Title: Christianity Viewed In Relation To The Present State Of Society And Opinion.
Author: Guizot, François
Language: English
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{i}

         Christianity Viewed In Relation To

     The Present State Of Society And Opinion.

                  By M. Guizot.


  Translated Under The Superintendence Of The Author.


                    London:

         John Murray, Albemarle Street.

                     1871.

{ii}

             By The Same Author.

       The Essence Of Christianity.
             Post 8vo, 9s. 6d.

  "No one can open this book, and recollect the circumstances
  which produced it, without feeling that it is a valuable
  contribution to the literature of the present controversy."
    --_Edinburgh Review_.



      The Present State Of Christianity.
          Post 8vo, 10s. 6d.

  "A remarkable series of religious meditations. They form a
  sequel to a similar volume on the Essence of Christianity,
  published two years ago, and an introduction to a further
  series, in which M. Guizot proposes to treat the great
  questions of the history of Christianity, and the future
  destiny of the Christian religion. The book is one of great
  interest."--_Pall Mall Gazette_.

{iii}

{iv}

{v}

                   Preface.


In the First Series of these Meditations, I gave a summary of the
facts and dogmas which constitute, as I think, the foundation and
the essence of the Christian Religion. In the next series I
retraced the Reawakening of Faith and of Christian Life during
the nineteenth century in France, both amongst Romanists and
Protestants. With Christianity thus reanimated and resuscitated
amongst us, after having passed through one of its most violent
trials, I confronted the principal philosophical systems which in
these days reject and combat it: Rationalism, Positivism,
Pantheism, Materialism, Scepticism. I essayed to determine the
fundamental error which seems to me to characterize each of those
systems, and to have always rendered them inadequate to the
office either of satisfying or explaining man's nature and
destiny.
{vi}
That series of my Meditations I concluded with these words: "Why
is it that Christianity, in spite of all the attacks which it has
had to undergo, and all the ordeals through which it has been
made to pass, has for eighteen centuries satisfied infinitely
better the spontaneous instincts and invincible cravings of
humanity? Is it not because it is pure from the errors which
vitiate the different systems of philosophy just passed in
review? because it fills up the void that those systems either
create or leave in the human soul? because, in short, it conducts
man nigher to the fountain of light?" [Footnote 1]

    [Footnote 1: Meditations on the Actual State of Christianity.
    Eighth Meditation: Impiety, Recklessness, Perplexity, p. 336.]

Far from wishing to elude any of the difficulties of this
question, I would now set Christianity in contact with the ideas
and forces that seem most contrary to it, and with three of them
more especially: Liberty, Independent Morality, and Science.
{vii}
Assertions are running the tour of the world that Christianity
can accommodate itself neither to liberty nor science; that
morality is essentially distinct and separate from Religious
Faith. All this I hold to be false and highly prejudicial to the
very cause of Liberty, of Morality, and of Science, which those
who give utterance to such assertions affect to serve. I believe
Christianity and Liberty to be not only compatible with each
other, but necessary to each other. I regard Morality as
naturally and intimately united to Religion. I am convinced that
Christianity and Science need not make any mutual sacrifices,
that neither has anything to fear from the other. This I
establish in the first three Meditations of the present series. I
then enter into the peculiar domain of Christianity, and
determine what, in the presence of Liberty, of Philosophical
Morality, and of Human Science, is the principle and what the
bearing of "Christian Ignorance" and of Christian Faith.
{viii}
I finally apply to ideas their natural and inevitable law, the
law which obliges them to express themselves in facts; I
interrogate theory thus transformed into practice, and I show
that Christianity alone supports this test victoriously.
"Christian Life" becomes a forcible demonstration of the
Legitimacy of Christian Faith. With these three Meditations the
present series concludes.

But to complete my undertaking, a final and capital question, the
historical question, remains to be treated. Not that I think of
retracing the History of Christianity throughout the whole of its
course; such a design is far from my thoughts. I neither can nor
wish to do more than to demonstrate the grand historical facts
which, in my opinion, are in Christianity the stamp of a divine
origin, and of a divine influence upon the development and
destiny of the human race. Of these facts the following is a
summary:--

  1. The authority of the sacred books.

  2. The primitive foundation of Christianity.

  3. The Christian Faith persistent from age to age.

{ix}

  4. The Church of Christ persistent also from age to age.

  5. Romanism and Protestantism.

  6. The different Antichristian crises, their
     character and their issue.

It is upon these grand facts, and the questions which they
suggest, that Historical Criticism has in our days exercised
itself with ardour, as it is continuing to do; science, severe
and daring, no invention of our epoch, but beyond all doubt one
of its glories! If, after concluding this final series of my
Meditations, I shall have succeeded in appreciating at their real
value the exigencies made and the results obtained by Historical
Criticism, where it has applied itself to the History of
Christianity, I shall have realised the object which I proposed
to myself on voluntarily entering upon this solemn and laborious
study, where I meet with so much that is obscure, and so many
quicksands.

{x}

But as I draw near the close, a scruple seizes me. What have I
been thinking of to persist obstinately in casting such a work
into the midst of the events and the practical problems which are
agitating the whole civilized world, and which are demanding
their instant solution? What good result can I expect from
studying the past history of the Christian Religion in my
country, or even speculating upon its future prospects, when the
actual condition of the present generation and the lot of that
which is to succeed it on the stage, are subject to so many
troubles and plunged in such darkness? The more narrowly I
scrutinize generations--the honour and the destiny of which I
have so much at heart, for my children form part of them--the
more am I struck and disquieted by two facts: on the one side the
general sentiment of fatigue and incertitude manifesting itself
in society and in individuals: on the other side not merely the
grandeur but the unusual complexity of the questions agitated.
{xi}
I fear that, in her lassitude and in her sceptical vacillations,
France may not render an exact account to herself of the problems
and perils scattered over her path, of their number, their
gravity, and their intimate connexion. I fear that, from not
having an accurate conception of what her burthen is, and from
not having the courage at once to weigh it well, the moment when
she will have to bear it will come upon her with the necessary
forces unmustered, and the necessary resolutions unformed.

Almost every great epoch in history has been devoted to some
question, if not an exclusive one, at least one dominant both in
events and opinions, and around which the varying opinions and
the efforts of men were concentrated. Not to go farther back than
the era of modern history--in the sixteenth century the question
of the unity of Religion and of its Reform; in the seventeenth
century the question of pure monarchy, with its conquests abroad
and administration at home; in the eighteenth century that of the
operation of civil and religious liberty: such have been in
France the different points on which ideas have culminated, the
different objects which each social movement had specially in
view.
{xii}
The systems of the day, although opposed, were clear; the
struggles ardent but well defined. Men walked in those days on
high roads; they did not wander about in the infinite
complications of a labyrinth.

And it is in a very labyrinth of questions and of ideas, of
essays and events, diverse in character, confused, incoherent,
contradictory, in which in these days the civilized world is
plunged. I do not pretend to seize the clue to the labyrinth; I
propose but to throw some light upon the chaos.

First I turn my eyes to the external situation and relations of
the States of Christendom, and consider the questions which
concern the boundaries of territories and the distribution of
populations between distinct and independent nations. Formerly
these questions were all reducible to one--the aggrandizement or
the weakening of these different States, and the maintenance or
the disturbance of that balance of forces which was called the
balance of power in Europe.
{xiii}
War and Diplomacy, Conquests and Treaties, discussed and settled
this supreme question, of which Grotius expounded the theory, and
Ancillon wrote the history. Now we are no longer in a situation
so simple. What a complication of ideas: what ideas, novel and
ill-defined, start up in these days to embarrass the course and
entangle the relations of States! The question of races, the
question of nationalities, the question of little states and of
great political unities, the question of popular sovereignty and
of its rights beyond the limits of nations as well as in their
midst,--all these problems arise and cast into the shade, as a
routine which has served its turn, the old public right and the
maxims of the equilibrium of Europe, in their place seeking
themselves to impose rules for regulating the territorial
organizations and the external relations of States.

{xiv}

Not that the old traditional policy of Europe does not mingle
itself with, and exercise a powerful influence upon, the new
ideas and questions which invade us; however intellectual
theories and ambitions may change, the passions and interests of
men are permanent. War and the right of conquest have made good
their old pretensions, and this before our very eyes, without any
respect for the principle of Nationalities and of Races, a
principle nevertheless inscribed upon the very standards which
the conquerors bore. Prussia has aggrandized herself in the name
of German Unity, and at the very moment excluded from
participating in the common affairs of Germany, the seven or
eight millions of Germans who form part of the Empire of Austria.
Prussia seized the petty German Republic of Frankfort, evidently
against the will of its sovereign people, and Danish Schleswick
does not yet form part of the political group, to the class of
which she belongs by similarity of national origin and of
language. Even while sheltering themselves under the Ægis of some
general idea, selfish interests and rude violence have not ceased
to play a great part in the events which are passing before us,
and if the ambition of Frederick the Second was not more
legitimate, it was at least more logical than that of his
successors.

{xv}

I am far from meaning to deny that the new ideas which men
follow, and the desires which they evince, contain a certain part
of truth, or to affirm that they have not a right to a certain
share of influence. The identity of origin and of race, the
possession in common of a single name and of one language, have a
moral value very capable of becoming itself a political force; of
this fair and prudent statesmanship is bound to hold account. But
policy becomes chimerical and dangerous when it attributes to
these new ideas and these aspirations a supreme authority and
right to dominion; and what shocks all experience and common
sense is to reject, as out of date, and no longer applicable,
maxims which were the foundation of the public law of nations,
and which, up to the present time, have presided over the
relations of States.
{xvi}
The equilibrium of Europe, the long duration of territorial
agglomerations, the right of small states to exist and be
independent, the ancient titles to government, and the respect
for ancient treaties,--all these elements of European order have
not succumbed, neither were they bound to succumb, to the theory
of nationalities, and the fashionable doctrine of great political
unities. What would not be said, and what would not be said with
justice, if France had proclaimed that, as Belgium and Western
Switzerland speak French, that, as their populations have, both
in origin and manners, great affinities with our fellow
countrymen in French Flanders and in Franche-Comté, the principal
of National Unity requires their incorporation with France?
Prince Metternich was wrong to say that Italy was a mere
Geographical expression; there are certainly between the nations
of Italy historical bonds, both intellectual and moral, which
draw them towards one another, and repel from their territories
all foreign domination.
{xvii}
But this relationship, which may, and ought to be, a principle of
union, did not impose upon Italy the form of political unity; and
the _régime_ of a confederation of States might have been
established in the peninsula and yet its liberation from the
foreigner might have been secured, and a satisfaction might have
been procured along our own frontier of the Alps, in the
interests of our own security, and of that of Europe, for the
preservation of the equilibrium of power. As soon as we look at
the question with serious attention, we are forced to admit that
any general application of the principle of nationalities, or of
that of the great political unities, would throw the civilized
world into such a confusion and fermentation as would be equally
compromising to the internal liberties of nations, and to the
preservation of peace between the different States.

{xviii}

What if I had to sound the consequences of another principle, the
sovereign authority which men also seek in these days to set up,
the right, I mean, of populations, or of some part of a
population, to dissolve the State with which they are connected,
and to range themselves under another State, or to constitute
themselves into new and independent States? What would become of
the existence, or even of the very name of country, if it also
were thus left to be dealt with according to the fluctuating
wills of men, and the special interests of such or such of its
members? There is in the destiny of men, whether of generations
or individuals, a great part which they have no share in deciding
or disposing of; a man does not choose his family, neither does
he select his country; it is the natural state of man to live in
the place where he is born, in the society where is his cradle.
The cases are infinitely rare which can permit of the bonds being
rent asunder by which man is attached to the soil, the citizen to
the state; which can justify his leaving the bosom of his
country, to order to separate himself from it absolutely, and to
strive to lay the foundation of a new country.
{xix}
We have just been spectators of such an attempt; we have seen
some of the States which form the nation of the United States of
America, abjure this union, and erect themselves into an
independent confederation. Wherefore? In order to maintain in
their bosom the institution of slavery. By what right? By the
right, it is said, of every people, or portion of a people, to
change its government at discretion. The States which remained
faithful to the ancient American Confederation denied the
principle and combatted the attempt. They succeeded in
maintaining the federal Union, and in abolishing slavery. I am
one of those who think that they had both right and reason on
their side. Many years before the struggle commenced, one of the
most eminent men in the United States, eminent by his character
as well as his talents, a faithful representative of the
interests of the States of the South, and an avowed apologist for
negro slavery, Mr. Calhoun, did me the honour of transmitting to
me all that he had written and said upon the subject.
{xx}
I was struck by the frank and earnest language with which he
expressed his convictions, but no less by the futility of the
efforts which he made to justify, upon general considerations and
by historical necessities, the fact of slavery in his country. He
would never have dared to paint it in its actual and living
reality, as Mrs. Beecher Stowe has done in her romances of "Uncle
Tom's Cabin" and of "Dred," which have everywhere excited so much
sympathy and emotion. I became every day more and more convinced
that there was here a radical iniquity and a social wound, of
which it was at last time to efface the shame and to conjure the
danger. It was with the motive of maintaining the system of
slavery that the States of the South undertook to break up the
great American State which was their country. Motive detestable
for a deplorable act! Our epoch, so unfortunate in many respects,
has, in my opinion, been fortunate in this, that it produced a
Republic, the greatest of all Republics of ancient or of modern
times, which has afforded us the example of an uncompromising
resistance to an illegitimate popular desire, and of an
unflinching respect for the tutelary principles of the life of
States.

{xxi}

So far of the territorial questions, and those which concern the
external relations of nations. Let me now speculate upon what the
future has in store for those which involve domestic order and
the organization of government. I meet here with the same
confusion, the same complications, the same fluctuations between
ideas and essays incoherent or inconsistent. At the base as at
the summit of society, the monarchy and the republic are in
collision: the monarchy reigns in events; the republic ferments
in opinions.

The proposition is now universally received that society has the
right not only to see clearly and to intervene in its own
government, but to see so clearly and to intervene in such a
manner as to justify the expression that it governs itself.
{xxii}
The Constitutional Monarchy and the Republic profess each to
attain this object: the one by a national representation, by the
monarch's inviolability and his ministry's responsibility; the
other by universal suffrage and the periodical elections of the
great representatives of public power. But neither the
constitutional monarchy nor the republic has as yet succeeded
amongst us in obtaining firm possession of opinions and of
events, of public confidence and of durable power. After and in
spite of thirty-four years of prosperity, of peace, and of
liberty, the constitutional power fell. The republic, accepted on
its sudden appearance as the form of government which, as was
affirmed, divided us least, after a few months of turbulent and
sterile anarchy, fell also. In the place of the constitutional
monarchy and of the republic there arose another form of
government, a mixture of Dictatorship and of Republic, a sort of
personal government combined with, universal suffrage. Will the
essay have greater success? Events will decide.
{xxiii}
In the meantime let us be sincere with ourselves; the cause of so
many painful and abortive attempts resides rather in the
disposition of the people of France than in the acts of its
governments: our revolutionary existence since 1789, our
ambitious aspirings and disappointments, both equally immense,
have left us at once very excited and very fatigued, full of
impatience at the same time as of incertitude; we know not very
well what we think or what we would have; our ideas are perplexed
and confused; our wills vacillating and feeble; our minds have no
fixed points, our conduct no determined objects; we often yield
ourselves up readily against our better judgment, nay against our
very wish, to whatever power extends its hand to seize us; but
soon, very soon, we evince towards that power not a whit less
exigency or unfairness; as soon as we feel ourselves rid of our
most urgent cause for disquietude, our discontent is as
precipitate as was our submission in the hour of peril. We are
again disposed to be quarrelsome, and demand instant action in
the midst even of our doubts and hesitation. Our revolutions have
taught us the lesson neither of resistance nor of patience. Yet
these are virtues without which it is idle to propose to found
any free government.

{xxiv}

I pass from political questions to social questions, and from the
state of our political institutions to that of the relations
existent between the different parts of society. I say the
_different parts_ to avoid saying _different classes_,
for we cannot hear the word class pronounced without thinking
that we are threatened with the re-establishment of privileges
and exclusions, of that entire _régime_ with its narrow
compartments and inseparable barriers within which men were
formerly enclosed, and ranked according to their origin, their
name, their religion, or whatever other factitious or accidental
qualification they might possess. In effect, this _régime_
has fallen--fallen completely and definitively; all legal
barriers have disappeared; all careers are open; all labour free:
by individual merit and by labour every man may aspire to
everything, and examples abound in confirmation of the principle.
{xxv}
This was the great work, the great conquest of 1789; we celebrate
it unceasingly, and we have often the air of forgetting that it
ever occurred. The different ancient classes are still full of
jealousy, of distrust, and of restless irritation; because they
have to struggle for influence in the midst of liberty, they
persuade themselves that they are still risking life and limb in
defence of their situation and of their right. The Restoration
was attacked and undermined on account, it was said, of the evils
that the _bourgeoisie_ had to endure, and the risks which it
had to run at the hands of the nobles. Under the government of
July, the working classes were told incessantly that they were
the victims of the privileges and of the tyranny of the middle
classes. Facts and actual events gave singularly the lie to such
assertions. With what effect? In the hurry of passions and the
intoxication of thought, men appealed to theories which had been
already often produced on the stage of the world,--theories which
have only served to agitate, never to satisfy it.
{xxvi}
Landed property and capital, labour and wages, the artificial
distribution of the means of material happiness amongst men, have
served sometimes as the subjects of unjust recrimination,
sometimes of chimerical expectations. Attacks were made upon
things which the assailants had no right to take; and promises
were made to give things which the promisers had not the power to
give.

I have heard it remarked by clear-sighted men who are good
observers, that this malady of the mind is decreasing, and that
even amongst the labouring classes themselves, false notions as
to the conflict of capital and labour, as to the artificial
settlement of wages, and the intervention of the State in the
distribution of the material means of existence, are in
discredit, and that the ambitious aspirings of the people,
although continuing to be very democratic, have ceased to assume
the form of Socialism.
{xxvii}
I ardently wish it were so: the passionate feelings which find
their field in facts affecting the sphere of material
subsistence, are the rudest, the most rebellious, and the most
recalcitrant to the principles of the moral order: it is easier
to deal with the aspirings of political ambition than with the
ardent cravings for physical advantages. But I fear, I confess,
that errors such as those which presented themselves under the
names of Socialism and Communism, and which recently made so much
noise, are not so discarded as we might hope them to be; that
they are actually without a mouthpiece is not a sufficient proof
of their defeat; materialism, and the evil instincts to which it
leads or from which it springs, have penetrated very far amongst
us, and a long period of social and moral progress in the midst
of a society which has been well ordered will be necessary in
order to surmount this danger.

Several years ago I put to a great manufacturer of Manchester,
who had been Mayor of that immense centre of industry, the
following question: "What amongst you is the proportion between
the laborious and well-conducted workmen, who live respectably in
their homes, set aside money in the savings' bank, and apply for
books at the people's library, and the idle and disorderly
workmen who pass their time at taverns, and only work so much as
is necessary to furnish them with the means of subsistence?"
{xxviii}
After a moment's reflection, he replied: "The former are
two-thirds of the whole number." After congratulating him, I
added, "Allow me to put one more question. If you had amongst you
great disorders, seditious assemblages, and riots, what would be
the result?" "With us, sir," he said without hesitation, "the
honest men are braver than the ill-conditioned ones." I
congratulated him this time still more.

In these questions I had touched the root of the evil which
afflicts us. It is to their shortcomings in morality, to their
disorderly lives, that we must attribute the favour with which
the working classes receive the fallacious theories that menace
social order. The condition of these classes is hard and full of
distressing accidents; whoever regards it closely, and with a
little fairness and sympathy, cannot fail to be deeply moved by
all the sufferings which they have to support, the privations
from which they have no chance of escape, and the efforts which
they must make to ensure themselves a living at best monotonous
and full of hazard.
{xxix}
The happy ones of the earth feel sometimes alarm and irritation,
when they hear from the pulpit descriptions purer and more true
to the life than are to be met with in philanthropical novels, of
the precarious state and distresses of the lower orders. Beyond
doubt, from pictures of this nature should be scrupulously
excluded everything that would seem to excite sentiments of
hostility, or that would set one class against another; still as
the upper classes must resign themselves to the spectacle, it
devolves more especially upon Christian Painters to place it
before them.
{xxx}
Nothing but strong moral convictions, and the habits of well
living amongst the labouring classes, can furnish them with
efficacious means of struggling against the temptations and
resisting the ambitious yearnings, suggested to them by the
spectacle of the world which surrounds them,--a world now at
length transparent to all, a world of which the stir, the noise,
the accidents, the adventures, penetrate with rapidity even to
the workshops of our cities and the remotest recesses of our
villages. What influence shall protect the masses of the people
from the irritating and demoralizing effect of such a sight,
unless it be the influence of religious principles, the moral
discipline which religion maintains, and the moral serenity which
religion diffuses over the rudest existences and the lives
subjected to the greatest privations? And it is precisely
religious belief and religious discipline, Christian faith and
Christian law, which are now being attacked and undermined, and
this far more in the obscurer classes, than in the brilliant
regions of society!

{xxxi}

These attacks are of a general although of diverse nature, and of
unequal violence; they occur in the bosom of Roman Catholicism,
of Protestantism, and of scientific philosophy; some are direct,
open, impetuous; others indirect and full of reserves, and of a
tenderness sometimes affected, sometimes sincere. Christianity
counts amongst its enemies fanatics who persecute it in the name
of reason and of liberty, as well as adversaries who criticise it
with moderation and prudence; the latter admit its practical
deservings, are distressed by the wounds which they inflict, and,
in the very act of dealing their blows, seek to lessen their
force. This diversity of attack is a proof of the trouble, of the
incertitude, and of the incoherence which reign in men's
opinions, both upon religious questions and upon questions which
are only simply political and social; many they are who would be
inclined to save such or such a portion of the edifice which they
are battering and seeking to destroy. But the upshot is, that all
these blows are telling upon the same point, and are concurring
to produce the same effect; it is the Christian Religion which
receives them all; it is the right and the empire of Christ
which, in the world learned and unlearned, is subjected to doubt
and exposed to peril.

{xxxii}

I have touched upon all the great questions which are agitating
the human mind and human societies: questions of public right,
questions of political organization, questions of social
institutions, questions of religious belief. Everywhere I
encounter two facts, facts everywhere the same: a great
complication and a great incertitude in man's opinions and in his
efforts. Nothing is simple, no one decided. Problems of every
kind--doubts of every kind weigh upon the thoughts of men, and
oppress their wills; their ambitious aspirings are varied,
immense, but everywhere they hesitate. They may be likened to
travellers already exhausted with fatigue, yet feebly driving to
feel their way through a labyrinth.

Are we then to infer that we are living in an era of decay and
impotence? that we have nothing ourselves to do, nothing to hope
for, in this situation so complicated and so obscure? that we
have only to wait until our lot is decided by that sovereign
power called by some Providence, by others Fate?

{xxxiii}

I am far from thinking so.

Of the men distinguished by singleness of views and strength of
convictions whom I have known, I consider the Marshal Gouvion
Saint-Cyr in these respects the most remarkable. He was one day
detailing his reasons for disapproving of the system of a royal
or imperial guard, or of privileged corps, in an army: "Few,"
said he, "are really brave: the best thing to be done is to
disseminate them in the ranks, where each singly, by his presence
and example, will make eight or ten more brave men around him." I
am no judge as to the value of the Marshal's maxim in a military
sense; I do not believe it to be invariably true, or always
applicable in the political sense; there are epochs at which, in
order to further the progress of which a nation stands in need,
to withdraw it from its embarrassments or to rouse it from its
apathy, the most urgent thing to be done, and the plan the most
efficacious, is to form in its bosom picked bodies of men (the
number is immaterial), and then to incorporate with them others
possessing distinguished qualities, and animated by the same
spirit, decided in their opinions, and resolute in their action,
single of purpose, and full of confidence: these would soon
attract to themselves as associates many others who would never,
without such impulse, begin to move in the same path.
{xxxiv}
We are, I believe, at an era which calls for such a mode of
influencing society, and which authorises us to expect success if
we adopt it.

I can never be accused of ignoring or extenuating the evil which
torments us upon all the points which I have just indicated, the
rights of nations, the civil organization of society and its
economy, moral and religious belief. In all these directions an
evil wind is blowing, an evil current is hurrying away a part of
French society, and it is my constant design so to arouse the
moral sense of the people, and its good sense, as to make them
attentive to the existence of the ill, and solicitous for its
removal.
{xxxv}
But at the side of this fact, so deplorable and so full of peril,
a fact of contrary and salutary nature is occurring and
developing itself: a good wind there also is which is blowing, a
good current which is impelling us forwards;--at the same time
that violent and revolutionary theories are being diffused, the
principles of legal order, and of liberties, serving mutually to
control and check one another, are proclaimed and maintained; the
maxims and the sentiments of the spirit of peace are heard at
least as loudly pronounced, as the souvenirs and the traditions
of the spirit of adventure and conquest; the sound principles of
political economy have defenders no less zealous than the
presumptuous and dreamy theories of Socialism; Spiritualism
raises its voice high at the side of Materialism; Christianity is
advancing at the same time as Incredulity, and with a progress
also distinguished by its scientific method and its practical
applications.
{xxxvi}
Following respectively their different objects, there are on both
sides groups of men of strong convictions, activity, and
influence, who hope for and pursue the triumph of their several
causes. Like the ardent huntsman of Bürgers ballad, France is
solicited by two Genii, ever at her side, ever present, urgent,
contrary. Since the commencement of the nineteenth century, our
history is made up of this great struggle and of its
vicissitudes, of the series of victories gained and defeats
sustained by these two forces, which are disputing the future of
our country.

They find a field of action in a people of quick, various, and
keen feelings, prone to generous impulses, full of human
sympathies and mobility, at this moment chilled and intimidated
by the checks imposed upon their ambitious yearnings, by the
disappointments which have befallen their hopes, and so brought
back by actual experience to confine their aspirations within the
modest limits of good sense; more occupied with the perils of
their situation than with the rights of thought, but always
remarkable for intelligence and sagacity; friendly to liberty
even when they dread its abuse, and to order although they only
defend it at the last extremity; more touched by virtue than
shocked by vice; honest in their instincts and moral judgments in
spite of the weakness of their moral belief and their complacent
indulgence of men whom they do not esteem; and always ready, in
spite of their doubts and their alarms, to recur to the noble
desires which they have the air of no longer entertaining.

{xxxvii}

We have in all this evidently matter to encourage the good genius
of France. The life of nations is neither easier nor less mixed
with good and evil, with successes and reverses, than the life of
individuals; but assuredly, in spite of what is wanting to it,
and in spite of its sorrows, the actual state of our country, as
well as its long history, open a wide field to the efforts and
the hopes of the men of elevated, resolute, and honest minds, who
are occupying themselves in earnest with its destiny.

{xxxviii}

What, in order to attain their object, can be, ought to be, the
conduct of the men engaged in this patriotic design, men who have
it at heart to second the good current and to stem the evil
current, which have both set in amongst us? Upon what conditions
and by what means can we hope to pass through the sieve of good
sense and of moral sense the confused ideas which plague us, and
to find an issue for the public out of the doubts and hesitation
which are a source of languor and enervation to the soul?

Political Liberty and Belief in Religion, the movement of society
in advance and the impulse of the soul towards eternity, Free
Government and Christianity, these are the two forces to which we
should recur, and the only ones capable of remedying this disease
of trouble and doubt which afflict both our thoughts and our
conduct, and which at one time impairs, at another paralyses, our
understanding.

{xxxix}

I have no intention here to speak of political liberties in the
abstract, and of their necessity either to a country in order to
guarantee to it a good administration at home and abroad, or to
individuals in order to secure their interests, moral and
material. The right of France to these liberties, and their
opportuneness to her at this moment, have recently been set in
their clearest light, and established in all their force on their
highest stage, in the bosom of the legislative body. [Footnote 2]
It is solely because of its influence upon that ill of our epoch,
the complication of questions and the hesitations of opinion,
that I speak here of political liberty; I regard it as one of the
two great remedies against this ill.

    [Footnote 2: Discourse of M. Thiers, _Sur les libertés
    nécessaires et sur la liberté de la presse_, in the séances of
    the 11th January, 1864, 13th February, 1866, 30th January,
    7th, 8th, 15th, 21st, and 22nd February, 1868.]

{xl}

When all questions are agitated pell mell, and all minds are
perplexed, the first salutary result consequent upon liberty is
that it sets all opinions and all intentions in contact and in
conflict. At first, and for a time, this simultaneous invasion of
so many complex facts, and of so many diverse and contrary ideas,
does but add to the perplexity of the questions and to the
confusion of minds; but little by little, and quickly too,
provided liberty endures, the winnowing process produces its
effect upon the questions, and light penetrates into the
understandings: the different facts, and problems which these
facts suggest, are set in turn in their place, and valued only
for as much as they are worth; actors and spectators grow
accustomed to them all, and begin to form more precise
conceptions of them.

Little by little order takes the place of confusion; opinions
define and classify themselves; and instead of the fermentation
of opinions in a chaotic confusion, we have a contest in regular
form, and upon intelligible issues, I repeat that a result so
salutary cannot be obtained unless upon the condition of a
liberty universal, real, and durable; partial or transitory, it
would serve only to aggravate the perturbation, and to unsettle
opinions still more.

{xli}

Political liberty has a second effect, one, perhaps, still more
important: it forces all questions to submit to the test of
practical experiment. As long as the liberty is only in the
thought, it is vain and intemperate; everything seems permitted,
and everything possible to those who are not responsible for the
effects of an act: man's thought, intoxicated with itself, runs
riot in the vagueness of infinite space and time. But when to
liberty of thought is superadded political liberty,--when,
instead of treating questions speculatively, they have to be
virtually solved,--when men are charged as real actors to
transform into facts their own opinions or those of the
spectators who are looking on,--then it is that the human mind,
making its own strength the object of its reflection and
examination, is driven to the admission that it does not dispose
at its own will of the world, and that even in order to satisfy
itself, it must confine itself to the limits imposed by good
sense, by justice, and by possibility,--then it is that it learns
to govern itself, and to hold itself responsible for its acts.
Responsibility engenders discretion, but is itself engendered by
liberty alone.

