Lectures on Modern History - Faculty of Social Sciences

<strong>Lectures</strong> on Modern History/13nations, and terminates in the equal claim of every man to be unhinderedby man in the fulfilment of duty to God—a doctrine laden with stormand havoc, which is the secret essence of the Rights of Man, and theindestructible soul of Revolution.When we consider what the adverse forces were, their sustainedresistance, their frequent recovery, the critical moments when the struggleseemed for ever desperate, in 1685, in 1772, in 1808, it is no hyperboleto say that the progress of the world towards self-government wouldhave been arrested but for the strength afforded by the religious motivein the seventeenth century. And this constancy of progress, of progressin the direction of organised and assured freedom, is the characteristicfact of Modern History, and its tribute to the theory of Providence. Manypersons, I am well assured, would detect that this is a very old story, anda trivial commonplace, and would challenge proof that the world ismaking progress in aught but intellect, that it is gaining in freedom, orthat increase in freedom is either a progress or a gain. Ranke, who wasmy own master, rejected the view that I have stated; Comte, the masterof better men, believed that we drag a lengthening chain under the gatheredweight of the dead hand; and many of our recent classics—Carlyle,Newman, Froude—were persuaded that there is no progress justifyingthe ways of God to man, and that the mere consolidation of liberty islike the motion of creatures whose advance is in the direction of theirtails. They deem that anxious precaution against bad government is anobstruction to good, and degrades morality and mind by placing thecapable at the mercy of the incapable, dethroning enlightened virtue forthe benefit of the average man. They hold that great and salutary thingsare done for mankind by power concentrated, not by power balancedand cancelled and dispersed, and that the whig theory, sprung from decomposingsects, the theory that authority is legitimate only by virtue ofits checks, and that the sovereign is dependent on the subject, is rebellionagainst the divine will manifested all down the stream of time.I state the objection not that we may plunge into the crucial controversyof a science that is not identical with ours, but in order to make mydrift clear by the defining aid of express contradiction. No political dogmais as serviceable to my purpose here as the historian’s maxim to do thebest he can for the other side, and to avoid pertinacity or emphasis onhis own. Like the economic precept laissez fairs, which the eighteenthcentury derived from Colbert, it has been an important, if not a finalstep in the making of method. The strongest and most impressive per-