Produced by Don Kostuch




[Transcriber's note: This production is based on
https://archive.org/details/meditationsonact00guiz/page/n6.]

{1}
              Meditations

     Actual State Of Christianity,

          And On The Attacks

     Which Are Now Being Made Upon It.



               By M. Guizot.




   Translated Under The Superintendence
	     Of The Author




               New York:
         Charles Scribner & Co.,

             654 Broadway.

{2}

{3}

                Preface.


When I published, two years ago, the first series of these
_Meditations_, the series which had for its object the
essence of Christianity, "that is to say, the natural problems to
which Christianity is the answer, the fundamental dogmas by which
it solves those problems, and the supernatural facts upon which
those dogmas repose," I indicated the general plan of the work
which I so commenced, and the order into which its different
parts would be distributed.

"Next to the essence of the Christian Religion," I said in my
Preface, "comes its history; and this will be the subject of a
second series of _Meditations_, in which I shall examine the
authenticity of the Scriptures; the primary causes of the
foundation of Christianity;
{4}
Christian faith, as it has always existed throughout its
different ages and in spite of all its vicissitudes; the great
religious crisis in the sixteenth century, which divided the
Church and Europe between Romanism and Protestantism; finally,
those antichristian crises which, at different epochs and in
different countries, have set in question and imperiled
Christianity itself, but which dangers it has ever surmounted.
The third series of _Meditations_ will be consecrated to the
study of the actual state of the Christian religion, its internal
and external condition. I shall retrace the regeneration of
Christianity which occurred among us at the commencement of the
nineteenth century, both in the Church of Rome and in the
Protestant Churches; the impulse imparted to it at the same epoch
by the Spiritualistic Philosophy that then began again to
flourish, and the movement in the contrary direction which showed
itself very remarkably soon afterward in the resurrection of
Materialism, of Pantheism, of Skepticism, and in works of
historical criticism.
{5}
I shall attempt to determine the idea, and consequently, in my
opinion, the fundamental error of these different systems, the
avowed and active enemies of Christianity. Finally, in the fourth
series of these _Meditations_, I shall endeavor to
discriminate and to characterize the future destiny of the
Christian religion, and to indicate by what course it is called
upon to conquer completely, and to sway morally, this little
corner of the universe, termed by us our earth, in which unfold
themselves the designs and power of God, just as, doubtless, they
do in an infinity of worlds unknown to us."

Still adhering in its entirety to the plan which I thus proposed,
I nevertheless now invert the order. I publish the
_Meditations_ concerning the actual state of Christianity
before those which propose for their object its history. I am
struck by two circumstances in the actual state of opinions upon
religious questions. On the one side, the sentiments contrary to
or favorable to Christianity are defining themselves each day
with greater precision.
{6}
Beliefs become firmer beliefs; opinions hostile to them receive
fuller developments. On the other side, vacillating minds are
occupying themselves more and more with the struggle to which
they are witnesses: minds, earnest at once and sincere, feel the
disturbing influence of the doctrines hostile to Christianity;
many again are uneasy at these doctrines, many demand a refuge
from them, without finding it or daring to seek it in the
essential facts and principles of the Christian faith. Between
the adversaries of Christianity and its defenders the discussion
grows each day in importance and gravity; and with it also grows
the perplexity in the minds of the spectators. By setting in full
light this actual state of the Christian religion, by comparing
the forces at its disposal with those of the systems that it
combats, I proceed thither where the emergency is the greatest; I
betake myself at once to the very field of battle. I shall
afterward resume the history of Christianity from its first
establishment down to our own time, and then finally consider the
prospect open to it in the future.

{7}

I regard with very complicated feelings, with feelings of great
perplexity, the actual state of my country; its intellectual and
moral state as well as its social and its political state. I have
a mind full at once of confidence and of disquietude, of hope and
of alarm. Whether for good or for evil, the crisis in which the
civilized world is plunged is infinitely more serious than our
fathers predicted it would be; more so than even we, who are
already experiencing from it the most different consequences,
believe it ourselves to be. Sublime truths, excellent principles,
are intrinsically blended with ideas essentially false and
perverse. A noble work of progress, a hideous work of
destruction, are in operation simultaneously in men's opinions
and in society. Humanity never so floated between heaven and the
abyss. It is especially when I regard the generation now
advancing, when I hear what they affirm, when I gather a hint of
what they desire and hope for, it is especially then that I feel
at once sympathy and anxiety.
{8}
Sentiments of propriety and of generosity abound in those young
hearts; they reject, when once convinced of their justice,
neither the ideas which they before did not admit, nor the curb
to which by the inspiration of the divine law even human ambition
does not refuse to submit; but by a strange and deplorable
amalgam, good instincts and evil tendencies exist in them
simultaneously; ideas the least reconcilable clash together, and
persist in them at the same time. The Truth does not rid them of
the error; a light indeed shines upon them, but out of a chaotic
darkness which that light has not the power to dissipate.

In the presence of this condition of men's minds, under the
impulse of the sentiment which it inspires, I publish this second
series of _Meditations_.
{9}
In touching upon the great questions at present under debate in
the philosophical world, in expressing my opinion concerning
Rationalism, Positivism, Pantheism, Materialism, Skepticism, I
have not for a moment pretended to discuss these different
systems completely and scientifically. Although I am convinced
that they are no more in a condition to support any profound
examination of severe reason than to stand the first regard of
common sense, the object which I propose to myself is to indicate
only their radical and incurable vice. This is no treatise of
Metaphysics; it is only an appeal addressed to upright and
independent minds; an appeal made to induce them to subject
science to the test of the human conscience, and to regard with
distrust systems, which, in the name of a pretended scientific
truth, would, between the intellectual order and the moral order,
between the thought and the life of man, destroy the harmony
established by the law of God.

    Guizot.
    Val-Richer, _April_, 1866.

{10}
{11}
               Contents.



                                            Page

      Preface                                  3

I.    The Awakening Of Christianity In
      France In The Nineteenth Century        13

II.   Spiritualism                           218

III.  Rationalism                            245

IV.   Positivism                             267

V.    Pantheism                              310

VI.   Materialism                            330

VII.  Skepticism                             350

VIII. Impiety, Recklessness, And Perplexity  369

{12}

{13}

     Meditations On The Actual State Of

         The Christian Religion.




          First Meditation.


    The Awakening Of Christianity In
    France In The Nineteenth Century.


In 1797, La Réveillière-Lépeaux, one of the five Directors who
then constituted the government of France, having just read to
that class of the Institut [Footnote 1] of which he was a member
a memorial respecting Theophilanthropism, and the forms suitable
for this new worship, consulted Talleyrand upon the subject; the
latter replied, "I have but a single observation to make: Jesus
Christ, to found his religion, suffered himself to be crucified,
and he rose again. You should try to do as much."

    [Footnote 1: The class of moral and political sciences.]

{14}

Nor was it long before events justified the ironical counsel. In
1802, hardly four years afterward, Theophilanthropism and its
apostle, the dream and the dreamer, had disappeared from the
stage where they had been powerless in influence, barren in
consequence. The strong hand of Napoleon again solemnly set up in
France the religion of Christ crucified and Christ risen, and in
that same year the brilliant genius of Chateaubriand again placed
before the eyes of his countrymen the beauties of Christianity.
The great politician and the great writer bowed each of them
before the Cross; the Cross was the point from which each
started--the one to reconstruct the Christian Church in France,
the other to prove how capable a Christian writer is of charming
French society and of stirring its emotions.

{15}

In these days, and in some parts of Christendom, the Concordat
and the "Génie du Christianisme," the one as a political
institution, the other as a literary production, have lost
something of their vogue. Catholics, zealous and sincere,
criticise severely the defects of the Concordat; they regard it
as sometimes incomplete, sometimes tyrannical: they reproach it
with assailing the rights of religious society, of paralyzing its
influence, and restricting its liberty. Some go so far as to
express wishes for the separation of Church and State, and for
their entire independence of each other, the only certain
guarantee to either, they affirm, of a real moral influence.
Protestants, equally zealous and sincere, entertain the same
opinions and the same wishes. Not contented with this, the latter
have gone further, and acted; they have separated themselves from
the Protestant Church recognized by the State, and have founded
independent Churches, self-governing and self-sufficing; nor have
they demanded anything from the State but the liberty that is
every citizen's due.
{16}
In a work recently published, [Footnote 2] a pastor of one of
these Churches, a man distinguished both by the elevation of his
mind and the generosity of his sentiments, M. Edmond de
Pressensé, has gone still farther.

    [Footnote 2: L'Église et la Revolution française,
    histoire des relations de l'Église et de l'État,
    de 1789-1802. 8vo. 1864.]

Not content with defending the principle of the separation of
Church and State, he has endeavored to prove that, in 1802, the
Concordat was, on the part of Napoleon, simply an act of tyranny
and ambition; that it was, as far as Christianity is concerned,
an untoward incident; and that if the Christian Church, at the
time spontaneously regenerating itself, had been left free and
uncontrolled, it would have risen by its own proper strength, and
would have grown in influence and in faith far more than the
Concordat has permitted it to do. I am far from proposing to
discuss here, as a general proposition, the system of separation
of Church and State, or its worth in a religious or social point
of view;
{17}
such a system I do not regard as the ideal of religious society:
the co-existence, I would rather say the competition, of Churches
recognized by the State and of Dissenting Churches independently
constituting themselves and self-sufficing, is, in my opinion,
the system most in conformity with the nature of things, and most
favorable to the solidity and general efficiency of religion.
That is a question rather of epoch, time, manners, and social
condition than of principle. But, however this may be, I hold it
as certain that, in 1802, the Concordat was, on the part of
Napoleon, far more an act of superior sagacity than of arbitrary
power, and that it was for the Christian religion in France an
event as salutary as necessary. After the anarchy and the orgies
of the Revolution, nothing but the solemn recognition of
Christianity by the State could have given satisfaction to the
public sentiment, and insured to the religion of Christ the
dignity and the stability, the recovery of which was so essential
to its influence.
{18}
Nothing is more liable to error than an attempt to appreciate,
with reference to present circumstances and the actual condition
of men's minds, what was possible and good sixty years ago; and I
am convinced, that in spite of his zeal for the separation of
Church and State, M. Edmond de Pressensé, had he lived in 1802,
would have been as little satisfied as France herself with a
Christian Church restored in accordance with the plan of the Abbe
Grégoire, The Concordat was a mixed and imperfect measure,
subject to grave objections, and the source of numberless
difficulties; but, taken altogether, the measure was grand and
salutary; it gave at once to the Christian movement a sanction
and an impulse that no other scheme would have been capable of
imparting.

M. de Chateaubriand and the "Génie du Christianisme" are entitled
to the same justice. I am ready, with regard to both book and
author, to concede the truth of all the objections and of all the
defects that the severest critic may be able or may wish to
detect; their grand and salutary action will not be the less a
living fact.
{19}
It is with books as it is with men; it is by their qualities,
whatever their faults, that they command position and exercise
sway, and wherever superior qualities are discernible, their
efficacy remains in spite of any faults, in spite of any defects,
by which they may be accompanied. Notwithstanding its
imperfections in a religious and literary point of view, the
"Génie du Christianisme" was in both these respects a performance
at the same time remarkable and powerful: it strongly moved men's
minds, it gave a fresh impulse to men's imaginations, it
reanimated and placed in their proper rank the traditions and the
early impressions of Christianity. No criticism, however
legitimate, can ever deprive that work of the place that it at
once assumed in the religious and the literary history of its
time and country.
{20}
Neither the Concordat nor the "Génie du Christianisme" was, in
1802, the result of a spirit of blind and barren reaction.
Napoleon and Chateaubriand were both, of them hardy innovators.
At the side of the ancient religion which he re-established,
Napoleon firmly maintained also the liberty of conscience,
whether in matters of worship or philosophy. At the very instant
when the Concordat was proclaimed and the "Génie du
Christianisme" was published, the learned physiologist, Cabanis,
also published his treatise on the relations of man's physical
and moral nature, a work which characterized man as a mere
machine. And in recalling France to an admiration of the beauties
of Christian literature, Chateaubriand imaged them to her in
forms of language so novel and so original, that many among the
severe guardians of the French language treated him as an
outrageous and barbarous writer. A new era opened at this epoch
in France for religion and for literature.
{21}
Christianity and systems opposed to Christianity, Roman
Catholicism, Protestantism, and Philosophy, a taste for classics,
and a tendency to romanticism, unfolded themselves
simultaneously, surprised to be living together, and at the same
time encountering one another as ardent combatants.

I have no design to retrace here their contests nor to constitute
myself their judge. Let but a great arena be thrown open, and the
crowd rushes in, carrying with it its confusion and its buzz.
Happily, the tumult is not of long duration. In this mighty
movement of men's minds in France at the commencement of the
nineteenth century I occupy myself with a single grand fact--the
Awakening of Christianity, its different characteristics, its
different results. The crisis itself had illustrious witnesses. I
will interrogate these alone.

After Napoleon and Chateaubriand, the first whom I meet with are
two Catholic writers, who have left behind them great and
deserved reputations. M. de Bonald and M. de Maistre hoisted the
banner of Christianity valiantly, and at an early date.
{22}
But their ideas and their writings were rather political than
religious: the exigencies of public order occupied their
attention far more than those of man's soul, and their works were
rather attacks upon the French Revolution than a defense of the
faith of Christians. By a coincidence very remarkable, although
at the same time very natural, the first production of each--"The
Theory of Power," by M. de Bonald, and the "Considerations on
France," by M. de Maistre--was published at the same moment, in
1796, and each in a foreign land, where the authors were living
as emigrants. In the first ardor of the reaction, and with the
impassioned and vague feelings that it suggested, each wrote
against the Revolution that shook the world and wrecked his own
fortunes. Potent intelligences both, profound moralists, eminent
writers; but their philosophy is a philosophy of circumstance and
of party. Their theories they use as arms; their books as a
discharge.
{23}
M. de Bonald is a lofty-minded original thinker, but subtle, too,
and complex; disposed to content himself with verbal combinations
and distinctions, and sparing no labor to contrive his vast web
of arguments proper to entrap the unwary adversary. M. de
Maistre, on the contrary, blasts him with the absoluteness of his
assertion, the poignancy of his irony, the rude eloquence of his
invectives. He is a powerful, a charming extemporizer. Both of
them excel in seizing and presenting in a striking manner one
great side, but only one of the great sides, in questions or
measures. They see not these in their variety and in their
entirety. Combatants approved--the one tenacious, the other
impetuous--they both committed two grave faults: they instituted
a closer bond between statesmanship and religion than is proper
or suitable to either; they could not discover any other remedy
for anarchy than absolutism. In the natural and never-ending
conflict of the two great forces whose co-existence imparts vital
energy to human society--authority and liberty--they declared for
the former alone, thus ignoring the right of thought, the spirit
of our times, and the general course of Christian civilization.
{24}
When attacked in her essence, Religion should be defended as she
was founded, in herself and for herself, setting aside every
political consideration, and in the name alone of the problems
which lay siege to man's soul, and of the relations of man's soul
with God. "Render unto Cesar the things which are Cesar's, and
unto God the things that are God's," said Jesus to the Pharisees
when they sought to embarrass and to compromise him politically.
Thus did Jesus himself define the proper and paramount
characteristic of his work. He did not come to destroy or to
found any government; he came to feed, to regulate, and to save
the human soul, leaving to time and to the natural efficacy of
events the development of the social consequence of his religious
faith and of his religious law. M. de Bonald and M. de Maistre
joined too often together God and Cesar.
{25}
They thought too much of Cesar while defending God. In doing this
they changed and compromised the character of that great
movement, the Awakening of Christianity, which their conduct
otherwise provoked and served. [Footnote 3]

    [Footnote 3: "The dead move quick," says the poet Burger in
    his ballad of Leonora. The men and the books I record died at
    a period already distant from us; and in spite of their fame
    that abides, they are probably little known to the generation
    at present in possession of the stage. I regard it,
    therefore, as not improper for me to mention below the titles
    of their principal works, of which I have in the text sought
    to determine the true character.

    Those of M. de Bonald are:

    1. La Théorie du pouvoir politique et religieux. 3 vols. 8vo.
    Constance: 1796.

    2. La Législation. primitive. 3 vols. 8vo. Paris: 1821.

    3. L'Essai sur le divorce. 1 vol. 8vo. Paris.

    4. Les Recherches philosophique. 2 vols. 8vo. 1818 and 1826.

    5. Les Mélanges littéraires et politiques. 2 vols. 8vo.

    6. Pensées et discours. 2 vols. 8vo.

    All these writings, with some others, have been collected in
    the complete edition of the works of M. de Bonald, in seven
    volumes. 8vo. Paris: 1854.

    The principal works of M. de Maistre are:

    1. Considerations sur la France. 1 vol. 8vo. 1796.

    2. Essai sur le principe générateur des constitutions
    politiques et des autres institutions humaines. 1 vol. 8vo.
    1810.

    3. Du Pape. 2 vols. 8vo. 1819.]

    4. De l'Église gallicane dans son rapport avec le souverain
    pontife. 8vo. 1821.

    5. Examen de la philosophic de Bacon. 2 vols. 8vo. 1836.

    6. Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg. 2 vols. 8vo.

    7. Lettres et opuscules inédits. 2 vols. 8vo. 1851.

    8. Mémoires politiques et correspondance du comte de
    Maistre, publiés par M. Albert Blanc. 2 vols. 8vo. 1858.

{26}

After these two great writers, another great writer, (shall I
term him Catholic?) the Abbé de la Mennais, placed himself upon
the same path, but to arrive at a very different issue. He, too,
made authority alone the basis of man's faith and of human
society; but seeking to ascertain the sign which distinguishes
legitimate authority, and which entitles it to unarguing
submission, he fixed this sign in the general and traditional
assent of mankind. "The common consent or authority,
_there_," said he, "we find the natural rule of our
judgment; and what but folly can reject that rule, and listen to
its own reason in preference to the reason of all? ... The search
for certitude is the search for a reason not liable to error at
all, that is, for a reason that is infallible.
{27}
Now this infallible reason must necessarily be either the reason
of each individual or the reason of all men; in fact, of human
reason. It is not the reason of each individual, for men
contradict one another, and nothing frequently is more discordant
and more contradictory than their judgments; therefore it is the
reason of all." [Footnote 4]

    [Footnote 4: Essai sur l'indifférence en matiére de religion,
    t. ii, p. 59. Défense de l'Essai sur l'indifférence, chap. x,
    pp. 133-148.]

In holding this language in his very first work, the Abbé de la
Mennais was already forgetting that he was a Christian and a
Catholic. When a man demands here below an infallible authority,
he must not seek it from any human source. The reason of all?
(That is, the reason of the majority of men in all the ages of
the world, for the reason of _all_ is a fallacy.) What is
such reason, but the sovereignty of superior numbers in the
spiritual order? Having fixed his principle, the Abbé de la
Mennais kept it in sight everywhere. After having established an
infallible authority in the name of the reason of all, he
proclaimed the absolute sovereignty in the name of universal
suffrage.
{28}
But this apostle of universal reason was at the same time the
proudest worshiper of his own reason. Under the pressure of
events without, and of an ardent controversy, a transformation
took place in him, marked at once by its logical deductions and
its moral inconsistency: he changed his camp without changing his
principles; in the attempt to lead the supreme authority of his
Church to admit his principles he had failed; and from that
instant the very spirit of revolt that he had so severely rebuked
broke loose in his soul and in his writings, finding expression
at one time in an indignation full of hatred leveled at the
powerful, the rich, and the fortunate ones of the world; at
another time in a tender sympathy for the miseries of humanity.
The "Words of a Believer" are the eloquent outburst of this
tumult in his soul. Plunged in the chaos of sentiments the most
contradictory, and yet claiming to be always consistent with
himself, the champion of authority became in the State the most
baited of democrats, and in the Church the haughtiest of rebels.

{29}

It is not without sorrow that I thus express my unreserved
opinion of a man of superior talent--mind lofty, soul intense; a
man in the sequel profoundly sad himself, although haughty in his
very fall. One cannot read in their stormy succession the
numerous writings of the Abbé de la Mennais without recognizing
in them traces, I will not say of his intellectual
perplexities--his pride did not feel them--but of the sufferings
of his soul, whether for good or for evil. A noble nature, but
full of exaggeration in his opinions, of fanatical arrogance, and
of angry asperity in his polemics. One title to our gratitude
remains to the Abbé de la Mennais--he thundered to purpose
against the gross and vulgar forgetfulness of the great moral
interests of humanity. His essay on indifference in religious
questions inflicted a rude blow upon that vice of the time, and
recalled men's souls to regions above.
{30}
And thus it was that he, too, rendered service to the great
movement and awakening of Christians in the nineteenth century,
and that he merits his place in that movement although he
deserted it. [Footnote 5]

    [Footnote 5: The principal works of the Abbé de la Mennais
    are:

    1. L'Essai sur l'indifférence en matière de religion, avec la
    défense de l'Essai. 5 vols. 8vo. The first volume appeared in
    1817.

    2. De la Religion considérée dans ses rapports avec l'ordre
    civil et politique. 1 vol. 8vo. 1825.

    3. Les Paroles d'un Croyant. 8vo. 1834.

    4. Les Affaires de Rome. 8vo. 1836.

    5. Esquisse d'une philosophic. 4 vols. 8vo. 1841-1846. All
    his works, including numerous pamphlets and articles
    published in religious and political journals, have been
    collected in two editions: one in 12 vols. 8vo., 1836-1837;
    the other in 11 vols. 8vo., 1844 and following years. Besides
    the above, there are his Posthumous Works, 2 vols. 8vo.,
    1856, and his Correspondence, 2 vols. 8vo., 1858.]

At the same time that great minds were thus at work in order to
restore to the belief in Christianity and the belief in
Catholicism its honor and its authority, another influence was
operating in the same direction, with less notoriety but no less
effect.
{31}
The Jesuits were re-establishing themselves in France--were
founding houses of education and noviciates for their order--were
opening chapels, preaching, teaching, careless of the existence
in France of laws proscribing them; occupying themselves solely
with fulfilling what they regarded as a duty, and a duty, too,
springing from a right believed by them to be superior to the
laws. That duty for them was to uphold the Church of Rome; that
right was the right of preaching and teaching, according to the
faith of the Church. The Jesuits have also been considered and
represented as politicians in the garb of monks, rather than
genuine members of the monastic orders. Often, in effect, in
their acts and in their words, they have appeared as politicians,
and politicians, too, with a certain indulgence for the world and
the world's masters; but, at bottom, they have been and they are
essentially monastic--an order perhaps the most ardent of all,
for they are of all orders the order most completely devoted to
the cause of religious authority.

{32}

There are commonplaces that have to be continually repeated, so
apt are men to forget them. In religions society, as well as in
civil society, there are two great moral forces--Authority and
Liberty; these coexist of necessity--have dominion turn by turn,
and have alternately their heroes and their martyrs. Regarded
either with respect to its political or religious constitution,
society cannot long dispense with either Authority or with
Liberty; and each of these two forces is liable to abuse its
influence, and to lose it by the very abuse.

When Authority has had a long dominion, and its abuse too has
been long, a reaction occurs: Liberty has her revenge; but in her
turn is prone to compromise her interests by abuses and by
excess. It is the history of all human society; facts prove it
quite as much as common sense foretells it. In the bosom of this
general fact it is the peculiar character, as it is the glory, of
Christianity that it has fully accepted these two rival forces;
and the one in the face of the other--authority and
liberty--both of divine origin.
{33}
Christianity has constantly accounted them for such as they
are--the one the revealed law of God, the other the innate right of
man, whom God created free and responsible. The history of the
Jews is only that of the intimate and continued relations between
God as sovereign and man as free agent; God uttering and giving
the law, man using his liberty at one time to fulfill, at another
to reject, the law of God. When the great day of humanity dawned
and Jesus came, it was in liberty's name, and in claiming the
right of the soul to obey the divine law according to its
convictions, that Christianity engaged in its primitive struggle
of three centuries. Under this banner, too, it conquered, and
under it religious society and civil society combined without
becoming identical. The tempestuous and painful fecundity of the
middle ages succeeded to the tyrannical unity of the Roman
empire, so sterile in result.
{34}
Hence principles the most inconsistent, issues the most
contradictory--the power of religion and the power of the
state--popes and kings now supporting, now combating each other's
ambitious purposes, and thwarting each other's measures, without
any regard to law or right; liberty sometimes suffering cruelly
by their alliance, sometimes happily profiting by their
dissensions; on some occasions popes, on others monarchs
protecting liberty against their reciprocal pretensions and
excesses. Spiritual and temporal princes still wavered in their
maxims and in their policy, and did not during the middle ages
systematically and on all occasions form coalitions, of which
liberty was to pay the cost. Liberty, on the contrary, continued
to subsist and to grow in the midst of their rivalries and of her
own sufferings. But these rivalries and these sufferings produced
a chaos which recurred incessantly, and became ever more and more
intolerable, precisely on account of the progress still made, and
which no effort could stifle.
{35}
The great body of Christians at last demanded some issue from
this chaos; then those who wielded the religious power and the
civil power, now separately, now in concert, endeavored to
satisfy the craving of the world; and by their councils,
pragmatic sanctions, encyclical letters and concordats, sought to
reform the abuses and the grievances which, as men loudly
proclaimed, existed, if not in the Church itself, at least in the
relations of the Church with the State. Whether from want of
wisdom, virtue, courage, or sagacity in their authors, or from
their measures being too superficial, or meeting with too much
opposition, those attempts failed; and the reform that was to
have proceeded from Authority herself remained without
accomplishment. Then came the reform by insurrection, in the name
of Faith and Liberty; and as happens in similar crises, whether
of the Church or the State, the supreme authority of Romanism was
attacked, not only in its abuses and its vices, but in its
principle and its very existence.
{36}
Rome then committed the fault almost always committed by Power
when seriously menaced--it defended itself by pushing its
principle and its right to the extreme, without holding account
of any other principle or of any other right. In the name of
Unity and Infallibility in matters of faith, the supreme power in
the Church of Rome allied itself with the absolute power in the
State, and supported the latter in its resistance to liberty.
Under the inspiration of their founder and hero, Loyola, whose
genius was that of a fanatic and a mystic, but who was adroit in
organizing and realizing his design, the order of the Jesuits
sprung into existence. This order was born of this war and for
this war--a chosen troop, charged in the name of the faith to be
the uncompromising defenders of authority in Church and in State.

{37}

Since that epoch three centuries have passed, and the fourth is
in its turn sweeping by us; neither times nor chances have been
wanting to causes to produce their effects, nor to men to
accomplish their designs; principles and events have received
their development over a vast space; and in the light of heaven
the different systems have been put to the test of successes and
of reverses. Absolutism has had its triumphs and its victories;
more than once the faults of its adversaries have played into its
hands, and it has found able and glorious champions. It has not
succeeded in arresting the course of a civilization full of
liberty and yet still greedy to have more. It has taken its place
in the midst of liberty as a temporary necessity, never as a
preponderating tendency. More than this, even in the epochs when
its influence was its height, and its splendor the greatest,
Absolutism has often served the cause hostile to its own. Louis
XIV. seconded the movement of mind and the people's progress;
Napoleon sowed in every direction the germs of social advancement
or innovation.
{38}
And now, even there, where liberty does not exist, Absolutism
does not avow itself; it furls its banner, and admits
institutions contrary to its principles, reserving to itself the
right to elude, or to render them powerless. Experience has
pronounced its judgment; whatever the problems that the future
will have to solve, or the trials which the future will have to
encounter, the cause of Absolutism is a lost cause throughout
Christendom.

At the commencement of this century, the Jesuits, unfortunately
for them, and yet very naturally, were regarded as devoted to
that cause. After having served it in the eighteenth century,
they had been the first victims of its decline; the papal and the
monarchical sovereignty had sacrificed them to the new opinions,
just as mariners in a tempest throw overboard their heavy
ordnance. When the nineteenth century opened, all was greatly
changed; the Revolution was not only victorious, but earnestly
engaged in conciliating parties by disavowing and making amends
for its excesses. After the commission of so many follies and
crimes in the pursuit of liberty, France submitted once more with
the greatest satisfaction to the voice of authority.

{39}

How would they then reconstruct that French policy that had been
at once so overthrown and so regenerated? By what means would
they conciliate new and ancient ideas, new and ancient interests?
Upon what terms would Authority and Liberty consent to be
reconciled, and to live henceforth side by side--Authority
soaring triumphant after her fall, Liberty embarrassed with her
recent excesses; and yet both of them more than ever necessary to
society, if society was to be healthy and strong? This was
evidently the vital question of the new century. God placed its
solution at first in the hands of Napoleon, the crown and the
scourge of the Revolution, the most remarkable example at once of
reaction and of progress recorded in the history of the world.

{40}

In this condition, so new to France, the situation of the Jesuits
was embarrassing and perilous. Napoleon was again re-establishing
the Church of Rome, and at the same time enforcing the maxims of
Absolutism--a double title to their sympathy. On the other hand,
he was consolidating the Revolution, and maintaining and putting
into practice some of its essential principles, among others,
that of freedom of conscience. Napoleon arrogated also to himself
the right of dictating and acting as master in the Church as in
the State, at Rome as at Paris; he was neither a serious believer
in the faith of Christ nor a sure friend of the Papacy. In this
twofold aspect, the Jesuits could not but regard him with
distrust. The distrust was mutual: for if Napoleon was for the
Jesuits a too faithful and too ambitious heir of the Revolution,
the Jesuits were for him Catholics too independent and too
devoted to their Church and to its chief. As far back as 1804,
their establishments, scarcely disguised under different names,
had been a source of disquietude to Napoleon.
{41}
He directed them to be closed, enforced the laws which denied to
religious corporations an independent existence, and founded the
University, which at the same time he invested with the privilege
of teaching. This system was not abolished at the Restoration.
The Jesuits then entered into the simultaneous possession of two
forces novel to them--the one sprang from the support of power,
the other was derived from the progress of liberty. They had the
favor of the court, and might wield as their own arms, and in
their own interests, the liberal principles that were dear to the
people. A position excellent, had they known how to restrict
themselves to their religious mission, keep aloof from political
contests, and devote themselves exclusively to the task of
awakening the faith of Christians, and arousing them to a
Christian life! Their action upon the soul might have extended
their influence beyond their peculiar sphere to the world
without. Had they not then a striking instance of such an
influence even in their own order?
{42}
To what cause, thirty years ago, did the Père Ravignan owe the
respect and moral authority with which he was surrounded, not
only by members of his own Church, but by men not remarkable for
their faith? Far less to his talent as an orator, than to the
thorough sincerity and disinterestedness of his religious
character. He was a believer, a pious Christian, and a stranger
to every mental reservation; neither was he a partisan, but
solely occupied with the service of God, of his Church, and of
his order, at the same time that he was propagating the faith and
enforcing piety. He declared himself aloud a Jesuit, but the
declaration excited no distrust even in his adversaries. If his
order had imitated his example, it would have obtained a similar
success. Nor was the instance new. In the seventeenth century, at
the court of Louis XIV., Bourdaloue displayed the same virtues as
the Père Ravignan in our own days; and, in all certitude, did
more honor and rendered more service to his Church and order than
had ever been done or rendered by Père la Chaise.

{43}

I shall not attempt to examine how far the Jesuits in effect were
really engaged, or what was the degree of their direct agency in
the intrigues of the retrograde party who were seeking to
repossess themselves of the relics of the ancient institutions,
in the idle hope of reconstructing the social edifice upon those
ruined foundations. I am convinced that France felt at this epoch
far too much alarm for this party and its allies, Jesuits or no
Jesuits, just as the Monarchy itself felt too much apprehension
of the Revolutionists. No graver fault can be committed by
nations or by governments than to give way to fears out of
proportion with the dangers which they encounter. France had no
reason under the Restoration to dread either the triumph of
Theocracy or of Absolutism; and yet she was alarmed at both, and
the people persisted in believing that the Jesuits were serving
this double cause--that of the ancient régime of the Papacy, and
of the ancient régime of the Monarchy.
{44}
The Jesuits had then to struggle at once against the ideas and
the passions of modern society, and the traditions and maxims of
ancient France herself; they had for adversaries, the laity, the
bar, and the liberals, respectively represented by M. de
Montlosier, M. Benjamin Constant, and M. Dupin. The odds against
them were too great; even the Monarchy itself, however well
disposed toward them, was carried away by the movement which
attacked them, and Charles X. did not think his own position
strong enough to dispense with treating them, by his ordonnances
of the 21st June, 1828, as Napoleon had done by his decree of the
22d June, 1804. Throughout this whole period the conduct of the
Jesuits was feebler than their cause. Sworn and devoted to the
defense of Authority, they had not foresight enough to perceive
by what means and on what conditions Authority might raise and
consolidate itself.
{45}
Haunted by the traditions of past times, and having the history
of their own order continually before their minds, they no longer
regarded the future boldly or confidently; they failed to
appreciate justly the present; they did not believe sufficiently
in the power of Christ's faith, and they believed too implicitly
in the efficiency of worldly policy. By this vulgar blunder they
compromised, in the case of many Christians, the full effect of
that great stirring movement of Christianity, at the very time
that, with respect to others, they aided it materially.

The Revolution of 1830 inflicted a rude blow upon these
retrograde tendencies, and a new element started up in the bosom
of the Church of Rome. In the midst of the grand manifestation
and progress of liberty now realizing itself in the State,
Catholics, genuine and ardent too, conceived the hope of turning
both to the profit of the Church of Rome, and of at last setting
Catholicism at peace and in harmony with the new social
institutions of France.
{46}
Then the group, I will not say the party, formed itself of men at
once generous and hardy, who did not hesitate to declare
themselves Ultramontanists, like the Père de Ravignan, Liberals
like M. de la Fayette. It consisted of priests and laymen, of men
of mature years and men in the spring-time of life--the Abbé
Lacordaire, Abbe Gerbet, M. de Montalembert, and M. de Coux: I
confine myself to the names that at the outset gleamed on their
banners. They founded an _agency_ for the defense of the
liberties of religion, and a journal, the _Avenir_, to
develop its principles and its constitution. But the association
was born under an unlucky star; for its little army had for its
declared chief, and the object of its passionate reverence, the
Abbe de la Mennais. In the more intimate and unrestricted
relations of life this great man appears to have exercised
extraordinarily attractive power over his friends and disciples.
{47}
Cited jointly with him on the 31st January, 1831, before the Cour
d'Assises of Paris to answer for the appearance of two articles
in the _Avenir_, the Abbé Lacordaire said, "I stand here
near the man who began the reconciliation of Catholicism with the
world. Let me tell him how affected I am by the part that God has
made for me in giving me him as my master and my father. Suffer
these words of filial piety to penetrate to the heart of one so
long misunderstood; suffer me to exclaim with the poet:

  "L'amitié d'un grand homme est un bienfait des dieux."
  [Footnote 6]

    [Footnote 6: "A great man's friendship, blessed gift of
    Heaven."]

The Abbé Lacordaire had soon to feel the danger and to repel with
sorrow the yoke of this seductive friendship. The errors and the
evil passions of the Abbé de la Mennais were not long in
exploding; his was a mind lofty and powerful, but without grasp,
without foresight, without moderation, and without equity;
incapable of discerning the different sides of a subject and of
embracing all the elements of the problem demanding solution, he
was a haughty slave to the truth that he served but partially,
and the somber enemy of every one who wounded his pride by
contesting his opinions.
{48}
He gave to the _Avenir_ a character at once democratic and
theocratic, imperious and revolutionary. All the ideas contrary
to his own, all the institutions, all the governments, that stood
in his way, were attacked by him with a degree of vehemence,
insult, and menace never surpassed by any political partisan,
however violent. The maxims of the Gallican Church were, to cite
his words, "an object of disgust and horror; opinions as odious
as they were base, which, while rendering even the conscience the
accomplice of tyranny, make servility a duty and brute force an
independent and just right." He demanded the separation of Church
and State as a necessity absolute and urgent; "for," said he, "we
regard as abolished and of no effect every particular law which
contradicts the Charter, and is incompatible with the liberties
that _it_ proclaims.
{49}
In the event of such law, we believe that it becomes immediately
and without delay the duty of government to come to an
understanding with the pope, and to rescind the Concordat, which
lost all the means of being executed from the instant when, thank
God, the Catholic religion ceased to be a state religion." Four
months had scarcely elapsed since the birth of the government of
July, and because the liberty of teaching promised by the Charter
of 1830 was not already in vigor, the Abbé de la Mennais said to
the Catholics: "Whence comes the oppression that weighs upon us?
Either, in what concerns us, the government cannot or it will not
keep its promises. If it cannot, what is this mockery of a
sovereignty, this miserable phantom of government, and what have
we to do with it? It is as far as we are concerned as if it were
_not_, and nothing remains to us but to forget it, and seek
our safety in ourselves.
{50}
Let us proclaim aloud who the powers are that are hostile to us;
whose servants seek only to satisfy blindly their thirst for
persecution." What attacks leveled at a government were ever more
precipitate, more violent, and showed a less just appreciation of
facts? What revolutionary party ever proclaimed with greater
audacity disobedience to the laws, and insurrection as the first
of rights and of duties?

Side by side with these violent and insulting invectives leveled
at the government of France, the _Avenir_ placed a
declaration of respect and submission to the chief of the Church
of Rome: "We profess," it said, "the most complete obedience to
the authority of the Vicar of Jesus Christ. We will not have
other faith than his faith, other doctrine than his doctrine. All
that he approves we approve, all that he condemns we condemn, and
without the shadow of a reservation; we, each of us, submit to
the judgment of the Holy See all our past, all our future
writings, of what nature soever they may be." Here, at least, the
revolutionary spirit seemed absent, or, at all events, was in a
hurry to disavow itself.

{51}

I am persuaded that, in holding this language, the Abbé de la
Mennais was sincere. When an exclusive idea or passion sways a
man's mind, nothing is more unknown to him than his own future
conduct; he knows even less what he will do than what he is
doing. The Abbé de la Mennais no more suspected in 1831 what he
would say and what he would do a few years later, than the most
violent leaders of the French Revolution suspected in 1789 what
they would be and what they would do in 1793. The court at Rome
was clearer-sighted than its fanatical champion; it had been
under the influence of the charm of the first works and of the
first successes of the Abbé de la Mennais. It had not, however,
failed to perceive what pernicious and dangerous seed might
thence germinate.
{52}
The _Avenir_ occasioned it profound disquietude; the
principles and the yearnings of modern society found therein a
too ready acceptance; the régime which had governed France since
1830 was too much the object of its attacks; it demanded too much
liberty, and made too much noise in doing so; for beneath that
noise, and in the shadow of that liberty, fermented the
anarchical doctrines and tendencies which in all cases and places
it is the aim and the policy of the court of Rome to contest.
Thus the _Avenir_ and its writers placed her in a position
full of embarrassment; Rome was anxious neither in any way to
ignore the services that they had rendered and that they might
continue to render her, nor to lose sight of the perils that they
made her incur; Rome desired to preserve silence respecting these
writers--neither to avow nor disavow them--and to leave it to
time to terminate their transport and their errors. The Abbé de
la Mennais did not, however, permit this expectant policy; he
insisted absolutely that the papacy, by pronouncing upon his
doctrines and upon his attitude, should publicly either give him
her support or withdraw it from him.
{53}
All the world knows of the journey which he undertook in 1831 to
Rome to obtain this result, and of his stay there in company with
the Abbé Lacordaire and M. de Montalembert, "three obscure
Christians"--to use the words of the Abbé de la Mennais--men who
thought themselves called, according to the expression of the
Abbé Lacordaire before the Cour d'Assises at Paris, "to reconcile
Catholicism with the world." The Pope (Gregory XVI.) judged
otherwise, and by his encyclical of the 15th August, 1832, with
regret, but at the same time with as much decision as to the
substantial matters before him as tenderness to the three
pilgrims personally, condemned the _Avenir_, its doctrines,
and its tendencies. On the instant, with the concurrence of their
friends, they declared, all three, (10th September, 1832,) that,
respectfully submitting themselves to the authority of the Vicar
of Jesus Christ, they abandoned the lists in which they had
faithfully combated during the past two years; that, in
consequence, the _Avenir_, which had been provisionally
suspended ever since the 15th November previously, would no
longer appear, and that the _General Agency for the Defense of
Religious Liberty_ was dissolved.

