and Rome. Nay, we already see evident indications that we are soon to be subjected to this new line of attack; and in more than one Puseyite publication we detect the germs of the view we here suggest, and which the romanticists seem to us to be pledged by their fundamental principles to develop and mature. It does not enter into our present purpose to discuss at length the actual character of the dark ages on their purely human and secular side. As far as the church was implicated in their phenomena, we accept them and glory in them; but as it regards all lying beyond, we feel comparatively indifferent. Under the point of view of humanity, it matters little to us, as Catholics, how dark, how superstitious, how turbulent, violent, or barbarous they were. Certainly we do not believe, and it will take much to persuade us, that they were truly civilized ages, either when compared with the present or when compared with classic. antiquity. Civilization is a word, no doubt, not easy to define, and different persons may define it differently; but as we define it, the middle ages, aside from what they owed to the church, were barbarous ages. We take the word in what we suppose to be its ordinary sense, as designating the exterior and interior life of a cultivated and polished people, having a fixed residence, and living under the empire of law, as distinguished from the empire of mere arbitrary will; and making abstraction of religion and what is derived from it, our standard of civilization is that of ancient Greece and Rome, combining the vouo of the former with the jus of the latter. Here, we frankly confess, we are Græco-Roman, and to us all tribes and nations are barbarian just in proportion as they recede from the Græco-Roman standard. We do not assert, we do not pretend, that, prior to Greece and Rome, no people had been truly civilized; we raise here no question as to whether the Græco-Roman civilization was indigenous or whether it was borrowed; we simply assert that the civilization of Greece and Rome, at their most flourishing period, under the purely human point of view, is the standard civilization of history and of human philosophy. Nowhere else does history show us man receiving, under all the aspects of his nature, so high, so thorough, so symmetrical, and so masculine a cultivation as under this wonderful civilization. Græco-Roman art embodies the highest ideal truth conceivable without the Christian revelation. The Phidian Jove embodies the highest ideal, not indeed of the Divinity, but of the full-grown man, without Christianity, in the order of nature. Eliminate from the Græco-Roman civilization all that it contains which depends on its false religion, or on its corruptions or misapplication of the principles of the primitive revelation in the sphere of the supernatural, add the Christian religion, and animate it with the Christian spirit, the Christian's faith, and the Christian's love, and you have a civilization beyond which there is nothing to seek. Tried by this standard, under the secular and human aspect of civilization, the middle ages cannot stand the test. The tribes which overthrew the old western Roman empire were barbarians, and inflicted on civilization what, had it not been for the church, would have been an irreparable evil, of the magnitude of which, confining our views to man merely as a social being and an inhahitant of this earth, we are utterly unable to form any adequate conception. The downfall of ancient Rome and its civilization stands alone in history, and we seek in vain for the record of an event analogous to it. Even external nature, if we may believe the accounts transmitted to us, felt the shock, and the seasons became inclement as society became barbarous. The changes in the natural world in parts of Italy, Gaul, and Britain seem to have been hardly less terrific than those of the political and social world. The downfall of Rome was also a terrible calamity to religion. It undid in a moment the labors of ages, and for long centuries crippled the missionary enterprises of the church, repressed her expansive energies, and imposed on her the immense labors-not yet completed-of re-civilizing mankind, and of restoring civilization to the height to which it had previously attained, or at least to the height at which she found it, when, emerging from the catacombs, she assumed, in the person of Constantine the Great, the imperial purple, and encircled her brows with the imperial diadem. Nor let it be supposed that these labors of re-civilizing the world were not demanded by the spiritual order. We know our church is catholic; we know that she can reach the heart of the barbarian or the savage, as well as of the civilized man, and can infuse into him her holy faith, her purifying and her sanctifying grace; but it is nevertheless true, that she finds herself at home, in her normal relations to social and secular life, only in the bosom of a high and pre true civilization. Man was originally constructed, and society was originally organized, with reference to the Catholic Church, and she can find them adapted to her purposes as a social or national religion, only in proportion as she finds them in their normal state. Their normal state is that of civilization. Neither man nor society, as we know from infallible faith, began either in savagism or barbarism. Savagism and barbarism have resulted from the corruptions. which supervened as men departed further and further from the original seat of the human race, and from the primitive revelation. There must have been, therefore, an original normal civilization. This civilization, probably, at no period has ever wholly ceased to exist, although it may have had its seat now in one nation and now in another. But, however this may be, it is evidently, at their flourishing period, domiciliated in Greece and Rome, and is served or reproduced in the Græco-Roman civilization, under its human and secular relations, in its purity and vigor. Being normal, and realizing the original type as far as possible without Christianity, the church must have an especial affinity for it, and must bear to it a relation perfectly analogous to that which Catholic theology bears to sound philosophy. Where, then, it does not exist, she must seek to introduce it, and where it