A

DISCOURSE

ADDRESSED TO THE

IN THEIR

BY

1848.

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Reprint and digital file August 15, 2001.

Willison Editor's note: This discourse begins with a tribute to an unnamed luminary who recently passed into death, no doubt well known to the audience, and well thought of by them. Beginning on page 8, the historical narrative of Christianity's potent impact on western civilization for the preceding eighteen centuries is expertly revealed by Mr. Bacon. This discourse is of unparalleled value to modern students, as the author succinctly states Christianity's reforming effects in civilizing government, suppressing barbaric practices, preserving and improving learning, and the arts.

Leonard Bacon, Yale, 1820, graduate of Andover Seminary, was pastor of the First Church of New Haven, and served as a professor and lecturer at Yale Divinity School. Source: Concise dictionary of American Anthology, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1977.

The following begins the original text:

How different are the hues of thought and emotion with which the old man and the young meet, on a day like this, in the halls of their common Alma Mater! Here, as in all promiscuous gatherings, the great majority are the young; and from them, and from that sympathy with their exhilaration which even age and sadness love to feel, the occasion receives its character of joyousness. And on the other hand, in the presence of the aged who have come to look once more upon the altered scene of years long past, when life was a hope and not a remembrance—and in the presence of those upon whose countenances time and care are ploughing their furrows, and whose hearts many a bitter experience has saddened—all minds are touched with graver sympathies, and the bounding heart of youth beats with a more measured motion.

We meet not the living only in this reunion to-day. The dead are present to our thoughts. Many a form, long since departed from among the living, seems to haunt these classic shades. The presence of the aged, who in their youth learned wisdom from the eloquent lips of Dwight, or were kindled by the enthusiasm of Stiles, brings us into a living connection with their teachers and their fathers, and with many a memorable name of their departed coevals. The simple record to which we have just been listening—the affecting record of the names that are hence-

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forth starred upon our catalogue—is of itself enough to awaken, even in the youngest of us, some sad and earnest thoughts. And yet how different are the trains of thought and the shades of emotion which the reading of this record calls up in the young man, from those which it calls up in him who feels he is no longer young. For example, among the names in that long obituary, is one which will be remembered till "American Law" is forgotten. Since our last anniversary, be who was then the surviving com-peer of Story and Marshall—the most illustrious and honored of all the living jurists of America—he whose classic writings in the science of the profession which he so long adorned, are cited with deference in lands beyond the ocean—he whose integrity, abhorrent of all injustice, and commanding universal veneration, was combined not only with the profoundest learning and the readiest sagacity, penetrating the obscure and unraveling the intricate, but with a childlike simplicity of manners, an undecaying verdure of every kind affection, and an ingenuousness and transparency of soul, which made him a universal favorite—has descended at last to the grave. To the young men among us, the mention of that great name in the record of death’s doings," is something like a trumpet-call, quickening the pulse of youthful aspiration. But what is it to him who finds himself to-day the last survivor of that class of 1781? So when the same record reminded us how lately it was that death, by a sudden stroke, removed from the highest council of the nation a Senator, who well sustained the honors of a nation which his kindred of former generations had made illustrious, and who, having served his native state and our common country, for a long course of years, in various offices of high distinction, died, while to

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human view the career of his usefulness and the accumulation of his honors had not been completed,—how different the impression on the buoyant heart of youth, from that which the same announcement produced upon those who have been his associates in the various walks of public life, and especially upon those who, almost half a century ago, began to know him as a classmate. There was a name in the record from the class of 1820. To our younger brethren, the graduates of recent years, that name recalled their school-boy lessons; for it stood in the title page of the admirable Grammar which was their guide to the knowledge of the majestic Roman tongue, and which, while teaching them the rules of Syntax, taught them the analysis of thought as well as the mechanical agreement and government of words. But how different the thoughts which that name, thus enrolled upon the record of the dead, awakens in our minds to whom it is the name of a classmate! All his career, from the long past days of our college life, rises before us in one vista. We think of him as he was when he was the companion of our studies, our debates, our walks; and in the same thought we think of his attenuated form laid down at last in the old cemetery where his ancestors for two centuries have been gathered—all but the parents that survive him. His work is done. His contribution to the progress of his country, and to the progress of mankind, is completed. His conflict with disease, in a body too frail for the activity of a mind that never rested, is all over. He has escaped that descent by which we are going down into the vale of years. He has escaped the bereavements that for us must thicken along our way to the grave. His head shall not be blanched by anxiety or grief, or by the frosty touch of time, as

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ours must be if we live on. Where he lives now, the tongues of earth have ceased, as needless in the communion of perfected spirits.; human knowledge bath vanished away in the access of eternal light; and charity never faileth. There duration is not measured, as we measure it, by the flight of years that mark us with the traces of decay.

