ART. II.-History of Latin Christianity; including that of the Popes to the Pontificate of Nicolas V. By Henry Hart Milman, D.D., Dean of St. Paul's. Vols. I., II., III.

London, 1854.

IT is often a matter of complaint, sometimes gravely felt, sometimes loudly expressed, how little connexion seems to exist between the magnificence of our great ecclesiastical edifices and the life of the institutions which are sheltered beneath them. Yet this sense of disproportion is not the one which has always been called up by the sight of those stately edifices. Nor will it be awakened, if in the heart of our crowded cities, in the centre of the busiest stir of national life, we are reminded not only of the pastoral zeal which ministers to the wants of the present, but of the learning which recalls the past, and the wisdom which forecasts the future. The lofty tower which before the Great Fire looked down over the metropolis, was no unworthy memento of the enlightened learning of Colet, or of the genius of Donne. The majestic dome of Wren might not unfitly cast its shadow over the temporary home of Butler. And we confess that now, in like manner, it is not without a certain pleasing sense of congruity that we see the name of the Dean of St. Paul's on the title-page of what may fairly be called the most important work on ecclesiastical history that the English language has produced.

We do not forget the quaint wisdom of Fuller, or the fervour of Milner-we do not overlook the compendious and useful narratives which have been published by Dean Waddington, by Dr. Burton, and (to mention the best and latest work of the kind) by Mr. Robertson. But none of these can vie in the union of learning, and ability, and extent, with that which is now before us. With a poetic temperament, of which the first fire glowed in those striking passages of lyrical and dramatic poetry by which he won his earliest fame, Dean Milman has combined an amount of industry and experience, which he has steadily applied to the subject of which these three-we trust we may add without presumptuous anticipation-these six volumes are the crowning result. Beginning with the history of the Jewish nation, he has gradually worked on through the rise of Christianity under the Roman Empire' to the period which covers its settlement in the European nations, and includes almost the whole ground which ecclesiastical history has usually occupied.

We do not mean to assert that this history is in all points the model of what such a history should be. For such a work no one man, with powers however varied, will ever suffice. To some we doubt not that in this, as in his earlier works, there will

appear

appear to be a certain monotony of sentiment, if we may so express it, which hardly suits with the richness and variety of a field, over which all the lights and shades of character, human and divine, are for ever playing in the most complicated forma tendency-probably induced by a natural recoil from the usual temper of ecclesiastical historians-to insist on the gentle and benevolent aspect of Christianity, sometimes almost to the exclusion of its sterner, and bolder expressions. There is also in many parts of these volumes an abruptness and carelessness of composition, which, whilst it sometimes presents an agreeable, oftener, perhaps, affords an unpleasing contrast to the polish and grace which characterized most of his former writings-sentences unconnected, repeated, broken-entangled with parenthesissometimes even facts, evidently from mere oversight, miswritten or omitted. Nor can we think that it was necessary (even for the sake of writing, according to his well-sustained purpose, a history, not a succession of dissertations on history') to give once again the details of obscure periods, or the summary-it can hardly be more than a summary of the lives of Carlovingian princes and German popes, whose names we willingly forget as soon as read.

But in spite of these drawbacks-some of them, perhaps, the inevitable results of the pressure of materials-we repeat that no such work has appeared in English ecclesiastical literature— none which combines such breadth of view with such depth of research-such high literary and artistic eminence with such patient and elaborate investigation-such appreciation of the various forms of greatness and goodness with such force of conception and execution-none which exhibits so large an amount of that fearlessness of results which is the necessary condition of impartial judgment and trustworthy statement. And in lesser points we cannot forbear to notice its abundant references (so far as we have had the means of judging) to the best sources, old and new; or again its happy art of questioning-that art which Bacon so well calls the half of knowledge-but which we never saw so frequently and aptly employed as in the long series of suggestive interrogatories which in these pages often take the place of what in other historians would be a collection of positive, but apocryphal, assertions.

Perhaps we shall render the fullest justice to our author and the best service to our readers, if we endeavour to answer the question-probably the first which many who open these volumes will ask-What is Latin Christianity ?'-and that the more, because in so doing we shall, in fact, bring out what is the chief and peculiar excellence of the work.

It is a happy circumstance for the introduction of this name to the English public, that for the first time, perhaps, since the close of the Crusades, not only the name but the object which it represents has become familiar to our minds. We had long known what was meant by Europe,' by Christendom,' by the Church of Rome; but the peculiar idea expressed by Latin Christianity' is one which must always sound strange, except at times when the two great divisions of Christendom are set in opposition to each other-when Western Europe is viewed in contrast to the East-when Roman Catholicism is opposed not to the Protestant nations of Northern Europe, but to the Greek and Armenian and Coptic Churches of the old Byzantine Empire. Such is the aspect under which the various forms of the Christian faith have necessarily been viewed, since the calamitous war which arose out of the controversy between the Greek and Latin Churches' over their sanctuaries in the Holy Land, and which is now sustained by the religious enthusiasm which the head of the Eastern sphere of Christendom has roused against his brother sovereigns of the West.

But although this distinction between Greek and Latin is brought out more prominently than usual at the present moment, it is one which has existed for centuries-one which has affected the whole course of European history, and which has its roots in some of the deepest movements that divide the human race.

