[76] And yet, with the exception of Professor Rawlinson’s “Manual of Ancient History,” where mention is made of Mr Palmer’s work as among eight principal works to be referred to on the subject of Egyptian chronology, and of a series of articles in the Month on the same subject, I do not recollect to have seen allusion made to it. A previous perusal of the articles in the Month above referred to will greatly facilitate the study of this question.
[77] It will be understood that, in the above scheme and throughout, Mr Palmer assumes the existence of cotemporaneous dynasties elsewhere demonstrated. It is admitted, on all hands, that cotemporary dynasties ceased with the XVIII. Dynasty; and, in the other direction, all schemes commence with Menes. If, then, this interval of time is known or determined by one part of a scheme (as it is known from the chronicle to be 477 years), and at the same time, the exigences of the case (owing to fictitious additions) require the location of other figures within the interval, then the super-additions must overlap (apparently to those who know 477 years to be the true historical figure) at one end or the other. One hundred and fifty-six years (as above) is the extent of the overlapping (the 443 years of the cycle standing apart) in the scheme of Eratosthenes.
[78] Such appears to me to be the conclusion of Mr Allies in his learned work (“The Formation of Christendom,” ii. chap. viii. 57), “Universality of false worship in the most diverse nations the summing up of man’s whole history.” I request attention, however, to the following passage, at page 382, which has an especial bearing upon my argument:—“No doubt the Greek mind had lived and brooded for ages upon the remains of original revelation, nor can any learning now completely unravel the interwoven threads of tradition and reason so as to distinguish their separate work. However, it is certain that in the sixth century B.C., the Greeks were without a hierarchy, and without a definite theology: not indeed without individual priesthoods, traditionary rites, and an existing worship, as well as certain mysteries which professed to communicate a higher and more recondite doctrine than that exposed to the public gaze. But in the absence of any hierarchy ... a very large range indeed was given to the mind, acting upon this shadowy religious belief, and re-acted upon by it, to form their philosophy. The Greeks did not, any more than antiquity in general, use the acts of religious service for instruction by religious discourse. In other words, there was no such thing as preaching among them. A domain, therefore, was open to the philosopher, on which he might stand without directly impeaching the ancestral worship, while he examined its grounds, and perhaps sapped its foundations. He was therein taking up a position which these priests, the civil functionaries of religious rites, scarcely any longer retaining a spiritual meaning or a moral cogency, had not occupied.”
[79] Take for instance Mr J. S. Mill’s peculiar views as to the status of women, “The law of servitude in marriage” [“Wives be obedient to your husbands,” St Paul], he says, “is in monstrous contradiction to all the principles of the modern world” (p. 147). “Marriage is the only actual bondage known to our law,” id. But at p. 49, Mr Mill says, “The general opinion of men is supposed to be, that the natural vocation of a woman is that of a wife and mother.” But he then adds (p. 37), “It will not do to assert in general terms that the experience of mankind has pronounced in favour of the existing system. Experience cannot possibly have decided between two courses, so long as there has only been experience of one. If it be said that the doctrine of the equality of the sexes rests only on theory, it must be remembered that the contrary doctrine also has only theory to rest upon. All that is proved in its favour by direct experience, is that mankind have been able to exist under it, and to attain the degree of improvement and prosperity which we now see; but whether that prosperity has been attained sooner, or is now greater than it would have been under the other system, experience does not say.”
