Chapter 1
The Background
IN THE period between the Reformation and the French Revolution a new social class established its title to a full share in the control of the state. In its ascent to power, it broke down the barriers which, in all spheres of life save the ecclesiastical, had made privilege a function of status, and associated the idea of rights with the tenure of land. To achieve its end, it effected a fundamental change in the legal relationships of men.
Status was replaced by contract as the juridical foundation of society. Uniformity of religious belief gave way to a variety of faiths in which even scepticism found a right to expression. The vague medieval empire of jus divinum and jus naturale gave way to the concrete and irresistible power of national sovereignty. The control of politics by an aristocracy whose authority was built upon the tenure of land came to be shared with men whose influence was derived solely from the ownership of movable capital. The banker, the trader, the manufacturer, began to replace the landàwner, the ecclesiastic, and the warrior, as the types of predominant social influence. The city, with its restless passion for change, replaced the countryside, with its hatred of innovation, as the primary source of legislation. Slowly, but, nevertheless, irresistibly, science replaced religion as the controlling factor in giving shape to the thoughts of men. The idea of a golden age in the past, with its concomitant idea of original sin, gave way to the doctrine of progress, with its own concomitant idea of perfectibility through reason. The idea of social initiative and social control surrendered to the idea of individual initiative and individual control. New material conditions, in short, gave birth to new social relationships; and, in terms of these, a new philosophy was evolved to afford a rational justification for the new world which had come into being.
This new philosophy was liberalism; and it is the purpose of this book to trace,
in general outline, the history of the forces by which it was shaped into a
coherent doctrine. The evolution, of course, was never direct and rarely conscious.
The pedigree of ideas is never straightforward. Into the development of liberalism
there have entered winds of doctrine so diverse in their origin as to make clarity
difficult, and precision perhaps unattainable. To the evolution of liberalism
have gone contributions of the first importance from men unacquainted with,
often hostile to, its aims; from Machiavelli and Calvin, from Luther and Copernicus,
from Henry VIII and Thomas More, in one century, from Richelieu and Louis XIV,
from Hobbes and Jurieu, from Pascal and Bacon in another. The unconscious impact
of events was at least as responsible as the deliberate effort of thinkers in
shaping the mental climate which made it possible. The geographical discoveries,
the new cosmology, technological invention, a renewed and secular metaphysic,
above all, new forms of economic life, all made their contributions to the formation
of its motivating ideas. It could not have become what it was without the theological
revolution we call the Reformation; and this, in its turn, received much of
its character from all that is implied in the revival of learning. Much of its
character has been shaped by the fact that the breakdown of the medieval respublica
Christiana divided Europe into a congeries of separate sovereign states
each with its own special problems to solve and its unique experience to offer.
Nor was its birth an easy one. Revolution and war presided over its emergence
from the womb; and it is not beyond the mark to say that there was hardly a
period until 1848 when its growth was not arrested by the challenge of
violent reaction. Men fight passionately to retain those wonted habits in which
their privileges are involved; and liberalism was nothing so much as a challenge
to vested interests rendered sacred by the traditions of half a thousand years.
The change it effected was, on any showing, an immeasurable one. A society in which social position was usually definite, the market predominantly local, learning and science rather in society than of its essential texture, change usually unconscious and, as a general rule, resented, habits dominated by religious precepts which few doubted at all and none successfully, in which there was little capital accumulation and production was dominated by the needs of a market for local use, slowly broke down. With the triumph of the new order in the nineteenth century the Church had given birth to the state as the institutional arbiter of human destiny. The claims of birth had been succeeded by the claims of property. The invention of invention had made change, instead of stability, the supreme characteristic of the social scene. A world-market had come into being, and capital had accumulated upon so immense a scale that its search for profit affected the lives and fortunes of societies to which European civilisation had previously been without meaning. If learning and science were still the handmaids of property, their significance was appreciated by every class in society. If religious precepts still counted, their power to dominate the habits even of their votaries had disappeared.
Not, indeed, that liberalism, even in its triumph, was a clear-cut body of either doctrine or practice. It sought to establish a world-market; but the logic of that effort was frustrated by the political implications of the nationalism which surrounded its birth and flourished with its growth. It sought to vindicate the right of the individual to shape his own destiny, regardless of any authority which might seek to limit his possibilities; yet it found that, inherent in that claim, there was an inevitable challenge from the community to the sovereignty of the individual. It sought relief from all the trammels law might impose upon the right to accumulate property; and it found that the vindication of this right involved the emergence of a proletariat prepared to attack its implications. No sooner, in a word, had it achieved its end than it was compelled to meet a defiance of its postulates which seems certain to change the order it had brought into being.
What, then, is the liberalism we have here to discuss? It is not easy to describe, much less to define, for it is hardly less a habit of mind than a body of doctrine. As the latter, no doubt, it is directly related to freedom; for it came as the foe of privilege conferred upon any class in the community by virtue of birth or creed. But the freedom it sought had no title to universality, since its practice was limited to men who had property to defend. It has sought, almost from the outset of its history, to limit the ambit of political authority, to confine the business of government within the framework of constitutional principle; and it has tried, therefore, fairly consistently to discover a system of fundamental rights which the state is not entitled to invade. But, once more, in its operation of those rights, it has been more urgent and more ingenious in exerting them to defend the interests of property than to protect as claimant to their benefit the man who had nothing but his labour-power to sell. It has attempted, where it could, to respect the claims of conscience, and to urge upon governments the duty to proceed by rule rather than by discretion in their operations; but the scope of the conscience it has respected has been narrowed by its respect for property, and its zeal for the rule of law has been tempered by a discretion in the breadth of its application.
Liberalism has usually, by reason of its origins, been hostile to the claims of churches. It has tended, less perhaps to the Erastianism of Hobbes, than to view religious bodies as associations like any other within the community, entitled to tolerance so long as they do not threaten the existing social order. It has been favourable to representative self-government even when this has involved admitting the principle of universal suffrage. It has, in general, supported the idea of national self-determination. As a rule, though by no means universally, it has been tender to the claims of minority groups and to the right of free association. It has been suspicious of the control of thought and, indeed, of any effort, by government authority, to impede the free activity of the individual. I do not mean that its history is a conscious and persistent search for these ends. It is more accurate, I think, to say that these were the ends its more ultimate purposes caused it to serve; and I shall seek later to bring out the implications of this difference.
But liberalism, as I have urged, is hardly less a mood than a doctrine. Its tendency has been sceptical; it has always taken a negative attitude to social action. By reason of its origins it has always regarded tradition as on the defensive; and, for the same reason, also, it has always preferred to bless individual innovation than to sanction the uniformities sought for by political power. It has always, that is, seen in both tradition and uniformity an attack upon the right of the individual to make of his own affirmations and insights a universal rule made binding not because authority accepts it, but because its inherent validity secures for it the free consent of others. There is, therefore, a flavour of romanticism about the liberal temper the importance of which is great. It tends to be subjective and anarchist, to be eager for the change which comes from individual initiative, to be insistent that this initiative contains within itseff some necessary seed of social good. It has, accordingly, always tended to make an antithesis (as a rule an unconscious one) between liberty and equality. It has seen in the first that emphasis upon individual action for which it is always zealous; it has seen in the second the outcome of authoritarian intervention of which the result, in its view, is a cramping of individual personality. The outcome of this is important. For it has meant that liberalism, though it has expressed itself always as a universal, has, in its institutional result, inevitably been more narrow in its benefit than the society it sought to guide. For though it has refused to recognise any limit in theory, whether of class or creed or even race, to its application, the historic conditions within which it has operated effected a limitation despite itself. It is the meaning of this limitation which is the key to the understanding of the liberal idea. Without it, we cannot explain either the triumphs or the failures in its record.
For what produced liberalism was the emergence of a new economic society at the end of the Middle Ages. As a doctrine, it was shaped by the needs of that new society; and, like all social philosophies, it could not transcend the medium in which it was born. Like all social philosophies, therefore, it contained in its birth the conditions of its own destruction. In its living principle, it was the idea by which the new middle class rose to a position of political dominance. Its instrument was; the discovery of what may be called the contractual state. To make that state, it sought to limit political intervention to the narrowest area compatible with the maintenance of public order. It never understood, or was never able fully to admit, that freedom of contract is never genuinely free until the parties thereto have equal bargaining power. This, of necessity, is a function of equal material conditions. The individual whom liberalism has sought to protect is always, so to say, free to purchase his freedom in the society it made; but the number of those with the means of purchase at their disposal has always been a minority of mankind. The idea of liberalism, in short, is historically connected, in an inescapable way, with the ownership of property. The ends it serves are always the ends of men in this position. Outside that narrow circle, the individual for whose rights it has been zealous has always been an abstraction upon whom its benefits could not, in fact, be fully conferred. Because its purposes were shaped by owners of property, the margins between its claims and its performance have always been wide.
I do not mean that the triumph of liberalism did not represent a real and profound progress. The productive relations it made possible immensely improved the general standard of material conditions. The advance of science was achieved only through the mental climate it created. All in all, the advent of the middle class to power was one of the most beneficent revolutions in history. No doubt, also, its cost has been very great; through its coming we lost the power to use certain medieva1 principles the recovery of which would, in my view, represent solid human gain. But no one can move from the fifteenth to the sixteenth, still more to the seventeenth, century, without the sense of wider and more creative horizons, the recognition that there is a greater regard for the inherent worth of human personality, as sensitiveness to the infliction of unnecessary pain, a zeal for truth for its own sake, a willingness to experiment in its service, which are all parts of a social heritage which would have been infinitely poorer without them. These were gains involved in the triumph of the liberal creed. They are not, of course, at any point gifts equally shared in the civilisation to which they came; and their achievement was accompanied by its full meed of tragedy. But without the liberal revolution, the number of those whose demands upon life would have been satisfied must have remained much smaller than it has been. That, after all, is the supreme test by which a social doctrine must be judged.
II
Liberalism came, then, as a new ideology to fit the needs of a new world. 'What entitles us to speak of novelty? There are the geographical discoveries. There is the breakdown of feudal economic relations. There is the establishment of new churches which no longer recognise the supremacy of Rome. There is a scientific revolution which altogether alters the perspective of men's thought. There is a growing volume of technological invention which leads to new wealth and increased population. There is the discovery of printing with its inevitable implication of widespread literacy. There is the consolidation of vague and inchoate localisms into centralised and efficient national states. Born of all this there is a new political theory which, as with Machiavelli and Bodin, makes the relation of man to man, instead of the relations of man with God, the foundation of social enquiry. There is the immense colonising effort of Spain and Portugal, then of France and England. Out of all this were born new habits and new expectations. These came into conflict with a tradition of thought and practice which, in three centuries, they so reshaped that a society was born whose distinguishing characteristics would hardly have been recognisable to a medi~val observer. It was a different society; and it knew that it was different. It had the sense of expansion, the feeling of spacious exhilaration, which come to men who know themselves to be engaged in the remaking of social foundations.
What was the essence of this new society? Above all, I think, its redefinition of the productive relations between men. For they then discovered that, to exploit those new relations in all their fulness, they could useneither the institutions nor the ideas they had inherited. The reason for the need of this transformation is a simple one. By the end of the fifteenth century the capitalist spirit began to attain a predominant hold over men's minds. What does this imply? That the pursuit of wealth for its own sake became the chief motive of human activity. Whereas in the Middle Ages the idea of acquiring wealth was limited by a body of moral rules imposed under the sanction of religious authority, after 1500 those rules, and the institutions, habits, and ideas to which they had given birth, were no longer deemed adequate. They were felt as constraint. They were evaded, criticised, abandoned, because it was felt that they interfered with the exploitation of the means of production. New conceptions were needed to legitimisc the new potentialities of wealth that men had discovered little by little in preceding ages. The liberal doctrine is the philosophic justification of the new practices.
