Armine, St. James, Monmouth, Marney, Bellarmine, Beaumanoir, St. Jerome families. A guide to the town houses and country seats of the English nobility might be compiled from his pages. He describes society in all its phases, society in the time before successful manufacturers, contractors, and miners could take a place in it; when to enter the charmed circle one required a title, a million, or a genius. In years to come students will turn to his books for information as to the political and social world of his day. Indeed, it is for this his books will endure, rather than for the plots, which nearly always are of secondary importance. Yet, in imagination, he is second only to the greatest. He is the only English writer who has poetically, as well as graphically, described the East. Read in Tancred the description of Jerusalem! In his books, as in his speeches, he shows himself a great master of phrase. He is never betrayed into false pathos. His humor is never forced. His taste is never at fault. It must be admitted, however, that he was sometimes guilty of exaggeration. Yet, except, perhaps, in his earlier works, it did not go to the length of caricature. Than the account of the rise of the Warren into Fitz-Warene, Earl de Mowbray, and of the origin of the Dukes of FitzAquitaine, descendants of a French actress, clever enough to persuade an easy-tempered monarch of this realm that the paternity of her coming babe was a distinction of which his Majesty might be proud, there is nothing finer or more scathing in The Book of Snobs. His pungent wit, brilliant word-painting, and powerful character-drawing are undeniable, even as his pictures of social-political life are unrivalled. A master of satire, he was at his best when reproducing the language of clubs and lobbies, when retailing the conversations of salons. If, on occa

sion, no one could be so flippant, at times no one could be more dignified. When carried away by his feelings, as in Sybil, no one could be more impassioned or more forcible; when governed by his ideals, as in Tancred, no one could be more picturesque. There are few passages in English literature more beautiful and more stately than that describing the late Queen's first council, with the insertion of which this article may fittingly be brought to a close:

The council of England is summoned for the first time within her bower. There are assembled the prelates and captains and chief men of her realm; the priests of the religion that consoles, the heroes of the sword that has conquered, the votaries of the craft that has decided the fate of Em

pires; men gray with thought, and fame, and age; who are the stewards of divine mysteries, who have encountered in battle the hosts of Europe, who have toiled in secret cabinets, who have struggled in the less merciful strife of aspiring senates; men, too, some of them, lords of a thousand vassals and chief proprietors of provinces, yet not one whose heart does not at this moment tremble as he awaits the first presence of the maiden who must now ascend her throne.

A hum of half suppressed conversation which would attempt to conceal the excitement, which some of the greatest have since acknowledged, fills that brilliant assemblage, that sea of plumes and glittering stars and gorgeous dresses. Hush! the portals open;. she comes! The silence is as deep as that of a noontide forest. Attended for a moment by her royal mother and the ladies of her court, who bow and then retire, Victoria ascends her throne; a girl, alone, and for the first time, amid an assemblage of men.

In a sweet and thrilling voice, and with a composed mien which indicates rather the absorbing sense of august duty than an absence of emotion, The Queen announces her accession to the throne of her ancestors, and her humble hope that divine providence will

guard over the fulfilment of her lofty trust.

The prelates and captains and chief men of her realm then advance to the throne, and kneeling before her, pledge their troth, and take the sacred oaths of allegiance and supremacy.

Allegiance to one who rules over the land that the great Macedonian could not conquer, and over a continent of which even Columbus never dreamed: to the Queen of every sea, and of nations in every zone.

The Fortnightly Review.

It is not of these I would speak, but of a nation nearer her foot-stool, and which at this moment looks to her with anxiety, with affection, perhaps with hope. Fair and serene, she has the blood and beauty of the Saxon. Will it be her proud destiny at length to bear relief to suffering millions, and with that soft hand which might inspire troubadours and guerdon knights, break the last links in the chain of Saxon thraldom?

Lewis Melville.

How is ecclesiastical history related to general history? This is a question which is either not treated at all in text books on ecclesiastical history or treated very briefly. The omission is easy to understand, for it proceeds from a view taken in earlier times and not yet exploded. The ancient and the mediæval Church regarded the history of the Church as something that differed from the history of the world. The Catholic Churches of our own day still regard it in the same light. They are convinced that the Church is under God's special guidance, possesses an infallible doctrine, is governed by men appointed by the Deity Himself, and has received a promise that it shall remain unchanged until the end of all things. The Church and its affairs are thus sharply separated from the rest of history; and while the rest of history, of course, exercises an effect on the Church, the effect is only on the circumference and does not reach the

centre.

