it became even more popular, and lowered itself to the very humblest of mankind. In Jesuitism it made a last effort to govern mankind by an incorporated caste. But Jesuitism found it necessary to reject many of the peculiarities of Monasticism: it made itself secular to overcome the world. But the compromise could not endure. Over the Indians of South America alone, but for the force of circumstances, it might have been lasting. In Eastern India it became a kind of Christian Paganism; in Europe a moral and religious Rationalism, fatal both to morals and to religion.

Throughout this period, then, of at least ten centuries, Latin Christianity was the religion of the Western Latin Chrisnations of Europe: Latin the religious language; tianity. the Latin translation of the Scriptures the religious code of mankind. Latin theology was alone inexhaustibly prolific, and held wide and unshaken authority. On most speculative tenets this theology had left to Greek controversialists to argue out the endless transcendental questions of religion, and contented itself with resolutely embracing the results, which she fixed in her inflexible theory of doctrine. The only controversy which violently disturbed the Western Church was the practical one, on which the East looked almost with indifference, the origin and motive principle of human action-grace and free will. This, from Augustine to Luther and Jansenius, was the interminable, still reviving problem. Latin Christian literature, like Greek, might have seemed already to have passed its meridian after Tertullian, Cyprian, Ambrose, and, high above all, Augustine. The age of true Latin poetry, no doubt, had long been over; the imaginative in Christianity could only find its expression to some extent in the legend and in the ritual; but, except in a very few hymns, it was not till out of the wedlock of Latin with the Northern tongues, not till after new languages had been born in the freshness of youth, that there were great Christian poets:

poets not merely writing on religious subjects, but instinct with the religious life of Christianity, Dante, Ariosto, Tasso, Shakspeare, Milton, Calderon, Schiller. But not merely did Latin theology expand into another vast and teeming period, that of the Schoolmen, culminating in Aquinas; but Latin being the common language, the clergy the only learned body throughout Europe, it was that of law, in both its branches; of science, of philosophy, even of history; of letters; in short, of civilisation. Latin Christianity, when her time was come, had her great æra of art, not only as the preserver of the traditions of Greek and Roman skill in architecture, and some of the technical operations in sculpture and painting, but original and creative. It was art comprehending architecture, painting, sculpture, and music, Christian in its fullest sense, as devoted entirely to Christian uses, expressive of Christian sentiments, arising out of and kindling in congenial spirits Christian thought and feeling.

The characteristic of Latin Christianity was that of the Its character. old Latin world-a firm and even obstinate adherence to legal form, whether of traditionary usage or written statute; the strong assertion of, and the severe subordination to authority. Its wildest and most eccentric fanaticism, for the most part, and for many centuries, respected external unity. It was the Roman empire, again extended over Europe by an universal code and a provincial government; by an hierarchy of religious prætors or proconsuls, and a host of inferior officers, each in strict subordination to those immediately above them, and gradually descending to the very lowest ranks of society: the whole with a certain degree of freedom of action, but a constrained and limited freedom, and with an appeal to the spiritual Cæsar in the last resort.

Latin Christianity maintained its unshaken dominion until, what I venture to call, Teutonic Christianity, aided by

Throughout the world, wherever the Teutonic is the groundwork of the

the invention of paper and of printing, asserted its independence, threw off the great mass of traditionary Teutonic religion, and out of the Bible summoned forth Christianity. a more simple faith, which seized at once on the reason, on the conscience, and on the passions of men. This faith, with a less perfectly organised outward system, has exercised a more profound moral control, through the sense of strictly personal responsibility. Christianity became a vast influence working irregularly on individual minds, rather than a great social system, coerced by a central supremacy, by an all-embracing spiritual control, and held together by rigid usage, or by outward signs of common citizenship. Its multiplicity and variety, rather than its unity, was the manifestation of its life; or rather its unity lay deeper in its being, and consisted more in intellectual sympathies, in affinities of thought and feeling, of principles and motives, in a more remote or rather untraceable kindred through the common Father and common Saviour. Ceremonial uniformity seemed to retire into subordinate importance and estimation. Books gradually became, as far as the instruction of the human race, a co-ordinate priesthood. No longer rare, costly, inaccessible, or unintelligible, they descended to classes which they had never before approached. Eloquence or argument, instead of expiring on the ears of an entranced but limited auditory, addressed mankind at large, flew through kingdoms, crossed seas,

language, the Reformation either is, or, as in Southern Germany, has been dominant; wherever Latin, Latin Christianity has retained its ascendancy.

It is obvious that I use Christianity, and indeed Teutonic Christianity, in its most comprehensive significance, from national episcopal churches, like that of England, which aspires to maintain the doctrines and organisation of the apostolic, or immediately post-apostolic ages, onward to that dubious and undefinable verge where Christianity melts into a high moral theism, a faith which would expand to purer spirituality with

VOL. I.

less distinct dogmatic system; or that which would hardly call itself more than a Christian philosophy, a religious Rationalism. I presume not, neither is it the office of the historian, to limit the blessings of our religion either in this world or the world to come; "there is One who will know his own." As an historian I can disfranchise none who claim, even on the slightest grounds, the privileges and hopes of Christianity: repudiate none who do not place themselves without the pale of believers and worshippers of Christ, or of God through Christ.

C

perpetuated and promulgated themselves to an incalculable extent. Individual men could not but be working out in their own studies, in their own chambers, in their own minds, the great problems of faith. The primal records of Christianity, in a narrow compass, passed into all the vernacular languages of the world, where they could not be followed by the vast, scattered, and ambiguous volumes of tradition. The clergy became less and less a separate body (the awakened conscience of men refused to be content with vicarious religion through them); they ceased to be the sole arbiters of man's destiny in another life: they sank back into society, to be distinguished only as the models and promoters of moral and religious virtue, and so of order, happiness, peace, and the hope of immortality. They derived their influence less from a traditionary divine commission, or vested authority, than from their individual. virtue, knowledge, and earnest, if less authoritative, inculcation of divine truth. Monasticism was rejected as alien to the primal religion of the Gospel; the family life, the life of the Christian family, resumed its place as the highest state of Christian grace and perfection.

Progressive

of Christian

This progressive development of Christianity seems the inevitable consequence of man's progress in knowdevelopment ledge, and in the more general dissemination of ity. that knowledge. Human thought is almost compelled to assert, and cannot help asserting, its original freedom. And as that progress is manifestly a law of human nature, proceeding from the divine Author of our being, this self-adaptation of the one true religion to that progress must have the divine sanction, and may be supposed, without presumption, to have been contemplated in the counsels of Infinite Wisdom.

The full and more explicit expansion of these views on this Avatar of Teutonic Christianity must await its proper place at the close of our history.