Westward empire

by Elias Lyman Magoon

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, philosophy appeared to have but one home, Italy; but in the seventeenth century, all Europe became the field of its culture, and the richest fruits were ripened by the setting sun. At earlier periods, inventive mind had scarcely any means of expression, save a single language, and that a dead one; but in the seventeenth century the Latin became the exception, and philosophy began to use national tongues, which it enriched and reformed. At the moment a new world was opened to the sublimest advance, philosophy admitted to its service only living languages, full of the future, and which placed it in direct communication with the masses. Thus it accumulated its resources, concentrated its influence, and pressed forward in its majestic career, promising soon to become an independent, universal, and popular power.

CHAPTER V.

RELIGION.

For the right examination of the divine dealings in the ancient world, heaven has vouchsafed an unerring guide. The predictions of the inspired writers, and especially the prophecies of Daniel, furnish a key to all the remarkable events which authentic history records. The fact of fatal revolutions, and both the names and leading traits of their predestined agents, are declared with a boldness which ought to confound the skeptic whom it fails to convince.

While Rome was already trembling under the power of decay, Judea witnessed the fulfillment of those great designs in aid of which that empire was permitted to gain universal mastery, and, in the words of one of her own Cæsars, recorded by Tacitus, to arrive at such a satiety of glory as made her willing to give peace to the world. Thus, when Christianity was to be produced, all was made ready for her advent, and the appropriate field was cleared. Rome expiring amid her ruins, gave birth to the Catholic hierarchy as the last effort of her grandeur, the uses and abuses of which were not less subordinated to the progressive welfare of mankind. The history of religion is the pedestal of all history, and is the supreme manifestation of God's supervision of humanity. This light illumines all the rest, and most clearly shows that, because Providence takes no retrograde steps, human progress never recoils, nor lacks agents adapted to its beneficent advance. The great chain of heavenly purpose can not be broken, however violent the assaults of earth. Great revolutions may seem to be suddenly unfolded: but in fact they were conceived and nurtured in the womb of society long before they emerged to the light of day. A review of religion in the age of Leo X. will most strongly impress us with this truth; and while we are obliged to abridge the statement of pertinent facts, we will hope not to be superficial in the elucidation of their governing principles. A palimpsest manuscript perhaps has had its original hymn to Apollo expunged, to admit a mediæval legend, but it was only that a supervening age might profit by the mutilated treasures so providentially preserved.

Under the domination of ancient Rome an unnoticed grain of seed fell in the Rheingau, and resulted in all the vineyards which have since enriched that prolific land. At the dawn of modern society, Christianity, that eagle from the throne of God, flying with the sun, deposited among the rocks of the Rhine an egg which contained the germ of more spiritual fruitfulness. Many Christians died the death of martyrs in those western wilds, and their ashes thrown to the winds, became the seed-corn of a new world. Innumerable heroes arose who were actuated by a profound faith—not of abstract reason, but of deep sentiment; the secret and source of an inspiration not to be cast aside, but which filled the soul, absorbed its faculties, and formed the chief aim of its existence. From the fifth century, Europe became a perpetually enlarged field for Christianity, but not its boundary. It was necessary that the divine power which underlies modern civilization, and which was given to transform the world, should go forth from the darkness and impediments of the middle ages, in order to develop itself, and produce the grander fruits it was destined to mature. That period has been characterized as the chrysalis of the new world. The first portion was marked by universal night and deadly sleep followed by a crystallized formalism of corporations in which soon appeared those grand beginnings of national regeneration which Christ came to occasion and complete. If the development of the divine purpose seemed to stop in the fourth century, when Christianity became the religion of the Roman empire, it was because that, at the time national existence became extinct in the East, the new Japhetic race of the West was to be trained to moral responsibility, and thus to national independence also, in religion.

In every epoch of the world, religion is the foundation and formative principle of all; it is this which generates the general faith, molds its manners, and fosters its institutions. The age we are now considering opened under auspices the most forbidding, and yet not unfavorable to the culture of exalted moral excellence. Destruction had invaded the world-wide empire of that city which arrogated to itself the epithet eternal; and even those great ecclesiastical establishments, the fruit of much martyr-blood, and of the devout labors of the primitive fathers, were swept away by the overwhelming torrent. "But," Neander says, "while the pagans hopelessly mourned at the grave of earthly glory, and, filled with despair, beheld all the forms of ancient culture dashed in pieces by the hands of barbarians, devout Christians held fast to the anchor of believing hope, which raised them above all that was changeable, and gave them a firm stand-point in the midst of the destroying waters. They knew that, though heaven and earth might pass away, the words of the Lord could not pass away;" and these words were to them, even when surrounded by death, an inexhaustible source of life. The existing ecclesiastical forms, as far as they were connected with the constitution of the Roman empire, necessarily perished in the universal breaking-up of society; but the essence of the church, as of Christianity, could not be touched by any destructive power, and at this period of the world's decrepitude and exhaustion showed itself more evidently to be the unchangeable vital principle of a new creation. In this time of invading destruction, a Christian father (probably Leo the Great, before he was a bishop) thus wrote: "Even the weapons by which the world is destroyed, subserve the operations of Christian grace. How many, who in the quiet of peace had delayed their baptism, were impelled to it by the fear of imminent danger! How many sluggish and lukewarm souls are roused by sudden and threatening alarm, on whom peaceful exhortation had produced no effect! Many sons of the church who had been brought into captivity, make their masters subject to the gospel, and become teachers of the Christian faith to those to whom the chances of war have subjected them. Others of the barbarians, who had entered the ranks of the Roman auxiliaries, have learned in Christian countries what they could not learn in their native land, and returned to their homes instructed in Christianity. Thus nothing can prevent divine grace from fulfilling its designs, whatever they may be; so that conflict leads to unity, wounds are changed into restoratives, and that which threatened danger to the church is destined to promote its increase."

