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ledge or ignorance of society at large. But how has it come to pass that the totality of knowledge has never been greater in the history of the greatest civilizations than at the moment when those civilizations have begun to decay, and have sunk into ruin? It was thus, not merely with the old Egyptian and Asiatic civilizations, but equally so with those of Greece and Rome. It will be in vain for Mr. Buckle to say it happened from this cause or that, for upon his principle there should not have been any causes in existence equal to such effects. All that those civilizations became, they became, according to Mr. Buckle, from the totality of their knowledge. Knowledge, moreover, is said to possess this special advantage-once possessed it is never lost. It must not only continue, it is in its nature that it should grow. Nevertheless, here are civilizations which this one agency-knowledge, has created, civilizations which retain this agency in its full vigour, and which one after the other sink into disorder, and return almost to barbarism. Mr. Buckle ridicules the idea of a progressive effect from a stationary cause. Has he no ridicule to bestow on the idea of an effect which retrogrades while its cause does not retrograde, but ought to be progressive? Our own oldfashioned way of looking at such matters leaves the case without difficulty. We should say that the moral culture of those nations did not keep pace with their general culture, and that thus the luxuries and effeminacy which they might otherwise have resisted, gained ascendancy over them, in defiance of all that the totality of their knowledge might have been expected to do for them.

But Mr. Buckle is not content to deal in this manner with the principles of morality, he so deals with very much beside. Religion, literature, and government, all have their place in the same category of the incapables. The ministers of religion, literary men, and statesmen, may imagine themselves great functionaries in the work of civilization. But it is all an illusion. The special work of those several classes has, in fact, no relation to that result. They do not give existence to civilization, it is civilization which gives existence to them. In this grave argument they find their place as effects, not at all as causes.

With regard to systems of religion, no sensible man will deny that they receive much of their complexion, for better or worse, from the state of society with which they become associated. Christianity itself has no doubt received a strong impress from the character of the communities by which it has been embraced, so much so that no man should be accounted competent to write the history of the Christian church, without being competent to write the history of society in relation to it. There needs not be any great parade of philosophy to settle matters thus far. But

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this does nothing for the case of Mr. Buckle. The question to be settled is this-has all the good which seems to have come from the influence of religion been so neutralised by the bad which has come from that source, that religion, on the whole, has strictly speaking done nothing towards the civilization of mankind? This question also divides itself into two parts-a part having respect to the extra-christian systems, and a part having respect to Christianity itself. We shall not take up this inquiry as it relates to the extra-christian systems, but shall look to it as it may be supposed to affect the claims of Christianity.

The substance of Mr. Buckle's reasoning on this point goes within a small compass. It is, that no people will ever invent or receive a religion that is much better than themselves. Should it be much above their own level, if they seem to embrace it, they will soon bring it to that level. Here also there is a measure of truth, but it is far-very far from being the whole truth.

In affirming so emphatically and repeatedly that the people who adopt an enlightened religion must so do as the effect of an enlightenment which they have derived from some other source, Mr. Buckle tacitly assumes that no religious system can become in itself an educator. Knowledge, in the purely secular sense in which Mr. Buckle uses that term, may suffice to make one religious system better than another, but it will be in vain to look to any system of religion as a source of knowledge. We need not attempt to expose the inconsistency of this view, nor to show its unfairness even towards the better systems of heathenism. Towards Christianity it is worse than unfair. Christianity, in the estimation of the Christian, is the matter of a divine revelation. As such it of course reveals something. It not only settles by an authority of its own, truths which before were much open to debate, but it announces facts which could not otherwise have been known, and those facts are all so many embodiments of new truth. The immortality of the soul, a future state of rewards and punishments, the wonderful medium through which forgiveness of sin and regenerating grace are said to come to men; the pattern of perfect manhood in the great Author of the gospel; the Christian's hope which looks to nothing less than a participation in that divine nature; and the sense of individual responsibility, irrespective of magistrate or priest, which Christianity inculcates-all these are conceptions which do assuredly take with them of themselves an educating and elevating power of a high order. Be it so, that among the communities which have embraced Christianity, few have embraced it in anything like its primitive simplicity and beauty-we still venture to assert

that where embraced even in its most deteriorated form, it has been, in one way and another, a more powerful instrument of instruction and civilization than any of the agencies which have worked along with it. In saying this we do not forget Mr. Buckle's description of the ignorance and superstitions of the Middle Ages. We only remember that Mr. Buckle gives us nothing beyond the dark side of that picture, and we have to ask what that age would have been without the Christianity it professed, corrupt as that Christianity was? To be obliged to admit that scientific truths may teach, while moral and religious ideas may not, would be humiliating enough even though we had no better light than our own moral and religious nature to guide us. For that would be to degrade our moral and religious capabilities below the power of the intellect, which has nothing either moral or religious in it. But to take this view of the condition of humanity, while professing to receive Christianity as the substance of a divine revelation, would be monstrous. Revelation is a revelation of truth, but of truth which, in this view, has no power either to improve or to enlighten!

