incident, and condensation and rotation the inevitable results. There must be a separation of rings all lying in one plane, a generation of planets and satellites all rotating alike, a central sun and engirdling globes. From a chaotic mass, through the operation of natural laws, an organized system has been produced. An integration of matter into worlds has taken place through a decline of heat.
If such be the cosmogony of the solar system, such the genesis of the planetary worlds, we are constrained to extend our views of the dominion of law, and to recognize its agency in the creation as well as in the conservation of the innumerable orbs that throng the universe.
But, again, it may be asked: “Is there not something profoundly impious in this? Are we not excluding Almighty God from the world he has made?
We have often witnessed the formation of a cloud in a serene sky. A hazy point, barely perceptible–a little wreath of mist–increases in volume, and becomes darker and denser, until it obscures a large portion of the heavens. It throws itself into fantastic shapes, it gathers a glory from the sun, is borne onward by the wind, and, perhaps, as it gradually came, so it gradually disappears, melting away in the untroubled air.
Now, we say that the little vesicles of which this cloud was composed arose from the condensation of water-vapor preexisting in the atmosphere, through reduction of temperature; we show how they assumed the form they present. We assign optical reasons for the brightness or blackness of the cloud; we explain, on mechanical principles, its drifting before the wind; for its disappearance we account on the principles of chemistry. It never occurs to us to invoke the interposition of the Almighty in the production and fashioning of this fugitive form. We explain all the facts connected with it by physical laws, and perhaps should reverentially hesitate to call into operation the finger of God.
But the universe is nothing more than such a cloud–a cloud of suns and worlds. Supremely grand though it may seem to us, to the Infinite and Eternal Intellect it is no more than a fleeting mist. If there be a multiplicity of worlds in infinite space, there is also a succession of worlds in infinite time. As one after another cloud replaces cloud in the skies, so this starry system, the universe, is the successor of countless others that have preceded it–the predecessor of countless others that will follow. There is an unceasing metamorphosis, a sequence of events, without beginning or end.
If, on physical principles, we account for minor meteorological incidents, mists and clouds, is it not permissible for us to appeal to the same principle in the origin of world-systems and universes, which are only clouds on a space-scale somewhat larger, mists on a time-scale somewhat less transient? Can any man place the line which bounds the physical on one side, the supernatural on the other? Do not our estimates of the extent and the duration of things depend altogether on our point of view? Were we set in the midst of the great nebula of Orion, how transcendently magnificent the scene! The vast transformations, the condensations of a fiery mist into worlds, might seem worthy of the immediate presence, the supervision of God; here, at our distant station, where millions of miles are inappreciable to our eyes, and suns seem no bigger than motes in the air, that nebula is more insignificant than the faintest cloud. Galileo, in his description of the constellation of Orion, did not think it worth while so much as to mention it. The most rigorous theologian of those days would have seen nothing to blame in imputing its origin to secondary causes, nothing irreligious in failing to invoke the arbitrary interference of God in its metamorphoses. If such be the conclusion to which we come respecting it, what would be the conclusion to which an Intelligence seated in it might come respecting us? It occupies an extent of space millions of times greater than that of our solar system; we are invisible from it, and therefore absolutely insignificant. Would such an Intelligence think it necessary to require for our origin and maintenance the immediate intervention of God?
From the solar system let us descend to what is still more insignificant–a little portion of it; let us descend to our own earth. In the lapse of time it has experienced great changes. Have these been due to incessant divine interventions, or to the continuous operation of unfailing law? The aspect of Nature perpetually varies under our eyes, still more grandly and strikingly has it altered in geological times. But the laws guiding those changes never exhibit the slightest variation. In the midst of immense vicissitudes they are immutable. The present order of things is only a link in a vast connected chain reaching back to an incalculable past, and forward to an infinite future.
There is evidence, geological and astronomical, that the temperature of the earth and her satellite was in the remote past very much higher than it is now. A decline so slow as to be imperceptible at short intervals, but manifest enough in the course of many ages, has occurred. The heat has been lost by radiation into space.
The cooling of a mass of any kind, no matter whether large or small, is not discontinuous; it does not go on by fits and starts; it takes place under the operation of a mathematical law, though for such mighty changes as are here contemplated neither the formula of Newton, nor that of Dulong and Petit, may apply. It signifies nothing that periods of partial decline, glacial periods, or others of temporary elevation, have been intercalated; it signifies nothing whether these variations may have arisen from topographical variations, as those of level, or from periodicities in the radiation of the sun. A periodical sun would act as a mere perturbation in the gradual decline of heat. The perturbations of the planetary motions are a confirmation, not a disproof, of gravity.
Now, such a decline of temperature must have been attended by innumerable changes of a physical character in our globe. Her dimensions must have diminished through contraction, the length of her day must have lessened, her surface must have collapsed, and fractures taken place along the lines of least resistance; the density of the sea must have increased, its volume must have become less; the constitution of the atmosphere must have varied, especially in the amount of water-vapor and carbonic acid that it contained; the barometric pressure must have declined.
These changes, and very many more that might be mentioned, must have taken place not in a discontinuous but in an orderly manner, since the master-fact, the decline of heat, that was causing them, was itself following a mathematical law.
But not alone did lifeless Nature submit to these inevitable mutations; living Nature was also simultaneously affected.
An organic form of any kind, vegetable or animal, will remain unchanged only so long as the environment in which it is placed remains unchanged. Should an alteration in the environment occur, the organism will either be modified or destroyed.
Destruction is more likely to happen as the change in the environment is more sudden; modification or transformation is more possible as that change is more gradual.
Since it is demonstrably certain that lifeless Nature has in the lapse of ages undergone vast modifications; since the crust of the earth, and the sea, and the atmosphere, are no longer such as they once were; since the distribution of the land and the ocean and all manner of physical conditions have varied; since there have been such grand changes in the environment of living things on the surface of our planet–it necessarily follows that organic Nature must have passed through destructions and transformations in correspondence thereto.
That such extinctions, such modifications, have taken place, how copious, how convincing, is the evidence!
Here, again, we must observe that, since the disturbing agency was itself following a mathematical law, these its results must be considered as following that law too.
Such considerations, then, plainly force upon us the conclusion that the organic progress of the world has been guided by the operation of immutable law–not determined by discontinuous, disconnected, arbitrary interventions of God. They incline us to view favorably the idea of transmutations of one form into another, rather than that of sudden creations.
Creation implies an abrupt appearance, transformation a gradual change.
In this manner is presented to our contemplation the great theory of Evolution. Every organic being has a place in a chain of events. It is not an isolated, a capricious fact, but an unavoidable phenomenon. It has its place in that vast, orderly concourse which has successively risen in the past, has introduced the present, and is preparing the way for a predestined future. From point to point in this vast progression there has been a gradual, a definite, a continuous unfolding, a resistless order of evolution. But in the midst of these mighty changes stand forth immutable the laws that are dominating over all.
If we examine the introduction of any type of life in the animal series, we find that it is in accordance with transformation, not with creation. Its beginning is under an imperfect form in the midst of other forms, of which the time is nearly complete, and which are passing into extinction. By degrees, one species after another in succession more and more perfect arises, until, after many ages, a culmination is reached. From that there is, in like manner, a long, a gradual decline.
Thus, though the mammal type of life is the characteristic of the Tertiary and post-Tertiary periods, it does not suddenly make its appearance without premonition in those periods. Far back, in the Secondary, we find it under imperfect forms, struggling, as it were, to make good a foothold. At length it gains a predominance under higher and better models.
So, too, of reptiles, the characteristic type of life of the Secondary period. As we see in a dissolving view, out of the fading outlines of a scene that is passing away, the dim form of a new one emerging, which gradually gains strength, reaches its culmination, and then melts away in some other that is displacing it, so reptile-life doubtfully, appears, reaches its culmination, and gradually declines. In all this there is nothing abrupt; the changes shade into each other by insensible degrees.
How could it be otherwise? The hot-blooded animals could not exist in an atmosphere so laden with carbonic acid as was that of the primitive times. But the removal of that noxious ingredient from the air by the leaves of plants under the influence of sunlight, the enveloping of its carbon in the earth under the form of coal, the disengagement of its oxygen, permitted their life. As the atmosphere was thus modified, the sea was involved in the change; it surrendered a large part of its carbonic acid, and the limestone hitherto held in solution by it was deposited in the solid form. For every equivalent of carbon buried in the earth, there was an equivalent of carbonate of lime separated from the sea –not necessarily in an amorphous condition, most frequently under an organic form. The sunshine kept up its work day by day, but there were demanded myriads of days for the work to be completed. It was a slow passage from a noxious to a purified atmosphere, and an equally slow passage from a cold-blooded to a hot- blooded type of life. But the physical changes were taking place under the control of law, and the organic transformations were not sudden or arbitrary providential acts. They were the immediate, the inevitable consequences of the physical changes, and therefore, like them, the necessary issue of law.
For a more detailed consideration of this subject, I may refer the reader to Chapters I, II., VII, of the second book of my “Treatise on Human Physiology,” published in 1856.
Is the world, then, governed by law or by providential interventions, abruptly breaking the proper sequence of events?
To complete our view of this question, we turn finally to what, in one sense, is the most insignificant, in another the most important, case that can be considered. Do human societies, in their historic career, exhibit the marks of a predetermined progress in an unavoidable track? Is there any evidence that the life of nations is under the control of immutable law?
May we conclude that, in society, as in the individual man, parts never spring from nothing, but are evolved or developed from parts that are already in existence?
If any one should object to or deride the doctrine of the evolution or successive development of the animated forms which constitute that unbroken organic chain reaching from the beginning of life on the globe to the present times, let him reflect that he has himself passed through modifications the counterpart of those he disputes. For nine months his type of life was aquatic, and during that time he assumed, in succession, many distinct but correlated forms. At birth his type of life became aerial; he began respiring the atmospheric air; new elements of food were supplied to him; the mode of his nutrition changed; but as yet he could see nothing, hear nothing, notice nothing. By degrees conscious existence was assumed; he became aware that there is an external world. In due time organs adapted to another change of food, the teeth, appeared, and a change of food ensued. He then passed through the stages of childhood and youth, his bodily form developing, and with it his intellectual powers. At about fifteen years, in consequence of the evolution which special parts of his system had attained, his moral character changed. New ideas, new passions, influenced him. And that that was the cause, and this the effect, is demonstrated when, by the skill of the surgeon, those parts have been interfered with. Nor does the development, the metamorphosis, end here; it requires many years for the body to reach its full perfection, many years for the mind. A culmination is at length reached, and then there is a decline. I need not picture its mournful incidents– the corporeal, the intellectual enfeeblement. Perhaps there is little exaggeration in saying that in less than a century every human being on the face of the globe, if not cut off in an untimely manner, has passed through all these changes.