{xlii}

Our own times have furnished us with three great examples of the
salutary empire exercised by political liberty in furnishing an
escape from the embarrassment of situations, and in solving
questions the most different--I might say the most contrary--in
their nature. We have only to cast our eyes over the contemporary
histories of England, of the United States of America, and of
France herself, to discover their examples and their authority as
precedents.

From 1792 to 1818, England was engaged in struggles first against
the spirit of Revolution, and then against that termed by M.
Benjamin Constant the spirit of usurpation and of conquest. With
what forces and with what arms did England support these two
formidable struggles? With the forces and the arms of political
liberty.
{xliii}
It was by the elections, by publicity, by discussions continued
in the midst of the energetic manifestations of all the parties,
--it was by appeals to public sentiments and opinions,--it was by
setting in action all the springs of a free and representative
government, that England succeeded in her resistance to the most
potent revolutionary and military movement which ever agitated
Europe. That struggle over, after the lapse of a few years,
during which the presiding policy prolonged its tenure of office
by pursuing a pacific course, England entered upon quite a
different path; sometimes under the Government of Liberals,
sometimes of Conservatives, the policy of Reform took the place
of the policy of resistance; and since 1828, it is in this path
that England is progressing; it is in favour of innovations,
sometimes prudent, sometimes daring, and sometimes, perhaps,
improvident, that she is exerting to the utmost all the forces of
the country, all the strength of its government. Political
Liberty has in turn, and with similar efficacy, served the cause
and assured the success, at one time of a policy of resistance,
at another of that of progress.

{xliv}

The United States of America have been subjected to a still ruder
trial. Their government has had to struggle against the
insurrection of a notable portion of their people, and against a
civil war entered upon in the name of a principle, popular
independence. The central power of the Confederation has resisted
an insurrection radically illegitimate, which was entered upon to
maintain the slavery of a part of the human race; it defended the
national existence of the State against the attempts which were
made to dislocate it, and which were founded upon the same
motive; and after a civil war which endured four years, in the
course of which each side was prodigal of efforts and sacrifices,
and displayed an equal energy, the policy of resistance triumphed
by the medium of a republican power, and the liberal idea of the
abolition of slavery vanquished the revolutionary idea of the
right of insurrection.
{xlv}
It is to political liberty, and to the potent force of the
institutions and manners founded under her influence, that this
victory of the great right of humanity was due; and, the war once
over, the civil _régime_ of American society resumed its
action, still stormy and perilous, but free from every anarchical
usurpation or military tyranny.

Newer to France, its principles less understood by it, and not so
well applied, Political Liberty has not on these accounts
remained without producing there some fruits. In 1830 and in 1848
France passed through two revolutions, one of which had been
preceded by sixteen the other by eighteen years of civil liberty.
Neither of the _régimes_ in operation immediately previous
to each revolution sufficed to prevent it, but they greatly
changed its character and weakened its effects. In 1830, thanks
to the instantaneous intervention of the public authorities which
owed their existence to the previous _régime_, a regular
government was promptly established, and a new constitutional
monarchy succeeded to that which had just fallen.
{xlvi}
On the instant it set itself in opposition to the revolutionary
movement which had given it birth; but the principle of respect
for the Law and for Liberty exercised, as yet, so incomplete and
feeble an empire upon men's minds, that the anarchical
fermentation of opinions prolonged themselves even after the
victory. The doctrine of Religious Liberty, in particular, was
more than once lost sight of and violated: in February, 1831, the
funeral ceremonies in the church of Saint Germain l'Auxerrois,
celebrated in commemoration of the Duke de Berri, who had been
assassinated eleven years previously, was not allowed to be
tranquilly celebrated; a violent and riotous mob sacked the
archiepiscopal palace of Paris, and was the cause of the church,
which had furnished them with a pretext for violence, being
closed for many months.
{xlvii}
In 1848, on the contrary, during a revolutionary crisis which set
men's passions far more furiously in movement, and which was more
profound than that of 1830, neither the liberty of Religion nor
the peace of the churches was disturbed; the ruling authorities
were exposed to anarchy for a longer period, but the rights of
the individual were respected, and he might affirm himself free
even in the midst of the public troubles and perils. Thirty-four
years of civil Liberty have not disappeared with the governments
which were then in force without leaving their traces; their
traditions and their examples have evidently exercised a salutary
influence both upon the last Revolution, and upon the Reaction
which put an end to it.

That this influence may still surmount the great trials through
which governments and people may have both to pass, two things
are necessary: the one is, that civil liberty should form real
citizens, that nations as well as governments should learn to
make use of their rights, and to submit to the limits imposed by
their laws; the other is, that each country and ruling power, at
the same time that they are culling the fruits of civil liberty,
should accept its inconveniences and its perils.
{xlviii}
A free government is not exempt from either vices or dangers; it
does not dispense men from the necessity of contemplating with
resignation the imperfection of every work of man as well as of
every human situation.

Free institutions are not of themselves enough: they leave room
to nations for--what do I say? they demand from them--great
activity and much responsibility. If nations strive to elude
their part of responsibility and omit to exercise their share of
action, free institutions become idle words; they are no longer
anything but a picture-frame without the picture--a drama
written, not represented--in which the actors fail to assume
their parts or to co-operate to produce the _dénouement_.

It is the absolute necessity of this co-operation of the public
in the life of free government which gives so capital an
importance to the popular beliefs, moral and religious.
{xlix}
When I say beliefs, moral and religious, I attach to the word a
sense at once the largest and most positive: these beliefs may
have different dogmas and different internal organizations; I am
not one of those who believe that Romanists are necessarily
hostile to civil liberty, or that the doctrine of the right of
private judgment impels Protestants inevitably to anarchy. What
is indispensable is, that in their diversity the beliefs styled
moral and religious should be beliefs really moral and
religious--beliefs which recognize and attest that man is
naturally moral and religious, and which assign to man something
essentially to distinguish him from the material world in the
midst of which he lives, in short a soul. Nations animated by
such beliefs are the only ones which accept really under a free
_régime_ a large share both of its responsibility and of its
active duties: it is only when so animated that they give
consequently to civil Liberty the potent support of which it
stands in need, for it is only then that they seriously believe
in the existence of moral Liberty. The world has seen more than
once how feeble and precarious an affection men feel for liberty
when they no longer believe in the human soul; and with what a
tame complacency, when they regard themselves as an ephemeral
combination of material elements, they submit to the empire of
the material forces which assail them.
{l}
Many in these days are of opinion that it is enough in a free
country if religious beliefs are freely practised by those who
profess them, and externally respected by others, and that all
which can be expected from them is an indirect influence in
favour of the maintenance of order. But this is a complete
misapprehension of the great facts of nature and of human
society. There are two things which never fail finally to prove
incompatible, Liberty and Falsehood. Whether from prudence or in
tenderness for the opinions of those who surround him, a man
isolated in position may preserve silence, or may utter even a
falsehood as to what he thinks and believes respecting the
supreme questions concerning Man's nature and Man's destiny; this
is possible, for such cases are seen; a single isolated
individual is so paltry a thing, and passes so quickly, that his
silence or his falsehood can exercise but little influence upon
the vast ocean of society in which he is plunged: but the
falsehood or the silence of a free people from feelings of
respect or of prudence cannot be regarded as possible; their
opinions and their sentiments concerning the supreme questions of
humanity manifest themselves necessarily, and carry with them in
such manifestation their natural and logical consequences.
{li}
To engage a free people to treat with tenderness and respect, to
refrain from contesting, perhaps even to reduce to practice,
moral and religious beliefs in which it does not itself believe,
is to give to it not only a very discreditable but a very
impracticable counsel. Liberty in the domain of civil society
calls for and infallibly induces veracity in the region of the
intellect; a free country can never escape in its public and
practical life from the effectual influence of any ideas, whether
moral or immoral, religious or irreligious, which may happen to
be fermenting and spreading themselves abroad in the minds of the
people.

{lii}

I leave generalities and call things by their proper names; in
all that I have just said respecting beliefs moral and religious,
it is of Christianity that I am thinking. That Christianity on
the one hand is necessary to the firm establishment of civil
Liberty amongst us, and on the other hand is very reconcilable
with the principles and the rights of modern society, is what I
have at heart to establish in the series of Meditations which I
am now publishing.

I do not deceive myself by imagining that it will be an easy task
to effect this reconciliation, and to restore at the present day
to Christianity, the object of so many attacks, that influence of
which the interests most dear to us, Liberty as well as Order,
stand equally in need. Still, I believe that success is not only
here possible but infallible. I was speaking just now of two
contrary currents which had set in in the domain of intellect as
well as of Politics, and which lead to the formation of groups
profoundly different, Conservatives and Revolutionists, Liberals
and Radicals, Spiritualists and Materialists, Christians and
Disbelievers.
{liii}
No one of these groups really represents a dominant party
in France: amidst them and around them there is a scattered and
hesitating population, sometimes heedless, sometimes anxious,
vacillating alternately between innovations and its traditions,
wearied of its agitations and of its doubt, and not seeing
clearly the quarter from which shall come that government of
truth, of liberty, and of order, which is to give repose to man's
thoughts and life and enable him again to rise. In this confused
and wavering multitude there are to be found men whose ways of
thinking, whose desires, and sometimes whose tastes, are, to
appearance, very decided, but whose opinions or wills are in
reality neither clear, determined, nor pronounced. We have here a
vast field open to all the winds, accessible to every labourer, a
field ever fertile, and, although harassed by various and
incoherent attempts, still a field only demanding good seed to
bear an abundant harvest. If we sound the depths of French
society in all directions, and study it in all its elements and
under all its aspects, we shall find it to be as I have here
described it.
{liv}
Above and below, in all classes and parties, amongst the powerful
and the humble, the learned and ignorant, we shall find
everywhere, on one side groups of persons of resolute purposes
devoting their activity to the service of opinions and causes the
most contrary; on the other a wavering, vacillating crowd, in
search of a path to follow, and impelled, perhaps, in the most
different directions. Upon this population it is that we must
act; it is amongst them that there are immense and decisive
conquests to make; good aspirations, moral and religious
instincts, those necessary preliminaries to faith in Christ, are
by no means wanting; but to conduct them to their goal, to
transform them into positive and effectual convictions, we must
accommodate ourselves to the general character of this
population; we must be of our time, and speak its language; an
adequate satisfaction must be offered, and a necessary confidence
must be inspired, before we can expect that a population, anxious
to ensure the rights and the interests of its new life, should
give in return its soul.
{lv}
It is not a complacent indulgence that I am counselling, it is
not concessions that I ask from the contemporary defenders of
Christianity; what their mission demands is, that they should
know, that they should comprehend, that they should love the
society to which they are addressing themselves, and that they
should zealously occupy themselves with it to rally it under
their banner, not to cast it prostrate or to humiliate it under
their blows.

Not only must their work have this character, but when it has it
prospers, and the nineteenth century has seen instances of such
success. I shall only cite two, which occurred at different
epochs, and in which the modes of action were different. Why did
Chateaubriand and the Father Lacordaire exercise upon their
times, and especially upon the youth of their times, so
extraordinary an influence?
{lvi}
First, because the awakening of Christianity which they provoked
was a thing in harmony with the popular instincts, but also
because, in the midst of the religious reaction of which they
were the organs, they each of them, by degrees and by different
processes, respectively inspired the France of their days with
the sentiment that they were its children and its friends, that
they shared its new aspirations, that they accepted its political
transformation, and that it was not in order to reconstitute it
on its ancient basis that they wished it to be Christian. They
more than once astounded, disquieted, even shocked their country,
the one by his political career, the other by his monastic zeal;
still their popularity continued, and they influenced it, the one
by causing Christianity to resume her place in the modern
literatures of France, the other notwithstanding his having
re-established in France the monastic orders. The reason of this
is, that in spite of the prejudices which it entertained against
them, and the opinions in which it differed from them, France
felt itself understood and honoured by them; it rejoiced in their
glory, because it believed in their sympathy.

{lvii}

Men such as M. de Chateaubriand and the Father Lacordaire are
rare; but the spirit which animated them, the comprehension of
their age and country which distinguished them, did not die with
them, nor are they without successors in their work of religion
and patriotism. Beyond a doubt the Faith of Christ and the Church
of Rome have in our days had no champion more eloquent and more
liberal than M. de Montalembert, and worthily the Father
Hyacinthe occupies the pulpit from which once resounded the voice
of the Father Lacordaire. At the side of these names, already
more than once cited by me, I see others start up of a different
origin and with a different physiognomy, but devoted to the same
cause and to the same work.
{lviii}
At the very moment at which I am terminating these Meditations,
two compositions meet my eye, published by men, neither of whom I
have the honour to know, men very different in position and in
ideas: the one a Romanist, the other a Protestant, the one a
great Prelate in his Church, the other a simple Pastor in his;
both firm Christians, and both sympathizers with the instincts,
the aspirations, and the moral and intellectual ideas prevalent
in the present state of French society; both having the
resolution and the ability required in order to present
Christianity to Frenchmen under the form and in the language most
proper to make it penetrate the soul. The one is Monseigneur
Darboy, the Archbishop of Paris, the other, M. Decoppel, pastor
at Alais. The former has just addressed to the clergy of his
diocese, (Lent, 1868,) _A Pastoral Letter upon the Truth of
Christianity_. [Footnote 3] The second presented, on the 7th
of November in the previous year, to the National Evangelical
Conference assembled at Nérac, _A Report as to the Actual
Requirements of Preachers in the Protestant Churches_.
[Footnote 4]

    [Footnote 3: This Pastoral Letter was published at full length
    in the _Gazette de France_, on the 25th and 26th of
    February, 1868.]

    [Footnote 4: This report was published, at Toulouse, by the
    Society for the Publication of Religious Books, 1868.]

{lix}

I was struck, in spite of their diversity, by the substantially
analogous character of these two documents, and I cite them here
because I would set in a clear light the great fact which each
reveals, that a general and contemporaneous work is now being
prosecuted in order to maintain and reestablish the harmony
between the Christianity of former ages and the spirit of the
present century, a work of which the mission is to solve, as far
as the solution can rest with man, the question whether our epoch
is Christian.

"Religion," says the Archbishop of Paris, "is a fact that was
contemporary with primitive man--a fact present in all ages, ever
paramount, ever visible, although not everywhere to the same
degree. Never was there wanting in the world a voice to remind
man of the truths of Religion, whether it proceeded from the tent
of the Patriarch, the synagogue of the Jew, or the church of the
Catholic; whether it was heard in the whisperings of a simple and
upright conscience, or emanated from legislators or prophet
raised up by Heaven, or was the voice of God himself incarnate,
constituting Himself the preceptor and the model of His
creatures, humanity was never so imperfect as that these lofty
lessons did not draw forth from the generously faithful responses
more or less unanimous.

{lx}

"Heathen nations--their history proves it--have preserved
something of these hopes and of the religious dogmas connected
with them. The grandsons of Noah, in dispersing in the plains of
Sennaar, convey to the four quarters of the earth the traditions
which they received from their grandsire, and which are the
common patrimony of the human race. Doubtless these traditions
are gradually altered and deformed by the vain intermixtures of
fables, which owe their origin to the dreamers of the far East
and to the poets of Greece and of Rome; but in the eyes of the
multitude, and particularly of those who are its superiors and
its governors, the grand features of the truth are readily
distinguishable. Thus, the existence of God and the action of
Providence, the distinction of good and of evil, the original
fall of man and the necessity for an atonement, the immortality
of the soul, the rewards and punishments of another life; all
these doctrines, more or less disfigured, it is true, live in the
depths of the conscience of the people.
{lxi}
Even Pagans have their souls by nature Christian, which testify
in favour of justice and virtue; and if Pagans are to be
condemned, says St. Paul, it is not for having ignored God, but
for having neglected to serve Him and to glorify Him.

"At an era nearer to ourselves, three centuries ago, a sorrowful
work was accomplished. Theological disputes led to religious
wars, and by a tearing asunder of ties which it is impossible too
much to deplore, Europe divided itself into Catholics and
Protestants. But in spite of this fatal resolution it remained
Christian, although not in the same degree. Their political
charters and institutions, their civil laws and social habits,
breathe all of Christianity; and the character of their baptism
remains stamped upon their foreheads, which it for ever ennobles.

{lxii}

"And now this fact, which is the common work of so many
generations, made up of beliefs expressed in every kind of manner
and sometimes practised even to heroism, written in books sacred
and profane, engraved on marble and on brass, in institutions and
in laws, in the mind and in the heart of nations--this fact, what
is its moral value, and what its bearing? Are we to be told that
it is purely natural--the spontaneous production of our habits,
the simple result of our instincts--and, so to say, an
irrepressible necessity of mankind? Even in this case it is
divine, as divine as our nature itself, which was directly
created by God; and so we must recognise and respect Religion as
a thing true, necessary and divine. It is reason, it is common
sense which tells us this.

"But there is more than that, my very dear brethren. This fact,
as it presents itself, so general and so constant, is not merely
the common work of the races of mankind. Our nature, left to its
own resources and its proper energy, is incapable of producing it
and of continuing it with a brilliancy that so endures, and with
a force which renews itself every day.
{lxiii}
It is also, it is more especially the providential and prodigious
effect of a cause to which all of us are subject, men and
nations, and which here shows itself that it is so by giving to
its effects a supernatural character. ... Supernatural means were
necessary, that is to say, a continual action of God always in
relation to the varying exigencies of each different age, and the
constant requirements of humanity, in order that the person of
the Revealer having disappeared, and His direct action being no
longer visible, His teachings, His spirit, and His institutions
should be maintained in the world in a manner authentic,
infallible, and triumphant. In a single word, there was necessary
a perpetual assistance of God, accrediting the mission of His
envoys by extraordinary facts--facts of a superhuman power,
miraculously protecting their work against the consequences of
the weaknesses of some and of the perversity of others,
intervening with supernatural _éclat_ to enable the mission
to develop itself amongst nations incessantly, to act more and
more efficaciously upon them in spite of their shortcomings and
their revolts, and to aid them and to support them in their
religious and predestined course.

{lxiv}

"This paramount action, this divine action, is manifested in the
highest degree in Religion. After the miracles and the prophecies
of ancient times, after the Jewish nation, whose history is a
prophecy and one unceasing miracle, Christianity appears with
signs so supernatural that it is impossible for us to deceive
ourselves. Miraculous agency appears at every turn. The Saviour,
and what he affirms concerning himself, His discourses, His
character and His actions, the difficulties of His undertaking,
the marvels of wisdom and sanctity which He accomplished;
finally, the survival and the development of His work through
centuries; everything here forces us to recur to the fact of the
direct intervention of God--sole possible means of finding a
satisfactory explanation of such grand results."

{lxv}

The circular letter is throughout but a development of the ideas
recapitulated in the passages of the text which I have cited--a
development sometimes so prudent and so little precipitate as to
assume the character of extreme circumspection, yet always
faithful to the same thought. The writer indulges in no
discussion purely theological, makes no pompous display of
ecclesiastical authority, engages in no polemics with any class
of dissent. When I affirm that we have here the History of
Humanity, a correct appreciation of the ideas and behaviour of
man in his different stages; Religion in general and Christianity
in particular; considered as a grand fact--a fact universal and
permanent, traceable everywhere and in all times, even amongst
the heathens; a fact which survived all the divisions, the
scientific struggles, and the civil wars which took place amongst
Christians themselves, particularly amongst Roman Catholics and
Protestants, all of whom are Christians, according to the writer,
by the same title, if not in the same degree;
{lxvi}
a fact at once human and divine--human by its accordance with
man's nature, divine by the direct and supernatural action of
God, of God the creator, personal, free, whose presence and power
reveal themselves, now by the general and permanent order of
events, now by special miracles, judged by Him necessary for the
accomplishment of His designs; the Christian faith thus
associated with the whole life of the human race; the principle
of the supernatural and miraculous, as well as the dogmas of
Christianity, proclaimed aloud, but without controversy, without
any appeal made to any external or exclusive dominion; homage
rendered to the right of the "conscience simple and upright" at
the same time as to the biblical traditions and to the authority
of the Church: when I affirm that all this is here, am I not
justified in also affirming that Christianity is here presented
under an aspect the least likely to shock opponents, the most
proper to rally the minds of the hesitating? Is it not in effect,
on the part of a Prince of the Church of Rome, the acceptance and
pursuit of that great work of harmony between the Christian
Religion and Modern Society, which is manifesting itself in so
many analogous manners and under banners so very diverse?

{lxvii}

The pastor of Alais chooses a subject more limited, but is more
vivid in thought and more incisive in manner than the Archbishop
of Paris. It is not the general history of Christianity which he
traces; it is its actual state, its religious bias and
requirements in the nineteenth century which he observes and
describes. His Report is no work of philosophy, but is penetrated
and animated throughout by a real liberalism. He does not go in
search of polemics: on the contrary, he recommends little use to
be made of them; but when the occasion or the necessity is there,
he does not evade it, but enters upon the arena unhesitatingly
and without compromise.

"There are," he says, "exigencies upon which all men concur in
insisting, and these depend upon the general state of men's minds
in our epoch. Each age has its ideas and its sentiments, its
prejudices and its doubts, a certain moral physiognomy which the
preacher encounters more or less in our congregations.
{lxviii}
Our auditors, perhaps we are too prone to forget this, do not
live isolated from their contemporaries; they are of their time,
they inhale its intellectual and moral atmosphere, they follow
its movement, they share in its shortcomings and in its
aspirations. We may indeed affirm that now more than ever men are
of their time, thanks to the rapidity with which ideas circulate
and diffuse themselves. Although men read less in France than in
many other countries, they read more than they did formerly. In
France, for good or for evil, there are influences at work which
have to be taken into account. One of our first duties, as
preachers, is, then, to know our age, to be attentive to every
symptom which can reveal to us its spirit and its tendencies. To
neglect this duty is to expose ourselves to the risk of
addressing, so to say, fictitious auditors, that is, men who
neither have the ideas nor feel the sentiments, nor think of the
objections which we attribute to them.

{lxix}

"In the midst of the discordant voices heard now-a-days, it is
easy, alas! to distinguish one high above the others--it is that
of incredulity; not as in the last century, marked by a raillery
or levity, but by an earnestness and a high tone, occasionally
even by a certain melancholy, and being for these very reasons
more seductive. It is in favour of the progress of liberty, of
the dignity of the soul, that is to say, of everything which is
noblest and most sacred to man, that that voice addresses our
generation, and invites it to bid for ever adieu to the faith of
its infancy. These sad words, which pretend to toll the knell of
Christianity, express but too faithfully the incredulity dominant
now-a-days in the elevated regions of science and of thought,
whence it is diffused over all the classes of society. It is
impossible to deceive ourselves; we are now in presence of a
fresh and a great conspiracy, not only against the faith of
Christ, but against every religious faith. The leaders of
incredulity proclaim aloud that the cycle of Religions is
definitively closed, and that we have, once for all, to efface
God from our thoughts and from our lives, just as if God were an
obsolete hypothesis, with which modern science has nothing to do.

{lxx}

"This Atheism is so much the more dangerous and contagious in
these days, that it does not appear in the shape of a mere revolt
or falling off of the mind, but as a generous doctrine, having
for objects the enfranchisement of nations, and their delivery
from the yoke of priests and of tyrants, who, it is supposed, are
combined in order to prey upon them. One of its principal adepts,
Guillaume Marr, exclaimed, a few years ago: 'The faith in a
personal and living God is the origin, the fundamental cause of
the miserable state of society in which we exist. The idea of a
God is the key-stone of the arch of the decayed and worm-eaten
civilization. Away with it! The true road to liberty, equality,
and happiness, is Atheism. There is no hope for the earth so long
as man shall cling to heaven by even a thread. ... Let nothing
henceforth stand in the way of the spontaneous action of the
human understanding. Let us teach man that he has no other God
than himself, that he is himself the alpha and omega of all
things, the being paramount, and the reality most real.'

{lxxi}

"Thus contemporary Atheism seeks to conquer the masses by their
weak side, by their democratical and liberal instincts. This is
not a mere system; it is a powerful party which has its
lecturers, its newspapers, its associations, its congresses, and
its Propaganda. A man of earnest meaning, M. Pearson, estimated
at 640,000 copies the number of publications avowedly atheistical
which appeared in England in the course of the year 1851. And it
is not only in England that Atheism is raising its head, it is in
France, Germany, and Italy.

"Far from me the idea of setting in the same category our Radical
Reformers, and the disbelievers and free thinkers who seek to
destroy every faith and all religion! Let us hope that the former
never will go so far as these.
{lxxii}
But, definitively, they openly extend to them a sympathizing
hand; they greet their writings with marked favour; and, say it
we must, when they go so far as to deny the supernatural,
stripping thus Christianity of every divine authority, or when
merely they proclaim the unimportance of dogmas to a religious
life, they are making common cause with Atheism, and working,
without suspecting that they are doing so, at the same work of
destruction.

"But although we have all this to deplore, how many subjects have
we for hope and encouragement! Moments of crisis are the most
painful, but they are not the least fruitful. Sow we do, indeed,
with tears; what matters, after all, that no hymn of triumph
attends our harvest. The thing essential is that we sow. Behold,
how magnificently the ground is in many respects prepared for the
Christian preacher. The mere fact that religious questions are
the fashion of the day gives us an immense advantage, and one by
which we may profit. Is it not very encouraging to know that in
discussing such subjects we are answering to serious demands of
general interest?
{lxxiii}
The contest which divides our churches has been certainly hurtful
to the growth of piety; but has it not also shaken many a soul
from its torpor? Has it not impelled many persons to search after
the truth who were before indifferent? Is it not better to have
to address ourselves to souls troubled if only by doubt, than to
souls plunged in the heavy torpor of indifference?

"After all, our age has its grandeur. Let us not underrate it: we
are not to imitate that ready and vulgar pessimism, which sees
everything dressed in the livery of woe, and which delights to
note the vices and shortcomings of an epoch, without admitting
the virtue to which it can lay just claim, or its generous
aspirations. It is certain that, even where rejecting the dogmas
of Christianity, our age has made immense progress in the social
application of Christianity, and especially in philanthropy. The
age passionately loves liberty, equality, tolerance, and peace;
it insists upon respect for all consciences; it dreams of the
union of all nations; it occupies itself with the material
happiness and the amelioration of all classes in society.
{lxxiv}
Not so rich as other ages in men of a high temper of character,
men really original, our age has nevertheless contributed, more
than others, perhaps, to the general awakening of men to their
rights as individuals, and of _self-government_, and
consequently, to the sentiment of personal responsibility. Here
assuredly we have noble tendencies; precious _points
d'appui_ for the preachers of the Gospel. Let us feel no dread
for this breath of Liberalism which is passing over nations.
Liberty rightly understood leads to the Gospel, as the Gospel
leads to Liberty.

"And now what have we to say to this age so tormented? What ought
we to say to these souls who have confidence in us, and who
demand from us Light and Peace? How often has this question
overwhelmed the Gospel preacher with the sentiment of his
weakness and insufficiency? How often has it made him prostrate
himself in his agony at the feet of the Lord? How often torn from
him the cry of the prophet--'Ah, Lord God, behold I cannot
speak, for I am a child!'

{lxxv}

"Let Christian Science proceed with its work! She has, assuredly,
much to do in these days. In the teeth of the affirmations of
Positivism and of Materialism let her make her own affirmation.
Hers the task to show that the biblical dogmas respecting the
origin of the world and of man are infinitely more rational and
more scientific than all that in these days men seek to
substitute in their place. Hers the task to prove that the
supernatural, far from being antagonistic to the science of
Nature, is as much called for by Nature as by the sentiment of
Religion itself.

"Let Christian Philosophy also accomplish her task. Hers it is to
establish the profound harmony which exists between Reason and
Faith; hers to show that the systems by which men seek to replace
Christianity present to the thought as many difficulties, if not
more, than any which follow from the evangelical dogmas.
{lxxvi}
Hers the task to lay the foundation of a new philosophy with the
materials furnished by Revelation, and by the Christian
Conscience.

"Let Christian Literature equally accomplish her mission! Let her
spread the truth by the means, infinitely diverse, which the
progress of the press has placed at her disposal! Let her make
herself popular; let her put on all forms to combat error; let
her oppose Journal to Journal, Review to Review; and, if it must
be so, Novel to Novel! Let her make herself everything to
everybody; and follow the adversary upon every field, and seize
all his arms.

"And for us Preachers, what have we to do? What this day is our
special mission in the special position in which God has placed
us?"

{lxxvii}

Having come to this, the particular object of his study and of
his Report, made by him to the Evangelical Conference of Nérac,
M. Decoppel enters, as to the Mission and actual work of the
preachers, into details which although they are full of life, and
evince the greatest practical knowledge, apply more especially to
the Protestant Churches of France. Finally, he reverts to the
general question of Christianity by a concluding remark of
general application, but announcing a truth of both practical and
urgent importance for all the Christian Churches.

"What is most essential," says he, "is not so much to defend
Christianity, as to present it to our age, not as an enemy that
comes to anathematize and to combat it, but as a friend that
comes to raise it and save it. Beyond a doubt, we must not fear
to lay stress upon Christian Truth, and to present it with its
most salient angles and its austerest face in advance; but with
anathemas and declamations we must have done. What most is
necessary is, that we address a word of sympathy to the Age; we
must show to it Christianity, I do not say so much in the aspect
fitted to inspire love as in the aspect in which it is loving.
{lxxviii}
Regard St. Paul at Athens. He does not consider himself bound to
confound the idolatry of his auditors; he does quite the
contrary; he knows how to find in their idolatry itself a
_point d'appui_ for the Gospel. Let us do as he did; let us
strive, we also, to find these _points d'appui_, those
keystones upon which the edifice of faith may in these days be
made safely repose. It is more especially true in our country
that Christianity is not known for what it is, and the remark
applies not only to the lower classes of society, but even to the
educated classes, so that when they attack Christianity it is, as
it were, an attack upon a thing unknown. The Age is liberal: let
us show it that the Gospel is still more liberal, and that its
liberality is of the genuine kind. The Age loves science, and
demands a rational faith: let us show it that faith is sovereign
reason, and cannot but profit by every conquest achieved by
science.
{lxxix}
The Age aspires to make progress in every branch of human
activity: let us show it that all genuine progress is contained
in the principles of the Gospel."

