Epilogue

That which the next page did unfold proved different from what men had expected. It was a new Germany, it was a new Italy, that had been thus consolidated into new monarchies. The Germany of to-day is unlike the Germany of 1830 or even the Germany of 1860. Population and wealth have in many regions grown, and towns have extended themselves with a speed that reminds the traveller of the cities of Western America. More effectively than any other nation of Europe, the Germans have turned to account the advances made by scientific discovery. The industry of the people, the abundance of minerals in some districts, the excellence of the railway system, the efficiency of the administration, the admirable organization of instruction in all grades, and not least in the sphere of theoretical and applied science, have led to a developement of manufactures and of commerce which has been followed by a correspondingly marked devotion of national thought and effort to every form of material progress. Projects of expansion beyond the seas, not so much to obtain an outlet for colonization as to secure new markets for German trade—projects in which Prussia never indulged, but which seemed appropriate to a German Empire—have been carried out by the acquisition of territories in Africa, China, and the islands of the Pacific. Learning is still cultivated, research is still prosecuted, with unflagging energy; but philosophy, poetry, and art hold a less conspicuous place than they did in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Italy has advanced less rapidly, because her mineral resources are less ample, and her people, who had been worse governed than the Germans, have had more leeway to make up. But in Italy also political unification has stimulated material progress, and material progress has absorbed more and more of the intelligence and energy of the population of the northern half of the peninsula.

In both countries there was a certain disappointment because freedom and unity had not brought all the peace and contentment for which men had hoped; and many thought that the generation which had entered into the enjoyment of freedom and unity stood on a lower moral level than the generation which had toiled and fought for those blessings. In both countries, while the thoughts of the educated class have been occupied with practical and economic questions rather than with political theories or religious reforms, the masses of the people, stirred by a new antagonism to the wealthier classes and a new passion for equality, have begun to busy themselves with projects for so transforming the structure of society as to secure a better distribution, or even perhaps an ultimate extinction, of private property.

Such ideas and projects shew how far the world has travelled from the days when the American and French Revolutions awoke a spirit of unrest in Europe. So too they suggest some reflections on the change that has passed upon the beliefs of mankind since the days when the Holy Empire embodied its loftiest ideal of human government. It is not only a new Germany and a new Italy that we see, but a new Europe, a Europe which in the course of the nineteenth century removed itself an immeasureable way from those ages of faith and imagination down which Caesar voyaged in the bark of Peter. The successor of Caesar is now an Emperor in Germany only, as the successor of Peter is obeyed by less than half of Western Christendom. But even if a universal monarchy were now possible, it would be a monarchy wholly unlike that which Dante held necessary to the welfare of mankind. The conditions of man’s life have changed, and the doctrines, theological and political, on which the Holy Empire rested, have vanished away. The mists of imagination have rolled off, and the world is now governed by facts—facts that stand out, hard and clear, in the light of common day.

800 and ad 1200.In the earlier Middle Ages Europe, still half-barbarous, was the prey of violence. Its greatest need was Justice, and a power strong enough and pious enough to execute justice, as the minister of God. The one force that confronted violence and rapacity was Religion. All had one religion, and though many by sinfulness of life belied their faith, none doubted its truth. Neither did any one doubt where the seat of authority lay. Rome, whence the Caesars had ruled the world, Rome where the Chief of the Apostles had exercised the pastorate given him by God when God walked the earth, was the divinely-appointed source of all lawful power. Whether that power was to be wielded by two rulers, each directly representing the Almighty, or whether the secular monarch was to be the servant of the spiritual—this was a question on which men were divided. But that the power of the secular ruler was consecrated by a Divine commission, and being so consecrated, was appointed for all time and for all mankind,—upon this they were at one. It was a small Christian world, which reached only from the Tagus to the Vistula: so a universal monarchy seemed less strange then than it does now. Nations were as yet scarcely conscious of themselves, and the strife that desolated Europe was more frequently within than between its countries. The disobedience of some rulers to the Emperor shook the theories of those who took dreams for realities hardly more than did the disobedience of a knot of heretics to the Pope.

It was a Christendom which had one literature, written in one ancient tongue, also the one tongue of worship, for the vernaculars of France and Italy, of Spain, Germany, and England, were only just beginning to grow into cultivated languages. Religion, grounded on undisputed dogmas, ruled the intellectual world, with Philosophy and Art for her handmaidens. And, in the name of Religion, the Church held half the wealth of every country and ruled its inhabitants with a power stronger than the sword. The world might seem to have passed into the hands of the Church, though in gaining the whole world, the Church had wellnigh lost her own soul.

