CHAPTER 3 Lord Acton

In attempting to clarify Acton’s position on the interconnection of religion and freedom, it must be kept in mind that a consistent attitude cannot be gleaned from his works as they now stand, since on crucial points they contain a number of contradictions. The explanation of this is to be sought in the long-run evolution which took place in Acton’s thinking, amounting in the end to a change of such an extent as to require a reclassification of him in the spectrum of political thought: the writer who began as an orthodox, if genial, Burkian, ended as a radical liberal of a rather unique sort.

The two greatest formative influences on Acton were the fact of his having been born into a Roman Catholic family with close connections to the great Catholic aristocracies of the Continent; and his inherited association, through his stepfather and others, with the Whig aristocracy of Britain.¹ As a young man and burgeoning scholar, particularly under the direction of Döllinger, Acton quickly emerged as a conservative Whig, excited by the renaissance of Catholic scholarship, especially in south Germany, and eager to demonstrate what he believed to be intimate relationship between the principles of English Constitution and the Roman Catholic Church.

In the view of the early Acton, there existed a “Catholic notion of the State,”² which, when properly investigated, would turn out to have at its root principles analogous to those which activated the English Constitution:

I think that there is a philosophy of politics to be derived from Catholicism on the one hand and from the principles of our constitution on the other … I conceive it possible to appeal at once to the example and interest of the Church and to the true notion of the English Constitution.³

In this connection he mentions the philosophical truth that “only the true religion corresponds with the truth in politics. Else there is sure to be a break somewhere in the harmony,”⁴ indicating, as it were, a metaphysical basis for the correspondence of the systems of ideas which he considered as most closely approximating the truth in religion and politics respectively. Indeed, he felt that English Catholics, as “the only permanently conservative element in the state,” were “the heirs of the establishment.”⁵ As an enemy of modern democracy, of the Revolution of which Tocqueville wrote, Acton in this period could refer with satisfaction to “the two great conservative powers, England and Rome [the papacy].”⁶

Characteristic of the young Acton was an exaggerated admiration for Edmund Burke, whom he thought of at this time as “the law and the prophets” in political philosophy.⁷ The fundamental reason for enlisting himself under the banner of Burke may well lie in what Acton conceived to be the Irishman’s connecting of the two traditions. As he wrote a correspondent:

I would try to get up few such essays as the following: Edmund Burke as a teacher for Catholics. In the writings of his last years (1792–1797) whatever was Protestant or partial or revolutionary of 1688 in his political views disappeared, and what remained was a purely Catholic view of political principles and history. I have much to say about this that nobody has ever said.⁸

As we shall shortly see, his commitment to the traditionalist Whiggism of Burke tended to dissipate with time, to the point where he could tell Mary Gladstone (although jokingly to be sure): “I would have hanged Mr. Burke on the same gallows as Robespierre.”⁹

The shift in Acton’s thought is most plainly to be seen in regard to the question of Catholic persecution. His early conservatism had brought him to the verge of the reactionary Catholic position of the earlier part of the century. In 1860 he wrote that while in certain departments the Spanish Inquisition had been an “unmitigated evil,” people had generally overlooked “its really great merit,” that of having acted as a guardian of the popular morality and having eradicated certain crimes and vices. The man of whom later on, at Cambridge, students were to say that “he had the Inquisition on the brain”¹⁰ in his uncompromising hostility, at this time praised it as an instrument of “humanity, morality and subordination.”¹¹

In a similar vein, Acton wrote to his co-worker on the Rambler, Simpson, in 1861:

In [Oxenham’s] notice of Guizot was a passage which would have made us obnoxious to the Index. To say that persecution is wrong, nakedly seems to me first of all untrue, but at the same time it is in contradiction with the solemn decrees, with Leo X’s Bull against Luther, with a Breve of Benedict XIV of 1748, and with one of Pius VI of 1791.¹²

The later Acton, as is well known, reversed the reasoning implicit in this passage, and, beginning with a moral condemnation of religious persecution, went on to condemn the popes and other ecclesiastical authorities who had condoned or championed it. “The Vatican system,” he was later to conclude, as a final judgment, “stands or falls with the doctrine that one may murder a Protestant.”¹³

Acton’s evolution is discernible also in his attitude towards Whiggism. While he was, from first to last, an opponent of Toryism, and saw it as a system of pure expediency and special interests masquerading as a legitimate political party,¹⁴ towards the later part of his life, Whiggism also came to some extent under the cloud of the same accusation.

In 1863, when he was still cherishing the idea of a Catholic system of politics, and trying to establish its relationship to the principle of the English Constitution, he wrote:

the essence of Whiggism is the acknowledgment of the supremacy of the divine will, or as we should say, if the term had not been degraded, of divine right, over the will of man, whether represented by the sovereign or by the people, in the institutions of the past, or in speculative theories…. It upholds the laws of the country; but it clings to their spirit, not the temporary forms by which the spirit is expressed or secured. In this way Selden shared in the Great Rebellion, Somers justified the Revolution, and Burke defended the constitutional idea in the American and the revolutionary wars.¹⁵

Later, however, he reproached Whiggism with a relative lack of commitment to principle, and distinguished it from liberalism, contrasting it unfavorably with the latter. He confessed to “identifying [liberalism] altogether with morality,”¹⁶ and to Lady Blennerhassett he wrote:

Les Whigs aussi voulaient la liberté, et ils voulaient l’obtenir, s’il le fallait, par la Révolution, c’est-à-dire, au prix du bien-être social. Mais ils y voyaient bien plus un privilège qu’un droit, et plutôt un droit qu’un devoir. Ils la demandaient pour eux plus que pour les autres, selon les conditions locales, les traditions nationales…. Le Libéralisme, chose moderne, est sorti du XVIIIe siècle, et des mains des hommes qui repoussaient les conditions de la vie anglaise, que les Whigs acceptaient en s’y adaptant.¹⁷

Acton’s gradually changing judgment on the great English Whig tradition can best be understood as part of the evolution of his views on the whole subject of the historical idea, of the emphasis on the slow growth and development of institutions, which was the great contribution to social science of certain late eighteenth-century British and, especially, Scottish thinkers, and of the Romantic movement. Acton’s early position is one of orthodox Burkeanism. In discussing the constitutional history of England and the development of the historical liberties of the English people, for example, Acton wrote, in 1863:

Every appeal against oppression was to hereditary rights; the only protection which Englishmen knew was in the traditional laws of the country. By means of this perpetual recurrence to old principles, and of the gradual contrivance of new forms in which to secure their action, the English people conquered their freedom…. When this was neglected, and scope was given to a new faith, or new ideas derived from foreign examples, the result was the establishment of tyranny…. The one thing that saved England from the fate of other countries was … the consistent, uninventive, stupid fidelity to that political system which originally belonged to all the nations that traversed the ordeal of feudalism.¹⁸

By the time he delivered his two lectures on the history of freedom, Acton had revised his view of the supreme role of tradition in this area: the achievement of religious freedom in England is ascribed not to fidelity to received ways, but to a deliberate rejection of them. At the beginning of the constitutional struggles of the seventeenth century,

The only accepted appeal was to tradition. Patriots were in the habit of saying that they took their stand upon the ancient ways, and would not have the laws of England changed … [however] the oracle of precedent sometimes gave responses adverse to the popular cause. In the sovereign question of religion, this was decisive, for the practice of the sixteenth century, as well as of the fifteenth century, testified in favor of intolerance…. But an age of stronger conviction had arrived; and men resolved to abandon the ancient ways that led to the scaffold and the rack, and to make the wisdom of their ancestors and the statutes of the land bow before an unwritten law.¹⁹

Acton never entirely abandoned the orthodox Whig interpretation of how the liberties of England had come to be; but with time a relative shift of emphasis emerged in his thought, a putting of the idea of slow growth and evolution towards liberty in its proper perspective, and an appreciation of the value of the “existential” element of a here and now witness and commitment on the part of men to the abstract moral law of liberty. This is particularly evident in his interpretation of the American Revolution.

It was apparently impossible for the later Acton to overestimate the importance for the history of liberty of the American Revolution.²⁰ The Revolution had rescued freedom in the world:

Aucun dogme de plus sûr en politique que celui-ci : La liberté allait mourir en Europe à partir de 1773, et c’est l’Amérique qui lui a donné la vie. C’est des forêts, non pas de la Germanie mais de la Pennsylvanie, qu’elle nous vient, telle que nous la voyons.²¹

To Acton the legal claims of the Americans were highly dubious, if not altogether invalid. At one time he wrote to Lady Blennerhassett:

il n’est nullement prouvé que 1’Angleterre ait eu tort légalement. Je ne décide pas; mais je constate que les premiers jurisconsultes, Blackstone et Mansfield, ne le croyaient pas, que Burke doutait, que Macaulay même ne doute pas du tout de notre droit.²²

On another occasion he is more definite, and writes: “Si, en politique, le droit dépendait de la loi, leurs adversaires anglais avaient raison.”²³ The great merit of the Americans, in fact, consisted precisely in their adherence to the moral code of freedom, independent of any legal or constitutional basis whatsoever:

Le problème posé par les Américains était, au fond, celui-ci : Doiton risquer l’existence de son pays, de sa famille, donner sa fortune à la ruine et ses enfants à la mort, verser le sang à flots, renoncer à tout ce qui est établi par l’autorité et sanctifié par la coutume, pour une idée qui n’est écrite nulle part, qui est du pur idéal, qui est spéculative et nouvelle, en contradiction avec la constitution, avec les lois de son pays et des autres, qui n’a pour elle ni sanction religieuse, ni crédit légal, qui est inconnue à tous les codes et à tous les législateurs ? La réponse affirmative, c’est la Révolution, ou comme nous disons le Libéralisme.²⁴

In this sense, the doctrines of the American Revolution were more profound than those of the Whiggish revolutions of the seventeenth century: “Les doctrines de 1640 et de 1688 avaient moins de portée. On pouvait les adopter sans être libéral dans toute la force du mot.”²⁵

