Hagiography

“ I should prove recreant, indeed, in duty to God, my country and liberty, were I to write a book of a purely political, moral or religious character, which would, at this time, receive the flattering commendation of the aristocracy and monarchists of Europe, where religion is a mockery or a farce, or at best, an engine of State, in an unholy alliance with cruelty and oppression, where virtue is shamed into retirement and obscurity, and where morality is among the discarded relics of an obsolete age. ”

“ We read history with more or less of prejudice and intolerance, viewing with the bright light of the nineteenth century those blots upon its page, which lay unseen in the early dawn of Christianity. And yet there is no name (but One) in all the records of the past, which we should dare to bring to the test of abstract virtue. ”

“ Therefore this much is clear, that the articles of our belief are what History, manifold and various, History the messenger of antiquity, and life of memory, utters and repeats in abundance; while no narrative penned in human times records that the doctrines foisted in by our opponents ever had any footing in the Church. ”

“ Indisputable facts are often the sepulchres of thought, and truth after all, not certainty, is the historian's goal. It might even be urged that the records of religion, the martyr's resolution, the saint's fervour, the reformer's aspiration, the prophet's faith, offer a surer hope of attaining this goal than the records of politics. ”

“ We may say now, without fear, that the noblest characters, the men most distinguished by their ability or courage, throughout this period of misfortune and calamity, belonged to the ecclesiastical order; and no other epoch of history supplies, in such a remarkable manner, the confirmation of this truth, so honourable to human nature, and perhaps the most instructive of all others,—that the most exalted virtues still spring up and develope themselves in the bosom of the most pernicious errors. ”

“ The historical annals are combined with rich and constant illustration, from what in secular literature would be called the poets and orators of the nation. There is everything to stimulate research, even did these remains contain no more than the merely human interest which attaches to the records of any great and ancient people. ”

“ King, Queen, Princes, Princesses, Cardinals, Archbishops, Marshals, courtiers, ladies in waiting, high dignitaries of the courts of justice, magistrates, consuls, bourgeois, guilds of artisans—all were about to batten upon the torture and death of the heretics, whose only crime consisted in the practice of the Evangelical doctrine in its pristine purity. ”

“ Political principles, we are told, are best studied in the history of classical antiquity, because they are there discussed and illustrated with a perfect abstraction from those particular associations which bias our judgment in modern and domestic instances. ”

“ The smaller gentry and the merchant class rose in importance as the nobles fell. Religion and morality passed out of the hands of the priesthood into those of the laity. Knowledge became vulgarized, it stooped to lower and meaner forms that it might educate the whole people. ”

“ But how one can teach, with satisfaction or even with justice to all faiths, such subjects as the story of the Reformation, the Inquisition, or even the New England effort to found 'a Church without a Bishop and a State without a King,' is more than I know. ”

“ It has come to signify, not the religious, not the moral, not even the social or political interests of the Christian community, but often the very opposite of these—its merely accidental, outward, ceremonial machinery. ”

“ In their enthusiasm, the exponents of history as the magic open sesame tend to identify the historical attitude with docility. They soon become infected with historicism, which is simply the error of making historical scholarship, truly enough a necessary condition of rectitude in learning from the past, into a sufficient condition. ”

“ Again, at the time of the Renaissance, the new knowledge and new interests combined with the weakening of the Church's and of the Empire's authority to bring about the demand for a revision of the ecclesiastical morality, and led to some not very successful attempts to find a firmer basis for conduct. ”

“ Connected as it is with some of the most violent prejudices of our nature, political, professional and personal, it has not only obtained a large share of attention from ecclesiastical historians of all ages, but has been discussed with great eagerness, not to say acrimony, by those who differed in opinion as to the wisdom and justice of the revival itself. ”

“ This, then, was the outcome of fifteen hundred years of Christian civilization in a land which had been entirely in the hands of the church authorities ever since the downfall of the Roman Empire; a country in which education, intellectual, moral, and religious, had been from the first in the hands of a body, claiming infallibility in its teaching of faith and morals, which had molded rulers and people at its own will during all these centuries. ”

“ Surely boys and girls should be taught elementary history, should be trained in the exercise of the powers that can trace cause and effect in historical narrative, should be given credit for the germs of a critical faculty and helped to cultivate it, before they are plunged into the details of the struggles of puritanism and absolutism, or the deep religious divisions, that for three centuries have separated Christendom into two camps and do so still. ”

“ Let them set aside absolutely all prejudice in favor of nation, family, school or order; let them relinquish all party spirit, and keep before their minds the undoubted doctrine of the Church, as laid down in the decrees of the councils, in papal documents, etc., knowing that there are opinions that, while they seem certain to one nation, school, or order, are, with the knowledge of the Holy See, opposed by others ”

“ The conquest of a Christian nation by a pagan one must have resulting justification of the highest order, if it is not to be stamped as one of the greatest calamities of history, and such justification is amply afforded by the splendid history of the English people. ”

“ It is to the mediaeval Church, her conservatism in the true sense of the word, her industry, her patience, her disinterested guardianship alike of sacred and of pagan letters, that the world owes most of our knowledge of antiquity. ”

“ Authority being originally, and in its essence, ecclesiastical and religious, an understanding of the successive developments in the position of the Revolution to church and religion is indispensable to a comprehension of the intellectual reaction which followed. ”

“ Silently, surely, without pomp, and [pg 618] without art, the new religion had made its way, against all opposition, prejudice, and hatred, from Jews and pagans alike, and was now a power in the empire. The followers of the hated sect were, however, from the humble classes, and but few great men had arisen among them, and even these were unimportant to the view of philosophers and rulers. The believers formed an esoteric circle, and were lofty, stern, and hostile to all the existing institutions of society. ”

