the drama proceeds in the broad light of certainty.

It is about 550 B.C. that the first great name in general history appears, and Cyrus founds the Persian empire. For ages along the mountain slopes between the Himalayas and the Caspian Sea, the Persian race had dwelt, a simple race of wandering herdsmen, apart from the vast empires of Babylon and Nineveh in the plains below. There they grew up with nobler and freer thoughts, not crashed by the weight of a powerful monarchy, not degraded by-decaying superstitions, nor enervated by material riches. They honoured truth, freedom, and energy. They had faith in themselves and their race. They valued morality more than ceremonies. They believed in a Supreme Power of the universe. Just as the northern nations afterwards poured over the Roman empire, so these stronger tribes were preparing to descend upon the decaying remains of the Asiatic empires. They needed only a captain, and they found one worthy of the task in the great King Cyrus. He, marshalling his mountain warriors into a solid army, swept down upon the plains, and one by one the empires fell before him, until from the Mediterranean to the Indus, from Tartary to the Arabian Gulf, all Asia page 44 submitted to his sway. His successors continued his work, pushing across Arabia, Egypt, Africa, and Northern Asia itself. There over that enormous tract they built up the Persian monarchy, which swallowed up and fused into one so many ancient empires. The conquerors were soon absorbed, like the Northmen, into the theocratic faith and life of the conquered, and throughout half of the then inhabited globe one rule, one religion, one system of life alone existed. But the Persian kings could not rest whilst a corner remained unconquered. On the shores of the Mediterranean they had come upon a people who had defied them with strange audacity. Against them the whole weight of the Asian empire was put forth. For ten years fleets and armies were preparing. There came archers from the wastes of Tartary and the deserts of Africa; charioteers from Nineveh and Babylon; horsemen, clubmen, and spearmen; the mailclad footmen of Persia; the fleets of the Phenicians; all the races of the East gathered in one vast host, and as men said, 5,000,000 men and 2000 ships poured over the Eastern seas upon the devoted people.

And who were they who seemed thus doomed? Along the promontories and islands of the eastern Mediterranean there dwelt the scattered race whom we call Greeks, who had gradually worked out a form of life totally differing from the old, who had wonderfully expanded the old arts of life and modes of thought. With them the destinies of the world then rested for all its future progress. With them all was life, change, and activity. Broken into sections by infinite bays, mountains, and rivers, scattered over a long line of coasts and islands, the Greek race, with natures as varied as their own beautiful land, as restless as their own seas, had never been moulded into one great solid empire, and early threw off the weight of a ruling caste of priests. No theocracy or religious system of society ever could establish itself amidst a race so full of page 45 life and motion, so exposed to influences from without, so divided within. They had borrowed the arts of life from the great Eastern peoples, and, in borrowing, had wonderfully improved them. The alphabet, shipbuilding, commerce, they had from the Phenicians; architecture, sculpture, painting from the Assyrian or Lydian empires. Geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, they had borrowed from the Egyptians. The various fabrics, arts, and appliances of the East came to them in profusion across the seas. Their earliest lawgivers, rulers, and philosophers, had all travelled through the great Asian kingdom, and came back to their small country with a new sense of all the institutions and ideas of civilized life. But the Greeks borrowed, they did not imitate. Alone as yet, they had thrown off the tyranny of custom, of caste, of kingcraft, and of priestcraft. They only had moulded the ponderous column and the uncouth colossus of the East into the graceful shaft and the life-like figure of the gods. They only had dared to think freely, to ask themselves what or whence was this earth around, to meet the great problems of abstract thought, to probe the foundations of right and wrong. Lastly, they alone had conceived the idea of a people not the servants of one man or of a class, not chained down in a rigid order of submission, but the free and equal citizens of a republic, for on them had first dawned the idea of a civilized community in which men should be not masters and slaves, but brothers.

On poured the myriads of Asia, creating a famine as they marched, drying up the streams, and covering the seas with their ships. Who does not know the tale of that immortal effort—how the Athenians armed old and young, burned their city, and went on board their ships—how for three days Leonidas and his three hundred held the pass against the Asian host, and lay down, each warrior at his post, calmly smiling in death—how the Greek ships lay in ambush in their islands, for the mighty fleet of page 46 Persia—how the unwieldy mass was broken and pierced by their dauntless enemy—how, all day, the battle raged beneath the eyes of the great king himself, and, at its close, the seas were heaving with the wrecks of the shattered host. Surely, of all the battles in history, this one of Salamis was the most precious to the human race. No other tale of war can surpass it. Do we enough estimate the heroism, the genius, the marvellous audacity by which these pigmy fleets and armies of a small, weak race, withstood and crushed the entire power of Asia, and preserved from extinction the life and intellect of future ages.

