The jokes adroitly ple cod.

66

remains, if ever possible, an ideal of the future." *
And assuredly, as a matter of principle, a nation is
entitled to safeguard, by its legislation, the religion
which it professes. "A state," writes Dr. Arnold,
may as justly declare the New Testament to be
its law as it may choose the institutes and code of
Justinian. In this manner the law of Christ's
Church may be made its law: and all the institutions
which this law enjoins, whether in ritual or disci-
pline, may be adopted as national institutions.
If a man believes himself bound to refuse obedience
to the law of Christianity, or will not pledge himself
to regard it as paramount in authority to any
human legislature, he cannot properly be a member
of a society which conceives itself bound to regulate
all its proceedings by this law." + From the point
of view of principle, this appears to me unanswer-
able. That it is never, in the long run, expedient
to repress, by penal legislation, religious beliefs and
practices-save such as are manifestly subversive of
civilised society seems to me just as certain. And
I know of no stronger argument in support of this
view than that which is furnished by the history of
the Inquisition itself.

Medieval intolerance then-to return to our immediate subject-was a natural consequence of the universal prevalence of the Christian faith, and of

*Naturrecht auf dem Grunde der Ethik, § 172.

Introductory Lectures on Modern History, pp. 53-60.

the supreme value set upon it. Coercion is certainly the most obvious way of guarding uniformity, and the men of the Middle Ages applied it as unhesitatingly in the religious sphere as we apply it in the political. Nor did it occur to them that in so doing they at all invaded individual liberty :"Posse peccare non est libertas nec pars libertatis,” says St. Anselm. Of course the particular form

which coercion assumes, varies according to circumstances. The lawgivers of the Middle Ages prescribed for religious dissidence the highest penalty they knew of. "The severity of the punishment of heretics," remarks Moehler, "depends clearly upon the severity of the penal laws admitted by the society of the period." The criminal legislation of "the ages of faith" was savage and cruel. But it must be remembered that men then thought as little of undergoing as of inflicting physical torture. To which we may add that real earnest belief, whatever its object, is impatient of contradiction. The Communists of our own day, assassinating "les serviteurs d'un nommé Dieu," the earlier champions of "liberty, equality, fraternity," massacring the priests and hurrying the laity by thousands to the scaffold or the river, may serve as illustrations of this fact. It may, perhaps, on the whole, be truly said that the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages, recognising and directing the impulses of human nature which found expression in the system then prevailing of religious coercion, controlled, re

D

strained, and mitigated what she could not destroy. However that may be, certain it is, as her severest critics allow, that the separation between temporal and spiritual authority, upon which she insisted, was "the parent of liberty of conscience": certain that her assertion of this principle has been a potent factor in the advance of human freedom.

Ideas have a life of their own. No generation can do more than surmise dimly, if at all, their future developments. The advance of the general mind is so slow as to be imperceptible, unless viewed at a distance: e pur si muove. And the public order follows tardily and unwillingly the general evolution of thought. The cause of religious liberty in the Middle Ages was bound up with the struggle of the Church against secular sovereignty. It meant little more to the most clear-sighted of its champions than the independence of the spiritualty from "kings,

**

"One beneficial consequence which M. Guizot ascribes to the power of the Church is worthy of especial notice the separation (unknown to antiquity) between temporal and spiritual authority. He, in common with the best thinkers of our time, attributes to this fact the happiest influence on European civilisation. It was the parent, he says, of liberty of conscience. The separation of temporal and spiritual is founded on the idea that material force. has no right, no hold, over the mind, over conviction, over truth. Enormous as have been the sins of the Catholic Church in the way of religious intolerance, her assertion of this principle has done more for human freedom than all the fires she ever kindled have done to destroy it."-Mill, Dissertations and Discussions, vol. ii. p. 243.

II.]

THE DIGNITY OF LABOUR.

35

tyrants, dukes, princes, and all the jailers of human souls." Yet in these words of Gregory VII., we have the root of the matter, and, potentially, all that has grown out of that root. For they involve the conception of freedom as ethical and spiritual, as resting upon the infinite worth of the individual and his direct relation to God, which prevailed in the Middle Ages, and which was the source of the great growth of individuality so strikingly characteristic of them. It has been said, "Classical history is a part of modern history; only medieval history is ancient." There never was a more foolish saying. Medieval history, considered as a whole, is the history of the gradual emancipation of all the forces which make up individual life, and of the assignment to them of their due place in the public order.

Adequately to deal even with the outlines of this great subject would require a volume. Here I shall merely touch upon one point: the work done by Christianity for those whom we call "the masses;" the multitudes condemned by the inexorable laws of life to manual toil. We speak of the elevation of the labourer from slavery, through serfdom, to personal freedom, as having been mainly wrought out by the Church. And truly. But this was only one part of the freedom wherewith she endowed him. If you regard the toil of the agriculturist, of the artisan, from a merely material point of view, what an ignoble drudgery it is!— "a naturally servile occupation," as Aristotle

deemed it. But Christianity, inspiring that toil with a higher motive than the needs of the physical organism, proclaiming the spiritual worth of all honest work, as a divinely appointed ordinance, nay, placing it upon a level with the highest exercises of devotion-laborare est orare-ennobled in a supreme degree the lives of the humblest toilers. Those companies of religious men, following the rule of St. Benedict, who cleared the forests, drained the morasses, reclaimed the desolate places of Germany, France, Spain, England, were doing a work of which they little dreamed. "We owe the agricultural restoration of a great part of Europe to the monks," writes Mr. Hallam. Yes; and we owe to them what is of far more importancethat sentiment of the dignity of labour without which the mere legal emancipation of the labourer would have been of little worth. All that is great in those Middle Ages-and how much does that mean!-springs from the same transcendental root. The gradual vindication of a man's right to be himself, to live out his own life, was wrought by men who felt the ineffable greatness of man, and the infinite value of life.

Such were our medieval forefathers, to whom we Englishmen directly owe "the ancient and immemorial rights and liberties of the subject," as we proudly call them, and the venerable institutions which are their guarantees and sacred shrines. The constitutional history of England is the history