“ The active presence of conflicting tendencies not only in politics but in religion and philosophy, during the reign of absolute rulers of the past, showed that they could not box culture within the confines of their dogmas and edicts. ”

“ Consider the countless efforts made to establish in the world the reign either of sanctity or of justice or both, from the Roman Empire which created law, up to Christianity which strove to cleanse human nature of sin, and up to the French Revolution, which proclaimed to the world the age of liberty, fraternity, and equality. ”

“ The Dissenter from the national church, whether in England or in France, is reminded by his own distinguishing religious opinions of the historic struggles through which those opinions have travelled. ”

“ In the continental schools and barracks, in newspapers, books, etc., what is developed by education is dynastic sentiment, national sentiment, soldierly sentiment; still again, under the same and other opportunities, religious and ecclesiastical sentiments, and by other influences, also class and rank sentiments.2212 In a democracy there is always a tendency towards big results on a pattern. An orthodoxy is produced in regard to all the great doctrines of life. It consists of the most worn and commonplace opinions which are current in the masses. ”

“ It is the business of the clergy, the aristocracy, and the higher officers of the State to teach the people what is good or bad, true or false in the worlds of morals and intellect. Other persons have no right to dispute about such matters, they must endure without murmuring. ”

“ So also the teachings of Christ, which were at first practised and developed by a small coterie of religious-minded men, acquired, under the conditions of the world, such secular and political influence, that about the time of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, the Church organisations of the Christian society alone were the real political authorities, and discharged all the important functions of the secular states. ”

“ But, as appears, we incline to ideas founded on opinion, though they be contrary, rather than to the truth. For it is austere and grave. Now, since there are three states of the soul—ignorance, opinion, knowledge—those who are in ignorance are the Gentiles, those in knowledge, the true Church, and those in opinion, the Heretics. ”

“ The clergy complain of the enormous spread of bold books, from the infidel tract to the latest handling of the miracle question, as sorrowfully as the most liberal members of society lament the unlimited circulation of the false morals issued by certain Religious Tract Societies. Both testify to the interest taken by the public in religion. The love of truth is also shown by the outbreak of heresy in all directions! ”

“ The supremacy which canon law obtained is easily accounted for when we compare the disciplined character of all ecclesiastical as compared with lay government, the training of the priest with that of the noble, the ignorance pervading all classes, and the rude character of the legislation administered in feudal society. ”

“ It is easy to make a catalogue of the glaring vices of antiquity, and to contrast them with the pure morality of Christian writings; but, if we desire to form a just estimate of the realized improvement, we must compare the classical and ecclesiastical civilizations as wholes, and must observe in each case not only the vices that were repressed but also the degree and variety of positive excellence attained. ”

“ All the threadbare topicks of poets and orators were displayed to discover to us, that merit and virtue were the only nobility; and that the advantages of blood, could not make a knave or a fool, either honest or wise. Most popular commotions we read of in the histories of Greece and Rome, took their rise from unjust quarrels to the nobles; and in the latter, the plebeians encroachments on the patricians, were the first cause of their ruin.
Suppose there be nothing but opinion in the difference of blood; every body knows, that authority is very much founded on opinion. ”

“ Just now a theologian or historian would be worth his weight in gold, who could produce evidence that all these forgeries and inventions are genuine monuments of Christian antiquity, and that the whole edifice of papal absolutism has been built up with the purest and most conscientious loyalty to truth. ”

“ While everyday life and its implements are thus rude, there are great varieties of social organisation, of ceremonial institutions, and of what, among Europeans, would be called speculative and religious ideas, expressing themselves in myths and rites. ”

“ The highest authorities of an enormous Christian empire, nineteen centuries after Christ, to prevent violation of the law, can devise nothing wiser and more moral than to take the transgressors,—grown-up, and sometimes elderly, people,—undress them, lay them on the floor, and beat their bottoms with birches. ”

“ The work embodies a mass of facts, collected from authentic sources, of the deepest interest to every friend of civil liberty and Protestant Christianity. The efforts of despotic European sovereigns, to inoculate our country with the religion of Rome, are fully proved. ”

“ The testimony of documents is uniform upon the poverty of these men, whom Protestant historians like Grotius, Robertson, and others marvel at, for the authority they possessed in the world, for the purity of their lives, their success in teaching, and their art of commanding with wisdom as they themselves obeyed with fidelity. ”

“ The rudiments of the social state, so far as they are known to us at all, are known through testimony of three sorts—accounts by contemporary observers of civilisations less advanced than their own, the records which particular races have preserved conceding their primitive history, and ancient law. ”

“ The principles of the realist combined readily with a Christian idealism: he relied upon the safe foundation of authority—the various elements of the church tradition, the Bible, the fathers, the canons of councils, and the decretals of popes; and treated logic as its useful but docile handmaid. ”

“ The intellectual revolution had engendered a keen and independent spirit of inquiry, a disregard of traditional authority, an iconoclastic zeal, a passion for ascertaining Truth, which, applied to religion, crashed against received systems and dogmas with a tremendous shock rending Christendom in twain. ”

“ By grouping under these comprehensive heads the facts to be considered, and dealing with each group separately, we shall doubtless acquire clear views of their inter-connection and their historical succession. I have treated of these conflicts as nearly as I conveniently could in their proper chronological order, and, for the sake of completeness, have added chapters on—An examination of what Latin Christianity has done for modern civilization; a corresponding examination of what Science has done; the attitude of Roman Christianity in the impending conflict, as defined by the Vatican Council. ”