IF

VON RANKE

OCTOBER, 1840

NOTE ON THE ESSAY

F the essay upon Gladstone's Church and State displays all the strength of Macaulay's understanding, all its weakness is seen in his essay upon Ranke's History of the Popes. Surefooted enough where robust common sense, political experience and ample reading could guard him from error, Macaulay seldom ventures on the discussion of a large philosophical problem without falling into commonplace disguised by rhetoric. His mind was not subtle nor was the theological atmosphere in which he had grown up favourable to unconventional thinking. In the following essay he involves himself in many contradictions. He tells us that, unless a church has made bad history or bad science matter of faith, the progress of knowledge leaves men where their fathers were in all that concerns religion. He then shows that every advance in general enlightenment has led to a fresh revolt against the authority of the Church of Rome. He indicates pretty clearly that in each of these revolts the Church of Rome has lost some ground, and he seems to infer that she will be eternal. He seems to imagine that the development of intelligence consists merely in the accumulation of fragments of knowledge without any change in habits of thought. He tells us that not one of the many sciences in which we surpass the Blackfoot Indians throws the smallest light upon the state of the soul after the animal life is extinct. Perhaps not; but the very conception of a purely spiritual essence is beyond the reach of a savage. If a Blackfoot Indian has a vision of a departed friend he feels sure that the friend has revisited this world. If a European scholar has such a vision he concludes that his nervous system or his digestion has been impaired. "A Christian of the fifth century with a Bible," says Macaulay, "is neither better nor worse situated than a Christian of the nineteenth century with a Bible, candour and natural acuteness being supposed equal." But the Christian of the nineteenth century possesses or may easily acquire a fund of historical, philological and critical lore respecting the Bible which was beyond the reach of a Christian of the fifth century. More than this, the mind itself is modified by the growth of knowledge and reflection. Things which the wisest men believed without effort four hundred years ago are incredible to very ordinary men in the present generation. Our conception

of the universe is for ever dissolving and re-forming itself. The process, although silent, is so swift and irresistible that as every historical student knows, and Macaulay himself must have known, it is almost as difficult to enter into the thoughts of men in a remote age as it would be to call up their faces or to hear their voices.

Macaulay treats every revolt against the Church of Rome as simply an attempt to substitute a more correct for a less correct system of theological propositions. But this is the mere outside of such controversies. The principle for which the reformers contended, although they knew it not, the principle that every man ought to use his own faculties in judging of the truth, this principle has survived their doctrinal variations, has penetrated the countries which rejected the Reformation, and has transformed Roman Catholic as well as Protestant societies. A student of natural science can lecture at Rome or Paris as safely as in London or Berlin, and runs no risk of being burnt alive at Vienna or even at Madrid. It is the operation of this very principle which explains the fact so surprising to Macaulay that Protestant orthodoxy gains little at the expense of Catholic orthodoxy. The principle of private judgment is a principle of progress. If it causes us to think differently from Hildebrand or Dominic it also causes us to think differently from Luther or Calvin. The real claim of Luther and Calvin to respect is not the human weakness ich led them to set dogma against dogma and to encounter intolerance with intolerance, but their courageous repudiation of teaching which revolted their own reason and conscience. The reformers were men as were the Popes and the inquisitors, and they also erred, but they fought for a better cause than they knew of, and conquered for later ages the freedom of the human spirit.

Macaulay is equally superficial in his criticism of the French freethinkers of the eighteenth century. He dwells truly enough upon their philanthropic ardour and the power which it gave them. But he fails to note that they too contended for the right of private judgment. Like the reformers they failed to see more than a portion of truth, and like the reformers they taught much that is of no lasting import to mankind. What was best and most durable in the writings of Voltaire and the Encyclopædists was the demand that men should be free to employ their reason upon everything that is of concern to humanity. We are so thoroughly accustomed to acknowledge this principle, we so firmly believe it to be an axiom of natural justice, that we forget how tardily it prevailed. Even in the eighteenth century it was only here and there, in England, in Holland, or in Prussia under Frederic the Great, that the student could feel secure of liberty to publish his conclusions. In France, in Italy, in most states of Germany, he might in fact remain unmolested, but neither law nor public opinion gave him unqualified protection. That the sense of individual responsibility and the right of individual inquiry will continue to modify the religious beliefs of civilised men can hardly be doubted. Official disclaimers and official anathemas unsupported by fire and sword can never quell the spirit of the age or arrest the natural evolution of science.