The greatest significance of Acton’s giving priority to the American as against the English revolutions is that it indicates a decisive turning away from the Whiggish-Catholic complex of ideas which had determined his early thought, to a more doctrinaire, individualistic and abstractly moral point of view. As late as 1878 Acton had written in a Whiggish vein of “the true law of the formation of free States … [which may be expressed] by saying that constitutions are not made, but grow.”²⁶ And yet, when Bryce, ten years later, gave expression to essentially the same views, in connection with the founding of the American Republic,²⁷ Acton composed a review in which he greeted them with scorn: “I descry a bewildered Whig emerging from the third volume with a reverend appreciation of ancestral wisdom, Burke’s Reflections, and the eighteen canons of Dort, and a growing belief in the function of ghosts to make laws for the quick.” Acton’s own mature opinion is one of moderation, avoiding both excessive rationalism and what he regarded as an all-too-fashionable exaggeration of the historical idea. As he wrote to a correspondent:

Bryce … pense que les choses se font par le ministère du temps, que la vie vient des racines naturelles, que la tradition règne, que rien ne dure, au soleil, qui ne soit préparé par un travail souterrain. C’est ainsi que parlaient Leibniz, Burke, Savigny, le Professeur [Döllinger], tous ceux qui appliquent à la vie universelle les doctrines particulières au droit romain, au droit anglais, à L’Église Catholique, au Positivisme, à l’évolutionnisme. Je crois que cela est faux, comme loi de l’histoire, et je n’ai voulu dire que cela; c’est-à-dire soulever un doute sur l’historicisme de mon ami. Je ne nie pas, bien entendu, l’immense part de vérité et de force dans ce principe : je voudrais faire la part du principe contraire, qui, en temps et lieu, dans certaines conditions, et sous des points de vue importants, aurait son droit ou aurait eu sa force.²⁸

The question remains, however: what led Acton to separate himself from the English Whig tradition and from the system he had fashioned for himself?

The fact of the matter is that Acton’s earlier championship of what may be called historicism, as he had gathered it from Burke, from early nineteenth-century German thought, and from other sources, was decisively tempered by his growing realization of the tension between this and the idea of an eternal and universal moral law. As Constant had once put it, while under the spell of historicism, “tout est bon, tout est mauvais, selon les lieux.”²⁹ But the ethical relativity implicit in the view of all institutions and systems of ideas as adaptations to the social circumstances of a particular period, which writers like Constant and Tocqueville could at times accept, was proving increasingly distasteful to Acton’s moral sense. He was unable to admit of any progress or development in the moral code. The antagonism between the two views was made agonizingly clear to Acton by the inability of his old master Döllinger (whom he customarily referred to as “the Professor”) to accept or even fully understand Acton’s own concept of the historian as judge; it was on the basis of historicist premises that Döllinger pleaded extenuating circumstances for those past statesmen whom Acton regarded as merely wholesale criminals. More and more Acton came to see the moral law as virtually an independent entity, transcending history and all institutions, including the Catholic Church. It thus became possible to suppose that at certain times and under certain favorable conditions, men acting in history would come to the same insight, act accordingly, and in this way accomplish a “historical leap,” which could not be fully accounted for by the historicist approach.³⁰

Acton’s position on the relationship of freedom and religion can best be studied by dividing the subject into two parts: first, the philosophical and analytical, having to do with the conceptual and theoretical interrelationship of morality, religion and freedom; and, second, the historical, concerning the role which religion—and, in particular, Christianity—has played in the evolution of freedom over roughly the past 2,800 years. As will be indicated, there are, of course, points at which the two areas overlap; nevertheless, they can be separated for purposes of analysis.

Regarding the first, analytical and philosophical part, an understanding would be facilitated by identifying Acton’s answers to a number of key questions:

1. What is the relationship between freedom and morality?

2. What is the relationship between morality and religion? Specifically, is religious faith either a necessary or a sufficient condition for an effective moral code?

3. What is the relationship between Christianity, and Catholicism in particular, and morality?

The relationship between freedom and morality was for Acton a very close, not to say intimate, one. Thus one is inevitably struck by the idealistic cast of his thought when he deals with the subject of freedom. Freedom for him was not a good of the same kind as other goods, such as wealth, scientific progress or happiness; it was incommensurable with these, and an increment of liberty could not, therefore, be weighed against an increment of some other desirable thing. Nor is liberty to be valued as the means to some other good. As more than one commentator has pointed out, there is no trace in Acton either of the narrower utilitarian argument for freedom—that in some intelligible sense a free society will tend to maximize welfare—or of the wider utilitarianism associated with Humboldt and Mill, that a free society, by multiplying potential centers of innovation, will tend to maximize progress.³¹ Welfare, while an increasingly significant value for Acton as he grew older and came to see more truth in the socialist, and particularly the kathedersozialistisch position,³² was never an end in itself, but primarily a means to prevent the growingly victorious masses from interfering with the liberal order. And, as he reiterates, a brilliant society of the sort that would presumably be brought about by the unhindered proliferation of new ideas and of experiments in living, was no ultimate end for him. Rather, the justification of a free society lay for Acton in the fact that (a) it was in an important sense synonymous with the realization of the moral order, and (b) it provided the individual with the requisite scope for the fulfillment of his moral obligations.

The crucial concept for Acton in this connection is that of rights. It is true that, as at least one commentator has noted, Acton had no strong or enduring interest in metaphysics or even philosophy generally, in this way resembling both Constant and Tocqueville; hence, his ideas on this subject tend to be difficult to disentangle. But it is clear that he believed in the existence of a “higher law,” “written on the tablets of eternity,” from which certain natural rights may be derived.³³ These rights are not socially or governmentally accorded; they are logically and temporally anterior to positive law. They come ultimately “not from civilisation but from nature, by reason of the divine image in the soul.”³⁴

But while he was an adherent of the doctrine of natural rights, Acton’s political philosophy does not begin with the positing of these rights. Rather, the logical sequence commences with the fact of duty, and it is from that that the fact of right, is derived.

It is generally acknowledged among ethicists that the existence of a right entails that there exists a claim (or claims) on the part of the person possessing the right, which others are morally obliged to respect—A’s right to liberty entails that there is a duty on the part of A’s fellows not to interfere forcibly with his action, as long as A remains an innocent and peaceful citizen. For most liberals of the natural rights school, it is rights which are primary, with their corresponding duties on the part of others following from them. The special place of Acton in the liberal tradition appears at least partially traceable to the fact that he reverses this order.

Acton was heavily influenced in this line of thought by the nineteenth-century Swiss moralist and Protestant theologian, Alexandre Vinet, for whom he had a very great admiration (he listed an exposition of Vinet’s thought by Astié among the world’s great books).³⁵ The rationale for the existence of rights which Acton accepted is put more clearly by Vinet:

Tout devoir emporte un droit: il n’est pas de droit plus sacré que celui de remplir son devoir; c’est même ici-bas le seul droit absolu; car le droit s’appuie sur une nécessité primitive; or le devoir est la première des nécessités, et, à la rigueur, la seule nécessité.³⁶

Vinet was the thinker who, in Acton’s view, made “Conscience and Liberty a law in Church and State,”³⁷ and his conception of the supreme importance of conscience is reflected in Acton’s perpetual appeal to this tribunal in his discussions of politics and morality. Of conscience, Acton writes: “elle est suprême; les états et les églises, l’opinion et la tradition, la coutume et le caractère national, les intérêts publics et les droits acquis plient devant elle et ne sont plus que sécondaire.”³⁸ Conscience is logically tied to liberty: “The proper name for the rights of conscience is liberty”;³⁹ and “liberty is the reign of conscience.”⁴⁰ (Actually, this last point might more precisely be put—within Acton’s own framework—by saying that liberty is the reign of conscience in the public realm; its reign in the private sphere Acton refers to as “virtue.”)

In Vinet’s exposition, conscience was a primitive faculty of human nature, which renders it a necessity to us “to make our actions harmonize with our convictions…. It is nothing but the sentiment of obligation, in its greatest purity, and most perfect abstraction.”⁴¹ His Outlines of Theology begins with an exposition of his concept of conscience, and rightly so; for in his view, it “constitutes the identity of the moral man, since deprived of this organ man would be man no longer.” Conscience may or may not be enlightened: that is, it may or may not operate in accordance with the moral law. Nevertheless, it is the “foundation [on which] God reconstructs man.” As long as conscience is respected, it is possible to rectify false ideas of duty and attach man to the true moral code.⁴²

Vinet asserts that, seen from an absolute standard, every other good is qualitatively inferior to the pursuit of duty as taught by conscience. Compared to duty, “talent, science, industry, public prosperity, national glory, all are mere child’s play.”⁴³ If one were to negate conscience, then the moral being perishes altogether. Thus, Vinet arrives at the indefeasible right of conscience:

if it so happened that any given law were opposed to that which conscience enforced on us as a duty, we must of necessity obey conscience rather than that law, conscience being above the law, and thus the very moral principle in virtue of which we obey human authority, would irresistibly impel us to resist that authority.⁴⁴

When Acton defines liberty as “the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes his duty against the influence of authority and majorities, custom and opinion,”⁴⁵ it becomes clear that he has accepted Vinet’s evaluation of the significance of conscience for man as a moral being, and sees the justification of liberty in the existence of an ideal and absolute set of duties.