{54}

As the first declaration of the writers of the _Avenir_,
after their acquittal by the Cour d'Assises at Paris, had been
sincere, so was also the declaration sincere which was published
by them immediately after their condemnation by the papacy; but
they promised more than they could perform. When a deep social
wound has been laid bare, and measures on a large scale have been
adopted to cure it, it is no longer in the power of any
individual to keep that wound secret, or to stifle the hope of a
remedy. How many times in the course of this century has not the
papacy, and have not the ardent champions of liberty, condemned
and combated the efforts made to reconcile Catholicism with
modern civilization, and to cause the Church to accept the
liberties of civil society, and the State to recognize the rights
of the Church?
{55}
How often has the Church by its censures signalized such efforts
as impious and suicidal? What wit, what eloquence, have not been
displayed by the Liberals to declare their vanity, their
worthlessness? To what reproaches, invectives, and sarcasms have
not their advocates had to submit? But no ecclesiastical censure,
no wrath of religion, no mockery of liberalism has arrested the
march of this great idea. It has made, and it continues every day
to force, its way in spite of condemnations, attacks, and
obstacles of every description. Why? For paramount reasons,
impossible to be lost sight of. For Christianity and modern
civilization confront each other; there exists in the public a
profound and irrepressible feeling of their reciprocal right and
strength--a profound and irrepressible feeling that their
disagreement is an immense evil for society and for men's souls;
that neither the new civil liberties nor the ancient forms of
belief and influences of Christianity can ever perish; that,
necessary, both of them, to nations and to individuals, they are
both of them destined to live, and consequently to live together.
{56}
When and in what manner will this feeling realize its object, and
when will the ancient Church and modern civilization have solved
the problem of their mutual pacification? No one can at this
moment pronounce; but in all certitude, the problem will not for
that cease to weigh upon the world, or the world to strive at its
solution. Even the men who, in a spirit of pious submission or in
a paroxysm of sadness and discouragement might wish, after having
attempted it, to renounce the work, could never remain inactive
before a necessity becoming more and more urgent; they doubtless
would not be long before they returned to the lists from which
they might have consented to withdraw.

{57}

And this is what happened to the three eminent men who had made
so precipitate a journey to Rome, and had importuned her at an
inconvenient moment, summoning her at once to solve the momentous
questions they had raised. They returned from Rome with the
intention of submitting to the decision of the Pope; but slumber
to such souls was impossible, and it was not long before men saw
them, the three, resuming, although by the most contrary paths,
all the activity of their minds and of their lives. The Abbé de
la Mennais threw himself with impetuosity into the revolt--a
revolt radical against the Church and against the State;
furiously demanding from the populace and from revolutions the
success which he could not obtain in the bosom of order, and in
concert with the authority previously so ardently defended by
him. Far from following in his new and violent course, the Abbé
Lacordaire and M. de Montalembert separated from him, and
returned each to his natural and tranquil position; the one to
that of a simple priest, almoner of the convent of the
Visitation, and preacher in the chapel of the College Stanislas;
the other to that of a young and brilliant political orator,
already a favorite in the chamber of Peers, although its members
did not always think or vote with him.
{58}
Both remained Romanists at heart; they zealously shared in the
great movement of Christianity, now roused from her slumber, but
without ceasing to be Liberals in their Catholicism, or without
arresting their efforts to reconcile the Church with the régime
of liberty.

The position of each, and the genius of each, determined the
share that he took in the duties, and the place that he selected
for the field of his action. The Abbé Lacordaire, from the pulpit
of Notre Dame, developed, or rather let me say, painted, in all
their splendor, the truths, the beauties, the moral and social
excellences of the Christian Faith and of the Catholic Church. M.
de Montalembert, in the house of Peers and in literature, was the
ardent and indefatigable champion of the Church, of its maxims,
and of its rights.
{59}
To neither was there any lack of success any more than any lack
of talent and of zeal. A numerous auditory, young and old, from
the salons and from the schools, believers and freethinkers,
flocked round the Abbé Lacordaire, all feeling the attraction,
and almost all the charm; many among them yielding to the
persuasion of that eloquence so fresh and vivid, and abundant,
and unlooked for--impetuous without rudeness, hardy yet graceful,
natural even where there was temerity of thought or of
expression, and repairing or vailing these faults by the
enchantment of candor and of originality. Different, but not
inferior, were the merits and the successes of M. de
Montalembert. He was a combatant young too, a fearless Christian,
both in the political arena and in society; and he carried with
him in his polemics to the service of the State a sincerity of
passion, a rich and mobile eloquence, piquant strokes of wit, an
outpouring of indignant conviction, all of which deeply stirred
the emotions of his auditors, whether friends or adversaries, and
left in the mind of calm spectators an impression of approving
satisfaction, however frequently a shock might be given to their
feelings of moderation and of fairness.
{60}
In the "Conferences" of the Abbé Lacordaire it cannot be denied
that many failings and many omissions are observable; although
expressed clearly and with vivacity, his thought was often
superficial; there was in turn a singular mixture of precipitate
enthusiasm and of discretion, the former displaying itself in his
exordiums, the latter at the close of his discourses. He
announced courageously his opinions, but accompanied them by more
reservations than are usually expected from one of his Church and
party: thus at the same time, that throughout all his discourses,
and in their general character, he showed himself the friend of
religious liberty, he hesitated sometimes even when the occasion
required him to proclaim its fundamental principle and to rebuke
its violations.
{61}
On his side, M. de Montalembert gave himself up entirely to the
impression and the combat of the moment; in his legitimate ardor
for free instruction, the then chosen object of his public life,
he held obstacles, however real, of no account; he ignored the
time necessary for its final triumph, as well as the real
progress, although partial, which it had obtained, from the
co-operation or the sufferance of the government of 1830; and in
his uncompromising defense of the Church, he was more violent
against the members of the executive government than his own
sentiments and his real political views would, in moments of cool
reflection, have permitted him to be. The Abbé Lacordaire did not
sound sufficiently the sources of his opinions; M. de
Montalembert did not properly measure his attacks. But in spite
of their shortcomings and of our own, of their faults and of our
own, in all the struggles that grew out of religious questions
between us, they rendered constantly faithful and powerful
services to their cause, which, notwithstanding our dissentiments
on other points, was really the cause of Christ's Faith awaking
to new birth and life on the bosom of Liberty.

{62}

It is not without well reflecting that I term that _our_
cause. When religious liberty reigns in a State, it is a great
and a too common error to believe that the statesmen charged with
its government have no religious belief whatever; that they are
careless in matters of faith because they embrace and advocate
the cause of liberty of conscience. The soul does not abdicate
the right to its proper and intimate life, because it respects in
other souls the rights of that same life; and nothing is more
logical or more legitimate than to sustain with fervor the
principle of freedom of conscience, and yet to be at the same
time a true and an earnest Christian.

{63}

I have not here to make a profession of faith for others; but I
affirm that, from 1830 to 1848, the Prince whom I had the honor
to serve, and the Cabinets to which I had the honor to belong,
not only always had at heart the maintenance, however difficult,
of the principle of religious liberty, but that they always
felicitated themselves upon the progress made by the Christian
Faith, even when the manner of that progress was for them a
source of serious embarrassment. In 1841 we were placed, in this
respect, in a most trying position. Great was the general
astonishment, and violent were the attacks made upon us, when,
with a devotedness to Catholicism even bolder than had been his
conferences at Notre Dame, the Abbé Lacordaire returned from Rome
a monk, and a monk of an order which has left more somber
memories behind it than any other, that of St. Dominic. This is
not the place to examine what the utility may be in our days to
the Catholic Church of the monastic orders, or to inquire whether
the services they are capable of rendering the Church outweigh
the objections and the feelings of repulsion and uneasiness which
they arouse.
{64}
No well-read man can deny their having, in seasons of chaotic
confusion, effectually served the cause, not only of the
Christian Faith, but of civilization, of science, and even of
liberty.

The condition of society and of the human mind is now very
different, and the monastic orders cannot take the same position
or produce the same effects. But whatever we may think of the
opportuneness of their reconstruction, of the right there can be
no doubt. Under a system sanctioning freedom of conscience and
free institutions, associations for religious purposes cannot be
worse treated than those for purposes of industry, commerce, or
literature. The State is required to exercise upon combinations
of every kind a certain degree of surveillance; but doubtless the
union of souls and of lives under one rule and in one costume,
with a view to eternal interests, is not a juster cause for
disquietude than a union of purses and of labor for the purpose
of economizing both, with a view to worldly interests.
{65}
In 1829, some young Catholic Liberals, MM. de Carné, de Cazalès,
de Champagny, de Montalembert, Foisset de Meaux, Henri Gouraud,
founded a periodical, _Le Correspondant_, devoted to the
reconciliation of Catholicism with the free social institutions
of the age. The _Correspondant_ had been suspended in 1835,
but reappeared in 1843, under the editorship of M. Charles
Lenormant, one of those friends I have lost who retain in my
memory the place they occupied in my life. In conducting this
work, he kept ever in view the principles in which it had
originated, and among other positions, he defended in 1845, with
the frank intrepidity both of a Catholic and of a Liberal, the
rights of those religious associations which were at the time the
object of violent debate. [Footnote 7]

    [Footnote 7: Des associations religieuses dans le
    catholicisme; de leur esprit, de leur histoire et de leur
    avenir; par Charles Lenormant, de l'Institut. Paris: 1845.]

{66}

The cabinet abstained from all measures of repression, and left
the new monks freely to their chances of success or failure.
Twenty-five years have since elapsed; the Père Lacordaire mounted
once more, in his costume as a Dominican, his pulpit in
Notre-Dame; he resuscitated in France an order forgotten, or the
object of dread only; and to what trouble or embarrassment, I
ask, to what complaints even, has this resuscitation led? To what
pretensions of ambition have these monks laid claim? what
turbulent disposition have they manifested? They have paced
meekly along our streets; they have preached eloquently in our
churches; they have founded some houses of education; they have
made use of their rights as freemen, without offering in any way
to infringe the liberty of any other class of citizens. More than
all this: the sincerity of their sentiments and language has been
put to the proof; the Père Lacordaire resumed, as a Dominican, at
Paris, at Toulouse, at Nancy, at Bordeaux, the conferences and
the preaching that had rendered him popular as a simple priest;
they became, perhaps, more liberal even than they had been
originally.
{67}
When the tempest of 1848 had given birth, in the imaginations of
all men, to every kind of dream, and had opened to every ambition
every career, the Père Lacordaire was returned by the popular
suffrage as Deputy to the Constituent Assembly. For a moment he
thought a new era opening for his Church--perhaps for himself. In
this arena, upon which the passions of party were unchained amid
the general darkness resting upon society, he soon discovered
that the priest and monk of our day was not in his proper place;
he withdrew from it to resume, in his modest retreat at Sorèze,
his true mission as a Christian teacher. He afterward issued from
it, but for a moment only, to express in the French Academy his
faith as a Catholic, and his confidence in the democratic
principles of modern times. Such are the peaceable, such the only
results among us, of the re-establishment of the order of the
Dominicans and of the glory of its restorer.

{68}

Its _only_ results? Not so; if the work of the Père
Lacordaire did not exercise any important influence upon the
laity, it was attended with fruitful and salutary effects in the
Church of Rome itself. Like him, other priests had the courage to
brave the prejudices of the age respecting the religious orders;
like him, others refused to suffer themselves to be subjugated by
the alarms felt by most members of their Church at the names of
Science and of Liberty; and like him, they scrupled not to devote
themselves to a common life and a common rule, "to work
together," according to their own expressions, "to secure the
triumph of Christian truth, and its triumph by means of
Philosophy and Science." Thus was re-established, under the
direction of the pious curate of Saint-Roch, the Père Pététot,
the congregation of the Oratoire--that learned and modest society
that gave to France Malebranche and Massillon, and of which
Bossuet said, two centuries ago: "The immense love for the Church
of the Cardinal de Bérulle inspired him with the design of
forming a company, to which he desired to give no other spirit
than the very spirit of the Church, no other rule than its
canons, no other superiors than its bishops, no other goods than
its charity, no other solemn vows than those of baptism and the
priesthood. ...
{69}
There, to form true priests, they lead them to the fountain of
truth; they have always in their hands the sacred volume, to
search there unceasingly its literal sense by study, its spirit
by prayer, its depth of meaning by retreat from the world, and
its end by charity--the termination of everything and the
treasure of Christianity--'Christiani nominis thesaurus,' as
Tertullian terms it." [Footnote 8]

    [Footnote 8: Bossuet, Oraison funèbre du père Bourgoing,
    delivered in 1662, vol. viii, p. 271.]

{70}

Dating its restoration from only thirteen years ago, the new
congregation of the Oratoire is still not numerous, and remains
little known; it is poor, and it desires to remain so; it has
need of extension and of support, but at the very outset of its
new career it proved itself faithful to its origin and worthy of
the words of Bossuet. One of its founders, the Père Gratry, took
his place at once in the first rank of the Christian apologists,
moralists, and writers of the day: he is a man at once animated
and gentle, full of his peculiar ideas and sentiments, which he
carries to an enthusiastic height, but without pride and without
jealousy, and ardently propagating them by his books, his
lectures, and his conversation. These are all distinguished by
eloquent appeals to human sympathies, touching even where they do
not convince, and leaving the mind always in emotion at the
prospects which they open. Another member of the new Oratoire,
the Père Valvoger, has given a succinct account, in a learned
work, ("Introduction historique et critique aux livres du Nouveau
Testament,") of the Researches and Evidences of Christianity, by
the principal foreign theologians.
{71}
Under the strong influence of the opinions of its first founders,
and at the same time comprehending the mind and the requirements
of France at the present day, the rising congregation of the
Oratoire does not evade examination or discussion; it respects
science, and in the religious truths which it teaches, and its
relations with the souls that it summons to believe, it does not
shrink from accepting fearlessly the terms and the forms of
liberty.

In the midst of this great movement of men's minds in matters of
religion, what has been done since the opening of this century by
the chiefs of the Catholic Church of France, by their bishops and
by the clergy, called, by their alliance with the State and by
their own rights, to assume the education and the Christian
direction of the human soul?

They were at first and especially occupied with the real
resuscitation of that Christian religion, now returning to French
society, to its rank there and to its mission, but returning as
exiles return--ill provided, disorganized, and to a home that
seems no home.
{72}
To render back to France, now Catholic, churches for its worship,
priests for its churches, seminaries to form its priests, pupils
to people those seminaries; to assure also to the edifice thus
rising from its ruins the time for its proper establishment and
consolidation--such, under the first empire, was the dominant
thought, almost the exclusive thought, of the Episcopacy, of the
clergy instituted by the Concordat. A work great and difficult,
for which neither materials nor workmen were at hand, and which
required for its accomplishment strong support and a long period
of repose. The clergy of this epoch have been justly reproached
with their uniform obsequiousness to the Emperor Napoleon. No
doubt it was a shameful spectacle, in 1811, which those docile
bishops afforded, when they assembled in council and were never
weary of lavishing caresses upon the despot who had not only
stripped the chief of their Church, Pius VII., of his dominions,
but was then detaining him a prisoner at Savona, denying his
natural counselors, the cardinals, all access to him, refusing
him even a secretary to write his letters, and charging an
officer of the gendarmerie to watch by day and by night all his
movements.
{73}
Only a single fact explains and somewhat excuses the
pusillanimity of the clergy when confronted with this tyranny:
these bishops had seen Christianity proscribed, its churches
closed, profaned, demolished, its priests hunted and massacred,
their flocks left without any worship, any guide, any
consolation. The chance of the recurrence of such events filled
them with horror. Who could affirm that there was no such chance,
and that the reality of the eve was not the possibility of the
morrow? With such causes of apprehension a good priest might feel
his conscience profoundly troubled; and a timid priest might
regard his weakness as justified. What sacrifices were not
permissible, nay, even imperative, to prevent such disasters?

{74}

Still, the violent measures of Napoleon did not fail to
encounter, sometimes rebukes, and occasionally resistance, on the
part of the clergy; it was not only that some prelates [Footnote
9] in the council, with more courage than moderation, censured
his conduct toward the Pope: the council itself--forgetting at
last, in its anxiety to vindicate the honor of the whole body,
its long habit of obsequiousness--voted an address to the
Emperor, an act of independence which occasioned its abrupt
dissolution.

    [Footnote 9: Among others M. d'Avian, Archbishop of Bordeaux,
    M. de Boulogne, Bishop of Troyes, and M. de Broglie, Bishop
    of Gaud.]

And of the two ecclesiastics to whose counsels, from just motives
of esteem, Napoleon showed least disinclination to give ear,
one--the Abbé Émery, "Superior General" of the Congregation of
St. Sulpice--had just previously, not long before he died,
openly, yet with dignity, resisted the Emperor; [Footnote 10] the
other, M. Duvoisin, Bishop of Nantes, dictated upon his deathbed
these powerful and affectionate lines: "I supplicate the Emperor
to restore the holy Father to liberty. His captivity troubles the
extreme moments of my life. On several occasions I had the honor
to inform the Emperor of the affliction which this captivity is
causing to the whole of Christendom, and of the inconveniences
which would attend its prolongation. The happiness of his Majesty
himself, I believe, depends upon the return of his Holiness to
Rome."

   [Footnote 10: Vie de M. Émery, supérieur général du séminaire
   et de la compagnie de Saint-Sulpice, t. ii, pp. 236-346.
   Paris: 1862.]

{75}

Idly does Despotism excuse its arbitrary acts, as if they
resulted from the want of foresight or the servility of its
flatterers; for the blindest have their gleams of light, and even
the most timid their intrepid moments, during which they speak
the truth, although they speak it in vain.

Under the Restoration, it was no longer fear, but hope--hope,
ill-founded, too--which misled the French clergy, betrayed them
into the commission of many faults, and checked the progress of
roused Christendom.
{76}
In the then reaction against the Revolution, ecclesiastical
ambition had its part; partisans of the Crown and of Rome--ardent
ones--some through sincere devotion, others from political
calculation, believed it to be necessary and possible to restore
to the Catholic clergy a part at least of the social position and
of the direct authority which they had possessed before 1789.
This was evincing a strange ignorance of the fundamental
character of French society, such as it has been made by its
history and by its great modern Revolution. French society is
essentially and insuperably "laic;" the separation of temporals
from spirituals, and the empire of the laity in public affairs,
are consummated and dominant facts, not to be attacked, or even
menaced, without occasioning throughout the whole framework of
society an irritation and a disquietude, perilous alike for
Church and for State. Nothing in France at the present moment is
more fatal to the influence of religion than the chance, or the
appearance even, of ecclesiastical domination.
{77}
This chance and this appearance were, under the Restoration, the
plague of the Catholic religion and of the French clergy--a
plague the grave consequences of which are the more to be
deplored as it was neither very deep-seated nor very formidable.
It is a fact too little remarked, that the clergy were not then
the principal authors of the faults which subsequently both they
and religion had such cause to rue. No doubt many inadmissible
claims, many unreasonable and offensive requirements, many rash
expectations, proceeded from the ranks of the clergy; but there
was in all this more a suggestion of their past history, or an
unmeaning vanity, than a real and ardent ambition; even the
clergy felt instinctively that political power was not now suited
to them, and that France would no longer accept at their hands as
ministers even a Cardinal Richelieu or a Cardinal Mazarin.
{78}
At first the contra-revolutionary and non-ecclesiastical party in
the Chamber of 1815, and, afterward, the blind fanatical coterie
of the Court of Charles the Tenth, hurried the clergy into their
own vortex, and compromised the cause of religion by making its
ministers instruments of their influence and auxiliaries in their
combats. The ecclesiastics had not the courage to resist; in
spite of their distaste for the new spirit which was abroad, most
of the bishops and of the priesthood, warned by their experience
in the Revolution, would have preferred to remain out of the
sphere of politics, and to confine themselves to the functions of
their religious mission, rather than to be constantly struggling
against popular opinions; so, when any opportunity presented
itself to show their sympathy, they hastened to embrace it. When,
in 1824, the bill of M. de Villèle for the conversion of the
"Rentes" created a great stir among the "Bourgeoisie" of Paris,
it was the Archbishop of Paris, M. de Quélen, who constituted
himself in the Chamber of Peers the principal organ of the
Opposition; and when, in 1828, the movement of public opinion and
of the magistracy against the religions congregations wrested
from the King (Charles the Tenth) the Ordonnances of the 21st
June, the Bishop of Beauvais, M. Feutries, at that time the
Minister of Ecclesiastical Affairs, did not hesitate to
countersign them.
{79}
The members of the priesthood live in close contact with the
people, and cannot long remain in ignorance of the real state of
their opinions, or long persist in holding them lightly. The
French clergy, as a whole, were more resigned to the new state of
society than King Charles the Tenth and his intimate friends; the
false ideas and the unreasonable political pretensions of the
monarch and of the coterie which formed his court, far more than
the religious bigotry of the Church, occasioned the great faults
committed under the Restoration.

{80}

At all epochs and in all parties some man is always met with in
whom are centered and personified whatever good sense, sound
views, and wise purposes there are in the party to which he
belongs. Such a man under the Restoration and for the lay
Legitimists was M. de Villèle. True to his friends, he
nevertheless knew, or I should rather say he promptly learned in
public life to understand, what France then actually was, and
what qualities, to be successful, her government should possess.
If he had had toward his party and his king as much independence
and firmness in action as he had correct appreciation in thought,
he might perhaps have obtained a more complete and more lasting
success. The clergy on their side also had at this epoch a
faithful representative of whatever religious or political
sagacity existed in the French Church: it is here to the Abbé
Frayssinous, Bishop of Hermopolis, that the honor and the merit
belong. His task was far easier than that of M. de Villèle, for
he was never put to any trial: he had no struggle to sustain; he
remained naturally, or kept himself voluntarily, out of the arena
of events and of parties; but it was in this precisely that he
showed his good sense, and his correct appreciation of the
permanent interests and the real dispositions of the clergy of
his time.
{81}
Neither as theologian, nor as orator, nor as statesman was the
Abbé Frayssinous a man of eminence, or remarkable for power of
intellect; but in the different phases of his career, in his
personal conduct, and in his writings, he had an unerring
instinct of what was just and possible, and showed no common tact
in retiring with dignity from untenable positions, and escaping
from questions that he could not settle. Upon these occasions he
would confine himself to his mission of a priest and moralist of
the Christian religion. From 1803 to 1822 he held, suspended, and
resumed in the Church of St. Sulpice, his "conferences upon
religious subjects;" remarkable not only by a judicious defense
of the great truths of Christianity, but by a continuous,
although somewhat timorous, effort to place the doctrines of the
Church in harmony with the principles of natural justice and of
civil liberty.
{82}
He was not, like the Père Lacordaire or M. de Montalembert, a
Catholic Liberal; he was a priest--moderate and equitable, not
from luke-warmness in his faith, but from respect to legal rights
and human sentiments. Although his "conferences" had not the
success and popularity that distinguished later, in Notre-Dame,
those of the Père Lacordaire, they attracted a numerous auditory,
and exercised material influence in giving to the awakening of
Christianity a wider range and a firmer basis. [Footnote 11]

    [Footnote 11: The "conferences" of the Abbé Frayssinous at
    St. Sulpice have been published under this title: Defense du
    Christianisme, ou conférences sur la religion. 3 vols. 8vo.
    Paris: 1825. The Abbé Frayssinous published also in 1818 a
    work with the following title: Les vrais principes de
    l'église gallicane sur la puissance ecclesiastique, la
    Papauté, les Libertés gallicanes, la Promotion des évêques,
    les trois Concordats, et les Appels comme d'abus.]

{83}

In his work upon the true principles of the Gallican Church, the
Abbé Frayssinous manifested the same moderate and conciliatory
spirit--not always tracing principles to their sources, but never
pushing facts or ideas to their extreme consequences; while
remaining the faithful servant of the Church he showed himself
also rather the friend of Christian peace than the jealous
advocate of ecclesiastical power. His mode of life was as modest
as his opinions; he never made power his aim, neither did he ever
seek for honors, whether political, ecclesiastical, or academic;
he declined them even when within his reach. He joined the
Cabinet in 1824, as Minister of Ecclesiastical Affairs and of
Public Instruction; he withdrew from it in 1828, when the
mounting wave of Liberalism demanded that a more vigorous policy
should be adopted against the religious congregations than the
pupil and orator of St. Sulpice was willing to sanction. He
neither had the qualities necessary for governing the French
clergy, nor did he pretend to govern them; but he represented
them, nevertheless, in all their more irreproachable and prudent
opinions.
{84}
Unfortunately, mere common sense and prudence do not suffice more
in the Church than in the State to save nations from the
consequences of their faults of omission and commission; for this
object, higher qualities are necessary as well as more rude
efforts.

It was one of the first effects of the Revolution in 1830, to
make visible to all the injury that the faults of their friends,
rather than the blows of their adversaries, had inflicted, under
the Restoration, upon the clergy, and through the clergy upon
religion. The acts of violence which, during the revolutionary
crisis from 1830 to 1832, were directed at the Churches--the
crosses thrown down, the insulting cries, and antichristian
manifestations; a little later, the riot before the church of St.
Germain l'Auxerrois, on the occasion of the service celebrated on
the anniversary of the death of the Duke de Berri--the
archiepiscopal palace ruined and pillaged--the church broken into
and closed--the menaces directed at the priests--what were all
these deplorable acts but the explosion of a popular reaction,
provoked by the share a part of the clergy had taken in favor of
a retrograde policy--of a return to the ancient régime and to
absolutism?
{85}
Violent men profited by this reaction to satisfy their impiety
and licentiousness, but they could never have excited the
movement or made it successful had they hoisted their own banner;
there must be some little truth before a populace will suffer
itself to be so misled; and the crowd who in February, 1831, so
furiously rose in insurrection before St. Germain l'Auxerrois,
would have paused in astonishment had it perceived that what it
was so brutally attacking and destroying was--not the ancient
régime, not absolutism--but religion and liberty.

To put an end to this confusion, full at once of deception and of
peril, but a single thing was required: to banish from the
Church, and from its relations with the State, worldly ambition
and influences, and to replace them by influences of a moral
description; instead of a political banner, they should have only
hoisted the banner of religious faith and liberty of conscience.
{86}
That was the great work, or, to use a better expression, the
great progress, which from 1830 to 1848 was aimed at and
accomplished.

The efforts made and the debates instituted at this epoch by the
most eminent champions of the Church are remarkable, because they
no longer proposed to restore any fragment of its ancient power,
but to insure to it its place and its share in the new public
institutions of liberty. The little militant party of Catholic
Liberals quitted the arena of the ancient political regime, and
took up their position on that of the new constitution, claiming
for the Church, for its ministers, and for its faithful subjects,
the exercise of all the rights and the free development of all
the power that, under the constitution, either belonged, or ought
to belong, to all citizens.
{87}
They made no reservation of opinion, no effort more or less
covert, in furtherance of any pretensions of bygone times,
whether dynastic, aristocratic, or theocratic; the frank
acceptance of the present age and actual society, provided that
Christian faith, Christian morals, and Christian institutions,
might have free room to work; such was, in the midst of all the
factions and political plottings of this period, the constant
attitude of the Catholic Liberal party, that is, of M. de
Montalembert, the Père Lacordaire, M. Charles Lenormant, Frederic
Ozanam, and of the friends in small number grouped around them.

Whoever feels astonished that their number was so small, shows
little acquaintance with our country or our times. The enterprise
which they undertook was singularly bold and difficult; to drag
France out of its rut of incredulity and irreligion, and at the
same time to extricate Catholicism from its rut of impolicy, its
alliance with absolutism, its timorous immobility in the presence
of liberty; to proclaim and simultaneously to defend, in
spirituals, the Christian faith, and, in temporals, the regime of
liberty.
{88}
Certainly in France, and in the 19th century, the devotion of men
to such a task supposes an enthusiasm and an energy of conviction
of which few are capable; and if the new Christian Liberals
flattered themselves that success would be easy, events must soon
have disabused them. Attacked with ardor by the opponents of all
religion, they were also assailed by Catholics devoted to the
ancient régime of the Church, and alarmed at the new system
pressed upon their acceptance. The former of these two attacks
caused the Catholic Liberals neither surprise nor embarrassment;
but the latter brought with it bitter annoyance and
disappointment, for they found directly opposed to them members
of their own faith. Soon they were to have as their adversary a
man who, by his vigorous talents--employed with equal violence
against the incredulous of all shades of opinions, and against
the Catholic Liberals--too exercised an influence upon a great
number of Catholics, whether of the laity or priesthood, and
indisposed them to any reconciliation with that modern society
which he irritated still more against them.
{89}
I knew M. Veuillot at the commencement of his literary career,
when he accompanied General Bugeaud to the seat of his government
in Algeria. At this epoch he addressed to me two memorials upon
the subject of the moral condition of the colony and of the army.
They struck me by their decided tone, and the straightforwardness
and candor with which he expressed sentiments already
distinguished by devotion. Already he regarded the religion of
his own Church, and of _it_ alone, as the sure basis of
human morality and social order; but he had not yet proclaimed as
his doctrine the deplorable error that Faith enjoins war upon
Liberty. He merited a better understanding of the cause of
Christianity; he merited to be a better advocate of the Church at
Rome than an advocate who, although one of its most devoted
defenders, has yet most injured the cause that he sought to
serve.

{90}

These political revolutions and these domestic dissensions left,
in the period that ensued after 1830, the Catholic Church in a
difficult situation, but in one salutary for it and fruitful of
consequences. The clergy no longer counted on the favor of
Government, but they had at the same time to fear from it neither
violence nor hostility. Left to themselves, they felt the
necessity of independent existence, and saw that they must
replace credit with the authorities by influence with the
country; and this influence they were likely to obtain. If they
did not possess all the privileges which they coveted, they had
enough to enable them every day to conquer additional powers,
supposing them willing and sagacious enough to take the trouble
and employ the right means.
{91}
In my opinion, they did not do at this epoch, in the interest of
religion and of the Church, all that their position permitted, or
all that their mission required at their hands; but temporal or
spiritual governors, layman or priests, who ever did, I do not
say what he ought, but what he could have done? The greater part
of the bishops and of the priests were vacillating and timorous;
the problem before them went beyond their opinions, and the
events beyond their strength; the impetuous Liberalism of M. de
Montalembert and of his friends disquieted them; they saw in him
rather a valiant champion than a representative they could rely
upon. Among those who joined with him in the struggle for the
freedom of instruction, there were some who showed, with
reference to the Government of 1830 and the University, little
fairness or prudence: these injured the cause rather than served
it. Whether from submission to orders from Rome, or from their
natural impulse, the clergy, taken as a whole, showed little
taste for liberty; even while they demanded it, they were rather
inclined to immobility than progress.
{92}
But whatever the fears and hesitations of individuals, when the
general current of ideas and of popular opinions once penetrates
to the classes least disposed to entertain them, it never fails,
whether they avow it, or whether they even know it, to swell and
to advance. Around and among the clergy themselves the spirit of
progress and of liberty gained ground, although by insensible
degrees. Here and there individual priests, like the Abbé
Bautain, formerly a student with M. Jouffroy at the École
Normale, and Professor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Letters at
Strasbourg, propagated in the Church the liberal movement,
forming for it in different places new centers of action. The
spirit which had awakened Christianity manifested itself, too, in
our great lay establishments for the higher course of
instruction; not always without check, but still with a success
the more conspicuous the more it was contested.
{93}
In 1846, some disturbances, occasioned by a thoughtless and
puerile intolerance, made by M. Lenormant, at that time my
substitute (suppléant) in the chair of Modern History at the
Faculty of Letters, determine to withdraw from the Sorbonne,
where he had made a courageous avowal of his faith; but M.
Ozanam, the worthy successor to the chair of M. Fauriel,
maintained in the same place the same principles with a more
successful perseverance, and with such a depth of conviction and
such a warmth of emotion that sometimes he carried the feelings
of his auditors away with him, and sometimes commanded respectful
attention even from those most confirmed in their incredulity.
And while the spirit of Christianity was thus manifesting itself
in the free Faculty of Letters, the teaching of the Faculty of
Theology attested, under that same roof, a notable progress in
knowledge and in Liberalism. The Abbé Maret, in his lectures on
the Dogmas of Religion, the Abbé Frère, in his discourses on the
Scriptures; the Abbé Dupanloup and the Abbé Gerbet, in their
lectures on Sacred Eloquence, displayed not only a firm and
active faith, but views upon philosophy, history, and literature,
necessarily implying an acquaintance with the works of human
science, and an appreciation of the rights of liberty.
{94}
Ecclesiastics and laymen, not members of the scientific
establishments of the State, published, under the name of the
"Université Catholique," a series of courses in which philosophy,
history, natural sciences, archaeology, and the arts were
explained and taught in harmony with the dogmas and sentiments of
religious men. And even far from Paris, in several great
episcopal seminaries, classical and theological studies took a
wider range, and attained a scientific value that they had not
for a long time possessed.

"Faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone," says the
Apostle St. James. Christianity has borne abundant fruits since
its awakening at the commencement of this century. I have before
me the "Manual des Œuvres et institutions de charité de Paris,"
published in 1862, by order of the archbishop, M. Sibour.
{95}
Independently of the establishments under the direction of
Government, I find in it 107 charitable institutions or
associations, of every kind, originated and supported by zealous
Christians in the interval between 1820 and 1848. Of these I will
only cite some of the principal ones, to establish their
character and their progress. In the year 1822 the idea struck
two poor servants at Lyons to make the rounds of their parish and
collect weekly one sou from each person, in aid of the conversion
of infidels. This was the origin of the association called
"l'Œuvre de la propagation de la Foi," now under the direction of
two councils, composed of members of the clergy and of the laity,
having their sittings, one at Lyons, the other at Paris. The
report published by this association in June, 1824, showed for
the two years, 1823 and 1824, a receipt of 80,000 fr.,
(3200_l_.) This association received in 1864 the sum of
5,090,041 fr. 48 cent., (203,601_l_. 13_s_.
3½_d_.,) in which amount France alone figures for 3,479,290
fr. 65 cent., (139,171_l_. 12_s_. 6½_d_.,) and it
divided 4,658,672 fr. 56 cent. (186,346_l_. 18_s_.
6½_d_.) among five hundred dioceses, and appropriated those
funds to the support of the Catholic missionaries in the five
parts of the world.
{96}
It counted from the year 1852, 1,500,000 subscribers, and it
distributed 170,000 copies of its "Annals," (Annales de
propagation de la Foi,) which form a sequel to the "Lettres
édificantes," and keep the Christian world informed of their
doings. In May, 1833, eight young men, at the suggestion of
Frederic Ozanam, "wishing," said the Perè Lacordaire, "to give
one more proof of what Christianity can effect in behalf of the
poor, began to ascend to those upper stories which were the
hidden haunts of the misery of their quarter. Men saw youths in
the flower of their age and fresh from school regularly visiting,
without any feeling of repulsion, the most abject habitations,
and conveying to their unknown and suffering tenants a passing
vision of charity."
{97}
Twenty years later, in 1853, Ozanam said at Florence, when on his
death-bed: "Instead of eight only, at Paris alone we are two
thousand strong, and we visit five thousand families, that is to
say, about twenty thousand individuals, or a quarter of the poor
contained in that great city. The conferences in France alone
number five hundred, and we have them too in England, in Spain,
Belgium, America, and even in Jerusalem." Nine years afterward,
in 1862, when the Government, listening to mistaken counsels,
suppressed the General Council of the Conferences of St. Vincent
de Paul, and by doing so destroyed the central bond that kept the
society together, the latter counted more than 3000 local
conferences; it consisted of about 30,000 members, who visited in
their homes more than 100,000 indigent families, and had already
introduced into the greater part of the principal cities a system
which exercised a control over the interests of apprentices and
of prisoners.
{98}
During the course of the same epoch the Sisters of Charity, whose
number, a century after their foundation by St. Vincent de Paul,
had not exceeded 1500, already reached 18,000, of whom 16,000
were Frenchwomen; and at this moment they are plying throughout
the world their works of piety and charity. Another society, "Les
petites sœurs des pauvres," was founded in 1845, in imitation of
Jeanne Jugan, a poor servant, a native of Brittany, who had been
just crowned by the French Academy. This society receives and
succors in their establishment nearly 20,000 aged men. Another
association, "Les Frères de la doctrine Chrétienne," which had in
the year 1844, 468 schools, maintains this year (1865) 920, and
the number of the pupils has increased from 198,188 to 335,382.
State and ecclesiastical documents attest, that by concurring
causes of encouragement on the part of the State, of local
subventions and of private donations, ten thousand churches have
been, during the last fifty years, built, rebuilt, or suitably
adapted for the performance of the services of the Church of
Rome.
{99}
I might cite many similar facts. In all the directions and under
all the forms in which piety and charity manifest themselves,
faith and liberty, and faith and science have, since the
awakening of Christianity and since the cause of religion has
been separated from politics, drawn nearer to one another, and
faith and its manifestation by charity have made a simultaneous
advance and a like progress.

Had the Government of 1830 remained standing; had State and
Church each retained reciprocally the same situation and the same
attitude, the facts to which I have just alluded might have long
remained unobserved. Society does not, any more than individuals,
render an account to itself of the intimate relations of its
existence, or of the transformations to which these give rise;
but Providence has its moments when it suddenly lightens up the
stage of the world and reveals to all actors and spectators the
import and the effect of what is passing around them.
{100}
The Revolution of 1848 threw upon the progress of the Catholic
Church and its relations with French society since 1830 the clear
light of such a revelation.

In this sudden subversion of all things, in the presence of a
republic extemporized upon the ruins of three monarchies--the
monarchy of glory, the monarchy of tradition, and the monarchy of
public opinion--in the midst of this nation, suddenly insurgent
and beyond either its aim or expectation sovereign, what became
of the Church? What did its ministers? If some of them
participated in the current dreams, certainly the majority were
full of anguish and alarm; they did not combat the new
institutions; they did not pretend to exercise any influence for
or against any party; they sought only to purify the Republic by
securing in it a place for Religion; they did not stand aloof
from the people; they showed themselves, in its great assemblages
and in its fêtes, planting the cross of Jesus by the side of the
tree of liberty.
{101}
Never did the Church stand so aloof from politics; never was she
more modest in her attitude; never less exacting--I will not say
more obsequious, as far as the Government or the public was
concerned; never more absorbed with her mission of piety and
morality, whatever the Government of France might be, and whoever
her masters.

