No More Learning

off at Chatham were often compelled to deliver their purses on
Gadshill, celebrated near a hundred years earlier by the greatest
of poets as the scene of the depredations of Falstaff. The public
authorities seem to have been often at a loss how to deal with
the plunderers. At one time it was announced in the Gazette
that several persons, who were strongly suspected of being high-
waymen, but against whom there was not sufficient evidence,
would be paraded at Newgate in riding dresses: their horses


## p. 9396 (#420) ###########################################

9396
THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY
would also be shown; and all gentlemen who had been robbed
were invited to inspect this singular exhibition. On another
occasion a pardon was publicly offered to a robber if he would
give up some rough diamonds, of immense value, which he had
taken when he stopped the Harwich mail. A short time after
appeared another proclamation, warning the innkeepers that the
eye of the government was upon them. Their criminal conniv-
ance, it was affirmed, enabled banditti to infest the roads with
impunity. That these suspicions were not without foundation, is
proved by the dying speeches of some penitent robbers of that
age, who appear to have received from the innkeepers services
much resembling those which Farquhar's Boniface rendered to
Gibbet.
It was necessary to the success and even to the safety of the
highwayman that he should be a bold and skillful rider, and that
his manners and appearance should be such as suited the master
of a fine horse. He therefore held an aristocratical position in
the community of thieves, appeared at fashionable coffee-houses
and gaming-houses, and betted with men of quality on the race
ground. Sometimes, indeed, he was a man of good family and
education. A romantic interest therefore attached, and perhaps
still attaches, to the names of freebooters of this class. The vul-
gar eagerly drank in tales of their ferocity and audacity, of their
occasional acts of generosity and good-nature, of their amours, of
their miraculous escapes, of their desperate struggles, and of their
manly bearing at the bar and in the cart. Thus it was related
of William Nevison, the great robber of Yorkshire, that he levied
a quarterly tribute on all the northern drovers, and, in return,
not only spared them himself, but protected them against all
other thieves; that he demanded purses in the most courteous
manner; that he gave largely to the poor what he had taken
from the rich; that his life was once spared by the royal clem-
ency, but that he again tempted his fate, and at length died, in
1685, on the gallows of York. It was related how Claude Duval,
the French page of the Duke of Richmond, took to the road,
became captain of a formidable gang, and had the honor to be
named first in a royal proclamation against notorious offenders;
how at the head of his troop he stopped a lady's coach, in which
there was a booty of four hundred pounds; how he took only one
hundred, and suffered the fair owner to ransom the rest by dan-
cing a coranto with him on the heath; how his vivacious gallantry


## p. 9397 (#421) ###########################################

THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY
9397
stole away the hearts of all women; how his dexterity at sword
and pistol made him a terror to all men: how at length, in the
year 1670, he was seized when overcome by wine; how dames of
high rank visited him in prison, and with tears interceded for his
life; how the King would have granted a pardon, but for the
interference of Judge Morton, the terror of highwaymen, who
threatened to resign his office unless the law were carried into
full effect; and how, after the execution, the corpse lay in state
with all the pomp of scutcheons, wax-lights, black hangings, and
mutes, till the same cruel judge, who had intercepted the mercy
of the Crown, sent officers to disturb the obsequies. In these
anecdotes there is doubtless a large mixture of fable: but they
are not on that account unworthy of being recorded; for it is
both an authentic and an important fact that such tales, whether
false or true, were heard by our ancestors with eagerness and
faith.
THE DELUSION OF OVERRATING THE HAPPINESS OF OUR
ANCESTORS
From the History of England'
THE
HE general effect of the evidence which has been submitted
to the reader seems hardly to admit of doubt. Yet in spite
of evidence, many will still image to themselves the Eng-
land of the Stuarts as a more pleasant country than the England
in which we live. It may at first sight seem strange that society,
while constantly moving forward with eager speed, should be con-
stantly looking backward with tender regret. But these two pro-
pensities, inconsistent as they may appear, can easily be resolved
into the same principle. Both spring from our impatience of the
state in which we actually are. That impatience, while it stimu-
lates us to surpass preceding generations, disposes us to overrate
their happiness. It is, in some sense, unreasonable and ungrate-
ful in us to be constantly discontented with a condition which is
constantly improving. But in truth, there is constant improve-
ment precisely because there is constant discontent. If we were
perfectly satisfied with the present, we should cease to contrive, to
labor, and to save with a view to the future. And it is natural
that being dissatisfied with the present, we should form a too
favorable estimate of the past.


## p. 9398 (#422) ###########################################

9398
THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY
In truth, we are under a deception similar to that which mis-
leads the traveler in the Arabian desert. Beneath the caravan
all is dry and bare; but far in advance, and far in the rear, is
the semblance of refreshing waters. The pilgrims hasten forward
and find nothing but sand where an hour before they had seen a
lake. They turn their eyes and see a lake where, an hour before,
they were toiling through sand. A similar illusion seems to haunt
nations through every stage of the long progress from poverty
and barbarism to the highest degrees of opulence and civiliza-
tion. But if we resolutely chase the mirage backward, we shall
find it recede before us into the regions of fabulous antiquity. It
is now the fashion to place the golden age of England in times.
when noblemen were destitute of comforts the want of which
would be intolerable to a modern footman, when farmers and
shopkeepers breakfasted on loaves the very sight of which would
raise a riot in a modern workhouse, when to have a clean shirt
once a week was a privilege reserved for the higher class of gen-
try, when men died faster in the purest country air than they
now die in the most pestilential lanes of our towns, and when
men died faster in the lanes of our towns than they now die on
the coast of Guiana. We too shall in our turn be outstripped,
and in our turn be envied. It may well be, in the twentieth
century, that the peasant of Dorsetshire may think himself miser-
ably paid with twenty shillings a week; that the carpenter at
Greenwich may receive ten shillings a day; that laboring men
may be as little used to dine without meat as they are now to
eat rye bread; that sanitary police and medical discoveries may
have added several more years to the average length of human
life; that numerous comforts and luxuries which are now un-
known, or confined to a few, may be within the reach of every
diligent and thrifty workingman. And yet it may then be the
mode to assert that the increase of wealth and the progress of
science have benefited the few at the expense of the many, and
to talk of the reign of Queen Victoria as the time when England
was truly merry England, when all classes were bound together
by brotherly sympathy, when the rich did not grind the faces of
the poor, and when the poor did not envy the splendor of the
rich.