Is there for each of us a providential intervention as we thus pass from stage to stage of life? or shall we not rather believe that the countless myriads of human beings who have peopled the earth have been under the guidance of an unchanging, a universal law?
But individuals are the elementary constituents of communities–nations. They maintain therein a relation like that which the particles of the body maintain to the body itself. These, introduced into it, commence and complete their function; they die, and are dismissed.
Like the individual, the nation comes into existence without its own knowledge, and dies without its own consent, often against its own will. National life differs in no particular from individual, except in this, that it is spread over a longer span, but no nation can escape its inevitable term. Each, if its history be well considered, shows its time of infancy, its time of youth, its time of maturity, its time of decline, if its phases of life be completed.
In the phases of existence of all, so far as those phases are completed, there are common characteristics, and, as like accordances in individuals point out that all are living under a reign of law, we are justified in inferring that the course of nations, and indeed the progress of humanity, does not take place in a chance or random way, that supernatural interventions never break the chain of historic acts, that every historic event has its warrant in some preceding event, and gives warrant to others that are to follow..
But this conclusion is the essential principle of Stoicism–that Grecian philosophical system which, as I have already said, offered a support in their hour of trial and an unwavering guide in the vicissitudes of life, not only to many illustrious Greeks, but also to some of the great philosophers, statesmen, generals, and emperors of Rome; a system which excluded chance from every thing, and asserted the direction of all events by irresistible necessity, to the promotion of perfect good; a system of earnestness, sternness, austerity, virtue–a protest in favor of the common-sense of mankind. And perhaps we shall not dissent from the remark of Montesquieu, who affirms that the destruction of the Stoics was a great calamity to the human race; for they alone made great citizens, great men.
To the principle of government by law, Latin Christianity, in its papal form, is in absolute contradiction. The history of this branch of the Christian Church is almost a diary of miracles and supernatural interventions. These show that the supplications of holy men have often arrested the course of Nature–if, indeed, there be any such course; that images and pictures have worked wonders; that bones, hairs, and other sacred relics, have wrought miracles. The criterion or proof of the authenticity of many of these objects is, not an unchallengeable record of their origin and history, but an exhibition of their miracle-working powers.
Is not that a strange logic which finds proof of an asserted fact in an inexplicable illustration of something else?
Even in the darkest ages intelligent Christian men must have had misgivings as to these alleged providential or miraculous interventions. There is a solemn grandeur in the orderly progress of Nature which profoundly impresses us; and such is the character of continuity in the events of our individual life that we instinctively doubt the occurrence of the supernatural in that of our neighbor. The intelligent man knows well that, for his personal behoof, the course of Nature has never been checked; for him no miracle has ever been worked; he attributes justly every event of his life to some antecedent event; this he looks upon as the cause, that as the consequence. When it is affirmed that, in his neighbor’s behalf, such grand interventions have been vouchsafed, he cannot do otherwise than believe that his neighbor is either deceived, or practising deception.
As might, then, have been anticipated, the Catholic doctrine of miraculous intervention received a rude shock at the time of the Reformation, when predestination and election were upheld by some of the greatest theologians, and accepted by some of the greatest Protestant Churches. With stoical austerity Calvin declares: “We were elected from eternity, before the foundation of the world, from no merit of our own, but according to the purpose of the divine pleasure.” In affirming this, Calvin was resting on the belief that God has from all eternity decreed whatever comes to pass. Thus, after the lapse of many ages, were again emerging into prominence the ideas of the Basilidians wad Valentinians, Christian sects of the second century, whose Gnostical views led to the engraftment of the great doctrine of the Trinity upon Christianity. They asserted that all the actions of men are necessary, that even faith is a natural gift, to which men are forcibly determined, and must therefore be saved, though their lives be ever so irregular. From the Supreme God all things proceeded. Thus, also, came into prominence the views which were developed by Augustine in his work, “De dono perseverantiae.” These were: that God, by his arbitrary will, has selected certain persons without respect to foreseen faith or good works, and has infallibly ordained to bestow upon them eternal happiness; other persons, in like manner, he has condemned to eternal reprobation. The Sublapsarians believed that “God permitted the fall of Adam;” the Supralapsarians that “he predestinated it, with all its pernicious consequences, from all eternity, and that our first parents had no liberty from the beginning.” In this, these sectarians disregarded the remark of St. Augustine: “Nefas est dicere Deum aliquid nisi bonum predestinare.”
Is it true, then, that “predestination to eternal happiness is the everlasting purpose of God, whereby, before the foundations of the world were laid, he hath constantly decreed by his council, secret to us, to deliver from curse and damnation those whom he hath chosen out of mankind?” Is it true that of the human family there are some who, in view of no fault of their own, Almighty God has condemned to unending torture, eternal misery?
In 1595 the Lambeth Articles asserted that “God from eternity hath predestinated certain men unto life; certain he hath reprobated.” In 1618 the Synod of Dort decided in favor of this view. It condemned the remonstrants against it, and treated them with such severity, that many of them had to flee to foreign countries. Even in the Church of England, as is manifested by its seventeenth Article of Faith, these doctrines have found favor.
Probably there was no point which brought down from the Catholics on the Protestants severer condemnation than this, their partial acceptance of the government of the world by law. In all Reformed Europe miracles ceased. But, with the cessation of shrine-cure, relic-cure, great pecuniary profits ended. Indeed, as is well known, it was the sale of indulgences that provoked the Reformation–indulgences which are essentially a permit from God for the practice of sin, conditioned on the payment of a certain sum of money to the priest.
Philosophically, the Reformation implied a protest against the Catholic doctrine of incessant divine intervention in human affairs, invoked by sacerdotal agency; but this protest was far from being fully made by all the Reforming Churches. The evidence in behalf of government by law, which has of late years been offered by science, is received by many of them with suspicion, perhaps with dislike; sentiments which, however, must eventually give way before the hourly-increasing weight of evidence.
Shall we not, then, conclude with Cicero, who, quoted by Lactantius, says: “One eternal and immutable law embraces all things and all times?”
CHAPTER X.
LATIN CHRISTIANITY IN RELATION TO MODERN CIVILIZATION.
For more than a thousand years Latin Christianity controlled the intelligence of Europe, and is responsible for the result.
That result is manifested by the condition of the city of Rome at the Reformation, and by the condition of the Continent of Europe in domestic and social life.–European nations suffered under the coexistence of a dual government, a spiritual and a temporal.–They were immersed in ignorance, superstition, discomfort.–Explanation of the failure of Catholicism–Political history of the papacy: it was transmuted from a spiritual confederacy into an absolute monarchy.–Action of the College of Cardinals and the Curia-Demoralization that ensued from the necessity of raising large revenues.
The advantages accruing to Europe during the Catholic rule arose not from direct intention, but were incidental.
The general result is, that the political influence of Catholicism was prejudicial to modern civilization.
LATIN Christianity is responsible for the condition and progress of Europe from the fourth to the sixteenth century. We have now to examine how it discharged its trust.
It will be convenient to limit to the case of Europe what has here to be presented, though, from the claim of the papacy to superhuman origin, and its demand for universal obedience, it should strictly be held to account for the condition of all mankind. Its inefficacy against the great and venerable religions of Southern and Eastern Asia would furnish an important and instructive theme for consideration, and lead us to the conclusion that it has impressed itself only where Roman imperial influences have prevailed; a political conclusion which, however, it contemptuously rejects.
Doubtless at the inception of the Reformation there were many persons who compared the existing social condition with what it had been in ancient times. Morals had not changed, intelligence had not advanced, society had little improved. From the Eternal City itself its splendors had vanished. The marble streets, of which Augustus had once boasted, had disappeared. Temples, broken columns, and the long, arcaded vistas of gigantic aqueducts bestriding the desolate Campagna, presented a mournful scene. From the uses to which they had been respectively put, the Capitol had been known as Goats’ Hill, and the site of the Roman Forum, whence laws had been issued to the world, as Cows’ Field. The palace of the Caesars was hidden by mounds of earth, crested with flowering shrubs. The baths of Caracalla, with their porticoes, gardens, reservoirs, had long ago become useless through the destruction of their supplying aqueducts. On the ruins of that grand edifice, “flowery glades and thickets of odoriferous trees extended in ever-winding labyrinths upon immense platforms, and dizzy arches suspended in the air.” Of the Coliseum, the most colossal of Roman ruins, only about one-third remained. Once capable of accommodating nearly ninety thousand spectators, it had, in succession, been turned into a fortress in the middle ages, and then into a stone-quarry to furnish material for the palaces of degenerate Roman princes. Some of the popes had occupied it as a woollen-mill, some as a saltpetre factory; some had planned the conversion of its magnificent arcades into shops for tradesmen. The iron clamps which bound its stones together had been stolen. The walls were fissured and falling. Even in our own times botanical works have been composed on the plants which have made this noble wreck their home. “The Flora of the Coliseum” contains four hundred and twenty species. Among the ruins of classical buildings might be seen broken columns, cypresses, and mouldy frescoes, dropping from the walls. Even the vegetable world participated in the melancholy change: the myrtle, which once flourished on the Aventine, had nearly become extinct; the laurel, which once gave its leaves to encircle the brows of emperors, had been replaced by ivy–the companion of death.
But perhaps it may be said the popes were not responsible for all this. Let it be remembered that in less than one hundred and forty years the city had been successively taken by Alaric, Genseric, Rieimer, Vitiges, Totila ; that many of its great edifices had been converted into defensive works. The aqueducts were destroyed by Vitiges, who ruined the Campagna; the palace of the Caesars was ravaged by Totila; then there had been the Lombard sieges; then Robert Guiscard and his Normans had burnt the city from the Antonine Column to the Flaminian Gate, from the Lateran to the Capitol; then it was sacked and mutilated by the Constable Bourbon; again and again it was flooded by inundations of the Tiber and shattered by earthquakes. We must, however, bear in mind the accusation of Machiavelli, who says, in his “History of Florence,” that nearly all the barbarian invasions of Italy were by the invitations of the pontiffs, who called in those hordes! It was not the Goth, nor the Vandal, nor the Norman, nor the Saracen, but the popes and their nephews, who produced the dilapidation of Rome! Lime-kilns had been fed from the ruins, classical buildings had become stone-quarries for the palaces of Italian princes, and churches were decorated from the old temples.
