John Stuart Blackie

“ When we cast a rapid glance—for it deserves nothing more—on the revolting record of the Roman Popes in the age immediately preceding the Reformation, we hear the solemn voice of history repeating again the maxim above quoted—corruptio optimi pessima: when priests are bad, they are very bad; when the salt of the gospel, which was meant to preserve the moral life of society from putrescence, has lost its savour, if not cast out, it is worse than useless—it becomes a poison. ”

“ Language is the outward body and form of which thought and reason and knowledge and ideas are the inward soul and force; and hence the wise Greeks, unlike our modern scientists, who delight in confounding man with the monkey, expressed language and reason with one word λόγος, while what we dignify with the name of language in birds and other animals was simply φωνή, or significant voice. If, therefore, there is any thing most human that history has to teach, it must be about religion. All the great nations whose names mark the march of human fates have been religious nations. ”

“ What requires to be represented in a reasonable representative system is not so much individuals as qualities, capacities, interests, and types. Every class should be represented, rather than every man in a class. Besides, the equality of votes which democracy demands, on the principle that I am as good as you and perhaps a little better, is utterly false, and tends to nourish conceit and impertinence, to banish all reverence, and to ignore all distinctions in society. ”

“ Here we have the stout, self-reliant, sober-minded Anglo-Saxon stock, well trained in the process of the ages to the difficult art of self-government; here we have a constitution framed with the most cautious consideration, and with the most effective checks against the dangers of an over-riding democracy; here also a people as free from any imminent external danger as they have unlimited scope for internal progress. Under no circumstances could the experiment of self-government, on a great scale, have been made with a more promising start. ”

“ By making love its chief motive power, it supplied both the steam and the oil of the social machine with a continuity of moral force never dreamt of in any of the ancient societies—a force which no mere socialistic schemes for organising labour, no boards of health, no political economy, no mathematical abstractions, no curiosities of physical science, no democratic suffrages, and no school inspectorships, though multiplied a thousand times, apart from this divine agency, can ever hope to achieve. ”

“ For there cannot be the slightest doubt that, whatever may have been the starting-point, there lay in the popular theology a tendency to multiply and to reproduce itself in kindred but not always easily recognisable forms, like the children of a family or the cousinship of a clan. But, taking Polytheism as the type under which history presents the objects of religious faith in the earliest times, we have to remark that under this common name, as in the case of Christianity, the greatest contrasts, both in speculative idea and in social efficiency, stare us everywhere in the face. ”

“ The virtue of war as a training school of civic manhood does by no means exclude the operation of many forces far from admirable in their motive; and it is the presence of these unholy influences, no doubt piously brooded over, that has generated in the breasts of our mild friends the Quakers that anti-bellicose gospel which they preach with such lovable persistency. But whatever the motives of famous conquerors have been, the results of their achievements in the great history of society have been most important. ”

“ The fact that the family is the great social monad, as it is undoubtedly one of the oldest and most accredited facts in human tradition, so it presents to us perhaps the most important of all the lessons that history teaches—a lesson as necessary to be inculcated at the present hour as at the earliest stages of social advance; and Aristotle certainly was never more in the right than when he emphasised this truth strongly in traversing Plato’s fancy of making the state the universal family, to the utter absorption of all subordinated family monads. ”

“ Christianity, of course, stands in no need of an Established Church; religion existed for three hundred years in the church without any State connection, and may exist again; but Christianity does, above all things, abhor the stirring up of strife betwixt Church and Church from motives of jealousy, envy, or greed; and, along with the highest philosophy and the most far-sighted political wisdom, must protest in the strongest terms against the abolishing of a useful ethical institution to gratify the insane lust of levelling in a mere numerical majority. ”

“ The doctrine of Aristotle, and the teaching of history that all extremes are wrong, is ever and ever repeated to passion-spurred mortals, and ever and ever forgotten. In the green ardour of our worship we make an idol of our virtue; the strong lines of the particular excellence which we admire are stretched into a caricature; our sublime, severed from all root of soundness, reels over into the ridiculous; we revel and riot and get into an intoxicated excitement with the fruit of our own fancy ”

“ Hence our poems, our high art, our churches, our legislations, our apostleships, our philosophies, our social arrangements and devices, our speculations and schemes of all kinds, which, though they are sometimes foolish, and always more or less inadequate, deliver the strongest possible proof that man is an animal who will rather die and embrace martyrdom than be content to live as the brutes do, neither spurred with the hope of progress nor borne aloft on the wings of the ideal.
Of the very earliest state of human society, as we have already said, history teaches nothing ”