## p. 9399 (#423) ###########################################

THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY
THE PURITAN
From the Essay on John Milton'
WⓇ
E WOULD Speak first of the Puritans; the most remarkable
body of men, perhaps, which the world has ever produced.
The odious and ridiculous parts of their character lie on
the surface. He that runs may read them; nor have there been
wanting attentive and malicious observers to point them out.
For many years after the Restoration they were the theme of
unmeasured invective and derision. They were exposed to the
utmost licentiousness of the press and of the stage, at the time
when the press and the stage were most licentious. They were
not men of letters; they were as a body unpopular; they could
not defend themselves, and the public would not take them
under its protection. They were therefore abandoned, without
reserve, to the tender mercies of the satirists and dramatists.
The ostentatious simplicity of their dress, their sour aspect, their
nasal twang, their stiff posture, their long graces, their Hebrew
names, the Scriptural phrases which they introduced on every
occasion, their contempt of human learning, their detestation of
polite amusements, were indeed fair game for the laughers. But
it is not from the laughers alone that the philosophy of history
is to be learnt. And he who approaches this subject should care-
fully guard against the influence of that potent ridicule which has
already misled so many excellent writers.
"Ecco il fonte del riso, ed ecco il rio
Che mortali perigli in se contiene;
Hor qui tener a fren nostro desio,
Ed esser cauti molto a noi conviene. »*
9399
Those who roused the people to resistance, who directed their
measures through a long series of eventful years, who formed
out of the most unpromising materials the finest army that
Europe had ever seen, who trampled down King, Church, and
Aristocracy, who, in the short intervals of domestic sedition and
rebellion, made the name of England terrible to every nation
on the face of the earth,—were no vulgar fanatics. Most of their
* «Behold the fount of mirth, behold the rill
Containing mortal perils in itself;
And therefore here to bridle our desires,
And to be cautious well doth us befit. "


## p. 9400 (#424) ###########################################

9400
THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY
absurdities were mere external badges, like the signs of free-
masonry or the dresses of friars. We regret that these badges
were not more attractive. We regret that a body to whose cour-
age and talents mankind has owed inestimable obligations had
not the lofty elegance which distinguished some of the adherents
of Charles the First, or the easy good-breeding for which the court.
of Charles the Second was celebrated. But if we must make our
choice, we shall, like Bassanio in the play, turn from the specious
caskets which contain only the Death's-head and the Fool's-head,
and fix on the plain leaden chest which conceals the treasure.
The Puritans were men whose minds had derived a peculiar
character from the daily contemplation of superior beings and
eternal interests. Not content with acknowledging, in general
terms, an overruling Providence, they habitually ascribed every
event to the will of the Great Being for whose power nothing
was too vast, for whose inspection nothing was too minute. To
know him, to serve him, to enjoy him, was with them the great
end of existence. They rejected with contempt the ceremoni-
ous homage which other sects substituted for the pure worship of
the soul. Instead of catching occasional glimpses of the Deity
through an obscuring veil, they aspired to gaze full on his intol-
erable brightness, and to commune with him face to face. Hence
originated their contempt for terrestrial distinctions. The differ-
ence between the greatest and the meanest of mankind seemed
to vanish, when compared with the boundless interval which sep-
arated the whole race from Him on whom their own eyes were
constantly fixed. They recognized no title to superiority but his
favor; and, confident of that favor, they despised all the accom-
plishments and all the dignities of the world. If they were un-
acquainted with the works of philosophers and poets, they were
deeply read in the oracles of God. If their names were not
found in the registers of heralds, they were recorded in the Book
of Life. If their steps were not accompanied by a splendid train
of menials, legions of ministering angels had charge over them.
Their palaces were houses not made with hands, their diadems
crowns of glory which should never fade away. On the rich
and the eloquent, on nobles and priests, they looked down with
contempt; for they esteemed themselves rich in a more precious
treasure and eloquent in a more sublime language, nobles by
the right of an earlier creation and priests by the imposition of
a mightier hand. The very meanest of them was a being to


## p. 9401 (#425) ###########################################

THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY
9401
whose fate a mysterious and terrible importance belonged; on
whose slightest action the spirits of light and darkness looked
with anxious interest; who had been destined, before heaven and
earth were created, to enjoy a felicity which should continue when
heaven and earth should have passed away. Events which short-
sighted politicians ascribed to earthly causes, had been ordained
on his account. For his sake empires had risen, and flourished,
and decayed. For his sake the Almighty had proclaimed his
will by the pen of the Evangelist and the harp of the prophet.
He had been wrested by no common deliverer from the grasp
of no common foe. He had been ransomed by the sweat of no
vulgar agony, by the blood of no earthly sacrifice. It was for
him that the sun had been darkened, that the rocks had been
rent, that the dead had risen, that all nature had shuddered at
the sufferings of her expiring God.
Thus the Puritan was made up of two different men: the one
all self-abasement, penitence, gratitude, passion; the other proud,
calm, inflexible, sagacious. He prostrated himself in the dust be-
fore his Maker; but he set his foot on the neck of his king. In
his devotional retirement he prayed with convulsions, and groans,
and tears. He was half maddened by glorious or terrible illus-
He heard the lyres of angels or the tempting whispers
of fiends. He caught a gleam of the Beatific Vision, or woke
screaming from dreams of everlasting fire. Like Vane, he thought
himself intrusted with the sceptre of the millennial year. Like
Fleetwood, he cried in the bitterness of his soul that God had.
hid his face from him. But when he took his seat in the coun-
cil, or girt on his sword for war, these tempestuous workings of
the soul had left no perceptible trace behind them. People who
saw nothing of the godly but their uncouth visages, and heard
nothing from them but their groans and their whining hymns,
might laugh at them. But those had little reason to laugh who
encountered them in the hall of debate or on the field of battle.
These fanatics brought to civil and military affairs a coolness
of judgment and an immutability of purpose which some writers
have thought inconsistent with their religious zeal, but which
were in fact the necessary effects of it. The intensity of their
feelings on one subject made them tranquil on every other. One
overpowering sentiment had subjected to itself pity and hatred,
ambition and fear. Death had lost its terrors, and pleasure its
charms. They had their smiles and their tears, their raptures