See then the difference between youth and age in respect to the associations of thought and feeling that connect themselves with the flight of time. He who has past the noon of life, finds his coevals gone or vanishing, and himself borne on a swift resistless current toward the grave. Youth, on the other hand, like immortality, is naturally unconscious of decay. To the old man, life is all remembrance. To the young man, life is all hope. The old man’s hopes in this world are for the young whom he expects to survive him. The young man hopes for himself; hope fills his soul—the hope of what he will be, and of what he will do. His whole consciousness yearns and brightens with hope. It is the unnatural extinction of all this hope, which makes the death of youth just ripening into manhood, the saddest thing, save guilt, in this sad world. There is no voice of grief like the wail of affection over such a death. What a dirge-like effect is there in those few words, at the opening of Milton’s monody on his college friend:

What an experience is it, when the young scholar, in the midst of hopes and plans for life, is touched with the presentiment of early death—then grows dimly conscious that

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the springs of life within are broken—watches the disease that is wasting his vital organs—gives up one cherished purpose after another—sees the companions of his former studies pressing on and leaving him behind—and at last, with the slow consuming hectic [ fever, Ed. ] in his veins, resigns himself to the certainty of death, and waits in pain and weakness for the hour! How tender are the sympathies with which his friends watch by his bedside, or hear the story of his early death! But the deepest and saddest impression is not upon his youthful friends. Their elastic spirits soon throw off the pressure, while older hearts bleed with the unforgotten sorrow. How can they whose very being is made up of hope, form any conception of a grief which says, "Would God I had died for thee !" As they press on, eager to turn their hopes into realities, how soon will they cease to speak, save at long intervals, of him from whom they were so early parted!

"He, the young and strong, who cherished

Noble longings for the strife,

By the roadside fell and perished,

Weary with the march of life;"

and how soon does he pass from their thoughts!

Yet on such an occasion as this—in such a gathering— they think of him again; his name is on their lips,

"Breathed softly, like the household name

Of one whom God has taken ;"

and the saddening remembrance brings their minds into something like sympathy with those to whom life is losing the garish brightness of its morn, and is clothing itself with the sober hues and trailing shadows of the day’s decline.

Pardon me that I have indulged so long in these musings. It was not thus that I intended to introduce the

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subject which I have chosen. I was thinking how fast the stream of time is bearing us along—how much of the world’s history has been unfolded within the period of our personal remembrance—how suddenly we find ourselves transferred from our earlier years into the middle of the nineteenth century. But it occurred to me that such thoughts belong only to those whose age, like mine, is passing into the sere and yellow leaf, and whose memory therefore runs back to a period before the birth of the living majority. And thus I was reminded that another generation has grown up, and is already beginning imperceptibly to crowd us off the stage—a generation to whom the burning of Moscow, the treaties of Vienna, the battle of New Orleans, and the Missouri compromise, are events of a by-gone age; and to whom the steamboat scorning the wind, and the railway with the snorting of its iron steeds, are no more a novelty or a wonder than the printing press.

And yet the youngest of us is conscious of living in the midst of changes that are to tell in history. This middle of the nineteenth century—this identical year 1848— impresses every one of us, in one degree or another, with the sense of an impending crisis in the affairs of the world. The nations are moved and shaken by the action of great forces, which, however inadequately analyzed or understood, are manifestly preparing a new order of things, not for Europe only and our own America, but ultimately for every habitable region of the globe. Among those forces, there is one which none of us can overlook. If there are those who think that religious ideas and principles have nothing to do, either directly or indirectly, with these great world-changes—if there are those who think that Christianity has no longer any influence upon

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the progress of the nations, and that the movements which are now taking place in Christendom, [ Commonly known as the countries of Europe, and Northern America, Ed. ]and which are ultimately to change the aspect of the world, might just as naturally have taken place had Europe and America been Mohammedan or Pagan—if there are those who, looking upon the events and manifest tendencies of the passing age, can avoid discerning the action of Christianity upon the destinies of the world—they are not here among the men who have shared so freely in the intellectual and moral nurture afforded by this Christian University. [ Yale, Ed.]

I trust, then, that you will give me no reluctant attention while I attempt to direct your thoughts to such considerations as present themselves, tending to illustrate the action and influence of Christianity as an element or power in history. Such a subject, if we can bring it fairly before our minds, can hardly fail to suggest some thoughts well suited to quicken our courage and to invigorate our diligence in the various departments of effort which we occupy as educated men in a free and Christian country.

Let us then, at the outset, explain to ourselves as distinctly as we can, what it is that we mean when we speak of Christianity as an element in history—an historic power.

