always made it peculiarly prevalent.1 Charles V., in 1531, issued a severe enactment against beggars in the Netherlands, but excepted from its operation mendicant friars and pilgrims.2 Under Lewis XIV., equally severe measures were taken in France. But though the practical evil was fully felt, there was little or no philosophical investigation of its causes before the eighteenth century. Locke in England, and Berkeley in Ireland, briefly glanced at the subject, and in 1704 Defoe published a very remarkable tract, called, ‘Giving Alms no Charity,' in which he noticed the extent to which mendicancy existed in England, though wages were higher than in any continental country. A still more remarkable book, written by an author named Ricci, appeared at Modena in 1787, and excited considerable attention. The author pointed out with much force the gigantic development of mendicancy in Italy, traced it to the excessive charity of the people, and appears to have regarded as an evil all charity which sprang from religious motives, and was greater than would spring from the unaided instincts of men. The freethinker Mandeville assailed charity schools,

1 Morighini, Institutions pieuses de Rome.

2 Eden, Hist. of the Labouring Classes, vol. i. p. 83.

3 Locke discussed the great increase of poverty, and a bill was brought in suggesting some remedies, but did not pass. (Eden, vol. i. pp. 243–248.) 4 In a very forcible letter addressed to the Irish Catholic clergy.

5 This tract, which is extremely valuable for the light it throws upon the social condition of England at the time, was written in opposition to a Bill providing that the poor in the poor-houses should do wool, hemp, iron, and other works. Defoe says that wages in England were higher than anywhere on the Continent, though the amount of mendicancy was enormous. 'The reason why so many pretend to want work is, that they can live so well with the pretence of wanting work. . . . I affirm of my own knowledge, when I have wanted a man for labouring work, and offered nine shillings per week to strolling fellows at my door, they have frequently told me to my face they could get more a-begging.'

6

Reforma degl' Instituti pii di Modena (published first anonymously at Modena). It has been reprinted in the library of the Italian economists.

and the whole system of endeavouring to elevate the poor,1 and Magdalen asylums and foundling hospitals have had fierce, though I believe much mistaken, adversaries.2 The reforms of the poor-laws, and the writings of Malthus, gave a new impulse to discussion on the subject; but with the qualifications I have stated, no new discoveries have, I conceive, thrown any just cloud upon Christian charity; and though its administration is often extremely injudicious, the principles that regulate it, in Protestant countries at least, require but little reform.

The last method by which Christianity has laboured to soften the characters of men has been by accustoming the imagination to expatiate continually upon images of tenderness and of pathos. Our imaginations, though less influential than our occupations, probably affect our moral characters more deeply than our judgments, and, in the case of the poorer classes especially, the cultivation. of this part of our nature is of inestimable importance. Rooted, for the most part, during their entire lives, to a single spot, excluded by their ignorance and their circumstances from most of the varieties of interest that animate the minds of other men, condemned to constant and plodding labour, and engrossed for ever with the minute cares of an immediate and an anxious present, their whole natures would have been hopelessly contracted, were

1 Essay on Charity Schools.

2 Magdalen Asylums have been very vehemently assailed by M. Charles Comte, in his Traité de Législation. On the subject of Foundling Hospitals there is a whole literature. They were vehemently attacked by, I believe, Lord Brougham, in the Edinburgh Review, in the early part of this century. Writers of this stamp, and indeed most political economists, greatly exaggerate the forethought of men and women, especially in matters where the passions are concerned. It may be questioned whether one woman in a hundred, who plunges into a career of vice, is in the smallest degree influenced by a consideration of whether or not charitable institutions are provided for the support of aged penitents.

