of the State. Thus, says our author, the principle of the liberty of conscience was deposited under the name of the separation between temporal and spiritual power in the very cradle of European civilization. There is, however, a long step from the independence of an order to the independence of the individual conscience, and thirteen centuries have not succeeded in establishing the connection between the two in all parts of the world. The influences which Mr. Guizot claims for Christianity here are not the results of its distinctive character as Christianity, but of its being a moral power, and being or believing itself to be of Divine origin. For aught that appears, some other religion, forced by circumstances into the same position, might have made good the same claim to independence. We wish that it had comported here with the method of the work to mention, if even in the briefest manner, some of the manifold effects on society of the gospel as a religion of love, redemption, spiritual power, and eternal life. Surely our Protestant historian would have been a worthy expounder of a theme so great. Nor would it have been out of place. For sinking and sunk as outward Christianity was, she entered the barbarian period with those humanizing influences with which she had blessed the falling Roman State, proving herself thus a benevolent power to society, as well as a moral one.

The third source from which modern civilization proceeded is the barbarians, as Guizot calls them. These were, for the most part, of Germanic origin, and, although differing among themselves in minor particulars, stood on nearly the same level of social life. What their social state exactly was, it is difficult, from the existing memorials, to decide; one sentiment, however, which animated them is manifest, that of personal independence, which is strictly a barbarian feeling, and belongs in common to them and to other savages, as, for example, to the Indians of America. This sentiment of personality, "this pleasure of feeling one's self a man, this human spontaneity in its free development," (p. 57), is what the barbarians of Germany introduced into the civilization of Europe. The Romans knew nothing of it, nor could it spring up in the Christian Church. Roman liberty was the liberty of the

citizen, and, under the influence of Christianity, there is brought on a "reaction of the man against himself, an interior struggle to subdue his own liberty, and to submit himself to what his faith requires." From these sources, therefore, the sentiment of personal liberty cannot be deduced, but only from the Germans; to whom we are indebted also for the tie of military companionship, which, at a later period, developed into the relation of lord and vassal in the feudal system.

In his lectures on the history of civilization in France, Mr. Guizot goes more at large into one of the points here noticed. He is at pains to bring together accounts of savage life from various parts of the world, which may serve as a touchstone of Germanic society, and a proof that, at the time of the invasion, these barbarians were essentially like others.

It was not then the Germanic element as such, which contributed to the improvement of Europe; it was no peculiar trait or latent power of cultivation in the Germanic character, out of which anything valuable in modern life has blossomed; but what they effected, they effected simply as barbarians, by the possession of a rude, coarse, indomitable energy of will, an unwillingness to be checked by the restraints of regular order. For aught that appears, the Huns, or the Petchenegri, or the Magyars, or the Mongols, might have done as well in their place.

The theory, then, of Mr. Guizot, must be that a mixture of barbarism was necessary to make up modern civilization, the presence of an antisocial element to advance society. In another lecture, the fourth, where he is speaking of the feudal system and its right of resistance, he justly calls this an antisocial right, and in another still, he accounts for the continuance of barbarism by this very trait of individualism, which, "in a state of extreme rudeness and ignorance, is mere selfishness, in all its brutality, with all its unsociability." (p. 73). What the transforming civilizing power was of this unsocial principle he nowhere says, so far as we remember. He cannot find it in the recognition of personal rights, for the principle among the Germans had taken no such definite shape; it was merely the delight felt in acting out one's own will,

whether rights were invaded or respected. We fancy he must find it in the deadness and effete state of the Roman empire. Individual strength and self-reliance were crushed by long ages of despotic government, the cities had fallen, nothing was strong but violence. In this prostrate condition the conquest by healthy children of nature was a renovating power, although they brought in lawlessness, self-will, and the dissolution, to a certain extent, of legal order. In the same way, Salvian of Marseilles, a Christian writer of the fifth century, in his treatise "de gubernatione Dei," seeks to show that the morals of the Empire, even after it had undergone a nominal conversion to Christianity, were inferior to those of the barbarians, so that their spread westward was a positive good. In both of these similar opinions there is truth; and this truth,-that a civilized society may sink so far down, as to contain within itself no self-renovating power. This prostration will not be owing to a want of means of advancement, but to the despair which takes possession of societies worn out by despotism, by scepticism, or by self-indulgent immorality. Conquest, the breaking up of the old, may thus be a blessing, not only because the new contains a vital force peculiarly its own, but because any revolution is better than the present condition of society; because any society, after passing through the state of ruin, will be apt to attain to a new life from having shaken off the burden that lay on its neck. Suppose, for instance, such a transitory but terrific invasion as that of the Huns to have cut off all the heads of society, and materially to have changed the relations of the parts. Is it not conceivable that, even without any influence from the savages themselves, an entire alteration of the social state,-freedom of serfs or slaves, deliverance from a central despotism,-might develop a new sense of personal power and importance, and lead society, reconstructed and under the sway of other classes, on a new career of prosperity and freedom.