VON RANKE

The Ecclesiastical and Political History of the Popes of Rome, during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. BY LEOPOLD RANKE, Professor in the University of Berlin: Translated from the German, by SARAH AUSTIN.1 3 vols. 8vo. London: 1840.

IT

T is hardly necessary for us to say that this is an excellent book excellently translated. The original work of Professor Ranke is known and esteemed wherever German literature is studied, and has been found interesting even in a most inaccurate and dishonest French version. It is, indeed, the work of a mind fitted both for minute researches and for large speculations. It is written also in an admirable spirit, equally remote from levity and bigotry, serious and earnest, yet tolerant and impartial. It is, therefore, with the greatest pleasure that we now see this book take its place among the English classics. Of the translation we need only say that it is such as might be expected from the skill, the taste, and the scrupulous integrity of the accomplished lady who, as an interpreter between the mind of Germany and the mind of Britain, has already deserved so well of both countries.

The subject of this book has always appeared to us singularly interesting. How it was that Protestantism did so much, yet did no more, how it was that the Church of Rome, having lost a large part of Europe, not only ceased to lose, but actually regained nearly half of what she had lost, is certainly a most curious and important question; and on this question Professor Ranke has thrown far more light than any other person who has

written on it.

There is not, and there never was on this earth, a work of

1 Sarah Taylor, 1793-1867, was a beautiful, intelligent and accomplished woman. In 1820 she married John Austin the jurist, and it was partly his poverty which made her so industrious a writer. They lived for a long time in Germany, where she collected material for her Germany from 1760 to 1814. But she usually employed herself in translating, especially from the German. Besides the History of the Popes she translated Ranke's Reformation in Germany, Raumer's England in 1835, Characteristics of Goethe, etc.

human policy so well deserving of examination as the Roman Catholic Church. The history of that Church joins together the two great ages of human civilization. No other institution is left standing which carries the mind back to the times when the smoke of sacrifice rose from the Pantheon, and when camelopards and tigers bounded in the Flavian amphitheatre.1 The proudest royal houses are but of yesterday, when compared with the line of the Supreme Pontiffs. That line we trace back in an unbroken series, from the Pope who crowned Napoleon in the nineteenth century to the Pope who crowned Pepin in the eighth; and far beyond the time of Pepin the august dynasty extends, till it is lost in the twilight of fable. The republic of Venice came next in antiquity. But the republic of Venice was modern when compared with the Papacy; and the republic of Venice is gone, and the Papacy remains. The Papacy remains, not in decay, not a mere antique, but full of life and youthful vigour. The Catholic Church is still sending forth to the farthest ends of the world missionaries as zealous as those who landed in Kent with Augustin, and still confronting hostile kings with the same spirit with which she confronted Attila.2 The number of her children is greater than in any former age. Her acquisitions in the New World have more than compensated for what she has lost in the Old. Her spiritual ascendency extends over the vast countries which lie between the plains of the Missouri and Cape Horn, countries which, a century hence, may not improbably contain a population as large as that which now inhabits Europe. The members of her communion are certainly not fewer than a hundred and fifty millions; and it will be difficult to show that all other Christian sects united amount to a hundred and twenty millions. Nor do we see any sign which indicates that the term of her long dominion is approaching. She saw the commencement of all the governments and of all the ecclesiastical establishments that now exist in the world; and we feel no assurance that she is not destined to see the end of them all. She was great and respected before the Saxon had set foot on Britain,

1 This may truly be said of the Christian Church as a whole. But impartial historians will scarcely allow that the Roman is older than the Greek Church.

2 Pope Leo I. was one of the ambassadors sent by Valentinian III. to appease Attila, King of the Huns, when he invaded Italy in A.D. 452. "The pressing eloquence of Leo, his majestic aspect and sacerdotal robes excited the veneration of Attila for the spiritual father of the Christians. The apparition of the two apostles, St. Peter and St. Paul, who menaced the barbarian with instant death if he rejected the prayer of their successor is one of the noblest legends of ecclesiastical tradition" (Gibbon, Decline and Fall, ch. xxxv.).