Freedom of speech, even of thought, were everywhere crimes: how, then, did the love of truth survive as an ideal of to-day? To escape these horrors, the gentle, the good, the learned, and the peaceful had to seek refuge in monasteries and nunneries, while by means of the celibacy of the clergy the Church, as Galton tells us, "by a policy singularly unwise and suicidal, brutalised the breed of our forefathers."
Here was the actual education of the world as man rose from barbarism to civilisation, and it was accompanied by a certain amount of retrograde selection by the cruel punishments, confinement in dungeons, or torture and death of those who opposed the rulers, and by the survival of the worst tools of the lords and tyrants.
Ought we not to be thankful that such education and custom, the varied influences of such an environment, were not hereditary? And is not the fact that the whole world has not become utterly degraded, and that anything good remains in our cruelly oppressed human nature, an overwhelming proof that such influences are not hereditary?
When we remember that many of these degrading laws and customs, oppressions, and punishments have extended down to our own times; that the terrible slave-trade and the equally terrible slavery have only been abolished within the memory of many of us; and that the system of wage-slavery, the distinction of classes, the gross inequality of the law, the overwork of our labouring millions, the immoral luxury and idleness of our upper-class thousands, while far more thousands die annually of want of the bare necessaries of life; that millions have their lives shortened by easily preventable causes, while other millions pass their whole lives in continuous and almost inhuman labour in order to provide means for the enjoyments and pernicious luxuries of the rich—we must be amazed at the fact that there is nevertheless so much real
goodness, real humanity, among us as certainly exists, in spite of all the degrading influences that I have been compelled here to enumerate.
To myself, there seems only one explanation of the very remarkable and almost incredible result just stated. It is, that the Divine nature in us—that portion of our higher nature which raises us above the brutes, and the influx of which makes us men—cannot be lost, cannot even be permanently deteriorated by conditions however adverse, by training however senseless and bad. It ever remains in us, the central and essential portion of our human nature, ready to respond to every favourable opportunity that arises, to grasp and hold firm every fragment of high thought or noble action that has been brought to its notice, to oppose even to the death every falsehood in teaching, every tyranny in action. The ethics of Plato and of the great moralists of the Ciceronian epoch, together with those of Jesus and of His disciples and followers, kept alive the sacred flame of pure humanity, and their preservation constitutes perhaps the greatest service the monastic system rendered to the human race. This service is finely expressed by an
almost unknown poet, J. H. Dell, in the prefatory to his volume, The Dawning Grey. Never has our indebtedness to the classical writers been more powerfully insisted on than in the following lines:—
"Hear ye not the measured footfalls echoing solemn and sublime,
From the groves of Academus down the avenues of Time;
See'st thou not the giant figures of the Sages of the Past,