History, it is to be remembered, is not a record of accidents or events that cannot be referred to causes; it is something very different from a dead chronological table. Nor is it merely or chiefly a record of the achievements of individual men, whether warriors or statesmen. The individual is not understood, till we look deeper than the surface of his personal performances, and understand what the forces were that acted upon him and through him. History then is concerned not so much with individuals as with the life of ages and of nations. Doubtless the first

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function of the historian is to chronicle facts ; his performance in the nature of it—by its very title—is a " story" rather than a speculation. Yet the facts which are the subject matter of history, in the enlarged and scientific meaning of the word, are comprehensive facts rather than individual occurrences ; not isolated facts and unexplained, but facts in their sequence, their connections, their dependence and their tendencies—facts in that enlarged and intelligent statement of them which includes not only the outward phenomena as they strike the vulgar and un-inquiring eye, but also their inward causes as grasped by philosophic apprehension. History, then, in the true meaning of the word—history as distinguished from a mere chronicle of occurrences—is a record of the action of causes. Directly or indirectly, by formal exposition or by impressive suggestion, it must needs reveal the great forces which variously affect, from age to age, the destiny of nations and the destiny of the race.

It is also to be remembered, that the action of these forces, whatever they may be, is always complicated. The destinies of nations and of humanity, from age to age, are affected by a great variety of causes acting in every variety of combination. Rarely, if ever, can any great historic phenomenon be adequately explained, without a careful analysis of the causes which have been employed in producing it. Sometimes the tendency of various forces, physical and moral, is in one direction, and the result is to be referred to their concurrent action. Sometimes one of these forces counteracts another, and the result is modified accordingly. The climate of a country, its soil, the configuration of its surface, its position in respect to the sea, the length and breadth—the depth and swift—

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ness of its rivers, and the outline of its coast, have much to do in forming the character, and determining the destiny, of its population. The original stock from which that population came, or the fusion of various races to which their origin may be traced—in other words, the peculiarities of physical constitution which they have inherited, and which are not altogether dependent on climate—constitute another force which cannot but reveal itself in all that people’s history. Traditionary habits and sentiments, ancestral recollections, national remembrances embodied in story and in song, or sustained by monumental structures and memorial celebrations, are another power that acts continually, and sometimes intensely, on national character, and so on national destiny. Political institutions, laws, and the administration of government; commercial relations and habits, and all sorts of intercourse with foreigners; methods of education, and systems of opinion and philosophy; religious ideas, and the objects and forms of worship—all have their efficacy, severally and jointly, on the development and tendency of a nation’s life.

Nor should it be forgotten that these various forces act upon each other, so that in many instances the forces themselves undergo change from age to age. Physical causes may seem at first sight to be permanent and inflexible. At first sight it would seem as if the same physical causes which acted on the population of New England in the middle of the seventeenth century must be acting now, and must continue to act forever. Is not the climate the same? Are not the soil and surface the same ? Are not the indentations of the coast the same ? Do not the rivers still keep their channels ; and the mountains rest upon their old foundations? Do not the same three thou-

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sand miles of ocean roll between our rock-bound shore and Europe? A little recollection, however, will show us that many of these physical causes which have so powerfully affected the history of New England in time past, have been themselves so modified by the action of moral forces, that they are no longer what they once were. The climate, considered as a fact in geography, is indeed unchanged ;—the sun performs the same circuit in our heavens, the winters are as long and snowy, the summers are as bright and sultry, as they were two centuries ago; probably a record of the weather for any brief cycle of years, would show the same extremes and average of temperature, the same vicissitudes of sunshine and of rain, of wind and calm, as a similar record would have shown at any former period. To whatever extent then the operation of the climate—considered as affecting the condition, the habits and the character of the people, and so acting upon history—may have been modified by counteracting moral causes, the climate itself, we may say, has probably undergone no sensible modification. But of the great physical causes that have affected the character and history of these New England states, what else is there which remains entirely unchanged? Not the soil surely. The turf which we tread is not the virgin mold which the unskillful plough share of our fathers turned up to the vernal sunshine two centuries ago. Here, as everywhere else, the soil is continually changing under the hand of culture. Bad husbandry exhausts its capabilities, till scientific agriculture comes to restore them and augment them. Nor can it be said that the surface of that New England which our fathers won for us, remains unchanged. The forest and the swamp have given place to farms and

