This earth, then, or at least the habitable part of it, was considered as most probably a flat plane. Below that plane, or in the centre of the earth, was the realm of endless fire. It could be entered (as by the Welsh knight who went down into St. Patrick’s Purgatory) by certain caves. By listening at the craters of volcanoes, which were its mouths, the cries of the tortured might be heard in the depths of the earth.
In that ‘Tartarus’ every human being born into the world was doomed to be endlessly burnt alive: only in the Church, ‘extra quam nulla salus,’ was there escape from the common doom. But to that doom, excommunication, which thrust a man from the pale of the Church, condemned the sinner afresh, with curses the most explicit and most horrible.
The superior clergy, therefore, with whom the anathematizing power lay, believed firmly that they could, proprio motu, upon due cause shewn, cause any man or woman to be burned alive through endless ages. And what was more, the Teutonic laity, with that intense awe of the unseen which they had brought with them out of the wilderness, believed it likewise, and trembled. It paralysed the wisest, as well as the fiercest, that belief. Instead of disgusting the kings of the earth, it gave them over, bound hand and foot by their own guilty consciences, into the dominion of the clergy; and the belief that Charles Martel was damned, only knit (as M. Sismondi well remarks) his descendants the Carlovingians more closely to the Church which possest so terrible a weapon.
Whether they were right or wrong in these beliefs is a question not to be discussed in this chair. My duty is only to point out to you the universal existence of those beliefs, and the historic fact that they gave the clergy a character supernatural, magical, divine, with a reserve of power before which all trembled, from the beggar to the king; and also, that all struggles between the temporal and spiritual powers, like that between Henry and Becket, can only be seen justly in the light of the practical meaning of that excommunication which Becket so freely employed. I must also point out to you that so enormous a power (too great for the shoulders of mortal man) was certain to be, and actually was, fearfully abused, not only by its direct exercise, but also by bargaining with men, through indulgences and otherwise, for the remission of that punishment, which the clergy could, if they would, inflict; and worst of all, that out of the whole theory sprang up that system of persecution, in which the worst cruelties of heathen Rome were imitated by Christian priests, on the seemingly irrefragable ground that it was merciful to offenders to save them, or, if not, at least to save others through them, by making them feel for a few hours in this world what they would feel for endless ages in the next.
LECTURE IX—THE MONK A CIVILIZER
Historians are often blamed for writing as if the History of Kings and Princes were the whole history of the world. ‘Why do you tell us,’ is said, ‘of nothing but the marriages, successions, wars, characters, of a few Royal Races? We want to know what the people, and not the princes, were like. History ought to be the history of the masses, and not of kings.’
The only answer to this complaint seems to be, that the defect is unavoidable. The history of the masses cannot be written, while they have no history; and none will they have, as long as they remain a mass; ere their history begins, individuals, few at first, and more and more numerous as they progress, must rise out of the mass, and become persons, with fixed ideas, determination, conscience, more or less different from their fellows, and thereby leavening and elevating their fellows, that they too may become persons, and men indeed. Then they will begin to have a common history, issuing out of each man’s struggle to assert his own personality and his own convictions. Till that point is reached, the history of the masses will be mere statistic concerning their physical well-being or ill-being, which (for the early ages of our race) is unwritten, and therefore undiscoverable.
The early history of the Teutonic race, therefore, is, and must always remain, simply the history of a few great figures. Of the many of the masses, nothing is said; because there was nothing to say. They all ate, drank, married, tilled, fought, and died, not altogether brutally, we will hope, but still in a dull monotony, unbroken by any struggle of principles or ideas. We know that large masses of human beings have so lived in every age, and are living so now—the Tartar hordes, for instance, or the thriving negroes of central Africa: comfortable folk, getting a tolerable living, son after father, for many generations, but certainly not developed enough, or afflicted enough, to have any history.
I believe that the masses, during the early middle age, were very well off; quite as well off as they deserved; that is, earned for themselves. They lived in a rough way, certainly: but roughness is not discomfort, where the taste has not been educated. A Red Indian sleeps as well in a wigwam as we in a spring bed; and the Irish babies thrive as well among the peat ashes as on a Brussels carpet. Man is a very well constructed being, and can live and multiply anywhere, provided he can keep warm, and get pure water and enough to eat. Indeed, our Teutonic fathers must have been comfortably off, or they could not have multiplied as they did. Even though their numbers may have been overstated, the fact is patent, that howsoever they were slaughtered down, by the Romans or by each other, they rose again as out of the soil, more numerous than ever. Again and again you read of a tribe being all but exterminated by the Romans, and in a few years find it bursting over the Pfalzgrab or the Danube, more numerous and terrible than before. Never believe that a people deprest by cold, ill-feeding, and ill-training, could have conquered Europe in the face of centuries of destructive war. Those very wars, again, may have helped in the long run the increase of population, and for a reason simple enough, though often overlooked. War throws land out of cultivation; and when peace returns, the new settlers find the land fallow, and more or less restored to its original fertility; and so begins a period of rapid and prosperous increase. In no other way can I explain the rate at which nations after the most desolating wars spring up, young and strong again, like the phoenix, from their own funeral pile. They begin afresh as the tillers of a virgin soil, fattened too often with the ashes of burnt homesteads, and the blood of the slain.
Another element of comfort may have been the fact, that in the rough education of the forest, only the strong and healthy children lived, while the weakly died off young, and so the labour-market, as we should say now, was never overstocked. This is the case with our own gipsies, and with many savage tribes—the Red Indians, for instance—and accounts for their general healthiness: the unhealthy being all dead, in the first struggle for existence. But then these gipsies, and the Red Indians, do not increase in numbers, but the contrary; while our forefathers increased rapidly. On the other hand, we have, at least throughout the middle ages, accounts of such swarms of cripples, lepers, deformed, and other incapable persons, as to make some men believe that there were more of them, in proportion to the population, than there are now. And it may have been so. The strongest and healthiest men always going off to be killed in war, the weakliest only would be left at home to breed; and so an unhealthy population might spring up. And again—and this is a curious fact—as law and order enter a country, so will the proportion of incapables, in body and mind, increase. In times of war and anarchy, when every one is shifting for himself, only the strongest and shrewdest can stand. Woe to those who cannot take care of themselves. The fools and cowards, the weakly and sickly, are killed, starved, neglected, or in other ways brought to grief. But when law and order come, they protect those who cannot protect themselves, and the fools and cowards, the weakly and sickly, are supported at the public expense, and allowed to increase and multiply as public burdens. I do not say that this is wrong, Heaven forbid! I only state the fact. A government is quite right in defending all alike from the brute competition of nature, whose motto is—Woe to the weak. To the Church of the middle age is due the preaching and the practice of the great Christian doctrine, that society is bound to protect the weak. So far the middle age saw: but no further. For our own times has been reserved the higher and deeper doctrine, that it is the duty of society to make the weak strong; to reform, to cure, and above all, to prevent by education, by sanitary science, by all and every means, the necessity of reforming and of curing.