Page:Three introductory lectures on the study of ecclesiastical history.djvu/23

I] society it was itself undermined and superseded. And the two chief historians of France and England in recent times—M. Guizot in his Lectures on French Civilization, Mr. Macaulay in his English History,—have both strongly brought out, as necessary parts of their dissertations or narratives, the religious influences, which by inferior writers of one class have been neglected, or by those of another class been rent from their natural context.

Never let us think that we can understand the history of the Church apart from the history of the world, any more than that we can separate the interests of the clergy from the interests of the laity, which are the interests of the Church at large.

How to adjust the relations of the two spheres to each other is almost as indefinite a task in history as it is in practice and in philosophy. In no age are they precisely the same. "Christians," it was well said by an ancient writer, "are to the world what the soul is to the body;" and it is one of the chief difficulties, as it is one of the chief delights of the historian of the Church, to detect this soul of the world under its various disguises, neither confounding the soul with the body, nor the body with the soul. Sometimes, as in the period of the Roman Empire, when this comparison was first made, the influence of one on the other is more by contagion, by atmosphere, even by contrast, than by direct intercourse. Sometimes the main interest of religious history hangs on an institution, like