The above article is a translation of the address which Professor Harnack delivered at the recent Congress held in connection with the St. Louis Exposition. I need hardly say that it has been a great pleasure to me

L

This way of looking at the matter found its classical expression in the earliest account which we possess of ecclesiastical history, namely, that given by Eusebius. According to him the history of the Church is only the further operation and fuller development of the fact that in Jesus Christ the divine Logos came down from heaven, and since that time the history of the Church has a place within ordinary history as a history of another kind. This is a view which is in no way affected by putting the beginnings of ecclesiastical history in some sense or other as far back as the beginnings of the human race. Such, indeed, was the attempt which Eusebius, following Justin Martyr, tried to make, and which Augustine actually carried out in his great work On the City of God. But by going back to the beginnings of the human race it is obvious that the whole conception of a Church and its history may easily be frittered away and destroyed. There were liberal

to do anything that may help in making it known to the English-speaking people on both sides of the Atlantic.-T. Bailey Saunders.

theologians in early times and in the Middle Ages who thus destroyed itAbelard, for instance. This, however, was not the way in which the Church itself understood that its history should be carried back. On the contrary, it clings to the belief that within the general course of events there is a sacred history which is supernatural.

The Protestants of the 16th century did not really break with this conception. They did, indeed, deny that the Church with its external forms and its government was a divine creation. The whole idea of the Church they explained from within. But of the spiritualized Church, which they often saw only in the form of a small community, they asserted very much the same thing as Catholicism maintains of its big Church. They hardly did anything to shake the notion that there were two kinds of events, and the Church remained, as before, the scene of a second history. Orthodoxy in the Protestant Churches in our own day still persists in this view. Whether there is any fundamental justification for it is a question on which we shall touch at the close; but certain it is that in the form in which orthodoxy still clings to the idea it is untenable. The very fact that there is absolutely no criterion by which we can distinguish two kinds of history is enough to destroy it. Moreover, it is also shown to be incorrect by the further fact that all the forces which the Church was unwilling to recognize as of equal importance with itself it had to combat as enemies, thus producing a state of permanent unrest. Finally, experience itself refutes this view, for only when belief in a special kind of history was given up did the history of the Church begin to be understood.

It was in the 17th century that certain enlightened spirits first shook off this wrong notion. The 18th century further developed the knowledge thus

won; in the 19th it was partly obscured again, but in the end it held its own. We can now say: The History of the Church is part and parcel of universal history, and can be understood only in connection with it.

But if the history of the Church is a part of universal history, it is closely bound up with other factors and developments, not as something alien, but as something akin to them; nay, it is only when thus bound up that it exists at all. The more attention we pay to these connections, the better we shall understand it. There are four large departments of history with which we are here specially concerned:

1. Political history.

2. The history of religion in general. 3. The history of philosophy and of knowledge as a whole.

4. Economic history.

I have purposely refrained from speaking of the history of civilization in particular, because it cannot be treated scientifically without being divided into various sections.

I.

Political history, in the widest sense of the word, is history proper; for on the way in which men are formed into communities everything else that happens and all development depend. We may say, then, that the history of the State is the backbone of general history. If we fail to recognize this we reduce history to a series of romances or a sort of clever argument. scientific study of ecclesiastical history, therefore, we must insist, first, that the political or social character of the Church shall be kept well in mind; and secondly, that its relation to the State in which it grew up, and to the States and communities in and among which it lives, shall be carefully examined.

For the

That the Church is a political organization has, of course, in some form or other, always been recognized. Even Eusebius spoke of it as a "polity." But it was only with the historian Mosheim that the first serious attempt was made to present this point of view. Up to his time people shrank from doing so, because they feared, not without reason, that the "divine" nature of the Church would suffer if its political character were placed in. the foreground. The clue which Mosheim gave was not sufficiently attended to by the philosophical historians in the Romantic movement during the first half of the 19th century, unless I except Richard Rothe; nay, even now the correct view has yet to make its way. The results which it gives us I may state at once: In every age the first thing to consider is the constitution of the Church. But in every period of the history of the Church its constitution has been dependent on the general political conditions and ideas of the time; or, to put the matter more accurately, the Church has at all times shown a tendency to copy within itself the constitution of the State in which it lived, or to prescribe to the State the constitution which the State was to have.

