got rid of it. We are no longer superstitious; we have made away with the old monks whose maxim was "work is worship;" we have struck down the last of the Barons; we are free; we have the Gospel of the cotton mill, laissez-faire, save who can, and the devil take the hindmost, and we can do what we please with our own. A notable change this, and worth considering. How was it brought about, and what has been the gain?

We cannot go fully into the inquiry this question opens up. The Middle Ages brought the human race forward not a little. What most strikes us is the high moral and spiritual exaltation which everywhere meets us. Man, through the faith nurtured and strengthened in him by the Church, became great, noble, chivalrous, energetic. This immense spiritual force accumulated in the interior of man during the four centuries named, overflows in the activity, bold adventure, vast enterprises, and important discoveries which commences in the fifteenth century. We note here four things resulting from it, which have especially contributed to the change of which we speak the Invention or rather general use of Gunpowder; the Revival of Letters; the Invention of Printing; and the Maritime Discoveries in the East and the West. These are considered, we believe, the principal agents in effecting what we have been pleased to call the Progress of modern society.

1. The art of war, as carried on prior to the introduction of fire-arms, which did not come into general use before the fifteenth century, was accessible for the most part only to the noble class and their retainers. It required so long a training, so great bodily strength and dexterity, and so much outlay in the equipments of the individual warrior, that artisans and peasants could make up but a small part, and never a very efficient part of an army. The chief reliance was, and necessarily, upon the nobility, the knights, and gentlemen. In this case the king was always more or less dependent on his nobles, and could rarely go to war without their assent and active aid. This restrained the royal power, and prevented the centralization of power in the hands of the monarch. The invention and general use of fire-arms lessened the importance of the cavalry, in which only the lords and gentlemen

served, and increased that of the infantry, composed of commoners. The monarch was able to dispense then, to a certain extent, with the services of his nobility, and to find his support in the people, artisans and peasants, easily collected and speedily disciplined. By thus introducing the infantry into the royal armies, as the main reliable branch of the service, a rude shock was given to the power and independence of the nobles. From that moment the Feudal nobility began to wane, and the power and independence of the monarch to increase.

The decrease of the power of the Nobility served to weaken that of the Church. The people naturally, with their instinctive wisdom, would cleave to the monarch, who employed them in his armies. They saw themselves now admitted to a share in an employment which had been previously, for the most part, the prerogative of their masters, and proud of being admitted to the high privilege of killing and being killed, they fancied that they were by this admission virtually enfranchised, and raised to an equality with those who had hitherto been their superiors. The rudest peasant, with a firelock in his hand, was more than a match for the bravest, strongest, best disciplined, and completely armed knight. Hence, all the tendencies of the people would be, in any contest, so far as possible, to support their royal masters. In the commons, then, royalty found its support against the nobility, and even against the Church. At least, by admitting the common people into the royal armies, Royalty weakened, or to some extent neutralized their affection for the Ecclesiastical power, which in any contest between it and the Church was of vast importance.

2. The Revival of Letters, as it is called, that is, of the study and reverence of Heathen Literature, which followed the taking of Constantinople by the Turks, had also a powerful influence in bringing about the change we have noted. The Church, during the Middle Ages, had paid great attention to Education; it had covered Europe over with universities and schools. In the early part of the fifteenth century, education was almost as general throughout the principal states of Europe as it is now; the actual amount of instruction one is tempted to believe

was greater, though perhaps a smaller number could read and write. The Bible had been translated into the vernacular language of Englishmen prior even to Wickliff, which would indicate that the Saxon population were able to read. There was, at any rate, a very general mental activity throughout Europe, as the relics of the popular ballads and literature of the time bear witness. The mind was prepared for the New Literature which was then brought to light. The Greek scholars, with Greek subtlety and Greek sophistry, were dispersed, by the taking of Constantinople, over the principal Latin states; the study of the ancient Heathen Literature went with them, and the several schools of ancient Greek philosophy had their disciples and champions in the very bosom and among the high dignitaries of the Church itself. Its obvious and unquestionable superiority, as to the perfection and beauty of its form, over the richer, profounder, more varied, and earnest, but less polished literature of the Fathers and the Church, secured it a ready adoption and an almost universal authority. In this fact we are to discover a powerful cause operating to destroy the power of the Church and the order of civilisation it had built up.