Take in illustration, again, the communistic schemes as against the institution of property. Now, although Christianity has realised all that will ever be possible in the way of communism in its religious orders, the communistic sects have always instinctively directed their first efforts against religion as against the basis of the social order of things which they attacked. This was forcibly brought out in certain letters on “European Radicalism,” in the Pall Mall Gazette, October and November 1869, e.g. “all the contests on the three capital questions (‘government, property, religion’) which we are now engaged in, are but continuations of the original divergence of opinion (before settled government), considerably modified, of course, under the influence of time, the various traditional notions mankind preserves under the name of beliefs, and the whole stock of experience it has accumulated under the name of knowledge. So like, indeed, are the ancient and modern contests on these matters,” &c.... (Letter I.) Again (Letter V.), speaking of our English socialist discussing “the necessity of building social edifices upon material, not religious grounds,” the writer adds, that among continental socialists “no one thinks there of the possibility of matters standing otherwise;” and that in the socialist workshops of France and Germany it is well known “that the very basis of social radicalism requires the abandonment of all kinds of religious discussion, as matter of purely personal inclination, and the abolition of all kinds of privileges as incompatible with equality.” [All this has been put out of date by the deeds of the Commune and the programme of the “International Society”—viz. “The burning of Paris we accept the responsibility of. The old society must and will perish.”] The Spectator, December 1869, speaks still more explicitly:—“Infirm and crippled though she be, the Roman Church is still the only one who has the courage to be cosmopolitan, and claim the right to link nation with nation, and literature with literature. Such an assembly as the Council is, at least, an extraordinary testimony to the cosmopolitanism of the great Church which seems trembling to its fall; and who can doubt that that fall, whenever it comes, will be followed by a great temporary loosening of the faith in human unity—in spite of the electric telegraph—by a deepening of the chasm between nation and nation, by the loss of at least a most potent spell over the imagination of the world, by a contraction of the spiritual ideal of every church? This ideal, even Protestants, even Sceptics, even Positivists have owed, and have owned that they owed, to the Roman Church, the only Church which has really succeeded in uniting the bond between any one ecclesiastical centre and the distant circumference of human intelligence and energy. But if the consequence of the collapse of Romanism would be in this way a loss of power to the human race, think only of the gain of power which would result from the final death of sacerdotal ideas, from the final blow to the system of arbitrary authority exercised over the intellect and the conscience, from the new life which would flow into a faith and science resting on the steady accumulation of moral and intellectual facts and the personal life of the conscience in Christ—from the final triumph of moral and intellectual order and freedom. It would doubtless be a new life, subject to great anarchy at first; but the old authoritative systems have themselves been of late little more than anarchy just kept under by the authority of prescription and tradition; and one can only hope for the new order from the complete recognition that it is to have no arbitrary or capricious foundation.”
[80] “It is, upon the whole, extremely doubtful whether those periods which are the richest in literature, possess the greatest shares, either of moral excellence or of political happiness. We are well aware that the true and happy ages of Roman greatness long preceded that of Roman refinement and Roman authors; and, I fear, there is but too much reason to suppose that in the history of the modern nations we may find many examples of the same kind” (F. Schlegel’s “History of Literature,” i. 373). See also the account of the corruption of morals in Rome in the Augustan period (Allies’ “Form. of Christendom,” I. Lect. I.) “It is curious to observe that the more eloquent, polite, and learned the Greeks became, in the same proportion they became the more degraded and corrupt in their national religion” (Godfrey Higgins’ “Celtic Druids,” 1829, p. 207).
[81] “Il n’y a, Messieurs, que deux sortes de repression possibles: l’une intérieure, l’autre extérieure.... Elles sont de telle nature que quand le thermomètre politique est élevé, le thermomètre de la religion est bas, et quand le thermomètre religieux est bas, le thermomètre politique, la repression politique, la tyrannie s’élève. Ceci est une loi de l’humanité, une loi de l’histoire.” Vide Disc. de Donoso Cortes (Marq. de Valdegamas), 4th January 1849; in which he pursues this remarkable parallelism throughout history.
[82] Montalembert (“Disc. de Reception,” 1852, Discours iii. pp. 614, 615, 621, 622) says of the Constituent Assembly of 1789—“It was the Assembly of 1789 which made the word revolution the synonyme of methodical destruction, of permanent war against all order and all authority.... It had that mania for uniformity which is the parody of unity, and which Montesquieu called the passion of mediocre minds.... In a word, the Constituent Assembly was wanting not only in justice, courage, and humanity, but it was also deficient in good sense. The evil which it created has survived it. It has made us believe that it is possible to destroy everything and to reconstruct everything in a day.... God has chastised it, above all, by the sterility of its work. It had had the pretence of laying the foundations of liberty for ever, and it had for its successors the most sanguinary tyrants who ever dishonoured any nation. Its mission was to re-establish the finances, the empire of the law, and it has bequeathed to France bankruptcy, anarchy, and despotism—despotism without even the repose which they have wrongly taken as the compensation of servitude. It has done more: it has left pretexts for every abuse of force, and precedents for any excess of future anarchy. [Montalembert could hardly have foreseen the last application of its principles which we have recently witnessed in Paris by the Commune, which, too, forsooth, was to have inaugurated a new era for humanity.] But it (this Constituent Assembly) founded nothing—Nothing! The ancient society which it reversed had lasted, in spite of its abuses, a thousand years.”
[83] From a purely philosophical point of view, why should these speculations of Mr Gladstone have been received “with more surprise and unfavourable comment” than any other “portions of his Homeric studies?”
[84] In one way, nothing is so uncertain as tradition, and, moreover, tradition is rarely positive and direct, but, on the contrary, prone to concrete into strange, fragmentary, and distorted shapes. As an instance, we may take the tradition which Genesis attests,—When Abraham’s hand had been stayed by the angel from the sacrifice of Isaac, ... “He called the name of that place ‘The Lord seeth.’ Whereupon, even to this day it is said, ‘In the mountain the Lord will see.’”—Gen. xxii. 14.