ways of making wrong into right, is the harshest ; but they
were directed by a noble purpose, and they have left a mark
never to be effaced in the history of the human race.
The fire died away. "The Israelites," we are told,
"mingled among the heathen and learned their works."
They ceased to be missionaries. They hardly and fitfully
preserved the records of the meaning of their own exodus.
Eight hundred years went by, and the flame rekindled in
9
130 RECTORIAL ADDRESSES
another country. Cities more splendid even than the
hundred-gated Thebes itself had risen on the banks of the
Euphrates. Grand military empires had been founded on
war and conquest. Peace had followed when no enemies
were left to conquer; and with peace had come philosophy,
science, agricultural enterprise, magnificent engineering works
for the draining and irrigation of the Mesopotamian plains.
Temples and palaces towered into the sky. The pomp and
luxury of Asia rivalled, and even surpassed, the glories of
Egypt ; and by the side of it a second nature-worship,
which, if less elaborately absurd, was more deeply detest-
able. The foulest vices were consecrated to the service of
the gods, and the holiest ceremonies were inoculated with
impurity and sensuality.
The seventh century before the Christian era was dis-
tinguished over the whole East by extraordinary religious
revolutions. With the most remarkable of these, that which
bears the name of Buddha, I am not here concerned.
Buddhism has been the creed for more than two thousand
years of half the human race, but it left unaffected our own
western world, and therefore I here pass it by.
Simultaneously with Buddha, there appeared another
teacher, Zerdusht, or, as the Greeks called him, Zoroaster,
among the hardy tribes of the Persian mountains. He
taught a creed which, like that of the Israelites, was
essentially moral and extremely simple. Nature-worship,
as I said, knew nothing of morality. When the objects of
natural idolatry became personified, and physical phenomena
were metamorphosed into allegorical mythology, the indiffer-
ence to morality which was obvious in nature became
ascribed as a matter of course to gods which were but
nature in a personal disguise. Zoroaster, like Moses, saw
behind the physical forces into the deeper laws of right and
wrong. He supposed himself to discover two antagonist
powers contending in the heart of man as well as in the
outward universe a spirit of light and a spirit of darkness,
a spirit of truth and a spirit of falsehood, a spirit life-giving
and beautiful, a spirit poisonous and deadly. To one or
JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE 131
other of these powers man was necessarily in servitude. As
the follower of Ormuzd, he became enrolled in the celestial
armies, whose business was to fight against sin and misery,
against wrong-doing and impurity, against injustice and lies
and baseness of all sorts and kinds ; and every one with a
soul in him to prefer good to evil was summoned to the holy
wars, which would end at last after ages in the final over-
throw of Ahriman.
The Persians caught rapidly Zoroaster's spirit. Uncor-
rupted by luxury, they responded eagerly to a voice which
they recognised as speaking truth to them. They have been
called the Puritans of the Old World. Never any people, it
is said, hated idolatry as they hated it, and for the simple
reason that they hated lies. A Persian lad, Herodotus tells
us, was educated in three especial accomplishments. He
was taught to ride, to shoot, and to speak the truth that is
to say, he was brought up to be brave, active, valiant, and
upright. When a man speaks the truth, you may count
pretty surely that he possesses most other virtues. Half the
vices in the world rise out of cowardice, and one who is
afraid of lying is usually afraid of nothing else. Speech is
an article of trade in which we are all dealers, and the one
beyond all others where we are most bound to provide
honest wares :
e'x#pos /J-ol Ka/ceivos o/xws 'Ai'Sao irvXalcriv
6's 6' erepov [xev Kevdy ivl (/>peo"iv aAAo Be eliry.
This seems to have been the Persian temperament, and
in virtue of it they were chosen as the instruments clearly
recognised as such by the Prophet Isaiah for one which
were to sweep the earth clean of abominations, which had
grown to an intolerable height. Bel bowed down, and Nebo
had to stoop before them. Babylon, the lady of kingdoms,
was laid in the dust, and " her stargazers and her astrologers
and her monthly prognosticators " could not save her with
all their skill. They and she were borne away together.
Egypt's turn followed. Pietribution had been long delayed,
but her cup ran over at last. The palm-groves were flung
132 RECTORIAL ADDRESSES
into the river, the temples polluted, the idols mutilated.
