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The self-sacrifice of the best men flows habitually in these channels. In such an age integrity in business relations and the domestic virtues which maintain the purity of the family may be highly valued, but they are chiefly valued because they are essential to the well-being of the State. The soldier who has attained to the highest degree the best qualities of his profession, the patriot who sacrifices to the services of the State his comforts, his ambitions and his life, is the supreme model, and the estimation in which he is held is but little lowered even though he may have been guilty, like Cato, of atrocious cruelty to his slaves, or, like some of the heroes of ancient times, of scandalous forms of private profligacy.

There are other ages in which military life is looked upon by moralists with disfavour, and in which patriotism ranks very low in the scale of virtues, while charity, gentleness, self-abnegation, devotional habits, and purity in thought, word and act are pre-eminently inculcated. The intellectual virtues, again, which deal with truth and falsehood, form a distinct group. The habit of mind which makes men love truth for its own sake as the supreme ideal, and which turns aside from all falsehood, exaggeration, party or sectarian misrepresentation and invention, is in no age a common one, but there are some ages in which it is recognised and inculcated as virtue, while there are others in which it is no exaggeration to say that the whole tendency of religious teaching has been to discourage it. During many centuries the ascetic and purely ecclesiastical standard of virtue completely dominated. The domestic virtues, though clearly recognised, held altogether a subordinate place to what were. deemed the higher virtues of the ascetic celibate. Charity, though nobly cultivated and practised, was regarded

mainly through a dogmatic medium and practised less for the benefit of the recipient than for the spiritual welfare of the donor.

In the eyes of multitudes the highest conception of a saintly life consisted largely if not mainly in complete detachment from secular interests and affections. No type was more admired, and no type was ever more completely severed from all active duties and all human relations than that of the saint of the desert or of the monk of one of the contemplative orders. To die to the world; to become indifferent to its aims, interests and pleasures; to measure all things by a standard wholly different from human happiness, to live habitually for another life was the constant teaching of the saints. In the stress laid on the cultivation of the spiritual life the whole sphere of active duties sank into a lower plane; and the eye of the mind was turned upwards and inwards and but little on the world around. 'Happy,' said one saint, is the mind which sees but two objects, God and self, one of which conceptions fills it with a sovereign delight and the other abases it to the extremest dejection.' As much love as we give to creatures,' said another Saint, just so much. we steal from the Creator.' 2 Two things only do I ask,' said a third, to suffer and to die.' 'Forsake all,' said Thomas a Kempis, and thou shalt find all. Leave desire and thou shalt find rest.' (Unless a man be disengaged from the affection of all creatures he cannot with freedom of mind attend unto Divine things.')

3

1 6

The gradual, silent and half-unconscious modification in the type of Morals which took place after the Reformation was certainly not the least important of its results. If it may be traced in some degree to the distinctive

1 St. Francis de Sales. 2 St. Philip Neri.

3 St. Teresa.

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theology of the Protestant Churches, it was perhaps still more due to the abolition of clerical celibacy which placed the religious teachers in the centre of domestic life and in close contact with a large circle of social duties. There is even now a distinct difference between the morals of a sincerely Catholic and a sincerely Protestant country, and this difference is not so much, as controversialists would tell us, in the greater and the less as in the moral type, or, in other words, in the different degrees of importance attached to different virtues and vices. Probably nowhere in the world can more beautiful and more reverent types be found than in some of the Catholic countries of Europe which are but little touched by the intellectual movements of the age, but no good observer can fail to notice how much larger is the place given to duties which rest wholly on theological considerations, and how largely even the natural duties are based on such considerations and governed, limited, and sometimes even superseded by them. The ecclesiastics who at the Council of Constance induced Sigismund to violate the safe-conduct he had given, and in spite of his solemn promise to condemn Huss to a death of fire,' and the ecclesiastics who at the Diet of Worms vainly tried to induce Charles V. to act with a similar perfidy towards Luther, represent a conception of morals which is abundantly prevalent in our day. It is no exaggeration to say that in Catholic countries the obligation of truthfulness in cases in which it conflicts with the interests of the Church rests wholly on