We have, then, to consider the social revolution produced by the German invasion in itself, the spirit the conquerors brought with them, and other possible causes which might conspire to the same result. The first of these Mr. Guizot

makes no account of: perhaps it is too intangible to be estimated. To the second he has done both justice and injustice; justice, in ascribing to the conquering Germans that spirit of self-dependence, that substitution of personal for political power, which is so characteristic of the feudal system; and injustice, in ascribing all this to the barbarian element, and attaching no special importance to the German element. We shall consider this point more at large in a future number, for it is connected with a theory or a feeling which has somewhat colored Mr. Guizot's views, and still more has led some of his countrymen to an unjust exaltation of the Roman, and an unjust disparagement of the German influence on modern society.

At present, we ask only whether another cause, Christianity, may not have contributed to the bringing out of the feeling of personality, and so have concurred at least with Mr. Guizot's barbarians. This is denied by him, somewhat inconsistently, for, only a few pages before, we find him asserting that "that very principle of liberty of conscience, for which Europe has so long struggled, was acted on under the name of a separation of the temporal and spiritual power in the infancy of European civilization." (p. 54). What is liberty of conscience, but a high exercise of the sense of personality; one, too, involving not brute desire, and free choice, like the freedom of the barbarian, but the freedom of a responsible being, acting in the sight of God, and by necessity of logic conceding the same to others like himself—a principle most binding and social? Or, if it should be said that only the leaders of the church exercised this right, it is equally true that only the leaders of the state had the free individuality of which our author speaks, while the mass of men lay in abject serfdom. Or, again, if it should be said that this liberty of conscience was a late blossom of the separation between church and state, we may go further, and say that the freedom of the towns out of which modern liberties have grown, cannot be shown to be at all the product of feudal and so of "barbarian" freedom.

But Christianity in other ways also promoted this same charac

ter of manly independence. It is not fair to say that the mind, under Christianity, extinguishes its own liberty when it gives itself up to the dictates of its faith. (p. 57). Mr. Guizot, on the same principle, would make the subjection of the mind to any moral rule a slavery, and the only freedom an extinction of the idea of right. He would teach us that in every sect of philosophers the members sacrifice their independence because they have an earnest zeal for the extension of its doctrines, while he who believes nothing, the skeptic, alone is free. But certainly the noblest freedom consists in willingly adopting a system of truth and duty as the guide of life, under which individual convictions must be carried out. And such liberty of the single soul, if diffused and strong enough, will transform all social and political institutions. It is, indeed, true, that in the working of the Christian church, blind faith and unreasoning obedience became the law for the mass of men; but we must not lose sight of the truth that notwithstanding this spirit of the church, the spirit of Christianity was not wholly prevented from giving power and independence to the individual.

There are, then, several sources of the feeling of personal independence, which, by uniting their streams, may aid the advance of civilization. Mr. Guizot's "fondness for genuine liberty, displaying itself without regard to consequences, and with scarcely any other aim than its own satisfaction," which, he adds, "has produced such lasting and beneficial results" in Europe, could never of itself have infused freedom into society, would, in fact, have rendered society impossible, would have prevented even those unions of the chief and his young men among the Germans, in which the latter gave themselves up to the guidance of the former.

To conclude, we regard the German invasion to have been necessary on account of the moral and political decay. We believe that the invaders brought in something better than the brute liberty of a lawless savage; and we look to the influence of Christianity as tending to mold the individual into sober, manly freedom.