And what in their turn was the conduct of the people toward the
Church? I do not mean to say that they confided in her, or showed
her much affection. The popular movement in 1848 was no doubt far
from being religious; and the ideas, acts, and language which
proceeded from it every instant, were well calculated to disturb
and sadden the hearts of Christians; but religion and its
ministers were in no respect ill treated, insulted, or
persecuted; their forms of worship were not interrupted: when
they showed themselves out of doors, they were received with
respect; and at the sight of a virtuous archbishop mortally
wounded in the streets, in the very endeavor to appease the civil
war by the exhibition of the cross, a painful stupor seized the
people; a pang of remorse and of shame traversed those masses of
disbelievers at the sight of a martyr.
{102}
It was clear that in the interval between 1830 and 1848, although
the Christian Church had not aroused in the people either faith
or sympathy, that Church had at least won liberty and peace. When
the revolutionary fever had subsided, when the Republic had given
itself a chief, and was waiting for a master, it was no longer in
the street, by popular impressions, but in the Assemblies, and by
the constituted authorities, that the great questions of the day
were put and were solved. There, too, the progress, which the
Catholic Church had made, became immediately evident, and its
gains were ascertained. It counted at this moment among its most
zealous servants a man new to public affairs, who had entered
political life as an adherent of the Legitimist Opposition to the
Monarchy of 1830, a man who accepted the Republic, and had
acquired in a few days a just renown by his courageous resistance
to anarchy.
{103}
By a choice, fortunate but at the same time unforeseen, M. de
Falloux became the Minister of Public Instruction and of Worship
in the first cabinet formed by the Prince President of the
Republic. The new minister immediately devoted himself to the
important measure that the Catholic Church had had in view ever
since the year 1830, that is, to the complete establishment,
under the sanction of the law, of the principle of liberty of
instruction. He proceeded in his task at once with intelligence
and boldness. To prepare his project of law, he appointed a
numerous commission, and summoned to it the most eminent men, who
represented views and interests the most diverse; laymen and
ecclesiastics, Romanists, Protestants and philosophers,
Republicans, Legitimists, Orleanists and Bonapartists, M. Thiers
and the Abbé Dupanloup, M. Cousin and M. de Montalembert, M.
Saint Marc Girardin and M. Cochin, M. Cuvier and the Abbé Sibour.
[Footnote 12]

    [Footnote 12: The following is a complete list of the members
    of the Commission, as given in the "Moniteur" of the 22d
    June, 1849: M. Thiers, president; MM. Cousin, St. Marc
    Girardin, Dubois, the Abbé Dupanloup, Peupin, Janvier,
    Laurentie, Freslon, Ballaguet, de Montalembert, Fresneau,
    Poulain de Bossay, Cuvier, Michel, Armand de Melun, Henri de
    Riancey, Cochin, the Abbé Sibour, Roux-Lavergne, de
    Montreuil-Housset, and Alexis Chevalier, secretary.]

{104}

M. Thiers was the president of this commission, which sat during
five months. It discussed every question respecting the
organization of public instruction with a passionate ardor, and,
at the same time, with an earnest and sincere desire to
conciliate, by their resolutions, all opinions. According to the
character of the times and the state of public sentiment,
critical and perilous situations precipitate men sometimes to the
commission of insane acts of violence, and sometimes keep them
within the line of fairness and prudence. The project of law
which issued from the commission of M. de Falloux had the merit
of prudence.
{105}
In making mutual concessions, the representatives of the
different systems took good care to protest that they did not
renounce their peculiar principles--a language which made
sometimes their resolutions have the air of a superficial and
incoherent compromise; but men could, nevertheless, observe how
conspicuous that project was for its large and practical
character, and its respect for different rights; and they could
also see how the State, the Church, and private establishments
were left free to compete in matters of public instruction. When
this project was discussed in the Legislative Assembly, M. de
Falloux was no longer minister; but the impulse had been given,
and his measure was out of danger; his successor, M. de Parien,
too, gave it the support which it deserved; and after a
discussion which occupied thirty-seven sittings, the Assembly, by
a strong majority, passed the law, without introducing any
important modification. The Liberty of Instruction was founded.

{106}

Fifteen years have passed, and it subsists. The State, the
Church, private institutions founded by laymen or by
ecclesiastics, have competed actively during all that period.
Religious congregations, Lazarists, Dominicans, Oratorians,
Jesuits, have in this struggle displayed all the enthusiasm of
faith, all the ardor of reciprocal rivalry. The Jesuits, since
the year 1850, have opened twenty colleges for secondary
instruction, and have founded at Paris, for courses of study
preparatory to the special schools, an establishment whose
successes have attracted the attention of the government and of
the public; for it sends every year to the Military Schools, the
Polytechnic, Naval, or Central, an extraordinary number of
successful candidates, who have passed with honor, although the
competition has been extensive and the examinations are severe.
{107}
A great school, founded by the Archbishop of Paris for the higher
branches of ecclesiastical study in the ancient house of the
Carmelites, has formed priests who, in the public examinations
and theses, have proved themselves capable of taking rank by the
side of the best pupils of the lay establishment of the "École
Normale Supérieure." Everywhere the University has encountered
numerous and ardent rivals; and it has been at the same time in
its own interior a prey to painful trials. Under the pretext of
an interest for studies of a scientific and practical nature,
classical and philosophical studies have been displaced and
depreciated. At the very moment that the University was losing
its privileges beyond, it saw its principles and its organization
shaken inside its walls.

Faithful to her convictions and traditions, even while accepting
the experiments and the struggles that were forced upon her, the
University has surmounted perils from within and rivalries from
without; on the one side, little by little, it has returned to
its system of a large and solid teaching of the classics; on the
other, the level of the studies in its principal establishments
has been raised, and the number of its pupils has been ever on
the increase.
{108}
The Lycées counted (in 1850) 19,300; they have now (1865) more
than 30,000 pupils. The State has thrown open the career of
instruction to the Church, and has at the same time redoubled its
own solicitude and success. Liberty of instruction has calmed
both the anxieties of the religious party that made them demand
it, and those anxieties of the laity which that liberty had
inspired. It has given peace to the State and to the Church, at
the same time that it has excited their emulation and stimulated
their progress.

An incident which made some noise at the time has, under the new
regime, shown the force of the Liberal spirit, and proved that,
when needed, it would have unforeseen defenders.
{109}
Under the influence of a blind zeal, a pious ecclesiastic, the
Abbé Graume, demanded by what right the literature of pagan
antiquity occupied the place it did in public teaching; denounced
it as "the devouring canker of modern societies;" and insisted
that the Christian classics should replace in our schools the
Greek and Latin classics. What was this but to reject one of the
great cradles of modern civilization; to condemn the renaissance
of literature in the fifteenth century, as well as the religious
reform in the sixteenth century; and to close to the minds of
rising generations of Christians the general history of the
world! This attack upon the system of public instruction which
had been in vigor during the last four centuries in all the
States of Christendom, met from a part of the Romanists with a
sympathetic reception: bishops, eminent for learning, thanked its
author; M. Veuillot constituted himself his champion. But in the
Catholic Church itself, as well as in the University, the fire of
the defense silenced that of the attack; ecclesiastics, as
eminent by their piety as by their science, the Bishop of Orleans
at their head, proclaimed aloud their sympathy for the
comprehensive scheme and the liberal studies which embrace all
the fair works of man's intelligence.
{110}
The Jesuits on this occasion set an example of broad views and
common sense; they introduced no modification into the programmes
of their colleges; the Pères Cahoux and Daniel demonstrated their
propriety, nay, their necessity; and the literature of the Greeks
and of the Romans has preserved in the education of Christians
the place which it gained in their history by the right of genius
and by the splendor of its productions.

Scarcely had this controversy on a literary and moral subject
been settled, when questions of far more gravity were raised, and
more profoundly agitated Christian society. Christians found
themselves attacked simultaneously upon scientific and upon
political grounds. Men denied to the Christian Faith its
reasonableness and its vital sources--to the Church of Rome its
traditional and historical régime, and the temporal power of its
chief.

{111}

Two things strike me in this double attack--on the one hand its
timidity, yet gravity; on the other, the powerful resistance
which it encounters. Nothing is less novel than a denial of the
supernatural character of Christianity, and of its primitive
facts, of its miracles, of the divinity of its founder. The
eighteenth century carried on this war in a far more violent,
rude, and iniquitous spirit than the nineteenth century has done.
M. Renan, in the attempt to dethrone Jesus, has at least treated
him with admiration and respect; not from calculation, I feel
assured, but from the natural tone of his mind. In our time, men
have instincts and tastes, at once inconsequent and prudent; at
the very time when they engage in a deadly struggle they affect
to carry thither the cool impartiality of spectators; they
flatter themselves that they unite the acumen of the critic to
the feeling of the poet. The skeptic shows no disinclination to
play the mystic; and the erudite man strives to cover with the
vail of fancy the ruin that he makes.
{112}
Hume was a more stubborn skeptic, and Voltaire an enemy more
daring. If I pass from philosophy to politics, and from books to
events, I observe the war undergoing a similar transformation.
What a contrast between the attacks of the Directory and the
Emperor Napoleon the First upon the Papacy, and the circumspect
and hesitating treatment of which, in spite of the blows that it
receives, the Papacy is in these days the object? Are we to
conclude that the general course of events has changed, and that
the flood, which for a century whirled Europe along, is arrested
and subsiding? Certainly not: there are abundant facts to prove
the contrary. Whether regarded as a religious or a political
question, whether considered as affecting opinions or interests,
the contest between authority and liberty, between faith and
incredulity, is carried on more earnestly and more systematically
now than ever: principles on each side are pushed to their
extreme consequences, and contrasted in a manner never before the
case.
{113}
But experience imposes a restraint upon men even where it does
not change them. In the years of internal order which the Empire
insured, and in the years of liberty to which the constitutional
Monarchy gave the sanction of its laws, the different parties
learned to appreciate the obstacles with which they had to
contend, and to measure their own strength and that of their
opponents: they now know that everything is not possible to them;
and necessity has inculcated a certain amount of equity and good
sense. The experience of the past, as well as that of each day,
convinces them of their inability to insure a complete success to
their systems and their designs. Its adversaries thought
Christianity expiring; but they soon saw that it was still full
of life: while they express their surprise and persevere in their
warfare, they admit its practical influence, render homage to its
moral value, and strive, although they contest its rights, to
appropriate to themselves the inheritance of its blessings.
{114}
The wind has often blown from the right quarter for Catholic
Absolutists during this century; they have enjoyed the favor of
more than one master, and more than once they have requited him
by devoted services. More than once, also, they have obtained
from the supreme head of their Church official declarations,
which have been used by them against the Catholic Liberals. The
Absolutists, nevertheless, have not succeeded in changing the
tendency of Christian societies; they have arrested the course
neither of ideas nor events; their defeats have cost them dearer
than their victories were worth; and in spite of the obstinate
infatuation of parties, I doubt whether they themselves believe
in the progress of their cause. And how often has the Papacy
itself in our days been insulted and despoiled? Has it not even
been vanquished and expelled?
{115}
Still, in spite of what it has suffered, sometimes from
revolutions, sometimes from arbitrary power, it has outlived not
only the triumphs of its enemies, but its own impolitic measures:
and at this day, assailed by freethinkers in spirituals, by
ambitious neighbors in temporals, menaced with abandonment even
by its protectors, it is more energetically defended and
efficaciously supported than it ever was at the commencement of
this century in its reverses. Pius VII. never received such
pecuniary contributions as have been forwarded to Pius IX. in his
necessities; and if the French bishops were now summoned to a
council, their conduct would, beyond doubt, be more dignified and
more influential than was that of their predecessors in 1811.

Why such changes in a situation itself in effect unchanged?
Whence these hesitating measures, this embarrassed attitude of
the adversaries of the Christian faith and of the Christian
Church? What cause at the same time gives such boldness and even
success to their defenders?

{116}

Each age has its own peculiar and characteristic mission, and one
from which it cannot escape; every human being has his share in
it, whether he knows it or not. As a consequence of the truths
and the errors, of the good and evil, of the triumphs and
reverses of the preceding centuries, the nineteenth century has
before it a special task, which will employ all its energies, and
which will also, I hope, constitute its glory. It has both in the
State and in the Church found the two supreme forces that preside
over man's life, and over that of society, Authority and Liberty,
in violent conflict, in turn intoxicated with victory, or
vanquished, ruined. It is the mission of the nineteenth century
to make them live together, and live in peace; or at least in an
antagonism entailing upon neither any mortal danger. The
recognition of, and respect for, authority; the acceptance and
guarantee of freedom; these are the imperative necessities which
our age is called upon to feel and to satisfy, both in State and
Church.
{117}
Nor does this imply, as is often pretended, any inconsistency or
any compromise of principle or any policy of expedients; it is
not by inconsistency that great questions are settled, it is not
by expedients that we content the cravings of men's souls, or
calm the anxieties of human society; for mankind yields genuine
submission and feels real confidence only where it believes in
the existence of truth and justice. The recognition, veneration,
and guarantee of the different rights which co-exist naturally
and necessarily in human societies--of the rights, both of
individuals and of the State--of the rights of religious society
and of civil society--of the rights of little local societies as
well as of the grand general society--of the rights of conscience
as well as of tradition--of the rights of the future as well as
of those of the past--these are the dominant principles of which
the nineteenth century has to insure the triumph.
{118}
Triumphs assured, if Liberals and Christians are both of them
determined to accomplish it! Notwithstanding all the violent
emotions of party, and of all our differences on intellectual and
social subjects, the consciousness of this situation is ever
before our minds; and whether we admit it or not, the alliance of
the liberal movement with the movement of awakened Christianity,
is the grand measure and the grand hope of the day.

A Catholic priest, now a bishop, inquiring the origin of the
actual disputes of religion, and their probable issue, expresses
himself as follows:--"Free institutions, freedom of conscience,
political liberty, civil liberty, individual liberty, liberty of
families, of education, and of opinions, equality before the
laws, the equal division of imposts and of public charges, these
are all points upon which we make no difficulty; we accept them
frankly; we appeal to them on solemn occasions of public
discussion; we accept, we invoke the principles and the liberties
proclaimed in 1789; even those who combat those principles and
those liberties admit that liberty of religion and free education
have become acknowledged, self-evident truths (_des verités de
bon sens_)." [Footnote 13]

    [Footnote 13: De la Pacification religieuse. By the Abbé
    Dupanloup, pp. 263, 294, 306. Paris, 1845.]

{119}

This Catholic, this bishop, is no timorous priest, disposed to
make every sacrifice for the purpose of conciliation. It is the
same priest, who, from the first attack made upon the
constitution of the Catholic Church, has always distinguished
himself by the warmth and ability with which he has defended it.
The Papacy, its rights, its temporal independence and spiritual
sovereignty never had a champion more resolute, more opposed to
weak concessions or fallacious compromises, more constantly
intrepid in the breach than the Bishop of Orleans.

{120}

When the contest was warmest, the Pope (Pius IX.) published his
"Encyclical" of the 8th of December, 1864. Exempt from every
feeling of prejudice and hostility, and having no connection or
relation with the Papacy to make me pause, I feel no hesitation
in saying what I think of this document, at once the occasion and
the pretext for such a stir. In my opinion the error was a grave
one. Regarded as doctrine, the "Encyclical" was dignified and yet
embarrassed, positive and yet evasive; it confounded in the same
sweeping condemnation salutary truths and pernicious errors, the
principles of liberty and the maxims of licentiousness; it made
an effort to maintain, in point of right, the ancient traditions
and pretensions of Rome, without avowing in point of fact that
the ideas and potent influences of modern civilization were the
objects of its declared and unceasing hostility. In a system like
that of the present day--a system of publicity and freedom of
discussion--this manner of proceeding, its inconsistencies, its
reticence, its obscurities, whether arising from instinct or
premeditation, have ceased to be good policy, and in fact serve
no purpose whatever.
{121}
As a measure to meet a particular emergency, the "Encyclical" of
the 8th of December 1864 did not resemble that of Gregory XVI. in
1832; it was not called for by such extravagances as those of the
_Avenir_, or those of the Abbé de la Mennais; no urgent
necessity, no public exigency required that Rome should pronounce
itself; the debate between the Catholic Absolutists and the
Catholic Liberals was of ancient date, and was evidently destined
to long duration; the Papacy could not flatter itself that it
could put an end to this contest by any peremptoriness of
decision; her indulgent consideration was as due to the one party
as to the other. Doubtless the Catholic Liberals had not shown
less zeal for her cause, nor had the services which they had
rendered been less important; it was not a moment of peril for
Rome, and Rome was bound in justice, without any open declaration
at least, to maintain toward them an attitude of reserve.
{122}
The party, even before the publication of the "Encyclical," had
earned, as it still merits, her gratitude and her esteem; neither
M. de Montalembert, nor the Prince Albert de Broglie, nor M. de
Falloux, nor M. Cochin, nor any of their friends had imitated the
example of the Abbé de la Mennais; nor has one of them shown
subsequently any irritation, or even uttered a word of complaint;
they have maintained a respectful silence. The Bishop of Orleans
has done even more. A man of action as well as of faith, he
thought in the midst of the storm excited by the "Encyclical" of
the 8th of December, that he was bound to consider the perils
rather than the faults, and that it became a priest who had
supported liberty to support authority also when the object of
attack. He threw himself into the arena to cover the Papacy at
all hazards with his valiant arms: after having played the part
of a sagacious counselor, he played that of a faithful champion,
and he inflicted upon her adversaries blows so sturdy, that the
latter were in their turn obliged to put themselves upon their
defense, even in the midst of the success that the "Encyclical"
had insured them.

{123}

The Bishop of Orleans is probably reserved for many other
struggles; he may even be hurried by a warlike temperament to
carry the war into a field where it is uncalled for; but I shall
be both surprised and grieved if he do not always remain what he
is at this moment in the Church of France, the most enlightened
representative of its mission, moral and social, as well as the
most intrepid defender of its true and legitimate interests.

Whether the matter in debate concerns religious or social affairs
and contests, parties are liable to two errors of equal gravity:
they may misapprehend their respective perils, or their
respective strength. Wisdom consists in a just appreciation of
these perils and of these forces, and it is upon such an
appreciation precisely that success itself depends. The actual
perils to which Catholicism is exposed are evident to all. It
owes its development and its constitution to times essentially
different from the present. It adapts itself with reluctance to
the principles required and the demands made upon it in this age.
{124}
Its antagonists think and assert that it will never so adapt
itself. Most of the lookers-on, who are indifferent or
vacillating--and their number is great--incline to believe its
antagonists in the right. This is the trial through which
Catholicism is at this moment passing. To pass through it
triumphantly, it has two great forces to rely upon; the one is,
the reaction in favor of religion occasioned by the follies and
the crimes of the Revolution, the other is, the liberal movement
that took place among the Catholics after the faults of the
Restoration, and the new opening made for them by the Government
of 1830. The Concordat built up again the edifice of the Catholic
Church; Liberalism is laboring to penetrate its sanctuary, and,
without impairing its faith, to obtain for it once more the
sympathies of civil government.
{125}
Let sincere Catholics reflect well upon their course, for here is
their main stay, here their best chance for the future; let them
maintain with a firm hand the strong constitution of their
Church, but accept frankly, and at once claim, their share also
in the liberties of their age; let them take care of their
anchors and spread their sails, for this is the conduct
prescribed to them by the supreme interest, which should be their
law, the future interests, I mean, of Christianity.

The time has been short, but the experiment has been made and is
successful. I have now enumerated the principal events connected
with religion which have taken place in the course of this
century in the bosom of the Catholic Church of France. In spite
of the obstacles, the oscillations, the deviations, and the
faults that are remarkable, the awakening of Christianity is
evident. Under the influence of the causes which I have pointed
out, Christian faith has evidently made progress; Christian
science, progress; Christian charity, as shown by works,
progress; Christian force, progress; progress incomplete and
insufficient but still progress, real, and fall of fruit,
symptomatic of vital energy and future promise.
{126}
Let not the enemies of Christianity deceive themselves; they are
waging a combat of life and of death, but their antagonist is not
in extremis!

---------------------------------

   II. Awakening Of Christianity In France.


I pass without any transitional stage from the awakening of
Christianity in the Roman Catholic Church to the awakening of
Christianity in the Protestant Church. What need of a transition?
I am not quitting the Christian Church. With respect to their
claims as Christians, Protestant nations have been put to the
test. They have had, like Catholic nations, to pass through
violent struggles, to combat evil tendencies, to undergo perilous
trials; but the peculiar characteristic of Christianity, the
simultaneous action of faith and of science, of authority and
liberty, has received a glorious development in the bosom of
Protestant nations.
{127}
England and Holland, Protestant Germany, Sweden, Denmark,
Switzerland, and the United States of America, have had their
vices, their crimes, their sufferings, and their reverses; but,
after all, these States have in the last four centuries labored
with effect at the solution, in a Christian sense, of that grand
problem of human society--the moral and physical progress of the
masses, as well as the political guarantee of their rights and
liberties. And in these days the States to which I have alluded
resist effectually the shocks--now of anarchy, now of despotism,
which alternately trouble the peace of Christendom. As for the
Christian Faith itself, if, in Protestant countries, it does not
escape the attacks elsewhere made upon it, neither is it without
its powerful defenders and faithful followers. In those
countries, Christian Churches are full of adherents, and the
cause of Christianity finds every day valiant champions to devote
to its service the arms which science and liberty supply.
{128}
There is on the part of the Romanists a puerile infatuation upon
this subject, which makes them absolutely close their eyes to
facts; by an error fatal to themselves, they persist in imputing
the fermentation in society, and the abandonment of religion, to
the influence of the Protestant nations--nations among whom
these two scourges are combated with at least as much resolution
and effect as elsewhere. It is not my wish to institute
disparaging comparisons, or to foment a rivalry opposed to the
spirit of Christ's religion. Protestantism is not, in
Christendom, the last, neither is it the sole bulwark of
Christianity; but there exists none that is stronger, that offers
fewer weak points to assailants, or that is better provided with
faithful and able defenders.

{129}

At the commencement of this century, and in the years which
followed the promulgation of the Concordat, the Protestants, like
the Catholics in France, thought only of the re-establishment of
their worship and of the liberty of their faith. A liberty the
more precious in their eyes, as it followed upon two centuries of
persecutions and of sufferings of which we cannot, in these days,
read the accounts without mingled sentiments of astonishment, of
indignation, and of sorrow. Faithfully should men guard the
memory of such outrages; they would be infinitely better than
they are if they had always present to their minds the vivid
pictures of the iniquities and woes which fill the page of their
history; and evils would not so soon recur if they were not so
soon forgotten. The system of Terrorism under the Revolution had
confounded Catholic and Protestant in a common oppression; it had
abolished the forms of worship of each, denied all free
expression of opinion to Christians; and without distinction
condemned to the same scaffold the "pastors of the desert" and
the bishops of the Court of Versailles--Rabaut Saint-Etienne as
well as the nuns of Verdun.
{130}
When this terrible regime had ceased to exist, neither party had
religiously or politically any desires or pretensions that were
not extremely moderate: the one thing regarded by all as the
sovereign good was, the right to live without molestation and the
liberty to address their prayers to God in the light of day. No
other subject so seriously interested them; and they heartily
wished to show their gratitude and deference to the Government,
which, while it gave security to their bodies, permitted their
souls to breathe freely. The condition of the Protestants was in
one sense better than that of the Catholics, for the former were
now experiencing the joy, not only of a deliverance but of a
positive conquest; they had just escaped as well from the system
of Terrorism, as from the ancient régime; they had lost nothing
to regret; no revengeful feeling made them desire a reaction;
their sole aspiration was for the consolidation of their rights,
and of their new acquisitions.
{131}
"You who lived, as we did, under the yoke of intolerance," (thus
they were addressed in 1807 by M. Rabaut-Dupuy, formerly
president of the legislative body, and the last surviving son of
one of their most estimable pastors,) "you, the relics of so many
persecuted generations, behold! compare! It is no longer in the
desert and at the peril of your lives that you render to the
Creator the homage which is his due. Our temples are restored to
us, and every day beholds new ones erected. Our pastors are
recognized as public functionaries; they receive salaries from
the State; a barbarous law no longer suspends the sword over
their heads. Alas! to those whom we have survived it was
permitted, it is true, to ascend Mount Nebo, and to obtain thence
a glimpse of the promised land, but it is we alone who have taken
possession."

What wonder if, on the morrow after the Concordat, which had
procured them the free exercise of their faith and the
impartiality of the law, the Protestants acquiesced without
difficulty in the incomplete organization with which the new
system had left their Church, and that they troubled themselves
little with the attacks made upon its independence and its
dignity!

{132}

But this modest enjoyment of their new privileges did not render
them indifferent to their ancient belief, and they returned to
the open practice of Christ's faith simultaneously with the
acquisition of their liberty. In 1812, in the midst of the
profound silence which reigned throughout the Empire, a professor
of the faculty of Protestant theology at Montauban, M. Grasc,
attacked, in his teaching, the dogma of the Trinity. Earnest
remonstrances were instantly made from the general body of the
Protestants in France; a great number of consistories, among
others those of Nîmes, of Montpellier, Montauban, Alais, Anduze,
Saint Hippolyte, pastors and laity, addressed their complaints,
some to the "Doyen" of the faculty of theology, others to M. Gasc
himself, demanding, all of them, the maintenance of the doctrine
of the Protestant Church.
{133}
The grand master of the University, M. de Fontanes, "earnestly
invited the professor not to depart from it," and M. Gasc himself
admitted that his teaching ought to be in conformity. The spirit
which had animated the Reformation in France in the sixteenth
century was still living in the nineteenth; and under the
new-born system of liberty, the Awakening of Christianity
announced itself by a summons to the faith.

When, under the Restoration, France had regained her political
liberty, it was not long before that liberty bore its natural
fruits in French Protestantism; it was accompanied, both on
religious and political subjects, by the manifestation of
discordant ideas and discordant tendencies, which were soon to
struggle for victory.
{134}
As at epochs of great intellectual crises eminent men emerge who
represent dominant ideas, so now M. Samuel Vincent and M. Daniel
Encontre immediately appeared in the Protestant Church: both were
pastors, and each worthily represented one of the two principles
which naturally develop themselves in the bosom of Protestantism,
faith in traditions and the right of private judgment; principles
different without being contradictory; principles which may
subsist in peace provided they remain respectively in their
proper places, and within the limits of their rights. M. Samuel
Vincent was a man of a mind remarkably comprehensive and of great
versatility and fecundity; but his habits at the same time were
those of a student, fitting him rather for intellectual
meditation than qualifying him either for expansive sympathies or
for action; he was versed in the philosophy and erudite criticism
of Germany, at that time novel and rare to France; he made the
essence of Christianity, according to his own expression, "to
consist in the liberty of inquiry." [Footnote 14:]

    [Footnote 14: Vues sur le protestantisme en France, par M.
    Samuel Vincent. 2e édition, p. 15. Paris, 1859.]

{135}

He rejected all written articles of faith, every limited idea of
religious unity, and claimed within the Church, for both pastors
and congregation, the greatest latitude in matters of opinion and
of teaching. But when he clung closely to this view of the
subject, and was pressed to indicate the extreme point to which,
within the Church itself, the diversity of men's individual
beliefs might be carried, his embarrassment became extreme, for
he had too much sense to admit that this diversity had no limit,
and that a Church, whether Protestant or not, could exist without
certain articles of faith common to all its members, and
recognized by them all. "Protestantism," said he himself, "must
not be merely a negation; it should also have its real and
positive side; it must be beyond all things a religion; that is
to say, it must be in the possession of the means to endure and
of the means to edify men by the propagation of a doctrine
benevolent and Christian. ... Christianity is the basis of
ecclesiastical teaching." [Footnote 15]

    [Footnote 15: Vues sur le protestantisme en France, par M.
    Samuel Vincent, pp. 17, 22.]

{136}

When, after having laid down this principle, M. Samuel Vincent
inquired how the Protestant Church could remain a Church, and a
Christian Church, in the midst of the independence of individual
beliefs, he found no other way out of the difficulty than "to
determine," he said, "by conventions, oral and unwritten, a
certain number of opinions that each man should, in the interest
of the general peace, be entreated to keep to himself." [Footnote
16]

    [Footnote 16: Vues sur le protestantisme en France, p. 24.]

How strange a proceeding, how difficult of realization, to
prescribe with once voice silence and liberty! M. Samuel Vincent
did not attempt to determine what those opinions were which, in
order to maintain the existence of a Christian Church in the
midst of the broadest system of free inquiry, "each man should be
entreated to keep to himself."
{137}
As for himself, he professed his faith in the supernatural, in
the revelation of the Old and of the New Testaments, in the
inspiration of the Scriptures, in the divinity of Jesus Christ;
in the grand historical facts as well as in the moral precepts of
the Gospel; he was one of the pastors, too, who signed the
remonstrance of the consistory of Nîmes, for the irregularity in
preaching of which Professor Grasc had been guilty. Did M. Samuel
Vincent regard every opinion contrary to these great evangelical
doctrines as an opinion which each man should, in the interest of
the general peace, be entreated to keep to himself? I doubt
whether he would have dared to engraft upon the liberty of
judgment such a reservation; but I doubt at the same time if he
would have persisted in regarding as true and faithful pastors of
the Protestant Church, men who should have openly deserted and
combated, in its most essential foundations, that Christian faith
which he himself professed. He dreaded almost equally "unity
defined," and "dissent declared." He would have remained in the
embarrassment into which those inevitably fall who neither accept
one basis and manifesto of a common faith, nor admit the moral
necessity of a separation into free and distinct Churches when a
common faith does not exist. [Footnote 17]

    [Footnote 17: The principal works of M. Samuel Vincent are:
    1. Vues sur le protestantisme en France, première édition. 2
    vols. 8vo. 1829. A second edition, in 1 vol. 12mo., was
    published in 1859 by M. Prévost-Paradol.

    2. Observations sur l'unité religieuse et observations sur la
    voie d'autorité appliquée a la religion, (1820,) contre
    l'Essai sur l'indifférance en matière de religion de l'Abbé
    de la Mennais.

    3. Meditations ou recueil de sermons, 1829.

    4. Mélanges de religion de morale et de critique sacrée. A
    periodical published from 1820 to 1825.]

{138}

No such embarrassment was experienced by M. Daniel Encontre when
he began his career to serve the movement of awakened
Christianity in the bosom of French Protestantism. I will not
venture here to cite the precise words, harsh and severe,
employed by him on the 13th of December, 1816, at Montauban, in
his capacity of "Doyen" of the faculty of Protestant Theology,
respecting those termed by him "the pretended ministers of the
Gospel, disbelievers in the Gospel and in the divinity of Jesus
Christ."
{139}
He regarded harmony of faith and language, harmony between
shepherd and flock, as the first law of religious society. Born
in a grotto of La Vaunage, to which his mother had fled to escape
from the flames of persecution; devoted from his birth by his
father, the Pastor Pierre Encontre, to the service of a "preacher
in the desert," M. Daniel Encontre belonged to that class of
indomitable Protestants who cling to their faith through all the
perils, sufferings, and sacrifices which it entails. His first
steps in life seemed to indicate in him other aptitudes, and to
promise for him a different career. After having studied divinity
at Lausanne and at Geneva, and been consecrated by his father
himself to the ministry of the Gospel "in an assembly in the
desert," he seemed to doubt his own vocation; for while
performing the functions of his ministry he devoted himself to
the study of mathematics, physics, philosophy, and the classical
languages, with an enthusiasm eager to become familiar with every
department of knowledge, and encountering no hinderance from,
internal obstacles or from preconceived opinions.
{140}
Having established himself at Montpellier, where his taste for
science found subjects of gratification, he led there, during the
dark days of the Revolution, a life very obscure, and at the same
time most laborious; giving lessons to the master masons upon
stone-cutting, imparting instruction, rendering the aids of
religion to Protestants, celebrating the baptismal and marriage
services, and pursuing at the same time his labors in geometry,
botany, philosophy, divinity, literature, and even poetry. When
order began to be re-established, he was led by his own natural
tastes and the counsel of his friends to select as his career
that of public instruction. He competed for and obtained, first
the appointment of professor of literature at the École Centrale
of Montpellier; then that of the higher mathematics, at the Lycée
and in the faculty of science, of which he was nominated "Doyen."
{141}
As his merits established themselves by repeated proofs, his
reputation increased; the papers of learned societies were filled
with his contributions, and the École Polytechnique with his
pupils. "I have met in our department," said Fourcroy, "two or
three heads equal to his, but not one superior." M. de Candolle
gladly selected him to aid him in his "Researches respecting the
Botany of the Ancients;" and M. de Fontanes has more than once
spoken of him to me as one of the men who most honored the
University. But in him, neither the mathematician, the botanist,
nor the philologist took precedence of the Christian. At one time
as expounder of Moses and of Genesis, [Footnote 18] at another as
a writer defending the Apostles, accused of being a copyist of
Plato. [Footnote 19] he neglected no occasion of placing his
scientific attainments at the service of Christianity;

    [Footnote 18: Dissertation sur le vrai système du monde
    comparé avec le récit que Moïse fait de la création.
    Montpellier, 1807.]

    [Footnote 19: Lettre à M. Combes-Dounous, auteur d'un Essai
    historique sur Platon. Paris, 1811.

    A remarkable essay of M. Daniel Encontre, "sur le Péché
    original," was published, after his death, in 1822, and he
    left a great number of manuscripts, among others a "Traité
    sur l'Église," (600 pages,) written in Latin; "Etudes
    théologiques," a Hebrew Grammar, a "Cours de philosophie," a
    "Cours de litérature Française," a "Flore biblique," several
    "Memoires de mathématiques transcendantes," etc. As a teacher
    of transcendental mathematics at Montpellier he had as pupil
    M. Auguste Comte, the head of the "École positiviste," who,
    in spite of the profound diversity of their opinions,
    regarded it as a duty to dedicate to him in 1856 his
    treatise, "Sur la Synthèse subjective," in testimony of
    admiration and of gratitude.]

{142}

and when, in 1814, he was asked to quit Montpellier, to abandon
his habits, his tastes, and his friends, for the chair of the
professorship of divinity at Montauban, where he was to fulfill
the functions of "Doyen," he sacrificed without hesitation the
enjoyment of his life to his religious vocation, and applied
himself with unceasing energy to the warlike activity of a
Christian professor, until the day when, overcome by fatigue and
sickness, he accorded to himself the melancholy satisfaction of
returning to Montpellier, in order to die near the tomb of a
beloved daughter, who had long aided him in his labors.

{143}

The destinies of Protestantism in France have, to a singular
degree, been at once varied and uniform, confused and simple.
After having in the sixteenth century valiantly disputed the
victory, it was vanquished, decimated, expelled. But it resisted,
and survived not only its defeat, but the gradual process of its
enfeeblement and its expulsion. In the course of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries the French Protestants lost the
protection of the laws, their secure sanctuaries, their great
chiefs, their great divines, their great writers; but they
preserved nevertheless their faith and their religious honor. In
the times that ensued their successors remained faithful to the
belief and the customs of their fathers; even persecuted and
condemned to death, having their property confiscated, or become
tenants of prisons and laborers in the galleys, they found in
their very sufferings a resource to confirm them in the
principles of Protestant piety.
{144}
Theological controversies died away from among them, leaving
behind them the fundamentals of Christianity--living and guiding
principles.

Among the higher and wealthier classes, the philosophical ideas
of the eighteenth century made also their way; the great liberal
movement filled the Protestant section of the nation with joy,
and commanded its sympathy without detaching it from its
religious habits and traditions. In its members faith had ceased
to be erudite; the popular Protestant sentiment had been always
profoundly biblical and evangelical. Freer and more fortunately
situated than their fathers, the French Protestants now anxiously
desired to remain, as they had been, Christians; and when, in
1790, Rabaut Saint-Etienne, who succeeded the Abbé de Montesquieu
as President of the Constituent Assembly, wrote to his aged
father, the Pastor Paul Rabaut, "The President of the National
Assembly is at your feet," he manifested to the humble and
zealous preacher in the assemblies of the desert, the pride at
once of a politician, the piety of a son, and the fidelity of a
Protestant.

{145}

M. Daniel Encontre was, at the commencement of the nineteenth
century, the faithful representative of this traditionally
religious character of French Protestantism; just as M. Samuel
Vincent was the well-meaning and sincere introducer to it of the
science and criticism of the Germans. The former corresponded
more closely to the pious and national spirit of Protestant
France of the olden times; the latter to the tendencies, at once
novel and indefinitely latitudinarian, of a foreign philosophy
and a foreign erudition. Doubtless, neither measured the range of
the religious crisis of which they were themselves the symptoms;
neither foresaw that within the bosom of Protestantism that
crisis was to be marked by an avowed struggle between Rationalism
in its progress and Christianity in its reaction.

{146}

This crisis began to manifest itself at Geneva. The mocking
skepticism of Voltaire, the rhetorical deism of Rousseau,
proclaimed at its gates, had deeply undermined the faith of
Christ in the very city of Calvin. It was not merely some of the
Calvinistic doctrines of the sixteenth century that the pastors
of Geneva doubted or denied, but it was also the fundamental
articles of Christianity; they abandoned not only the Dogmas of
predestination and salvation by faith alone, but the dogmas of
original sin, and of the divinity of Jesus Christ. In 1810
according to some, as far back as 1802 according to others,
symptoms of an evangelical reaction showed themselves at Geneva
among the students in theology, some of whom afterward became
distinguished pastors or writers. It was not long before MM.
Gaussen, Malan, Gonthier, Bost, Merle d'Aubigné, displayed their
orthodox fervor and their ability. In 1816 a pious Scot, Mr.
Robert Haldane, previously an intrepid sailor, who had only
quitted his calling to devote himself entirely to the service of
his faith, went to Geneva, and contracted with the young
Methodists of that city relations of the greatest intimacy and
activity.
{147}
They had meetings; they discussed, they preached, they prayed,
they wrote. Mr. Haldane could hardly express himself in French;
having his English Bible continually at hand, he turned over its
pages incessantly, pointed out to his friends the passages that
he regarded as decisive, invited them to read them aloud from
their French Bible, and then commented upon them in a manner that
always commanded their favorable attention, the conviction of the
commentator had such moving and persuasive power. [Footnote 20]

    [Footnote 20: Genève religieuse au XIX siècle: par le Baron
    de Goltz; traduit de l'allemand par C. Malan: 8vo., pp.
    137-149. Genève et Paris. 1862.]