Churches decorated from the temples! It is for this and such as this that the popes must be held responsible. Superb Corinthian columns bad been chiseled into images of the saints. Magnificent Egyptian obelisks had been dishonored by papal inscriptions. The Septizonium of Severus had been demolished to furnish materials for the building of St. Peter’s; the bronze roof of the Pantheon had been melted into columns to ornament the apostle’s tomb.
The great bell of Viterbo, in the tower of the Capitol, had announced the death of many a pope, and still desecration of the buildings and demoralization of the people went on. Papal Rome manifested no consideration, but rather hatred, for classical Rome, The pontiffs had been subordinates of the Byzantine sovereigns, then lieutenants of the Frankish kings, then arbiters of Europe; their government had changed as much as those of any of the surrounding nations; there had been complete metamorphoses in its maxims, objects, claims. In one point only it had never changed–intolerance. Claiming to be the centre of the religious life of Europe, it steadfastly refused to recognize any religious existence outside of itself, yet both in a political and theological sense it was rotten to the core. Erasmus and Luther heard with amazement the blasphemies and witnessed with a shudder the atheism of the city.
The historian Ranke, to whom I am indebted for many of these facts, has depicted in a very graphic manner the demoralization of the great metropolis. The popes were, for the most part, at their election, aged men. Power was, therefore, incessantly passing into new hands. Every election was a revolution in prospects and expectations. In a community where all might rise, where all might aspire to all, it necessarily followed that every man was occupied in thrusting some other into the background. Though the population of the city at the inception of the Reformation had sunk to eighty thousand, there were vast crowds of placemen, and still greater ones of aspirants for place. The successful occupant of the pontificate had thousands of offices to give away–offices from many of which the incumbents had been remorselessly ejected; many had been created for the purpose of sale. The integrity and capacity of an applicant were never inquired into; the points considered were, what services has he rendered or can he render to the party? how much can he pay for the preferment? An American reader can thoroughly realize this state of things. At every presidential election he witnesses similar acts. The election of a pope by the Conclave is not unlike the nomination of an American president by a convention. In both cases there are many offices to give away.
William of Malmesbury says that in his day the Romans made a sale of whatever was righteous and sacred for gold. After his time there was no improvement; the Church degenerated into an instrument for the exploitation of money. Vast sums were collected in Italy; vast sums were drawn under all manner of pretenses from surrounding and reluctant countries. Of these the most nefarious was the sale of indulgences for the perpetration of sin. Italian religion had become the art of plundering the people.
For more than a thousand years the sovereign pontiffs had been rulers of the city. True, it had witnessed many scenes of devastation for which they were not responsible; but they were responsible for this, that they had never made any vigorous, any persistent effort for its material, its moral improvement. Instead of being in these respects an exemplar for the imitation of the world, it became an exemplar of a condition that ought to be shunned. Things steadily went on from bad to worse, until at the epoch of the Reformation no pious stranger could visit it without being shocked.
The papacy, repudiating science as absolutely incompatible with its pretensions, had in later years addressed itself to the encouragement of art. But music and painting, though they may be exquisite adornments of life, contain no living force that can develop a weak nation into a strong one; nothing that can permanently assure the material well-being or happiness of communities; and hence at the time of the Reformation, to one who thoughtfully considered her condition, Rome had lost all living energy. She was no longer the arbiter of the physical or the religious progress of the world. For the progressive maxims of the republic and the empire, she had substituted the stationary maxims of the papacy. She had the appearance of piety and the possession of art. In this she resembled one of those friar-corpses which we still see in their brown cowls in the vaults of the Cappuccini, with a breviary or some withered flowers in its hands.
From this view of the Eternal City, this survey of what Latin Christianity had done for Rome itself, let us turn to the whole European Continent. Let us try to determine the true value of the system that was guiding society; let us judge it by its fruits.
The condition of nations as to their well-being is most precisely represented by the variations of their population. Forms of government have very little influence on population, but policy may control it completely.
It has been very satisfactorily shown by authors who have given attention to the subject, that the variations of population depend upon the interbalancing of the generative force of society and the resistances to life.
By the generative force of society is meant that instinct which manifests itself in the multiplication of the race. To some extent it depends on climate; but, since the climate of Europe did not sensibly change between the fourth and the sixteenth centuries, we may regard this force as having been, on that continent, during the period under consideration, invariable.
By the resistances to life is meant whatever tends to make individual existence more difficult of support. Among such may be enumerated insufficient food, inadequate clothing, imperfect shelter.
It is also known that, if the resistances become inappreciable, the generative force will double a population in twenty-five years.
The resistances operate in two modes: 1. Physically; since they diminish the number of births, and shorten the term of the life of all. 2. Intellectually; since, in a moral, and particularly in a religious community, they postpone marriage, by causing individuals to decline its responsibilities until they feel that they are competent to meet the charges and cares of a family. Hence the explanation of a long-recognized fact, that the number of marriages during a given period has a connection with the price of food.
The increase of population keeps pace with the increase of food; and, indeed, such being the power of the generative force, it overpasses the means of subsistence, establishing a constant pressure upon them. Under these circumstances, it necessarily happens that a certain amount of destitution must occur. Individuals have come into existence who must be starved.
As illustrations of the variations that have occurred in the population of different countries, may be mentioned the immense diminution of that of Italy in consequence of the wars of Justinian; the depopulation of North Africa in consequence of theological quarrels; its restoration through the establishment of Mohammedanism; the increase of that of all Europe through the feudal system, when estates became more valuable in proportion to the number of retainers they could supply. The crusades caused a sensible diminution, not only through the enormous army losses, but also by reason of the withdrawal of so many able-bodied men from marriage-life. Similar variations have occurred on the American Continent. The population of Mexico was very quickly diminished by two million through the rapacity and atrocious cruelty of the Spaniards, who drove the civilized Indians to despair. The same happened in Peru.
The population of England at the Norman conquest was about two million. In five hundred years it had scarcely doubled. It may be supposed that this stationary condition was to some extent induced by the papal policy of the enforcement of celibacy in the clergy. The “legal generative force” was doubtless affected by that policy, the “actual generative force” was not. For those who have made this subject their study have long ago been satisfied that public celibacy is private wickedness. This mainly determined the laity, as well as the government in England, to suppress the monasteries. It was openly asserted that there were one hundred thousand women in England made dissolute by the clergy.
In my history of the “American Civil War,” I have presented some reflections on this point, which I will take the liberty of quoting here: “What, then, does this stationary condition of the population mean? It means, food obtained with hardship, insufficient clothing, personal uncleanness, cabins that could not keep out the weather, the destructive effects of cold and heat, miasm, want of sanitary provisions, absence of physicians, uselessness of shrine-cure, the deceptiveness of miracles, in which society was putting its trust; or, to sum up a long catalogue of sorrows, wants, and sufferings, in one term–it means a high death-rate.
“But more; it means deficient births. And what does that point out? Marriage postponed, licentious life, private wickedness, demoralized society.
“To an American, who lives in a country that was yesterday an interminable and impenetrable desert, but which to-day is filling with a population doubling itself every twenty-five years at the prescribed rate, this awful waste of actual and contingent life cannot but be a most surprising fact. His curiosity will lead him to inquire what kind of system that could have been which was pretending to guide and develop society, but which must be held responsible for this prodigious destruction, excelling, in its insidious result, war, pestilence, and famine combined; insidious, for men were actually believing that it secured their highest temporal interests. How different now! In England, the, same geographical surface is sustaining ten times the population of that day, and sending forth its emigrating swarms. Let him, who looks back, with veneration on the past, settle in his own mind what such a system could have been worth.”
These variations in the population of Europe have been attended with changes in distribution. The centre of population has passed northward since the establishment of Christianity in the Roman Empire. It has since passed westward, in consequence of the development of manufacturing industry.
We may now examine somewhat more minutely the character of the resistances which thus, for a thousand years, kept the population of Europe stationary. The surface of the Continent was for the most part covered with pathless forests; here and there it was dotted with monasteries and towns. In the lowlands and along the river-courses were fens, sometimes hundreds of miles in extent, exhaling their pestiferous miasms, and spreading agues far and wide. In Paris and London, the houses were of wood daubed with clay, and thatched with straw or reeds. They had no windows, and, until the invention of the saw-mill, very few had wooden floors. The luxury of a carpet was unknown; some straw, scattered in the room, supplied its place. There were no chimneys; the smoke of the ill-fed, cheerless fire escaped through a hole in the roof. In such habitations there was scarcely any protection from the weather. No attempt was made at drainage, but the putrefying garbage and rubbish were simply thrown out of the door. Men, women, and children, slept in the same apartment; not unfrequently, domestic animals were their companions; in such a confusion of the family, it was impossible that modesty or morality could be maintained. The bed was usually a bag of straw, a wooden log served as a pillow. Personal cleanliness was utterly unknown; great officers of state, even dignitaries so high as the Archbishop of Canterbury, swarmed with vermin; such, it is related, was the condition of Thomas a Becket, the antagonist of an English king. To conceal personal impurity, perfumes were necessarily and profusely used. The citizen clothed himself in leather, a garment which, with its ever-accumulating impurity, might last for many years. He was considered to be in circumstances of ease, if he could procure fresh meat once a week for his dinner. The streets had no sewers; they were without pavement or lamps. After nightfall, the chamber-shatters were thrown open, and slops unceremoniously emptied down, to the discomfiture of the wayfarer tracking his path through the narrow streets, with his dismal lantern in his hand.
Aeneas Sylvius, who afterward became Pope Pius II., and was therefore a very competent and impartial writer, has left us a graphic account of a journey he made to the British Islands, about 1430. He describes the houses of the peasantry as constructed of stones put together without mortar; the roofs were of turf, a stiffened bull’s-hide served for a door. The food consisted of coarse vegetable products, such as peas, and even the bark of trees. In some places they were unacquainted with bread.
Cabins of reeds plastered with mud, houses of wattled stakes, chimneyless peat-fires from which there was scarcely an escape for the smoke, dens of physical and moral pollution swarming with vermin, wisps of straw twisted round the limbs to keep off the cold, the ague-stricken peasant, with no help except shrine-cure! How was it possible that the population could increase? Shall we, then, wonder that, in the famine of 1030, human flesh was cooked and sold; or that, in that of 1258, fifteen thousand persons died of hunger in London? Shall we wonder that, in some of the invasions of the plague, the deaths were so frightfully numerous that the living could hardly bury the dead? By that of 1348, which came from the East along the lines of commercial travel, and spread all over Europe, one-third of the population of France was destroyed.