Let us take an illustration on this point from our own history. When Gregory the Great sent Augustine and his monks to Anglo-Saxon Britain, he sent with them the Christianity which then obtained in Rome. It was Christianity such as Rome and the age had made it, neither better nor worse. Let it be admitted that the impress which Rome had given to this religion was in many respects bad, and that the impression made upon it afterwards by the Anglo-Saxons was in many respects bad. Still, it was something greatly better than Rome would otherwise have possessed, and greatly better than anything the AngloSaxons would otherwise have possessed. It substituted much of the teaching of the New Testament for the lessons of the Edda, the heaven of the gospels for the halls of Valhalla, and the spirit of Christ for the spirit of Odin. It brought motives from the next world to the side of the industries and peaceful occupations of the present. It gave the rude settlers among whom it sought a home the first elements of art and literature. The slow establishment, and the subsequent feuds, of the Heptarchy, and, above all, the ravages of the Danes, were formidable hindrances to the progress of civilization. But the rule of Alfred and Athelstan was the rule of able and civilized men, if compared with any of the men of their times. In all this, however, religion had been the great element of progress, and the ministers of religion had been our sole educators. Some of these teachers were no doubt ambitious men, most were superstitious, but all were

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nevertheless educators. The idea of a layman as a teacher, either in science or letters, had no place in men's thoughts in those days. The England which became so tempting a prize to the Normans, was England, for the most part, as these ecclesiastical influences had made it. Praise is due to the aptness and genius of the pupils, but efficiency there supposes efficiency elsewhere. Long after the Conquest, what scientific or literary intelligence the country possessed, was almost wholly in the hands of the ecclesiastics. So it continued until Oxford and Cambridge became famous as seats of learning. In England, as over the whole of Europe, establishments of that nature owed their origin to the clergy. Laymen after a time imitated the conduct of the more wealthy ecclesiastics in endowing colleges, but down to the sixteenth century nearly all the teachers in those establishments were men separated to religious functions-clergymen, monks, or friars. What had been preserved from the wreck of the ancient civilization was preserved by such men. From their labours the mind of modern Europe received the first impulse in the path of her civilization. With all their faults, the clergy of those times were, in a thousand ways, the humane, and often the only possible mediators, between rude military chiefs and a subject people. The extinction, first of slavery, and then of serfdom, was mainly their work. The Christian estimate of man in any form of it is incompatible with such institutions. What is true in all these respects of England, is true to a large extent of the greater part of Europe; and it is in the face of such facts that Mr. Buckle insists that religion should not be reckoned among the causes of civilization.

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Mr. Buckle, indeed, says: The system of morals pro'pounded in the New Testament contained no maxims which ' had not been previously enunciated; and that some of the most 'beautiful passages in the Apostolic writings are quotations from pagan authors is well known to every scholar-to assert that Christianity communicated to man moral truths previously unknown, argues on the part of the assertors either gross igno'rance or wilful fraud.'—p. 164. The most beautiful passages ' in the Apostolic writings,' quoted from pagan authors, are three in number, and of these only one, that cited on Mars Hill, has any marked significance, or the least claim to be described by the term 'beautiful.' But this whole passage is a rhetorical outburst of passion and prejudice. It belongs neither to history nor to philosophy. It betrays the animus, we fear, which has been too commonly present with the author in the prosecution of his inquiries. That many pious men greatly underrate the ethical

theories of the better class of Greek speculators is no doubt true, but we know of nothing worse in the pages of any avowed infidel than is the attempt to dispose of Christianity after this fashion.

Further-the intellectual revolution of the sixteenth century was nowhere more conspicuous than in Italy. But in Italy that revolution was simply intellectual-it was not religious, and it has left that country as unsettled, unhappy, and abject as before. North of the Alps and of the Pyrenees, especially in Germany, Holland, and England, that revolution was not simply intellectual, it was mainly religious. In all these countries the change produced has amounted to a national regeneration. Nothing has remained as it was. Still, we are told that religion ought not to be classed among the causes of national progress. It is clear, however, from these instances, that knowledge, in Mr. Buckle's sense, may exist apart from religious thought and be powerless, and that it may exist along with such thought and prove to be all but irresistible. It is in vain to attribute this failure in Italy and elsewhere to minor causes-the 'more powerful' cause which should have made all causes do its bidding has been there and has not so done. England, which was much less under the influence of this more powerful' cause than Italy, has achieved greatly more in the race of civilization. How has this

happened? We can answer this question, but Mr. Buckle has no consistent way of so doing. Of the part which religious thought has had to play in our later history we need not speak. Even Hume admits, as every one knows, that if England has liberties at all, she owes them to her religious men-to men who committed themselves to the grand struggle for freedom with a seriousness, a conscientiousness, and a spirit of self-sacrifice which nothing but religion could have inspired. To write concerning religion and religious men as Mr. Buckle has done, in the face of such facts, is not only to be untrue to history, it is to be unjust to some of the noblest qualities of our nature, and to betray an amount of prejudice incompatible with anything like the true spirit of philosophy. Mr. Buckle may not understand it, but it is not the less true, that of all the motives that may dispose a man to be the best that he may be, and to do the best that he may do, the religious motive is the strongest. In its healthy state it includes all other inducement to action, and its own higher inducement beside. The religious not only accepts the secular, but consecrates it, and gives it a special power by making it sacred.

Mr. Buckle's reasoning concerning literature is the counterpart of his reasoning concerning religion. It is not at all betterand it could hardly be worse. Acquaintance with physical and

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