{148}

In 1816 and 1817 the evangelical reaction made rapid progress,
and the body of Genevese pastors resolved to combat it by the
voice of authority. They found, however, no better method of
doing so than by insisting upon what, twelve years later, even M.
Samuel Vincent did not scruple to recommend; they prescribed
silence even whilst they proclaimed liberty. "Without"--these are
their words--"giving any judgment upon the questions really
involved, and without controlling in any respect the liberty of
opinions," they imposed a solemn engagement both upon students
demanding to be consecrated to the sacred ministry, and upon
ministers candidates for pastoral functions in the Church of
Geneva. It was conceived as follows: "As long as we reside and
preach in the churches of the Canton of Geneva, we promise to
abstain from establishing, either in entire discourses or in
parts of discourses directed to this object, our opinion--first,
of the manner in which the divine nature was incarnate in the
person of Jesus Christ; secondly, of original sin; thirdly, of
the mode in which grace operates, or grace is efficient;
fourthly, of predestination. We promise also not to combat, in
any public discourse, the opinion of any pastors or ministers
touching these subjects." [Footnote 21]

    [Footnote 21: Genève religieuse au XIX siècle: par le Baron
    de Goltz; p. 153.]

{149}

It is difficult to understand how men ever could have flattered
themselves with the hope of re-establishing peace in the Church
by the employment of so sorry an expedient. Liberty, that has
rent asunder such heavy chains, does not permit itself to be
confined by so flimsy a net. The immediate effect of the
regulation of the Genevese pastors was an outburst of discontent.
The more violent Methodists, MM. Malan and Bost at their head,
proclaimed aloud their separation from the established Church;
the more moderate, among others, MM. Gaussen and Merle d'Aubigné,
persisted in remaining, by right of their ministry, in its bosom,
holding themselves responsible representatives _there_ of
the doctrines of the Reformation, which, in fact, they did
continue to preach and to teach.
{150}
The body of pastors at first used great forbearance toward them,
and respected their liberty; and when the populace, irritated at
the agitation caused in families by the Dissenters, and offended
by the austerity of their precepts, made hostile demonstrations
toward them, the Council of Geneva had the wisdom and fairness to
use measures of repression; but, soon becoming weary of this
painful duty, the Council formally forbade, without its express
permission, any book of religious controversy to be printed at
Geneva.
{151}
The body of pastors soon pronounced as vehement a condemnation of
the moderate Methodists as of the ultra Dissenters. The moderate
Methodists then in their turn resorted to energetic measures in
support of their cause: they founded an evangelical society and a
school of theology; devoted the one to propagate the zeal and the
other to teach the principles of the Christian reaction; and
fifteen years after the commencement of the struggle, the chiefs
of the party which had proclaimed that the free divergence of
individual belief in the bosom of the Church was "the great fact
of our epoch, and the great step that the Reformation had in our
days to make"--these chiefs, being the body of pastors, the
Consistory, and the Council of State at Geneva, suspended M.
Gaussen from his functions of pastor in the parish of Satigny for
having taken part in the organization of an independent form of
worship, and of a school of independent theology; "a proceeding,"
they said, "incompatible with the peace of the Church, and to be
regarded as an act of insubordination, tending to bring
ecclesiastical authority into discredit." [Footnote 22]

    [Footnote 22: Genève religieuse au XIX siècle: par le Baron
    de Goltz; pp. 379-384.]

Such religious ferment in the primitive home of the French
Reformation, and at the very gates of France, could not fail to
exercise a powerful influence upon the French Protestant Church.
{152}
On quitting Geneva in 1817, Mr. Robert Haldane proceeded to
Montauban, where he formed friendships with some of the
Professors of the Faculty, and among others with M. Daniel
Encontre. He published there also a work in French, which his
friends hastened to circulate. It was styled "Emmanuel: vues
Scripturaires sur Jésus-Christ." In 1818, a society formed in
England, named the "Continental Society," specially devoted
itself to the purpose of seconding on the Continent the progress
of this Christian reaction. An English dissenter, Mr. Mark Wilks,
pastor of the American community formed at Paris, was the most
efficient agent of the societies which had this object in view.
"It might be said of Mr. Wilks," wrote lately the Pastor
Juillerat, "that he might have governed an empire, his character
was so energetic, his mind so active and enterprising. He brought
me aid of every description: money was required, he had money;
pamphlets and books were wanted, no one was better provided; no
one understood better the details pertaining to the printing and
publication of papers."
{153}
Several Protestant journals and magazines, "La Voix de la
Religion Chrétienne au XIX siècle," "Les Archives du
Christianisme au XIX siècle," "Les Mélanges de Religion, de
Morale, et de Critique Sacrée," "L'Evangeliste," "La Revue
Protestante," "Le Semeur," etc., etc., were at this epoch
successively founded and carried in different directions
throughout the scattered Protestant Church, from its central
organization, the fervor which had there been kindled. Genuine
zeal for religion is not satisfied by action from a distance, or
by action upon unknown persons, or by indirect means, as by books
and by journals: it demands direct oral communication from man to
man--the union of men's souls in common prayer. Certain young
pastors who had at first shared in the evangelical movement at
Geneva, MM. Neff, Pyt, Bost, Gonthier, scattered themselves over
France, some assuming functions as local pastors, others as
traveling missionaries, attracting to their proximity groups of
zealous Protestants, animating the lukewarm, and erecting in
every place where they made any stay little centers of
Christianity, which radiated to the neighboring country around.
{154}
Distinct associations, some officially recognized by the State,
others having no public character, [Footnote 23] gave to the
labors of isolated individuals the publicity, the unity, the
permanence which they required; and a special organization
(colportage biblique) which at its commencement numbered only
seven, but a few years afterward had sixty agents, all of them,
although obscure individuals, as zealous as their patrons were
zealous, caused the Holy Scriptures and religious tracts to
penetrate into parts of France hopelessly inaccessible to any
other method of communication and of instruction.

    [Footnote 23: La Société biblique, la Société pour
    l'encouragement de l'instruction primaire parmi les
    protestants, la Société évangélique de France, la Société des
    traités religieuse, la Société des missions protestantes, la
    Société centrale pour les intérêts protestants, la Société
    d'évangelisation, etc.]

{155}

To a movement so earnest and so general, although propagated by a
small number of persons in the heart of a population itself
forming but a small minority in the nation at large, obstacles
would inevitably occur. They were encountered on all hands and of
all kinds, religious and political--from the administration, from
popular prejudices, from the distrust of the Government, from the
hostility of the Roman Catholic clergy, from differences of
opinion on theological points among Protestants themselves, from
the _amour propre_ of individuals, and the perplexed or
timorous ideas of subalterns in authority. The activity of the
Protestant societies created uneasiness in bishops and priests,
who strove not merely to counteract their influence, but to
interfere with their liberty of action. Mayors of towns, judges
of the peace, sometimes too, magistrates and administrators of
more elevated rank, lent their aid to these exceptionable
proceedings. Hence arose suspicions, complaints, and struggles
which retarded the new-born impulse of awakening Christianity.
{156}
But the earnest perseverance of its patrons, the general wisdom
of the supreme Government, and the authority, growing more and
more each day, of the principles of justice and of liberty,
gradually surmounted all these obstacles. It was the Restoration
that recognized the chief Protestant societies and gave them the
sanction of the law. Under the Government of 1830 they used their
rights with more confidence and fewer hinderances. The equitable
intentions of King Louis Philippe and of his counselors upon
religious matters could not be doubtful, whatever their caution
not to cause uneasiness or wound the susceptibilities of the
Roman Catholics. The Protestants now believed it to be no longer
necessary to look to foreign support. Formed at Paris in 1833,
the Evangelical Society of France experienced a momentary impulse
of national jealousy, the result of which was some coldness in
its relations with the Continental Society of London; but as soon
as the latter perceived that its direct interference was rather
an embarrassment than a necessity to the Christian reaction in
France, it withdrew its agency without withholding its sympathy,
and handed over to the Evangelical Society of France all the
"stations" and religious charities which had up to that time been
founded by its exertions.

{157}

The awakening of Christianity among the Protestants of France had
now produced such results that it mattered little who the patrons
of the movement might be; it had assumed its true character, and
was drawing its strength from the fountain of truth. In times of
religious incredulity and of religious indifference, and even in
the transitional times which immediately ensue, it is the error
of many, and even of men who respect and support religion, to
consider it in the light of a great political institution--a
salutary system of moral police, however necessary to society,
indebted for its merits and its prerogatives rather to its
practical utility than to its intrinsic truth.
{158}
Grave error, misconceiving both the nature and the origin of
religion, and calculated to deprive it both of its empire and its
dignity! Utility men hold as of great account, but it is only
truth that commands unconditional surrender. Utility enjoins
prudence and forbearance; truth alone inspires feelings of
confidingness and devotion. A religion having no other guarantee
for its influence and its endurance than its social utility would
be very near its ruin. Men have need of, nay, they thirst for
truth in their relations with God, even more than in their
relations with one another; the spontaneous prayer, adoration,
obedience, suppose faith. It was in the very name of the verity
of the Christian religion, of that verity manifested in its
history by the word and even by the presence of God, that the
awakening of Christians was accomplished among us. The laborers
in this great work felt the faith of Christianity, and they
diffused it; had they spoken only of the social utility of
Christianity, they would never have made the conquest of a single
human soul.

{159}

At first sight one is tempted to attribute this success to energy
of faith on the part of these laborers in the cause, to the
active and devoted perseverance of their zeal. Again a mistake!
Not that human merit was without its share in the results; but
even where the faith was thus propagated, the share that that
faith itself had in the result was infinitely greater, from its
own proper and inherent virtue, than any share of men.
Incredulity and indifferentism may diffuse themselves and pretend
to dominate; they leave unsolved the problems that lie in the
depth of man's soul: they do not rid him of his perplexities, of
instinct or of reflection, as to the world's creation and man's
creation, the origin of good and evil, providence and fate, human
liberty and human responsibility, man's immortality and his
future state.
{160}
Instead of the denials and the doubts that had been thrown over
these unescapable questions, those who applied themselves fully
to rouse awakened Christianity, recalled the human soul to the
memory of positive solutions of these questions; solutions in
accordance with the traditions of their native land, in
accordance with their habits as members of families, and in
harmony with the recollections of early childhood; solutions
often contested, never refuted; always recurring in the lapse of
ages, and century after century! It was from the intrinsic and
permanent value of the doctrines which they were preaching, and
not from themselves, that the laborers in the work derived their
force and their credit.

They had another principle of force as well; a force born and
developed in the bosom of the Christian religion, and in that
alone; they had the passionate desire to save human souls. Men
are not, they never have been, struck as they ought to have been
struck with the beauty of this passion, or with its novelty in
the moral history of the world, or with the part that it has
played among Christian nations.
{161}
Before the era of Christianity, in times of Asiatic and European
antiquity, pagans and philosophers busied themselves about the
destiny of men after the close of their earthly life, and with
curiosity, too, did they sound the obscurity; but the ardent
solicitude for the eternal welfare of human souls, the
never-wearying labor to prepare human souls for eternity--to set
them even during this existence in intimate relations with God,
and to prepare them to undergo God's judgments;--we have in all
this a fact essentially Christian, one of the sublimest
characteristics of Christianity, and one of the most striking
marks of its divine origin. God constantly in relation with
mankind and with every man, God present during the actual life of
every man, and God the arbiter of his future destiny; the
immortality of each human soul, and the connection between his
actual life and his future destiny; the immense value of each
human soul in the eyes of God, and the immense import to the soul
of the future that awaits it: these are the convictions and the
affirmations all implied in the one passion alluded to, the
passion for the salvation of men's souls, which was the whole
life of our Saviour Jesus Christ, which passed by his example and
by his precepts into the life of his primitive disciples, and
which, amid the diversities of age, people, manners, opinions,
has remained the characteristic feature and the inspiring breath
of the genius of Christianity; breath which animated the men who
in our days labored, and with success, to revive Christian faith
among the Protestants of France!
{162}
Their zeal was employed in a very circumscribed sphere; beyond it
their names were unknown, and unknown they have remained. What
spectators, what readers, what public knew at that time, or know
even at this moment, what manner of men they were or what their
deeds--those men who called themselves Neff, Bost, Pyt, Gonthier,
Audebez, Cook, Wilks, Haldane?
{163}
But who, I would ask, in the time of Tacitus and of Pliny, knew
what manner of men they were, and what the deeds of Peter, Paul,
John, Matthew, Philip--the unknown disciples of the Master,
unknown himself, who had overcome the world? Notoriety is not
essential to influence; and in the sphere of the soul, as in the
order of nature, fountains are not the less abundant because
their springs are hidden in obscurity. The Christian missionaries
of our time did not trouble themselves to lessen that obscurity.
To literary celebrity they had no pretension, nor did they seek
the triumph of any political idea, of any specific system of
ecclesiastical organization, of any favorite plan in which their
personal vanity was interested: the salvation of human souls was
their only passion, and their only object. They looked upon
themselves as humble servants commissioned to remind men of
promises which they had forgotten--of promises of salvation by
faith in Jesus. "The stir of the reaction," one of themselves has
said, "bore impressed upon it the character of youth, or even of
childhood.
{164}
The humblest pastor on his circuit became a missionary; his
transit was regarded almost like that of a meteor. On the instant
an assembly was convoked, it numbered twenty, thirty, fifty, a
hundred, two hundred persons, collected to listen joyfully, as if
it were a great novelty or miracle, to that Gospel which we know
by heart;--alas! which we know by heart far more than we have it
in the heart!" [Footnote 24]

    [Footnote 24: Mémoires pouvant servir à l'histoire du réveil
    religieux des églises protestantes de la Suisse et de la
    France, par A. Bost, (1854,) t. 1, p. 240.]

Who could mistake, on hearing such sentiments and such language,
the really Christian character of the reaction?

Never-ending weakness of man's nature, and inevitable
imperfection of man's work, even when man is walking in the ways
of God! In the midst of awakening Christianity, and of this
fervent return to the faith of the Gospel, reappeared some of the
ancient pretensions of theology, and among others the pretension
to penetrate the decrees of God and to define the terms of man's
salvation.

{165}

In February, 1818, the pious and orthodox "Doyen" of the
Protestant Faculty of Montauban, M. Daniel Encontre, rendering an
account of the work of Mr. Robert Haldane, (Emmanuel, ou vues
Scripturaires sur Jésus-Christ,) which had just appeared,
hastened, after having justly commended it, to add: "The
concluding pages of the 'Emmanuel' express sentiments which
Evangelical Christians are far from sharing. The author lays down
the principle, that all men who do not believe in the perfect
equality of the _Son_ and of the _Father_, are enemies
alike of both _Father_ and _Son_; that they deny, and
blaspheme against both, and cannot avoid eternal death. He
regards the forbearance we show to them as infinitely criminal,
and seems even inclined to condemn all who have not the courage
to condemn them. As for me, I venture to believe that it is the
duty of a Christian to work out his own salvation without
allowing himself to pronounce upon the salvation of others.
{166}
_Judge not, that ye be not judged_, says He whom we all
acknowledge as our Master; and St. Paul adds, '_Who art
thou_ that condemnest another man's servant?' I seize this
opportunity to declare to all men desirous to hear it, that I
believe firmly in the divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ, and that
I adopt in every respect the Nicæan Creed. I dare to affirm
besides, that these sentiments are actually those of all the
members of our Faculty, as they have always been those of our
Churches. It seems to me that persons who know not Jesus Christ
as 'God above all things, blessed eternally,' are much to be
pitied, and want the greatest of all consolations. This error
appears the more dangerous, because it is generally followed by
other errors; for the truths which are the objects of faith are
so connected and riveted together, that it is impossible to
discard one without shaking or overturning all the others.
{167}
These truths form together a majestic edifice, to which all its
parts are absolutely necessary, and which falls in ruins if a
breach be made anywhere; and particularly, if the first stone
removed be the keystone of the corner. But what would become of
us all, if the erring, even when they err in good faith, had no
hope of access to the throne of grace? Men who, as I do, feel how
much they need God's mercy, and man's indulgence, feel little
disposition to be severe toward others." [Footnote 25]

    [Footnote 25: Archives du Christianisme aux XIX e siècle, t.
    1, pp. 63-66.]

In holding this language, M. Encontre was not merely performing,
on his own account, an act of humility and of Christian charity;
he was touching upon one of the supreme questions which, in our
days, are occasioning a crisis in Christendom; and he was
indicating its true and its sole solution. Like all passions,
(the best are not exempt,) the passion for the salvation of man's
soul is full of enthusiasm and fall of blindness; it believes too
readily in the possibility of attaining the object; it is too
unscrupulous and undiscriminating in the means.
{168}
Hence sprung religious tyranny and theological intolerance: the
powerful thought they could compel the human soul to work out its
own salvation; the learned believed they could define the
conditions of that salvation. Mistakes, both of them, profoundly
antichristian! Just as no power of man has the right to strip any
single soul, created by God free and responsible, of its liberty
of conscience; so, equally, no science of man can define the laws
and the facts that shall regulate the future state of the soul.
Liberty is, on this earth, the principle of the moral life of
man; man's state beyond this earth is a question between him and
his Maker, and to be determined by the use which man may have
here made of his liberty. To respect God's gift of liberty to
man, and the mystery of God's decrees respecting man's salvation,
is in reality the law of Christians; and it is only on this
double condition that there really is either any awakening or any
progress of Christians.

{169}

Nothing does more honor to the memory of M. Daniel Encontre than
to have been one of the first to understand and to fulfill this
double duty. Firmly attached to those fundamental articles of
belief which are Christianity itself, he was strange to every
narrowness or exaggeration of doctrine, to every presumptuousness
of opinion, and to every theological intolerance; his piety was
comprehensive, without there being any vagueness in his faith;
his Christianity was that of a Liberal; nor did his attainments
as a mathematician indispose him to remain a Christian.

Scarcely was M. Encontre dead, when two new men, both, like him,
eminent as pastors and professors--M. Alexandre Vinet and M.
Adolphe Monod--appeared on the religious arena, and gave more
éclat to the Christian reaction by using similar means, and by
impelling the Protestant Church of France in the same direction.

{170}

Although he was born and continually lived and wrote in
Switzerland, M. Alexandre Vinet was of French extraction; he
belongs to France as much as to Switzerland, for he knew, and
understood, and loved France as much as he did Switzerland. He
served, too, the cause of religious liberty, and the Christian
reaction, in France not less than in Switzerland. A delicate
child, son of a poor and an austere school-master, who destined
him to the obscure life of a village clergyman, he manifested
from the commencement of his laborious career an ardent taste for
literature and for study, which promised him a rich reward in the
intellectual enjoyment of the chef-d'oeuvres of ancient and
modern literature. He was found upon one occasion in his little
chamber in a fit of enthusiasm and affected to tears by a perusal
of the "Cid." At the age of twenty he became Professor of French
Literature at Bâle; and there he devoted himself to the service
of every candidate upon the Rhine or upon the Swiss Alps who
required to be taught to comprehend and admire the great writers
of France of whatever age, and in whatever department of
literature.
{171}
Philosophers and orators, prose-writers and poets, Christians or
Freethinkers, Catholics or Protestants, Conservatives or
Reformers, Classicists or Romanticists--all the men who have
constituted the intellectual and literary glory of France,
obtained in this fervent Methodist of the Valdenses an admirer as
warm as he was intelligent and impartial. The prevailing
characteristic of M. Vinet's literary essays and criticisms is
their geniality; and wherever he encounters any spark or trace of
the true or the beautiful, under whatever banner they appear, and
however they may be mingled with opinions otherwise shocking to
his feelings, he is at once attracted and moved, and he admires
and praises with enthusiasm. His was a mind of comprehensive
sympathies, open to every impression, keen to appreciate, always
ready to enjoy everything that deserved to give pleasure, even
although it might be only momentarily and in passing.

{172}

This passionate admirer of the beautiful, this critic, so
liberal-minded and so impartial, was a sound and uncompromising
moralist, as well as a pious and firm Christian. The predominant
idea of all his literary judgments is moral; and this determines
the tone of his criticism, and the impression which it leaves
behind it, without ever rendering it either harsh, or illiberal,
or narrow-minded. In the sphere of positive belief, without
importing into controversies between believer and believer any
microscopic criticism of detail, M. Vinet has never, upon the
divine origin and the fundamental dogmas of Christianity, had the
least hesitation, never made the smallest concession; he grapples
directly with the most specious and the most popular objections
of his adversaries, and combats them with a conviction the
expression of which becomes more and more eloquent the clearer
and the more complete its manifestation. "To attempt to
distinguish morality from dogma," he says, "is to attempt to
distinguish a river from its source.
{173}
The Christian dogma is at its outset a morality, although a
Christian one. Just as God, in the creed of Christianity, reveals
himself under a form that nature did not announce, Christian
morality, in its turn, invests itself with a character that
nature would never have impressed upon it. Man finding his own
inability to make himself a religion, God came to aid him in his
weakness. It is now rather more than eighteen centuries since, in
an obscure corner of the world, there appeared a man. I do not
say that a long series of prophets had announced the coming of
that man; that a long series of miracles had marked with the seal
of God the nation where he was to be born, and even the prophecy
which foretold him; that, in a word, an imposing mass of evidence
surrounds and authenticates him. I say merely that that man
preached a religion. That religion is not natural religion; the
dogmas of the existence of God and of the soul's immortality are
everywhere taken for granted in his discourses--never taught,
never proved.
{174}
Neither are the ideas which he teaches deduced logically from the
primitive axioms of reason; that which he teaches, that which
forms the substance of his doctrine, embraces subjects which
confound the reason, and to which the reason has neither way nor
access; he preaches a God on earth, a God man, a God poor, a God
crucified; he preaches wrath involving the innocent, mercy
exempting the guilty from all condemnation, God the victim of
man, and man forming one person with God; he preaches a new
birth, without which man can never be saved; he preaches the
sovereignty of God's grace, and the plenitude of the liberty of
man. I do not in any way qualify his teaching; I give them to you
as they are, and without disguise; I seek not to justify them.
You may, if you please, feel surprise, you may take offense;
scruple not to do so. But when you have to your heart's content
wondered at their strangeness, I on my side will propose to you
another subject for your wonder.
{175}
These strange dogmas conquered the world. In their very infancy
they invaded learned Athens, rich Corinth, haughty Rome. They
gathered together 'Confessors' from workshops, from prisons, from
schools, from the courts of justice, and from thrones. Conquerors
of civilization, they triumphed over barbarism; they made to pass
under the same yoke the degraded Roman, the savage Sicambrian.
The forms of society have changed; society has been dissolved and
moulded afresh. They alone have endured in their integrity. No
other doctrine, whether of philosophy or of religion, lasted:
each had its time; each time its idea; and, as a celebrated
writer has said, the religious sentiment, abandoned to itself,
chose for itself moulds in accordance with the time, which it
broke when the time was no longer there. But the dogma of the
Cross persisted in recurring.
{176}
Had it only taken possession of a certain class of persons it
would have been much, it would perhaps have been even
inexplicable; but you find followers of the Cross in the camp and
in civil life, among the rich and among the poor, among the bold
and among the timid, among the learned and among the ignorant.
This dogma is good for all, everywhere, always; it never grows
old. The religion of the Cross appears nowhere in arrear of
civilization; on the contrary, far as civilization may progress,
it ever finds Christianity in advance. Suppose not that a
complaisant Christianity will ever cancel any article or expunge
any idea to accommodate itself to the age: no, it derives its
strength from its inflexibility, and needs not make any surrender
to be in harmony with what is beautiful, legitimate, true; for it
is in itself the type of them all. Still it is not a religion
which flatters man; and the worldly, by keeping aloof, show
plainly enough that Christianity is a strange doctrine. Those who
dare not reject it strive to render it palatable. They strip it
of what offends them--of its myths, as they are pleased to style
them; they almost make out of Christ's doctrine a
_rationalism_.
{177}
But, singular to say, once a rationalism it has no longer any
force; in this respect resembling one of the most marvelous
creatures in the animate world, to which it is death to lose its
sting. The _strange_ dogmas disappear, but with them all
zeal, fervor, sanctity, charity, disappear also; the salt of the
earth has lost its savor, and we know not by what means to
restore it. But, on the other hand, do you learn that somewhere
or other there is an awakening of Christians, that Christianity
is resuscitating, that faith shows signs of life, that zeal
abounds? Ask not in what soil these precious plants are
springing; you may pronounce yourself: it is in the rude and
rugged soil of orthodoxy, in the shade of the mysteries which
confound human reason, and of which human reason would like so
much to get rid, ... Some passages in the fair work of M.
Saint-Marc Girardin upon dramatic literature might, at least I
fear so, lead to the conclusion that Christianity is, in its
essence, only the result of a natural progress of man's mind, a
gradual development of ancient wisdom.
{178}
Such, for instance, is the passage where the author tells us that
the Greeks were advancing step by step toward Christian
spiritualism. We regret that M. Saint-Marc Girardin did not say
in what sense he understood this, and within what limits. We hope
that he will not see in us the champion of a captious orthodoxy,
if we say that nothing so much weakens the authority of
Christianity, that nothing prejudices in men's minds its cause
more, than to treat it as a link in the chain, which chain in
reality it severed. That events, that is, Providence, did
aforehand hollow a bed in the regions of the west for this divine
river, what believer, however rigid, would ever entertain any
scruple in admitting? But still it is essential that we should
not misapprehend the source whence that river welled forth.
{179}
No natural development of events, either among the Jews or among
the Greeks, can account for the existence of Christianity.
Whatever the progress made by the ancients, there never was a
time when there existed not an infinity between their ideas, and
the ideas of Christianity; and infinity alone can fill up the
gulf between. There is an end of Christianity if men agree in
thinking the contrary--if they succeed in causing the
Supernatural to assume a place in one of the compartments of the
Philosophy of History. As far as we are concerned, we would
prefer for the Christian religion the most outrageous denial, to
an admiration circumscribed within such limits. Christ's faith is
nothing if not, like Melchisedek without earthly parent here
below, and without genealogy." [Footnote 26]

    [Footnote 26: Essai sur la manifestation des convictions
    religieuses, p. 85. Premiers discours, pp. 14, 50, 53.
    Littérature Française, vol. iii, p. 623.]

{180}

Whoever indicated with greater distinctness the keystone in the
edifice of Christianity, or ever clung to it more closely? M.
Vinet occupied himself in turn with freedom of conscience and of
man's thought, with the faith of Christ, and with the literature
of France. These three subjects became the passions of his life,
stirring his soul, though at unequal depths. But of these three
only one, the passion for literature, was a source to him of
tranquil and unmitigated enjoyment. In his advocacy of man's
liberty and of Christianity, M. Vinet had to pass not only
through the ordeal of intellectual labors and combats, but
through the solicitudes and sorrows of life. The defender of the
liberty of forms of worship, crowned as such by the "Societé
Français de la Morale Chrétienne," lived to see this liberty
attacked in his native Switzerland, at once by popular fury and
by civil authority. The fervent promoter of the Christian
reaction, beheld one hundred and sixty evangelical pastors of the
Canton of the Vaud, his companions in this pious work, forced to
quit their "Chairs" in order to preserve their faith.
{181}
And it was in sickness, and at the approach of death, that M.
Vinet had to undergo all this. Neither his faith nor the
tranquillity of his soul was disturbed. He continued, to his last
hour, to be the active champion of liberty, the faithful servant
of Christ, the eloquent admirer and commentator upon French
literature, which he followed in all its phases, whether calm or
stormy, whether pure or defiled. "After all," so he wrote in
1845, "I am not one of those who despair; God, without any
violence to our freedom of action, rather by that freedom itself,
conducts us to the unknown shores. The ports at which we land do
not all of them afford secure mooring; we know something of that
even in this little country. Our progress will be slow, and amid
storms; but the circle of universal truth will be completed, and
man's sense of moral right and wrong will be improved, at the
same time that man's science will be enriched.
{182}
I should feel horror if I thought that _Some One_ is not at
the center of all this movement, holding all its elements in his
hand; _Some One_ to whom, whether they know him or do not
know him, the aspirations of all creatures ascend in their
sorrow, and whom they instinctively salute with the sweet
reassuring name of 'Father.'" [Footnote 27]

    [Footnote 27: Notice sur M. Alexandra Vinet, par M. E.
    Souvestre, published in the Magazin Pittoresque de 1848, p.
    81.

    The principal works of M. Alexandre Vinet are:

    1. Traité et Polémique sur la liberté des cultes. 1826, 1852.

    2. Discours sur quelques sujets religieux. 1831, 1853.

    3. Essais de philosophic et de morale religieuse. 1837.

    4. Essai sur la manifestation des convictions religieuses, et
    sur la séparation de l'Église et de État. 1842, 1858.

    5. Études et méditations évangéliques. 1847, 1849, 1851.

    6. Études sur Pascal. 1848, 1856.

    7. Chrestomathie Française, Histoire de la littérature
    Française au XVIII siècle, et Études sur la littérature
    Française au XIX siècle. 1829, 1849, 1853, etc.

    He wrote, besides, numerous short pieces, and articles in
    reviews and journals, suggested by topics of the day.]

Upon a single point, the relations of Church and State, his usual
comprehensiveness of view and independence of thought appeared to
abandon M. Vinet.
{183}
Justly struck and afflicted by his own experience of the
inconveniences of a strict bond between Church and State,
disgusted at the servility and falsity which frequently are,
sometimes on the part of the State, sometimes on the part of the
Church, its results, he concluded that in all cases all alliance
between the two conditions of society is radically vicious; and
he declared their entire separation a general and absolute
principle, the sole reasonable and just system, the sole
efficacious guarantee of truth and of liberty in spirituals or
temporals. He thus ignored, it appears to me, the natural causes
which produce, and the human motives which sanction, a certain
alliance between societies civil and ecclesiastical; he ignored
also the inestimable advantages which, at certain times and in
certain circumstances, each may derive, and has actually derived,
from that alliance. In the United States of America, the entire
separation of the State and of the different Churches was
necessary and salutary, for it was the spontaneous consequence of
the condition of men's minds, and of the position of society.
{184}
In England, in spite of the acts of injustice, and the ills
engendered by the intimate union of the state with a Church
legally constituted and having exclusive privileges, the
coexistence of the Church of England with the freedom, more and
more every day complete and recognized, of the Churches of the
Dissenters, was for the Christian religion a potent principle of
life, of force, and of durability.

And if we go back to the ancient history of Europe, who can doubt
that at the fall of the Roman Empire, if the State and the Church
had not, although distinct institutions, been allied, the
development of Christianity would have been far less energetic,
and its conquest of its barbarous conquerors far more
problematical? This is, I repeat, a question not of principle,
but of time, of place, of circumstance, and of condition of
society. A complete separation of Church and State may be good
and practicable; it is neither the only good system, nor is it
always a practicable system.

{185}

An alliance of the two upon certain fixed terms has its
inconveniences and its perils, but its effects may be also very
salutary; it may be essential, and does not of necessity exclude
religious sincerity or religious liberty. M. Vinet, in discussing
the subject, lost sight of the general history of human
societies, and attached too much importance to the specious and
transient facts which he had before his eyes.

If M. Vinet were now living, he might in his own country behold
two fair examples of the good results of the mixed systems which
he so absolutely condemned. In the Cantons of the Vaud and of
Geneva, after the violent and painful contests to which I have
above referred, a dissenting Independent Church was established
by the side of a Church recognized and supported by the State. In
neither canton was this establishment a temporary expedient, the
fruit of a momentary ardor; the Independent Church has
consolidated and developed itself; it endures and prospers. Like
the Establishment, it has its pastors, its churches, its
solemnities, its schools for general and for superior
instruction.
{186}
I have before me facts and figures which prove its vitality and
its progress. And not only did the Established Church finally
acquiesce in the peaceable existence of the independent Church,
it also profited by it, and its salutary influence has been
frankly acknowledged by its worthiest pastors. In Switzerland, as
in England, Scotland, and Holland, and in our days more easily
and more promptly than in ancient times, the existence on the one
side of a national Church recognized by the State, has given to
the different forms of Christian belief a stability and a dignity
which have secured its permanent effects upon succeeding
generations; the existence, on the other side, of independent
Churches, and the religious emulation between the two
establishments, have turned in both to the profit of faith and of
piety.

{187}

M. Adolphe Monod seemed, even more than M. Vinet, to promise by
natural bent of his character, and by the incidents of his life,
to become the champion of an entire separation of Church and
State. At the very commencement of his career, he suffered from a
Government based upon their connection. Pastor at Lyons, in 1831,
of the established Protestant Church, he was dismissed from these
functions by the Consistory of that city, as too exacting in his
orthodoxy, and as troubling by his exigencies the peace of his
Church. He then became the founder and pastor of a small
dissenting and independent Church at Lyons. The energy with which
he expressed his convictions, and the excellence of his
preaching, rapidly spread, and increased his renown for piety.
Numerous Protestants manifested the desire to see him once more
within the pale of the national Church. He made no objection; a
Chair becoming vacant in the Faculty of Montauban, M. Adolphe
Monod was nominated, and from 1836 to 1847 he both lectured and
preached at Montauban with a commanding ability that made itself
felt, not only among the majority of the students, but propagated
its influences to a distance among the principal centers of
French Protestantism.
{188}
In 1847 he was summoned to Paris as the suffragan of another
pastor, M. Juillerat. Nor did he scruple to accept this secondary
and precarious situation. He had full confidence in the divine
vocation, and was firmly resolved to proceed to any place where
the faith of Christ might demand his services. He had, in the
evangelical chair, even more success at Paris than at Lyons and
Montauban. When, after the Revolution of 1848, a general assembly
of the Reformed Churches of France assembled for the purposes of
considering their institutions and discussing points of common
interest, a grave question was raised, and became the subject of
warm and lengthened debate: Should French Protestants proclaim
their ancient Confession of Faith, that of Rochelle, or should
they proclaim a confession of new articles; or lastly, should
they remain passive and do nothing? some, and particularly their
pastor, M. Frederic Monod, elder brother of M. Adolphe Monod,
announced their determination to retire from the assembly and
from the established Church, unless they adopted a Confession of
Faith in accordance with the traditional principles of the
Reformation.
{189}
The inertness of the hesitating and timid assembly was equivalent
to a refusal, and they did in effect retire. To the great
surprise and great regret of his adversaries, M. Adolphe Monod,
although favorable to the principles of the Confession of Faith,
did not follow the example by retiring; he even succeeded his
brother as titular pastor in the Church of Paris, and published
to the world the motives of his conduct. [Footnote 28]

    [Footnote 28: In his work entitled, Pourquoi je demeure dans
    l'Église établie.]

{190}

His motives were good, such as a man of elevated character and
energetic purpose might conceive and might avow. In spite of
their importance, the questions which concern the organization of
the Church and its eternal relations were, in the eyes of M.
Adolphe Monod, only secondary considerations, subject in a
certain measure to time and to circumstance. For him the question
of faith was supreme; and he occupied himself infinitely more
with the spiritual state of souls than with ecclesiastical
government. To the serious thinker the Christian faith is quite
different from any conception or conviction of the understanding;
it is a general condition of the whole man; it is the very life
of the soul; not merely its actual life, but the source and the
guarantee of its future life. The faith in Christ Jesus, the
Redeemer, the Saviour, makes the life of a Christian; and the
life of a Christian is a preparation for an eternal salvation.
With this faith penetrating to his very marrow, and with the
intimate persuasion of its consequences, the duty of giving a
voice to that faith, and of diffusing it, was the dominant idea,
the permanent passion, of M. Adolphe Monod.
{191}
He had not himself been always firmly settled in his religious
convictions; he had been a prey to great moral perplexities, and
to attacks of profound melancholy. When he had escaped from
these--or rather, to use his own words, "when God had become
really the master of his heart"--he had no other thought but that
of bringing other souls to the same state, and of rousing them to
a faith in Christ, with a view to their eternal salvation. The
position which he regarded as of all the most appropriate for
himself, was one in which he could most profitably forward this
work. When in 1848 the question was thus put to him, and when he
had been convinced both by his past observation of the Protestant
Church of France during the last twenty years, and by his own
experience of it, that the established Church offered to him in
his Christian purpose the vastest field of exertion, and the best
chance of success, he did not hesitate to remain in it. "I find
in the situation," he said, "grave disorders, of which it is my
duty to seek unceasingly the reform; but that situation has also
its hopeful side.
{192}
A long development of my ideas would be superfluous; let us
confine ourselves to some striking facts. Try and reckon how many
orthodox pastors our Church possessed when the reaction began in
1819, and then make a similar calculation for 1849. I do not mean
to fix the precise numbers; but is it too much to say, that in
the course of a single generation the number of orthodox pastors
is ten, fifteen, twenty times perhaps as great? This applies to
the clergy, of whom everywhere the immense influence is felt.
Among their congregations it is less easy to follows things; but
the attentive observer does not fail to mark similar indications.
Behold our religious societies: are not the most popular among
them those which hoisted most manfully the colors of orthodoxy?
And if some are in a languishing condition, is it not because
they offered in this respect fewest guarantees? Evidently the
first condition of existence for our religious institutions of
charity is sound doctrine.
{193}
My readers, permit me to question you still more closely. Throw
your eyes upon the eight or ten families best known to you,
beginning with your own, and compare what they are now with what
they were in 1819; contrast their occupations, tastes,
sacrifices, and intercourse, the modes of education, the books
read, friendships formed, and so on; and then declare, thankless
ones, if God has allowed you to be without encouragement."
[Footnote 29]

    [Footnote 29: Pourquoi je demeure dans l'Église établie, par
    M. Adolphe Monod, pp. 25-32. Paris, 1849.]

M. Adolphe Monod had good reason to draw attention to this
general progress of Christianity; but there was another progress
also deserving notice, that which he had himself made, and which
he was making more and more every day, in the attainment of the
true and distinguishing character of a Christian.

{194}

At the commencement of his career as a minister of the Gospel, in
his different controversies, and especially in his controversy
with the Consistory of Lyons, he had shown rudeness, impatience,
and want of foresight; he had been too precipitate in enforcing
his faith by arguments, and too much disposed to undervalue the
obstacles in its way. Thanks to his genuine sincerity and the
natural elevation of his character, time, experience, and success
had given at once breadth and suppleness to his thought. Faith
had generated modesty, and hope patience. Contrary to the
ordinary bias of men, his liberalism had increased in the same
measure as his strength. As an act of duty he made in 1848 an
avowal of the state of his mind in this respect. "The age," he
said, "reproaches us with '_exclusisme_,' (exclusiveness,) a
new word expressly invented to denote its favorite charge; for
false ideas the age has only the resource of a barbarous
phraseology. This '_exclusisme_' is the sole thing which the
age cannot tolerate in matters of doctrine: it is prepared, it
says to itself, to take everything within its pale except the
'exclusives.'
{195}
Thus they demand from us only one change in the profession of our
faith; they call upon us to substitute for our usual prefatory
formula, 'This is the truth,' the words, 'This is my opinion.'
And if they, in claiming such qualification of language, limited
their demand to things which, in spite of any relative
importance, do not constitute the substance of the faith and of
the life of a Christian, we should do what they require; perhaps
I should rather say, we do it already, as brother should do to
brother, and in the interest of truth itself. It is one of the
distinctive features of the awakening of Christians in our epoch,
that charitably sparing in the absolute dogmatism of which the
sixteenth century was prodigal, they make dogmas of only a small
number of fundamental doctrines. And even of these they strive to
contract the circle, until having reached the vital forces, the
very heart, so to say, of truth, they sum it up in one single
name, Jesus Christ, and in one single word, grace.
{196}
Whoever is of that faith, whatever name he bears elsewhere, and
whatever place he occupies in the Universal Church--Lutheran,
Anglican, Methodist, Moravian, Baptist, nay, Roman Catholic, or
Greek Catholic, we receive that man as a brother in Christ Jesus;
and not we only, but the whole contemporary Evangelical Church,
with certain exceptions becoming every day rarer, and arising
from a narrow or sectarian pietism. Hence the 'Evangelical
Alliance,' formed in our own time of more than twenty Protestant
denominations, the prelude only to another evangelical alliance
which will exclude none who rely upon the sole merits of Jesus
Christ, the Saviour and Lord of all.