I do not mean to imply that the idea of wealth for its own sake was a new idea suddenly born at a particular time; no doubt it is as old as civilisation itself. It is clear that what we term the capitalist spirit was present in men like St. Godric or Jacques Coeur or the Florentine bankers long before the end of the fifteenth century. But before that time it did not begin to colour the whole mentality of society. Before that time the criteria of legitimate activity were not, so to say, derived from the pursuit of gain merely, taken as an end in itself, but were determined by moral rules to which economic principles were subordinate. The medieval producer, whether in the realm of finance or commerce or manufacture, attained his individual end through an activity which, at every stage, bound him to rules of conduct which assumed the achievement of wealth to be justified only within a framework of ethical principle. He was entitled to sufficiency; but he must attain sufficiency by the use of means deemed morally adequate. He must not make value a mere function of demand. He must not pay only such wages as the labourer can exact. Hours of labour, quality of material, method of sale, the character of his profit, all of these, to take examples only, are subject to a body of rules worked out, at their base, in terms of certain moral principles the observance of which is deemed to be essential to his heavenly salvation. The Middle Ages are permeated by the idea of a supreme end beyond this life to which all earthly conduct must conform. The pursuit of wealth for its own sake is deemed incompatible with that idea. Wealth was regarded as a fund of social significance and not of individual possession. The wealthy man did not enjoy it for himself or for its own sake; he was a steward on behalf of the community. He was, therefore, limited both in what he might acquire and in the means whereby he might acquire it. The whole social morality of the Middle Ages is built upon this doctrine. It is enforced both by the rules of the Church and by the civil law.
This spirit begins to disappear with the emergence of the capitalist spirit as predominant. A social conception of wealth gives place to an individualist conception. The idea of divine sanction for the rules of behaviour is gradually replaced by a utilitarian sanction. And the principle of utility is no longer determined by reference to social good. New meaning is given to the desire to satisfy individual want--it being assumed that the greater the wealth the individual possesses, the greater will be his power to secure this satisfaction. Once this attitude begins to obtain its hold over men's minds, it develops a revolutionary power. It replaces the predominant medieval idea of subsistence--which implies a static or traditional society--by the modern idea of production without limit; and this, in its turn, implies a society which is dynamic and anti-traditional because, since the desire for wealth is endless, it must continually seek experiment and novelty. More, it implies a society in which there will always be a tendency to anti-authoritarianism, for authority is by its nature conservative, and fears the disorder implied in unresting experiment. The logic of this new spirit, moreover, compels it to shape the whole world to its purposes. Where the ideas and institutions it encounters inhibit the progress of its search for wealth, it seeks to transform them to its own ends. For it offers to its votaries tangible and direct satisfactions, obtainable in this life, which the previous outlook was unable to offer. In the competition of ideas it is able, therefore, to change the basis of social relationships. Men are willing to bring a new world into existence because they agree that the balance of the old must be redressed.
If we ask why the capitalist spirit triumphed, the answer, surely, is the sufficient one that within the confines of the older system the potentialities of production could no longer be exploited. Little by little, the new men, and their new methods, pointed the way to a volume of wealth unattainable by the older society. The attraction of this wealth aroused expectations which that society, given its premises, could not fulfil. Men, therefore, begin to doubt the legitimacy of those premises. The attitude to usury, the acceptance of the guilds as a rational way of controlling production, the notion of the Church as the fit source of ethical criteria, all begin to appear as inadequate because they stand in the way of the potentialities revealed by the new spirit. Within the confines of medieval culture the idea of capitalism could not be contained. The capitalist begins, therefore, his task of transforming that culture to suit his new purposes. To do so, no doubt, he has to proceed piecemeal; and, of course, he is not successful until he has encountered a resistance which, all in all, may be said to have lasted three centuries. He seeks to establish his right to wealth with the minimum interference from social authority of any kind. In that effort, broadly speaking, he has to pass through two great phases. On the one hand, he seeks to transform society; on the other, he seeks to capture the state. He seeks to transform society by adapting its habits and customs to a milieu suitable to his purpose. He seeks to capture the state because thereby he has, at long last, in his hands the supreme coercive power of society and may consciously use it for his ends. He justifies his effort by persuading his fellows--not without a considerable dose of coercion in the persuasion--that in the pursuit of wealth for its own sake social good is necessarily involved. The man who becomes rich becomes a social benefactor by the mere fact that he becomes rich. That is the essence of the new spirit. That is the centrai clue to the great adventure of modem times.
It is important here to emphasise one fact in this development which the very
gradualness of the evolution tends to obscure. The inner idea of capitalism
is inherently a philosophy of life. Those who accept it do not need extra-capitalist
sources to validate their activities. Their search for wealth as individuals
colours and shapes their attitude to every department of behaviour. Unless this
had been the case, capitalism could not have achieved the revolution it effected.
There was no sphere of life in which it did not encounter norms of conduct resistant
to its spirit. 'Without exception, it transformed them, or sought to do so.
It begins by modifying old practices and institutions; it ends by abandoning
them. It begins by evasions and exceptional privileges; it ends by making evasions
and exceptions into privileges. Jacques Cceur may need a licence to trade with
the infidel; his successor does not require any permission of the kind. Relaxation
of guild restrictions may seem adequate at one stage; but a time arrives when
nothing less than their dissolution is regarded as satisfactory. Early capitalist
theory, at least until the end of the mercantilist period, regards the subordination
of economics to politics as natural; but an inefficiently administered state
interferes with the full exploitation of the economic resources of society,
and men begin to recommend the principles of laissez-faire. The state which,
as late as the early eighteenth century, is still widely regarded as a beneficent
agent of capitalist purposes, has, by its end, come to be regarded as almost
their natural foe. The whole ethos of capitalism, in a word, is its effort to
free
the owner of the instruments of production from the need to obey rules which
inhibit his full exploitation of them. The rise of liberalism is the rise of
a doctrine which seeks to justify the operation of that ethos.
Let me put all this in a slightly different way. Before the advent of the capitalist spirit, men lived within an economic order in which the effective social institutions, whether the state or the Church or the guild, judged that activity by criteria derived from outside itself. They did not regard the individual interest as conclusive. They refused to accept material utility as a valid justification of economic behaviour. They sought to impose, they partly enforced, a body of rules upon economic life of which the inner principle was consideration for social well-being taken in the context of individual salvation in the next life. To this consideration they were prepared to sacrifice the economic interest of the individual on the ground that by so doing they were assuring their heavenly destiny. With that purpose in view, competition was controlled, the number of customers a trader might have was limited, commerce was forbidden on religious grounds, prices and the rate of interest were fixed, feast days were compulsory, wages and the hours of labour were regulated, speculation was, within wide limits, prohibited. These are, of course, a selection only of much wider regulations which go to prove the non-economic standards by which economic behaviour was judged. The rules broke down because the spirit which informed them cramped the power of men to satisfy the expectations they could fulfil, given the means of production, when the motive of wealth for its own sake was substituted for the medieval ideal. Almost every element in the new outlook was present in the Middle Ages. Its inventions, for example, show the same eager zest for gain that we recognise as capitalist in temper. Even the division of labour is in keeping with medi~val practice in so fundamental an industry as mining. But though the capitalist spirit was present, it did not set the tempo of economic life. 'We note it as an exception rather than as a rule. Men appreciated wealth; but the search for it had not come to occupy the dominating position that is characteristic of the sixteenth century. Social organisation was not yet rationalised upon the basis that this search was the true way to satisfy the nature of man.
Once it begins to be dominating, the whole atmosphere changes. Every aspect of social organisation is seen in a new light. There is a new spirit of enterprise, a feverish activity, a zest for innovation, different in their quality from what the Middle Ages can show. It is as though a new challenge has confronted man, and he is determined to show his power to meet it. There is a new scale of things in capital accumulation, in risk-taking, in the organisation of factories. The business man welcomes the new nationaiism with its greater guarantee of internal peace; for this means not only greater security in enterprise, but, also, the way to evade the regulations of the guilds by the location of industries outside their privileged areas. He welcomes the attack on the church, for this means a blow at the old, impeding rules, and it unquestionably made important resources more available for capitalist exploitation than they were under their ecclesiastical proprietors. The great increase, moreover, in the width of the market made for a new attitude to production. Capital was more urgently demanded, and the need to produce it led to new forms of banking and finance. The wider market, again, made the means of transportation, its cheapness, also, more important than it had been at any time since the break-up of the Roman Empire. This, in its turn, was a further encouragement to the centralised state which made possible such improvements by organising protection for its citizens; and the protection, often enough, took the very practical form of building roads and developing navigation. The progress of accountancy, also, makes possible a new economic foresight, an ability to organise production on a wider scale and with a greater power to take risk confidently, of which the consequences were momentous.
We must beware of thinking of this capitalist spirit as new in the sense that men suddenly, at the end of the Middle Ages, began to be acquisitive for the first time. The pursuit of gain is as old as recorded history. What is new is the emergence of a philosophy which argues that social well-being is best attained by giving the individual the largest possible initiative in action. It is new because, if room for that initiative was to be found, the medieva1 idea of a society with clearly distinguished classes to each of which, under ultimately divine sanction, customary duties attached was no longer adequate. For it denied what was patently before men's minds. It denied their power to exploit the resources at their disposal in the fashion which changed economic conditions had made possible. They found that, to exploit them, new class-relations were necessary. But new class-relations, in their turn, require a new philosophy to justify the habits they impose. The movement from feudalism to capitalism is a movement from a world in which individual well-being is regarded as the outcome of action socially controlled to one in which social well-being is regarded as the outcome of action individually controlled.
The essence of the revolution that occurred is thus, in a real sense, the emancipation of the individual. And because that emancipation justified itself by the wider satisfactions it secured to society, it gradually broke down the main barriers which stood in its way. In so regarding the change, however, we must beware of two mistakes. We must not think of the change as sudden because we recognise it as real. It takes, as I have insisted, something like three centuries to accomplish. It has to triumph over cross-currents of opinion derived from habits and ideas which were as stoutly armed as any in the history of mankind. And it did not, everywhere, make its way at the same pace; in the fifteenth century, it looked as though Italy was to embody its fullest expression. But political disunity, on the one hand, and the economic consequences of geographical discovery, on the other, were fatal to the brief dream of Italian leadership. So, also, in Germany the intensity of religious war, and the ruin caused by that intensity, held back German development for something like two centuries. France, also, had to struggle against well-organised and powerful centrifugal forces before the age of Colbert permitted a great forward movement. England was more fortunate. Her feudalism had always a national foundation after the Oath of Salisbury; and the outcome of this is a political receptivity to the new spirit wider and deeper than in any other country save Holland. And in Russia, until the time of Peter the Great, the new spirit makes hardly any impact at all. The new philosophy, in short, is like a tide which seeps in slowly over the land it is to overwhelm. Its progress is aided here, and arrested there, by natural conditions so different that it is difficult, until the land finally disappears, to recognise that it has, in fact, been a unified movement; the more difficult, indeed, because, as it reaches its highest goal, we discover that it is already on the turn.
III
The new spirit encountered, as it arose, that theological movement we call the Reformation, and it played an essential part in the shaping of its doctrines. Here we have to be careful in the definition of its influence. A thinker so eminent as Max Weber has argued that the coming of Protestantism makes possible the triumph of the capitalist temper; and he has found in the Puritan doctrine of the "calling" an ethos almost invented in order to facilitate its advance. His theories have found widespread support. The capitalist spirit, so cautious an historian as Professor Tawney has written, found in Puritanism "a potent force in preparing the way for the commercial civilisation which finally triumphed at the (French) Revolution." What is the connexion between Liberalism and the Reformation?