## p. 9402 (#426) ###########################################

9402
THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY
and their sorrows; but not for the things of this world. Enthu-
siasm had made them Stoics; had cleared their minds from every
vulgar passion and prejudice, and raised them above the influ-
ence of danger and of corruption. It sometimes might lead them
to pursue unwise ends, but never to choose unwise means. They
went through the world, like Sir Artegal's iron man Talus with
his flail, crushing and trampling down oppressors, mingling with
human beings, but having neither part nor lot in human infirm-
ities; insensible to fatigue, to pleasure, and to pain; not to be
pierced by any weapon, not to be withstood by any barrier.
Such we believe to have been the character of the Puritans.
We perceive the absurdity of their manners. We dislike the sul-
len gloom of their domestic habits. We acknowledge that the
tone of their minds was often injured by straining after things
too high for mortal reach: and we know that in spite of their
hatred of Popery, they too often fell into the worst vices of that
bad system,-intolerance and extravagant austerity; that they had
their anchorites and their crusades, their Dunstans and their De
Montforts, their Dominics and their Escobars. Yet, when all cir-
cumstances are taken into consideration, we do not hesitate to
pronounce them a brave, a wise, an honest, and a useful body.
SPAIN UNDER PHILIP II.
From the Essay on Lord Mahon's "History of the War of the Succession in
Spain >
WH
HOEVER wishes to be well acquainted with the morbid anat-
omy of governments, whoever wishes to know how great
States may be made feeble and wretched, should study
the history of Spain. The empire of Philip the Second was
undoubtedly one of the most powerful and splendid that ever
existed in the world. In Europe, he ruled Spain, Portugal, the
Netherlands on both sides of the Rhine, Franche Comté, Rous-
sillon, the Milanese, and the Two Sicilies. Tuscany, Parma,
and the other small States of Italy, were as completely dependent
on him as the Nizam and the Rajah of Berar now are on the
East India Company. In Asia, the King of Spain was master of
the Philippines, and of all those rich settlements which the Por-
tuguese had made on the coasts of Malabar and Coromandel, in
the Peninsula of Malacca, and in the spice islands of the Eastern


## p. 9403 (#427) ###########################################

THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY
9403
Archipelago. In America, his dominions extended on each side
of the equator into the temperate zone. There is reason to
believe that his annual revenue amounted, in the season of his
greatest power, to a sum near ten times as large as that which
England yielded to Elizabeth. He had a standing army of fifty
thousand excellent troops, at a time when England had not a
single battalion in constant pay. His ordinary naval force con-
sisted of a hundred and forty galleys. He held, what no other
prince in modern times has held, the dominion both of the land
and of the sea. During the greater part of his reign, he was
supreme on both elements. His soldiers marched up to the capi-
tal of France; his ships menaced the shores of England.
It is no exaggeration to say that during several years, his
power over Europe was greater than even that of Napoleon.
The influence of the French conqueror never extended beyond
low-water mark. The narrowest strait was to his power what it
was of old believed that a running stream was to the sorceries
of a witch. While his army entered every metropolis from
Moscow to Lisbon, the English fleets blockaded every port from
Dantzic to Trieste. Sicily, Sardinia, Majorca, Guernsey, enjoyed
security through the whole course of a war which endangered
every throne on the Continent. The victorious and imperial
nation which had filled its museums with the spoils of Antwerp,
of Florence, and of Rome, was suffering painfully from the want
of luxuries which use had made necessaries. While pillars and
arches were rising to commemorate the French conquests, the
conquerors were trying to manufacture coffee out of succory and
sugar out of beet-root. The influence of Philip on the Continent
was as great as that of Napoleon. The Emperor of Germany
was his kinsman. France, torn by religious dissensions, was
never a formidable opponent, and was sometimes a dependent
ally. At the same time, Spain had what Napoleon desired in
vain, ships, colonies, and commerce. She long monopolized the
trade of America and of the Indian Ocean. All the gold of the
West, and all the spices of the East, were received and distributed
by her. During many years of war, her commerce was inter-
rupted only by the predatory enterprises of a few roving pri-
vateers. Even after the defeat of the Armada, English statesmen
continued to look with great dread on the maritime power of
Philip. "The King of Spain," said the Lord Keeper to the two
Houses in 1593, "since he hath usurped upon the kingdom of


