source of enjoyment fitted for a wide social field, draws men out of their own narrow field of experience, and distracts them from haunting memories of broken purposes and neglected claims, just because it is not mere hollowness, because it is not so easily exhausted, as mere artificial social life. Nevertheless it fails utterly as a permanent bond even of the outer framework of society at large. For the passions, which it does not even strive to repress, soon snap the slender threads of intellectual esteem and sympathy; and the intellect is soon got under by coarser forces, from its pure lack of power to hold the reins of the mind.

The utter incoherence of all states of society in which the only unity was intellectual, is an historical fact which Mr. Buckle apparently regards as accidental. His three counter-statements appear to be (1) that if civilisation require any other than an intellectual aid, the matter is hopeless, as religion, and every thing indeed except scientific truth, contracts immediately to the moral dimensions of the people to whom it is brought; (2) that what our author terms the greatest evils of the world's history, war and persecution on account of private opinion, have been lessened by the intellect, and by it alone-while the one has been fostered, the other almost produced, by religious faith; and (3) that in point of fact the periods of most rapidly advancing civilisation in modern history have been periods of sceptical inquiry. Here is a general issue enough, which no one who has a tenth part of Mr. Buckle's knowledge, without his somewhat antiquated prejudice for the mild gospel of the enlightened understanding, would hesitate for a moment to accept. He is perhaps nearly the only learned and moderately able thinker of the present day who still believes implicitly that " calm inquiry" is the one remedy for the manifold sins and miseries of social existence ;* who still regards war as unmixed evil, and cannot see what a purifying discipline it may prove for deeper ills; or who would compare for a moment the evils of dogmatic persecution, frightful as they have been and are, with the putrid diseases of some really intellectual and many non-persecuting civilisations. If Mr. Buckle indeed thinks, as he would seem to think, that Marcus Aurelius and Julian were more mischievous to the civilisation of their day than Commodus and Heliogabalus, simply because the former were persecutors and the latter were not, we find his moral measure of things so totally different from our own, that there is scarcely a common basis for discussion.†

* Mr. Buckle's mild dogmatism is often very amusing. After a thin argument, demonstrating that intellectual excellence is "far more productive of real good" than moral excellence, he adds naïvely, "These conclusions are no doubt very unpalatable; and what makes them peculiarly offensive is, that it is impossible to refute them."

See pp. 167, 168: "There is no instance on record of an ignorant man who,

Mr. Buckle's first plea, that faith, as a civilising agent, is zero; that it is not, and cannot be, a plus quantity in the agencies of the world at all; that it so immediately contracts to the shape and quality of the minds it enters as to become whatever they already are, no more and no less,-is not easy to refute, except by the facts of history. It arises, however, in the confusion, which is completely ingrained into Mr. Buckle's book, between an opinion and a trust. He would not deny, we imagine, that a real reliance, a leaning on a higher human being, -a being morally and spiritually higher than ourselves,--does affect the character, and draws it up towards that higher mind. It is because he regards a faith as a mere moral and intellectual product of the state of mind, spun like the spider's web out of the mind, that he doubts this in regard to religion. He would be very much surprised to hear it argued, that his own sympathy with, and reverence for, a friend could not change him, on the ground that his friend's image must be immediately coloured and affected with all his own characteristics of thought. He would reply at once, that if so, individual and social life are the same; that no man can change society, and that society can change no man. And yet that is his argument concerning religious trust; although, as is evident from one part of his book, he does not question the real existence of the object of faith.

But the only effectual answer to Mr. Buckle's argument, that Christian faith could not have done any thing for civilisation, is to take a little evidence as to what it did. He will scarcely deny that it did something for the societies of the early Christian church; that it did something for St. Paul, for instance, and for some of his followers. Finding such a society as we have described, during the downfall of Greek and Roman civilisation; finding a society stained by vices such as those with which Corinth and Rome were but too familiar, as we do not need St. Paul's letters to testify; finding a decaying body, full of all rottenness, his faith restored to it, in St. Paul's mind and that of his disciples, a spiritual unity, a new life, a cohering power, which no human shock could destroy. Society reassumed, through their new trust, so far as their influence reached it, the having good intentions, and supreme power to enforce them, has not done far more evil than good. But if you diminish the sincerity of that man, if you can mix some alloy with his motives, you will likewise diminish the evil that he works." And then Mr. Buckle instances the cases above mentioned. We do not suppose he means to weigh Aurelius and Julian, in their whole personal influence, against Commodus and Heliogabalus; but unless he means to weigh their respective influence on civilisation, there is no point or meaning in the illustration. There can be no doubt that the pure lives of Marcus Aurelius and Julian really did far more for Christianity, by showing the moral exhaustion of the noblest pagan philosophy, than they could possibly have effected had not their lives been so strenuous and faithful to their own standard.

unity it had lost; and St. Paul speaks of the various members of the "one body" as though he had again forgotten the utter corruptness he had so often alluded to, in the profligate Greek city to which he writes. The mere opening of a few Christian hearts to the trust that, amid all this confusion and evil, men were still capable of doing the will and receiving the purifying power of God, gave the system of society a new strength and soundness, and enabled them gradually to withdraw their life from the slavery to social impurities, in which they had plunged the deeper that they could never appease their hunger for something deeper and more exciting still. This sudden access of religious fervour, Mr. Buckle might say, is a well-known phenomenon,-the fanaticism of the world's reaction from its own excesses, assuming the form of a strict and visionary fraternity. No doubt; but nevertheless the phenomenon had a vitality; for from that time the history of social decay was measured back again in the reverse order. First, the social bond was renovated, assuming a purely religious character, and often renovated even at a temporary expense of other ties; then those other ties were gra dually purified and strengthened; lastly, class-divisions were softened and shaded away. But, first of all, the new religious constitution of society bore down almost all other ties before it: "Those of one house were divided, the mother against her daughter-in-law, and the daughter against her mother-in-law." Secular social relations, too, were left untouched. This new faith had not yet strength to remodel the old civil ties on a new principle, or even to recognise their essential importance to the healthy action of social life. But when the religious tie became firm and indissoluble, Christian faith inevitably busied itself with the general secular relations of men, alleviating soonest those that were most obviously oppressive, recognising least completely the divine character of those that were most spoiled indeed, but spoiled by no outward wrong, and remediable rather by internal than by external influence. The Church soon became the richest power in the community, and very soon, therefore, possessed a large proportion of the slaves: she was the kindest power, and therefore soon raised their condition above that of slaves. cent writer thus describes this state of things:

