[Footnote 196]
[Footnote 196:
1. History of European Morals, from Augustus to Charlemagne. By W. E. H. Lecky. London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1869. 2 vols. 8vo.
2. History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe. By the same. From the London edition. New York: Appleton & Co., 1868. 2 vols. 8vo.]
Two irreconcilable systems of morals have disputed the empire of the earliest times. The one is founded on the fact that God creates man; the other on the assumption that man is himself God, or, at least, a god unto himself. The first system finds its principle in the fact stated in the first verse of Genesis, "In the beginning God created heaven and earth;" the second finds its principle in the assurance of Satan to Eve, "Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil." The first system is that of the Biblical patriarchs, the synagogue, the Christian church, and all sound philosophy as well as of common sense—is the theological system, which places man in entire dependence on God as principle, medium, and end, and asserts as its basis in us, HUMILITY, "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." The other system is the gentile or pagan system, or that which prevailed with the Gentiles after their falling away from the patriarchal religion. It assumed, in its practical developments, two forms, the supremacy of the state and the supremacy of the individual; but in both was asserted the supremacy of man—or man as his own lawgiver, teacher, and master, his own beginning, middle, and end, and therefore, either individually or collectively, man's sufficiency for himself. Its principle or basis, then, is PRIDE.
Mr. Lecky adopts, as we have shown in our former article, the pagan, or, more properly, the satanic system of morals, at least as to its principle, though in some few particulars he gives the superiority to Christian morals, particulars in which Christians advanced further than had advanced the best pagan school before the conversion of Rome, but in the same direction, on the same principle, and from the same starting-point. He nowhere accepts the Christian or theological principle, and rejects everywhere, with scorn, Christian asceticism, which, according to him, is based on a false principle—that of appeasing the anger of a malevolent God. He accepts Christianity only so far as reducible to the pagan principle.
The only points in which Christian morals—for Christian dogmas, in his view, have no relation to morals, and are not to be counted—are a progress on pagan morals, are the assertion of the brotherhood of the race and the recognition of the emotional side of human nature. But even these two points, as he understands them, are not peculiar to Christianity. He shows that some of the later Stoics, at least, asserted the brotherhood of the race, or that nothing human is foreign to any one who is a man—that all good offices are due to all men; and whoever has studied Plato at all, knows that Platonism attached at least as much importance, and gave as large a scope to our emotional nature, as does Christianity. Christian morals have, then, really nothing peculiar, and are, in principle, no advance on paganism. The most that can be said is that Christianity gave to the brotherhood of the race more prominence than did paganism, and transformed the Platonic love, which was the love of the beautiful, into the love of humanity. This being all, we may well ask, How was it that Christianity was able to gain the victory over the pagan philosophers, and to convert the city of Rome and the Roman empire?
Mr. Lecky adopts the modern doctrine of progress, and he endeavors to prove from the historical analysis of the several pagan schools of moral philosophy, that the pagan world was gradually approaching the Christian ideal, and that when Christianity appeared at Rome it had all but attained it, so that the change was but slight, and, there being a favorable conjuncture of external circumstances, the change was easily effected. The philosophers of the empire had advanced from primitive fetichism to a pure and sublime monotheism; the mingling of men of all nations and all religions in Rome, consequent on the extension of the empire over the whole civilized world, had liberalized the views, weakened the narrow exclusiveness of former times, and gone far towards the obliteration of the distinction of nations, castes, and classes, and thus had, in a measure, prepared the world for the reception of a universal religion, based on the doctrine of the fraternity of the race and love of humanity.
All this would be very well, if it were true; but it happens to be mainly false. The fact, as well as the idea of progress, in the moral order, is wholly foreign to the pagan world. No pagan nation ever exhibits the least sign of progress in the moral order, either under the relation of doctrine or that of practice. The history of every pagan people is the history of an almost continuous moral deterioration. The purest and best period, under a moral point of view, in the history of the Roman republic, was its earliest, and nothing can exceed the corruption of its morals and manners at its close. We may make the same remark of every non-Catholic nation in modern times. There is a far lower standard of morals reached or aimed at in Protestant nations to-day than was common at the epoch of the Reformation; and the moral corruption of our own country has increased in a greater ratio than have our wealth and numbers. We are hardly the same people that we were even thirty years ago; and the worst of it is, that the pagan system, whether under the ancient Greco-Roman form or under the modern Protestant form, has no recuperative energy, and the nation abandoned to it has no power of self-renovation. Pagan nations may advance, and no doubt, at times, have advanced, in the industrial order, in the mechanic arts, and in the fine arts, but in the moral, intellectual, and spiritual order, never.
Mr. Lecky confines his history almost entirely to the moral doctrines of the philosophers; but even in these he shows no moral melioration in the later from the earlier, no progress towards Christian morals. In relation to specific duties of man to man, and of the citizen to the state, the Christian has, indeed, little fault to find with the De Officiis of Cicero; but we find even in him no approach to the Christian basis of morals. The Greeks never have any conception of either law or good, in the Christian sense. The
was only a rule or principle of harmony; it had its reason in the