“The principles that govern human affairs, extending like a path of light from century to century, become the highest demonstration of the superintending providence of God.”[G]
But it is not necessary to multiply quotations illustrative of his faith in the Deity. Throughout the whole of his writings he manifests a devout, reverential state of mind, and keeps constantly before the reader the idea that God is the great power back of those mighty movements that stir the nations of the world.
The philosophic cast of his mind is clearly revealed in all his discussions of causes and results. He firmly believes that “the problems of politics can not be solved without passing behind transient forms to efficient causes,” and he ever seeks to find the real origin of an event. He dates the American Revolution back to the Reformation under Luther and Calvin, and in relating the events that led to a separation from the mother country he discusses with great clearness and elaborateness three points essential to the proper understanding of the subject: In the first place he speaks of the emancipation of the mind at the Reformation, and the consequent birth of the idea of freedom. In the second place he discusses the growth of this idea of freedom in the nations of Europe and on this continent. In the third place he describes with wonderful fairness the violent discussions that arose in England and in this country when the colonists raised a protest against the tyrannies of the mother country. Referring to the origin of our present liberty, he says explicitly:
“The Reformation was an expression of the right of the human intellect to freedom.”[H]
He thus speaks of the influence of Luther and the Reformation: “At his bidding truth leaped over the cloister walls and challenged every man to make her his guest; aroused every intelligence to acts of private judgment, changed a dependent, recipient people into a reflecting, inquiring people; lifted each human being out of the castes of the middle age, to endow him with individuality, and summoned man to stand forth as man. The world heaved with the fervent conflict of opinion. The people and their guides recognized the dignity of labor; the oppressed peasantry took up arms for liberty; men reverenced and exercised the freedom of the soul. The breath of the new spirit moved over the earth; it revived Poland, animated Germany, swayed the north; and the inquisition of Spain could not silence its whispers among the mountains of the Peninsula. It invaded France; and, though bonfires of heretics, by way of warning, were lighted at the gates of Paris, it infused itself into the French mind, and led to unwonted free discussions. Exile could not quench it. On the banks of the Lake of Geneva, Calvin stood forth the boldest reformer of his day; not personally engaged in political intrigues, yet, by promulgating great ideas, forming the seed-plot of revolution.… Calvinism was revolutionary; wherever it came it created division.… By the side of the eternal mountains and perennial snows and arrowy rivers of Switzerland, it established a religion without a prelate, a government without a king.… It entered Holland, inspiring an industrious nation with heroic enthusiasm; enfranchising and uniting provinces; and making burghers, and weavers, and artisans, victors over the highest orders of Spanish chivalry, the power of the inquisition, and the pretended majesty of kings. It penetrated Scotland, and while its whirlwind bore along persuasion among glens and mountains, it shrunk from no danger, and hesitated at no ambition; it nerved its rugged but hearty envoy to resist the flatteries of the beautiful Queen Mary; it assumed the education of her only son; it divided the nobility; it penetrated the masses, overturned the ancient ecclesiastic establishment, planted free parochial schools, and gave a living energy to the principle of liberty in a people. It infused itself into England, and placed its plebeian sympathies in daring resistance to the courtly hierarchy; dissenting from dissent, longing to introduce the reign of righteousness, it invited every man to read the Bible, and made itself dear to the common mind, by teaching, as a divine revelation, the unity of the race and the natural equality of man.”[I]
It is evident that Bancroft has studied the Reformation, not simply in its outward political aspect, but so as to understand the different shades of theological belief that influenced the minds of the great reformers. His parallel between Luther and Calvin is a fine specimen of composition, noted for its vigorous English, clear, discriminating judgments, and polished style: “Both Luther and Calvin brought the individual immediate relation with God; but Calvin, under a more stern and militant form of doctrine, lifted the individual above pope and prelate, and priest and presbyter, above Catholic church and national church and general synod, above indulgencies, remissions and absolutions from fellow-mortals, and brought him into immediate dependence on God, whose eternal, irreversible choice is made by himself alone, not arbitrarily, but according to his own highest wisdom and justice. Luther spared the altar, and hesitated to deny totally the real presence; Calvin, with superior dialectics, accepted as a commemoration and a seal the rite which the Catholics revered as a sacrifice. Luther favored magnificence in public worship, as an aid to devotion; Calvin, the guide of republics, avoided in their churches all appeals to the senses as a peril to pure religion. Luther condemned the Roman Church for its immorality; Calvin for its idolatry. Luther exposed the folly of superstition, ridiculed the hair shirt and the scourge, the purchased indulgence, and dearly bought, worthless masses for the dead; Calvin shrunk from their criminality with impatient horror. Luther permitted the cross and the taper, pictures and images, as things of indifference; Calvin demanded a spiritual worship in its utmost purity. Luther left the organization of the church to princes and governments; Calvin reformed doctrine, ritual, and practice; and, by establishing ruling elders in each church, and an elective synod, he secured to his policy a representative character, which combined authority with popular rights. Both Luther and Calvin insisted that, for each one, there is and can be no other priest than himself; and, as a consequence, both agreed in the purity of the clergy.”[J]
While the rhetoric of Bancroft is not faultless, it certainly deserves a place in our classic English. In the discussion of grave historical and philosophical questions, his stateliness of expression and his dignity of style challenge our admiration. His descriptions are very fine, and suggest a mind keenly alive to the beautiful and the poetical; but they do not reveal that spontaneity so characteristic of Irving, nor that indefinable symmetry so noticeable in Hawthorne. If his style is sometimes declamatory, I think it is generally in a connection such that the cultivated taste will pronounce it admissible.
Thoroughly versed in the historic lore of this and other countries, broad in his general scholarship, remarkably free from prejudice, an uncompromising American, and yet not an American in a narrow and bigoted sense, careful and systematic in his methods of labor and recreation, unswerving in his belief in the superintending providence of God, George Bancroft justly merits the high place of honor and esteem so willingly accorded to him, and his noble example should be a never-failing source of inspiration.
[E] Vol. III., p. 6.