The truth of this proposition may be proved at every point in the history of the Church. Consider the Roman Catholic Church-what else is it but the old Roman Empire reproduced in the ecclesiastical domain? At the opposite pole to the Roman Church stand the Free Congregational Churches. But do not they, too, correspond to the political ideal which prevailed in the land of their birth at the time when they arose, and still prevails? And all the different forms of Churches which lie between these two extreme limits are they not all of them ecclesiastical imitations of the political constitutions in and among which they exist? Everywhere the

constitution of the Church has followed the pattern set for the time being by the State, or anticipated the constitution which the State was to take.

But by tending to copy the constitution of the State in which it lives the Church comes into a double relation to the State-a friendly and a hostile relation. Up to a certain point this tendency helps the State to carry out its necessary aims. Yet on the other hand, as a result of this same tendency, the Church becomes the rival of the State. The State must inevitably desire that everything developed within its borders shall be homogeneous with it, so far as law, authority, and the relations of the various classes are concerned. In this sense it is very glad to extend its toleration, nay, even to give privileges, to a community formed in accordance with its regulations. But the Church, as a religious community, also possesses rights of its own, and as soon as it extends these over the whole field of its political organization, it enters into secret or open opposition to the State: it becomes its rival.

The conflicts, however, which in these circumstances were inevitable, led to complications of a still greater kind. For, in the first place, the Church claimed to be the legitimate successor of the theocratic Jewish State, however much it also emphasized the fact that it itself was something new and of a different nature. In making this claim it at once, protest as it might to the contrary, advanced political pretensions of the most comprehensive character, even if at first it asserted them only negatively. In the second place, the Church was not content with simply copying within itself elements in the organization of the State. It refused to allow anything that it copied to have any value outside its own pale. By its own marriage-law it depreciated the civil marriage-law. By the development of its official hierarchy it lowered

the authority of the State officials. By its Papacy it lowered the Imperial dignity. Finally, in the third place, after compelling the State to accept the Christian creed, it put the State into a position of the greatest difficulty. By accepting the creed the State placed itself on the ground taken by the Church, and declared the ideals of the Church to be the right and the highest ideals. If it was now driven to defend itself against the claims of the Church to be master, it was compelled to fight with broken weapons, because it dared not attack the ultimate principles of the Church from which its own power was derived. The "Christian" State, then, when confronted by the Church, was bound to come off worst; for it was only half what the Church was entirely. The Christian State is the State undermined and sucked dry by the Church. It is like a towering tree brought to decay by the creeper that has fed on its sap. But when the State decays the national consciousness is always in danger of disappearing as well.

With certain exceptions, however, things did not come to this pass even in the Middle Ages. In the East the State found ways and means of taking over important functions of theocratic government, and of effecting an intimate fusion between Church and Nationality. In the West the tension between Church and State led to struggles which promoted the progress of civilization; for, at the very moment when the Church appeared to have attained its aim, the proof was afforded that, however capable it may be of winning

a victory, the Church is unable to keep possession of the field. Nay, the great developments then began which led to the formation of our modern States and of the Protestant Churches. It is part of the very character of modern States that they no longer are, or aim at being, Chris

tian in the same sense as Mediæval States, and Protestant Churches have either wholly or in part given up all theocratic pretensions. But in this connection we must not overlook the fact that even the constitutions and ecclesiastical ideals of the Protestant Churches, although they derive their basis from the inherent nature of Protestantism and from the Bible, are in strict dependence on the political theories and ideals which modern times have produced. The State Church, the National Church, more particularly as it is developed in Germany, offers in all its stages a precise parallel to the developments of the modern State, and the various theories of the State. In the same way, wherever free Churches are formed, they are dependent on the republican and democratic ideas of the period. The converse, it is true, has also happened: a Christian idea has preceded the political idea; but it was the political idea which first produced an ecclesiastical polity corresponding to it. The Christian idea, too, as a rule, asserted itself only when political ideas akin to it came to its aid.

This shows us that the study of political history is the necessary preliminary to the study of ecclesiastical history. Without it the most important developments remain unintelligible. In the history of the Church, however, every stage of the political history of the last two thousand years is still, as it were, actually present. In the two great Catholic Churches, the Roman and the Græco-Russian, the forms and tendencies of the Middle Ages are embodied; they still live on in them and still threaten us to-dayin Jesus Christ's name-with that Babylonian theocracy which destroys all national and individual freedom. We know how it came about that this universal theocratic ideal could estab lish itself on Christian ground. A