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We have thus endeavoured to trace the varied fortunes, the rise and the fall, of this celebrated prodigy. Well pleased shall we be if any future traveller, as in his Nile boat he nears that majestic monument, shall feel that he owes to our pages a more accurate knowledge of its history, and a warmer interest in its

survey.

ART. VIII.—1. The Era of the Protestant Revolution. By Frederic Seebohm. London, 1874.

2. Geschichte der auswärtigen Politik und Diplomatie im Reformationszeitalter, 1485-1556. Von Karl Fischer. Gotha,

1874.

IT.

T is now more than half a century since a great English statesman, conversant above most of his compatriots with European ideas, as he drew toward the conclusion of a masterly and memorable vindication of his right to guide the public, spoke thus:

'It is perfectly true . . . . that there is a contest going on in the world between the spirit of unlimited monarchy and the spirit of unlimited democracy. Between these two spirits, it may be said, that strife is either openly in action or covertly at work throughout the greater portion of Europe. It is true, . . . . also . . . . that in wo former period in history is there so close a resemblance to the present as in that of the Reformation. . . . . The hon. member for Westminster has observed, that, in imitation of Queen Elizabeth's policy, the proper place for this country in the present state of the world, is at the head of free nations struggling against arbitrary power. Sir, undoubtedly there is, as I have admitted, a general resemblance between the two periods; forasmuch as in both we see a conflict of opinion, and in both a bond of union growing out of those opinions, which established between parts and classes of different nations a stricter communion than belongs to community of country. It is true-it is . . . . a formidable truth-that in this respect the two periods do resemble each other. But, though there is this general similarity, there is one circumstance which mainly distinguishes the present time from the reign of Elizabeth. . . . . Elizabeth was herself among the revolters against the authority of the Church of Rome; but we are not amongst those who are engaged in a struggle against the spirit of unlimited monarchy. We have fought that fight. We have taken our station. We have long ago assumed a character differing altogether from that of those around us. . . . . Let us be ready to afford refuge to the sufferers of either extreme party; but it is not surely our policy to become the associate of either..... We look down upon those struggles from the point to which we have happily attained, not with the cruel delight which is described by the poet as arising from the contempla

tion of agitations in which the spectator is not exposed to share, but with an anxious desire to mitigate, to enlighten, to reconcile, to save; -by our example in all cases, by our exertions where we can usefully interpose.. Great Britain .... has looked before and after ... has assumed the attitude and the attributes of justice, holding high the balance and grasping, but not unsheathing, the sword.'

In these noble and stately sentences the orator was indeed 'looking before and after;' his words strike the ear and are felt at the heart of his country with even greater force in 1875 than in 1823.

We have placed at the head of this article an admirable little book by an English writer, who is separated by many years from Mr. Canning's influence and by many associations from Mr. Canning's opinions and party. When we call to mind the peculiar ecclesiastical and civil position of Mr. Frederic Seebohm, who, if we mistake not, is a member of the Society of Friends, we can accord nothing but praise to the most kindly, moderate, and discriminating tone which pervades' the present small work equally with his previous and more ambitious essay on 'The Oxford Reformers.'

Different as they are in almost all other respects, there is in like prominence in the active Foreign Secretary of the commencing nineteenth century, and in our Quaker country banker and student of its later decades, this common quality, that they both survey the sixteenth and the nineteenth century, by a sort of intuition, particularly on the political side, and that this their point of view is a markedly English one. Mr. Seebohm, trained on such an opposite model of taste and feeling to Mr. Canning's, struck with the contrasts between our own gradual national development and the tumultuary agonies of neighbouring States, styles the epoch of history he has undertaken to describe, adopting a title which yet manifestly would not have been used in this connection in any century preceding the nineteenth, The Era of the Protestant Revolution.'

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It is our intention, on the present occasion, to follow these examples. To us nothing seems to throw more light on the Imperial and Papal movements of our own times-on, for instance, the varying fortunes of the Napoleons and of the Holy Alliance and its later imitations, or again on the preparations for and the results from the Vatican Council and the rise to predominance in Germany of the Hohenzollern; further, on the history of England as a separate interest in European and universal affairs-than a careful examination of corresponding appearances in the sixteenth century. No doubt, as will be

seen

seen as we proceed, there is much in the setting of the two periods to testify to the numerous changes in the interval between them.

The sixteenth century, it has to be said at starting—and we might include also the seventeenth--had fallen, until a comparatively recent date, too specially to the ecclesiastical historian as his undisputed province. The fact is easily enough explained, nor is the misfortune without its compensations. Theological controversialists, quite excusably, first approached and got hold upon the land; they examined it and worked it out, and have, it must be allowed, for their requirements made, relative to it, a tolerably exhaustive report. But their estimates and explorations, however precise and painstaking, ought not to have been accepted as final by political and literary investigators, who, in their excursions into this ground, have far too seldom left the beaten track and strayed afield after bits of prospect to suit their own focus and opportunities, to try by their proper tests the conditions and products of the region. An inquirer, honestly anxious to arrive at the real position of civilisation in those days, will soon discover how unfruitful, how actually deluding and arbitrary, is the attempt to deal with the huge unsettlement he has before him as consistently and exclusively a revolt from the teaching and abuses of a creed and its corruptions. As such their undertaking did not then present itself to all, though it did to some, of the most eminent leaders. And certainly by those who regard the steps of those leaders not at one given turn or by some momentary flash-by those who can calculate, aided by the commentary of subsequent experiences, their impetus and goal-so partial and insufficient an appreciation will at once be abandoned.

