understand that about which they write. In historical science, as in all sciences which have to do with concrete phenomena, laboratory-practice is indispensable, and the laboratory practice of historical science is afforded, on the one hand, by active social and political life, and, on the other, by the study of those tendencies and operations of the mind which embody themselves in philosophical and theological systems. Thucydides and Tacitus, and, to come nearer our own time, Hume and Grote, were men of affairs, and had acquired, by direct contact with social and political history in the making, the secret of understanding how such history is made. Our notions of the intellectual history of the middle ages are, unfortunately, too often derived from writers who have never seriously grappled with philosophical and theological problems: and hence that strange myth of a millennium of moonshine to which I have adverted.
However, no very profound study of the works of contemporary writers who, without devoting themselves specially to theology or philosophy, were learned and enlightened—such men, for example, as Eginhard or Dante—is necessary to convince one's self that, for them, the world of the theologian was an ever-present and awful reality. From the center of that world, the Divine Trinity, surrounded by a hierarchy of angels and saints, contemplated and governed the insignificant sensible world in which the inferior spirits of men, burdened with the debasement of their material embodiment and continually solicited to their perdition by a no less numerous and almost as powerful hierarchy of devils, were constantly struggling on the edge of the pit of everlasting damnation.[1]
The men of the middle ages believed that through the Scriptures, the traditions of the fathers, and the authority of the Church, they
- ↑ There is no exaggeration in this brief and summary view of the Catholic cosmos. But it would be unfair to leave it be supposed that the Reformation made any essential alteration, except perhaps for the worse, in that cosmology which called itself "Christian." The protagonist of the Reformation, from whom the whole of the Evangelical sects are lineally descended, states the case with that plainness of speech, not to say brutality, which characterized him. Luther says that man is a beast of burden who only moves as his rider orders; sometimes God rides him, and sometimes Satan. "Sic voluntas humana in medio posita est, ceu jumentum; si insederit Deus, vult et vadit, quo vult Deus. . . . Si insederit Satan, vult et vadit, quo vult Satan; nec est in ejus arbitrio ad utrum sessorem currere, aut eum quærere, sed ipsi sessores certant ob ipsum obtinendum et possidendum"(Thus the human will is put in the middle, like a beast of burden; if God sits upon it, it wills and goes where God wills; ... if Satan sits upon it, it wills and goes where Satan wills. Nor is it within its discretion to run to either rider or to seek after him, but the riders themselves contend which shall get and possess it).—(De Servo Arbitrio, M. Lutheri Opera, edition 1546, tomus ii, p. 468.) One may hear substantially the same doctrine preached in the parks and at street-corners by zealous volunteer missionaries of Evangelicism any Sunday in modern London. Why these doctrines, which are conspicuous by their absence in the four Gospels, should arrogate to themselves the title of Evangelical, in contradistinction to Catholic, Christianity, may well perplex the impartial inquirer, who, if he were obliged to choose between the two, might naturally prefer that which leaves the poor beast of burden a little freedom of choice.