That the rise of Protestantism aided the growth of the Liberal philosophy there can be no doubt at all; that this was in any way a part of the purpose of the Reformers is not, I think, supported by any important evidence at our disposal. The Reformation broke the supremacy of Rome. In doing so it gave birth to new theological doctrines, it effected widespread changes in the distribution of wealth, it immensely facilitated the growth of the secular state. Because it was a grave blow at authority, it loosened the hold of tradition on men's lives. Because it called into question ideas which had long held sway, it gave a deep impetus to the temper of rationalism. Both its doctrines and its social results were emancipating to the individual. But this is not to say that the makers of the Reformation intended this consequence. They did their work in a mental climate in which they had to adjust their ideas to innumerable influences wholly alien from the objects upon which they concentrated. Sometimes they adjusted those ideas consciously in order to win support vital to their effort; sometimes they made the adjustment quite unconsciously, with no real insight into its implications. The emancipation of the individual is a by-product of the Reformation. At no point is it of its essence.
For let us remember that the Reformation is, above all, a revolt against papalism. It is an attempt to rediscover the conditions of the Christian life. Its protagonists believed that the Pope was anti-Christ, that obedience to him, therefore, imperilled their salvation. They did not free the individual from his control in order to make the pursuit of wealth for its own sake the cardinal principle of social action; they freed him in order that be might become, as they thought, a better Christian. There was not one of them who would not have regarded with abhorrence any plain statement of the principles of a liberal society. In every fundamental sense, Luther was a conservative in all matters of social constitution. He hated usury, he was hostile to the new mechanisms of finance, he believed, as Troeltsch has pointed out, in a social organisation dominated by a supernatural revelation all the terms of which were medieval. He postulated, no doubt, the priesthood of all believers; but he did not affirm their right to believe differently from himself. They must believe the plain word of Scripture; and that "plain word" lays down a code of conduct which, in his interpretation, is at every critical point identical with the medieval ideal.
He laid down the right of princes to control the religion of their subject, and thereby, even if indirectly, he gave a mighty impetus to the secularisation of politics. But Luther's theory of the state is no more than the urgent pragmatism to which every revolutionary is impelled; it is simply a search, on almost any terms, for the conditions of victory. Every concession made by Luther--and he is rarely consistent in his concessions--is a safeguard of the support he needs. He never hedged about the state with rights which entitled it to deny his religious premises. It was always, for him, subservient to an idea of a Christian social order incompatible with the new spirit that was emerging.
Weber and. his disciples have, indeed, admitted this; it is in the work of
Calvin, and not of Luther, that they find the main evidence for their view.
That the ideas of Calvin differ profoundly from those of Luther is clear enough;
but there is nothing in that mighty authoritarian which entitles us to proclaim
him a protagonist
of individualism. The proof, surely, is in what he made of Geneva, its massive
and tyrannical discipline, its strict subordination of commercial behaviour
to religious precept, its passionate repudiation of liberty of conscience. The
very essence of Calvinism is theocracy. No individual therein has a private
personality. He belongs, as Choisy has said, to the collectivity of which he
is part, and this collectivity, in its turn, belongs to a body of divinely inspired
rules from which it cannot depart save at the expense of its salvation. Compared
with this absolutism, the famous letter to Claude de Sachins, in which he permits
the taking of interest, weighs but little in the balance.
For what does Calvin say in that text upon which so much has been built? He argues that the Scriptural injunctions against usury are not conclusive. He rejects the patristic theory that money cannot breed money. He considers that the problem must be judged upon the basis that men now live under very different conditions from those of Scriptural times. Money, he concludes, can be lent out at interest so long as the conditions of the loan are equitable. There are seven conditions which constitute exceptions to this general thesis. Read in their light, Calvin does not appear as an innovator in any marked degree. He recognises that there are some commercial transactions in which payment for the use of capital is justified. But nothing he says adds anything, in my judgement, to the argument of St. Antonino of Florence, or to that of the Sententiae of Gabriel Biel, both of whom recognise that the full doctrine of the just price is no longer workable. His attitude was in full accord with the later view of the medieva1 canonists. What it was to become is a different matter; but for that Calvin, surely, can hardly be held responsible.
We are told, however, to see in the Puritan doctrine of the "calling" a contribution to the emergence of an individualist economy. Here, I suggest, the time factor is all-important. The Puritan conception is not a static thing. It changes from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century, and, again, from the seventeenth to the eighteenth. There is nothing in Calvin's own economic ideas which suggests any great divergence from the previous period; and the practice of Geneva, both in his day, and in that of Beza, proves the toughness of medievalism. The English reformers of the sixteenth century can hardly be accused of any tenderness for the new wea1th. Each alike saw what Aquinas saw, a divine plan in the universe which called the individual to his special place in the economy of things, and warned him of the danger of seeking to rise above it. That is the attitude of Robert Crowley, as good a Puritan as ever there was; it is the attitude of Thomas Lever; it is the attitude of Hugh Latimer. Their view of wealth, of the obligations of the individual, poor or wealthy, is that of Luther with all its inherent medievalism. All of them, indeed, were led by the view they took of the "calling" to be the defenders of the old order against the new, to protest against the practices of the "new rich" of their time as contrary to the principles of the Christian life. They inveighed, of course, against indolence; and they would not have been Puritans if they had not praised the virtues of asceticism. But there is not an atom of progressiveness or secularity in their outlook. To live the way of salvation; to accept the place in life to which he has been called; to do diligently the duties of that place; to regard either wealth or poverty as God's gift in which there is an opportunity of "grace"--this is, I think, the essence of their teaching. It is as far removed as possible from the outlook of the men who were shaping the new society. When, in the second half of the seventeenth century, the idea of the "calling" became infected with the capitalist spirit the new society was already a hundred and fifty years old, and by that time it had at least as fundamentally influenced the Catholic attitude as the Puritan. Weber and his disciples have committed a grave anachronism in their eagerness to prove a theory. It is as though they judged the response to social problems of the churches in the twentieth century by their responses in the eighteenth. We do not estimate contemporary doctrine by either the precepts or the practice of Secker and Watson.
IV
To understand the impact of the Reformation, therefore, we have to look in other directions. Doctrinally, it sought to renovate and not to evade, the principles of the Christian life; there was no nourishment for liberalism in that outlook. What gave the Reformation its importance for social doctrine was the fact that it synchronised with, and in part was caused by, the great economic dislocation of its time. Faced by that challenge, the Church had no answer to it. The result was to unleash against its foundations all the accumulated grievances of the Middle Ages. They were of the most varied kind, religious, legal, political, dynastic. They were given new point and dramatic substance by the refusal of the Papacy to weigh them adequately. As always, refusing reform, it invited a revolution. Its failure to set its house in order at the time of the Conciliar movement was fatal to its effort to maintain its pretensions before the new conditions it encountered.
We can see this most clearly, I think, if we look at the characteristics of the English Reformation, and draw our inferences from them. Broadly speaking, there was nothing new in the nature of the English grievances. Provisors' appeals, Peter's pence, there had been protests against these for centuries. The effort, again, to make the wealth of the clergy bear its due share of national taxation was no new thing. The sense of ecclesiastical corruption, the resentment against clerical wealth, is an omnipresent note in medieval English literature. The English Reformation was not born of Henry VIII's libidinous temper. It was not even the outcome of a dispute about the nature of supremacy over the Church. The roots of the change had been growing for some hundreds of years. We can see signs of it in the struggle between Henry II and Thomas Becket. It is implied in the attitude of Edward I to the bull Clericis Laicos. It informs the treatises of Wyclif, in one mood, and the poems of Chaucer and Langland in another. Something of its temper is represented by the rebels who, in 1381, executed Simon of Sudbury, the Archbishop of Canterbury; and another aspect still is indicated by the attitude of the Council of Regency, under Henry VI, to the claims of Cardinal Beaufort to an effective share in power.
On the very eve of the Reformation, Dean Colet, whose loyalty to the Church is above suspicion, attacked it in terms that no adherent of the change would have disavowed. "All the corruption, all the decay of the Church, all the offences in the world," he told Convocation at Saint Paul's in 1512, "come of the covetousness of the priests." The picture he paints of that corruption is a terrible one. Pluralism, simony, a worldly temper, greed, nepotism, the commercial spirit, the temper of the usurer, absenteeism, abasement to the great for preferment's sake, all these are in his indictment. He does not hesitate to tell his clerical brethren that their enormous wealth permitted them a lazy life, given up to gluttony and lust. It is significant that his plea was widely popular. And it is significant, also, that he should demand the enforcement of old laws against "those daily newly invented arts of getting money." Colet Jooks backward to the past for the principles of his reformation.
We can find a similar indictment in Erasmus, who was well acquainted with English conditions. There is the same outlook in the famous pamphlet of Simon Fish, important enough, in its popularity, not only to attract the favour of the King, and an answer from Sir Thomas More, but also to be translated into German and Latin. Fish pleads roundly for royal action against the clergy, and he sees in the confiscation of their wealth the means to a new national prosperity. That, with all its defiant exaggeration, the "Supplicacyon of the Beggars" should have been so popular is an index to the degree in which the leadership of the Church had been undermined. The people was not anti-Catholic; but it was anti-papal with an intensity which had been gathering momentum for a generation.
To understand the English Reformation, above all the ease with which it was effected, its anti-papalism must be borne in mind. It is minimal in matters of doctrine; it is maximal in matters of exaction. Its essential legislation is directed against practices which tended to impoverish the realm for the benefit of the Church. Behind it lay the kind of solid experience embodied in Guilford's account of the probate of Sir William Crompton's will. Appeals, annates, pluralities, nonresidence, provisors, clerical absorption in secular occupations, the crying evil of mortuaries, all these were dealt with drastically by the Reformation Parliaments. The sweep of the measures, and their completion by the abolition of the monasteries, enables us to understand how Fox could write to Wolsey in 1523 that the people "were continually crying out against clerical abuses." They got a full response to their cry.
The English Reformation, in brief, did three things. It abolished papal jurisdiction; it relieved the people from a grievous mass of clerical taxation, widely abused and resulting in vast corruption; and it transferred a great volume of property from clerical to lay hands. What explains its acceptance? Not, I think, moral indignation against abuses, and certainly not a desire for a purer theology. The causes of its success go deeper than either of these, even though there were men profoundly interested in both. A good deal was due to suspicion of the foreign interest of the clergy. This cut across that deep sense of nationalism which marks the Tudor period. Clerical devotion to Rome, outspoken in the case of Fisher of Rochester, was as profound as it was held to be dangerous; for it was held by the government that the wealth of the church might be used in defence of the Roman jurisdiction. That this suspicion was justified was shown by the experience of the Bishop of London when he tried to collect the fine imposed on the clergy; and by the large part played by them in organising the disaffection which resulted in the Pilgrimage of Grace. It is, moreover, clear that there was a moment in 1536 when effective leadership in the North might easily have meant the threat of a national disintegration like that suffered by France during her religious wars; to deprive the Church of its wealth was obviously to mitigate this danger.
Another element of importance is the outcome, also, of the centralising nationalism of the time. It was felt that, as Wyclif had urged, the confiscation of church property would enable money to be devoted to the national defence without imposing further financial burdens upon the taxpayer. The point is also made with great force by Simon Fish; one of the keynotes of his attack is that the nation cannot stand the drain on its resources, in case of war, represented by the flow of money abroad. The cost of the military and naval policy of Henry VIII was undoubtedly a real factor in stimulating the suppression of the monasteries. These preparations, wrote Lord Herbert of Cherbury, "seemed to excuse the King's suppressing the abbeys; as the people willing to spare their own purses, began to suffer it easily; especially when they saw orders taken for building divers forts and bulwarks upon the seacoast." Then, as now, a spirited foreign policy produced unexpected ramifications.