The bishops of Jerusalem, Alexandria, Antioch, Constantinople and Rome, at an early period took precedence over the others, and received the title of patriarchs, which the eastern metropolitans still retain. The name of pope, from the Greek pappas, father, was once common to all the bishops, and is still given to the Greek priests in Russia. The term was not monopolized by the bishop of Rome, till the time of Gregory VII., in 1073, when he claimed, as the successor of St. Peter, the primacy over all others, and was sustained in this by the provincial councils. At length, however, difficulties arose, which led pope Felix II. to excommunicate the patriarchs of Constantinople and Alexandria; and thus the Eastern or Greek Church was separated from the Western or Roman, though both assumed to be universal. But it was the western church only that advanced in the career of improved civilization. The monastic system, under which monks and nuns secluded themselves, was introduced by Anthony, in Egypt, and, in connection with papal celibacy, soon spread throughout Christendom. The use of images in worship, commenced in the sixth century, in the East; and though condemned at Constantinople in 754, it afterward prevailed, both there and in all the West. Meanwhile the gospel had been preached, in France, about A.D. 290; in Ireland, about 470; and in England, by the monk Augustin, who died about 608.

In the midst of the great and universal ruins of the old Roman empire, the church alone remained upright, and became the corner stone of the new edifice. Civilization passed under her direction to the other side of the Alps, where it established a new centre of unity and brotherhood, around which a vast circle soon extended itself, and embraced all Europe in the same range of improvement. A common faith united all the members of that society of the middle ages, and from the day of its conversion, each nation dated its entrance upon the path of progress. From the fifth to the sixteenth century, the notions, sentiments, and manners of European society were essentially theological. Every great question that was started, whether philosophical, political, or historical, was considered in a religious point of view. Notwithstanding all the evils, errors, and abuses which may have crept into the Roman church, it must be acknowledged that her influence upon popular progress and culture was beneficial; that she assisted in the development of the general mind rather than its compression, in its extension, rather than its confinement.

The uses of early Catholicism are well stated by Macaulay, as follows: "Whatever reproach may, at a later period, have been justly thrown on the indolence and luxury of religious orders, it was surely good that, in an age of ignorance and violence, there should be quiet cloisters and gardens, in which the arts of peace could be safely cultivated, in which gentle and contemplative natures could find an asylum, in which one brother could employ himself in transcribing the Æneid of Virgil, and another in meditating the Analytics of Aristotle; in which he who had a genius for art might illuminate a martyrology or carve a crucifix, and in which he who had a turn for natural philosophy might make experiments on the properties of plants and minerals. Had not such retreats been scattered here and there among the huts of a miserable peasantry and the castles of a ferocious aristocracy. European society would have consisted merely of beasts of burden and of beasts of prey. The church has many times been compared by divines to that ark of which we read in the Book of Genesis; but never was the resemblance more perfect than during that evil time when she alone rode, amid darkness and tempest, on the deluge beneath which all the great works of ancient power and wisdom lay entombed, bearing within her that feeble germ from which a second and more glorious civilization was to spring." Elsewhere the same eloquent writer suggests that, what the Olympian chariot race and the Pythian oracle were to all the Greek cities, from Trebizond to Marseilles, Rome and her bishops were to all Christians of the Latin communion, from Calabria to the Hebrides. This elicited sentiments of enlarged benevolence, and caused races separated from each other by seas and mountains, to acknowledge a fraternal tie, and a common code of public law. A regular communication was opened between the western islands and that part of Europe in which the traces of ancient power and policy were yet discernible. "Many noble monuments which have since been destroyed or defaced, still retained their pristine magnificence; and travelers, to whom Livy and Sallust were unintelligible, might gain from the Roman aqueducts and temples some faint notion of Roman history. The dome of Agrippa still glittering with bronze; the mausoleum of Adrian, not yet deprived of its columns and statues; the Flavian amphitheatre, not yet degraded into a quarry, told to the Mercian or Northumbrian pilgrims some part of the story of that great civilized world which had passed away. The islanders returned, with awe deeply impressed on their half-opened minds, and told the wondering inhabitants of the hovels of London and York that, near to the grave of Saint Peter, a mighty race, now extinct, had piled up buildings which would never be dissolved till the judgment day. Learning followed in the train of Christianity. The poetry and eloquence of the Augustan age were assiduously studied in the Anglo-Saxon monasteries. The names of Bede, of Alcuin, and of John surnamed Erigena, were justly celebrated throughout Europe. Such was the state of this country when, in the ninth century, began the last great descent of the northern barbarians."