This is certainly a more plausible test than the two former. Learning, the arts, the sciences, the classics, all relate to the higher part of man’s nature, and reflect honor on those who strive to be their interpreters. This seems worthy of man, akin to his primeval state, and like the occupation of his future life. But alone even education cannot stand. When dissevered from religion, it falls, either into atheism or fanaticism, sometimes into both. At least one example of its pernicious moral results when thus left to itself is the brilliant shame of the Medicean renaissance. In the new groves of Academe, the ducal gardens of Fiesole, heathen voluptuousness speedily followed heathen philosophy; polished manners and elegant diction redeemed loose morals and equivocal conversation; Christianity was voted barbarous, and Christian pageants uncouth. It was the age of Boccaccio. The poison spread far and wide, the fever of a misdirected and one-sided education seized all classes, and the fathers of the church were forgotten for the lascivious poets of Greece and Rome. The mysteries of Bona Dea were almost enacted over again, the dances of Bacchus were revived, and the processions of Venus and Cupid took the place of Christian solemnities. The corruption was thus forced on the people, who, excited by gorgeous public entertainments of pagan complexion, caught the hollow enthusiasm of their rulers, and emulated the servile Romans of the empire who cried out, Panem et circenses, while they blindly surrendered their freedom into the crowned showman’s hands. Material prosperity and godless learning combined, stifled the last semblance of Florentine liberty under the rule of the Medici. In France it was atheism concealed under the guise of learning which prepared the way for the Revolution of ‘93; it was the delicately veiled irony, and the sportive unbelief of Voltaire’s disciples, which first made the “little rift within the lute.” The savage leaders of the Reign of Terror had nothing to do save crown with the guillotine the elaborate system of corruption already founded by the “philosophers.”
Education without religion has been as treacherous and as frail a support to the civilization of men as the reed that pierces the hand of him who leans upon it; political freedom (?) without religion has been only another name for a retrograde movement towards anarchy, and material wealth without the controlling influence of religion has proved the most dangerous because the most emasculating of allies to those nations who have built their civilization on its basis.
Each and all of these experiments have fallen far short of the ideal of the Garden of Eden, and each has practically confessed by its failure the radical infirmity of the theory it represented. The reason is self-evident: a system which undertakes to guide the complex workings of human nature cannot afford to disregard any of nature’s manifold instincts, and, by obstinately refusing to give a place to all legitimate aspirations, overbalances itself, and falls sooner or later into a trap of its own setting. You cannot govern man through his animal wants alone or through his intellectual yearnings only, any more than you can rule him solely through his spiritual instincts. He must be fed, clothed, and housed, true, but this alone will not satisfy him; his reason cries out for development and exercise, and his heart also puts in a claim to the notice of any one who would undertake to rule him. It is true that man is not an angel, and that spiritual food alone would not allay his hunger, but it is equally true that he is not a brute being, to be abundantly satisfied with good fodder and a dry stable. His nature is threefold: animal, intellectual, and spiritual, and claims an equal recognition of each of its phases. Neither mere riches addressed to the contentment of his lower instincts, nor mere educational and political advantages addressed to the satisfaction of his nobler self, are enough for his welfare; his soul is a higher region yet, and one which demands yet more imperatively an adequate amount of attention. This soul it is which, when bound and blinded as it but too often is in mere worldly systems of civilization, ends by grasping, like Samson, the insecure supports of this partial civilization itself, and in the untamed strength of despair dragging down the fabric in ruins at its feet.