"Our '_exclusisme_,' besides, has not for its objects
individuals but doctrines. Absolute affirmation is legitimate
when the object is to define the faith, which is the promise of
salvation, for God has clearly revealed it in his word; but when
the object is to mark the individuals who possess that saving
faith, similar affirmation could not be used without temerity;
for God has nowhere revealed to us either the internal state of
any man, or the final lot reserved for him.
{197}
_We_ exclude no man, _we_ judge no man, alive or dead;
the judgment of the quick and of the dead belongs to God alone.
Doubtless we estimate, according to our ability, the spiritual
condition of a man by his works, as we do a tree by its fruits;
Jesus himself invites us to do so. Doubtless, when we see a man
living and dying in the works of the faith, we hope for him, and
our hope may grow even to a firm assurance; and when, on the
contrary, we see a man living and dying in the works of
incredulity, we have a feeling of anxiety for him--a feeling as
painful as it is mysterious. But, after all, neither in the first
case nor in the second, and still less in the second than the
first, are we authorized to pronounce any personal judgment; and
but for the paradoxical turn of the expression, I would willingly
adopt the language of the devout Bunyan: Three things would
astonish me in heaven; first, not to see there certain persons
whom I expect to see there; secondly, to see there those I do not
expect to see there; and thirdly, which would surprise me most,
to see myself there.'" [Footnote 30]

    [Footnote 30: Sermon sur l'Exclusisme, ou l'unité de la foi,
    in the Recueil des Sermons de M. Adolphe Monod. 3me série, t.
    ii, pp. 386-390. Paris, 1860. The sermons of M. Adolphe Monod
    have been collected and published in four vols. 8vo. Paris,
    1856-1860. He also wrote several small works, among others:

    1. Lucile, ou la lecture de la Bible. 1841.

    2. La Destitution d'Adolphe Monod, récit inédit, rédigé par
    luimême. 1864.

    3. Récit des conférences qui ont eu lieu en 1834, entre
    quelques Catholiques Remains et M. Adolphe Monod. Paris,
    1860.

    4. Les adieux d'Adolphe Monod à ses amis et à l'église.
    Paris, 1856.]

{198}

A piety so profound, and at the same time so modest and so large,
expressed with an eloquence which combined an impassioned
earnestness of language with an impassioned earnestness of
conviction, could not fail to exercise great influence. As a
preacher, M. Adolphe Monod was powerful.
{199}
He had acquired, not by careful and cold observation, but by an
assiduous and conscientious study of the Gospels and of himself,
a remarkable knowledge of human nature, of its strength and of
its weakness, of its deficiencies and of its aspirations. He laid
siege, so to speak, to the souls of men, and he pressed the siege
ardently and with skill; he assailed all their gates, and pursued
them to their innermost defenses, keeping constantly displayed
the banner of Christ, and inspiring them with the perfect
confidence that he was urging them to take _their_ stand,
too, beneath it, not from any human motive, or any desire of
glory to himself, but from a serious desire for their souls'
welfare, and from it alone. Thus did he gain over to his Divine
Master the hearts disposed to receive him, strongly shake the
purpose of those not confirmed in their rebellion, and leave
astonished and intimidated those whom he did not bring over. As
pastor also his influence was extraordinary; his life was the
reflection and the commentary upon his preaching.
{200}
He applied first to his own case the precepts of his faith, and
the conclusions therefrom logically deducible. As he said nothing
that he did not think, so he thought nothing that he did not
practice; and without being readily impressionable, like that of
M. Vinet, his zeal was expansive, and his piety gave him no rest
from the task of diffusing by example and precept the faith and
the practice of Christianity. Attacked by a painful and incurable
illness, which at last condemned him to immobility, he did not
suffer it to render him inactive and useless. Every Sunday during
the last six months of his life, his family, some pastors his
colleagues, and as many attached friends as his chamber could
receive, gathered around his bed, and his zeal surmounted his
pain. He addressed to them, to use his very words, "sometimes the
regret of a dying man, sometimes the results of his own
experiences of faith and of life." The devout assemblage was
again convoked, at his expressed wish, for the 6th April, 1856.
{201}
But that day, before the hour fixed for the assembly had arrived,
God took to him his servant, granting the wish expressed in his
own often repeated prayer, "Let my life only terminate with my
ministry, and my ministry only with my life." [Footnote 31]

    [Footnote 31: These are the words inserted in a publication
    bearing the title "Les adieux d'Adolphe Monod à sa famille et
    a l'église," in which the last exhortations and conversations
    of this dying Christian have been piously collected. P. viii.
    Paris, 1856.]

Eighteen months before the decease of M. Adolphe Monod, an
eminent pastor of the Lutheran Church of Paris, his friend and
fellow-laborer in the work of Christianity, M. Edouard Verny,
died suddenly in the Evangelical Chair at Strasbourg, while
preaching upon the words addressed by the Apostles to the
Christians of Antioch, "It seemed good to the Holy Ghost, and to
us, to lay upon you no greater burden than these _necessary_
things," words not less liberal than pious, and faithfully
expressing the sentiments of the Christian orator, who died while
commenting upon them.
{202}
The mind of M. Verny was naturally liberal and independent; his
intellectual career had commenced with philosophical studies, and
he had retained a strong bias in favor of the progress of
thought. This did not, however, prevent him from promptly and
calmly appreciating the opinions which he did not share. Without
possessing either the impassioned style or the power of M.
Adolphe Monod, he was not less devoted to the cause of
Christianity; and he convinced those by the charms of his manner,
into whose minds M. Monod entered by force and as a conqueror.
[Footnote 32]

    [Footnote 32: Although M. Verny had long preached, and had
    often written in religious reviews and journals, and
    particularly in the "Semeur," very few monuments remain of
    his ideas and of his talents. The principal are:

    1. A sermon "Upon the Unity of the Church," preached in the
    church of Bolbec in 1854.

    2. Two sermons, one "Upon the Prayer of the Canaanite Woman;"
    the other "Upon Repentance;" preached at Paris in 1843 and
    1846.

    3. The sermon "Sur l'Ouverture solennelle de la session du
    Consistoire supérieur de l'Église de la Confession
    d'Augsbourg," preached at Strasbourg on the 19th of October,
    1854: while preaching which M. Verny died in the pulpit.

    4. An "Essai sur les droits de la science," inserted in the
    "Revue de Théologie et de Philosophie Chrétienne," published
    at Strasbourg by M. Colani. Vol. ix, pp. 208-248. 1854. This
    essay was to have been followed by an "Essai sur les devoirs
    de la foi," of which the sudden death of M. Verny prevented
    the completion.]

{203}

Although the Protestant Church of France thereby sustained an
immense loss, it had a striking and salutary spectacle also
presented to it by the end of these two servants of Christ, the
one dying suddenly, in the plenitude of his strength, at the very
moment when from his pulpit he was maintaining with distinguished
ability the doctrines of his Master; the other, from his bed,
gathering with pain what of breath remained to him in this world,
to pour once more a flood of faith into the souls of his
auditors.

Such lives, such deaths, could not remain sterile of result;
under their influence the Christian faith was relumed; it again
spread itself among the Protestants of France. Nor was this that
arid cold faith which men accept to acquit their consciences, and
to rid themselves of a trouble and a scruple; nor that vague and
dreamy faith which feasts rather upon its own emotions, than
nourishes itself with the truths which are the voice of God.
{204}
A Christian's faith is neither an act of prudent submission nor a
paroxysm of mystic fervor. Conviction and sentiment, the firm
adhesion of the mind, and the filial love of the heart, meet in
that faith in essential and intimate union. It is the light
coming from on high, and bringing down with it the genial
principles of vital warmth and fecundity; out of which, like
salubrious waters from a pure source, flow freely and in
abundance the works of human charity. I have lying before me a
list of the different charities to which Christianity has in our
own days since the reaction given birth in the Protestant Church
of France. [Footnote 33]

    [Footnote 33: Exposé des oeuvres de la charité protestante en
    France, par H. de Triqueti, membre du conseil presbytéral et
    du diaconat de l'Église réformée de Paris. 18mo. 1863.]

{205}

I see there manifold associations, enterprises supposing a long
duration of existence, unremitting efforts for the moral
development of men; for the bodily solace of their earthly
condition; for the propagation and the defense of freedom of
opinion in religious matters; for the support and diffusion of
the faith itself: all these objects, at once so various and so
analogous, are being laboriously worked out both by the
independent Protestant Churches, and by the Protestant Church
established from the State. M. Edmond de Pressensé and M. Eugène
Bersier devote their talents and their zeal to the same forms of
Christian belief as were advocated by M. Alexandre Vinet and M.
Adolphe Monod. In spite of the free divergence of sentiment and
the diversity of ecclesiastical government in French
Protestantism, we may observe in its bosom a progress of
Christian Faith, a progress in works of Christian Charity, a
progress in Christian Science, and a progress in Christian
Influence.
{206}
I use the same terms employed by me in speaking of the
contemporary Catholic Church of Rome, because I find before me
similar facts. These facts do not announce the reconciliation of
the two Churches--profound differences of opinion continue to
separate them; but these facts are, in both Churches, signs of
the Awakening of Christianity.

---------------------------------------

    III. Awakening Of Christianity In France.


But the world has not changed since God at its creation delivered
it up to the disputes of mankind; nor have the diversity and
conflict of ideas and of passions ever ceased to be the condition
of humanity. By the side of the movement of Christianity to which
I refer, a movement in the contrary direction is manifesting
itself, and is pursuing its course. Christianity at its Awakening
is challenged to ruder combats. Philosophy refuses to its
fundamental dogmas the marks and the rights of rational truth.
{207}
An erudite criticism contests its historical evidence. The
natural sciences proclaim that they do not require its aid to
account for man and for the world. It is affirmed as a principle,
and maintained in learned societies, that morality is entirely
independent of religion. Man in his aspirations for liberty, that
generous passion of the age, retains a profound resentment for
the chains and the sufferings which, under pretext of
Christianity, human conscience and human thought have so long
been made to endure. The influence of these bitter reminiscences
is manifesting itself in the different Christian Churches under
various forms, and with different effects. Many liberals so dread
the prospect of the Church of Rome obtaining power over civil
society that they hardly accord to this Church the rights of
common liberty; or, if they do so at all, they do it reluctantly
and little by little.

{208}

Among the Protestants, some push the pretensions of liberty so
far as to insist that in religious society a community of faith
should count for nothing; that a man should be entitled to remain
a member of a Church, and even to remain its minister, although
he profess respecting the essential facts and dogmas of the
Church the most contradictory opinions, and opinions the
strangest to its traditions and its texts. With respect to Roman
Catholics, the dominant question is that of liberty. Are the
liberties of civil society to be accorded to the Church? Are
those of the Church to be allowed to remain intact in the bosom
of the State? In Protestantism, on the other hand, the complete
liberty of religion in the midst of civil society, the right of
every individual to avow his belief, and to solemnize his own
forms of worship--these are all privileges already acquired, and
contested as little by any orthodox believer as by any
freethinker. The questions really here agitated are questions of
faith and of discipline. Are a common faith and a uniform
internal discipline essential to the Church? Here is the debate.
{209}
But above all these special questions and these different
situations of the various Christian Churches rise, for Romanist
and Protestant alike, the general question and the common
situation; it is Christianity itself which is engaged in the
contest, and its awakening spirit confronts the antichristian
movement.

Let us not delude ourselves as to the character, the force, or
the danger of this antichristian movement. It is not merely a
feverish excitability in men's minds, a simple revolutionary
crisis in the religious order. No; we have here earnest
convictions at work, and the prospect of a long war. Impatience
of an ancient yoke, a spirit of reaction, a love of innovation,
frivolous instincts not a few, as well as evil impulses, may
claim a share--and a large share--in the attacks of which
Christianity is in these days the object; but what gives to these
attacks their most formidable character is a sentiment far more
serious, one that has made heroes and martyrs, the love of truth
at all risk and in despite of consequence, for the sake of truth
and for its sake alone.
{210}
The feeling that makes man thirst for truth is an honor to human
nature. If he fancies that he has found that truth, man abandons
himself with transport to the satisfaction of his cravings, and
does not scruple to drink even to intoxication at this pure
source. But here he is incurring a great danger: man is not
merely an intelligence whose vocation during his brief transit
through this world confines him only to study and science: he is
an active, responsible being; a being engaged in a life full of
labors, with a future life before him full of mystery; a laborer
in a career having a particular interest for himself, and yet
forming part of a general scheme, of the design of which he has
but imperfect glimpses. Very incomplete and very imperfect is
that man's state of intellectual action, who restricts himself to
that which appears to him to be scientific truth, who does not,
at the same time, submit his thought to all the tests to which he
is himself subject, and who does not examine whether that thought
be in harmony with the laws of his nature--whether it respect or
transgress the limits imposed upon his means of knowledge.
{211}
The danger of falling into error becomes greater in proportion as
this incomplete and imperfect state of his mind is in itself a
noble state, a state that satisfies noble impulses, and procures
noble means of enjoyment. The most eminent among the actual
adversaries of Christianity believe themselves the interpreters
and the defenders of truth; some of philosophical truth; others
of historical truth, others again of the truth of the facts and
laws of the physical world. They are all proud of belonging to
the department of pure science, and of making of scientific truth
the sole object, the sole rule of their labors; but they are also
all forgetful of some conditions--nay, the most indispensable
ones--to which science is bound to conform; some tests--and the
most legitimate ones--to which science is obliged to submit.

{212}

They claim, too, the honor of bearing the banner of a grand and
noble cause, the cause of Liberty. That Christianity alone
restored to man, as man, and for no other reason, his rights to
liberty, is a fact that the comparative histories of the world,
whether Christian or Pagan, place beyond all doubt; for confront
these two histories, and name the nations among whom the idea of
the dignity of man's liberty became a general idea, powerful in
influence and fruitful in consequence! Another fact equally
historic and certain is, that Christianity knew how to adapt
itself, and did readily adapt itself, to the different states of
society, and the different forms of government; that it set
itself up and maintained its rank in republics as well as
monarchies, under constitutional regimes as well as in
despotisms, in the midst of democratical as well as
aristocratical institutions; and, beyond doubt, it was not in
free states that it displayed least vigor, or met with the
smallest success.
{213}
These two great facts are nowadays lost sight of. Christianity is
accused of being hostile to Liberty and incompatible with the
spirit of modern societies; and this is, indeed, the chief charge
laid to its score. True it is, that the charge is not without
deriving countenance from the history of Europe in modern times;
worldly interests, selfish passions, events complex and obscure,
in which moral order and social order have been compromised, have
as it were suspended in certain countries the liberal action of
Christianity, and enlisted momentarily the cause of Liberty under
a banner not Christian. The error is profound, but transient; the
traditional influences of ages will resume their empire, the
grand events their course; Christ's religion and man's liberty
will once more remember that each stands in need of the other,
and that their alliance in the bosom of order is their natural
and necessary condition. That they do misunderstand each other
occasions the most serious crisis at this moment in modern
society.

{214}

Here, too, is the gravest peril which the Christian religion has
in our days to surmount. Appreciate the force of the two
sentiments to which I just now referred, the love of science and
the love of liberty; understand through what phases of
degeneration and of deceptive transformation those sentiments
may, in the ardor of pursuit and of combat, have to pass; reckon
up, if reckon you can, all the false ideas, the chimerical hopes,
which they may suggest; and then add to the amount, and as their
consequences, the immoral and anarchical passions which may make
those sentiments their pretext and their tools; and in doing
this, you will find that you have passed in review the forces of
that enemy now waging an implacable war against Christianity,
although a war to which Christianity is called upon to put an
end.

{215}

I do not in any respect underrate the forces of that army. I
disparage no more their quality than their numbers. To maintain
the combat worthily and efficaciously we should, at the onset,
accord to our adversaries the whole amount of their merits as
well as of their strength, and then attack them in their
strongest entrenchments. I have charged the enemies of
Christianity with puerile presumptuousness when they refuse to
see the energy and the progress of the awakening of Christianity.
It is of infinite importance to Christians, on their side, not to
be blind to the ardor and the effects which that Antichristian
demonstration is producing, of which their Faith and their Church
are the aim. I am firmly convinced that in this war Christianity
will conquer; but it will leave its enemies with arms still in
their hands. It will no more gain over them any complete or
definitive victory than it will be able to conclude with them any
serious or durable peace. In the actual state of men's minds and
of society, the struggle will go on between the followers and the
opponents of Christianity; the two armies will continue to deploy
their forces in the face each of the other; and that of the
Christians, in order to defend and to extend its domain, will be
incessantly called upon to watch and to combat the movements of
its enemy.
{216}
While combating them it will be also obliged to comply with the
terms that truth exacts, and the conditions that liberty imposes.
From these exigencies and these conditions Christianity has
nothing to dread--that is, if it accepts them boldly, and in its
turn imposes them upon its enemies. Let man's science, labors,
and systems be submitted to the same tests, and handled with the
same freedom of examination, as are being applied to the
foundations and the doctrines of Christian faith; this is all
that Christians are entitled to, all that they need to demand.

Thus far I have explained the actual state of the Christian
religion in France, the sources of its strength and of its
weakness, its awakening and its perils. It is my intention now to
examine the actual state of those doctrines and systems which
repudiate, or which more or less deny and combat Christianity.
{217}
When I have passed the hostile army in review, I will once more
confront Christianity with its adversaries, and endeavor to
distinguish, by contrasting them, on which side the truth is, on
which side the right, and on which side the hope of future
success.

---------------------------------------

{218}

            Second Meditation.

              Spiritualism.


I witnessed the birth--not, certainly, the birth of Spiritualism,
for this was, like its twin brother Materialism, born in the
cradle of Philosophy, and while the steps of Philosophy were
still those of an infant--but the birth of the spiritualistic
school of the nineteenth century. This birth was a national
reaction against the Sensualism of the eighteenth century--just
as the Christian Awakening was a reaction against the impiety of
the same epoch. Theories do not escape the influence of events:
after the ideas come the facts, to pour upon those ideas floods
of light, and to reveal the vices, whether of philosophy or of
policy, in all their practical consequences.
{219}
The Sensualism--that is to say, to style it by its true name, the
Materialism--of the eighteenth century, did not pass triumphantly
through this test: it still reigned in France at the commencement
of the nineteenth century, but it was the reign of an antiquated
sovereign in decline--a sovereign of whom the public know the
defects, and whose successor is at hand.

M. Royer-Collard was the first who had the merit and the honor of
bringing back Spiritualism into the teaching of philosophy and
into the minds of the people; his was a return simply to the
spiritualistic doctrines of the seventeenth century; but still a
real progress, effected by a novel route, and a really scientific
method. M. Royer-Collard was neither a philosopher by profession
nor the disciple of any master, nor was his mind a mind disposed
to take up with systems--he observed, he read, he studied and
reflected, as a looker on, and an earnest judge of the world and
of men. In philosophy and his professional chair, as later in
politics and in the chamber, he was an original and profound
thinker.
{220}
His mind united good sense with loftiness of sentiment,
circumspection with self-respect; he was thoroughly imbued with
the spirit of his times, at the same time that he refused to
accept its yoke. In his grave and independent course of
instruction, he treated philosophical questions as they presented
themselves step by step, each on its own account, without
troubling himself about anything but the discovery of the truth;
and still less with any zealous endeavor to set together or
resolve all the questions upon a general system, the result of
any learned premeditation. Those who had opportunities of
listening to him, and even those whose only means of judgment are
the fragments published by M. Jouffroy, [Footnote 34]
characterize his lessons as directed, each of them, toward some
special questions well determined beforehand, and they regard
them as models of analysis and of philosophical criticism,
scrupulously confined by the lecturer to the facts and the
results that the inductive process discovers in the facts
themselves.

  [Footnote 34: In his "Traduction des oeuvres complètes de
  Reid," vol. iii, pp. 299-449, vol. iv, pp. 273-451.]

{221}

He had been a great reader of the writings of the Scotch
philosophers, held them in high esteem, and walked in their
steps; his views were, however, loftier, and his footing firmer,
although not less prudent. He had in his short philosophical
career two rare pieces of good fortune: one was, that he had a
friend in M. Maine de Biran, a profound and enthusiastic observer
of the human soul in his own soul--a subtle metaphysician, almost
a mystic, whom I would, if I dared, name the Saint Theresa of
philosophy; his other advantage was, that he had for his disciple
M. Cousin, the congenial rival and eloquent interpreter of the
great philosophers of all ages. M. Cousin, in his turn, has been
fortunate in having for his disciple M. Jouffroy--a disciple, of
mind original and independent, following a master accomplished in
the art of observing intellectual and moral facts, and of
describing them and ordering them, without altering their
essential character.
{222}
Sometimes, it is true, M. Cousin yields to the ambition of his
thought, or is swayed by the intellectual current of opinions in
vogue; but very soon his common sense checks, or at least sets
him on his guard--a common sense that finds lucid expression, and
is distinguished by probity of intent. Such are the founders and
the glorious chiefs of the spiritualistic school of the
nineteenth century.

Nor have they failed to find disciples and heirs worthy of such
predecessors. For some years past it has been the custom, in
certain regions of the learned world, to demand, frivolously
enough, and in a tone not free from irony, "What has become of
the spiritualistic school--what can it be about?" I will not
answer for it as Tertullian did to the Pagans, "We are only of
yesterday, and we are everywhere--in your domains, your cities,
your isles, your fortresses, your communes, your councils, your
camps, your tribes, your 'decuries,' in the palace, the senate,
the forum; we only leave you your temples." [Footnote 35]

    [Footnote 35: Tertullian Apologet., ch. xxxvii.]

{223}

The modern Spiritualists had no such conquests to make, and it is
fitting for philosophers to be more modest; but however short my
experience may have taught me that the human memory may in
similar cases sometimes be, I am astonished that men should so
forget facts, and facts, too, that are recent and patent. What
school of philosophy ever furnished in half a century so many men
and so many works, some of eminence, all of them of distinguished
merit? I will cite only a few names: MM. de Rémusat, Damiron,
Adolphe Garnier, Franck, Jules Simon, Barthélemy, Saint-Hilaire,
Saisset, Caro, Bersot, Lévêque, Bouillier, Janet, some of whom
have scarcely disappeared from the stage of the world, and others
are only just arrived there--they belong all to the
spiritualistic school, to which they have all done honor by
important works on philosophy, whether speculative, historical,
political, economic, or practical.
{224}
Their doctrines, it is true, have now been for some time hotly
attacked, and the wind of the day does not blow into their sails.
They have, besides, in my opinion, been wrong in this respect,
that they have not directed sufficient attention to these
polemics; that they have combated in a manner too indirect, or
with too little energy; the ideas in whose name their own have
been assailed; a certain share of languor and of embarrassment is
at this moment the malady of the best minds and of the sincerest
convictions. But in spite of the blows which it receives and
returns, although with insufficient sturdiness, the
spiritualistic school, if we judge it by the names and the works
which belong to it, by their talent, and their fame, remains in
our century in possession of the domain and of the banner of
philosophy.

Its merits will present themselves still more clearly if we
examine closely the results of its labors.

{225}

The first and the most important result, in a point of view
purely philosophical, is, that the Spiritualists of our days have
given to their researches and to their ideas a character really
scientific: they have introduced into the study of man and of the
intellectual world, the method practiced with so much success in
the study of man and of the material world--that is to say, they
have taken the observation of facts as the point of departure and
the constant guide of their investigations. Are there in man and
in the intellectual world, as there are in man and in the
material world, facts capable of being observed, seized,
described, classified, generalized? This is the question which
the spiritualistic school proposed and discussed at the outset. I
have no hesitation in saying, that it resolved it in the
affirmative, and that, thanks to this school, psychology has
assumed its rank among the positive sciences, just as physiology
did. Like physiology, geology, or botany, psychology has its
special object, its determined domain, in which it proceeds
absolutely according to the same method observed by the physical
sciences in their domain.
{226}
That this method, the observation of facts, of their value and
their laws, is in psychology more difficult to be followed than
in the physical sciences, is certain; but this certainly does not
deprive psychology either of its domain or of its scientific
character. It is a science by the same right and upon the same
conditions as all the others are so. The labors of the
spiritualistic school, and particularly those of M. Jouffroy,
have given it a solid foundation: and this has been formally
recognized by several even among the adversaries of this school,
among others by M. Taine and M. Berthelot. [Footnote 36]

    [Footnote 36: I read in the Métaphysique et la Science of M.
    Vacherot:

    "_The Metaphysician:_

    "In his denial of psychology, I stop at once the author of
    the 'positive philosophy,' and I demand of him by what right
    he thus banishes from the domain of the experimental sciences
    a science of observation.

    "_The man of learning:_

    "It constitutes in effect 'hiatus' in this philosophy, and a
    hiatus which all the sound minds of the positive school are
    beginning to admit. M. Littré, for example, may make his
    reservations of opinion as to the manner in which our
    psychologists understand psychology, and as to the method
    which they apply to it; but he has too much sense not to
    admit that the intelligence--all that constitutes man's
    identity, the moral man--is the object of a peculiar study,
    of which many previous works have shown the possibility, and
    many practical results prove the high and vital interest."--
    Vacherot, la Métaphysique et la Science, vol. iii, p. 181.]

{227}

It is in the name of science and by the processes of science that
the Spiritualists of the nineteenth have combated the Sensualists
of the eighteenth century. They have not, it is true, absolutely
crushed Materialism, that child and legitimate heir of
Sensualism; but while dethroning the parent, they have compelled
the child sometimes to avow himself boldly, sometimes to
transform himself, and to assume other features and other arms
than those of his cradle. I will only cite the lecture of M.
Cousin on the "Sensualistic Philosophy in the Eighteenth
Century," and the essay of the Duke de Broglie on the "Existence
of the Soul," [Footnote 37] written on the occasion of the work
of M. Broussais: "De l'Irrritation et de la Folie."

    [Footnote 37: This essay, first inserted in 1828 in the Revue
    Française, has been reprinted in the "Ecrits et discours
    divers" of the Duke de Broglie, collected and published in
    1863.]

{228}

Whoever, after having read them, would still persist in
maintaining the Sensualism of Locke and of Condillac, or in
refusing to see the consequences to which Sensualism leads, would
prove, in my opinion, that he has not understood either the
question put, or the doctrine combated and refuted. We have here
a result acquired for the science of the intellectual world, and
we owe the result to the polemics of the spiritualistic school.

That school has obtained another result more important still, and
which belongs no longer to the polemics of simple negation, but
to positive doctrine; it has set in the broad light of day the
real and fundamental principle of morals, the distinction as to
the essentials of moral good and evil, as well as the law of
obligation, that "categorical imperative," the sole refuge which
Kant found against Skepticism.
229
Neither the interest well defined of each individual, nor the
interest of the greater numbers, nor any sentimental sympathy,
nor any system of positive written law, can, for the future, be
considered as the basis of morals. An attempt is made in the
present day to establish another thesis, and to represent
morality as absolutely independent of religion. Grave error,
which discards from morality, if not its principle, at least its
source and its object, its author and its future; an error,
however, very different from those errors which dispense even
with the principle of morals, and assign as the rule for the
conduct of men, motives having in themselves nothing moral,
nothing absolute. The fact that man's conscience and man's reason
recognize the distinction of moral good and evil, and at the same
time the duty of practicing that good as the law of human
actions, is a fact which we may now regard as acquired to
philosophy.
{230}
The treatise "Du Bien," in the work of M. Cousin upon "Le Vrai,
le Beau, et le Bien," the preface of M. Jouffroy to the "Outlines
of Moral Philosophy," by Dugald Stewart, and the "Essia sur la
Morale," in the "Mélanges Philosophiques," which M. Jouffroy
published in 1833, the book of M. Jules Simon upon "Le Devoir,"
these are all solid and brilliant works, by which the
spiritualistic school has victoriously established the truth to
which I have referred.

And in establishing it, it has paid a remarkable act of homage to
another fact, and rendered an immense service by enforcing a
truth, with which are intimately connected man's rights in this
world, as well as his prospects beyond this world: I mean the
fact of man's liberty. This is no question of pure theory and
scientific curiosity; but a vital question, whose solution has
for man, in time present and time future, the most important
practical consequences. Upon what grounds would the claim of man
to liberty in the social state rest, what would become of his
hopes and fears of a future eternity, if man were not a being
morally free and responsible for the decisions which determine
his acts?
{231}
The civil liberty of man during his life on earth, and his
future destiny after his life on earth, closely depend upon the
fact of his free volition and upon the responsibility which
accompanies it. Without free volition man falls in this world,
without rights, under the yoke of whatever force may take
possession of him, or use him as its instrument; what remains for
man, then, but to tremble at the destiny which awaits him beyond
this world by virtue of the unknown decree of his Sovereign
Master? To the spiritualistic school belongs the honor of having
firmly established and rendered plain the psychological fact of
the freedom of the human will; nor in doing so has it allowed
itself to be troubled and blinded by the ontological questions
which that fact suggests, or by the difficulty attending the
solution of these questions. Consequently, it has accepted upon
this point the limits of man's science, and at the same time
maintained the rights of man's nature. It has laid in man's
liberty and man's responsibility the legitimate foundation of
political liberty, as well as that of the personal morality of
man and of man's future.

{232}

Thus, then, the spiritualistic school of the nineteenth century
is at once scientific, moral, liberal. Eminent merits, rare
combination in any time, and still more so in our time!

With these great merits, and in spite of them, two omissions are
still remarkably striking.

The spiritualistic school, our contemporary, has halted abruptly
before the sovereign problems which weigh upon the human soul,
and which, in the first series of these "Meditations," I styled
natural problems; [Footnote 38] it has in no respect furthered
their solution according to reason, or accepted their solution
according to Christianity; its "Theodicy" has remained far in
arrear of its Psychology.

    [Footnote 38: Meditations on the Essence of the Christian
    Religion.]

Halted it has, also, before any practical solution of these same
problems; nor has it eliminated either any faith or any law which
suffices for man's soul or man's conduct in life--in short, any
religion.
{233}
M. Jules Simon, in his work entitled "La Religion Naturelle," MM.
Saisset and De Rémusat, in their "Essais de Philosophie
Religieuse," have striven, irrespectively of all positive
revelation, to give to man's soul and to man's conduct that
satisfaction and that religious rule which both require. I doubt
their counting much upon the success of their attempts; I doubt
their believing that their natural religion, or their religious
philosophy, are sufficient substitutes for Christianity. Far
other things than such drops of science are required to appease
the thirst of humanity for religion.

Whence, in the spiritualistic school, this double hiatus--this
twofold weakness, whence?

In my opinion, the causes are themselves twofold. The
spiritualistic school has been at once too timid and too proud.
It has not seen in the psychological facts which it was observing
and describing, all that they contain and reveal upon the subject
of the great natural problems of man and of the world; it has
neglected the cosmological facts and the historical facts which
concur to throw light upon those problems; its psychology has
remained isolated and incomplete.
{234}
It has, at the same time, failed to see the limits of psychology
and of human science in general; not having succeeded in
advancing the torch of science into the regions where access to
it is denied, it has refused to accept the light descending upon
man by another way than that of science.

Like Plato, Descartes, Leibnitz, Reid, and Kant, M. Cousin, now
the most eminent representative of the spiritualistic school,
establishes, by virtue of psychological observation, these two
great facts: first, that there exist universal and necessary
principles manifesting themselves in the human mind, and reigning
there without being capable of being subverted, which are called
into action by sensations coming from the external world;
secondly, that these sensations, so coming from the external
world, do not in any way supply the human mind with these
universal and necessary principles, and that they can explain
neither their presence nor their origin.
{235}
Such, for instance, are the principles, that everything which
begins to appear has a cause--that every quality belongs to a
substance! [Footnote 39] Sensualism is not in a position to
account in any way for these two principles, or to find them
among those facts that form all its psychology.

    [Footnote 39: Du Vrai, du Beau, et du Bien, pp. 19-66. 1857.]

I am not called upon to develop or to discuss this idea, which,
for my part, I fully admit; enough that I mention it as a
fundamental doctrine of the spiritualistic school.

The philosophers, who have admitted the existence of these
universal and necessary principles, have assigned them different
names, and have enumerated and classified them differently; but
whether they style them "ideas," or "innate ideas," or "laws," or
"forms," or "categories of the understanding"--whether they
enlarge or limit their number--they agree as to their nature, and
declare them inherent in the human mind itself, which applies
them, so to say, as its own peculiar property in its appreciation
of the external world; so far is the mind from borrowing them
from that world!

{236}

These universal and necessary principles once admitted and
characterized, some of the philosophers who so admit and
characterize them, the Scotch philosophers for instance, go no
further, and adhere to the psychological fact without examining
its value or its consequences in an ontological sense. Others,
like Kant, refuse to that psychological fact all ontological
value, and are of opinion that nothing authorizes us in affirming
that those principles, inherent in the internal existence of the
human mind, are true in the domain beyond the human mind, or that
they regulate the realities of the external world, as they
regulate our intellectual activity.
{237}
Others, finally, M. Cousin, with Plato, Descartes, Leibnitz,
Fénélon, and Bossuet, see the work of God, and consequently God
himself, in the universal and necessary principles which preside
over the intellectual existence of man; and they recognize God as
the infinite and sovereign being in whom the necessary principles
reside; and they regard these as the manifestations of him, and
think that he placed them in the intelligence of man when he
placed man himself in the middle of the world.

To this doctrine I firmly adhere; but why does the spiritualistic
school so stop short, why does it not advance to the very end of
the path upon which it has entered? It admits God as the being in
whom these necessary principles reside, and from whom man has
received them; what does this mean but that it recognizes in God
the author and instructor of man? And to recognize in God the
author and the instructor of man, what is this but to recognize
the fact of the creation, and the fact of the primitive
revelation inherent in the fact of the creation?
{238}
These two truths are involved in the fact that the necessary
principles exist in the mind of man, and that man derives them,
not from his relations with the external world, but from himself,
and from the source whence he himself emanates--from God, his
Creator. God has created man armed at all points, as well in the
order of the intellect as of matter, complete in his soul as in
his body: that is to say, God has given to him at his creation
the necessary principles of his intellectual life, just as he has
given him the necessary mechanism of his physical organization.
Scientific psychology thus mounts up to that supreme point where
it meets Christian revelation. There is, on its part,
inconsistency or timidity in not recognizing and proclaiming the
existence of that light to which it so attains.

What was the import, what the form, of that primitive revelation?
Has the revelation itself been renewed at any epoch subsequent to
the creation? If so, by what instruments and with what incidents
has it been renewed? These are questions to which I shall recur,
but which for the moment I do not approach; I wish here only to
establish the fact of the divine revelation in the sphere and in
the terms of scientific psychology.

{239}

Facts in cosmogony lead to the same conclusion. I repeat here
what I said in the first series of these Meditations, when
speaking of the dogma of the creation:

  "The only serious opponents of the dogma of the creation are
  those who maintain that the universe, the earth, and man upon
  the earth, have existed from all eternity, and, collectively,
  in the state in which they now are. No one, however, can hold
  this language, to which facts are invincibly opposed. How many
  ages man has existed on the earth is a question that has been
  largely discussed, and is still under discussion. The inquiry
  in no way affects the dogma of the creation itself; it is a
  certain and recognized fact that man has not always existed on
  the earth, and that the earth has for long periods undergone
  different changes incompatible with man's existence. Man,
  therefore, had a beginning: man has come upon the earth."
  [Footnote 40]

    [Footnote 40: Meditations on the Essence of the Christian
    Religion, page 18.]

{240}

He did not come there by spontaneous generation--that is to say,
by any creative force or organizing power inherent in matter.
Scientific observation overturns more and more, every day, this
hypothesis, which, in other respects also, it is impossible to
admit as any explanation of the first appearance upon the earth
of the complete man, the man in a condition to survive. "Another
delusion of which we must rid ourselves," said, lately, a member
of the Academy of Sciences, as he quitted the lecture-room where
M. Pasteur had been throwing upon this subject the light of his
luminous and scrupulous criticism. The hypothesis of the
progressive transformation of species does not explain better the
existence of man, such as we now see him upon the earth.
{241}
This hypothesis is also rejected by the exact student of facts;
even if admitted, it would still leave existing the same
problems; for, whence came these primitive types, whose
successive transformations have, as supposed, produced the
existing species? God is as necessary to create the ape or the
primitive type of the ape as he is necessary to create man
himself. Scientific cosmology accords with scientific psychology.
God, the creator and instructor of man, is the grand fact which
each of these sciences encounters at the summit of its labors.

The whole current of history contains the same teaching. I admit
that error abounds in history, that it is full of false
assertions, of recitals tortured from the truth, facts mutilated,
legends invented by men as imaginations. It is not, for all that,
the less certain that in a great part the truth still remains
there, that certain historical events are authenticated and
attested by undeniable testimony. I mention here only two,
because connected with the subject which engages me.
{242}
It is a general belief, a universal tradition in the history of
nations, that, either at the moment of the creation, or at some
epoch subsequent to creation, the God, or the gods, whom those
nations respectively adored, had had direct relations with man;
had become manifest to him by different acts or under different
forms, and had assumed a place and exercised an active influence
upon man's destinies. The idea of a single revelation, or of a
succession of revelations--revelations characterized at one time
by a strange grossness, at another by a subtle mysticism, is a
thing ever recurring in the history of humanity. The tradition of
the special revelation, proclaimed first by the Hebrews, and
after them by the Christians, is equally undeniable; criticism
may apply itself to the volumes that contain the accounts; may
contest the authenticity or exactitude or date of particular
books; but so far from ever negativing, it will not even weaken
the evidence of the existence and the powerful influence of the
religious tradition which gave birth to Judaism and to
Christianity.
{243}
We have here a remarkable historical fact, manifesting at once
the natural faith of mankind in the divine revelation, and in the
relations of the Creator with his creatures.

If the spiritualistic school refused from its very origin to
admit these facts, drawn from cosmogony and from man's history,
into the sphere of its labors; if it limited psychology to its
peculiar scientific object--the study of the human soul--I am far
from making such refusal matter of reproach: for the
Spiritualists did thereby nothing but what they were entitled and
called upon to do. But they have fallen into a twofold error.
While observing and describing psychological facts, they did not
perceive nor accept all that they imported: they saw in the
intelligent man the work and the trace of God; but they did not
see what was implied in that man besides--that is, revelation as
well as creation. They did not leave pure psychology to demand of
kindred sciences, such as cosmology and history, whether their
results accorded or did not accord with the results that they had
deduced from psychology.
{244}
In short, on the one side they stopped short of the limits of the
domain of psychology; and on the other, they confined themselves
to it too exclusively.