This was, we may note, a position which Acton did not substantially alter in the course of his career. As early as 1860, he maintained that it was a fundamental element of the “Catholic notion” of the state, as against the ideas of the modern world: the former defines “liberty not as the power of doing what we like, but the right of being able to do what we ought,” and thus provided a firmer foundation for individual freedom.⁴⁶

Acton’s manner of presenting his ideas in this area could conceivably lead to misunderstanding, however. The duties which men owe their fellows Acton sometimes chooses to refer to as “the rights of God.” Thus, he criticizes John Morley:

He sees nothing in politics but higher expediency and no large principles. As there are, for him, no rights of God, there are no rights of man—the consequence, on earth, of obligation in Heaven.⁴⁷

And, on another occasion, he affirms that “the rights of man on earth are the consequence of the rights of God in heaven.”⁴⁸

Acton believed that the higher liberal vision was the one he proposed, where rights were not viewed from the vantage point of a possessive individualism, as part of the original “property” of the individual, which he consequently was justified in defending against all would-be aggressors; rather, he emphasized the logical primacy of the bond of interpersonal obligation. He criticized his fellow liberals in a manuscript note: “Liberty and morality. How they try to separate them—to found liberty on rights, on enjoyments, not on duties. Insist on their identity.” Liberty, he thought, “is not the realisation of a political ideal: it is the discharge of a moral obligation.”⁴⁹ Thus, he praises the sects of the seventeenth century for coming upon the great idea of

sanctifying freedom and consecrating it to God, teaching men to treasure the liberties of others as their own, and to defend them for the love of justice and charity more than as a claim of right [which] has been the soul of what is great and good in the progress of the last two hundred years.⁵⁰

And in praise of the American revolutionaries, he writes:

le système du droit naturel, des principes abstraits, du droit absolu, du droit comme forme du devoir, de la politique entendue comme science et non comme expédient—ce système est entré comme un fer tranchant dans le monde par les jurisconsultes de Boston et les théoriciens de Virginie.⁵¹

The position of the young Acton on the question of the connection between morality and religion was consonant with his general conservative approach, as has been outlined above. In fact, in 1861, he not only affirmed that morality depended on religion, but went on to adduce this as a justification for religious persecution:

as the preservation of morality depends on the preservation of faith, both alike are in the interest and within the competence of the State. The Church of her own strength is not strong enough to resist the advance of heresy and unbelief. Those enemies find an auxiliary in the breast of every man whose weakness and whose passions repel him from a Church which imposes such onerous duties on her members.⁵²

As late as 1878, he reaffirmed his belief that morality was dependent on religious faith. In speaking of the decline of morality in late fifth-century Athens, he stated:

It was a very short step from the suspicion of Protagoras, that there were no gods, to the assertion of Critias that there is no sanction for laws. If nothing was certain in theology, there was no certainty in ethics and no moral obligation. The will of man, not the will of God, was the rule of life, and every man and body of men had the right to do what they had the means of doing. Tyranny was no wrong, and it was hypocrisy to deny oneself the enjoyment it affords.⁵³

As time went on, Acton’s conviction in this regard began to dim. To be sure, he never lost a certain apprehensiveness concerning non-religiously based morality: he confided to Gladstone that he could not think the ethical order safe in the hands of the positivists;⁵⁴ and to Lady Blennerhassett he communicated the remarkable opinion that utilitarianism was “destitute of any ethical system.”⁵⁵ Nevertheless, with time he began to part company with the view frequently set forth by Tocqueville of the tight connection of morality and religion, and the moral code, as manifested in conscience, came to have an autonomous validity. Christianity he increasingly saw as “a system of ethics which borrowed its metaphysics elsewhere,” rather than “a mere system of metaphysics which borrowed some ethics from elsewhere.”⁵⁶ It is perhaps not too much to say that a certain deism came to penetrate the thought of Acton in later years; he came to value the “higher morality of a William Penn” more than “the science of a Bossuet,” for instance.⁵⁷ In explaining the difference between the Old and the New Whigs (he considered the latter part of the Liberal movement), he attributed it primarily to the idea of conscience cultivated by the sects and coming to flourish towards the end of the seventeenth century. He explains that it could not expand in an atmosphere of reverence for established churches; it only came about

lorsque le Christianisme s’est trouvé réduit à sa plus simple expression, sans église, sans sacrement, sans clergé, sans rituel, et qu’il est arrivé au point de se confondre avec la morale universelle. Dans cette forme-là le Christianisme a fondé un état.⁵⁸

An indication of what has here been characterized as a sort of incipient deism is contained in a letter of Acton’s to Lady Blennerhassett:

L’Histoire ne peut se servir des systèmes de morale attachés aux religions, car ils ne sont applicables que dans les limites de ces religions. Et une morale indépendante manque à la Science. Il faut donc que l’Histoire se compose son propre système.⁵⁹

Acton goes on to say that history begins by judging according to the criminal codes of all nations, where it finds a few universal principles: no retroactive punishments, the innocent are not to suffer the punishment reserved for the guilty, what is essential for the existence of society must be saved, etc. Now,

[i]l n’y a d’absolument essentiel que la vie. Donc, c’est la vie humaine qui est l’arche sainte. Personne ne peut être décidément caractérisé et condamné que celui qui verse le sang…. Plus on réussit à étendre cette épreuve, plus l’histoire s’élève au-dessus de l’opinion et entre dans la Science.⁶⁰

This is an interesting passage, and merits some attention. What Acton has done, in his search for an ethical standard to apply in judging actors in history, is, first, to reject the moral system of any religion, because, connected as such moralities are with faith in a theology which sanctions them, they are “inapplicable” to those who do not share the faith. He turns then to the law, the institutionalized conscience of society, and in a comparison of the laws of all societies he believes he is able to come up with—only a few, it is true—universal principles, assented to by all mankind. The desperate character of Acton’s search is revealed by his train of reasoning at this point: it is from the allegedly universal legal principle of “sauver ce qui est essentiel à l’existence de la société,” and from the fact that only “life” is essential to society, that he claims to be able to derive the absolute prohibition against shedding blood. The thinness of this reasoning is an indication, it would appear, of the lengths to which Acton was forced to go to find a suitable substitute for a religiously-based moral system. It suggests, too, that he was beginning to move from a religiously-based ethics to one having its foundation in the universal conscience of mankind. The reason for this is not far to seek.

In his earlier period, Acton could accept without devoting too much thought to it the ethical and metaethical beliefs of the ordinary Roman Catholic.⁶¹ Thus, he felt, for example, that the subjectivity of conscience ought to be subordinated to an objective law, which, in the religious domain, was the one transmitted and interpreted by the Church, by virtue of its divine authority. As he became intrigued and then obsessed with the cluster of problems revolving around Ultramontanism, Infallibility and the crimes of the papacy, new and highly disturbing possibilities opened up for him. As MacDougall remarks, his “work during the months of the Vatican Council represented his final great effort to save Liberal Catholicism.”⁶² Afterwards, he began to turn in a different direction. The notion of a distinctively Catholic political theory appeared increasingly ephemeral. His historical researches forced him to the conclusion that, in fact,

the papacy contrived murder and massacre on the largest and also the most cruel and inhuman scale. They were not only wholesale assassins, but they made the principle of assassination a law of the Christian Church and a condition of salvation.⁶³

Ultramontanism, however, sanctified the past crimes of the papacy. Its essence was that “the Pope—or that system of authorities concentrated in him—decides the points on which salvation depends. That principle is rejected by those who believe that it is wrong to tell lies or to commit murder for the good of the Church.”⁶⁴ But, while such persons might reject Ultramontanism, there was no guarantee that it would not be accepted by the Church as a whole: the history of the Vatican Council could offer Acton no solace in this regard. Here the only hope for checking Papal aggression was the Episcopate, but the bishops had failed completely. Moreover, there was no real appeal from the popes, past or present, to the tradition of the Church. For the tradition was equivocal at best on questions of religious toleration and, furthermore, the popes could influence— and had influenced—that tradition, adding to the weight of some past authorities through canonization. This is what had happened, in Acton’s view, to two eminent figures of the past who had sanctioned the killing of innocent Protestants: Saint Charles Borromeo and Saint Pius IV.⁶⁵ It was unsafe to link morality to Christianity because, when Christianity appears as an institutionalized, historical force, it was often, so to speak, a hostage to forces which had been almost the incarnation of evil. Too often in the past, conscience had been, not enlightened and strengthened by Christ’s Church, but warped by it. The case of the Jesuits is instructive. As Acton put it, “It is this combination of an eager sense of duty, zeal for sacrifice, and love of virtue, with the deadly taint of a conscience perverted by authority, that makes them so odious to touch and so curious to study.”⁶⁶ Indeed, it was the fact that the Church’s influence is directed towards the spiritual realm, the sphere of conscience that had made it the source of a more deadly corruption than that spread either by royal absolutism or by modern revolutionary republicanism: the papacy’s corruption is “the fiend skulking behind the Crucifix.”⁶⁷ By 1879, Acton could count himself with pride among those “who sacrifice … authority to morality,” and in this way fulfill the divine purpose better than its supposed official representatives.⁶⁸

Another indication that what concerned Acton was the part of Christian ethical teaching which it had in common with the teaching of the higher pagan philosophers, with other religions, and with the common sense of mankind, as embodied in the legal codes of virtually all nations, and not anything distinctively Christian, is contained in his repeated assertion that large portions of traditional Christian morality are outside the historian’s legitimate field of interest. (We must, of course, keep in mind that Acton never spoke of the historian without meaning at the same time mankind’s judge over the actions of past figures.) He writes that the moral judgment of history “n’est pas celui de la vie privée. Bien des péchés n’influent pas sur la véracité et n’entrent pas en compte, ou n’y entrent que rarement.” In the case of Louis XIV, for instance, his disordered private life is of historical significance only because of the biographical fact that, once it ceased, his mania for religious persecution began.⁶⁹ Acton points out on another occasion, that “Je mets en avant autant que je puis l’idée de crime au lieu de celle d’erreur et de péché,” while complaining that Döllinger never appreciated his position on this.⁷⁰

Finally, the connection between the idea of rights flowing from duties and the question of the religious basis of morality is stated explicitly by Acton:

although I fully admit that political rights proceed directly from religious duties, and hold this to be the true basis of Liberalism, I do not mean to say that there is no other foundation for a system of rights for men who know of no relation between man and God.⁷¹

It is, however, difficult to know how much of a concession Acton is making here to non-religious ethical systems. While reaffirming his belief that the natural rights of man derive from religiously-based duties, he is willing to concede that there are other possible bases for these rights—but bases which, presumably, he must hold to be false. We shall indicate the nature of the problem that arises presently, in discussing a similar difficulty in Acton’s appreciation of the ethical beliefs of George Eliot.

