Historical and Political Essays

by William Edward Hartpole Lecky

Such views, though now sufficiently commonplace, seemed very novel in England when Milman wrote. Dean Stanley described his work as 'the first decisive inroad of German theology into England; the first palpable indication that the Bible could be studied like another book; that the characters and events of sacred history could be treated at once critically and reverently.' But though Milman was very well acquainted with German theology, he resented the notion that he was its interpreter or representative. He contended that in restricting the province of inspiration to the direct inculcation of religious truth he was following a sound Anglican tradition. He quoted the authority of Paley and Warburton, of Tillotson and Secker. In such principles of interpretation he said he had found 'a safeguard during a long and not unreflective life against the difficulties arising out of the philosophical and historical researches of his time.' They had enabled him 'to follow out all the marvellous discoveries of science, and all those hardly less marvellous, if less certain, conclusions of historical, ethnological, linguistic criticism, in the serene confidence that they are utterly irrelevant to the truth of Christianity.' 'If on such subjects,' he concluded, 'some solid ground be not found on which highly educated, reflective, reading, reasoning men may find firm footing, I can foresee nothing but a wide, a widening—I fear, an irreparable—breach between the thought and the religion of England. A comprehensive, all-embracing, truly Catholic Christianity which knows what is essential to religion, what is temporary and extraneous to it, may defy the world.'

These words are taken from the later preface to which we have referred. In the same preface, and also in his 'History of Christianity,' may be found some interesting remarks on the German school of Biblical criticism, the greater portion of which has arisen since the original publication of the 'History of the Jews.' In many of its conclusions he had anticipated it, and he was quite as sensible as the German writers of the hopelessness of seeking scientific revelations in the Biblical narrative; of the worthlessness of most of the common schemes for reconciling science and theology; of the untrustworthy character of Jewish chronology and Jewish figures; of the grave doubts that hang over the authorship and the date of some of the books; of the necessity of making full allowance, when reading them, for human fallibility and inaccuracy. At the same time, his admiration for the German critics was by no means unqualified. While fully admitting their extraordinary learning, industry, and ingenuity, he complained that their too common infirmity was 'a passion for making history without historical materials,' basing the most dogmatic and positive statements upon faint indications, or upon ingenious conjectures that could not legitimately go beyond a very low degree of probability. The assurance with which these writers undertook by internal evidence to decompose ancient documents, assigning each paragraph to an independent source; the decisive weight they were accustomed to give to slight improbabilities or coincidences, and to small variations of style and phraseology; the confidence with which they put forward solutions or conjectures which, however ingenious or plausible, were based on no external evidence as if they were proved facts, appeared to him profoundly unhistorical.

It must have been somewhat irritating to one who clung so closely to University life, and who had been justly regarded as one of the most brilliant of Oxford scholars, to find that his own University was prominent in the condemnation of the 'History of the Jews.' Only two years before he had preached with general approbation the Bampton Lectures in defence of Christianity. His new work was again and again condemned from the University pulpits, and among others by the Margaret Professor of Divinity and by the Hulsean lecturer for 1832. The clamour was naturally taken up in many other quarters, and especially by the religious newspapers. It was noticed that 'Milman's History' appeared in the window of Carlisle, the infidel bookseller.

'I only wish,' wrote Milman, when the fact was brought to his notice, 'all Carlisle's customers would read it. A noble lord once wrote to the bishop of a certain diocese to complain that a baronet who lived in the same parish brought his mistress to church, which sorely shocked his regular family. The bishop gravely assured him that he was very glad to hear that Sir —— brought his naughty lady to church, and hoped that she would profit by what she heard there and amend her ways. So say I of Carlisle's customers.'[50]

The opinions expressed in this, as in his later works, no doubt in some degree obstructed the promotion of Milman in the Church, but he had no reason to regret it. Of all men, he once said, he thought he owed most to Bishop Blomfield, for there was once a question of offering him a bishopric, and it was a remonstrance of the Bishop of London that prevented it. 'I am afraid,' he said, 'that if it had been offered me I should have accepted it, and I should then never have written my "Latin Christianity."' But, though he escaped the fate which has cut short the best work of more than one distinguished historian, his conspicuous position among the scholars and writers in the Church was widely recognised, and he was soon transferred from a provincial town to a central position in the Metropolis. In 1835 Sir Robert Peel made him Rector of St. Margaret's, Westminster, and Prebendary in the Abbey. Though continuing without intermission his historical work, he appears to have discharged with exemplary vigour the duties of a large and poor parish until 1849, when Lord John Russell appointed him Dean of St. Paul's. The position was exactly suited to him. It was one of much dignity, but also of much leisure, and it gave him ample opportunities of pursuing the studies which were the true work of his life.