“ The aristocracy of gold and the tyranny of capitalists in Christian New York has shown itself no less able to usurp the public land and defraud the people of their share in the soil than the lordly aristocracy and the slave-dealing magnates of heathen Rome. Nevertheless we need not despair. The sins of American democracy may serve as a useful hint to us not rashly to tinker our own mixed constitution without waiting for a verdict on issues, which, as Socrates wisely says, lie with the gods ”

“ In conclusion, we must bear in mind that democracy or social self-government is the most difficult of all human problems, and must be approached, not with inflated hopes and rosy imaginations, but with sobriety and caution and a sound mind, and at critical moments not without prayer and fasting. Before entering on any scheme for rebuilding our social edifice on a democratic model, we should consider seriously what a democracy really implies, and what we may reasonably promise ourselves from its possible success. ”

“ If there is any one element, always of course excepting the element of gross sensuality and absolute villainy, which more than another is adverse to the spirit of Evangelical Christianity, it is the element of court intrigue, political contention, and party feuds. In this region love, which is the life of the regenerate soul, cannot breathe; truth is put under ban; lies flourish; conscience is smothered; and low expediency everywhere takes the place of lofty principle. ”

“ The epiphany of an absolute monarch with a triple tiara on his head when contrasted with the simplicity and unworldliness of the primitive bishops wears such a strange look that it has been judged, especially in Protestant countries, with a more sweeping severity than it deserved. As a mere form of government, no man can give any good reason why the Church should not be governed by a monarch as well as the State ”

“ Anyhow, there can be no doubt that great masses of men acting together on exciting occasions are peculiarly liable to hasty resolutions and violent opinions; all democracies, therefore, are unsafe which are unprovided with checks in the form of an upper chamber composed of more cool materials, and planted firmly in a position that makes them independent of the fever and faction of the hour. A strong democracy stands as much in need of an aristocratic rein as a strong aristocracy does of a democratic spur. ”

“ All great nations, in fact, have been cradled in war, the Hebrews no less than the Greeks and Romans; and it is only an amiable sentimentalism, pardonable in women, but inexcusable in men, that, in contemplation of the hard blows, red wounds, and gashed bodies with which war is accompanied, will allow itself to forget the hardihood, endurance, courage, self-sacrifice, and devotion to public duty, of which, under Providence, it has always been the great training school.7 There is no profession that I know more favourable to the growth of noble sentiment and manly action than that of the soldier ”

“ I have enlarged on the development and decay of the Roman republic, not only because in point of political achievement Rome is by far the most notable of the great States of the world, but because in the struggle between aristocracy and democracy which was the salient feature of its history from the expulsion of the kings to the battle of Actium, it presents a very close and instructive parallel to what has been going on amongst ourselves from the revolution settlement of 1688 to the present hour. ”

“ The steps of this realisation, often slow and painful, and always difficult, are what we mean by human progress; and it is the dominant characteristic of man, of which amongst the lower animals there is not a vestige, neither indeed could be; for so long as they have no ideas, neither reason nor the outward expression of reason in language—two things so closely bound together that the wise Greeks expressed them both by one word, λόγος—so long must it be ridiculous to think of them shaping their career according to an inborn type of progressive excellence. To do so is exclusively human. ”

“ Here was a machinery cunningly, one might think, constructed for the purpose of working out its own disruption, even supposing both the popular and aristocratic elements had been composed of average good materials. But they were not so. In the age of the Gracchi, 133 B.C., the high sense of honour, the proud inheritance of an uncorrupted patrician body, and the shrewd sense and sobriety of a sound-hearted yeomanry, had equally disappeared. The aristocracy were corrupted by the wealth which flowed in from the spoils of conquest; they had become lovers of power rather than lovers of Rome ”

“ A man may live in a hole like a fox, but his proper humanity is shown by building a house and inventing a style of architecture. A man can sing like a bird, but—what the bird cannot do—he can make a harp or an organ. He can scrape with his nails like a terrier, but, as a man manifesting his proper manhood, he prefers to make a shovel of wood and a hatchet of stone or iron. ”