During the preceding centuries the nobles, being almost wholly occupied with governing, fighting, and doing their part, as they could, in the general affairs of society, had left literature almost entirely to the Church. But, in the fifteenth century, in consequence of the change already noted in the art of war, their original occupation was to a considerable extent taken away, and they began to turn their attention towards Letters. The Schools and Universities began to send out scholars from the lay commoners, and we had for the first time in Europe, since the establishment of the Barbarians, an educated and literary laity. The surface of education had been greatly extended; and always in proportion as education extends laterally does it lose in depth. The diffusion of education among the laity had created an immense class of superficial thinkers, halfeducated, always worse, more to be dreaded than those who have no education, as simplicity is always preferable to ignorance fancying itself wisdom.

We had then just the state of mind necessary to welcome the heathen Literature of which we speak. Its very superficialness, want of earnestness and strength, when compared with Christian Literature, was a recommendation, and facilitated its reception.

The effect of this revived heathen Literature, on the tone of thought, and its general bearings on Christian faith, are not always duly considered. The Fathers of the Church in the first five centuries had culled out from it all that Christianity would assimilate to itself, and made it an integral part of the common literary and philosophic life of the Church. We had in the Church all of heathen Greece and Rome that was worth retaining, or that could be retained in consistency with our faith as Christians. The human race then did not need the Revival. No good could come of it; for nothing new, but exploded heathenism, was to be obtained from it. The Revival was then in very deed a revival of heathenism. It was hostile to Christianity, and deeply prejudicial to the faith of Christians. And so history has proved it. We speak advisedly. We know very well the estimation in which the ancient Classics are held, and that one may as well speak against the Bible as against them. But, what is this so much boasted classical Literature? We admit the exquisiteness of its form; the perfection of the execution; we, too, have our admiration for the Divine Plato; we love as well as others an Aristotle, and find much in the Greek Tragedians that we love and admire; but we cannot forget that the whole body of Ancient Greek and Roman Literature is heathenish, wanting in true religious conception, in genuine love of man, in true, deep, living, Christian piety. Permit us to quote here, what we wrote on this subject some seven years ago, from another point of view, it is true, and with a far different aim, but still with substantially the same faith :

lars of the fifteenth century were intro"By means of the Classics, the schoduced to a world altogether unlike, and much superior [perhaps not] to that in which they lived,-to an order of ideas wholly diverse from those avowed or tolerated by the Church. They were enchanted. They had found the Ideal of their dreams. They became disgusted

with the present, they repelled the civilisation effected by the Church, looked with contempt on its Fathers, Saints, Martyrs, Schoolmen, Troubadours, Knights, and Minstrels, and sighed and yearned, and labored to reproduce Athens or Rome.

"And what was that Athens and that Rome which seemed to them to realize the very Ideal of the Perfect? We know very well to-day what they were. They were Material; through the whole period of their historical existence, it is well known that the material or temporal order predominated over the spiritual.

Human interests, the interests of mankind in time and space predominate. Man is the most conspicuous figure in the group. He is everywhere, and his imprint is upon everything. Industry flourishes; commerce is encouraged; the State is constituted and tends to Democracy; citizens assemble to discuss their common interests; the orator harangues them; the aspirant courts them; the warrior and the statesman render them an account of their doings, and await their award. The PEOPLE not the Gods-will, decree, make, unmake, or modify the laws. Divinity does not become incarnate, as in the Asiatic world; but men are deified History is not Theogony, but a record of human events and transactions. Poetry sings heroes, the great and renowned of earth, or chants at the festal board and at the couch of voluptuousness. Art models its creations after human forms, for human pleasure, or human convenience.

"There are gods and temples, and priests and oracles, and augurs and auguries, but they are not like those we meet where Spiritualism reigns. The gods are all anthropomorphous. Their forms are the perfection of the human. The allegorical beasts, the strange beasts, compounded of parts of many known and unknown beasts, which meet us in Indian, Egyptian, and Persian Mythology, as symbols of the gods, are extinct. Priests are not a caste, as under Spiritualism, springing from the head of Brahma, and claiming superior sanctity and power as their birthright; but simple police officers. Religion is merely a function of the State. Numa introduces or organizes Polytheism at Rome, for the purpose of governing the people by means of appeals to their sentiment of the Holy; and the Roman Pon

tifex Maximus was never more than a master of police.