There is no doubt that the general economic condition of the realm created a wide feeling in favour of confiscation. Pamphieteers and memorialists were luxurious in suggestion of what might be done with clerical wealth for the common welfare. The expense of defence might be met. The sufferings from the enclosures might be mitigated. A policy of public works, including, significantly enough, the building of roads, might be undertaken to meet the burden of unemployment. All such plans, as we know, came to nothing; it may be doubted whether they were ever seriously considered. But there can be little doubt that it was under cover of them that the Reformation policy went through. It was evidence of the degree to which men had become disillusioned with the Church that so many should think of its property as of a national fund to which the state could legitimately turn for relief in a period of difficulty.
But what, quite unquestionably, made the policy of suppression popular was the opportunity it opened up to the King, the nobility, and the upper middle class of self-enrichment. The grasping cupidity with which men, from great nobles like the Duke of Norfolk, to country gentlemen like Humphrey Stafford, and even unknown members of the urban bourgeoisie, petitioned, bargained, and bribed to get their share of the spoils is highly significant. It created a solid party in favour of maintaining the new order of things. It facilitated the building up of great estates, and, hence, the progress of the enclosure movement. It stimulated the accumulation of capital, and thereby the number of men prepared to risk their surplus wealth in the new commercial adventures. There can be little doubt that the policy represented by the Reformation is, psychologically, the expression of nothing so much as the breakdown of the medizval economic order. The expansion of trade and industry requires a strong monarchy able to govern in the interest of that expansion. The Church is unfavourable to it. Its practices--witness the attack of Latimer on the evil effects of feast days--stand in the way of production. Its property not only has a penumbra of foreign allegiance, but is unavailable for full exploitation by the new methods. It hinders, by its incidence, that favourable balance of trade which has come to seem so vital to the nation. Even the charity of the Church is held to encourage idleness. Its whole organisation, as an agency of social control, is antithetic to the new spirit. Its destruction, as an organisation, offered the prospect of new wealth at a time when men were dizzy with the sense of new opportunities. Its own corruption supplied a justification for this greed to men eager to seize on any pretext of the kind. Thereby, as they thought, they might enrich themselves negatively by shifting the burden of taxation on to other shoulders, and, positively, by obtaining their share of the spoils. To the new social order the Church, as it was organised, seemed a definite encumbrance. The principles for which it stood meant the withdrawal of great elements of wealth, land, labour, and capital, from the new uses to which they might be devoted. The contrast between the eager merchant and the avaricious landlord of the Tudor age, on the one hand, and the priest and the monk, on the other, left no doubt of the result of the struggle for the wealth of the Church. When, at the Council of Trent, the Papacy awakened to the need for reform, it was already too late. For by that time it had lost the half of its empire. The new men were in the saddle. The new terms of exploitation had been laid down. It was no longer for the new spirit to make its terms with the Church. It was now the business of the Church to make its terms with the new spirit.
V
It is, therefore, in this indirect fashion that the Reformation came to the support of liberal doctrine. It opened the way to individualism by confiscating wealth used to support principles which stood in the way of individual opportunity. With the disappearance of that wealth, the influence of those principles diminished also. In antithesis to them, there slowly emerges a secular conception of life which defines ever more narrowly the empire they can maintain. More than this, that secular conception, in its turn, affects the content of Christian principle so as to shape it to its own needs. The way in which this was done is complex and tangled. Partly, it came from events which compelled the Churches to shift their point of view; in searching for allies, for example, the weakened commonwealth of Rome was no longer able to make its own terms. Partly, also, it came from the fact that, in the struggle to advance the new outlook, ideas developed, and that in the most diverse realms, the long impact of which was in the direction the new spirit required. In the sixteenth century this ideological revolution has three main emphases. It is, in part, an evolution of political doctrine; a theory of the state as a self-sufficient entity is built. Partly, again, it is a new theology; and in the building of this researches are undertaken which undermine the hold of the faith upon men's minds. Finally, a new cosmology is built, the results of which are a new scientific outlook, on the one hand, and a new metaphysics on the other. We move from Copernicus and Kepler, from Cardan and Vesalius, to Galileo and Harvey, to Bacon and Descartes. By the time we have reached the seventeenth century man the individual has a sense of mastery over the universe that is new in both depth and aspiration. He is prepared, as it were, to dispute with God for the right to supremacy over its destiny.
Each of these elements needs separate consideration, though none, in truth,
is separate from the others. The history of political thought in the sixteenth
century is the history of the effort of men to justify, with only partial success,
the implications of a new environment. They are confronted with the fact of
a political power divorced from the theological foundations in which it was
previously embedded. The old sanctions of obedience are in process of disappearance;
new sanctions have to be found. They can no longer build their commonwealths
upon a divine law of which Rome is the ultimate interpreter, for the right of
Rome to interpretation is challenged by the half of Europe. They can no longer
teach the coevality of political duty and religious obligation; for each of
these has, by revolution, become diverse. The problem they have to meet is,
no doubt, the eternal one of the reconciliation of liberty and order. But the
idea of liberty is now set in a new framework. It meets an environment of which
the material emphasis is different from any known since the rise of the papal
dominion. The evolution that occurs is the outcome of this novelty.
Sixteenth-century political philosophy opens with an expression of modernity
which, whether for realism or power of insight it was never to surpass. The
whole of the Renaissance is in Machiavelli. There is its lust for power, its
admiration for success, its carelessness of means, its rejection of medieval
bonds, its frank paganism, its conviction that national unity makes for national
strength. Neither his cynicism nor his praise of craftiness is sufficient to
conceal the idealist in him. He espouses Dante's dream of a united and renovated
Italy with all his heart. But he is also an administrator to his finger tips,
an administrator with the courage to avow that he who wills the end must will
the means also. He believes in liberty, but he has been taught by grim experience
that power is the price of liberty. So that all which stands in the way of realising
power, and maintaining it, he puts, ruthlessly, on one side. Moral limitations
on conduct, an independent Church, these are the admissions of weakness; and
weakness is the sin against the Holy Ghost. Machiavelli's prince might well
stand as the portrait of the new man of his age. He knows what he seeks to achieve;
he is ruthless in serving his ideal. He is frankly materialistic--unencumbered
by any of that other-worldliness so rooted in medieval practice. Utility is
the keystone of his practice, with power as the criterion of utility. His aims
are wholly secular; his state has its eyes fixed wholly on this earth. If religion
enters into his calculations, it is only as an instrument of value in bending
men to the service of his arms.
Machiavelli is a man of genius, and the man of genius is never, perhaps, wholly typical of his age. But it is highly significant that, on the threshold of a new time, a book should have appeared which so frankly commended its inner essence. For, after all, the character of his prince is not a caricature of the century which followed, but an index to it. We find him in all its typical men, in Cromwell and Walsingham in England, in the Guises and Catherine de' Medici in France, even, under their special protective colouration, in Luther and Calvin and popes like Paul III and Paul V. He is in religious zealots like Ignatius Loyola not less than in splendid pirates like Hawkins and Drake. A new enterprise, a new efficiency, serve a new ideal. If, with him, that ideal is nakedly terrestrial that is because, in a double sense, a new world has swum into his ken. He outlined, once for all, the ideal of amoral power which is worthy of pursuit for its own sake. He revealed the secrets of an impulse so profound in the human constitution that few sacrifices were deemed too great for its satisfaction.
But not less significant, in the sixteenth century, is the indignation Machiavelli aroused. Until some such time as that of Bacon, his unashamed secularity of temper was meat too strong for men's digestion. They are not less eager for power than he is, but they seek to clothe their purpose in terms that will make it compatible with the moral climate of their time. The idea of a strong and self-sufficient state frees itself but painfully from the trammels of competing ends. It is helped by Luther's view of the prince as a chosen instrument of God; with Luther, there is no Church behind to act as the judge of his conduct. It is helped, again, by Calvin's insistence--he falters only upon a single occasion--upon the Christian obligation to obey constituted authority. It was helped, once more, by the Presbyterian conception--largely the work of Andrew Melville--of the two Kingdoms; for that already involved the admission of a temporal world outside the boundaries of religious control. It drew nourishment from the Jesuit theory, so magistrally developed by Bellarmine--of the indirect power of the Papacy, since this was built upon the thesis that a state which abstained from persecuting the faithful might assume its right to freedom from ecclesiastical intervention. Above all, perhaps, it was aided by the angry passion of religious war. For the cost of civil strife in social misery and political anarchy was so intense that men, of whom Bodin is deservedly the most famous, arose to argue that the state should not perish for the sake of religious conscience. They sought, like the Politiques in France, to discover a plane of political action, a sanction, therefore, for the authority it requires, which should be free from the intrusion of religious argument. That meant, on the one hand, toleration; a conception from which, with rare exceptions Jike Marsiglio of Padua, the Middle Ages were inevitably free. And, on the other, it meant an approach, however circuitous and doubtful, to the atmosphere in which Machiaveffi built his commonwealth. Religion may not have abdicated its claims by the end of the century; but it has been put in fetters so strong that, after its close, there is no longer any danger that those claims may prevail.
The most striking result of political change in the sixteenth century is, so far as theory is concerned, the Commonwealth of Bodin. Both in motive and in argument, that is a book no medieva1 thinker could have attempted. It would not be of its age if it did not pay some tribute to the idea of natural law; but its significance lies wholly in a different emphasis. It is a treatise on the avoidance of anarchy. It urges the need, in any political society, of a supreme authority which shall give laws to all, and receive laws from none. Bodin was the first writer of the modern world to see that, once a state is to be sovereign, there can be, legally, no challenge to its authority. Its will is, by definition, an unlimited will. He thus discovers a plane for its activities upon which the rivalry of any competing authority, such as the Church, is, a priori, impossible. Yet, superb as is the clarity of Bodin's analysis, he hesitates before the implications of his own construction. Having built a state theoretically incapable of restraint, he then suggests that there are certain principles to which it should yield primacy. These are divine law, the fundamental laws of the commonwealth, and that "natural" law which should prevent a prince from despoiling the property of his subjects.
Those limitations are clearly of high significance. They mean, I take it, that Bodin saw, and desired, the inevitability of a purely secular state, but realised, from his own vivid experience of the Valois monarchy, the dangers of unlimited power. The limitations he therefore sought to impose are, all of them, conceived in the spirit of his own time. On the one hand, under the conventional name of divine law, they are an acceptance of the moral conventions of his generation; on the other, they are an effort to find some place for the consent of subjects to the actions of authority, with special reference to the need for security in matters of economic constitution. The emphasis, for example, on the irrevocability of the Salic law is the realist's grim recognition that Renaissance man was apt to take advantage of a woman's weakness on the throne. The ascription of a special sanctity to private property, so that its control is ultimately to be born of consent through law, is the outcome of his knowledge that men are never so apt to fight as when they conceive their property to be in danger. Bodin's theory of sovereignty is a conscious search for a formula of peace in an age racked by civil strife. It is a measure of the changed atmosphere he confronts that he should find his remedy in the idea of civil supremacy. With him, the uneasy duality of the Middle Ages is finally laid to rest. The struggle between ecclesiastical and civil power is decided in favour of the latter. And this means--it is notable that it should mean--that the sanctions of conduct are, in increasing measure, to be secujar and not divine.
Bodin's thesis, at bottom, rests upon a foundation of utility which makes order the highest good; a typical outlook, let us remember, for the lawyer to take in an age of anarchy. It is an attempt to find the groundwork of obedience within the confines of law itself. There were competing hypotheses slowly worked out within the period. The most notable of them are the idea, by no means new, and with good Scriptural warrant behind it, of the Divine Right of Kings, and the doctrine, again a renovation, of the social contract. The reason for their re-emergence is obvious enough. It is a disturbed age, in which men felt themselves in the presence of revolutionising novelty. All the combatants sought to prove, first, that they did not seek to fight, and, second, that they were justified in fighting. All of them, therefore, from Luther onwards, were driven to examine the foundations of p~litica1 authority. That there must be obedience they were all agreed, not least the Reformers who shrank from no accusation so angrily as that which declared them to be the proponents of social confusion. But they were not prepared for obedience without conditions; and they invented principles to explain that their own ends were, in fact, universal and eternal principles which all reasonable men ought to accept. Mostly, their view of the state was set in the framework of the religious debate which gave its immediate context to the conflict. But, as I shall seek to show, behind that context there can be descried a wider horizon.