has fallen into decay, or been destroyed, she must seek to restore it;-not, indeed, as a preparation for the reception of her faith and charity by individuals, for that would deny her catholicity, -but as the condition of domesticating herself, so to speak, in the country; of converting or securing the conversion of the nation itself,-baptizing, as it were, its very soil; of becoming the vivifying sap of all its institutions, and the informing principle of its whole instinctive and unconscious life. History, as well as speculation, establishes this view. The church, in converting the empire, found nothing in the Græco-Roman order of civilization to change, nothing in the essential constitution of the state, nothing in its general economy of life, public or domestic,-in the res publica or the res domestica,-and very little in the laws themselves. The great body of the civil law, still the public law of all Catholic, and to a great extent of some Protestant, states, existed and was in force before the introduction of Christianity. The changes required were, for the most part, purely spiritual, such as conversion of itself effected, or as the VOL. X-17 church, in the discharge of her purely spiritual functions, could herself effect, without the aid of the civil power. What we mean is, that there was nothing in the order of the civilization that constrained her; and after the law had recognized her and ceased to enjoin paganism, she had no other obstacles to contend against than those which human depravity in individuals always and everywhere interposes to her operations. On the other hand, though the church has certainly converted innumerable individuals who were strangers to the Greco-Roman civilization, we can call to mind, at this moment, no nation which had not originally received that order of civilization or has not subsequently been subjected to it, at least in its essential principles, that has ever accepted, or, if it has at one time accepted, has for more than a brief period retained, the Catholic faith. When the barbarians invaded the empire, the limits of the Macedonian and Roman conquests were very nearly those of Christendom. The church had indeed extended her missions beyond, but they were the mere outposts pushed into the enemy's country, or, as it were, the military occupation of a country whose conquest was not yet completed. Other nations assuredly have been brought within the pale of Christendom, but they have remained within only as the church has succeeded in civilizing them, so to speak Græco-Romanizing them. Wherever the barbaric element has remained predominant in the national life, as in Russia, Scandinavia, Prussia, Saxony, northern Germany, or where, through exterior or interior causes, it has regained the preponderance, as in England, and the once christianized oriental nations, the nation has relapsed into heathenism, or fallen off into heresy or schism. In several of the nations which have fallen off from the church, the old barbaric institutions, traditions, customs, and hereditary hatred of Græco-Roman civilization always survived in the heart of the people, and nourished a schism between its national life and its Christian faith. In nearly all, the barbaric monarchy was retained after the conversion, or subsequently introduced or developed; and between the barbaric monarchy-that is, oriental despotism, the distinctive principle of which is, that the commonwealth is the private property of the prince, the natural termination of all barbaric chieftainship-and the Græco-Roman polity, whose distinctive principle is that the prince represents the majesty of the state,-is the first magistrate of the republic, bound to govern according to law, there is an eternal and irreconcilable hostility; because between them there is all the difference that there is between liberty and slavery. Barbarism is essentially slavery, or rather slavery is the distinctive principle of barbarism, and the distinctive principle of Græco-Romanism is liberty. Hence, as the church always and everywhere presented herself as the uncompromising asserter of liberty, upholding the supremacy of LAW, and declaring it no less binding on princes than on their subjects, on the master than on the servant, barbaric nations and barbaric governments, recognizing no authority but mere will, would not, and as such could not, submit to her spiritual jurisdiction. With these views of the relations of the church to civilization, and which it would be easy to confirm by decisions of the Holy See, and by a reference to the history of modern missions in barbarous and savage countries, we can have no disposition to defend the middle ages, save in what they owed to the church, and cannot be expected to sympathize with their sentimental and romantic admirers. Under many relations we believe that, after the tenth century to the middle of the fourteenth, they were far superior to the present, though not under the relations of civilization properly so called. But what they are principally lauded for by our sentimentalists and romanticists is precisely that in them which was the least in accordance with Catholicity and genuine civilization; for it is what proceeded from their barbaric, not from either their Christian, or their Græco-Roman, elements. The revival of letters in the fifteenth century-that century of wonderful activity and enterprise-was a great event, and its bearing on human culture has hardly been over-estimated; but it came in a shape hostile to the schoolmen, and even to Catholicity, and it revived to a fearful extent the old Græco-Roman gentilism. The humanists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries have produced the romanticists of the nineteenth century. They seized upon the Græco-Roman elements of modern society, sought to render them exclusive, to develop and realize them independently, on the one hand, of the church, and, on the other, of medieval barbarism, and they deprived them of life, and brought forth a dead and petrified classicism, as offensive to good taste as to true piety, as incapable of aiding the growth of a truly human as of a truly Christian life. The romanticists revolted at this petrified classicism, and, already gentilized by the old humanists, had no alternative but to seek a living literature - |