Victory followed upon victory, and the whole Greek race expanded with this amazing triumph. The whole of the old world had been brought face to face with the intellect which was to transform it. The Greek mind, with the whole East open to it, exhibited inexhaustible activity. A century sufficed to develope a thoroughly new phase of civilization. They carried the arts to a height whereon they stand as the types for all time. In poetry they exhausted and perfected every form of composition. In politics they built up a multitude of communities, rich with a prolific store of political and social institutions. Throughout their stormy history stand forth great names. Now and then there arose amongst them leaders of real genius. For a time they showed some splendid instances of public virtue, of social life, patriotism, elevation, sagacity, and energy. For a moment Athens at least may have believed that she had reached the highest type of political existence. But with all this activity and greatness there was no true unity. Wonderful as was their ingenuity, their versatility and energy, it was too often wasted in barren struggles and wanton restlessness. For a century and a half after the Persian invasion, the petty Greek states contended in one weary round of contemptible civil wars and aimless revolutions. One after another they cast their great men aside, to think out by themselves the thoughts that were page 47 to live for all time, and gave themselves up to be the victims of degraded adventurers. For one moment only in their history, if indeed for that, they did become a nation. At last, wearied out by endless wars and constant revolutions, the Greek states by force and fraud were fused in one people by the half-Greek Macedonian kings, and by them, instead of by true Greeks, the great work so long postponed, but never through their history forgotten, was at length attempted—the work of avenging the Persian invasion, and subduing Asia. Short and wonderful was that career of conquest, due wholly to one marvellous mind. Alexander, indeed, in military and practical genius seems to stand above all Greeks, as Cæsar above all Romans; they two the greatest rulers of the ancient world. No story, perhaps, in history, is so romantic as the tale of that ten years of victory when Alexander, at the head of some thirty thousand veteran Greeks, poured over Asia, crushing army after army, taking city after city, and receiving the homage of prince after prince, himself lighting like a knight-errant: until subduing the Persian empire, and piercing Asia from side to side, and having reached even the great rivers of India, he turned back to Babylon to organize his vast empire, to found new cities, pour life into the decrepit frame of the East, and give to these entranced nations the arts and wisdom of Greece. For this he came to Babylon, but came thither only to die. Endless confusion ensued; province after province broke up into a separate kingdom, and the vast empire of Alexander became the prey of military adventurers. Yet though this attempt of his, like so much else that Greece accomplished, was, indeed, in appearance a disastrous failure, still it had not been in vain. The Greek mind was diffused over the East like the rays of the rising sun when it revives and awakens slumbering nature. The Greek language, the most wonderful instrument of thought ever composed by man, became common to the whole civilized world; it bound together all educated men page 48 from the Danube to the Indus. The Greek literature, poetry, history, science, philosophy, and art, was at once the common property of the empire. The brilliance, the audacity, the strength of the Greek reasoning awoke the dormant powers of thought. The idea of laws, the idea of states, the idea of citizenship, came like a revelation upon the degenerate slaves of the Eastern tyrannies. Nor was the result less important to the Greek mind itself. Now, at last, the world was open without obstacle. The philosophers poured over the new empire; they ransacked the records of primeval times; they studied the hoarded lore of the Egyptian and Chaldean priests. Old astronomical observations, old geometric problems, long concealed, were thrown open to them. They travelled over the whole continent of Asia, studying its wonders of the past, collecting its natural curiosities, examining its surface, its climates, its production, its plants, its animals, and its human races, customs, and ideas. Lastly, they gathered up and pondered over the half-remembered traditions and the half-comprehended mysteries of Asian belief, the conceptions which had risen up before the intense abstraction of Indian and Babylonian mystics, Jewish and Egyptian prophets and priests, the notion of some great principle or thought, or Being, utterly unseen and unknown, above all gods, and without material form. Thus arose the earliest germ of that spirit which, by uniting Greek logic with Asian or Jewish imaginations, prepared the way for the religious systems of Mussulman and Christian.

Such was the result of the great conquest of Alexander. Not by its utter failure as an empire are we to judge it; not by the vices and follies of its founder, or the profligate orgies of its dissolution, must we condemn it. We must value it as the means whereby the effete world of the East was renewed by the life of European thought, by which the first ideas of nature as a whole and of mankind as a whole, arose, by which the ground was page 49 first prepared for the Roman empire, and for Christian and Mahometan religion. And, now, what was the gift of Greece to the world? As a nation the Greeks had established little that was lasting. They had changed much; they had organized hardly anything. As the great Asian system had sacrificed all to permanence, so the Greek sacrificed all to movement. The Greeks had created no majestic system of law, no solid political order, no complex social system. If civilization had stopped there it would have ended in ceaseless agitation, discord, and dissolution. Their character was wanting in self-command and tenacity, and their genius was too often wasted in intellectual license. Yet if politically they were unstable, intellectually they were great. The lives of their great heroes are their rich legacy to all future ages; Solon, Pericles, Epaminondas, and Demosthenes stand forth as the types of all that is great in the noble leader of men. The story of their best days has scarcely its equal in history. In art they gave us the works of Phidias, the noblest image of the human form ever created by man. In poetry, the models of all time—Homer, the greatest and the earliest of poets; Æschylus the greatest master of the tragic art; Plato, the most eloquent of moral teachers; Pindar, the first of all in lyric art. In philosophy and in science the Greek mind laid the foundations of all knowledge, beyond which, until the last three centuries, very partial advance had been made. Building on the ground prepared by the Egyptians, they did much to perfect arithmetic, raised geometry to a science by itself, and invented that system of astronomy which served the world for fifteen centuries. In knowledge of animal life, and the art of healing they constructed a body of accurate observations and sound analysis; in physics, or the knowledge of the material earth, they advanced to the point at which little was added till the time of Bacon himself. In abstract thought their results were still more surprising. All the page 50 ideas that lie at the root of our modern abstract philosophy may be found in germ in Greece. The schools of modern metaphysics are little but developments of theirs. They analysed with perfect precision and wonderful minuteness the processes employed in language and in reasoning; they invented grammar and logic, and rhetoric, and music: they correctly analysed the human mind, the character, and the emotions, and invented the science of morality and the art of education; they correctly analysed the elements of society and political life, and invented the science of politics, or the theory of social union. Lastly, they criticized and laid bare all the existing beliefs of mankind; pierced the imposing falsehood of the old religions; meditated on all the various answers ever given to the problem of human destiny, of the universe and its origin, and slowly worked out the conception of unity through the whole visible and invisible universe, which, in some shape or other, has been the belief of man for twenty centuries. Such were their gifts to the world. It was an intellect active, subtle, and real, marked by the true scientific character of freedom, precision, and consistency. And, as the Greek intellect overtopped the intellect of all races of men, and combined in itself the gifts of all others, so were the great intellects of Greece all overtopped and concentrated in one great mind—the greatest, doubtless, of all human minds—the matchless Aristotle; as the poet says, "The master of those who know," who, on all branches of human knowledge, built the strong foundations of abiding truth.