Perhaps the easiest way to see the significance of the argument is to look at it in the age of its greatest richness-that of the Counter-Reformation. And, in that age, there can be little doubt that the most remarkable discussion is that which arose in France after the fateful massacre of Saint Bartholomew and continued with passionate intensity until Henry IV's triumphant entry into Paris, over twenty years later. The problem is the terms upon which order can be made from confusion. There are religious differences, economic conflict, dynastic rivalries, constitutional disagreements. Before St. Bartholomew, the Huguenots had protested that they accepted the authority of the Crown; they took up arms only against its evil advisers. After the massacre they became more radical. Power, they argue, is a trust which binds its holders to good government. It is born of a contract between prince and people, in which the latter have the right to withdraw the authority they have conferred upon a tyrant. It is the mark of tyranny to persecute a subject who is doing his duty to his God. For that subject has made a contract with his maker to place allegiance to him before any human obligation. When, therefore, he is persecuted, the right of resistance follows. But that right is to be exercised under significant limitations. The solid men of property, under whose auspices the Huguenot theory was constructed, never forgot things like the Peasant's War in Germany, the anarchist communism of the Anabaptists, the danger, when rebellion is proclaimed as a right, that all solid principles may be cast in doubt. They therefore deny the right of resistance to the common man. His duty is a passive one, until he is summoned to the field by his natural leaders, the princes of the blood, the nobility, the constituted magistracy of the commonwealth. They are the judges of when legal rebellion may be undertaken. They will take care, we may assume, that no resistance will seek to overthrow the principle of private property as such. A rebellion in the name of religious conscience is not to be made a cover for undue social radicalism.
The pamphlets which urge this attitude are innumerable; some of them, like those of Buchanan and Beza and the author of the Vindiciae have left a permanent mark upon political thought. But, after 1589, Henry of Navarre, a Huguenot, is king. Thenceforward the note of Huguenot argument changes. Its protagonists are all for accepting the Divine Right of Kings. They have a monarch on the throne in whose conduct they have confidence. The idea of resistance seems to them wholly evil. The powers that be are ordained of God; it is blasphemy to resist their decrees. After 1589 the Huguenots are a minority still, but they are a minority with hope. They know that, once Henry's title is secure, there will be no difficulty in the way of their toleration. They therefore expend all their energies to prove that the civil state rests on divine foundations, that those who resist its decrees are guilty of blasphemy and are the enemies of the well-being of the realm. There is little sense in them of inconsistency. New conditions have made peace their objective in one generation, as older conditions had made for war in another. Their real anxiety is to survive, to pursue their way through life unimpaired. They take the argument most likely to serve that end as the proper foundation for a political philosophy.
The Catholics go in a reverse direction. Until 1589 their protagonists are full of horrified indignation at men who threaten the foundations of social order. The state, they feel, is their state, and they exalt with enthusiasm the right of the prince to order its activities simply because, from St. Bartholomew onwards, it operates to their advantage. But after the accession of Henry IV their view changes completely. A heretic is on the throne; and the Ligueurs do not doubt that rebellion is better than the acceptance of a heretic king. They therefore preach the sovereignty of the people as indefensible. They argue that the people may confer it or withdraw it at their pleasure. It is conferred, they say, for the purpose of good government. But good government is impossible without religion; and religion, of course, must be the true religion, which is that of Rome. The preachers of the League, therefore, develop a democratic theory of political authority in the knowledge that the majority is on their side. It is, indeed, hardly too much to say that the Vindiciae is the source of later Whig, the sermons of men like Boucher of later radical, philosophy. The Catholic view, of course, is but a temporary phase, nourished on the fanatical passion of a Paris mob which had tasted blood, and saw in the return of the Huguenots to Paris a threat to their virtual monopoly of trade and employment in the capital city; we can understand their reciprocity to these radical ideas if we remember the contemporary popularity of anti-Semitism in Germany with the small shopkeepers and professional men. The analogy is important, because, even after Henry's conversion ended the Catholic need for a doctrine of popular sovereignty based on contract, the church used the argument of economic advantage to foster the acceptance of hostility to tolerance of heresy.
Amidst this shock of pragmatic opposites a different doctrine was being slowly evolved. Huguenot and Catholic alike appealed beyond utility to a theory of right, however limited the idea of right that theory was to serve. The party of the Politiques, who may perhaps trace their origin to the noble effort of Michel de l'Hopital for peace, have a very different outlook. They do not doubt the desirability of religious unity; they do not even deny the desirability of persecution, if it has the hope of being successful. But they insist that civil society must not perish for conscience's sake. The interests of peace come first; the religious interest is a secondary consideration. For them, it is more important that Frenchmen should recognise their common interests as citizens of France, noblemen, landowners and traders alike, than that they should make of France two nations and a ruined society on the ground of religious difference. If this, they say, is the great barrier to peace and prosperity, let us level it. Let us grant toleration, since the long agony of civil conflict makes it clear that war is not a successful highroad to national unity. Let us find a plane of political activity upon which men may meet as citizens regardless of their religious differences.
This is the view that prevailed, and I do not need to stress the significance of its victory. It meant the triumph of the secular state. It meant that the status of political right no longer needed definition in terms of an ecclesiastical sanction. From the medieval angle, it put the worldly interests of men above what was regarded as their heavenly interest. It meant that the preservation of order was so much the highest political good, that the state would disregard any claim to its interference which would jeopardise the cause of order. Once that view was accepted, the self-sufficiency of the state had no longer to be argued. Behaviour would then be justified, not by its coincidence with an idea of right justified by its conformity with divine law, but by its acceptable congruity with ends which the state chose to serve. And those ends, broadJy speaking, would henceforth be essentially secular ends. No state, henceforth, will embark upon religious persecution purely in the name of some sacred truth. Its concern will, beneath that claim, always be a state concern; even, the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes has political unity rather than religious truth as its objective, and it aroused no enthusiasm in Rome. Once order has become an end in itself, the differences between men are concerned with fundamentally economic problems of what that order makes, with the response, in short, of the state to the rights claimed by the owners of property. And the criterion of the response, at this stage, is no longer that of divine law. It is the criterion of a conception of utility related to material well-being. The pursuit of wealth as the basic social aim has become the corner stone of political activity.
One further aspect of political doctrine in this epoch deserves some little emphasis. The sixteenth century is an age in which new legal principles were forged to meet the needs of a new society. These principles may be looked at from two points of view. From one angle they are the birthplace of international law in its modern sense-that is, of a law governing the relations between states regarded as its effective units. On another side, public law begins to be sharply differentiated from private law with which, under the feudal system, it had been closely confounded. We get not only lawmaking in a sense much closer to the modern idea of legislative innovation. We get, also, a judicial revision of legal doctrine intended to suit commercial necessities of a new kind in men's experience.36 It may even be asserted that nowhere is the fact of a new society so obvious as in the legal realm.
The need for an international law was increasingly obvious after the Reformation.
It was made clear by the geographical discoveries. What was to constitute valid
title to a colonial empire? Papal authority no longer sufficed, since it could
not bind the Protestant powers. A body of doctrine had to be formulated which
rested upon a different sanction. And the need was made greater by the new fact
of national unity. The state this unity makes possible has relations with other
states much more intense, especially in the realm of commerce, than was the
case a century before. The rise of new nation-states, like that of Holland,
gives point to the need. The finality of religious difference, implicitly recognised
by Bellarmine, involved a new international status for the Papacy. The ambassador
of the sixteenth century is, almost consciously, a very different and superior
figure to his fifteenth-century prototype; and the new monarchies he represented,
the new and wider functions he performed, needed new rules to define his position
and its privileges. The discoveries, moreover, raised large issues of international
trading rights involving treaty arrangements of a complex kind. Publicists,
in these conditions, had to find a body of rules, secular in their sanction,
which were binding upon men of diverse faiths. The impetus is clear; the sources
which go to make that central stream which culminated in the work of Grotius
are more varied. Moral principle, as in the noble work of Francisus e Victoria,
has its quota to contribute. There is a stream of moral rationalism, ecclesiastical
in purpose, but only partially so in method, which comes from Suarez and the
great Jesuits of the Counter-Reformation. There is the element born of the new
raison d'etat of which, though only in part consciously, Machiavelli
is the fountain head. There is the influence of the Roman law, with all its
revived authority in this epoch, as it is related to the new problems by men
like Alberico Gentili. The result is a body of doctrine of which the consequences
were great.
For its basis is the idea that nature gives birth to a body of rational principles as clear and as immutable as those of mathematics and physics. The analogy is a startling one. For the notion of binding force, Grotius has already gone to the new science rather than to the old theology. His state is fairly built on the social instinct of man, and its practices are guided by that rule of reason which he takes to be nature's law. The purpose of society is conservation; and, for him, writing as a Dutchman who has watched the struggle for independence and commercial supremacy, peace is the highroad to conservation. If the unending mass of citation makes us realize how near in time is Grotius to the schoolmen, from the jungle they make emerges principle after principle which indicate that a new lesson has been learned. The distinction between just and unjust war, the desirability of arbitration, the exposition of the rights and duties of neutrals, the restraints suggested on devastation and pillage as incidents of war, these indicate not merely a new humanitarianism, but also a sense of new terms in the relationships states imply. It is important that the whole scheme is outside the theological scheme of things. It is important, further, that the development of rules for the protection of private property should occupy so much of his attention. And read in the context of his famous controversy with Selden over maritime rights, it is not difficult to see in its conclusions the charter of that new commerce to the empire of which no boundaries could yet be assigned.
The evolution of the civil law has more complex implications. Yet its essence is unmistakably secularisation. The decline of the canon law reflects definitively the defeat of the claims of Rome. The Reception of the Roman Law, in Germany, Scandinavia, and Scotland as well as in the Latin countries, came because its principles were far better suited than feudal rules to an age which required uniformity and strong government. The appeal of Roman law lay not merely in the prestige of its associations, but in the fact that it exalted the state, and the prince as the embodiment of the state, as the unchallengeable sanction of political power. It had the further advantage that it suited the class divisions of the new society far more creatively than feudal principles based on distinctions already largely obsolete. For it was important that the Roman law was made for an empire built on world trade. Its conceptions of property, therefore, were far more adequate to the new economic order than those of the system it supplanted. If they acted with depressive effect on the poorer class, that was probably a commendation in the eyes of the men who adopted them. What was supremely important was, that once the change had been made, the power of the state rested upon a different level from that of any possible competitor. The courts were applying a doctrine nursed by a philosophy which did not easily permit a challenge to secular power.
In England, of course, the direction took a different turn, since the common law proved too tough for civilian transformation. 'What is important with ourselves is less immediately new doctrine-this comes, a little tardily, in the seventeenth century-than the fact that the strong and popular Tudor monarchs broke the last vestiges of feudal pretensions. That meant the decay of the feudal courts, a consequential advance, accordingly, in the authority and prestige of the national judges. New legislation, a new and powerful class of officials largely composed of novi homines, the renovation of the office of justice of the peace and its attachment by unbreakable links to the Crown, these are the main experiments of the period, and they all make for that centralising nationalism which was the most urgent need of the age. Nor must we fail to note the significance of Parliament, different in quality from that of any continental legislature. The Tudors, no doubt, were despots; Professor Pollard has said of Henry VIII that he was Machiavelli's prince in action. But they were despots by popular consent. Whatever the divisions of the nobility, the middle classes rallied to them. The landowner and the merchant enabled them to use Parliament as the instrument of a state using political means for economic welfare. The Tudors made their law prevail by infusing it with the spirit that the new order required. They recreated self-confidence and enterprise in the middle class by providing them with security. That is the temper which always nourishes a new social philosophy.