Two cases will serve to show that Acton eventually came to the conclusion that morality was not inevitably tied to Christianity, nor even to religious faith in general: that of the pre-Christian philosophers, and of his contemporary, George Eliot.

Acton had long been interested in the relationship between the religious thought of antiquity and of Christianity, and at one time considered the plan of writing an essay on the theme. The close approach of ancient ethical thinking at its best to the thought of the Gospels and the early Church was an idea that occurred to him whenever he saw it challenged. He criticized Döllinger, for example, for not having made clear in his Heidenthum und Judenthum the actual progress achieved by pagan thinking in the centuries of its predominance; if he had, then the real scope of the innovation represented by Christianity would have been clearer.⁷² This he termed “one of the most important problems in the philosophy of history,” and he desired to have it ascertained to what extent the ethics of Christianity had been anticipated.⁷³ On more than one occasion he chastised Gladstone for underestimating the value of the ethical thought of antiquity, and overestimating what Christianity had accomplished for culture and morality. Very significant is Acton’s statement that

it would be very difficult indeed to show that the interval between the Ethics of Seneca and the Ethics of St. Ambrose could never have been bridged over by the progress and combination of Stoic, Alexandrian and Chinese morality, as they stood, apart from the Gospel.⁷⁴

Not only did Acton come to believe that an adequate moral system could be achieved independently of Christianity, but he also concluded that classical philosophy contributed a necessary antidote to some of the evils in the moral teachings of historical Christianity: “Religion alone,” one of his manuscript cards read, “is no safeguard for morality. Classical philosophy giving an independent morality prevents men from falling under such teachers as Knox, Beza, and Suarez.”⁷⁵

In the case of Acton’s attitude towards George Eliot we have an even clearer example of his mature judgment that morality is possible independently of Christianity or of any religion.

Acton’s estimate of Eliot was very high, not to say extravagant. He wrote to Mary Gladstone:

You cannot think how much I owe her. Of eighteen or twenty writers by whom I am conscious that my mind has been formed, she was one…. In problems of life and thought, which baffled Shakespeare disgracefully, her touch was unfailing. No writer ever lived who had anything like her power to manifold, but disinterested and impartially observant sympathy.⁷⁶

The basic reason for the enormous appeal of Eliot to him is sketched in a letter to Lady Blennerhassett, on the occasion of the publication of his article on Eliot in 1885. This appeal, it becomes clear, has chiefly to do with her place in the history of modern atheism.

Over the past 200 years, Acton asserts, atheism has been continually on the rise, until today “about one-half of the classic writing, of the creative thinking of the world [is] done by unbelievers…. No minds could be reared except by the aid of Grote, Mill, Austin, Darwin, Lewis, Huxley, Tyndall, Clifford—to take England only. The universities were saturated with their books.”⁷⁷

But in the midst of a situation where atheism was coming, if not absolutely to prevail, at least to present an alternative to belief which a substantial part of the educated class might be expected to embrace, the old question of the possibility of an enduring ethical system based on atheism had not yet been settled. “Many think that no enduring system of moral order can be founded on disbelief in God. Everybody sees that there is no security that the ethics of Infidelity will practically harmonize with the ethics of Belief.”⁷⁸ In fact, the situation was worse, since the chief atheistic schools of thought—utilitarianism, positivism, pessimism, materialism, etc.—had proven themselves devoid of any ethical system.⁷⁹

It was the great merit of George Eliot to have retrieved this dangerous situation. An atheist taught and surrounded by atheists, her moral teachings, Acton finds, are very elevated. He calls her “a preacher of lofty virtue … not at all perfect, indeed, or absolutely consistent, but far more impressive, more true, more elevated, than any but the very best Christian writers.” She had, he thought, redeemed atheism “from the most formidable and most ancient peril and reproach”—that of being unable to sustain a code of morality. In fact, Eliot’s new morality was in some respects to be preferred to that of “current religions”: “It has no weak places, no evil champions, no bad purpose, no screen or excuse, unlike almost all forms of Christianity.”⁸⁰ Finally, she seems to have been the harbinger of a strong ethical movement in the agnostic and atheistic camp, so that in the present day, in England and Germany at least, writers such as Hartmann, Spencer, Stephen, Sidgwick, etc., have contributed to the formation of a responsible ethic of unbelief.⁸¹

It is true that Eliot’s moral teachings, because of their atheistic underpinnings, were somewhat superficial. “Deny God, and whole branches of deeper morality lose their sanction. Here I am preaching against Bradlaugh, after all.”⁸² But there is no reason to believe that Acton is here implying the existence of any disabling condition in Eliot’s ethics; it was, presumably, still capable of sustaining a free society, even if certain loftier spheres were closed to it.

Although this would seem to establish Acton’s later position on the subject unequivocally, the letter here discussed leaves one somewhat puzzled. In the first place, Acton admits that, in his view, whatever the loftiness of Eliot’s teachings, they were basically mistaken, for “the keystone of her philosophy” was the idea of Earthly Retribution: that evildoers, in the nature of things, are punished for their sins and crimes on earth. This is an idea, Acton states, “which no historical-minded person can accept. She herself was aware that virtue is not much happier than crime; and she never filled up this tremendous gap.” That it is also an idea which “goes down so well with British Christians,”⁸³ seems rather unimportant in the long run, if, as Acton states, it is plainly false, for her atheistic ethical system is then one which cannot possibly hope to endure.

Moreover, Acton’s claim that Bentham and Mill were “destitute of any ethical system” would indicate that he had not devoted any substantial amount of analytical thought to the subject. Presumably this judgment is a reflection of his distaste for any form of the pleasure philosophy, his belief that pleasure and pain are irrelevant to the categories of ethics (we have already encountered this idea in the case of Constant); but then he would seem to be ignoring the possibilities of a more elevated morality contained in Mill’s distinction between higher and lower pleasures; and, furthermore, it is difficult to see why, on this basis, he should regard as legitimate the ethics of Spencer and Sidgwick.

It must be admitted, therefore, that Acton’s position on Eliot leaves some room for confusion as to his view of the connection between unbelief and morality—and hence between unbelief and freedom. We may conclude, nevertheless, that the mature Acton had definitely rejected what he referred to in a letter to Döllinger as “das Vorurteil das es keine Sicherheit für die Tugend gibt ohne Gott,”⁸⁴ and that there is little evidence for the claim advanced in a recent work on Acton and John Henry Newman: “Though differing considerably in their approach to many questions, they were agreed that only in religious culture could freedom flourish.”⁸⁵

Acton’s view of the relationship between religion and freedom can be made considerably clearer if we examine how he conceived these two factors to have interacted in history.

This is the predominant theme of the great History of Liberty to which he devoted so much thinking and planning. Although, of course, he never completed or even really began it, the vision is discernibly present in his two lectures, “The History of Freedom in Antiquity” and “The History of Freedom in Christianity,”⁸⁶ and in his review of Erskine May’s Democracy in Europe;⁸⁷ these essays, supplemented by other pertinent material, may justly be taken as reflecting more or less his mature judgment on religion’s historical relationship to liberty.

From the very beginning of the first of these, Acton presents the course of liberty through history as slow, hard and devious. At all times, it has had to make its way against its natural enemies, “ignorance, superstition … lust of conquest and love of ease … the strong man’s craving for power, and the poor man’s craving for food.”⁸⁸ But, as Tocqueville believed that Providence was leading the world towards equality, Acton held that the finger of God is discernible in the world’s progress to freedom; he speaks of “the methods by which divine wisdom has educated the nations to appreciate and to assume the duties of freedom.” For Acton, the idea that something more than human intention is involved in the unfolding of liberty in history was not purely rhetorical; this may be gathered from the fact that, while he believed that liberty had to a large extent been established by his day in the Anglo-Saxon nations, “at all times, sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities, that have prevailed by associating themselves with auxiliaries whose objects often differed from their own.”⁸⁹ Thus, while history may be looked on as the history of freedom, and while freedom has forced its way to a relative triumph, peculiarly, at every point, it has been the goal of only a small minority; and interests and parties whose objects have been far different, and even contrary, have unintentionally contributed to its growth.⁹⁰ Acton here posits something like an invisible hand, operating throughout history, conducing to the victory of liberal ideas and institutions. And the “invisible hand” for Acton, unlike as for Smith, is not simply a euphemism for certain empirically observable forces in the social organization making for unintentional order. He severely criticized Newman, for instance, for denying “the divine government of the world,” for believing that “Providence does not manifest itself in history,” that “the law of Progress is not the law of history.”⁹¹ To Döllinger he asserted:

there is a grand unity in the history of ideas—of conscience, or morality, and of the means of securing it. I venture to say that the secret of the philosophy of History lies there:—It is the only point of view from which one discovers a constant progress, the only one therefore which justifies the ways of God to man.⁹²

This progress towards freedom is not merely a generalization which holds for the past: it can be expected to continue indefinitely. Here Acton’s thinking begins to touch on millenarianism and utopianism: one of his manuscript notes reads: “End with the Kingdom of God, which is liberty.⁹³

But given that religion in the sense just outlined forms the core of Acton’s philosophy of history, what more specifically does history show to have been its connection with the growth of liberty?

In the first place, there is no positive connection between religion per se and freedom, and certainly religion is not a sufficient condition for a free society. Indeed, the religious beliefs and ecclesiastical organization of a society may operate in a fashion decidedly detrimental to liberty. In addition to the cases of the Russian Church and the Russian State, and Islam and the Islamic states, the best example of this principle are the states of classical antiquity. Here it was precisely the religious beliefs of the people which reinforced the essentially totalitarian thrust of their political organization.

