In a temporal as well as in a spiritual sense, the public authorities appreciated its power. Queen Elizabeth was not the only sovereign who knew how to thunder through a thousand pulpits.
The pulpit yields to the press.For a length of time, as might have been expected, considering its power and favouring adventitious circumstances, the pulpit maintained itself successfully against the press. Nevertheless, its eventual subordination was none the less sure. If there are disadvantages in the method of acquiring knowledge by reading, there are also signal advantages; for, though upon the printed page the silent letters are mute and unsustained by any scenic help, yet often—a wonderful contradiction—they pour forth emphatic eloquence, that can make the heart leap with emotion, or kindle on the cheek the blush of shame. The might of persuasiveness does not always lie in articulate speech. The strong are often the silent. God never speaks.
Listening and reading.There is another condition which gives to reading a great advantage over listening. In the affairs of life, how wide is the difference between having a thing done for us and doing it ourselves! In the latter case, how great is the interest awakened, how much more thorough the examination, how much more perfect the acquaintance. To listen implies merely a passive frame of mind; to read, an active. But the latter is more noble.
Decline of pulpit influence.From these and other such considerations, it might have been foreseen that the printing-press would at last deprive the pulpit of its supremacy, making it become ineffective, or reducing it to an ancillary aid. It must have been clear that the time would arrive when, though adorned by the eloquence of great and good men, the sermon would lose its power for moving popular masses or directing public thought.
Newspapers; their origin.Upon temporal as well as ecclesiastical authority, [204] the influence of this great change was also felt. During the Turkish war of 1563 newspapers first made their appearance in Venice. They were in manuscript. The "Gazette de France" commenced in 1631. There seems to be doubt as to the authenticity of the early English papers reputed to have been published during the excitement of the Spanish Armada, and of which copies remain in the British Museum. It was not until the civil wars that, under the names of Mercuries, Intelligences, etc., newspapers fairly established themselves in England.
Decline of power in parliamentary eloquence.What I have said respecting the influence of the press upon religious life applies substantially to civil life also. Oratory has sunk into a secondary position, being every day more and more thoroughly supplanted by journalism. No matter how excellent it may be in its sphere of action, it is essentially limited, and altogether incompetent to the influencing of masses of men in the manner which our modern social system requires. Without a newspaper, what would be the worth of the most eloquent parliamentary attempts? It is that which really makes them instruments of power, and gives to them political force, which takes them out of a little circle of cultivated auditors, and throws them broadcast over nations.
Dawn of the Reformation.Such was the literary condition of Western Europe, such the new power that had been found in the press. These were but initiatory to the great drama now commencing. We have already seen that synchronously with this intellectual there was a moral impulse coming into play. The two were in harmony. At the time now occupying our attention there was a possibility for the moral impulse to act under several different forms. The special mode in which it came into effect was determined by the pecuniary necessities of Italy. It very soon, however, assumed larger proportions, and became what is known to us as the Reformation. The movement against Rome that had been abandoned for a century was now recommenced.
Variation of human thought.The variation of human thought proceeds in a continuous manner, new ideas springing out of old ones either [205] as corrections or developments, but never spontaneously originating. With them, as with organic forms, each requires a germ, a seed. The intellectual phase of humanity observed at any moment is therefore an embodiment of many different things. It is connected with the past, is in unison with the present, and contains the embryo of the future.
Human opinions must hence, of absolute necessity, undergo transformation. What has been received by one generation as undoubted, to a subsequent one becomes so conspicuously fallacious as to excite the wonder of those who do not distinctly appreciate the law of psychical advance that it could ever have been received as true. These phases of transformation are not only related in a chronological way, so as to be obvious when we examine the ideas of society at epochs of a few years or of centuries apart—they exist also contemporaneously in different nations or in different social grades of the same nation, according as the class of persons considered has made a greater or less intellectual progress.
Variations in Italian ideas.Notwithstanding the assertion of Rome, the essential ideas of the Italian system had undergone unavoidable modifications. An illiterate people, easily imposed upon, had accepted as true the asseveration that there had been no change even from the apostolic times. But the time had now come when that fiction could no longer be maintained, the divergence no longer concealed. In the new state of things, it was impossible that dogmas in absolute opposition to reason, such as that of transubstantiation, could any longer hold their ground. The scholastic theology and scholastic philosophy, though supported by the universities, had become obsolete. With the revival of pure Latinity and the introduction of Greek, the foundations of a more correct criticism were laid. An age of erudition was unavoidable, in which whatever could not establish its claims against a searching examination must necessarily be overthrown.