There remains one more element which is still claimed by a brave minority, as the essence of all true civilization, and that is religion. This is the most comprehensive criterion of a “well-ordered” state of society, for it includes all the rest as a matter of course. Religion is not incompatible with the possession and accumulations of wealth, as some erroneously suppose, but she requires that such interests shall be amenable to the dictates of moderation, and of charity; she does not scout learning as an ally, but eagerly welcomes it, so long as it keeps within its province and does not use its power to stifle the spiritual nature of man; she is no enemy to political freedom or to any particular form of government whatever, but she firmly resists the claims to omnipotence which every strong government, whether popular or absolutist, has in the hour of its worldly triumph invariably made. With a wisdom the counterpart of that which equalizes and controls the various forces of nature, religion holds in her hand the various emotions, passions, and necessities of man, and balances according to a divine standard the proportions in which each one may be legitimately satisfied. She subordinates the lower satisfactions to the higher, in exact proportion as the lower nature of mankind is, or should be, subordinate to the higher; she places delegates in each inferior sphere, that there may be no violence done to the spiritual order in furthering the interests of the material; she bids honesty watch over the legitimate increase of wealth, integrity temper the efforts of men in the cause of political freedom, and reverence guide them in the pursuit of learning. She gathers up these single threads of our lives, and, weaving them into a triple cord, imparts to them a strength which her blessing alone can confer, and which individually they could never have attained. It is she alone who skilfully brings within the practical reach of the poor, the oppressed, and of the ignorant, those theories which in the mouth of worldly apostles seem either poetical dreams or subversive and socialistic principles. It is she who is the true reformer, the true progressist, the true patriot. But why is she so? Simply because she is also the only true conservatrix in the world. Her mission is to foster the good, to seek it out, to make it known, to assimilate it to herself, to absorb it into her system. Material good is not excluded; wherever it is, it belongs of right to her; whether it be old or new, foreign or native, it matters not, religion takes it into her bosom, gives it immortality, sanctions its use, recommends its adoption. Being founded on the rock of truth, she can safely stoop to draw from the wreck of error any fragment of good contained in it, whether it be a scientific, a literary, or a domestic addition to the stock of ideas which is the common property of human nature, and of which she stands the perpetual guardian. This broad, open-armed, fearless, progressive spirit is the nearest approach to the ideal of the lost paradise: this is civilization—this is Christianity.
As an example of the superiority of religion over any other test of civilization, let us return for a moment to what we have said of the Jews. To the only reasonable and dignified conception of the Godhead known to the nations of old, they added the only worthy conception of human duties and responsibilities. Their domestic system was the only one in which woman bore a seemly part; their political organization, whether in the desert, under Moses and his “rulers over thousands, and over hundreds, and over fifties, and over tens”[148] (the same division afterwards prevalent in the Roman army), or in the land of Chanaan under the Judges, was essentially self-governing, federal, and independent. Their laws were minute in detail and stringent in execution, not only after their establishment as a nation in Chanaan, but during the forty years of their nomadic existence in the wilderness, a period which with any other people would have been one of irremediable lawlessness. Compacts and treaties are mentioned in the Bible even before the direct segregation from the world of what was afterwards known as the people of Israel. Abraham and Lot agreed solemnly and peaceably to settle the differences between their followers, by each tribe taking up its abode within certain given limits; Abraham and Abimelech came to a public understanding, the former meaning to do the heathen and alien leader no harm, and the latter restoring a well of which his servants had possessed themselves by force; Abraham insisted upon paying a full and fair equivalent in money to the Hethite who offered him gratis the funeral cave of Mambre; Eleazar made between Isaac and Rebecca a formal marriage contract; Esau when he had voluntarily sold his birthright, though at the bidding of necessity, was bound to hold by his rash cession; Jacob made and faithfully kept with his uncle Laban an engagement to give him his services for fair wages for a given number of years. Such social compacts, rigorously adhered to even when made with idolaters, are among the most convincing proofs of the high state of a country’s civilization, and present a strange, suggestive contrast with the rude polity of nations who, at that time and even many ages later, knew no right of property save that of forcible possession, and no guarantee of good faith save that which the sword could enforce. Attention to the duties of hospitality, another prominent sign of civilization, was a characteristic of the Jews. We have so many Biblical examples of this that it is impossible to give them. The division of the community into fixed orders of occupation is another recognized sign of an advanced state of society. Of course this and many others were held by the Jews in common with several nations of heathendom, some eminently distinguished for heroism, for honor, for learning, etc; and yet which of all the polished nations of antiquity had not some festering sore of pauperism, superstition, or barbarity, to conceal beneath its fair outside of dazzling “civilization”? The people of God, on the contrary, the only representatives of the true religion, were free from such social ulcers, and, even when their history shocks us by scenes of mysterious cruelty, it is universally admitted that the hand of God was working through them, and that they were but as instruments wielded in the dark by a power mightier than themselves.