## p. 9404 (#428) ###########################################

9404
THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY
Portugal, hath thereby grown mighty by gaining the East Indies;
so as, how great soever he was before, he is now thereby mani-
festly more great. . . . He keepeth a navy armed to impeach
all trade of merchandise from England to Gascoigne and Guienne,
which he attempted to do this last vintage; so as he is now
become as a frontier enemy to all the west of England, as well
as all the south parts, as Sussex, Hampshire, and the Isle of
Wight. Yea, by means of his interest in St. Maloes, a port full of
shipping for the war, he is a dangerous neighbor to the Queen's
isles of Jersey and Guernsey, ancient possessions of this crown,
and never conquered in the greatest wars with France. "
The ascendency which Spain then had in Europe was in
one sense well deserved. It was an ascendency which had been
gained by unquestioned superiority in all the arts of policy and
of war.
In the sixteenth century, Italy was not more decidedly
the land of the fine arts, Germany was not more decidedly the
land of bold theological speculation, than Spain was the land
of statesmen and of soldiers. The character which Virgil has
ascribed to his countrymen might have been claimed by the
grave and haughty chiefs who surrounded the throne of Ferdi-
nand the Catholic, and of his immediate successors. That majes-
tic art, "regere imperio populos," was not better understood
by the Romans in the proudest days of their republic than
by Gonsalvo and Ximenes, Cortez and Alva. The skill of the
Spanish diplomatists was renowned throughout Europe. In Eng-
land the name of Gondomar is still remembered. The sovereign
nation was unrivaled both in regular and irregular warfare.
The impetuous chivalry of France, the serried phalanx of Switz-
erland, were alike found wanting when brought face to face with
the Spanish infantry. In the wars of the New World, where
something different from ordinary strategy was required in the
general and something different from ordinary discipline in the
soldier, where it was every day necessary to meet by some new
expedient the varying tactics of a barbarous enemy, the Spanish
adventurers, sprung from the common people, displayed a fertility
of resource, and a talent for negotiation and command, to which
history scarcely affords a parallel.
The Castilian of those times was to the Italian what the Ro-
man, in the days of the greatness of Rome, was to the Greek.
The conqueror had less ingenuity, less taste, less delicacy of
perception, than the conquered; but far more pride, firmness, and


## p. 9405 (#429) ###########################################

THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY
9405
courage, a more solemn demeanor, a stronger sense of honor.
The subject had more subtlety in speculation, the ruler more
energy in action. The vices of the former were those of a
coward; the vices of the latter were those of a tyrant. It may
be added, that the Spaniard, like the Roman, did not disdain to
study the arts and the language of those whom he oppressed. A
revolution took place in the literature of Spain, not unlike that
revolution which, as Horace tells us, took place in the poetry of
Latium: "Capta ferum victorem cepit. " The slave took prisoner
the enslaver. The old Castilian ballads gave place to sonnets
in the style of Petrarch, and to heroic poems in the stanza of
Ariosto, as the national songs of Rome were driven out by imi-
tations of Theocritus and translations from Menander.
In no modern society, not even in England during the reign
of Elizabeth, has there been so great a number of men eminent
at once in literature and in the pursuits of active life, as Spain
produced during the sixteenth century. Almost every distin-
guished writer was also distinguished as a soldier and a politi-
cian. Boscan bore arms with high reputation. Garcilaso de Vega,
the author of the sweetest and most graceful pastoral poem of
modern times, after a short but splendid military career, fell
sword in hand at the head of a storming party. Alonzo de
Ercilla bore a conspicuous part in that war of Arauco which he
afterwards celebrated in one of the best heroic poems that Spain
has produced. Hurtado de Mendoza, whose poems have been
compared to those of Horace, and whose charming little novel is
evidently the model of Gil Blas, has been handed down to us by
history as one of the sternest of those iron proconsuls who were
employed by the House of Austria to crush the lingering pub-
lic spirit of Italy. Lope sailed in the Armada; Cervantes was
wounded at Lepanto.
It is curious to consider with how much awe our ancestors in
those times regarded a Spaniard. He was in their apprehension
a kind of dæmon; horribly malevolent, but withal most sagacious
and powerful. They be verye wyse and politicke," says an
honest Englishman, in a memorial addressed to Mary, "and can,
thorowe ther wysdome, reform and brydell theyr owne natures
for a tyme, and applye their conditions to the manners of those
men with whom they meddell gladlye by friendshippe: whose
mischievous manners a man shall never knowe untyll he come
under ther subjection: but then shall he parfectlye parceyve and
«<


## p. 9406 (#430) ###########################################

9406
THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY
fele them; which thynge I praye God England never do: for
in dissimulations untyll they have ther purposes, and afterwards
in oppression and tyrannye when they can obtayne them, they
do exceed all other nations upon the earthe. ” This is just such
language as Arminius would have used about the Romans, or as
an Indian statesman of our times might use about the English.
It is the language of a man burning with hatred, but cowed by
those whom he hates; and painfully sensible of their superiority,
not only in power, but in intelligence.
St
THE CHARACTER OF CHARLES II. OF ENGLAND
From the Essay on Mackintosh's History of the Revolution in England'
UCH was England in 1660. In 1678 the whole face of things
had changed. At the former of those epochs eighteen years
of commotion had made the majority of the people ready to
buy repose at any price. At the latter epoch eighteen years of
misgovernment had made the same majority desirous to obtain.
security for their liberties at any risk. The fury of their return-
ing loyalty had spent itself in its first outbreak. In a very few
months they had hanged and half-hanged, quartered and embow-
eled, enough to satisfy them. The Roundhead party seemed to
be not merely overcome, but too much broken and scattered ever
to rally again. Then commenced the reflux of public opinion.
The nation began to find out to what a man it had intrusted
without conditions all its dearest interests, on what a man it had
lavished all its fondest affection.
On the ignoble nature of the restored exile, adversity had
exhausted all her discipline in vain. He had one immense
advantage over most other princes. Though born in the purple,
he was far better acquainted with the vicissitudes of life and the
diversities of character than most of his subjects. He had known
restraint, danger, penury, and dependence. He had often suffered
from ingratitude, insolence, and treachery. He had received many
signal proofs of faithful and heroic attachment. He had seen, if
ever man saw, both sides of human nature. But only one side
remained in his memory. He had learned only to despise and
to distrust his species; to consider integrity in men, and modesty
in women, as mere acting: nor did he think it worth while to
keep his opinion to himself. He was incapable of friendship; yet