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villages; and the outspread landscape rejoices in the variety of meadows and cornfields, groves and orchards. Two centuries ago, the entire coast of New England was only the wild outline, with its promontories and its indentations, its sandbars and its hidden rocks, just as nature left it. But now the moral forces of civilization have been here; and every lighthouse, every wharf, every breakwater, and every buoy, tells us of the change. Nor are the rivers all the same, though bearing for the most part the names their old possessors gave them. Here pouring a deeper volume through a more navigable channel—there spanned with bridges—there again diverted into race-courses, and their roaring freedom tamed into subserviency to the production of wealth—their power as physical causes acting on the character and destiny of the people, is materially modified. The mountains, still resting on their old foundations, have ceased to be the barriers which they once were in the way of intercourse; the iron track of the railway now winding along their sides, now piercing along their wildest ravines, now forcing its passage through their everlasting granite, has brought the mountains low and made the rough places plain. The ocean itself no longer separates New England from the old world as of yore. The seclusion in which our fathers dwelt, when the Atlantic with its multitudinous waves guarded them on the one hand, and the mysterious depths of the forest closed around them on the other—that isolation from the world which had so much to do in the formation of the original New England character—is now forever broken. Commerce and the inventive faculties of man have converted the wild waste of waters into a thronged highway of rapid intercourse; and Europe is less than half as far from

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us as it was from our fathers. Thus moral causes, every where, are not only compelled to act in combination with physical causes, cooperating or counteracting, but they manifest their power by acting upon those physical causes themselves to change their character. Even those hereditary physical peculiarities, or constitutional aptitudes, by which one race of men is distinguished from another, and which are unquestionably among the most powerful and stubborn of all the physical forces that act in history, yield, in the slow course of ages, to the moral power of civilization and religion; and the blood of barbarous races is gradually ennobled, while that of the proudest is slowly tainted with debasement, in the heraldry of nations. And if physical causes are thus acted upon and modified by immaterial moral forces, how much more are those moral forces, in their turn, acted upon and modified by the power of physical causes, or by each other. Commerce, that mighty power in history, deserts, from time to time, its ancient paths; and what was once a crowded emporium, gorgeous with riches gathered from all climes, becomes a lonely rock, where a few fishermen have built their huts, and where they spread their nets to dry. In the peaceful intercourse of nations, or their warlike collisions; in the migration of tribes from one region to another; in the slow influence of climate and of geographical position upon national character; in the accumulation of wealth and of the means of luxurious enjoyment; in the growth of population and the progress of industry and knowledge; and in the convulsions and destructions of war, changes are involved, by which all the moral forces that act upon the character and destiny of nations are materially and permanently modified. Thus laws, institutions,, forms of government,

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manners, opinions, systems of thought, are continually undergoing change, as they act upon each other, or are acted upon by forces of another order.

In speaking, then, of Christianity as a power in history, we regard it as one element in the great combination of those forces which determine the destinies of nations and the destinies of humanity. We regard it not exclusively in its action on the individual mind which it emancipates from the power of selfishness and elevates to communion with the mind of God, but rather in its action on the life of nations and the progress of the ages. We regard it not as acting alone, and producing results which are simply and perfectly its own, but as resisting or aiding, modifying or controlling the action of other forces ;—not as achieving its ends with the sudden grandeur of a creative fiat, hut as working towards its ends by long processes like the processes of growth and life in the realms of nature. We regard it not merely in its own intrinsic purity as it came from the mind of God, but in its modifications and varieties as it is received into the minds of men, and as it is acted upon and subjected to change by the various forces with which it is combined in history. Christianity in history, is Christianity as affected by the ignorance, the prejudices, the errors, the habits and passions, the entire intellectual and moral being of those who receive it. It is Christianity as affected by the diversities of language, of climate, or of blood—by varieties in the frame of government, in the structure of society, and in the tone of national sentiment—and by the modifications of learning, and philosophy. It is Christianity not in the abstract, but in the concrete—not in its Divine ideal, incapable of change, but in its human realization, a thing for develop-

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ment and progress, for action and reaction, for acquisition and assimilation. It is like the grain of mustard seed sown in the earth, there quickened by the softening moisture and the genial warmth, bursting its tiny cuticle, yearning and working toward the light, building itself up by materials attracted and assimilated from the soil and from the air, and so growing into a tree. It is like leaven working in the mass till all is leavened.