"In classical antiquity religion is a function of the State. It is the same under Protestantism. Henry the Eighth, of England, declares himself supreme head of the Church, not by virtue of his spiritual character, but by virtue of his character as a temporal prince. The Protestant princes of Germany are protectors of the Church; and all over Europe there is an implied contract between the State and the Ecclesiastical Authorities. The State pledges itself to support, the Church, on condition that the Church support the State. Ask the kings, nobility, or even Church dignitaries, why they support religion, and they will answer with one voice, Because the people cannot be kept in order, cannot be made to submit to their rulers, and because civil society cannot exist, without it. The same, or a similar answer will be returned by almost every political man in this country: and truly may it be said, that religion is valued by the Protestant world as an auxiliary to the State, as a mere matter of police.

"Under the reign of Spiritualism all questions are decided by authority. The Church commanded, and men were to obey, or be counted rebels against God. Materialism, by raising up man and the State, makes the reason of man, or the reason of the State, paramount to the commands of the Church. Under Protestantism, the State in most cases, the individual reason in a few, imposes the creed on the Church. The King and Parliament of Great Britain determine the faith, the clergy must profess and maintain; the Protestant princes in Germany have the supreme control of the symbols of the Church, the right to enact what creed they please."

The Revival and general study of the Classics, tended by their character to destroy the power of the Church of the Middle Ages, to introduce an order of thought favorable to the supremacy of the Civil over the Ecclesiastical order, the effect of which is seen in the sudden growth of the monarchical or royal authority, which took place at the close of the fifteenth century, and the beginning of the sixteenth. The influence of this heathen literature, breaking the authority of the Church, and the use of fire-arms superseding

to some extent the co-operation of the old feudal nobility, combining, enabled the European potentates to shake off the authority of the Church, and to establish themselves in their independence. The cause of Protestantism was eminently the cause of the kings, and under the social and political aspect, the only aspect in which we now consider, or wish to consider the subject at all, was the cause of the people, only so far as it was for their advantage, to lose the protection of the Church, and the Feudal Noble, and to come under the unrestrained authority of the civil magistrate,-an authority which was not slow to degenerate into unbearable tyranny, as we see in the English Revolution in the seventeenth century, and the French in the eighteenth. But fire-arms and Classical Literature succeeded, by bringing the laity into the literary class, and the commoners into the armies, in breaking down the authority of the Church, destroying the old Feudal Nobility, and in establishing the independence of kings and the temporal governments, and not merely in what were called Protestant countries; for the principle of Protestantism triumphed throughout Europe for a season, in the countries remaining Catholic in name, as well as in those that became avowedly Protestant. Francis the First and Charles the Fifth would have done what did Henry the Eighth, the Princes of the north of Germany, and Gustavus Adolphus, if they had not humbled the Church, and for a time compelled the Holy See to succumb to their interests and wishes.

The independence of civil governments established, and the kings, freed from the dominion of the Church and the checks of the old Feudal barons, were not slow to adopt a purely worldly policy; and before the close of the fifteenth century, the policy now termed Machiavellian, was adopted and avowed by every court in Europe,-that is to say, a policy wholly detached from all moral and religious doctrines or principles. Machiavelli was born at Florence, of a noble family, in 1469, and, though

often execrated, was a great and learned man, and by no means ignorant or destitute of morality. He was the politician, the statesman of his epoch, and may be consulted as the highest authority for the maxims on which rested the policy of the European courts at the period under consideration.*

3. The INVENTION OF PRINTING on movable types, we are far from thinking; far, very far from wishing to intimate; is not destined to effect the greatest good; but we are equally decided that, up to the present moment, it would be difficult to say whether it has been productive of the more good or evil. We will not so far dishonor ourselves as even to say that we are the friends. of knowledge and universal enlighten-ment; we know no advocates of ignorance; we have no sympathy with. those, if such there be, who would withhold education from any portion of the human race; but we repeat that we regard half-education as worse than no education. We are not ashamed to avow our agreement with Pope, that Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring; "A little learning is a dangerous thing; There sh low draughts intoxicate the

brain,

But drinking deeply sobers us again."

The great mass of our American people can read, and do read the newspapers, and many other things; and all of them fancy themselves competent to sit in judgment on all matters human and divine. They are equal to the profoundest philosophical speculations, the loftiest theological dogmas, and the abstrusest political problems. Filled with a sense of their own wisdom and capacity for sound judgment, they lose all teachableness, and are really in a more deplorable state than if they made no pretensions to general intelligence. Unquestionably we must pass through this stage of superficial knowledge, which merely engenders pride, conceit, self-will, before we can come to that of true enlightenment; and therefore we do not complain, but submit to the present evil, consoling ourselves with the