The great subject of the history of Christianity was, indeed, continually before him. Among other things, he studied minutely both the text and the authorities of Gibbon, for whom he had a deep and growing admiration. An excellent edition of Gibbon was one of the first results. Milman's notes have been included in Smith's later edition, and, though a large proportion of them were naturally somewhat controversial, being devoted to refuting some of the conclusions of the fifteenth and sixteenth chapters, it is impossible to read them without recognising the candour as well as the learning and the acumen of the critic. Few things that Milman has written are finer than the preface in which, in ten or twelve masterly pages, he sums up his estimate of his great predecessor.

The three volumes of the 'History of Christianity,' dealing with its early history up to the period of the abolition of Paganism in the Roman Empire, appeared in 1840, and they were followed by the six large volumes of the 'History of Latin Christianity,' carrying the history of the Western Church to the end of the Pontificate of Nicholas V. in 1455. This great work was published in two instalments—the first three volumes in 1854, and the remaining three in the following year—and it gave its author indisputably the first place among the ecclesiastical historians of England and a high place among the historians of the nineteenth century. He possessed, indeed, in an eminent degree some of the qualities that are most rare, and at the same time most valuable, in ecclesiastical history. A large proportion of the most learned ecclesiastical historians have been men who have devoted their whole lives to this single department of knowledge, who derived from it all their measures of probability and canons of criticism, and who, treating it as an isolated and mainly supernatural thing, have taken very little account of the intellectual and political secular influences that have largely shaped its course. Most of them also have been men who undertook their task with convictions and habits of thought that were absolutely incompatible with real independence and impartiality of judgment in estimating either the events or the characters they described. Milman was wholly free from these defects. His wide knowledge, his cool, critical, admirably trained judgment, were never better shown than in the many pages in which he has pointed out the analogies or resemblances between Jewish and other Oriental beliefs; the manner in which national characteristics or secular intellectual tendencies affected theological types; the countless modifications in belief or practice which grew up, as the Church accommodated itself to the conditions of successive ages and entered into alliance or conflict with different political systems; the many indirect, subtle, far-reaching ways in which the world and the Church interacted upon each other in all the great departments of speculation, art, industry, social and political life. A certain aloofness and coldness of judgment in dealing with sacred subjects was the reproach which was most frequently brought against him. As he himself said, he wrote rather as an historian than a religious instructor, and he dealt with his subject chiefly in its temporal, social, and political aspects. Justice and impartiality of judgment to friend and foe he deemed one of the first moral duties of an historian, and Dean Church was not wrong in ascribing to him a quite 'unusual combination of the strongest feeling about right and wrong with the largest equity.' 'What a delightful book, so tolerant of the intolerant!' was his characteristic eulogy of the work of another writer, and it truly reflects the turn of his own mind. Provost Hawtrey, who was no mean judge of men, said, after an intimacy of nearly fifty years, that he had never known a man who possessed in a greater degree than Milman the virtue of Christian charity in its highest and rarest form. It was a gift which stood him in good stead in dealing with the very blended characters, the tangled politics, the often misguided enthusiasms of ecclesiastical history. While he was constitutionally extremely averse to the moral casuistry which confuses the boundaries of right and wrong, he had too sound a grasp of the evolution of history to fall into the common error of judging the acts of one age by the moral standards of another. His history was eminently a history of large lines and broad tendencies. The growth, influence, and decline of the Papacy—the distinctive characteristics of Latin and Teutonic Christianity; the effect of Christianity on jurisprudence; the monastic system in its various phases; the rise and conquests of Mohammedanism; the severance of Greek from Latin Christianity; Charlemagne, Hildebrand, the Crusades, the Templars, the Great Councils; the decay of Latin and the rise of modern languages; the influence of the Church on literature, painting, sculpture, and architecture—are but a few of the great subjects he has treated, always with knowledge and intelligence, often with conspicuous brilliancy.

