Such, nevertheless, was the evil which overbore the church in its relations with the faithful, though its weight became alleviated, as I shall hereafter demonstrate. We have already seen, that for the clergymen themselves, and in the heart of the church, liberty had no guarantee. For laymen, and outside the church, the matter was much worse. Amongst ecclesiastics, there was at all events discussion, deliberation, and a deployment of individual faculties; with them the excitement of dispute supplied in some sort the lack of liberty. But there was nothing of this description between the clergy and the people. The laymen assisted in the government of the church as simple spectators. And thus we perceive that idea so early vegetate and expand, that theology, or religious questions and affairs, are the privileged domain of the clergy, that the clergy alone have a right to decide, or even to canvass them, and that on no account, or under any pretence, ought laymen to interfere. At the era under review this theory was already in full blossom; and it has required ages and terrible revolutions to subdue it, and to bring back, even partially, religious questions and science to the public domain.
Therefore, in principle as well as in fact, the legal separation of the clergy and the Christian people was nearly complete before the twelfth century.
In spite of this, however, the Christian people were not without influence, even at this epoch, upon their government. Legal interference was wanting to it, but not influence. In fact its extinction is scarcely possible in any government, much less in one founded upon articles of belief common to the governing and the governed. Whenever an actual community of ideas is developed, or an intellectual movement of the same order is participated by both government and people, a bond necessarily exists between them which no viciousness in the organisation can utterly break. To give a clear explanation of my meaning, I will take an example from our own history of the political cast. At no date in the history of France have the French people had less legal control over their government, by means of institutions, than in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, under Louis XIV. and Louis XV. Every one knows that almost all the direct and official interference of the country, in the exercise of authority, had died away at those periods. Yet there is no doubt that the public and the country then exercised much more influence over the government than at other times—in those, for instance, in which the States-General were frequently convoked, in which the parliaments took considerable part in politics, and in which the legal participation of the people with power was unquestionably greater.
It is because there is a force which laws do not entomb, and which, upon occasion, can shake off the burden of institutions, the force of ideas, of public intelligence and opinion. In the France of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there was a public opinion much more potential than at any other epoch. Although it was debarred from legal means of acting on the government, it acted indirectly, by the sway of ideas common to the governing and the governed, and by the impossibility experienced by the rulers to set at nought the opinion of society. A similar fact occurred in the Christian church of the fifth to the twelfth centuries: the Christian people, it is true, were deficient in means of legal action, but there was a great mental movement in religious matters, which operated conjointly upon laymen and ecclesiastics, and gave means of action to the people upon the clergy.
In studying history, it is essential to set great value upon indirect influences in all things, for they are much more efficacious, and sometimes more salutary, than are commonly represented. It is natural for men to wish that their action should be prompt and palpable, and to derive pleasure from taking part in their own success, power, and triumph. But this is not always possible, nor even useful. There are times and situations in which indirect and imperceptible influences are alone advantageous and practicable. I will again adduce an example of the political order. More than once, in 1641 especially, the English parliament has claimed, like many other assemblies in analogous cases, the right of directly nominating the great officers of the crown, the ministers and councillors of state, &c. regarding this direct interference in the government as a great and precious guarantee. It has sometimes exercised this privilege, and the experiment has always met with bad success. Yet what takes place now in England? Is it not the influence of the two houses of parliament which decides the formation of the ministry, and the nomination of all the great officers of the crown? Certainly; but it is an indirect and general influence, instead of a special intervention. The result for which England has long laboured is produced, but by another course; the first had never worked beneficially.
There is a reason for this, upon which I shall linger for a moment. The direct action requires, in those to whom it is confided, an unusual share of enlightenment, sound sense, and prudence: as they aim at reaching their point at once, and without delay, they have good need of caution, lest their enterprise be ill-timed, and fail. Indirect influences, on the contrary, encounter obstacles ere they come into play, and undergo trials which test and rectify them: before succeeding, they are subjected to discussion, opposition, and restriction: their triumph is slow, and upon conditions, in a certain degree. Therefore, when the minds of men are not sufficiently advanced and ripened to render the direct action secure, indirect and mitigated influences are preferable. It was thus that the Christian people acted on their government, very incompletely, and far too stintedly, I am aware, yet they certainly did act.
