of legislation, and direct the whole course of civilization for a thousand years, and yet that the period in which they were so supreme should have been one of the most contemptible in history."

Mr. Lecky calls attention to three leading features in the moral action of Christianity. It enlarged greatly the scale and range of the virtues, adding to the heroic ones, which had been so nobly understood and interpreted by Stoicism, the benevolent ones, and those connected with purity; and it further affected greatly the relation, proportion, and value of the virtues among themselves. It made, or it restored, the connexion of morality with religion. And it did what had been absolutely unattempted before-it sought, in its morality, contact with the multitudes, regarded their needs as its object, and tried to place virtue within the reach of their hopes and efforts. It preached the Gospel to the poor, and sought the lost, the castaway, and the forsaken.

On the other hand, loss in some things, and new false directions in others, went along with this new and vast moral advance. If the amiable virtues gained, Mr. Lecky thinks that the heroic ones suffered. If benevolence, charity, modesty-and, above all, purity-took a place in real life which went beyond all former ideals of virtue, it is no less certain, Mr. Lecky holds, that Christian civilization has been much less rich than heathen in the grand excellences of civic and political life, in the nobleness of patriotic and public virtue. In the next place, Christian morality, like heathen, had gone wrong in exaggerated and mistaken developments. Its great conquest was purity; its eternal disgrace was asceticism. Heathen morality never soared so high as that conquest, not merely by the rational, but by the spiritual over the animal nature, that cleansing and lifting up of the affections, which Christianity has not only set up as a standard, but realized so conspicuously as a social fact; but heathen morality never sunk so low as to the sanctity of the monks of the desert. Further, in the hands of Christianity,

morality, animated by religion, was opened in a novel way, and on an unexampled scale, to the average crowd; it found new modes of reaching and regulating, not merely a few choice natures, but numbers who in heathen days would have been left as not worth attending to, desperate and incapable of improvement. But this great advantage was dearly purchased. When religion taught morality, and addressed the masses, the preachers of morality were priests a new channel of despotic power was opened; and as religion must always suppose itself to be certainly and exclusively right, liberty of thought almost perished for the world as a habit of the mind, and in outward and practical things intolerance, the most brutal and blind, became the rule.

In all this there is abundant truth:

the difficulty is about its amount and proportions. To prove that, as seen with our eyes, Augustine was extravagant or Athanasius overbearing, is not necessarily to do them historical justice. The general difficulty of being candid in the right place, where candour tells, and perhaps impairs the force of a statement, is often exhibited in Mr. Lecky's elaborate and learned pictures. Some of them have the intrinsic fault of being overcharged. More often they mislead, from not being placed in sufficiently distinct relation to those which balance and qualify them. In judging an influence or a character, it makes all the difference what you make paramount and what subordinate, which the substance and which the qualification, which the governing result and which the abatement. In Mr. Lecky's view of the influence of Christianity on morals, very important consideration appears to be, if not overlooked, at least not present with sufficient constancy. This is the inchoate and germinal character of this influence in the period which he treats. What the Christian Church attempted in elevating man and society was something without precedent, and of which the difficulty is beyond calculation. Without experience, without knowing, or having any means to know,

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how great principles would work, and how they had to be guarded and modified, with society going to pieces, with the multitudes at the stage at which they were in the provinces of the Empire and the hordes of the invading barbarians, the Church leaders, men of their own age, and necessarily reflecting much of its character, had to carry on their bold and eventful experiments. It is easy for us, reaping at the end of century upon century the fruit of their great attempt, and able to see how tendencies and efforts have worked out, to criticise what they thought that they had to do. Much of it was rough, harsh, immoderate, and, we see now, unwise; it partook of the nature of all beginnings; as in the beginning of knowledge, of art, of mechanism, the aim was crude and vague, and the ways of attaining it still more so. But besides that the aim in those early Christian times was distinctly and with overruling purpose towards higher things, and that all that early Christian literature, to our eyes so often deformed by extravagance and error, was in all its intensity a force towards moral good, there was this also: that from first to last, one thing has never failed in Christianity, the power of self-correction, self-renovation, self-reform. The course of good and evil, of light and darkness, have swayed backwards and forward in varying lengths of time and degrees of force but no alternations on the bad side have ever yet succeeded in extinguishing the power so characteristic of Christianity, of trying again and again after failure, to realize its first principles in a still better form, of restoring what has decayed, of returning to the lost path. In the very darkest times of those dark ages,-about which Mr. Lecky, after all that Guizot, Palgrave, and Freeman, certainly not ecclesiastical zealots, have written, is too apt to repeat the prejudiced judgments and the summary sneers of Hume and Robertson,the idea of continual reformation, of the duty and the obvious possibility of correcting what had gone down and gone astray, was never lost sight of The

reformations of Councils and Church rulers may often have been strange and ill-judged: but they kept alive the spirit of progress and improvement, and were real steps in that long but unceasing ascent by which European society has reached the point, far as it still is below the summits, from which we can look down, sometimes with scanty justice, on the rough hard efforts which in their place contributed to our advance.

It is the failure to give due weight to this peculiarity of Christian history which impairs the value of Mr. Lecky's survey, and makes his judgments sometimes unjust. Under it men have steadily grown; there have been pauses in the progress, but the progress has never ceased. But, of course, much that was natural or inevitable in the earlier stages is as utterly out of place in the later, and is seen, perhaps, to have been in its own time mistaken or excessive. But you cannot expect men in rude times to be in earnest or have strong convictions, and to be as tolerant or as moderate and judicious as they learn to be by the experience and miscarriages and terrible disasters of successive ages. When in our days we condemn the old asceticism, we do not always realize the frightful forces on the other side, to which at the time asceticism seemed the only practical counterpoise. When we complain of the want of free inquiry, we do not always ask ourselves what sort of free inquiry would have been possible in the days of the falling Empire, or of the barbarian conquest, or what it would have led to, not only in the region of theology, but of morals. When we are shocked at intolerance, we do not always sufficiently reflect that, in all things, the law must come before freedom, and that law is intolerant in its very nature; and if time and discipline are elements of progress in the race as well as in the individual, it is idle to carry back the conditions of one age to another at a totally different stage of growth, and unjust to be severe, in the name of freedom, on what was a necessary antecedent to its healthy growth.

In the general summaries which Mr.

Lecky gives on these points, and in the balance of judgment to which he attempts to come, he is, with all his fulness, hardly satisfactory. He leaves some great questions, arising out of his subject, untouched; or he deals with them in a commonplace and superficial way which is sometimes astonishing. But

there is one thing in which he never fails. He keeps nothing back that comes before him. You may differ from him in your inferences or judgment. You

may not always be content with the fashion in which he exhibits his details. You may think that with the facts which he produces, he ought to have remembered them when he was stating -perhaps with rhetorical point and strength-his general views, and ought to have been more guarded and measured. But if you have patience, you will almost always find in Mr. Lecky both sides of the question. There is something about

the book, with all its earnestness and strength of assertion, which strikes a reader as inconclusive and indeterminate. But no book has yet attempted, as this does, to bring under one view the facts of moral progress in all their variety and complexity at the opening period of modern society, and to connect them in a comprehensive and reasonable order; and Mr. Lecky has further the great and uncommon merit-in which those who most differ from him may well learn a lesson-the merit of furnishing in his details the materials for correcting his own inferences and for qualifying his general statements. There are deeper and more powerful thinkers than Mr. Lecky; there are writers even more able than he to be fair and tolerant to what they dislike and disapprove : but there are very few so candid in showing their hand and letting their readers know the grounds of their judgments.

R. W. C.