Such was the condition of the peasantry, and of the common inhabitants of cities. Not much better was that of the nobles. William of Malmesbury, speaking of the degraded manners of the Anglo-Saxons, says: “Their nobles, devoted to gluttony and voluptuousness, never visited the church, but the matins and the mass were read over to them by a hurrying priest in their bedchambers, before they rose, themselves not listening. The common people were a prey to the more powerful; their property was seized, their bodies dragged away to distant countries; their maidens were either thrown into a brothel, or sold for slaves. Drinking day and night was the general pursuit; vices, the companions of inebriety, followed, effeminating the manly mind.” The baronial castles were dens of robbers. The Saxon chronicler records how men and women were caught and dragged into those strongholds, hung up by their thumbs or feet, fire applied to them, knotted strings twisted round their heads, and many other torments inflicted to extort ransom.
All over Europe, the great and profitable political offices were filled by ecclesiastics. In every country there was a dual government: 1. That of a local kind, represented by a temporal sovereign; 2. That of a foreign kind, acknowledging the authority of the pope, This Roman influence was, in the nature of things, superior to the local; it expressed the sovereign will of one man over all the nations of the continent conjointly, and gathered overwhelming power from its compactness and unity. The local influence was necessarily of a feeble nature, since it was commonly weakened by the rivalries of conterminous states, and the dissensions dexterously provoked by its competitor. On not a single occasion could the various European states form a coalition against their common antagonist. Whenever a question arose, they were skillfully taken in detail, and commonly mastered. The ostensible object of papal intrusion was to secure for the different peoples moral well-being; the real object was to obtain large revenues, and give support to vast bodies of ecclesiastics. The revenues thus abstracted were not infrequently many times greater than those passing into the treasury of the local power. Thus, on the occasion of Innocent IV. demanding provision to be made for three hundred additional Italian clergy by the Church of England, and that one of his nephews–a mere boy– should have a stall in Lincoln Cathedral, it was found that the sum already annually abstracted by foreign ecclesiastics from England was thrice that which went into the coffers of the king.
While thus the higher clergy secured every political appointment worth having, and abbots vied with counts in the herds of slaves they possessed–some, it is said, owned not fewer than twenty thousand–begging friars pervaded society in all directions, picking up a share of what still remained to the poor. There was a vast body of non-producers, living in idleness and owning a foreign allegiance, who were subsisting on the fruits of the toil of the laborers. It could not be otherwise than that small farms should be unceasingly merged into the larger estates; that the poor should steadily become poorer; that society, far from improving, should exhibit a continually increasing demoralization. Outside the monastic institutions no attempt at intellectual advancement was made; indeed, so far as the laity were concerned, the influence of the Church was directed to an opposite result, for the maxim universally received was, that “ignorance is the mother of devotion.”
The settled practice of republican and imperial Rome was to have swift communication with all her outlying provinces, by means of substantial bridges and roads. One of the prime duties of the legions was to construct them and keep them in repair. By this, her military authority was assured. But the dominion of papal Rome, depending upon a different principle, had no exigencies of that kind, and this duty accordingly was left for the local powers to neglect. And so, in all directions, the roads were almost impassable for a large part of the year. A common means of transportation was in clumsy carts drawn by oxen, going at the most but three or four miles an hour. Where boat-conveyance along rivers could not be had, pack-horses and mules were resorted to for the transportation of merchandise, an adequate means for the slender commerce of the times. When large bodies of men had to be moved, the difficulties became almost insuperable. Of this, perhaps, one of the best illustrations may be found in the story of the march of the first Crusaders. These restraints upon intercommunication tended powerfully to promote the general benighted condition. Journeys by individuals could not be undertaken without much risk, for there was scarcely a moor or a forest that had not its highwaymen.
An illiterate condition everywhere prevailing, gave opportunity for the development of superstition. Europe was full of disgraceful miracles. On all the roads pilgrims were wending their way to the shrines of saints, renowned for the cures they had wrought. It had always been the policy of the Church to discourage the physician and his art; he interfered too much with the gifts and profits of the shrines. Time has brought this once lucrative imposture to its proper value. How many shrines are there now in successful operation in Europe?
For patients too sick to move or be moved, there were no remedies except those of a ghostly kind–the Pater-noster or the Ave. For the prevention of diseases, prayers were put up in the churches, but no sanitary measures were resorted to. From cities reeking with putrefying filth it was thought that the plague might be stayed by the prayers of the priests, by them rain and dry weather might be secured, and deliverance obtained from the baleful influences of eclipses and comets. But when Halley’s comet came, in 1456, so tremendous was its apparition that it was necessary for the pope himself to interfere. He exorcised and expelled it from the skies. It slunk away into the abysses of space, terror-stricken by the maledictions of Calixtus III., and did not venture back for seventy-five years!
The physical value of shrine-cures and ghostly remedies is measured by the death-rate. In those days it was, probably, about one in twenty-three, under the present more material practice it is about one in forty.
The moral condition of Europe was signally illustrated when syphilis was introduced from the West Indies by the companions of Columbus. It spread with wonderful rapidity; all ranks of persons, from the Holy Father Leo X. to the beggar by the wayside, contracting the shameful disease. Many excused their misfortune by declaring that it was an epidemic proceeding from a certain malignity in the constitution of the air, but in truth its spread was due to a certain infirmity in the constitution of man–an infirmity which had not been removed by the spiritual guidance under which he had been living.
To the medical efficacy of shrines must be added that of special relics. These were sometimes of the most extraordinary kind. There were several abbeys that possessed our Savior’s crown of thorns. Eleven had the lance that had pierced his side. If any person was adventurous enough to suggest that these could not all be authentic, he would have been denounced as an atheist. During the holy wars the Templar-Knights had driven a profitable commerce by bringing from Jerusalem to the Crusading armies bottles of the milk of the Blessed Virgin, which they sold for enormous sums; these bottles were preserved with pious care in many of the great religious establishments. But perhaps none of these impostures surpassed in audacity that offered by a monastery in Jerusalem, which presented to the beholder one of the fingers of the Holy Ghost! Modern society has silently rendered its verdict on these scandalous objects. Though they once nourished the piety of thousands of earnest people, they are now considered too vile to have a place in any public museum.
How shall we account for the great failure we thus detect in the guardianship of the Church over Europe? This is not the result that must have occurred had there been in Rome an unremitting care for the spiritual and material prosperity of the continent, had the universal pastor, the successor of Peter, occupied himself with singleness of purpose for the holiness and happiness of his flock.
The explanation is not difficult to find. It is contained in a story of sin and shame. I prefer, therefore, in the following paragraphs, to offer explanatory facts derived from Catholic authors, and, indeed, to present them as nearly as I can in the words of those writers.
The story I am about to relate is a narrative of the transformation of a confederacy into an absolute monarchy.
In the early times every church, without prejudice to its agreement with the Church universal in all essential points, managed its own affairs with perfect freedom and independence, maintaining its own traditional usages and discipline, all questions not concerning the whole Church, or of primary importance, being settled on the spot.
Until the beginning of the ninth century, there was no change in the constitution of the Roman Church. But about 845 the Isidorian Decretals were fabricated in the west of Gaul–a forgery containing about one hundred pretended decrees of the early popes, together with certain spurious writings of other church dignitaries and acts of synods. This forgery produced an immense extension of the papal power, it displaced the old system of church government, divesting it of the republican attributes it had possessed, and transforming it into an absolute monarchy. It brought the bishops into subjection to Rome, and made the pontiff the supreme judge of the clergy of the whole Christian world. It prepared the way for the great attempt, subsequently made by Hildebrand, to convert the states of Europe into a theocratic priest-kingdom, with the pope at its head.
Gregory VII., the author of this great attempt, saw that his plans would be best carried out through the agency of synods. He, therefore, restricted the right of holding them to the popes and their legates. To aid in the matter, a new system of church law was devised by Anselm of Lucca, partly from the old Isidorian forgeries, and partly from new inventions. To establish the supremacy of Rome, not only had a new civil and a new canon law to be produced, a new history had also to be invented. This furnished needful instances of the deposition and excommunication of kings, and proved that they had always been subordinate to the popes. The decretal letters of the popes were put on a par with Scripture. At length it came to be received, throughout the West, that the popes had been, from the beginning of Christianity, legislators for the whole Church. As absolute sovereigns in later times cannot endure representative assemblies, so the papacy, when it wished to become absolute, found that the synods of particular national churches must be put an end to, and those only under the immediate control of the pontiff permitted. This, in itself, constituted a great revolution.
Another fiction concocted in Rome in the eighth century led to important consequences. It feigned that the Emperor Constantine, in gratitude for his cure from leprosy, and baptism by Pope Sylvester, had bestowed Italy and the Western provinces on the pope, and that, in token of his subordination, he had served the pope as his groom, and led his horse some distance. This forgery was intended to work on the Frankish kings, to impress them with a correct idea of their inferiority, and to show that, in the territorial concessions they made to the Church, they were not giving but only restoring what rightfully belonged to it.
The most potent instrument of the new papal system was Gratian’s Decretum, which was issued about the middle of the twelfth century. It was a mass of fabrications. It made the whole Christian world, through the papacy, the domain of the Italian clergy. It inculcated that it is lawful to constrain men to goodness, to torture and execute heretics, and to confiscate their property; that to kill an excommunicated person is not murder; that the pope, in his unlimited superiority to all law, stands on an equality with the Son of God!
As the new system of centralization developed, maxims, that in the olden times would have been held to be shocking, were boldly avowed–the whole Church is the property of the pope to do with as he will; what is simony in others is not simony in him; he is above all law, and can be called to account by none; whoever disobeys him must be put to death; every baptized man is his subject, and must for life remain so, whether he will or not. Up to the end of the twelfth century, the popes were the vicars of Peter; after Innocent III. they were the vicars of Christ.