The precious Apis, for all its godhood, was led with a halter
before the Persian king, and stabbed in the sight of the
world by Persian steel.
" Profane ! " exclaimed the priests, as pious persons, on
like occasions, have exclaimed a thousand times : " these
Puritans have no reverence for holy things." Eather it is
because they do reverence things which deserve reverence
that they loathe and abhor the counterfeit. What does an
ascertained imposture deserve but to be denied, exposed,
insulted, trampled under foot, danced upon, if nothing less
will serve, till the very geese take courage and venture to
hiss derision ? Are we to wreathe aureoles round the brows
of phantasms lest we shock the sensibilities of the idiots
who have - believed them to be divine ? Was the Prophet
Isaiah so tender in his way of treating such matters ?
Who hath formed a god, or molten a graven image that is profit-
able for nothing ? He heweth him down cedars. He taketh the
cypress and the oak from the trees of the forest. He burneth part
thereof in the fire ; with part thereof he eateth flesh. He roasteth
roast, and is satisfied : yea, he warmeth himself, and saith, Aha, I am
warm, I have seen the fire : and the residue thereof he maketh a god,
even his graven image : he falleth down unto it, and worshippeth it,
and prayeth unto it, and saith, Deliver me ; for thou art my god.
Enter into the rock, and hide thee in the dust, for fear of the
Lord, for the glory of His majesty when He ariseth to shake terribly
the earth. In that day a man shall cast his idols of silver and gold,
which they made each one for himself to worship, to the moles and
the bats.
Again events glide on. Persia runs the usual course.
Virtue and truth produced strength, strength dominion,
dominion riches, riches luxury, and luxury weakness and
collapse fatal sequence repeated so often, yet to so little
purpose. The hardy warrior of the mountains degenerated
into a vulgar sybarite. His manliness became effeminacy ;
his piety a ritual of priests ; himself a liar, a coward, and a
slave. The Greeks conquered the Persians, copied their
manners, and fell in turn before the Eomans. We count
little more than 500 years from the fall of Babylon, and the
JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE 133
entire known world was lying at the feet of a great military
despotism. Coming originally themselves from the East,
the classic nations had brought with them also the primaeval
nature-worship of Asia. The Greek imagination had woven
the Eastern metaphors into a singular mythology, in which
the gods were represented as beings possessing in a splendid
degree physical beauty, physical strength, with the kind of
awfulness which belong to their origin ; the fitful, wanton,
changeable, yet also terrible powers of the elemental world.
Translated into the language of humanity, the actions and
adventures thus ascribed to the gods became in process of
time impossible to be believed. Intellect expanded ; moral
sense grew more vigorous, and with it the conviction that, if
the national traditions were true, man must be more just
than his Maker. In iEschylus and Sophocles, in Pindar and
Plato, you see conscience asserting its sovereignty over the
most sacred beliefs instinctive reverence and piety struggling
sometimes to express themselves under the names and forms
of the past, sometimes bursting out uncontrollably into in-
dignant abhorrence :
'E/-106 8' a.7ropa yacTTpifxapyov
Ma/captov tiv ei7retv.
' A<f>i(TTafjLaL . . .
KGU TTOV Tt KGU /3pOTWV (fyptVOlS
v-rrep tov d\a6rj Aoyov
8e8ai8aXfxevoL \ptv8e(Ti ttolkcXois
ea7raTWVTt p,v9oi.
Xapts 8' onrep airavTa Tev)(eL
ra petAi^a Ovarols
TTL<f>pOl(Ta Tlp\a.V
Kat, amcrTOv epycraTO it'kttov
p,p.Vat TO TToXXaKlS.
To me 'twere strange indeed
To charge the blessed gods with greed.
I dare not do it
Myths too oft,
With quaintly coloured lies enwrought,
To stray from truth have mortals brought
And Art, which round all things below
A charm of loveliness can throw,
Has robed the false in honour's hue,
And made the unbelievable seem true.
134 RECTORIAL ADDRESSES
" All religions," says Gibbon, " are to the vulgar equally
true, to the philosopher equally false, and to the statesman
equally useful " : thus scornfully summing up the theory of
the matter which he found to be held by the politicians of
the age which he was describing, and perhaps of his own.