Agriculture, or the “arts of peace,” called by some the representative of civilization, was an honored calling among the Hebrews. The riches of Judith and of Booz were fields and cattle; the promises of future prosperity scattered through Holy Writ are always typified by “fields and vineyards”; the inheritances and dowers of the sons and daughters of Israel were herds and fields, and so jealous was each tribe of its landed possessions that it was enacted that its members should intermarry only among themselves, under pain of forfeiting all claim to the legal portion allotted the offender. So careful of the condition of the land and its products were the divinely inspired laws of the Hebrews that they provided every seven years a season of rest, “the Sabbath of the land,” when for a twelvemonth the fields should not be ploughed nor the vineyards pruned, neither any fruit forced to grow and produce by artificial means. It would take a volume to develop this mysterious superiority of the chosen people, as regards even material civilization, over every other contemporary nation during fully two thousand years. They saw whole systems of social economy rise from barbarism, and fade away into political dotage, or disappear beneath the heel of conquest; they watched nations live and die, and drop out of the memory of mankind as completely as Pharao’s hosts were hidden by the waves of the Red Sea, and yet they stood firm and indestructible, with unchanged laws, with fixed customs, a people small in number, but great in tradition, invincible as the sun, immovable as a rock. And why? Because their political existence and their social system was founded on truth, and controlled by religion. The Hebrew nation was the one holy and only true church of those days. And for the same reasons which gave the Jews that supernatural vitality, Christianity is at this day in the van of civilization. Everything we have said of the one applies to the other; the signs which we noticed as such prominent features of Jewish polity—division of orders, fixed occupations, care for agriculture, good faith, property and family laws, individual and federal government—whence have they come to us? We say it unhesitatingly, from Christianity. To put it into plainer language, let us say, from the church, and chiefly through the monastic orders.
These armies of peaceful conquerors invaded the morasses and forests of the North, and, carrying with them all that made the Hebrew system divine, planted that very system in the midst of the barbarian hordes. The monks were the first agriculturists, the first mechanics, the first engineers, of our modern civilization. What need to tell again the story of their giant labors and glorious success? After teaching us how to build our houses, to till our fields, to protect our rights, to clothe our bodies, they taught us how to beautify our lives by art, and store our minds with learning. They gave us cathedrals, that we might know how glorious was the God they taught; they gave us Roman, Greek, and Hebrew lore, that we might see how liberal was the Master they served. The laws under which all European nations and their offshoots now live were framed on the model of the Canons of the Church, themselves based on the Tables of the Mosaic law; and the sciences, the literature, and the arts, of which we in our pygmy self-glorification are so proud, have been painfully transmitted to us by the patient labor of monastic scholars. Christianity in the person of these heroic pioneers has paved the way for all the civilization we can boast of, and those who seek to divorce civilization from Christianity thereby disown their very title-deeds. Once blot the church out of the map of the world, and civilization will speedily follow. Thank God that that, at least, is now impossible!
Having therefore inherited all that made the Hebrew system the most perfect approach to the ideal of the Garden of Eden, Christianity stands to-day in the position of the only legitimate representative of true civilization. For one thousand five hundred years, Christianity meant Catholicism, and to the reign of her undisputed supremacy belongs every important discovery, every material progress, the world has ever made. Why then, when we face to-day that world which owes it to the church that it is strong enough to face anything—do we meet everywhere the reproach of intolerance, of retrogression?
Is the reproach true to-day which in the days of S. Columba was false? Have we changed, has the church changed? If not, where is the fault?
It lies, as all human mistakes do, in the confusion and perversion of terms. The world in its aberration has turned against its teacher, and wounded itself with the weapons that only a practised and steady hand may safely wield. It has erected its own puny tribunal at the foot of God’s throne, and judged the Eternal from its own point of view. If the childish madness were not so sad in its results, it would make one smile at its presumption. But it has the power of damning a human soul, and of frustrating the work of God himself on Calvary, so that we dare not smile at its arrogance, how supremely ridiculous soever it may be from a merely philosophical point of view. It is this aberration of the human mind which for the last three centuries has dubbed Christianity as retrograde. When the Pope’s Syllabus made the difference clear between true progress and its infidel counterfeit, the world cried out that he was retrograde. “See” it said, “he condemns the liberty of the press, the liberty of association, the right of self-government, the spread of education; he would have heretics burnt at the stake, and all Protestant sovereigns deposed from their thrones.”