But an absolute sovereign has need of revenues, and to this the popes were no exception. The institution of legates was brought in from Hildebrand’s time. Sometimes their duty was to visit churches, sometimes they were sent on special business, but always invested with unlimited powers to bring back money over the Alps. And since the pope could not only make laws, but could suspend their operation, a legislation was introduced in view to the purchase of dispensations. Monasteries were exempted from episcopal jurisdiction on payment of a tribute to Rome. The pope had now become “the universal bishop;” he had a concurrent jurisdiction in all the dioceses, and could bring any cases before his own courts. His relation to the bishops was that of an absolute sovereign to his officials. A bishop could resign only by his permission, and sees vacated by resignation lapsed to him. Appeals to him were encouraged in every way for the sake of the dispensations; thousands of processes came before the Curia, bringing a rich harvest to Rome. Often when there were disputing claimants to benefices, the pope would oust them all, and appoint a creature of his own. Often the candidates had to waste years in Rome, and either died there, or carried back a vivid impression of the dominant corruption. Germany suffered more than other countries from these appeals and processes, and hence of all countries was best prepared for the Reformation. During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the popes made gigantic strides in the acquisition of power. Instead of recommending their favorites for benefices, now they issued mandates. Their Italian partisans must be rewarded; nothing could be done to satisfy their clamors,. but to provide for them in foreign countries. Shoals of contesting claimants died in Rome; and, when death took place in that city, the Pope claimed the right of giving away the benefices. At length it was affirmed that he had the right of disposing of all church-offices without distinction, and that the oath of obedience of a bishop to him implied political as well as ecclesiastical subjection. In countries having a dual government this increased the power of the spiritual element prodigiously.
Rights of every kind were remorselessly overthrown to complete this centralization. In this the mendicant orders were most efficient aids. It was the pope and those orders on one side, the bishops and the parochial clergy on the other. The Roman court had seized the rights of synods, metropolitans, bishops, national churches. Incessantly interfered with by the legates, the bishops lost all desire to discipline their dioceses; incessantly interfered with by the begging monks, tho parish priest had become powerless in his own village; his pastoral influence was utterly destroyed by the papal indulgences and absolutions they sold. The money was carried off to Rome.
Pecuniary necessities urged many of the popes to resort to such petty expedients as to require from a prince, a bishop, or a grand-master, who bad a cause pending in the court, a present of a golden cup filled with ducats. Such necessities also gave origin to jubilees. Sixtus IV. established whole colleges, and sold the places at three or four hundred ducats. Innocent VIII. pawned the papal tiara. Of Leo X. it was said that he squandered the revenues of three popes, he wasted the savings of his predecessor, he spent his own income, he anticipated that of his successor, he created twenty-one hundred and fifty new offices and sold them; they were considered to be a good investment, as they produced twelve per cent. The interest was extorted from Catholic countries. Nowhere in Europe could capital be so well invested as at Rome. Large sums were raised by the foreclosing of mortgages, and not only by the sale but the resale of offices. Men were promoted, for the purpose of selling their offices again.
Though against the papal theory, which denounced usurious practices, an immense papal banking system had sprung up, in connection with the Curia, and sums at usurious interest were advanced to prelates, place. hunters, and litigants. The papal bankers were privileged; all others were under the ban. The Curia had discovered that it was for their interest to have ecelesiastics all over Europe in their debt. They could make them pliant, and excommunicate them for non-payment of interest. In 1327 it was reckoned that half the Christian world was under excommunication: bishops were excommunicated because they could not meet the extortions of legates; and persons were excommunicated, under various pretenses, to compel them to purchase absolution at an exorbitant price. The ecclesiastical revenues of all Europe were flowing into Rome, a sink of corruption, simony, usury, bribery, extortion. The popes, since 1066, when the great centralizing movement began, had no time to pay attention to the internal affairs of their own special flock in the city of Rome. There were thousands of foreign cases, each bringing in money. “Whenever,” says the Bishop Alvaro Pelayo, “I entered the apartments of the Roman court clergy, I found them occupied in counting up the gold-coin, which lay about the rooms in heaps.” Every opportunity of extending the jurisdiction of the Curia was welcome. Exemptions were so managed that fresh grants were constantly necessary. Bishops were privileged against cathedral chapters, chapters against their bishops; bishops, convents, and individuals, against the extortions of legates.
The two pillars on which the papal system now rested were the College of Cardinals and the Curia. The cardinals, in 1059, had become electors of the popes. Up to that time elections were made by the whole body of the Roman clergy, and the concurrence of the magistrates and citizens was necessary. But Nicolas II. restricted elections to the College of Cardinals by a two- thirds vote, and gave to the German emperor the right of confirmation. For almost two centuries there was a struggle for mastery between the cardinal oligarchy and papal absolutism. The cardinals were willing enough that the pope should be absolute in his foreign rule, but the never failed to attempt, before giving him their votes, to bind him to accord to them a recognized share in the government. After his election, and before his consecration, he swore to observe certain capitulations, such as a participation of revenues between himself and the cardinals; an obligation that lie would not remove them, but would permit them to assemble twice a year to discuss whether he had kept his oath. Repeatedly the popes broke their oath. On one side, the cardinals wanted a larger share in the church government and emoluments; on the other, the popes refused to surrender revenues or power. The cardinals wanted to be conspicuous in pomp and extravagance, and for this vast sums were requisite. In one instance, not fewer than five hundred benefices were held by one of them; their friends and retainers must be supplied, their families enriched. It was affirmed that the whole revenues of France were insufficient to meet their expenditures. In their rivalries it sometimes happened that no pope was elected for several years. It seemed as if they wanted to show how easily the Church could get on without the Vicar of Christ.
Toward the close of the eleventh century the Roman Church became the Roman court. In place of the Christian sheep gently following their shepherd in the holy precincts of the city, there had arisen a chancery of writers, notaries, tax-gatherers, where transactions about privileges, dispensations, exemptions, were carried on; and suitors went with petitions from door to door. Rome was a rallying-point for place-hunters of every nation. In presence of the enormous mass of business-processes, graces, indulgences, absolutions, commands, and decisions, addressed to all parts of Europe and Asia, the functions of the local church sank into insignificance. Several hundred persons, whose home was the Curia, were required. Their aim was to rise in it by enlarging the profits of the papal treasury. The whole Christian world had become tributary to it. Here every vestige of religion had disappeared; its members were busy with politics, litigations, and processes; not a word could be heard about spiritual concerns. Every stroke of the pen had its price. Benefices, dispensations, licenses, absolutions, indulgences, privileges, were bought and sold like merchandise. The suitor had to bribe every one, from the doorkeeper to the pope, or his case was lost. Poor men could neither attain preferment, nor hope for it; and the result was, that every cleric felt he had a right to follow the example he had seen at Rome, and that he might make profits out of his spiritual ministries and sacraments, having bought the right to do so at Rome, and having no other way to pay off his debt. The transference of power from Italians to Frenchmen, through the removal of the Curia to Avignon, produced no change–only the Italians felt that the enrichment of Italian families had slipped out of their grasp. They had learned to consider the papacy as their appanage, and that they, under the Christian dispensation, were God’s chosen people, as the Jews had been under the Mosaic.
At the end of the thirteenth century a new kingdom was discovered, capable of yielding immense revenues. This was Purgatory. It was shown that the pope could empty it by his indulgences. In this there was no need of hypocrisy. Things were done openly. The original germ of the apostolic primacy had now expanded into a colossal monarchy.
NEED OF A GENERAL COUNCIL. The Inquisition had made the papal system irresistible. All opposition must be punished with death by fire. A mere thought, without having betrayed itself by outward sign, was considered as guilt. As time went on, this practice of the Inquisition became more and more atrocious. Torture was resorted to on mere suspicion. The accused was not allowed to know the name of his accuser. He was not permitted to have any legal adviser. There was no appeal. The Inquisition was ordered not to lean to pity. No recantation was of avail. The innocent family of the accused was deprived of its property by confiscation; half went to the papal treasury, half to the inquisitors. Life only, said Innocent III., was to be left to the sons of misbelievers, and that merely as an act of mercy. The consequence was, that popes, such as Nicolas III., enriched their families through plunder acquired by this tribunal. Inquisitors did the same habitually.
The struggle between the French and Italians for the possession of the papacy inevitably led to the schism of the fourteenth century. For more than forty years two rival popes were now anathematizing each other, two rival Curias were squeezing the nations for money. Eventually, there were three obediences, and triple revenues to be extorted. Nobody, now, could guarantee the validity of the sacraments, for nobody could be sure which was the true pope. Men were thus compelled to think for themselves. They could not find who was the legitimate thinker for them. They began to see that the Church must rid herself of the curialistic chains, and resort to a General Council. That attempt was again and again made, the intention being to raise the Council into a Parliament of Christendom, and make the pope its chief executive officer. But the vast interests that had grown out of the corruption of ages could not so easily be overcome; the Curia again recovered its ascendency, and ecclesiastical trading was resumed. The Germans, who had never been permitted to share in the Curia, took the leading part in these attempts at reform. As things went on from bad to worse, even they at last found out that all hope of reforming the Church by means of councils was delusive. Erasmus exclaimed, “If Christ does not deliver his people from this multiform ecclesiastical tyranny, the tyranny of the Turk will become less intolerable.” Cardinals’ hats were now sold, and under Leo X. ecclesiastical and religious offices were actually put up to auction. The maxim of life had become, interest first, honor afterward. Among the officials, there was not one who could be honest in the dark, and virtuous without a witness. The violet-colored velvet cloaks and white ermine capes of the cardinals were truly a cover for wickedness.
The unity of the Church, and therefore its power, required the use of Latin as a sacred language. Through this, Rome had stood in an attitude strictly European, and was enabled to maintain a general international relation. It gave her far more power than her asserted celestial authority, and, much as she claims to have done, she is open to condemnation that, with such a signal advantage in her hands, never again to be enjoyed by any successor, she did not accomplish much more. Had not the sovereign pontiffs been so completely occupied with maintaining their emoluments and temporalities in Italy, they might have made the whole continent advance like one man. Their officials could pass without difficulty into every nation, and communicate without embarrassment with each other, from Ireland to Bohemia, from Italy to Scotland. The possession of a common tongue gave them the administration of international affairs with intelligent allies everywhere, speaking the same language.
Not without cause was the hatred manifested by Rome to the restoration of Greek and introduction of Hebrew, and the alarm with which she perceived the modern languages forming out of the vulgar dialects. Not without reason did the Faculty of Theology in Paris re-echo the sentiment that, was prevalent in the time of Ximenes, “What will become of religion if the study of Greek and Hebrew be permitted?” The prevalence of Latin was the condition of her power; its deterioration, the measure of her decay; its disuse, the signal of her limitation to a little principality in Italy. In fact, the development of European languages was the instrument of her overthrow. They formed an effectual communication between the mendicant friars and the illiterate populace, and there was not one of them that did not display in its earliest productions a sovereign contempt for her.