Eeligion, as a moral force, died away with the establishment
of the Eoman Empire, and with it died probity, patriotism,
and human dignity, and all that men had learnt in nobler
ages to honour and to value as good. Order reigned un-
broken under the control of the legions. Industry flourished,
and natural science, and most of the elements of what we
now call civilisation. Ships covered the seas. Huge towns
adorned the Imperial provinces. The manners of men be-
came more artificial, and in a certain sense more humane.
Eeligion was a State establishment a decent acknowledg-
ment of a power or powers which, if they existed at all,
amused themselves in the depths of space, careless, so their
deity was not denied, of the woe or weal of humanity : the
living fact, supreme in Church and State, being the wearer
of the purple, who as the practical realisation of authority,
assumed the name as well as the substance. The one god
immediately known to man was thenceforth the Divus
Caesar, whose throne in the sky was waiting empty for him
till his earthly exile was ended, and it pleased him to join
or rejoin his kindred divinities.
It was the era of atheism atheism such as this earth
never witnessed before or since. You who have read
Tacitus know the practical fruits of it, as they appeared at
the heart of the system in the second Babylon, the proud
city of the seven hills. You will remember how, for the
crime of a single slave, the entire household of a Eoman
patrician, four hundred innocent human beings, were led in
chains across the Forum and murdered by what was called
law. You will remember the exquisite Nero, who, in his
love of art, to throw himself more fully into the genius of
Greek tragedy, committed incest with his mother that he
might be a second (Edipus, and assassinated her that he
might realise the sensations of Orestes. You will recall one
JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE 135
scene which Tacitus describes, not as exceptional or standing
alone, but merely, he says, " quas ut exemplum referam ne
saepius eadem prodigentia narranda sit" the hymeneal
night-banquet on Agrippa's lake, graced by the presence of
the wives and daughters of the Eoman senators, where,
amidst blazing fireworks and music, and cloth-of-gold
pavilions, and naked prostitutes, the majesty of the Caesars
celebrated his nuptials with a boy.
There, I conceive, was the visible product of material
civilisation, where there was no fear of God in the middle
of it the final outcome of wealth and prosperity and art
and culture, raised aloft as a sign for all ages to look upon.
But it is not to this, nor to the fire of hell which in due
time burst out to consume it, that I desire now to draw your
attention. I have to point out to you two purifying move-
ments which were at work in the midst of the pollution,
one of which came to nothing and survives only in books,
the second a force which was to mould for ages the future
history of man. Both require our notice, for both singu-
larly contained the particular feature which is called the
reproach of Calvinism.
The blackest night is never utterly dark. When man-
kind seem most abandoned there are always a seven thou-
sand somewhere who have not bowed the knee . to the
fashionable opinions of the hour. Among the great
Eoman families a certain number remained republican
in feeling and republican in habit. The State religion
was as incredible to them as to every one else. They
could not persuade themselves that they could discover
the will of Heaven in the colour of a calf's liver or in
the appetite of the sacred chickens ; but they had re-
tained the moral instincts of their citizen ancestors. They
knew nothing of God or the gods, but they had something
in themselves which made sensuality nauseating instead of
pleasant to them. They had an austere sense of the mean-
ing of the word " duty." They could distinguish and rever-
ence the nobler possibilities of their nature. They disdained
what was base and effeminate, and, though religion failed
136 RECTORIAL ADDRESSES
them, they constructed out of philosophy a rule which would
serve to live by. Stoicism is a not unnatural refuge of
thoughtful men in confused and sceptical ages. It adheres
rigidly to morality. It offers no easy Epicurean explanation
of the origin of man, which resolves him into an organisa-
tion of particles, and dismisses him again into nothingness.
It recognises only that men who are the slaves of their
passions are miserable and impotent, and insists that per-
sonal inclinations shall be subordinated to conscience. It
prescribes plainness of life, that the number of our neces-
sities may be as few as possible, and in placing the business
of life in intellectual and moral action, it destroys the tempt-
ation to sensual gratifications. It teaches a contempt of
death so complete that it can be encountered without a
nutter of the pulse ; and, while it raises men above the
suffering which makes others miserable, generates a proud
submissiveness to sorrow which noblest natures feel most
keenly, by representing this huge scene and the shows
which it presents as the work of some unknown but irresist-
ible force, against which it is vain to struggle and childish
to repine.