Let us pause for a moment to reflect what point we have reached in the history of civilization. Asia had founded the first arts and usages of material life, begun the earliest social institutions, and taught us the rudiments of science and of thought. Greece had expanded all these in infinite variety and subtlety, had instituted the free state, and given life to poetry and art, had formed fixed page 51 habits of accurate reasoning and of sytematic observation. Materially and intellectually civilization existed. Yet in Greece we feel that, socially, everything is abortive. The Greeks had not grown into an united nation. They split into a multitude of jealous republics. These republics split into hostile and restless factions. All that we associate with true national existence was yet to come, but the noble race who were to found it had long been advancing towards their high destiny. Alexander, perhaps, had scarcely heard of that distant, half-educated people, who for four centuries had been slowly building up the power which was to absorb and supersede his empire. But far beyond the limits of his degenerate subjects, worthier successors of his genius were at hand—the Romans were coming upon the world. The Greeks founded the city, the Romans the nation. The Greeks were the authors of philosophy, the Romans of government, justice, and peace. The Greek type was thought, the Roman type was law. The Greeks taught us the noble lesson of individual freedom, the Romans the still nobler lesson, the sense of social duty. It is just, therefore, that to the Romans, as to the people who alone throughout all ages gave unity, peace, and order to the civilized world, who gave us the elements of our modern political life, and have left us the richest record of acts of public duty, heroism, and self-sacrifice; it is just that to them we assign the place of the noblest nation in history. That which marks the Roman with his true greatness was his devotion to the social body, his sense of self-surrender to country; a duty to which the claims of family and person were implicitly to yield, which neither death, nor agony, nor disgrace could subdue; which was the only reward, pleasure, or religion which a true citizen could need. This was the greatness, not of a few leading characters, but of an entire people. The Roman state did not give birth merely to heroes, it was formed of heroes; nor were they less marked by their page 52 sense of obedience, submission to rightful authority where the interest of the state required it, submission to order and law. They had too deeply a sense of justice. They did not war to crush the conquered; once subdued, they dealt with them as their fellows, they made equal laws and a common rule for them; they bound them all into the same service of their common country. Above all other nations in the world they believed in a mission and a destiny. They paused not century after century in one great object. No prize could beguile them, no delusion distract them. Each Roman felt the divinity of the Eternal City, destined always to march onwards in triumph: in its service every faculty of his mind was given; life, wealth, and rest were as nothing to this cause. In this faith they could plan out for the distant future, build up so as to prepare for vast extension, calculate far distant chances, and lay stone by stone the walls of an enduring structure. Hence each Roman was a statesman, for he needed to provide for the future ages of his country; each Roman was a citizen of the world, for all nations were destined to be his fellow-citizens; each Roman could command, for he had learnt to obey, and to know that he who commands and he who obeys are but the servants of one higher power—their common fatherland.

Long and stern were the efforts by which this power was built up. But deep as is the mystery which covers the origin of Rome, we can still trace dimly how, about the centre of the Italian peninsula, along the banks of the Tiber, fragments of two tribes were fused by some heroic chieftain into one; the first more intellectual, supple, and ingenious, the second more stubborn, courageous, and faithful. We see more clearly how this compound people rose through the strength of these qualities of mind and character to be the foremost of the neighbouring tribes; how they long maintained that religious order of society which the Greeks so early shook off; how it moulded all the institutions of their life, filled page 53 them with reverence for the duties of family, for their parents, their wives, for the memory and the spirit of their dead ancestors, taught them submission to judges and chiefs, devotion to their mother city, love for her commands, her laws, and her traditions, trained them to live and die for her, indeed compassed their whole existence with a sense of duty towards their fellows and each other; how this sense of social duty grew into the very fibres of their iron natures, kept the State through all dangers rooted in the imperishable trust and instinct of a massive people; then how this well-knit race advanced step by step upon their neighbouring tribes, slowly united them in one, gave them their own laws, made them their own citizens; step by step advanced upon the only civilized nation of the peninsula, the theocratic society of Etruria, took from them the arts of war and peace; how the hordes of Northern barbarians poured over the peninsula like a flood, sweeping all the nations below its waters, and when they emerged, Rome only was left strong and confident; how, after four centuries of constant struggle, held up always by the sense of future greatness, the Romans had at length absorbed one by one the leading nations of Italy, and by one supreme effort, after thirty years of war, had crushed their noblest and strongest rivals, their equals in all but genius and fortune, and stood at last the masters of Italy, from shore to shore. And now came the great crisis of their history, the long wars of Rome and Carthage. On one side was the genius of war, empire, law, and art, on the other the genius of commerce, industry, and wealth. The subjects of Carthage were scattered over the Mediterranean, the power of Rome was compact. Carthago fought with regular mercenaries, Rome with her disciplined citizens. Carthage had consummate generals, but Rome had matchless soldiers. Long the scale trembled. Not once nor twice was Rome stricken down to the dust. Punic fleets swept the seas. African horsemen scoured the page 54 plains. Barbarian hordes were gathered up by the wealth of Carthage, and marshalled by the genius of her great captain. For her fought the greatest military genius of the ancient world, perhaps of all time. Hannibal, himself a child of the camp, training a veteran army in the wars of Spain, led his victorious troops across Gaul, crossed the Alps, poured down upon Italy, struck down army after army, and at last, by one crowning victory, scattered the last military force of Rome. Beset by an invincible army in the heart of Italy, her strongholds stormed, without generals or armies, without money or allies, without cavalry or ships, it seemed the last hour of Rome was come. Now, if ever, she needed that faith in her destiny, the solid strength of her slow growth, and the energy of her entire people. They did not fail her. In her worst need her people held firm, her senate never lost heart, armies grew out of the very remnants and slaves within her walls. Inch by inch the invader was driven back, watched and besieged in turn. The genius of Rome revived in Scipio. He it was who, with an eagle's sight, saw the weakness of her enemy, swooped, with an eagle's flight, upon Carthage herself, and at last, before her walls, overthrew Hannibal, and with him the hopes and power of his country and his race.

It is in these first centuries that we see the source of the greatness of Rome. Then was founded her true strength. What tales of heroism, dignity, and endurance have they not left us! There are no types of public virtue grander than those. Brutus condemning his traitor sons to death; Horatius defending the bridge against an army; Cincinnatus taken from the plough to rule the State, returning from ruling the state again to the plough; the Decii, father and son, solemnly devoting themselves to death to propitiate the gods of Rome; Regulus the prisoner going to his home only to exhort his people not to yield, and returning calmly to his prison; Cornelia offering up her children to death and shame for the cause of the people; page 55 great generals content to live like simple yeomen; old and young ever ready to march to certain death; hearts proof against eloquence, gold, or pleasure; noble matrons training their children to duty; senates ever confident in their country; generals returning from conquered nations in poverty; the leaders of triumphant armies becoming the equals of the humblest citizens.