This is a theme which is in many ways crucial for Acton’s conception. The great value he placed on the Catholic Church as a liberating factor in history can only be fully justified given his interpretation of the essential nature of the classical state. We need not, however, examine in detail his account of the constitutional crises and evolution of the Athenian and Roman polities. It will be sufficient to point up the lessons which Acton suggests may be gained from this evolution.

While the Greek contribution of democracy represented in several respects an advance for the cause of freedom, the Athenian experiment failed on account of both institutional and ideological flaws (corresponding to the two levels on which Acton pursues this theme in these essays). On the one hand, there existed no real division of powers, no system of checks and balances, for the “humblest and most numerous class of Athenians united the legislative, the judicial and, in part, the executive.” Moreover,

the philosophy that was then in the ascendant taught them that there is no law superior to that of the State—the law-giver is above the law. It followed that the sovereign people had a right to do whatever was within its power, and was bound by no rule of right or wrong, but its own judgment of expediency … the emancipated people of Athens became a tyrant.⁹⁴

The same basic flaw is to be found in the Roman state, and the true nature of the classical polity is as follows:

[The ancients] concentrated so many prerogatives in the State as to leave no footing from which a man could deny its jurisdiction or assign bounds to its activity…. The vice of the classic State was that it was both Church and State in one. Morality was undistinguished from religion and politics from morals; and in religion morality and politics there was only one legislator and one authority. The State … claimed the use of all [man’s] faculties and the determination of all his duties…. What the slave was in the hands of his master, the citizen was in the hands of the community. The most sacred obligations vanished before the public advantage.⁹⁵

This is a highly important passage, and we will return to an analysis of it; we ought to observe, however, that Acton is here continuing the traditional nineteenth-century liberal interpretation of the nature of the classical state that we have already encountered in the thought of Constant, Laboulaye and others. Its chief significance lies in the fact that, by depicting the ancient republics as by law and ethos virtual totalitarian states, it raises the question: What was responsible for the transformation of the view of the relation between state and citizen? While Constant, as we have seen, traces it to various social factors, such as population, the degree of militarism of the two civilizations, etc., many of the later authors sought the key in the religion whose emergence and triumph marked off the two epochs. It is this tradition to which Acton attaches himself.

In Acton’s view, totalitarianism is not merely the final outcome of the politics of the ancient world: it permeated much of it from the beginning. Thus, in the case of the early Roman Republic, he ascribed the acceptance of human sacrifice on the part of the populace to their idolatrous attitude towards the State: “The deification of the State made every sacrifice which it exacted seem as nothing in comparison with the fortune of Rome; and the perils which for centuries menaced it from Carthage or Gaul, Epirus or Pontus, Parthia, Spain or Germany, each demanded its human victims.”⁹⁶ By the end of the classical period, whatever breath of freedom had existed was extinguished: “love and appreciation of liberty were absorbed by respect for law, so that at the time of the Teutonic invasions the latter alone survived.”⁹⁷

If we return to the lengthy passage quoted above, we find two elements which may be separated out in the state worship of antiquity. First, the recognized claims of the state were limitless, and there was, so to speak, no Archimedean point outside of it from which the individual might reject them. The highest law acknowledged was that of the general welfare, and no individual obligations or duties could be suffered to stand in its way. Second, and reinforcing the first, was the fact that morality and religion were both branches of politics. The gods were national gods, and their function was to preserve the state. It mattered not at all whether the sovereign was the demos, as at Athens, or, as in the later history of Rome, the emperor who governed in the name and supposed interest of the demos: classical democracy and classical imperial absolutism were both grounded in the same totalitarian view of the omnipotence of the state and the insignificance of the individual.

While religion in classical times afforded no aid to liberty, but rather the reverse, there did finally emerge a religion that has assisted the growth of freedom mightily, that may actually be said to have founded freedom. This is Roman Catholicism.⁹⁸

If God’s purpose in history is the progressive emergence and establishment of liberty, it is scarcely surprising that he should have taken advantage of His Church to promote His ends. But what precisely was Catholicism’s contribution to liberty? If we were to judge solely by the actions of the early Church, Acton asserts, precious little. Significantly, he uses the idea of passive obedience to a despot as a touchstone in this matter. Although the early Christian writers were not unanimous on the subject, and Origen “spoke with approval of conspiring for the destruction of tyranny,” the weight of the authority of the early church seems to have been on the side of acquiescence by the subject in whatever the civil power might choose to do.⁹⁹ It was only with time and suitable circumstances that certain liberal implications of the New Testament manifested themselves.

These implications did not have to do with the rationale for liberty. The term “liberty” and similar expressions are employed a number of times in the New Testament. Thus: “The truth shall make you free” (John 8:32); “Free from the law of sin and death” (Romans 8:2); “Where the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty” (II Cor. 3:17); etc. It is most significant that Acton chose to ignore these passages, and concentrated instead on a different passage (which does not contain the term “liberty”). It strongly indicates that Acton was aware that the New Testament references to liberty, freedom, etc., had no direct bearing on his subject; they referred, rather, to a metaphysical and theological conception.¹⁰⁰ As far as the Gospels, St. Paul, etc., are concerned, civil liberty—the subject with which Acton was dealing—was of little or no importance.

Acton makes it clear that Christianity did not importantly add to the body of philosophical arguments for freedom. “There is hardly a truth in politics or in the system of rights of man that was not grasped by the wisest of the Gentiles and the Jews, or that they did not declare with a refinement of thought and a nobleness of expression that later writers could never surpass.”¹⁰¹ The Stoics, especially, had already come upon the keystone of the arch of liberty, the doctrine of the higher law. It was they “who emancipated mankind from its subjection to despotic rule.” This they achieved by making

it known that there is a will superior to the collective will of man, and a law that overrules those of Solon and Lycurgus. Their test of good government is its conformity to principles that can be traced to a higher legislator. That which we must obey, that to which we are bound to reduce all civil authorities, and to sacrifice every earthly interest, is that immutable law which is perfect and eternal as God Himself, which proceeds from his nature, and reigns over heaven and earth and over all nations.¹⁰²

In this way, Stoicism made good the chief philosophical impediment to the advance of liberty in classical times and the flaw which had condemned Athenian democracy, for instance, to failure.¹⁰³

Moreover, on the institutional level, there had existed mixed governments, and popular ones, and ones based on a federal structure. What had been lacking was effectively limited governments; there was “no State the circumference of whose authority had been defined by a force external to its own.”¹⁰⁴ In this pregnant passage, we can discern the fruit of Acton’s reflections on power. He had agreed with Montesquieu and Calhoun (among others) that the tendency to abuse power and to enlarge it at the expense of others is a constituent part of human nature. For this reason, the doctrine of checks and balances and the division of powers (particularly including federalism) is the foundation of the liberal theory of state organization. “Liberty,” Acton maintained, “depends on the division of power.”¹⁰⁵ This doctrine attempts to divide up the powers at the disposal of the state among its various branches, in the expectation that in this way the will to power of one branch will be held in check by that of others, preventing total control from being exercised by one will. So far, however, nothing is achieved for the goal of limiting the whole collection of state powers. This cannot be done by anybody which is part of the state apparatus, and some force external to the state would somehow have to be induced to assume the task.

That this had never been the case in antiquity was responsible for the fact that the limits of state power had remained largely philosophical and ideal:

Those who proclaimed the assistance of a higher authority had indeed drawn a metaphysical barrier before the governments, but they had not known how to make it real. [The Stoics, for instance,] could only advise the wise to hold aloof from politics, keeping the unwritten law in his heart.¹⁰⁶

This situation was radically changed by Christianity, and the key scriptural passage here is Jesus’s admonition to “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s.” These words, in Acton’s view,

gave the civil power, under the protection of conscience, a sacredness it had never enjoyed and bounds it had never acknowledged; and they were the repudiation of absolutism and the inauguration of freedom.¹⁰⁷

The great advance represented by the Christian version of this idea over, say, the Stoic one, consisted in the fact that it was not merely the product of a chain of moral reasoning or of the insight of a sage, but that Jesus “created the force to execute it.”

To maintain the necessary immunity in one supreme sphere, to reduce all political authority within defined limits, ceased to be an aspiration of patient reasoners, and was made the perpetual charge and care of the most energetic and the most universal association in the world.¹⁰⁸

This was the root from which grew liberty as Western Europe was to know it. As Acton expressed it on another occasion: “All liberty consists in radice in the preservation of an inner sphere exempt from State power. That reverence for conscience is the germ of all civil freedom, and the way in which Christianity served it … liberty has grown out of the distinction (separation is a bad word) of Church and State.”¹⁰⁹

The great merit of Christianity, then, was to have arranged things such that (a) there would exist a very powerful extra-state force, and (b) this force would find itself in collision with the state. Thus, one area, at least, of human action (and, indeed, the most important area) had been removed from the control of the state, whether democratic or not, and a powerful institution had been made its trustee: there had been created the term of what Acton had once earlier referred to as “the hierarchical organization, which renders Catholicism so formidable to statesmen.”¹¹⁰ That the limits of this area outside of state control would be in dispute, and that in any case, the wielders of political power would be vexed by the very existence of such an area, would in the future provide cause for beneficent conflict between the two authorities.

Before tracing the historical operation of the principle just outlined, however, two important points must be underscored.

