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Updated: June 28, 2025
Often indeed they have even moved pari passu, and at all times there has been found the most intimate connexion between them. Christianity waited till the orbis terrarum attained its most perfect form before it appeared; and it soon coalesced, and has ever since co-operated, and often seemed identical, with the Civilization which is its companion.
In a word, the Classics, and the subjects of thought and the studies to which they give rise, or, to use the term most to our present purpose, the Arts, have ever, on the whole, been the instruments of education which the civilized orbis terrarum has adopted; just as inspired works, and the lives of saints, and the articles of faith, and the catechism, have ever been the instrument of education in the case of Christianity.
Be my soul with the saints! In the same month the words of St. Augustine were pointed out to me, "Securus judicat orbis terrarum"; they struck me with a power which I had never felt from any words before; the theory of the "Via Media" was absolutely pulverised. In the summer of 1841, in retirement at Littlemore, I received three blows which broke me.
Above the door of one, neatly carved in wood, were the lines from Horace: "Ille terrarum mihi praeter omnes. Angulus ridet." Only a few chosen guests found admittance into this long, narrow apartment. It was completely wainscoted with wood, and from the centre of the richly-carved ceiling a strange picture gleamed in brilliant hues. This represented the landlord.
Now, before going on to speak of the education, and the standards of education, which the Civilized World, as I may now call it, has enjoined and requires, I wish to draw your attention, Gentlemen, to the circumstance that this same orbis terrarum, which has been the seat of Civilization, will be found, on the whole, to be the seat also of that supernatural society and system which our Maker has given us directly from Himself, the Christian Polity.
It has preserved to us the judgment of the men of that time, and there is a certain relative sense in which the maxim, 'Securus judicat orbis terrarum, is true. The decisions of an age, especially decisions such as this where quite as much depended upon pious feeling as upon logical reasoning, are usually sounder than the arguments that are put forward to defend them.
And he concludes in a tranquil spirit: "Meanwhile, the reader who feels troubled lest it should be his duty also to forsake all the conditions of his life and to take up the position and work of a common laborer, may rest for the present on the principle, SECURUS JUDICAT ORBIS TERRARUM. With few and rare exceptions," he continues, "the whole of Christendom, from the days of the Apostles down to our own, has come to the firm conclusion that it was the object of Christ to lay down great eternal principles, but not to disturb the bases and revolutionize the institutions of all human society, which themselves rest on divine sanctions as well as on inevitable conditions.
Hither, then, as to a sort of ideal land, where all the archetypes of the great and the fair were found in substantial being, and all departments of truth explored, and all diversities of intellectual power exhibited; where taste and philosophy were majestically enthroned as in a royal court; where there was no sovereignty but that of mind, and no nobility but that of genius; where professors were rulers and princes did homage, hither flocked continually from the very corners of the orbis terrarum, the many-tongued generation, just rising or just risen into manhood, in order to gain wisdom.
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