Carthage once overcome, the conquest of the world followed rapidly. Spain and the islands of the Mediterranean Sea were the prizes of the war. Lower Gaul, Greece, and Macedon, were also within fifty years incorporated in Rome. She pushed farther. The whole empire of Alexander fell into her hands, and at length, after seven hundred years of conquest, she remained the mistress of the civilized world. But, long before this, she herself had become the prey of convulsions. The marvellous empire, so rapidly expanded, had deeply con-up ted the power which had won it. Her old heroes were no more. Her virtues failed her, and her vast dominions had long become the prize of bloody and selfish factions. The ancient republic, whose freemen had once met to consult in the Forum, broke up in the new position for which her system was utterly unfit. For nearly a century the great empire had inevitably tended towards union in a single centre. One dictator after another had possessed and misused the sovereign power. At last it passed to the worthiest, and the rule over the whole ancient world came to its greatest name, the noble Julius Cæsar. In him were found more than the Roman genius for government and law, with a gentleness and grace few Romans ever had; an intellect almost Greek in its love of science, of art, in reach and subtlety of thought; and, above all this, in spite of vices and crimes which he shared with his age, a world-wide breadth of view and heart, a spirit of human fellowship and social progress peculiar to one who was the friend of men of different races, countries, and ideas—at once general, orator, poet, historian, ruler, law- page 56 giver, reformer, and philosopher; in the highest sense the statesman, magnanimous, provident, laborious, large-hearted, affable, resolute, and brave. With him the Roman empire enters on a new and better phase. He first saw and showed how this vast aggregate of men must be ruled no longer as the subjects of one conquering city, but as a real and single State governed in the interest of all, with equal rights and common laws; and Rome be no longer the mistress, but the leader only of the nations. In this spirit he broke with the old Roman temper of narrow nationality and pride; raised to power and trust new men of all ranks and of all nations; opened the old Roman privileges of citizenship to the new subjects; laboured to complete and extend the Roman law; reorganized the administration of the distant provinces; and sought to extinguish the trace of party fury and hatred. And when the selfish rage of the old Roman aristocracy had struck him down, before his work was half complete, by a wanton and senseless murder, yet his work did not perish with him. The Roman empire at last rose to the level which he had planned for it. For some two centuries it did succeed in maintaining an era of progress, peace, and civilization—a government, indeed, at times frightfully corrupt, at times convulsed to its foundations, yet in the main in accordance with the necessities of the times, and rising in its highest types to wise, tranquil, and prudent rule, embracing all, open to all, just to all, and beloved by all. Then it was, during those two centuries, broken as they were by temporary convulsions, that the nations of Europe rose into civilized life. Then the Spaniard, the Gaul, the Briton, the German, the people that dwelt along the whole course of the Rhine and the Danube, first learnt the arts and ideas of life; law, government, society, education, industry, appeared amongst them; and over the tracts of land trodden for so many centuries by rival tribes and devastating hordes, security first appeared, turmoil gave place to repose, and there rose page 57 the notion, not forgotten for ten centuries, of the solemn Peace of Rome.

And now, what was it that the Roman had given to the world? In the first place, his law—that Roman law, the most perfect political creation of the human mind, which for one thousand years grew with one even and expanding life—the law which is the basis of all the law of Europe, including even our own. Then, the political system of towns. The actual municipal constitution of every town in Western Europe, from Gibraltar to the Baltic, from the Hebrides to Sicily, is but a development of the old Roman city, which lasted through the middle ages, and began modern industrial life. Next, all the institutions relating to administration and police which modern Europe has developed had their origin there. To them in the middle ages men turned when the age of confusion was ending. To them again men turned when the middle ages themselves were passing away. The establishment of elective assemblies, of graduated magistracies, of local and provincial justice, of public officers and public institutions, free museums, baths, theatres, libraries, and schools—all that we understand by organized society, in a word, may be traced back to Rome. Throughout all Western Europe, from that germ, civilization raised its head after the invasion of the Northern tribes. From the same source too arose the force at once monarchic and municipal, which overthrew the feudal system. It was the remnant of the old Roman ideas of provincial organization which first formed the counties and duchies which afterwards coalesced into a State. It was the memory of the Roman township which gave birth to the first free towns of Europe. It was the tradition of a Roman emperor which, by long intermediate steps, transformed the Teutonic chieftain into the modern king or emperor. London, York, Lincoln, Winchester, Gloucester, and Chester were Roman cities, and formed then, as they did for the earlier periods of our his- page 58 tory, the pivots of our national administration. Paris, Rouen, Lyons, Marseilles, Bordeaux, in France; Constance, Basle, Coblentz, Cologne, upon the Rhine; Cadiz, Barcelona, Seville, Toledo, Lisbon, in the Spanish, Genoa, Milan, Verona, Ravenna, Rome, and Naples, in the Italian peninsula, were in Roman, as in modern times, the great national centres of their respective countries. But, above all else, they gave not the notion merely, but the reality of a state, a permanent system of free obedience to the laws on the one hand, and a temperate administration of them on the other; the constant sense of each citizen having his place in a complex whole.

The Roman's strength was in action, not in thought; but in thought he gave us something besides his special creation of universal law. It was his to discover the meaning of history. Egypt had carved on eternal rocks the pompous chronicles of kings. The Greeks wrote profound and brilliant memoirs. It was reserved to a Roman to conceive and execute the history of his people stretching over seven hundred years, and to give the first proof of the continuity and unity of national life. In art the Roman did little but develope the Greek types of architecture into stupendous and complex forms, fit for new uses, and worthy of his people's grandeur. But the great triumphs of his skill were in engineering. He invented the arch, the dome, and the viaduct. The bridges of the middle ages were studied from Roman remains. The great domes of Italian cathedrals, of which that of our own St. Paul's is but a feeble imitation, were formed directly on the model of a temple at Rome. But in thought, the great gift of Rome was in her language, which has served as an admirable instrument of religious, moral, and political reflection, and forms the base of the spoken dialects of three of the great nations of Europe. Then it was, under that Roman empire, that the stores of Greek thought became common to the world. As the empire of Alexander had shed them page 59 over the East, the empire of Rome gave them to the West. Greek language, literature, poetry, science, and art, became the common education of the civilized world; and from the Hebrides to the Euphrates, from the Atlas to the Caucasus, for the first and only time in the history of man, Europe, Asia, and Africa formed one vast whole. The union of the oriental half, indeed, was mainly external and material, but throughout the western half a common order of ideas prevailed. Their religion was the belief in many gods—a system in which each of the powers of nature, each virtue, each art, was thought to be the manifestation of some separate god. It was a system which stimulated activity, self-reliance, toleration, sociability, and art, but which left the external world a vague and unmeaning mystery, and the heart of man a prey to violent and conflicting passions. It possessed not that idea of unity which alone can sustain philosophy and science, and alone can establish in the breast a fixed and elevated moral conscience.

The Roman system had its strong points, but it had also the weak. They were in the main three. It was a system founded upon war, upon slavery, upon a false and vague belief. Now as to war, it is most true that war was not then, as in modern times, the monstrous negation of civilization. It seems that by war alone could nations then he pressed into that union which was essential to all future progress. Whilst war was common to all the nations of antiquity, with the Romans alone it became the instrument of progress. The Romans warred only to found peace. They did not so much conquer as incorporate the nations. Not more by the strength of the Roman than by the instinctive submission in the conquered to his manifest superiority, was the great empire built up. Victors and vanquished share in the honour of the common result—law, order, peace, and government. When the Romans conquered, it was once for all. That which once became a province of the Roman empire rested thenceforth in profound tran- page 60 quillity. No standing armies, no brutal soldiery, overawed the interior or the towns. Whilst all within the circle of the empire rested in peace, along its frontiers stood the disciplined veterans of Rome watching the roving hordes of barbarians, and protecting the pale of civilization.