## p. 9407 (#431) ###########################################

THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY
9407
he was perpetually led by favorites, without being in the small-
est degree duped by them. He knew that their regard to his
interests was all simulated; but from a certain easiness which had
no connection with humanity, he submitted, half laughing at him-
self, to be made the tool of any woman whose person attracted
him or of any man whose tattle diverted him. He thought
little and cared less about religion. He seems to have passed
his life in dawdling suspense between Hobbism and Popery.
He was crowned in his youth with the Covenant in his hand;
he died at last with the Host sticking in his throat; and dur-
ing most of the intermediate years was occupied in persecuting
both Covenanters and Catholics.
He was not a tyrant from
the ordinary motives. He valued power for its own sake little,
and fame still less. He does not appear to have been vindictive,
or to have found any pleasing excitement in cruelty. What he
wanted was to be amused, to get through the twenty-four hours
pleasantly without sitting down to dry business. Sauntering
was, as Sheffield expresses it, the true Sultana Queen of his
Majesty's affections. A sitting in council would have been insup-
portable to him if the Duke of Buckingham had not been there
to make mouths at the Chancellor. It has been said, and is
highly probable, that in his exile he was quite disposed to sell
his rights to Cromwell for a good round sum. To the last, his
only quarrel with his Parliaments was that they often gave him
trouble and would not always give him money. If there was a
person for whom he felt a real regard, that person was his
brother. If there was a point about which he really entertained
a scruple of conscience or of honor, that point was the descent
of the crown. Yet he was willing to consent to the Exclusion
Bill for six hundred thousand pounds; and the negotiation was
broken off only because he insisted on being paid beforehand.
To do him justice, his temper was good; his manners agreeable;
his natural talents above mediocrity. But he was sensual, frivo-
lous, false, and cold-hearted, beyond almost any prince of whom
history makes mention.
Under the government of such a man, the English people
could not be long in recovering from the intoxication of loyalty.


## p. 9408 (#432) ###########################################

9408
THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY
THE CHURCH OF ROME
From the Essay on Ranke's 'History of the Popes >
THE
HERE is not, and there never was on the earth, a work of
human policy so well deserving of examination as the
Roman Catholic Church. The history of that Church joins
together the two great ages of human civilization. No other in-
stitution is left standing which carries the mind back to the times.
when the smoke of sacrifice rose from the Pantheon, and when
camelopards and tigers bounded in the Flavian amphitheatre. The
proudest royal houses are but of yesterday, when compared with
the line of the Supreme Pontiffs. That line we trace back in an
unbroken series from the pope who crowned Napoleon in the
nineteenth century to the pope who crowned Pepin in the eighth;
and far beyond the time of Pepin the august dynasty extends, till
it is lost in the twilight of fable. The republic of Venice came
next in antiquity. But the republic of Venice was modern when
compared with the Papacy; and the republic of Venice is gone,
and the Papacy remains. The Papacy remains, not in decay, not
a mere antique, but full of life and useful vigor. The Catholic
Church is still sending forth to the farthest ends of the world
missionaries as zealous as those who landed in Kent with Augus-
tin, and still confronting hostile kings with the same spirit with
which she confronted Attila. The number of her children is
greater than in any former age. Her acquisitions in the New
World have more than compensated for what she has lost in the
Old. Her spiritual ascendency extends over the vast countries
which lie between the plains of the Missouri and Cape Horn,
countries which, a century hence, may not improbably contain
a population as large as that which now inhabits Europe. The
members of her communion are certainly not fewer than a hun-
dred and fifty millions; and it will be difficult to show that all
other Christian sects united amount to a hundred and twenty
millions. Nor do we see any sign which indicates that the term
of her long dominion is approaching. She saw the commence-
ment of all the governments and of all the ecclesiastical estab-
lishments that now exist in the world; and we feel no assurance
that she is not destined to see the end of them all. She was
great and respected before the Saxon had set foot on Britain,
before the Frank had passed the Rhine, when Grecian eloquence
still flourished in Antioch, when idols were still worshiped in the


## p. 9409 (#433) ###########################################

THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY
9409
temple of Mecca. And she may still exist in undiminished vigor
when some traveler from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a
vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge
to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's.
We often hear it said that the world is constantly becoming
more and more enlightened, and that this enlightening must be
favorable to Protestantism and unfavorable to Catholicism. We
wish that we could think so. But we see great reason to doubt
whether this be a well-founded expectation. We see that during
the last two hundred and fifty years the human mind has been
in the highest degree active; that it has made great advances in
every branch of natural philosophy; that it has produced innu-
merable inventions tending to promote the convenience of life;
that medicine, surgery, chemistry, engineering, have been very
greatly improved; that government, police, and law have been
improved, though not to so great an extent as the physical sci-
ences. But we see that during these two hundred and fifty
years, Protestantism has made no conquests worth speaking of.
Nay, we believe that as far as there has been a change, that
change has on the whole been in favor of the Church of Rome.
We cannot, therefore, feel confident that the progress of knowl-
edge will necessarily be fatal to a system which has, to say the
least, stood its ground in spite of the immense progress made by
the human race in knowledge since the days of Queen Elizabeth.
Indeed, the argument which we are considering seems to us
to be founded on an entire mistake. There are branches of
knowledge with respect to which the law of the human mind.
is progress. In mathematics, when once a proposition has been
demonstrated, it is never afterwards contested. Every fresh story
is as solid a basis for a new superstructure as the original
foundation was. Here, therefore, there is a constant addition to
the stock of truth. In the inductive sciences, again, the law is
progress. Every day furnishes new facts, and thus brings theory
nearer and nearer to perfection. There is no chance that either
in the purely demonstrative or in the purely experimental sci-
ences, the world will ever go back or even remain stationary.
Nobody ever heard of a reaction against Taylor's theorem, or
of a reaction against Harvey's doctrine of the circulation of the
blood.
But with theology the case is very different. As respects nat-
ural religion,-revelation being for the present altogether left out
XVI-589


