Volume 2

History of European morals from Augustus to Charlemagne / William Edward Hartpole Lecky.

  • Lecky, William Edward Hartpole, 1838-1903.
Date:
1920
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: History of European morals from Augustus to Charlemagne / William Edward Hartpole Lecky. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    32/428 (page 16)
    Bupreine; and that, in judging the ignorance of the dark ages, we must make large allowance for the dislocations of society by the barbarians. In all this there is much truth; but when we remember that in the Byzantine Empire the reno¬ vating power of theology was tried in a new capital free from Pagan traditions, and for more than one thousand years un¬ subdued by barbarians, and that in the West the Church, for at least seven hundred years after the shocks of the invasions had subsided, exercised a control more absolute than any other moral or intellectual agency has ever attained, it will appear, I think, that the experiment was very sufficiently tried. It is easy to make a catalogue of the glaring vices of antiquity, and to contrast them with the pure morality of Christian writings; but, if we desire to form a just estimate of the realised improvement, we must compare the classical and ecclesiastical civilisations as wholes, and must observe in each case not only the vices that were repressed, but also the degree and variety of positive excellence attained. In the first two centuries of the Christian Church the moral eleva¬ tion was extremely high, and was continually appealed to as a proof of the divinity of the creed. In the century before the conversion of Constantine, a marked depression was already manifest. The two centuries after Constantine are unifbrmly represented by the Fathers as a period of general and scandalous vice. The ecclesiastical civilisation that fol¬ lowed, though not without its distinctive merits, assuredly supplies no justification of the common boast about the re¬ generation of society by the Church. That the civilisation of the last three centuries has risen in most respects to a higher level than any that had preceded it, I at least firmly believe ; but theological ethics, though very important, form but one of the many and complex elements of its excellence. Mechanical inventions, the habits of industrial life, the dis¬ coveries of physical science, the improvements of government, the expansion, of literature, the traditions of Pagan antiquity,