In so vast a field there were, no doubt, many subjects which have been treated with a greater fulness and completeness by other writers. There are some in which subsequent research has gone far to supersede what Milman has written, and inaccuracies of detail not unfrequently crept into his work; but in the truthfulness of its broad lines, in the sagacity of its estimates both of men and events, it holds a high place among the histories of the world. Very few historians have combined in a larger measure the three great requisites of knowledge, soundness of judgment, and inexorable love of truth. The growth and modifications of doctrines and the minutiæ of religious controversies were, however, subjects in which he took little interest, and though they could not be excluded from an ecclesiastical history, they are dealt with only in a slight and cursory manner. Those who desire to study in detail this side of ecclesiastical history will find other histories much more useful. It has been said that his work is imperfect as a book of reference, for while the great events and personages are discussed with a fulness that leaves little to be desired, many of the more insignificant transactions or more obscure periods are passed over or barely noticed. Critics of different religious schools have also complained that his mind was essentially secular; that he had a low sense of the certainty and the importance of dogma; that there were some classes of ecclesiastical writers who have been deeply revered in the Church with whom he had no real sympathy; that the spirit of criticism was stronger in his book than the spirit of reverence; that he did not do full justice to the spiritual and inner side of the religion he described. He looked upon it, they said, too externally. He valued it as a moral revolution, the introduction of new principles of virtue and new rules for individual and social happiness. Much of this criticism would probably have been accepted with but little qualification by Milman himself. He would have said that what these writers complained of was in the main inseparable from an historical as distinguished from a devotional treatment of his subject. He would have added that no form of human history reveals so clearly as ecclesiastical history the fallibility, the credulity, the intolerance of the human mind, or requires more imperatively the constant exercise of independent judgment and of fearless and unsparing criticism, and that, if the history of the Church is ever to be written with profit, it must be written in such a spirit. Of his own deeper convictions he seldom spoke; but in the concluding page of his 'Latin Christianity' there is a passage of profound interest. Leaving it, as he says, to the future historian of religion to say what part of the ancient dogmatic system may be allowed to fall silently into disuse, and what transformations the interpretation of the Sacred Writings may still undergo, he adds these significant words:

'As it is my own confident belief that the words of Christ, and his words alone (the primal indefeasible truths of Christianity), shall not pass away, so I cannot presume to say that men may not attain to a clearer, at the same time more full, comprehensive, and balanced sense of those words, than has as yet been generally received in the Christian world. As all else is transient and mutable, these only eternal and universal, assuredly whatever light may be thrown on the mental constitution of man, even on the constitution of nature and the laws which govern the world, will be concentered so as to give a more penetrating vision of those undying truths.... Christianity may yet have to exercise a far wider, even if more silent and untraceable influence, through its primary, all-pervading principles, on the civilisation of mankind.'

Macaulay, speaking of the 'History of Latin Christianity' in his Journal, says, 'I was more impressed than ever by the contrast between the substance and the style: the substance is excellent; the style very much otherwise.' Looking at it from a purely literary point of view it had undoubtedly great merits. Milman had an admirable sense of proportion—a rare quality in history. He was invariably lucid, and it is easy to cull from his history many characters excellently drawn, many pages of vivid narrative, or terse and weighty criticism. Still, on the whole his historic style is on a lower level than that of Macaulay, Buckle, and Froude, though it will compare, I think, not unfavourably with that of Hallam and Grote. The points of controversy are usually relegated to his notes, which contain a great mass of curious learning and excellent criticism. The reader who turns to them from works of the German school will be struck by his strong English common-sense and grasp of facts, and his dislike of subtle far-fetched ingenuities of explanation. He has the crowning merit of being always readable, and his strong sane moral sense never left him. He was probably at his best in the later volumes, when he could treat his subject like secular history and was free from the embarrassing theological difficulties of the earlier portion, and he is especially admirable in those chapters which give scope to his wide literary and artistic sympathies. He was an excellent Italian scholar and keenly sensible of the beauties of Italian literature, and his love of the ancient classics never left him. There was something at once characteristic and amusing in the delight which he again and again expressed, after the termination of his History, at being able to return to them after spending so many years in reading bad Latin and Greek. In taste and character he was indeed pre-eminently a man of letters, and as such he ranks in the first line among his contemporaries.