A re

"She became rich; and her riches were not only calculated in provinces, but in hundreds of thousands of human beings. These beings were chained to her will as they had been chained to that of the Roman patrician or Frankish chief, who had bought them at Treves or London. She did not, however, manumit; for she could not do so without destroying the value of the property she had acquired Her lands were worthless without cultivators; and none but slaves were left or adapted for that work. She, however, gave an carnest

that they had fallen into better hands, by ameliorating their servitude. She treated them mildly, remitted labour on Sunday, and brought the possibility of freedom within reach. . . . . She began to teach boldly that the difference between the serf or slave and the proprietor was a social difference only; that the eternal particle of each was of equal value; and salvation, unlike worldly honour, was to be won by means which the slave, as well as the baron, could command. Her teachings were followed by actions. She began to plead the cause of the slave in her councils. At Orleans, in 538, she directs that serfs who have sought the church as an asylum against Jewish masters, shall be bought, not restored. Again, 541, if Christian slaves of the Jews have fled their masters and demanded liberty, having given just price, they shall be set at liberty. In the same council it is ordained that if a bishop has made a number of free men from serfs of the Church, they shall remain free. At Clermont, in 549, As we have discovered that several people reduce again to servitude those who have been set at liberty in the churches, we order that every one shall keep possession of the liberty he has received; and if this liberty is attacked, justice must be defended by the Church.' In the canons of a council at London, in 1102, it is ordered that no one from henceforth presume to carry on that wicked traffic, by which men in England have hitherto been sold like brute animals.'"*

6

But it was not simply that Christian faith worked back from the religious renovation of the social tie to the renewal of secular ties; it gave a new life to that very literature which in Greece and Rome had died out from inanition. "If institutions could do all," says M. Guizot, contrasting the state of the civil or pagan with that of the Christian or religious society of Gaul in the fourth and fifth centuries, "the intellectual state of Gaulish civil society at this epoch would have been far superior to that of the religious society. . . . Roman Gaul was covered with large schools... They were taught philosophy, medicine, jurisprudence, literature, grammar, astrology, all the sciences of the age." The Christians, he says, "had only their own ideas, the internal and personal movement of their thought." "Still the activity and intellectual strength of the two societies were prodigiously unequal. With its institutions, its professors, its privileges, the one was nothing and did nothing,-with its single ideas the other incessantly laboured, and seized every thing. All things in the fifth century attest the decay of the civil schools. The contemporary writers, Sidonius Apollinaris and Mamertius Claudianus, for example, deplore it in every page, saying that the young men no longer studied, that professions were without pupils, that science languished and was being lost." Compare with this the same writer's remarkable account of the healthy vigour Influence of Christianity on Civilisation. By Thomas Craddock. Long

mans, 1856.

of Christian literature at the same time. There is no truer sign of the health of literature than this,-that its deepest things come out quite incidentally in the discussion of occasional questions. Then, and then only, can we be sure that they constantly occupy the mind. "Literature, properly so called, held but little place in the Christian world; men wrote very little for the sake of writing, for the mere pleasure of manifesting their ideas; some event broke forth, a question arose, and a book was often produced under the form of a letter to a Christian, to a friend, to a church. Politics, religion, controversy, spiritual and temporal interests, general and special councils,-all are met with in the letters of this time; and they are among the number of its most curious documents."

Now, does Mr. Buckle conceive that this is the picture of a life utterly unchanged by faith? Wherever we look,-to the decayed Roman, decayed Greek, or undecayed barbarian world, the picture is the same-a new society, new morality, new institutions, new literature. The effete Greek philosophy takes a new life and power in the pages of Justin, Clement, and Origen. The effete Roman eloquence gives out a new warmth of conviction in Lactantius, and a new Roman force in Ambrose. Even the tropical African blood that beats passionately in the gross and virulent invectives of Tertullian, does not urge him to seek the conflicts of civil life; for he feels that the most real passions of that day, as well as its most real thoughts, concern the spiritual world, and touch eternity more than time. And here in Gaul it is still in the Christian church that the barbarians are learning eagerly and fast, while the Roman aristocracy are rapidly deserting the schools. Here is little enough sign that civilisation arises in intellectual activity. The new faith steals away Greek and Roman from their hollow intellectual discipline, and the barbarian from his servile toil; and after it has united them in a religious society, begins to organise a new law. It holds back the hand of the master; it stirs up the lethargy of the serf; and not only remodels the relations between the powerful and the poor, but opens their minds by a new literature. If this be the spontaneous progress of the popular mind, why did it not arise in the Roman schools? why did it not start from the last antecedents of the old world? why did it not build on the old foundations? Because men believed in a new bond, because they had a new vision. The "life" had been "manifested," they said; and they saw it. And much as they degraded and narrowed what they beheld, in the process of giving it the form of a practical creed, yet their trust was living enough to give it an influence on their life. The change was slow, and often retrograde; and after the outward church had given