From this twofold error sprang another still more serious.
Spiritualism gave birth to Rationalism--a transformation as
unnatural as unfortunate, which has rendered the science of man
and of the intellectual world still more inexact and incomplete!

---------------------------------------

{245}

             Third Meditation.

               Rationalism.


A man of a mind as unprejudiced as rare, one who will never be
suspected of any undue bias for Christianity, M. Sainte-Beuve,
avowing to me recently the high esteem with which M. Alexandre
Vinet inspired him, borrowed an expression of Pascal's: "The
heart has its reasons, which the reason does not comprehend."
[Footnote 41]

    [Footnote 41: Between this phrase and that of Pascal there is
    a slight difference. Pascal said, "Le cœur a des raisons que
    la raison ne connaît point:" "The heart has reasons that the
    reason knows not at all." Pensées de Pascal, edition of M.
    Faugère, 1844, vol. ii, p. 172.]

I only admit half of what is implied in this conciliatory phrase;
and these are my reasons.

{246}

True religious faith, or, to call things by their real names,
Christian faith, is founded upon instincts and upon sentiment at
the same time that it is founded upon reasons. If reason do not
accept the sentiments of the heart, on which side is the fault?
Is the fault with the heart, that it feels them, or is it with
the reason, that it does not comprehend them?

My reply to this question is easy. I reject the distinction made.
I admit no such persons as are respectively styled the heart, the
reason. Here is only an attempt at a psychological anatomy; no
true enunciation of a real fact. Man, the human being, is
essentially one, and single: he has the faculty of
self-observation and self-study, but in exercising it he does not
destroy the unity of his nature; it is not his mere reason, it is
himself, and his whole self, that makes himself the object of his
observation and of his study, and that cannot but recognize
himself and accept himself in his entirety. He has no right to
say, with an air of scientific disdain, "My reason comprehends
not the reasons of my heart."
{247}
He must perforce say: "I comprehend not myself;" he must perforce
proclaim, not the incoherency of his being, but the insufficiency
or the incompetency of what he styles his reason.

Philosophy, like poetry, is full of personifications that
mislead; the one personifies by images, the other by
abstractions. Both have need of them--the one for its creations,
the other for its studies; I am far from seeking to deny their
respective use. All that I contend for is, that we must not
misconceive the real import of these expedients of human
language; we must not, by taking them for realities, lose sight
of or destroy what are really and genuinely realities, the
entities of divine creation.

I insist the more on this error, because in the philosophy of our
time it is a common and a potent error, and the source too of
other errors, deplorable as well in a scientific as in a moral
and practical point of view. Condillac and his disciples had set
apart and specially studied in man the faculty of sensation, and
they were thereby led to make out of this faculty, and out of it
alone, man himself and the whole man.
{248}
Kant and his school considered particularly in man the faculty of
the reason and judgment, and very soon reason came with them to
constitute the whole man. I am far from intending to examine in
its fundamental principles and its entirety the system of Kant,
the greatest philosophical work upon the human understanding that
any man has produced since the time of Plato. I single out this
fact, that it treats the reason as the proper, special, and
paramount object of philosophy. Warned by his profound,
scrupulous genius, Kant did not limit himself to a point of view
so narrow, although so lofty; he studied man's reason under its
different aspects, he constituted himself the critic of pure
reason, the critic of practical reason, the critic of æsthetic
reason--that is, of reason applied to the discrimination of the
beautiful; he decomposed, so to say, the reason itself into as
many different faculties as he found different phases in the
intellectual and moral life of man; but the faculty that he
styled the reason remained the basis of his study and of his
system.
{249}
It became in his school, and in the schools akin to it,
pre-eminently the intellectual substance, the basis of man and of
philosophy; and the human being himself, in his personal unity,
with all his life and his free will, entirely disappeared from
their teaching.

As results of this system I will cite only two facts, very
different in their nature, both very foreign to the founder of
the system and his disciples, but which serve the better to
reveal that system's faultiness, as these facts are, although its
indirect, remote, and involuntary, nevertheless, its undeniable
consequences.

When, in 1793, the frenzied men who disposed, as masters, of the
destinies of France, abolished the Christian religion and
Christian worship, they resolved, nevertheless, to give to men an
object to adore. They instituted the worship of reason.
{250}
The church of Notre-Dame at Paris was metamorphosed into a temple
of reason; a young woman was made to figure there as the goddess
of reason; and the orator of the National Convention, Chaumette,
cried aloud as he pointed her out to the people, "Behold living
Reason; we celebrate here to-day the sole true worship, the
worship of Liberty and of Reason."

At the distance of three quarters of a century from the date of
these revolutionary orgies, in 1865, not in France but in
England, a man of earnest intentions, superior mind, and
extensive learning, whose sincerity is evident, and his
sentiments moral at once and moderate, writes a book entitled,
"Rationalism in Europe;" and the object of this book is to
establish, that all the good effected in Europe since the fall of
the Roman empire, all the progress made by states in justice, in
humanity, in liberty, and general happiness--whether in the
sphere of science or of practical industry--is due to the
influence of Rationalism, to its developments and its conquests.
{251}
Mr. Lecky is not a metaphysician; he attaches no precise and
philosophical meaning to the word "Rationalism;" he does not
trouble himself about the system of Kant, nor the place occupied
in it by the pure, the practical, or the aesthetic reason; he
only retraces the intellectual and social history of Europe, and
all the happy results that this history commemorates, all the
salutary consequences of the activity of the human mind, of the
liberty of man's thought, of the amelioration of human
institutions and manners, he sums up all in a single name,
attributes them to a single cause, and assigns all the honor to
the progress of Rationalism!

{252}

Arrived, nevertheless, at the conclusion of his work, a single
reflection disquiets Mr. Lecky: he asks himself whether, in
extolling the happy effects of what he styles Rationalism, he has
not gone too far, said too much, and hoped too much:

  "Utility is perhaps the highest motive to which reason can
  attain. ... It is from the moral or religious faculty alone
  that we obtain the conception of the purely disinterested. ...
  The substitution of the philosophical conception of truth for
  its own sake, for the theological conception of the guilt of
  error, has been in this respect a clear gain; and the political
  movement which has resulted chiefly from the introduction of
  the spirit of Rationalism into politics, has produced, and is
  producing, some of the most splendid instances of
  self-sacrifice. On the whole, however, the general tendency of
  these influences is unfavorable to enthusiasm, and both in
  actions and in speculations this tendency is painfully visible.
  With a far higher level of average excellence than in former
  times, our age exhibits a marked decline in the spirit of
  self-sacrifice, in the appreciation of the more poetical or
  religious aspect of our nature. The history of self-sacrifice
  during the last eighteen hundred years has been mainly the
  history of the action of Christianity upon the world.
{253}
  Ignorance and error have, no doubt, often directed the heroic
  spirit into wrong channels, and have sometimes even made it a
  cause of great evil to mankind; but it is the moral type and
  beauty, the enlarged conception and persuasive power of the
  Christian faith, that have chiefly called it into being, and it
  is by their influence alone that it can be permanently
  sustained. ...

  "This is the shadow resting upon the otherwise brilliant
  picture the history of Rationalism presents. The destruction of
  the belief in witchcraft and of religious persecutions; the
  decay of those ghastly notions concerning future punishments,
  which for centuries diseased the imaginations and embittered
  the character of mankind; the emancipation of suffering
  nationalities; the abolition of the belief in the guilt of
  error, which paralyzed the intellectual, and of the asceticism
  which paralyzed the material progress of mankind, may be justly
  regarded as among the greatest triumphs of civilization; but
  when we look back to the cheerful alacrity with which, in some
  former ages, men sacrificed all their material and intellectual
  interests to what they believed to be right, and when we
  realize the unclouded assurance that was their reward, it is
  impossible to deny that we have lost something in our
  progress." [Footnote 42]

    [Footnote 42: History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit
    of Rationalism in Europe, by W. E. H. Lecky, vol. ii, 1866,
    third edition, pp. 403-409.]

{254}

But to leave England and Mr. Lecky, and to return once more to
France. I turn to the pages of a rationalistic philosopher more
profound, and more profoundly troubled, too, in his sentiments
than Mr. Lecky. I find there, in an essay of M. Edmond Scherer,
entitled "The Crisis of Protestantism," [Footnote 43] the
following passage:

    [Footnote 43: Mélanges d'histoire religieuse. Pp. 250-254.
    1864.]

{255}

  "That which is really imperiled is not so much Protestantism;
  it is Christianity, it is very religion. As for natural
  religion, that exists only in books. Religions which have vital
  force and influence are positive religions; that is, religions
  which have a Church, and particular rites, and dogmas. What are
  these dogmas? Taken in their intimate meaning, they are the
  solutions of the great problems which have ever disquieted the
  mind of man--the origin of the world, and of evil; the
  expiation; the future of humanity. The doctrines of religion
  are a sort of revealed metaphysics.

  "Considered in its form, dogma is the supernatural--not merely
  because religions were born at an epoch when the imagination
  was greedy of miracles, and when the imagination, in her
  _näiveté_, associated herself with everything; but also
  because, as may be readily understood, it is impossible for a
  positive religion to have any other origin than a revelation;
  it is necessarily a history of the intervention of God in the
  destinies of man, the account of acts by which God created and
  saved the world--it is that or it is nothing. We see then at
  once that in religion everything is not religious. There is in
  every religion a multitude of elements, historical, physical,
  and metaphysical, as to which its dogmas may come into conflict
  with science. Nevertheless, it is not of this antagonism that I
  would here speak. The religious sentiment has also its critical
  action; _it_ also may enter into a struggle with religion.

{256}

  "As long as the authority of the priest or of the book
  preserves its prestige, the believer receives his religion
  ready made for him, without himself making distinctions; but as
  soon as that authority is shaken, a man, if he do not entirely
  reject his first belief, will at least no longer accept it
  without reservations. He only retains so much of it as
  enlightens or touches him, so much as commends itself to his
  understanding or to his heart; so much, in a word, as gives a
  satisfaction to his religious requirements.

  "Thus it is that religious sentiment becomes the measure of
  religious truth. It receives all in religion that addresses
  itself to the soul, all that nourishes and fortifies the soul,
  all that raises the soul to the infinite and the ideal, all
  that unites the soul to God.
{257}
  Religious sentiment appropriates it all, but it appropriates
  nothing more. Let but a thing become indifferent, and it feels
  it as an importunity, and looks upon it in the light of an
  element strange, useless, arbitrary. It rejects, for this
  reason, doctrines purely speculative as well as facts purely
  marvelous. Man requires his religion to be entirely religious;
  that is to say, to be in all respects in direct relation with
  piety, and, so to speak, to be vertical to his conscience. The
  more his faith purifies itself, the more a man eliminates from
  his religion dogmas which, having no root either in the divine
  nature or man's nature, appear on that very account to have no
  ground to exist at all.

  "At first sight this gradual emancipation of faith and this
  corresponding progress of religion in the ways of Spiritualism,
  seem a natural process by means of which religious opinion and
  the human mind contrive to maintain themselves in a state of
  constant equilibrium.
{258}
  We imagine all difficulties removed, and fancy that we catch a
  glimpse of the religious future of humanity in a sort of
  Christian Rationalism, a rational Christianity not excluding
  fervor of devotion, but leaving all its liberty to man's
  thought.

  "I demand nothing better as far as I am concerned; but I cannot
  refrain from asking, not without anxiety, whether Christian
  Rationalism is really a religion. What remains in the crucible
  after the operation just detailed? Is the residue really the
  essence of the positive dogmas, or is it but a _caput
  mortuum?_ When Christianity is rendered translucent to man's
  mind, conformable to man's reason and man's moral appreciation
  of things, does it still possess any great virtue? Does it not
  very much resemble Deism, and is it not equally lean and
  sterile? Does not the potent influence of religious belief
  reside in its dogmatic formulas and marvelous legends just as
  much as in anything more essentially religious that it
  possesses?
{259}
  Is there not even somewhat of superstition in genuine piety,
  and is it possible for piety to dispense with that popular
  system of metaphysics, that attractive mythology, which men
  strive to eliminate from it? Do not the elements which you
  pretend to abstract from religion constitute the alloy, without
  which the precious metal becomes unsuitable for the rough
  usages of life? In short, when criticism shall have succeeded
  in overthrowing the supernatural as useless, and dogmas as
  irrational; when the religious sentiment on the one side, and a
  scrupulous reason on the other, shall have penetrated man's
  belief, assimilated and transformed it; when no other authority
  shall remain standing, save that of the personal conscience of
  each individual; when, in a word, man having torn every vail
  and penetrated every mystery, shall behold that God face to
  face to whom he aspires, will it not be discovered that that
  God is, after all, nothing else than man himself, the
  conscience and the reason of humanity personified? Will not
  religion, in the very attempt to become more religious, have
  ceased to exist?"

{260}

Such, according to the views of its most eminent representatives,
are the potent influences and the final results of Rationalism.
After having confusedly attributed to it all the progress of
man's thought and of man's civilization, Mr. Lecky expresses the
apprehension that he has lowered the nature of man, by depriving
him (these are his very words) "of our noblest quality, of the
divine spark, the principle in us of everything that is heroic,"
the complete and pure devotedness of Christian faith. M. Scherer
asks himself sadly if in rejecting all dogma and all positive
revelation, in obliging religious sentiment to be self-sufficing,
and to feed itself with its own and single virtue, rational
criticism does not inflict a deadly blow upon religion itself;
and M. Sainte-Beuve, in the same perplexity, contents himself
with saying, as resignedly, though more coldly, "The heart has
its reasons, which the reason comprehends not."

{261}

Nothing is so affecting to me, but nothing, at the same time,
throws such light upon the subject of my meditations as this
involuntary, this invincible anxiety observable in men of lofty
sentiments and profound convictions, when confronting the chasms
in their system, and dealing with the incoherences of their own
convictions. However profound, however different my own
conviction may be, I have no desire to engage, either with them
or against them, in any direct or prolonged controversy. I have
been engaged all my life in frequent and ardent polemics. Those
could not be well avoided by a man like myself, forced not merely
to combat human opinions, but to grapple with human affairs; and
called upon to resolve, upon the instant, practical and urgent
questions. But while I voluntarily submitted to the necessity of
precipitate and unforeseen struggles, experience has taught me
their inconveniences and their perils.
{262}
The combatants on each side are prone to make use of weapons of
too offensive a nature; men involve themselves for party
interests and party honor, and push their conclusions with
obstinate pertinacity beyond the strictness of truth, sometimes
even beyond their own intentions. I do not wish in the arena of
philosophy to run the risk of striking upon any similar rock; but
avoiding all personal polemics, all controversy of detail, I will
express upon the essence of Rationalism, although only in a
general manner, my sincere and intimate convictions.

There are in Rationalism two fundamental errors. First, it
mutilates man while it studies him; it holds as of no account
several of the constituent elements and essential facts of human
nature, of which it ignores the meaning and the import. Secondly,
Rationalism extends the pretensions of human science beyond its
rights, and beyond its legitimate limits.

{263}

The instincts, the sentiments, of humanity are certainly not
sufficient reasons for scientific conviction, nor conclusive
proofs in support of any particular system whatever. The
instinctive belief of the human race in one or more supernatural
forces is no demonstration of the reality of the supernatural;
and the aspirings of man's soul for a life beyond this
terrestrial one does not rationally prove the soul's immortality.
Error may occur in human instincts or sentiments just as much as
in human ideas. But when these instincts and these sentiments are
universal, permanent, indestructible, encountered in all ages and
in all countries--when they resist and survive all attacks, all
doubts of reason or science--they are, beyond all question,
considerable facts, and facts which the human understanding
cannot but recognize and respect. If these instincts and
sentiments do not solve the problems which trouble man's
understanding, at least they demand imperiously some solution; if
they throw no light upon his road to science, they oblige him to
see that that road has its mysteries.
{264}
Rationalism mutilates humanity when it ignores such facts,
regarding them as vain illusions because it cannot explain them;
and when, after this mutilation, it assigns the entire empire to
a single portion of the human nature, to a single faculty, called
by it reason, as if reason constituted the entire man,
Rationalism does in the intellectual world what it would be doing
in the physical world did it deny the reality of night because it
only sees the day clearly.

Rationalism is the more wrong in thus discarding facts which it
does not explain, that in its proper domain similar facts occur,
and that its science of reason arrives also finally at mysteries.
I mentioned it before, as a truth acquired to philosophy, that
there exist in the human mind certain universal and necessary
principles, neither furnished to the mind by impressions derived
from the external world, nor created by the mind itself; and that
those principles are inherent in the nature of the mind, and come
to it from another source than that of sensation, or any
discovery of man's own thought.
{265}
We have here a psychological fact which, after the profound
studies of the spiritualistic school from the time of Plato down
to M. Cousin, Rationalism is obliged to admit. To what does this
fact tend, and what is its logical consequence? What but God,
creation, revelation, and the relations of God with man? Will
Rationalism give any better explanation of these divine laws of
the human mind than it has given of the instincts and of the
sentiments of the human heart? or will it ignore the one result
as it has ignored the other?

But now to touch upon the radical and permanent error of
Rationalism. It regards all things as accessible to the
researches and to the methods of human science. When Spiritualism
has recognized and proclaimed the essential and necessary facts
which constitute the intellectual and moral being by it styled
man, it halts abruptly; it hesitates also to recognize and
proclaim the mysterious facts in that sanctuary the very door of
which it has reached; it does not resign itself to adore what
lies behind the vail; it is inconsequent and timid, although
respectful and modest.
{266}
Rationalism, on the contrary, is presumptuous and audacious; its
ambition is to see clearly, to touch what is in the center of the
sanctuary, as it sees and touches what is on its outside. Its
pretension is that it may study and know, by its ordinary
processes, as well the invisible world, its Sovereign and its
laws, as the visible world in which man is now placed; and it
wars upon Christianity because Christianity admits no such
pretension. But Christianity here encounters another adversary,
Positivism. Positivism arrests its progress, saying: "I do not
know, nobody knows, if an invisible world be or be not a really
existing thing. It is a mere loss of time to think of it, for
nothing can be known about it with certainty. All religion, all
metaphysics, are chimerical and vain sciences; there is no
science but the science of the physical world, of its facts and
of its laws!"

---------------------------------------

{267}

          Fourth Meditation.

              Positivism.


I seek no quarrel with words, even when they provoke it.
Positivism is a word, in language a barbarism, in philosophy a
presumption. Unlike Geology, Ideology, Theology, Physics, it
qualifies a doctrine, not by its object, but by its supposed
merit. All science pretends to positiveness--that is, to be
founded upon fact and truth. But "Positivism" alone arrogates to
itself this quality. It is an arrogance, in my opinion, radically
unjustifiable.

I knew its founder, M. Auguste Comte, personally. I had some
communication with him in the period from 1824 to 1830. I then
was struck by the elevation of his sentiments and by the vigor of
his mind.
{268}
In October, 1832, at the moment when I was entering upon my
functions as Minister of Public Instruction, he came to me and
formally demanded that I should create for him in the "College of
France" a professorship of general history for the physical and
mathematical sciences. I see no cause to express myself here
otherwise than I have already done in my "Memoirs" as to the
impression produced upon me by his conversation and his personal
bearing. "He explained to me drearily and confusedly his views
upon man, society, civilization, religion, philosophy, history.
He was a man single-minded, honest, of profound convictions,
devoted to his own ideas, in appearance modest, although at heart
prodigiously vain; he sincerely believed that it was his calling
to open a new era for the mind of man and for human society.
While listening to him, I could hardly refrain from expressing my
astonishment that a mind so vigorous should at the same time be
so narrow as not even to perceive the nature and bearing of the
facts with which he was dealing, and the questions which he was
authoritatively deciding; that a character so disinterested
should not be warned by his own proper sentiments--which were
moral in spite of his system--of its falsity and its negation of
morality.
{269}
I did not even make any attempt at discussion with M. Comte: his
sincerity, his enthusiasm, and the delusion that blinded him,
inspired me with that sad esteem that takes refuge in silence.
Had I even judged it fitting to create the chair which he
demanded, I should not for a moment have dreamed of assigning it
to him." [Footnote 44]

    [Footnote 44: "Mémoires pour servir a l'histoire de mon
    temps," t. iii, pp. 125-7. In the sixth volume of these
    Mémoires I have rectified an error inadvertently committed by
    me as to the epoch of my first relations with M. Auguste
    Comte.]

{270}

I should have been as silent and still more sad if I had then
known the trials through which M. Auguste Comte had already
passed. He had been, in 1823, a prey to a violent attack of
mental alienation, and in 1827, during a paroxysm of gloomy
melancholy, he had thrown himself from the Pont des Arts into the
Seine, but had been rescued by one of the king's guard. More than
once, in the course of his subsequent life, this mental trouble
seemed upon the point of recurring.

Many will be tempted to demand how a man so little master of
himself, and whose mind was under so little government, could
ever have succeeded in producing a doctrine so considerable, and
in exercising such real influence upon the philosophical world.
The fact is nevertheless beyond question. Whether the cause is to
be referred to the merit of M. Comte and of his doctrine, or to
the state of men's minds at the time, it is certain that not only
in France but in Europe, and particularly in England, numerous
and honorable disciples came over to his ideas, and that
Positivism became a school wanting neither in sincerity nor
credit. When such men as M. Littré, at Paris, and Mr. J. Stuart
Mill, in London, declare themselves his adherents, the doctrine
has claims to a serious examination.

{271}

M. Auguste Comte lived constantly, as far as he was individually
concerned, under the empire of a fixed idea, which occasioned him
many a painful disappointment; and he lived, as far as his system
was concerned, under the empire of a false idea, which associated
with views just in themselves and sometimes grand, one pervading
and permanent error.

His fixed personal idea consisted in his thinking himself called
to regenerate human science and human society by the single
virtue of his doctrine. Besides their share in the
presumptuousness which is the common character of mankind, minds
that are inventive and fond of systematizing are particularly
prone to extend beyond their legitimate bearings--nay, beyond all
bounds--the pretensions and the hopes which their ideas suggest.
M. Auguste Comte was one of the most striking instances, as well
as one of the most honest victims, of this intellectual
intoxication--the noblest although not the least fantastic form
of human pride.
{272}
The Christian religion has its apostles and it has its
missionaries, speaking in the name of a Master other than
themselves, and preaching a faith they did not themselves
originate. M. Auguste Comte was his own proper apostle--the
inventor and missionary of his own proper faith. Of profound
convictions, with no selfish, worldly views, he aspired to the
entire empire of the intellect, believing both the interests of
social order and the honor of the human mind involved in the
triumph of his doctrine; he ardently desired not only its
propagation, but its organization as a permanent and potent
institution, to insure and perpetuate his triumph. The real and
practical government of nations, according to him, was only, as
it ought to be only, a sort of stewardship, charged with the duty
of realizing and carrying into effect the ideas of thinking men.
"The systematic separation of the two elementary forces, the
Spiritual and the Temporal," so he wrote to Mr. J. Stuart Mill,
"constitutes certainly the principal condition for a
_denouement_ of the actual situation.
{273}
I admit that the special requirements of a situation where those
two forces are confounded may authorize, and sometimes oblige,
philosophers, in the interest of a final regeneration, to
participate, by way of exception, in actual political life,
although an inclination for such a life exposes them to the
danger of many a quicksand, and demands that their principles
should be firmly settled, to avoid the risk of a real deviation.
To embody my thought upon this subject in a palpable example
relative to a great occurrence, I blame the philosopher Condorcet
for having suffered himself to be returned as member to our
glorious Convention, in which men of action were leaders, and
properly so, whereas Condorcet could never be so placed as to
regard things from the same point of view; hence that false
position for which in the sequel he had so cruelly to suffer.
{274}
But on the contrary, I should have regarded it as very natural
for him to develop a great activity in the club of the Jacobins;
for, placed beyond the sphere of the government, properly so
called, that club constituted at that time a sort of spiritual
power, in that remarkable and so little comprehended combination
of things which characterized the revolutionary régime. ... I
have learned with much satisfaction," he added, still addressing
Mr. Mill, "that the wise energy of your resistance has succeeded
in triumphing over the blind persistence of your friends who urge
you toward a parliamentary career. I shall propose in my last
volume, and in direct terms, the institution, by individual
efforts, of an European committee, charged permanently with the
direction of a common movement of philosophical regeneration,
when once Positivism shall have planted its standard--that is,
its lighthouse, I should term it--in the midst of the disorder
and confusion that reigns; and I hope that this will be the
result of the publication of my work in its complete state."
[Footnote 45]

    [Footnote 45: Letters of the 20th November, 1841, and 4th
    March, 1842, published in the work of M. Littré, entitled,
    "Auguste Comte and the Positive Philosophy," pp. 424, 425,
    427, 429.]

{275}

One can scarcely refrain from a smile when he contemplates these
dreams reduced to the form of system, ignoring every sentiment of
reality, and expounded with the confidence of fanaticism in the
name of a science called Positive. Here it is that we find the
fixed and dominant idea that pervaded and compromised the whole
life of M. Auguste Comte. Whoever did not accept his doctrine and
his system, was for him either a retrogradist full of prejudice,
or an ignoramus without scientific education, or an interested
and jealous enemy. Whoever, on the other hand, lent himself to
his views on any point, or for any time, however short, became in
the eyes of M. Comte his conquest and his property, his
philosophical serf, as it were, bound to his master by the tenure
of duty, and the render of services from which he could never
hope to enfranchise himself, without the risk of being treated
upon the instant as a deserter or a rebel, and of seeing at once
broken the closest and most approved bonds of intimacy and
friendship.
{276}
He had so entire a confidence in his own intellectual
superiority, and in the rights which it conferred, that he
expressed it sometimes with a _näiveté_ amounting almost to
idolatry. One day, believing that he had won over to his ideas M.
Armand Marrast, then the editor of the _National_, he wrote
thus to his wife: "Marrast no longer feels any repugnance in
admitting the indispensable fact of my intellectual superiority;
he is in this respect, in my opinion, especially influenced by
Mill, whom he holds, and with reason, in high account. To speak
plainly and in general terms, I believe that, at the point at
which I have now arrived, I have no occasion to do more than to
continue to exist; the kind of preponderance which I covet
cannot, henceforth, fail to devolve upon me." [Footnote 46]

    [Footnote 46: Letter of the 3d December, 1842: "Auguste Comte
    et la philosophic positive;" p. 324.]

{277}

Shortly after the date of this letter, M. Comte was separated
from his wife and embroiled with Mr. Mill himself, who had not,
as the former fancied, fulfilled toward him all the duties of an
accepted and loyal disciple.

I pass from the fixed idea of the man to the false idea of his
system; it appears over and over again at each step in the "Cours
de philosophie positive" of M. Auguste Comte, [Footnote 47] and
in the imposing biography consecrated to his memory by his most
accomplished disciple, M. Littré. [Footnote 48]

    [Footnote 47: Six volumes 8vo., published in the interval
    from 1830 to 1842 inclusive.]

    [Footnote 48: Auguste Comte et la philosophic positive. 8vo.
    1863.]

I extract from different parts of these volumes the passages in
which the fundamental doctrine is most clearly expressed:

  "Positive philosophy is the whole body of human knowledge.
  Human knowledge is the result of the study of the forces
  belonging to matter, and of the conditions or laws governing
  those forces." [Footnote 49]

    [Footnote 49: Ibid., p. 42.]

  "The fundamental character of positive philosophy is, that it
  regards all phenomena as subjected to invariable natural laws,
  and considers as absolutely inaccessible to us, and as having
  no sense for us, every inquiry into what is termed either
  primary or final causes." [Footnote 50]

    [Footnote 50: Cours de philosophic positive, by M. Auguste
    Comte, vol. i, p. 14.]

{278}

  "The scientific path, in which I have, ever since I began to
  think, continued to walk, the labors that I obstinately pursue
  to elevate social theories to the rank of physical science are
  evidently, radically, and absolutely opposed to everything that
  has a religious or metaphysical tendency." [Footnote 51]

    [Footnote 51: Auguste Comte et la philosophic positive, by M.
    Littré, p. 194.]

  "My positive philosophy is incompatible with every theological
  or metaphysical philosophy, and consequently equally so with
  every corresponding system of policy." [Footnote 52]

    [Footnote 52: Ibid., p. 210.]

  "M. Comte," says M. Littré, "made it a duty to speak in public
  without any reticence, to deduce his positive truths, and to
  confront them with the conceptions of Theology and of
  Metaphysics. . . . 'Religiosity' is in his eyes not only a
  weakness, but an avowal of want of power." [Footnote 53]

    [Footnote 53: Auguste Comte et la phil. pos., by M. Littré,
    pp. 198-255.]

{279}

  "The 'positive state' is that state of the mind in which it
  conceives that phenomena are governed by constant laws, from
  which prayer and adoration can demand nothing, but to which
  intelligence and science may address their demands; so that, by
  familiarizing himself with those laws more and more, and by
  conforming to them more and more, man acquires an ever-growing
  empire over nature and over himself, which empire is the sum of
  all civilization. The 'theological state,' on the contrary, is
  that state of the mind which conceives that phenomena are the
  results of volition, or, if the social development has arrived
  at Monotheism, that they are the results of a single, all-wise,
  and all-powerful will. This providence, essentially collective
  where Polytheism is supposed, essentially single in the case of
  Monotheism, governs the world, dispenses its good and its evil,
  lays its finger upon human events, and regards the destiny of
  each individual man.
{280}
  Such is the contrast between the two doctrines. ... Profiting
  by the instruction of the illustrious De Maistre, our French
  priests at last comprehended that ultramontanism was the only
  logical consequence deducible from their essential principles.
  The more the positive school defines the real character of its
  progress, the more must we see this retrograde concentration
  also develop itself; which will involve at some later epoch
  Deists themselves, as Positivism proceeds to gain complete
  ascendancy; an ascendancy, in other respects, far more likely
  to be furthered than retarded by such coordination of its
  adversaries, for this will tend to give at last to the
  struggles of philosophy a decisive character; but the
  Positivists will alone succeed in prevailing (at least as far
  as speculative doctrines are concerned) over the coalition of
  all the philosophical forces of the ancient school, whether
  metaphysical or theological." [Footnote 54]

    [Footnote 54: Auguste Comte et la phil. pos., by M. Littré,
    pp. 370, 434. ]

{281}

M. Comte had even more aversion for Metaphysics than for
Theology. He took particular offense at the contemporary
spiritualistic school, and the scientific psychology of MM.
Royer, Collard, Maine de Biran, Cousin, and Jouffroy.

  "In no view," said he, "is there any room for this illusory
  psychology; this final transformation of a theology, which men
  strive, nowadays, so idly to reanimate; for--without troubling
  itself either with the physiological study of our intellectual
  organs, or with the observation of those rational processes,
  which in effect direct our different scientific
  researches--Psychology pretends to arrive at the discovery of
  the fundamental laws of the human mind by contemplating that
  very mind--that is to say, by making complete abstraction both
  of causes and of effects." [Footnote 55]

    [Footnote 55: Cours de philosophic positive, by M. Auguste
    Comte, vol. i, p. 34.]

{282}

Even while absolutely rejecting Theology, M. Comte treated it
with more esteem than Metaphysics.

  "We are," he said, "too disposed, nowadays, to ignore the
  immense benefits due to religious influence. The positive
  philosophy, however paradoxical it may be to claim for it such
  a peculiarity, is virtually the only philosophy capable of
  worthily appreciating all the participation of the spirit of
  religion in the whole grand development of humanity. Is it not
  directly evident that, as by an invincible organic necessity,
  moral efforts have almost always to combat to some degree or
  other the most energetic impulses of our nature; the
  theological spirit was imperatively called upon to furnish to
  social discipline that general basis which was quite
  indispensable at a time when human foresight, whether of men in
  masses or of men as individuals, was certainly far too limited
  to offer any sufficient _point d'appui_ to influences
  purely rational?"

{283}

  ... "When the positive philosophy shall have acquired that
  character of universality which it is still without, it will be
  capable of replacing entirely, with all its native superiority,
  that theological philosophy and that metaphysical philosophy of
  which this universality is in these days the sole real
  peculiarity, and which, deprived of this motive for preference,
  will have for our successors nothing but an historical
  existence." [Footnote 56]

    [Footnote 56: Cours de philosophic positive, by M. Comte,
    vol. v, p. 73; vol. i, p. 23.]

I do not pause to notice in how many respects this language is
superficial, confused, and incoherent. I only draw attention to
the fundamental idea which it manifests--matter, the forces of
matter, and its laws; these are the sole objects of human
knowledge, the sole domain of the human mind. Aware of, and
embarrassed by the objections which the idea has from the
beginning of time excited, M. Littré has striven to rid himself
of them by an admission, sincere no doubt, like everything that
he thinks, and everything that he says, but full in its turn of
confusion and incoherence.

{284}

  "The positive philosophy," says he, "is at once a system which
  comprehends all that is known of the world of man and of
  society, and also a general method, containing in itself all
  the ways by which men have come to learn all these things. What
  is beyond, whether, materially speaking, that space without
  limit, or intellectually that concatenation of never-ending
  causes, all this is absolutely inaccessible to the human mind.
  By inaccessible is not meant null or non-existent. Immensity in
  matter, as in intellect, is connected by a close band with what
  we know, and it is only by such an alliance that it becomes an
  idea positive in itself, and of the same order; what I mean is,
  that by so touching and bordering what we know, immensity
  appears under the double character of reality and of
  inaccessibility. It is an ocean which dashes upon our shores,
  and for which we have nor bark nor sail, but the clear vision
  of which is as salutary as it is formidable." [Footnote 57]

    [Footnote 57: Auguste Comte et la phil. pos., by M. Littré,
    p. 519.]

{285}

The vision so admitted by M. Littré is not clear, and neither is
it salutary; but vague, and without result. The imagery does not
destroy the system which it seeks to vail from us. Every
religious belief, every spiritual doctrine, God and the human
soul, are discarded by Positivism, and treated as arbitrary and
transitory hypotheses, which, however they may have conduced to
the development of humanity, ought now to be rejected by human
reason, just as the foot may throw down the ladder which has
enabled it to mount to the summit. To call things by their proper
names, Positivism is Materialism and Atheism, with more or less
explicitness, confidently or hesitatingly, accepted as the last
term of human science, and when hard pressed, taking refuge in
the darkness of skepticism.

What are the foundations upon which Positivism rests? What facts,
what proofs, does M. Auguste Comte adduce in support of his
principles, that matter, its forces, and its laws, constitute the
sole object of human knowledge, the sole domain of the human
mind?

{286}

He appeals to two arguments--the one metaphysical, the other
historical; the one derived from the mind of man itself, the
other from the history of humanity.

I cannot here follow M. Comte in his long and complex explanation
of the two orders of proofs to which he appeals in support of his
system; what I shall say will, I think, suffice to demonstrate
that neither can stand any serious examination.

As a metaphysician--for metaphysician he must permit himself to
be called, since he makes use of metaphysics, whatever his
antipathy for philosophers who bear that name;--as
metaphysician, I repeat, M. Auguste Comte belongs to the
sensualistic school, He thinks with Locke and Condillac, that man
deduces all his ideas and all his knowledge from impressions
received by him from the outer world, and from the reflections
which he makes upon those impressions.
{287}
He takes, therefore, as his starting point, the maxim of that
school which proclaims that "there is nothing in the intelligence
which has not first been in the sense." Nevertheless, whether by
an act of proper and remarkable sagacity, or struck by the reply
of Leibnitz, "unless the intelligence itself," he admits that
sensation does not account for all that passes and develops
itself in the mind of the observer of the external world. "If,"
he says, "on the one side every positive theory must necessarily
be founded upon observation, it is, on the other side, equally
plain that to apply itself to the task of observation, our mind
has need of some 'theory.' If, in contemplating the phenomena, we
do not immediately attach them to certain principles, not only
would it be impossible for us to combine these isolated
observations, so as to draw any fruit therefrom; but we should be
entirely incapable of retaining them, and in most cases the facts
would remain before our eyes unnoticed.
{288}
The need at all times of some 'theory' whereby to associate
facts, combined with the evident impossibility of the human mind
at its origin forming 'theories' out of observations, is a fact
which it is impossible to ignore." [Footnote 58]

    [Footnote 58: Cours de philosophic positive, par M. Auguste
    Comte, vol. i. p. 8.]

This fact, thus proved by M. Comte himself; this necessary part
of the human mind, indispensable to enable it to acquire
knowledge of the external world; this "theory," anterior to all
observation, which man requires for the purpose himself of
observing, what are they else than those universal and necessary
principles proclaimed by the spiritualistic school, and to which
I recently referred?--principles inherent in the human mind,
which it applies as from its own stores in taking cognizance of
the external world, and by virtue of which, just as one mounts a
river up to its source, man mounts and mounts up to God, and up
to the relations of man with God.

{289}

But, admitting the same fact, M. Comte does not explain it in
this way. This "theory;" these principles anterior to external
observation, and which the mind absolutely requires in order to
be able to observe, are, according to him, pure inventions of the
human mind itself, temporary instruments which the mind creates
and employs in its labors until it can obtain better. "Between,"
says he, "two difficulties, pressed on the one hand by the
necessity of observing in order to form 'theories,' and on the
other by the no less imperious necessity of creating 'theories'
in order to be able to deliver itself up to a series of coherent
observations, the human mind at its birth would find itself shut
in by a vicious circle from which it would never have had any
means of escaping, had it not succeeded in opening a natural
issue by the spontaneous development of theological conceptions,
which presented a point to which his efforts might be
concentrated, and which might furnish aliment for his activity.
{290}
It is, in effect, very remarkable, that questions the most
radically inaccessible to our capacities, the intimate nature of
being, the origin and the end of all phenomena, should be
precisely those which the intelligence propounds to itself, as of
paramount importance in that primitive condition, all the other
problems really admitting of solution being almost regarded as
unworthy of serious meditation. The reason of this it is not
difficult to discover, for experience alone could have given us
the measure of our strength; and if man had not begun by
entertaining an exaggerated opinion of that strength, it would
never have been capable of acquiring all the development of which
it is susceptible. So much does our organization exact."
[Footnote 59]

    [Footnote 59: Cours de philosophie positive, par M. Auguste
    Comte, vol. i, pp. 9, 10.]

{291}

Strange error of a man, whose supreme pretension it is to found
all human knowledge upon the observation of facts! At his very
first step, at the first difficulty which he encounters, M. Comte
observes inexactly and incompletely, does not see in the facts
all that the facts contain, and only explains them by assigning
to the human mind, in its primitive and spontaneous operations, a
hypothesis, the hypothesis of "theological conceptions." God, and
man's relations with God, is a human invention, destined to
support man at the commencement of his career as an intelligent
being, and to occupy provisionally the place of science!

The source of this misapprehension, the capital error of
Positivism in its metaphysical argument, is, that it ignores the
nature and the limits of science.