I make no more citations. I neither examine nor discuss any of
the particular ideas, or phrases, or words which these two
documents contain: I would solely draw attention to their main
and common characteristic. These writings are not only Christian,
but uncompromisingly Christian; at the same time, they aim at
leading Christianity and Modern Society to understand each other,
to accept each other mutually and freely, and to exercise, the
one upon the other, such an action as shall be salutary to both.
The authors are not authors, or orators, or amateurs in religion,
or in philosophy; they are ecclesiastics by profession, belonging
to different churches who are entering upon this war, regarded by
each both as legitimate and necessary; who are labouring to draw
to it the populations placed naturally under their influence; and
are hoping, without doubt, that their efforts will be successful.

{lxxx}

I think that they are right both in their hope and their
endeavours, and knowing that outside of the groups of persons
pledged to particular opinions or sides in the contests of
religion and politics, there exists a vast population, uncertain
and vacillating, now indifferent, now anxious upon the subject of
religious questions and the relations of Christianity to Modern
Society, I think that this population, which is, in effect,
France, is capable of feeling religious emotions, of being
informed and brought back to the great beliefs of Christianity as
well as to a sentiment of the natural and necessary agreement
between Christian faith and the principles of public Liberty. The
profound desire which I feel, and the hope from which I will not
part, of this great result, have induced me to give still greater
development to these Meditations, and to risk them amidst the
events, the issue of which is obscure, which are now crowding
upon each other, and amidst questions, passions, and interests,
to which such subjects are all very strange.
{lxxxi}
The more I consider the matter, the more I feel persuaded that
France is not so little busied as she would appear to be with
religious questions, and that in the midst of her languor and
fluctuations she has a secret sentiment of their imperishable
grandeur and their practical importance. If this, as I think, is,
at bottom, the public disposition, I may consider myself well
entitled to command attentive listeners. In the course of my long
life, I have seen much and have done somewhat. I have taken part
in the world's affairs. I have quitted it, and am no longer
anything more than a spectator. For twenty years I have been
essaying my tomb. I have gone down into it living, and have made
no effort to issue forth again. Not only have I experience of the
world, but nothing attaches me to it.
{lxxxii}
Could I be still of some service to the two great causes, in my
eyes but one, the cause of Christian Faith in men's souls, and
the cause of Political Liberty in my country, I should await with
thankfulness, in the bosom of my seclusion, the dawn of that
eternal day which "fools call death," says Petrarch:--

  Quel che morir chiaman gli sciocchi.

    Guizot.
    Paris, _April_, 1868.

{lxxxiii}

                Contents.


                                         Page

Preface                                    v

I.   -- Christianity and Liberty            1

II.  -- Christianity and Morality          52

III. -- Christianity and Science           93

IV.  -- Christian Ignorance               128

V.   -- Christian Faith                   153

VI.  -- Christian Life                    190

Appendix. -- Observations upon the Work
             called "Ecce Homo"           213


{lxxxiv}

{1}

      Meditations On Christianity

               in its

     Relation To The Actual State
       Of Society And Opinion.



           First Meditation.

       Christianity And Liberty.


The passionate longing both of men and of nations in these days
for Liberty and Equality, is a fact not only evident but dominant
in modern civilization. Sometimes this desire has for its object
Liberty only, sometimes Equality only, sometimes both
simultaneously. Sometimes the desire is at once intelligent and
respectable, sometimes nothing more than a blind and
ill-regulated impulse.
{2}
Sometimes the feeling displays itself in revolutions, in which it
develops itself in all its intensity; sometimes it fades away,
and subsides amidst the reactions which those very revolutions
have, by their calamities and excesses, called forth. At one time
men vaunt that the problem is solved, at another they are
discouraged, and pronounce it to be insolvable. But whether they
vaunt or are discouraged, the passionate desire continues to
exist, and the problem ever reappears. Such a state of opinion
may be applauded or may be deplored; it may have incense showered
upon it or it may be visited with malediction; but to escape from
it is an impossibility. It remains a trial which humanity is
condemned to pass through; it furnishes it with a task which it
is bound to perform.

But it is not only this fact and this problem with which our
epoch has to deal; at their side there is another not less
important, the solution of which also falls within the mission of
the age. Many of the friends of Liberty and Equality regard
Christianity, and especially Roman Catholicism, as their greatest
enemy.
{3}
In his moments of perverseness and angry waywardness, Voltaire so
treated it. Thousands of men, not only men of intelligence, but a
multitude of others, obscure enough, still not deficient in
activity, speak and act under the empire of the same idea; at one
time brutal, at another hypocritical, the anti-Christian
sentiment is at once ardent and far-spread. Is it well founded?
Is Christianity, after all, the obstacle to the progress of
Liberty and of Equality? Or is it not, on the contrary, rather
true that both already owe much to Christianity, and that both
require its sanction and its support to ensure their legitimate
and durable triumph? The great question of the 19th century
remains in suspense, and social order in peril, so long as that
other question is not solved.

I meet at every step in the Gospels words such as these--"What
shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world, and lose
his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?"
[Footnote 5]

    [Footnote 5: Mark viii. 36, 37.]

{4}

"Fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the
soul; but rather fear Him which is able to destroy both soul and
body in hell." [Footnote 6] "Go ye into all the world, and preach
the Gospel to every creature." [Footnote 7]

    [Footnote 6: Matthew x. 28.]

    [Footnote 7: Mark xvi. 15.]

The dominant idea in the Gospels is the infinite worth of the
human soul, of every human soul. Jesus came to influence and to
save souls, all souls without exception,--souls of the powerful
and of the obscure, of the rich and poor, learned and ignorant,
happy or afflicted. The condition and the salvation of souls is
the foundation of the Christian Religion.

The human soul is no mere word, no mere abstraction, no mere
hypothesis; the soul is the human being himself, the individual
being who feels and thinks, enjoys and suffers, wills and acts,
who observes and knows himself, in the complexity of his actual
condition, and to whom his destiny in remote futurity is an
object of present solicitude.
{5}
To those who confound soul and body, and see in man only a
product, an ephemeral form of matter, I have nothing to say. What
have they to do with the words of the Gospel--with the immense
value attached to a fugitive shadow, deceived according to them
as to its own reality, and only appearing to lose itself
forthwith in nonentity? It is Spiritualists and Christians who
speak with propriety when they discourse in grand and elevated
tones of the human soul; and if they so discourse it is because
they see in every human soul a true being, a real and individual
man, with the grandeur of man's nature and of man's destiny. What
constitutes the essential worth of the human being, of every
human being, is, that he is free to act or not to act, and that
he is morally responsible how he acts. Man believes essentially
in the distinction of moral good and evil and in the obligation
which this entails; he believes that he is at liberty to act up
to it or not as he pleases, that he is responsible for the use
which he makes of his liberty. It is because such is the nature
of man, whether his own conduct is in conformity to it or not,
that the Gospel exalts man so nigh, and accords to him so sublime
a destiny.
{6}
Philosophers, Christian and anti-Christian too, have made great
efforts, in my opinion ill-judged efforts, to solve the problem
of man's liberty in relation to God's prescience; the Gospel
recognises and proclaims human liberty without troubling itself
about the problem of philosophy. The Christian Religion entirely
rests upon the fact which it assumes, that man is a free and
responsible being. Man's liberty is the point from which
Christianity starts in all that she says to humanity, and in
every command that she gives to humanity.

Christianity, then, is essentially liberal, in favour of all men,
and of them as men; by her elementary and fundamental idea of
man's nature, she founds his liberty upon the most solid basis
and the broadest right that human thought can conceive. The most
daring of the writers on public law never carried to so high a
point as the Gospel has done either the native universal dignity
of man's nature or the consequences derivable from this fact.

{7}

Christianity does not confine itself to this;--after having laid
down the principle of Liberty, it gives to it the practical
sanction which Liberty requires: it establishes the right of
resistance to oppression. The priests and the chiefs of the
synagogue at Jerusalem "commanded them (Peter and John) not to
speak at all, nor teach in the name of Jesus;" but Peter and John
answered them and said unto them, "Whether it be right in the
sight of God to hearken unto you more than unto God, judge ye."
[Footnote 8]

    [Footnote 8: Acts iv. 18,19.]

Having been again summoned before the high priest, who says to
them, "Did not we straitly command you that ye should not teach
in this name?" Peter replies, "We ought to obey God rather than
men." [Footnote 9]

    [Footnote 9: Acts v. 28, 29.]

The multitude joins its acts of violence to the injunctions of
the authorities. Stephen, the first Christian Deacon, avows his
faith before the multitude, and falls the first martyr to the
principle of Christian resistance. [Footnote 10]

    [Footnote 10: Acts vii. 59.]

{8}

The most zealous of the persecutors of Stephen, Paul of Tarsus,
who had become Christian, is, in his turn, stoned and left for
dead by the multitude of Lystra and Iconium; in his turn he
resists the multitude, and returns again to Lystra and Iconium,
"confirming the souls of the disciples, and exhorting them to
continue in the faith," and representing to them that it is by
much tribulation that we must enter into the kingdom of God.
[Footnote 11] Resistance to oppression is an essential principle
of Christianity, and the definitive guarantee of Liberty.

    [Footnote 11: Acts xiv. 19, 22.]

It is the peculiar characteristic and honour of Christianity that
it derives both the right of resistance to oppression, and the
principle of even Liberty itself, not from the temporal and
transitory interests of earthly life, but from the moral and
eternal interests of the soul. At the same time that it affirms
the principle of Liberty and proclaims its consequences, it
equally affirms and proclaims the principles and rights of
Authority.
{9}
I have referred to this upon another occasion; when Jesus made
that reply to the question of the Pharisees whether it was
permissible or not to pay tribute to Caesar, "Render unto Cæsar
the things which are Cæsar's; and unto God the things that are
God's," he established in principle the distinction between the
religious life and civil life, between the Church and the State.
Cæsar has no right to intervene with his laws and material force,
between the soul of man and his God; and on his side the faithful
worshipper of God is bound to fulfil towards Cæsar the duties
which the necessity of the maintenance of public order imposes.
[Footnote 12]

    [Footnote 12: Meditations upon the Essence of Christianity,
    p. 278. London: 1864.]

It was by affirming and defending religious liberty, the highest
and proudest of all liberties, that modern civilization
commenced. The principle and right of liberty once deeply rooted
in the soul, the flower and the fruit of this potent germ have
strongly developed themselves in the course of ages, and expanded
with more or less of promptitude and fecundity, according as the
seasons were favourable or unfavourable; but upon the whole,
history has confirmed the Gospel.

{10}

Of all the Religions which have appeared in the world,
Christianity is the only one which conquered by means of Liberty,
and which was founded upon Liberty; the only one which has been
able to assume and keep her place amidst the greatest diversity
of social institutions, and which in them all, as exigencies
required, accepted and supported at one time authority, at
another liberty.

Even if I wished, it would be impossible for me in this place to
refer to more than the general and evident facts of history. If I
remount to the origins of the different religions, I observe that
Christianity was the only one which did not appeal to force; she
was the only one which did not employ force to issue forth from
her cradle and to grow. During more than three centuries she
alone combated and conquered her adversaries by vanquishing souls
in the name of truth and by the arms of truth.
{11}
If I interrogate the results, I find that three great religious
establishments--Paganism, Bouddhism, and Mahometanism--have
held, and, with Christianity, still hold a great place in the
world. Paganism, after some fair but brief moments of progress,
attained to nothing but the anarchy of the Greek and Roman
Republics, and the despotic decay of the Roman Empire. Bouddhism
did nothing but generate the fantastic superstitions and the
enervating abstractions of a pantheistic mythology, amidst the
immobility of the castes and the stagnation of absolute power.
Mahometanism carried into every quarter to which she penetrated
only the yoke of force, the incurable animosity of races, the
sterility of conquest. Christianity alone accepted the spirit of
Liberty and Progress where she found it already existing in the
soul of man and in human societies, and where she did not find it
she awakened it.

Let me not be accused of forgetting that since the triumph of
Christianity, oppressive tyrannies and odious persecutions have
occurred in, different Christian societies in the name of the
Christian faith.
{12}
No one more than I deplores and detests such facts. They were the
work of the sins of men, not of the principles of Christianity,
which, far from authorising them, condemns them. Water from the
purest source is changed and polluted in its course over the
surface of the earth, after it has been exposed to the stormy
atmospheric influences. In creating man free, God left him a part
and a share in his own destiny and in the events which determine
it. Christianity, emanating from God, marks out and combats
uncompromisingly all evil desires and bad motives, all the
excesses and all the weaknesses of man's selfishness: she has not
destroyed them; she did not at once restore innocence to man nor
make him a present of virtue: he is bound to labour in the work
of his own control and of his own reformation; the Gospel is a
Mirror in which, if he looks at himself, he may, it is true,
behold the stains upon his soul and upon his life, but those
stains proceed from himself, and not from the mirror, which only
enables him to see them.
{13}
When we lay to the charge of the Christian Religion the fatal
errors, the unlawful passions and actions which have appeared
under its name in the history of Christian Societies, we acquit
without reason men, whether princes or nations, learned or
ignorant, of the responsibility that weighs upon them; we ignore
what Christianity commands and what she forbids; we demand from
her that which she has not promised.

Of history thus far. I now confine myself to the present epoch
and to the problems which the actual relations of Christianity to
Liberty present. What are the principal obstacles at the present
day in the way of the establishment of a real and lasting
Liberty, and what are the means within our reach to surmount
them? In other terms, which express my meaning more exactly, What
are our infirmities to retard, what our strength to accelerate,
the establishment of a free government? Is Christianity an
obstacle to us in this work or a help, an ill or a remedy?

{14}

It is with a profound feeling of sadness that I see eminent men,
men truly Christian, incessantly depicting in the most sombre
colours society as it now exists, and representing it as only a
prey to political and moral diseases now acute, now indolent, as
deprived thereby of all title to respect, and of all hope of
amelioration, incapacitated at one time for orderly life, at
another for Liberty. As for straightforward attacks upon our
vices and failings, our errors and shortcomings, I complain not
of them however violent: nations as well as individuals require
to be often admonished frankly and with severity; the rudeness
which shakes them is more salutary than the indulgence which
cradles them to sleep. But what I regret and deplore in the
attitude and in the language of these worthy Christian Censors,
is not that they scrupulously and unsparingly expose prevalent
evils, our bad propensities, and our foolish pretensions; but
that they ignore what good there is in us, the progress which we
make, and the just and salutary results to which we are tending.
{15}
The simultaneous presence, the profound intermixture, of good and
evil, of virtue and vice, of wisdom and folly, is the chronic
sore of man and of human societies; this is no new fact, no evil
which we are the first to endure and for which we are the first
to be responsible; it is the old condition of the world as it
appears from the constant testimony of History; each of its ages
has incurred and has merited reproaches, not the same, but at
least as serious as those laid to the charge of our age; and if
we were suddenly transported to any other epoch of the past, it
matters not to which, I do not hesitate to affirm that we would
not willingly accept that epoch in exchange for our own, nor
should we even very much like to contemplate the spectacle.
Severity is well, but justice is due to different periods and
different conditions of society. In the last hundred years we
have gained more, both in morality and in common sense, than we
have ever forgotten.

{16}

And here I am met by a question respecting which I will explain
my view unreservedly and at once. Society in France has reached
its actual condition only by a progressive effort, an advance
more or less perceptible, more or less rapid, but not without
numerous interruptions and vicissitudes; it has sought to escape
in turn from the feudal system, from the pretensions and the
selfish contests of the great nobles, from the predominance of
the Court, from arbitrariness, from the improvidence and caprices
of absolute power. National unity, civil equality, and political
liberty have been, throughout the whole course of our history,
the objects of our aim and desire. Our greatest thinkers, the
actors on the stage of our Politics, the nation itself, with its
tendency dimly marked, yet powerful, have constantly proceeded in
this direction and towards this object. The Revolution of 1789
was the most violent and most serious explosion of this incessant
travail of France. Was it pregnant with fruitful consequences, or
is the issue to be now deplored? France believed that she had
then gained a great victory, not only for herself, but for all
mankind. Did she deceive herself?
{17}
Have we been for so many centuries proceeding in a good road or
in a bad road, towards success or towards delusion? Are we
progressing, or are we declining? It is a question upon which
eminent men, and men whose opinions are entitled to every
respect, are, at the present day, not all of the same opinion;
for whereas some persist in a cry of triumph, others give but
utterance to gloomy and alarming prognostics.

I have some right to say that no one is more struck, more shocked
than I am by the crimes, faults, errors, and follies both of
opinion and action generated by this French Revolution; I never
hesitated openly to characterise them as, in my opinion, they
deserved; indeed the severe contests through which I have had to
pass in my public career may, perhaps, in some degree have
originated in my sincerity upon this subject. I had to confront
many prejudices, and to wound much self-love. I regret no
sentiment which I felt, and I retract no language which I used.
{18}
But in spite of the strong anti-revolutionary opinions which have
been attributed to me, I was and still am convinced that, upon
the whole, whatever the evil which that Revolution occasioned,
and is occasioning, it nevertheless, served the good cause both
of the nation and of Humanity; I believe that France and the
world will gain by it more than they suffered, or are suffering,
and that we are, in the midst of all our trials, still in an æra
of progress, and not at the commencement of a decline. I derive
motives for my Optimism upon this subject in the sphere of ideas
as well as in that of facts. Theoretically the principles of 1789
contain a large share of truth, truth pregnant of consequence,
truth superior to the share of error which they contain, and
which is, nevertheless, large. Historically the tendency and the
travail of opinion which have been for centuries a source to
France of incontestable progress in the way of justice, liberty,
and social happiness, cannot have become, all of a sudden, a
cause of decline.
{19}
Practically, in spite of all its ills and all its shortcomings,
the present century has no cause to dread a comparison with past
centuries. There never has been any epoch in the history of
French society in which it would have bettered its condition by
halting, or to which it should wish to return.

I revert to my question; what perils, what obstacles, do our
social institutions and our manners oppose to the establishment
of Liberty with effect and upon a lasting footing? Is
Christianity of a nature to stand us in good stead, or to hurt us
in such a work?

All earnest men, all clear-sighted men, at the present day,
whether they are Conservatives or Liberals, Christians or
Free-thinkers, Catholics or Protestants, are unanimous in
deploring the preponderance of material interests, the thirst for
physical and vulgar pleasures, and the habits of selfishness and
effeminacy which they generate.

{20}

They are right; we have indeed here an evil greater, when we
consider what is the mission of our epoch, than perhaps even
those believe it to be who deplore it. The Emperor Napoleon said,
in a phrase marked by all the clear and forcible colouring of his
habitual language:--"I do not fear conspirators who rise at ten
o'clock in the morning, and who cannot do without a fresh shirt."
[Footnote 13]

    [Footnote 13: "Je ne crains pas les conspirateurs qui se
    lèvent à dix heures du matin, et qui ont besoin de mettre une
    chemise blanche."]

There is no question of conspirators here, and for the soul to be
vigorous it is not essential that the care of the person should
be neglected. What concerns those who would be free, whether
individuals or nations, is that they should not have their
attention essentially absorbed by considerations affecting merely
their material prosperity, or their petty personal comforts; they
have especially to guard themselves against selfishness and
Epicureanism. Whether his tastes be refined or gross, the
Epicurean does not readily resign himself to make either effort
or sacrifice; but he is not difficult to content if he is
permitted to enjoy his pleasures and his repose.
{21}
Selfishness, even where it is sober and gentle, is a cold and
sterile passion, it owes its empire to its success in enervating
and lowering a man's nature. Liberty calls for a character of
more strength, higher aspirations, greater power of resistance; a
state of soul offering freer action to moral sympathy and
disinterested motives. It is precisely here that Christianity can
supply modern society with that of which it stands in need.
Christianity teaches all men, the great and the small, the rich
and the poor, not to devote all their lives to material things;
she summons them to more elevated regions, and whilst she
inspires them with a purer ambition, she opens to them a fairer
hope even of happiness. The Christian, whether his station be
powerful or humble, and his aspirations ambitious or modest, can
never find an exclusive object of attention, or an exclusive
motive to action, even in that principle of interest which
politicians, using the word in its best sense, vainly imagine to
be a panacea.
{22}
Man, whether towards his fellow-creatures, or on his own account,
has another object to pursue, other laws to accomplish, other
sentiments to display and to satisfy: he can neither be an
Epicurean nor an Egotist.

This is the first and the greatest of the services which
Christianity can and does render in our days to every society
which aspires to Liberty. I proceed to mention a second service.

There is no liberty without a large measure of license. They are
dreamers who hope to enjoy the benefits of the one without
incurring the risk, and undergoing the inconveniences, of the
other. They, too, are dreamers who believe that license will ever
be effectually repressed by penalties, courts of justice, or
measures of Police. Two things are certain; the one is, that it
is idle to attempt to repress license completely in a free
country; the other, that the moral and preventive forces of
society itself are alone to be relied upon, both by governments
and nations, to enable them to support that license which they
cannot suppress.
{23}
Christianity is the most efficacious, the most popular, and the
most approved of these forces. It is efficacious against license
for two reasons and in two ways. In principle, Christianity
maintains to Authority its right and its rank intact; without
humbling it before Liberty, Christianity yet recognises the
rights of Liberty, and demands that these should be admitted; in
fact Christianity inspires men with a sentiment, with which
authority cannot dispense, respect. The absence of respect is the
most serious danger to which authority is exposed; authority
suffers much more from insult than from attack; it is precisely
to the task of systematically insulting and debasing authority,
that its most ardent opponents, in our days, address themselves
with most passion and with most art. There exist licentious,
turbulent, and insolent persons in Christian societies, just as
such exist in other societies; but Christian principles and
Christian habits make and maintain friends to Order in the great
mass of the people as well as in the higher classes, friends to
order, who respect order both in law and in morals, men whom
licentious and insulting; conduct shock as much as they terrify,
and who, equally free, appeal in their own favour to the maxims
and the arms of Liberty.
{24}
History supplies us on this subject with conclusive examples. The
nations of Christendom are the only nations to which license has
not brought as a final consequence anarchy and despotism,--the
only nations which, although they have on different occasions and
by salutary reactions experienced the excesses both of power and
of liberty, have not succumbed under them morally and
politically. Neither the states of Pagan Antiquity nor those of
the East, whether Bouddhist or Mussulman, have stood such trials;
these have had their days of healthy vigour and even of glory;
but when the evils which license or tyranny generated have once
come upon them, they have fallen irretrievably, and all their
subsequent history has merely been that of a decline more or less
rapid, more or less stormy, more or less apathetic.

{25}

It is the honour of the Christian Religion that it has within it
that which can cure states of their maladies, as well as
individuals of their errors; and that, by the belief which it
generates, and the sentiments which it inspires, it has already
more than once furnished, sometimes to the friends of Order, and
sometimes to the friends of Liberty, a refuge in their reverses,
as well as strength to recover lost ground.

It would be as imprudent as ungrateful in these days for the
friends of Liberty to ignore this grand fact and its salutary
admonishment. They are called to a work much more difficult than
any that they have hitherto had to accomplish: their task is no
longer merely to search after guarantees for Liberty against the
encroachments of pre-existent Power, or the accidental and
transient ebullition of License. They have to reconcile the
normal and constitutional dominion of Democracy with Liberty, and
with the regular action and permanence of Liberty.
{26}
Until modern times, political liberty, wherever it has existed,
has been the result of the simultaneous presence and of the
conflict of different forces of society, no one of them strong
enough to rule alone, but each too weak to resist efficaciously
the attack of the others; at one time the Crown, at another the
Aristocracy, at another the Church, each previously powerful and
independent, have lived side by side with Democracy when
Democracy has had limits and restrictions imposed upon its power
and success; but at the present day, there are amongst us no
distinct surviving influences which are powerful enough to play a
similar part in society and in the government. The Crown, the
Aristocracy, and the Church are no longer anything but frail
wrecks of the past, or instruments created by the Democracy, and
indebted to it for a borrowed force. Is this to be henceforth the
permanent condition of human society, or is it only a phase, more
or less transitory, of a series of ages and of revolutions, which
fresh ages and fresh revolutions will hereafter profoundly
modify? Futurity must decide. In any case, it is only under the
exclusive dominion of a single force, Democracy, that in these
days free institutions can be founded.

{27}

That every dominant force when single is tempted to commit abuses
and to become tyrannical, is a truth so much in accordance with
the lessons of experience and with the conclusions of reason,
that no pains need be taken to insist upon it. Not to speak of
the dangerous acclivity upon which Democracy, in common with all
other forces, is placed, it has peculiar characteristics which
are not of a nature to set the friends of Liberty at their ease.
Democracy derives its origin and power from the right of every
human will, and from the majority of human wills. Truth and error
press so very closely upon each other in this system, that
Liberty is placed in a position of great peril. Man's volition is
entitled to every respect; but it is not all its law to itself,
nor is it in itself essentially a law at all: it is bound to
another law, which does not emanate from itself, and which comes
to it from a higher source than man, and which it is as unable to
abrogate as it was to create.
{28}
The law paramount is the moral law,--the law laid down by God, to
which all wills of men, whatever their number, are bound to
submit. Democracy, essentially busied with the wills of men, is
always inclined to attribute to them the character and the rights
of divine law. Man occupies so much space in this form of
government, and has so elevated a position there, that he easily
forgets God--easily takes himself for God. The result is a sort
of political polytheism, which, unless it appeals to a gross,
material arbitrament, and to the majority of human wills, is
incapable of arriving at that unity of law and of action, with
which no society or government can dispense. I do not say that
the individual man, and that numbers of men, are the only
principles, but I do say, that they are principles characteristic
of Democracy; it is against the absolute dominion of these two
principles that Democracy has, in the interest of its own honour
and of its own safety, to be incessantly admonished and defended.
{29}
A royal sage enjoined that he should be saluted every morning
with the words, "Remember thou art man." This sublime and prudent
admonition is no less needful for Democracy than for Royalty, and
it is precisely the salutary service which is rendered to it by
Christianity. In Christianity there is a light, a voice, a law, a
history, which does not come from man, but which, without
offending his dignity, sets him in his proper place. No belief,
no institution, exalts man's dignity so highly, and at the same
time so effectually represses his arrogance. The more democratic
a society is, the more it is important that this double effect
shall take place within it. Christianity alone has this virtue.

I am aware of the capital objection made to its empire. "The
Physic without the Physicians," exclaimed Rousseau, in a sally
against medical men, but the expression shows nevertheless how
little he was disposed to forget that it is possible for medicine
to be good and salutary.
{30}
How often have I heard men of intelligence and men in all other
respects very worthy of consideration, exclaim, "Let me have
Religion without the priests: I am a Christian, but no friend of
the clergy." I am far from seeking to leave this difficulty
unnoticed, or to elude it. It is a difficulty of the gravest
nature, not in essence, but in the actual circumstances and state
of opinions at the present day.

As a Protestant it does not concern me. The clergy is not amongst
Protestants the object of any such uneasiness. One of the best
results, in my opinion, of the Reformation of the 16th century,
whether regarded as Lutheran or Calvinistic, as Anglican, or as
the work of other Dissidents in religion, is that it strongly
cemented the union between the ecclesiastics and the general
religious community--between the spiritual and the lay members of
the Church. The Reformation produced this effect, first, by
authorising the clergy to marry and to enter into the relations
which a life of family brings with it; and, secondly, by giving
to the laity a share in the government of the Church.
{31}
The partition was not always judicious or equitable. At one time
the clergy, at another the laity, have been transported from
their natural places, and injured in their legitimate rights; but
the relations between the two classes ceased to present the
appearance of either absolutism on the one hand, or of entire
subordination on the other; the laity obtained a voice and
influence in the affairs of the flock; the priests, although
remaining religious pastors and religious magistrates, ceased to
be spiritual masters. This organisation has led to the two social
institutions combining themselves in a variety of ways. At one
time the civil power has invaded the government of the religious
society, and deprived the clergy, not merely of empire, but of
independence; at another time the two forms of society, the State
and the Church, have regulated by treaty the terms of their
mutual relations; whereas, in the United States of America, the
two forms of society have been entirely separated, and have
mutually recovered their independence;
{32}
elsewhere, as amongst the Quakers and the Moravians, all
ecclesiastical authority and orders of priesthood have been
abolished, and laymen have lived in the isolation each of his
individual conscience, obedient only to its spontaneous impulses.
But amidst all this diversity, it is the fundamental
characteristic of the churches and of the sects which issued from
the Reform of the 16th century, that priests do not in themselves
constitute the necessary and sovereign mediators between God and
man's soul, nor the sole rulers of religious society. It is
particularly by virtue of this principle that the distinction
between civil life and religious life has become an efficacious
and a consecrated doctrine, and that Liberty has resumed its
right and become an active influence in religious society itself.

{33}

But amongst Roman Catholic nations, priests are the objects of a
persistent distrust which has been the fruitful source of much
calamity to Christianity. History forbids surprise. The Roman
Catholic clergy has often presented the spectacle of ambition and
passion, of mundane and selfish interests, strangely intermixed
with faith and with earnest zeal for the furtherance of their
religious mission. Serious ills and grave abuses have resulted
therefrom in the relation of Church to State, and of priests to
their flocks, and even in the bosom of the Church itself. These
are facts almost as undisputed as they are indisputable; in proof
of them the testimony, not only of its adversaries, but of the
holiest members of the Church of Rome itself, may be invoked.
Nothing is more natural, and indeed more inevitable, than that
this should have led and should still lead, not only to ill-will
towards priests, but to their being regarded as proper subjects
for attack. It is not, however, on that account less certain that
such an attack is, in our days, and as society is at present
constituted, unjust, silly, and inopportune, as injurious to
State as to Church, to Liberty as to Religion. There may be
injustice and ingratitude to institutions as well as to
individuals.
{34}
From the fall of the Roman Empire, and during the rudest and most
sombre ages of modern history, the Catholic clergy, whether as
Popes, Bishops, monastic orders, or simple priests, in the midst
of their selfish pretensions and ambitious usurpations, displayed
and expended treasures of intellect, courage, and perseverance in
order to affirm and protect the immaterial and moral interests of
humanity. They did not on all occasions accept their mission to
its full extent; they did not maintain the Christian Religion in
all its breadth, and in all its evangelical disinterestedness;
they had their share in the acts of violence, iniquity, and
tyranny of the different masters of society for the time being;
they often made Liberty pay dearly for the services which they
rendered to civilization; but when Liberty has become one of the
conquests of that very civilization, the proof as well as the
guarantee for its further progress, there is injustice and
ingratitude in forgetting what part the Roman Catholic clergy
effected towards the constitution of that society, the ultimate
result of which has been so glorious.

