222 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



perience. The first condition of such a devel- 

 opment is independence of spirit, which is sel- 

 dom obtainable without independence of pocket. 

 The first, though not the loftiest, duty of man is 

 to pay his way; though it must, of course, be 

 added that limitation of wants, rather than in- 

 crease of means, is the legitimate mode of se- 

 curing that object. If, like Wordsworth, you 

 think that you can be a great man by living upon 

 bread-and-water, you are certainly right in not 

 aiming at the vulgar prizes of money and pre- 

 ferment. But a career is honorable even if it 

 fails ; and we may safely honor the man who 

 limits himself to a modest livelihood in order to 



devote himself to great work. The evil is, that 

 most men want to have both advantages ; to live 

 splendidly, and yet to stake their means of living 

 upon literary fame ; to gain the praise of the world 

 as well as the praise of posterity ; and, in short, to 

 set about a campaign which can only be justified 

 by success without counting the cost beforehand. 

 That is why so many men of genius run to seed, 

 and so many men of no genius fancy that they 

 are acting nobly when they neglect their ordinary 

 duties in search for glory, and fancy that the 

 greatness of their ambition is an apology for the 

 imperfection of their work. 



— Cornhill Magazine. 



CHRISTIANITY AND PATRIOTISM. 



By the Eev. RICHARD F. LITTLEDALE. 



AMONG the many objections alleged in the 

 present day against the moral complete- 

 ness of Christianity as an ethical code, that 

 which is perhaps most frequently urged is that 

 it gives no encouragement to the virtue of patri- 

 otism, and that it is not only strictly incompati- 

 ble therewith in theory, but has in fact usually 

 tended to its depreciation, if not to its abandon- 

 ment in practice. 



There is an element of truth in the indictment, 

 though very much smaller than its advocates 

 suppose, so that it is desirable to inquire into the 

 details of the subject, under the following heads : 



1. What circumstances in the origin and first 

 growth of Christianity were likely to influence 

 the mind of the Church on the matter ? 



2. How far is patriotism really a virtue ? 



3. What is the historical evidence as to the 

 relations of Christianity and patriotism ? 



4. What has given rise to the impression, so 

 far as it has a basis of truth, of antagonism be- 

 tween them ? 



Now, as regards the initial question, it is to 

 be remembered that patriotism, as a living senti- 

 ment, was found in only one corner of the Ro- 

 man Empire at the time when Christianity began 

 to make itself felt as a social power. The all-em- 

 bracing tyranny of the conquering race had crushed 

 out the spirit of local independence everywhere 

 that the legionaries could march, and from the 

 time of the Social War it had gradually become 

 the fixed policy cf the central power to substi- 



tute the idea of Roman citizenship, full or partial, 

 for that of national life. This policy reached its 

 climax under the Emperor Bassianus, by whom 

 the freedom of Rome was conferred on every 

 municipality within the state. The centralizing 

 tendency of the government further impeded the 

 growth of local feeling ; and, though in the fre- 

 quent struggles for the purple we find particular 

 regions and provinces tending to split off under 

 their favorite claimants into independent empires, 

 as in the cases of Carausius and Allectus in this 

 country, yet, if patriotism played any part at all 

 in these civil wars, it was a wholly subordinate 

 one. And when, later on, the empire broke up 

 under the irruption of the Teutonic and allied 

 races, the new invaders had, of course, no habits 

 of attachment to the soil where they settled down 

 as occupants, nor any hereditary associations 

 with it. Their patriotism, if the word may be 

 used in such a collocation, was purely tribal, and 

 it was to the Gothic, the Vandal, or the Burgun- 

 dian king, not to the territorial ruler of such a 

 portion of Italy, Gaul, or Spain, that the warriors 

 of his race gave their allegiance. In a word, 

 Rome had killed patriotism, and the barbarians 

 had not generated it at the time when the ten- 

 dencies of the Christian Church had not been 

 merely developed, but formulated. The senti- 

 ment was not there to work on or be guided, and 

 it will hardly be contended that it was in any 

 sense the duty of Christian teachers to endeavor 

 its revival. A very weighty reason most natu- 