In this respect we must notice that security has its price. What the state did in aid of liberalism in the sixteenth century is different from what it achieved, or was even asked to achieve, in later ages; and there is a difference in attitude between one country and another because the time factor is different in the emergence of similar problems. Broadly, we may say that the contribution of the sixteenth century is the destruction of ecclesiastical. authority in the economic sphere. This enables property relations to develop unhampered by theological considerations. There emerged from this a secular state which sought, and found, its mission upon the basis that it replaced the Church as the guardian of social well-being. It builds its own morality, based upon utility, to suit its new prestige. But, in this first phase, its habits are necessarily marked by practices inherited from the previous age. We have a long period of widespread state activity in which it is assumed that the rules of economic conduct are to be laid down by the state instead of by the Church. Individual economic good is still set in the context of a community--good of which the state is the appointed guardian. Men are still too accustomed to intervention of authority in economic life to doubt its general validity. There may be occasional protest, like that of the English Parliament against monopolies, or that of the merchants of Antwerp to Philip II against the proposal to make a privileged insurance corporation under royal patronage; in these, as in occasional similar instances, a significant plea for freedom of trade will be made. But the new order, while the sixteenth century lasts, has still far too great a need for the security built by its actions, to resent its interference in any wholesale way. The achievement of a secular state was a sufficient revolution for one period to effect. Doubts of interventionism have to wait until the suspicion is widespread that the effect of intervention is less admirable than the theory which lies behind it.
Mercantilism, therefore, is the first step taken by the emerging secular state
on the road to the full achievement of liberalism. Its acceptance is natural
enough. The action of a strong government has secured peace; why should such
a government not secure prosperity also? Industrial decay, large-scale emigration,
especially in distressed countries like France, a debased currency, the need
to protect international economic adventure, not least in the colonial field,
the general confusion of g8
industrial rules and standards, the struggles, due to the general decline of
authority, between master and employé, on the one hand, and between rival
crafts, on the other, all pointed to the need of state-intervention. The belief
that the export of the precious metals is dangerous, the threat of foreign competition,
the desire, accordingly, for a protective tariff, made men look naturally to
the state as a source of aid in their difficulties. The wars and the unemployment
caused by changing economic methods like the enclosures meant that legal provision
must be made for the new race of sturdy vagabonds of whom the literature of
the sixteenth century has so much to say. The root of the mercantilist idea
is its recognition of the need for a new discipline, a code of economic behaviour
which will make for prosperity instead of misery, for work instead of indolence.
It was natural to look to the state, in these circumstances, as the great regulator
from whose beneficent action abundance might be won.
Mercantilism, in the first stage, therefore simply transfers the idea of social control from the Church to the state in the economic realm. It is, of course, a momentous transference. For the motive of state action is no longer the good life, but the attainment of wealth, the enactment, by legislation, of the conditions that will make for wealth. This attitude can be seen with abundant clearness in Englishmen like Hales and Cecil, in Frenchmen like Laffemas and Montchretien, in Italians like Serra. Their outlook in these matters is wholly secular. The recommendation of their policy is simply that it will add to the wealth of the Kingdom. What is new in their outlook is its frank utilitarianism, their acceptance of the idea of plenty as a self-sufficient social ideal. This emerges, above all, in their attitude to the poor. It is not, I think, too much to say that they look upon the unemployed as social criminals; they detract from the wealth that is attainable. This is the spirit of the Elizabethan poor law; it is evident in the repressive measures against them recommended by Laffemas. The whole spirit of their effort is to get people working; even the new charity of the religious revival in France has no other purpose. The Statute of Apprentices, the French rules for dealing with abandoned children, are all permeated by this desire. The interest of a mercantile class which has made productivity a god is written all over the new temper. To it is sacrificed the interest alike of the consumer and the workingman. The whole trend of policy is to make a state responsive to the needs of the business man. When Laffemas recommended the fixing of wages by compulsory arbitration through a chamber wholly dominated by the employers, he gave merely a specially vivid expression to the outlook of the new business man. He was using the political machinery of the state to establish the conditions upon which he believed his prosperity to depend. He invoked its coercive power to effect the discipline of social life which gave him security for his effort.
It is this approach which explains the rise of the idea of toleration. No doubt there are men--Acontius, for example, and Castellion and Robert Brown--who urge the desirability of protecting conscience on purely religious grounds. But the history of toleration shows that it is the economic destruction wrought by civil war which creates the mental climate favourable to toleration. It comes because, at bottom, persecution is a threat to property. It endangers the conditions of sound business enterprise. It suggests that the foundations of state action are still primarily religious in character. It was anti-individualistic in implication because it postulated the assumption that the end of the state must be judged by non-political criteria. It is too much to say that the sixteenth century was fully prepared to reject that assumption. But it is significant that, in England, Elizabeth had already ceased to persecute on religious grounds alone; she tolerated her Catholic subjects so long as they did not threaten the unity of the kingdom. She was more concerned for order than for truth, because she saw in order the key to material well-being. That is the outlook which, as I have shown, emerged also from the religious wars in France; the triumph of Henry IV is a victory for étatisme. What suffers defeat is the doctrine that no price is too high for the Kingdom of Heaven. It takes two centuries for the defeat to become conclusive. But, almost from the beginning of religious difference, it is significant that the economic influence is ardently on the side of peace.
One final point upon the evolution of political doctrine it is necessary to make. The rejection of religion as the principle entitled to make political policy might easily have resulted in a new absolutism. The state might have taken the place of the Church as itself the sufficient criterion of good and evil. There might easily have emerged what, indeed, is implied in mercantilist theory, a religion of the state in which the interest of the individual would have been subordinated to raison d'etat. That attitude, certainly, is the predominant one in the sixteenth century. The political theorists, like Machiavelli and Bodin, are concerned that the state shall be strong; the economic theorists, like Laffemas, are concerned that it shall be wealthy; and the new administrators, men like Cecil in England, share their objectives. We can see, in men like Bacon, at the end of the age, that a strong state rather than a free individual, that étatisme rather than liberalism, is still the dominating conception. In France, indeed, that outlook lasted still longer. It is not until the last twenty years of Louis XIV's reign that we begin to see the liberal ideal challenging the power of the state. Why did not the idea of the state as itself a religion persist?
We may answer that question by pointing out that interventionism as a doctrine is challenged almost as soon as it becomes a principle of state policy. The most remarkable expression of that doctrine is, no doubt, the protests of the House of Commons against monopolies under Elizabeth. It is, perhaps, too much to say that the new economic spirit favoured freedom from the outset of its emergence. It is, however, true to insist that it supported the policy of interventionism only so long as internal order and peace were in doubt. Once the state had crushed all internal rivals its attitude to regulation was criticised immediately it was felt as a handicap to individual effort. That was partly because the administrative ability of the state was inadequate to the intervention it attempted. It was partly, also, because its favouritism tended to make of the privileges it organised a way of benefit to the courtier at the expense of the trader; "all free subjects," the House of Commons told James,"are born inheritable to the free exercise of their industry." Partly, again, as Pirenne has pointed out, most of the new capitalists were parvenus who can, given order, make their way better in a régime of liberty, than when a price has to be paid for state assistance. National economy, in a word, was a stage on the way to individual economy. It persisted so long, but only so long, as it was successful. It produces internal order, and it is welcomed on that ground. But it is, in its nature, arbitrary, capricious, and inefficient. Its habits are dominated by statesmen whose outlook only partially fits the requirements of capitalism. They want a state which they can directly shape to their own purposes; and, the more fully internal order is achieved, the more certain they are that the highroad to such a state is their own domination of it. In these circumstances, they can have rules to govern the acquisition of wealth that they themselves have the main share in making. They can control the will of the monarch, not least in financial matters. They can limit the privileges of a landed aristocracy which tends to secure a monopoly of political office. The absolute state hinders the full exploitation of unfettered capitalism. Constitutional theory, with its substitution of rule for discretion, of civil liberty for monarchical caprice, is the answer of the business men to the failure of national economy to serve his needs. Mercantilism breaks down because the principles of liberty offer wider prospects of exploitation to men whose interests are bound up with the implications of unfettered production.
VI
The new theology follows a similar path. Its main result is the substitution of reason for authority as the main criterion of the right to believe. In a sense, of course, this attitude is implicit in the very fact of Protestantism. Luther's bibliolatry is inevitably anti-authoritarian simply because he had no criterion save individual insight to which to appeal for validation of his own views. Even the rigidity of Calvinist logic had no better hold. The accusation of Bossuet, that the variations of the Protestant sects opened the door to atheism is an irrefutable one. But, for my purpose, the importance of the theological change is less in the attack it made upon Rome than in the unlooked-for result it had in promoting a secular and individualist attitude to the world. We must examine how this came to influence the development of the liberal doctrine.
It did so, in the first place, because it promoted free thought in the religious sphere. Once the authority of Rome was called into question, the basis of dogma was bound to become the worth of the testimony it could invoke in its support. That testimony was examined from angles wholly new in their temper. Biblical scholarship not only denies the pretensions of Rome; it also multiplies the variety of permissible religious faiths. The rediscovery of classical antiquity made possible new intellectual allegiances in which Christianity itself could be called into question. No doubt infidelity was much rarer in the sixteenth century than the fantastic exhortations of the clergy would tempt us to believe. But the fate of men like Bruno and Vanini, the attitude of Rabelais and Montaigne, Bodin's reputation for impiety, the fact that Viret can find it necessary to invent the term "Deist," is evidence enough of a new temper. And, as the imaginary voyages of the seventeenth century were to show more fully, the discovery of immense variations of human belief by the explorers, led to the notion that a morality could be defined independently of the Christian sanction. All revolutionary periods are unfavourable to the hold of traditional religions upon their votaries. The age of the Reformation is no exception to the general rule.
It presented a spectacle of confusion inevitably hostile to the idea of religious authority. The war of sects, with its passionate recrimination, naturally undermined respect for it. That was seen clearly by Nashe; and its results were summarised with his usual succinctness by Bacon when he wrote that "if there is one main division it addeth zeal to both sides, but many divisions introduce atheism." As early as 1565 Acontius proposed the unity of all religious sects as the only way to preserve faith in Christianity. Arminius attacked the sectarian spirit; but the remedies he recommended--prayer, forbearance, and a general council--were nothing so much as a confession of helplessness. In such an atmosphere the scepticism of Montaigne became the natural attitude of a cultivated man. For him, truth has ceased to be absolute in religious matters. "We receive our religion," he wrote, "but according to fashion. . . . Another country, other testimonies, equal promises, like menaces, would imprint a contrary religion in us." The result of religious warfare was undoubtedly to weaken the hold of dogma upon men's minds.
And as soon as the hold of dogma was weakened, the empire of reason extended its boundaries. The knowledge of other peoples, with moral principles as fine as the best Europe could show, with wealth as resplendent, with power not less impressive, made men see the Christian argument in a new perspective. It becomes one opinion, one morality, among others; even the Jesuit missionaries are prepared to doubt whether some of the savage tribes they visit do not show a nobler habit in all their paganism. Christianity begins to be viewed in the perspective of history and geography. The effect is to make it a part of nature and not the mistress of it. And this outlook, in its turn, suggests that principles of life may be discovered which are those of nature itself. From this, as with Rabelais and Montaigne, it is an easy step to argue that the life according to nature is the path a wise man will follow. Inherent in that view is, among other things, an earthly view of pleasure, a rejection of the ascetic emphasis of the middle ages. The motto of the Abbey of Theleme becomes an increasingly powerful canon of conduct. But to act as one will, one must have the means of pleasure; and these are the outcome of the conquest of material power. The decay of dogmatic faith, in fact, made once again for the growth of that secular spirit which justified activity by its power to secure material satisfactions. The lights of heaven are not extinguished, but their illumination seems more distant as the secular spirit grows.