{35}

The injustice is the greater that it is now inopportune and
useless. From the acrimony, the anger, and alarm which
characterise the attacks directed at Roman Catholicism and its
Priests, we might suppose that the Inquisition was at our gates,
that Rome was making a perilous onslaught upon our civil and
religious liberties, and that we need to deploy all our force and
all our passions to repulse the domination of the Court of Rome
and of its army. Was there ever so strange a perversion of facts?
For a century past, on which side has been the movement and the
aggression? Is it not evidently the spirit of religious and
political liberty which has now the initiative, the impulsive,
onward movement? The defensive is the natural and enforced
situation of the Roman Catholic Church; Romanism is much more
menaced, much more attacked by public opinion in these days than
our liberties are menaced or attacked by her. The supreme power
in the Church of Rome, the Papacy, does indeed maintain, in
principle, certain maxims and certain traditions irreconcileable
with, the actual state of opinion and society; it continues to
condemn authoritatively some of the essential principles of
modern civilization.
{36}
In all earnestness, yet with every feeling of respect, I shall
here make at once use of my right, both as a Protestant and as
the citizen of a free country, to declare my profound conviction
that this systematic persistence, however conscientious and
dignified it may be, shows a great want of religious foresight as
well as of political prudence. I think that Romanism, without
abdication and without renouncing anything that is vitally
essential to itself, might assume a position in harmony with the
moral and social state in these days, and with the conditions
also vitally essential to the existence of such state. I may add,
that so long as the government of the Romish Church shall not
have accepted and accomplished this work of
conciliation--conciliation real and profound--the friends of
Liberty will be justified in keeping themselves on the alert, and
in maintaining a reserve towards it, as representing, themselves,
those moral and liberal principles which it disavows.
{37}
But let them not attribute to this disavowal a greater importance
than it deserves; let them watch the ecclesiastical power which
utters it, without alarm; it has in it nothing very menacing,
nothing that opposes any effectual barrier to the march of
events; Liberalism is not the less victorious in these days, and
not the less advancing. Many faults have been committed, and many
probably will continue to be committed; as has already been the
case, we shall have perhaps many a barrier opposed in our path,
many a reactionary movement to endure, but the general onward
impulse will nevertheless be the same, and the final result, the
conquest of Liberty, religious, civil and political, not the less
a certainty.

This is no mere philosophical aspiration. It is already history.
There have been many vicissitudes in France, and many a crisis of
different kinds during the last hundred years in the struggle
between Liberalism and Roman Catholicism; the former has often
committed errors, made mistakes, by which Romanism has adroitly
profited; but at every reverse Romanism has recognised her own
defeat, and accepted some part of its consequences.
{38}
The Constituent Assembly by the civil organisation of the clergy,
the National Convention by its proscriptions, had endeavoured,
the one to enslave, the other to abolish the Catholic Church; the
great master of the revolution, Napoleon, raised it up again by
the Concordat of 1802; but the Concordat at the same time
consecrated many of the fundamental principles of the liberal
regime, and the Catholic Church of Rome consecrated Napoleon and
signed the Concordat, even whilst protesting against some of its
consequences. At the Restoration some wished to discuss again the
question of the Concordat, and to re-establish the relation
between Church and State upon their ancient foundations; but the
attempt encountered, in the ranks of the Royalists themselves, a
decisive resistance, and totally failed. Under the Government of
1830, Roman Catholicism regained its ground and resumed fresh
vigour by both using the name of Liberty and claiming its right.
{39}
When the Republic again appeared in 1848, Roman Catholicism
treated it with as much tenderness as it experienced itself from
the Republic. I pause before the actual relations of the Church
of Rome to the new Empire; Rome has paid a dear price for all
that she has received from the Empire; but even here she showed,
and appears disposed still to show, a large measure of patience
and resignation. She is right.

One fact particularly arrests my attention in the course of this
stormy history. In the midst of her reverses and her concessions,
Roman Catholicism has displayed rare and energetic virtues of
fidelity and independence. She has opposed to the bloody
persecution of Terrorism, the inexhaustible blood of her martyrs,
bishops, priests, monks, men and women; that Clergy of France,
once so vacillating in faith and so mundane in morals, bore their
cross with an indomitable sentiment of Christian honour.
{40}
The despotism of the Emperor Napoleon encountered in the person
of Pope Pius VII., in some Cardinals, and some Bishops, a passive
but firm resistance, which neither the power of the Despot, nor
the contagious servility of their contemporaries, could surmount.
And again, in these days, who can fail to perceive with what
activity and devotedness, with what sacrifices and efficacy,
Roman Catholicism, by the mere force of its native energy,
upholds the cause of its chief and of itself? If civil society
had defended its liberties and its dignities as the Church of
Rome defends hers, Liberalism in France would be farther advanced
on its road and towards its object.

But let not Romanists deceive themselves: one cannot make use of
Liberty without being forced to enter into an engagement and
compromise with Liberty; one cannot appeal to Liberty without
doing homage to her; she lays her hand upon those to whom she
lends her aid. The great fact which I before invoked, the work of
reconciliation between modern society and Roman Catholicism, is
more advanced than those believe who still stand aloof from it
and oppose it.
{41}
This is proved by two facts. In the very bosom of Roman
Catholicism, and from amongst its most zealous defenders, that
group of liberal Catholics was formed which has played and which
continues to play so active a part in struggling for the
Liberties of their church, and for the rights of their chief:
these are at once the ornaments of then church, and its
intellectual sword; and the publication which supports their
views, the "Correspondant," is, next to the "Revue des deux
Mondes," the periodical which meets with most success and has the
greatest circulation. Passing from this brilliant group to the
more modest ranks of the Roman Catholic clergy, I ask what is the
disposition, the attitude, the conduct of those faithful and
humble priests who exercise the Christian ministry in our
provinces and in the inferior quarters of our cities; they have
not always all the science, all the mental culture, which one
might desire; but whilst adhering to Catholic faith and giving
the example of Christian lives, they live in the midst of the
people;
{42}
they know it, they understand it; they are aware what the
conditions are which permit them to live with and to exercise an
influence upon the people; they enter by degrees into its
sentiments and its instincts; without premeditation, almost
without perceiving it, they become each day more and more men of
their time and country, more familiar with the ideas and liberal
tendencies of modern society. Thus at the two poles of Roman
Catholicism, in its most elevated ranks and in its popular
militia, the same result is obtained, in the one case by men of
enlightened views and of superior ability, and in the other case
by men of good sense and honesty of purpose; and thus in the
Roman Church those moral and political principles of 1789 make
their way, which form the basis of the new social edifice, of its
laws, and of its liberties.

I do not dispute, neither do I attack; I record facts as I
observe and appreciate them. And in my opinion, with reference to
French institutions,--for I speak only of France,--the essential
consequences from these facts, as far as they bear upon the
relations of Christianity to Liberty, are as follows.

{43}

I have here not a word to say respecting the Protestant Church in
France; the questions which have agitated her for some time past
are questions of faith and internal discipline, entirely aloof
from any incertitude or differences of opinion as to the rights
of conscience or of religious society in their relations to civil
society. Protestantism in France, whether orthodox or not, adopts
and upholds the largest maxims as to religious liberty, and as to
the guarantee for it, in the separation of religious life from
civil life. The most zealous Liberals have nothing more in this
respect to demand from even the most orthodox Protestants; these
are indeed of their church the most urgent in claiming for
religious society the right to have its internal autonomy, and to
stand independently of the state. It is, on the contrary, Roman
Catholics, and the advocates of the essential principles of
modern society, who most dispute about the general question of
liberty.

{44}

The more I reflect, the more I am convinced that henceforth this
question can only be seriously and efficaciously dealt with in
one of two ways: the one is by the alliance of Church and State,
on conditions which, whilst distinguishing civil life from
religious life, shall guarantee to individuals religious liberty
in civil society, and to the church itself its internal autonomy
in matters of faith and of religious discipline. The other
solution is the complete separation of Church and State, and
their mutual independence.

That the Church prefers the system of an Alliance with the State
to that of the Church's Liberty and isolation from the State, I
well understand.

She is right. Alliance with the State is to her a sign of
strength, a means of influence, a pledge for her dignity and her
stability. The complete separation of the two societies leaves
religious institutions, and particularly their clergy, in a
fluctuating and precarious situation: a system essentially
democratic, it rather places the ecclesiastical magistracy under
the opinions and wills of its lay members, than these under the
influence of the religious authorities.
{45}
This system is especially alien to the origin, the fundamental
principle, and the Hierarchy, of the Roman Catholic Church; it is
impossible for this Church to accept it unless urgently demanded
by the interests of moral authority, independence, and liberty.
But let not the Roman Catholic Church misapprehend; an alliance
of Church with State has also conditions without which a Church
would vainly expect any advantage; for the alliance to be serious
and effectual, there must be between Church and State a large
measure of harmony as to the essential principles of the
religious society and of the civil society which the Church and
the State respectively represent: if the two societies and those
who govern them, do not mutually admit their respective
principles, if they disavow each other incessantly, and carry on
in the bosom of their alliance, a war, open or secret, all the
good effect of such alliance disappears, and the alliance itself
is soon compromised.
{46}
The treaties concluded at different epochs, under the name of
Concordats, between Chambers and States in different countries of
Christendom, have only been possible and efficacious, because
there was a great basis of harmony in the fundamental
institutions of the two contracting parties; they differed upon
some points; they had reciprocally to make concessions and grant
guarantees; but taken altogether they approved of each other and
were sincere in supporting each other; peace was the point from
which their alliance started, and the dissentiments which existed
on each side had no reference to any vital questions. It suffices
for us to cast a glance at the history of Catholicism in France,
of the Anglican Church in England, of the Lutheran Church in
Germany and in Sweden, to acknowledge this truth; and what is
occurring and forming matter of negotiation in our days in Italy
and in Austria, upon the subject of the relations of the Church
with the State, furnishes a further striking confirmation.
{47}
In an age of liberty, of publicity, and of continual discussion,
when it is possible for anything to be thought or said, and for
any opinion to be maintained or attacked, it is more than ever
indispensable that any treaty between Church and State should be
serious and sincere; that is to say, that the two contracting
parties should recognise and accept in each other, without
equivocation and without subterfuge, the character which each
really possesses. This is the only condition upon which an
alliance can be real, becoming, and advantageous. In presence of
the undisguised movements and the ever recurring and daring
ventures of Liberty, a policy of reticence and procrastination,
obscure and dim reservations, inconsistent expedients, and secret
warfare, is no longer practicable; such policy, far from lending
any help, discredits and weakens the power which places its trust
in it.
{48}
As for me, I believe that the Catholic Church, if not without
endangering her habits, at least without endangering her
essential principles, has it in her power to set herself at peace
with the fundamental principles of modern society and of actual
civil governments; but should she either not wish or not know how
to march towards this object and to obtain it, let her not give
way to any illusion; alliance with the State would be rather a
source of weakness and of peril to her than an advantage, and she
would only eventually be driven to seek a refuge in the system of
separation and complete independence.

As for the State, the system which separates the two societies
would free it from many a burthen and much embarrassment; but it
would cause her other embarrassments, and lead to the loss of
many advantages. It is convenient to discourse of the principle
of a "Free church in a free country," but after the long alliance
which has existed between them, it is easier to proclaim such
principle than to apply it: not only is it impossible to divorce
Church from State without violently wrenching asunder previous
bonds, but more lasting consequences ensue; once disengaged from
every connection with the civil power, ministers of religion busy
themselves no longer about the interests of civil society; their
thoughts are exclusively absorbed by questions of religion and
its affairs.
{49}
Governments have long been accustomed to derive, and derive at
the present day, a moral influence of great value from an
alliance with the Church: but this influence supposes one
condition which is not only especially important in our days, but
of capital importance: in the actual state of opinion and of
manners, no good results can be politically looked for from the
alliance, if the civil power do not abstain from all interference
in questions purely religious; the complete independence of the
church and of its chiefs, in matters of faith and of religious
discipline, is the only condition which can justify their giving
their indirect support to the state government, and which can
purge their support of all impure motives.
{50}
The alliance of the two powers could formerly, in a certain
degree, co-exist with no inconsiderable confusion in their
respective attributes, and a somewhat earnest claim on the part
of each to domineer over the other; nothing similar can occur at
the present day; neither Church nor State can any longer be the
master or the servant of the other. Let neither princes nor
priests deceive themselves; their reciprocal independence, and
their uncontested empire, each in its own province, can alone
give to their alliance the dignity which the alliance requires,
if it is to be real, efficacious, and lasting.

Every road leads me to the same point; to every question the
facts give me the same answer. Liberty has need of Christianity,
Christianity has need of Liberty. As modern society demands to be
free, the religion of Christ is its most necessary ally.
Christianity and civil society have mutually, I admit it, a grave
feeling of disquietude and distrust; but this disquietude and
distrust are not natural and inevitable results of principles
essential to civil society and religious society, of any
compulsory relations existing between them; they spring from the
faults which the two institutions have committed towards each
other, and from the contest which each has forced upon the other.
{51}
Liberty alone can effectually combat such sentiments which have
become habitual and traditional. To dissipate them entirely,
something besides Liberty is requisite; but without Liberty
neither religious society nor civil society will obtain their
legitimate objects, these objects being peace in their relations
to each other, and the moral progress of man, and of the State,
whether allied with or independent of the Church.

{52}

           Second Meditation.

       Christianity And Morality.


Two attempts are now being simultaneously made, of different
characters, although, of the same origin and tendency. Seriously
minded men, who persist in believing and calling themselves
Christians, are labouring to separate Christian morals from
Christian dogmas, and although they make Jesus their moral idea
of humanity, are stripping him of his miracles and divinity.
Others, who declare openly that they are no Christians, endeavour
to separate morality in the abstract from religion in the
abstract, and place the source of morality, as well as its
authority, in human nature, and in it alone. On the one side we
find a Christian morality independent of Christian faith; on the
other a Morality independent of all religious belief, either
natural or revealed: these two doctrines are in our days
proclaimed and propagated with ardour.

{53}

I frankly admit that their defenders are sincere in adopting and
upholding them, and that they do so in the name of truth alone.
In philosophy, as in politics, I believe error and honest
intentions to be more general than falsehood and evil design.
Moreover, who would discuss convictions, unless himself convinced
that they are serious and earnest? Opinions founded on interested
or hypocritical motives are not worth the honour of a discussion;
they merit only to be attacked and unmasked. In the name of truth
alone I combat the two doctrines to which I have alluded, and
which some now strive to accredit.

The true cause of this twofold attempt is the incredulity and the
scepticism which prevail with regard to religion. Non-Christians
are numerous; few Deists are quite sure of their belief and of
its efficacy.
{54}
A necessity for morality is felt to exist; its right to regulate
the actions of man is acknowledged; it is in order to preserve to
it its integrity and its force that efforts are made to separate
it from religion, from all religious creeds, all of which, it is
here assumed, are either ruined or tottering. Thus, Independent
Morality is, as it were, a raft, offered to the human soul, and
to human society, to save their time-worn vessel from being
wrecked.

The idea is false, the attempt of evil consequence. They who
flatter themselves that they can leave Christian morality
standing, after wrenching it from Christian dogmas,--and they who
believe it possible to preserve morality, after detaching it from
religion,--err alike, for they fail to recognise the essential
facts of human nature and of human society.

Both doctrines are derived from an inexact and incomplete
observation of these facts. I have already stated in these
Meditations what I think of the isolation of Christian morality
from Christianity, and the reason why I reject it.
{55}
At present I apply myself to the idea of independent morality,
and in the name of a psychology, pure at once and severe, I
affirm that there exists an intimate, legitimate, and necessary
union between morality and religion.

A preliminary observation occurs to me. Those who adopt the
theory of an independent morality, start from the idea that there
is a moral law, strange to and superior to all interested
motives, to all selfish passions; these rank duty above, and
treat it as independent of, every other motive of action.

I am far from contesting this principle with them, but they
forget that it _has_ been, and still _is_, strongly
contested: contested by both ancient and modern philosophers.
Some have considered the pursuit of happiness, and the
satisfaction of individual interests, as the right and legitimate
aims of human life. Others have placed the rule of man's conduct,
not in personal interests, but in general utility, in the common
welfare of all mankind. Others have thought that they could
perceive the origin and the guarantee for morals in the sympathy
of human sentiments.
{56}
The moral and obligatory law, or duty, is far from being the
recognised and generally accepted basis of morality; systems the
most varied have arisen, and are incessantly forming themselves,
with respect to the principles of morals, as with respect to
other great questions of our nature; and the human understanding
fluctuates no less in this corner of the philosophic arena than
in the others. Let the moralists of the new school not deceive
themselves; in proclaiming morality to be independent of
religion, they mean to give it one fixed basis, the same for all,
and they believe that they succeed in the attempt. They deceive
themselves: morality, thus isolated, remains as much as ever a
prey to the disputes of man.

I pass over this grave misconception on the part of the defenders
of the system, and I examine the system itself. Let us see if it
is the faithful and full expression of human morality, if it
contains all the facts which constitute its natural and essential
elements.

{57}

These facts I sum up as follows: the distinction between moral
good and evil; the obligation of doing good and avoiding evil;
the faculty of accomplishing or not this obligation. In brief and
philosophic terms the Moral Law, Duty, and Liberty. These are the
natural, primitive, and universal facts which constitute human
morality; it is by reason and by virtue of these facts that man
is a moral being.

I have not here to enter into a discussion of these same facts; I
do not occupy myself at this moment with systems which disregard
or deny them, in whole or in part; all the three facts, or any
one of the three. The partisans of the system of independent
morality admit them all, as I do; the question between them and
myself is this, whether or not, whilst rendering homage to the
true principle of morality, they fully comprehend its
signification, and accept its results.

{58}

It is the characteristic and the honour of man that he is not
satisfied with merely gathering facts which relate either to
himself or to the external world, but that he seeks to know their
origin and object, their import and bearing.

In morals, as in physics, statistics are only the point from
which science sets out; it is only after having well observed
facts, and having verified them, that we have to discuss the
questions which they raise, and the further ultimate facts which
the facts already ascertained contain and reveal. The fact of
human morality, such as I have just described it in its three
constituent elements, the Moral Law, Duty, and Liberty, cannot
fail to suggest these two questions: Whence proceeds the moral
law, and whence is its authority? What is the sense, and what the
ultimate result to the moral being himself, of the fulfilment or
violation of his duty; that is to say, of the use which he makes
of his liberty? No philosophical system can either suppress or
elude these questions; they present themselves to the mind of man
as soon as he directs his attention to the moral character of
man's nature. I propose to consider in succession the three
constituent elements of this great truth, so as to determine
rightly its source and bearing.

{59}

Moral law has neither been invented by man, nor does it spring
from any human convention; man, by acknowledging it, admits that
he has not created it, that he cannot abolish or change it.
Political and civil laws are diverse and ever varying; they
depend in a great measure upon time, place, social circumstances,
or human will; when men adopt or reject them, they do so with the
feeling that they are the masters of them, to deal with them
accordingly as their interests or their fancies suggest.

But when a law presents itself to them in the form of a moral
law, they feel that this is not dependent on them, that it takes
its source and derives its authority elsewhere than from their
own opinion or volition. They may mistake in rendering or in
refusing homage to a particular precept of conduct; they may
attach to laws a moral value which they do not intrinsically
possess, or pass unnoticed the really moral character of another
law, and the obligations which it imposes upon them; but wherever
they believe that they perceive the character of a moral law,
they bow before it as before something which does not emanate
from them, and before a power of a different nature from man's.

{60}

The moral law no more belongs to the general mechanism of the
world, than to the invention of man; it has none of the
characteristics that mark the laws of physical order; none of the
results which follow from them; it is by no means inherent in the
forms or combinations of matter; it does not govern the relations
or movements of bodies; obligatory, and fixed as fate, it
addresses itself solely to that intelligent and free being, of
whom Pascal said, in his grand language, "If the universe were to
crush him, still man would be more noble than that which
destroyed him, because he knows that he dies; and of the
advantage that the universe has over him, the universe knows
nothing." Man does much more than know that he dies; it happens,
sometimes, that he encounters death voluntarily--that he chooses
to die in obedience to the moral law. It is the law of Liberty.

{61}

What mean these words, Law of Liberty? How does this law, called
Duty, come to establish itself in the human mind, and command
man's Liberty to respect it?

Some essay to found Duty upon Right, and to derive its authority
solely from the independence and dignity of humanity. Man, it is
said, feels and knows that he is a free agent; as such it is his
right that no human being shall attack his independence or his
dignity. He finds in every other human being the same nature, and
therefore the same right as he possesses himself. Thus mutual
right is derived from individual right, and "Duty is nothing but
the right which it is recognised that another possesses."
[Footnote 14]

    [Footnote 14: La Morale Independante,
    a weekly journal, No. 1, 6th August, 1865.]

{62}

There is here a profound mistake, and a strange forgetfulness.

Why, when a man finds himself in relation with his fellow-men,
does he attribute to them the same right which he recognises
himself as possessing, and which he calls upon them to see and
admit there? If this is a prudent calculation, the wisdom which
arises from a correct appreciation of his interest, let us have
done with it, it is not morality. If, prudence and interest
apart, man regards himself as bound to pay, to the independence
and personal dignity of his fellow-men, the same respect, and to
attribute to them the same right, as he lays claim to for
himself; if reciprocity becomes in this manner the fundamental
principle of morality, what becomes of the obligation where there
is no reciprocity? Will man be bound to respect in others the
right which will not be respected in himself? If he is bound to
it in all cases, and in spite of everything, then Duty has
another source than the mutual respect of persons. If he is, on
the other hand, not bound to it in all cases, what becomes of the
paramount and absolute character of Duty; in other words, of the
moral law? It is no longer anything but law upon condition.

{63}

Not merely the religion of Christ, but all the great doctrines of
the world, religious or philosophical, peremptorily refuse to
attach this conditional character of reciprocity to the moral
law; all maintain that duty is in every case absolute and
imperative, independently of the conduct of others. "If ye love
them which love you, what thank have ye? for sinners also love
those that love them. And if ye do good to them which do good to
you, what thank have ye? for sinners also do even the same."
"Love ye your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing
again; and your reward shall be great, and ye shall be the
children of the Highest: for he is kind unto the unthankful and
to the evil." [Footnote 15]

    [Footnote 15: Luke vi. 32, 33, 35.]

"Be ye," say the laws of Menou to the Hindoos, "as the wood of
the sandal tree, that perfumes the hatchet which wounds it." If
we interrogate Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, Kant; in whatever other
respect they may disagree, they think upon this fundamental point
with the Gospel and the Laws of Menou.

{64}

It is in the confusion of Duty and of Right, and in the inversion
of their natural and their true order, that the error resides of
those who maintain the Theory of an Independent Morality. Duty is
the moral law of men's actions; law intimate, personal. Right, on
the other hand, is derived from the application of the moral law
to the relations of men. I will not deny myself the great yet
melancholy pleasure of citing upon this subject a few words of a
person whose mind and life were united to mine, and who, in a
modest essay, threw over this important subject a flood of light
as vivid as it is pure: "The word Right, brings with it the idea
of a relation to something. As every Right is an application of a
moral law to the different relations of Society, there exists not
a Right of which Society is not the occasion. A Right is only the
moral power of an individual over the Liberty of another: a power
attributed to him by virtue of the moral law which regulates the
relations of men with one another.
{65}
Duty is the sole basis of Right. Did there exist no duties there
would exist no rights. There is no claim of a right which does
not affirm a Duty to be its source. Duty applied as a rule to
govern the relations of man to man constitutes justice; justice
cannot exist without Duty; a thing is neither just, nor unjust,
as far as regards the being who has not had the duty prescribed
to him of distinguishing between them. Ideas of Right are as
essential to men as ideas of duty; for if the idea of Duty is the
social bond;--the means of peace and of Union amongst
mankind;--the idea of Right constitutes the arms, offensive and
defensive, which society gives to men, for reciprocal use. Every
man has a consciousness of his own rights, which aids him to keep
others in the line of their duty; but rights only so far aid him
to do this, as the duty upon which they are founded is known and
respected; for with regard to that man who ignores his duty, the
man who has a right has absolutely nothing.
{66}
Right is a moral power producing its effects without the help of
physical force; if he who has both right and power must employ
the power to enforce his right, it is no longer his right which
triumphs, it is his power; his right remains to him to justify
the employment of force; but it is not his right which has made
his cause triumph. Thus it is that the idea of Duty is the basis
of society, and is at the same time the basis of the idea of
right, an idea which in its turn contributes also to the
stability of society. To found society upon the sole idea of
duty, is to deprive society of one of its most powerful means of
defence and of development; to strip the tree of the buds which
serve to give it at once strength and amplitude. To found society
upon the idea of Right without the idea of duty, is to cut away
the very roots of the tree." [Footnote 16]

    [Footnote 16: "Essai sur les idées de droit et de devoir
    considérées comme fondement de la société." It is inserted in
    the work entitled, "Conseils de Morale, ou Essais sur
    l'homme, les mœurs, les caractères, le monde, les femmes,
    l'education, etc. Par Madame Guizot, née de Meulan,"
    (2 vols. 8vo, 1828) vol. ii., pp. 147-271.]

{67}

This is not all. Besides the mistake which they commit in
considering Duty as a mere consequence of Right, derived from the
independence and dignity of man as man, the advocates of the
theory of an independent morality forget an entire class of moral
elements occupying an important position in our nature; I mean,
the instinctive sentiments intimately allied to the Moral Law,
sentiments to which the notion of a Right, founded upon the
independence and dignity of man's personality, is completely
strange. Is it on account of the independence and dignity of
man's personality that fathers and mothers regard it as their
duty to love their children, to take charge of them, to work for
and devote themselves to them? Is it by virtue of this principle,
and of the right which flows from it, that children are bound to
honour their father and their mother? Man's soul, man's
existence, is full of moral relations and moral acts, in which
the idea of Right has no part; no part, I mean, in the sense
which these theorists of an independent morality attach to it:
their system is no more an explanation of Sympathy than of Duty.

{68}

I am touching upon the source of their error. If they make the
principle of human morality consist in a Right emanating from
man's Liberty and man's intelligence, it is that they see in man
only a free and intelligent being. Strange ignorance, and
mutilation of man's nature. At the same time that he is a free
and intelligent being, man is a being dependent and subject: he
is dependent, in the material order, upon a power superior to his
own; and subject, in the moral order, to a law which he did not
make, which he cannot change, which he is forced to admit even
whilst he is free not to obey it; a law from which he cannot
withdraw himself without troubling his soul and endangering his
future. Morality in a sense is in effect independent; it is
essentially independent of man; man, the free agent man, is its
subject. Morality is truly the law of Liberty of Action.

{69}

Liberty is not an isolated fact, which exhausts itself by working
its own completion, and which, once accomplished, remains without
further consequences. To Liberty is attached Responsibility. When
the human being, giving effect to his free will, resolves and
acts, he feels that he is responsible for his resolution and his
act. The Laws of Society declare this to him in express terms,
for they punish him if they judge his act to be criminal; not
merely because they find his act to be hurtful, but because they
find it to be morally culpable: for, were its author pronounced
to be mad, or his mind or volition recognised as unsound, the
laws of society would acquit him. And if a culprit escape legal
punishment, he does not escape from the internal punishment of
remorse. Without speaking of penal laws, remorse is at once the
proof and the sanction of moral responsibility. Possible it is
that all remorse may be lulled to sleep in the mind of the
hardened offender; but there are a thousand instances to prove
that it may be always reawakened.
{70}
Neither in good nor in evil is man's nature entirely effaced.
Repentance sometimes hides itself in recesses so profound, that
to penetrate thither is impossible, except for the soul which
feels repentance even when seeking to escape from it.

As Liberty supposes responsibility, so Responsibility supposes an
idea of merit or of demerit attaching naturally to the use made
of liberty. I set aside here all the questions, in my opinion,
ill put and wrongly solved by Theologians, upon this subject of
merit or demerit. According to the general sentiment and common
sense of all mankind, there is merit for a man in the
accomplishment of Moral Law, there is demerit in its violation.
It is a fact recognised and proclaimed even in the simplest and
most ordinary incidents of human life, as well as in the
political organisation of society, and in the problems which
concern the eternal future.
{71}
However the recompense or the punishment may be accelerated or
delayed; whatever its nature or its measure; the moral career of
a man is not complete, nor the moral order established, until the
responsibility inherent in his Liberty has received its
complement and arrived at its end in the just appreciation and
equitable return made to him for his merits or demerits.

Thus far I have spoken of Independent Morality; I have
scrupulously confined myself to studying moral facts as man's
nature, and man's nature alone, presents them to us. I have
considered and described them as they are in themselves, entirely
apart from every other element and every other consideration.
Those moral facts are briefly as follows:--

  The distinction between moral good and moral evil.

  The Moral Law, the duty of doing good and avoiding evil.

  Moral Liberty.

  Moral Responsibility.

  Moral merit and demerit.

{72}

These are, I admit, facts which man recognises in himself as the
proper and intimate characteristics of his own nature. But these
truths once recognised and determined, what is their import? Are
they facts isolated in human nature, as they are in Psychology,
or have they anterior causes and necessary consequences! Are they
self-sufficing, or do they contain and reveal other truths which
form their complement and their sanction? The human mind cannot
elude this question.

I have established that the moral law is not of human invention;
that it does not exist merely by man's agreement; that it is not
one of those laws of fate by which the material world is
governed. It is the law of the intellectual world, of the free
world; a law superior to that world which, by recognising it as
law, recognises itself at the same time both as free and subject.
Who is the author of that law? Who imposes it upon man--upon man
of whom it is not the work, and whom it governs without
enslaving? Who placed it above this world where the present life
is passed?
{73}
Evidently there must be a superior power from which the moral law
emanates, and of which it is a revelation. With the good sense
which his frivolity and his cynicism made him so oft forget,
Voltaire said, speaking of the material world and the order
reigning in it:--

  "Je ne puis songer
  Que cette horloge existe et n'ait point d'horloger."

  I cannot think
  This clock exists and never had a maker.