Still, however useful in its place, it was a system of war; a system necessarily fatal in the long run to all progress, to all industry, to all the domestic virtues, to all the gentler feelings. In a State in which all great ideas and traditions originated in conquest, the dignity of labour, the arts of industry, were but slowly recognised or respected; the work of conquest over, the existence of the great Roman became in too many cases purposeless, idle, and vicious. Charity, compassion, gentleness, were not easy-virtues. The home was sacrificed. The condition of woman in the wreck of the family relations sank to the lowest ebb. In a word, the stern virtues of the old Roman private life seemed ending in inhuman ferocity and monstrous debauchery.

Secondly, the Roman was a system of slavery. It existed only for the few. True industry was impossible. The whole industrial class were degraded. The owners of wealth and its producers were alike demoralized. In the great towns were gathered a miserable crowd of poor freemen, with all the vices of the "mean whites" of America. Throughout the country the land was cultivated, not by a peasantry, not by scattered labourers, but by gangs of slaves, guarded in workhouses and watched by overseers. Hence the whole population and all civilization was gathered in the towns. The spaces between and around them were wildernesses, with pasturage and slaves in place of agriculture and men. Thirdly, it was a system based on a belief in a multitude of gods, a system without truth, or coherence, or power. There was no single belief to unite all classes in one faith. Nothing ennobling to trust in, no standard of right and wrong which could act on the moral page 61 nature. There were no recognised teachers. The moral and the material were hopelessly confused. The politicians had no system of morality, religion, or belief, and were void of moral authority. The philosophers and the moralists were hardly members of the State, and taught only to a circle of admirers, and exercised no wide social influence. The religion of the people had long ceased to be believed. It had long been without any moral purpose; it became a vague mass of meaningless traditions. With these threefold sources of corruption, war, slavery, false belief, the Roman empire so magnificent without, was, within, a rotten fabric. Politically vigorous, morally it was diseased. Never perhaps has the world witnessed cases of such stupendous moral corruption, as when immense power, boundless riches, and native energy were left as they were then without object, control, or shame. Then, from time to time, there broke forth a very orgy of wanton strength. But its hour was come. The best spirits were all filled with a sense of the hollowness and corruption around them. Statesmen, poets, and philosophers, in all these last eras were pouring forth their complaints and fears, or feebly attempting remedies. The new element had long been making its way unseen, had long been preparing the ground, and throughout the civilized world there was rising up a groan of weariness and despair.

For three centuries a belief in the existence of one God alone, in whom were concentrated all power and goodness, who cared for the moral guidance of mankind, a belief in the immortality of the soul and its existence in another state, had been growing up in the minds of the best Greek thinkers. The noble morality of their philosophers had taken strong hold of the higher consciences of Rome, and had diffused amongst the better spirits throughout the empire new and purer types. Next the great empire itself, forcing all nations in one State, had long inspired in its worthiest members a sense of the great brotherhood page 62 of mankind, had slowly mitigated the worst evils of slavery, and paved the way for a religious society. Thirdly, another and a greater cause was at work. Through Greek teachers the world had long been growing familiar with the religious ideas of Asia, its conceptions of a superhuman world, of a world of spirit, angel, demon, future state, and overruling Creator, with its mystical imagery, its spiritual poetry, its intense zeal and fervent emotion. And now, partly from the contact with Greek thought and Roman civilization, a great change was taking place in the very heart of that small Jewish race, of all the races of Asia known to us, the most intense, earnest, and pure : possessing a high sense of personal morality, the truest yearnings of the heart, and the deepest capacity for spiritual fervour. In their midst arose a fellowship of true-hearted brethren, gathered around one noble and touching character, which adoration has veiled in a mystery which passes from the pale of definite history. On them had dawned the vision of a new era of their national faith, which should expand the devotion of David, the high purpose of Isaiah, and the moral excellence of Samuel, into a gentler, wider, and more loving spirit.

How this new idea grew to the height of a new religion, and brightened, and was shed over the whole earth by the strength of its intensity and its purity, is to us a familiar and enchanting tale. We know how the first fellowship of the brethren met; how they went forth into all lands with words of mercy, love, justice, and hope; their self-denial, humility, and zeal; their heroic lives and awful deaths; their loving natures and their noble purposes; how they gathered around them wherever they came the purest and greatest; how across mountains, seas, and continents, the communion of saints joined in affectionate trust; how from the deepest corruption of the heart arose a yearning for a truer life; how the new faith, ennobling the instincts of human nature, raised up the slave, the poor, and the page 63 humble to the dignity of common manhood, and gave new meaning to the true nature of womanhood; how, by slow degrees, the church, with its rule of right, of morality, and of communion, arose; how the first founders and apostles of this faith lived and died, and all their gifts were concentrated in one, of all the characters of certain history doubtless the loftiest and purest,—the unflinching, the unselfish, the great-hearted, the loving Paul.

But deeply as this story must always interest us, let us not forget that the result was due not to one man or to one people, that each people gave their share to the whole; Greece, her thought and gentleness; Rome, her social instinct, her genius for discipline; Asia, her intensity of belief and personal morality. The task that lay before the new religion was immense. It was, upon a uniform faith, to found a system of sound and common morality, to reform the deep-rooted evils of slavery; to institute a method which should educate, teach, and guide, and bring out the tenderer and higher instincts of our nature. The powers of mind and of character had been trained by Greece and Rome, to the Christian church came the loftier mission of ruling the affections and the heart.

From henceforth the history of the world shows a new character.

Now and henceforward we see two elements in civilization working side by side—the practical and the moral. There is now a system to rule the State and a system to act upon the mind; a body of men to educate, to guide and elevate the spirit and the character of the individual, as well as a set of rulers to enforce the laws and direct the action of the nation. There is henceforward the State and the Church. Hitherto all had been confused; statesmen were priests and teachers; public officers pretended to order men's lives by law, and pretended in vain. Henceforward our view is fixed on Europe, on Western Europe alone: we leave aside the East, we leave the half Romanized, the page 64 half Christianized East to the empire of Mohammed, to the Arab, the Mongol, and the Turk. We turn solely to the heirs of time, the West, in which is centred the progress and the future of the race. Henceforward, then, for the ten centuries of the middle ages which succeeded in Western Europe the fall of the Roman Empire, we have two movements to watch together—Feudalism and Catholicism—the system of the State and the system of the Church: let us turn now to the former.