First, Acton emphasizes that it was certainly not the conscious intention of the Catholic Church to promote liberty. As an institution, it was scarcely more devoted to free institutions than was the state power itself. At times, to be sure, it seemed to aid freedom from disinterested motives, as when, in the early Middle Ages, the clergy “taught that power ought to be conferred by election; and the Councils of Toledo furnished the framework of the parliamentary system of Spain, which is, by a long interval, the oldest in the world.”¹¹¹ At other times, however, it has acted in a manner distinctly contrary to the interests of liberty, as when, in the seventeenth century, it supported the idea of the divine right of kings. But this should give little cause for wonder. The hierarchy of the Church is, of course, composed of human beings, and there is no reason to suppose—certainly none, if the matter is viewed historically—that these men will be any more able to escape the innate human striving for power than will other men. The assistance which the Church furnished to liberty was motivated by selfish interest. As we shall see, the struggle against the Empire and the other European monarchies, which begins with Hildebrand, was one of self-defense; with popes such as Boniface VIII, the Church gave itself over to an aspiration for universal monarchy dominion over the political order, and, as Acton put it, “sought to substitute a despotism of priests for the tyranny of kings.”¹¹²

The second point that must be made is that Acton’s view of the assistance given liberty by the Catholic Church is a “naturalistic” one. That is, although he was, of course, of the belief that it was the Church founded by Christ and a uniquely divine institution, when he comes to explain how it acted to promote liberty, the explanation contains no reference to these facts. Acton’s explanation could be accepted in its entirety by a non-Catholic, a non-Christian, or even an atheist, since it deals in terms of social and political forces which are brought into existence and interact with one another in a purely non-supernatural way. It is the eye of Acton the believer, not of Acton the historian, which discerns the finger of God in the march of freedom through history.

If the Christian epoch is dated from the establishment of Christianity as the official religion of the Empire, then it is from the very beginning of this epoch that the fruitful struggle of Church and State dates. In the nature of things, it was the state which was the aggressor, and Constantine as well as his successors attempted by every means at their disposal to turn the Church into “the gilded crutch of absolutism.” Despite his conversion to Christianity, he fully intended to carry forward Diocletian’s attempt to found a despotism of the Asiatic type, even aiming to make use of Christianity for this purpose. Acton suggests, for instance, that moving the seat of government to the East was part of the Emperor’s plan to remove his Church from the influence of the Roman patriarch, and found a patriarchate that would be absolutely under his control.¹¹³

At first—as was again to be the case during the Reformation—divisions within Christianity helped absolutism along by dividing the possible opponents of the state and even inducing them to look to the civil power for support against their theological enemies.¹¹⁴ Thus, Acton implies, a situation of countervailing powers, rather than one in which a fragmented Church faces a unified state was, at least at this point in history, most conducive to liberty.

Ecclesiastical resistance to state pretentions during the early centuries was further impeded by the traditions of state worship deriving from the late Empire and of political quietism handed down from the early Christians. During the earlier Middle Ages the Church entered into a sort of bargain with the barbarian kings, exchanging the means of conducting government—the knowledge at the disposal of its relatively well-educated clergy—for special exemptions.¹¹⁵ This was a time of civilization and state building, of the taming and Christianizing of the barbarians, and it was not to be expected that freedom would flourish under these conditions.

It was only with the emergence of high feudalism that the conflict that was to be so productive for liberty began to develop. This was a time when

the nations of the West lay between the competing tyrannies of local magnates and of absolute monarchs, when a force was brought upon the scene which proved for a time superior to the vassal and his lord.¹¹⁶

In the history of European freedom, this era was the crucial one. The Normans had destroyed the liberties of England, and the primitive democratic institutions of the barbarians had fallen into decay, while the towns and the middle class had not yet come onto the scene:

The only influence capable of resisting the feudal hierarchy was the ecclesiastical hierarchy; and they came into collision, when the process of feudalism threatened the independence of the Church by subjecting prelates severally to that form of personal dependence on the kings which was peculiar to the Teutonic State.¹¹⁷

The importance of the Investiture Controversy is emphasized by Acton: “To that conflict of four hundred years we owe the rise of civil liberty,”¹¹⁸ and there will develop “a long tradition [connecting] the Hildebrandine controversy with the Long Parliament, and St. Thomas with Edmund Burke.”¹¹⁹ This is the prime example of Acton’s whole theme, and the chief way in which Christianity has historically aided the progress of liberty.

The promotion of liberty was no part of the intention of either kings or popes in this struggle; just as St. Thomas, the leading Guelph writer, “would have made the papacy control all Christian governments,” so Marsilius of Padua would have subjected the clergy to the civil power. Liberty was rather “the means by which the temporal and the spiritual power called the nations to their aid.”¹²⁰ In their attempt to draw allies to their side, the papacy and the monarchies were forced to make concessions to the people on both the theoretical and institutional levels. Institutionally, as a result of the conflict, “the towns of Italy and Germany won their franchises, France got her States-General, and England her Parliament out of the alternate phases of the contest.” As long as it lasted, the struggle forestalled the rise of the doctrine of divine right. Political theory set limits to the legitimate action of kings, and it came to be commonly held that there existed “a public law to which all monarchs were held subject.” It was in accordance with this conception that King John, for instance, was brought to account. By the thirteenth century, both Guelphs and Ghibellines were admitting what was essentially the Whig theory of government, and Acton refers to St. Thomas as the “first Whig.”¹²¹

How the Church acted to prevent the rise of the sort of absolutism that had marked the late Roman Empire and had since become entrenched at Constantinople is illustrated by the following:

A disposition existed to regard the Crown as an estate descending under the law of real property in the family that possessed it. But the authority of religion, and especially the papacy, was thrown on the side that denied the indefeasible title of kings.¹²²

Thus it was while acting mainly in its own interest that the Church promoted the interests of liberty. The Church upheld the notion that a people had the right to deprive their king of his throne under certain conditions; gradually (presumably in accordance with its own inner logic), this idea “was made to stand on broader grounds, and was strong enough to resist both Church and State.”¹²³

The readiness of the people to stand up to their kings was strengthened by the Church’s chronic undermining of the dignity of royalty. The people were “accustomed to see those whom they most respected [the clergy] in constant strife with their rulers,” and distrust of the civil power was promoted by popes such as Gregory VII, who referred to states as the work of the devil. In such an atmosphere it was quite unlikely that there should arise any analogue to the emperor worship of antiquity.

What Acton conceived to be the principle operating here may be fathered from his comment on certain Austrian concessions to the papacy in his own time:

now that Francis Joseph has publicly acknowledged the rights of the Pope in matters hitherto belonging to the State, will not his subjects ask themselves whether perchance in other respects, too, the State has not hitherto overstepped the limits of its just authority? No State is safe from the influence of so pernicious an example.¹²⁴

That is, special rights wrested from the state by a powerful Church not only remove certain areas from state control directly, but provide an example and precedent for the acquisition of other privileges by non-ecclesiastical agencies. By virtue of its character as a corporation “strong enough for resistance, permanent in its organization, constant in its maxims, and superior to national boundaries,” the Church was enabled to become the first body to acquire those privileges and special rights which are the characteristic of medieval liberty.¹²⁵

Acton sums up the achievements of the Middle Ages from the point of view for freedom, which were much more impressive than is commonly believed. While he states that they were not so much “towards the perfection of their institutions” as “towards the attaining of the knowledge of political truth,” there are two highly significant institutional changes which he mentions, both signaling great advances over the state of affairs at the end of the classical period: first, representative bodies had become almost universal, and second, slavery had virtually disappeared. On the theoretical level, there was general recognition that no “tax was lawful that was not granted by the class that paid for it,” and—a theme that was central for Acton—“the right of insurrection was not only admitted, but defined, as a duty sanctioned by religion.”¹²⁶

Comparing the medieval with the classical period, Acton declares:

The issue of ancient politics was an absolute state planted on slavery. The political produce of the Middle Ages was a system of states in which authority was restricted by the representation of powerful classes, by privileged associations, and by the acknowledgment of duties superior to those which are imposed by man.¹²⁷

While much remained to be done in practice, “the great problems of principle had been solved.”¹²⁸

Nevertheless, as Acton points out, there existed a certain provincialism in medieval Christianity which had a deleterious effect on liberty. It had been held that, true religion being of supreme importance, the rights of man—the duties of their neighbors and rulers towards them— varied according to their religion. This was not, of course, a doctrine implied in Christianity as a system of ideas which may be gathered from the New Testament; rather, it was part of the system of ideas and sentiments associated with historical Christianity. Nevertheless, it proved useful to the modern state (which emerges from about the fourteenth century), by promoting some of the latter’s more objectionable claims. And not only was this denial of the rule of law taken over by the state as against its enemies, but the idea was to have very unfortunate consequences once the religious unity of Europe was fragmented by the Reformation.¹²⁹

The sixteenth century represented in every way a retrogression for liberty. A process had been underway by which both monarch’s power was increasing in fact, and his claims were being widened in theory. The role that the Catholic Church had previously filled, that of acting as a counterweight to the civil power, fell into abeyance. Here Acton indicates that the reason is largely to be sought in the failure of the Conciliar movement, which, with its attempt to create a sort of constitutional monarchy in the Church, posed a threat to the power of the popes, uniting them to the kings in opposition to “the system of divided authority.” In addition, in France, Spain, Sicily and England, strong monarchs were able to bring the Church under their control, and thus demolish the delicate balance of Church and State which had previously provided a free area in which other social bodies might flourish.¹³⁰

Thus the tide was already running strongly in the direction of absolutism when the Reformation broke out.