## p. 9410 (#434) ###########################################

9410
THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY
of the question,-it is not easy to see that a philosopher of the
present day is more favorably situated than Thales or Simonides.
He has before him just the same evidences of design in the
structure of the universe which the early Greek had.
We say
just the same; for the discoveries of modern astronomers and
anatomists have really added nothing to the force of that argu-
ment which a reflecting mind finds in every beast, bird, insect,
fish, leaf, flower, and shell. The reasoning by which Socrates,
in Xenophon's hearing, confuted the little atheist Aristodemus,
is exactly the reasoning of Paley's Natural Theology. Socrates
makes precisely the same use of the statues of Polycletus and the
pictures of Zeuxis which Paley makes of the watch. As to the
other great question, the question what becomes of man after
death, we do not see that a highly educated European, left to
his unassisted reason, is more likely to be in the right than a
Blackfoot Indian. Not a single one of the many sciences in
which we surpass the Blackfoot Indians throws the smallest light
on the state of the soul after the animal life is extinct. In truth,
all the philosophers, ancient and modern, who have attempted
without the help of revelation to prove the immortality of man,
from Plato down to Franklin, appear to us to have failed de-
plorably.
Of the dealings of God with man, no more has been revealed
to the nineteenth century than to the first, or to London than to
the wildest parish in the Hebrides. It is true that in those
things which concern this life and this world, man constantly
becomes wiser and wiser. But it is no less true that, as respects
a higher power and a future state, man, in the language of
Goethe's scoffing fiend,
·
"bleibt stets von gleichem Schlag,
Und ist so wunderlich als wie am ersten Tag. ”*
The history of Catholicism strikingly illustrates these observa-
tions. During the last seven centuries the public mind of Europe
has made constant progress in every department of secular knowl-
edge. But in religion we can trace no constant progress. The
ecclesiastical history of that long period is a history of movement
to and fro. Four times, since the authority of the Church of
Rome was established in Western Christendom, has the human
*«-
remains always of the same stamp,
And is as unaccountable as on the first day. "


## p. 9411 (#435) ###########################################

THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY
9411
intellect risen up against her yoke. Twice that Church remained.
completely victorious. Twice she came forth from the conflict
bearing the marks of cruel wounds, but with the principle of life
still strong within her. When we reflect on the tremendous
assaults which she has survived, we find it difficult to conceive in
what way she is to perish.
LOYOLA AND THE JESUITS
From the Essay on Ranke's 'History of the Popes›
I™
Is not, therefore, strange that the effect of the great outbreak
of Protestantism in one part of Christendom should have
been to produce an equally violent outbreak of Catholic zeal
in another. Two reformations were pushed on at once with
equal energy and effect: a reformation of doctrine in the North,
a reformation of manners and discipline in the South. In the
course of a single generation, the whole spirit of the Church of
Rome underwent a change. From the halls of the Vatican to
the most secluded hermitage of the Apennines, the great revival
was everywhere felt and seen. All the institutions anciently
devised for the propagation and defense of the faith were
furbished up and made efficient. Fresh engines of still more
formidable power were constructed. Everywhere old religious
communities were remodeled and new religious communities
called into existence. Within a year after the death of Leo, the
order of Camaldoli was purified. The Capuchins restored the old
Franciscan discipline, the midnight prayer and the life of silence.
The Barnabites and the society of Somasca devoted themselves
to the relief and education of the poor. To the Theatine order
a still higher interest belongs. Its great object was the same
with that of our early Methodists; namely, to supply the defi-
ciencies of the parochial clergy. The Church of Rome, wiser than
the Church of England, gave every countenance to the good
work. The members of the new brotherhood preached to great
multitudes in the streets and in the fields, prayed by the beds
of the sick, and administered the last sacraments to the dying.
Foremost among them in zeal and devotion was Gian Pietro
Caraffa, afterwards Pope Paul the Fourth.
In the convent of the Theatines at Venice, under the eye
of Caraffa, a Spanish gentleman took up his abode, tended the
poor in the hospitals, went about in rags, starved himself almost


## p. 9412 (#436) ###########################################

9412
THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY
to death, and often sallied into the streets, mounted on stones,
and waving his hat to invite the passers-by, began to preach in
a strange jargon of mingled Castilian and Tuscan. The Thea-
tines were among the most zealous and rigid of men: but to
this enthusiastic neophyte their discipline seemed lax, and their
movements sluggish; for his own mind, naturally passionate and
imaginative, had passed through a training which had given to
all its peculiarities a morbid intensity and energy. In his early
life he had been the very prototype of the hero of Cervantes.
The single study of the young Hidalgo had been chivalrous ro-
mance; and his existence had been one gorgeous day-dream of
princesses rescued and infidels subdued. He had chosen a Dul-
cinea, no countess, no duchess, "- these are his own words,-
"but one of far higher station;" and he flattered himself with
the hope of laying at her feet the keys of Moorish castles and
the jeweled turbans of Asiatic kings.
«<
In the midst of these visions of martial glory and prosper-
ous love, a severe wound stretched him on a bed of sickness.
His constitution was shattered, and he was doomed to be a crip-
ple for life. The palm of strength, grace, and skill in knightly
exercises, was no longer for him. He could no longer hope to
strike down gigantic soldans, or to find favor in the sight of
beautiful women. A new vision then arose in his mind, and
mingled itself with his own delusions in a manner which to most
Englishmen must seem singular, but which those who know how
close was the union between religion and chivalry in Spain will
be at no loss to understand. He would still be a soldier; he
would still be a knight-errant: but the soldier and knight-errant
of the spouse of Christ. He would smite the Great Red Dragon.
He would be the champion of the Woman clothed with the Sun.
He would break the charm under which false prophets held
the souls of men in bondage. His restless spirit led him to the
Syrian deserts and to the chapel of the Holy Sepulchre. Thence
he wandered back to the farthest West, and astonished the con-
vents of Spain and the schools of France by his penances and
vigils. The same lively imagination which had been employed in
picturing the tumult of unreal battles and the charms of unreal
queens, now peopled his solitude with saints and angels. The
Holy Virgin descended to commune with him. He saw the
Savior face to face with the eye of flesh. Even those mysteries
of religion which are the hardest trial of faith were in his case
palpable to sight. It is difficult to relate without a pitying smile