As with Calvinism, a theoretic belief in an overruling
will or destiny was not only compatible with but seemed
naturally to issue in the control of the animal appetites.
The Stoic did not argue that, " as fate governs all things, I
can do no wrong, and therefore I will take my pleasure ; "
but rather, " The moral law within me is the noblest part
of my being, and compels me to submit to it." He did not
withdraw from the world like the Christian anchorite. He
remained at his post in the senate, the Forum, or the army.
A Stoic in Marcus Aurelius gave a passing dignity to the dis-
honoured purple. In Tacitus, Stoicism has left an eternal
evidence how grand a creature man may be, though unas-
sisted by conscious dependence on external spiritual help,
through steady disdain of what is base, steady reverence for
all that deserves to be revered, and inflexible integrity in
word and deed.
But Stoicism could under no circumstances be a res;en-
JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE 137
erating power in the general world. It was a position only-
tenable to the educated ; it was without hope and without
enthusiasm. From a contempt of the objects which man-
kind most desired, the step was short and inevitable to
contempt of mankind themselves. Wrapped in mournful
self-dependence, the Stoic could face calmly for himself
whatever lot the fates might send :
Si fractus illabatur orbis,
Impavidum ferient ruinae.
But, natural as such a creed might be in a Eoman noble
under the Empire, natural perhaps as it may always be in
corrupted ages and amidst disorganised beliefs, the very
sternness of Stoicism was repellent. It carried no consolation
to the hearts of the suffering millions, who were in no
danger of being led away by luxury, because their whole
lives were passed in poverty and wretchedness. It was
individual, not missionary. The Stoic declared no active
war against corruption. He stood alone, protesting scorn-
fully in silent example against evils which he was without
power to cure. Like Caesar, he folded himself in his mantle.
The world might do its worst. He would keep his own
soul unstained.
Place beside the Stoics their contemporaries, the Galilean
fishermen and the tentmaker of Tarsus. I am not about to
sketch in a few paragraphs the rise of Christianity. I mean
only to point to the principles on which the small knot of
men gathered themselves together who were about to lay the
foundations of a vast spiritual revolution. The guilt and
wretchedness in which the world was steeped St. Paul felt
as keenly as Tacitus. Like Tacitus, too, he believed that the
wild and miserable scene which he beheld was no result of
accident, but had been ordained so to be, and was the direct
expression of an all-mastering Power. But he saw also
that this Power was no blind necessity or iron chain of con-
nected cause and effect, but a perfectly just, perfectly wise
being, who governed all things by the everlasting immutable
laws of his own nature ; that when these laws were
138 RECTORIAL ADDRESSES
resisted or forgotten they wrought ruin and confusion, and
slavery to death and sin ; that when they were recognised
and obeyed the curse would be taken away, and freedom
and manliness come back again. Whence the disobedience
had first risen was a problem which St. Paul solved in a
manner not at all unlike the Persians. There was a
rebellious spirit in the universe, penetrating into men's
hearts, and prompting them to disloyalty and revolt. It
removed the question a step further back without answer-
ing it, but the fact was plain as the sunlight. Men had
neglected the laws of their Maker. In neglecting them
they had brought universal ruin, not on themselves only,
but on all society, and if the world was to be saved from
destruction they must be persuaded or forced back into
their allegiance. The law itself had been once more
revealed on the mountains of Palestine, and in the person
and example of One who had lived and died to make it
known ; and those who had heard and known Him, being
possessed with His spirit, felt themselves commissioned as a
missionary legion to publish the truth to mankind. They
were not, like the Israelites or the Persians, to fight with
the sword not even in their own defence. The sword can
take life, but not give it ; and the command to the Apostles
was to sow the invisible seed in the hotbed of corruption,
and feed and foster it, and water it with the blood, not of
others, but themselves. Their own wills, ambitions, hopes,
desires, emotions, were swallowed up in the will to which
they had surrendered themselves. They were soldiers. It
was St. Paul's metaphor, and no other is so appropriate.