In the moral world we have to do with something far different
from a clock; nor are we in the presence of a machine
constructed, regulated, once for all; the law of Order, that is
to say, the moral law, is incessantly in contact with man's free
agency; man does homage to the law which he is yet at liberty to
accomplish or to violate; the law is a manifestation of the
supreme legislator, of whose thought and will it is the
expression. God moral sovereign, and man free subject, are both
contained in the fact of the moral law. In this fact alone Kant
found God; he erred in not also finding God elsewhere; but it is
nevertheless true that it is in the moral law, the rule of human
Liberty, that God shows himself to man most directly, most
clearly, most undeniably.

{74}

Just as the moral law, without a sovereign legislator to impose
it upon man, is an incomplete and inexplicable fact, a river
without source, just so the moral responsibility of the free
agent man, without a supreme judge to apply it, is an incomplete
and inexplicable fact, a source without outlet, which runs and
loses itself no one can tell whither. Just as the moral law
reveals the moral legislator, just so does moral Responsibility
reveal the moral judge. Just as the moral law is no law of human
invention, just so human judgments, rendered in the name of moral
responsibility, are hardly ever the judgments perfectly true and
just which such responsibility expects and calls for. God is
contained in the moral law as its primal author, and in moral
responsibility as its definitive judge. The moral system, that
is, the empire of the moral law, is incomprehensible and
impossible if there is no God there, not only to establish it in
a region above and paramount to man's free agency, but to
establish it when troubled by man's conduct as a free agent.

{75}

Thus the moral truths, inherent in and proper to the human
nature--that is, the distinction between moral good and moral
evil, moral obligation, moral responsibility, moral merit and
demerit,--are necessarily and intimately connected with the
truths of Religion; for instance, with God moral legislator, God
moral spectator, God moral judge. Thus morality is naturally and
essentially connected with religion. Morality is, it is true, a
thing special and distinct in the ensemble of man's nature and of
man's life, but it is in no respect independent of the ensemble
to which it belongs. It has its particular place in that
ensemble, but it is only in that ensemble that its existence is
reasonable, thence only that it derives its source and its
authority.

Morals may, in the order of science, be separately observed and
described; but in the order of actuality morality is inseparable
from Religion.

{76}

What would be said of a physiologist if he maintained that the
heart is independent of the brain, because those two organs are
distinct, organs which are closely united and indispensable to
each other in the unity of the human being?

The spectacle of the world leads us to the same result as the
study of man, and reads us the same lesson. History confirms
Psychology. What is the great action which makes itself most
remarkable upon the stage of human societies? The constant
struggle of good with evil, of just with unjust. In this struggle
what shocking disorders! What iniquity perpetrated! How frequent
an interregnum in the empire of the moral law and of justice, and
what vicissitudes there! At one time the moral decree is expected
in vain, and the human conscience remains painfully troubled by
the successes of vice and of crime: at another time, contrary to
all expectation, and after the most deplorable infractions of the
moral law, the moral judgment comes.
{77}
"In vain," said Chateaubriand fifty years ago, "does Nero
prosper; Tacitus already lives in the empire; he grows up
unnoticed near the ashes of Germanicus, and already a just
providence has left in the hands of an obscure child the fame of
the master of the world." Chateaubriand was right: Tacitus was
the avenger of the moral law outraged by the masters of the Roman
Empire; he was the judge of their triumphs; but in that very
Empire the most victorious of its masters, Marcus Aurelius, after
having consecrated his life to the search after and the practice
of the moral law, dies in profound sadness beneath his tent on
the banks of the Danube; sad on account of his wife, sad on
account of his son, and of the future of that world which he had
governed, and which was only to be renewed, and regenerated, by
those Christians whom he had persecuted. Everything is
incomplete, imperfect, incoherent, obscure, contradictory, in
this vast conflict of men and actions called History; and
Providence, the personification of eternal wisdom and justice,
sometimes manifests itself there with _éclat_, and sometimes
remains there, inert and veiled, beneath the most sombre
mysteries.
{78}
Is such the normal, definitive state of the universe? Shall
truth, shall justice, never assume there more space than they now
occupy? When shall light dawn upon the darkness? Who restore
order to this chaos? Man evidently is insufficient to the task;
in the world, as in individual man, the moral principle is still
mutilated, and too infirm for its mission, unless it is
intimately united to the religious principle. Morality can as
little dispense with God in the life of the human race, as in
that of the individual man.

In these days more than ever morality has need of God. I am far
from thinking ill of my country or of my age; I believe that they
progress, that they have a future; but humanity is now-a-days
exposed to a rude trial. On one side we have been witnesses to
events of the most contradictory character: everything in the
world of opinion has been questioned; everything in that of facts
has been shaken, overthrown, raised up again, left tottering.
{79}
Oppressed by this spectacle, what remains to men's minds more
than feeble convictions--dim hopes? On the other side, in the
midst of this universal shock of minds, science, and man's power
over the surrounding world, have been prodigiously extended and
confirmed; light has shone more and more brightly upon the
material world, at the very moment when it was becoming paler and
paler, declining more and more, in the moral world. We have
plucked and are still plucking, more actively than ever, the
fruit of the tree of knowledge; whereas the rules of human
conduct, the laws of good and of evil, have become indistinct in
our thought. Man remains divided between pride and doubt;
intoxicated by his power, and disquieted by his weakness. Man's
soul, how perturbed! human morality, how endangered!

{80}

Thus far I have treated the subject with far more reserve and
indulgence for the opinions of others than I intended. I have
limited myself to the bounds assigned to the question by the
advocates of the theory of independent morality themselves. I
have done nothing more than set in broad daylight the intimate,
natural, and necessary connection of morals with religion; of
man, moral being, with God, moral sovereign. I am only at the
threshold of the truth. It is not merely to religion in general
that morality pertains; it is not merely the idea of God of which
it has need; it requires the constant presence of God, his
unceasing action upon the human soul. It is from Christianity
alone that morality can now derive the clearness, force, and
security, indispensable for the exercise of its empire. And it is
not for her practical utility, it is for her truth, her intrinsic
value, that I hold Christianity to be necessary to the human
soul, and to human societies. It is because she is in perfect
harmony with man's moral nature; and because she has been already
tested in man's history; that Christianity is the faithful
expression of the moral law, and the legitimate master of the
moral being.

{81}

The first and the incomparable characteristic of Christianity, is
the extent, I should rather say the immensity, of her moral
ambition. The moral system established by Christ has often been
contrasted with the reforms aimed at by great men whose endeavour
it also was to fix moral laws for man's conduct, and to secure
their empire over him. Jesus has been compared to Confucius,
Zoroaster, Socrates, Cakia-mouni, Mahomet. The comparison is
singularly inappropriate and superficial. The wisest, the most
illustrious, of these moral reformers, even the most powerful,
understood and accomplished at best but a very limited and
incomplete work; sometimes they only sought to place in a clear
light the rational principles of morality; sometimes they gave to
their disciples, addressing themselves to these alone, rules for
conduct in conformity with rational principles of morality; they
taught a doctrine or established rules for discipline; they
founded schools or sects.
{82}
The Christian work was something quite different. Jesus was not a
philosopher who entered into discussions with his disciples, and
instructed them in moral science; nor a chief who grouped around
him a certain number of adepts, and subjected them to certain
special rules which distinguish, nay sever, them from the mass of
mankind: Jesus expounds no doctrine, sets up no system of
discipline, and organises no particular society: he penetrates to
the bottom of the human soul, of every soul; he lays bare the
moral disease of humanity, and of every man; and he commands his
disciples with authority to apply the cure, first to themselves,
and then to all men:--"Save your soul, for what would it profit a
man to gain the whole world, if he lose his own soul?" "Go and
preach to all nations."

What philosopher, what reformer, ever conceived an idea so
ambitious, so vast? ever undertook to solve so completely, so
universally, the moral problem of man's nature and man's destiny?

{83}

And this was no chimerical ambition; the mission of Christ has
been pursued, and is still being pursued in the world, its onward
movement often crossed, interrupted, altered, never hopelessly
arrested. And during the first three centuries of Christianity,
it was in the name and solely with the arms of Faith and of
Liberty, that she commenced her enterprise of vanquishing man and
the world. And in these days, after the lapse of nineteen
centuries, in spite of the intermixture of error, of crime, and
evil, it is with the same arms, and with them alone, that
Christianity, in the name of Faith and of Liberty, and exposed to
fresh and violent attacks, resumes in the moral world the same
task, and promises herself fresh success.

Without attempting, indeed, to sound them to their depths, let me
at least indicate the causes of this indomitable vitality of the
Christian Religion, and show why the hope is well founded which
she entertains in the midst of her trials.

{84}

Of the moral philosophers, almost all are either bitter censors,
cold observers, or flatterers of human nature. Some of them
proclaim that man is naturally good, and that his vices are
solely due to the bad institutions of society. Some, again,
regard self-interest and self-esteem as the only springs of human
actions. Others describe the errors and foibles of man with a
careful sagacity, and yet a sagacity that does not indispose them
to jeer and mock at them, as if they were actors in a drama, both
amused themselves and amusing the spectators. How different the
regard and the sentiment of Jesus when contemplating man: how
serious that regard! how profound, how pregnant with effect that
sentiment! No illusion, no indifference with respect to the
nature of man; full, he knows it to be, of evil and at the same
time of good; inclined to revolt against the moral law, at the
same time that it is not incapable of obeying it; he sees in man
the original sin, source of the troubles and of the perils of his
soul: he does not regard the evil as incurable; he contemplates
it with an emotion at once severe and tender, and he attacks it
with a resolution superior to every discouragement, and prepared
for every sacrifice.
{85}
Why should I not simply employ Christian terms, the most genuine
of any, as well as the most impressive? Jesus lays bare the sin
without reserve, and without reserve devotes himself to the
sinner's salvation. What philosopher ever comprehended man so
well, and loved him so well, even whilst judging him so freely
and so austerely?

Jesus does not occupy himself less with man's futurity than with
man's nature. At the same time that he lays down, in all its
rigour, the principle of the moral law, the pure accomplishment
of duty, he forgets not that man has need of happiness, and
thirsts after happiness, after a happiness pure and lasting; he
opens to virtue the prospect of its attainment, he holds out a
hope, foreign to all worldly objects, hope of an ideal happiness
inaccessible to the curiosity of man's mind, but apt to satisfy
the aspirations of his soul, and not, as it were, a conquest to
be effected by merit, nor the acquittal of a debt, but a
recompense to be accorded to the virtuous efforts of man by the
equitable benevolence of God.
{86}
The Christian Religion, at the same time that it compels man
during this life to constant and laborious exertion, has in store
for him, if only he labour in accordance to the law, "the kingdom
of God" and "the promises of eternal life."

Thus, Jesus knows human nature entirely, and satisfies it; he
keeps simultaneously in view man's duties and his necessities,
his weaknesses and his merits. He does not allow the curtain to
fall upon the rude scenes of life, and the sad spectacles of the
world, without any _dénouement_. He has a prospect, and a
futurity, and a satisfaction for man, superior to his trials, and
superior to his disappointments. In what manner does Jesus attain
this result? How does he touch all the chords of man's soul, and
respond to all its appeals? By the intimate union of morality
with religion, of the moral law with moral responsibility: sole
view, complete at once and definitive, of the nature and destiny
of humanity; sole efficacious solution of the problems which
weigh upon the thought and life of man!

{87}

I say the sole efficacious solution. Efficacy is, in truth, the
peculiar, the essential characteristic of Christianity. However
high-reaching the ambition of philosophy is, it is infinitely
less so than that of religion. The ambition of philosophers is
purely scientific. They study, observe, discuss; their labours
produce systems, schools. The Christian Religion is a practical
work, not a scientific study. At the base of its dogmas and of
its precepts there is certainly a philosophy, and, in my opinion,
the true philosophy; but this philosophy is only the point from
which Christianity departs, not its object. The object is to
induce the human soul to govern itself according to the divine
law; and to attain this object it deals with man's nature as it
is, in its entirety, with all its different elements, all its
sublime aspirations. There, to borrow the language of strategy,
we see the basis of operation of Christianity; the basis upon
which it enters upon its moral struggle, and upon which it
undertakes to ensure the triumph in man of good over evil, and to
procure the salvation of man by his reformation.

{88}

When I published, two years ago, the Second Series of these
Meditations--the subject of which is the actual state of the
Christian Religion--I essayed to characterise therein the
fundamental errors of the different philosophical systems which
combat it. I sent, according to my custom, the volume to my
companion in life, and my _confrère_ at the Institute, M.
Cousin, with whom, notwithstanding our differences of opinion, I
maintained always very friendly relations. On the 1st June, 1866,
he wrote to me from the Sorbonne the following letter:--

  "My dear Friend,

  "As soon as I received your book I hastened to read it, and I
  tell you very sincerely that I am very content with it. The
  little difference between our opinions, which you have not
  pretended to conceal, are inevitable, because they are the
  consequence of a general dissimilarity in the manner in which
  we form our conceptions of the nature of philosophy and of the
  nature of religion.
{89}
  These two great powers may and ought to be in accord, still
  they are different. To Religion belongs an influence of an
  elevated and universal kind; to philosophy an influence more
  restricted, and still very elevated. The one addresses itself
  to the entire soul, comprising in it the imagination; the other
  only addresses itself to the reason. The first sets out from
  mysteries, without which there is no religion; the second sets
  out from clear and distinct ideas, as has been said both by
  Descartes and by Bossuet. This distinction is the foundation of
  my philosophy and of my religion; and this distinction is also,
  in my view, the principle of their harmony. To confound them
  is, I think, an infallible mode of confusing them each by the
  other, as Malebranche has done. To absorb philosophy in
  religion gave, in Pascal, the result of a faith full of
  contradiction and of anguish; to absorb religion in philosophy
  is an extravagant enterprise, of which sound philosophy must
  disapprove. To admit them both, each in its place, is truth,
  grandeur, and peace.

{90}

  "Hence you perceive the reason of our differences of opinion,
  which are no more hurtful to our union, than they are to our
  old and sincere friendship."

I replied to him on the 13th of June:--

  "I count, as well as you, my dear friend, upon our
  dissentiments not being hurtful to our old and sincere
  friendship; and I feel the more pleasure in so counting,
  because, independently of our particular and petty
  dissentiments, there is, as you say, between us a general, a
  profound difference of opinion. I think, as you do, that
  philosophy is not to be confounded or absorbed in religion, nor
  religion in philosophy. I regard them both as free in their
  manifestations and in their influence; but I do not found their
  distinction or their accord upon the same grounds as you do.
{91}
  To me, philosophy is but a science, that is the work of man,
  limited in its sphere and reach, as is man's mind itself.
  Religion, in its principle and its history, is of divine origin
  and institution. The one springs from man's avidity of
  knowledge; the other is the light coming from God, 'which
  shines upon every man that comes into the world,' and which God
  continues to maintain and to shed over the world, according to
  his impenetrable designs, by the act, general or special, of
  his free will.

  "I will not say more. We know, both of us, how far our opinions
  are in the same road, and where is the point of divergence."

I had left Paris when I received M. Cousin's letter. He was at
Cannes when I returned to Paris. We never saw each other
afterwards. He has preceded me to that region where light is shed
upon the mysteries of this life. But in our last correspondence
we had each touched in a few words upon the knot of the whole
question.
{92}
It is this--What are the points of resemblance, and what of
difference, between Religion and science, between Christianity
and philosophy? Although M. Cousin and I agreed as to the
reciprocal rights of these two influences to liberty of action,
we entertained different sentiments as to their origin and their
nature, and consequently as to the boundaries of their empire,
and the character of their mission.

{93}

           Third Meditation.

        Christianity And Science.


It is the faith of Christians, and the point from which
Christianity starts, that the Scriptures, which render an account
of its origin, its dogmas, and its precepts, are divinely
inspired. Not that Christians understand by these words that
divine action upon the mind of man so often called inspiration,
and of which Cicero said, "No one has ever been a great man
without some divine inspiration;" [Footnote 17] and of which
Plato was thinking when he said, "It is not by art that they make
these noble poems, but because a God is in them, by whom they are
possessed. ... They do not speak so by art, but by divine power."
[Footnote 18]

    [Footnote 17: Pro Archià, c. 8.]

    [Footnote 18: I have translated the Greek text literally,
    which M. Cousin has rendered with his accustomed elegance.
    (Jon., vol. iv. p. 249, et passim.) Note of author.]

{94}

The inspiration of the holy book of Christianity is quite a
different thing: it is special and supernatural. There is divine
inspiration in all the great works of man; these books are a work
directly and personally inspired by God: they affirm this
themselves. The language used by Jesus in the Gospels incessantly
implies it; and, in numerous passages, the epistles of St. Peter
and St. Paul, as well as the Acts of the Apostles, declare it
positively. [Footnote 19]

    [Footnote 19: In his History of Christian Theology in the
    Apostolic Age, M. Reuss acknowledges it: "This inspiration,"
    says he, "was regarded as something unlike any other, and
    reserved to a few individuals chosen by Providence, and only
    to them upon special and solemn occasions;" and he refers to
    the different texts of the New Testament which prove his
    assertion. (Vol. i. p. 411, ed. 1860.)]

This Christian principle of the special and divine inspiration of
the Scriptures was not originally taken in so narrow an
acceptation as in later times.
{95}
In the first ages of the Christian era, the Christians of the
school of Plato, whilst carefully distinguishing the inspiration
of the sacred volumes from the inspiration of the great poets,
strove to determine the process common to these two kinds of
inspiration, and to explain one by the other--"It is not by any
effect of nature nor by any human faculty," says St. Justin,
"that it is in the power of men to know things so grand and so
divine; it is by the grace which descends from on high upon the
saints. They have no need for any art to be revealed to them;
pure themselves, they must offer themselves to the action of the
divine spirit, in order that the divine bow, descending itself
from heaven and making use of the just, in the same way as the
musician does of the chords of a harp or lyre, may unfold to us
the knowledge of things divine." "I think," says Athenagoras,
"that you are not ignorant of Moses, or of Isaiah, or of the
other prophets, who, being turned aside from any process of
individual reasoning, and moved by the spirit of God, proclaimed
aloud that which echoed within them, the holy spirit employing
them and attaching itself to them as the player adds to his flute
the breath which makes it discourse its music."

{96}

Questions soon began to be agitated in Christendom as to which of
the religious books in circulation were really inspired, and as
to which did not possess this divine characteristic. Hence
proceeded disputes in respect to the Apocryphal books, and the
formation of the Canon, or collection of the Holy Scriptures. But
even in the very books, received by all as divinely inspired,
great Christian doctors, not merely Origen, but St. Jerome and
St. Augustin, discovered grammatical errors and faults which it
was impossible to attribute to divine inspiration; and they
distinguished, with greater or less exactness, the inspiration of
God from the imperfection of man. St. Jerome points out solecisms
in the Epistles of St. Paul; and St. Augustin says, in speaking
of St. John, "I venture to say that John perhaps has not spoken
of the thing as it really was, but only as it was in his power to
speak; for he is a man, and he speaks of God.
{97}
Inspired, no doubt, by God, but still a man. ... When we meet
with such diversity of expressions--although not in themselves
contradictory--used by the Evangelists, we should regard, in the
words of each, only the intent with which the words are
pronounced, and not, like wretched cavillers, attach an idea of
truth to the external form of the letter; for we must seek the
very spirit, not only in all the words, but in everything else
which serve as symptoms of the manifestation of the spirit."

It was in the presence and in spite of these discussions, of this
explanation and of this free criticism, that the divine
inspiration of the Scriptures was nevertheless upheld in the
fourth century as the common and positive faith of Christians.

I pass by the twelve following centuries: a long period; full of
darkness, but yet with flashes of light; silent yet full of
uproar, full of liberty and oppression: period beginning with the
invasion of the Barbarians and terminating with the Renaissance;
that period in short which, taken together, is called the Middle
Age.

{98}

I transport myself at once to the sixteenth century, that epoch
of political struggles, when men reduced to systems, and reasoned
upon, the different elements of moral and social institutions;
for they had, ever since the fall of the Roman Empire, been
fermenting pell-mell in Europe, which, although so small, was yet
destined to conquer and civilize that globe, termed by us the
world.

Striving to discover what, after the lapse of so many years and
events, had become of the principle of the divine inspiration of
the sacred books, that base of the religious faith and rule of
Christian societies, I find that this question had received two
solutions: one in the name of the Church of Rome, by its
representative the Council of Trent; the other in the name of the
Protestant churches, by their great founders and teachers. The
Council of Trent "receives all the books both of the old and of
the new Testament, since the same God is the author of each;
surrounds them with the same respect, and with an equally pious
reverence;" inserts in its decree the complete catalogue of these
books, and "anathematises whoever does not accept as sacred and
canonical those books, with all that they contain, just as they
are in use in the Catholic Church, and as they exist in the
ancient Latin edition known as the Vulgate." [Footnote 20]

    [Footnote 20: Le Saint Concile de Trente, translated by the
    Abbé Chanut, pp. 10--13. Paris, 1686.]

{99}

The founders of the great Protestant Churches, although they
began to apply the right of historical criticism to both texts
and manuscripts, proclaimed nevertheless the absolute and
complete inspiration of the holy volumes, in form and sense,
narrative, precepts, and words. The Bible, all the Bible, the
old, the new Testament, were, according to them, written at God's
dictation to serve as the law of Christian Faith.

{100}

The Decree of the Council of Trent remains the Rule of the Church
of Rome in the nineteenth century as much as it was in the
sixteenth century; and in our days a Protestant Divine, justly
respected for elevation of thought as much as for the energetic
sincerity of his Faith, in maintaining the principle of the
complete and divine inspiration, and of the absolute
infallibility, of the Bible, has been driven so far as to make
this strange assertion: "All the expressions and all the letters
of the ten commandments were certainly written by the finger of
God, from the Aleph with which they begin, to the Caph with which
they end;" a few pages further on he says: "The Decalogue, we
repeat, was written entirely by the finger of Jehovah upon the
two stone slabs." [Footnote 21]

    [Footnote 21: Théopneustie. By M. Gaussen.
    2nd ed., 1842, pp. 225, 242.]

"Be on your guard," said Bossuet, "you assign to God arms and
hands; unless you strip these expressions of all that savours of
humanity, so as to leave nothing of arms and hands but their
action and their force, you err. ... God does everything by
command; he has no lips to move, neither does he strike the air
with his tongue to draw forth sounds from it; he has only to
will, and his will is accomplished." [Footnote 22]

    [Footnote 22: Elévations sur les Mystères, vol. ix. pp.
    66-68, 85, 109; and the Sixiéme Avertissement sur les lettres
    de Jurieu, vol. xxx. pp. 57, 134.]

{101}

The empire of circumstances, both in the sixteenth and the
nineteenth centuries, has had much to do with the adoption of
these two doctrines, thus conceived and expressed. The Council of
Trent, in order to cut short all controversies with the
Reformers, took the Scriptures, and the interpretation of the
Scriptures, under the guardianship of the supreme and infallible
authority of the Church of Rome. The Reformers, in their turn,
found their fixed point and a basis, firm in the midst of the
movement to which they were giving the impulse, in the
infallibility of the Bible, itself divinely inspired. And at the
present time, on the one side the Church of Rome in its new
dangers, and on the other side the Protestants, sincere in their
ardent zeal to awaken that Christian Faith which is languishing,
have pushed the two doctrines,--the former of ecclesiastical
authority, the latter of biblical infallibility,--to their
extremest verge: in my opinion each beyond the limits of right
and of truth. History explains errors, it does not justify them.
{102}
I resume, briefly: those with which I reproach the two doctrines
referred to,--they severally infringe, the one the rights of
religious liberty, the other those of human science. In both
cases they greatly endanger that Christian Religion which they
have, in these respects, severally ill understood.

I have already expressed my views upon this subject. [Footnote
23]

    [Footnote 23: Meditations on the Essence of Christianity.
    Sixth Meditation. Inspiration of the Holy Scriptures, pp.
    145-146. London, 1864.]

Fervent and learned men maintain "that all, absolutely all, in
the Scriptures is divinely inspired--the words as well as the
ideas, all the words used upon all subjects--the material of
language, as well as the doctrine which lies at its base. In this
assertion I see but deplorable confusion, leading to profound
misapprehension both of the meaning and the object of the sacred
books. It was not God's purpose to give instruction to men in
grammar, and if not in grammar neither was it his purpose to give
instruction in geology, astronomy, geography, or chronology.
{103}
It is on their relations with their Creator, upon duties of men
towards Him and towards each other, upon the rule of faith and of
conduct in life, that God has lighted them by light from heaven.
It is to the subject of religion and morals, and to these alone,
that the inspiration of the Scriptures is directed."

I have read the Holy Scriptures scrupulously, and over and over
again, with a view neither to criticise nor defend, with the sole
object of familiarising myself with their character and sense.
The more I advanced in this study, the longer I had lived in the
Bible, the more did the two facts seem clear to me, the Divine
truths and the human faults at once profoundly distinct and in
intimate contact. I meet at each step in the Bible with God and
with man: God, Being real and personal, to whom nothing happens,
in whom nothing changes, Being identical and immovable in the
midst of the universal movement, who gives of himself the
unparalleled definition, "I am that I am:" on the other side man,
Being incomplete, imperfect, variable, full of deficiencies and
of contradictions, of sublime instincts and gross desires, of
curiosity and ignorance, capable of good and of evil, and
perfectible in the midst of his imperfection.
{104}
What the Bible is incessantly showing us is, God and Man, their
points of connection and their contests,--God watching over and
acting upon man; man at one time accepting, at another rejecting,
God's influence. The divine person and the human person, if the
expression is permissible, are in each other's presence, each
acting upon the other and upon events. It is the education of man
after his Creation: his education as a religious and moral being,
nothing less and nothing more. God does not, in thus educating
man, change him: he created him intelligent and free: he
enlightens him as to the religious and moral law with light from
heaven; in other respects he leaves him absorbed in the laborious
and perilous exercise of his intelligence and of his liberty as a
free agent.
{105}
At each epoch, in every circumstance, during his continuous
action upon man, God takes him as he finds him, with his
passions, vices, defects, errors, ignorance; just such a being as
he has made himself; nay, every day is making himself, by the
good or bad use of his intelligence and of his freedom of action.
This is the Biblical account, and the Biblical history of the
relations of Man with God.

What a strange contrast, and still what an intimate and powerful
connection exists, in this history, between those whom--how shall
I dare to permit myself to call the two actors! God does not
appear so elevated, so pure, so strange to imperfection, so
untroubled by any human nature, so immutable and serene in the
plenitude of the divine nature, so really God, in any tradition,
invention of poetry, or in any mythology, as he is presented to
us in the Bible. On the other hand, in no nation, in no
historical narrative or document, does man show himself more
violent and ruder, more brutal, more cruel, more prompt to
ingratitude, and more rebellious to his God, than he is amongst
the Hebrews.
{106}
Nowhere else, and in no history, is the distance so great between
the divine sphere and the human region, between the sovereign and
the subject. Still, Israel never entirely separates itself from
God; and, in spite of vices and excesses, Israel returns to God,
and recognises his law and empire, even whilst incessantly
violating them. Nowhere, on the other hand, does God appear, in
his turn, so occupied with man, does he at once exact so much
from him and yet evince so much sympathy for him: he does not
change him suddenly, by any act of his sovereign will; he is a
witness to all his imperfections, all his weaknesses, and all his
errors; nevertheless, he abandons him not; he holds ever steadily
before him the torch of Heavenly Light, and never omits to
interest himself in his destiny. The religious and moral idea is
ever present and dominant; nowhere else have the business and
labour of human science held so small a place in man's thoughts
and man's society. God, and the relations of God and man, are the
only subjects which fill the Holy volumes.

{107}

In what do those relations consist? By what results does this
continuous action manifest itself, of God upon man; this
incessant dialogue between God and man? By laws, precepts, and
commands, religious and moral--God proposes these to man; he
enjoins nothing more; he speaks to him of nothing else; demands
nothing from him but obedience to his Law. God does not teach, he
commands; God does not discuss, he warns. And the organs of God's
speech, the men whom he takes for his interpreters and his
prophets, Moses, Samuel, Isaiah, do neither less nor more.
Although superior to most of their contemporaries by reason of
possessing certain attainments, they are no professors of human
sciences: just as they speak the language of the common people
whom they address, just so do they share most of their ignorance
and errors respecting the objects and facts of the finite world,
in the midst of which they are living.
{108}
When they are made the medium for the religious and moral
precepts and warnings of God, it is then that they are no longer
mere men of their time; it is then, only then, that the light of
divine inspiration descends upon them, and that they diffuse it
to all around them.

I do not wish to limit myself to a general summary only of what I
regard as the essential character of the Holy Scriptures,--the
simultaneous presence of the divine element and of the human
element; the one in all its sublimity, the other in all its
imperfection; God revealing to man in a certain place his
religious law and his moral law, but without conveying elsewhere
the divine light; God taking man as he finds him, in the points
of time and of space in which he is placed, with all his
barbarism and imperfections. I proceed, therefore, to consider
some of the particular examples presented by the Scriptures,
which make this great truth so evident as to be incontestable.

{109}

I open the book of Genesis and read:--

  "And it came to pass after these things, that God did tempt
  Abraham, and said unto him, Abraham: and he said, Behold, here
  I am.

  And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou
  lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him
  there for a burnt-offering upon one of the mountains which I
  will tell thee of.

  And Abraham rose up early in the morning, and saddled his ass,
  and took two of his young men with him, and Isaac his son; and
  clave the wood for the burnt-offering, and rose up, and went
  unto the place of which God had told him.

  Then on the third day Abraham lift up his eyes, and saw the
  place afar off.

  And Abraham said unto his young men, Abide ye here with the
  ass; and I and the lad will go yonder and worship, and come
  again to you.

  And Abraham took the wood of the burnt-offering, and laid it
  upon Isaac his son: and he took the fire in his hand, and a
  knife: and they went both of them together.

  And Isaac spake unto Abraham his father, and said, My father:
  and he said, here am I, my son. And he said, Behold the fire
  and the wood: but where is the lamb for a burnt-offering?

  And Abraham said, My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a
  burnt-offering: so they went both of them together.
{110}
  And they came to the place which God had told him of; and
  Abraham built an altar there, and laid the wood in order; and
  bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar upon the wood.

  And Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to
  slay his son.

  And the angel of the Lord called unto him out of heaven, and
  said, Abraham, Abraham: and he said, here am I.

  And he said, Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou
  any thing unto him: for now I know that thou fearest God,
  seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from me.

