whose reigns exhibiting as they do, the paramount influence of religion on public life, constitute the happiest era, and the truly golden period of our annals. The peculiar nature and constitution, the internal spirit and essence of the Christian state, would be much more clearly and vividly represented by the examples of these great characters, who to the pure will of their energetic, heroic souls, united a practical knowledge of life, and a natural insight into the principles of Christian policy. Such a course I would prefer to entangling myself in the usual disputes about the respective relations of the spiritual and temporal powers, and all the contentious points involved in that matter; or to entering upon any dissertation respecting the decisive era in the developement of royalty and its rights, or in the progress of the constitution of the three estates, and of various municipal corporations; however useful and instructive such enquiries may be in the special history of particular countries. And even in the latter respect, those glorious names form a mighty epoch; and in the history of almost all the great European countries, we meet with some holy and magnanimous monarch, who laid the solid foundations of his country’s constitution, or introduced a higher civility and refinement in life and manners. Such were in Hungary the holy King Stephen, and in France, the great St. Lewis, who in more unquiet times restored a better spirit, and for a while retarded the progress of corruption. There were also
other kings, heroes and emperors, like Rodolph of Hapsburgh, who without being honoured with the title of saints, were truly pious, chivalric and equitable monarchs, and may be esteemed and revered as the Christian regenerators of their age, and the founders of a true and religious system of government and manners. A lively sketch of such men and rulers, who acted and governed well and greatly according to Christian principles and views, would, I think, furnish a far more complete idea of the true nature of the Christian state in this its first period of developement, than any laboured or artificial definition. There are along with these individual characters, individual and transient periods of prosperity, which break out for one generation or more in the history of those early times; periods which can only be considered as historical exceptions from the general order of things. Even those more comprehensive, and so far more general political institutions, evidently peculiar to those Christian ages, and nowhere else to be found—like the truce of God, which repressed within certain limits the hereditary spirit of feud—or the spiritual chivalry in the orders of the Templars and of the Knights of St. John, consecrated to warfare in the cause of God, and opening as they did, in the time of the crusades, to the same spirit of chivalrous feud a higher path and a more noble career—all these political institutions, I say, springing out of the nature and exigencies of their age,
can be understood only by a reference to the circumstances and prevailing spirit of the times, and must therefore be judged as historical peculiarities. As they often sprang up suddenly without a visible or apparent cause, and as if by some high mysterious impulse, so they often sank again as rapidly; and the pure spirit—the true import of such institutions appeared but for a moment, like a silvery gleam; then they degenerated, or were transformed into something totally different. And we must not be astonished at this, since what is best and noblest in man—feeling and its divine quality, is most easily and rapidly impaired, and may sometimes indeed preserve an external vigour, when it has undergone an internal change, and assumed a direction opposed to God and all goodness. There were also particular rulers possessed of an energetic will and a comprehensive understanding, who exercised a wide and commanding, but pernicious influence on their age, and the world; and among these, the most noted were Barbarossa and that secret friend of the Saracens, the emperor Frederick the Second; princes who with some others, must be regarded as the first authors of the great dissension. After this dissension had broken out in the fearful struggle of the Guelphs and Ghibellines, and Christendom was divided into two parties; discord became general, pursued its resistless course, and acting in those distracted times like some new destroying law
of nature, absorbed all personality and its influence in the general abyss of error, or made it at least less conspicuous.
I will now endeavour to give a short sketch of the general progress of European society in this its first period of developement, and to point out the then peculiar nature and constitution of the Christian state;—from that epoch when Charlemagne laid the first solid foundation for a permanent system of christian government and christian manners, down to the moment when an anti-christian spirit of discord broke out with incurable violence, and became universally predominant. I will at the same time endeavour to take an historical survey of the whole Christian West, as it has remained the theatre of the subsequent progress of society, and of the great transactions of the world down to our times.
In the blame so commonly lavished, (and not unreasonably, when we consider the historical consequences,) on the customary divisions in the Frankish or Carlovingian Empire, and the other German states, men forget that according to the old Germanic idea, a kingdom was nothing more than any other great family estate, or princely inheritance, and governed, like these, by the same law of descent. This was so from the earliest times among both the principal races of the Germans. In this manner we find the nation of the Goths divided into two kingdoms; and as the Saxons were with difficulty
united under one head in their own ancestral country on the Northern coast of Germany; so in the England which they had conquered and newly peopled, we find seven principalities or petty kingdoms of Anglo-Saxons co-existent with one another; and these were only by accident reduced to a less number, and but for a time blended into one sovereignty. We often ascribe to the men, and to the spirit of those times, pretensions quite inappropriate, inapplicable, and perfectly modern. So possessed are we with the notion of our times as to the natural and eternal boundaries of this or that country, of the predestination of a people to political unity, or of the necessary national unity of every state—notions or prejudices which are held as so many mathematical axioms, in which we make the highest idea of policy to consist, to which we ascribe an inviolable sanctity, and which in our reverence, and in some cases, we might almost say—idolatry, we exalt above every thing else, and would make every thing else subservient to. To the simplicity of those ancient times, the excellence and advantages of a mild, domestic, paternal, national sovereignty for the more convenient administration of smaller states, appeared great, and superior to every other consideration. Thus those who had to decide of themselves, and without the imperious call of duty—without the feeling of a strong necessity for undertaking, even at the sacrifice of a part at least of their own national
welfare, the heavy burden of the imperial office, in that Christian empire evidently established by divine Providence for the protection of the church, and all the nations belonging to it;—without this strong feeling of duty, I say, they never would have deviated from the good old simple usage of dividing the royal patrimony. The more so indeed as the glory they sought was rather of a chivalrous kind, consequently purely personal; and that favourite idol of modern times—national vanity, was perfectly unknown to them. Their institution, certainly, would not be adapted to our times; nor was it even suited to those immediately succeeding; but an age to be judged aright and duly appreciated, must be estimated by its own standard, and the opinions proper to it. That even a division of sovereignty and partition of kingdoms is not incompatible with the external union of the body politic for one general design, so long as the potentates are animated by a Christian and brotherly feeling, and a spirit of union as to this one object—the all-uniting bond of confederacy; is a truth which may be proved by many pleasing and glorious examples from the history of the earlier middle age, and from that of Germany especially. If on the one hand we would lay it down as a general historical law, and axiom of state, that separated or divided kingdoms and countries can never combine for one common object, nor remain permanently united in feeling nor Christian equity—so
on the other hand, we must remember that the division of nations according to certain natural boundaries, which we would fain regard as the only perfect and absolutely right one, is like the quadrature of the circle, a problem eluding all calculation, and remaining for ever insoluble, since each one, according to his peculiar political position, or national prejudices, views those eternal boundaries in a different light, and determines them differently. Thus in order to put an end to all discord and to the injurious system of partition, nothing would remain but the vulgar resource of an universal monarchy and military dominion—a resource which as often as it has been tried, has been as little justified or recommended by its historical results, as that custom of partition which prevailed in the German ancestral kingdoms of the earlier middle age.
The dangers of a bitter family feud, or of the mutual jealousies of the heirs to the several kingdoms as to their respective portions, when these grew to any considerable extent, were early enough perceived. It is to be observed that in the first division of the great Carlovingian empire into three parts, designed by Charlemagne himself, but accomplished only under his feebler successor; the inheritance assigned to the eldest and imperial brother—Lothaire, was together with Rome and Italy, the Rhenish district situate between France on the one side, and the interior of Germany on the other, and