The rise of the many-tongued European literature was therefore coincident with the decline of papal Christianity; European literature was impossible under Catholic rule. A grand, a solemn, an imposing religious unity enforced the literary unity which is implied in the use of a single tongue.
While thus the possession of a universal language so signally secured her power, the real secret of much of the influence of the Church lay in the control she had so skillfully obtained over domestic life. Her influence diminished as that declined. Coincident with this was her displacement in the guidance of international relations by diplomacy.
CATHOLICITY AND CIVILIZATION. In the old times of Roman domination the encampments of the legions in the provinces had always proved to be foci of civilization. The industry and order exhibited in them presented an example not lost on the surrounding barbarians of Britain, Gaul, and Germany. And, though it was no part of their duty to occupy themselves actively in the betterment of the conquered tribes, but rather to keep them in a depressed condition that aided in maintaining subjection, a steady improvement both in the individual and social condition took place.
Under the ecclesiastical domination of Rome similar effects occurred. In the open country the monastery replaced the legionary encampment; in the village or town, the church was a centre of light. A powerful effect was produced by the elegant luxury of the former, and by the sacred and solemn monitions of the latter.
In extolling the papal system for what it did in the organization of the family, the definition of civil policy, the construction of the states of Europe, our praise must be limited by the recollection that the chief object of ecclesiastical policy was the aggrandizement of the Church, not the promotion of civilization. The benefit obtained by the laity was not through any special intention, but incidental or collateral.
There was no far-reaching, no persistent plan to ameliorate the physical condition of the nations. Nothing was done to favor their intellectual development; indeed, on the contrary, it was the settled policy to keep them not merely illiterate, but ignorant. Century after century passed away, and left the peasantry but little better than the cattle in the fields. Intercommunication and locomotion, which tend so powerfully to expand the ideas, received no encouragement; the majority of men died without ever having ventured out of the neighborhood in which they were born. For them there was no hope of personal improvement, none of the bettering of their lot; there were no comprehensive schemes for the avoidance of individual want, none for the resistance of famines. Pestilences were permitted to stalk forth unchecked, or at best opposed only by mummeries. Bad food, wretched clothing, inadequate shelter, were suffered to produce their result, and at the end of a thousand years the population of Europe had not doubled.
If policy may be held accountable as much for the births it prevents as for the deaths it occasions, what a great responsibility there is here!
In this investigation of the influence of Catholicism, we must carefully keep separate what it did for the people and what it did for itself. When we think of the stately monastery, an embodiment of luxury, with its closely-mown lawns, its gardens and bowers, its fountains and many murmuring streams, we must connect it not with the ague-stricken peasant dying without help in the fens, but with the abbot, his ambling palfrey, his hawk and hounds, his well-stocked cellar and larder. He is part of a system that has its centre of authority in Italy.. To that his allegiance is due. For its behoof are all his acts. When we survey, as still we may, the magnificent churches and cathedrals of those times, miracles of architectural skill–the only real miracles of Catholicism–when in imagination we restore the transcendently imposing, the noble services of which they were once the scene, the dim, religious-light streaming in through the many-colored windows, the sounds of voices not inferior in their melody to those of heaven, the priests in their sacred vestments, and above all the prostrate worshipers listening to litanies and prayers in a foreign and unknown tongue, shall we not ask ourselves, Was all this for the sake of those worshipers, or for the glory of the great, the overshadowing authority at Rome?
But perhaps some one may say, Are there not limits to human exertion–things which no political system, no human power, no matter how excellent its intention, can accomplish? Men cannot be raised from barbarism, a continent cannot be civilized, in a day!
The Catholic power is not, however, to be tried by any such standard. It scornfully rejected and still rejects a human origin. It claims to be accredited supernaturally. The sovereign pontiff is the Vicar of God upon earth. Infallible in judgment, it is given to him to accomplish all things by miracle if need be. He had exercised an autocratic tyranny over the intellect of Europe for more than a thousand years; and, though on some occasions he had encountered the resistances of disobedient princes, these, in the aggregate, were of so little moment, that the physical, the political power of the continent may be affirmed to have been at his disposal.
Such facts as have been presented in this chapter were, doubtless, well weighed by the Protestant Reformers of the sixteenth century, and brought them to the conclusion that Catholicism had altogether failed in its mission; that it had become a vast system of delusion and imposture, and that a restoration of true Christianity could only be accomplished by returning to the faith and practices of the primitive times. This was no decision suddenly arrived at; it had long been the opinion of many religious and learned men. The pious Fratricelli in the middle ages had loudly expressed their belief that the fatal gift of a Roman emperor had been the doom of true religion. It wanted nothing more than the voice of Luther to bring men throughout the north of Europe to the, determination that the worship of the Virgin Mary, the invocation of saints, the working of miracles, supernatural cures of the sick, the purchase of indulgences for the perpetration of sin, and all other evil practices, lucrative to their abettors, which had been fastened on Christianity, but which were no part of it, should come to an end. Catholicism, as a system for promoting the well-being of man, had plainly failed in justifying its alleged origin; its performance had not corresponded to its great pretensions; and, after an opportunity of more than a thousand years’ duration, it had left the masses of men submitted to its influences, both as regards physical well-being and intellectual culture, in a condition far lower than what it ought to have been.
CHAPTER XI.
SCIENCE IN RELATION TO MODERN CIVILIZATION.
Illustration of the general influences of Science from the history of America.
THE INTRODUCTION OF SCIENCE INTO EUROPE.–It passed from Moorish Spain to Upper Italy, and was favored by the absence of the popes at Avignon.–The effects of printing, of maritime adventure, and of the Reformation–Establishment of the Italian scientific societies.
THE INTELLECTUAL INFLUENCE OF SCIENCE.–It changed the mode and the direction of thought in Europe.–The transactions of the Royal Society of London, and other scientific societies, furnish an illustration of this.
THE ECONOMICAL INFLUENCE OF SCIENCE is illustrated by the numerous mechanical and physical inventions, made since the fourteenth century.–Their influence on health and domestic life, on the arts of peace and of war.
Answer to the question, What has Science done for humanity?
EUROPE, at the epoch of the Reformation, furnishes us with the result of the influences of Roman Christianity in the promotion of civilization. America, examined in like manner at the present time, furnishes us with an illustration of the influences of science.
SCIENCE AND CIVILIZATION. In the course of the seventeenth century a sparse European population bad settled along the western Atlantic coast. Attracted by the cod-fishery of Newfoundland, the French had a little colony north of the St. Lawrence; the English, Dutch, and Swedes, occupied the shore of New England and the Middle States; some Huguenots were living in the Carolinas. Rumors of a spring that could confer perpetual youth–a fountain of life–had brought a few Spaniards into Florida. Behind the fringe of villages which these adventurers had built, lay a vast and unknown country, inhabited by wandering Indians, whose numbers from the Gulf of Mexico to the St. Lawrence did not exceed one hundred and eighty thousand. From them the European strangers had learned that in those solitary regions there were fresh-water seas, and a great river which they called the Mississippi. Some said that it flowed through Virginia into the Atlantic, some that it passed through Florida, some that it emptied into the Pacific, and some that it reached the Gulf of Mexico. Parted from their native countries by the stormy Atlantic, to cross which implied a voyage of many months, these refugees seemed lost to the world.
But before the close of the nineteenth century the descendants of this feeble people had become one of the great powers of the earth. They had established a republic whose sway extended from the Atlantic to the Pacific. With an army of more than a million men, not on paper, but actually in the field, they had overthrown a domestic assailant. They had maintained at sea a war-fleet of nearly seven hundred ships, carrying five thousand guns, some of them the heaviest in the world. The tonnage of this navy amounted to half a million. In the defense of their national life they had expended in less than five years more than four thousand million dollars. Their census, periodically taken, showed that the population was doubling itself every twenty-five years; it justified the expectation that at the close of that century it would number nearly one hundred million souls.
KNOWLEDGE IS POWER. A silent continent had been changed into a scene of industry; it was full of the din of machinery and the restless moving of men. Where there had been an unbroken forest, there were hundreds of cities and towns. To commerce were furnished in profusion some of the most important staples, as cotton, tobacco, breadstuffs. The mines yielded incredible quantities of gold, iron, coal. Countless churches, colleges, and public schools, testified that a moral influence vivified this material activity. Locomotion was effectually provided for. The railways exceeded in aggregate length those of all Europe combined. In 1873 the aggregate length of the European railways was sixty-three thousand three hundred and sixty miles, that of the American was seventy thousand six hundred and fifty miles. One of them, built across the continent, connected the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
But not alone are these material results worthy of notice. Others of a moral and social kind force themselves on our attention. Four million negro slaves had been set free. Legislation, if it inclined to the advantage of any class, inclined to that of the poor. Its intention was to raise them from poverty, and better their lot. A career was open to talent, and that without any restraint. Every thing was possible to intelligence and industry. Many of the most important public offices were filled by men who had risen from the humblest walks of life. If there was not social equality, as there never can be in rich and prosperous communities, there was civil equality, rigorously maintained.
It may perhaps be said that much of this material prosperity arose from special conditions, such as had never occurred in the case of any people before, There was a vast, an open theatre of action, a whole continent ready for any who chose to take possession of it. Nothing more than courage and industry was needed to overcome Nature, and to seize the abounding advantages she offered.
ILLUSTRATIONS FROM AMERICAN HISTORY. But must not men be animated by a great principle who successfully transform the primeval solitudes into an abode of civilization, who are not dismayed by gloomy forests, or rivers, mountains, or frightful deserts, who push their conquering way in the course of a century across a continent, and hold it in subjection? Let us contrast with this the results of the invasion of Mexico and Peru by the Spaniards, who in those countries overthrew a wonderful civilization, in many respects superior to their own–a civilization that had been accomplished without iron and gunpowder–a civilization resting on an agriculture that had neither horse, nor ox, nor plough. The Spaniards had a clear base to start from, and no obstruction whatever in their advance. They ruined all that the aboriginal children of America had accomplished. Millions of those unfortunates were destroyed by their cruelty. Nations that for many centuries had been living in contentment and prosperity, under institutions shown by their history to be suitable to them, were plunged into anarchy; the people fell into a baneful superstition, and a greater part of their landed and other property found its way into the possession of the Roman Church.
I have selected the foregoing illustration, drawn from American history, in preference to many others that might have been taken from European, because it furnishes an instance of the operation of the acting principle least interfered with by extraneous conditions. European political progress is less simple than American.