There was likewise another cause of reconcilement between the church and laymen, existing in the dispersion, so to speak, of the Christian clergy amongst all the conditions of society. Almost everywhere, when a church has been constituted independent of the people whom it governed, the body of priests has been formed of men nearly in the same situation; not that marked inequalities did not prevail amongst them; but still, upon the whole, the power has been vested in colleges of priests, living in community, and governing, from the depths of a temple, the people bowing under their yoke. The Christian church was quite differently organised. From the miserable hut of the boor or serf, at the foot of the feudal castle, to the palace of the king, there was throughout society a priest or member of the clerical body. Clergymen were associated to all conditions of men. This diversity in the situation of the Christian priests, this sharing in all fortunes, has been a great principle of union between the clergy and laymen, which has been entirely wanting to the majority of churches invested with power. The bishops and chiefs of the Christian church were furthermore, as has been previously mentioned, mixed up with the feudal organisation, and were members of the civil as well as of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Hence arose common interests, usages, and manners, between the civil and religious orders. It has been judged scandalous, and reasonably, that bishops waged war, and that priests led the life of laymen. Assuredly it was a great abuse, and yet one infinitely less disastrous than was elsewhere the existence of those priests who never issued out of the temple, and who were altogether separated from the people in their course of life. The bishops, who took part, to a certain extent, in the civil disorders, were of more avail than priests, complete strangers to the population, its affairs, and its manners. In this respect there was a parity of destiny and situation between the clergy and the people, which, if it did not correct, certainly lessened, the evil of the separation between the rulers and the governed.
Now, this separation being admitted, and its limits and countervailing influences determined, let us next inquire how the church governed, in what manner it acted upon the populations subject to its empire; what it effected, on the one hand, for the development of the man, for the moral advancement of the individual, and, on the other, for the amelioration of the social state.
To speak the truth, I do not believe that, at the era in question, the church concerned itself greatly about the development of the individual. It endeavoured to inspire the powerful in the world with milder sentiments, and to induce them to act with more justice in their relations with the weak; and it taught the oppressed to lead a moral life, and to indulge in sentiments and hopes of a loftier order than those to which their immediate destiny condemned them. Yet for individual development, properly so called, for imparting value to the personal nature of men, I do not believe that the church then did much, at least so far as laymen were concerned. What it did was confined to the ecclesiastical society itself; it made great exertions for the development of the clergy, for the instruction of priests; for them it had schools, and all the institutions which the deplorable state of society allowed. But they were ecclesiastical schools, appointed for the instruction of the clergy alone, and, with their exception, the church acted indirectly, and by very slow means, towards the progress of ideas and manners. It doubtless gave a stimulus to general mental activity by the career it proffered to all those whom it judged capable of serving it; but that was pretty nearly all it did, at that period, for the intellectual development of the laity.
It had a greater influence, and acted in a more efficacious manner, towards the amelioration of the social state. It resolutely struggled against the great vices of the social state—for example, against slavery. It has been often asserted that the abolition of slavery in modern Europe was exclusively owing to Christianity. I think that is saying too much. Slavery long existed in the heart of the Christian society, without greatly exciting its astonishment, or drawing down its anathema. A multitude of causes, and a great development in other ideas of civilisation, were required to eradicate this evil of evils, this iniquity of iniquities. Yet it is indubitable that the church employed its influence in restraining it. There exists an unquestionable proof of this fact. The greater part of the formulas of enfranchisement, made out at different eras, are founded upon a religious motive; it is upon the invocation of religious ideas, of hopes of eternal bliss, and of the equality of men in the eyes of Heaven, that the enfranchisement is almost invariably pronounced.