If now we call to our thoughts the merest outline of the world’s history since the commencement of the Christian era, it cannot but strike us in a moment that the history of human progress, from that date to the present hour, is inseparable from the history of Christianity. The one cannot be philosophically or fairly given without the other; they are not merely parallel; they are not merely intermixed; they are parts of one whole; each is the complement of the other. He who should attempt to give the history of Christianity, disconnected from its relations to what is called secular history—he who should attempt to embody in a continuous narrative the lives of saints and fathers, of martyrs and confessors, of theologians and reformers, without reference to the history of the successive ages in which they lived and acted and which acted upon them—would fail of giving any other than the narrowest and most inadequate conception of Christianity itself. And on the other hand, what breadth of view or comprehensiveness of exposition—what truth or fairness—can there be in any history of civilization since the Christian era, or in any history of particular countries or races within the compass of the civilized world, if that history is so conceived and put together as not to involve the history of Christianity? At the moment at which the Roman empire,

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having attained the summit of its grandeur and its splendor, began to exhibit those tendencies to ruin which were the necessary consequences of its growth, Christianity emerges from the obscurity of its origin, rises above the contempt of those who had heard of it only as one of the factions of Judaism, and thrusts itself as a strong and growing reality upon the attention of the philosophic Pliny and the imperial Trajan. From that time onward, the history of the empire in its slow decay is full of the workings of Christianity——full of the changes that attend the progress of a great moral revolution—full of the collisions of Christianity with hostile or counteracting forces. The marvelous phenomenon is exhibited, of a religion asserting its independence of the state, disowning all nationality, building itself up by argument and fearless controversy, and assuming every where and for every man the right of individual belief and the obligation to believe the truth. In the collisions which ensue, the world of thought is shaken to its foundations; new forms of literature, and of intellectual effort, make their appearance; new themes of discussion, and new objects of affection and of passion occupy the attention of mankind; and new views of the energies and capabilities of the human soul are revealed from the depths of new experiences. In like manner, the history of the middle ages, commencing with the downfall of the Roman Empire, is full of the working of this great force. As the rudiments of a new civilization begin to appear, we discover not only that conquest, and the coming in of new possessors and rulers, and the peculiar genius of the conquering races have acted upon Christianity; but also that Christianity, corrupted as it is, has become the teacher of the barbarians, is conquering the conquerors,

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is modifying their institutions and their characters, and is continually showing its presence as a power in the progress of Europe through those ages of confusion. He who would truly know the history of the middle ages, must study well the Christianity of those ages, its theology, its discipline, its institutions, its relations to the various orders in society, its forms of devotion, and its earnestness and enthusiasm, as well as its corruptions and its abortive struggles after reformation. Nor can the history of any single European state or people be mastered, without a specific study of the particular influence of Christianity on the institutions and structure of the state, and on the condition, the morals, and the entire character of the people. Strange as the suggestion may seem to the unquestioning admirers of flume, the attempt to narrate the history of England from the time of the Heptarchy to the present age, without a serious study and an earnest appreciation of the religious element in the life of the English people, can achieve at the best only a splendid fiction founded upon fact. It is as if one should narrate the history of the crusades, and overlook entirely the medieval veneration of the holy sepulchre,—or the history of the British conquests in Asia, without any reference to the organization or the nature of the East India Company. It is as if one should elaborately record the history of our late Mexican war, and yet never recognize, from first to last, the statesmanship of Polk, or the generalship of Scott and Taylor. What philosophic calmness of narration—what classic beauty and severity of style—what accuracy in the geographical and statistical details—could make amends for such an omission? There is as much of the true history of England to be learned from Shakespeare as from Hume.

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We have no time to analyze the vast complexity of history since the commencement of the Christian era. Years spent in the analysis would not suffice to trace out all the connection between Christianity and the progress of the human race for these eighteen centuries. Yet there are some great topics of illustration that stand out too prominently not to command our attention, though only for a moment.

Think then of the ancient Church, and of the power which it exercised for so many ages on the fortunes of the civilized world. Far as we are from acknowledging the divine authority or the divine origin of the Church, as the word is ordinarily used in history, we may yet admire the grandeur of that institution, so unique in its nature and position, and so powerful in its influence. Christianity makes its first appearance in the story of the Roman empire, as the principle of a new and peculiar association among men. Acting for a while on individual minds alone, and naturally seizing, by an elective affinity, those minds that were in some sense prepared to receive its influence, it was every where detaching its disciples from many of their old connections, and binding them to each other by new sympathies and duties. The new ideas and facts which are the substance of Christianity, were the bond of a peculiar fellowship. In the society of those who had one hope, "one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all," the differences of nation and of race were merged; the Jew and the Greek, the barbarian and the Scythian, the slave and the freeman, were on one level. To them the distinction between the Christian and the not Christian, was one, in comparison with which all other distinctions were of no account. In this sense

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Christianity was Catholic; it was not local or national, but universal; it was for all men alike, of whatever race or country or condition. Thus in the decay of the old nationalities which Rome had conquered, and which the empire was slowly dissolving and absorbing, the Church came into being and began its growth—a new association, held together at first not by the force of any outward formal constitution, but by the force of living sympathies—a new organic unity, with its branches every where partaking of one life, and with a capacity of indefinite extension. The constant hostility of the state gave to this new fellowship an increasing compactness, invested its leading minds and its official functionaries with increasing power, and forced it into more completeness of organization, till the empire, unable to maintain the conflict, surrendered its gods and acknowledged the power of the Church. In proportion as all other institutions grew weaker and approached the verge of dissolution, the Church, in the freshness of its youth, and animated by a higher and independent life, grew stronger; and when at last the deluge of barbarian conquest had swept over the empire, the Church stood up, stronger than ever, to accomplish its destiny.