The vast empire of Rome broke up with prolonged convulsions. Its concentration in any single hand, however necessary as a transition, became too vast as a permanent system. It wanted a rural population; it was wholly without local life. Long the awe-struck barbarians stood pausing to attack. At length they broke in. Ever bolder and more numerous tribes poured onwards. In wave after wave they swept over the whole empire, sacking cities, laying waste the strongholds, at length storming Rome itself; and laws, learning, industry, art, civilization itself, seem swallowed up in the deluge. For a moment it appeared that all that was Roman had vanished. It was submerged, but not destroyed. Slowly the waters of this overwhelming invasion abate. Slowly the old Roman towns and their institutions begin to appear above the waste like the highest points of a flooded country. Slowly the old landmarks re-appear and the forms of civilized existence. Four centuries were passed in one continual ebb and flow; but at length the restless movement subsided. One by one the conquering tribes settled, took root, and occupied the soil. Step by step they learned the arts of old Rome. At length they were transformed from the invaders into the defenders. King after king strove to give form to the heaving mass, and put an end to this long era of confusion. One, at length, the greatest of them all, succeeded, and reared the framework of modern Europe. It was the imperial Charlemagne, the greatest name of the middle ages, page 65 who, like some Roman emperor restored to life, marshalled the various tribes which had settled in France, Germany, Italy, and the north of Spain, into a single empire, beat back, in a long life of war, the tide of invaders on the west, and north, and south, Saxon, Northman, and Saracen, and awakened anew in the memory of nations the typo of civil government and organized society. His work in itself was but a single and a temporary effort; but in its distant consequences it has left great permanent effects. It was like a desperate rally in the midst of confusion; but it gave mankind time to recover much that they had lost. In his empire may be traced the nucleus of the state system of Western Europe; by the traditions of his name, the modern monarchies were raised into power. He too gave shape and vigour to the first efforts of public administration. But a still greater result was the indirect effect of his life and labours. It was by the spirit of his established rule that the feudal system which had been long spontaneously growing up from beneath the debris of the Roman empire, first found strength to develope into a methodical form, received an imperial sanction to its scheme, and the type of its graduated order of rule. And now what was this feudal system, and what were its results?

In the first place, it was a system of local defence. The knight was bound to guard his fee, the baron his barony, the count his county, the duke his duchy. Then it was a system of local government. The lord of the manor had his court of justice, the great baron his greater court, and the king his court above all. Then it was a system of local industry; the freeholder tilled his own fields, the knight was responsible for the welfare of his own lands. The lord had an interest in the prosperity of his lordship. Hence slowly arose an agricultural industry, impossible in any other way. The knight cleared the country of robbers, or beat back invaders, whilst the husbandman ploughed beneath his castle walls. The nation no longer, as under page 66 Greece and Rome, was made up of scattered towns. It had a local root, a rural population, and complete system of agricultural life. The monstrous centralization of Rome was gone, and a local government began. But the feudal system was not merely material, it was also moral; not simply political, it was social also. The whole of society was bound by it together by a long series of gradations, Bach man had his duo place and rank, his rights, and his duties. The knight owed protection to his men; his men owed their services to him. Under the Roman system, there had been only citizens and slaves. Now there was none so high but had grave duties to all below; none so low, not the meanest serf, but had a claim for protection. Hence, all became, from king to serf, recognised members of one common society. Thence sprung the closest bond which has ever bound man to man. To the noble natures of the northern invaders was duo the now idea of loyalty, the spirit of truth, faithfulness, devotion, and trust, the lofty sense of honour which bound the warrior to his captain, the vassal to his lord, the squire to his knight. It ripened into the finest temper which has ever ennobled the man of action, the essence of chivalry; in its true sense not dead, not destined to die,—the temper of mercy, courtesy, and truth, of fearlessness and trust, of a generous use of power and strength, of succour to the weak, comfort to the poor, reverence for age, for goodness, and for woman; which revolts against injustice, oppression, and untruth, and never listens to a call unmoved. Is it possible that this spirit is dead? This which watched the cradle of modern society, and is the source of all our poetry and art, does it not live for future service, and new beauty, transformed from a military to a peaceful society? May it not revive the seeds of trust and duty between man and man, inspire the labourer with dignity and generosity, raise the landlord to a consciousness of duty, and renew the mysterious bond which unites all those who labour in a common work?

page 67

We turn to the Church, the moral element which pervades the middle ages. Amidst the crash of the falling empire, as darker grew the storm which swept over the visible state on earth, more and more the better spirits turned their eyes towards a kingdom above the earth. They turned, as the great Latin father relates, amidst utter corruption to an entire reconstruction of morality; in the wreck of all earthly greatness, they set their hearts upon a future life, and strove amidst anarchy and bloodshed to found a moral union of society. Hence rose the Catholic Church, offering to the thoughtful a mysterious and inspiring faith; to the despairing and the remorseful a new and higher life; to the wretched comfort, fellowship, and aid; to the perplexed a grand system of belief and practice—in its creed Greek, in its worship Asiatic, in its constitution Roman. In it we see the Roman genius for organisation and law, transformed and revived. In the fall of her material greatness Rome's social greatness survived. Rome still remained the centre of the civilized world. Latin was still the language which bound men of distant lands together. From Rome went forth the edicts which were common to all Europe. The majesty of Rome was still the centre of civilization. The bishops' court took the place of that of the imperial governor. The peace of the Church took the place of the peace of Rome. The barbarian invaders who overthrew the hollow greatness of the empire, humbled themselves reverently before the ministers of religion. The Church stood between the conqueror and the conquered, and joined them both in one. She told to all—Roman and barbarian, slave or freeman, great or weak—how there was one God, one Saviour of all, one equal soul in all, one common judgment, one common life hereafter. She told them how all, as children of one Father, were in His eyes equally dear; how charity, mercy, humility, devotion alone would make them worthy of His love; and at these words there rose up in the fine spirits of the new races a page 68 sense of brotherhood amongst mankind, a desire for a higher life, a zeal for all the gentler qualities and the higher duties, such as the world had not seen before. Thus was her first task accomplished, and she founded a system of morality common to all and possible to all. She spoke to the slave of his immortal soul, to the master of the guilt of slavery. Master and slave should meet alike within her walls, and lie side by side within her tomb; and thus her second task was accomplished, and she overthrew for ever the system of slavery, and raised up the labourer into the dignity of a citizen. Then she told how their common Master, of power unbounded, had loved the humble and the weak. She told of the simple lives of saints and martyrs, their tender care of the poorer brethren, their spirit of benevolence, self-sacrifice, and self-abasement; and thus the third great task was accomplished, when she placed the essence of practical religion in care for the weak, in affection for the family, in reverence for woman, in benevolence to all, and in personal self-denial. Next, she undertook to educate all alike. She provided a body of common teachers; she organized schools; she raised splendid cathedrals, where all might be brought into the presence of the beautiful, and see all forms of art in their highest perfection-architecture, and sculpture, and painting, and work in glass, in iron, and in wood, heightened by inspiring ritual and touching music. She accepted all without thought of birth or place. She gathered to herself all the knowledge of the time, though all was subordinate to religious life. The priests, so far as such were needed, were poets, historians, dramatists, musicians, architects, sculptors, painters, judges, lawyers, magistrates, ministers, students of science, engineers, philosophers, astronomers, and moralists. Lastly, she had another task, and she accomplished even that. It was to stand between the tyrant and his victim; to succour the oppressed, to humble the evil ruler, to moderate the horrors of war; above all, to join nation to nation, to page 69 mediate between hostile races, to give to civilized Europe some element of union and cohesion.