It was a stream as gigantic and as irresistible in volume as can be conceived of, which was in full career. Those dissolvent and reconstructive energies, which worked so mightily on humanity in respect of its spiritual expectations and assurances, were as potent and searching in relation to the sources, bases, and securities of all national and corporate existence whatsoever, and in relation to speech itself, and all it can express, as the sole appliance by means of which man, a transitory yet rational force in nature, may strive to fix for himself, and to illustrate and communicate, his inner passions, pleasures, hopes, his emotions and his sympathies. A change was hurrying through its ultimate rather than through its preliminary phases in the whole theory of the highest ideal-not at all merely of religious doctrine of human thought and of human society. We must ask leave to take a rapid retrospect.

Let

Let a glance be cast back over the whole past of Europe since the conquests of Julius Cæsar and the preaching of Christianity down to about the end of the twelfth century, where the date may be approximately fixed, at which other influences came into vigorous action, and the notion of the supreme value of discipline, as the secret of public and personal well-being, prompts and explains all the phenomena. According to it was planned and erected the fabric of the medieval Roman Empire and of the medieval Catholic Church. The Emperor and the Pope were both of them strictly elective, and were both of them, at the assumption of their dignity, and all through their continuance in it, invested with a Divine mission, and confirmed by sanctions of a kingdom other than the kingdoms. of the earth. They did not, in theory, owe their place to any excellence of blood, or any unanimity of popular suffrages: it was not necessary that there should appear to be rewarded, or that there should be readily discernible in them, any conspicuously qualifying virtues. In their own interpretation of their power, and by the consent of those they governed, that power was sovereign by reason of a superhuman mandate and in coherence with a transcendental arrangement of the universe, pre-established and immutable. They stood above the rest of men, uplifted and upheld by omnipotent hands; neither of them could have an equal or a competitor. In the one, God had bestowed a captain on the whole congregation of His people; in the other, He had sent to all men the apostle of His gospel. Beyond the sweep and range of these two, His revealed and indisputable emissaries, men were out of reach of God's government of the world. An Emperor or a Pope acquired an awe of himself; he had become an implement through which the finger of destiny determined the laws of mankind; he was the repository of a wisdom and a will, which were in him but not of him; his consecration had extended the scope of his office in the universe out of all analogy and proportion to that of any other mortal.

It was in order to get an overmastering motive to obedience that the sceptre and the crook of medieval Rome were adorned with their mysterious and talismanic insignia. The metropolis of Europe had, in truth, never wavered from her oldest methods; her authority had always surrounded itself with the attributes of incontrovertible majesty, and insisted on implicit and religious subservience. And thus in the phraseology and imagination of Christendom, in its predominating institutions for many ages Roman in character and Latin in speech, there had lived on the

principles

principles of the Empire of Heathen antiquity. By the force of these principles, Rome deemed herself not only to have conquered the world, but to have been the only grandly successful instructor of the West in pacific sciences and arts, and, as she could plausibly enough affirm, in the faith of Christ. To us, now, how stupendous and amazing seems her concluding exploit: the building up, in the midst of the confusion of Teutonic barbarism, of a Holy Roman Empire, and, against the spell of the spirit and words of the New Testament, of a Catholic and Roman Church; the preservation and the perpetuation of the most impious and tremendous pretensions of the autocratic arrogance and pomp of Paganism in a Christian Cæsar and a triply-crowned Vicar of St. Peter! In that so different era the end. seemed to justify the means. Under authorities which had been thus defined, which, as thus defined, were admitted and recognised, could not the final organisation of humanity be taken in hand and brought about? It was made possible to prepare elaborate and infallible prescriptions of conduct, by which the individual should be compelled to mould his intellect and to formulate his behaviour. It was made possible to set up a standard, by which righteousness and truth might be minutely weighed, and from which the remunerations of good and the deserts of evil deeds could be told off for time and eternity. On this foundation is grounded, as we have said, the whole feudal as well as the whole hierarchical system. The rules of the various monastic reforms, and of the several military societies under vows, and likewise the ordinances of secular chivalry, and the codes of guilds and trades, are framed on the same model of submission to one allembracing, fixed and settled, external law, which relieves him, who conforms to it, from the conflict with self and with circumstances, and whose appointment and right it is to do so. the most self-conscious, introspective, and aspiring souls, provision was made. Their tastes for by-paths had been foreseen, and the road-book was ready for them. The perfect knight, the perfect saint, a Godfrey of Bouillon, or a Bernard of Clairvaux, was the slave and martyr of obedience.

So long as the struggle with barbarism was internecine and the foremost labour incumbent upon the Christian man was that

*The same political faith, the same semi-spiritualist semi-materialist fervour, which animated, for example, the pilgrimage of the Emperor Hadrian to the image of Memnon, and his record on the spot-Audivi vocês divinas'—survived (will they survive as long as mankind?), only grown more crass, in, to cite but one specimen, the famous medieval couplet,

'Spiritus est Papa, carnis velamine clausus,

Hune quasi terrenum describere quis fo:et ausus?'

of

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