  And Abraham lifted up his eyes, and looked, and behold, behind
  him a ram caught in a thicket by his horns: and Abraham went
  and took the ram, and offered him up for a burnt-offering in
  the stead of his son."

A man who, by his enlightened views, and the elevation of his
mind, as well as by his faithfulness as a follower of Christ, is
an honour to the church which he serves, Dr. Arthur Stanley, Dean
of Westminster, explains and characterises in these terms the
Biblical truths to which I am referring.

{111}

"There have been," he says, "in almost all ancient forms of
religion, and also in some of more modern date, two strong
tendencies, each in itself springing from the best and purest
feelings of humanity, yet each, if carried into the extremes
suggested by passion or by logic, incompatible with the other and
with its own highest purpose. One is the craving to please, or to
propitiate, or to communicate with the powers above us, by
surrendering some object near and dear to ourselves. This is the
source of all sacrifice. The other is the profound moral instinct
that the Creator of the world cannot be pleased, or propitiated,
or approached by any other means than a pure life and good deeds.
On the exaggeration, on the contact, on the collision of these
two tendencies, have turned some of the chief difficulties of
evangelical history. The earliest of them we are about to witness
in the life of Abraham. ...
{112}
The sacrifice, the resignation of the will in the father and the
son was accepted; the literal sacrifice of the act was repelled.
The great principle was proclaimed that mercy was better than
sacrifice,--that the sacrifice of self is the highest and holiest
offering that God can receive. ... We have a proverb which tells
us that man's extremity is God's opportunity." [Footnote 24]

    [Footnote 24: Lectures on the History of the Jewish Church.
    By Arthur P. Stanley, D.D. Vol. i. pp. 47, 48, 50. London,
    1867.]

Abraham was upon the point of accomplishing an act which, even in
the presence of virtuous motives and a divine command, has been
forbidden, and is held accursed by the subsequent Revelation and
the sentiments of all whom it has enlightened. At this moment the
hand of Abraham is stayed, and patriarchal religion is saved from
the antagonism of a conflict between the rigour of the Hebrew law
and the merciful dispensation of the Gospel.

The sentiment which Dean Stanley expresses has my full
concurrence; but I go still further, and maintain that there is
in the pathetic narrative of Abraham's sacrifice something more
than he points out.
{113}
This interposition of God in order to arrest the very act which
he has required is in accord with the general doctrine of the
Bible, expressly condemning human sacrifices; [Footnote 25] but
Abraham's as well as several other examples prove how such
sacrifices continued to exist in the ferocious traditions and
manners, not only of several nations of Semitic origin, but even
of the Hebrews themselves. God's intent is to try Abraham, and he
pauses as soon as Abraham's obedience to the divine order is
beyond doubt. Abraham does not hesitate to execute the divine
command; he expresses no surprise at it. The sacrifice of Isaac
is prepared, and very nearly consummated, as an event almost of
course. Here we have man in the grossest and blindest condition
of barbarism, in the presence of God, in whom as sovereign he
believes, and whose sovereignty it is not his purpose to dispute.

    [Footnote 25: Leviticus xviii. 21; Deuteronomy xii. 31;
    Ezekiel xx. 26. This question is treated and conclusively
    solved in the Theologische Encyclopedie of Herzog, art.
    Sacrifice, vol. x. p. 621.]

{114}

It would be easy for me to multiply these examples, and to show,
in many other passages of the Bible, the following fundamental
characteristic of Biblical History: the thought and word of man,
although constantly in presence of the divine law and of the
divine action, yet in contact and contrast with the thought and
word of God. I prefer seeking for proofs in support of my
conviction in a comparison of the Old and New Testaments, and in
the light which Christianity sheds upon the Hebrew Revelation,
which it does not contradict, but to which it applies a movement
of progress.

I say progress,--progress immense, infinitely grander than man's
imagination could ever have conceived,--and at the same time the
character of the divine work remaining absolutely the same. It is
no longer, as in the Old Testament, the stormy combat, the
continuous struggle of God and of man in the events of the world
and in the life of the people. God no longer interposes in the
New Testament to warn or direct, to raise up or humble, to
recompense or to punish man in this world; he decides no longer
directly the issue of battle or the destiny of states.
{115}
It is still God, God in Jesus Christ, with all his sublimity: He,
and He only, occupies and fills the place. He appears there under
a different aspect. In his human form, He is weakness itself,
intended and destined to become the very type of humility and of
suffering; the voluntary victim, who expiates man's sin; the
victim of man's fall. But in the midst of His miseries it is God,
God as He was for Israel in all the splendour of His power.
Christ's own knowledge of this appears throughout. He says it, He
manifests it unceasingly by actions and by words; sometimes by
natural effects, sometimes by miracles. And yet how different!
what a range in the object and the bearing of His actions and of
His words! In the Old Testament the scene concentrates itself
upon a corner of the world, a single people, a petty nation,
separated by God from the rest of the world, in order to withdraw
it from the contagion of idolatry;--but now it is for the whole
world, for all nations, for future as well as for living
generations, for the Gentile as well as for the Jew, for the
barbarians of Malta as well as for the Greeks of Athens, that the
God of the New Testament manifests Himself and speaks; it is over
the whole of humanity that He spreads His light and orders His
servants to extend His empire.

{116}

He does more, much more. That divine light which Jesus comes to
spread over the whole world, although it continues to emanate
from the same fountain, becomes more complete and more pure.
Jesus is the first to recognise the fact that the ancient law,
although issuing from God, bears here and there traces of human
errors and passions. "I am not come," says he, "to abolish the
law, but to fulfil it." How fulfil it? By removing the errors
with which it had become intermixed owing to the imperfect nature
of the men, of the time, and of the place, at which it appeared,
and by filling up the gaps which that imperfection had entailed.
He disentangles the ancient law from every human element, and
brings it back to its one divine element, its one pure and
perfect source. I refrain from all argument or commentary. I will
not cite anything in proof of this grand fact but those very
texts of the Ancient and of the New Testament which embody their
most essential precepts.

{117}

I read in Exodus, "Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand,
foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for
stripe." [Footnote 26] Jesus effaces this _lex talionis_.
"Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy
neighbour, and hate thine enemy: but I say unto you, Love your
enemies; bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate
you, and pray for them that despitefully use you and persecute
you." [Footnote 27]

    [Footnote 26: Exodus xxi. 24, 25.]

    [Footnote 27: Matthew v. 43, 44.]

It is said in the book of Deuteronomy: "When a man hath taken a
wife and married her, and it come to pass that she find no favour
in his eyes, because he hath found some uncleanness in her: then
let him write her a bill of divorcement, and give it in her hand,
and send her out of his house." [Footnote 28]

    [Footnote 28: Deuteronomy xxiv. 1.]

{118}

I read in the New Testament: "And the Pharisees came to him, and
asked him, Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife? ... And
he answered and said unto them, What did Moses command you? And
they said, Moses suffered to write a bill of divorcement, and to
put her away. And Jesus answered and said unto them, For the
hardness of your hearts he wrote you this precept. But from the
beginning of the creation God made them male and female. For this
cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and cleave to his
wife; and they twain shall be one flesh: so then they are no more
twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together,
let not man put asunder." [Footnote 29]

    [Footnote 29: Mark x. 2-9;  Matthew xix. 3-9.]

The Mosaic law condemns to death every adulterer: "If a man be
found lying with a woman married to an husband, then they shall
both of them die, both the man that lay with the woman, and the
woman: so shalt thou put away evil from Israel." [Footnote 30]

    [Footnote 30: Deuteronomy xxii. 22.]

{119}

Jesus is called upon to pronounce upon the very case: "And the
scribes and Pharisees brought unto him a woman taken in adultery;
and when they had set her in the midst, they say unto him,
Master, this woman was taken in adultery; in the very act. Now
Moses in the law commanded us that such should be stoned: but
what sayest thou? This they said tempting him, that they might
have to accuse him. But Jesus stooped down, and with his finger
wrote on the ground as though he heard them not. So when they
continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them,
He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at
her. And again he stooped down, and wrote on the ground. And they
which heard it, being convicted by their own conscience, went out
one by one, beginning at the eldest, even unto the last: and
Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst. When
Jesus had lifted up himself, and saw none but the woman, he said
unto her, Woman, where are those thine accusers? hath no man
condemned thee? She said, No man, Lord. And Jesus said unto her,
Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more." [Footnote 31]

    [Footnote 31: John viii. 3-11.]

{120}

The Mosaic law is full of minute ceremonial regulations, and of
rigorous conditions, which attach to the performance of certain
external acts, in certain appointed places, the duty of adoration
and of prayer. Not only does Jesus object to the Scribes and
Pharisees that they place all their faith and their piety in the
acts alone; he does more; he gives his disciples personally a
lesson of striking simplicity by teaching them the Lord's Prayer;
and when the Samaritan woman, whom he meets near the well of
Jacob, says to him: "Our fathers worshipped in this mountain; and
ye say that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship.
... Jesus saith unto her, Woman, believe me, ... the hour cometh,
and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in
spirit and in truth: for the Father seeketh such to worship him.
God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in
spirit and in truth." [Footnote 32]

    [Footnote 32: John iv. 20, 21, 23, 24.]

{121}

Thus Jesus, not to abolish but to accomplish the ancient law, and
to make it harmonise with the new and universal work which he is
about, separates from the law that which the imperfection of man
had introduced in it in other times, and for a more limited work;
he leaves in it nothing but the divine element in all its purity
and empire. He only leaves to the divine element its religious
and moral empire, for it is in its name alone that he speaks; the
religious and moral law is the only law revealed by Jesus, and
extended over the entire world; no other thought mixes itself
with his doctrine, no other motive influences his action;
political science, human science, have absolutely no place at all
in the New Testament; Jesus does not think of satisfying either
social ambition or intellectual curiosity; he desires to make
neither kings nor doctors; as soon as he finds such pretensions
advanced, he sets them aside;
{122}
"Render unto Cæsar the things which are Cæsar's; and unto God the
things that are God's." "I thank thee, Father, Lord of heaven and
earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and
prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes." [Footnote 33]

    [Footnote 33: Matthew xxii. 21; xi. 25.]

Jesus occupies himself with man's soul alone, with the human
being in his native simplicity; the relations of man, of every
man, with God; the state and destiny of the human soul, of every
human soul, in the present and in the future: this is the sole
idea, the sole mission, of the New Testament. Jesus knows that
when once accomplished this will bring with it its own salutary
consequences: "Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his
righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you."
[Footnote 34]

    [Footnote 34:  Matthew vi. 33.]

{123}

I do not hesitate, then, to affirm, that human science, in its
different and special objects,--whether astronomy, geology,
geography, chronology, physics, historical criticism,--is as
foreign to the object as it is to the source of the sacred
Volumes. In the sciences we have the domain of the mind of man
left to itself, and to itself alone. They are the fruits,
assiduously cultivated and slowly acquired by the laborious
exertions of the human intellect during a succession of ages. If,
then, you meet, in Scriptural texts, not treating of acts
declared miraculous, terms and assertions apparently repugnant to
facts recognised as truths in these different sciences, feel no
disquietude. It is not there that God has set up His divine
torch; it is not there that God has spoken. The language is the
language of the men of the different epochs, men who speak
according to the measure of their knowledge or of their
ignorance, the language which they are obliged to speak in order
to be understood by their contemporaries. I feel surprised that
men should require to be told this, so simple, so clear is it.
{124}
In matters of religion and of morality there have always existed,
and in every place there have existed, spontaneous instincts,
aspirations, and ideas common to all men, which lead them to
employ a similar language,--a language comprehended and received
by all who hear it, whatever in other respects may be their
inequality in attainments and civilization; whereas, in matters
purely scientific we find nothing at all like this; men in the
mass see and speak of these, not as they are to the eye of
science, but according to their appearances, and so men
comprehend or do not comprehend them, hear them or do not hear
them, according to the degree of scientific knowledge or of
ignorance prevalent at the time and place at which they live.
What would the Hebrews in the Desert, or the Jews about the
person of Christ, or the savages of the Pacific have said to his
missionaries, if they had been told that it is the earth which
turns round the sun, that its shape is that of a spheroid, that
it is habitable and inhabited at opposite points of its
circumference?
{125}
What is more natural, what more inevitable, than that the
language of the Scriptures should agree with the scientific
imperfection of men upon all these matters, even where that
language is full of divine inspiration as to the religious or
moral law of humanity?

No one honours science more than I do, no one feels a greater
admiration for it. It is a mission that man has to perform, and
it is one of his glories; but it has no place in the relation of
man with God, and in the action of God upon man. God is no
sublime, no mighty doctor, who reveals truths of science to man,
to give him the noble pleasure of contemplating them, or of
publishing them; he has left such researches to labours purely
human. The work of God is more complex and grander: it is
essentially practical. That of which man, every man, stands in
need, that after which he thirsts, that which all mankind asks of
God, simple as well as learned, is to be enlightened as to the
religious and moral truths which are to regulate his soul and his
life, and to decide his lot in eternity.
{126}
It is to all mankind that God responds; it is to the salvation of
all men that the Scripture applies itself. A celebrated
philosopher, a man of a mind lofty and sincere, but one of the
most lost of the great lost ones of the human intelligence,
thought differently. According to Spinoza, "all men are far from
being called to enjoy eternal life in the same plenitude. ...
After death the reason,--just ideas survive; all the rest
perishes. Souls governed by reason, philosophical souls, who even
from the moment when their life in this world ceases, live in
God, are consequently exempt from death; for death deprives them
only of that which is of no value. But those dim and feeble
souls, upon which reason hardly gleams at all, those souls made
up entirely, so to say, of empty imaginings and passions, perish
almost entirely; and death, instead of coming to them as a simple
accident, penetrates to the very bottom of their being. The soul
of the sage, on the contrary, cannot be more than barely
troubled; possessing, by a sort of eternal necessity, the
consciousness of itself and of God, and of things as they really
are, it never ceases to exist; and as for real tranquillity of
soul, it possesses it for ever." [Footnote 35]

    [Footnote 35: Œuvres de Spinoza. According to the translation
    of Emile Saisset. Introduction, vol. iii. p. 291.]

{127}

I know not if human pride ever gave expression to a thought
showing a stranger aberration of intellect; and in spite of the
favour with which some men of distinguished abilities endeavour
at the present day to encircle the name of Spinoza, I do not
believe that there is any chance, at an epoch when war is
declared against all privileges, for philosophers to make good
their exclusive claim to the privilege of immortality.

{128}

           Fourth Meditation.

          Christian Ignorance.


When I use the term "Christian Ignorance," I would not have
either the sense which I attach to the expression, or the
intention with which I use it, misunderstood. I do not think that
it should be denied to man to make any use of his intelligence,
to exercise any right to inquire freely after truth, or after any
kind of truth. Is the field which is open to the human mind
limited in extent? Is the mind itself of limited reach? Is there
a difference of degree in human knowledge according as the
objects are different to which it is applied? These are
questions, all of them, fundamentally contained in the words
"Christian Ignorance;" and of these questions it is my aim to
offer what appears to me to be the right solution.

{129}

I am in the presence of four sciences, and of six schools or
systems, which have made, are making, and will always continue to
make, much noise in the world. The sciences are, Physiology,
Psychology, Ontology, and Theology. The systems to which these
sciences have given birth are, Materialism, Positivism,
Scepticism, Spiritualism, Scientific Theology, Mystical Theology.
I am far from meaning to discuss here the principles of these
systems, or to attempt to determine their value; it would be to
undertake the task of examining all philosophy and all
philosophies. I mean to touch only upon one of the special
questions which furnish in our days matter of debate between
Christianity and these different schools. It is thus, and thus
only, that I can clearly establish the sense which I attach to
the words "Christian Ignorance;" and determine, at the same time,
their bearing and their limitation.

{130}

I have, and for very simple reasons, little to say respecting the
first three systems to which I have just referred, i. e.,
Materialism, Positivism, Scepticism. By its denial of the
distinction of the soul and the body, of mind and matter,
Materialism rejects Psychology, and arrives, as far as Ontology
is concerned, only at Atheism or at Pantheism. Of the four great
philosophical sciences, Physiology is the only one with which
Materialism has any concern. Amongst Positivists, some, the more
eminent, admit, it is true, the reality of Objects, or to speak
more exactly, the reality of the domain of Psychology and of
Ontology; but in admitting it they declare it to be inaccessible
to the human mind: "Inaccessible," says M. Littré, "not null or
non-existent; it is an ocean which washes our shore, and for
which we have neither bark nor sail." [Footnote 36]

    [Footnote 36: A. Comte et la Philosophie Positive.
    By M. Littré, p. 519.]

That is to say, that, according to Positivists, Psychology,
Ontology, and Theology are not--cannot be--sciences.
{131}
As for sceptics, they contest to the human mind all certitude,
and especially certitude with respect to the subject-matters of
Psychology, Ontology, and Theology. The fundamental principle of
Christian belief is then too absolutely strange to those three
schools for it to be necessary that I should discuss with them
the source, bearing, and legitimacy of that which I term
"Christian Ignorance."

It is only with Spiritualists, with scientific Theologians, and
with mystic Theologians, that it is possible to discuss this
question of Christian Ignorance, for the three schools to which
they belong are the only ones which, in the same way as
Christianity itself does, open to the human mind the domain of
the four sciences--Physiology, Psychology, Ontology, and
Theology, and which recognise the right of the human mind there
to search after truth, and the possibility of its being there
discovered.

When I speak of Spiritualists, a preliminary remark is
indispensable. Christianity is as spiritualistic, not to say more
so, than Spiritualism itself.
{132}
It is not, then, with Spiritualism in general, and with all
Spiritualists without distinction, that Christians have to deal
in the question of "Christian Ignorance," as it has in other
questions; the discussion here lies between Christianity and
Rationalistic Spiritualism alone; and not only between
Rationalism and Christian ignorance, but also between
Rationalistic science and Christian science.

Rationalistic Spiritualism admits the reality of Psychology, of
Ontology, and of Theology, just as it does that of Physiology; it
admits that these different sciences owe their birth and
development necessarily to the spectacle of the universe, of men
and of things, and have for their object the solution of the
questions which this spectacle suggests. But this great fact once
admitted, Rationalism places in Psychology, and in Psychology
alone, the starting-point and the fulcrum of Ontology and of
Theology; it only admits in these two sciences results to which
the human mind attains by its own unaided efforts, that is to
say, by way of observation and of reasoning; it recognises for
human knowledge, with respect to Ontology and Theology, no source
other than human reason.
{133}
Christianity opens to Ontology and Theology a larger sphere and
other sources of knowledge: besides the psychological facts
supplied to these two sciences by observation and reasoning, it
recognises historical facts as truths, not only which they are
bound themselves to admit, but which they have a right to demand
that others shall admit; Christianity does not make the human
mind the sole object of its belief; it believes also in the
history of Humanity, and finds in that History facts to the truth
of which centuries, and the traditions of centuries, have
testified, which it therefore holds, and is bound to hold, as
well proved and as certain as any physical or psychological fact
proved by the observations of contemporary science. The Creation,
the primitive Revelation, the Mosaic Revelation, the Evangelical
Revelation, are in Christian Doctrine historical facts which
Ontology and Theology take, with reason, as the elementary data
and the legitimate bases of science.

{134}

I am here met by a fundamental objection made to these facts and
to their scientific authority; they are, it is said, opposed to
the permanent laws of nature and of reason, as well as of human
experience; science cannot admit supernatural facts. I have no
intention in merely passing to re-enter here upon this great
question; I have already expressed unreservedly my opinion with
respect to it, [Footnote 37] and upon some other occasion I shall
return to it; for, if I do not deceive myself, the question has
not hitherto been properly sounded and to the depth which it
demands. Here I confine myself to referring to two ideas--facts,
rather--absolutely forgotten or ignored by the systematic
opponents of the supernatural.

    [Footnote 37: Meditations on the Essence of Christianity.
    Third Meditation: "The Supernatural," pp. 84-108. London,
    1864.]

Liberty, free agency, in presence of the external or internal
causes which operate upon the will, is the peculiar and
distinctive characteristic of man.
{135}
It is by this that man separates himself from and raises himself
above nature, understanding by the term the ensemble of things
determined by laws general, anterior, permanent. Man alone has it
in his power to commence a new series of facts foreign to any
general law, and originating in his will alone. To deny such
facts, is to deny that man is a free agent, and to make him a
machine regulated by external and fatal laws; that is to say, to
drive man back to the condition of that nature which is
substantially governed by laws of this kind, and thus to abolish
at one blow human morality and human liberty.

The blow strikes still higher--it would abolish God. God, who
created man, is, and was previous to the existence of his
creations, a being essentially free; for liberty cannot be the
daughter of Fatality. It is in the free divine volition that
human Liberty has its source, and man's Liberty itself testifies
to the source from which it emanates.
{136}
By denying human liberty, we throw not only man but God into the
condition of physical nature, that is to say, into the ensemble
of causes obedient to fate, and deprived of all moral essence;
that is to say, we plunge into Pantheism, which, in spite of
Spinoza and Goethe, in spite of all the efforts of logical
reasoning or poetic imagination, is, in ultimate analysis,
nothing more than Atheism.

The systematic opponents of the supernatural must submit to this
consequence. Most of them, I am certain, are far from being
disposed to accept it, and would indeed repudiate it with the
most honourable perseverance. Vain efforts! Driven from
entrenchment to entrenchment, from fall to fall, they will be
finally reduced to this extremity; and if divine wisdom had not
assigned limits to the force of man's Logic, the practical
consequences of such a system would soon make themselves evident
in the moral and social condition of humanity.

{137}

There is a second necessity to which the systematic opponents of
the supernatural must make up their minds. They must affirm that
the laws proclaimed by them as general laws, laws immanent and
permanent in what they call nature, are in effect the essential
laws of all nature, of the entire universe, and of all the beings
whose seeds are there sown. They would have no right to reject
absolutely facts as supernatural if they were not supernatural of
necessity and everywhere; if, in short, they were anywhere in
harmony with laws of nature other than the laws of this hardly
perceptible corner of nature which is the residence of man. If
the laws of our world are not universal and absolute, who will
venture to affirm that they cannot be changed or suspended, even
there where they reign? Is human science ready to maintain that
the laws which she discovers from her infinitely small
Observatory are in effect universal and absolute laws in every
place where matter exists, and where life manifests itself, in
the midst of space and of time?

{138}

Here it is that Christian Ignorance begins to take its place; it
admits the unknown and the diverse in the universe--an unknown
incommensurable, a diverse infinitely possible. I respect and
admire science profoundly; I am as moved, I feel as proud as M.
de Laplace could ever have been at the aspect of this sublime
flight of the human intelligence, which marches with sure footing
in space and across worlds, measures their distances, and knows
how many years are required for the light of the nearest of the
fixed stars to reach us, whereas the light of our own sun reaches
us in a few minutes. I am not less touched by the labours and the
discoveries of the great modern Physiologists, who, walking in
the footsteps of Bichat, observe and note, even in their minutest
and most obscure details, the different phenomena which life in
the midst of matter presents. But when I have rendered homage to
these triumphs of human science, I compare them with the reality
of things, with this universe infinitely great and infinitely
minute, which man makes his study, and I cannot prevent the
reflection, that the universe contains infinitely more objects
than man's mind attains to, and infinitely more secrets than it
discovers.
{139}
What astronomer will dare to affirm that he has counted all the
worlds, and that his eye has reached the point beyond which no
more exist? What physiologist, what naturalist, will affirm that
all those worlds have living inhabitants? and that, if so, those
inhabitants must have the same form, and be subject to the same
conditions and laws, as govern the inhabitants of this globe. Our
science becomes very modest when set side by side with our
ignorance, even in the matters appropriate to science; and,
however extensive and various the conquests of the human mind may
be, the universe is infinitely vaster and more varied than is
either the genius or the strength of its vain conqueror. Knowing
this, and without ceasing to admire the works of human science,
Christian Ignorance bows humbly before that work of God, which
outstrips and surpasses immeasurably every attainment of man.

{140}

Thus on two sides, and by two different processes, Christianity
has a higher point of view, and penetrates further into the
reality of things than Rationalistic Spiritualism. On the one
side, by allowing its place to historic facts which are the life
of mankind, as well as to psychological facts which are the life
of man's soul, Christianity gives to Christian science a deeper,
a broader foundation than rationalistic science supplies. On the
other side, Christianity admits, both with greater grandeur and
with more modesty than Rationalism, the unfathomable immensity of
the universe, as well as the infinite diversity of its possible
laws; and by the avowal of a "Christian Ignorance," it places
itself, at least, at the most elevated point to view the
spectacle of which human science cannot traverse or measure the
extent.

{141}

It is in the presence of another rival, I do not say of another
adversary, that I have now to set Christian Ignorance. I begin by
asking learned Theologians to forgive the freedom of my thoughts
and of my speech; I feel for them a sincere sentiment of respect,
let me say brotherly respect; for in the question to which I
address myself I am now to deal with Christians. But actuated by
the same feeling as that which influenced me when I was before
speaking of the relation of the sacred writings to human science,
I must declare my profound conviction that the subject which is
here being treated is of pressing interest to Christian Religion
in the great struggle in which it is engaged.

The Christian Religion is founded upon facts, upon an
uninterrupted series of facts recorded in documents which exist.
Whether the authenticity or the authority of any part of these
documents, the reality or even the possibility of any of the
facts which they contain is admitted or contested, it is not the
less true that Christianity is not, as Greek Paganism was, a
poetical mythology attributed to fabulous times; as the religion
of Zoroaster was, a personification of the great forces and of
the great phenomena of nature; or as the writings of Confucius
were, a collection of philosophical meditations, and of moral
precepts and counsels, for the use of wise and simple, of princes
and subjects.
{142}
I am far from contesting that poetry and philosophy, human
imagination and human meditation, have their share in the books
which form the documents of Christianity; it is at the same time
incontestable, however, that the peculiar and essential
characteristic of Christianity, from its very origin down to its
latest development, is that it is historical: we behold the
Christian Religion starting to life, living, traversing
centuries, growing great and independent, just as we behold civil
society doing, in a series of facts which succeed to one another
and are different from one another. Christianity is not merely a
religious doctrine; it is the history of the events wherein have
been manifested the relations of God to man, and the action of
God upon the destinies of Mankind.

{143}

In proportion to the vigour with which these events have
developed and spread themselves, the human mind has been exposed
to two temptations, which constitute at once its honour and its
peril, the temptation of explanation and that of controversy.

What an undertaking! to explain God! his relation to man! the
means and the process of his action upon man! Even when he essays
to study, and to describe, the Nature of the God in whom he
believes, Man's vision is troubled by the dazzling light; his
thought exhausts itself, loses itself in the vain effort to
attain, by means of comparisons and figures of all kinds, to the
Divine Person: he conceives that person, he affirms that person,
he contemplates that person, and yet that person he cannot know,
cannot explain. The nearer he feels himself to God, the more does
Man cast his eyes down, the more lowly does he incline himself,
to adore, where he cannot pretend to observe. Even the very
presence of God does not aid man in attaining to the science of
God. What, then, the result where he would seek closely to follow
the agency of God in the facts in which he only sees Him
imperfectly,--where he attempts to carry the torch of human
science into the depths of the secrets of Divine action?

{144}

I here enter into the domain which Christianity ignores. Two
examples will fully suffice, I hope, to make my meaning clear.

The Divinity of Jesus, God's incarnation in Jesus, Jesus God and
Man, these are the truths admitted, proclaimed, incessantly
repeated in different forms, by the Gospels and the primitive
documents of Christianity. I have already said [Footnote 38] that
"it is the fact itself of the Incarnation which constitutes the
Christian faith, and which rises above all definitions and all
theological controversies. To disregard this fact--to deny the
divinity of Jesus Christ--is to deny, to overthrow the Christian
religion, which would never have been what it is, and would never
have accomplished what it has, but that the Divine Incarnation
was its principle, and Jesus Christ--God and Man--its author."

    [Footnote 38: Meditations on the Essence of
    Christianity. Second Meditation, pp. 75, 76.]

{145}

But Christians have not confined themselves to the belief of this
sublime truth; they have striven to explain it; they have sought
to know and to define how, and when, the divine nature and the
human nature became united in Jesus Christ, to what extent such
union took place, and what effect it produced upon Christ's
personality. Hence all the questions, all the controversies,
which were raised as to the mode and the consequences of the
divine incarnation, by Nestorius and Eutyches, and which in the
councils of Constantinople, of Ephesus and Chalcedon, divided and
agitated the Christian Church, especially in the East.

Man had here essayed to construct a science of Religion and of
divine History.

The Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, and the Epistles, as
unanimously and persistently as they have proclaimed the
Incarnation, contain and proclaim another great truth of
Christianity, the co-existence of the Father, Son, and Holy
Ghost, and their combined action upon the human soul.
{146}
The Trinity is written in the New Testament, where it takes its
place in the history and in the Faith of Christ from their very
beginning. Here, again, men have refused to restrict themselves
to History, or to a belief in History; they have essayed to
determine the elements, and to explain the "quomodo" of the
religions truth; in other words, to transform history into
science. Hence all the controversies, all the contests, all the
authoritative decisions which have pretended to fix the nature,
rank, and relations of the three Divine persons, or the manner of
the one God's existence and action in the Trinity of Father, Son,
and Holy Ghost.

I enter into none of these controversies; I examine none of the
doctrines and decisions which those controversies have either
originated, or disputed; I now only seek to determine their
essential character; it is the transition from divine truth to
human science: it is Theology, the offspring, more or less
legitimate, of Religion.

{147}

When I say its offspring more or less legitimate, and speak of
Theological science in these guarded terms, it is not that I do
not design to say openly all that I think upon the subject. The
scientific Theology of Christianity commands often my admiration,
always my respect. In their effort to explain the grand facts of
the Old and New Testament, its writers have addressed themselves
to a glorious task; they have in pursuing it fallen upon and
thrown light upon sublime truths; they have engaged for the cause
of Christianity in formidable contests; they have lent a moral
influence often pregnant of effect to the institutions and
authorised teachers of Christ's religion. But their efforts have
been even more ambitious than energetic, more compromising than
efficacious; they have, even with the words unceasingly in their
mouths, shown an ignorance of the limits of human science. The
Christian Religion is a miracle, the miraculous work of God; this
was the point from which they started, their fundamental datum;
forgetting what they have so affirmed, they have sought and they
have thought to ensure the triumph of the divine truth by
explaining it; they have obscured and changed it by an
intermixture of man's work.
{148}
Man can recognise as realities the facts which are at the same
time both Christian dogmas and Christian mysteries. Man can
recognise his own subjection to them, but it is not given to man
to make of them a science.

