Natural History of Enthusiasm

by Isaac Taylor

But a far happier anticipation is with reason indulged; for it may well be believed that the same Benignant Influence which is to remove the covering of gross ignorance from the nations, shall, at the same moment, scatter the dimness that still hovers over the Church in its most favored home; and then, and under that influence, the fervors of Christian zeal may reach the height even of a seraphic energy, and yet without enthusiasm.

SECTION VIII.
SKETCH OF THE ENTHUSIASM OF THE ANCIENT CHURCH.

An intelligent Christian, fraught with scriptural principles in their simplicity and purity, but hitherto uninformed of Church history, who should peruse discursively the ecclesiastical writers of the age of Jerom, Ambrose, and Basil, would presently recoil with an emotion of disappointment, perplexity, and alarm. That within a period which does not exceed the reach of oral tradition, the religion of the apostles should have so much changed its character, and so much have lost its beauty, he could not have supposed possible. He has heard indeed of the corruptions of popery, and of the enormous abuses prevalent in "the dark ages;" and he has been told too, by those who had a special argument to prop, that the era of the secular prosperity of the church was that also of the incipient corruption of religion. But he finds in fact that there is scarcely an error of doctrine, or an absurdity of practice, ordinarily attributed to the popes and councils of later times, and commonly included in the indictment against Rome, which may not, in its elements, or even in a developed form, be traced to the writings of those whose ancestors, at the third or fourth remove only, were the hearers of Paul and John.

But after the first shock of such an unprepared perusal of the fathers has passed, and when calm reflection has returned, and especially when, by taking up these early writers from the commencement, the progression of decay and perversion has been gradually and distinctly contemplated, then, though the disappointment will in great part remain, the appalling surmises at first engendered in the modern reader's mind, will be dispelled, and he will even be able to pursue his course of reading with pleasure, and to derive from it much solid instruction. Considerations such as the following will naturally present themselves to him in mitigation of his first painful impressions.

While contemplating in their infant state those notions and practices (of the third century, for example) which afterwards swelled into enormous evils, it is difficult not to view them as if they were loaded with the blame of their after issues; and then it is hard not to attribute to their originators and promoters the accumulated criminality that should be shared in small portions by the men of many following generations. But the individuals thus unfairly dealt by, far from forecasting the consequences of the sentiments and usages they favored, far from viewing them, as we do, darkened by the cloud of mischiefs that was heaped upon them in after times, saw the same objects bright and fair in the recommendatory gleam of a pure and a venerated age. The very abuses which make the twelfth century abhorrent on the page of history, were, in the fourth, fragrant with the practice and suffrage of a blessed company of primitive confessors. The remembered saints, who had given their bodies to the flames, had also lent their voice and example to those unwise excesses which at length drove true religion from the earth. Untaught by experience, the ancient church surmised not of the occult tendencies of the course it pursued, nor should be loaded with consequences which human sagacity could not well have foreseen.

Each of the great corruptions of later ages took its rise, in the first, second, or third century, in a manner which it would be harsh to say was deserving of strong reprehension. Thus the secular domination exercised by the bishops, and at length supremely by the bishops of Rome, may be traced very distinctly to the proper respect paid by the people, even in the apostolic age, to the disinterested wisdom of their bishops in deciding their worldly differences. The worship of images, the invocation of saints, and the superstition of relics, were but expansions of the natural feeling of veneration and affection cherished towards the memory of those who had suffered and died for the truth. And thus, in like manner, the errors and abuses of monkery all sprang, by imperceptible augmentations, from sentiments perfectly natural to the sincere and devout Christian in times of persecution, disorder, and general corruption of morals.

Again: human nature, which is far more uniform than may be imagined, when suddenly it is beheld under some new aspect of time and country, is also susceptible of much greater diversities of habit and feeling than those are willing to believe who have seen it on no side but one. This double lesson, taught by history and travel, should be well learned by every one who undertakes to estimate the merits of men that have lived in remote times, and under other skies.

A caution against the influence of narrow prejudice is obviously more needful in relation to the persons and practices of ancient Christianity, than when common history is the subject of inquiry; for in whatever relates to religion, every one carries with him, not merely the ordinary prepossessions of time and country, but an unbending standard of conduct and temper, which he is forward to compare, in his particular manner, with whatever offends his notions of right. But though the rule of Scripture morals is unchangeable, and must be applied with uncompromising impartiality to human nature under every variety of circumstance, yet is it impractible, at the distance of upwards of a thousand years, so fully to calculate those circumstances, and so to perceive the motives of conduct, as is necessary for estimating fairly the innocence or the criminality of particular actions or habits of life. The question of abstract fitness, and that of personal blameworthiness, should ever be kept apart: at least they should be kept apart when it is asked—and we are often tempted to ask it in the perusal of church history—May such men be deemed Christians, who acted and wrote thus and thus? Before a doubt of this kind could be solved satisfactorily, we must know—what can never be known till the day of universal discovery—how much of imperfection and obliquity may consist with the genuineness of real piety; and again, how much of real obliquity there might be, under the actual circumstances of the case, in the conduct in question. Who can doubt that if the memorials of the present times, copious, and yet inadequate as they must be, shall remain to a distant age, they will offer similar perplexities to the future reader, who, amidst his frequent admiration or approval, will be compelled to exclaim—But how may we think these men to have been Christians? Christianity is in gradual process of reforming the principles and practices of mankind, and when the sanative operation shall have advanced some several stages beyond its present point, the notions and usages of our day, compared with the commands of Christ, as then understood, will, no doubt, seem incredibly defective.

Perhaps it may be said, that in all matters of sentiment, depending on physical temperament, and modes of life, the people of the British islands are less qualified to appreciate the merits of the nations of antiquity than almost any other people of Christendom; and perhaps, also, by national arrogance and pertinacity of taste, we are less ready to bend indulgently to usages unlike our own than any other people. Stiff in the resoluteness of an exaggerated notion of the right of private judgment, we bring all things unsparingly to the one standard of belief and practice; or rather to our particular pattern of that standard; and do not, until our better nature prevails, own brotherhood with Christians of another complexion and costume. A somewhat austere good sense, belonging, first, to the haughtiness and energy of the English character, then to the liberality of our political institutions, and lastly, but not least, to the all-pervading spirit and habits of trade, renders the style of the early Christian writers much more distasteful to us than it has proved to Christians of other countries. Moreover, recent enhancements of the national character, resulting from the diffusion of the physical sciences, and from the more extended prevalence of commercial feelings, have placed those writers at a point much further removed from our predilections than that at which they stood a century ago.