“ Then, again, the fundamental postulate of extreme democracy that the majority have everywhere a right to govern is manifestly false. No man as a member of society has a natural right to govern: he has a right to be governed, and well governed; and that can only be when the government is conducted by the wisest and best men who compose the society. If the numerical majority is composed of sober-minded, sensible, and intelligent persons who will either govern wisely themselves or choose persons who will do so, then democracy is justified by its deeds ”

“ Nay, I can readily believe that those who can find a priesthood in the genius of the gospel and the apostolic institution of the Christian Church, will naturally be inclined to maintain that the superior power of the Gregories, Bonifaces, and Innocents of the medieval Church, as contrasted with anything that we read or know of the Egyptian, Hebrew, and Roman pontiffs, is the natural and necessary outcome of the superior excellence of the Christian religion ”

“ There is, indeed, a certain intolerance in truth which will not allow it to hold parley with error; and every new religion with a lofty inspiration, conscious of a divine mission, is necessarily aggressive: it delights to pluck the beard of ancestral authority, and marches right into the presence of hoary absurdity and consecrated stupidity. ”

“ To what ends logical consistency can lead a politician in high places Charles I. and Archbishop Laud learned when it was too late; and the fate of these two high-perched worthies stands as a speaking lesson to all politicians, whether of the democratic or the monarchical type, how easy a thing it is for a man to be a good Christian and a consistent thinker, and yet on all political matters a perfect fool. ”

“ Instead of choking and strangling, or at least depressing, the free self-assertion of the individual, by which alone he feels the full dignity of manhood, such a democracy gives a free career to talent and civic efficiency in the greatest number of capable individuals ”

“ Closely connected with war, or, more properly, as the natural development of it in its more advanced stages, we must mention Conquest; that is, the violent imposition of the results of a foreign civilisation on the native social foundations of any country. Here, no doubt, there may often be on the conquering side something very different from a manly self-assertion—viz. self-aggrandisement at the expense of an innocent neighbour, greed of territory, lust of power, and the vanity of mere military glory, which our brilliant neighbours the French were so fond to have in their mouth. ”

“ Our evangelists must remove from the van of their evangelic force all that sharp fence of metaphysical subtlety and scholastic dogma, which, being ostentatiously paraded in creeds and catechisms, has given more just offence to those without than edification to those within the Church; the gospel must be presented to the world with all that catholic breadth, kindly humanity, and popular directness which were its boast before it was laced and screwed into artificial shapes by the decrees of intolerent councils, and the subtleties of ingenious schoolmen. ”

“ By preaching the unity of God, not as an abstract metaphysical idea, but as what it really is, a divine fatherhood, Christianity at one stroke bound all men together as brethren and members of a common family; and in this way, while in the relation of nation to nation it substituted apostleships of love for wars of subjugation, in the relation of class to class it established a sort of spiritual democracy, in which the implied equality of all men as men gradually led to the abolition of the abnormal institution of slavery, on which all ancient society rested. ”

“ It never can be the virtue of a man to wish to be more than man; and every religion which sets a stamp of special approval on superhuman, and therefore unhuman, virtue, erects a wall of separation between the gospel which it preaches and the world which it should convert. ”

“ True, a thorough-going and sternly-consistent republican may ask, with an indignant sneer, What is the use of a king, when we have shorn him of all honours save the grace of a crown and the bauble of a sceptre—reduced him, in fact, to a mere machine to register the decrees of a democratic assembly? But such persons require to be reminded that there is nothing more dangerous, not only in political, but in all practical matters, than logical consistency ”

“ Let them grapple bravely with all social problems, and prove whether Christianity, which has done so much to purify the motives of individuals, may not be able also to put a more effective steam into the machinery of society. If they shall fail here, they will fail gloriously, having done their best. It is not given to any people, however great, to solve all problems. ”

“ To such an extent did they abuse the natural vantage ground of their social position that, while the great body of the substantial yeomanry, who shed their blood in a constant succession of petty wars for the safety of the State, were stinted of their natural reward and degraded from their rightful position, the insolent monopolisers of all dignities and privileges did not blush to take from the people their natural heritage in the public land, and, for the enlargement of their own order, to deprive the State of its stoutest citizens, and the army of its most effective soldiers. ”

“ A state of society is not at all inconceivable in which the many shall make all the laws and monopolise all the offices of a fussy bureaucracy, while the few are burdened with all the taxes. Never too frequently can we repeat, in reference to all public acts, no less than to the conduct of individuals in private life, the great Aristotelian maxim that all extremes are wrong ”