THE

CHRISTIAN REFORMER.

No. LXI.]

JANUARY, 1850.

[VOL. VI.

ESSAYS IN ECCLESIASTICAL BIOGRAPHY.*

THESE Essays are a reprint of a series of articles contributed to the Edinburgh Review, during a period of eleven years. Following the examples of Macaulay, Jeffrey and Sydney Smith, Sir James Stephen has withdrawn his works from the mass of incongruous or ephemeral matter in which they were enveloped, and given them something of a systematic unity. Their present title is the most suitable; they are hardly to be called Reviews, since the merits of the author, whose name stands at the head of each article, are in general little noticed, and the stream of information which the writer pours out is gathered from a hundred other sources. Old-fashioned people grumbled when the painstaking analyses of the Monthly and the Critical Reviews were superseded by the dashing Essays of the Edinburgh; but we have long since learnt to go with our age, and take thankfully a good piece of criticism or biography, however slight its claim to the title of a Review. We owe the separate publication of Sir James Stephen's contributions, to the shameless piracies of our Brother Jonathan, who has reprinted them in a mean and inaccurate form. The state of international copyright is a disgrace to modern civilization. True it is, we may and do make reprisals. But if Diomed has stolen the armour of Glaucus, Glaucus gets a poor compensation by seizing Diomed's in return; and we fear this inequality is one of the greatest obstacles to the establishment of reciprocal rights.

The Essays are now arranged in the chronological order, not of their publication, but their subjects, beginning with Gregory the Seventh, and ending with Isaac Taylor. Saint Francis of Assisi, the Founders of Jesuitism, Martin Luther, the French Benedictines, the Port-Royalists, Richard Baxter, the Evangelical Succession, William Wilberforce, the Clapham Sect, form the intermediate subjects, and their enumeration will give an idea of their wide and various range. The readers of the Edinburgh Review will remember that their appearance in the pages of that work gave to it a new character, indicative of a change in men and times. For many years religion was a subject studiously avoided by all its writers, or if touched upon at all, only in relation to politics. The principles of toleration in the case of Dissenters and Roman Catholics were powerfully defended, but on merely secular grounds, and with a tone at once of levity and contempt, which took away all gratitude from those whose cause was pleaded. It

Essays in Ecclesiastical Biography. By the Right Honourable Sir James Stephen, K.C.B. 2 Vols. 8vo. 1849.

must be acknowledged that the withdrawal of Sydney Smith from the Edinburgh Review, nearly coincident with that of others of its original contributors, deprived it of the brilliancy which had once been its characteristic. But the spirit of this age required, that a topic so momentous as religion should neither be omitted nor treated lightly and secularly. Sir James Stephen is of the Evangelical School, by descent and by conviction; but has shaken off much of its narrowness and intolerance. He has himself related how the rugged Calvinism of the founders of the Evangelical party, Whitfield, Newton, Venn, Scott, was mellowed and softened down in the Thorntons, the Gisbornes, and the Bowdlers of the Clapham sect; and judging from his own example, we might conclude that the further the stream runs from its source, the less it retains of its original hardness. We are not sure that if analyzed as it runs through theological channels, it would shew the same improvement in its quality. It is not, however, from the temper and language of the clergy that the true state of national feeling or national opinion in regard to religion is to be gathered. They are bound by rigid formulas, and exposed to professional temptations to intolerance. If the laity think more freely and judge more charitably than their predecessors, the tone of the clergy will change in due season.

One of the most delightful characteristics of these Essays is the truly catholic spirit in which the writer judges men of every variety of church and denomination, who have feared God and wrought righteousness. Ecclesiastical biographers have usually been the panegyrists and apologists of men of their own church, and the censors of all others. Sir James Stephen falls into neither of these errors. He acknowledges a true servant of God and Christ, in every man who has laboured with self-sacrificing zeal to revive religion and elevate human nature. Had it fallen within his scope to write of Channing and Tuckerman, we are convinced from the temper of his work that the difference of religious belief would not have prevented him from doing generous justice to their philanthropy and piety. If there be any men who seem beyond the pale of his Christian charity, it is the Tractarians; and remembering the proceedings by which they had earned themselves the title of Oxford Malignants, when the passages relating to them were written, we cannot be much surprised at the bitterness with which he treats them. Apart from these proceedings, the disgrace of a few leading men, we think his candour and sagacity would lead him to recognize in the movement of this party a reforming impulse, a desire to reanimate the lifeless forms and ritual of the Church with the spirit of religion, and make her an instrument for the improvement and regeneration of the multitude, whose welfare she had so long neglected.

We are glad that these papers have cast off the inappropriate character of Reviews, and assumed their proper designation of Essays. We confess ourselves to be among those who are repelled by pamphlets of a hundred pages under the covers of a periodical. The "light wings of saffron and of blue" were never meant to sustain so ponderous a bulk. At least nothing could tempt us to go through such reading, but perceiving the hand of a Macaulay in the first half-dozen lines. In their own proper character Sir James Stephen's writings will keep