QUARREL BETWEEN FRANCE AND THE PAPACY. Before considering its manner of action, and its results, I will briefly relate how the scientific principle found an introduction into Europe.
INTRODUCTION OF SCIENCE INTO EUROPE. Not only had the Crusades, for many years, brought vast sums to Rome, extorted from the fears or the piety of every Christian nation; they had also increased the papal power to a most dangerous extent. In the dual governments everywhere prevailing in Europe, the spiritual had obtained the mastery; the temporal was little better than its servant.
From all quarters, and under all kinds of pretenses, streams of money were steadily flowing into Italy. The temporal princes found that there were left for them inadequate and impoverished revenues. Philip the Fair, King of France (A.D. 1300), not only determined to check this drain from his dominions, by prohibiting the export of gold and silver without his license; he also resolved that the clergy and the ecclesiastical estates should pay their share of taxes to him. This brought on a mortal contest with the papacy. The king was excommunicated, and, in retaliation, he accused the pope, Boniface VIII., of atheism; demanding that he should be tried by a general council. He sent some trusty persons into Italy, who seized Boniface in his palace at Anagni, and treated him with so much severity, that in a few days he died. The succeeding pontiff, Benedict XI., was poisoned.
The French king was determined that the papacy should be purified and reformed; that it should no longer be the appanage of a few Italian families, who were dexterously transmuting the credulity of Europe into coin–that French influence should prevail in it. He Therefore came to an understanding with the cardinals; a French archbishop was elevated to the pontificate; he took the name of Clement V. The papal court was removed to Avignon, in France, and Rome was abandoned as the metropolis of Christianity.
MOORISH SCIENCE INTRODUCED THROUGH FRANCE. Seventy years elapsed before the papacy was restored to the Eternal City (A.D. 1376). The diminution of its influence in the peninsula, that had thus occurred, gave opportunity for the memorable intellectual movement which soon manifested itself in the great commercial cities of Upper Italy. Contemporaneously, also, there were other propitious events. The result of the Crusades had shaken the faith of all Christendom. In an age when the test of the ordeal of battle was universally accepted, those wars had ended in leaving the Holy Land in the hands of the Saracens; the many thousand Christian warriors who had returned from them did not hesitate to declare that they had found their antagonists not such as had been pictured by the Church, but valiant, courteous, just. Through the gay cities of the South of France a love of romantic literature had been spreading; the wandering troubadours had been singing their songs–songs far from being restricted to ladye- love and feats of war; often their burden was the awful atrocities that had been perpetrated by papal authority– the religious massacres of Languedoc; often their burden was the illicit amours of the clergy. From Moorish Spain the gentle and gallant idea of chivalry had been brought, and with it the noble sentiment of “personal honor,” destined in the course of time to give a code of its own to Europe.
EFFECT OF THE GREAT SCHISM. The return of the papacy to Rome was far from restoring the influence of the popes over the Italian Peninsula. More than two generations had passed away since their departure, and, had they come back even in their original strength, they could not have resisted the intellectual progress that had been made during their absence. The papacy, however, came back not to rule, but to be divided against itself, to encounter the Great Schism. Out of its dissensions emerged two rival popes; eventually there were three, each pressing his claims upon the religious, each cursing his rival. A sentiment of indignation soon spread all over Europe, a determination that the shameful scenes which were then enacting should be ended. How could the dogma of a Vicar of God upon earth, the dogma of an infallible pope, be sustained in presence of such scandals? Herein lay the cause of that resolution of the ablest ecclesiastics of those times (which, alas for Europe! could not be carried into effect), that a general council should be made the permanent religious parliament of the whole continent, with the pope as its chief executive officer. Had that intention been accomplished, there would have been at this day no conflict between science and religion; the convulsion of the Reformation would have been avoided; there would have been no jarring Protestant sects. But the Councils of Constance and Basle failed to shake off the Italian yoke, failed to attain that noble result.
Catholicism was thus weakening; as its leaden pressure lifted, the intellect of man expanded. The Saracens had invented the method of making paper from linen rags and from cotton. The Venetians had brought from China to Europe the art of printing. The former of these inventions was essential to the latter. Hence forth, without the possibility of a check, there was intellectual intercommunication among all men.
INVENTION OF PRINTING. The invention of printing was a severe blow to Catholicism, which had, previously, enjoyed the inappreciable advantage of a monopoly of intercommunication. From its central seat, orders could be disseminated through all the ecclesiastical ranks, and fulminated through the pulpits. This monopoly and the amazing power it conferred were destroyed by the press. In modern times, the influence of the pulpit has become insignificant. The pulpit has been thoroughly supplanted by the newspaper.
Yet, Catholicism did not yield its ancient advantage without a struggle. As soon as the inevitable tendency of the new art was detected, a restraint upon it, under the form of a censorship, was attempted. It was made necessary to have a permit, in order to print a book. For this, it was needful that the work should have been read, examined, and approved by the clergy. There must be a certificate that it was a godly and orthodox book. A bull of excommunication was issued in 1501, by Alexander VI., against printers who should publish pernicious doctrines. In 1515 the Lateran Council ordered that no books should be printed but such as had been inspected by the ecclesiastical censors, under pain of excommunication and fine; the censors being directed “to take the utmost care that nothing should be printed contrary to the orthodox faith.” There was thus a dread of religious discussion; a terror lest truth should emerge.
But these frantic struggles of the powers of ignorance were unavailing. Intellectual intercommunication among men was secured. It culminated in the modern newspaper, which daily gives its contemporaneous intelligence from all parts of the world. Reading became a common occupation. In ancient society that art was possessed by comparatively few persons. Modern society owes some of its most striking characteristics to this change.
EFFECTS OF MARITIME ENTERPRISE. Such was the result of bringing into Europe the manufacture of paper and the printing-press. In like manner the introduction of the mariner’s compass was followed by imposing material and moral effects. These were–the discovery of America in consequence of the rivalry of the Venetians and Genoese about the India trade; the doubling of Africa by De Gama; and the circumnavigation of the earth by Magellan. With respect to the last, the grandest of all human undertakings, it is to be remembered that Catholicism had irrevocably committed itself to the dogma of a flat earth, with the sky as the floor of heaven, and hell in the under-world. Some of the Fathers, whose authority was held to be paramount, had, as we have previously said, furnished philosophical and religious arguments against the globular form. The controversy had now suddenly come to an end–the Church was found to be in error.
The correction of that geographical error was by no means the only important result that followed the three great voyages. The spirit of Columbus, De Gama, Magellan, diffused itself among all the enterprising men of Western Europe. Society had been hitherto living under the dogma of “loyalty to the king, obedience to the Church.” It had therefore been living for others, not for itself. The political effect of that dogma had culminated in the Crusades. Countless thousands had perished in wars that could bring them no reward, and of which the result had been conspicuous failure. Experience had revealed the fact that the only gainers were the pontiffs, cardinals, and other ecclesiastics in Rome, and the shipmasters of Venice. But, when it became known that the wealth of Mexico, Peru, and India, might be shared by any one who had enterprise and courage, the motives that had animated the restless populations of Europe suddenly changed. The story of Cortez and Pizarro found enthusiastic listeners everywhere. Maritime adventure supplanted religious enthusiasm.
If we attempt to isolate the principle that lay at the basis of the wonderful social changes that now took place, we may recognize it without difficulty. Heretofore each man had dedicated his services to his superior–feudal or ecclesiastical; now he had resolved to gather the fruits of his exertions himself. Individualism was becoming predominant, loyalty was declining into a sentiment. We shall now see how it was with the Church.
INDIVIDUALISM. Individualism rests on the principle that a man shall be his own master, that he shall have liberty to form his own opinions, freedom to carry into effect his resolves. He is, therefore, ever brought into competition with his fellow-men. His life is a display of energy.
To remove the stagnation of centuries front European life, to vivify suddenly what had hitherto been an inert mass, to impart to it individualism, was to bring it into conflict with the influences that had been oppressing it. All through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries uneasy strugglings gave a premonition of what was coming. In the early part of the sixteenth (1517), the battle was joined. Individualism found its embodiment in a sturdy German monk, and therefore, perhaps necessarily, asserted its rights under theological forms. There were some preliminary skirmishes about indulgences and other minor matters, but very soon the real cause of dispute came plainly into view. Martin Luther refused to think as he was ordered to do by his ecclesiastical superiors at Rome; he asserted that he had an inalienable right to interpret the Bible for himself.
At her first glance, Rome saw nothing in Martin Luther but a vulgar, insubordinate, quarrelsome monk. Could the Inquisition have laid hold of him, it would have speedily disposed of his affair; but, as the conflict went on, it was discovered that Martin was not standing alone. Many thousands of men, as resolute as himself, were coming up to his support; and, while he carried on the combat with writings and words, they made good his propositions with the sword.
THE REFORMATION. The vilification which was poured on Luther and his doings was so bitter as to be ludicrous. It was declared that his father was not his mother’s husband, but an impish incubus, who had deluded her; that, after ten years’ struggling with his conscience, he had become an atheist; that he denied the immortality of the soul; that he had composed hymns in honor of drunkenness, a vice to which he was unceasingly addicted; that he blasphemed the Holy Scriptures, and particularly Moses; that he did not believe a word of what he preached; that he had called the Epistle of St. James a thing of straw; and, above all, that the Reformation was no work of his, but, in reality, was due to a certain astrological position of the stars. It was, however, a vulgar saying among the Roman ecclesiastics that Erasmus laid the egg of the Reformation, and Luther hatched it.
Rome at first made the mistake of supposing that this was nothing more than a casual outbreak; she failed to discern that it was, in fact, the culmination of an internal movement which for two centuries had been going on in Europe, and which had been hourly gathering force; that, had there been nothing else, the existence of three popes–three obediences–would have compelled men to think, to deliberate, to conclude for themselves. The Councils of Constance and Basle taught them that there was a higher power than the popes. The long and bloody wars that ensued were closed by the Peace of Westphalia; and then it was found that Central and Northern Europe had cast off the intellectual tyranny of Rome, that individualism had carried its point, and had established the right of every man to think for himself.