And what was that destiny? As we pause to think of it,—as we call up to our thoughts the part which that great institution had in the birth and infancy of modern civilization, the mind is bewildered with the grandeur and complexity of the conception. The Church, having survived the downfall of the empire, and having achieved the conversion of the barbarians to a Christianity modified indeed and barbarized, yet not wholly corrupted,—became the most remarkable institution, and the most powerful, whether for good or evil, that the world has ever seen.

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We have our Protestant and Puritan judgment strongly made up, against the superstitious Christianity and the hierarchical and domineering Church of the middle ages; but that judgment needs revising, if it hinders us from seeing that even a superstitious Christianity was better than none, or if it forbids us to acknowledge that the great conservative power of those ages—the power which counteracted the universal tendency to barbarism—was in the Church rather than out of it. The Church, with all its superstitions, was the ark that saved Christianity itself from being lost in that universal deluge; it contained indeed, unclean and ravenous beasts, but within it, as it floated on, was the only hope for the restoration of life and beauty to the desolated world. The Church, like that primitive Christianity of which it held the tradition, was a power of association and of union; it remembered that in the fellowship of Christians the distinctions of nationality, of blood and of outward condition are insignificant; and it became the efficient means of fusing and blending the conquerors with the conquered. The Church kept up the use of letters and of a learned language, and thus gave dignity and sanctity to learning. The Church having established itself with its hierarchy in every kingdom, in every principality, in every city, in every castle, was the organization which gave unity to Europe, and held its parts together as members of one system, all owing allegiance to one law higher than the will of kings. The Church stood in the sight of all Europe, the embodiment and organization of a power essentially moral and yet more coercive and more terrible than the power of the sword. It stood between the king and his people, between the feudal lord and his vassal, between the master

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and his helpless thrall. The mailed baron with his retainers around him—the belted earl in his castle—the king amid his peers—trembled before the unarmed representative of spiritual power. The Church had only to pronounce her sentence against a faithless and oppressive sovereign; and his subjects were absolved from their allegiance, and the king was an outcast. Doubtless that power of the Church was built on superstition—doubtless it tended to infinite corruption and abuse; but in those ages of the barbarous infancy of states and nations, it was something for the welfare of the world, that there was a power to which kings were responsible, and which was mightier than armies. Nor has that Church of the middle ages ceased, even yet, to act upon the world. Not only does it survive in its reputed successor, the Church of the Council of Trent, and in the ecclesiastical forms of those countries that own allegiance to the See of Rome; its influence is felt in Protestant Europe and Protestant America. The doctrines even of Puritan creeds are indebted for their precision to the disputatious of the medieval theologians. Our chairs of theology, and our pulpits of popular religious teaching, are still reechoing—often unconscious of any obligation to the past—the metaphysical expositions of doctrine that were first brought forth by the intense intellectual activity that studied, and lectured, and wrangled, in the crowded universities of what we call "the dark ages." Of those universities, the predecessors and models of our own, the Church was the author. That Church is still acting on the intellectual progress of mankind, through every university and every college in Christendom. Nay more; it has its material monuments that stand like the great objects of nature to act upon

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mankind from age to age. The elder cities of Europe, from the Mediterranean to the Baltic, are still beautified with old colossal piles of sacred architecture, touching irresistibly that sense of grandeur and of beauty which thousands mistake for religion. How many a traveler from this new world, as he has paced those "long drawn aisles," has been carried away by the appeal to his imagination and his unreasoning sensibilities, and has grown ashamed of his iconoclast Puritan blood! Who can measure the influence which the cathedrals of Europe, considered simply as masses of architecture, have had on the character and destiny of Europe. Had Cromwell battered down the cathedrals of England, when he dethroned the king and subdued the peerage, England had been revolutionized forever. It was the Church that built the cathedrals.

So much for the influence which Christianity has exerted upon history through the Church, as it arose in the declining ages of the Roman empire, and afterwards made itself the great controlling institution of Europe in the middle ages. Look now for a moment at the influence which Christianity has had in history, and is to have, through the great movement of the Reformation.