Bossuet also essayed to fathom the Trinity; in the midst of his
explanations and of his comparisons, he stops short and exclaims:
"I do not know who can vaunt that he understands that perfectly,
or who can satisfy himself as to what the modes of being can add
to being, or as to whence arises their distinction in the unity
and the identity which they have with the being itself. All this
is not very comprehensible; all this, nevertheless, is truth."
[Footnote 39]

    [Footnote 39: Élévations sur les Mystères.
    Works of Bossuet, vol. ix., p. 49.]

Thus after this final effort of his genius, it was in Christian
ignorance that the last great doctor of the Church was forced to
take refuge.

{149}

It is not only that these attempts of Scientific Theology are
unsuccessful, they entail, as experience painfully shows, a
serious danger. Pride is the ordinary companion of science, and
what pride equal to the pride of the science which dares to
believe that it has penetrated the secrets of God's action and of
man's destiny! Scientific Theology has had the greatest share in
religious persecutions; its doctors have had to defend not only
their faith but their system, not only God's work but their own
work and this simultaneously. Those whose systems were the most
logical have generally been the most tyrannical; history in this
respect fully confirms what independently of history might fairly
be presumed; namely, that supposing the faith equal, "Christian
ignorance" is far more naturally and readily inclined to
moderation and charity than Theological science.

But it is not only the scientific Theologians whose ambition and
efforts have led them to mount beyond the sphere of human
science; others there are who fall in a different manner into the
same error and the same peril.
{150}
The Mystic Theologians ask for light as to the relations of God
to man, not from dialectics and reasoning, but from sentiment and
inspiration. They admit between God and man a direct and
mysterious communication, which, in certain cases and upon
certain conditions, conveys to the human being divine revelations
of a character personal and individual. With this torch in the
hand they approach the questions which concern grace, prayer, and
the destiny awarded by Providence to each creature, and flatter
themselves that they are able to raise the veil by which the
solution of such questions is hidden.

I cannot contemplate without profound emotion these pious
impulses of the human soul, desirous of penetrating the secrets
of God. What more excusable than that ardent and trembling
curiosity in the midst of the darkness of our life and destiny?
Whoever believes really in God cannot fail to believe himself
under the eye and in the power of God; how, indeed, would it be
possible for him to admit that his Creator is indifferent and
powerless?
{151}
There are, it may be added, very few who, at certain moments and
under certain circumstances, have not felt, in the innermost
recesses of their being, a stirring, an impulsion, not proceeding
from themselves, nor from the world around them, inexplicable to
them, except as proceeding from a superior source and power. Who
of us has not, in the course of his life, been sometimes aware of
a design foreign to his own volition, his own forecast,
conducting him to an end which he did not forecast? And, finally,
in the infinite number of prayers rising to God from the midst of
human misery and suffering, are there not some to which the event
brings satisfaction, just as there are others with respect to
which the contrary is the case? Hence the problems of the divine
Grace, the divine Providence, the efficacy of prayer. No doubt
the desire is very natural which passionately aspires to solve
problems so grand, and which, in the hope to do so, strives to
rise to a direct and personal communication with their Divine
author.
{152}
But the more natural the desire, the more profound the error. No
doubt God acts upon us, upon our soul, and upon our destiny, by
his providence and by his grace; no doubt he hears and listens to
our prayers; but it is not given to us to foresee his action and
his answer, nor to appreciate them in their motives and their
effects. "The ways of God are not our ways." Whether general
problems are submitted to man's intelligence, or questions
touching him personally trouble his soul; whether the Doctors of
Theology construct systems, or the Mystic Theologians fall into
ecstasies, we see in all these cases that man has arrived at
limits which oppose an effectual barrier to his scientific
vision, and which no transports of piety will ever enable him to
overleap. Beyond those limits, the condition imposed by God upon
man is confidence in spite of ignorance; or in other words,
"Christian Ignorance" which is gage at once for his wisdom, his
charity, and his liberty.

{153}

           Fifth Meditation.

           Christian Faith.


Forty years ago, upon the appearance of a work of the Abbé
Bautain, entitled "The Morality of the Gospel compared with the
Morality of the Philosophers," I published, in the "Revue
Française," an essay upon that state of the human soul which is
called Faith, upon the different intellectual facts which it
expresses, and the different ways by which man attains to it.
Although my special subject, at present, is no longer Faith in
its abstract sense, but of Faith in Christ, it is not foreign to
my purpose to lay before readers in the year 1868 some passages
which appeared in my essay in 1828. For notwithstanding the
imperfection of the essay referred to, I have not ceased to
regard it as founded on just reasoning; it serves as a
starting-point for that Meditation upon Christian Faith which I
now give to the press.

{154}

By the word faith is commonly understood a certain belief in
facts or dogmas of a special nature--in facts or dogmas of
religion. This word, indeed, has only this meaning, when in
speaking of _the faith_ the term is used alone and
absolutely. This, however, is neither its sole meaning, nor its
fundamental meaning; it has a still more extended sense from
which its religious sense is derived. Expressions like the
following are met with:--"I have full _faith_ in your words;
this man has _faith_ in himself--in his strength--in his
fortune, &c." This employment of the word _faith_ in secular
matters, so to say, occurs more frequently in the present day; it
is, however, no recent invention, and religious ideas have never
been so exclusively its sphere that the word faith has not had
also other significations attached to it.

{155}

It appears, then, by the usages of common speech and popular
opinion, 1st, that the word _faith_ designates a certain
internal condition of the person who believes, and not merely a
certain species of belief: that it refers to the nature itself of
the conviction, not to its object; 2ndly, that this word was,
nevertheless, in its origin, and still is, more generally applied
to those kinds of belief termed religious. What then, in its
special and ordinary application to religious belief, are the
variations which have taken place in its meaning, and which are
taking place every day?

Men engaged in teaching and preaching a religion, a doctrine, a
religious reform, sometimes whilst appealing to the whole energy
of the human mind in its state of liberty, succeed in producing
in their disciples an entire, profound, and powerful conviction
of the truth of their teaching. This conviction is called
_Faith_; a name which neither masters and disciples will
repudiate, nor even their adversaries disallow.
{156}
Faith then is only a profound and imperious conviction of the
truth of a dogma of religion; it matters little whether the
conviction has been acquired by way of reasoning, or has been
generated by controversy, or by free and rigorous examination;
that which gives to it its character, and entitles it to the name
of _Faith_, is its energy, is the empire which that energy
gives to it over the whole man. Such at every time was the faith
of the great Reformers, and more especially in the sixteenth
century, such the faith of their most illustrious disciples, of
Calvin after Luther, and Knox after Calvin.

The same men have preached the same doctrine to persons whom it
was impossible for them to convince by the use of reasoning, by
an appeal to examination, or to science, to women and crowds of
persons incapable alike of laborious study and of lengthened
reflection. They spoke to the imagination, to the moral
affections, where the persons whom they addressed were prone to
feel emotion, and to believe in consequence of emotion. They gave
the name of _Faith_ to the result of their action, just as
they had done so to the result of the process essentially
intellectual of which I was before speaking.
{157}
Faith thus instilled was a religious conviction, not acquired by
reasoning, and deriving its origin in human sensibility. This is
the idea of faith as entertained by the Mystic Sects.

Appeals to human sensibility and human emotion have not always
sufficed to generate faith. Another spring of human influence has
been resorted to; and men have been commanded to adhere to
practices and to form habits. Man must sooner or later attach
ideas to the acts which are habitual to him, and attribute a
meaning to that which produces in him a constant effect. The mind
was led to the belief of the principles which had given birth to
certain practices and habits. A new kind of faith appeared, it
had for its principle and dominant characteristic, the submission
of the mind to an authority invested with the right at once to
govern man's life and to regulate his thought.

{158}

Finally, faith has not everywhere nor constantly been generated
in the human mind, either by the free exercise of the
intelligence, or by appeals to sensibility, or by the formation
of habits. It was then said that faith was incommunicable, that
it was not in man's power to impart faith, or to acquire it by
any exertion of his own, that for this purpose God's intervention
and the action of his grace were necessary. Divine grace became
thus the preliminary condition of faith and its definitive
character.

The word _faith_ has, consequently, in turn expressed: 1st,
a conviction acquired by the free efforts of the human
intelligence; 2ndly, a conviction acquired by way of the
sensibility, and without the concurrence of the reason, and often
even against its authority; 3rdly, a conviction acquired by man's
long submission to a power invested with a power from on high to
command conviction; 4thly, a conviction induced by supernatural
means,--by divine grace.

{159}

What in the midst of this variety of sources from which it may
emanate is the essential and invariable character of faith? What
is the state of the soul in which faith reigns when we consider
it independently of its origin and of its object?

Two kinds of belief exist in man: the one, I will not call it
innate, for this is an inexact and justly criticised expression,
but a belief natural and spontaneous which springs up and
establishes itself in the mind of man, if not without his being
aware of it, at least without the help of any reflection or
volition on his part, by the development alone of his nature and
the influence of that external world in the midst of which his
life is passed; the other kind of belief is the result of
laborious examination and reflection, the fruit of voluntary
study and of the power possessed by man either to concentrate all
his faculties upon a certain object with the design of mastering
it, or to direct the thought inwards, and realise what is there
taking place--to render an account thereof to himself, and thus
to acquire by an act of volition and of reflection, a knowledge
which he did not before possess, although the facts which form
its object nevertheless existed as facts external--and which he
might see by his eyes,--or as facts which were taking place
within him.

{160}

Of these two kinds of belief which merits the name of
_faith_?

It seems at first sight that the name is perfectly suitable to
that kind of belief which I have termed natural and spontaneous:
such belief is exempt from doubt and disquietude; it directs man
in his judgment, in his actions, and with an empire which he
dreams neither of eluding nor contesting; it is ingenuous,
unhesitating, practical, sovereign; who would not recognise in it
the characteristics of _faith?_

Faith has in effect two characters; but it has at the same time
others which belief natural and spontaneous has not. Almost
unnoticed by the man who is yet guided by it, this natural and
spontaneous belief is to him, as it were, a law from without
which he has received, not accepted; which he obeys by instinct
without having given it any intimate and personal assent.
{161}
It suffices for the exigencies of his life; it guides him,
admonishes him, impels him, or checks him; but without, so to
say, any concurrence on his own part, without giving birth in him
to the sentiment that any active, energetic, or powerful
principle is stirring within him, without procuring him the
profound joy of contemplating, loving, adoring the truth which
reigns over him. _Faith_, on the contrary, has this power;
faith is not science, neither is it ignorance; the mind which
faith penetrates has never yet, perhaps, rendered a true account
to itself of that in which it has faith; and, perhaps, never will
do so; but the mind is, nevertheless, certain of it; to the mind
it is present, living; it is no longer a general belief, a law of
human nature which governs the moral man, as the law of
gravitation governs bodies; it is a personal conviction, a truth
which the moral man has made his own by force of contemplation,
of voluntary obedience, and love. Henceforth this truth does much
more than suffice to his life, it satisfies his soul; it does
much more than direct him, it enlightens him.
{162}
How many, for instance, live under the empire of a natural and
instinctive belief that moral good and moral evil exist, without
our being able to affirm that they have _faith_ in them.
Such belief is in them, as it were, a master undisputed; to whom,
nevertheless, they render no homage, whom they obey without
seeing and without loving. But if a circumstance, a cause,
however trivial, revealing, so to say, the conscience to itself,
should attract and fix their attention upon this distinction
between moral good and evil, which is a spontaneous law of their
nature; should they knowingly acknowledge and accept it as their
legitimate master, should their intelligence honour itself by
comprehending it, and their liberty do itself honour by obeying
it; should they feel their soul, as it were, the sanctuary of a
sacred law, as the focus into which this truth concentrates and
establishes itself in order thence to diffuse its rays of light;
this is no longer simple natural belief, it is _faith_.

{163}

Faith, then, does not exclusively consist of either of the two
kinds of belief which at first sight seem to share between them
the soul of man; it partakes at once of natural and spontaneous
belief and of the belief which is the fruit of reflection and
science; yet it differs from each; like the latter, it is
individual and intimate; like the former confidant, active,
dominant. Considered in itself, independently of all comparison
with any other particular and analogous state of the intellect,
faith is the full security of man in the possession of his
belief, as absolved from effort, as exempt from doubt; the path
which the mind has pursued in arriving at it is obliterated, and
a sentiment only is left behind of the natural and pre-existent
harmony between the mind of man and the truth itself. To the man
whose mind faith penetrates, his intelligence and his volition
present no longer any problems for solution as to the things
which are the objects of his faith: he feels himself in full
possession of the truth to light and to guide him on his way, and
in full possession of himself to act according to the truth.
{164}
As faith has internal characteristics which are peculiar to it,
it has also, with some strange and rare exceptions, external
conditions which are necessary to it; it is distinguishable from
other modes of human belief, not only by its nature, but by its
object. Up to a certain point these conditions may be determined
and perceived, although imperfectly, according to the nature
itself of that state of the soul and of its effects. A belief may
be so entire and sure of itself that no further effort of the
intellect seems necessary, and the believer, wholly absorbed in
the truth which in his judgment he possesses, may lose all memory
of the way by which he arrived at it. A conviction may be so
forcible as to become master of his every action, as well as of
every impulse of his mind, and may imperatively force and morally
oblige him to submit all things to its empire; a state this of
the intellect which is the fruit, perhaps, not merely of the
exercise of the intelligence, but of a strong emotion, of a long
obedience to certain practices, and in the midst of which all the
three great faculties of man, the sensibility, the intelligence,
and the will, are simultaneously in activity, and simultaneously
satisfied.
{165}
Where all this is the case, the occasion which has induced such a
situation of the soul, had need be one worthy of the soul, and of
its situation; the subject with which it is so occupied, had need
be one which embraces the entire man, which sets in play all his
faculties; responding to all the requirements of his moral
nature, it has a right in return to all his devotedness.

The characteristics of ideas proper to become really a faith
would seem _à priori_ to be intellectual beauty, and
practical importance. An idea which should present itself to the
mind as true, without at the same time striking it by the extent
or the gravity of its consequences, might produce certitude; but
the name of _faith_ would not be suitably applied to it.
{166}
Nor would the practical merit, or the immediate utility of an
idea suffice of itself to generate faith; to do so it must also
attract, it must also take possession of the human mind by the
pure beauty of truth. In other words, in order that a simple
belief, whether instinctive, or arising from reflection, may
become faith, the thing believed must be of a nature to procure
to man the united joys of contemplation and of activity, to
awaken in him the twofold sentiment, that it is of lofty origin
and of potent influence; his idea must be such as that he shall
be induced to regard it as a medium between the ideal world and
the real world, as a missionary charged to model the one upon the
other, and to unite them.

It is easy to understand why the name of faith is used almost
exclusively to characterise religious beliefs; no other belief
possesses in so high a degree the two characteristics, [Footnote
40] which provoke the development of faith.

    [Footnote 40: Intellectual beauty and practical importance.]

{167}

Many principles of science are beautiful and fruitful in useful
applications; political theories may strike the mind by the
elevation of the ideas which they embody, and by the grandeur of
their results; the doctrines of a pure morality are still more
surely and more commonly invested with this double power. Nor
have these kinds of belief failed sometimes to generate faith in
the human soul. Still, to receive a clear and profound impression
at one time of their intellectual beauty, at another of their
practical importance, a certain measure of science and of
sagacity, or a certain turn for public life, or for politics, as
the case may require, is almost always necessary, and this does
not belong to all men, nor to every epoch. Religious belief, on
the contrary, has no need of such resources: it carries in
itself, and in its very nature, infallible means of effect;
having once penetrated into the heart of man, however limited and
undeveloped in other respects his intelligence may be, or however
rude and low his condition, it seems to him a truth at once
sublime and usual, a truth which addresses itself to him as an
habitant of this earth, and at the same time which opens to him
access to those lofty regions, to those treasures of intellectual
life, which without the light of faith he would have never known;
it has for him the charm of the purest truth, and exercises over
him the empire of the most powerful interest.
{168}
Can it astonish us, that the belief once existent, its transition
to a state of _faith_ should be so rapid and so general? But
it is precisely on account of its instinctive tendency to
transform itself into faith, and into a faith of extraordinary
energy, that religious belief has need to continue always free
and always subject to the tests which Liberty has the right to
impose. Legitimate faith, that is, as we understand it, the faith
which does not deceive itself as to its objects, and which
addresses itself really to the truth, is beyond contradiction the
loftiest condition to which the human mind, in its present state,
can attain, for it is that state in which man feels his moral
nature fully satisfied, in which he gives himself up entirely to
the mission prescribed to him by his thought.
{169}
But a faith may be illegitimate; it is possible for this state of
the soul to be produced by error; the chance of error (experience
proves this at every step) is even here greater, the more the
different routes which lead to faith are multiplied and the more
its effects are energetic; man may be led astray in his faith by
his sentiments, by his habits, by the empire of moral affections
or of external circumstances, as well as by the defect or the
abuse of his intellectual faculties; for his faith may spring
from any of these various sources. Nevertheless, faith once
there, it is daring and ambitious; it passionately aspires to
diffuse itself, to usurp, to reign, and constitute itself the law
of opinions and facts. Not only is faith ambitious, it is strong,
it possesses, it displays, in support of its pretensions and its
designs, an energy, an address, a perseverance, which are almost
always wanting to opinions simply scientific. So that for this
mode and degree of conviction and belief, far more than for any
other, there is chance of the individual falling into error, and
of society falling under oppression.

{170}

For these perils there is but one remedy, Liberty. Whether in
belief or in action, the nature of man is the same: not only his
will but his thought, if it is not to become absurd or culpable,
has incessantly need of contradiction and of control. Where faith
fails, moral energy and moral dignity fail equally; where liberty
does not exist, faith first usurps,--then becomes
bewildered--finally destroys itself. If human belief passes to
the state of faith, it is its progress and its glory; if, in its
efforts toward this result, and after having attained it, it
abides constantly under the control of the free intelligence; we
have, in this fact, at once a guarantee for society against the
tyranny of that faith and a pledge that the faith is legitimate.
In the co-existence and mutual respect of these two forces
consist the excellency and security of society. [Footnote 41]

    [Footnote 41: Revue Française (January, 1828), Méditations et
    Études Morales, par M. Guizot, pp. 143, 173-175 (edition of
    1861).]

{171}

If I consider this essay, or psychological portrait, shall I
rather call it, of faith in general, and compare with it
Christian faith, I am immediately struck by two features as
characterising it. On the one side, the ideas and the facts upon
which Christian faith is founded, have evidently that twofold
merit of intellectual beauty and of practical importance which
has both the right and the power to compel faith. On the other
side, Christian faith may originate, in fact does originate, in
sources the most diverse, in study and rational meditation, in
sentiment, in authority, in an appeal to the divine grace.

What grander and more impressive to the mind of man than the
principles of Christian faith, regarded as a whole? God and Man
incessantly present the one to the other, in the life of each
man, as in the history of the human race! What more grave and
more momentous, regarded from a practical point of view? In the
present hour, it is peace to the soul of man, peace to his life;
in the future, it is his destiny throughout eternity.

{172}

The diversity of the sources of Christian faith is not less
evident than its intellectual beauty and its practical
importance. Beyond a doubt, the Christian faith of the Chancellor
de l'Hospital, of Pascal, of Bossuet, of Fénelon, of Luther, of
Calvin, of Newton, of Euler, of Chalmers, was as much the fruit
of reflection and of learning, was as freely meditated and
adopted as the scepticism of Montaigne and of Bayle, as the
sensualism of Hobbes, and the pantheism of Spinoza. It is equally
certain that all Christian communities, Roman Catholic or
Protestant, have had their mystics, their eminent and sincere
believers, whose faith was illumed and fed by sensibility and
imagination; in the former case in the emotions and practices of
fervent piety; in the latter, in empassioned transports and
strivings after a direct communication with God and with Christ.
As for the faith founded upon authority, the Church of Rome has
presented the most extraordinary example which the world has ever
seen, and if Protestantism has caused the faith of individuals to
make great strides in the direction of liberty, it has
nevertheless taken for its fixed basis the divine inspiration of
the Sacred Book, and has thus ensured a great importance and very
efficacious influence to the principle of authority.

{173}

Having thus placed Christian Faith in its true point of view, and
assigned to it its just rank in the history of the human soul,
let us see whence arises the contest in which that Faith is
engaged with natural Religion and with religious philosophy? What
is the principle of this contest, and what its character?

Here we are met by that all-important question, the question
which has been agitated during nineteen centuries, and to which
all the intellect of modern times has applied itself. Is the
Christian Faith in contradiction to human reason? Some affirm
that a contest between the two is natural and inevitable; of
these there are who tell us that reason should give way to faith,
and again others who say that faith should yield to reason:
whereas, on the contrary, there are those also who deny that such
contest is inevitable, and who maintain that faith and reason, as
they ought to do, may both live in peace with each other.

{174}

In my opinion, the difference between Christian Faith and that
which is styled natural Religion, or religious philosophy, is
profound; but I do not think that the question between the two
has been rightly put, or that the character of their opposition
has been rightly defined.

To discover what, in effect, this character is, I address myself,
first, to the philosophers.

We know how Descartes began his great philosophical inquiries, to
what state he brought his mind in order to enter upon his task:
"I persuaded myself," says he, "that I could not do better with
respect to the opinions which up to that time I had entertained,
than to begin by ridding myself of them entirely, in order then
either to replace them by better opinions, or to return to the
old ones if I should find them, on examination, to conform to the
standard of reason."
{175}
Then proceeding to determine the precepts to be followed by him
in this recasting of all his opinions by such standard,--"My
first principle," said he, "was never to accept anything as true,
unless I could evidently recognise its truth; in other words, to
avoid carefully any precipitate judgment, to allow my mind to
follow no bias, and not to comprise anything in its judgments but
what presented itself so clearly and so distinctly to my mind as
to leave me no room for doubt." [Footnote 42]

    [Footnote 42: Discours de la Méthode. Works of Descartes,
    vol. i., pp. 135, 141; edition of M. Cousin.]

More than a century after Descartes, Condillac, wishing to trace
to its source the origin of human knowledge, and to write the
history of its progressive development, did far more than
obliterate from his mind its primitive ideas. He began his
labours by curtailing the human mind of a great part of its
proper proportions; he reduced man to the primitive condition of
a statue, leaving to it no other faculty than the sensation: and
then he fancied he could derive from sensations all man's ideas,
all his knowledge,--in fact, the entire man himself.

{176}

Thus these two great systems, Spiritualism and Sensualism, have
their very commencement, each in an arbitrary assumption.
Descartes, effacing from the human mind all that it has learnt to
know or to believe, solely by its spontaneous activity, and by
the natural course of human life, has treated the mind as a
_tabula rasa_, and to fill up the void which he has so made,
he does not admit anything there unless it presents itself "so
clearly and so distinctly to his mind, as to leave him no room to
doubt respecting it." Condillac, on the other hand, suppresses
not only all that which man has learnt spontaneously and without
reflection, but the man himself; leaving in the place of man a
statue, sentient, it is true, but only sentient, and with this
statue and his sensations alone, he undertakes to reconstruct the
man--the entire man--with all the developments of his nature and
of his thought.

{177}

I see nothing in either of these processes more than a starting
point entirely fictitious, a false step made at the very
commencement of philosophy,--in short, a mere hypothesis.
Descartes rendered admirable services to the cause of liberty and
of intellectual sincerity; Condillac contributed to the progress
of the method which I shall call, the method of anatomy and
scientific dissection applied both to the human mind and to the
material world; but from their very commencement both these
philosophers threw themselves out of the high road, the straight
road of philosophy; each from the very commencement substituted a
mere hypothesis in the place of an exact and complete
appreciation of facts. It is far from my intention to discuss
either of these two systems; I am content to put aside the two
hypotheses, the _tabula rasa_ of Descartes, and the statue
of Condillac, and I proceed, my way lighted by the facts, as they
are, naturally produced in the history of the mind of man, to
inquire what is the cause, and what the import, of the struggle
which is taking place between rationalistic religious philosophy,
and Christian faith.

{178}

The true point of departure of this history and the first of the
facts which show themselves there, is the co-existence of man and
the universe, spectator and spectacle, the one confronting the
other, the "_moi_" and the "_non moi_," the subject and
the object, in the language of philosophy. I hasten to say that I
repudiate absolutely the different systems,--Pantheism, whether
materialistic or idealistic,--Scepticism, whether idealistic or
absolute,--which refuse to admit this primary fact, deny the
reality of the external world, or the legitimacy of the knowledge
of it which the understanding acquires, see only illusions in the
relations of man to the universe, or absorb man and the universe
together, in the confusion and the obscure darkness of a
pretended identity. I do not dream of here discussing these
different systems; if I engaged in such discussion, I should have
to deal with something very different from the question to which
I am applying myself at this moment.
{179}
Here I have only to do with Rationalistic Spiritualism. This form
of Spiritualism has so much in common with Christianity, that it
admits the reality and the distinction of the "_moi_" and of
the "_non moi_" of the subject and the object, of the
spectator and the spectacle, of spirit and matter, of man and the
universe. For Rationalistic Spiritualists as well as for
Christians, this is the great fact in the midst of which, and
under the empire of which, man's intelligence is developed, man's
life passed. Man is there passive, active, and witness, all
simultaneously. As spectator he receives impressions from the
spectacle, which both prompt him to act, and which stir his being
from within; he is witness both to what is passing within himself
and to what is passing without himself. Notwithstanding the
diversity and the mobility of the impressions which he receives
from without, and of the acts which he originates himself, he has
a consciousness of his own personal and permanent existence, and
also the consciousness of existences other than his own; he knows
not, by the way of reasoning or hypothesis, but by instinctive
and immediate intuition, that which, although it is not himself,
yet acts upon himself as something coming from himself.
{180}
Man discovers the external world as he becomes aware of himself,
by the intercommunication which takes place between them, and
which, nevertheless, shows him how distinct from himself is that
external world. He observes and notes both what takes place
without him and within him. The results of this observation he
terms facts, nor are they for him vain appearances, creations
merely of his thought or volition; they are manifestations to him
of realities independent of himself, and yet to which he stands
in relation; they are bonds of union in which he feels that he is
highly interested, not merely as any curious spectator might be,
but as a real being; interested, not merely for the sake of
science, but interested as one whose very destiny is therein
involved.

{181}

Amongst these facts, in their nature so numerous and so diverse,
I only select those which concern the religious instincts of man,
or the questions which they suggest. I admit two kinds of these;
first, the spontaneous and common religious beliefs, which
mankind professes, although under very different forms and in
very different degrees; secondly, the theories and systems of
philosophy, emanating from and promulgated by philosophers in
order to bring under discussion the popular religious opinions,
and to resolve the questions which they involve. On the one side
is the natural and instinctive religion of humanity; on the other
is human science, which, when it addresses itself to the task of
disengaging natural religion from every system of mythology, is
called religious philosophy.

Are there in the nature and in the religious history of men no
other great facts besides these instincts of humanity, and these
systems of human science? Natural Religion with its mythologies,
and religious philosophy with its systems, are these all the
religious aid accorded to man to enlighten him upon subjects of
religion?

{182}

To the question thus formalised, Rationalistic Spiritualism says,
Yes; whereas Christian Faith replies, No.

In addition to the facts to which I have just referred, viz., the
instinctive beliefs of mankind, and the systemised doctrines of
human science concerning religion, the Christian faith admits and
proclaims another great religious fact, the real and active
presence of God in the life of man and in the history of
humanity. What the Christian faith affirms is, that the real and
active presence of God, in man's life, amidst the mysteries of
Providence, of prayer, and of grace, and the real and active
presence of God in the history of the human race, amidst the
mysteries of Revelation, of Inspiration, of the Incarnation, and
of the Redemption, do not constitute simply a poetical mythology,
are not merely hypotheses of philosophy, but are psychological
and historic facts which human science cannot explain, but which
it nevertheless can, nay, is bound to recognise.

{183}

Not philosophers only, but the whole human race, believers and
disbelievers, are placed in the same permanent position in which
all originally stood; that is to say, Man stands always
confronting the Universe, Man always at once spectator and actor,
greedy to know and comprehend the spectacle on which he is
looking, and of which he himself forms part. The spectacle is
immense, infinite; the spectator petty, imperfect, ephemeral,
diverse, and with limited powers of vision. Accordingly as he is
situated, accordingly as he is disposed and his intelligence
reaches, he sees to a greater or less distance, and with a vision
more or less accurate, all that the spectacle presents. He
observes more or less completely, more or less exactly, the facts
which are occurring there. Hence the differences of opinion
amongst mankind. Who are they amongst them who succeed best in
appreciating and in describing these facts without altering their
character or omitting any? This is the fundamental question, the
question antecedent to and which governs all the others.

{184}

The contest, then, between Christians and non-Christians, is not
a contest between Faith and Reason. Reason occupies a place, and
a large place, in the Faith of Christians; they attain to faith
as well by reason as by sentiment or authority; nor is there, at
the same time, in the negations or the doubts of non-Christians,
as much reflection and as much accurate observation as they
themselves suppose. Are Christians right in affirming not only
the existence of God, but his real and active presence in the
life of man and in the history of the human race? Are these
psychological and historic facts which reason and science are
bound to admit? Or are the Deists who are not Christians
justified in denying these facts and in limiting God to existence
alone, and in treating him as subject to the general and
permanent laws assigned to all other existences?

{185}

As far as Christianity and Rationalistic Spiritualism are
concerned, this is the real question at issue.

Having pointed out the source of the differences of opinion which
we find amongst men, I will now indicate their consequences.