Acton’s views on the Reformation are particularly important for our subject, since this is the point at which it becomes clearest that, unlike Constant and Tocqueville, Acton is emphasizing the contribution not of the religious sentiment or of Christianity as a whole, but of Roman Catholicism.¹³¹

Prima facie one would have expected that Luther’s influence would have worked against the absolutist tendencies of the sixteenth century, since he was faced with a strong alliance of Church and State, and, in fact, his most determined enemies at first were to be found within the political and not the ecclesiastical structure. Unfortunately, it was otherwise. First, because “the dread of revolution was the deepest of [Luther’s] political sentiments,” and the obsequiousness of this priest towards the state went so far, in Acton’s view, that he may justly be called the inventor of the theory of the divine right of kings. Secondly, because of his radical rejection of the medieval heritage of Christianity and his desire to return the Church to the pristine Apostolic age, Luther was led to reject also the liberal achievements of the medieval period and the scholastic writers.¹³²

We have seen that Acton thought that the Gospels and the early Church manifested a relative lack of interest in liberty; it was under the pressure of actual conflict with a self-aggrandizing political power that the seed of liberty contained in Jesus’s injunction germinated. Luther, therefore, with his too literal interpretation of the New Testament and his rejection of Church tradition, was condemned to accept “the passive obedience of the apostolic age” and could not agree with the “gloss by which the Guelphic divines had got over” it, since this “was characteristic of the medieval method of interpretation which he rejected.”¹³³ It is likely that Acton had in mind here primarily the famous passage from Romans 13:1–2. For him, as is evident throughout these essays, the assertion of the right of insurrection and the denial of passive obedience was of paramount importance. Thus, virtually his only mention of Zwingli’s political views in this lecture has to do with the fact that, compared to Luther, he at least had the virtue of not shrinking from “the medieval idea that evil magistrates must be cashiered.”¹³⁴ But the brevity of his reforming career forestalled any profound influence by Zwingli on the political ideas of the Reformation.

Calvin, too, accomplished nothing for liberty; on the contrary, he was a determined opponent of popular institutions, and “desired an aristocracy of the elect, armed with the means of punishing not only crime, but vice and error”—in short, a theocracy. Again, as with Luther, his chief mistake consisted in sweeping away the achievements of the Middle Ages in favor of an older tradition—this time, the theocratic tradition of Hebrews. In this way, Calvin undid the great accomplishment of medieval Christianity in forcing a distinction between the realms of Church and State; he returned to what was in form the pagan state, with the difference that it was the spiritual order which now engulfed the secular.¹³⁵

This is merely another instance of what Acton takes to be the general character of the period of the Renaissance and Reformation: it is a time that was signalized by the disappearance in many areas of the highly beneficial division of powers between Church and State. By his hatred of anti-authoritarian impulses and movements, and by depriving them of effective strength through his approval of the idea of passive obedience, Luther virtually subjected the Church to the political authority. It is interesting to note that Acton saw an analogous development in the Renaissance Church. At one time he had wanted to make clear “the connection between the absolutist tendencies of the Church [at the time of Julius II and Leo X] and the establishment of the Roman monarchy [the temporal power], which is very important and not understood.”¹³⁶ The growth of the temporal power of the papacy, indeed, introduced a principle not basically distinct from that of the pagan state: “The domain of conscience [is] not distinct, therefore, from the domain of the State—sins, crimes, and sins against faith, even when private, without proselytism, are acts of treason.”¹³⁷

Summing up, Acton states that the “direct political influence of the Reformation effected less than has been supposed,” largely, presumably, because the direction in which it did affect affairs was the one in which they had already been tending. Indirectly, however, it led to a great increase of state power. The fact of religious schism and heresy was used by rulers already interested in increasing their power to assume “every prerogative needed to preserve their faith,” and they were encouraged in this by their people. Thus:

All the care to keep Church and State asunder and to prevent the confusion of their powers which had been the work of ages, was renounced in the intensity of the struggle.¹³⁸

Acton stresses that religion was the excuse employed by princes for their own ends: “all through the religious conflict policy kept the upper hand.”

When the last of the Reformers died, religion, instead of emancipating the nations, had become an excuse for the criminal art of despots. Calvin preached and Bellarmine lectured, but Machiavelli reigned.¹³⁹

In the later sixteenth and the early seventeenth century, however, there occurred the rebirth of the idea of the right of armed resistance to tyranny as a consequence of the religious disunity of Europe. This was provoked by events such as the St. Bartholomew Massacre, and was used to justify the revolt of the Netherlands from Spain.¹⁴⁰ Gradually, the rationale for this idea was widened: from being linked to the defense of the “true” religion (which had to vary, of course, from case to case), it came to be founded on natural law and the rights of man. In this sense, Grotius performed a great service. By breaking the connection between natural law and theology, he afforded a basis for the idea of the rights of all men against all oppressive governments, and, as Acton put it, “drew the lines of real political science.”

From that time it became possible to make politics a matter of principle and conscience, so that men and nations differing in all other things could live in peace together, under the sanctions of the common law.¹⁴¹

Thus, in this case it is the separation of political theory from any moorings in theology or religion to which Acton attributes responsibility for a progress towards freedom.

On the other hand, the seventeenth century also saw liberty promoted by groups that emphasized its close connection with Christian principles. The Independent sects required and demanded religious freedom, and understood that this could only be attained by limiting state power generally. On the whole, Acton assigns religion the greatest weight as a factor leading to the growth of freedom in England in this period:

[The] great political ideas, sanctifying freedom to God, teaching men to treasure the liberties of others as their own, and to defend them for the love of justice and charity more than as a claim of right, has been the soul of what is great and good in the progress of the last two hundred years. The cause of religion, even under the unregenerated influence of worldly passion, had as much to do as any clear notions of policy in making this country the foremost of the free. It had been the deepest current in the movement of 1641, and it remained the strongest motive that survived the reaction of 1660.¹⁴²

Complementary to his emphasis on religion as a source of inspiration for freedom is Acton’s disdain for the argument for liberty based on a defense of property rights. He speaks of Locke, for instance, as one “whose notion of liberty involves nothing more spiritual than the security of property,”¹⁴³ and, further on, he writes of the unfortunate effects of Locke’s thinking on succeeding writers: “Even Hume did not enlarge the bounds of his ideas; and his narrow materialistic belief in the connection between liberty and property captivated even the bolder mind of Fox.”¹⁴⁴

In the case of the American Revolution—in Acton’s view the most important modern occurrence related to his theme—no special religious motive or influence is emphasized, nor is irreligion held responsible for the failure of the French Revolution. In both cases, however, commitment to the doctrine of the higher law, whether religiously based or not (or lack of such commitment), is seen as crucial to the success or failure of the revolution from a liberal point of view.¹⁴⁵

Acton does not pursue his subject, in these essays, further than the period of the French Revolution. If he had, his later writings indicate that he would have attributed more weight to liberalism as a coherent movement, and devoted more attention both to its workings out in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and to its historical roots. This is of great importance for the questions we are examining, since Acton became convinced that liberalism as a whole was at best unitarian or deist, often agnostic or atheist; generally, he pointed out, the liberal was characterized by an “extreme profaneness of mind.”¹⁴⁶ To Gladstone, who had insisted on the supreme importance of belief in the divine nature of Christ for the upward development of culture, Acton retorted by mentioning

a Church whose Fathers are the later Milton and the later Penn, Locke and Bayle, Toland, Franklin, Turgot, Smith, Washington, Jefferson, Bentham, D. Stewart, Romilly, Jeffrey, B. Constant, Tocqueville [n.b.], Channing, Macaulay, Mill, …. These men and others like them disbelieved that Doctrine, established freedom, and undid the work of orthodox Christianity. They swept away that appalling edifice of intolerance, tyranny, cruelty, which believers in Christ built up, to perpetuate their belief.¹⁴⁷

Thus, as a practical matter, religious liberty, so crucial in Acton’s view for liberty in general, was brought into existence not by the established and orthodox Christian churches, but by writers and statesmen who ranged from unitarians to atheists.

Ultimately, therefore, the historical relation between Christianity and freedom has been ambiguous. On the one hand, freedom was promoted by the Catholic Church in earlier times, especially in the high Middle Ages. On the other hand, “if Liberalism has a desperate foe it is the Church, as it was in the West, between 1200 and 1600 or 1700.” Later Christianity acted in an “anti-liberal and anti-social” manner, until the promotion of liberty was taken up by the independent sects, which in significant ways cannot be identified with historical Christianity, and by non-Christian and anti-Christian forces.¹⁴⁸

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¹Gertrude Himmelfarb, Lord Acton (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1962), pp. 4–9.

²Lord Acton and His Circle (Correspondence), ed. by Abbot Gasquet (New York: Franklin, 1968), p. 79.

³Ibid., p. 3.

⁴Ibid., p. 228.

⁵Ibid., p. 32.

⁶Ibid., p.72

⁷Ibid., p. 60.

⁸Ibid., p. 4.

⁹F. E. Lally, As Lord Acton Says (Newport, R.I.: Pioneer, 1942), p. 128.

¹⁰G.E. Fasnacht, Acton’s Political Philosophy (London: Hollis and Carter, 1952), p. 190.

¹¹Lally, op. cit., p. 216.

¹²Lord Action and His Circle, p. 243.

¹³Lord Acton, Letters to Mary Gladstone, ed. by Herbert Paul (London: Macmillan, 1905) p. 136.

¹⁴Ibid., p. 158.

¹⁵Quoted in Lally, op. cit., pp. 216–217.

¹⁶Lord Acton, Selections from the Correspondence of the First Lord Acton, ed. by J. N. Figgis and R.V. Laurence (London: Longmans, 1917), p. 54.

¹⁷Ibid., p. 278.

¹⁸Quoted in Lally, op. cit., p. 54.

¹⁹Lord Acton, Essays on Freedom and Power, ed. by Gertrude Himmelfarb (New York: Meridian, 1956), p. 103.

²⁰Gertrude Himmelfarb, Victorian Minds (New York: Knopf, 1968), pp. 189–193.

²¹Acton’s Correspondence, p. 277.

²²Ibid., pp. 295–296.

²³Ibid., p. 278.

²⁴Ibid.

²⁵Ibid., p. 280.

²⁶Freedom and Power, p. 110.

²⁷E.g., “The spirit of 1787 was an English spirit, and therefore a conservative spirit…. The American constitution is no exception to the rule that everything which has power to win the obedience and respect of men must have its roots deep in the past, and that the more slowly every institution has grown, so much the more enduring it is likely to prove…. There is a hearty Puritanism in the view of human nature which pervades the instrument of 1787…. No men were less revolutionary in spirit than the heroes of the American Revolution.”