In that great rending of Western Christendom, which we commonly call the Reformation, there was strictly no new element. The elements which then produced the explosion and separation, had existed for ages within the enclosure of the so-called Catholic Church. On the one hand there was Christianity as modified by the genius of the Romanic and Romano-Celtic nations; on the other hand, there was Christianity as modified by being received into the minds of the Teutonic races. On the one hand, there was the tendency to spiritual despotism which had

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grown up in the Church and had become inseparable from its existing constitution; on the other hand, there was the tendency to intellectual and spiritual freedom, which is inseparable from the Gospel. On the one hand, there was the ever accumulating mass of tradition, and the concurrent growth of superstitious opinions; on the other hand, there was the silent acknowledgment of the Scriptures as the original source of Christian doctrine, and the conscious or unconscious implication of their supreme authority, as a revelation of the word of God. On the one hand were the irresistible tendencies to corruption of morals, resulting from the corrupted doctrines and the mischievous discipline which the Church had established; on the other hand was the outcry of the moral sense of Europe. On the one hand were the Inquisition, the rich and luxurious monasteries, the mendicant friars, and the peddlers of indulgences; on the other hand were the universities. On the one hand was the Pope, supported by the great prelates, putting his foot upon the neck of kings, and working out his plan of universal power; on the other hand were the secular governments, jealous for their rights and struggling for national independence. On the one hand were the pomps and outward splendor of cathedral worship; on the other hand the lonely prayer of many an earnest contrite soul, hungering and thirsting after righteousness.

For ages, these opposite tendencies had been working against each other, sometimes in fierce conflict, sometimes in comparative silence. But all the while there was progress—progress of corruption indeed, but also progress in the working of Christianity toward a better state of things. At last the predestined crisis came; and thenceforth the Churches of the Reformation on the one hand, and the

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Church of Rome on the other, as defined and established by the Council of Trent, divided the allegiance of European Christendom.

As to the effects of the Reformation in history, what need is there of my recalling them to your remembrance? I will only remind you of one fact which involves, in its progress and its ultimate results, an entire change in the condition and character of every people. The Church of the middle ages performed a great work for mankind, in that it kept learning from extinction, and even the use of letters from oblivion. Its office in this respect was to guard, rather than to diffuse. It was in many respects the friend of the people; it stood between them and their oppressors; it taught them all they knew; and through the gradations of its hierarchy the peasant boy might rise to a cathedral throne, and be the peer of nobles and the awe of princes. But the Church never conceived the idea—for it had not clearly grasped any principle which involved the necessity —of the universal diffusion of knowledge. The Reformation, on the contrary, making its appeal to the Scriptures against tradition, and to the people against the hierarchy, was under the necessity of bringing the Scriptures and the people into each other’s presence, face to face. Planting itself, as primitive Christianity did, upon the principle of individual freedom to think and to believe, and armed, as primitive Christianity was not, with the newly invented art of multiplying copies by the press, it not only gave the Bible to the people in their various living languages, but that the gift might be effectual, it must needs teach the people how to read it. Historically, then, the system of common schools, established that every child in city and in country may be taught to read, is one of the effects of the Reformation.

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Arrangements for the education of the whole people in the use of letters, were for a long tune peculiar to reformed countries, and most developed in the countries most reformed. That system, founded originally upon religious reasons, and brought into existence by the necessities of Christianity as restored by the Reformation, has become political; it is spreading over Europe; it must needs enter ere long into the policy of every government in the civilized world. What a phenomenon is this which is taking place before our eyes, and which is so immediately connected with the working of Christianity in history! What changes must this one great change draw after it! When all the population of the civilized world shall be, like the native population of these free states, a reading population—when reading, instead of being as it once was the luxury of the few, shall have become, like eating and drinking, an absolute necessity of human nature—what censorship, what ecclesiastical or secular despotism, shall undertake to prohibit or prescribe the reading and the thinking of the people? Where then will be the power of hierarchies built on superstition ?— where, the devotion which has ignorance for its parent?—where, the submission of groaning but unthinking millions to the selfish sway of aristocracies?—where, the possibility of a throne that is not supported by the confidence of the people?

Perhaps the illustrations which I have adduced will be deemed more than sufficient, to show how important to a right understanding of the course and tendency of history since the commencement of the Christian era, is the careful study of the working of Christianity as one of the great historic forces. Other illustrations, of the most impressive character, have doubtless suggested themselves to your