Let us think of it as it was in its glory, not in its decay. Let us remember it as a system of life which for ten centuries possessed the passionate devotion of the foremost spirits of their time; one which has left us a rich store of thought and teaching, of wise precept, lofty poetry, and matchless devotion; as a system which really penetrated and acted on the lives of men. Let us think of it as it was in essence, truly the union of all the men of intellect and character of their age towards one common end; not like Egyptian priests, pretending to govern by law; not like Greek philosophers, expounding to a chosen sect; not like modern savants, thinking for mere love of thought, or mere love of fame, without method or concert, without moral guidance, without social purpose; but a system in which the wisest and the best men of their day, themselves reared in a common teaching, organized on a vast scale, and directed by one general rule, devoted the whole energies of their brains and hearts in unison together, to the moral guidance of society; sought to know only that they might teach, to teach only to improve, and lived only to instruct, to raise, to humanize their fellow men. Let us think of it thus as it was at its best; and in this forget even the cruelty, the imposture, and the degradation of its fall; let horror for its vices and pity for its errors be lost in one sentiment of admiration, gratitude, and honour, for this the best and the last of all the organized systems of human society; of all the institutions of mankind, the most worthy of remembrance and regret.

But if we are generous in our judgment let us be just. The Catholic system ended, it is most true, in disastrous and shameful ruin. Excellent in intention and in method, it was from the first doomed to inevitable corruption from the inherent faults of its constitution. It had worthily trained and elevated the noblest side of human nature—the reli- page 70 gious, the moral, and the social instincts of our being; and the energy with which it met this the prime want of men, upheld it through the long era of its corruption, and still upholds it in its last pitiable spasm. But with the intellectual and with the practical sphere of man's life, it was by its nature incompetent to deal. In its zeal for man's moral progress it had taken its stand upon a false and even a preposterous belief. Burning to subdue the lower passions of man's nature, it had vainly hoped to crush the practical instincts of his activity. It discarded with disdain the thoughts and labours of the ancient world. It proclaimed as the ideal of human life, a visionary and even a selfish asceticism. For a period, for a long period, its transcendent and indispensable services maintained it in spite of every defect and vice; but at last the time came when the outraged instincts reasserted their own, and showed how hopeless is any religion or system of life not based on a conception of human nature as a whole at once complete and true. The Church began in indifference towards philosophy and contempt for material improvement. Indifference and contempt passed at length into hatred and horror; and it ended in denouncing science, and in a bitter conflict with industry. At last it had become, in spite of its better self, the enemy of all progress, all thought, all industry, all freedom. It allied itself with all that was retrograde and arbitrary. It fell from bad to worse, and settled into an existence of timid repression. Hence it came that the Church, attempting to teach upon a basis of falsehood, to direct man's active life upon a merely visionary creed, to govern a society which it only half understood, succeeded only for a time. It was scarcely founded before it began to break up. It had scarcely put forth its strength before it began to decay. It stood like one of its own vast cathedrals, building for ages yet never completed; falling to ruin whilst yet unfinished; filling us with a sense of beauty and of failure; a monument of noble design and misdirected strength. It fell like page 71 the Roman empire, with prolonged convulsion and corruption, and left us a memory of cruelty, ignorance, tyranny, rapacity and vice, which we too often forget were but the symptoms and consequences of its fall.

And now we have stood beside the rise and fall of four great stages of the history of mankind. The priestly systems of Asia, the intellectual activity of Greece, the military empire of Rome, the moral government of Catholicism, had each been tried in turn, and each had been found wanting. Each had disdained the virtues of the others; each had failed to incorporate the others. With the fall of the Catholic and feudal system, we enter upon the age of modern society. It is an age of dissolution, reconstruction, variety, movement, and confusion. It is an era in which all the former elements re-assert themselves with new life, all that had ever been attempted is renewed again; an era of amazing complexity, industry, and force, in which every belief, opinion, and idea is criticised, transformed, and expanded. Every institution of society and habit of life is thoroughly unsettled and remodelled; all the sciences constructed—art, industry, policy, religion, philosophy, and morality, developed with a vigorous and constant growth; but, withal, it is an era in which all is individual, separate, and free, without any system, or regularity, or unity, or harmony.

First, the feudal system broke up under the influence of the very industry which it had itself fostered and reared. The great fiefs as they became settled, gradually gathered into masses; one by one they fell into the hands of kings, and at length upon the ruins of feudalism arose the great monarchies, and the feudal atoms crystallized into the actual nations of Europe. The variety and dispersion of the feudal system vanished. A central monarch established one uniform order, police, and justice; and modem political society, as we know it rose. The invention of gunpowder made the knight helpless, the bullet pierced his mail, and page 72 standing armies took the place of the feudal militia. The discovery of the compass opened the ocean to commerce. The free towns expanded with a new industry, and covered the continent with infinitely varied products. The knight became the landlord, the man-at-arms became the tenant, the serf became the free labourer, and the emancipation of the worker, the first, the greatest victory of the Church was complete.