It is no new name invented for the occasion; it is the name which both philosophically, and practically, expresses the origin of the most extensive diversities of Christian faith and practice; and when Dean Milman states that 'the great event in the history of our religion and of mankind, during many centuries after the extinction of Paganism, is the rise, the development, and the domination of Latin Christianity,' he states a fact, often indeed overlooked, but yet the key of the main questions of ecclesiastical history, as well as of the chief interest of his own work. There is doubtless a sense in which the Church is truly Catholicthat is, truly independent of any national or social differencea sense also in which the main divisions of Christian opinion may be viewed irrespectively of any territorial or ethnological boundaries. There are feelings aroused, principles strengthened, evils cast out, by the reception of Christianity-whether in its simplest or its most complex form--which belong not to this or that nation, but to the human heart itself. There are, again, diversities of opinion arising from varieties of the human mind, which are to be found in every community which has reached a certain pitch of civilization and religious consciousness. To treat of ecclesiastical history from this point of view, is, to a certain extent,

the

the object of Neander's History of the Christian Church; and a work which should fully accomplish this would fill a blank which neither he nor any one else has adequately occupied. Happy would it be for the Church, happy for the world, if we could be made clearly to see what are the elements of Christianity common to all its several forms-what the characters most nearly resembling the Divine Original which, on any hypothesis, must be regarded as the foundation and the centre of all subsequent developments. But if a task like this be too remote and impalpable, it may in the mean time be useful to trace how large a share in our ecclesiastical diversities is to be ascribed not to theological or religious causes, but to the more innocent, and in one sense, more inevitable influences of nation, of climate, of race, of the general stream of human history. There can be little question that the main root of the difference between the Church of England and Dissenters is not so much a divergence of theological principle or opinion as of social and hereditary position. And what is thus true of the Church of a single country is in its measure true of the several Churches of the great Christian family. In the following pages it will be our object to draw out this idea, as it is set forth in the work before us-to exhibit the rise, and growth, and peculiar features of Latin Christianity, as alone it can be exhibited fully in its earlier stages, by contrast with Greek or Eastern Christianity. On some future occasion. we may perhaps return to the contrast between Latin Christianity and the Avatar of Teutonic Christianity,' which Dean Milman has promised in his forthcoming volumes, and yet more to the pictures of individual characters, which must wait for the completion of the series-for those later periods when they will occupy a more conspicuous place. Lest we should appear to have overlooked them altogether, or lest the reader should imagine that even this first instalment of the work is exclusively made up of the abstractions which we are about to present to him, we refer him to the striking portraitures of Gregory the First, of Hildebrand, of Wilfrid, of Abelard, and of Becket. For ourselves,. we will at once proceed to the task we have proposed.

The first beginning of the distinction between Greek and Latin Christianity is well stated at the outset of the work :—

'For some considerable (it cannot but be an undefinable) part of the three first centuries, the Church of Rome, and most, if not all, the churches of the West, were, if we may so speak, Greek religious colonies. Their language was Greek, their organization Greek, their writers Greek, their Scriptures Greek; and many vestiges and traditions show that their ritual, their Liturgy was Greek.* Through Greek

* We may add what he has previously stated in a note, p. 22, that all the earlier

names

Greek the communication of the churches of Rome and of the West was constantly kept up with the East; and through Greek every heresiarch, or his disciples, having found his way to Rome, propagated, with more or less success, his peculiar doctrines. Greek was the commercial language throughout the empire; by which the Jews, before the destruction of their city, already so widely disseminated through the world, and altogether engaged in commerce, carried on their affairs. The Greek Old Testament was read in the synagogues of the foreign Jews. The churches, formed sometimes on the foundation, to a certain extent on the model, of the synagogues, would adhere for some time, no doubt, to their language. The Gospels and the Apostolic writings, so soon as they became part of the public worship, would be read, as the Septuagint was, in their original tongue. All the Christian extant writings which appeared in Rome and in the West are Greek, or were originally Greek, the Epistles of Clement, the Shepherd of Hermas, the Clementine Recognitions and Homilies; the works of Justin Martyr, down to Caius and Hippolytus, the author of the Refutation of All Heresies. The Octavius of Minucius Felix and the Treatise of Novatian on the Trinity are the earliest known works of Latin Christian literature which came from Rome. So was it too in Gaul; there the first Christians were settled, chiefly in the Greek cities, which owned Marseilles as their parent, and which retained the use of Greek as their vernacular tongue. Irenæus wrote in Greek; the account of the Martyrs of Lyons and Vienne is in Greek. Vestiges of the old Greek ritual long survived not only in Rome, but also in some of the Gallic churches. The Kyrie eleison still lingers in the Latin service. The singular fact, related by the historian Sozomen, that, for the first centuries, there was no public preaching in Rome, here finds its explanation. Greek was the ordinary language of the community, but among the believers and worshippers may have been Latins, who understood not, or understood imperfectly, the Greek. The Gospel or sacred writings were explained according to the capacities of the persons present. Hippolytus indeed composed, probably delivered, homilies in Greek, in imitation of Origen, who, when at Rome, may have preached in Greek; and this is spoken of as something new. Pope Leo I. was the first celebrated Latin preacher, and his brief and emphatic sermons read like the first essays of a rude and untried eloquence, rather than the finished compositions which would imply a long study and cultivation of pulpit oratory. Compare them with Chrysostom.-i. pp. 27-29.

It might, therefore, seem as if Greek Christianity were the parent and Latin Christianity the child; and it is curious that this view, substantiated as it is by this tissue of minute and complex facts, is put forward with singular force and perspicuity by no less a person than the Emperor Napoleon, in his famous "note' on Egypt. Christianity, according to him, was a triumph

names of the Roman bishops are Greek. Pius, Victor, Caius-surely the Dean should have added Clemens-are among the very few genuine Roman.

of