ས.

ON CHRISTIAN CIVILIZATION.1

I AM to speak this evening of Christian Civilization. Very elaborate definitions have been given of the word civilization. One of the ablest writers upon it has stated some good reasons for thinking that a definition of it would be mischievous, if it were possible. Perhaps we may arrive as nearly as we require for our present purpose at the sense of the word, by considering the adjective civil, out of which it has grown. Civil is near akin to civic; civil life, I apprehend, is the life of a citizen. Civility is the proper quality or characteristic of a citizen. Whatever then helps to make citizens, to give them the qualities that appertain to citizens, to bring them into a better apprehension of their position as citizens, to prevent that position from becoming an untenable one, must come under the name of "civilization."

You may think perhaps that I have limited the word too much. We oppose civil to rustic. Do I suppose that rustic life or country life has nothing to

1 Delivered to the Young Men's Christian Association, about 1850.

do with civilization? We oppose civil to military. Do I suppose that the military man must be an uncivilized man; that he may not be a very civilized one? We oppose civil to ecclesiastical. Do I suppose that ecclesiastical life is not civilized life, or that the Church has had nothing to do with civilization?

These are not idle questions. They are very pertinent and important questions. I will try to answer them. I do not hold either rustic life, military life, ecclesiastical life, to be inconsistent with civilized life. I have a great reverence for country life, military life, ecclesiastical life. I do not know that I can quite contemplate civilized life apart from any one of the three. Suppose it tried to exclude them all; I conceive it would destroy itself. Nevertheless I hold the distinctions which I have pointed out to be valuable. If we attend to them, they will help us in our inquiry. There may be a rustic or country life which is a step to the life of cities, an absolutely indispensable step, and a step which does not lose its worth when you have ascended to the next. There may be patriarchal communities, village communities, which contain the germs of what is most precious in the community of the town or city, and which may continue side by side with that. But there may be conditions of existence in the country which are hostile to the growth of larger societies, which are in fact not social conditions at all. Those conditions we have a right to call uncivilized, or by any epithet, such as savage or barbarous, which is synonymous with that. So again

there may be a camp or military life, which is the very beginning of the life of towns and cities, out of which that life may develop itself; and there is a camp or military life which may be the protection of the life of towns and cities, and may grow out of that. But there is also a military life which may forbid the growth of a civic life or which may destroy it. Again, there is an ecclesiastical life, which may produce or may nourish the life of towns or cities; there is one which may try to absorb it into itself and to extinguish it.

These observations will, I hope, make themselves more clear to us as we proceed; but I introduce them at once because they will assist us, I think, in seeing what our subject is, and in not confounding it with others which may lie very near it. We want to know what powers have been at work in former days, and what powers are at work now, to fit men for being citizens, or to prevent them from ceasing from being citizens. Whatever does this deserves to be called civilization.

Are there then different kinds of civilization? Is there a true and a false civilization? If we adhere strictly to the terms that I have used, we shall not perhaps be obliged to assume that there is. Whatever contributes to make our life as citizens a really tenable, healthful life, must be good. The evil influences must then be, the uncivilizing influences. On the whole, I believe this is the right and accurate way of speaking. But there are reasons which compel us

sometimes to depart from it. Cities may spring up too slowly; there may be a number of causes which check and stifle their growth, which keep men from being citizens at all. But they may also spring up too quickly; men may become citizens before they have passed through the needful preparation for being citizens. They may acquire habits which seem expressly derived from their fellowship in cities, and yet which, in any true sense, are unfavourable to that fellowship, and will ultimately undermine it. If ever I have to speak of a false civilization, this is what I shall mean, something which is produced by an overeagerness to get the fruits of civil life when one has not yet found the root of it.

And now, having spoken of the substantive in my title, it behoves me to speak of the adjective. You are members of a Young Men's Christian Association; you have no doubt therefore that the names Christian and Society are naturally and properly connected. And I am convinced that you are not content that the word Christian should have a loose, vague signification. You believe that it has a real, distinct, awful signification. You would not, I suspect, be inclined to talk of Christianity doing this or that thing, effecting this or that change in the condition of the world. You would be afraid of such an abstraction as that, which might stand for a multitude of different notions, false and true. You would say that you must have it changed for something that is personal and vital; and you would have no doubt

where you ought to go that you may get it so changed. You would think that the grounds of all teaching upon this subject must be in the Bible.

That is my conviction. And I do not think it is only about the word Christian that we may find light there. I believe the ground of civilization, and the cause of civilization, are clearly set forth in its earliest Books. The modern history of the world is, I believe, an application and illustration of principles which are discovered and illustrated in them.

When I speak of the ground of civilization, I wish you to understand at once what I mean. In one of Mr. Carlyle's miscellaneous essays, where he is complaining of some of the departures in modern times from the grandeur and simplicity of the older times, he asks whether any geometrician of our day would recognize the force of a phrase which he ascribes, I think, to Kepler, "God geometrizes." I have no doubt that many mathematicians and students of physics in our day, would feel that this language, however little they might be disposed to use it carelessly, or to introduce it when it was not called for, had a profound signification. I should be more afraid that our moralists and politicians would not appreciate the force of the expression "God civilizes." I would wish to use that expression reverently and cautiously; but I cannot accept any other in place of it. I cannot talk of Providence doing this or that; it seems to me bad English and bad sense to adopt such a phrase. Providence is foresight. If there is foresight, there must be