Thus, at last, the energies of men ceased to be occupied by war, to which a small section of the society was permanently devoted. Peace became in fact the natural, not the accidental state of man. Society passed into its final phase of industrial existence. Peace, industry, and wealth again gave scope to thought. The riches of the earth were ransacked, new continents were opened, intercourse increased over the whole earth. Greeks, flying from Constantinople before the Turks, spread over Europe, bringing with them books, instruments, inscriptions, gems, and sculptures; the science, the literature, and the inventions of the ancient world, long stored up and forgotten on the shores of the Bosphorus. Columbus discovered America. The Portuguese sailed round Africa to India; a host of daring adventurers penetrated untrodden seas and lands; man entered at last upon the full dominion of the earth. Copernicus and Galileo unveiled the mystery of the world, and made a revolution in all thought. Mathematics, chemistry, botany, and medicine, preserved mainly by the Arabs during the middle ages, were again taken up almost where the Greeks had left them. The elements of the material earth were eagerly explored. The system of experiment (which Bacon reduced to a method) was worked out by the common labour of philosophers and artists. For the first time the human form was dissected and explored. Physiology, as a science, began. Human history and society became the subject of regular and enlightened thought. Politics became a branch of philosophy. With page 73 all this the new knowledge was scattered by the printing-press, itself the product and the stimulus of the movement, in a word, the religious ban was raised from off the human powers. The ancient world was linked on to the modern. Science, speculation, and invention lived again after twelve centuries of trance. A fresh era of progress opened with the new-found treasures of the past.

Next, before this transformation of ideas, the Church collapsed. Its hollow dogmas were exposed, its narrow prejudices ridiculed, its corruptions probed. Mens' consciences and brains rose up against an institution which pretended to teach without knowledge, and to govern though utterly disorganized. Convulsion followed on convulsion; the struggle we call the Reformation opened, and for a century and a half shook Europe to its foundations. At the close of this long era of massacre and war, it was found that the result achieved was small indeed. Europe had been split into two religious systems, of which neither one nor the other was fit for its duty. Admiration for the noble characters of the first Reformers, for their intensity, truth, and zeal, their heroic lives and deaths, the affecting beauty of their purposes and hopes is yet possible to us, whilst we confess that the Protestant, like the Catholic faith, had failed to organize human industry, society, and thought; that both were alike hollow, bigoted, and weak, and both had failed to satisfy the wants and hopes of man. More and more has thought and knowledge grown into even fiercer conflict with authority of Book or Pope; more and more in Catholic France as in Protestant England, does the moral guidance of men pass from the hands of priests, or sect, to be assumed, if it be assumed at all, by the poet, the philosopher, the essayist, and even the journalist; more and more does Church and sect stand dumb and helpless in presence of the evils with which society is rife.

Side by side the religious and the political system tottered in ruin together. From the close of the fifteenth page 74 century, now one, now the other was furiously assailed. For the most part both were struck at once. The long religious wars of Germany and Franco; the heroic defence of the free Republic of Holland against the might of Spain; the glorious repulse of its Armada by England; the immortal revolution achieved by our greatest stateman, Cromwell; the struggle of his worthy successor, William of Orange, against the oppression of Louis XIV., were all but parts of one long struggle, which lasted during the whole of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a struggle in which religion and politics both equally shared, a struggle between the old powers of Feudalism and Catholicism on the one side, with all the strength of ancient systems, against the half-formed, ill-governed force of freedom, industry, and thought; a long and varied struggle in which aristocracy, monarchy, privileged caste, arbitrary and military power, church formalism, dogmatism, superstition, narrow teaching, visionary worship, and hollow creeds, were each in turn attacked, and each in turn prostrated.

A general armistice followed this long and exhausting struggle. The principles of Protestantism, Constitutionalism, Toleration, and the balance of power, established a system of compromise, and for a century restored some order in the political and religious world. But in the world of ideas the contest grew still keener. Industry expanded to incredible proportions, and the social system was transformed before it. Thought soared into unimagined regions, and reared a new realm of science, discovery, and art. Wild social and religious visions arose and passed through the conscience of mankind. At last the forms and ideas of human life, material, social, intellectual, and moral, had all been utterly transformed, and the fabric of European society rested in peril on the crumbling crust of the past. The great convulsion came. The gathering storm of centuries burst at length in the French Revolution. Then, indeed, it seemed that chaos was come again. It was as if page 75 an earthquake had come, blotting out all trace of what had been, engulfing the most ancient structures, destroying all former landmarks, and scattering society in confusion and dismay. It spreads from Paris through every corner of France, from France to Italy, to Spain, to Germany, to England; it pierces, like the flash from a vast storm-cloud, through every obstacle of matter, space, or form. It kindles all ideas of men, and gives wild energy to all purposes of action. For though terrible it was not deadly. It came not to destroy but to construct, not to kill but to give life. And through the darkest and bloodiest whirl of the chaos there rose up clear on high, before the bewildered eyes of men, a vision of a new and greater era yet to come—of brotherhood, of freedom, and of union, of never ending progress, of mutual help, trust, co-operation, and goodwill; an era of true knowledge, of real science, and practical discovery; but, above all, an era of active industry for all; of the dignity, and consecration of labour, of a social life, just to all, common to all, and beneficent to all.

That great revolution is not ended. The questions it proposed are not yet solved. We live still in the heavings of its shock. It yet remains with us to show how the last vestiges of the feudal, hereditary, and aristocratic systems may give place to a genuine, an orderly, and permanent republic; how the trammels of a faith long grown useless and retrograde may be removed without injury to the moral, religious, and social instincts, which are still much entangled in it; how industry may be organized, and the workman enrolled with full rights of citizenship, a free, a powerful, and, a cultivated member of the social body. Such is the task before us. The ground is all prepared, the materials are abundant and sufficient. We have a rich harvest of science, a profusion of material facilities, a vast collection of the products, ideas, and inventions of past ages. Every vein of human life is full; every faculty has page 76 been trained to fall efficiency; every want of our nature is supplied. We need now only harmony, order, union; we need only to group into a whole these powers and gifts; the task before us is to discover some complete and balanced system of life; some common basis of belief; some object for the imperishable religious instincts and aspirations of mankind; some faith to bind the existence of man to the visible universe around him; some common social end for thought, action, and feeling; some common ground for teaching, studying, or judging. We need to extract the essence of all older forms of civilization, to combine them, and harmonize them in one, a system of existence which may possess something of the calm, the completeness, and the symmetry of the earliest societies of men; the zeal for truth, knowledge, science, and improvement, which mark the Greek, with something of his grace, his life, his radiant poetry and art; the deep social spirit of Rome, its political sagacity, its genius for government, law and freedom, its noble sense of public life; above all else, the constancy, earnestness, and tenderness of the mediæval system; its sense of the surrender of self to a Power above, its undying zeal for the spiritual union of mankind :—and with all this the industry, the knowledge, the variety, the activity, of modern life.

The End.

Harrild, Printer, London.