their place in our libraries. Readers of the present day are as much wearied with ordinary ecclesiastical history,-the history of dogmas and church ordinances,-as with the endless wars and intrigues of civil history. They must be tempted by some more generous and succulent food; they want an account of living men, not dead forms and creeds. The author laments that a life of official duty has left him so little leisure for study; but it is evident that few men, of exclusively literary habits, have been able to acquire such stores of historical knowledge as he possesses. He has the first requisite for effective biography, a strong sympathy with the excellences of the character which he delineates. He combines the details which bring this character in the vividness of life before us, with the more general relations which connect biography with history; he often contrives to group around his principal figure a number of his contemporaries; descriptions of the scenery and accompaniments of the events related enliven the narrative, and complete the reality of the picture. The author is not one of those who think the former days were better than these; on the contrary, he is fully sensible of the blessing of living in an age of constitutional freedom, of religious liberty, of mental and material activity; but he believes each preceding condition of society to have been good for its time, and to have fulfilled a necessary part in the progressive scheme of Providence. The style, though somewhat diffuse, is vigorous and animated, occasionally too stately and pompous for the easy flow of a narrative, too metaphorical for clearness, too antithetical for simple truth, and a little infected with the desire of saying things in a very emphatic way. In the account of Henry Martyn (II. 337), his receiving £1200 a year for his missionary services is thus described: "he was brought within the sphere of those secular influences which so often draw down our Anglican worthies from the Empyrean along which they would soar, to the levels, flat though fertile, on which they must depasture." "The sarcasms of the facetious and the conclusive objections of the sensible, fell on Francis (of Assisi) like arrows rebounding from the scales of Behemoth." (I. 100.) Like Gibbon, the author is fond of designating his personages by something else than their proper names. Thus in the article on the French Benedictines, we are told that while Mabillon was propagating the legends of Church miracles, "the walls of his monastery were passed by a youth whose falcon eye illuminated with ceaseless change one of the most expressive countenances in which the human soul had ever found a mirror." Few readers probably recognize in this description the personage intended, and some may still be at a loss when they find him designated a few lines further as "the youthful Arouet:" even in the close of the paragraph he is only revealed to us as "the patriarch of Ferney." We prefer the simple plan of calling a spade, a spade, and Voltaire, Voltaire.

It is an easy and pleasant task to confirm by extracts what we have said of the liberal spirit, the accurate knowledge and the animated writing which these Essays display. Among their various subjects there is no one whose praise is more repugnant to Protestant feeling than that of Hildebrand, better known to history as Gregory VII., and usually regarded as a mere impersonation of spiritual pride and ambition. Sir James Stephen does not absolve him from these charges; he

does not even assent to the praises bestowed on him by Guizot, much less to the enthusiastic panegyrics of his biographer, M. Delecluze; but he claims for him the merit of desiring and effecting a great reform in the morals of the clergy, and he clearly sees that had the Church in that age possessed no other power than its founder had bequeathed, it could never have been a bulwark against feudal despotism and a shelter for the feeble remains of letters and civilization.

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To grasp, to multiply, and to employ these resources in such a manner as to render the Roman Pontiff the suzerain of the civilized world, was the end for which Hildebrand lived--an unworthy end, if contrasted with the high and holy purposes of the Gospel-an end even hateful, if contrasted with the free and generous spirit in which the primitive founders of the Church had established and inculcated her liberties-yet an end which might well allure a noble spirit in the eleventh century, and the attainment of which (so far as it was attained) may be now acknowledged to have been conducive, perhaps essential, to the progress of Christianity and civilization.

"To the spiritual despotism of Rome in the middle ages, may indeed be traced a long series of errors and crimes, of wars and persecutions. Yet the Papal dynasty was the triumphant antagonist of another despotism, the most galling, the most debasing, and otherwise the most irremediable, under which Europe had ever groaned. The centralization of ecclesiastical power more than balanced the isolating spirit of the feudal oligarchies. The vassal of Western, and the serf of Eastern Europe, might otherwise at this day have been in the same social state, and military autocracies might now be occupying the place of our constitutional or paternal governments. Hildebrand's despotism, with whatever inconsistency, sought to guide mankind, by moral impulses, to a more than human sanctity. The feudal despotism with which he waged war, sought, with a stern consistency, to degrade them into beasts of prey or beasts of burden. It was the conflict of mental with physical power, of literature with ignorance, of religion with injustice and debauchery. To the Popes of the middle ages was assigned a province, their abandonment of which would have plunged the Church and the World into the same hopeless slavery. To Pope Gregory the Seventh were first given the genius and the courage to raise himself and his successors to the level of that high vocation. "Yet Hildebrand was the founder of a tyranny only less odious than that which he arrested, and was apparently actuated by an ambition neither less proud, selfish nor reckless, than that of his secular antagonists. In the great economy of Providence, human agency is ever alloyed by some base motives; and the noblest successes recorded by history, must still be purchased at the price of some great ultimate disaster."—I. 85-87.

Those who have seen how the influence of the Franciscan and the Capuchin friar is employed at the present day in those Roman Catholic countries where they are still permitted to exist, to feed the credulity and prolong the ignorance of the people, may find it difficult to sympathize with the praises of their founder, St. Francis of Assisi. Yet the Mendicants were called into existence by a deep-felt want of the age, and it would be a great error to suppose that they were from the first nothing but tools for framing and fastening on the necks of the vulgar the yoke of papal tyranny. A Mission to the Poor was needed, and this mission Francis undertook. The older monastic orders had lost the enthusiasm which animated their early days amidst the wealth which superstition had heaped upon them; nor indeed, had they preserved it, were any of them fitted to be the friends, instructors and comforters of the poor. The Benedictines had become luxuriously indolent, or at best the cultivators of a learning which had no use or