## p. 9413 (#437) ###########################################

THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY
9413
that in the sacrifice of the mass, he saw transubstantiation take
place; and that as he stood praying on the steps of the Church
of St. Dominic, he saw the Trinity in Unity, and wept aloud
with joy and wonder. Such was the celebrated Ignatius Loyola,
who in the great Catholic reaction bore the same part which
Luther bore in the great Protestant movement.
Dissatisfied with the system of the Theatines, the enthusiastic
Spaniard turned his face towards Rome. Poor, obscure, without
a patron, without recommendations, he entered the city where
now two princely temples, rich with painting and many-colored
marble, commemorate his great services to the Church; where
his form stands sculptured in massive silver; where his bones,
enshrined amidst jewels, are placed beneath the altar of God.
His activity and zeal bore down all opposition; and under his
rule the order of Jesuits began to exist, and grew rapidly to
the full measure of his gigantic powers. With what vehemence,
with what policy, with what exact discipline, with what dauntless
courage, with what self-denial, with what forgetfulness of the
dearest private ties, with what intense and stubborn devotion to
a single end, with what unscrupulous laxity and versatility in the
choice of means, the Jesuits fought the battle of their church,
is written in every page of the annals of Europe during several
generations. In the Order of Jesus was concentrated the quint-
essence of the Catholic spirit; and the history of the Order of
Jesus is the history of the great Catholic reaction. That order
possessed itself at once of all the strongholds which command the
public mind: of the pulpit, of the press, of the confessional, of
the academies. Wherever the Jesuit preached, the church was
too small for the audience. The name of Jesuit on a title-page
secured the circulation of a book. It was in the ears of the
Jesuit that the powerful, the noble, and the beautiful breathed
the secret history of their lives. It was at the feet of the Jesuit
that the youth of the higher and middle classes were brought
up from childhood to manhood, from the first rudiments to the
courses of rhetoric and philosophy. Literature and science, lately
associated with infidelity or with heresy, now became the allies
of orthodoxy.
Dominant in the South of Europe, the great order soon went
forth conquering and to conquer. In spite of oceans and deserts,
of hunger and pestilence, of spies and penal laws, of dungeons
and racks, of gibbets and quartering-blocks, Jesuits were to be


## p. 9414 (#438) ###########################################

9414
THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY
found under every disguise and in every country; scholars, phy
sicians, merchants, serving-men; in the hostile court of Sweden,
in the old manor-house of Cheshire, among the hovels of Con-
naught; arguing, instructing, consoling, stealing away the hearts
of the young, animating the courage of the timid, holding up
the crucifix before the eyes of the dying. Nor was it less their
office to plot against the thrones and lives of the apostate kings,
to spread evil rumors, to raise tumults, to inflame civil wars,
to arm the hand of the assassin. Inflexible in nothing but in
their fidelity to the Church, they were equally ready to appeal
in her cause to the spirit of loyalty and to the spirit of freedom.
Extreme doctrines of obedience and extreme doctrines of liberty,
the right of rulers to misgovern the people, the right of every
one of the people to plunge his knife in the heart of a bad ruler,
were inculcated by the same man, according as he addressed
himself to the subject of Philip or to the subject of Elizabeth.
Some described these divines as the most rigid, others as the
most indulgent of spiritual directors; and both descriptions were
correct. The truly devout listened with awe to the high and
saintly morality of the Jesuit. The gay cavalier who had run his
rival through the body, the frail beauty who had forgotten her
marriage vow, found in the Jesuit an easy well-bred man of the
world, who knew how to make allowance for the little irregu-
larities of people of fashion. The confessor was strict or lax,
according to the temper of the penitent. The first object was to
drive no person out of the pale of the Church. Since there were
bad people, it was better that they should be bad Catholics than
bad Protestants. If a person was so unfortunate as to be a
bravo, a libertine, or a gambler, that was no reason for making
him a heretic too.
The Old World was not wide enough for this strange activ-
ity. The Jesuits invaded all the countries which the great mari-
time discoveries of the preceding age had laid open to European
enterprise. They were to be found in the depths of the Peru-
vian mines, at the marts of the African slave-caravans, on the
shores of the Spice Islands, in the observatories of China. They
made converts in regions which neither avarice nor curiosity had
tempted any of their countrymen to enter; and preached and dis-
puted in tongues of which no other native of the West understood
a word.


## p. 9415 (#439) ###########################################

THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY
THE REIGN OF TERROR
From the Essay on ‘Barère›
9415
N-[disinterested enthusiasts].
O GREAT party can be composed of such materials as these
It is the inevitable law that
such zealots as we have described shall collect around them
a multitude of slaves, of cowards, and of libertines, whose savage
tempers and licentious appetites, withheld only by the dread of
law and magistracy from the worst excesses, are called into full
activity by the hope of impunity. A faction which, from what-
ever motive, relaxes the great laws of morality, is certain to be
joined by the most immoral part of the community. This has
been repeatedly proved in religious wars. The war of the Holy
Sepulchre, the Albigensian war, the Huguenot war, the Thirty
Years' war, all originated in pious zeal. That zeal inflamed the
champions of the Church to such a point that they regarded all
generosity to the vanquished as a sinful weakness. The infidel,
the heretic, was to be run down like a mad dog. No outrage
committed by the Catholic warrior on the miscreant enemy could
deserve punishment. As soon as it was known that boundless
license was thus given to barbarity and dissoluteness, thousands
of wretches who cared nothing for the sacred cause, but who
were eager to be exempted from the police of peaceful cities and
the discipline of well-governed camps, flocked to the standard of
the faith. The men who had set up that standard were sincere,
chaste, regardless of lucre, and perhaps, where only themselves
were concerned, not unforgiving; but round that standard were
assembled such gangs of rogues, ravishers, plunderers, and fero-
cious bravoes, as were scarcely ever found under the flag of any
State engaged in a mere temporal quarrel. In a very similar
way was the Jacobin party composed. There was a small nucleus
of enthusiasts; round that nucleus was gathered a vast mass
of ignoble depravity; and in all that mass there was nothing so
depraved and so ignoble as Barère.
Then came those days when the most barbarous of all
codes was administered by the most barbarous of all tribunals;
when no man could greet his neighbors, or say his prayers, or
dress his hair, without danger of committing a capital crime;
when spies lurked in every corner; when the guillotine was long
and hard at work every morning; when the jails were filled as