They claimed no merit through their calling ; they were too
conscious of their own sins to indulge in the poisonous
reflection that they were not as other men. They were
summoned out on their allegiance, and armed with the
spiritual strength which belongs to the consciousness of a
just cause. If they indulged any personal hope, it was only
that their weaknesses would not be remembered against
them that, having been chosen for a work in which the
victory was assured, they would be made themselves worthy
JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE 139
of their calling, and, though they might slide, would not be
allowed to fall. Many mysteries remained unsolved. Man
was as clay in the potter's hand one vessel was made to
honour and another to dishonour. Why, who could tell ?
This only they knew, that they must themselves do no
dishonour to the spirit that was in them gain others, gain
all who would join them for their common purpose, and
fight with all their souls against ignorance and sin.
The fishermen of Gennesaret planted Christianity, and
many a winter and many a summer have since rolled over
it. More than once it has shed its leaves and seemed
to be dying, and when the buds burst again the colour
of the foliage was changed. The theory of it which
is taught to-day in the theological schools of St. Andrews
would have sounded strange from the pulpit of your once
proud cathedral. As the same thought expresses itself in
many languages, so spiritual truths assume ever-varying
forms. The garment fades the moths devour it the
woven fibres disintegrate, and turn to dust. The idea
only is immortal, and never fades. The hermit who made
his cell below the cliff where the cathedral stands, the
monkish architect who designed the plan of it, the princes
who brought it to perfection, the Protestants who shattered
it into ruin, the preacher of last Sunday at the University
church, would have many a quarrel, were they to meet now,
before they would understand each other. But at the
bottom of the minds of all the same thought would be pre-
dominant that they were soldiers of the Almighty, com-
missioned to fight with lies and selfishness, and that all
alike they and those against whom they were contending
were in his hands, to deal with after his own pleasure.
Again six centuries go by. Christianity becomes the
religion of the Eoman Empire. The Empire divides, and
the Church is divided with it. Europe is overrun by the
Northern nations. The power of the Western Coesars
breaks in pieces, but the Western Church stands erect
makes its way into the hearts of the conquerors, penetrates
the German forests, opens a path into Britain and Ireland.
140 RECTORIAL ADDRESSES
By the noble Gothic nations it is welcomed with passionate
enthusiasm. The warriors of Odin are transformed into a
Christian chivalry, and the wild Valhalla into a Christian
Heaven. Fiery, passionate nations are not tamed in a
generation or a century, but a new conception of what was
praiseworthy and excellent had taken hold of their imagina-
tion and the understanding. Kings, when their day of toil
was over, laid down crown and sword, and retired into
cloisters, to pass what remained of life to them in prayers
and meditations on eternity. The supreme object of rever-
ence was no longer the hero of the battlefield, but the bare-
foot missionary who was carrying the Gospel among the
tribes that were still untaught. So beautiful in their con-
ception of him was the character of one of these wandering
priests that their stories formed a new mythology. So vast
were the real miracles which they were working on men's
souls that wonders of a more ordinary sort were assigned to
them as a matter of course. They raised the dead, they
healed the sick, they cast out devils, with a word or with
the sign of the cross. Plain facts were too poor for the
enthusiasm of German piety ; and noble human figures were
exhibited, as it were, in the resplendent light of a painted
window in the effort to do them exaggerated honour.
It was pity, for truth only smells sweet for ever, and
illusions, however innocent, are deadly as the cankerworm.
Long cycles had to pass before the fruit of these poison-
seeds would ripen. The practical result, meanwhile, was to
substitute in the minds of the sovereign races which were
to take the lead in the coming era the principles of the
moral law for the law of force and the sword.
The Eastern branch of the divided Church experienced
meanwhile a less happy fortune. In the East there was no
virgin soil like the great noble Teutonic peoples. Asia was
a worn-out stage on which drama after drama of history had
been played and played out. Languid luxury only was
there, huge aggregation of wealth in particular localities, and
the no less inevitable shadow attached to luxury by the
necessities of things, oppression and misery and squalor.
JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE 141
Christianity and the world had come to terms after the
established fashion the world to be let alone in its
pleasures and its sins ; the Church relegated to opinion, with
free liberty to split doctrinal hairs to the end of time. The
work of the Church's degradation had begun, even before it
accepted the tainted hand of Constantine. Already in the
third century speculative Christianity had become the
fashionable creed of Alexandria, and had purchased the
favour of patrician congregations, if not by open tolerance
of vice, yet by leaving it to grow unresisted. St. Clement
details contemptuously the inventory of the boudoir of a fine