The famous "enthymême" of Descartes, "I think, therefore I am,"
is a pleonasm. As soon as the human being says to itself "I," the
human being affirms its own existence, and distinguishes itself
from that external world whence it derives impressions of which
it is not the author.
{292}
In this primary fact are revealed the two primary objects of
human knowledge: on the one side the human being himself, the
individual person that feels and perceives, that feels himself
and perceives himself; on the other side, the external world that
is felt and perceived: the subject and the object, (the
_moi_ and the _non-moi_.) Such is the twofold field, at
the beginning of his intellectual existence, opened to the
knowing faculty of man.

In each of these fields, whether the human being makes himself or
whether he makes the external world the object of his
contemplation, he proceeds by the same method; he considers
particular facts, classes these under more general facts which
serve as their summary, and recognizes laws that govern them,
these laws being themselves facts. When this method of
observation and of generalization is applied to the outer world,
understanding by that world the human body also, it gives birth
to the sciences of physics and of physiology.
{293}
When such method is applied to the human being, regarded as
distinct from the body in which he lives and by which he acts, it
gives birth to the science of psychology, logic, and morals. It
is not here my intention to propose a classification of the
sciences, but only to determine the domain of science properly so
called--that is to say, the field in which the human mind by
observation gets directly at facts and at the laws of facts.

Philosophers, in their study of man and of the world, do not
sufficiently consult language, the general language, the common
language, that instinctive expression of the activity of the
human mind. I interrogate our native language upon the question
which now occupies me, and I find it reflecting the greatest
light. It has, to express the results of the intellectual process
which takes place in man, when regarded as the spectator of the
universe and of himself, many different words: "connaître,"
"savoir," "croire," "connaissance," "science," "croyance," "foi."
{294}
These are not mere different names to express the same idea and
the same fact, they are signs of different facts and of diverse
states of the human soul. If we interrogate the languages of
civilized nations, ancient or modern, we find in all of them,
with more or less abundance, precision or subtlety, a similar
variety of terms corresponding to a similar diversity of facts.

Talleyrand said once in the chamber of Peers, "There is somebody
who has more intellect than Napoleon, more intellect than
Voltaire; that somebody is the Public." I also say, there is a
more profound observer than Bacon, a greater philosopher than
Kant; it is mankind. Mankind is right when it distinguishes in
its languages knowledge from science and from belief, science
from belief and from faith. Bossuet wrote a book entitled "De la
Connaissance de Dieu et de soi-même;" the idea would never have
occurred to him of entitling it "De la science de Dieu et de
soi-même;" it would have shocked his good sense as much as his
piety.
{295}
The child believes the smile and the speech of its mother; in its
belief there is certainly no scientific appreciation (no science)
of the relations which unite it to its mother, and of the reasons
which make it believe in her. Knowledge, science, belief, and
faith, are facts essentially distinct, although all equally
natural to the human soul; and it is impossible to confound them,
to take one for the other, to annul one in favor of the other, or
to attempt to reduce them to one term, without ignoring
realities, and falling into enormous errors.

Such has been the constant error of M. Auguste Comte, and such is
the radical vice of Positivism. M. Comte ignores the natural and
permanent diversity in the intellectual states through which a
man may pass in his ardent pursuit of truth. He refuses here to
recognize any state as legitimate and definitive except the
scientific state. He regards intuitive knowledge and instinctive
belief as preparatory and transitory states, states without any
rational authority; as, in short, simple steps on the way to that
scientific state which alone sets man in possession of the truth.
{296}
Positivism is thus led to extend the pretensions of science
beyond its proper domain, that is, beyond the finite world, its
facts and its laws; and as science finds itself incapable of
observing and of defining infinity, Positivism is, perforce,
reduced either to deny infinity, or to declare infinity
absolutely inaccessible to the human mind, and so to pass it over
in silence.

This negation discovers another immense error of the school and
of its chief. Convinced, and with reason, that the observation of
facts is the natural and constant process of the human
understanding in its labor after knowledge, M. Auguste Comte has
ill understood, and incompletely understood, the results of this
labor. He failed to perceive that it was observation itself,
carried on and accomplished by the process, no less natural and
no less legitimate, of induction, which was revealing to the mind
its peculiar facts and its peculiar laws, as well as the facts
and the laws of the external world, within which that mind is
placed.
{297}
M. Comte ended by ignoring or denying the elements _à
priori_ of human knowledge; that is to say, the universal and
necessary principles by which man raises himself to God, and has
relations with God. Thus M. Comte mutilates the human mind,
because he fails to observe it and to recognize it in its
entirety.

He is impelled by his system to another and still more serious
mutilation of human nature. After having declared matter, its
forces and its laws, to be the single object of human knowledge,
and these laws to be inherent in matter, eternal and invariable,
what is to be said of human liberty? What place is to be assigned
to human liberty in this world, in which it is powerless to
create anything or to change anything, and in which there exists
no power from which it can demand anything or obtain anything?
{298}
Evidently, in such a system human liberty is a chimera, an idle
luxury of human nature; man, with all his faculties, has nothing
to do but to study matter carefully, its forces and its laws, to
adapt himself to them, and to make the best use he can of them,
with a view to his welfare and to the satisfaction of his
desires. Fatalism is the law of man as of the world within which
he lives!

The moral instincts, and the naturally lofty mind of M. Comte
revolted at this consequence, although it flowed imperiously from
his system. The respect which he felt for the method of
observation, and for the facts which it attains to, did not
permit him absolutely to ignore or expressly to deny the
psychological fact of man's liberty. Sometimes he attempts to
find it a place in that sum of external facts and fixed laws
which is, in his opinion, the sole field for man's activity and
for man's science.
{299}
But such is the want of coherence of idea, that M. Comte is
visibly embarrassed; consequently, in his works--more especially
in his "Cours de philosophie positive,"--the most solid and
consistent of all his writings in its fundamental principles--he
sets almost completely aside the essential fact of human liberty,
and of free will in the individual man; and in those books in
which he treats of social organization, when he finds himself
face to face with the wants and the rights of political liberty,
that natural consequence of individual free will and of the
responsibility attaching to it, he struggles to elude questions
of this kind, feeling the impossibility of reconciling the
principle of moral order with the despotism and the fatalism of
the material world; and when he explains his views as to the
government of human societies, it is easy to see that, although
writing "I am, head and heart Republican," [Footnote 60] he is,
in his dreams, rather substituting a scientific domination for a
theocratic domination than instituting any liberal _régime_.

    [Footnote 60: Auguste Comte et la phil. pos., by M. Littré,
    p. 251.]

{300}

After metaphysics comes history. M. Comte appeals to the annals
of all nations and all ages in confirmation of his system of the
world and of humanity. This history is to be divided, according
to him, into three successive states, the theological state, the
metaphysical state, and the scientific state. In the theological
state and epoch, the human mind and social institutions are under
the empire of pretended supernatural powers, of several such or
of only one such, invented by man for the solution of the natural
problems which lay siege to man, and for the determination of the
laws, with which the social order cannot dispense. In the
metaphysical epoch and state, vain abstractions essay to replace
the supernatural powers of the theological state, and only end in
an anarchy, both of opinions and society. The third epoch is
destined to be the reign of positive science, founded solely upon
observation and respect for the facts, the forces, and the laws
of that external world which is the theater of man's existence.
The first two states are, according to him, essentially
irrational and transitory. They are the first steps of that which
M. Comte styles the grand evolution of humanity, of which the
_régime_ of science is the end and the summit.

{301}

It would be difficult more entirely to deform, difficult to show
greater ignorance of man's general history. That which M. Comte
regards as three successive states in the history of the human
race is only the complex and permanent condition of humanity,
agitated by movements swaying in different directions, according
as it meets with the successes or encounters the reverses, the
hopes, or the fears to which different nations and generations
are subject. That theological conceptions and metaphysical
meditations are only transitory facts, "which," according to the
expression of M. Comte, "will have henceforth only an historical
existence," is an assertion no more true of such facts than of
those that the study of physics supplies. These different
yearnings of the mind, and their different labors, are the very
essence--the indestructible and indivisible essence--of human
nature.
{302}
At no time and in no country have men more ceased, or will they
more cease, to pray to God, and to strive to comprehend him, than
they will cease to study the physical world, and to make it
subserve their interests. Nations and generations of individuals,
in different ages, have advanced more or less in one or other of
these careers of intellectual activity; and so they will continue
to advance. Religious faith, metaphysical meditation, and
scientific inquiry have their alternations of enthusiasm and of
languor, of glory and of sterility; they appear and they prosper,
sometimes separately, sometimes simultaneously. If India plunged
herself deep among the symbols of mythology and amid the void of
Pantheism, Greece cultivated with like success the metaphysical
and the natural sciences--Aristotle was the contemporary of
Plato. Where other nations fluctuated variously between
theological conceptions, metaphysical abstractions, and
scientific studies, the Hebrew people continued, in the
theological state, Monotheists.
{303}
In the sixteenth century, when the spirit of free inquiry and of
independence was awakened, and made its influence felt far and
wide, Christian faith, at the same time, was resuscitated and
confirmed; and the eighteenth century founded at once the
political liberty of Protestant England and the philosophical and
literary glory of Catholic France. The human mind has, according
to time and place, its favorite labors and its favorite impulses;
but it subsists always one and entire; it never renounces any one
of its grand hopes or of its grand operations; and those men
strangely mutilate and debase it who represent the mind as
having, during ages, lost itself in the vain effort to attain a
knowledge of God and of its own nature, and who condemn it
henceforth to take up its quarters in the science of matter--of
its forces--of its laws.

{304}

Why need I appeal to history for a proof of the simultaneous and
indestructible co-existence of these different conditions of
humanity, among which M. Auguste Comte refuses to admit more than
one as rational and definitive? M. Comte has himself
undertaken--he alone--to furnish me with this proof. This
intractable adversary of all religious belief and tendency could
not, even for the short space of this life, himself remain
indifferent to such belief and tendency; during this brief period
he traversed, and in the inverse order of his own theories, each
of the different intellectual states which he had assigned as the
successive stages of the human race. He had placed the
theological state at the beginning and the scientific state at
the close of the career of humanity; after having made his own
_début_ by the scientific state, it was as impossible for
him, as it is for the human race, to content himself with that,
and he himself ended there, where, according to him, mankind had
commenced, namely, with the theological state. He had declared
his positive philosophy to be "in radical and absolute
contradiction to every kind of religious or metaphysical
tendency."
{305}
He had separated with _éclat_ from the Saint-Simonians, "for
they will soon," he said, "sink themselves in ridicule and
contempt. Only imagine, their heads are turned to such a degree,
that they propose nothing less than the establishment of a real,
new religion, a sort of incarnation of the divinity in the person
of Saint-Simon." [Footnote 61]

    [Footnote 61: Letter of the 9th December, 1828, to M. Gustave
    d'Eichthal. Auguste Comte et la philosophie positive, by M.
    Littré, p. 173.]

And some years after holding this language, and while still in
the plenitude of bodily vigor and thought, M. Comte in his turn
launched into a theological career; he took it upon him to
transform Positivism into a religion. By the most violent of all
personified abstractions, he made out of humanity the great
being, the real being, sovereign and adorable, and he placed that
being in the place of God, declaring himself at the same time to
be his chief priest.
{306}
He had more than once proclaimed that all religion was
essentially founded upon the supernatural; and yet a religion all
natural--the religion of humanity, the worship of humanity, the
church of humanity, were summoned by him to succeed to the
Christian religion and to the Church of Christ. On the 19th of
October, 1851, when terminating his third philosophical course on
the general histories of humanity, M. Comte summed it up in these
words: "In the name of the past and of the future, the
theoretical servitors and the practical servitors of humanity are
about to assume worthily the direction of the general affairs of
this world, in order to construct, at last, the true providence,
moral, intellectual, and material, at the same time excluding
irrevocably from political supremacy all the different slaves of
God--Catholics, Protestants, or Deists--as being at once in
arrear of the age and its perturbators." The positivist religion
thus proclaimed, a positivist catechism and a positivist
calendar--these last both composed by M. Comte--reduced his
principles to practice.
{307}
In a series of conversations between "The Priest and the Woman,"
the catechism first establishes and explains the dogma, then the
worship, of the new religion, its internal order and its external
order, its private worship and its public worship. And the
calendar, by a retrospective chronology, determines for any given
year of thirteen months, and for the seven days of the week, the
names of the grand servitors in every department of humanity, who
are to replace the Christian saints: three hundred and sixty-four
names, men and women, with one hundred and sixty-five additional
names, are inscribed upon this list, which begins with Moses and
ends with Bichat, passing through Homer, Aristotle, Archimedes,
Cæsar, Saint Paul, Charlemagne, Dante, Gutenburg, Shakspeare,
Descartes, and Frederic the Second!

A chaos is a sorry sight; a chaos of the soul a still sorrier
spectacle than a chaos of worlds! Epochs of moral and social
crises, even while they bring on and prepare for mankind eras of
mighty progress, throw also great and potent intellects into
chaos.
{308}
Under the seduction of a noble ambition, and the delusion of a
partial success, they enthusiastically attach themselves to some
special subject, some incomplete idea; vain of their shallow and
confused systems, or rather of the brilliant coloring in which
they invest them, they pretend to explain and regulate man and
the world, and yet are nothing more than their superficial and
presumptuous observers. Among these "great lost ones of
humanity," (I borrow a phrase of their own,) M. Comte was one of
the most disinterested and the most sincere. The sincerity and
the courage evinced by him in expressing his convictions led him
on from inconsequence to inconsequence; in his benighted course
he caught glimpses occasionally of grand ideas, and of these he
apprehended neither the scope nor the connection: first it was an
idea of a science excluding all idea of religion; and then a
certain idea of a religion reconciled with and intimately united
with the idea of science; turn by turn he gave himself up to the
one and to the other with a blind and a daring devotedness.
{309}
Had he appeared in Greece at the great era of philosophy, or in
France in the seventeenth century, in the midst of the great
Christian controversy, he would have been taxed with insanity--at
the one epoch, not only by Plato but by Aristotle; at the other,
not only by Bossuet but by Spinoza. In our days he has been more
fortunate: he attached himself passionately to the method of
observation of facts, which is the very character of science, and
although his observations were superficial, inexact, and
incomplete--although he fell into the strangest
inconsistencies--the fundamental principle of his system, and the
coincidence of his primary ideas with the method and the tendency
of the physical sciences, the darling study of our age, have
given him more importance and more influence than were really his
due.

-------------------------------

{310}

          Fifth Meditation.

             Pantheism.


No two essays at philosophy are more dissimilar--I should indeed
say more contradictory--than Pantheism and Positivism. What
Positivism declares to be impossible, Pantheism seeks to
accomplish; what Positivism forbids man to seek, Pantheism
promises to give him. It is the fundamental principle of
Positivism to confine the human mind to the finite world, its
facts and its laws; Pantheism aspires at a knowledge and a
comprehension of Infinity, and of the relations of the finite
with Infinity. "I have explained God, God's nature and his
attributes," says Spinoza. [Footnote 62]

    [Footnote 62: Ethics, 1st part; of God: Appendix, vol. i, p.
    39. French translation by M. Saisset.]

{311}

I hasten to explain, in order to prevent misconstruction; it is
to Pantheism, properly so called--to the sole system that merits
the name--that my remarks are here applicable. "We must," says
M. Cousin, "it seems, distinguish two kinds of Pantheism. The
assertion that this visible universe, indefinite or infinite,
suffices to itself, and that there is nothing to be sought for
beyond, is the Pantheism of Diderot, Helvetius, de la Mettrie,
d'Holbach. This Pantheism is clearly Atheism, and it would not be
very easy to comprehend the complacent indulgence that should
spare it that name of Atheism--a name, unfortunately, of ancient
date, which would then have no longer any object to fit it, and
would need to be erased from our dictionary. But is it possible
for a similar Pantheism to be imputed to Spinoza? With the French
Encyclopedists, things exist in particularity and individuals
singly: the universe is an assemblage of individuals--an
assemblage without unity, or of which the sole unity is a
presumed primary matter, which the philosopher admits or which he
does not admit, but with which his thought has no business, to
occupy itself.
{312}
With Spinoza, on the contrary, the single substance is all, and
the individuals are nothing. This substance is not the nominal
unity of the assemblage of individuals, each of which exists
singly, but is the single really existing substance, and in the
presence of that substance the world and man are but shadows; so
that from the 'Ethics' may be gathered an exaggerated Theism
which leaves no individual existing as such. Rigorously, and at
bottom, there is here perhaps only one and the same system, but a
system, nevertheless, with two very different forms--the one,
where God is nothing but the Universe; the other, where the
Universe exists only in God." [Footnote 63]

    [Footnote 63: Histoire générale de la philosophie, p. 433,
    ed. 1863.]

{313}

I think, with M. Cousin, that, rigorously and at bottom, there is
here but one and the same system, but in appearance, and I say
besides, in the opinion of its authors, the difference is great,
and requires to be noticed. I postpone for the subject
"Materialism," all that I have to say upon the subject of the
so-called Pantheism, which admits no other existence than either
that of the individualities that people the visible universe, or
that of the primary matter whence they have issued. I occupy
myself, at this moment, solely with the idealistic Pantheism.

Do we wish to behold a spectacle of how weak the human mind
really is in the midst of all its grandeur, and of the limits
which must finally and abruptly check its progress, however high
its flight, we will read Plotinus, Spinoza, and Hegel, three
martyrs to intellectual ambition, differing very much according
to the difference of the eras and the nations to which they
respectively belong, but similar in this point at least, that
they ignore the visible world, and leave it behind them, to enter
that world which dazzles their sight, where they plunge into a
void in quest of what they call "Being!"

{314}

Two passions have impelled, are impelling, and will, probably,
still occasionally impel men of eminent powers of mind to
Pantheism: the passionate craving for an universal science, and
the passionate longing for universal unity--feelings noble both,
but illegitimate and incapable of satisfaction.

"I have resolved," said Spinoza, "to search if there exist a real
Good, a Good capable, singly, of filling the entire soul after it
shall have rejected all the rest--in a word, a Good that gives
the soul, when the soul finds it and possesses it, the eternal
and supreme happiness. ... Man is essentially a being that
thinks, and the highest degree of human knowledge ought to be the
highest degree of human felicity. ... My sources of enjoyment
consist in the exercise of the reason." [Footnote 64]

    [Footnote 64: Œuvres de Spinoza, French translation of M.
    Emile Saisset, vol. i, pp. 15, 16.]

{315}

What obliviousness of man's nature and of man's life! Man is not
merely a being that thinks, but a being that feels, wills, and
acts, a being moral and responsible for his acts, at the same
time that he is a being of intelligence, and a being insatiate of
knowledge. It is by his thought that he accounts to himself for
his sentiments, and for the motives of his acts, but it is not
from his thought that he derives either his sentiments or his
liberty, neither does knowledge constitute his sole enjoyment.
Spinoza mutilates man strangely when he places "the highest
degree of human felicity in the highest degree of human
knowledge." Man is more exacting than the philosopher, and it
requires infinitely more to satisfy the most modest human soul
than to satisfy the proudest mind. Infinitely more in respect of
happiness, infinitely less in respect of science! Not that I
would make their intellectual ambition a reproach to
philosophers, even when it leads them astray.
{316}
It is an honor to the human mind that it aspires higher than it
can attain, that it torments itself in the struggle to carry its
science into that invisible world, which it instinctively feels
by anticipation, just as it does into that visible world that it
sees. God granted to man this privilege; he implanted in his soul
the ardent desire to know him and to possess him fully. But at
the same time, God granted to men in general certain instincts
and spontaneous beliefs which adequately satisfy this desire
without the necessity of any profound study. What would have
become of the human race if, in order to believe in God, to hope
in him, and to pray to him, man had been obliged to wait until
philosophers had resolved the problems which still weigh upon
_their_ genius? As God, in creating man free, took care that
the maintenance of the general order in this world should not be
completely abandoned to the disputes of men, so did he provide
for the spiritual nourishment of mankind, without denying to the
great ambitious ones of the earth either the prospect of a
satisfaction more complete, or the right to search for it.

{317}

Let us never tire of repeating, this is the mystery of man's
mixed nature--an indication of a destiny in store for him
superior to his actual condition. He carries within him the ideas
of infinity, of perfection, and yet here below he is nothing but
a finite being, imperfect, equally incapable of sufficing to
himself and of satisfying himself, either in the domain of
thought or of actual life. "There are more things in heaven and
upon earth than philosophy--than even the philosophy 'of the
absolute'--can explain. ... To comprehend God, it needs to be
God. A child might have said as much to Hegel." These words I
borrow from M. Edmond Scherer's exposition of the doctrine of
Hegel. [Footnote 65]

    [Footnote 65: Melanges d'histoire religieuse, pp. 366, 341.
    1864.]

Jesus in effect said, eighteen centuries ago: "I praise thee,
Father, Lord of heaven and of earth, that thou hast hidden these
things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto
babes."

{318}

Pantheists are entirely of the opinion of M. Scherer, for to
enable man to comprehend God, they have found no other expedient
than to make of man himself the God that man is desirous of
comprehending. The passion for an universal science has ended by
receiving no being as God but man.

The passion for universal unity has led to the same result. That
truth is one--that is to say, that all truths, whatever their
object, are in harmony with one another--the very word truth
implies and proclaims. From the unity of truth the Pantheists
passed, with a single bound, to the unity of being. They
identified idea and reality, science and existence, confounding
all things in order to reduce them to one single thing, and
abolishing all beings in order to concentrate them all in one and
the same being, which, after all, is nothing more than an
impersonal notion and a barren name, falling in its turn into the
void.

{319}

By what path did the Pantheists arrive at this abyss? What was
the process employed by men of eminent powers of mind to
construct a system so singularly factitious and hypothetical, and
yet pretending, at the same time, to be so necessary and so
rigorously philosophical?

Like some great men of antiquity, (and their number is
considerable,) who sought to explain nature and the physical
world by incomplete and precipitate hypotheses and systems,
invented irrespectively of either facts or their laws, the
Pantheists by similar means proceeded--nay, are proceeding--to
explain man, the universe, and God; the Infinite and the finite.
The method which for three centuries has constituted the glory of
the natural sciences, and made their progress lasting, the exact
study of facts and their relations; that method so long strange
not only to general philosophy but to the special sciences
themselves--I may at once call it by its proper name, the
scientific method--was formerly, and remains still, strange to
the Pantheists; to Spinoza as to Plotinus, to Hegel as to
Spinoza.
{320}
Whether Plotinus plunges into an _ecstacy_ to arrive at and
comprehend God in uniting man to God by the virtue of
contemplation; or Spinoza, defining _substance_, makes it
the principle from which to deduce his theory of the universe and
of its unity; or Hegel, speaking of _idea_ in order to
arrive at the same result as Spinoza, seeks to obtain from his
term _substance_--it is the same defect that appears in the
labors of all these potent intelligences, not only in their
development, but in the very point from which they start; for
observation of facts and of their laws they substitute the
affirmation and the definition of an axiom, and the deduction,
logical, it is true, of its consequences. They disdain and set
aside all study of the realities of the universe, believing
themselves to be in possession of a key to open its secrets.

{321}

They see not that their key is a deception, that at each step
facts evident, indestructible, give the flattest denial to their
inferences, and that to maintain their arbitrary and insufficient
principle they are forced to ignore and to deny other facts,
themselves evident, indestructible.

Psychological observation proves and irresistibly establishes
three facts, however the consequences of these facts themselves
may lead to questions and controversies.

1. Man believes in his own existence, and in his own personality.
He feels himself and perceives himself to be a being, real and
distinct from every other being.

2. Man feels himself and knows himself to be a free agent. Of the
freedom of his resolves, whatever the motives and deliberations
which precede them, man has an intimate and assured
consciousness.

3. Good and evil exist in man, and exist in the world; moral good
and evil as well as physical good and evil. Whatever may be
thought of their origin, the mixture and the struggle of good and
of evil, in the moral order and in the physical order, are facts
evident in themselves, and attested by the conscience and by the
experience of the human race.

{322}

Pantheism sometimes ignores and omits, sometimes formally denies,
these facts, which psychology attests and proves. There is,
however, a notable difference in this point in the three great
representatives of Pantheism. Thanks to the Platonic school, from
which he sprang, Plotinus, in treating the different questions of
man's liberty and of the reality of good and of evil, soars in an
elevated region where the truth now shines in splendor, now
obscures itself and disappears in the labyrinth in which the
philosopher himself is entangled as soon as he attempts to
explain the one and infinite Being and that Being's relations
with nature and with man. Spinoza is more consequent and plainer.
He formally denies all individuality, all human liberty.
Substance, "_the being_" is single and universal.
{323}
All act of man, as every fact of nature, is produced by fated
laws and causes: "Free will is a chimera, flattering to our pride
and in reality founded upon our ignorance. All that I can say to
those who believe that they can, by virtue of any free decision
of the soul, speak or be silent--or, to use a single word,
act--is that they dream with their eyes open." [Footnote 66]

    [Footnote 66: Œuvres de Spinoza, French translation of M. E.
    Saisset, vol. i, Introduction, p. clii.]

... "Nothing," adds he, "is bad in itself. Good and evil indicate
nothing positive in things considered in themselves, and are
nothing but manners of thinking. Not only has every man the right
to seek his good, his pleasure, but he cannot do otherwise. ...
The measure of each man's right is his power. ... He who does not
yet know reason, or who, having not as yet contracted the habit
of virtue, lives according to the laws only of his appetites, is
as much in his right as he who regulates his life according to
the laws of reason.
{324}
In other words, just as the sage has an absolute right to do all
that his reason dictates to him, or to live according to the laws
of his reason, in the same manner has the ignorant man and the
madman a right to everything that his appetite impels him to
take; in other words, the right to live according to the laws of
appetite. ... And he is no more obliged to live according to the
laws of good sense than a cat is obliged to live under the laws
that govern the nature of a lion. ... Hence we conclude that a
compact has only a value proportioned to its utility; where the
utility disappears the compact disappears too with it, and loses
all its authority. There is, then, folly in pretending to bind a
man forever to his word; unless, at least, man so contrive that
the breach of the compact shall entail for him that violates it
more danger than profit." [Footnote 67]

    [Footnote 67: Œuvres de Spinoza, vol. i, pp. clix, clx.]

{325}

Hegel is less absolute and less blind. Of a mind large, and from
its greatness naturally just, he escaped at moments the yoke of
his system. Struck by the particular truths, moral, historical,
æsthetic, that offered themselves to his view in the theater of
the universe, he admitted them without very well knowing what
place he should assign to them. "He was," said one of his most
intelligent disciples, "a conciliator in his philosophy. His
philosophy stands midway between Theism and Pantheism; between
historical right, as the expression of actual reason, and the
absolute right to liberty and equality, as the end of universal
history. His system seems to sanction the most profound piety,
and to regard Christianity as the true and absolute religion, at
the very time when it appears also as its negation; just as in
politics it presents itself as at one and the same moment
conservative and progressive, favorable to existing rights and
yet revolutionary."  [Footnote 68]

    [Footnote 68: Histoires de la philosophie allemande depuis
    Kant jusqu'a Hegel, by S. Willm: a work crowned by the
    Institute: vol. iv, p. 337.]

{326}

"It is impossible," says M. Edmond Scherer, "to read Hegel
without asking ourselves if he, be serious. He falls incessantly
into a style of images and personifications; and one would
suppose one's self, in perusing his writings, to be present at
the formation of a mythology, at the development of a world like
that of the ancient Gnostics, in which notions assumed forms and
marched on, passing through all kinds of adventures." [Footnote
69]

    [Footnote 69: Melanges d'histoire religieuse, pp. 298, 838.]

M. Edmond Scherer's is a mind hard to please, which is ever
struck and offended by incoherence of objects, futility of
artificial combinations, and vain play upon words, even where he
recognizes or admires the genius. The philosophical "rout" is not
embarrassed for so slight a cause; it marches straight to the
object toward which the dominant idea, once adopted, gives the
impulse. In spite of its complexities and of its craving for the
reconciliation of religion and of politics, the Pantheism of
Hegel has borne its natural fruits.
{327}
A school has resulted from it, which, in accordance with its
proper and independent manifestations, a learned and moderate
judge, M. Willm, characterizes in these words: "The new German
philosophy, of which Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, and Arnold Rüge are
the principal chiefs, comes, in its ultimate results, in contact
with the _Humanism_ of M. Pierre Leroux, the
_Positivism_ of M. Auguste Comte, and the _Atheism_ of
M. Proudhon. It tends to substitute for the ancient worship the
worship of humanity, and to found a new worship dispensing with
God, and with morality properly so called. ... There is no such
thing as _theology_ but only _anthropology_; for the
mind of humanity is the divine mind realized. There is no longer
any other piety than devotedness to the objects of humanity; no
longer any other prayer than the contemplation of the human mind.
... Man accomplishes every reasonable object if he accomplishes
his own peculiar object, and he cannot do better than employ all
his faculties to realize his own objects. _Man's will be
done:_ such is the principle of the new law." [Footnote 70]

    [Footnote 70: Histoire de la philosophie allemande, depuis
    Kant jusqu'a Hegel: by S. Willm: vol. iv, pp. 624, 626.]

{328}

Such is the inevitable result at which Pantheism, even that kind
termed idealistic Pantheism, ultimately arrives, whatever the
elevation of mind and the morality of intent in its first
authors. This is no scientific doctrine, founded upon the
observation of facts and their laws; it is an hypothesis framed
by dint of violent abstractions, verbal commutations and
reasoning, in the blindness of a thought drunk with itself. Under
the breath of Pantheism all beings--real and personal
beings--vanish, and are replaced by an abstraction becoming in
its turn the Being _par excellence;_ the sole being,
although without personality and without volition, swallowing up
all things in a bottomless abyss, which absorbs that being, too,
after it has already absorbed everything that it has sought so to
explain.

{329}

Was there ever, in the conceptions of mythology, or in the
mystical dreams of the human imagination, anything so artificial,
anything so vain, as this hypothesis, which at its very
beginning, as well as throughout its entire course, loses sight
of the best attested facts respecting man and the world; and,
shocking equally science and common sense, departs as much from
the method of philosophy as from the spontaneous instincts of
mankind?

---------------------------------------

{330}

           Sixth Meditation.

             Materialism.


Materialistic Pantheism is more consistent and more intelligible.
I must at once restore to it its genuine name; it has no right to
that of Pantheism: it sees God neither in the universe nor in
man; the eternal world and ephemeral individuals are, in its
eyes, only combinations and different forms of matter. It is
Materialism in its principle, and Atheism in its consequences.

Two things strike me in the actual state of men's minds; the
progress that Materialism is making, and its constant timidity in
that very progress.

{331}

The progress of Materialism is evident; progress in the learned
world and in the unlearned world, in the name of the scientific
studies and of popular tendencies. A contemporary spiritualistic
philosopher, as distinguished by intellectual probity as by the
independence and the moderation of his opinions, of whom the Duke
de Broglie, on learning his death, exclaimed, "We have lost a
sage"--M. Damiron I mean--published eight years ago his
"Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire de la philosophie au 18
siècle;" he had read it in successive parts to the _Académie
des Sciences Morales et Politiques_. He said in his preface,
"Men are disposed a second time to have Sensualism; they insist
upon something that they may oppose to and substitute for pure
and simple Spiritualism: be it so; but then let them at least
well understand what it is that they are asking for.
{332}
It is not merely Locke, the moderate chief of the school, nor is
it d'Alembert, nor Saint-Lambert, nor even Helvetius; these keep
themselves relatively within bounds: it is Diderot who has so
little moderation, it is d'Holbach, it is Naigeon, it is Lalande,
and de la Mettrie; it is a whole order of minds, not very
eminent, but very decided and very consistent and logical in
their materialism; materialists in all and for all, from the soul
up to God--not forgetting, be it remembered, liberty, duty, a
future life, etc. ... These men, with their heads in the air and
their masks in their hand, with a confidence in themselves and a
faith almost confounding itself with religion, profess openly as
truth, fatalism, egotism, and atheism. This is what men want, and
what, if they wish to be logical, men must want, when, closely or
remotely, they adhere to a philosophy that reduces everything to
sensation, and that which is the object of sensation. Let there
then be no illusion upon this subject; all the principles of
morals and of religion are at stake. Sensualism _is_ what it
is, and _can_ be nothing else. It was made a complete system
in the eighteenth century; nothing remains in it that can be
either made or remade; and if men recur to it in our days, the
mechanism and the form may be altered--for these are
variable--but not the essential substance, for that is _not_
so.
{333}
There are not two manners of being consequent any more in this
system than in any other; however the attempt may be made, men
can never by any reproduction render it what it is not, and what
its nature prevents it from ever being; so we must take it or we
must leave it alone; we cannot change its principles." [Footnote
71]

    [Footnote 71: Memoires pour servir à l'histoire de la
    philosophie au 18 siècle, by Ph. Damiron, member of the
    Institute; vol. i, p. xiv. 1858.]

What M. Damiron eight years ago felt would occur, has been
accomplished rapidly. Sensualism, in its true nature as
Materialism, has resumed its activity and returned to the stage;
now tacitly admitted by sober, studious men, now loudly professed
and loudly proclaimed by the "enfants terribles" of the school;
professed and proclaimed not only with all its principles, but
with all its consequences.

{334}

A profound sentiment of hesitation and embarrassment clings,
nevertheless, to the doctrine of Materialism. The most
distinguished of its adepts struggle to give explanations that
look like disavowals, and many repudiate the charge of being
Materialists as if it were an insult. "I have never," says M. de
Remusat, "observed without astonishment the testy sensibility of
philosophers upon this point. Who is there that has not witnessed
the indignation manifested by the followers of the philosophy of
sensation when they hear retraced to them the positive
consequences of this doctrine? It seems just as if their rightful
claims were being disavowed, or as if they were being denounced;
as if the Inquisition were still at hand, with its tortures and
its auto-da-fès; or as if their refuters were sending them to
martyrdom. A general timidity reigns throughout their school;
they seem to think freedom of opinions never sufficiently
assured, and society never tolerant enough, for their philosophy
to declare and avow itself for such as it is.
{335}
Whether from shame or from fear, Materialism asks to be tenderly
handled, suspects that every one who defines her has the designs
of a persecutor, makes protestations of her good intentions, and
is alarmed at her very faith. She defends herself from the
imputation of believing only in the senses, even while making
sensation the one universal fact. It might be said that she
blushes at matter just as persons infirm of faith blush at the
name of Jesus. Perhaps this may be an indirect proof of the
distrust which their cause inspires in Materialists, and an
involuntary avowal that the human mind belongs not to them."
[Footnote 72]

    [Footnote 72: Essais de philosophie, by Charles de Remusat:
    vol. ii, p. 179.]

Whence arise, what signify, these two contradictory facts: on the
one side, the perseverance and the facility with which, in our
days, Materialism reproduces and propagates itself; on the other
side, the uneasiness and the timidity which it inspires in many
of those even who admit it?

{336}

Materialism is the doctrine of appearances. "Specious doctrine,"
says M. Vacherot, "to those whose conception of things depends
solely upon their ability to picture them to themselves."
[Footnote 73]

    [Footnote 73: La métaphysique et la science, vol. i, p. 171.]

It is by their material appearances that, at the outset, the
external world and man himself manifest themselves to the human
mind. It is only by reflection and by a process of observation
within itself that it penetrates beyond mere appearances, and
discovers what appearances alone would never enable it to see. To
minds at once active and superficial, inquisitive, impatient to
acquire science, although not very nice as to the kind,
Materialism is a commodious and apparently clear solution of
certain difficult and obscure questions which fasten irresistibly
upon the human understanding.

{337}

Besides all this, these questions, and the different solutions of
which they are susceptible, have their epochs of ardor or
languor, of favor or discredit. In our days, the fruitful
activity and the brilliant progress of the sciences of the
material world, come in aid of the doctrine of Materialism. This
progress is, however, far from being as exclusive of other
progress as is often said. Although less popular than a few years
ago, Spiritualism has not ceased to be an active and influential
doctrine in the elevated region of philosophy, and the Christian
awakening persists and develops itself energetically in the face
of the adversaries of Christianity. The times in which we live
are entitled to more justice than men accord to them;
intellectual labors are now very extensive and very varied; the
most different tendencies coexist, and pursue their independent
career. Even in this, Materialism is again the doctrine of
appearances; it is neither so strong nor so near its triumph as
it has the air of being.

{338}

Nothing proves this better than the hesitation and persistent
embarrassment of the most distinguished among its adherents. The
circumstance noticed by M. de Remusat twenty-five years ago, is
recurring at the present day as plainly as ever. Sometimes we
find disavowals of the consequences of the principle of
Materialism, and attempts of all kinds to escape from those
consequences; sometimes we find efforts made to disguise the
principle itself under purer colors. A general and enduring
instinct in man persists in protesting against the appearances
upon which Materialism is founded. Man does not believe either
himself or the universe to be exclusively matter. The distinction
between matter and mind is a natural and spontaneous, a primitive
and permanent, belief of the human race.

And is this, then, merely an instinct and an aspiration, a proud
pretension of human nature? Is it not, on the contrary, the
innate sentiment, the intimate knowledge of that essential fact
in humanity of which observation recognizes and evidences the
existence?

{339}

The fact to which I allude is the following: As soon as a
consciousness of life is awakened in man--as soon as he feels and
perceives what is taking place within him--he has a perception of
himself as of a real, personal, and distinct being. He gives
voice to this feeling and this perception as soon as he uses the
word "I," and he does so before he has any clear knowledge in
detail of the being whose existence he so recognizes and affirms.

When, in the natural development of life, man thus makes himself
as a real and personal being, the object of his own observation,
he recognizes in himself as such real and personal being certain
facts in their nature essentially different. On the one side, he
recognizes a body inherent in his being, which forms part of his
being, and through which he communicates with the external world,
either by the impressions which he receives from that world, or
by the modes in which he acts upon that world.
{340}
On the other side, whether he regard himself as, so to say, the
theater of action, or as the very actor, he recognizes himself to
be a single being, a being permanent and abiding, ever the same
in the midst of the variety of his personal impressions or of his
actions upon the world beyond him; and this, too, in spite of the
complications and incessant transformations of his body, the
organ and the medium of those impressions and actions.

Thus it is that in man's consciousness there is a manifestation
and proof at once of the unity and of the complex nature of the
human being; that is, in accordance with the spontaneous language
of mankind, at once of the distinction and of the union of the
soul and of the body. This is the primitive and essential fact of
man in his actual life.

{341}

In proportion as the human being develops himself, as he extends
the circle of his observations upon the world and upon himself,
special facts confirm the general truth of which I have just
given a summary, and prove the essential distinction of the soul
and the body by the essential diversity of the properties of
each. Thus the body, in its organization and in its life, is
subject to fixed and pre-established laws, over which man's will
has no control or power; whereas the soul is essentially free,
and capable of determining itself and of acting from motives
foreign to the laws which govern the body. Fatality is the
condition of the human being in corporeal existence; liberty is
his privilege in his moral life. I say in his moral life, and the
expression reveals between the soul and the body another
essential and ineffaceable difference. The body is strange to
every idea of morality, abandoned to the exigencies of its
necessities and its appetites; it has no aspiration, no tendency
but to satisfy them.
{342}
The soul has needs and desires of quite a different kind, and
they are often contrary to those of the body; and however often
the soul may yield to the tendencies of the body, not seldom also
does it withstand and surmount them; and this both in persons of
obscure condition, and in those who stand in the public gaze of
men. When the body is dominant in man, man tends toward
Materialism; when he listens to the aspirations of soul it is, on
the contrary, to Spiritualism that his nature rises. The
complexity of his nature manifests itself in the development of
his life as in the first instinct of his consciousness; at
whatever epoch he is the subject either of his own or of our
observation he cannot be called exclusively body, matter, without
facts giving his assertion at each step the flattest
contradiction.