And its growth is not least shown in the theological sphere itself. Secularism demands reason as its weapon; and by the end of the century nothing shows so much that religion is on the defensive as the fact that it is using the weapons of reason to defend itself. It can no longer impose its postulates; it has to commend them by proving that they are justified by rational inference. Nothing shows this more clearly than the character of the ablest defence of the Elizabethan religious settlement that our literature produced. Anyone who compares the Ecclesiastical Polity of Hooker with the spirit of the Reformers a generation before will feel that he has moved into a different world. "The natural measure," he wrote, "whereby to judge our doings is the sentence of Reason determining and setting down what is good to be done." He has the scholar's respect for tradition; but it is not a blind respect. "For men to be tied and led by authority," he argued, "as it were with a kind of captivity of judgment and, though there be reason to the contrary, not to listen to it, but to follow, like beasts, the first in the herd, they know not nor care not whither: this were brutish. Again, that authority of men should prevail with men, either against or above Reason, is no part of our belief. Companies of learned men, be they never so great and reverend, are to yield unto Reason." To its claims, therefore, even the voice of the Church is subordinate; and he insists that "without the help of natural discourse and Reason," no knowledge can be obtained which wiji secure the acceptance of the prescriptions of faith.
From this standpoint the theories of Hooker are almost wholly built upon a rational and utilitarian foundation. The power of the prince over the Church is accepted, not on ground of history or of Scriptural text, but of social convenience. The idea is inequitable that the clergy should have the sole right of ecclesiastical legislation. "We are to hold it," he wrote, "a thing most consonant with equity and reason that no ecclesiastical laws be made in a Christian commonwealth without consent as well of the laity as of the clergy, but least of all without consent of the highest power." Even the laws of God are not immutable. "And therefore laws though both ordained of God himself, and the end for which they were ordained continuing, may, notwithstanding cease, if by alteration of persons or times, they be found unsuflicient to attain to that end." It is, therefore, in his view, legitimate to accept a doctrine of evolution for the Church. "I therefore conclude that neither God's being Author of laws for the government of his church, nor his committing them unto Scripture, is any reason sufficient wherefore all churches should for ever be bound to keep them without change."
It is not too much to say of this attitude that Bacon would not have disowned it in Hooker's own generation, and hardly Hobbes in the next. Its temper is largely Erastian; it is built upon the assumption that the state can equitably alter religious habits to suit new social needs. It shows that Hooker is the contemporary of those men of science who were shaping a new world. It is not, indeed, the work of an individualist in religious matters; there is no hint of that almost defiant anarchism with which, a generation later, Chillingworth was to defend the right of private judgment in religious matters. Hooker was as convinced as any of his critics of the need for order, rule, and form in the ecclesiastical field. But his Church is in this world and not above it. He seeks to square it with the needs of men living in a new society, to lay its foundations in such a manner that it shall be capable of further adaptation, if this be required. The very depth of his own Christianity only makes his outlook the more significant. Such a Church as he conceives does not define the life of the society in which it moves, but expresses only the general habits of that life. It is consciously receptive to new influences. It has ceased to be the prisoner of tradition. Not since Erasmus had there been concessions of this magnitude to the requirements of a new time.
Hooker's attitude, no doubt, was to the left of most of his contemporaries; it is an indication of direction, rather than a definition of it. But it still shows, with much fidelity, the contours of the revolution that had been effected within eighty years of Luther's first great adventure. There is by then no institutional expression of Christianity with more than a partial validity in Europe; and there is already none powerful enough to challenge successfully the political state upon which it has come to depend for what social discipline it may impose. Increasingly, it is exposed to critical winds of doctrine which impair the full power of that discipline. Rationalism has arrived on the scene; the new world, half in shame and half in silence, is granting it its letters of credit. That rationalism is secular in purpose; it is seeking to give mankind a material empire over nature as its primary objective. That rationalism, also, is individualist in temper; for the breakdown of the Church's universal discipline means that the individual is himself increasingly able to frame the conditions of the discipline he will accept. And as it is individualist, so also it is naturalistic in temper. It is less and less moved by the cardinal dogma of original sin, more and more influenced by the antithetic principle of self-fulfilment. Individual effort has made so many in this age the masters of their own destinies, that the moral ideal they seek as binding is one that leaves room for that expression. But the channels of individual effort are in the period defined, above all, by the new economic opportunities. The typical man is the new merchant, the new administrator, the new explorer, the adventurer in new thought. All of them are, so to say, experimenting with themselves; they resent whatever may interfere with such experiment. They therefore begin to question dogmas the inference from which is the right to limit such behaviour in men as experience suggests will conduce to their greater advantage. Once this attitude becomes widespread, theology loses its self-confidence. Having begun by resting on the authority of faith, it now seeks to insist that the findings of reason are equally on its side. But such submission means one of two things. Either it is an appeal to the individual judgement or it is a claim, on secular grounds, for the support of the civil power. In the one case it abandons the right to impose itself; in the other it seeks for authority for purposes alien from its own ends. Either view is an abandonment, more or less explicit in this age, of its title to dominate civil society.
This, then, is the real meaning of the theological revolution. By denying that there was no salvation outside the Church it left no authority save the state capable of controlling the conduct of the individual. The state assumed that task, but from motives, and for ends quite different from those of the Church. The latter thought of the individual in terms of his heavenly destiny; the former thought of him in terms of his contribution to material power. For the state, therefore, the Church was transformed into one of its own instruments, a weapon it might use in furtherance of its own limited ends. The Church had its profound suspicions of wealth as such; the state had no such suspicions. Its sanctions, accordingly, erode one by one those elements of religious principle which stand in the way of the accumulation of wealth. This evolution, of course, is never uniform and only partially conscious. There is a time when the state almost approaches the Church in fear and trembling; as self-sufficient, it is itself too new to venture easily to lay impious hands upon it. It requires an undermining of ecclesiastical authority far more profound than a single century can effect for the process to be complete. The age of the Reformation effects little more than its commencement. It is the age of challenge rather than the age of victory. It brings emancipations which are never more than half-complete. But the foundations of emancipation are laid. Protestantism meant that man might question the title of his Church to allegiance. To vindicate his right to question there was no realm of enquiry he did not ransack for argument, and, at its end, he had completed that first and essential step which consisted in proving that he had justified his presumption in thinking out anew the terms of the human adventure. From that justification all else followed that was to be accomplished.
VII
Medieval theology was a metaphysic and a cosmology; with its defeat a new interpretation of the world was essential. The change in the direction of men's thoughts from a universe in which their main attention was concentrated upon the problems of the after-life to one in which their chief emphasis was upon the issues of the life we know was revolutionary in its consequences. It gave an altogether new impetus to the study of natural phenomena. It meant the analysis of experience by reason and the validation of hypothesis by experiment. As the new knowledge accumulated, it replaced an interpretation of nature in which magic and miracle were fundamental elements by one in which observed and regular sequence permitted the formulation of law and this, in its turn, conferred the power to predict. As the results of science began to make possible a greater power over nature, so its practitioners developed an ever greater confidence in the power of reason, unaided by authority or faith, to resolve its mysteries. Where these, indeed, stood in the path of reason they were resented; and the men of science became, though in large part without deliberate purpose, soldiers in that battle for the right to think freely which is one of the cardinal principles of the liberal faith The root of their attitude was a rejection of the two great medieval principles of homocentricity, on the one hand, and teleology, on the other. It was not, of course, a rejection which came suddenly and it had to be fought for inch by inch. The martyrdom of Giordano Bruno, the imprisonment of Galileo, the caution of Descartes, the passionate mysticism of Kepler, the fact that a great experimentalist like Harvey could still take part in an examination for witchcraft, the deep and abiding interest of Newton in the conventional problems of dogmatic theology, all show how tough and resistant was the climate of medievalism. But, after the publication of the Copernican hypothesis, the shift of the scientific spirit to secularism is rapid. Knowledge for the sake of power over a tangible and visible world becomes its self-sufficient justification That attitude allies itself with the new spirit of commercial enterprise to alter the sanctions of behaviour.
Nor must we forget the significance of the relation of the scientific spirit to technological advance. A large part of the discoveries were made possible by the making of new instruments which multiplied enormously the power to observe. Jansen's discovery of the compound microscope, the work of Leonard Digges in telescopy, the great improvements in marine instruments, the achievements of Tycho Brahe in more accurate astronomical calculation, all meant an insight into a new world. The development of mathematics in the hands of men like Vieta and Cardan put new weapons in their hands. Stevin laid the foundations of modem hydro-mechanics; and, at the end of the century, Kepler had put the science of optics on a new foundation. Not less remarkable was the work of Gilbert in magnetism and electricity; and its importance consisted hardly less in its method of experiment than in its actual results. The voyages of discovery gave an immense stimulus both to geography and to the biological science. In botany L'Eclus and Mattioli, Bauhin and Cesalpini, mark an epoch. Vesalius may be said to have effected alone a revolution in anatomy; and Servetus and Fabricius laid the foundations of Harvey's fundamental discovery. Medical progress, too, was rapid. There is not merely advance in diagnosis and treatment; there is the manufacture of artificial eyes and limbs, the use of new drugs, the more specialized study of disease. A name like that of Ambroise Pare alone is indicative of a revolutionary approach.
It would take me beyond my allotted province to discuss in detail the relation
between the scientific achievement of the age and its economic character. It
is enough for me to point out here their close interrelation. The stimulus provided
by the geographical discoveries to the art of navigation, and, hence, to astronomy
and physics; the importance of the new methods of warfare to engineering and
thence, once again, to physical science; the way in which the agricultural revolution
produced the light plough and thence, through the enclosures, new methods and
machines in weaving; the relation of the classical revival in architecture to
the solution of new problems in structural mechanics; the stimulus to engineering
and metallurgy effected by the development of deep-mining for both coal and
metals; the need, emphasised by Agricola in 1556, for labour-saving devices
in all aspects of heavy-industry; constructional works for municipal water-supplies,
like those completed at Augsburg in 1558 and at Toledo even earlier; all these
show an intimate connexion between the work of the scientist and the evolution
of industry. It is not, I think, excessive to say that the new outlook codified
in the Principia of Newton emerged from a nexus of problems presented
to science by business men. In their search for wealth, they required new power
over nature, new instruments to develop that power. Their needs defined new
horizons for the scientist out of which emerged a new picture of the universe
and a new control of nature. This partnership in experiment, here deliberate,
there only half-conscious, is one of the most momentous events in the modern
world.
We can see that significance in every aspect of the century's striving. But nowhere are its implications more clear than in the lives of two very different men who summarise in their outlook the ultimate burden of its teaching. Giordano Bruno is less, perhaps, the child of the Reformation than of the Renaissance; or, rather, the attitude he symbolises is born of that conflict between old authority and new insight which defined its basic canon. He is impatient of medieva1 dogma and the provincial outlook it engendered. He sees in the universe the order and regularity of inviolable law. His gaze into the infinite transcends even the vision of Copernicus with its sense of an infinity of worlds which reduces to pettiness a merely Christian theology. The keynote of his writings is their almost reckless luxuriance in a feeling of emancipation from tyranny. He is a Pantheist drunk with the knowledge of universal godhead; but a Pantheist, also, with a new sense of the majesty of the human personality to whom this insight has been vouchsafed. From his marriage of the philosophy of Cusanus with the. science of Copernicus he produced a metaphysic which made entire abstraction of the accepted doctrines of his day. And with that feeling of emancipation there goes a claim to enjoy its power so intensely felt that he seemed almost to welcome the conscious defiance of authority it implied. He is driven to proclaim new truth with ecstasy. He has no sense of the caution which, in other men of his time, led either to silence or to compromise. His sense of a mission of which he could not evade the fuffilment almost invited martyrdom; but his enemies might well have suspected that the flames which consumed his body were burning an old world also as they consummated his tragic fate.