It took centuries to break up this vast solid fabric of mediaeval society and mediaeval doctrine. The larger kingdoms were consolidated and the nations that dwelt in them felt themselves to be nations. New worlds were disclosed beyond the ocean, worlds which Rome had never known; and in them there have arisen new nations, one of which is mightier than any European state. The literary and philosophical Renaissance of the fifteenth century passed into the religious Reformation of the sixteenth, and out of the two movements arose the political Revolution which began in England in the seventeenth century, convulsed France in the eighteenth, reached Italy and Germany in the nineteenth. The work of the new ideas thus engendered has been for the most part destructive. The Church has been rent into many fragments. For a time there seemed a prospect that the See of Rome might recover her old dominion, but that prospect has now grown so faint that even the controversy regarding her claims is languidly maintained. For nearly three centuries she retained her wealth and power in the countries that were still loyal, but now wealth and legal power have almost gone: monasteries have been suppressed, bishops stripped of their estates: it is everywhere a secular world.

Christianity has overspread the whole earth; and States calling themselves Christian are now masters of the Muslim and the heathen. But it is what would have been deemed by St. Bernard or by Dante a disintegrated and attenuated Christianity. Religion holds no such place of pride as she once held. Even in countries which still maintain a church established by law ecclesiastics are jealously excluded from mundane affairs. Nowhere, outside Russia and the most backward of the Spanish-American republics, does the State recognize the duty of protecting and propagating one form of faith. Theology occupies itself but little with the old questions regarding the nature of Christ and the relation of the Divine will to the human. She asks, What is the relation of God to Nature, and what is the evidence of the revelation of God to man? Philosophy does not inquire how justice is to be established, nor what is the true seat and origin of civil authority: she accepts political power as being the result of actual forces, the will or the acquiescence of the strongest elements in the community; and sees no more sacredness in the head of a State than in the chairman of a commercial company. Order, for which the Middle Ages sighed, has been established; and if justice is still imperfect, this is due, not to the impunity of law-breakers, but to faults in the law itself, springing perhaps from the selfishness of the classes that have shaped it. Order, whose name had been often discredited by being used as a cloak for tyranny, ceased long ago to be the great aim of progressive minds: it was Liberty that they set before themselves, believing that all other blessings would follow in her train. The subject has now become the citizen. He holds himself to have as much right to govern as he has duty to obey, and the obedience he owes is deemed to be due not to the representative of God but to the transient depositary of an authority that issues from himself.

Yet this ideal of individual freedom which seemed a century ago so full of promise to those who had suffered from the despotism of custom and tradition, as well as from the pressure of meddlesome bureaucracies, has not realized all that was expected. Popular government, installed by the votes of a multitude on which the gift of power was assumed to have also bestowed wisdom, self-control, and public spirit, lost much of its credit when it was seen that masses of men were still prone to be swayed by unreasoning passions and racial animosities, still liable to fall under the control of wealth directed by astute self-interest. The hopes that illumined the first half of the nineteenth century have slowly paled; and the nearest approach to a scheme for the creation of an ideal State which has since emerged is that which would entrust the State with the function of superseding private property and allotting to each citizen his share of labour and of the means of subsistence. Material interests are uppermost in the minds of nations as in those of individuals: and the idealism of this new Europe is, so to speak, a material kind of idealism when compared to the old types of perfection in Church and State, as they were set forth either by the Catholic Church in the days of Hildebrand or by religious reformers from the days of Arnold of Brescia to those of Savonarola and of Calvin.

This may be a passing phase, short in the view of world-history, the teachings of which seem to shew that men do not for any long time remain without a consistent theory of life, and a faith on which to ground such a theory. Ages of negation and criticism are succeeded by ages of construction. Filled with discordant schools of thought and irreconcileable schemes for social progress, permeated by a scepticism which distrusts all schemes equally, the world may appear to be waiting for some new idealistic system, possibly already in the germ. The foundation of institutions that have in the past proved durable has been laid in men’s innermost convictions, in certain fixed and settled principles, lying so deep as to be part of themselves, and inwoven with their strongest emotions, principles which they hold as self-evident and which bring the life of each into harmony with the lives of others and with the universe in which they are placed. These convictions are slow to form and slow to break: it is a work of many generations. Seven centuries were needed, from St. Augustine to Pope Gregory the Seventh, to create the mediaeval scheme. It lived for three centuries; and nearly four centuries more were needed to destroy the principles on which it rested.

If in the years to come a new body of ideas and beliefs is by degrees built up capable of satisfying the need men have to find a consecration for Power and a tie which shall bind them together and represent the aspirations of collective humanity, the form these beliefs will take must differ widely in outward aspect from that in which the Middle Ages found satisfaction. But it may embody some portion of that which was the soul and essence of the Holy Empire—the love of peace, the sense of the brotherhood of mankind, the recognition of the sacredness and supremacy of the spiritual life.