1 'Cum dictus Johannes Hus fidem orthodoxam pertinaciter impugnans, se ab omni conductu et privilegio reddiderit alienum, nec aliqua sibi fides aut promissio de jure naturali divino vel humano, fuerit in præjudicium Catholicæ fidei observanda.' Declaration of the Council of Constance. See Creighton's History of the Papacy, ii. 32.

the basis of honour, and not at all on the basis of religion. In the estimates of Catholic rulers no impartial observer can fail to notice how their attitude towards the interest of the Church dominates over all considerations of public and private morals.

In past ages this was much more the case. The Church filled in the minds of men a place at least equal to that of the State in the Roman Republic. Men who had made great sacrifices for it and rendered great services to it were deemed, beyond all others, the good men, and in those men things which we should regard as grossly criminal appeared mere venial frailties. Let any one who doubts this, study the lives of the early Catholic saints, and the still more instructive pages in which Gregory of Tours and other ecclesiastical annalists have described the characters and acts of the more prominent figures in the secular history of their times, and he will soon feel that he has passed into a moral atmosphere and is dealing with moral measurements and perspectives wholly unlike those of our own day.'

In highly civilised ages the same spirit may be clearly traced. Bossuet was certainly no hypocrite or sycophant, but a man of austere virtue and undoubted courage. He did not hesitate to rebuke the gross profligacy of the life of Louis XIV., and although neither he nor any of the other Catholic divines of his age seriously protested against the wars of pure egotism and ostentation which made that sovereign the scourge of Europe and brought down upon his people calamities immeasurably greater than the faults of his private life-although, indeed, he has spoken of those wars in language of rapturous and unqualified

I have collected some illustrations of this in my History of European Morals, ii. 235-242.

1

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eulogy he had at least the grace to devote a chapter of his 'Politique tirée de l'Écriture Sainte' to the theme that God does not love war.' But in the eyes of Bossuet the dominant fact in the life of Louis XIV. was the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the savage persecution of the Huguenots, and this was sufficient to place him among the best of sovereigns.2

Bull

"This a

To those who will candidly consider the subject there is nothing in this which need excite surprise. The doctrine that the Catholic Church is the inspired guide, representing the voice of the Divinity on earth and deciding with absolute authority all questions of right and wrong, very naturally led to the conviction that nothing which was conducive to its interests could be really criminal, and in all departments of morals it regulated the degrees of praise and blame. The doctrine which is still so widely professed but now so faintly realised, that the first essential to salvation is orthodox belief, placed conduct on a lower plane of importance than dogma, while the conviction that it is in the power of man to obtain absolute certainty in religious belief, that erroneous belief is in the eyes of the Almighty a crime bringing with it eternal damnation, and that the teacher of heresy is the greatest enemy of mankind, at once justified in the eyes of the believer acts which now seem the gravest moral aberrations. Many baser

See, e.g. his funeral oration on Marie Thérèse d'Autriche.

2 See the enthusiastic eulogy of the persecution of the Huguenots in his funeral oration on Michel le Tellier. It concludes: Épanchons nos cœurs sur la piété de Louis; poussons jusqu'au ciel nos acclamations, et disons à ce nouveau Constantin, à ce nouveau Théodose, à ce nouveau Marcien, à ce nouveau Charlemagne ce que les six cent trente Pères dirent autrefois dans le Concile de Chalcédoine: "Vous avez affermi la foi; vous avez exterminé les hérétiques; c'est le digne ouvrage de votre règne; c'en est le propre caractère. Par vous l'hérésie n'est plus, Dieu seul a pu faire cette merveille. Roi du ciel, conservez le roi de la terre; c'est le vœu des Églises; c'est le vœu des Évêques.'