Bruno makes evident, if in an extreme way, the degree to which the new science had freed his generation from the fetters of the old cosmology. His attitude is nothing so much as the proclamation of the right of modern man to follow his thought wherever it may lead. Professor Whitehead may be right in saying that "the cause for which he suffered was not that of science but that of free imaginative speculation"; but the point of his martyrdom is the fact that the new science had supplied the full perspective of his thought. That is true, also, of Francis Bacon. In him there is expressed, more magistrally than in any other figure of his time, the realisation, first, that a new world has been born, and, second, that science has given to man the means of becoming its master. The discoveries, he tells us, "have changed the whole face and state of things throughout the world." He has little save contempt for the "degenerate learning" of the schoolmen (who) "did out of no great quantity of matter and infinite agitation of wit, spin out unto us those laborious webs of learning which are extant in their books . . . but of no substance or profit." What he pleads for is experiment, co-operative investigation of nature, the abandonment of prejudice, the establishment of right methods of enquiry. We must be empirical and rational. We must observe relentlessly, and take pains to record our observations. We must endow scientific research as a principle of public policy. As we do this, "human knowledge and human power meet in one; for where the cause is not known, the effect cannot be produced. Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed."
To command nature, indeed, is the highest end of Bacon's ambition; and the way to command it is to discover the rhythm it follows. His view is, if in a high sense, an essentially utilitarian one. He has little of Bruno's zest in knowledge for its own sake; his objective is knowledge for the sake of the power it confers. He is the foe of tradition, and of that species of authority which, for the sake of tradition, would set boundaries to the acquisition of knowledge. "The relief of man's estate," "the service of human convenience," "the amplification of the rule and power of mankind over the world," "the restitution of man to the soverignty of nature," these are the purposes of science as he conceives it. The reader of the New Atlantis can still feel in its pages the sense of a new power which is to regenerate the universe. Nor is his vision limited to natural science. He calls for a new history. He makes of philosophy a method almost alien, in any traditional sense, from metaphysical speculation; for philosophy, with him, is little save the knowledge of nature. His attack on the academic deficiencies of his time proposes an ideal hardly yet, in the fulness he gave it, realised in our own day. His admission of usury shows him the statesman wtio puts commercial requirement before theological principle. His attitude to the Church is purely Erastian; for him it is simply an instrument that the state may use in its pursuit of power.
The idea of power, indeed, is at the heart of his whole outlook. In a fundamental sense he is the disciple of Machiavelli in that he makes his code of ethics one of which the criterion is ability to satisfy material appetite. Indeed, save Machiavelli, he is the least theological writer in spirit of his time. Efficiency and utility are his gospel; and he has no condemnation too strong for whatever interferes with their attainment. Man, as he sees him, is above all a creature moved by desire to fulfil his capacity. He seeks the conditions by which, in a world of ambition, vanity, fear, selfishness, a world, moreover, in which he knows that the medieval discipline has broken down, that capacity may be fulfilled at its maximum. The criteria he applies to conduct are those of the business man, with power, instead of profit, as the end to be served. In his conception of science, there may have been deficiencies which bound him. despite himself, to the older, Aristotelian outlook; he may, as Harvey bluntly put it, have written of science like a Lord Chancellor. But he wrote of it as a Lord Chancellor concerned to administer a vast terrestrial estate the bowidless possibilities of which intoxicated him; and he would admit the validity of no principle of government which hindered the realisation of those possibilities.
VIII
By 1600 we may say definitively that men are living and working in a new moral world. The sources that have gone to its making are various indeed. But what permeates them all is the sense of a new wealth at hand for the seeking. What has been born of that new wealth is an attitude of criticism to tradition which is, in the long run, fatal to its power to impose a discipline upon men. There is hardly any element in life which is not seen in a new and creative way. The passion for novelty is intense; the avidity with which men reach the record of geographical adventure is alone proof of that. The emergence, from that record, of ideas like that of the virtuous savage, the good life independent of Christian principle, the possibility of progress, relativism in morals and government, the far-off land where men may find peace and toleration, all these are of an importance beyond denial. They affected even the missionaries themselves, as the Jesuit narratives made evident. How greatly they shaped the minds of thinkers like Montaigne and Bodin is evident from every page of their writings. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that, already in the sixteenth century, there are laid down those general principles which, in the eighteenth century, formed the outlook of Voltaire and Adam Smith, of Hume and Diderot and Kant. Mankind is consciously engaged in a new human adventure in which it resents as fetters the characteristics of the old.
This it is which explains the emergence of secularism. The attack on Rome is above all an attack upon a way of life which stood as a barrier across the new path. Its sanctions were too absolute; they were devised, it was felt, for a static world which had departed for ever. The emphasis of Rome was so much upon this life as a mere preparation for the life to come that it interfered in a hundred ways with all the possibilities in which men felt themselves involved. Whether that interference was for good or evil we have not to determine; it is enough for us that it was felt so widely an unjustifiable restraint. Secularism had the immense advantage over the Roman outlook in that it implied advantages which were immediately measurable and tangible. It could be made the parent of a new outlook with wholly new postulates, and wholly new inferences for conduct to be drawn from those postulates. How largely they were drawn in the economic realm we have seen in the new attitude to usury and to the poor. Each changes because it interferes with the accumulation of wealth. Each is abandoned because it limits the exploitation of new opportunity. By the close of the sixteenth century it is the state and not the Church which is the sanction of peace and order. The state develops its own principles of conduct; it is not too much to say that it develops its own theology. It is not too much to say that, after the Ref ormation, it looks upon religion as an instrument to use rather than as an end to serve. It has suffused the Churches with its own ideology. It has made them agents in the emphasis upon utilitarianism as the criterion of moral ideals.
But the state, after all, is no more than a body of men who, at some given time, exercise the supreme coercive power of society in a particular way. The significant fact in the sixteenth century is the way in which that power is exercised. Predominantly, it is exercised for peace and material power. It is, increasingly, incarnate in the prince who directs it; there is little literature in the epoch which does not, in greater or less degree, assume that incarnation, for the influence of classical example is weak before the need of the strong man who, in an age of anarchy, shall impose his will on his subjects. The sixteenth-century prince is allowed wide powers because, the greater his authority the better the chance of the economic revival which conflict hinders. And none are so eager for peace as the new merchants. It is their alliance with the monarchies that is most helpful in extinguishing the effort of the great feudatories to retain some vestige of independent authority. The rising bourgeoisie sees in a strong central authority the best guarantee of its own survival, the best hope of its own prosperity. The princes recognised the value of that alliance, and their legislation is, in large part, a deliberate effort to establish the conditions the bourgeoisie requires. The greater the wealth the bourgeoisie can attain, the more powerful will be the state. The prince should encourage and protect manufacturers, give them peace and a cheap and rapid justice, a disciplined working-class schooled to work. We can still catch the note of this temper in the stately English of the preambles to Tudor statutes. We can still measure something of the price it involved in the tragic pleas of clergy and pamphleteers for a more generous attitude to the defeated in those who exploit the new methods.
The bourgeoisie is rising; let us note that it has not yet risen. Its attitude to the state is still one of profound genuflexion. It is an ally conscious of the need to be humble, not yet daring to claim mastery. What it seeks it asks for as privilege and not as right; the groundwork of its requests, so to say, is always an advantage to itself that the state may realise by yielding to them. We have not yet, at this period, reached the stage of individualism. Monarch and aristocracy still have an exceptional status; and the alliance between the lawyer and his business client is still far from complete. But each step in this period that the state has to take makes it more and more dependent upon the business men. The increased need for military defence gives industry, whether for the financing of policy or the manufacture of arms, a new significance. The effect is cumulative simply because the more intense the military effort of the state, the greater the fortunes the business men will make thereby; "artillery," as Bouillion noted in the seventeenth century, "devours finance." And the nature of the new armament leads to a growth of the heavy industries upon a far wider scale than previously known. Not merely so. This, in its turn, poses problems, in ballistics, for example, which cements the partnership between science and industry, and makes the men of one group the supporters of the needs and outlook of the other. And the new militarist state, once more, is naturally bound to a policy of public works, especially in the field of communications. This means the development of loans, with the new significance it gives to the banker, and of the engineer. It emphasises, in fact, the need of the state, if it is to maximise its strength, to act upon the principles which the bourgeoisie is applying in its own private sphere. It makes the state a capitalist state, almost despite itself. For the state, by 1600, is beginning to pursue ends it can only pursue successfully if it adopts as its own the fundamentals of the new economic spirit. The new ways of power have to be, increasingly, bourgeois ways.
And all this involves a rationalisation of administrative principle which is to have large consequences. It is important that the chief officials of the state become laymen instead of priests; this was in itself something of a revolution. But it is not less important that, in large degree, the chief officials are also novi homines, adventurers whose attitude to their problems makes them very apt to sympathise with both the purposes and the methods of the new enterprise. We must not, indeed, push this fact too far. As soon as the Stuarts come to the English throne the disparity between the outlook of the state they envisage and that of the business men becomes immediately apparent. Yet the fact that by 1642 the business men are prepared to fight the monarchy for the right to control the state is evidence of how far the new conception of administration has made its way. Their temper is already foreshadowed in the sixteenth century in such things as the debate upon monopolies; and the way in which Peter Wentworth is prepared to use Parliament as a platform for the expression of grievance makes him in some sort the real predecessor of Pym and Hampden. We can at least say that, by 1600, the state has built the institutional instrumentalities it requires for new purposes. The English Parliament, no doubt, occupies a place apart. But the King's Council, the King's courts, the administrative departments, are all operating upon a new scale. The King's Ministers, whether it is William Cecil in England or, a little later, Sully in France, have a wholly new outlook. To them both the soldier and the aristocrat are subordinate. The lawyer is arising to independent political status, partly because the enhanced significance of national law has given him a new importance, partly because the very nature of the new régime requires legal principles and standards of administration he is the type most fitted to define. The contrast is great between a chancellor like More, at the beginning of the century, and one like Bacon a century later; their criteria of good have no relevance to each other. The one has, with all his modernity, the typical aspects of a medieval saint; the other is the efficient courtier in whom personal advancement determines all standards of conduct. The author of the Utopia was not unaware of the passions and discoveries of the Renaissance, but he sought their subordination to the glories of the Catholic ideal. The author of the New Atlantis is wholly secular in temper. He stands for the world of the future, its frank materialism, its lust for power, its contempt for asceticism, its healthy acceptance of the natural man. Between the death of More and the death of Bacon a whole world passes. The difference between them symbolises what was implicit in the transition.
In the sixteenth century, this is to say, the foundations of a liberal doctrine have been laid. There is a social discipline which finds its sanctions independently of the religious ideal. There is a self-sufficient state. There is an intellectual temper aware, perhaps a little uneasily aware, that a limitation to the right of speculation is also a limitation to the right to material power. There is a new physical world, in both the geographical and the ideological sense. The content of experience being new also, new postulates are needed for its interpretation. Their character is already being defined in the realm of social theory, not less than in those of science and philosophy. This content is material and of this world, instead of being spiritual and of the next. It is expansive, utilitarian, self-confident. It sets before itself the ideal of power over nature for the sake of the ease and comfort this power will confer. In its essence, it is the outlook of a new class which, given authority, is convinced that it can remould more adequately than in the past the destinies of man. It has hinted at the philosophy upon which it proposes to proceed. In the next age it proceeds without hesitation to its fuller definition.