there no sphere in which their imaginations could expand. Religion is the one romance of the poor. It alone extends the narrow horizon of their thoughts, supplies the images of their dreams, allures them to the supersensual and the ideal. The graceful beings with which the creative fancy of Paganism peopled the universe shed a poetic glow on the peasants' toil. Every stage of agriculture was presided over by a divinity, and the world grew bright by the companionship of the gods. But it is the peculiarity of the Christian types, that while they have fascinated the imagination, they have also purified the heart. The tender, winning, and almost feminine beauty of the Christian Founder, the Virgin mother, the agonies of Gethsemane or of Calvary, the many scenes of compassion and suffering that fill the sacred writings, are the pictures which, for eighteen hundred years, have governed the imaginations of the rudest and most ignorant of mankind. Associated with the fondest recollections of childhood, with the music of the church bells, with the clustered lights and the tinsel splendour, that seem to the peasant the very ideal of majesty ; painted over the altar where he received the companion of his life, around the cemetery where so many whom he had loved were laid, on the stations of the mountain, on the portal of the vineyard, on the chapel where the storm-tossed mariner fulfils his grateful vow; keeping guard over his cottage door, and looking down upon his humble bed, forms of tender beauty and gentle pathos for ever haunt the poor man's fancy, and silently win their way into the very depths of his being. More than any spoken eloquence, more than any dogmatic teaching, they transform and subdue his character, till he learns to realise the sanctity of weakness and suffering, the supreme majesty of compassion and gentleness.

Imperfect and inadequate as is the sketch I have drawn, it will be sufficient to show how great and multiform have been the influences of Christian philanthropy. The shadows that rest upon the picture I have not concealed; but when all due allowance has been made for them, enough will remain to claim our deepest admiration. The high conception that has been formed of the sanctity of human life, the protection of infancy, the elevation and final emancipation of the slave classes, the suppression of barbarous games, the creation of a vast and multifarious. organisation of charity, and the education of the imagination by the Christian type, constitute together a movement of philanthropy which has never been paralleled or approached in the Pagan world. The effects of this movement in promoting happiness have been very great. Its effect in determining character has probably been still greater. In that proportion or disposition of qualities which constitutes the ideal character, the gentler and more benevolent virtues have obtained, through Christianity, the foremost place. In the first and purest period they were especially supreme, but in the third century a great ascetic movement arose, which gradually brought a new type of character into the ascendant, and diverted the enthusiasm of the Church into new channels.

Tertullian, writing in the second century, in a passage which has been very frequently quoted, contrasts the Christians of his day with the gymnosophists or hermits of India, declaring that, unlike these, the Christians did not fly from the world, but mixed with the Pagans in the forum, in the market-places, in the public baths, in the ordinary business of life. But although the life of the

1 Apol. ch. xlii.

hermit or the monk was unknown in the Church for more than two hundred years after its foundation, we may detect, almost from the earliest time, a tone of feeling which produces it. The central conceptions of the monastic system' are the meritoriousness of complete abstinence from all sexual intercourse, and of complete renunciation of the world. The first of these notions appeared in the very earliest period, in the respect attached to the condition of virginity, which was always regarded as sacred, and especially esteemed in the clergy, though for a long time it was not imposed as an obligation. The second was shown in the numerous efforts that were made to separate the Christian community as far as possible from the society in which it existed. Nothing could be more natural than that, when the increase and afterwards the triumph of the Church had thrown the bulk of the Christians into active political or military labour, some should, as an exercise of piety, have endeavoured to imitate the separation from the world which was once the common condition of all. Besides this, a movement of asceticism had long been raging like a mental epidemic through the world. Among the Jews-whose law, from the great stress it laid upon marriage, the excellence of the rapid multiplication of population, and the hope of being the ancestor of the Messiah, was peculiarly repugnant to monastic conceptions-the Essenes had constituted a complete monastic society, abstaining from marriage and separating themselves wholly from the world. In Rome, whose practical genius was, if possible, even more opposed than that of the Jews to an inactive monasticism, and even among those philosophers who most represented its active and practical spirit, the same tendency was shown. The Cynics of the later empire recommended a complete renunciation of civic and do