## p. 9416 (#440) ###########################################

9416
THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY
close as the hold of a slave-ship; when the gutters ran foaming
with blood into the Seine; when it was death to be great-niece
of a captain of the royal guards, or half-brother of a doctor of
the Sorbonne, to express a doubt whether assignats would not
fall, to hint that the English had been victorious in the action.
of the first of June, to have a copy of one of Burke's pamphlets
locked up in a desk, to laugh at a Jacobin for taking the name
of Cassius or Timoleon, or to call the Fifth Sans-culottide by its
old superstitious name of St. Matthew's Day. While the daily
wagon-loads of victims were carried to their doom through the
streets of Paris, the proconsuls whom the sovereign committee
had sent forth to the departments reveled in an extravagance of
cruelty unknown even in the capital. The knife of the deadly
machine rose and fell too slow for their work of slaughter. Long
rows of captives were mowed down with grape-shot. Holes were
made in the bottom of crowded barges. Lyons was turned into
a desert. At Arras even the cruel mercy of a speedy death was
denied to the prisoners. All down the Loire, from Saumur to
the sea, great flocks of crows and kites feasted on naked corpses,
twined together in hideous embraces. No mercy was shown to
sex or age. The number of young lads and of girls of seven-
teen who were murdered by that execrable government is to be
reckoned by hundreds. Babies torn from the breast were tossed
from pike to pike along the Jacobin ranks. One champion of
liberty had his pockets well stuffed with ears. Another swag.
gered about with the finger of a little child in his hat. A few
months had sufficed to degrade France below the level of New
Zealand.
It is absurd to say that any amount of public danger can
justify a system like this, we do not say on Christian principles,
we do not say on the principles of a high morality, but even on
principles of Machiavellian policy. It is true that great emer-
gencies call for activity and vigilance; it is true that they justify
severity which, in ordinary times, would deserve the name of
cruelty. But indiscriminate severity can never, under any cir-
cumstances, be useful. It is plain that the whole efficacy of
punishment depends on the care with which the guilty are dis-
tinguished. Punishment which strikes the guilty and the innocent
promiscuously operates merely like a pestilence or a great con-
vulsion of nature, and has no more tendency to prevent offenses
than the cholera, or an earthquake like that of Lisbon, would


## p. 9417 (#441) ###########################################

THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY
9417
have. The energy for which the Jacobin administration is praised
was merely the energy of the Malay who maddens himself with
opium, draws his knife, and runs a-muck through the streets,
slashing right and left at friends and foes. Such has never been
the energy of truly great rulers; of Elizabeth, for example, of
Oliver, or of Frederick. They were not, indeed, scrupulous. But
had they been less scrupulous than they were, the strength and
amplitude of their minds would have preserved them from crimes
such as those which the small men of the Committee of Public
Safety took for daring strokes of policy. The great Queen who
so long held her own against foreign and domestic enemies,
against temporal and spiritual arms; the great Protector who gov-
erned with more than regal power, in despite both of royalists
and republicans; the great King who, with a beaten army and
an exhausted treasury, defended his little dominions to the last
against the united efforts of Russia, Austria, and France, with
what scorn would they have heard that it was impossible for
them to strike a salutary terror into the disaffected without send-
ing schoolboys and schoolgirls to death by cart-loads and boat-
loads!
-
The popular notion is, we believe, that the leading Terrorists
were wicked men, but at the same time great men. We can see
nothing great about them but their wickedness. That their policy
was daringly original is a vulgar error. Their policy is as old
as the oldest accounts which we have of human misgovernment.
It seemed new in France and in the eighteenth century only
because it had been long disused, for excellent reasons, by the
enlightened part of mankind. But it has always prevailed, and
still prevails, in savage and half-savage nations, and is the chief
cause which prevents such nations from making advances towards
civilization. Thousands of deys, of beys, of pachas, of rajahs, of
nabobs, have shown themselves as great masters of statecraft as
the members of the Committee of Public Safety. Djezzar, we
imagine, was superior to any of them in their new line. In fact,
there is not a petty tyrant in Asia or Africa so dull or so un-
learned as not to be fully qualified for the business of Jacobin
police and Jacobin finance. To behead people by scores without
caring whether they are guilty or innocent, to wring money
out of the rich by the help of jailers and executioners; to rob
the public creditor, and to put him to death if he remonstrates;
to take loaves by force out of the bakers' shops; to clothe and


## p. 9418 (#442) ###########################################

9418
THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY
mount soldiers by seizing on one man's wool and linen, and on
another man's horses and saddles, without compensation,-is of
all modes of governing the simplest and most obvious. Of its
morality we at present say nothing. But surely it requires no
capacity beyond that of a barbarian or a child.
By means like those which we have described, the Commit-
tee of Public Safety undoubtedly succeeded, for a short time, in
enforcing profound submission and in raising immense funds.
But to enforce submission by butchery, and to raise funds by spo-
liation, is not statesmanship.