Whence comes this essential and primordial fact--the fact of the
complexity and yet unity of the human being? How is this union of
soul and body accomplished? their mutual influences exercised,
how? Here, according to religion, is the mystery; here, for
philosophy, lies the problem.

{343}

Materialism is but an hypothesis adopted for the explanation of
this great fact, and the hypothesis consists not in the solution
of the problem, but in its suppression by the denial of the fact
itself. What need, they say, to seek to explain how the union of
soul and body is accomplished? Neither this complexity of the
human being nor his unity in that complexity is a reality. Man is
only a product and an ephemeral form of matter!

I shall not refuse myself the pleasure of refuting this
hypothesis by the mouth of a contemporary philosopher, whom I
shall soon myself have to combat. "Nothing," says M. Vacherot,
"proves that the hypothesis of Materialism is true; on the
contrary, positive facts evidence its falsity. ... If the soul be
only the result of the play of the organs, how is it that the
soul is able to resist the impressions and the appetites of the
body, to direct, concentrate, and govern its faculties? If the
will be but the instinct in a different form, how explain its
empire over the instinct?
{344}
This fact is an irresistible argument; it is the rock upon which
Materialism has always wrecked itself, and upon which it will
continue to do so. ... The wisdom of the ancients pronounced its
decree more than two thousand years ago. 'Do we not see,' says
Socrates, according to Plato, 'that the soul governs all the
elements of which it is pretended that it is composed? that the
soul resists them throughout the whole course of life, and
subdues them in every way, repressing some harshly and painfully,
as where the gymnastic or the medical method is resorted to;
repressing others more gently, rebuking these, warning those,
speaking to desires, to anger, to fear, as to things of a nature
alien to its own? So Homer, in the "Odyssey," represents Ulysses
as

  "Smiting his breast, and chiding thus his heart:
   Bear this, O heart, thou that hast worse endured." [Footnote 74]

    [Footnote 74:
    Στῆθος δὲ πληξὰς, κραδίην ἠνίπαπε μύθῳ,
    Τέτλαθι δὲ, κραδίη. καὶ κύντερον ἄλλο ποτ᾿ ἔτλης.
    Odyssey, Book xx, v. 17.]

{345}

"'Do you think,' adds Socrates, 'that Homer would have so
expressed himself had, in his conception, the soul been a mere
harmony, necessarily governed by the passions of the body? Did he
not rather think that the soul ought to govern and master those
passions, and that the soul is something far more divine than any
harmony?'" [Footnote 75]

    [Footnote 75: La Métaphysique et la science, by M. Vacherot,
    vol. i, p. 174; Plato, Phæd, xliii.]

Materialists themselves have felt the feebleness of their
hypothesis; to support it they have invented a second hypothesis.
"No force without matter, no matter without force," [Footnote 76]
says Dr. Buchner, at the present day one of the most resolute
interpreters of the doctrine. That is to say, not being able to
explain facts by matter alone, as matter is observed and
conceived naturally by the human mind, they endow matter with
what they term _force_, a principle of movement and of
production.

    [Footnote 76: Le Materialisme contemporain en Allemagne, by
    M. Paul Janet, of the Institute, p. 20. 1864.]

{346}

"Matter and force are," it is now said, "inseparable; both have
existed from all eternity." Thus, imperiously urged by instinct
and by their observation of facts, they begin again by
distinguishing and naming separately matter and force; then, all
at once, they confound them, treat them as united in their
essence and from all eternity, and conclude by believing that
they have succeeded in giving an explanation of man and of the
world!

In this, what do they more than add an abstraction to an
abstraction, and an hypothesis to an hypothesis? We are here in
the presence of facts that are certain and yet perplexing; in
presence of an external world, which evidently has not always
been such as it is, which had a beginning, which is continuing to
develop itself according to certain laws, and which is tending to
certain ends; in the presence, too, of man, evidently a being at
once one and complex, identical and yet variable. The ancients
gave names and explanations to those incontestible facts, but the
names and explanations are now rejected!
{347}
Still, names and explanations are needed; man must put something
in the place of God, Creator, and Providence--in the place of
mind, and matter, and soul, and body. It is not for the first
time that man finds himself confronted by this necessity, or that
he essays to satisfy it; many abstractions, many words, have been
already employed for this purpose. _God_ was replaced by
_nature_, by _substance_, by _cause_; the _human
soul_ was transformed into _vital principle_; the vital
principle was elevated to the dignity of soul. It seems that
these words, these abstractions, have had their time and lost
their credit; and so now it is _force_ which replaces
_them_; _force_ is mind, _force_ is soul,
_force_ creates, _force_ is God. It is enough now that
they incorporate force with body; the problem no longer exists;
man and the universe are laid bare!

{348}

When Leibnitz, to combat the Idealism of Descartes, and the
Pantheism of Spinoza, developed the idea of force, he did not
foresee that that very notion would be one day made use of to
reduce to nonentities God, the human soul, all real and personal
being, all first and final cause; to reduce, in short, everything
to a medley of mechanics and dynamics incarnate in matter!

However specious it may appear to superficial minds, or to minds
prejudiced in its favor by the peculiar nature of their studies
and of their habitual labors, Materialism, like Pantheism, is
only an hypothesis--an hypothesis constructed by dint of mere
abstractions and purely verbal assertions. These not only
disregard or suppress the facts which they pretend to explain,
but are in direct contradiction with facts themselves recognized
and proved by psychological observation. It is, in effect, an
hypothesis, (I am forced here to repeat what I before affirmed of
Pantheism,) equally revolting to true science and to common
sense.

{349}

The hypothesis of Materialism has but a single merit; it is more
consistent than those of the other systems. But even to this
merit Materialism loses its title whenever it shrinks from
pushing its principles boldly to their consequences, whether
philosophical or practical: that is to say, whenever it shrinks
from denying man's liberty, a moral law, the necessary principles
of the human mind--whenever, in short, it shrinks from
proclaiming its ultimate results, which are, as M. Damiron puts
them, Fatalism, Egotism, Atheism. Philosophers are right in
seeking for truth and in respecting truth for itself and at every
risk; but there are some consequences which are the clearest
evidence of a vice in principle; and this vice, in Materialism,
is the blind forgetfulness of the best proved facts and the most
essential elements of human nature.

---------------------------------------

{350}

           Seventh Meditation.

              Skepticism.


There are two kinds of Skepticism, experimental Skepticism and
systematic Skepticism. Experimental Skepticism is the result of
the incertitude which arises in men's minds from the spectacle of
the infinite variety, discordance, and mobility of human
opinions. Systematic Skepticism, on the other hand, challenges
the power itself of the human understanding, and declares it
incapable of knowing things in their essence--reality in itself.
The one is doubt applied in practice; the other is doubt affirmed
as a principle.

{351}

In an essay on Skepticism, written in 1830, M. Jouffroy treated
experimental and practical skepticism with great contempt: this
skepticism "founds itself," says he, "only upon the apparent
contradictions of human judgment. To prove that there is a
contradiction either between the results at which each faculty of
the mind when taken separately arrives, or between the final
results attained by different faculties, as by the sense and by
the reason; to establish that there is a contradiction of a like
nature between the opinions received by different men or by
different nations, or between those opinions themselves, which,
at different epochs, have variously for a time contented
humanity; then to conclude from all this that the human
intelligence regards in turn as true things which are
contradictory, and that consequently there is for that
intelligence no truth at all: such is all the mechanism in which
this second-rate skepticism consists which has fascinated, and
still continues to fascinate, whole hosts of little minds. Long
ago this skepticism was refuted, and at all its points; long ago
the unity of human truth was demonstrated, after having been
admitted _à priori_ in all ages by their leading minds.
{352}
This kind of skepticism is a theme upon which men will long
continue to dilate; the darling subject for wits, it merits not
to arrest the attention of philosophers."

By way of amends, however, for these remarks, M. Jouffroy makes
an immense concession to the systematic skepticism which declares
the human mind incapable of knowing things as they really are in
themselves, for he admits this skepticism to be rationally
legitimate; "the foundation of all belief," says he, "is an act
of faith, blind but irresistible. In effect there is no
contradiction between faith and skepticism; for man believes by
instinct and doubts by reason. ... Skeptics fall into no
contradiction when, in the practice of life, they believe their
senses, their consciousness, their memory, and when they act in
consequence; they obey the laws of their instinctive nature by so
believing, and they obey their rational natures by confessing
that their beliefs are illegitimate.
{353}
So we equally excuse humanity which believes, and skepticism
which doubts; but we cannot equally excuse the philosophers who
have combated skepticism by striving to demonstrate the rational
legitimacy of human belief. When men affirm that mankind
believes, and that skeptics do so with mankind, they affirm a
fact in itself incontestable; when they add that mankind believes
itself right in believing, that is to say, virtually admits that
the human intelligence sees things as they are, this is true too,
and skeptics do not deny it; but when, grappling with skepticism
itself, men pretend to show that the human intelligence really
sees things as they are, this is a pretension which I cannot
understand. What! do they not perceive that this pretension is
nothing less than the pretension of demonstrating the human
intelligence by the human intelligence, which has been, is, and
will be eternally impossible? We believe skepticism forever
invincible, because we regard skepticism as the final word of the
reason concerning the reason itself." [Footnote 77]

    [Footnote 77: Mélanges philosophique, pp. 238-240.]

{354}

I do not agree with M. Jouffroy in his disdain for experimental
and practical skepticism. This is not, it is true, a system which
philosophers are called upon to refute, but a fact which ought to
occupy an important place with them, for by showing to us how
incomplete human science is, and human error how frequent, it
sets us on our guard against all presumptuous confidence in our
own ideas, and against intolerance toward the ideas of others--two
of the most dangerous infirmities to which human intelligence
and society are liable. But as for the reasoning which impels M.
Jouffroy to accept the systematic and definitive skepticism as to
the intrinsic reality of things, I repudiate it altogether. If
that were, as he says, "the final word of the reason respecting
the reason itself," it would be the negation, or to use a better
expression, the suicide, of man's reason and of the human
intelligence.

{355}

In his discourse which he pronounced in 1813, on resuming his
functions at the "Faculté des Lettres," M. Royer-Collard summed
up his conclusions upon this fundamental question--conclusions
very different, more different essentially than even apparently
they are, from those arrived at by M. Jouffroy. Whereas M.
Jouffroy believes systematic skepticism forever invincible,
"because he regards it as the final word of the reason concerning
the reason," M. Royer-Collard, on the contrary, ends his
discourse with these words: "We cannot divide man; we cannot
assign a part only to skepticism; as soon as skepticism once
penetrates into the understanding, in [it?] invades it
throughout." I would confirm this conclusion of M. Royer-Collard,
by carrying still further the reasoning which led him to it.

{356}

"The most general result," says he, "presented by the history of
modern philosophy--its most striking characteristic when
contrasted with ancient philosophy--is its skepticism with
respect to the existence of the external world; that world in
which mankind has so long believed, which begins to reveal itself
in us with our existence itself, and in the bosom of which we are
forced to perceive ourselves as mere fragments of its immensity.
... I am not here to reason in favor of the received opinion;
that opinion needs neither proofs nor defenders; it is rooted
deeply enough in our most intimate nature to brave all attack. It
is not the world that risks anything at the hands of the
philosophers; it is rather the honor of philosophy which suffers
some discredit; it is rather philosophy that relieves the vulgar
from a part of the respect which philosophy yet demands at its
hands, when it gives birth to paradoxes bearing, seemingly, the
very impress of folly.
{357}
Moreover, whether the material world really exist or not, is not
a matter in controversy; this question would resolve itself into
one still more general--whether all those facilities of ours, of
which the authority is indivisible, are organs of truth or organs
of falsehood; and upon this point we shall ever be driven to
accept the testimony of those very organs. The sole question
which belongs to philosophical analysis, consists in examining if
it be certain that our faculties attest to us the existence of an
external world, and if the human race believes in this existence;
for if it believes in it, this universal belief becomes a fact in
our intellectual constitution; and whether this fact be a
primitive one, or a deduction from any anterior fact--whether it
be the immediate teaching of nature or an acquisition by
reasoning--it is entitled to its place unmutilated in the
synthetic table of science. Has it disappeared? Then the man of
philosophy is not the man of nature; science is false, and
consequently, the analysis without fidelity; and one may rest
assured that philosophers have inserted in the understanding some
principle, or some fact, which was not there before; or that they
have not collected with care all the principles and facts which
are actually there."

{358}

Having thus formalized the question, M. Royer-Collard follows it
up with an inquiry as exact as it is profound, of the
psychological fact of the perception of the external world which
accompanies the fact of sensation: this inquiry leads him to this
conclusion:

  "Sensation has no object; sensation is merely relative to the
  sentient being; if not perceived, sensation does not exist. But
  the perception, which affirms an external existence, supposes
  two things--the mind which perceives, and the object which is
  perceived; the being that thinks, and the being that is the
  subject-matter of thought. Just as the sensation is relative to
  the mind, so is the act of the perception relative to it also,
  and just so does it suppose the mind; the object, on the
  contrary, supposes neither the mind nor the mind's perception.
{359}
  The object does not exist because we perceive it; but we
  perceive it because it exists--because we are endowed with the
  faculty of perception. In a city inhabited no longer, there
  remain no sensation, no idea, no judgment; the houses remain,
  and even the streets, and with them nature, with all nature's
  laws, which are not suspended in their course. To the universe,
  the energetic presence of its Creator suffices; it does not
  require our presence; the absence of spectators would not make
  it languish; it existed before us, it will exist after us; its
  reality is independent of us and of our thoughts--it is
  absolute. The authority which persuades us of this is no less
  than that of the consciousness itself; it is the authority of
  the primitive laws of thought, and to man's mind those laws are
  absolute laws of truth. The same draught may convey the
  impression of sweetness and of bitterness, because sensation is
  relative to the variable state of sensibility, and sensibility
  itself is relative to organization; but the laws of the mind
  are an immutable standard.
{360}
  The imperfection of knowledge does not render it uncertain, and
  although it admits of degrees, it does not admit of
  contradiction. Our limited faculties do not, it is true,
  perceive all that there is in things; but still, what they do
  perceive, is in effect there just as they perceive it. ...
  If a man call upon me to prove this by reasoning, I shall, in
  my turn, demand of him, too, that he first prove to me by
  reasoning that reasoning is more convincing than perception;
  that he at least prove that the memory, without which there is
  no such thing as reasoning, is a faculty more to be relied upon
  than those faculties whose testimony they reject.

  "Intellectual life is an uninterrupted succession, not merely
  of ideas, but of beliefs, explicit or implicit. The beliefs of
  the mind are the force of the soul and the moving incentives of
  the will. Whatever determines us to believe we call _evidence_.
  ... Reason renders no account of what is evident; to condemn it
  to do so is to annihilate it, for it also has need of an
  evidence peculiar to itself.
{361}
  Did not reasoning rest upon principles anterior to the reason,
  analysis would be without end, and synthesis without
  commencement. The fundamental laws of belief constitute the
  intelligence itself; and as those laws all flow from the same
  source, they have the same authority; they judge by the same
  right; there is no appeal from the tribunal of one to that of
  another. Whoever revolts against any single one of these laws,
  revolts against them all, and so abdicates all his nature. Are
  there weapons of legitimate use against that faculty by which
  we perceive the external world? These same weapons may be
  turned against the conscience, the memory, the moral sense,
  against reason itself. ... Let but, in any single point, the
  nature of knowledge--the nature, I say, and not the degree--be
  made subordinate to our means of knowing, and all certitude is
  at an end; nothing is true, nothing is false. But it is not
  enough to say this; for all is true and false altogether, since
  truth and falsehood no longer differ from sweet and bitter.
{362}
  The void itself is then deprived of its absolute nullity: it
  enters into the domain of the relative; it is something,
  nothing, according to the conformation of the spectator's eye.
  The useful is the sole subject that the understanding
  contemplates, the sole subject for which the heart has to make
  its laws. A legislation capricious and without efficacy, which
  applies only shifting rules to actions, and which has none for
  the intentions and for the desires. This is not mere
  declamation; all these consequences have been deduced from
  skeptical doctrines with an exactitude leaving nothing to be
  either desired or contested. It is then a fact that public and
  private morality, the order of society and the happiness of
  individuals, are directly at stake in the controversy between
  true philosophy and false philosophy respecting the reality of
  knowledge. For when existences themselves become problems, what
  force remains to the bond that unites them? We cannot divide
  the entire man; we cannot assign a part only to skepticism; as
  soon as skepticism once penetrates into the understanding it
  invades it throughout." [Footnote 78]

    [Footnote 78: Fragments de M. Royer-Collard, in the works of
    Reid, translation of M. Jouffroy, vol. iv, pp. 426-451.]

{363}

I retrench nothing, change nothing in these remarkable words that
express so energetically the conclusions of the common sense of
mankind. I would only render them still more complete, by
illustrating in its primitive and indestructible unity the fact
upon which they are founded. "We cannot divide man," says M.
Royer-Collard. Here is precisely the risk that philosophical
science incurs, and to which it too often succumbs. It divides
man in order to study him; and after having so studied him, when
it seeks to deduce from its laborious operation what man in his
complete and living reality is, we find the result a strange
misapprehension, because science has neglected to re-establish
the unity which it broke.
{364}
It puts together, it is true, the scattered members, but the
being itself has disappeared; and then it is that philosophers
know not how to solve the problems or to extricate themselves
from the doubts by which they are confronted. Entire, living,
one, the human being explained himself; mutilated and severed
into distinct parts, that being loses all power and falls into
obscurity.

What is sensation, what perception, judgment, reasoning, reason,
will, consciousness? They are the human being, feeling,
perceiving, judging, reasoning, willing, and observing what is
passing within him. This is no troop of actors playing, each his
part, in a complex drama; but a being single and alive, actor and
sole spectator in the drama of his proper life.

What is this one and single being doing when he feels, perceives,
judges, reasons, wills, and watches what is occurring within
himself? He is taking cognizance at once of himself, and what is
not himself.
{365}
His own existence and the existence of that which is not himself,
reveal themselves to him from the very first in those diverse
facts and acts which philosophical science discriminates, and
calls by the particular names of sensation, perception, judgment,
reason, will, consciousness. The primitive and essential fact at
the root of all, is the fact itself of the cognizance which man
takes of himself, and of what is not himself. A cognizance, at
first confused, and always incomplete, but at the same time
direct and certain. Not by way of deduction, nor as a mere
appearance, but by way of immediate intuition, and as a positive
reality, does the human being become aware of his own existence
and of that existence which is not his. This fact is lost sight
of, or at least is not characterized exactly and as it is in
itself, when it is said that man believes naturally and
inevitably in his own existence, and in that of the external
world. This is a very different thing from _belief:_ it is
_knowledge_ itself of that double reality, internal and
external, called by the name of Man and World.
{366}
Philosophers ignore, and they change the nature of this fact,
when, merely playing with verbal distinctions and reasonings,
they condemn the human mind not to issue forth from itself, when
they refuse to it the right to affirm as real, out of the mind
and in itself, that which, in the mind and for the mind, the mind
yet admits to be true.

The human being may deceive himself, and often does deceive
himself in such or such a special affirmation as to external
realities; it has of them only a knowledge incomplete, and liable
to error; but its general and permanent affirmation as to their
existence is still folly justified and legitimate; it knows them
as it knows itself, by the same proof and by the same natural
process. M. Royer-Collard expresses admirably this great fact
when he says: "The universe does not exist because we perceive
it; but we perceive it because it exists. ... It needs not our
presence; the absence of spectators would not make it languish
away; it was before us, it will still be after us; its reality is
independent of us: it is absolute."

{367}

Systematic skepticism is not, like Materialism and Pantheism, an
hypothesis invented, although unsuccessfully invented, in order
to solve the grand problem of soul and body, of finite and
infinite; its error is not less considerable, although of a
different character. It consists in a defective examination of
the primitive fact of the human mind, and in the misapprehension
of the nature and the import of that fact. This fact is by no
means, as M. Jouffroy affirms, "a faith blind and irresistible,"
disavowed by rational science; it is really the natural
knowledge, and the earliest knowledge acquired by the human being
when it enters into activity; a knowledge, confused and
incomplete, either of itself or of what is not itself; but still
a knowledge direct and certain of the existence of itself, and of
the existence of what is not itself. "Man believes by instinct
and doubts by reason," adds M. Jouffroy; "skeptics obey the law
of their instinctive nature when they believe, like the mass of
mankind, in their senses, their consciousness, their memory, and
when they act in consequence; so also they obey their rational
nature when they confess that their beliefs are illegitimate."

{368}

This is strangely to _ignore_--I permit myself the use of
this, here, incorrect expression--at once the reality of facts,
and the value of words. What M. Jouffroy terms _instinct_,
is the intuitive consciousness of internal reality and of
external reality, and this consciousness the human being acquires
directly by the complete and indivisible exercise of all his
faculties; what he terms _reason_ is the result of the
isolated operation of one of the faculties of the human being,
who virtually forgets, when he decomposes himself for his own
study, what he really is. Skepticism is not the "final word of
the reason respecting the reason;" it is the suicide of the
reason by a negation falsely termed scientific, of natural
evidence, and of the common sense of mankind.

---------------------------------------

{369}

            Eighth Meditation.

  Impiety, Recklessness, And Perplexity.


The different systems, of each of which I have endeavored to show
the essential and characteristic vice, do not remain confined to
learned regions, or to the classes to which, from profession or
from taste, man and the world are a special object of study. The
breath of science penetrates to a distance, and pervades, unseen
itself, places even where ignorance reigns. How often in remote
cities and even rural districts, among a population alien to
every kind of study, have I met with and discovered the traces of
Rationalism, of Positivism, of Pantheism, Materialism,
Skepticism; and yet these had been imported, imperceptibly and in
manner that the sense could not detect, like a noxious miasma,
into places where their very names were unknown; and yet they
bore everywhere their natural fruits!
{370}
There is a contagion in the intellectual as well as in the moral
order; and the facility, the rapidity, the universality of
communication, which contribute so much to the force and the
grandeur of modern civilization, are as much at the disposal of
evil as of good, of error as of truth.

The effects of this intellectual contagion vary with the social
regions into which it penetrates, and the dispositions that it
there encounters. When the systems of philosophy present
themselves confusedly to minds in which ambitious and passionate
feelings are fermenting, and these feelings are capable of being
aided by those systems, their action is prompt and forcible. At
epochs and among classes where pride and ambition of intellect
reign without bounds, Rationalism and Pantheism are received with
favor. In those, on the other hand, conspicuous for the almost
exclusive study of the material world, or for the ardor with
which men thirst after physical enjoyments, Positivism and
Materialism seem very readily to prevail.
{371}
After long perturbations of society, and in the midst of the
disappointments and the jaded feelings that they leave behind
them, many minds fall involuntarily into skepticism, or make it
even their refuge. These different social facts, and the
influence which they give to the different systems of philosophy,
manifest themselves in our days in the state of men's minds, and
they do so whether men be learned or unlearned, demonstrative or
taciturn.

Three dispositions of the mind are very observable and very
general--impiety, recklessness as to religion, and religious
perplexity.

I feel no difficulty in thus ranging side by side things which
are coexisting, and developing themselves simultaneously although
contrary in their nature. There are epochs when a great current
rises and hurries society toward a single object and by a single
way.
{372}
Others there are where different currents cross and combat one
another, and impel society at the same moment toward different
objects. The spirit of authority and of faith was very
predominant in the seventeenth century; the spirit of
independence and of innovation in the eighteenth. The nineteenth
century is sweeping on its way under the empire of tendencies
various but simultaneous in their power and their activity; the
different principles and elements of our society, good or the
reverse, confront one another, awaiting the moment when they may
again be harmonized. I retraced the awakening of Christianity and
its progress; I seek in no respect to qualify any remark that I
have made, either as to that important movement or as to the
confidence with which it inspires me; but I, at the same time,
believe also in the forcible influence of the antichristian
demonstrations which are taking the form of impiety or of
recklessness; nor can I disregard the force of that religious
perplexity into which this great struggle throws so many men of
feeble purpose, and even some men of eminent powers of mind.

{373}

In our days impiety is spreading, and assuming serious
development, more especially among the operative classes, and in
that young generation that issues from the middle classes, and is
destined to follow the liberal professions. Not that the
infection is universal even there; on the contrary, those classes
show also the most different tendencies; among them, too, the
progress of the Christian awakening has made itself felt, and
religious belief is treated with more respect. There, however, it
is that the evil of impiety has its focus and its center of
expansion. Sometimes it manifests itself under gross and cynical
forms, sometimes with a pretension to thought and learning; now
by the brutal licentiousness of its behavior, now by the arrogant
yet embarrassed expression of its opinions.
{374}
Last year I received an invitation to attend the great congress
of students assembled at Liège; an invitation which, although I
expressed for the purpose of this assemblage a real and a sincere
interest, I declined. When I learned what the ideas were that had
been there loudly expressed--when I read that the question had
there been put as one between God and man, and that the idolatry
of man had been proclaimed in the place of the adoration of
God,--I experienced two sentiments the most contradictory, a
lively satisfaction that I had held myself aloof from such a
scene, and a profound regret, at the same time, that I had not
been present to protest against such an invasion of Pantheism and
of Atheism into young souls, upon whom my thoughts only rest with
sentiments of affectionate hopefulness. I have grown old, I have
had to undergo painful disappointments, but in spite of all, my
first impulse has ever been to believe in the prompt efficacy of
truth when it knocks unhesitatingly at the door of the mind; nor
is it without reluctance that I bring myself to wait for time and
experience to unvail what is error.
{375}
Of the two kinds of impiety which I have just alluded to, the
impiety which is gross and cynical, which springs from immorality
and which produces immorality, is undoubtedly the more fatal to
the human soul, to its dignity and its future lot; but systematic
impiety--impiety that establishes itself into doctrine--is the
more dangerous for human societies; for, enamored of itself, it
takes its pride in self-glorification and self-propagation. The
ambitious ones of impiety obtain more credit than those, the
chief characteristic of whose impiety is licentiousness.
Recklessness in religion is in our days a more widely spread evil
than impiety. I do not here speak of that indifferentism with
respect to religious subjects that the Abbé de la Mennais so
eloquently attacked; that sentiment may be profound, and it may
be frivolous; it may spring from Materialism, from Skepticism,
from a thoughtful impiety, as well as from a gross forgetfulness
of the paramount questions which exercise the human mind.
{376}
The recklessness now so common gives no thought at all to these
subjects, does not picture to itself that there is any ground for
so doing; where this tendency prevails, man's thought confines
itself to its terrestrial, its actual life; the business and the
interests of this life alone occupy him, alone content him; there
is, as it were, a sleep of all those instincts and requirements
of the human soul which go beyond this low region, and if not a
complete abdication, at least a sluggish torpor of the heavenly
part of our nature.

Let not the friends of a religious life and of the Christian
faith deceive themselves; it is here that they have the greatest
obstacles to encounter, the deadest weight to lift and to remove.
Aggression provokes resistance; a struggle leads to the
marshaling of the different hostile forces; nor does the learning
of the believer dread to enter the arena with the learning of the
incredulous.
{377}
But recklessness in religion is like a vast Dead Sea in which no
being lives, an immense barren desert in which no vegetation
pushes. It is, if not the most revolting, at least the most
formidable evil of the day. It is against this evil that
Christians are bound, more especially, to direct their energies,
for there are a world and an entire population here to be
conquered.

Nor will _points d'appui_ or means of action fail them in
this great work. For if religious recklessness is in our days
deplorably common, neither is perplexity as to religious matters
a stranger among us. It springs from sentiments and out of
interests very different in their natures, sometimes merely on
the surface, sometimes in the depths of the soul. There is a kind
of perplexity founded upon the dictates of common sense, and
entitled to every respect, but to which I do not accord,
nevertheless, the epithet of religious; this perplexity is
generated by the instinct or the experience of the utility of
religion for the maintenance of order in society, not merely in
the great public society, but also in the smaller domestic
societies, that is, in the state as well as in families.
{378}
A man of distinguished mental capacity and of an honorable
character, "elève" of the "Ecole politechnique," and "ingénieur
en chef" in one of our great departments, was one day speaking to
me with sorrow of the attacks leveled at Christianity. "It is
not," he said, "on my own account that I regret these attacks;
you know I am a 'Voltairean;' but I ask for regularity and peace
in my own household; I felicitate myself that my wife is a
Christian, and I mean my daughters to be brought up like
Christian women. These demolishers know not what they are doing;
it is not merely upon our Churches, it is upon our houses, our
homes and their inmates, that their blows are telling!"

{379}

There is a perplexity more serious and more profound--a
perplexity really religious--one suggested not merely by the
necessity of social order, but by that of moral security, of
harmony, of confidence, and of intimate hopefulness in the
presence of the problems and of the chances that weigh upon man.
This perplexity takes place not merely in the minds of thinking
men--of men who render to themselves an account of their internal
troubles, and who avow them undisguisedly; it causes agitation
and spreads desolation among multitudes of single-minded, modest,
and silent men, who suffer from the antichristian _malaria_
spread around them. What framer of statistics shall count their
number? what philosopher minister successfully to their disease?

I go further still. I listen to contemporary philosophers
themselves, and I find in the cases of some of the more eminent
an intellectual perplexity, showing itself clearly through
opinions the most systematic, and the furthest removed from the
Christian religion. I shall name but two--M. Vacherot and M.
Edmond Scherer.
{380}
I have no intention of entering here into a special examination
of their ideas; I seek only to show the state of their minds and
of their souls, as it results from the tenor of their works.

I have read, and read over again, with scrupulous attention, the
two principal philosophical treatises of M. Vacherot, _La
Métaphysique et la Science ou Principes de Philosophie
Positive,_ [Footnote 79] and the _Essais de Philosophie
Critique_. [Footnote 80]

    [Footnote 79: Second edition, three vols. 12mo., 1863.]

    [Footnote 80: One vol. 8vo., 1864.]

M. Vacherot does not desire to be, nor is he really, in his
conscience and in his own eyes, an advocate either of
Materialism, or Positivism, or Pantheism, or Atheism, or
Skepticism.
{381}
He analyzes and he refutes successively these different systems,
as conceived and expounded by their most distinguished
representatives; he defends himself, and with warmth, from the
charge of adhering to them: "a man," he says, "is not an Atheist,
a Materialist, a Pantheist, an Idealist, because he does not
believe in God, soul, mind, matter, world--in all these
metaphysical words taken in a given acceptation. The true
_Atheist_, if such a one exists, is he whose mind is grossly
empirical, and wanting in the sense of what is intelligible,
ideal, and divine. The true _Pantheist_ is he who identifies
truth and reality, God and the world, whether, like Spinoza and
Goethe, he deifies the world, or like the Stoics, he materializes
God. The true _Materialist_ is he who degrades man to the
beast, either by denying him his superior and really human
faculties, or by deriving these from animal faculties. The true
_Idealist_, like Berkeley, is he who rejects all external
reality as an illusion, whatever the conception of that reality;
whether it be as a thing made up of forces and of laws, or as
consisting of extended matter. ... All these words require to be
defined and explained, or they necessarily occasion mysteries,
contradictions, and absurdities. In their vague complexities they
do not express ideas of sufficient simplicity, nor do they answer
to ideas sufficiently precise for science to adopt them
unreservedly and without distinction. ...
{382}
A chosen few exist whose sympathy is dear to me; I remain
profoundly attached to all the truths which they, with reason,
regard as constituting the strength, life, and honor of
philosophy. I remain, like them, a Spiritualist, an Idealist, a
Theist, although with other methods, another language, and also,
beyond a doubt, with notable reservations." [Footnote 81]

    [Footnote 81: La Métaphysique et la science; in the
    Introduction and the Preface, vol. i., pp. xvi, xxxiv.]

Nor is M. Vacherot more of a Skeptic than of a Materialist and a
Pantheist; he believes firmly in absolute truth, in scientific
metaphysics, and in the universal and essential principles which
form their bases. "Metaphysics," he says, "have nothing to dread
from analysis; it is a test from which they can only issue with
honor. The truths _à priori_ upon which the science rests,
will inspire no more doubt so soon as it comes to be well
understood that those truths are founded upon the ordinary
principles of demonstration, like all the truths _à priori_
of the other sciences.
{383}
Metaphysics have, and will ever have for their object, the Being
infinite, necessary, absolute, and universal. Now the ideas of
being, infinite, necessary, absolute, universal, are so involved
in the notion of appearance, finite, contingent, relative,
individual, that it is impossible for the human mind to separate
them. Accordingly, in order to be entitled to deny Metaphysics,
and the truths which are peculiar to them, we must first mutilate
the human mind, and reduce it to the pure faculties of sensation
and imagination which are common to it with animals. From the
moment when the reason, the thought, the faculty peculiar to the
human intelligence, enters the field, it brings necessarily with
it the object of sensation and of imagination, under the
categories of quantity, quality, being, relation, unity.
{384}
Then it is that appear to the mind the distinction, and afterward
the logical connection, of the two terms corresponding to each
category, of the finite and the infinite, of the contingent and
the necessary, of the individual and the universal, of the
relative and the absolute, of appearance and being. The thought
enters then perforce, whether it is conscious of it or not, upon
the peculiar ground of Metaphysics. Nothing but a gross and, so
to say, an animal empiricism, has the right to deny the
conceptions and the truths of this science, and the denial is a
denegation of the higher faculties of the intelligence."
[Footnote 82]

    [Footnote 82: La Métaphysique et la science; Preface, vol. i,
    p. xlviii.]

It is impossible to disavow more indignantly Materialism,
Atheism, Skepticism, with their principles and their
consequences. But after all these declarations and these
disavowals, when M. Vacherot has to draw his conclusions, and has
to set the affirmation of his own ideas by the side of his
criticism of the ideas of other writers; when he, in his turn,
undertakes to explain God and the world, this twofold object of
Metaphysics, the perplexity of the thinker becomes at once
apparent, and he falls, in spite of himself, into the very paths
from which he proposed to escape.

{385}

"What do you understand by God?" says he; "the perfect Being? He
is the God of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Malebranche, Leibnitz;
he is the God of all the theologians with whom _Divinity_
and _Perfection_ are synonyms. That God is our God too. But
if, of this God, immutable in his perfection, elevated beyond
time, space, the movement of universal life, you make anything
else than an ideal of the thought, I confess I no longer
comprehend him. ... These ideas, all equally reducible to the
idea of the _Perfect_, as understood by Plato, Descartes,
Malebranche, Fénélon, Leibnitz, can have no _objective
reality_, and only exist in the ideal order of pure thought;
absolutely in the same manner as the figures of geometry do,
which lose all the vigorousness and all the exactitude of their
definition elsewhere than in the domain of the understanding. ...
{386}
Perfection exists, can only exist, in the thought. It is of the
essence of perfection to be purely ideal; and the remark applies
as truly to the Perfect Being of Descartes and of Leibnitz as to
the 'intelligible world' of Plato and of Malebranche. A 'perfect
God,' or a 'real God?' Theology must make its choice. A perfect
God is only an ideal God." [Footnote 83]

    [Footnote 83: La Métaphysique et la science; vol. i, pp. xii,
    1, vol. iii, p. 247.]

That is to say, that for Metaphysics to admit God, the
_Being_ God must vanish, and remain only a conception, a
notion, an idea. It may be that to a philosopher or two this may
seem still Theism; to the human soul, and to the human race, it
is Atheism, and nothing else.

God thus made to vanish, what becomes in its turn of the world?

{387}

Here God reappears. "As for the _real_ God," says M.
Vacherot, "he lives, he develops himself in the immensity of
space and in the eternity of time; he appears to us under the
infinite variety of forms which are his manifestations--he is
_Cosmos_. ... The world _thought of_ is something else
than the world _imagined_. Imagination represents to us the
world as an immense mass of dispersed matter, as an infinite
collection of forces disseminated in the vast fields of space.
The idea does not occur to men of vulgar minds, nor even to our
men of learning, that this image of universal life cannot for an
instant support the glance of reason; they do not perceive that
_void_ is synonymous with _nothing_, that the atom is
an unintelligible hypothesis; that _being_ is always and
everywhere, without any possible solution of continuity, either
in time or in space; that the universal life is one in its
apparent dispersion; and finally, that the world is a
_being_, and not merely a _whole_." [Footnote 84]

    [Footnote 84: La Métaphysique et la science, vol. iii, p.
    247; vol. i, p. lii.]

What is this if it be not Pantheism?

{388}

And these incoherences, these contradictions, these relapses of
M. Vacherot into systems that he disavows, and that he has just
combated, what are they but striking evidences of the vanity of
his efforts, like those of so many others, to explain, unaided by
God, God and the universe?

Of another nature is the perplexity of M. Edmond Scherer; his is
the disquietude of the critic, not the embarrassment of the
metaphysician. M. Edmond Scherer was a believing Christian, a
believer zealous in his faith, and active in its cause. The
examination of systems and of facts, historical criticism and
philosophical criticism, impelled him to skepticism; not to that
skepticism which is indifferent and strange to all personal
conviction. M. Scherer believes in truth and in the rights of
truth; but where that truth? He seeks it, he finds it not; he
wanders among systems and facts as in a labyrinth, discovering at
each step that his path is the wrong one, and from it
nevertheless finding no issue. He is still aware that humanity
cannot live in a labyrinth, that it requires--nay, absolutely
requires--to issue forth, to behold, or at least to catch
glimpses of, the light of day.
{389}
He has a sentiment of the moral requirements of human nature, of
man's life; and he sees well that the negations and the doubts of
the different systems of philosophy can never satisfy those
requirements. I have already cited, in the course of these
_Meditations_, some of the passages in which this perplexity
strikingly manifests itself; a perplexity full at once of pride
and sadness, which, although it does not shake M. Scherer in his
convictions, makes him nevertheless see their vanity. [Footnote
85] He knows that its own thought suffices not for the human
soul; perhaps it is his own soul suggests to him that knowledge.

    [Footnote 85: See particularly the passage cited in the Third
    Meditation (Rationalism) of this volume, p. 256, etc., and in
    the "Meditation on the Essence of the Christian Religion,"
    (Third Meditation, the Supernatural,) p. 119.]

{390}

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 higher to the fountain of light? Question paramount, to which
these _Meditations_ are intended as the prelude, and which I
shall essay to solve, by confronting, as I before said, [Footnote
86] Christianity with its opponents, and by showing that, if it
succeeds where they fail, the reason is, that, sprung from a
higher source than man, it alone has the right to succeed, for it
alone knows man rightly as he is--as one entire being; it alone
satisfies man by furnishing him with a rule for his guidance
through life.

    [Footnote 86: First Meditation, p. 200.]



                The End.