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minds; but you will excuse me from attempting to exhibit them. The effects of Christianity on manners, and on the development of the human sensibilities and moral sentiments of the nations that have received it, would detain us long if we should enter on that topic, but the illustration which it affords of our present subject, is as familiar as it is impressive. Doubtless the prize fighting in England, and the bull fights of Spain, are brutalizing things, almost below the dignity of savage life, but what are they when compared with those bloody amusements of the Roman circus which Christianity abolished? The streams of human blood on the altars of the old Mexican idolatry—the wholesale slaughter that swells the funeral pomp of an Ashantee monarch—things that we turn pale to read of— are hardly more horrible than the butcheries that "made a Roman holiday." The murder of wretched men by hundreds in the open amphitheater, their blood pouring from ghastly wounds upon the hot sand of the arena and tainting the soft Italian breeze with the scent of slaughter—this was the amusement which not only delighted the atrocity of the populace, but afforded a gentle excitement to delicate ladies and exquisite dandies in that metropolis of wealth, art, literature and refinement, as well as of empire, where the civilization of Paganism attained its last perfection ere it fell. Surely the force which wrought so great a change, could not but take effect on all the elements of history. Accordingly, the influence of Christianity exerting itself upon law, is another of those illustrations of our subject into which we cannot enter. In proportion as Christianity affects the manners of a people, and modifies their views of right and wrong, and quickens their human sympathies, its influence will be traceable in the laws

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that express that people’s sense of justice. Thus, imperfectly as it has affected the common mind of any nation hitherto, it has given to Christendom a code of international law, the prevailing spirit of which, with all its deficiencies, is justice and humanity. By the old barbarous law of nations, every captive in war,—man, woman, or child—became the absolute possession of the captor. In that barbarism was the origin of slavery; and to-day, whether in heathendom or Christendom—whether under the imbecile scepter of Spanish royalty, or the starry flag of our democracy—there is no human chattel whose servitude, traced to its origin, is warranted by any higher sanction than that old savage law of nations, propounded by woolyheaded Puffendorfs and Wheatons, ages ago, when Africa was young. Christianity has given a better international law to Christendom. Nay more, not satisfied with that achievement, it has been for ages encroaching upon slavery itself, raising the chattel to the level of humanity, opening the eye of law to see him and the ear of law to hear him, and stretching forth the power of law for his protection, till now, at length, the primitive unmitigated form of slavery—chattel slavery—lingers only here and there in all the vast domain of Christendom; and where it lingers, it feels with pain and fear the advancing light, and, at each cheerful noise of morning, it "starts like a guilty thing upon a fearful summons."

The more we study Christ and the influence of Christianity in history, the deeper, also, and more cheering will be our conviction that Christianity, as one of the forces that control the progress of nations and of the human race, has never demonstrated all its efficacy. In the ages past, the various and complicated moral forces that move the world have been in opposition to its influence, or have acted to corrupt it. Its mission in the world is to work itself free from the corruptions that have soiled its purity, and impaired its efficacy, and mingling itself with all that acts on human character—literature, art, philosophy, education, law, statesmanship, commerce—to bring all things into subordination to itself, and to sway all the complicated elements of power for the renovation of the world.

We, brethren in the commonwealth of letters,—all of us, from the most gifted to the humblest—are workers in history.

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Christianity—if we are true to our position and our nurture—is working through us upon the destinies of our country and of our race. Not the missionary only who goes forth, in the calm glow of Apostolic zeal, to labor and to die in barbarous lands for the extension of Christ’s empire—not the theologian only who devotes himself to the learned investigation and the scientific exposition of the Christian faith—not the preacher and the pastor only—but all who act in any manner, or in any measure, on the character and moral destiny of their fellow men, are privileged to be the organs and the functionaries of Christianity. The Senator, whose fearless voice and vote turn back from the yet uncontaminated soil of his country the polluting and blighting barbarism of slavery, and consecrate that soil eternally to freedom—the patriot statesman, who in defiance of the ardor civium prava jubentium lifts up his voice like a prophet’s cry against the barbarous and pagan policy of war and conquest——the jurist, who, like Granville Sharp, by long and patient years of toil, forces the law to recognize at last some disregarded principle of justice—the teacher, the author, the artist, the physician and the man of business, who, in their various places of duty and of influence, are serving their generation under the influence of Christian principles—these all are in their several functions the anointed ministers of Christianity, "kings and priests to God." In the all-embracing scheme of the eternal providence, no act, or effort, or aspiration of goodness shall be in vain. No rain-drop mingles with the ocean, or falls upon the desert sand—no particle of dew moistens the loneliest and baldest cliff, but God sees it and saves it for the uses of his own beneficence. The vanished aspirations of the youth who fell and was forgotten—

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whose early promise sparkled for a moment and exhaled—— are not wholly lost,—he has not lived nor died in vain.

Let these thoughts cheer us as we labor, and hear us up m our discouragements.

"Not enjoyment, and not sorrow

Is our destined end or way,

But to act that each to-morrow

Find us farther than to-day.

"Let us then be up and doing,

With a heart for any fate;

Still achieving, still pursuing,

Learn to labor and to wait."