²⁸Acton’s Correspondence, p. 296.

²⁹Œuvres, p. 262.

³⁰E. L. Woodward, “The Place of Lord Acton in the Liberal Movement of the Nineteenth Century,” Politica 4 (1939), p. 260. Cf., Hugh A. MacDougall, The Acton-Newman Relations (New York: Fordham University Press, 1962), p. 141, who states: “By 1879 Acton had developed into an inflexible judge who deemed it the duty of the historian to decide on the moral guilt or innocence of historical characters. The historian could make no allowance for time or place. If he tried to mitigate the guilt of those who had committed crime in the past, he was as worthy of reprobation as the criminal he sought to excuse.”

³¹Crane Brinton, English Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1933), pp. 200–201; see also Woodward, loc. cit., p. 265.

³²See for instance, Letters to Mary Gladstone, pp. 70, 72.

³³Quoted in Lally, op. cit., p. 153.

³⁴Lionel Kochan, Acton on History (London: Deutsch, 1954), p. 70.

³⁵Fasnacht, op. cit., p. 242.

³⁶Ibid.

³⁷Ibid., p. 146.

³⁸Acton’s Correspondence, p. 279.

³⁹Lord Acton, Lectures on the French Revolution (New York: Noonday, 1959), p. 227.

⁴⁰MacDougall, op. cit., p. 179.

⁴¹Alexander Vinet, Outlines of Theology (London: Strahan, 1866), pp. 2–3.

⁴²Ibid., pp. 4–6.

⁴³Ibid., p. 10.

⁴⁴Ibid., p. 16.

⁴⁵Freedom and Power, p. 55.

⁴⁶Quoted in MacDougall, op. cit., pp. 68–69.

⁴⁷Letter to Mary Gladstone, p. 179.

⁴⁸Quoted in Kochan, op. cit., p. 70.

⁴⁹Letter to Mary Gladstone, p. 73.

⁵⁰Freedom and Power, p. 104.

⁵¹Acton’s Correspondence, p. 280. (Italics added.)

⁵²The History of Freedom and Other Essays (London: Macmillan, 1907), pp. 327–328.

⁵³Ibid., p. 70.

⁵⁴Acton’s Correspondence, p. 211.

⁵⁵Quoted in Kochan, op. cit., p. 70.

⁵⁶Acton’s Correspondence, p. 291.

⁵⁷Kochan, op. cit., pp. 70–71.

⁵⁸Acton’s Correspondence, p. 279.

⁵⁹Ibid., p. 281.

⁶⁰Ibid.

⁶¹Cf., MacDougall, op. cit., p. 95.

⁶²Ibid., p. 116.

⁶³Acton’s Correspondence, p. 55.

⁶⁴Ibid., p. 42.

⁶⁵It appears that Acton was mistaken in attributing this view to these two men.

⁶⁶Letters to Mary Gladstone, p. 114.

⁶⁷Acton’s Correspondence, p. 56.

⁶⁸Ibid., p. 54.

⁶⁹Ibid., p. 282.

⁷⁰Ibid., p. 63.

⁷¹Quoted in Kochan, op. cit., p. 95.

⁷²Acton’s Correspondence, p. 297.

⁷³Ibid., p. 255.

⁷⁴Ibid., p. 264.

⁷⁵Quoted in Kochan, op. cit., pp. 95–96.

⁷⁶Letters to Mary Gladstone, p. 57.

⁷⁷Acton’s Correspondence, p. 290.

⁷⁸Ibid., p. 289.

⁷⁹Ibid., p. 291.

⁸⁰Ibid., pp. 291–292.

⁸¹Ibid., p. 291.

⁸²Letters to Mary Gladstone, p. 96.

⁸³Acton’s Correspondence, p. 292.

⁸⁴Quoted in Woodward, loc. cit., p. 264.

⁸⁵MacDougall, op. cit., p. ix.

⁸⁶Freedom and Power, pp. 53–112.

⁸⁷History of Freedom, pp. 61–100.

⁸⁸Freedom and Power, p. 53.

⁸⁹Ibid.

⁹⁰Compare Tocqueville on democracy: “all men have aided it by their exertions, both those who have intentionally labored in its cause and those who have served it unwittingly; those who have fought for it and even those who have declared themselves its opponents have all been driven along in the same direction, have all labored to one end … [it] is, therefore, a providential fact.” Democracy in America, vol. 1, p. 6.

⁹¹Quoted in MacDougall, op. cit., p. 175.

⁹²Ibid., p. 169.

⁹³Ibid., p. 173.

⁹⁴Freedom and Power, pp. 63–64.

⁹⁵Ibid., pp. 68–69.

⁹⁶Quoted in Lally, op. cit., p. 220.

⁹⁷Ibid., pp. 139–140.

⁹⁸Although Acton speaks in terms of Christianity in these essays, it will become clear that what he has in mind is essentially the Roman Catholic form.

⁹⁹Freedom and Power, pp. 79–60.

¹⁰⁰Cf., Pieter Geyl, “The Idea of Liberty in History,” in Encounters in History (New York: Meridian, 1961), p. 245. Acton explicitly makes this distinction in a letter to Mary Gladstone: “[I]t is wrong, in a political book, to call Luther an apostle of freedom, as he was an apostle of authority and divine right, and promoted freedom in the other, the spiritual sense.” Letters to Mary Gladstone, p. 192.

¹⁰¹Freedom and Power, p. 79.

¹⁰²Ibid., p. 76.

¹⁰³It is, however, open to Acton to maintain—although he does not do so, at least explicitly—that, while the doctrine of the higher law was not discovered by the Church, the latter was responsible for incorporating it into the structure of its religious beliefs, and thus giving it a much wider currency that it could have attained as the dogma of a merely philosophical school.

¹⁰⁴Ibid., pp. 80–81.

¹⁰⁵Letters to Mary Gladstone, p. 98.

¹⁰⁶Freedom and Power, p. 81.

¹⁰⁷Ibid. As we have seen, Laboulaye also makes this passage the pivot of his discussion of the same issue. Fustel de Coulanges likewise emphasizes its importance, op. cit., p. 393. More recently, Ernest Barker has followed Acton’s judgment on the extreme importance of this passage, as well as his analysis of the impact of Christianity, and especially of the medieval papacy, on liberty; see his Principles of Social and Political Theory (Oxford: Oxford University, 1961), pp. 7–11.

¹⁰⁸Freedom and Power, p. 81.

¹⁰⁹Acton and His Circle, p. 254.

¹¹⁰Quoted in MacDougall, op. cit., p. 71.

¹¹¹Freedom and Power, pp. 85–86.

¹¹²Quoted in Kochan, op. cit., pp. 50–51.

¹¹³Freedom and Power, pp. 82–83.

¹¹⁴Ibid., p. 83.

¹¹⁵Ibid., p. 85.

¹¹⁶Ibid., p. 86.

¹¹⁷Ibid.

¹¹⁸Ibid.

¹¹⁹Ibid., p. 97.

¹²⁰Ibid., p. 87. Acton makes the same point in his review of Erskine May’s Democracy in Europe, using the term “democracy” (but it is clear that he is speaking of the same development as above): “Christianity did not directly influence political progress…. The revival of democracy was due neither to the Christian Church nor to the Teutonic State, but to the quarrel between them.” History of Freedom, pp. 79–80.

¹²¹Freedom and Power, pp. 87–89.

¹²²Ibid., p. 87.

¹²³Ibid.

¹²⁴Lord Acton and His Circle, p. 94.

¹²⁵Quoted in Kochan, op. cit., pp. 50–51.

¹²⁶Freedom and Power, p. 91.

¹²⁷Ibid.

¹²⁸Ibid.

¹²⁹Ibid., pp. 91–92.

¹³⁰Ibid., p. 93.

¹³¹The contrary doctrine that it was Protestantism, as against Catholicism, that was conducive to freedom and crucial in its historical development was, of course, a widespread one in the nineteenth century (it constituted, for example, part of the Whig interpretation of history) and can be traced to the Enlightenment. Thomas Erskine May, for instance, maintained that the historian could “observe despotism allied to Pagan superstitions and corruptions of the Christian faith” and “liberty flourishing in union with the best and purest types of Christianity”; and in this connection he cites Montesquieu, who in L’esprit des lois (bk. 4, chap. 5) states: “Les peuples du nord embrassèrent le protestantisme, et ceux du midi la catholique.” “C’est que les peuples du nord ont et auront toujours un esprit d’indépendance et de liberté, que n’ont pas les peuples du midi.” Democracy in Europe (New York: Middleton, 1879), p. xxv.

¹³²Ibid., p. 94.

¹³³Ibid. Another example of Acton’s emphasis on this principle is that of Socinus, who, he states, “was the first who on grounds that Church and State ought to be separated required universal toleration. But Socinus disarmed his own theory, for he was a strict advocate of passive obedience.” Ibid., p. 104. (Italics added.)

¹³⁴Ibid., p. 94.

¹³⁵Ibid., p. 94. See also, Lord Acton and His Circle, pp. 49–50.

¹³⁶Quoted in Lally, op. cit., p. 200.

¹³⁷Lord Acton and His Circle, p. 256.

¹³⁸Freedom and Power, pp. 94–95.

¹³⁹Ibid., pp. 95–96.

¹⁴⁰Ibid., pp. 96—97.

¹⁴¹Ibid., p. 98.

¹⁴²Ibid., p. 104.

¹⁴³Ibid.

¹⁴⁴Ibid., pp. 105–106. It is interesting that Acton speaks of economic liberalism almost not at all; the only connection in which political economy is cited is that its “sudden rise … suggested the idea of applying the methods of science to the art of government.”

¹⁴⁵Ibid., pp. 106–108.

¹⁴⁶Acton’s Correspondence, p. 49.

¹⁴⁷Ibid., pp. 216–217.

¹⁴⁸Ibid., p. 217.