The Holy Scripture - english version B.indd - Sabbat

388THE TWO BIBLES.did not end there. It called bodies corporate into being, it communicated to themthe idea of social rights, and supplied an organisation for the acquisition and theexercise of these rights. The Reformation thus erected a platform on which it waspossible to develop a higher civilisation, and achieve a more perfect liberty, thanthe human race had yet known. Even leaving out of view the Christian graces,which formed of course the basis of that civilisation, the civic virtues now shot upinto a stature, and blazed forth with a spendour, which far transcended anythingof the kind that Greece and Rome had witnessed in their short-lived heroic age.Whereever the Reformation came, the world seemed to be peopled with a newrace. Fired with the love of liberty, and with the yet more sacred love of truth,men performed deeds which brightened the lands in which they were done withtheir glory. Whatever country it made its home it ennobled by its valour, enrichedby its industry, and sanctified by its virtues. The fens of Holland, the mountains ofSwitzerland, and the straths of Scotland became its seat, and straightway, thoughtill now rude and barbarous, these regions were illumined with a glory brighterthan that which letters and arms had shed on Italy and France. There it convertedburghers and artizans, weavers and tillers of the soil into heroes and martyrs.Such was the new life which the Reformation gave, and such the surprising andhitherto unknown transformations which it wrought on the world.Under the Reformation society attained its manhood. The manhood of theindividual Christian was reached under primitive Christianity, but the manhoodof society was not realised till the Reformation came. Till that time society wasunder tutors and governors. Despotism flourished previous to that epoch, as beingthe only form of government compatible in those ages with the peace and goodorder of States. Till the Reformation permeated nations with the Gospel, they hadabsolutely no basis for freedom. The two great necessities of States are libertyand order. The Gospel is the only power known to man that can bestow these twoindispensable gifts. Atheism, by emancipating the conscience from superstitiousthraldom, can give liberty, but in giving liberty it destroys order. Despotism andsuperstition can give order, bit in maintaining order they extinguish liberty. ButChristianity gives both. Inasmuch as it sets free the conscience, it gives liberty ;and inasmuch as it rules the conscience, it maintains order. Thus the Reformation,making the influence of the Bible operative over the whole domain of society, wasthe first to plant in nations a basis for freedom ; and along with liberty and orderit bestowed the capacity of a terrestrial immortality. The nations of antiquity, aftera short career of spendour and crime, followed each other to the grave. If atheismdid not precipitate them into anarchy, and so cause them to perish in theirown violence, superstition held them in her chains till they sunk in rottennessand disappeared from the earth. The balance, in their case, was ever being lostbetween the restraint which conscience imposes and the liberty which knowledgegives, and its loss was ever followed by the peanalty of death ; but the Gospel [thegood tidings] is able to maintain that balance forever, and so to confer on nationsa terrestrial, even as it confers on the individual a celestial, immortality.History is just a second Bible, with this difference, that it is written, not likethe first in letters, but in great facts. The letters and the facts, however, are chargedwith the same meaning. In the first Bible - that written in letters - the Creator has