DECOMPOSITION OF PROTESTANTISM. But it was impossible that the establishment of this right of private judgment should end with the rejection of Catholicism. Early in the movement some of the most distinguished men, such as Erasmus, who had been among its first promoters, abandoned it. They perceived that many of the Reformers entertained a bitter dislike of learning, and they were afraid of being brought under bigoted caprice. The Protestant party, having thus established its existence by dissent and separation, must, in its turn, submit to the operation of the same principles. A decomposition into many subordinate sects was inevitable. And these, now that they had no longer any thing to fear from their great Italian adversary, commenced partisan warfares on each other. As, in different countries, first one and then another sect rose to power, it stained itself with cruelties perpetrated upon its competitors. The mortal retaliations that had ensued, when, in the chances of the times, the oppressed got the better of their oppressors, convinced the contending sectarians that they must concede to their competitors what they claimed for themselves; and thus, from their broils and their crimes, the great principle of toleration extricated itself. But toleration is only an intermediate stage; and, as the intellectual decomposition of Protestantism keeps going on, that transitional condition will lead to a higher and nobler state –the hope of philosophy in all past ages of the world–a social state in which there shall be unfettered freedom for thought. Toleration, except when extorted by fear, can only come from those who are capable of entertaining and respecting other opinions than their own. It can therefore only come from philosophy. History teaches us only too plainly that fanaticism is stimulated by religion, and neutralized or eradicated by philosophy.
TOLERATION. The avowed object of the Reformation was, to remove from Christianity the pagan ideas and pagan rites engrafted upon it by Constantine and his successors, in their attempt to reconcile the Roman Empire to it. The Protestants designed to bring it back to its primitive purity; and hence, while restoring the ancient doctrines, they cast out of it all such practices as the adoration of the Virgin Mary and the invocation of saints. The Virgin Mary, we are assured by the Evangelists, had accepted the duties of married life, and borne to her husband several children. In the prevailing idolatry, she had ceased to be regarded as the carpenter’s wife; she had become the queen of heaven, and the mother of God.
DA VINCI. The science of the Arabians followed the invading track of their literature, which had come into Christendom by two routes–the south of France, and Sicily. Favored by the exile of the popes to Avignon, and by the Great Schism, it made good its foothold in Upper Italy. The Aristotelian or Inductive philosophy, clad in the Saracenic costume that Averroes had given it, made many secret and not a few open friends. It found many minds eager to receive and able to appreciate it. Among these were Leonardo da Vinci, who proclaimed the fundamental principle that experiment and observation are the only reliable foundations of reasoning in science, that experiment is the only trustworthy interpreter of Nature, and is essential to the ascertainment of laws. He showed that the action of two perpendicular forces upon a point is the same as that denoted by the diagonal of a rectangle, of which they represent the sides. From this the passage to the proposition of oblique forces was very easy. This proposition was rediscovered by Stevinus, a century later, and applied by him to the explanation of the mechanical powers. Da Vinci gave a clear exposition of the theory of forces applied obliquely on a lever, discovered the laws of friction subsequently demonstrated by Amontons, and understood the principle of virtual velocities. He treated of the conditions of descent of bodies along inclined planes and circular arcs, invented the camera-obscura, discussed correctly several physiological problems, and foreshadowed some of the great conclusions of modern geology, such as the nature of fossil remains, and the elevation of continents. He explained the earth-light reflected by the moon. With surprising versatility of genius he excelled as a sculptor, architect, engineer; was thoroughly versed in the astronomy, anatomy, and chemistry of his times. In painting, he was the rival of Michel Angelo; in a competition between them, he was considered to have established his superiority. His “Last Supper,” on the wall of the refectory of the Dominican convent of Sta. Maria delle Grazie, is well known, from the numerous engravings and copies that have been made of it.
ITALIAN SCIENTIFIC SOCIETIES. Once firmly established in the north of Italy, Science soon extended her sway over the entire peninsula. The increasing number of her devotees is indicated by the rise and rapid multiplication of learned societies. These were reproductions of the Moorish ones that had formerly existed in Granada and Cordova. As if to mark by a monument the track through which civilizing influences had come, the Academy of Toulouse, founded in 1345, has survived to our own times. It represented, however, the gay literature of the south of France, and was known under the fanciful title of “the Academy of Floral Games.” The first society for the promotion of physical science, the Academia Secretorum Naturae, was founded at Naples, by Baptista Porta. It was, as Tiraboschi relates, dissolved by the ecclesiastical authorities. The Lyncean was founded by Prince Frederic Cesi at Rome; its device plainly indicated its intention: a lynx, with its eyes turned upward toward heaven, tearing a triple-headed Cerberus with its claws. The Accademia del Cimento, established at Florence, 1657, held its meetings in the ducal palace. It lasted ten years, and was then suppressed at the instance of the papal government; as an equivalent, the brother of the grand-duke was made a cardinal. It numbered many great men, such as Torricelli and Castelli, among its members. The condition of admission into it was an abjuration of all faith, and a resolution to inquire into the truth. These societies extricated the cultivators of science from the isolation in which they had hitherto lived, and, by promoting their intercommunication and union, imparted activity and strength to them all.
Returning now from this digression, this historical sketch of the circumstances under which science was introduced into Europe, I pass to the consideration of its manner of action and its results.
INTELLECTUAL INFLUENCE OF SCIENCE. The influence of science on modern civilization has been twofold: 1. Intellectual; 2. Economical. Under these titles we may conveniently consider it.
Intellectually it overthrew the authority of tradition. It refused to accept, unless accompanied by proof, the dicta of any master, no matter how eminent or honored his name. The conditions of admission into the Italian Accademia del Cimento, and the motto adopted by the Royal Society of London, illustrate the position it took in this respect.
It rejected the supernatural and miraculous as evidence in physical discussions. It abandoned sign-proof such as the Jews in old days required, and denied that a demonstration can be given through an illustration of something else, thus casting aside the logic that had been in vogue for many centuries.
In physical inquiries, its mode of procedure was, to test the value of any proposed hypothesis, by executing computations in any special case on the basis or principle of that hypothesis, and then, by performing an experiment or making an observation, to ascertain whether the result of these agreed with the result of the computation. If it did not, the hypothesis was to be rejected.
We may here introduce an illustration or two of this mode of procedure:
THEORIES OF GRAVITATION AND PHLOGISTON. Newton, suspecting that the influence of the earth’s attraction, gravity, may extend as far as the moon, and be the force that causes her to revolve in her orbit round the earth, calculated that, by her motion in her orbit, she was deflected from the tangent thirteen feet every minute; but, by ascertaining the space through which bodies would fall in one minute at the earth’s surface, and supposing it to be diminished in the ratio of the inverse square, it appeared that the attraction at the moon’s orbit would draw a body through more than fifteen feet. He, therefore, for the time, considered his hypothesis as unsustained. But it so happened that Picard shortly afterward executed more correctly a new measurement of a degree; this changed the estimated magnitude of the earth, and the distance of the moon, which was measured in earth-semidiameters. Newton now renewed his computation, and, as I have related on a previous page, as it drew to a close, foreseeing that a coincidence was about to be established, was so much agitated that he was obliged to ask a friend to complete it. The hypothesis was sustained.
A second instance will sufficiently illustrate the method under consideration. It is presented by the chemical theory of phlogiston. Stahl, the author of this theory, asserted that there is a principle of inflammability, to which he gave the name phlogiston, having the quality of uniting with substances. Thus, when what we now term a metallic oxide was united to it, a metal was produced; and, if the phlogiston were withdrawn, the metal passed back into its earthy or oxidized state. On this principle, then, the metals were compound bodies, earths combined with phlogiston.
SCIENCE AND ECCLESIASTICISM. But during the eighteenth century the balance was introduced as an instrument of chemical research. Now, if the phlogistic hypothesis be true, it would follow that a metal should be the heavier, its oxide the lighter body, for the former contains something–phlogiston–that has been added to the latter. But, on weighing a portion of any metal, and also the oxide producible from it, the latter proves to be the heavier, and here the phlogistic hypothesis fails. Still further, on continuing the investigation, it may be shown that the oxide or calx, as it used to be called, has become heavier by combining with one of the ingredients of the air.
To Lavoisier is usually attributed this test experiment; but the fact that the weight of a metal increases by calcination was established by earlier European experimenters, and, indeed, was well known to the Arabian chemists. Lavoisier, however, was the first to recognize its great importance. In his hands it produced a revolution in chemistry.
The abandonment of the phlogistic theory is an illustration of the readiness with which scientific hypotheses are surrendered, when found to be wanting in accordance with facts. Authority and tradition pass for nothing. Every thing is settled by an appeal to Nature. It is assumed that the answers she gives to a practical interrogation will ever be true.
Comparing now the philosophical principles on which science was proceeding, with the principles on which ecclesiasticism rested, we see that, while the former repudiated tradition, to the latter it was the main support while the former insisted on the agreement of calculation and observation, or the correspondence of reasoning and fact, the latter leaned upon mysteries; while the former summarily rejected its own theories, if it saw that they could not be coordinated with Nature, the latter found merit in a faith that blindly accepted the inexplicable, a satisfied contemplation of “things above reason.” The alienation between the two continually increased. On one side there was a sentiment of disdain, on the other a sentiment of hatred. Impartial witnesses on all hands perceived that science was rapidly undermining ecclesiasticism.
MATHEMATICS. Mathematics had thus become the great instrument of scientific research, it had become the instrument of scientific reasoning. In one respect it may be said that it reduced the operations of the mind to a mechanical process, for its symbols often saved the labor of thinking. The habit of mental exactness it encouraged extended to other branches of thought, and produced an intellectual revolution. No longer was it possible to be satisfied with miracle-proof, or the logic that had been relied upon throughout the middle ages. Not only did it thus influence the manner of thinking, it also changed the direction of thought. Of this we may be satisfied by comparing the subjects considered in the transactions of the various learned societies with the discussions that had occupied the attention of the middle ages.
But the use of mathematics was not limited to the verification of theories; as above indicated, it also furnished a means of predicting what had hitherto been unobserved. In this it offered a counterpart to the prophecies of ecclesiasticism. The discovery of Neptune is an instance of the kind furnished by astronomy, and that of conical refraction by the optical theory of undulations.
But, while this great instrument led to such a wonderful development in natural science, it was itself undergoing development–improvement. Let us in a few lines recall its progress.
The germ of algebra may be discerned in the works of Diophantus of Alexandria, who is supposed to have lived in the second century of our era. In that Egyptian school Euclid had formerly collected the great truths of geometry, and arranged them in logical sequence. Archimedes, in Syracuse, had attempted the solution of the higher problems by the method of exhaustions. Such was the tendency of things that, had the patronage of science been continued, algebra would inevitably have been invented.