Rationalistic Spiritualism affirms the existence of God, and
those who follow this system evince the strongest desire to
demonstrate his existence. They are right; for the existence of
God, and the rational consequences of his existence, form all
their natural religion, all their religious philosophy. In these
days, men of minds, as eminent as sincere, M. Émile Saisset, M.
Jules Simon, M. Ernest Bersot, M. de Rémusat, have made
earnest--I would willingly say pious--efforts to elucidate the
proposition of God's existence, and to derive from it all the aid
that reason can furnish to explain the instincts and satisfy the
religious exigencies of humanity. But these Spiritualists deceive
themselves. They do not attain to God himself, they only attain
to the idea of God; what they establish is the admissibility of
the intellectual idea, not the presence of a real being.
{186}
In rejecting the psychological and historical facts upon which
Christianity is founded, that is to say, the relations free and
unintermitted of God with Man, whether in the individual life of
each man or in the history of the mankind, Rationalistic
Spiritualism deprives itself of direct and positive evidence to
prove God's existence; it places a human argument in the place of
the divine manifestation, and a scientific work of man in the
place of the real action of God.

In an excellent book, justly entitled by him "Idea of God,"
another contemporary philosopher, M. Caro, has valiantly, and
with brilliant success, defended this idea against the different
systems which reject or distort it. And not limiting himself to
polemics, he has concluded his work by a forcible and clear
enunciation of his own thought.
{187}
"It is the living God, the intelligent God, whom we defend
against the God of Naturalism, who would not be more than a law
of geometry or a blind force; against the God of Hegel, who would
not be more than an indeterminate Being, an origin and a
commencement of things, or an absolute mind, result at once and
product of the world; against the God of the new Idealists, who,
to save his divinity, strip him of his reality. We affirm, in
opposition to all these subtle and hazardous conceptions, that a
supposed perfect being, unless he had an existence, would not be
perfect; that a mere ideal of the mind is not a God; that if he
is not a substance he is but a conception, a pure category of
spirit, a creation and dependence upon man's thought which, in
ceasing to exist, annihilates its God; that, if he is not cause,
he is the most useless of beings; and if he is cause, he is mind
supreme, for were he not so he would be nothing but an
unconscious and necessary agent, a blind spring of the world,
inferior to what he produces, since in the organic matter that
emanates from him, an intelligence displays itself, of which he
would possess nothing, and since too in man is manifested a
divine Reason.

{188}

Another remark, and we have done with our definition. This living
God, this God intelligent, is also a God that loves ... A God
that loved not would not be worthy of being adored ... We do not
adore a law, however simple it may be, however fruitful in
consequence; we do not adore a force if it be blind, however
potent, however universal it may be; nor an ideal, however pure
it may be, if it be only an abstraction. We only adore a being
who is living perfection, the perfection of reality in its
highest forms of mind and love. Every other adoration implies a
contradiction if the object is a pure abstraction, idolatry if
the object be the substance of the universe or humanity.

This is God as he appears to reason, and as the religious
conscience of humanity will have him. This is your God."
[Footnote 43]

    [Footnote 43: L'Idée de Dieu et ses Nouveaux Critiques.
    By E. Caro. p. 498. 8vo. Paris, 1864.]

{189}

It is to be regretted M. Caro has not carried his conclusions
still higher, and completed his work by proceeding on from
philosophical spiritualism to Christian Spiritualism.

Rationalistic Deism is merely an idea of God, given as the
philosophical solution of the grand problem, which the spectacle
of the Universe and of Man in the Universe causes to weigh upon
the soul of man.

Christianity is faith in God, Being real, Sovereign real,
continually present, and active in the government of the
Universe, as he is in the soul of man and in the history of the
human race.

Rationalistic Deism arrives at the idea of God, and stops short
there, because it ignores the psychological and historical facts
which go beyond this idea. It is by holding account of these
facts, and by doing to them the homage which is their due, that
Christianity forwards and justifies her faith.

{190}

           Sixth Meditation.

            Christian Life.


Every doctrine, religious, moral, or political, has yet to submit
to a test--the great test--the practical application. The idea
has to be transformed into reality, the thought to be made life.

Philosophers pride themselves upon searching only for the truth,
upon busying themselves only with the theoretical truth of their
ideas, to the neglect of every other consideration. They are
right in one sense: for the knowledge of truth, of truth as it is
in itself, is that which the human mind proposes to itself as its
object, and is the only thing which can satisfy it; if man
pretends to it, it is his right and his honour to do so: whatever
the object of his study, the mind does not halt or rest until it
believes that it has attained to the truth.

{191}

This is no privilege of philosophers; neither are they the only
ones for whom truth is a law: all men have a right to live under
its empire, whether as to facts or ideas. No one, not even those
who affect most disdain for theory, would venture to lay down the
principle that we should be indifferent whether we are
essentially in the right, and that practically there is no
difference between truth and error.

But by what signs is truth recognisable? Are there no other than
the affirmations of that inquisitive spectator, named the human
mind? Is it only by language, by reasoning, and by discussion,
that the truth of an idea and of a doctrine manifests and proves
itself?

To such a pretension, if advanced, I hesitate not to reply with a
denial, and in doing so, to repeat what I have just said: every
doctrine, religious, moral, or political, has to submit to a
test,--the practical application.
{192}
The idea transformed into reality, the thought made the life;
these are the most certain signs of an idea being intrinsically
true, these, too, are proofs of its reasonable legitimacy, which
it is bound to give.

There is a radical difference between the material world and the
intellectual world. The laws which regulate and maintain order in
the material world, are independent of man, of both his thought
and his volition. It matters not that he knows these laws, or is
ignorant of them; they do not the less exist and govern; man has
no power to change, arrest, or suspend their operation; he cannot
influence them. Galileo was right to say of the earth, in spite
of his judges, "Still it moves;" it would have moved even if
Galileo, as well as his judges, had been ignorant of the fact,
and the contest between the whirlpool of Descartes and Newton's
principle of attraction, was a matter perfectly indifferent to
the general system of the world. _There_ man's error is
absolutely without effect or influence.

{193}

In the intellectual and moral world it is otherwise; here man is
not only spectator, he is an actor, an actor free or not to act--
to act with effect. He thinks and he wills, and so contributes to
the facts which take place in the world; he knows, or is ignorant
of, the laws, he respects or violates the laws which preside
here, but which do not preside here as laws external to and
independent of himself. Man's errors, man's faults, are not here
without real and serious consequences; they have the power of
sowing evil and of carrying perturbation into the intellectual
and moral world, thus delivered up, as the Bible proclaims, to
the disputes of men.

Learned men, in the study and appreciation of the material world,
separate sciences absolutely, and, considering each apart from
its practical application, occupy themselves in their scientific
investigations only with the pure theory. This I understand and
admit; for such a course does not endanger the security of
society or the results of their own labours.
{194}
Their ignorance and their errors have no doubt grave
inconveniences; the facts and the forces of the material world
are either misconceived or not turned sufficiently to account;
man and human society do not reap all the advantages which the
profound and exact knowledge of the truth might, in this respect,
procure them. Such ill, although real, is of a negative
description, a good, it may be, missed or postponed; but no
general disturbance results in that material world upon which
naturalists or chemists concentrate their labours; the world will
not have to undergo the effect, nor to pay the penalty, of their
ignorance or of their errors. The intellectual and moral world,
on the contrary, runs a greater risk, and imposes upon its
teachers severer duties; no doubt these study it as freely, and
make truth, too, their object; but science does not here escape
the weight of its own conclusions; it is a power as formidable in
its abuse as it is in itself sublime; it may carry into the world
to which it addresses itself trouble instead of order,
incendiarism instead of light. If practical application is not
here the object of science, it is still its necessary and
appropriate proof; in facts as in a mirror are reflected the
truth or the error, the good or the ill, of human opinions.

{195}

Christianity has now been subjected to this test for nineteen
centuries: it is subject to it at this moment, it will continue
ever to be so. I need not say that I do not propose to retrace
here the narrative of the manner in which it has supported and
surmounted that test; that would be to write the History of
Christianity. I confine myself, on the contrary, to a single
small part of this history, the most modest part, the least
pretending: and shall endeavour to bare a little to the view what
Christianity, when it has been put into practice, what Christian
Faith, after it has become Christian Life, has in the different
situations of man's life accomplished, and is every day
accomplishing, for the ennoblement of his nature, and the
furtherance of his ultimate destiny.

{196}

Three words, "_Rights of Man_" inscribed upon the banners of
the French Revolution, constituted its force; the rights of man
as man, rights by this title alone, by virtue alone of his
humanity. Three other words, _Liberty, Equality,
Fraternity_, have served as a commentary upon the three
former. It is in the name of these two maxims that the French
Revolution is making the tour of the world; they are the sources
of the good and the evil, the movements in advance as well as the
ruinous calamities of our time and of an unknown future.

Whilst all of true and good that these two maxims contain is
Christian and was proclaimed by Christianity, all that they have
of false and fatal is condemned and expressly repudiated by
Christianity. Not only in this terrible confusion does
Christianity proclaim in principle the part that is good, and
condemn in principle the part that is evil; but Christianity
alone, in point of fact, has the necessary authority and moral
force to suppress the evil without at the same time causing the
good also to perish.

{197}

It is a subject to us, in these days, of pride, and of a pride
that is just, that we have at last begun to consider man himself,
the individual man, his existence, and his personal liberty, his
rights, and the guarantees of his rights, as the essential
objects of social institutions. We have at last emerged from the
rut of pagan antiquity, glorious at once and rude, where the
individual, made wholly subordinate, was sacrificed to the state,
where man was regarded simply as citizen, and thousands of human
creatures were degraded and treated as cyphers in favour of a
single class. Men are no longer numbered as Jews and Gentiles,
Romans and Barbarians, freemen and slaves. Christianity first not
only proclaimed but put into practice this important truth. The
right of every man, as man, the worth of the human soul, and of
the human person, irrespectively of his situation in life,
constitute the starting-point, the fundamental idea, the dominant
precept of the Christian religion.
{198}
It was, in effect, in religious society, in the rising Christian
Church, that this principle was first proclaimed, and first put
into practice; Christianity treated the relation of man to God as
the chief concern of man's life, and religious liberty as the
chief of human liberties; it was in the presence of God that
Christians admitted the equal importance of every soul; as it was
amongst Christians themselves that they greeted each other as
brethren, and that fraternity engendered charity. But although
sprung from a source so elevated, and applied at first upon a
stage so small, the Christian idea was not on that account less
potent, or less fruitful; in spite of obstacles and reverses it
maintained itself, and diffused itself through centuries and over
distant countries; it made constant efforts to penetrate civil
society. At the epochs of the history of Christendom which are
most to be deplored, in the midst of the oppressions and the
iniquities which have brought desolation upon it, daring voices
have never been wanting: at one time it was the voice of the
Christian Church itself directed against the masters of the
earth; at another a voice issuing from the bosom of the Church
itself, full of generous protestations against the disorders and
acts of violence which were taking place in its own bosom.
{199}
Jesus, God and man, having raised man before God, man never
afterwards entirely humiliated and degraded himself before any
human tyranny. In the presence of the greatest inequalities of
earthly power, the appellation, _brethren_, never ceased to
be echoed in Christian Society; and even at this day, after all
the progress which equality has made in civil society, it is only
in religious societies and in Christian Churches that men hear
themselves greeted as _brethren_.

The Christian faith has not only exercised a political influence
in the state by changing the relations in which individuals stand
to the political authorities, or in which the different classes
stand to one another: it has also introduced a change in the
constitution of the primary natural and imperishable association,
called family.
{200}
There, also, it has caused to disappear, at one time, the
despotism of husband and father; at another, the degradation of
wife, and the brutal or licentious independence of children. If
we give ourselves the trouble to compare the Christian family as
religion, laws, and morals have made it, with the family of
antiquity which was most strongly constituted, namely, the Roman
family,--we shall not need to examine long before we discern
clearly on which side order really is, on which side the just
appreciation of natural sentiments, the respect for right and
liberty.

I have said that at the same time that Christianity proclaims and
puts in practice all that is true and healthy in the popular
maxims of our times, man's rights and liberty, his equality and
fraternity, it condemns and rejects all that they contain of
false and deplorable. There is one very striking fact in the
history of the foundation of Christianity, a fact traceable not
merely in the records of a few years, but through three
centuries.
{201}
Christianity began with resisting absolute power, and with laying
claim to liberty of conscience. It owed its establishment to the
same cause. In the Roman world no one any longer made even a show
of resistance; every kind of oppression was in force, every claim
to freedom abandoned: the Christians again raised high the banner
of right, and of resistance in the name of right; but never did
they raise their banner to encourage revolt or attacks upon
authority; they undertook the defence of liberty against tyranny,
and never made appeals to insurrection against authority.
Martyrdom, not murder; such is the sum of the history of
Christianity from the day of its birth in the manger of Jesus, to
the day when it mounted the throne of Constantine. The reason of
this is, that from the time when Christianity was yet in its
cradle, and even afterwards when it was struggling to conquer its
liberty, liberty was not an exclusive idea for Christians either
in their doctrines or their lives: they recognised, respected,
and proclaimed with equal solicitude both principles upon which
the moral order of the world reposes, authority and liberty.
{202}
They never, in any respect, sacrificed the one to the other, nor
humiliated the one in the presence of the other; masters and
disciples, all referred power to its true source, and did homage
to its right at the same time that they maintained their own
right against power. When Jesus spoke, the people were astonished
at his doctrine, "for he taught as one having authority, and not
as the Scribes." [Footnote 44]

    [Footnote 44: Matthew vii. 29.]

Jesus declared formally to his disciples his authority over them,
and the mission which it imposed upon them: "Ye have not chosen
me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that ye should go
and bring forth fruit, and that your fruit should remain."
[Footnote 45]

    [Footnote 45: John xv. 16.]

And when St. Paul, although exposed to all kinds of perils and
struggles, spread abroad throughout the Roman Empire the
doctrines of Jesus, he said to the new Christians, "Let every
soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but
of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. ... Wherefore ye
must needs be subject, not only for wrath, but also for
conscience' sake." [Footnote 46]

    [Footnote 46: Romans xiii. 1, 5. ]

{203}

Nor can I here omit again to cite the words which Jesus himself
addressed to the Pharisees: "Render under Cæsar the things which
are Cæsar's, and unto God the things that are God's." [Footnote
47]

    [Footnote 47: Matthew xxii. 21.]

The respect for authority as much as for liberty, the right of
power as well as the right of conscience, the separation of
religious life from civil life,--all these were not, for the
primitive Christians, simple necessities arising out of their
situation, nor simple counsels of prudence; they were principles
of doctrine and precepts of life, recognised and practised in the
name of justice and of truth.

{204}

Christian doctrine and Christian practice have been, I know,
greatly altered, lost sight of, violated, in the course of the
history of the Christian world. Human nature succumbs readily to
the temptations of victory and pleasure; when Christianity once
became powerful it was too often invaded and disfigured by
earthly interests and passions; ambition, cupidity, pride, the
arrogance of power, and the lies of cunning; every evil
inclination, every vice which the Christian faith rebukes and
combats, displayed themselves in this world which Christianity
had not conquered merely to hand it over to them, but from which,
nevertheless, it had not expelled them. The grand and salutary
doctrines of Christianity have been often themselves perverted
and profaned to the service of an egotism assuming every shape
and carried to every pitch. Still they never were lost, they
never perished in this impure mixture and this unworthy use; they
survived, they combated, sometimes in obscurity, sometimes in the
broad light of day; everywhere, at every epoch, Christian voices,
Christian lives, and Christian Reforms protested and struggled
against the passions and the corruptions of mankind. And in spite
of all these centuries, so sombre, so full of agitation, of
violence, and of oppression, so full of moral and material ill,
the decline of man and of human society did not ensue.
{205}
Greece and Rome, in their state of youthful growth, were glorious
and vigorous; and glorious, too, was the development in them of
human intelligence and dignity; but their career was short, and
these two brilliant forms of society did not find in their ideas,
traditions, or models, a sufficiency of moral force to enable
them to escape from, or even survive, the seductive and
corrupting influence of material grandeur and of human success.
Amidst all the sufferings, all the darkness, all the crimes which
agitate her long career, Christianity has proved infinitely
healthier and more sound; she has made herself an incessant
subject of study; she has shifted her place upon her couch of
sorrow; she has raised herself up, she has renewed, regenerated
herself; she has grown and prospered at the same time that she
has suffered; and in spite of the ills, vices, and perils against
which Christianity has had to defend herself, and against which
she will ever have to defend herself, she has before her, over
the whole face of the world, a future immense and full of
promise. This she owes to her origin--she was born in the manger
of Jesus.

{206}

There is at present a disposition amongst earnest and enlightened
men to recognise, it is true, the services which Christianity has
rendered to the world; but to attribute them only to the morality
of Christianity. They laud to the sky the moral character of
Jesus, and his moral precepts; but they repudiate, nay, deplore,
the dogmas with which, in the Christian faith, Christian morality
is combined and incorporated; they demand that the morality be
separated from it, and be presented to man without anything but
its intellectual beauty and practical excellence. Although not
disputing that there is somewhat of human in the origin and
empire of morality, I have established in this volume of
Meditations that it is necessarily allied to religious belief,
and that when separated from its divine source, and viewed apart
from that which gives it sanction, it is incomplete, illogical,
and powerless--a branch without root and without fruit.
{207}
I go farther now, and express my meaning fully. Not only is
Christian morality intimately connected with Christian faith, as
the Christian faith is itself connected with Christian dogmas,
but Christian morals, Christian faith, and Christian dogmas have
taken their origin, and derived their force, at a source still
higher, and in an authority still more decisive. Christianity did
not begin, it did not rise upon the world, as one body of
doctrines or code of precepts; from its first step it was a
truth, strange to the ordinary course of human affairs, and
superior to them; a fact divine, and an act divine; it was as
such, and by its character as such, that, sometimes all at once,
and sometimes gradually, it struck men as by a blow and
vanquished them, at first the rude and simple, then the great and
learned, publicans and emperors, the disciples of Plato, and the
fishermen of the sea of Gennesareth.
{208}
At different moments, and for different motives, all of them saw
in the cradle, and the rapid extent of infant Christianity, a
sublime and superhuman fact, a God present and acting in and by
Jesus. Some recognised and adored him at the very moment of his
appearing; others observed him with troubled and angry feelings;
but, in proportion as the truth developed itself, even those who
detested him doubted if they were right in doubting. The council
and all the senate of the children of Israel had caused Peter and
the other apostles to be placed in prison, and took counsel to
have them put to death. "Then stood there up one in the council,
a Pharisee, named Gamaliel, a doctor of the law, had in
reputation among all the people, and commanded to put the
apostles forth a little space; and said unto them: Ye men of
Israel, take heed to yourselves what ye intend to do as touching
these men. For before these days rose up Theudas boasting himself
to be somebody, to whom a number of men, about four hundred,
joined themselves: who was slain, and all, as many as obeyed him,
were scattered and brought to nought.
{209}
After this man rose up Judas of Galilee in the days of the
taxing, and drew away much people after him: he also perished;
and all, even as many as obeyed him, were dispersed. And now I
say unto you, Refrain from these men, and let them alone: for if
this counsel or this work be of men, it will come to nought: But
if it be of God, ye cannot overthrow it; lest haply ye be found
even to fight against God." [Footnote 48]

    [Footnote 48: Acts v. 21, 33--39.]

The question which Gamaliel thus put with respect to Christianity
at its birth was not new; the high priest of Israel had already
made the same demand of Jesus himself: "I adjure thee by the
living God, that thou tell us whether thou be the Christ, the Son
of God? Jesus saith unto him, Thou hast said." [Footnote 49]

    [Footnote 49: Matthew xxvi. 63, 64.]

{210}

The Jews replied to the affirmation of Jesus by crucifying him. A
short time afterwards, when they sought to treat the apostles as
their Master had been treated, Gamaliel counselled them to abide
the test of time, and in the meanwhile to leave "these people in
repose." They did not leave these people in repose, and the proof
was only on that account the more decisive: after three centuries
of persecutions and martyrdoms, the grand facts of
Christianity,--the Revelation, the Incarnation, the Redemption,
the Inspiration of the Scriptures,--became the grand dogmas of
Christianity, the basis of Christian faith, which faith in its
turn is the basis of Christian Life. Sixteen centuries elapsed
from this trial of Christianity in its cradle, and it was made to
undergo fresh and still ruder trials; in these trials earthly
interests and human errors and passions had a great part;
Christ's precepts were sometimes forgotten, and sometimes
converted into human instruments; no doctrine or idea was ever so
constantly in contact with, and at issue with, facts; never was
theory more rigorously reviewed, more subjected to the test of
practical application in every form and every shape.
{211}
The design which emanated from God traversed and surmounted all
these perils; it braved the faults of its adherents and the blows
of its enemies. It is engaged in our days in a new contest, and
is subjected to fresh trials; it has entered upon it with the
same arms, which, nineteen centuries ago, secured its triumph,
with the grand facts which form the basis of Christian faith, and
the great examples which furnish the rule of Christian living.
The History of Christianity is the strongest proof of its
Divinity, and the surest guarantee for its future. The
authenticity and authority of this history will be the subject of
the next and last series of my "Meditations."

{212}

{213}

               Appendix.


Ecce Homo: such is the title of a work published anonymously, at
London and at Cambridge in 1866, which produced on its appearance
a great sensation in London, a sensation which still continues:
all the papers and reviews, whether religious, philosophical, or
simply literary, busied themselves with it, either to praise or
attack it; the distinguished chief of the Liberal Party himself,
perhaps soon to be the Prime Minister of England, Mr. Gladstone,
has just made it the subject of three articles, which are
remarkable alike for acuteness, elegance, and eloquence. They
appeared in one of the most widely circulated periodicals in his
country. [Footnote 50]

    [Footnote 50: "Good Words," a Monthly Review, edited by
    Norman Macleod, one of the Chaplains of her Majesty Queen
    Victoria. The articles referred to appeared in the numbers of
    January, February, and March, 1868.]

  "No anonymous book," says he, "since the 'Vestiges of Creation'
  (now more than twenty years old), indeed, it might almost be
  said, no theological book, whether anonymous, or of certified
  authorship--that has appeared within the same interval, has
  attracted anything like the amount of notice and of criticism
  which have been bestowed upon the remarkable volume, entitled
  'Ecce Homo.'"

{214}

The anonymous author has expressed in a very short preface his
intention in writing this volume, as well as its fundamental
ideas. "Those who feel," says he, "dissatisfied with the current
conceptions of Christ, if they cannot rest content without a
definite opinion, may find it necessary to do what, to persons
not so dissatisfied, it seems audacious and perilous to do. They
may be obliged to reconsider the whole subject from the
beginning, and placing themselves, in imagination, at the time
when he whom we call Christ bore no such name, but was simply, as
St. Luke describes him, a young man of promise, popular with
those who knew him, and appearing to enjoy the Divine favour, to
trace his biography from point to point, and accept those
conclusions about him, not which Church doctors, or even apostles
have sealed with their authority, but which the facts themselves,
critically weighed, appear to warrant.

"This is what the present writer undertook to do for the
satisfaction of his own mind, and because, after reading a good
many books on Christ, he felt still constrained to confess that
there was no historical character whose motives, objects and
feelings remained so incomprehensible to him. The inquiry which
proved serviceable to himself may chance to be useful to others.

"What is now published is a fragment. No theological questions
whatever are here discussed. Christ as the Creator of modern
Theology and Religion will make the subject of another volume;
which, however, the author does not hope to publish for some time
to come. In the meanwhile, he has endeavoured to furnish an
answer to the question, 'What was Christ's object in founding the
Society which is called by his name, and how is it adapted to
attain that object?'"

{215}

On merely considering, even after a first perusal, the brief
words which I have here extracted, it is, I think, impossible not
to perceive how much there is that is artificial and embarrassed,
I had almost said how much there is that is false, not only in
the position in which the Author has placed himself at the very
outset, but in the special intentions which he avows. To study
the life and the aim of the life of Christ without considering
him "as the Creator of Modern Theology and Religion," to defer
all examination and conclusion upon this last subject; to aspire
to know the person and the mind of Christ after thus separating
him from his work; to inquire what he meant to accomplish when
living, without considering what he in effect accomplished in the
ages which followed his passage through the world; to treat him,
in short, and to examine him as we should treat and examine a
person unknown to us--a fossil man, so to say, of which the
features might be traceable in some contemporary document,
showing that he once existed, but who has left no other trace to
supply us with argument or proof of what he intended, or what he
performed;--this, undoubtedly, is a strange manner of proceeding,
one which holds out very little chance of an accurate and true
comprehension of the immense fact called Christianity, thus
mutilated in its very cradle, Christianity of which the writer
limits himself to a bare search after the germ in the nascent
thought of its owner, whereas it might have been observed, and
its nature verified in its positive and vast development.

{216}

This is a species of decomposition, of which the great facts of
history and morality do not admit. We are not here, like
anatomists, describing the autopsy of a corpse. To know and
comprehend such facts really, we must study them in their
different elements and in all the development of their life. They
form a drama in which we are actors, not a manuscript which we
are deciphering.

I can easily understand how the anonymous writer of the "Ecce
Homo" came to conceive the idea of his book, and to confine it
within the limits which he has himself assigned: I can also
understand his motives. Like all his contemporaries, he is placed
and lives in presence of the grave questions agitated in these
days respecting Christianity and its author. What was Christ?--a
man or very God, or God and man at once? How did the divine
nature and the human nature manifest themselves in him? Did he
really effect the miracles assigned to him? Can there be such
things as miracles? What are we to understand by the
supernatural? Is God a real being personal and free, existing and
accomplishing his works in a region beyond that which we style
Nature? Christianity and the life of its founder inevitably
suggest all these questions, which in our days occupy and
violently agitate men's minds. The anonymous author of the "Ecce
Homo" did not wish to enter upon them; nay, it was his aim to
study and comprehend Christ without touching them at all. Is it
because upon these grave problems he entertains himself no
positive and decided opinions? Or, because he wished, to a
certain extent, to accommodate himself to the state of opinion of
some of his contemporaries, and to treat Christ as those speak of
him who only see in him a man, who regard Christianity as a fact
not supernatural, owing its origin, like other natural facts, to
the sole and proper force of mankind?

{217}

Upon this I can form no opinion; I neither know the anonymous
author of the "Ecce Homo," nor the motives which actuate him:
what is certain is, that he is quite right in entitling his book
"Ecce Homo," for it is only the Man Christ that he has proposed
to study, and it is by studying the Man Christ that he has
proposed to explain Christianity.

I do not know if, after having written his book, he was aware of
the result to which it leads, but the result is in effect a
strange one,--it is condemnatory and destructive of the
fundamental idea of the book, it demonstrates by a sincere and
honest, although an incomplete and superficial study of the
facts, the impossibility of explaining either Christ by the human
nature alone, or the Christian Religion by any merely natural
operations of humanity.

The work is divided into two parts, and contains altogether
twenty-four chapters. The first part is devoted to the study of
Christ personally, his peculiar character, his manner of dealing
with men, the mission which he proposed to himself to accomplish,
the nature of the society which he sought to found, and the
authority which he counted upon exercising. In the second part,
the Christian society itself, its points of resemblance to the
systems of philosophy and its points of difference therefrom, its
fundamental principles and positive laws, and the habits and
sentiments which are developed by those laws, all become in turn
the objects of the author's observations and descriptions.
Observations often profound, descriptions often exact and
striking, although somewhat minute and lengthy; everywhere,
however, there breathes forth a sentiment unquestionably moral,
and full of the gentlest sympathy for humanity.

{218}

All this gives to the work a real attractiveness, in spite of the
vagueness of the ideas which reign there, and in spite of the
perceptible incertitude of the author's conclusions upon the
solemn questions which he approaches, but upon which he does not
enter.

I have no intention of saying more; I have not to render an
account in detail of this book or to discuss any of the author's
opinions or assertions upon which I may not agree with him; my
aim is only to determine the character of his work, and to show
plainly, first its tendency and then its insufficiency. There
precisely is his originality; in setting out, and dealing with
the subject of the purely human nature both of Christ and of
Christianity, he seems not far from participating the opinions of
Rationalistic criticism; but the more he advances, the farther he
departs from the goal at which the Rationalists arrive: he
appears predisposed in their favour; the process of his thought
seems often to conform to theirs; his conclusions are not clearly
contrary, but in effect, under the empire either of his instincts
or under the influence of his historical and moral studies, he is
more Christian than he appears, perhaps even more so than he
believes himself to be; and if the firm doctrines of Christianity
find in him no sure and declared defender, neither do they
encounter in him the consistent hostility of a severe logician or
the indifferentism of a mere sceptic.

{219}

There are several passages of this remarkable work which are
particularly distinguished by these characteristics. To these I
feel pleasure in referring the reader. They are in both parts of
the book; that is to say, in the first part, chapter fifth,
entitled _Christ's Credentials_, and chapter ninth,
[Footnote 51] entitled _Reflections on the Nature of Christ's
Society;_ in the second part, chapter tenth, entitled
_Christ's Legislation compared with Philosophic systems_,
and chapter the eleventh, _The Christian Republic_ [Footnote
52] A perusal of these passages will, if I do not deceive myself,
fully justify the impression which the work has made upon me, and
satisfy the reader that I am right in what I have said of the
author's inconsistency with respect to religion.

    [Footnote 51: Ecce Homo, ed. 1866, pp. 41-51, 81--102.]

    [Footnote 52: _Ibid_, pp. 108--119, 120--126.]

Without expressly referring to any other passages I simply
remark, that there are in this book ideas expressed and
particular assertions made, which suggest numerous questions and
call for many observations. I find in the entire volume a
singular mixture of plain and practical common sense with a
subtlety sometimes tinctured with piety, and sometimes with
philosophy. There reigns in it, upon the nature of man and of
human societies, an intellectual elevation, both moral and
religious, which embarrasses and obscures itself in a long and
painful process of refinements. It bears the impress of a
grandeur of thought and of sentiment, without presenting them,
however, in a form sufficiently simple and vivid. But I have no
idea of examining or discussing here in detail this remarkable
work; my aim is only to make the result clear to the reader, to
which I have already referred, and indeed it appears
incontestable. The author's aim has been to study and portray the
human part of Christ, the human part of his doctrine as well as
of his life. He has declared this to be his aim by entitling his
book "Ecce Homo," and by saying that he deferred to another
volume "every theological question, every study of Christ as the
Creator of Theology and of Modern Religion."
{220}
He has already done much more than he is aware; the striking
inference from his first volume being that there was in Christ
much more than man, and that if he had been but man, however
superior we may picture his nature to be to that of ordinary
humanity, the work of Christianity, such as it in fact was and
is, would have been to him a thing not only which he could not
have accomplished, but which he could not even have conceived.


                 The End.



  Bradbury, Evans, And Co., Printers, Whitefriars.





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